How many deaths would there be from teachers who momentarily snapped and did something stupid? How many deaths would there be from children getting their hands on the guns and doing something stupid? How many deaths would there be from the cross-fire during a school shooting?
a) It depends on whether the school system is built to empower or depower teachers. There were they're made powerless and to submit to the mercy of students they're very likely to snap. There were they have authority and students who disrespect them are properly dealt with by the system it's an almost null possibility.
b) If the children received proper instruction on weapon security, as is standard practice anywhere where weapons are common, none or almost none. They'd know what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. Only children with no idea of how weapons work do stupid things with them.
c) Where almost everyone is armed there's almost no shootings. People tend to be very, very educated around each other, for obvious reasons.
A gun ban (like every other civilized country) would have made the massacre of children at Sandy Hook impossible.
Like a drug ban makes consuming drugs impossible and the prohibition caused everyone to stop drinking?
Here in Brazil we have a near total ban on guns. It's almost impossible to get a license to own a gun, and even more impossible to get the right to carry it around. Miraculously though, almost all criminals have guns, several of which military grade. Guess who are the only people who don't? A hint: starts with "law abiding" and ends with "citizens".
Here's what would stop any massacre in any school: an unknown number of armed teachers. Child-massacring wannabees chose schools because they know those are not only defenseless, but mandated by law to be defenseless. Break that assumption and the issue solves itself.
Are you kidding? Never head the term "genuine leather" etc.? Genuine has meant "really proceeding from its reputed source" since the 1660s, what did you think it meant??
That's a different case. Is "genuine leather" as opposed to something that isn't leather. A pirated copy of Windows is still "genuine Windows", not something that "isn't Windows". What the disk isn't is a "genuinely pressed by a Microsoft contractee" disk. The distinction is clear, but Microsoft's effort a few years ago was in the direction of muddling the distinction to the point that one'd consider a "non-genuinely pressed by a Microsoft contractee" disk as also being a "non-genuine Windows". It's this kind of confusion that needs solving.
Changing the commonly understood meaning of a word just to suite your argument is disingenuous at best.
You're incorrect. It's unchanging the meaning back to something that makes sense. "Original" only has meaning in a crafts and arts context. The Mona Lisa painted by da Vinci is an original. Copies wouldn't be the original even if authorized by da Vinci himself. The concept of an "original copy" is nonsensical and only came about due to marketing efforts by copyrightists. For a software, or any piece of digital media really, "the original" would be the hard drive where the first finished version was produced, and even so provided it never ever were to be defragmented, otherwise any remaining copy in the drive would still be mere a copy, not the original (now destroyed). Copies can be authorized or unauthorized, and if authorized by a licensee or by the author himself, but they are never, ever, "original" anything.
Ask anyone on the street whether an unauthorised copy created by a 3rd party sold as created by the 1st party is genuine and they'll say no.
Genuine is another term whose actual meaning was distorted by copyrightists' marketing efforts. In the case, Microsoft. And it took them years and millions of dollars to ingrain in the minds of the unsuspecting sheep this new meaning. It's another word that needs rescuing.
You can argue that people should be allowed to make and sell these 3rd party versions,
Which I do.:-)
but if they were sold as being created by the 1st party then they still wouldn't be genuine.
Nope. They'd be genuine copies of the copies of the original made by the 1st party.
No it doesn't depend, you can't just make up your own definition of "genuine" and the ship of Theseus has nothing to do with it. (...) Seriously, read the definition of (...)
Yes, I can, and yes, it does. Dictionary writers list common usages of words, they're historians, not rulers, and their books, the dictionaries, are descriptive, not normative. My disagreement then isn't about semantics, what I question and oppose is that which said words point to, the very illogical and cognitively deficient principles which sustain them. Copyrights are illogical, patents are illogical, trademarks are illogical. The whole linguistic landscape developed around these errors to sustain them must be questioned, replaced and ultimately reduced to historical footnotes in the etymological dictionaries of the future.
Genuine doesn't mean "identical", it means that it is what it's claimed to be (the dictionary definition is "possessing the claimed or attributed character, quality, or origin; not counterfeit; authentic; real: genuine sympathy; a genuine antique.")
As always the answer is "it depends". The disk is original from its manufacturer. The service of copying is the copier's original service. The contents is the software house's compiler's original output. What isn't original in all of this?
A counterfeit disk can have 100% identical data to a real copy, but if the seller claims that counterfeit disk came from the official distributor when it didn't then by definition it's not genuine.
The claim is a lie, but it doesn't make the content any less original.
Also you can't have something that is "almost genuine", either the item is as described or it isn't. If you buy Windows disk that was claimed to have come from an official distributor but didn't then how is that "almost genuine"?
Because once installed it's indistinguishable from an installation made from an official distributor's disk.
To better understand what I'm referring to read on the Ship of Theseus paradox. The human brain's concept of sameness is a broken cognitive fiction. That it then gives rise to nonsensical laws and all manners of secondary paradoxes is unsurprising.
You do know that these men were arrested for selling counterfeit copies as genuine copies right?
