My argument isn't that the arguments are illogical, but rather that they are arbitrary.
A logical reason against information being considered as "property" becomes a problem because in general you can't replicate property like you can information. This is the reason the entire concept of intellectual property was created, because information just doesn't behave as physical property would.
You're arguing for a reason why intellectual property should not be physical property, which it is not. That doesn't mean that it is not property. Arguing that "property" should be constrained only to "physical property" is at least arbitrary, and at worst reactionary denialism.
Is electrical engineering not engineering because engineering only deals with macroscopic construction? Electrical engineering after all only deals with electrical circuits.
Technically, that gold bar of yours is useless if no one knows about it but you. If you want to utilize the value of a gold bar, you have to tell someone about it to sell it or trade it for something else of value. Property only has value because it is desired by others in order to be traded for other property or utilized.
No, the gold bar is not actively doing anything (thus "useless"), but were I to uncover it then others would desire it. The secrecy of my bar of gold does not diminish the value and desire that others have for gold in general.
This is the point, even while secret, the bar of gold is still an object desired by others.
The wife in this case had a secret affair, this information had no value until her husband found out about the information.
You imply with this statement that the information then had value when the husband found out, thus creating value for the information that was being acquired.
You're producing a weird dichotomy where this information is not property until it is uncovered, and spontaneously, POOF! It has value, and is thus property.
The other problem to think about is that property only has value because it is scarce and desired. Anything that can be infinitely copied by definition has no value. (Copyright gives value to things that can be infinitely copied by enforcing scarcity upon it. So no, that's not a contradiction).
Arithmetic has no value then? Because everyone knows it, right? Funny, I didn't think "value" really works this way.
But if hyper-inflation occurred tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter a bit what you think that $20 under your mattress is worth. So no, your own opinion of the value of your assets is fairly irrelevant. They only have actual value when someone else ascribes value to them.
Actually, my $20 bill would still be worth the same thing: "20 US dollars". Sure, the arbitrary value of the unit the bill is based upon has depreciated significantly, but the bill still maintains a fixed value in relation to the arbitrarily established fiat.
After all, the "dollar" has special pseudo-objective value precisely because we have all bought in to it having an "objective" value. Thus, a $20 bill has a value attached to it even when maintained in secret, because said value has been pre-ascribed and pre-accepted by others.
Don’t humour the notion. It was ridiculous and meant to sound ridiculous... and the contortions and gymnastics you’re trying to do to make it sound logical just reinforce the point that it isn’t logical.
I'm aware that you attempted to concoct a ridiculous analogy in an attempt to sway my opinion. However, in true Socratic method, how am I to define the limits of my own beliefs unless I am willing to entertain what seems like the most absurd comedy?
I also don't think I've had to do any particularly strenuous mental gymnastics to project the notion of contracts upon the field of property. If you think that my single somersault is a dazzling display of magical mental gymnastics, then please for the love of god do not get into programming...
But w.r.t. destruction of jointly-owned property – actual property – there is precedent: the answer is most certainly yes, you can.
In Iowa, the appellate court held that “the wording of [its] statute, as well as public policies of preventing domestic violence and damage to property generally, suggests that the statute should apply to marital property as well as any other.”[cite]. The court in People v. Kheyfets, [cite: N.Y.Sup.Ct.1997], stated that holding individuals liable for destruction of property they own jointly with another “would be in tune with the spirit of the recent Federal and State domestic violence legislation.”... Our conclusion, that D.C.Code SS22-303 applies to individuals who destroy jointly owned property, is certainly consistent with the intent of those legislative initiatives. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/dc-court-of-appeals/1076345.html
Interestingly, it holds that destroying martial property is a violation of Domestic Violence law, not the general "Malicious Mischief" form of property destruction that destroying, or vandalizing another person's property would qualify as. In as such, it is declared to be a criminal violation of marital conduct.
I'm aware that the difference holds little substantive meaning... a crime is still a crime even if it is covered under a different section of law... but it is still abstractly a crime because it is a show of marital violence, rather than simply damage of property.
Can you find any case law on incidental or unintended damage to marital property? (Of course, this would have to apply only to civil matters, as negligent damage to property is hardly on the level of criminal liability.)
I suspect that any civil court hearing about damages that were not intentionally caused by one party of the marriage upon martial property would be ruled as a jointly held loss. Namely, if the marriage is to accept incidental and intentional gains as joint property, then they must accept incidental damage.
