New Zealand bans some software patents

We should discuss ideas on their merits rather than trying to psychoanalyze or dig up dirt on the commenter.

Also, I'm not "defending" him. I don't know if he is or is not a shill, and I don't care. But he made verifiable statements about the content of the bill. All I want to know is, are his statements wrong?

My point is that an algorithm is more general than any particular implementation. They aren't concrete. They're abstract. (And of course if patents only covered one concrete implementation then nobody would bother getting them.)

But, natural rights are in the same category as human rights, and there are many human rights that I value despite their nonexistence as laws.

It seems to me that natural rights are often a covert argument for male supremacy over women and children. A man is stronger than a woman, therefore he has a natural right to dominate her. The same goes for children. A child has no right to anything from its parents, because if you must depend on someone else, you wouldn't be free to obtain it in the absence of other people.

But dependence is how we are born into the world. Education is given to us while we are in a state of dependence. Is it really only that educators have the right to educate? Perhaps, if you really don't believe in assigning rights on the basis of need.

In the libertarian mindset, it's almost as if the government represents one's parents, and the romanticized state of being alone in the wild represents freedom from one's parents. Actually I believe that it's next to impossible for anybody arguing for an extreme position like anarcho-capitalism in the typical cult-like manner that we see to be reasonable, because doing so would require making the connection from what they're proselytizing to their own lives and processing their own feelings about authority.

I don't believe in "natural rights", nor do I believe concept has any real value. That said, you're misconstruing their argument.

Someone who believes in natural rights would say:

> You have a right to own property, but you aren't entitled to be given property. Similarly, you have the right to get an education, but you aren't entitled to be given an education.

Copyright and patents are a notable exception to the above. They are an explicitly granted monopoly, through an explicitly enumerated power of the federal government. The "property" part appears nowhere in the constitution and is a tendentious word added later, like "pro-life."

In fact, the consensus that rights are infringed proves they exist. This is a correct example of the often misused phrase, "the exception that proves the rule".

But you are right that the specifics of weighing rights against each other are tricky. That's where cultures, governments, and legal systems come in. To be clear, those human organizations do not create inalienable rights, but they are responsible for enforcing them. And a failure to do so would be a moral failure, not an impossibility.

Either way, I think it stems from the same basic human desire, probably hardwired, to not have things taken and to have some basic loyalty or respect to members of your 'tribe'. (After all, governments are made of people and those people must have thought the concept of 'property' was a good idea for some reason.)

I don't feel like I'm doing the concept justice, but hopefully I'm conveying the gist well enough to distinguish from "ownership" and "possession".

That is a depressing but thankfully unrealistic view of how people behave. In my office there are no specific rules about taking keyboards, monitors, or even computers off each other's desk. Once a year the department takes an inventory of the equipment to make sure it is still in the building, and once in the past five years an email was sent out to remind everyone not to take monitors home with them.

The reason nobody takes things from each other here is respect and courtesy. There are only about 100 of us in this building, making us a small enough group that we can trust each other. When things are truly stolen -- taken out of the building, rather than just moved between desks -- emails are sent out asking if anyone knows what happened. It is almost always the case that an outsider came in and grabbed something valuable, and that almost never happens.

Obviously this is not something that scales past a hundred or so people, but the point is that in small, trusting groups there is no real need for iron-clad rules or harsh punishments. People can and do behave respectfully and courteously.

Yes, I do. It is how I think, and I think well enough of my coworkers that I believe they think the same. I wouldn't assume that they don't think that way without evidence of it, since that is a vile thing to assume.

Are there some people without this respect who are held in line merely by the law, or fear of losing their job? Sure, of course there are some people like that. The fact remains that a notion of property/possession exists for the rest of the population; for the people who are not defective in such a way.

Not everybody would steal from those around them if they thought they could get away with it. To be perfectly honest, I am rather suspicious of anyone who assumes that everybody would steal if given the chance.

I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing.

I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks.

That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection.

In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".

Castle doctrine is a states-only policy and the feds have no position on it. The second amendment states only that people's right to bear arms shall not be infringed, it doesn't state anything about the application of force.

I don't want to get into this debate on HN but there's not that much evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant to be a check on the army. It's related to the long-standing English principle of the right to self-defense and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English always thought you had the right to defend yourself with deadly force and a long standing tradition of a natural right to bear arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

Of course, that number depends on things like the environment (a favorable environment will mean a smaller number) and the genetics of the "first" generation. I seriously doubt that the number could be as small as two for any species even under the most ideal circumstances.

Do not confuse the right to think with the right to profit from your ideas. You do have a natural right to think about whatever you want, as well as a natural right to communicate your thoughts to others.

Laws are nothing but codified decisions from government. Sometimes they define the specifics of how natural rights are balanced against each other. However, laws sometimes violate rights, such as the now-repealed Jim Crow laws in the American South. Furthermore, the term "legal rights" can also be a misnomer for government-guaranteed privileges such as the "right" to government-provided benefits or (in my opinion) intellectual property "rights".