Yes. In these cases (lying to a customer, not piracy per se) I'm all of them getting punished, but notice I was replying to the OP's far more generic question on whether selling unlicensed stuff is okay, for which I replied that yes, by itself it is.
By the way I don't agree with this usage of the term "genuine". Unless the contents was in some way altered it's as much "genuine" as one sold by an official licensee. Perhaps the version those guys was, in addition to unlicensed, also cracked, and which case it's also non-genuine, but usually the more apt distinction is between licensed vs. unlicensed, not between genuine vs. non-genuine, particularly because there are degrees of "genuinity", it isn't a binary distinction. For example, a cracked MS Windows disk is almost genuine (it's still Windows) while a Linux disk dressed in a Windows-like skin and sold as if it where Windows would be completely non-genuine, although even this would be made less non-genuine were it to have Wine installed and configured in a way that were transparent to the user.
yeah. So what? Other security features may copy this method. And then your "tissue under the skin" will be stored on a phone, maybe stolen by apps, and used on other security systems, maybe to identify as you on a ATM.
Not necessarily. Here in Brazil my bank uses some kind of camera-based palm scanning instead of fingerprints. This is an easy way to keep things independent: fingerprints for non-important stuff, whole hand for stuff that requires more security, maybe whole hand plus retina plus voice plus... for very important stuff etc. Sure it all comes down to a limited set of passwords, but considering the alternative are usually 4-digit pins (reused everywhere) it's an improvement nonetheless.
Wait a minute: Are you telling me it's "OK" to sell something you don't have license to?
Yes, it is. They're finding the data, burning it into a disc, packaging, perhaps offering warranty so that they'll replace the disk if it doesn't work etc. That's a service. The same service the original publisher does mind you, even if the original publisher puts more quality in the end result. As service providers both are certainly entitled to charge whatever they want for said service, provided of course they don't lie about what they're selling to their customers. It's mere competition.
"Ah, but one pays the author/artist/studio, the other doesn't!!!" Then the one who does can write in his packaging "Official product! We pay the [whatever]! Buy official and support [whatever]!" And that's marketing. And that's an advantage the other service provider doesn't have.
As for who will sell more and win in the end, let the free market decide.
By the way: I always purchase the official version if it's available (if it isn't I pirate). I don't do this because some idiotic anti-private property law demands from me to obey a government mandated monopoly, but because *I* want to support official licensees whenever *they* support me. My money, my morals, my choice.
So, assuming one deregulated in the method you described, how would the process of de-regulating and then re-regulating at an agreed-upon minimum work? And who would ensure the level playing field plus guard the process against inappropriate gaming of the system?
Among libertarians you have two diverging thoughts on this.
On one side are the anarcho-capitalists, who advocate for zero State. For them everything should be private, including enforcing powers, so their answer would be that two parties in conflict would have to solve it by themselves. That could be by force, but the idea is that the playing field is level because everyone has access to basically the same weapons (think private police) and besides because most people prefer peace coexistence to violence and presumably go out of their way to enforce it (this cultural aspect is key, without it the whole thing would degrade into warlords fighting tribal wars until one won and we were back into a State), so if one party were to start with violence against another that'd is a very good way for them to receive retaliation not only from said another party but also from everyone around, thus losing a quite the gruesome way. Hence conflicting parties would have strong incentives to seek arbitrage (private justice) from an agreed upon 3rd party with a good reputation for fairness, otherwise one party or the other wouldn't approve of him. And thus, from arbitration to arbitration to arbitration you'd get everyone adjusting to everyone else.
On the other side are the minarchists, who advocate for a minimum State. For them the above scenario is fantasy as it'd unavoidably devolve into warlords etc., thus it's better to sidestep the whole "civilization into chaos and back into a State anyway" by shaping said State into something that'd allow the maximum freedom with the minimum conflict. The idea then is that you'd have a State with two mandates: protecting private property (as in material property, which includes live, but not intellectual property, since that one violates material property) and enforcing contracts. This could lead to temporary monopolies, particularly on very new or very rare stuff, but the idea is that a monopoly or even a cartel not backed by government regulation is fragile and breaks in short time due precisely to the fact that the lack of regulation means anyone (corporation or cooperative of individuals) with enough money can build a competing business. Thus either the "monopoly" keeps prices low enough and quality high enough so as to make competing with it economically unfeasible, and thus consumers win, or it becomes dumb and by charging too much creates incentives for the establishment of new competitors who'll drive prices down, and thus consumers also win. In other words, the level playing field is guarded from inappropriate gaming of the system due to there not existing any system to be gamed.
