Can a majority vote, in a well informed democracy, ethically suspend human rights?
Most definitely not, and the reason is that anything which is truly a right can never be taken away by someone other than the owner of that right. It doesn't matter one whit whether the persons taking rights are part of a majority or not. You can only waive your own rights, you can't vote away someone else's.
Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jackpot before better-funded competitors can duplicate their work, but most creators will be outdone in profits by someone who has a fully funded team, an existing factory, and a standing army of salesmen ready to hit the market worldwide before the original inventor can get known by anyone or build a relationship with more than a handful of retailers.
Also, you seem to have a strange notion that the world is divided into "people who can create" and "people who can only copy," where people who can create have some infinite store of inventions or writings and an unending, Godlike power of creation, that at a moment's notice they can spit out a new, improved version of whatever someone else just copied, thereby holding some kind of perpetual lead based on a pure and complete mental superiority over all competitors. It is more accurate to say that many people have occasional points where they come up with a really good idea, and that working out the way these ideas can be put into practice is a difficult process. To imagine that someone who once innovates successfully is guaranteed to be able to generate an infinite stream of successfully implemented new ideas, each abandoned to competitors as quickly as those competitors can implement the same, is to dream of people having a different sort of nature than they really do. (Ayn Rand happened to have much the same misunderstanding, but it is nevertheless a misunderstanding.)
Countries and companies who have no intellectual property protections are "on the way up" in the same sense that, in a complete free-for-all, dog-eat-dog system, the dogs on the eating end are benefiting. Nobody can claim that it is not at the expense of other dogs or that those on the rise are doing anything whatsoever to introduce new calories into the food chain.
"Race" is just a convenient term to try to place people into one of these various groups, although obviously it doesn't work for everyone (like someone who has parents from very different places), but then again the scientific concept of "species" isn't really black-and-white either and there's a lot of controversy about that too.
In other words, race is more or less a social construct, as opposed to one with a great deal of accuracy or usefulness in science. The genetic variation within African blacks is greater than the genetic variation of all other people combined, which means that people of the "black race" are actually in many cases far less closely related to one another than, say, European whites and south Asians. To say that differently, people of different races are often more similar genetically than people of the same race. Which makes race a very rough descriptor, an imprecise and a proxy of limited usefulness for the actual differences among people. It isn't a completely silly term, as it is useful to be able to distinguish among groups of people with different visual characteristics and different regional ancestry, but it is foolish to think it is more than a vague term, scientifically speaking.
Dividing people by color is therefore kind of like dividing foods by color. There are some generalities that one can find, like green ones are made of plant matter, and a chef concerned with artistic presentation of the food on the plate may well find color a useful concept, but nutritionally, biologically, or compositionally, is a green bell pepper more like an asparagus or a watermelon than it is like a yellow bell pepper? Is it reasonable to put turnips and fish in the same food group and call that a meaningful category? Obviously not.
I don't know how even on Slashdot there are some people who tend to argue "what do I care, if I'm not doing anything bad with my phone?" Let's get rid of that before it gets started here. I have a Samsung, Android, Sprint phone. That means I apparently have a logger installed that can track every key I press, every message I send, every web site I visit. That means that Sprint, Sprint employees, and whosoever Sprint or its employees should share this information with, whether that be government, advertisers, companies or individuals with malicious or invasive intent, whether this is shared on purpose or by accident or security breach, has access to such things as:
Phones are not just text messaging and dialing devices anymore. A keylogger on my phone is equally offensive as a keylogger on my home PC, and has the potential for just as great a compromise of my life's privacy and security. I have no control over the security with which Sprint or anyone else transmits or stores my personal information, and even more importantly, they have no right to have it in the first place. Besides the fact that the FBI has a well-known history of tracking the lives of many private citizens with politically motivated intent, I certainly do not care for the idea of private corporations and whoever works for them having all of my passwords and knowing where all my accounts are. There is no reasonable argument for why I should think this is okay. I do not have to be doing anything illegal for me to reasonably object to my mobile phone company having, or storing (with who knows what security), a back door into every single piece of my life. Somebody whose involvement in my life is supposed to be merely providing me with telephone service does not need and has no right to expect the master key to my whole digital, financial, social, and business life.
I will be contacting Sprint and asking them for a means to permanently remove this software from my phone. If they are unwilling (which they probably will be, but they need to actively hear a complaint from me and everyone else so they understand the offensiveness of their actions), I will have to go down the "root it and fix it myself" path. I hope the rest of you with affected phones will do the same.
No it wasn't, the author of that article specifically takes on the idea of the crypto being delivered through a secure channel, having two basic objections: 1) If you have a secure channel already, then you don't need JavaScript encryption; and 2) JavaScript is completely malleable at runtime, and so you can't guarantee that running code, or the functions/libraries/objects on which it depends (down to the very basic JavaScript objects), will remain unmodified and trustworthy.
The first issue applies to a little different problem than the one being solved here. While the author was considering client-server communications, what we're dealing with here is a different use: end-to-end email encryption. That is, the browser-GMail encryption of the user session and all its contents is already taken care of by HTTPS, but GMail still knows what your email contains. This is, as I understand it, an attempt to encrypt/decrypt the text of the email on the client, such that GMail would only see the ciphertext and never receive the cleartext at all.
Fine in theory, but the second issue would seem to me to still apply. I haven't looked at their source, so maybe they've found a way to avoid this, but if any code from a server can interact with the code from this plugin, then it isn't obvious how the code remains trustworthy, no matter how secure the original channel was through which it was loaded.
My point is that the burden of selling into any given jurisdiction is identical for local or mail-order/internet retailers. If someone wants to sell by distance into a particular jurisdiction, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to adhere to that jurisdiction's laws. You will see this in action if you try to order wine online, for instance. If those laws are too complex or onerous, then nobody will want to sell there. But that doesn't make the burden any different for one than for the other, for any given sale. I think if Amazon refused to ship to your ZIP code, your municipal or state legislators would suddenly be under a lot of pressure to make the taxes conform to a common pattern such that retailers find it worthwhile to sell there...just like they already have to make taxes palatable for local retailers to set up shop.
And it certainly is a retailer's responsibility to pay taxes on the items it sells, so I'm not sure what you mean by your claim. How do you think sales taxes are currently paid to the state? They are calculated and charged to you at the register by the retailer, who has to report and give them to the government. The buyer takes almost no part in this process except coughing up his or her part of the cost. And a state has the right to impose whatever tax burden it wants on transactions which take place in that state. The only reason this has not been applied to mail-order or online retailers is that the actual location of the transaction isn't really defined for a purchase happening across state lines. But since the federal government has the Constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce, it is within its powers to make a law defining that interstate transactions will be considered to be geographically taking place at the location of the buyer. (Or at the point of the seller, but that would be a bad idea.)
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian