5,213 karma · joined February 22, 2007
http://www.phreedom.org/research/rogue-ca/
The potential for intentional collisions makes it critical that an attacker cannot control or predict all of the inputs to your signing operation.
The truth of the matter is that working to defeat mortally is supererogatory -- as a young Spock put it, an act which is morally praiseworthy but not morally obligatory.
[1] Similar in spirit to the TOS episode, "A Taste of Armageddon," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
This article is a compelling story that suggests there is a moral imperative to engage in anti-aging research, and that we have become blind, in our acceptance of our current mortality, to both the suffering that it causes, and to the fact that we can now hope to do something about it.
I can make my own music. I decided many years ago I didn't need theirs that much if they couldn't play nicely in the sandbox.
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Into modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
... which is identical to the style of nearly all modern research papers.
And Great Britain seemed to do acceptably well with fewer than 40-50 million people during its empire period.
Besides, during the defining interval, 1800-1920 or so, Argentina could have made up the difference by being a better place to immigrate, which is in part what the article covers.
Are they kidding? Since 802.11_ protocols are 'smart' in the sense that wifi nodes exercise congestion avoidance with other nodes running the same protocol, the next wifi standard just needs to be allocated dedicated space in the spectrum, rather than having to share the same narrow common space with baby monitors and AV extenders. Alternatively, the band of less-regulated spectrum needs to be expanded wide enough that manufacturers can create some informal standards to avoid stepping on each others toes.
(And yes, trust me, I know why this is politically difficult, and that it wouldn't immediately help the enormous number of users with current-generation hardware. But really, their recommendation isn't likely to make much short-term difference either.)
Modern medicine raises our standard of living by eliminating disease, which is mostly irrelevant to a discussion of the unique causal effects technology has on freedom.
The difference between a car and a bus to me is the difference between the internet and cable television. With the former, you get what you want when you want it. With the latter, you have to go along with the group and rely on others to decide for you.
When we all send our money into one big pool, and then have to grovel and beg to get it back from bureaucrats, we start to resent our neighbors.
Lessig thinks Declan's criticisms (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601234) of his old book are mostly fair. Lessig's own position has changed, and if he hadn't been urged to do so, he wouldn't have responded at all.
Lessig has been reading libertarian authors over the years and has become more strongly libertarian himself. He even shares the view that "governments as we know them are hopeless."
But Lessig recognizes that technology is on a collision course with politics. Technology developed today for commercial ends can easy become a tool of power and force tomorrow (think AT&T rolling over for the Bush administration). So Lessig believes we should pay attention to the technology we are building.
That is correct. But let's be specific [1]. So MS went to Dell (let's say) and said, if you sell only Windows, we'll lower your buy-rate from $150 to $75 (I'm making this part up as a representative example). Or they went to one of their channel partners and said, if you push any other operating system than Windows, we're going to stop passing customer leads your way.
If any other company in the world did that, we'd all just consider that a deal term, something to be considered, priced into the deal, and negotiated. At no point did Microsoft commit fraud or threaten or use violence. If Dell decided to accept those terms, it was because they felt it was in their best interest to do so. It isn't as though there weren't other perfectly good operating systems around they could have used for free. They had other options (NeXT seemed to manage without doing a deal to buy Windows licenses). They chose not to take them. And the channel partner might have decided that those leads from Microsoft were worth the loss of other options. So what?
Anti-trust laws use the government to force Microsoft to not do things that are perfectly moral (or at least, not immoral) and reasonable to do in business (even if they are not very nice things to do). And if Microsoft isn't willing to comply, the government is willing to steal the company from them for the benefit of the "public good." So while I'm not trying to castigate you, I really don't think my terms are too harsh. Instead, I believe the abstract nature of the political process [2] leads people to make different moral judgments than the more reasonable ones they would make in the normal course of their lives.