In practice both view are idealistic to a fault, anarcho-capitalism even more so than minarchism, but I think the main function of these considerations isn't really as descriptions of how to actually build a society, but as rulers with which to judge what's going around in the real world and how far it is from what it should be, as well as a means of providing clarity on what to strive for, even if it's unachievable. From this perspective it becomes obvious that the problem with Verizon et al. is that the market they operate isn't free, it's a protected market in which only the very few players with pockets deep enough to pay for the lawyers, lobbyists campaigns etc. can enter, and thus a government-protected cartel doing things that only said protection would allow. Were it freed (deregulated and unsubsidized) and in due time the whole net neutrality debate would become moot as there would be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of competitors, and anyone idiotic enough to attempt breaking net neutrality would in very short order find themselves with no customers, all of whom would have fled to some
I'd be interested to hear a libertarian's take on this
So here it is: for a libertarian anyone with copper should be allowed to build a network of copper cables, and anyone with a radio transmitter/receiver should be allowed to build a RF networks, and then allowed to charge whatever they wanted for whatever service they provided, and blocked from preventing any 3rd party from offering competing services, and so on and so forth. Plus, anytime any of those (wires and RFs) crossed over someone else's property they'd need to negotiate with that property's owner the terms of the right of passage or simply not have them passing through it, no such thing as a government demanding you to let someone else's stuff within what's yours.
That said, the environment in which these corporations operate is already full of government interference that makes meaningful competition under a libertarian approach impossible, and hence reasoning from a libertarian point of view doesn't work. Verizon et. al. only have the level of power they have because they're in bed with government regulators. You'd have to first remove all regulations over regulations over regulations over regulation... on everything dealing directly or indirectly with the establishment of sellable network service before one could entirely depart from network neutrality without this causing problems. Until then, I'm all for keeping network neutrality around, as government-backed monopolism plus lack of regulation would be the worst of the possible worlds. For the later to be removed in a way that'd actually work you'd also need to remove the former.
we should start doing something together, to RIGHT THE WRONGS.
The problem is that whenever discussions on these topics come about, the proposed "solutions" are always framed within the rules set by the power elites. And the power elites are this because they are masters of this game. In fact, they've mastered it so much that nowadays even violent revolutions are no exceptions, they also fit within the rules, just another subset of the same old game.
No, the actual solution is to break the rules altogether. Throughout history what managed to alter the rules the most were technological and scientific changes. But only alter, because they still mostly happened at a pace master manipulators (politicians, statesmen and other power hungry individuals) could deal with. So to actually break the rules technological change must come at even faster rates, to the point it surpasses human ability to keep pace altogether. And by that I don't mean merely politicians' ability. Organizations like the NSA employ the brightest of the brightest. That's the level that must be overcome.
What will right the wrongs then, if we happen to do it right, will be molecular nanotechnology-controlling friendly exponentially self-improving general artificial intelligence, a.k.a. the Singularity. The flip side of the coin is that not doing it right will mean the extinction of the human species, as a non-friendly one won't have any reason to keep us around. In any case, one way or the other it'll be the ultimate rule breaker, the one after which everything that came before will be meaningless.
So, we should really focus on that. The first research institute (or garage or basement) to manage it will change everything, for better or worse. As for the standard alternatives though, nope, they're just more of the same.
I've hear tons of good things about SourceTree, a freeware Git / Mercurial client originally for Mac but recently released for Windows. I know it's used by lots of non-technical folk for non-coding purposes (think designers managing Photoshop projects), so it might work for your scenario too. I haven't used it myself though so I can't comment from personal experience.
By the way, you could set things so that you'd have a different repository for each project, similar to your set of root folders, instead of a single repository covering everything. That'd keep things neatly separated as users would be able to branch only the specific projects they're working with rather than the whole thing. And since it all comes down to the original files/folders being copied up and down with the addition of a few hidden metadata files/folders, end users wouldn't really notice anything is added under the hood unless they have Explorer set to show hidden files, evidently.
What passed years ago was "It's high time PayPal was regulated as a bank."
That'd cause it to become US-only. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for a non-American to get an US bank account? As one such non-American who never visited the US and who purchases stuff from different countries through PayPal and similar services, turning them into banks with all the restrictions that implies would be very annoying, to say the least.
There's also apatheism, in which one simply doesn't care whether gods exist or not and doesn't think the question whether this can or cannot be known is important. Buddhists tend to be apatheists: some think gods exist (but meh) while others think they don't (but whatever).
1) non-Muslems "people of the book" (Christians and Jews): a) convert to Islam b) pay a -stay alive- "tax" c) die!
It depends on the perspective. From Muslim's one it works like this:
a) convert to Islam, become automatically eligible for the draft (and free of the military tax), become subject to the Sharia; b) don't convert to Islam, become automatically ineligible for the draft (and subjected to the military tax), become allowed to live in a protected autonomous region under your own religion's laws; c) don't convert to Islam, don't pay the military draft, go live somewhere else.
2) the rest of non-Muslems (e.g., Buddist, Hindu, atheists): a) convert to Islam b) die!
Buddhists and Hindus are people of the book, so no. As for actual infidels (effective enemies of Islam), yes, that's basically it.
By the way: those that kill the Christians in Egypt are Muslims.
No, they're fundamentalist Muslims, members of one of the several sects invented in the end of the 18th-century under the influence of Western ideas (Puritanism back then) which nowadays branched into other sects influenced by more Western ideas (Nietzscheanism, Marxism, Nazism, Heideggerianism etc.). By the way, these guy are so crazy that they work like this:
3) non-fundamentalist everyone else (actual Muslim believers, people of the book, infidels):
a) convert to batshit-crazy fundamentalist branch of pseudo-Islam; b) die.