It might even be possible to argue affirmatively against the domestic violence interpretation of destruction of property that no violence to other individual was ever intended. Such as taking
But just because we made a convenient and pragmatic choice when creating corporations does not mean we need to blindly follow that choice. Corporations are just legal entities and should not have any inherent or natural rights.
I agree to some extent that corporations should have vastly more limited rights than natural persons, however the problem becomes one of legal abstraction. Once you have abstracted a corporation as a person, you cannot begin excluding that person from certain rights without painstakingly dismantling the abstraction of "person".
Denying corporations inherent and natural rights requires creating a legally acceptable way to violate equal protection of the law. Once one has done it for corporations, what is to stop one from doing it for any disliked or hated group?
Right, but a corporation is not a person, and they don't seem to behave like one.
But a corporation is a person, which is why we can hold them liable just like anyone else. If corporations were made non-persons then we would have to reenact all sorts of laws to make them apply to "people and corporations". Such as: who can be party to a contract, etc.
Corporations also do act like people... psychopathic greedy assholes, but those are people, too. (I realize this is subject to debate.)
Of course I anticipated that response. The answer is no, it does not, until someone else knows about it and attributes value to it.
Of course it has value. You may proscribe it as only "potential value" but it has value none the less. "Value" is not just the value that others ascribe to my property, but also the value that I ascribe to my property.
More specifically, the secret $20 bill under my mattress has a defined and exact monetary value which is a part of my total assets, as long as I myself know about it.
The stolen original Mona Lisa still has value even while hidden because of the desire others have to obtain the original. Regardless of if anyone is aware of its location, the item still has definite value.
I took issue with the proposition that everything which has value is property. Plenty of other counter-examples could be offered. For instance, a solid marriage also holds some intangible amount of value, and by cheating on him this woman destroyed some of that value; according to your definition, that’s destruction of property. Should she be charged with vandalism? No. That would be silly.
Humoring the notion of "a marriage is property", the woman owned the marriage as much as the man... can I be charged for destruction of property for damaging some piece of property that I myself own? Can I be charged with destruction of property for something that is community property of my marriage? The answer is no. During divorce proceedings however, such destruction of property can be seen as me taking the full value of such item into my portion of the distributed assets, thus diminishing the overall value of my part... however, I cannot be charged with destruction of property for it.
Marriages are also defined as contracts, and thus she violated the terms of a contract, and is liable for the consequences as a result of this violation. Contracts are a special form of "property" that are not subject to destruction of property laws, because breaches of contract maintain the existence and enforceability of the contract, thus a contract can define the scope and punishment of such a breach of the very same contract.
Why are you so disposed for arguing this matter? Property is an arbitrary distinction of law, and thus by very definition information is legal property. It's like arguing that a tomato isn't a vegetable... certainly one can mount powerful logical arguments against "tomatoes are vegetables", but they are legally defined as such for arbitrary reasons, and no court would entertain your philosophical arguments...
So, what do you expect to win from this argument? I am correct that the law you quoted was violated because he acquired property, and it is unlikely that I will ever be wrong in this argument.
Information only has value if it is secret, and thus it is not property; property only has value if it is not secret.
Um... no, this is not a true statement. The gold bar I have under my bed has value even if no one knows about it.
And the assertion that information only has value "if it is secret" fails to assail the proposition that since it has value it is property.
If I have secret information, then by your own assertion it has value, and by my definition, property is anything that has a value, thus secret information is property.
The wife in this case had a secret affair, this information was secret and thus property, and it was acquired by her husband, therefore he acquired property by his actions.
However I have no problem with the notion that some information can (or even should) be secret. That’s obvious.
And how do we allow that information to be kept secret? The idea that we have to rewrite all of our laws to include "on a computer" just to make them enforceable when a computer is used is the same stupidity that results from refusing to consider broader definitions.
Information has value, and thus it is property... the same as our fiat money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything you just said could have been avoided if you’d have re-read the 2nd paragraph in the post above it.
Ok...
I believe that information is either secret or it isn’t. However in no sense of the word is it “property”.
Nope, everything I said still should be stated. Because:
Privacy has value, and that is why we ascribe some features of legal property to that which it protects.
And if you want me to get all pedantic... why do you even consider "money" property at all either? Our money has value simply by fiat, not because it is actual property at all.
