It's what matters because it was what was being discussed, for one thing. If you don't think what is being discussed is important, you say that, you don't just make claims that aren't true about the topic being discussed.
That sounds like some sort of petty "keeping up with the Joneses" metric.
Whether or not it seems petty to you, relative deprivation is a rather significant source of human misery, strife, etc. There are, I would say, actually fairly good reasons, from an evolutionary perspective, for this to be true.
you fail to understand the corrupting influence of money.
No, I don't.
in countries where it is small, it is still real, canada for instance tries to diligently minimize the impact of cash in public races, but still has political dramas involving money, like the kickbacks to quebec in the previous administration.
Yes, people tend to act in their own narrow self-interest. This is not news.
it is a basic tenet of all politics, from the dawn of time that power corrupts those in power.
It's a common aphorism, though I'd say its a lot more likely the case that people who are willing to engage in corruption in order to attain or retain power are simply more likely to get or stay in positions of power than those who are less willing to do so.
that's one of the reason we have term limits.
It's certainly one of the excuses for term limits, sure. Though history has not shown that systems with stricter term limits have any less corruption, in general, so I'd be careful about calling that a reason (or at least, a rational reason) for term limits.
against this backdrop of the basic realities of politics, you want people to feel 100% responsible for when their leaders go bad.
Er, no, I don't. I do want people to realize the connection between the actions they reward and the actions they get from their politicians.
like i said before, and i'll say again, you have a deluded understanding of how responsibility works.
Since apparently you've made up a set of beliefs about responsibility that aren't mine as the basis for this conclusion, you ought to be a little bit more careful about tossing at accusations of being "deluded".
because you see all of this reposnibility on the people's backs... but none on the politicians themselves
Since when did I say there was none on the politicians? You seem to be attributing to me your own deluded, exclusive view that responsibility for an action cannot be shared between a direct actor and someone who rewards that actor.
sometimes, when people DO get fed up enough, they revolt.
Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they wake up soon enough to take action before violent revolution is the only effective route to change. I, personally, prefer the latter. YMMV.
how you could blame the actions of a corrupt leader on those who suffer under him is insane. he smiled and rode on their support, and then changed. he made a mess the people have to clean up. but that doesn't make the people responsible for someone else's corruption
As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." In a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", to the extent that the people neglect the oversight of their government and allow it to become corrupt, they bear some responsibility. This is not exclusive of the responsibility of the direct parties to the corruption. And it is rare that leaders are pure as the driven snow when they come into power and morph into corrupt monsters once they get it; and even when they do, in a system with regular elections, it is the responsibility of the electorate to look out for and punish such emergent corruption.
I suspect the bigger question here is whether having a large gap between rich and poor is bad, provided everyone's needs are met?
Oh, sure, the question of what is important is always out there; but I'd dispute the implicit claim that "everyone's needs are met" in any country, even the US, by any non-strained definition of "needs". And, further, I think its pretty clear that inequity is an independent problem, since there is considerable research showing that subjective dissatisfaction is as much tied to very much to relative deprivation compared to one's own past experience and surroundings, often moreso than absolute deprivation. Its also important because it has practical effects on liberty and practical, if not theoretical, political equality and equal justice.
In the USA, however, the basic needs are met, at least 98% of the time - most everyone has a roof over their heads, most everyone has food, most everyone has equal access to a basic education, etc.
I don't think this, either the generality or, for instance, the last specific example is particularly true (except, perhaps, with a very strained definition of either "basic" or "equal".)
This is why the rich-poor gap and the issue of what "poor" means in different countries aren't orthogonal - they tie very closely together.
Not really. If lots of people are very poor, on an absolute scale, that's bad, independent of whether the gap between the rich and poor is fairly narrow (as in India) or fairly wide (as in Brazil). OTOH, a wide gap between the rich and the poor is bad, for the reasons discussed above, even if it is in a fairly rich country (like the US).
Of course, its worse to have both poor overall conditions and a wide gap together than either one separately. And certainly most people would agree the overwhelming greater overall wealth of the US makes life in the US, despite the greater inequality, better than that in India, for most people (though the issue becomes less clear with developed countries with much less average wealth but also much less inequality than the US.)
i think most people resent corporate money in politics.