* i am a Greek from Greece (never lived in Egypt as many Greeks did in the past few mileniums (Alexandria and other stuff...!) until they forced to leave few decades ago), and i am Orthodox - i mention this because i don't like it how you portray Muslims as defenders of the Christians,
I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact. Islam has very specific rules determining that Christians must be protected. It's a duty of actual Muslims, affirmed and reaffirmed for centuries by the four Sharia schools. The exception to this are the fundamentalists who disregard the four schools of jurisprudence preferring to do their own stuff.
By the way: Muslims Protecting a Christian Church in Egypt. The white clothe is a symbol of Sufism, the traditional esoteric path within Islam where the Islamic equivalent to Orthodox Christians' Theosis is practiced. And note: Sufis are themselves prime assassination targets of fundamentalist pseudo-Muslims.
or the Orthodox Christians as persecuting the Coptic Christians (Coptics actually are native to Egypt, never "fleed" from Europe to save themselves from Orthodox or Catholics)
True, I misremembered the details, they didn't flee from Europe. But you're incorrect in that the Orthodox (or, to be more precise, the still undivided Catholic-Orthodox Church) did indeed persecute the Coptics. From Wikipedia's article:
"Copts suffered under the rule of the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire. The Melkite Patriarchs, appointed by the emperors as both spiritual leaders and civil governors, massacred the Egyptian population whom they considered heretics. Many Egyptians were tortured and martyred to accept the terms of Chalcedon, but Egyptians remained loyal to the faith of their fathers and to the Cyrillian view of Christology. One of the most renowned Egyptian saints of that period is Saint Samuel the Confessor."
So, yeah.
And then came the Muslims and stopped this particular nonsense, although starting the tax stuff.
What is the penalty for apostasy in the Muslim religion?
The same one applied in the Christian and Jewish religions: death.
What? You thought either preached something different? No, they just don't put into practice. But that it's in the book all the same, it is.
How old was Muhammad's wife? How old must a person be to be wed under Islamic law? How old must that wife be to have sex?
Of legal age at the time. Of legal age under said law.:-)
What? You think our Western laws aren't arbitrary either? Try talking to someone from 3613 CE an see what he thinks of your morality and the laws you think of as just. Just as a matter of perspective I'll say this: a radical progressive of the 1920's would feel welcome among the extreme right wing of the GOP of today. Ditto for us all in 100 years, never mind in 1600.
Since the the entire religion is based on the koran and [it] states that all non-muslims are infidels
No, it doesn't. The Koran distinguishes believers on one extreme, infidels on the other, and "people of the book" in the middle, who must be protected by believers even though they're (thought of as being) in error. Christians and Jews are explicitly cited as "people of the book". Afterwards Buddhists, Hinduists and others were added to the list.
By the way: traditional Muslims in Egypt have been helping protect Christian churches from the fundamentalist Christian-hating ones. In particular, they've been protecting Coptic Christian churches, the same Coptics that both Catholics and Orthodox Christians were persecuting several centuries ago and who had to flee from Europe and find refuge there, in Islamic Egypt, back in the day fundamentalist Islam hadn't been invented yet (this one's an English Puritanism-inspired 18th-century innovation).
True, but if it's a goal at all it includes at a minimum "not starting wars". If a country is in as few wars as possible, limiting itself to only entering into those started by others against it, that by itself does wonders in terms of committing neither war crimes nor crimes in war. Doubleplusgood bonus: that country is seen as even more of a good guy.
Who'd have thought that not doing something has so many benefits?;-)
If I put up a web site that forbid anyone working for or on behalf of any TLA or law enforcement agency from accessing any publically accessible content on my site could I use CFAA against the government when they ignore my wishes and suck the whole thing into a NSA database?
No. Governments can do almost everything the laws it imposes say citizens (subjects?) cannot do. That's the point of a government, to be the single exception to the rule so that it can impose the rule on everyone else. Also, when the government promises it won't do something that isn't really binding. Sure, some of the time they'll more or less try, without much emphasis and only if they're feeling like it, most of the time however it'll be like that Star Wards exchange between Lando and Darth Vader:
Darth Vader: "Calrissian! Take the princess and the Wookie to my ship." Lando Calrissian: "You said they'd be left at the city under my supervision." Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
If I were PJ and the feds or whomever came down on me with a gagging order, a reaction and a message like this would be the only possibly-legal way of informing the users
That makes an EXTREME amount of sense, thank for pointing it out! I guess I should learn to read between the lines rather than taking things so easily at face value...:-(
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How many deaths would there be from teachers who momentarily snapped and did something stupid? How many deaths would there be from children getting their hands on the guns and doing something stupid? How many deaths would there be from the cross-fire during a school shooting?
a) It depends on whether the school system is built to empower or depower teachers. There were they're made powerless and to submit to the mercy of students they're very likely to snap. There were they have authority and students who disrespect them are properly dealt with by the system it's an almost null possibility.
b) If the children received proper instruction on weapon security, as is standard practice anywhere where weapons are common, none or almost none. They'd know what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. Only children with no idea of how weapons work do stupid things with them.
c) Where almost everyone is armed there's almost no shootings. People tend to be very, very educated around each other, for obvious reasons.