"Property" is a vague notion in the first place, and obtaining information qualifies legally as "acquiring property", and there is no good logical reason to deny this... (and I explicitly state here that the illogical desire to reject copyright law is not a "good logical reason")
If all they do is get access to them, there would be no consequences. But I suspect that what you’re actually suggesting is that they’d use that access to commit fraud, and probably take things that I do consider “property”. Like money.
No, I will simply take your information, and sell it to someone else. That third-party certainly is spending a lot of money to gain absolutely no "property", but that's no concern of mine, and neither is what he does with it.
In your view of the world, I having obtained the information, and simply further disseminated it have done nothing wrong.
Though it could perhaps be, that similar to half interest in a remainder of my mother's life estate of our family home there is no PHYSICAL manifestation of the property, yet none the less it is still a form of property.
Privacy has value, and that is why we ascribe some features of legal property to that which it protects.
As a further example, you have information that explicitly declares your commission of a crime. Should the government simply be able to acquire that information without due process? After all, information wants to be free, right?
My opinion on the matter is irrelevant. However, I'm happy to inform you that you are asserting that a person should be able to gain access to your passwords, bank accounts, PIN numbers, and tax returns and take them without any consequences.
Imagine a child raised without contact with any women, for example, who does not understand mood swings due to biological timing. Further imagine a hetero child who cannot relate to the western concept of being 'tough'.
So, the "extra credit" purpose--as you put it--of having two heterosexual parents in a marriage is to enforce sexist gender roles upon their children?
They get a special, government-granted status which limits liability of the investors.
This is true.
Right off the bat, a corporation is playing by a different set of rules than a non-corporation.
No, a corporation doesn't really. A corporation is still just as liable for their actions as anyone else.
If however, you refer to the difference that an individual operating a sole proprietorship may be sued for private funds as well as business related funds, this is because a sole proprietorship has its funds tied inextricably to the individual operating it. As in, the income of the sole proprietorship is directly the income of the individual operating it.
Meanwhile the profits of a corporation are not inextricably tied to the incomes of the individuals having share in it, and in fact, the investors may have no part in the corporation at all beyond donating money.
If we widely allowed for "piercing of the veil", then the lone employee, who negligently failed to add the vital support beam that caused the death of 9 people, would be wholly responsible, and the only one who could be sued, rather than the corporation as a whole.
And what of the situation where multiple individuals in the corporation are found to be at fault? By comparative fault, what kind of horrible mess are we constructing for plaintiffs to sue for damages?
The legal abstraction of a corporation into a legal entity is vastly desirable to any alternative. People will collect in to groups of aligned agents of a collective will, and treating them as individuals is a practice in blind idiocy.
To argue that they shouldn't be regulated because of "interference in the free market" is just plain absurd, since the free market was tampered with simply by allowing corporations in the first place.
Again, people will collect into "corporations" whether you define them as such or not. Any market freed of governmental interference, as the free market enthusiasts proclaim to desire, will produce abusive gangs, but they will become entirely unaccountable organizations.
About the only thing given to small farms is special bankruptcy rules, for when you can't pay your bills anymore.:(
Also, the point about stabilizing the food supply. This ties into the "we should deregulate electricity" article... if you deregulate something and let the free market manage it, then you get wild and wide swings, that is simply exactly what the free market produces. Like when the banks failed, if we took the free market solution (let the banks fail) then the market would have destabilized and potentially crashed. That sort of boom-and-bust cycle was exactly what regulation was supposed to stop.
I for one appreciate a regularized food supply, but I wish it weren't so profit driven... especially because the government is so hesitant to do anything that would raise the price for consumers... as a result it mostly just becomes subsidies to agrobusiness so their profits can keep going up, without affecting the consumer's price at the market.
You mean as opposed to the black-market non-government-authorized gangs and crime syndicates?
The government is still interfering by forcing those groups underground. The black market is generally not very efficient. For one thing, the seller has more knowledge of the product than the buyer. For another, you can't really set up much of a black-market clearinghouse... any operation that gets too big and efficient would attract the eye of the authorities.
Ok, let's hypothetically say that the government were completely absent in the creation of groups of people working towards a single goal.
You're going to tell me that they'll produce happy employee and customer loving groups rather than exploitive and abusive gangs?
This idea that corporations would be better off without government interference is sheer lunacy. They have and always will be thugs when they get to define their own legality.
I for one welcome our legally defined, and regulated corporations. Although, I do they could be better with more regulation.
