"Words are just labels, neutral representations of concepts."

Words may be, but *names* are selected by people to reflect what they feel is important to convey to the public about a project. Having been involved in several startups and launched a few products, names become contentious issues because they are the very, very first impression of a product to the customer.

Here we have some products where the important thing was clearly the author's inability to score a date, ever, and thus an obsession they have with images of what they can't have. If that is what people want to advertise, I agree they should be allowed to... but probably not on my server. Freedom of association and freedom of speech are a balancing act, and I prefer to associate with mature people. The fact that a package name is being used for trolling isn't a big deal, but clearly nobody needs to *distribute* it and associate with the images being conjured.

But hey, how are your contributions to Pedobear Security Software going?

I'm going to have to agree with you fully on this. The *reason* I still used Firefox was the plugins, otherwise I just use Chrome recently.

Now the plugins I want are disabled, some never becoming *4* compliant and here we are with *5* and even more plugins failing. This is the opposite of progress, unless the goal is to strip the browser of the reasons I use it over the alternatives.

Yes, it is a security problem. So why is this OK: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fsilverlight%2Ffuture%2F%23graphics (specificially: "Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU").

It isn't a security vulnerability when Silverlight gains access to the GPU. Hhmmm.

If this "will not happen for the vast majority" then why isn't this happening in parts of the world without a strong state presence? By "this" I mean specifically the use of this proposed "cheap security".

Genocide is far beyond my "taking of land" proposal, but there it is in the news. One would think that in the lawless areas that the raping, pillaging and burning of the communities would make such a "cheap security" a self fulfilling prophecy if it wasn't some Utopian fiction.

So, as Cyber Vandal says, you aren't selling this particularly well. The private security firm that you are paying can very easily be outclassed by a warlord as history and current events related in the stateless (or weak state) areas will attest. Really, there seems to be two outcomes historically: a strong state asserts its presence or small factions vie for domination via violence.

I wish your Utopia the best, but I suspect (even discounting statist action) Galt's Gulch will be razed and burning.

That is quite the Utopian description and quite the bit of typing, but it doesn't address the short, simple question I actually asked.

Someone is in conflict with you over your private ownership of the land. The group who disputes your ownership is not participating in a Utopia but are nothing more than organized criminals (a warlord and his muscle) looking for low hanging fruit to pluck. They are willing to use violence. In keeping with the lack of a state that can threaten violence, who is going to prevent them from taking over your land?

This isn't a theoretical question: during the heyday of the mob there were cities that were effectively ruled by warlords (mobster families). They were rooted out only with the application of force and they used force to fight against being rooted out. Mexico is under siege from internal warlords and stateless regions of our planet are rife with warlords.

Not everyone is going to internalize libertarian principles and without a way to fight those groups, I see those willing to use violence prevailing against those who spout platitudes. Your vision seems to frame criminals as individual actors that traditional (if private) policing can manage. I argue that such a Utopian society will fall prey to those organized groups without such deep thinking and fewer morals.

Returning to the direct question: who prevents your land from being taken over in this scenario?

Assuming as given the premise that the state can only exist if it is non-violent, who prevents the situation from degrading into warlords filling the violence vacuum. If you have a private police on your small chunk of land you live on, what is to stop another from simply taking your land by force? In a traditional state, we rely on the courts, police and laws (rules) thereof to establish the accepted norms and to enforce them.

Are you simply saying that your "private police" will be bigger than the aggressors?

I have followed alternative presentations of knowledge for a long time, dabbling in creating systems for pseudo-3D presentation of information, using various types of mind mapping and collaborative knowledge systems. The reality is that the web succeeded and the various competitors failed precisely because of the "poor" implementation choices of the current nightmare of kludged together technologies are "worse is better" type work. Would it be nice to have a better framework? Sure, but not at the cost of paralysis.

Xanadu wants to give strict copyright enforcement with a pay-as-you-eat system for consumption. The implementations have been plagued by pulling the rug out from under any implementer who gets "close" to a solution, usually with accusations that the implementer was trying to steal his technology. The Xanadu system is intended (as far as I have seen: the implementations never got far enough to tell for sure) to allow distributed content, but always with verification of the original source material's permissions and state. In short: the project is surrounded by control freak symptoms.

Maybe we will have such systems in the future, but they will stand along side the chaos that is the open Internet and I'm glad for it. For every neat feature I like about Xanadu, there is a control freak feature that takes away from the free-form nature of the existing Internet. Xanadu would make a great academic knowledge system, perhaps a real authoritative online Wikipedia where people with actual knowledge contributed and could avoid random yahoo intervention on their work. But I would never want to live with it as the only implementation of hyperlinking.

This is the heart of the matter. Corporations are *better* off than people under the law because the people inside a corporation can commit crimes and the *corporation* suffers the consequences of their crimes. Piercing the corporate veil is hard and generally only possible when "an example" is being made.