In a civilized country having very strict gun laws actually work.
In a civilized country civilization works. Having civilization the need to ban guns becomes a moot point given that people are, you know, civilized.
A gun ban (like every other civilized country) would have made the massacre of children at Sandy Hook impossible.
Like a drug ban makes consuming drugs impossible and the prohibition caused everyone to stop drinking?
Here in Brazil we have a near total ban on guns. It's almost impossible to get a license to own a gun, and even more impossible to get the right to carry it around. Miraculously though, almost all criminals have guns, several of which military grade. Guess who are the only people who don't? A hint: starts with "law abiding" and ends with "citizens".
Here's what would stop any massacre in any school: an unknown number of armed teachers. Child-massacring wannabees chose schools because they know those are not only defenseless, but mandated by law to be defenseless. Break that assumption and the issue solves itself.
they do consider themselves to be respectable professionals and don't like their reputation to be dragged through the mud to obviously.
"It's the 99 percent of lawyers who give the rest a bad name."
Are you kidding? Never head the term "genuine leather" etc.? Genuine has meant "really proceeding from its reputed source" since the 1660s, what did you think it meant??
That's a different case. Is "genuine leather" as opposed to something that isn't leather. A pirated copy of Windows is still "genuine Windows", not something that "isn't Windows". What the disk isn't is a "genuinely pressed by a Microsoft contractee" disk. The distinction is clear, but Microsoft's effort a few years ago was in the direction of muddling the distinction to the point that one'd consider a "non-genuinely pressed by a Microsoft contractee" disk as also being a "non-genuine Windows". It's this kind of confusion that needs solving.
I agree with your remaining points.
Changing the commonly understood meaning of a word just to suite your argument is disingenuous at best.
You're incorrect. It's unchanging the meaning back to something that makes sense. "Original" only has meaning in a crafts and arts context. The Mona Lisa painted by da Vinci is an original. Copies wouldn't be the original even if authorized by da Vinci himself. The concept of an "original copy" is nonsensical and only came about due to marketing efforts by copyrightists. For a software, or any piece of digital media really, "the original" would be the hard drive where the first finished version was produced, and even so provided it never ever were to be defragmented, otherwise any remaining copy in the drive would still be mere a copy, not the original (now destroyed). Copies can be authorized or unauthorized, and if authorized by a licensee or by the author himself, but they are never, ever, "original" anything.
Ask anyone on the street whether an unauthorised copy created by a 3rd party sold as created by the 1st party is genuine and they'll say no.
Genuine is another term whose actual meaning was distorted by copyrightists' marketing efforts. In the case, Microsoft. And it took them years and millions of dollars to ingrain in the minds of the unsuspecting sheep this new meaning. It's another word that needs rescuing.
You can argue that people should be allowed to make and sell these 3rd party versions,
Which I do. :-)
but if they were sold as being created by the 1st party then they still wouldn't be genuine.
Nope. They'd be genuine copies of the copies of the original made by the 1st party.
No it doesn't depend, you can't just make up your own definition of "genuine" and the ship of Theseus has nothing to do with it. (...) Seriously, read the definition of (...)
Yes, I can, and yes, it does. Dictionary writers list common usages of words, they're historians, not rulers, and their books, the dictionaries, are descriptive, not normative. My disagreement then isn't about semantics, what I question and oppose is that which said words point to, the very illogical and cognitively deficient principles which sustain them. Copyrights are illogical, patents are illogical, trademarks are illogical. The whole linguistic landscape developed around these errors to sustain them must be questioned, replaced and ultimately reduced to historical footnotes in the etymological dictionaries of the future.
Genuine doesn't mean "identical", it means that it is what it's claimed to be (the dictionary definition is "possessing the claimed or attributed character, quality, or origin; not counterfeit; authentic; real: genuine sympathy; a genuine antique.")
As always the answer is "it depends". The disk is original from its manufacturer. The service of copying is the copier's original service. The contents is the software house's compiler's original output. What isn't original in all of this?
A counterfeit disk can have 100% identical data to a real copy, but if the seller claims that counterfeit disk came from the official distributor when it didn't then by definition it's not genuine.
The claim is a lie, but it doesn't make the content any less original.
Also you can't have something that is "almost genuine", either the item is as described or it isn't. If you buy Windows disk that was claimed to have come from an official distributor but didn't then how is that "almost genuine"?
Because once installed it's indistinguishable from an installation made from an official distributor's disk.
To better understand what I'm referring to read on the Ship of Theseus paradox. The human brain's concept of sameness is a broken cognitive fiction. That it then gives rise to nonsensical laws and all manners of secondary paradoxes is unsurprising.
You do know that these men were arrested for selling counterfeit copies as genuine copies right?