I find that I don't type very fast at all when I'm writing code; after all, the limiting factor there is how quickly I can think through what I want to do, not how quickly I can twiddle my fingers. I suppose if you're working from a very detailed design document you would need to be able to type quickly, but if it's that detailed why isn't it already a program?
Because a proper engineer does detail things this greatly prior to even starting anything. It's a sad indictment of programmers that we typically do not follow rigorous design processes.
All of these would be sore thumbs in a code review. Getting this into production code would have to rely on your co-contributors being nitwits.
Working at a Very Highly Notable Computer Operating System Producing Company, I was hit by a number of reviews that likely would not have caught any of this code, because no one I worked with cared particularly hard about code-reviews at all. I would constantly get code reviews back that state: "looks good", and then after performing my own code review, I would pull up some crazy stupid easy-to-catch bug that anyone should have seen if they actually looked over my code review.
And when I gave these code reviews to others, what I received back were people being pissed and upset that I would nitpick their code.
As for using totally stupid and inefficient algorithms, I hit across a number of those while working on a bug, and I attempted to refactor them when I could. One of the most egregious issues I dealt with was a config file reader that listed magic constants THREE TIMES throughout the code. Once for a a validity check, the next for a more robust check, and then a huge IF-THEN-ELSE block to define behavior. After refactoring this to use ONE set of definitions for these magic constants, the code was so altered that it could not be backported at all.
I absolutely don't trust code reviews from anyone outside of the open source community anymore. They have their own job to do, and they rarely consider code reviews of someone else's code to be their "job". They view it as being non-productive and non-work... like going to meetings. Volunteers at least take the code-reviews seriously, as it is their own time that they're spending on it.
In the Common Law systems of the United States, client-attorney privilege only applies to solicitation of legal advice, and thus donations through a lawyer or lawyer group can likely be disclosed by any simple court order.
Now, if you go to them and ask them how to legally donate to Wikileaks anonymously, then they cannot disclose any information about that.
Who would have thought that Dr. Who would be the only scifi show on the air at one point?
Where did the market go for shows like Star Trek and ST:TNG?
What is going on?
You do realize that Star Trek only ran 3 seasons with 79 episodes, right? Sure SGU will go off the air with only 2 seasons and 40 episodes, but still.
Actually, I'm peeved that they decided to delay the webcast on Hulu by 30 days. Grats idiots, all your total viewership stats per episode are now delayed 30 days...
Why do channels even have themes anymore? Why not just 'Network Blue' or 'Shazbot' or something stupid? TLC did that, there's no more Learning there (and I fuckin miss the James Burke series' they used to show regularly)..
Blah! I totally know what you mean, I hate how all of the channels seem to have just up and made a universal decision to drop niche markets and become generic channels of randomness pushing whatever series they happen to manage to grab the rights for.
OBTW, I think TLC stands for "The Lil'people Channel" now, actually...
(Thank you mandatory preview for showing me that I totally fucked up my tags so I can fix them, and not look like an idiot.)
zOMG U hateses mah story why?!:( I/3 u people who dont appreciate all my work. I put ALOT of work into SGU, an u all just hate on me for it.
Well, Im have to get going to my flute session here at camp now, but I told my BFF though I should of pitched my stories to someone who appreciates it!
If you are a competent coder you can hide things right in front of someone and they will not spot it. It's scary as hell what some of these guys can do.
If you're a competent coder you can make what looks like obvious mistakes that any proper editor should be able to distinguish as an error. (The top two runner ups on that page are obvious coding errors that any code review should pick up. The third is something that testing and a good code review should catch.)
Now, all of that said, I had a hojillion code reviews working for A Very Large Multinational Computer Operating System Company that came back with the only comment being: "looks good". I caught at least one or two horrible bugs that any code review should have caught while doing my own my own code reviews after their code reviews.
However, all of that said, the first two "winners" are of a coding level that they would never be accepted into the OpenBSD core. The third is a bit iffy, I can't speak to the specifics of how good OpenBSD code review process is... however the switching of an inequality would trigger major issues, and heaven forbid if you tried to use _snprintf() in a macro with the OpenBSD folks... Theo would hunt you down and spear you with your own buffer overflow...
Slashdot Mirror
My argument isn't that the arguments are illogical, but rather that they are arbitrary.
A logical reason against information being considered as "property" becomes a problem because in general you can't replicate property like you can information. This is the reason the entire concept of intellectual property was created, because information just doesn't behave as physical property would.
