Millions of people would be happy to commit murder, rape, theft, and other crimes if there were no consequences.

If there were really no consequences, we would be ok with people committing murder, rape and theft! Welcome to Valhalla, where we hack each other to death with axes and then wake up the next morning and happily feast together.

The reason that murder, rape and theft are crimes, is that there are consequences. If you could address them (though you can't), then you would have eliminated some crimes.

You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.

The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports, and you did it, but you were angry at your boss so you passive-aggressively wrote all the TPS reports in Swahili, and your boss doesn't know Swahili. The boss somehow got an unpaid volunteer with a weird sexual fetish to translate the reports into English. (Somehow, this person gets off by translating Swahili to English, and is quite happy to do it for pleasure or glory or whatever the hell is going on there. People are weird!)

On the surface, the process appears to work so perfectly (the boss is actually very happy with his unobfuscated TPS reports) that he fires you, because he forgot that the new guy was really just repairing the deliberately-sabotaged TPS reports, not actually providing the reports' content. All because you insisted on being a total dick, and also all because there are some really weird people out there who are happy to clean up after you.

Long-term this looks like a bad situation. OTOH, it seems that eventually someone else comes along and writes more TPS reports (but in enciphered Swahili) for a single pay period. Then they get fired too. So you report-writers are making money, but a lot less than if you could just stop being a dick and hold a steady job. And the bosses are sort of happy because they're getting their reports, but they can't help but think that if they could find employees worth keeping who weren't dicks, the company would be more productive. Everyone is losing (except the fetishists), and things aren't working well, but somehow we're all getting by.

(Further complication and analogy-repair: There are really two bosses, in different departments, and there's a broken accounting system. Only one of the bosses' budgets are actually having to pay the paychecks for the high-turnover dick TPS report-writers, but the other boss whose budget never gets hit, also gets to read the repaired TPS reports from the volunteers. So we're not all paying evenly for this broken system. The "pirate boss" get a free ride and the "chump boss" who keep hiring dicks, is getting visciously shafted. Some people think the pirate boss or the volunteer translators are the problem here, but I think the dick report-writer is the problem, and yet, solving the problem requires that we all start talking to the chump bosses, explaining "Stop being a chump, and stop paying those dicks. Let's just put 'reports must be in English' into the hiring contract, and so the dicks don't get even a single paycheck." If we can all agree to stop being chump bosses, the dicks will get selected out of the job market and either starve to death or change their behavior, and we can start hiring employees who write unobfuscated TPS reports. That seems to be the everyone-wins scenario, though I'm not sure how the fetishist translators will occupy their time, after that.)

It's unnecessary to post something like this.

It was just as unnecessary to post the superstitious comment that SuricouRaven replied to, but you didn't call that AC an asshole, nor did you say to them, "Who cares if you're praying?" No, you just wanted to single one of the "unnecessary" comments out for "you're an asshole" treatment. Ok, let's probe deeper into that.

Someone is begging for real help with a serious real-life problem, and they got an AC reply that was pretty much the same as "I'll get flak for this, but have you tried applying nipple clamps to the patient and then standing over her while you masturbate?" and someone shot back, "I predict that won't work," (in a tone suggesting some offense at the idea even being suggested). Now look at which of those two you just flamed: was it the silly/offensive suggestion, or was it productive comment to try to correct, cull, or (yes) mock that silly/offensive suggestion?

You decided to flame the relatively productive comment.

Perhaps you, sir, are the asshole.

I'm going to "go off" a little here, mainly because I'm trying to talk myself into something. I almost didn't even bother posting this.

can you kindly fill me in on the methodology? .. I'm hoping for a convincing argument that we are not already lost as a country

By actively taking responsibility. And don't wait for, or care about, any arguments as to the future. Whether or not your part of the country is lost, is a decision (not a discovery) that you make.

You see; I'm of the opinion that the government, particularly the federal government, has become so corrupted, so full of bad political influence by monied interests, so controlled by cash (particularly in light of Citizens United and other rulings that claim that money==speech), that the only way I can see to bring the country back to rationality is via armed conflict.

Consider what is required, for armed conflict to viably change policies. (Not counting the policy of over-reactive crackdown; I'll give you, that you can achieve that, if it's your goal. McVeigh was successful in further empowering the feds in this regard; yet another reason to hate him.) I think armed rebellion to end corruption, would require a whole bunch of people, who currently prove every two years that they don't care about anything, to start giving a fuck. And you can't aim gun at another person (especially when you know they're likely to point one back), without first giving a fuck, about what is going to happen next.