Yes. In these cases (lying to a customer, not piracy per se) I'm all of them getting punished, but notice I was replying to the OP's far more generic question on whether selling unlicensed stuff is okay, for which I replied that yes, by itself it is.
By the way I don't agree with this usage of the term "genuine". Unless the contents was in some way altered it's as much "genuine" as one sold by an official licensee. Perhaps the version those guys was, in addition to unlicensed, also cracked, and which case it's also non-genuine, but usually the more apt distinction is between licensed vs. unlicensed, not between genuine vs. non-genuine, particularly because there are degrees of "genuinity", it isn't a binary distinction. For example, a cracked MS Windows disk is almost genuine (it's still Windows) while a Linux disk dressed in a Windows-like skin and sold as if it where Windows would be completely non-genuine, although even this would be made less non-genuine were it to have Wine installed and configured in a way that were transparent to the user.
yeah. So what? Other security features may copy this method. And then your "tissue under the skin" will be stored on a phone, maybe stolen by apps, and used on other security systems, maybe to identify as you on a ATM.
Not necessarily. Here in Brazil my bank uses some kind of camera-based palm scanning instead of fingerprints. This is an easy way to keep things independent: fingerprints for non-important stuff, whole hand for stuff that requires more security, maybe whole hand plus retina plus voice plus ... for very important stuff etc. Sure it all comes down to a limited set of passwords, but considering the alternative are usually 4-digit pins (reused everywhere) it's an improvement nonetheless.
Wait a minute: Are you telling me it's "OK" to sell something you don't have license to?
Yes, it is. They're finding the data, burning it into a disc, packaging, perhaps offering warranty so that they'll replace the disk if it doesn't work etc. That's a service. The same service the original publisher does mind you, even if the original publisher puts more quality in the end result. As service providers both are certainly entitled to charge whatever they want for said service, provided of course they don't lie about what they're selling to their customers. It's mere competition.
"Ah, but one pays the author/artist/studio, the other doesn't!!!" Then the one who does can write in his packaging "Official product! We pay the [whatever]! Buy official and support [whatever]!" And that's marketing. And that's an advantage the other service provider doesn't have.
As for who will sell more and win in the end, let the free market decide.
By the way: I always purchase the official version if it's available (if it isn't I pirate). I don't do this because some idiotic anti-private property law demands from me to obey a government mandated monopoly, but because *I* want to support official licensees whenever *they* support me. My money, my morals, my choice.
So, assuming one deregulated in the method you described, how would the process of de-regulating and then re-regulating at an agreed-upon minimum work? And who would ensure the level playing field plus guard the process against inappropriate gaming of the system?
Among libertarians you have two diverging thoughts on this.
On one side are the anarcho-capitalists, who advocate for zero State. For them everything should be private, including enforcing powers, so their answer would be that two parties in conflict would have to solve it by themselves. That could be by force, but the idea is that the playing field is level because everyone has access to basically the same weapons (think private police) and besides because most people prefer peace coexistence to violence and presumably go out of their way to enforce it (this cultural aspect is key, without it the whole thing would degrade into warlords fighting tribal wars until one won and we were back into a State), so if one party were to start with violence against another that'd is a very good way for them to receive retaliation not only from said another party but also from everyone around, thus losing a quite the gruesome way. Hence conflicting parties would have strong incentives to seek arbitrage (private justice) from an agreed upon 3rd party with a good reputation for fairness, otherwise one party or the other wouldn't approve of him. And thus, from arbitration to arbitration to arbitration you'd get everyone adjusting to everyone else.
On the other side are the minarchists, who advocate for a minimum State. For them the above scenario is fantasy as it'd unavoidably devolve into warlords etc., thus it's better to sidestep the whole "civilization into chaos and back into a State anyway" by shaping said State into something that'd allow the maximum freedom with the minimum conflict. The idea then is that you'd have a State with two mandates: protecting private property (as in material property, which includes live, but not intellectual property, since that one violates material property) and enforcing contracts. This could lead to temporary monopolies, particularly on very new or very rare stuff, but the idea is that a monopoly or even a cartel not backed by government regulation is fragile and breaks in short time due precisely to the fact that the lack of regulation means anyone (corporation or cooperative of individuals) with enough money can build a competing business. Thus either the "monopoly" keeps prices low enough and quality high enough so as to make competing with it economically unfeasible, and thus consumers win, or it becomes dumb and by charging too much creates incentives for the establishment of new competitors who'll drive prices down, and thus consumers also win. In other words, the level playing field is guarded from inappropriate gaming of the system due to there not existing any system to be gamed.