You're arguing for a reason why intellectual property should not be physical property, which it is not. That doesn't mean that it is not property. Arguing that "property" should be constrained only to "physical property" is at least arbitrary, and at worst reactionary denialism.
Is electrical engineering not engineering because engineering only deals with macroscopic construction? Electrical engineering after all only deals with electrical circuits.
Technically, that gold bar of yours is useless if no one knows about it but you. If you want to utilize the value of a gold bar, you have to tell someone about it to sell it or trade it for something else of value. Property only has value because it is desired by others in order to be traded for other property or utilized.
No, the gold bar is not actively doing anything (thus "useless"), but were I to uncover it then others would desire it. The secrecy of my bar of gold does not diminish the value and desire that others have for gold in general.
This is the point, even while secret, the bar of gold is still an object desired by others.
The wife in this case had a secret affair, this information had no value until her husband found out about the information.
You imply with this statement that the information then had value when the husband found out, thus creating value for the information that was being acquired.
You're producing a weird dichotomy where this information is not property until it is uncovered, and spontaneously, POOF! It has value, and is thus property.
The other problem to think about is that property only has value because it is scarce and desired. Anything that can be infinitely copied by definition has no value. (Copyright gives value to things that can be infinitely copied by enforcing scarcity upon it. So no, that's not a contradiction).
Arithmetic has no value then? Because everyone knows it, right? Funny, I didn't think "value" really works this way.
But if hyper-inflation occurred tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter a bit what you think that $20 under your mattress is worth. So no, your own opinion of the value of your assets is fairly irrelevant. They only have actual value when someone else ascribes value to them.
Actually, my $20 bill would still be worth the same thing: "20 US dollars". Sure, the arbitrary value of the unit the bill is based upon has depreciated significantly, but the bill still maintains a fixed value in relation to the arbitrarily established fiat.
After all, the "dollar" has special pseudo-objective value precisely because we have all bought in to it having an "objective" value. Thus, a $20 bill has a value attached to it even when maintained in secret, because said value has been pre-ascribed and pre-accepted by others.
Don’t humour the notion. It was ridiculous and meant to sound ridiculous... and the contortions and gymnastics you’re trying to do to make it sound logical just reinforce the point that it isn’t logical.
I'm aware that you attempted to concoct a ridiculous analogy in an attempt to sway my opinion. However, in true Socratic method, how am I to define the limits of my own beliefs unless I am willing to entertain what seems like the most absurd comedy?
I also don't think I've had to do any particularly strenuous mental gymnastics to project the notion of contracts upon the field of property. If you think that my single somersault is a dazzling display of magical mental gymnastics, then please for the love of god do not get into programming...
But w.r.t. destruction of jointly-owned property – actual property – there is precedent: the answer is most certainly yes, you can.
In Iowa, the appellate court held that “the wording of [its] statute, as well as public policies of preventing domestic violence and damage to property generally, suggests that the statute should apply to marital property as well as any other.”[cite]. The court in People v. Kheyfets, [cite: N.Y.Sup.Ct.1997], stated that holding individuals liable for destruction of property they own jointly with another “would be in tune with the spirit of the recent Federal and State domestic violence legislation.” ... Our conclusion, that D.C.Code SS22-303 applies to individuals who destroy jointly owned property, is certainly consistent with the intent of those legislative initiatives.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/dc-court-of-appeals/1076345.html
Interestingly, it holds that destroying martial property is a violation of Domestic Violence law, not the general "Malicious Mischief" form of property destruction that destroying, or vandalizing another person's property would qualify as. In as such, it is declared to be a criminal violation of marital conduct.
I'm aware that the difference holds little substantive meaning... a crime is still a crime even if it is covered under a different section of law... but it is still abstractly a crime because it is a show of marital violence, rather than simply damage of property.
Can you find any case law on incidental or unintended damage to marital property? (Of course, this would have to apply only to civil matters, as negligent damage to property is hardly on the level of criminal liability.)
I suspect that any civil court hearing about damages that were not intentionally caused by one party of the marriage upon martial property would be ruled as a jointly held loss. Namely, if the marriage is to accept incidental and intentional gains as joint property, then they must accept incidental damage.
It might even be possible to argue affirmatively against the domestic violence interpretation of destruction of property that no violence to other individual was ever intended. Such as taking
But just because we made a convenient and pragmatic choice when creating corporations does not mean we need to blindly follow that choice. Corporations are just legal entities and should not have any inherent or natural rights.
