PDF is not exactly an "open" format - it _is_ Adobe's proprietary format after all. The basics of it are fairly standardised, however, so it tends to display & print with reasonable consistency on most platforms.
Seems like you don't meet very many good programmers.
Most of the good programmers I've met would've just treated it as a new feature request & figured out a way to make it easy for their customer to do all their "common" transactions.
In the process, they (the developer) would've tried to learn as much as they could about the requirements of their customer & would probably end up providing functionality for the customer that the customer didn't realise was possible with this new systme.
That's the kind of thing that you do when your business model is writing software as a service, and you're trying to make a customer happy so they'll come back to you the next time they need help.
I beg your pardon, I lumped your reply in with the message that you were responding to. It sounded to me like you were agreeing with the parent of your message.
You implied that selling copied goods (selling pirated goods) is the same as using someone's work as your own (using cover art). One is fraud, the other is copyright infringement. The fact that you couldn't figure out what I was referring to from your own post just proves my point.
I can't tell whether you're arguing for or against. For either case, you haven't referenced any peer-reviewed studies to support your point. A well-crafted study should be able to show if there is some "good" level of IP, if such a good effect actually exists.
I'm arguing against IP laws in general (both copyright and patents). Both of these concepts depend on mechanisms which suppress the use of ideas, but they are touted regularly, without proof or study, as encouraging the production of new ideas. I'm not seeing that connection, and have been waiting for someone to point me to something a little more robust than "It's obvious!" to support the idea that suppressing the use of ideas actually encourages innovation, which is the whole social justification for implementing IP.
On the other hand, intellectual property is important. Even you must agree with that.
Why would I agree with such a nonobvious conclusion?
I've never understood why so many people accept, without any kind of proof, the canard that being able to restrict someone else's development of an idea is somehow going to "encourage" innovation. Proponents state that like a mantra, but I haven't met anyone who has been able to point me to any kind of study showing that such an effect is true (and I've read several studies showing that IP laws tend to retard innovation in a society). At first glance, it seems to make more sense that you'd encourage societal innovation by giving ideas as large a spread through society as possible, not by using mechanisms that restrict them.
The current importance of intellectual property is completely artificial, and is hurting the rate of innovation in the US (and the other countries that follow the US's lead). If the legislation defining IP hadn't ever been concocted, then the marketplace would've developed in a much more natural and sustainable way, where the value of goods & services would have a much more direct correlation with the resources, skill & labor used to provide them. Unfortunately, IP laws have created such large artificial value that entire industries depend on it to bolster otherwise weak business models, which is not a good setup if you're trying to encourage an efficient marketplace economy.
Mostly, we need to ask what we are protecting this property from
No, first you have to prove whether treating ideas like real property provides any societal benefit or not. Just saying it is so isn't a good enough basis for overriding private property rights. And if you can't prove that such an effect exists, then there's no reason to support the idea of intellectual property rights.
Your government believes that intellectual property is important, and for the most part, they're exactly on the money. Part of America's progress as a world power (if not hegemony) is its exports in information.
Yeah, nothing says "World Power" like basing a big chunk of your economy on a fundamentally-artificial business model. Especially when it's so easy to enforce it on other countries who might not agree with that business model.
Imagine, if you will, that you are leading America in an age where manufacturing has become either trivial and moved offshore, or incredibly complex with the use of robotics and other such things developing nations are not yet good at. What would you do?
Well, I dunno - we could, like, try and do that stuff better than other countries? You know, _compete_? Or has that become a taboo subject nowadays? I know! We can force the other countries to follow our arbitrary IP rules for no benefit to themselves! I'm sure they'll go for that!
It's about maintaining a leading role in research, development, technology, infrastructure, information technology, and a host of other things.
I guess it's lot easier to try and suppress the innovation in other countries by "tricking" or browbeating them into following our IP rules than it is to try and beef up our own society to be able to compete with them. Frankly speaking though, if a country has to compete like that, it's only a matter of time before that country will become another has-been power while the countries concentrating on REAL innovation pass them up.
The U.S. did it to Europe during the Industrial Revolution, and now China is doing it to the U.S. If the U.S. leadership or public had any sense of history, we'd get our asses in gear & make the societal investment to be able to stay competitive, but all we've got right now are people like you who think that the U.S. is somehow entitled to control the information flow to the rest of the world.
Near future: within 200 years, with "near" being relative to our overall existence as a unique organism.