I think before you get even a fraction toward that level of giving-a-fuck, you'll be able to accept the lesser burden, of personally running for an office, or bothering to show up and vote for someone who does that, instead of using America's default algorithm (I think the programmer called it "negligentApathy 1.0"), which is "Whose ad budget was the highest, among those who have the correct letter next to his name? I'm voting for that guy." It is way easier to resign to your fate of having to be a US Senator, or a state district representative, or a city councilor, or a neighborhood association board member, or even a father, than it is to go risk your life sniping at people who are invariable better than you at that game. (And that's the hard version. It's even easier to not be that guy, but to write-in his name. And somewhere on the scale of difficulty between these things, is getting that guy onto a ballot so he doesn't have to be written-in.)

Once people get that far (where people vote or run, based on politics rather than ads), all the campaign advertising money in the world will be not quite useless, but nearso. If people give a fuck and become political, then money really will be speech: most of it wasted and dissolving in the uncaring winds, like us two here on Slashdot. Let them impotently spend their money buying television ads that nobody saw anyway. Your current problem isn't that they bought the ads; it's that anyone saw them, or used them for purposes of other than counting them to determine approximations of how badly a candidate must have sold out to someone.

If people start caring about politics, then you're never going to have to kill anyone, because long before then, you're going to get over the lower hurdle of your guys winning their first election. Not because you're a nice guy or because murder is bad, but because it's easier. Maybe not easy but easier than being a revolutionary soldier.

Or to put it another way: winning an armed conflict to overthrow corruption, would itself require some element of civic spirit. You can't achieve it, without passionate people. And once you have the people, you don't even need your guns anymore.

How do we get there? Here begins my bullshit (and I'm going to put some words in your mouth), but actually, I already told you this part.

First, think really hard about whether or not you have actually reached the point of giving-a-fuck. What I mean is, do you honestly care, a whole lot? You mentioned armed conflict, so think about whether or not you would be willing to participate in that (don't worry, you're not really going to have to do this part), and pick up your gun and get yourself killed by professoinals, without making the slightest strategic impact (since that's exactly what you know for certain, is going to happen, if you pick up your gun). Are you willing to make that personal sacrifice, because you're a patriot and this is really important to you?

Yes? Outstanding! I have good news for you. I'm about to ask you to pay a much lesser price.

Run for city council or mayor or state rep or any policy-making position. You. That is what I want you to do. And I want you to win, by talking to a bunch of people and making them realize that you are the right guy for this, not that guy who spent a lot of money on glossy postcards or television ads. You walk house to house, and use the cheap new thing (web) that your grandparents' politicians didn't have.

You. Not me, because I'm not sure I really give a fuck, yet. ;-) But seriously, this is the way. It just takes a bit more serious motivation than posting on Slashdot does.

I am building a series of memorial groves for the greatest patriots of our generation: Timothy McVeigh, Andrew Stack, and Marvin Heemeyer. You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "

And tell me, as an innocent person who got harmed, did you have any time to think about people being harmed when McVeigh murdered them, in spite of them being innocent third parties totally unrelated to McVeigh's ostensible oppression, and also completely unrelated to anyone's complaints about the federal government?

Weev, there's something really important that you need to hear, so please pay attention to this: Fuck You.

I'm a fellow government-hater, except.. no. You are too much of a worthless piece of shit asshole for me to want to be a fellow anything with you. Please, please go fuck yourself (preferably with a bullet), so that they rest of us can spread advocacy of moving power back away from DC to more accountable localities, without worthless pieces of shit like you, distracting them with their nutcase "I know how to solve this civics problem: let's murder a bunch of innocent bystanders!" distractions. You are not helping, asshole.

Well, maybe you are helping someone.

I was sorry you got fucked, but your attempt to retroactively earn what happened to you, seems to have nullified the emotional component of that. You just did the feds a big favor; they used to have to worry about having made you a martyr, but now they can sigh with relief. When they falsely arrest the next guy, instead of the public crying out, "oh no you don't, not again!" the people will say, "Oh, another McVeigh clone? I'm glad you feds caught him in time."

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho.

