There are plenty of limitations on what you can do with your property. You cannot use it to kill people, for one thing (unless you are a government or a corporation, but even than it's usually illegal, it just gets swept under the carpet). Try buying a nuclear bomb with your money. Heck, try buying drugs.

So there are legal restrictions. Then there are moral restrictions. Let's say you want to buy an island full of people and have it just for yourself, so you buy it and sweep all the inhabitants into the ocean. Or send them off on rafts. Would you argue this is a legitimate use of your property? In fact, this kind of thing happens all the time, except with houses rather than islands. But governments have done exactly that with islands, too - google Diego Garcia.

The issue is emphatically *not* about whether there can or should be limits on using your property - because there always have been such limits, and for a good reason. The issue is only whether a particular new restriction should or should not be introduced. That can be decided on a case-by-case basis, not through groveling against your little property god.

Bull. You could just as well say that a loaf of bread has zero value until it is sold. If you can borrow against it, it has value - and a very precisely estimated value, at that.

The fact that it might become worthless overnight is an entirely different matter. You get taxed on what is, not on what might be at some later time. That loaf of bread *will* be worthless in two days or so, too.

First, if you can borrow against it, it's not worthless. Quite the contrary, your broker and your bank will know exactly how much it is worth.

Second, see what happens when you walk into a bank and when Mark Zuckerberg walks into a bank. See the difference? Still think stock is just a worthless piece of value until it is exercised?

Third, where does "it could just as easily" enter into a tax scheme? You pay taxes on what is, not on what might be. You own stock at your personal risk, why should anyone else care or be poorer for it? If you're on a salary, you might "just as easily" get mugged and have it stolen from you on the payday. That is no reason to not tax your earnings, is it?

I am greatly amused to see all the whining, above and below, about how it is impossible to determine the value of "idle" stock and how a paper fortune might become worthless overnight. At the same time we are constantly brainwashed about how investing in stock is a good policy to safeguard your future, because it will - it must! - appreciate in value, long term, and we'll all be vacationing on the Bahamas when we retire.

So which is it?

What you say totally makes sense but it may just be a thing of the past:
http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16148629

(The article conveniently omits that one British court had already dismissed the guy's case, effectively saying he didn't commit a crime in the UK. Then another British court okayed his extradition to the US.)

Dictionaries do not decide what a term means. They record usage. If enough industry lobbyists, misinformed pundits and bribed politicians have used the words "steal" and "theft" to describe common copyright infringement - and they certainly have - then newer editions of dictionaries will record that sense.

That however still doesn't make copyright infringement legally or morally equivalent to theft. It's just a piece of propaganda we've been living under for a generation and many people have internalized it. "God is great" is another, or "Dear Leader is great" if you live in North Korea. Same thing, though not quite the same scale yet.

I don't, because it will either be an Adobe plugin, hence slow and a memory hog, or it will be written from scratch, hence not fully compatible and probably slow as well. Add to the mix all the potential security issues with active content in PDF documents. I disable all of it in Adobe Reader, now I'll have to disable it in Firefox as well.

PDFs should be treated like executables or archive files - saved to disk.

Other than that, I really don't understand why Firefox has to be aping Chrome instead of going its own way. What's wrong with the top-level menu that it had to be replaced with a single, hierarchical menu that's always harder to navigate? What was wrong with the well-established, intuitive tabbed interface metaphor, which Chrome managed to break so badly by disconnecting the tabs from their content?

And really, websites will be putting items on the tab context menus? Advertisers are already salivating. Good luck finding the "Close tab" command among fifty links to commercials.

Would you kindly expand on that comment? Because as it stands, it is a non-sequitur. In order to have oil, you need to buy it on an open market. Exactly where do the army, navy and air force come in here?

Unless you actually meant to say that in order to have oil, the US and UK must take it by force. Please clarify.

New York Times already runs on that particular business model. They sat for a year on the story about NSA's illegal (at the time) surveillance, came out with it only after the 2004 elections. No-one needs Wikileaks to provide services they already have catered for.

As you said, the guy brought the gun in, and got arrested. This is the story:

Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun
http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/news/Ex-soldier-faces-jail-handing-gun/article-1509082-detail/article.html

I've already said what I think about Kaspersky's views here and I won't be renewing my license but... do you have anything other than anecdotal evidence (your own)? I switched from ESET Security Suite (essentially nod32 + firewall) to Kaspersky specifically because it uses significantly less memory, less CPU, and its on-access scan is much faster. Still a relative hog, like all av software today, but not nearly as bad as other things I've tried.

And anyway, it's really beside the point how good (or not) their products are. The man has just lost me as a customer even though I *like* what he makes.

> Security expert wants a more secure system. Freedom experts want a free system.
> Unsurprisingly these two views clash

And there are technical reasons why they do - that's fine, that's tough, we understand the constraints. This isn't the problem.

The problem seems to be that some (many?) "security experts" do not **value** freedom - at all.

When you hear a government or a corporate official say "security", think "control". It makes things much clearer.

I was born in communist Poland, early enough to remember it well but like you, too late to have endured any particular hardships or to have faced tough political choices. So without judging or justifying Kaspersky either way, let's note than in Russia in the 70s there would have been precious few career avenues for a kid gifted in maths and cryptanalysis.

The views he's expressing today are a completely different affair. Today he really talks as if the KGB thinking is catching up with him. (Not that you won't hear US or EU officials express like sentiments!) I've switched just recently from nod32 (s-l-o-w on-access scan!) to Kaspersky AVP, but I don't think I will be renewing the license when it expires in under a year. Wish there was more I could do.

"informal surveys show that many scientists would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space"

A one-way mission to Mars.
Space geeks.
Makeshift weapons.

Welcome to...

DOOM 4!