Even assuming that our engineering starts bumping regularly against fundamental physical limits, there is still vast room for improvement, through expanding parallellism through nothing else. (Our own brain's evolution has been constrained quite a bit by its huge demands for energy, just being able to fit through the birth canal, and being able to carry our brains on a mobile platform - what kind of brain could you get if you didn't have those limits, much less being able to use a much more efficient/faster computation element than neurons?)
We can already design systems that can solve specific problems much faster and more efficiently than we could ever hope to do ourselves without help. People are already studying self-organising systems - neural networks can already organize themselves in ways that are too complex for us to understand (for all but the simplest of networks). All it takes is someone who figures out how to make those self-organising systems dynamically adapt themselves to their environments, and that will be the beginning of our end.
As far as an improved body is concerned, biological systems are beautifully complex molecular systems, but I don't think you'll find too many biologists that couldn't think of at least a few improvements here or there. There are also some inherent limits to computation systems based on chemical reactions (slow compared to pure electronics!) that we would need to be able to bypass to compete with a "built-from-scratch" brain. I also think that you're being _seriously_ unimaginative about what AI will eventually be able to do - we're talking about FUTURE technology, not current technology.
There is nothing in your list: "autonomous, self-repairing, highly mobile, socially organised and can eat all kinds of stuff" that a properly-designed set of machines can't do (especially if they adopt an insect-like "hive" organization), and if we can't compete as a species, we will disappear from the universe, with Darwin's work as our epitaph.
Your other responder already described one part of the problem (whether we would be dominant in such a relationship), and I would also add that when such a being _is_ more intelligent than we are, how can we be sure that we _will_ be able to guide it in a way that it will remain friendly toward us?
The only way we can retain some sort of parity in such a relationship is if we can stay on equal footing, ability-wise, so that those beings regard us as peers rather than pets. We have to either evolve ourselves or make sure that the AIs don't become more intelligent than us - but in a situation where an AI is learning & evolving itself, I don't think we would able to put such a lid on its capacity.
At some point in the near future, people will figure out how to make a machine that can learn. At that point, it will only be a matter of time before there are machines that will be more intelligent than a typical human, and will be able to build bodies for themselves which are far superior to our biological bodies.
If we haven't learned how to evolve ourselves, either through genetics and/or cybernetics at that stage, we _will_ be replaced as the dominant life form in this region of space.
I said that the feature was deliberate ambiguity because, while the actual framework was agreed, the details were deliberately left to be resolved in the light of experience by future actors.
Yeah, that's what I was calling silly. The justice framework doesn't haven to be ambiguous at all, even in the details. It just needs agents that can handle ambiguity at the vital decision points.
It's like saying that creating a computer program using a computer language where many of the operators create ambiguous results will somehow make that system handle ambiguous inputs better. All you'll really get in that situation is confusion. Allowing the framework itself to be ambiguous just makes people confused about the "proper" way of using the system.
I said that the feature was deliberate ambiguity because, while the actual framework was agreed, the details were deliberately left to be resolved in the light of experience by future actors.
No, your original statements were more correct: many elements of the U.S. legal system are fundamentally ambiguous - partly by choice, partly because an ambiguous language was used to define it. That ambiguity causes unnecessary confusion and problems when trying to "run" the implementation.
This is often not a bug, but a deliberate feature.
...
Much of the problem in law is that the ideas being expressed are inherently fuzzy, not just poorly expressed.
That's a silly "feature", and has caused a lot of social headaches throughout history.
You don't need to make the actual framework of your justice system deliberately ambiguous to handle ambiguous inputs. If you want a system that needs to handle ambiguous inputs, then build your system so that when those ambiguities are recognized, judgements about them can be handed over to agents that can handle such inputs (judges & juries, for example).
I believe that at least a few SQL database interfaces can be configured to _require_ a WHERE clause - and if you want your statement to apply to the entire database, you have to specify something like "WHERE 1".
It probably would've saved a lot of grief if that had been made part of the original SQL spec:-)
The usual approach to double-checking counting machines is to handcount a large enough randomly-chosen sample to have some degree of confidence in the machine's results. Statisticians have all kinds of "rules" to get desired levels of accuracy. You have to make sure, of course, that the text that the people use to do the handcount is the same text that the machine is using to do the handcount (hence using a font that both the machine & the people can read easily). Exit polls are another way to detect whether it might be a good idea to do a full handcount.