In practice both view are idealistic to a fault, anarcho-capitalism even more so than minarchism, but I think the main function of these considerations isn't really as descriptions of how to actually build a society, but as rulers with which to judge what's going around in the real world and how far it is from what it should be, as well as a means of providing clarity on what to strive for, even if it's unachievable. From this perspective it becomes obvious that the problem with Verizon et al. is that the market they operate isn't free, it's a protected market in which only the very few players with pockets deep enough to pay for the lawyers, lobbyists campaigns etc. can enter, and thus a government-protected cartel doing things that only said protection would allow. Were it freed (deregulated and unsubsidized) and in due time the whole net neutrality debate would become moot as there would be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of competitors, and anyone idiotic enough to attempt breaking net neutrality would in very short order find themselves with no customers, all of whom would have fled to some
I'd be interested to hear a libertarian's take on this
So here it is: for a libertarian anyone with copper should be allowed to build a network of copper cables, and anyone with a radio transmitter/receiver should be allowed to build a RF networks, and then allowed to charge whatever they wanted for whatever service they provided, and blocked from preventing any 3rd party from offering competing services, and so on and so forth. Plus, anytime any of those (wires and RFs) crossed over someone else's property they'd need to negotiate with that property's owner the terms of the right of passage or simply not have them passing through it, no such thing as a government demanding you to let someone else's stuff within what's yours.
That said, the environment in which these corporations operate is already full of government interference that makes meaningful competition under a libertarian approach impossible, and hence reasoning from a libertarian point of view doesn't work. Verizon et. al. only have the level of power they have because they're in bed with government regulators. You'd have to first remove all regulations over regulations over regulations over regulation... on everything dealing directly or indirectly with the establishment of sellable network service before one could entirely depart from network neutrality without this causing problems. Until then, I'm all for keeping network neutrality around, as government-backed monopolism plus lack of regulation would be the worst of the possible worlds. For the later to be removed in a way that'd actually work you'd also need to remove the former.
we should start doing something together, to RIGHT THE WRONGS.
The problem is that whenever discussions on these topics come about, the proposed "solutions" are always framed within the rules set by the power elites. And the power elites are this because they are masters of this game. In fact, they've mastered it so much that nowadays even violent revolutions are no exceptions, they also fit within the rules, just another subset of the same old game.
No, the actual solution is to break the rules altogether. Throughout history what managed to alter the rules the most were technological and scientific changes. But only alter, because they still mostly happened at a pace master manipulators (politicians, statesmen and other power hungry individuals) could deal with. So to actually break the rules technological change must come at even faster rates, to the point it surpasses human ability to keep pace altogether. And by that I don't mean merely politicians' ability. Organizations like the NSA employ the brightest of the brightest. That's the level that must be overcome.
What will right the wrongs then, if we happen to do it right, will be molecular nanotechnology-controlling friendly exponentially self-improving general artificial intelligence, a.k.a. the Singularity. The flip side of the coin is that not doing it right will mean the extinction of the human species, as a non-friendly one won't have any reason to keep us around. In any case, one way or the other it'll be the ultimate rule breaker, the one after which everything that came before will be meaningless.
So, we should really focus on that. The first research institute (or garage or basement) to manage it will change everything, for better or worse. As for the standard alternatives though, nope, they're just more of the same.
I've hear tons of good things about SourceTree, a freeware Git / Mercurial client originally for Mac but recently released for Windows. I know it's used by lots of non-technical folk for non-coding purposes (think designers managing Photoshop projects), so it might work for your scenario too. I haven't used it myself though so I can't comment from personal experience.
By the way, you could set things so that you'd have a different repository for each project, similar to your set of root folders, instead of a single repository covering everything. That'd keep things neatly separated as users would be able to branch only the specific projects they're working with rather than the whole thing. And since it all comes down to the original files/folders being copied up and down with the addition of a few hidden metadata files/folders, end users wouldn't really notice anything is added under the hood unless they have Explorer set to show hidden files, evidently.
What passed years ago was "It's high time PayPal was regulated as a bank."
That'd cause it to become US-only. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for a non-American to get an US bank account? As one such non-American who never visited the US and who purchases stuff from different countries through PayPal and similar services, turning them into banks with all the restrictions that implies would be very annoying, to say the least.
There's also apatheism, in which one simply doesn't care whether gods exist or not and doesn't think the question whether this can or cannot be known is important. Buddhists tend to be apatheists: some think gods exist (but meh) while others think they don't (but whatever).
1) non-Muslems "people of the book" (Christians and Jews): a) convert to Islam b) pay a -stay alive- "tax" c) die!
It depends on the perspective. From Muslim's one it works like this:
a) convert to Islam, become automatically eligible for the draft (and free of the military tax), become subject to the Sharia;
b) don't convert to Islam, become automatically ineligible for the draft (and subjected to the military tax), become allowed to live in a protected autonomous region under your own religion's laws;
c) don't convert to Islam, don't pay the military draft, go live somewhere else.
2) the rest of non-Muslems (e.g., Buddist, Hindu, atheists): a) convert to Islam b) die!
Buddhists and Hindus are people of the book, so no. As for actual infidels (effective enemies of Islam), yes, that's basically it.
By the way: those that kill the Christians in Egypt are Muslims.
No, they're fundamentalist Muslims, members of one of the several sects invented in the end of the 18th-century under the influence of Western ideas (Puritanism back then) which nowadays branched into other sects influenced by more Western ideas (Nietzscheanism, Marxism, Nazism, Heideggerianism etc.). By the way, these guy are so crazy that they work like this:
3) non-fundamentalist everyone else (actual Muslim believers, people of the book, infidels):
a) convert to batshit-crazy fundamentalist branch of pseudo-Islam;
b) die.