I agree to some extent that corporations should have vastly more limited rights than natural persons, however the problem becomes one of legal abstraction. Once you have abstracted a corporation as a person, you cannot begin excluding that person from certain rights without painstakingly dismantling the abstraction of "person".
Denying corporations inherent and natural rights requires creating a legally acceptable way to violate equal protection of the law. Once one has done it for corporations, what is to stop one from doing it for any disliked or hated group?
True, "Happy Birthday" is copyrighted, however, fortunately for Kindergartner in Germany, "Hoch Soll Er/Sie Leben" is not under copyright.
Right, but a corporation is not a person, and they don't seem to behave like one.
But a corporation is a person, which is why we can hold them liable just like anyone else. If corporations were made non-persons then we would have to reenact all sorts of laws to make them apply to "people and corporations". Such as: who can be party to a contract, etc.
Corporations also do act like people... psychopathic greedy assholes, but those are people, too. (I realize this is subject to debate.)
Of course I anticipated that response. The answer is no, it does not, until someone else knows about it and attributes value to it.
Of course it has value. You may proscribe it as only "potential value" but it has value none the less. "Value" is not just the value that others ascribe to my property, but also the value that I ascribe to my property.
More specifically, the secret $20 bill under my mattress has a defined and exact monetary value which is a part of my total assets, as long as I myself know about it.
The stolen original Mona Lisa still has value even while hidden because of the desire others have to obtain the original. Regardless of if anyone is aware of its location, the item still has definite value.
I took issue with the proposition that everything which has value is property. Plenty of other counter-examples could be offered. For instance, a solid marriage also holds some intangible amount of value, and by cheating on him this woman destroyed some of that value; according to your definition, that’s destruction of property. Should she be charged with vandalism? No. That would be silly.
Humoring the notion of "a marriage is property", the woman owned the marriage as much as the man... can I be charged for destruction of property for damaging some piece of property that I myself own? Can I be charged with destruction of property for something that is community property of my marriage? The answer is no. During divorce proceedings however, such destruction of property can be seen as me taking the full value of such item into my portion of the distributed assets, thus diminishing the overall value of my part... however, I cannot be charged with destruction of property for it.
Marriages are also defined as contracts, and thus she violated the terms of a contract, and is liable for the consequences as a result of this violation. Contracts are a special form of "property" that are not subject to destruction of property laws, because breaches of contract maintain the existence and enforceability of the contract, thus a contract can define the scope and punishment of such a breach of the very same contract.
Why are you so disposed for arguing this matter? Property is an arbitrary distinction of law, and thus by very definition information is legal property. It's like arguing that a tomato isn't a vegetable... certainly one can mount powerful logical arguments against "tomatoes are vegetables", but they are legally defined as such for arbitrary reasons, and no court would entertain your philosophical arguments...
So, what do you expect to win from this argument? I am correct that the law you quoted was violated because he acquired property, and it is unlikely that I will ever be wrong in this argument.
Information only has value if it is secret, and thus it is not property; property only has value if it is not secret.
Um... no, this is not a true statement. The gold bar I have under my bed has value even if no one knows about it.
And the assertion that information only has value "if it is secret" fails to assail the proposition that since it has value it is property.
If I have secret information, then by your own assertion it has value, and by my definition, property is anything that has a value, thus secret information is property.
The wife in this case had a secret affair, this information was secret and thus property, and it was acquired by her husband, therefore he acquired property by his actions.
However I have no problem with the notion that some information can (or even should) be secret. That’s obvious.
And how do we allow that information to be kept secret? The idea that we have to rewrite all of our laws to include "on a computer" just to make them enforceable when a computer is used is the same stupidity that results from refusing to consider broader definitions.
Information has value, and thus it is property... the same as our fiat money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything you just said could have been avoided if you’d have re-read the 2nd paragraph in the post above it.
Ok...
I believe that information is either secret or it isn’t. However in no sense of the word is it “property”.
Nope, everything I said still should be stated. Because:
Privacy has value, and that is why we ascribe some features of legal property to that which it protects.
And if you want me to get all pedantic... why do you even consider "money" property at all either? Our money has value simply by fiat, not because it is actual property at all.
"Property" is a vague notion in the first place, and obtaining information qualifies legally as "acquiring property", and there is no good logical reason to deny this... (and I explicitly state here that the illogical desire to reject copyright law is not a "good logical reason")
If all they do is get access to them, there would be no consequences. But I suspect that what you’re actually suggesting is that they’d use that access to commit fraud, and probably take things that I do consider “property”. Like money.