You've got to put double-checks in at every phase, of course - you don't want to let just let the election officials pick that "random" sample set, for example, or sooner or later one of those phases will be compromised. That's one of the reasons why you have to allow all kinds of "hostile" observers to monitor every phase of the counting, to increase the chances that any attempt at fraud will be screamed about. You don't get that opportunity where there are no paper ballots to look at, since there's nobody who can stand inside the machines & count the bits moving around.
All of these protections for paper-ballot counting have been worked out for quite a while, however, usually in response to trial-by-fire election fraud situations such as the old Chicago political machines. It's a testament to how corrupt or how incompetent many of the current election officials are, that they insist that you can throw out all of these established & tested failure-check principles simply because they want to use a new system to count the votes. (Conspiracy theorists might contend that "they" want the new systems used _because_ it gives them the opportunity to throw out all those failure-check procedures.)
It takes a lot more manpower to defraud a hand-counted, hardcopy-based election than it does to corrupt a centralized electronic-counting system, and the more people involved, the more likely the fraud will be discovered.
I can think of a LOT more possibilities for defrauding an electronic system, even "properly designed", than I can for a properly-designed hardcopy system.
You can make a very nice vote-printing machine (rather than a vote-counting) machine, with all kinds of standards to make sure the questions are easy to read (or hear), that the answer that you put down is actually associated with the question that is on the screen, and that you can only put down ONE answer per voting question.
The resultant ballot sheet should contain a list of the items that you voted on, with your answer easily readable next to each item (using a machine AND voter-readable font, since having a separate machine-readable code would make the voter-verification worthless).
If anything looks fishy, the voter tosses the ballot into the shredder & gets a new blank one.
Manual recounts would be a helluva lot easier (no hanging chads, no wondering what a stray mark covering two ovals means, etc).
As the grandparent says, there's quite a few benefits that are possible by designing a solid system for printing votes, but using the computers to count the votes is really problematic.
Reponse to 1: Who runs the lot, and what pool are the jury members selected from? Will there be any attempt at avoiding conflict of interest, or if you get a few people on the jury who wants you dead, are you screwed? (Or could you get away with blatant murder if some of the jury members end up being your close friends or didn't like the victim?)
Reponse to 2 & 3: Why would a typical "citizen" be qualified to decide either of those types of things? I think you're making a big assumption about how intelligent and educated these jury members are going to be, which brings up a whole 'nother elephant in a "functioning anarchic state" argument: do you honestly believe that you will get a society where most of the citizens are decently educated and/or trained in critical analysis if you don't have some sort of publicly-supported educational system?
(The obvious response is that most citizens nowadays aren't very good at critical analysis anyway even given the current public education system, which I would be forced to agree with, although I still contend that without a decent public education system you have very little chance of a widely-educated public).
4. I contend that in an anarchic environment, i.e., without a clear, well-defined & _enforced_ legal & justice system, and without decently-educated/trained jury members, you will _rarely_ get any kind of good, rational judgement out of a jury.
Re: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Egg. Eggs existed for many genetic ancestors of the chicken before anything recognizable as a modern chicken even came into existence. This holds true whether you treat chickens as coming into existence incrementally (becoming more and more chicken-like through generations) or if you define some kind of threshhold point of "chickeness" where chickens don't exist until they reached that state of evolution.
If you really want to hurt peoples' heads, you can probably look up some good Zen koans somewhere - they're designed not to have any logical answers:-)
--
I've listened to too many people, when faced with government incompetence & corruption, claim in a knee-jerk fashion that an anarchy-based society is the natural "cure" to such ills, but when you try and get into the practical details about how such a society might work, they haven't put any real thought into it at all.
All my own mental "what-if" attempts at thinking about how such a society might work have been pretty much ended up concluding that it can't work. I'd be thrilled if someone can point me to a decent description of such a society which doesn't depend on the same sort of pie-in-the-sky assumptions about human nature that communism does (or "utopian" capitalism for that matter).
Frankly speaking, if you don't have easy answers to questions like the above (which I just threw out as they occurred to me), I'm not terribly impressed with the amount of thought that you have put into preparing your argument for how an anarchy-based society could work.
If they have a suspect's phone number, then they can get a warrant to get the phone records for that suspect's phone number like any other standard investigation procedure.
Getting ALL of a company's phone records, without warrants, to go on a fishing investigation for "potential" terrorists is definitely trending into police-state territory. This kind of behavior and its willing participants need to be rooted out and exposed to the light of civil criticism.
