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Comment by mdmarra | Hacker News Reader

If someone had a Mercedes and only drove it twice a year, is it OK for someone to steal it?

No. But I'd feel less bad for that person than someone who drove their Mercedes every day and had it stolen.

Also, a Mercedes and a twitter handle (or domain name) aren't exactly the same thing as a twitter handle is a unique owner of a particular pice of the namespace.

A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use.

> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use.

So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?

I think you're deliberately not hearing what I'm saying. Here's a good analogy:

Some rich guy buys an amazing house on a beautiful California beachfront. But then never even bothers to stay there because he's got 3 other vacation homes. It just sits there empty all year long.

Would it be ok for someone to break in and start living there? No, of course not.

But you do have to kind of dislike that guy right? If he doesn't want to use this limited and valuable resource he should maybe give it up so someone else can get good use out of it.

So a minute ago you're saying that a Mercedes can't really compare to a unique Internet handle but somehow owning 4 houses is comparable? I'm really not following your analogy.

Twitter handles are free and multiple tweets are free.

There is no reason he should have to give up @H just because he isn't utilizing it enough. The person that got it better not send a single tweet shorter than the maximum to fit your logic.

> If he doesn't want to use this limited and valuable resource he should maybe give it up so someone else can get good use out of it.

You mean Communism?

Communism would be suggesting that the government should force him to give it up.

There's nothing wrong with advocating the concept of sharing when a person obviously has more resources than he could actually use.

No! We aren't talking about every property ever. Not your backyard, not your car and not your water bottles. Valuable properties. Nobody cares about @d7a8df74a98d or www.fe5461d77vvc.com. We're talking about crumbling buildings near a national monument, or in the technology field, m.com or @N. Domain squatting is awful. Is it genuinely that unintuitive to you?!

And if seizing it is too "communist" for you, then enormous taxes should be close enough to socialism.

If I own it, it's none of your or anyone else's business what I do with it. One should neither pass judgement on how I use it, why I use it, or if I use it, because it's mine (provided what I do with it isn't criminal in nature). Dislike != ok to take my shit.

Did you even read what I wrote?

"Would it be ok for someone to break in and start living there? No, of course not."

Dislike != ok to take my shit but it's still dislike.

EXACTLY. Same thing happened to a friend of mine who was working overseas all year long.

Somebody just moved in and started living in his house. And just tossed all of his personal belongings out.

To be honest, I kind of disliked my friend for a while.

I am trying to understand what you are saying.

I understand that you have not said that the situation the OP faced is deserved, but you don't feel too bad about it.

Unfortunately your defense does make it seem that you are not completely opposed to a framework that would take back "limited resources" not being used well. Most likely this is not your intention at all.

I often come across businesses/store locations and most importantly domain names that are not using even a small fraction of true potential. I do feel sorry for them, but I can't say I dislike them, they might dislike themselves if they knew what I knew.

The only way I can fathom the minutest possibility of disliking them is if they knew how to thrive and did not do anything, if it was common knowledge on how to do it right, but they chose not too.

Unfortunately most people don't know how to use potential or don't recognize it at all, can't dislike them for trying though.

What's funny about this discussion is that many states in the US have laws for this very purpose - known as Adverse Possession. If you occupy a piece of land unchallenged for a period of time (often long, like 10+ years), it becomes yours.

As far as I'm concerned, yes, it would be okay for someone to start living there, and some jurisdictions at some times have had squatting laws that recognize this. Land is essentially a public resource; unlike manufactured goods, I can't create land, and if I claim ownership of a piece thereof, I can only do so by denying use of it to everyone else; the "it's mine and I'll do anything I want with it" property rights that correctly apply to manufactured goods, don't entirely apply to land. A case could be made for saying the same thing of public namespaces.

I have a friend with family in Venezuela. A few years ago, Chavez decided that underutilized land is suddenly free for the poor to squat on. Their family member had bought the land after saving a long time, and was now saving for the funds to build a house on the land. Now the land is gone.

The GP's analogy is extremely weak.

Land is a bit different; there is a fixed supply, and you are not sovereign over it (unless you're the prince of a principality). Depending on the legal system of the country you're in, your ownership isn't really ownership to do with as you see fit - you normally can't pollute on it, can't build without permission, often don't own it all the way to the core of the earth, almost never own all the space above it, etc.

Yes. This is the point of adverse possession: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

Land should not remain unused.

Why shouldn't it remain unused?

"They paved paradise, put up a parking lot." Joni Mitchell

IANAL, but I have a hard time believing that a court of law is going to issue a judgement of adverse possession where the perpetrator used fraud/identity theft, extortion and blackmail to come into possession of it.

Good analogy. Another one is email. If you used an email address for personal conversations and commercial transactions, that should not entitle you to keep the email address. You should give your email address to another person that wants it.

For example, I used one email for most of my life. But recently, I stopped using that email address, and have used another one due to wanting to boycott that company. Since I no longer use that email address, I should have to give the password to another person. This is just the right thing to do in all cases.

That would FREE UP a lot of email addresses. If you have any email addresses that you do not need, you are obligated to give your password to another person. If you don't, then they can't use email.

Just make sure that if you use that email to sign in to other websites using that email and password combination, go to all of those websites and notify your friends that you are giving your email to someone else and you are not the same person if you see future comments using that name.

You might want to mark up your sarcasm slightly better as people are already falling for it in other posts you made.

Poe's law and all that.

I'd have a hard problem going to every single website where I ever made an account and changing the email preferences.. Assuming I'm a normal human being, there are bound to be sites that I forget about and someone dedicated enough could then get access to my accounts on those sites.

Not a security risk I'm willing to take, when I could simply leave that email address dormant. There's not really a huge shortage of good email addresses if you're willing to pay $10 a year for your own domain.

Some email providers actually already free up dormant email addresses for the public to register again. This poses a problem for exactly the reasons you described. I believe hotmail does, for example.

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