Certainly, lots of people say they do. Less reflect this resentment in their substantive actions.
i also think they are powerless to do anything about it.
People have the power to vote against people who enact policies that they feel are against the public interest on behalf of corporate interests. If they don't, whose fault is that?
so in a way, you are blaming iraqis for saddam hussein, or filipinos for ferdinand marcos:
No, I'm not. I'm blaming people that whine about government doing bad things but don't actively seek information about who, in particular, is involved in those things they are whining about and vote against them for enabling the very problems they are complaining about.
what cvan the common man do about corruption?
Vote against the corrupt. Run for office. Support, in states that provide for citizen initiatives, laws that don't go through politicians at all to open up the electoral process to weaken the control of entrenched interests.
you have an "interesting" understanding of how responsibility works.
Yeah. People are responsible for their own voluntary action or inaction. Bizarre, far out concept, that.
In a sense, all rights are imaginary: rights don't have natural, concrete existence (despite rhetorical appeals to "natural law"), they are creations of the human imagination.
But property rights—whether in intangible personal property, like copyrights and stocks and debts, or otherwise—are no more "imaginary" than any other rights.
except that congress is not currently representing the people, congress is currently representing the money. so the people cannot revoke copyright laws.
Congress represents the people that vote. If the people that vote don't actively seek to understand how Congress acts and vote based on that, but instead chose to be passive and let themselves be manipulated by whoever has the slickest advertising campaign—as they largely do—then they are directing members of Congress to act in a way to maximize the amount of money they have available for advertising, and any member of Congress who fails to follow that directive will be replaced with one who will follow it.
While 'exlusive right' to ownership of IP is not in this way secured in the same sense as the right to freedom of speech or religion, it is a constitutional directive that congress enact laws protectign copyright and patent.
No, that's not true. Congress has the power to enact copyright/patent protection for a limited time (though modern copyright law has stretched the definition of "limited time" to the point where it is impossible to take seriously), but it is not directed to do so. It can choose to or choose not to.
The fact that current copyright benefits the cartels instead of the artists isn't a problem with copyright.
It is certainly not a problem with the fundamental idea of copyright, but it is, largely, a problem with the details of copyright law.
It's a problem with the way the industry is organized. If artists stopped giving the cartels the rights to their work, it would fix a whole hell of a lot.
If Congress stopped adding to the rights (particularly, adding to their duration) after they had been been sold (through, e.g., copyright extensions), that would fix some things, as well. You think there would be a big impetus for copyright extensions if the copyrights reverted to the heirs of the original creator after the date on which they would have expired when created?
You're confusing the reason for the existence of property laws with the reason for the existence of copyright laws.
No, I'm not.
Property laws exist because objects are an exclusive resource - if I use foo, you don't get to use it.
That's rather emphatically not true for physical objects. For many kinds of things (much tangible personal property), the most common uses will exclude simultaneous use by other parties, but its certainly not the case, for instance, that my presence on a large plot of real estate necessarily interferes with your use of that same piece of real estate. It may, it may not.
The reason for the existence of property laws, whether for real property, tangible personal property, or intangible personal property is that, property laws encourage the creation and/or improvement of 'things' (either tangible goods or social constructs) that are valuable to society by providing a legally enforceable right of control which creates an incentive for people to create, or provide an incentive for others to create, things which the person who acquires the legal right to them would be unable to protect and extract as much value from in the absence of law. The legal right of control increases the value of creation/improvement for the person creating or improving, and therefore encourages creation and improvement.
Compare that with why copyright exists: it's so that people are guaranteed an incentive to create ideas and abstract concepts.
Certainly, that is why copyright exists, but it is also (expanded to a more general concept of "valuable things" than "ideas and abstract concepts") why all property law exists. Without enforced property law, a person can't keep more than they can defend by force, and thus has no incentive to create or improve anything that they can't defend personally by force.
If someone copies an idea, I can still enjoy it. If someone copies my music, I can still enjoy it. Ideas are a non-exclusive resource - their availability actually increases the more people use them.