Depends on the state laws. Some states provide tenants with rights over and above the landlord's property rights, because some landlords in the past have abused those rights (going into tenants' area w/o advance notice, bugging tenants' area, etc).
The tenant's right to privacy from the landlord might very well be included in those laws, in which case the police should have to get a warrant like any other surveillance situation when they want to collect anything other than public information about those tenants.
How are the jury members picked? Does the jury also decide when they need to convene, who collects the evidence (and which evidence should be collected), organizes & analyzes its own arguments, decides on the punishment, and then maybe picks one of its members to carry out the punishment? Do all of the jury members get forensic & deductive training, or do you think the "average" citizen (especially people whose education might be a wee bit compromised with an "anarchy"-society-supported "education" system) will make consistently good, rational judgements?
Are there any scenarios where the jury's decisions can be appealed, and who gets to decide whether the appeal can be held, and who hears the appeal? Another jury? Apply all questions about juries to them too.
Does the jury also get to decide whether or not the suspect should be held, and if they decide that he/she's a flight risk, does one of them "hold" the suspect at their house? If they don't, where do they hold the suspect & who gets to pay for such a facility (assuming you've still got a functioning currency system)?
What happens if the suspect is an expert sniper or makes boobietraps & decides to take all of the members of the "jury" out before they can try and take HIM out?
Try and give some details about this "smoothly-functioning" anarchy-based society - I'd really like to be able to imagine how such a society can work.
Actually, what I'd be interested in a widespread technology that recorded "n" channels of audio, with "3D virtual" positioning information for each channel of audio. The receiving equipment would be responsible for taking that "virtual sound" data & reproducing it in its target environment.
Although I'm not one, it might give audiophiles something to spend money on that makes a real difference in listening quality - the better equipment (speakers, acoustics of listening environment, binaural earphones, etc) will do a better job at reconstructing a "3D virtual environment" based on that positioning data.
You could also do lots of fun things with the individual channels (add/move position/apply effects/delete each channel).
Once we've reached the limits of human hearing, there are still plenty of ways to use extra bandwidth for transmitting audio data.
I'm sorry, that's called "dodging the question". Either point me at a reference (printed journal is fine if you can't find an online reference), or just admit that you don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that support your point.
Gah, that didn't make sense - I meant, do you know of any formal economic studies which show that preventing people from copying works/ideas will _encourage_ innovation?
Slashdot Mirror
PDF is not exactly an "open" format - it _is_ Adobe's proprietary format after all. The basics of it are fairly standardised, however, so it tends to display & print with reasonable consistency on most platforms.
*rolls eyes*
Seems like you don't meet very many good programmers.
Most of the good programmers I've met would've just treated it as a new feature request & figured out a way to make it easy for their customer to do all their "common" transactions.
In the process, they (the developer) would've tried to learn as much as they could about the requirements of their customer & would probably end up providing functionality for the customer that the customer didn't realise was possible with this new systme.
That's the kind of thing that you do when your business model is writing software as a service, and you're trying to make a customer happy so they'll come back to you the next time they need help.
I beg your pardon, I lumped your reply in with the message that you were responding to.
It sounded to me like you were agreeing with the parent of your message.
You implied that selling copied goods (selling pirated goods) is the same as using someone's work as your own (using cover art). One is fraud, the other is copyright infringement. The fact that you couldn't figure out what I was referring to from your own post just proves my point.
*snort*
There's nothing inconsistent about the viewpoint that fraud is bad, regardless of whether copyright infringement occurred or not.
It doesn't surprise me that you three dislike making the distinction.
I can't tell whether you're arguing for or against. For either case, you haven't referenced any peer-reviewed studies to support your point. A well-crafted study should be able to show if there is some "good" level of IP, if such a good effect actually exists.
I'm arguing against IP laws in general (both copyright and patents). Both of these concepts depend on mechanisms which suppress the use of ideas, but they are touted regularly, without proof or study, as encouraging the production of new ideas. I'm not seeing that connection, and have been waiting for someone to point me to something a little more robust than "It's obvious!" to support the idea that suppressing the use of ideas actually encourages innovation, which is the whole social justification for implementing IP.
Why would I agree with such a nonobvious conclusion?