I think we wish we had a right to be forgotten. We see how, if we had such a right, then things would magically be better. (As someone who has said and done plenty of asinine things, I'm totally with you on this!) It looks like we might enact laws such that things are as though we had such a right. (Apparently I'm not the only person who has said and done asinine things; that's weirdly comforting. So there's lots of support for this idea.)

Yet despite all this, there is little reason to thing we actually have that right, and plenty reason to say we don't have that right.

Whose interests are at greater stake within your own memories, for example? Can you even invent a fictitious scenario, where someone else's "right" to make you forget something, outweighs your right to remember the same thing? I can't. In my head and in my computers, my rights are more important than anyone else's. It's not even "just a little bit" more important, either. We're talking "worth killing people for" level importance. Imagine someone credibly said they're about to perform surgery on you to force you to forget something. You would consider that to be an attack, against both your body and dignity. It simply wouldn't be tolerable, under any circumstances. You would kill someone to prevent that, and you would approve someone else killing to prevent that. It's that important.

So I think this all going to be more about regulating commerce or speech (e.g. Google telling things to people) than actually regulating memories. Google can be allowed to know something, but not allowed to speak it.

If we focus it that narrowly, then there shouldn't be any weird made-up-rights paradoxes. Indeed, it almost could get sucked in to plain libel laws, except being a weird case where the regulated statements happen to be true rather than false, but are otherwise treated as being similarly harmful.

And really, that's going to be enough. It's going to address the problem sufficiently, and also even speech regulation is hard enough for people to swallow, that there will (and should be!!) plenty of opposition to even going that far. This battle plan is quite ambitious enough!

Ooo! How about if I only have to pay $25,000 for a Ferari if I promise to only drive it on shitty roads?

Say I'm a car salesman. I just want to sell you a car and get as much profit as I possibly can. I don't care about promises you make about roads (whatever!), but I'm happy to hear you talk about the shittiness or awesomeness of your roads, in the hopes that it reveals information about you to me, so I know how much money you feel like spending.

Suppose I know that you only have shitty roads to drive on. Would you pay over $25k for a car to drive on them? (Depending on what you mean by "shitty" I might even wonder if you would pay over $2500 for a car.) I would make a relatively cheap car and offer it at a price where I think you might bite. I know that if I offer you a Ferrari for $70k you're going to chuckle and keep walking, to my competitor who makes cars more suitable for your road situation.

Yet, there are other suckers who spend more money on their roads, so not only might they be willing to buy more expensive cars, they've shown they have more money to burn, by spending so much on those roads. That's who my Ferrari brand name is for. No, they're not walking out of my store, having paid only $25k. I am going to soak those chumps.

(Now that we're done talking about Market Segmentation 101, can someone help me find where I enter screen size into couchpotato's preferences? And will entering a higher number hit my block accounts harder?)

I think basically, he's proposing pay per pixel.

They sort of have this model now (in the disc world.)

Oh great, now Terry Pratchett's books are priced by the page? Sheesh, Alzheimer's must be expensive!

the new crime

Vandalism and pranks are not new. And this particular form (tipping/inverting/moving_to_weird_places any unusually small/light car) is something I've heard of going back to at least as early as the 1960s. Your grandparents were doing this when they were kids (assuming your grandparents were assholes).

Next on slashdot: someone spraypaints the screen on someone else's phone! It's all part of the new Anti-Tech Movement!! You are totally a square and working for The Man and thinking-inside-the-box and not-cool, if you aren't doing this yet. You probably don't even have an onion on your belt, lamer. Get with it, man!

100% of people eventually die. If every person's death costs society $6M (on average) then society is doomed to bankruptcy unless people generate at least that much GBP per capita per lifetime. Wikipedia shows average income as about $32k per year so everyone needs to work for about 187 years before the die. And that's to break even.

They don't work that long.

If we say everyone should have to work about 50 years, then society breaks when a life is worth about $1.6M. Keep in mind, breaking even means utter desolate poverty; each person generated enough wealth and pays 100% income tax, to reimburse society for their later costly death. At that break-even point, no person can afford to eat a single meal in their life time, no person ever lives under a roof, etc. We probably want to do more than break even (life should be worth living), so even $1.6M is probably an extreme overestimate of the cost of death.

Of course, this is all based upon certain assumptions. ;-)

Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge. If one direction generates more traffic than the other, the source pays for the asymmetry.