* i am a Greek from Greece (never lived in Egypt as many Greeks did in the past few mileniums (Alexandria and other stuff...!) until they forced to leave few decades ago), and i am Orthodox - i mention this because i don't like it how you portray Muslims as defenders of the Christians,
I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact. Islam has very specific rules determining that Christians must be protected. It's a duty of actual Muslims, affirmed and reaffirmed for centuries by the four Sharia schools. The exception to this are the fundamentalists who disregard the four schools of jurisprudence preferring to do their own stuff.
By the way: Muslims Protecting a Christian Church in Egypt. The white clothe is a symbol of Sufism, the traditional esoteric path within Islam where the Islamic equivalent to Orthodox Christians' Theosis is practiced. And note: Sufis are themselves prime assassination targets of fundamentalist pseudo-Muslims.
or the Orthodox Christians as persecuting the Coptic Christians (Coptics actually are native to Egypt, never "fleed" from Europe to save themselves from Orthodox or Catholics)
True, I misremembered the details, they didn't flee from Europe. But you're incorrect in that the Orthodox (or, to be more precise, the still undivided Catholic-Orthodox Church) did indeed persecute the Coptics. From Wikipedia's article:
"Copts suffered under the rule of the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire. The Melkite Patriarchs, appointed by the emperors as both spiritual leaders and civil governors, massacred the Egyptian population whom they considered heretics. Many Egyptians were tortured and martyred to accept the terms of Chalcedon, but Egyptians remained loyal to the faith of their fathers and to the Cyrillian view of Christology. One of the most renowned Egyptian saints of that period is Saint Samuel the Confessor."
So, yeah.
And then came the Muslims and stopped this particular nonsense, although starting the tax stuff.
What is the penalty for apostasy in the Muslim religion?
The same one applied in the Christian and Jewish religions: death.
What? You thought either preached something different? No, they just don't put into practice. But that it's in the book all the same, it is.
How old was Muhammad's wife? How old must a person be to be wed under Islamic law? How old must that wife be to have sex?
Of legal age at the time. Of legal age under said law. :-)
What? You think our Western laws aren't arbitrary either? Try talking to someone from 3613 CE an see what he thinks of your morality and the laws you think of as just. Just as a matter of perspective I'll say this: a radical progressive of the 1920's would feel welcome among the extreme right wing of the GOP of today. Ditto for us all in 100 years, never mind in 1600.
We're all the cavemen of tomorrow.
Since the the entire religion is based on the koran and [it] states that all non-muslims are infidels
No, it doesn't. The Koran distinguishes believers on one extreme, infidels on the other, and "people of the book" in the middle, who must be protected by believers even though they're (thought of as being) in error. Christians and Jews are explicitly cited as "people of the book". Afterwards Buddhists, Hinduists and others were added to the list.
By the way: traditional Muslims in Egypt have been helping protect Christian churches from the fundamentalist Christian-hating ones. In particular, they've been protecting Coptic Christian churches, the same Coptics that both Catholics and Orthodox Christians were persecuting several centuries ago and who had to flee from Europe and find refuge there, in Islamic Egypt, back in the day fundamentalist Islam hadn't been invented yet (this one's an English Puritanism-inspired 18th-century innovation).
It's for Government Programs, and it's free to the user.
In that I (will) envy you. Here in Brazil a single sign-on smart card for government services valid for 3 years costs between $100 and $200...
perfection in war is not possible
True, but if it's a goal at all it includes at a minimum "not starting wars". If a country is in as few wars as possible, limiting itself to only entering into those started by others against it, that by itself does wonders in terms of committing neither war crimes nor crimes in war. Doubleplusgood bonus: that country is seen as even more of a good guy.
Who'd have thought that not doing something has so many benefits? ;-)
If I put up a web site that forbid anyone working for or on behalf of any TLA or law enforcement agency from accessing any publically accessible content on my site could I use CFAA against the government when they ignore my wishes and suck the whole thing into a NSA database?
No. Governments can do almost everything the laws it imposes say citizens (subjects?) cannot do. That's the point of a government, to be the single exception to the rule so that it can impose the rule on everyone else. Also, when the government promises it won't do something that isn't really binding. Sure, some of the time they'll more or less try, without much emphasis and only if they're feeling like it, most of the time however it'll be like that Star Wards exchange between Lando and Darth Vader:
Darth Vader: "Calrissian! Take the princess and the Wookie to my ship."
Lando Calrissian: "You said they'd be left at the city under my supervision."
Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Over and over and over again.
If I were PJ and the feds or whomever came down on me with a gagging order, a reaction and a message like this would be the only possibly-legal way of informing the users
That makes an EXTREME amount of sense, thank for pointing it out! I guess I should learn to read between the lines rather than taking things so easily at face value... :-(
You estimate of Tor's privacy is higher than mine, and, evidently, PJ's.
An interesting read, thanks! What about setting up Freenet's Freemail then?