I've never understood why so many people accept, without any kind of proof, the canard that being able to restrict someone else's development of an idea is somehow going to "encourage" innovation. Proponents state that like a mantra, but I haven't met anyone who has been able to point me to any kind of study showing that such an effect is true (and I've read several studies showing that IP laws tend to retard innovation in a society). At first glance, it seems to make more sense that you'd encourage societal innovation by giving ideas as large a spread through society as possible, not by using mechanisms that restrict them.
The current importance of intellectual property is completely artificial, and is hurting the rate of innovation in the US (and the other countries that follow the US's lead). If the legislation defining IP hadn't ever been concocted, then the marketplace would've developed in a much more natural and sustainable way, where the value of goods & services would have a much more direct correlation with the resources, skill & labor used to provide them. Unfortunately, IP laws have created such large artificial value that entire industries depend on it to bolster otherwise weak business models, which is not a good setup if you're trying to encourage an efficient marketplace economy.
No, first you have to prove whether treating ideas like real property provides any societal benefit or not. Just saying it is so isn't a good enough basis for overriding private property rights. And if you can't prove that such an effect exists, then there's no reason to support the idea of intellectual property rights.
Yeah, nothing says "World Power" like basing a big chunk of your economy on a fundamentally-artificial business model. Especially when it's so easy to enforce it on other countries who might not agree with that business model.
Well, I dunno - we could, like, try and do that stuff better than other countries? You know, _compete_? Or has that become a taboo subject nowadays? I know! We can force the other countries to follow our arbitrary IP rules for no benefit to themselves! I'm sure they'll go for that!
I guess it's lot easier to try and suppress the innovation in other countries by "tricking" or browbeating them into following our IP rules than it is to try and beef up our own society to be able to compete with them. Frankly speaking though, if a country has to compete like that, it's only a matter of time before that country will become another has-been power while the countries concentrating on REAL innovation pass them up.
The U.S. did it to Europe during the Industrial Revolution, and now China is doing it to the U.S. If the U.S. leadership or public had any sense of history, we'd get our asses in gear & make the societal investment to be able to stay competitive, but all we've got right now are people like you who think that the U.S. is somehow entitled to control the information flow to the rest of the world.
Near future: within 200 years, with "near" being relative to our overall existence as a unique organism.
Even assuming that our engineering starts bumping regularly against fundamental physical limits, there is still vast room for improvement, through expanding parallellism through nothing else. (Our own brain's evolution has been constrained quite a bit by its huge demands for energy, just being able to fit through the birth canal, and being able to carry our brains on a mobile platform - what kind of brain could you get if you didn't have those limits, much less being able to use a much more efficient/faster computation element than neurons?)
We can already design systems that can solve specific problems much faster and more efficiently than we could ever hope to do ourselves without help. People are already studying self-organising systems - neural networks can already organize themselves in ways that are too complex for us to understand (for all but the simplest of networks). All it takes is someone who figures out how to make those self-organising systems dynamically adapt themselves to their environments, and that will be the beginning of our end.
As far as an improved body is concerned, biological systems are beautifully complex molecular systems, but I don't think you'll find too many biologists that couldn't think of at least a few improvements here or there. There are also some inherent limits to computation systems based on chemical reactions (slow compared to pure electronics!) that we would need to be able to bypass to compete with a "built-from-scratch" brain. I also think that you're being _seriously_ unimaginative about what AI will eventually be able to do - we're talking about FUTURE technology, not current technology.
There is nothing in your list: "autonomous, self-repairing, highly mobile, socially organised and can eat all kinds of stuff" that a properly-designed set of machines can't do (especially if they adopt an insect-like "hive" organization), and if we can't compete as a species, we will disappear from the universe, with Darwin's work as our epitaph.
Your other responder already described one part of the problem (whether we would be dominant in such a relationship), and I would also add that when such a being _is_ more intelligent than we are, how can we be sure that we _will_ be able to guide it in a way that it will remain friendly toward us?
The only way we can retain some sort of parity in such a relationship is if we can stay on equal footing, ability-wise, so that those beings regard us as peers rather than pets. We have to either evolve ourselves or make sure that the AIs don't become more intelligent than us - but in a situation where an AI is learning & evolving itself, I don't think we would able to put such a lid on its capacity.
I haven't seen a comment on this viewpoint yet:
At some point in the near future, people will figure out how to make a machine that can learn. At that point, it will only be a matter of time before there are machines that will be more intelligent than a typical human, and will be able to build bodies for themselves which are far superior to our biological bodies.