And to think: I have been paying my ASDL provider, when I should have been charging them.

Here in the UK, there's a whole bunch of sentences that don't involve time in prison. People can be fined or made to work so many hours in community service or prevented from being in certain areas etc.

Those are all examples of something that you would never tolerate being done anyone, unless it were a criminal sentence. Instead of referring to them as fines or compelled service, you would call them theft and involuntary servitude. Being part of a punishment changes everything, and makes the intolerable become tolerable (or even downright desirable and a good idea). If I pointed a gun at your face and said "pick up that trash" or "teach these kids to read" then I think we would later find ourselves in court, where the whole topic of conversation would be my criminal actions rather than the relatively benign actions that I wanted to force you to perform.

Who are you to tell me (hypothetical drunk driver) I'm not allowed to visit pubs? Who are you, to stand in my way and forcefully prevent me (hypothetical pedophile) from enjoying a nice sit on a bench in the playground, where I can admire and chat up the delightfully fresh, juicy children? Oh, you're the government, enforcing my criminal sentence, that's who. Good thing, because if anyone else tried to interfere with my life in such a manner, that person would be in big trouble.

It seems absurd to think of preventing convicted pedophiles from hanging out in playgrounds as "torture" but if a non-government entity followed you around and consistently harassed you (a person not convicted, or even suspected to be, a bad guy) are you sure you might not use "torture" to describe it?

Also, what about government's role in building infrastructure such as roads, airports etc?

If I pointed a gun at your face and demanded 500 quid because I want to hire some guys to build a road, then we'd be back in court again, with you at the witness and me as the accused. Building roads and airports is technically fairly easy (you don't need a government for that) and anyone could theoretically do it ("Tonight on Gardener's World: Monty Don shows you how to build a path around your rose garden."). The hard part is getting the resources (laborer's time, materials, the land itself). We have agreed to allow a special entity go around to force everyone cough up their share of the expense. It's not a crime when that entity does it. It is a crime if anyone else does it. If there weren't so many expenses involved in building infrastructure, we wouldn't have the government do it, because we wouldn't need to. ("Tonight on Love Your Airport: Alan Titchmarsh shows an elderly widow how to construct an eight thousand foot long reinforced-concrete runway.")

It's a dirty job, but we all come out ahead if we get together and agree to make a special entity exempt from the usual prohibitions against doing it.

we cannot, as a society, debase ourselves by resorting to torture of the mind, body, or soul.

What else is there? Have you ever heard of any sentences in any societies, that didn't involve that stuff in some form?

All sentences are intended to do normally-intolerable things to a convict, where whatever you do to them, would literally be a crime if it weren't part of a sentence. The whole point of government is to create a highly-regulated monopoly on those dirty things that "nobody should ever do yet somebody's gotta do it."

IMHO any activity that isn't usually considered evil, is not a job for government. If you ever find out your government is doing something not repugnant, then you should revoke your government's power to do that thing. Everything they do should make us think "ugh, that's horrible" followed by "except I guess it'd be even worse if they didn't do that."

in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.

Were that true, Mt Gox wouldn't have been in business.

Mt Gox is a great example! Ok, so I mis-spoke when I said everybody already does it. I meant everybody already knows they should, and a majority of people do it. Most people wouldn't do business with Mt Gox, and the few who did, either got an "oops" reminder or had to shrug and admit they had been taking great risks.

You've got to remember that especially over the last year, a shitload of people involved in Bitcoin (and especially the people you hear about in the media) had been thinking of Bitcoin as a speculative investment, not as a type of money. They're the same kind of get-rich-quick-without-doing-anything people that were "day trading" a decade ago. They either knew they taking risks when they worked with companies like Mt Gox, or they were fools.

I'm amazed that people think Mt Gox somehow shows a failure in Bitcoin (or as some weird exception to all the same money-related common sense that people normally expect to see in other people and themselves). You've got this thing in its total infancy, going through its recent speculation bubble, and this is as bad as it gets?!

The especially funny thing about Mt Gox is that if they had been a dollars-euros exchange and the same thing had happened (where they disappeared with a bunch of peoples' dollars and euros) I wonder which currency people would blame it on. Was it dollar's fault, or was it euro's fault? (I just know that people who'd say "It was neither a dollar or euro problem; fools will be fools and sometimes they get burned," would be called anarchists or libertards.)