It is true that the subject matters of copyright (and patent) protection are different from physical objects in that respect; this doesn't create a difference in the purpose of copyright law (or patents), though it does create a difference in the way in which the public can benefit from the subjects, which encourages limited terms of protection where such are probably not as useful in terms of tangible personal property (they may be, for different reasons, in real property, but that's an entirely different debate and beyond the scope of the immediate discussion, I would think.)
I wouldn't call copyright government instituted theft, but it certainly restricts the dissemination of ideas.
It can have that effect, certainly.
And at some point you have to ask yourself, do the restrictions hurt the general society more than it benefits specific individuals?
Certainly, you do. And I agree that, for many provisions of present copyright law, the answer is "Yes". Present copyright law fails to return value to the community that it ought to, I agree. I'm certainly not a fan of the current copyright regime.
If you cannot understand the difference between a physical object and information, there is no hope for you.
Um, I can. Property rights exist in things that are tangible physical objects (tangible personal property and realty) and in things that are not (stocks, debts, etc., as well as the subjects of intellectual property.)
Property rights are merely legally enforceable powers. Exactly what parameters they have vary based on the subject of the rights, to be sure, but that doesn't make property rights in any one class of subject any more "imaginary" than any other.
Noone is claiming that stealing a physical representation of information is legal.
And no one is arguing against that position, either, so why are you bringing it up?
But arranging for a physical representation of the same information, using my own resources, is not stealing.
There are certainly definitions of "stealing" for which that is true, and ones for which it isn't. So?
It is only illegal because of copyright law.
Everything which is illegal is only illegal because of the specific law which prohibits it. That's pretty much true by definition. So what?
You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor.
Yes, actually, you can, as they are completely orthogonal issues.
If you consider the poor of the USA (or many other nations) to be "poor" in the same way as the poor of India, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Saying that the disparity of wealth is greater in the US (which is, in fact, true by every common measure of wealth disparity) is not saying that the poor of the USA are in similar conditions to the poor in India. It says nothing about that at all. Yes, if you said that, on average, the poor of the US were equally poor to those in India you would be wrong. But that's not the issue at all. The issue was disparity of wealth, not absolute conditions of the "poor" in each country.
Can it be any clearer to average Americans; Government will allow all your hands-on, technical, dirty, manual, but well-paying jobs go to other countries without hardly a gasp, but fight tooth-and-nail to protect an elite few who own, run, and work in the movie industry.
Members of Congress want to stay in office. They will do what it takes to get votes. If an issue is one where few people pay attention and vote based on the issue, they'll do whatever will get them the most campaign cash to sell themselves to voters.
If substantial numbers of people pay attention and vote based on the issue, then the votes are a factor in decision making.
If you care about an issue, pay attention, vote accordingly, and make sure your representatives know that you are doing that.
It wouldn't hurt, if you have the resources, to give money to organized groups lobbying for your interests, too. If you've got a good paying job that you are trying to protect, for instance, consider what its worth to you to protect that job, because you can be sure that the elites that stand to profit off every dollar they can shave by employing cheaper labor someplace that doesn't have the same environmental or working conditions rules that exist in the US will be considering what it is worth to them, and spending money to influence policy accordingly.
Yes, it is imaginary because they don't own anything.
Ownership of a thing is nothing more than a legally enforceable power to control what other people do with regard to something. Ownership of a copyright is no more "imaginary" than ownership of a stock, ownership of land, or ownership of a hand tool.
Copyright is attempted theft with government backing.
The same argument has been made of property more generally, and is no more true in the narrower case of copyright than the more general case.
It exists for the sole benefit of an industry of entrenched interests.
No, it doesn't. Though, of course, many of the details of copyright law serve various industries of entrenched interests.
Yes, creating a consistent ontology is challenge. But the bigger challenge is the lack of incentive for ontology truthfulness.
I'd say consistent ontology is a bigger challenge (though also one that doesn't need to be anywhere near completely solved for all kinds of useful applications to exist.) Trust mechanisms built on RDF aren't really all that big of a challenge: trust relationships are fairly basic, straightforward relationships of exactly the type RDF was designed to express from the outset, after all.