Using the "funding a movie" context from another branch of this thread, a corporation can be formed to create a movie which is nothing but libelous nonsense about someone disliked by the founders. Properly structured, this corporation won't have any money left once the movie has been released. This is done by paying other corporations excessive amounts for all of the production costs. (Those other companies usually have overlapping owners to the primary company, but buried under a few layers of shell company registrations.) When the victim "wins" the lawsuit, the corporation folds and the people behind it are free to form a new corporation to continue their harassment campaign, untouchable by law.

Perhaps some expendable hire who was used to write the script is fed to the legal machine, but the actual malcontents are free to go.

This example can be extended to all kinds of things that, as an individual would land one in jail, but as a corporation simply causes "another unfortunate corporate failure which drains the economy of jobs".

Chart 2 is the "also ran" chart. Try chart 1: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Show me a single instance of government regulation of the internet -ever- increasing freedom and having a truly positive end.

Since the government sort of took the initiative in creating the thing in the first place, I'm not sure how to comment to that. I can tell you an example where deregulation had the opposite effect, where telling carriers that they didn't have to lease their lines to competing companies set up local monopolies and discouraged further development beyond high-rent urban areas. It's also sort of funny that we're discussing giving the FTC power to restrict throttling on certain content, and you're trying to tell us that this is what leads to... the FTC censoring certain content. That's a bit like telling me I need to go South to get to Canada from Houston, because eventually I'll swing all the way around the globe.

Regulation breeds monopolies and big businesses that are 'too big to fail'.

It's just the opposite, unless you don't consider antitrust laws to be regulation. We have large investment banks in control of much of our trading sector because we stopped deciding at some point that too-big-to-fail entities were in violation of monopoly laws. You should see how we used to break up large companies, even if they didn't control 100% of the market. It's sort of amazing that after a heavy downturn in the market that came about largely because of commodities being traded unregulated in a sort of a shadow market that people somehow believe that government regulation NEVER improves the market.

Daniel Gross does a decent job of highlighting the Chicken Little effect of regulation on Wall Street here. But of course, this was a discussion about the internet, not Wall Street. In order to believe that further regulation will hurt the development of the internet, you sort of have to believe that there's already healthy competition in the American broadband market, that local monopolies don't exist, that customer service isn't getting worse as the ISPs get lazy on lack of competition, and that the rest of the world isn't slowly smoking us on improving network speeds. But obviously if we'd just get out of Comcast's way, then the internet will be just fine, right?

I don't pretend to know what "broad coverage" means, but if MS wanted to fight Apple, doing via open source proxy would be an ideal way to do it. HTC does the fighting and MS provides the ammunition. All the risks are with HTC and MS is at least partly insulated from bad press it would get in a direct confrontation with Apple. And the situation could be very bad for Apple: they are going after an open source platform, with all the bad press that going to bring on them, but they are also going against one the most intimidating patent portfolios there is, and one of the few companies with a war chest to match theirs, and they would have a lot to lose, while MS doesn't.

Is it profiling when dealing with someone with a legal infraction to prove who they are?

If you only do so with brown people, yes.

And if they can't, taking additional steps to verify that they are legal residents?

If all people pulled over are required to demonstrate US residency, then no.

Well you see, that is where the problem is. Those protesting the new law, which does exactly what I describe, thinks that this is "racial profiling" simply and solely because MOST of the illegals are indeed Hispanic. If Most of the illegals were from ... say ... Britain, it wouldn't be, but because they are from south of the boarder, it is.

Nope. This law, in no way, requires profiling. However, it's crafted in such a way that it sounds like it greatly encourages illegal profiling. In fact, it so much encourages profiling that it the law has a clause that pretty much says "we know you cops are going to illegally profile under this law, so at least try to make it appear constitutional."

You see the logical fallacy in the argument being made yet? Only one group is using "race" to justify their position. GUESS WHICH SIDE??

But that's not profiling. "Jews are smelly" isn't profiling, even though it uses a class of people to assign an unrelated trait. And race is being brought up because, though it says race can't be the only factor in selecting someone for harassment, it can be one of two, such as being hispanic and being the the wrong neighborhood. But to pretend race will have nothing to do with the new law's implementation indicates that you are a liar or a moron. Since you object to moron, that only leaves one choice.

That was my point. And you call me a moron. Sheesh .

Your point is that when the government says "we promise not to profile" and people say "I don't believe you" that the second group is made up of racists. Again, moron or liar, which are you?

40 man-years.

One guy's been using it since it was invented. Someone else found out about it eleven years ago and has been using it since them.

How do you purpose that McDonalds impose "personal responsibility" on their customers?

I don't.

My first USB drive was 4MB, most machines needed to be updated to even see them -- windows 98SE was the only one to naively recognize if on a certain update and very few people had Win2K. Ironically I needed a diskette with usb mass storage drivers to use the USB stick as not everyone even had internet. Zip disks were my choice for movable mass media at that time (w/ accompanying zip driver diskette when mobile). A couple years later is a different story, though.