If we haven't learned how to evolve ourselves, either through genetics and/or cybernetics at that stage, we _will_ be replaced as the dominant life form in this region of space.
Yeah, that's what I was calling silly. The justice framework doesn't haven to be ambiguous at all, even in the details. It just needs agents that can handle ambiguity at the vital decision points.
It's like saying that creating a computer program using a computer language where many of the operators create ambiguous results will somehow make that system handle ambiguous inputs better. All you'll really get in that situation is confusion. Allowing the framework itself to be ambiguous just makes people confused about the "proper" way of using the system.
No, your original statements were more correct: many elements of the U.S. legal system are fundamentally ambiguous - partly by choice, partly because an ambiguous language was used to define it. That ambiguity causes unnecessary confusion and problems when trying to "run" the implementation.
That's a silly "feature", and has caused a lot of social headaches throughout history.
You don't need to make the actual framework of your justice system deliberately ambiguous to handle ambiguous inputs. If you want a system that needs to handle ambiguous inputs, then build your system so that when those ambiguities are recognized, judgements about them can be handed over to agents that can handle such inputs (judges & juries, for example).
I believe that at least a few SQL database interfaces can be configured to _require_ a WHERE clause - and if you want your statement to apply to the entire database, you have to specify something like "WHERE 1".
:-)
It probably would've saved a lot of grief if that had been made part of the original SQL spec
The usual approach to double-checking counting machines is to handcount a large enough randomly-chosen sample to have some degree of confidence in the machine's results. Statisticians have all kinds of "rules" to get desired levels of accuracy. You have to make sure, of course, that the text that the people use to do the handcount is the same text that the machine is using to do the handcount (hence using a font that both the machine & the people can read easily). Exit polls are another way to detect whether it might be a good idea to do a full handcount.
You've got to put double-checks in at every phase, of course - you don't want to let just let the election officials pick that "random" sample set, for example, or sooner or later one of those phases will be compromised. That's one of the reasons why you have to allow all kinds of "hostile" observers to monitor every phase of the counting, to increase the chances that any attempt at fraud will be screamed about. You don't get that opportunity where there are no paper ballots to look at, since there's nobody who can stand inside the machines & count the bits moving around.
All of these protections for paper-ballot counting have been worked out for quite a while, however, usually in response to trial-by-fire election fraud situations such as the old Chicago political machines. It's a testament to how corrupt or how incompetent many of the current election officials are, that they insist that you can throw out all of these established & tested failure-check principles simply because they want to use a new system to count the votes. (Conspiracy theorists might contend that "they" want the new systems used _because_ it gives them the opportunity to throw out all those failure-check procedures.)
It takes a lot more manpower to defraud a hand-counted, hardcopy-based election than it does to corrupt a centralized electronic-counting system, and the more people involved, the more likely the fraud will be discovered.
I can think of a LOT more possibilities for defrauding an electronic system, even "properly designed", than I can for a properly-designed hardcopy system.
You can make a very nice vote-printing machine (rather than a vote-counting) machine, with all kinds of standards to make sure the questions are easy to read (or hear), that the answer that you put down is actually associated with the question that is on the screen, and that you can only put down ONE answer per voting question.
The resultant ballot sheet should contain a list of the items that you voted on, with your answer easily readable next to each item (using a machine AND voter-readable font, since having a separate machine-readable code would make the voter-verification worthless).
If anything looks fishy, the voter tosses the ballot into the shredder & gets a new blank one.
Manual recounts would be a helluva lot easier (no hanging chads, no wondering what a stray mark covering two ovals means, etc).
As the grandparent says, there's quite a few benefits that are possible by designing a solid system for printing votes, but using the computers to count the votes is really problematic.
All right, at least something to talk about:
:-)
Reponse to 1: Who runs the lot, and what pool are the jury members selected from? Will there be any attempt at avoiding conflict of interest, or if you get a few people on the jury who wants you dead, are you screwed? (Or could you get away with blatant murder if some of the jury members end up being your close friends or didn't like the victim?)
Reponse to 2 & 3: Why would a typical "citizen" be qualified to decide either of those types of things? I think you're making a big assumption about how intelligent and educated these jury members are going to be, which brings up a whole 'nother elephant in a "functioning anarchic state" argument: do you honestly believe that you will get a society where most of the citizens are decently educated and/or trained in critical analysis if you don't have some sort of publicly-supported educational system?