TFA isn't clear if the letters were sent by Congress as a whole (unlikely, that would take a joint resolution of both houses), by a particular Committee, or by a handful of members of Congress. The only member clearly involved is a member of the minority party who isn't even in the minority leadership on the Committee mentioned, who is also, apparently, the source of threats of action.
Both the "Microsoft optimized Java out of existence on Windows" and "Sun sued Java out of existence on Windows" are true, from different, but neither unreasonable, perspectives.
The Microsoft "Java" was incompatible with all other Java, and thus reasonably, despite the use of the name, not "Java" but merely "Java-like", so its reasonable to say that Microsoft destroyed Java on Windows.
And, of course, Sun sued Microsoft for breaking their license for Java, resulting in Microsoft not bundling any "Java" VM with windows.
It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India.
The issue being discussed wasn't "where is it worse to be poor", but the inequities of wealth, the contrast between rich and poor. Yes, on average, people who are "poor" by local standards in India are worse of than those "poor" by local standards in the US. Also, on average, the "rich" by local standards in the US are better off than the "rich" by local standards in India.
But the inequality of wealth in the US is, by most measures, substantially greater than that in India, and simultaneously (and by a wider margin) less than that in Brazil.
Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor".
The United States has truly poor people, though they aren't the ones whose conditiosn you mention—they are the worst off of the homeless. But, yes, other countries have more people living in worse absolute conditions than the US. But that wasn't what was being discussed, what was being discussed was the inequality of wealth, not the condition of the poorest of the poor.
not only that but 1 million unit's is fuck all. economy's of scale hardly even kick in at 1 million units.i suspect this will end up like the $100 laptop saga - start at $10, end up at $70.
I'm not sure that a +600% increase above the initial price target is a whole lot like a +75% increase above the initial price target.
You've clearly never left the US. We've got it pretty good here.
On the issue being discussed, wealth inequality, that's debatable—it might be true if your standards for "pretty good" are really generous. Considering only the three countries being discussed in this strand of the conversation, the United States is significantly worse than India by most measures of inequality (richest 10%:poorest 10%, richest 20%:poorest 20%, Gini index, etc.), though also much better than Brazil by the same measures. The US has worse inequality than almost any other place in the developed world (though the UK is close), and worse also than lots of places in the developing world.
If they could watch an object leaving my house, getting into my car, driving to work, going to my desk, going out for lunch, returning to work and later returning home, I wouldn't particularly care if they knew whether they were tracking my car keys or my socks.
I think you misunderstood the "...or get any information at all about it" part; its all a matter of access controls and how information is partitioned;
I'm not disputing that there are privacy implications if things like this are done wrong, just that the answer to that is to make sure that they are done right, not hope they aren't done at all.
I dunno, how come you didn't? Look, clearly, its easiest and to either do nothing in the field or settle for for letting Microsoft define the standard and always hang out a couple steps behind. And there's nothing, IMO, inherently wrong with doing that. But when you pretend those are the only options that exist, that's just silly.
I hope you do not mind leading the way, we will follow you.
I rather thought the point was that you'd already found someone to follow.
The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight, inventing a better system will not make the Silverlight content magically be transformed or accessible to us.
If you make it better enough that there is a compelling reason for people to use it as their content platform rather than Silverlight, yes, it will. Well, except not "magically", unless you regard the normal action of the market as "magic".
So we got a couple of strategies dealing with this:
(a) the ostrich strategy also known as the "i-cant-hear-you" strategy: pretend that Silverlight does not exist and hope that by ignoring it, it will go away and vanish.
(b) Hope that nobody adopts it. I seriously doubt that Silverlight will not be adopted, in particular the CLR version shows a lot of promise.
(c) Be proactive and implement it ourselves: we got most of the hard bits of the technology already (a CLR, a JIT, the GC, the core class libraries, even up to some parts of LINQ).
I think you left out:
(d) come up with something better that can be made cross-platform from the get-go that gives people a compelling reason to use it instead of Silverlight, rather than permanently following along a few steps behind Microsoft.
If you can find your carkeys on Google, then so can Google.
