If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).
> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."
The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)
I'm sorry - I used "accepted" when I should have used "chosen," since self-determination was implicitly my end. With that in mind: eagerness does not mean you had a choice (though perhaps that's unimportant to you).
There is only a choice if the alternative was actually an option. When the government can force you to eat cake, it hardly matters if you may have enjoyed that first piece. What matters is that you will be eating it one way or another. (That is not what I would call "establishing a free market" - that's not even a free lunch.)
If we are only interested in punitive measures, Kickstarter is just as able to fund prisons and buy guns and pay for legal offensives as any government program (I don't think most forms of damage need a new law as such). (My point from another comment though was that government actions have a strong tendency to be a punitive, and I do not consider that leadership.) Ideally, governments would see no money whatsoever that people didn't voluntarily commit to specific ends. When record-keeping and communication were slow, the current system made better sense - but now that those things are fast and easy, taxation feels like an anachronism.
To your comment below:
> Those 100 people have nowhere near the resources required to take on the company.
I don't see a big difference between appealing to the public for the resources to mount a legal offense and lobbying campaign to revise the law to better support a cause, vs appealing to the government for the same ends. In the former, the individuals affected retain the moral authority and in the latter, the government is cast as a parent figure which I find patronizing and undesirable (not to mention highly susceptible to corruption and self-interest of officials, with access to a bottomless purse). While we may need the latter in times of extreme duress (war), I wouldn't recommend using it that way unless we actually want government interference to be the norm. (IMHO governments should not even have the capacity for selfish behaviour, so I am trying to think of ways to minimize it.)
I have a bigger problem with taxes. Central planning is fine IMHO assuming everyone involved is onboard - otherwise the ship should stay in the dock to the degree people still want off. For what it's worth, I am fond of industry standards when they are documentary in nature and not prescriptive (the difference between designing something to be perfect and picking a winning technology to distill).
Not to disagree with the idea, but I would add that any such tax is at the discretion of the taxing body making it susceptible to difficulties like abuse or negligence. (That makes me wary.)
I would prefer a mechanism without such a centralization of moral authority (ex, Kickstarter rather than taxes). That's the big conflict in free societies: the cohabitation of different moralities. (What is a benefit and what is an externality are decided individually rather than by decree or in the average. I think our desire to average things leads us to think we can work backwards from an average to collective behaviour in cases like these, when not everything is a bijection...)
I can't think of any rules that aren't enforced by threat. (The equivalent of patching Starcraft in the real world makes you rich or lands you in jail for tax evasion. The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.)
While I think it's somewhat natural for society to talk about "collective ownership," since the ownership model is what we use for individual transactions, the idea of "public goods" implies that they are "owned/managed by the public" - and that degenerates into "stewardship" by the government "for the public good" (for my/our benefit, even if I disagree, for my part). I definitely don't enjoy the "for my own good"/parental logic - so I don't like the "collective ownership" language we seem to be working with.
I think it would be better if individuals (and governments, to the limited degree I can rationalize them) acted pro-actively/responsibly, rather than defensively (tax, tax, tax...). IMHO, a better model would be to grow (to "invest" not "subsidize") what the public deems worthwhile, driven by intelligence and creativity ("leadership"), rather than perpetually trying to put out fires through punitive intervention (tax, tax, tax...). (Why centralize decision-making if not to aid leadership?) Bringing something to the market through collective action doesn't diminish the market - it is the market. I'm not saying punitive measures are ever off the table, but they should be the last act of a desperate will.
This could be as simple as using approaches like Kickstarter more (instead of taxes), but that depends on people keeping the money they already have.
IMHO government is mostly the sum of our negative/fear-based responses (digging in our heals against "threats" leading us to tax, and inspect, and...). That governments are as large as they are - and that we are taxed as much as we are - reflects a culture of fear.
I get your point, but promoting a tax to get the most out of the market is doublespeak. A carrot ("This is better because... and you can use it!") is more "free-market" than a stick ("Don't do that.") - even if I would prefer not to be tempted (or threatened) by either.
This is where saturation flooding of meaningless garbage can play a role in anonymization. In addition to making timing attacks more difficult, bulk garbage data provides a cheap smokescreen for the anonymized traffic and participants, increasing the burden for storage and analysis.
I'm pretty sure even the NSA would have a hard time storing and sorting through the collective output of everyone's /dev/random or /dev/urandom.
It's also a very low-risk thing to do - less so than even routing. If routing, one can just top up a channel with garbage to whatever rate both sides agree upon. It needn't affect speeds for others.
"if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details?"
(Repeating myself) Privacy != copyright.
"And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?"