No, I will simply take your information, and sell it to someone else. That third-party certainly is spending a lot of money to gain absolutely no "property", but that's no concern of mine, and neither is what he does with it.
In your view of the world, I having obtained the information, and simply further disseminated it have done nothing wrong.
Though it could perhaps be, that similar to half interest in a remainder of my mother's life estate of our family home there is no PHYSICAL manifestation of the property, yet none the less it is still a form of property.
Privacy has value, and that is why we ascribe some features of legal property to that which it protects.
As a further example, you have information that explicitly declares your commission of a crime. Should the government simply be able to acquire that information without due process? After all, information wants to be free, right?
Only if you believe that information is property.
My opinion on the matter is irrelevant. However, I'm happy to inform you that you are asserting that a person should be able to gain access to your passwords, bank accounts, PIN numbers, and tax returns and take them without any consequences.
to acquire, alter, damage delete or destroy property
No he didn't do any of those and didn't have intent to do those.
So, by accessing her emails and printing them out, he didn't acquire any property?
Imagine a child raised without contact with any women, for example, who does not understand mood swings due to biological timing. Further imagine a hetero child who cannot relate to the western concept of being 'tough'.
So, the "extra credit" purpose--as you put it--of having two heterosexual parents in a marriage is to enforce sexist gender roles upon their children?
Hot damn, it's memetic survivalism apparently.
They get a special, government-granted status which limits liability of the investors.
This is true.
Right off the bat, a corporation is playing by a different set of rules than a non-corporation.
No, a corporation doesn't really. A corporation is still just as liable for their actions as anyone else.
If however, you refer to the difference that an individual operating a sole proprietorship may be sued for private funds as well as business related funds, this is because a sole proprietorship has its funds tied inextricably to the individual operating it. As in, the income of the sole proprietorship is directly the income of the individual operating it.
Meanwhile the profits of a corporation are not inextricably tied to the incomes of the individuals having share in it, and in fact, the investors may have no part in the corporation at all beyond donating money.
If we widely allowed for "piercing of the veil", then the lone employee, who negligently failed to add the vital support beam that caused the death of 9 people, would be wholly responsible, and the only one who could be sued, rather than the corporation as a whole.
And what of the situation where multiple individuals in the corporation are found to be at fault? By comparative fault, what kind of horrible mess are we constructing for plaintiffs to sue for damages?
The legal abstraction of a corporation into a legal entity is vastly desirable to any alternative. People will collect in to groups of aligned agents of a collective will, and treating them as individuals is a practice in blind idiocy.
To argue that they shouldn't be regulated because of "interference in the free market" is just plain absurd, since the free market was tampered with simply by allowing corporations in the first place.
Again, people will collect into "corporations" whether you define them as such or not. Any market freed of governmental interference, as the free market enthusiasts proclaim to desire, will produce abusive gangs, but they will become entirely unaccountable organizations.
About the only thing given to small farms is special bankruptcy rules, for when you can't pay your bills anymore. :(
Also, the point about stabilizing the food supply. This ties into the "we should deregulate electricity" article... if you deregulate something and let the free market manage it, then you get wild and wide swings, that is simply exactly what the free market produces. Like when the banks failed, if we took the free market solution (let the banks fail) then the market would have destabilized and potentially crashed. That sort of boom-and-bust cycle was exactly what regulation was supposed to stop.
I for one appreciate a regularized food supply, but I wish it weren't so profit driven... especially because the government is so hesitant to do anything that would raise the price for consumers... as a result it mostly just becomes subsidies to agrobusiness so their profits can keep going up, without affecting the consumer's price at the market.
You mean as opposed to the black-market non-government-authorized gangs and crime syndicates?
The government is still interfering by forcing those groups underground. The black market is generally not very efficient. For one thing, the seller has more knowledge of the product than the buyer. For another, you can't really set up much of a black-market clearinghouse... any operation that gets too big and efficient would attract the eye of the authorities.
Ok, let's hypothetically say that the government were completely absent in the creation of groups of people working towards a single goal.
You're going to tell me that they'll produce happy employee and customer loving groups rather than exploitive and abusive gangs?
This idea that corporations would be better off without government interference is sheer lunacy. They have and always will be thugs when they get to define their own legality.