That depends where the logic is that identifies a particular electronic identifier as your carkeys; done properly, other people might be able to locate an object with a particular identifier, but not know that it is the keys to your car. Or get no information at all about it.
But for ubiquitous computing to not be a giant gaping security hole, we're going to need ubiquitous encryption and a whole generation of new tools to manage it and partition information.
Slashdot Mirror
It's what matters because it was what was being discussed, for one thing. If you don't think what is being discussed is important, you say that, you don't just make claims that aren't true about the topic being discussed.
Whether or not it seems petty to you, relative deprivation is a rather significant source of human misery, strife, etc. There are, I would say, actually fairly good reasons, from an evolutionary perspective, for this to be true.
No, I don't.
Yes, people tend to act in their own narrow self-interest. This is not news.
It's a common aphorism, though I'd say its a lot more likely the case that people who are willing to engage in corruption in order to attain or retain power are simply more likely to get or stay in positions of power than those who are less willing to do so.
It's certainly one of the excuses for term limits, sure. Though history has not shown that systems with stricter term limits have any less corruption, in general, so I'd be careful about calling that a reason (or at least, a rational reason) for term limits.
Er, no, I don't. I do want people to realize the connection between the actions they reward and the actions they get from their politicians.
Since apparently you've made up a set of beliefs about responsibility that aren't mine as the basis for this conclusion, you ought to be a little bit more careful about tossing at accusations of being "deluded".
Since when did I say there was none on the politicians? You seem to be attributing to me your own deluded, exclusive view that responsibility for an action cannot be shared between a direct actor and someone who rewards that actor.
Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they wake up soon enough to take action before violent revolution is the only effective route to change. I, personally, prefer the latter. YMMV.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." In a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", to the extent that the people neglect the oversight of their government and allow it to become corrupt, they bear some responsibility. This is not exclusive of the responsibility of the direct parties to the corruption. And it is rare that leaders are pure as the driven snow when they come into power and morph into corrupt monsters once they get it; and even when they do, in a system with regular elections, it is the responsibility of the electorate to look out for and punish such emergent corruption.
Oh, sure, the question of what is important is always out there; but I'd dispute the implicit claim that "everyone's needs are met" in any country, even the US, by any non-strained definition of "needs". And, further, I think its pretty clear that inequity is an independent problem, since there is considerable research showing that subjective dissatisfaction is as much tied to very much to relative deprivation compared to one's own past experience and surroundings, often moreso than absolute deprivation. Its also important because it has practical effects on liberty and practical, if not theoretical, political equality and equal justice.
I don't think this, either the generality or, for instance, the last specific example is particularly true (except, perhaps, with a very strained definition of either "basic" or "equal".)
Not really. If lots of people are very poor, on an absolute scale, that's bad, independent of whether the gap between the rich and poor is fairly narrow (as in India) or fairly wide (as in Brazil). OTOH, a wide gap between the rich and the poor is bad, for the reasons discussed above, even if it is in a fairly rich country (like the US).
Of course, its worse to have both poor overall conditions and a wide gap together than either one separately. And certainly most people would agree the overwhelming greater overall wealth of the US makes life in the US, despite the greater inequality, better than that in India, for most people (though the issue becomes less clear with developed countries with much less average wealth but also much less inequality than the US.)
Certainly, lots of people say they do. Less reflect this resentment in their substantive actions.
People have the power to vote against people who enact policies that they feel are against the public interest on behalf of corporate interests. If they don't, whose fault is that?
No, I'm not. I'm blaming people that whine about government doing bad things but don't actively seek information about who, in particular, is involved in those things they are whining about and vote against them for enabling the very problems they are complaining about.
Vote against the corrupt. Run for office. Support, in states that provide for citizen initiatives, laws that don't go through politicians at all to open up the electoral process to weaken the control of entrenched interests.
Yeah. People are responsible for their own voluntary action or inaction. Bizarre, far out concept, that.
In a sense, all rights are imaginary: rights don't have natural, concrete existence (despite rhetorical appeals to "natural law"), they are creations of the human imagination.
But property rights—whether in intangible personal property, like copyrights and stocks and debts, or otherwise—are no more "imaginary" than any other rights.
Congress represents the people that vote. If the people that vote don't actively seek to understand how Congress acts and vote based on that, but instead chose to be passive and let themselves be manipulated by whoever has the slickest advertising campaign—as they largely do—then they are directing members of Congress to act in a way to maximize the amount of money they have available for advertising, and any member of Congress who fails to follow that directive will be replaced with one who will follow it.
No, that's not true. Congress has the power to enact copyright/patent protection for a limited time (though modern copyright law has stretched the definition of "limited time" to the point where it is impossible to take seriously), but it is not directed to do so. It can choose to or choose not to.
It is certainly not a problem with the fundamental idea of copyright, but it is, largely, a problem with the details of copyright law.
If Congress stopped adding to the rights (particularly, adding to their duration) after they had been been sold (through, e.g., copyright extensions), that would fix some things, as well. You think there would be a big impetus for copyright extensions if the copyrights reverted to the heirs of the original creator after the date on which they would have expired when created?
No, I'm not.
That's rather emphatically not true for physical objects. For many kinds of things (much tangible personal property), the most common uses will exclude simultaneous use by other parties, but its certainly not the case, for instance, that my presence on a large plot of real estate necessarily interferes with your use of that same piece of real estate. It may, it may not.
The reason for the existence of property laws, whether for real property, tangible personal property, or intangible personal property is that, property laws encourage the creation and/or improvement of 'things' (either tangible goods or social constructs) that are valuable to society by providing a legally enforceable right of control which creates an incentive for people to create, or provide an incentive for others to create, things which the person who acquires the legal right to them would be unable to protect and extract as much value from in the absence of law. The legal right of control increases the value of creation/improvement for the person creating or improving, and therefore encourages creation and improvement.
Certainly, that is why copyright exists, but it is also (expanded to a more general concept of "valuable things" than "ideas and abstract concepts") why all property law exists. Without enforced property law, a person can't keep more than they can defend by force, and thus has no incentive to create or improve anything that they can't defend personally by force.
It is true that the subject matters of copyright (and patent) protection are different from physical objects in that respect; this doesn't create a difference in the purpose of copyright law (or patents), though it does create a difference in the way in which the public can benefit from the subjects, which encourages limited terms of protection where such are probably not as useful in terms of tangible personal property (they may be, for different reasons, in real property, but that's an entirely different debate and beyond the scope of the immediate discussion, I would think.)
It can have that effect, certainly.
Certainly, you do. And I agree that, for many provisions of present copyright law, the answer is "Yes". Present copyright law fails to return value to the community that it ought to, I agree. I'm certainly not a fan of the current copyright regime.
Um, I can. Property rights exist in things that are tangible physical objects (tangible personal property and realty) and in things that are not (stocks, debts, etc., as well as the subjects of intellectual property.)
Property rights are merely legally enforceable powers. Exactly what parameters they have vary based on the subject of the rights, to be sure, but that doesn't make property rights in any one class of subject any more "imaginary" than any other.
And no one is arguing against that position, either, so why are you bringing it up?
There are certainly definitions of "stealing" for which that is true, and ones for which it isn't. So?
Everything which is illegal is only illegal because of the specific law which prohibits it. That's pretty much true by definition. So what?
Yes, actually, you can, as they are completely orthogonal issues.
Saying that the disparity of wealth is greater in the US (which is, in fact, true by every common measure of wealth disparity) is not saying that the poor of the USA are in similar conditions to the poor in India. It says nothing about that at all. Yes, if you said that, on average, the poor of the US were equally poor to those in India you would be wrong. But that's not the issue at all. The issue was disparity of wealth, not absolute conditions of the "poor" in each country.
Members of Congress want to stay in office. They will do what it takes to get votes. If an issue is one where few people pay attention and vote based on the issue, they'll do whatever will get them the most campaign cash to sell themselves to voters.
If substantial numbers of people pay attention and vote based on the issue, then the votes are a factor in decision making.
If you care about an issue, pay attention, vote accordingly, and make sure your representatives know that you are doing that.