[1] I can't believe I'm about to defend Microsoft here. Please don't conflate the idea that what Microsoft did should be perfectly legal with the idea that how they operated was "good" or even "right." Not everything that is bad should be illegal. Breaking up with your girlfriend via a post-it note is "bad," but should clearly be lawful.
[2] That is to say, the greatly increased distance in time, space, and intermediaries between the moral judgment and its real effects on other people.
Discussing what the law should be is of interest to me. Using the law as an argument for why a company should be obligated to do something (outside of practical concerns for the company itself) is an argument I find to lack substance.
and we agree Google is a bad example of the law applied, so what's your point?
This thread started with a defense of Standard Oil. I'm making the broader point that anti-trust laws are ineffective (not to mention more likely to be used as a tool against political enemies than as a boon to consumers), unnecessary (because unless the monopoly is propped up by government, the market will route around the roadblock anyway in the few cases where this comes up), and unjust (because unless the monopolist is using force to prop up the monopoly, there is no moral justification for using forceful coercion against the company owners).
But come on, I don't want to argue your specific example -- it is clearly meant to be ridiculous. Real-world natural monopolies tend not to last very long without government support (or a strained and narrow definition of what their market is that ignores substitution), particularly if they aren't serving their customers well. The exceptions that you can think of are just that, exceptions. And even at that, I can't think of very many good counter-examples. Microsoft is perhaps the best case, but even there, by strangling the desktop they arguable accelerated the move towards innovation in the cloud (so that we could get around them). You can see this effect even as early as 1995, when PG started Viaweb as a webapp in part because he didn't want to develop for Windows. Substitution is always the death of an otherwise strong monopoly. The government didn't breakup Microsoft, but no one is worried about them these days anyway (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html).
You keep falling back on what is or is not lawful. I'm not interested in debating that. It takes an expensive discovery process and a lot of lawyers and judges to determine what is or is not lawful in a complex real-world situation. In my book, lawful does not equal moral, and unlawful does not equal immoral. I find morality more meaningful to talk about.
As for the terms I use, they simply reflect my moral approach to the problem. If you can imagine a scenario in which taking the fruit of a peaceful individual's labor from him or her by force is moral and just, then you're starting from different moral axioms than I am.
1. Larry creates something immensely valuable for the world.
2. Through innovation, Larry is able to sell it for a fraction of its earlier price, or even to give it away for free.
3. At some point, Larry decides he wants to put an ActiveX control on the homepage, lowering its value to you.
4. You advocate stealing Larry's company at this point, or using force to coerce Larry into doing what you want him to do, even though objectively speaking, you are still better off, even with the ActiveX control, than if Larry had never existed. Or at worst, he's done no harm to you, compared to the state in which he didn't exist.
The Standard Oil case you reference is widely misunderstood. Standard Oil's market share was dropping for a decade before the anti-trust case. And at the time of the case, 1911, there were some competitors you might recognize, such as Texaco, Shell, and Gulf already established in the market.
And at any rate, do you really believe that society would be better off if these so-called private monopolies (I'm going to exclude the monopolies created by government force here, such as cable franchises, telephone companies for most of history, patents, etc.), such as Google, Standard Oil, or Alcoa, had simply closed their doors? "You're right, we're a monopoly. The world would be better without us. Effective next week, we're all going home to tend to our gardens and take up piano lessons."
See also: http://mises.org/story/2694
And speaking more generally, I do believe there is a sense of trust that is broken when a customer realizes that a business is intentionally standing in the way of something he or she wants to do. If that something isn't BitTorrent for one user, it could very well be whatever Apple decides to block next month.
Also: the app in question is apparently a remote control for a BitTorrent client running on a real computer, so it might have wider appeal than your question would suggest.
The two key techniques for doing this effectively are to 1) eliminate subvocalization while reading, and 2) expand your field of vision so that you are reading sentences and paragraphs instead of words.
Of course, if you're reading contracts you're going to sign, you probably want to spend more time on each word.