I for one welcome our legally defined, and regulated corporations. Although, I do they could be better with more regulation.
companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
Companies? You mean, like, government-chartered corporations? A free market wouldn't have these artificial liability-limiting entities :)
You mean as opposed to the black-market non-government-authorized gangs and crime syndicates?
I find that I don't type very fast at all when I'm writing code; after all, the limiting factor there is how quickly I can think through what I want to do, not how quickly I can twiddle my fingers. I suppose if you're working from a very detailed design document you would need to be able to type quickly, but if it's that detailed why isn't it already a program?
Because a proper engineer does detail things this greatly prior to even starting anything. It's a sad indictment of programmers that we typically do not follow rigorous design processes.
All of these would be sore thumbs in a code review. Getting this into production code would have to rely on your co-contributors being nitwits.
Working at a Very Highly Notable Computer Operating System Producing Company, I was hit by a number of reviews that likely would not have caught any of this code, because no one I worked with cared particularly hard about code-reviews at all. I would constantly get code reviews back that state: "looks good", and then after performing my own code review, I would pull up some crazy stupid easy-to-catch bug that anyone should have seen if they actually looked over my code review.
And when I gave these code reviews to others, what I received back were people being pissed and upset that I would nitpick their code.
As for using totally stupid and inefficient algorithms, I hit across a number of those while working on a bug, and I attempted to refactor them when I could. One of the most egregious issues I dealt with was a config file reader that listed magic constants THREE TIMES throughout the code. Once for a a validity check, the next for a more robust check, and then a huge IF-THEN-ELSE block to define behavior. After refactoring this to use ONE set of definitions for these magic constants, the code was so altered that it could not be backported at all.
I absolutely don't trust code reviews from anyone outside of the open source community anymore. They have their own job to do, and they rarely consider code reviews of someone else's code to be their "job". They view it as being non-productive and non-work... like going to meetings. Volunteers at least take the code-reviews seriously, as it is their own time that they're spending on it.
In the Common Law systems of the United States, client-attorney privilege only applies to solicitation of legal advice, and thus donations through a lawyer or lawyer group can likely be disclosed by any simple court order.
Now, if you go to them and ask them how to legally donate to Wikileaks anonymously, then they cannot disclose any information about that.
Who would have thought that Dr. Who would be the only scifi show on the air at one point?
Where did the market go for shows like Star Trek and ST:TNG?
What is going on?
You do realize that Star Trek only ran 3 seasons with 79 episodes, right? Sure SGU will go off the air with only 2 seasons and 40 episodes, but still.
Actually, I'm peeved that they decided to delay the webcast on Hulu by 30 days. Grats idiots, all your total viewership stats per episode are now delayed 30 days...
Why do channels even have themes anymore? Why not just 'Network Blue' or 'Shazbot' or something stupid? TLC did that, there's no more Learning there (and I fuckin miss the James Burke series' they used to show regularly)..
Blah! I totally know what you mean, I hate how all of the channels seem to have just up and made a universal decision to drop niche markets and become generic channels of randomness pushing whatever series they happen to manage to grab the rights for.
OBTW, I think TLC stands for "The Lil'people Channel" now, actually...
(Thank you mandatory preview for showing me that I totally fucked up my tags so I can fix them, and not look like an idiot.)
zOMG U hateses mah story why?! :( I /3 u people who dont appreciate all my work. I put ALOT of work into SGU, an u all just hate on me for it.
Well, Im have to get going to my flute session here at camp now, but I told my BFF though I should of pitched my stories to someone who appreciates it!
If you are a competent coder you can hide things right in front of someone and they will not spot it. It's scary as hell what some of these guys can do.
If you're a competent coder you can make what looks like obvious mistakes that any proper editor should be able to distinguish as an error. (The top two runner ups on that page are obvious coding errors that any code review should pick up. The third is something that testing and a good code review should catch.)
Now, all of that said, I had a hojillion code reviews working for A Very Large Multinational Computer Operating System Company that came back with the only comment being: "looks good". I caught at least one or two horrible bugs that any code review should have caught while doing my own my own code reviews after their code reviews.
However, all of that said, the first two "winners" are of a coding level that they would never be accepted into the OpenBSD core. The third is a bit iffy, I can't speak to the specifics of how good OpenBSD code review process is... however the switching of an inequality would trigger major issues, and heaven forbid if you tried to use _snprintf() in a macro with the OpenBSD folks... Theo would hunt you down and spear you with your own buffer overflow...