It wouldn't hurt, if you have the resources, to give money to organized groups lobbying for your interests, too. If you've got a good paying job that you are trying to protect, for instance, consider what its worth to you to protect that job, because you can be sure that the elites that stand to profit off every dollar they can shave by employing cheaper labor someplace that doesn't have the same environmental or working conditions rules that exist in the US will be considering what it is worth to them, and spending money to influence policy accordingly.
Ownership of a thing is nothing more than a legally enforceable power to control what other people do with regard to something. Ownership of a copyright is no more "imaginary" than ownership of a stock, ownership of land, or ownership of a hand tool.
The same argument has been made of property more generally, and is no more true in the narrower case of copyright than the more general case.
No, it doesn't. Though, of course, many of the details of copyright law serve various industries of entrenched interests.
I'd say consistent ontology is a bigger challenge (though also one that doesn't need to be anywhere near completely solved for all kinds of useful applications to exist.) Trust mechanisms built on RDF aren't really all that big of a challenge: trust relationships are fairly basic, straightforward relationships of exactly the type RDF was designed to express from the outset, after all.
TFA isn't clear if the letters were sent by Congress as a whole (unlikely, that would take a joint resolution of both houses), by a particular Committee, or by a handful of members of Congress. The only member clearly involved is a member of the minority party who isn't even in the minority leadership on the Committee mentioned, who is also, apparently, the source of threats of action.
Both the "Microsoft optimized Java out of existence on Windows" and "Sun sued Java out of existence on Windows" are true, from different, but neither unreasonable, perspectives.
The Microsoft "Java" was incompatible with all other Java, and thus reasonably, despite the use of the name, not "Java" but merely "Java-like", so its reasonable to say that Microsoft destroyed Java on Windows.
And, of course, Sun sued Microsoft for breaking their license for Java, resulting in Microsoft not bundling any "Java" VM with windows.
The issue being discussed wasn't "where is it worse to be poor", but the inequities of wealth, the contrast between rich and poor. Yes, on average, people who are "poor" by local standards in India are worse of than those "poor" by local standards in the US. Also, on average, the "rich" by local standards in the US are better off than the "rich" by local standards in India.
But the inequality of wealth in the US is, by most measures, substantially greater than that in India, and simultaneously (and by a wider margin) less than that in Brazil.
The United States has truly poor people, though they aren't the ones whose conditiosn you mention—they are the worst off of the homeless. But, yes, other countries have more people living in worse absolute conditions than the US. But that wasn't what was being discussed, what was being discussed was the inequality of wealth, not the condition of the poorest of the poor.
I'm not sure that a +600% increase above the initial price target is a whole lot like a +75% increase above the initial price target.
On the issue being discussed, wealth inequality, that's debatable—it might be true if your standards for "pretty good" are really generous. Considering only the three countries being discussed in this strand of the conversation, the United States is significantly worse than India by most measures of inequality (richest 10%:poorest 10%, richest 20%:poorest 20%, Gini index, etc.), though also much better than Brazil by the same measures. The US has worse inequality than almost any other place in the developed world (though the UK is close), and worse also than lots of places in the developing world.
I think you misunderstood the "...or get any information at all about it" part; its all a matter of access controls and how information is partitioned;
I'm not disputing that there are privacy implications if things like this are done wrong, just that the answer to that is to make sure that they are done right, not hope they aren't done at all.
I dunno, how come you didn't? Look, clearly, its easiest and to either do nothing in the field or settle for for letting Microsoft define the standard and always hang out a couple steps behind. And there's nothing, IMO, inherently wrong with doing that. But when you pretend those are the only options that exist, that's just silly.
I rather thought the point was that you'd already found someone to follow.
I think you left out:
(d) come up with something better that can be made cross-platform from the get-go that gives people a compelling reason to use it instead of Silverlight, rather than permanently following along a few steps behind Microsoft.
That depends where the logic is that identifies a particular electronic identifier as your carkeys; done properly, other people might be able to locate an object with a particular identifier, but not know that it is the keys to your car. Or get no information at all about it.
But for ubiquitous computing to not be a giant gaping security hole, we're going to need ubiquitous encryption and a whole generation of new tools to manage it and partition information.
They aren't, they are liable for their own deliberate actions in violations of the rules.