I'm not sure voluntarily going on a plane is the government violating your right to privacy.

Be sure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Your houses have privacy, and so do your papers, and so do your effects, and so does your person. You do not need to keep all your things, including your body, in your house to keep your privacy. Traveling is *expected* behavior of people - it does not remove your civil rights.

Well, in theory. The Bill of Rights only says what the Government may do and not do - if it behaves otherwise it's behaving illegally, but so what? Complain and get violated some more. Just don't fool yourself into thinking the Constitution is more than a relic of a long-lost Republic. If you don't care about rule-of-law, then just go about your business and submit to virtual strip searches. Just don't act surprised when a right you do care about is violated.

so some sort of article would be nice.

First you guys complain about broken links in the summaries, and now when there are no broken links in the summaries you're complaining too! Can't an editor catch a break around here?

Licensing is more complex than program itself. Everybody's getting sucked in to the lawyers' game.

This isn't surprising because one side is working with human nature - the tendency to share whatever makes them happy, and the other side is focused on battling government monopolies called "intellectual property", which is artificial scarcity enforced at the point of a gun.

Copyleft is just a hack to route around copyright damage. Absent governments enforcing it, we'd all just either release code or not release code and the licensing friction would all go away. Some dude would just issue a pull request and move on. There'd be nobody jumping up and down shouting about courts, fines, SWAT raids, caging and sexual torture over duplicating digital data.

But that's the reality we have to face. If more people chose WTFPL we'd get more done as a non-zero-sum group. The trick with the 'rising tide' analogy is that it's the sum that's non-zero; every individual value may or may not be positive, and some of those values that are currently positive might be negative and, man do humans waste time protecting their downside risks to the point of eliminating their upside potential.

Citation needed.

It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.

While entirely true, I was visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics lab in 1990 and heard just that. The sad part was I'd have to wait until 2012 for the first commercial fusion reactor to be viable! It was sweet to stand in the control room while they fused a few atoms in the tokamak. And the flywheels they had were the stuff of a steampunk's wet dream!

To be fair, funding did decrease over the same time period and J.H.F.C., if the money spent on screwing up Iraq even more than it was had been spent on fusion research instead, Iraq would be much less relevant today in so many ways.

IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.

We just need "JFK" to get out of the way and stop squashing every attempt commercialize technologies that actually put a huge dent into the carbon energy industry. Big oil plus big taxes on it is the stuff of _DC_ wet dreams.

I guess you've never personally worked on a community broadband project and learned what's involved with getting pole space (in the supposed 'public' right of way).

Give it a try - you'll learn something!

Haha, the old "you're just a troll so I don't have to defend my flawed position" card.

I don't have a wife. Will you answer my very simple question now? It is not a rhetorical trick to ask you to clarify your point if that is what you were implying. You wrote a thousand god damn words to beat around the bush so you could avoid making a concrete statement. You did that so you could continually hand wave and say people miss your point when they disagree with you. When they demonstrate they do understand your point you say they are arguing in "bad faith".

That nonsense doesn't work on me. So I will ask a simple question again

You have stated that he handled the issue badly because he did not admit that he was wrong. Your issue was not with his handling of the situation- it was his politics. He had no obligation to defend his personal politics to you in the first place.

An absolute moral authority does not exist. It is not me saying someone isn't a moral authority that makes it true; the lack of its existence makes it true.

Demonstrate one. First you will have to define my "morality". The only way you will ever change somebody's mind about something is to actually see things from their perspective. Basing your arguments on another's moral inferiority precludes your ability to see things from their perspective.

Please explain how advocating the avoidance of using emotional arguments is arguing from the gut.

Fair enough but that comment was talking about people of the "someone must stop you" variety. And that someone saying that others are "free to hate" is somehow anti-gay and pro-homophobia. Of which there are quite a few. AmiMojo's strawman there is pretty good evidence that they are one of those people.

My issue is that kind of sentiment only makes problems worse. If both sides are just screaming that the other is harming society how can we make it anywhere? They are both deaf of anything but emotional arguments which they fully belief are already on their own side.

There was nothing wrong with saying Eich was wrong, explaining why he was wrong or even mocking him (I did all those things). But attacking him personally for his political opinion crosses a line. And no matter how wrong you think his opinion is it is in fact shared by a lot of people. If the tide ever turns back in their favour do you really want to leave them with the power to destroy political opponents on that level?

I'm not making a slippery slope argument. I'm not saying one will lead to the other. I am saying people's moral objections to both are usually fairly similar. All I am advocating is for people to avoid making emotional and moral arguments. They just don't help. For instance: the main reason that the anti gay marriage folks are losing the battle (slowly but surely) is because all they have is emotional and moral arguments. Using the same method to combat them only gives their methods more power.

And gays aren't legally allowed to marry. Case closed? You cannot use "one is illegal" as justification of difference when you are arguing why something should be legal for the other. It just doesn't make sense.

How would you replace that? How does anarchy work exactly?

There are entire sections of libraries about how this has worked in the past, works now (every unregulated transaction), and what kinds of improvements could be made in the future, but you can YouTube Bob Murphy for some gentle introductions. Just be careful of the "but who would pick the cotton?" arguments.

Well we were talking about Eich's political beliefs and how people caused him to lose his job because of them in this thread. You seemed to be defending those people. Or at least trying to deflect criticism away from them.

No one has even made the claim that homosexuality is wrong. Only that some believe that and that they should be free to have such a belief.

Hell, if people could actually trust each other, we wouldn't *need* nation states in the first place.

Nation states killed 350 million people in the last century alone.

The onus is on nation states' defenders to show that neighborly spats and other small disputes would do worse than that. It's not like private conflict-resolution services don't already exist (and are always preferred in business contracts). Every lack-of-imagination excuse people have for "needing" nation states must be justified vis-a-vis the demonstrated body count (and that's only taking the utilitarian stance, not even the moral one).

If somebody showed up today promising peace in exchange for executing a tenth of the world's population, they'd be locked up in the psychopath ward and the religious people would call him an antichrist.

ob. Joker:

"Spy on entire nations and nobody bats an eye - spy on a few government officials, and suddenly everybody loses their shit."