Sure, why not? A specific case like Iron Man 3, is frankly irrelevant when trying to formulate a general rule though - unless it provides a contradiction. The case of Iron Man 3 does not contradict my general rule - namely, that restricting copying for the sake of copyright is immoral (and my mom's rule: "sharing is caring"). Iron Man 3 is not worth copying IMHO, but just because I don't want it doesn't mean I care if someone else does. I cannot know how watching Iron Man 3 might help someone, and I'm not about to guess. But, it would be immoral IMHO to prevent them from copying it, since they are the ones paying for the process (ISP, HD, PC... It's all on their dime), and since copies are not held exclusively.
The work that went into making Iron Man 3 is done. The copies should have nothing to do with the economics: if the product of the process was not viable - without basing that viability on artificially impeding others' private computing and thinking actions - it should not have been done. I have no obligation to subsidize any wasteful endeavor.
Similarly, I do not keep Justin Bieber from charging for his time, in advance (like kickstarter) or afterwards (like most jobs), or accepting gratuities at any point. However, I do not support forcing gratuities with copyright. Copies are as good as thoughts to me, and IMHO it is simply too far past the line of reasonable for a society that claims to value knowledge to willfully prevent access to it. Paying for copies should be optional IMHO. Not everyone tips the same, and I am not breaking the law if I walk out without leaving anything.
"How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided?"
It is paying more than once to pay more than the time and resources that go into a thing. Don't get me wrong - I am often willing to pay a premium (more than once) for physical goods rather than go without, or roll my own, but my good will only goes so far and I will generally not buy something terribly overpriced. In the case of physical objects, it is immoral to keep/take something without paying. In the case of copies, it is immoral to restrict copying for lack of paying. The difference is stark, and has everything to do with their respective natures and respective exclusivities. A physical book can only be in one place at a time - holding it deprives everyone else. Copies, quite to the contrary, can be made freely and each new copy does exactly zero damage to anyone. Again, do not confuse copyright for privacy. I will defend privacy. I will not defend copyright.
Your use of "value" is revealing. How "valuable" an idea/copy is to me is known only to me, and dies with me - you can have no insight into my mind other than what I reveal to you, nor should you (privacy!) - that's precisely why gratuities are optional, and why the copyright is pure fantasy (copyright and privacy contradict). Your economic rationalization of copyright is based on an insight you have no access to, and which there is no exclusivity to leverage me or anyone into revealing, since obligation is proportional to exclusivity. Since copies are not exclusive at all, obligation is negligible and payment ("should be"; de facto "is") 100% optional.
People share things they have with people they like. It makes sense that in the case of digital copies, without the exclusivity property, people will share liberally and anyone arguing against it will go blue in the face. Fighting that is fighting human nature...
"I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free."
I do not work for free and do not expect anyone to, however: if I have already made something digital, anyone is free to use it.
"Ask yourself why printing money is restricted."
Money is not simply a copy, money is a unit of obligation embodied uniquely in an object or number. It retains exclusivity. A new unauthorized bill is a lie about an obligation, and an obligation that can be used for real goods, amounting to theft. Someone listening to Justin Bieber is not claiming to be Justin Bieber, and in no way harms Justin Bieber and is in no way "theft" since you cannot "trade" a copy as you would trade money because of the lack of exclusivity (even though copyright proponents really wish they could). Saying a copy reduces Justin Bieber's income because it represents lost income is like saying "because I said so." It's circular. Copyright is the only reason people expect payment for copies, and forcing payment is the reason people keep promoting copyright. (Fallacies 101) People were able to get away with it with books and CDs other other physical things, and now they expect to keep getting away with it, even though the physical bottom dropped out and it's 100% digital without any of the exclusivity, and there is no logic left.
"making copies can have economic consequences."
Correct, since making copies can empower someone, regardless of his or her economic background. You may call that communism but it has nothing to do with economics. In fact, I strongly value physical property and ideas, but I'm only willing to pay to own the former since ownership doesn't apply to a copy. You cannot own a sunrise. You can own a photograph or a painting of a sunrise, but you cannot own the meaning, aka: the information. I own my computer, but I do not own copies. Privacy is the line in the sand, and copyright exists beyond the need for privacy - at great expense. Why would I feel obligated to pay for a copy - something I cannot own? If I can't recognize any obligation to pay for copies - why are there laws enforcing payment (monopolies)? It is possible to wash off this muck and move forward.
To say it differently: copies are not worthless... Copies are priceless. A sunset is a thing of beauty. Charging for that is immoral. Charging for the creation and upkeep of a lookout area may be necessary for a popular spot, but the sunset itself is priceless and not the subject of ownership. Do governments charge for pictures of the landscape on copyright grounds? (Similarly, I would not privatize roads, even if that makes me a communist.) Copyright doesn't enter into it. People need privacy, not copyright.
Back to Communism - since it always comes back to that. Communism is simply the largest monopoly possible - a total government monopoly - therefore capitalism and communism are identical in the extreme, unless lines are drawn where necessary (and monopolies broken). (The price of liberty is eternal vigilance... Or something.) Promoting copyright (a monopoly on thoughts) seems to me to be advancing that end (going beyond a reasonable limit in order to inflict a monopoly), and I seem to recall you saying you were against communism (pardon my FUD).
"Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?"
Why does it have to be about insults? People who know how to do a thing should simply be free to, and not be held back for fictional reasons like copyright. Copies do not cause harm or deprivation. 1+1=2. Nothing is lost besides the malice associated with watching someone starve to death. Similarly, people who have a surplus and the desire to give, should be free to. People who leave tips are not stupid.
"I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard."
I'm not promoting communism (you brought it up), I'm saying the very comparison is a tangential emotional appeal, as it was with most of McCarthy's accusations. (Also, FWIW, my friends tend to agree with me too.)
"nor do I want to have every web site be able to track them by globally routable IPv6 address everywhere I go."
So, you would rather use one address for everything, making it easy as pie to track you? You can pretty much pick IPv6 addresses at random (under your router prefix), and you have (many many many) more addresses than the whole IPv4 address space to choose from (it's a 128 bit address space and providers typically give a /48, /56, or /64 prefix at worst... that's 128-64=64 bits... that's 2^63.9999... more addresses than IPv4). In short, you don't really "map" the IPv6 space the same way you do the IPv4 space.
Taking credit for someone else's work very much is a useful analogy: if I can only speak through a third party, and I need that third party's permission to speak, let alone be spoken to, I quickly resent him or her. This is quite the case with current NAT solutions, with system administrators restricting "their" networks, making communication difficult for everyone else (by holding the only globally-routable address or "allocating" only a few; everyone else is second-class).
> Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided by their labor.
No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.
> anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like communism.
McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.
>> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly...
> Just like money...
OK, this is part of a larger tangent, but this is worth setting apart and responding to. No, money is not a government-granted monopoly. Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a government of one is hardly a government). (As for more conventional forms of money, we all together gave our respective governments monopolies on that - only in a different sense than you mean - not the other way around.)
> "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces.
That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge via the Internet. You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the Internet, but there is nothing supporting that. Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean toilets - and thus should be paid for it.
> What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive value without paying for it.
Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").
> 1. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you from profiting from copies of other people's expression, which is in no way related to restricting what goes on in your head.
Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.
> 5. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the US alone; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit.
It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the ability to make copies.
I don't see developer convenience and user experience as mutually exclusive. If an application is simpler and more consistent, that can save time for both users and developers.
(I also don't see how a one-process-per-DOM model prevents any other forms of sandboxing inside the browser. The OS doesn't understand webpages and cannot isolate them from each other - the browser does - so sandboxing pages is the browser's responsibility...)
I can't accept your complicated worldview. Iframes, for example, don't need to be new processes. One process - one window - one DOM. The only new process should be the rendering canvas/window. An iframe, or any nested resources can re-use cookies associated with a window/process, including caching. In order to persist tokens/cookies/cache between processes you hand them their own copy when you spin them up and write them out to a common, re-usable place when you close, but for the most part I consider browser statefulness to be more like a flaw than a feature (I constantly clear my cookies, form data, and history). how about a "save session" button, rather than the default being to cache objects and cookies in some common blocking profile that only allows one session and that, when it crashes, it all comes down... If you really want to share, you wrap those services up in a library - which is closer to the present model - but you have to know that in doing so you are making it harder to isolate things when they fail... And isn't that what's wrong with most browsers?
And there is a simple solution to that (poor multi-core utilization): go back to a one-window, one process model (go back, as in delete a lot of unnecessary code); forget the browser tabs - let the OS handle multitasking and let the window manager handle the windows.
Ah, the "if you don't like it - move to Russia" doctrine. Rather than racing to the bottom, why shouldn't the glaring problems simply be addressed?
Being grateful for health and freedom is one thing - being so grateful as to not put them to use, or let them slip away, is another. If Facebook has made a change for the worse, it's worth talking about.
"What's with the widespread fixation against attributing any positive security attributes to Network Address Translation"
It probably has something to do with NAT being a huge obstacle later, when needs change. For example, while it might make sense at one point to have multiple hosts appear as one, it is at the expense of direct addressability, and the workaround - having a unique address+port combination - makes less sense than having a unique directly-routable address.
"What would you call it when a router at the edge of a private network presents a single IP to the world no matter how many devices are behind it, for privacy reasons?"
The wrong tool for the job. :)
The privacy is gained not by translation but by blocking direct connections (which is a feature of a firewall - not of NAT). While there is some value in NAT's ability to falsify the origin of data - ie, to take credit for non-local flows - but if those applications ever grow they will be fighting to escape the single address of NAT and are thus only suitable in the short term. Ideally, NAT would go unused because every element is uniquely addressable and fully independent... Most people would not consider someone else who continually takes credit for their or someone else's work to be a feature, and so it is with NAT.
If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).
> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."
The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)