(The obvious response is that most citizens nowadays aren't very good at critical analysis anyway even given the current public education system, which I would be forced to agree with, although I still contend that without a decent public education system you have very little chance of a widely-educated public).
4. I contend that in an anarchic environment, i.e., without a clear, well-defined & _enforced_ legal & justice system, and without decently-educated/trained jury members, you will _rarely_ get any kind of good, rational judgement out of a jury.
Re: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Egg. Eggs existed for many genetic ancestors of the chicken before anything recognizable as a modern chicken even came into existence. This holds true whether you treat chickens as coming into existence incrementally (becoming more and more chicken-like through generations) or if you define some kind of threshhold point of "chickeness" where chickens don't exist until they reached that state of evolution.
If you really want to hurt peoples' heads, you can probably look up some good Zen koans somewhere - they're designed not to have any logical answers
--
I've listened to too many people, when faced with government incompetence & corruption, claim in a knee-jerk fashion that an anarchy-based society is the natural "cure" to such ills, but when you try and get into the practical details about how such a society might work, they haven't put any real thought into it at all.
All my own mental "what-if" attempts at thinking about how such a society might work have been pretty much ended up concluding that it can't work. I'd be thrilled if someone can point me to a decent description of such a society which doesn't depend on the same sort of pie-in-the-sky assumptions about human nature that communism does (or "utopian" capitalism for that matter).
Feel free to respond in this thread.
Frankly speaking, if you don't have easy answers to questions like the above (which I just threw out as they occurred to me), I'm not terribly impressed with the amount of thought that you have put into preparing your argument for how an anarchy-based society could work.
If they have a suspect's phone number, then they can get a warrant to get the phone records for that suspect's phone number like any other standard investigation procedure.
Getting ALL of a company's phone records, without warrants, to go on a fishing investigation for "potential" terrorists is definitely trending into police-state territory. This kind of behavior and its willing participants need to be rooted out and exposed to the light of civil criticism.
Depends on the state laws. Some states provide tenants with rights over and above the landlord's property rights, because some landlords in the past have abused those rights (going into tenants' area w/o advance notice, bugging tenants' area, etc).
The tenant's right to privacy from the landlord might very well be included in those laws, in which case the police should have to get a warrant like any other surveillance situation when they want to collect anything other than public information about those tenants.
My my, what a completely useless response.
How are the jury members picked? Does the jury also decide when they need to convene, who collects the evidence (and which evidence should be collected), organizes & analyzes its own arguments, decides on the punishment, and then maybe picks one of its members to carry out the punishment? Do all of the jury members get forensic & deductive training, or do you think the "average" citizen (especially people whose education might be a wee bit compromised with an "anarchy"-society-supported "education" system) will make consistently good, rational judgements?
Are there any scenarios where the jury's decisions can be appealed, and who gets to decide whether the appeal can be held, and who hears the appeal? Another jury? Apply all questions about juries to them too.
Does the jury also get to decide whether or not the suspect should be held, and if they decide that he/she's a flight risk, does one of them "hold" the suspect at their house? If they don't, where do they hold the suspect & who gets to pay for such a facility (assuming you've still got a functioning currency system)?
What happens if the suspect is an expert sniper or makes boobietraps & decides to take all of the members of the "jury" out before they can try and take HIM out?
Try and give some details about this "smoothly-functioning" anarchy-based society - I'd really like to be able to imagine how such a society can work.
Actually, what I'd be interested in a widespread technology that recorded "n" channels of audio, with "3D virtual" positioning information for each channel of audio. The receiving equipment would be responsible for taking that "virtual sound" data & reproducing it in its target environment.
Although I'm not one, it might give audiophiles something to spend money on that makes a real difference in listening quality - the better equipment (speakers, acoustics of listening environment, binaural earphones, etc) will do a better job at reconstructing a "3D virtual environment" based on that positioning data.
You could also do lots of fun things with the individual channels (add/move position/apply effects/delete each channel).
Once we've reached the limits of human hearing, there are still plenty of ways to use extra bandwidth for transmitting audio data.
I'm sorry, that's called "dodging the question". Either point me at a reference (printed journal is fine if you can't find an online reference), or just admit that you don't know of any peer-reviewed studies that support your point.
Gah, that didn't make sense - I meant, do you know of any formal economic studies which show that preventing people from copying works/ideas will _encourage_ innovation?