Smaller government also has less hold over corporations, who will grow to fill the power vacuum filled by shrinking government. End result: The consumer is raped by the corporate world.
Larger government may be better able to contain corporations, but the end result of that is that the citizen is raped by federal power.
You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. What exactly is a free society to do?
As you know very well, copyright law has nothing to do with peoples' personal information.
> Now lets say a cop gets on FreeNet and downloads CP and traces the line and part of the CP came from your IP address.
I thought the latter action was impossible on FreeNet. It's been a while since I messed with it, but I remember strong anonymity being one of its selling points.
> I do believe Julian Assange should be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for what he did.
Which US law did he break again?
>1999 called
Did you warn them?!
About Haiti and Japan?!
NO? YOU ASSHOLE!!
> Sorry, but Apple (alongside IBM) are the corporations that can Do No Wrong in the eyes of Groklaw.
Evidence?
Read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Billions of dollars of chemical and food additive research goes into making fast food taste good. It kind of creeped me out to learn that.
I saw "Project Icarus: an Interstallar Mission Timeline" and thought we were finally going to research a way to dial the ninth chevron. Alas, disappointed yet again.
On the contrary. While I am not a LastPass user, I think more highly of them knowing that this is how they react to even
> [Joe Downloader] it's not theft. It's copyright infringement.
Actually, I would call this an instance of data theft. I, too, believe that calling copyright infringement "theft" or "stealing" is ridiculous rhetoric, but there's a difference between music/movies/software available on BitTorrent and personal information kept on Sony's servers. Copyrighted material is meant to be available to the public, even if it's not supposed to be distributed over file sharing networks. In theory, anyone can legally obtain a copy and be able to view it to their heart's content. Sony customer data, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) carefully guarded and kept safe from unauthorized viewers (which I imagine would be just about everyone except certain Sony employees). The unauthorized copying of the latter is, in my opinion, much closer to actual theft, although I nonetheless feel a small chill using the word theft to describe the copying of data.
Furthermore, there is no copyright protection for personal information, so that rules out infringement as well.
The funny thing is that you're actually right. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is freeloading. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is theft. The problem is that making claims like "it's theft/freeloading, pure and simple" do nothing whatsoever to address the issue itself; they only exacerbate the giant Internet flamewar that is the piracy debate. Most people consider "freeloading" to be a negative term, so when they hear "pirates are freeloaders", they automatically assume that "pirates are bad" without asking themselves "Is noncommercial, nonprofit copyright infringement really such a serious issue that we should be scrambling to make it impossible?". It's the lazy way out, and I wish we would avoid such terms for the sake of intellectual honesty.
And it doesn't count if he or she is not aware of it. The app is a Trojan.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
