It's an analogy. Come on now.

It's the same thing when physicists think about cats in boxes with poison, or spherical cows. It settles fundamental questions.

I can get sufficiently close to flying to satisfy my desires, thank you very much.

No one was ever talking about omnipotence. We mean liberty.

Out of all the choices a person could make, what is the subset of things that are right to do? One person on an island, everything. Two people on an island, less than everything, but still well-defined. Person A can't physically attack person B, or steal their stash of coconuts, and so on.

On the contrary, freedom is pretty well defined even in contexts of two or more people, it's just a whole lot more difficult to enforce (and study) than a "Crusoe" economy since there's literally nothing that one person can do by themselves to violate one's rights.

The addition of another person to the Crusoe economy is how economists study the origin of natural rights. Crusoe's welfare could improve because of comparative advantage; or it could fail, say, if he were attacked.

Society is basically adding a bunch more people to a much bigger island and studying the limit as n approaches infinity.

Just because it's difficult to study, doesn't mean 'absolute freedom' doesn't/can't exist.

Yeah, except that the FCC rules passed wouldn't have applied to a single case so far.

They vaguely itemize some "threats" that could possibly happen sometime in the near future, and they talk about them as if the existing court system couldn't handle these issues.

But it would have stopped Netflix/Cogent/Comcast, right? Wellll... no. That was caused by a badly negotiated peering agreement, not any action on the ISP's part. And yet the FCC rules: "We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are
subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today." Oh. Huh. Well. And here we were thinking the FCC could do something useful for once.

It's just a suspicion, though. Without an encryption key - the actual thing that's sensitive - it just looks like random data. It could have been put anywhere else on the Internet. If they could prove it's encrypted, how can they prove you have the key? Maybe you own the key -- on a USB drive at home. And so on.

Presumably that's better than having silent spyware like a key logger, which can cause significant financial harm far in excess just buying a new laptop.

Nowadays there's nothing it can't mean, but I originally understood it to mean "Virtual machine hosted on lots of identical nodes with no guarantee of uptime for any one node" -- as opposed to a mainframe, or time-shared machine.

Then it sort of became "Use the Internet to store things normally kept on your computer, have your content on all your devices." Well, ok, but that's what the Web is.

Then it was existing, long-established companies just rebranding their service without any change. "Cloud email!" Um, wat.

How about never dealing with cash, never calculating tip, never even discussing payment, receipts sent to your email, and never having to wait more than five minutes for a ride.

You can't sue unless you're an injured party, though. Being a competitor doesn't generally rise to that level. (In some cases, a lawsuit as a competitor would be illegal in and of itself for being anti-competitive.)

If you bought the product and found out it was misrepresented, that's an injury.

Encrypted information isn't sensitive, that's the whole point of encryption: To take big secrets (data) and make them little secrets (secret key).

You could almost say capitalism is... a race to the top? Improving the living standard of everyone, where even the poorest of the poor have A/C and television?
*gives cookie*

Yeah, people have been saying this since the beginning and yet, all the scientific, economic indicators say, for the vast majority of the time (like 98%), things are getting better, not worse.

GDP, nutrition, productivity, hours of relaxation time, variety of entertainment, cost of basic necessities and transit... all improving, many even through recessions (i.e. when GDP is going down).

http://reason.com/blog/2012/05...

Yes.

What if I told you

*glasses*

you don't need employees

and you can provide a better, safer service

Even when the law is wrong? Really?

Telling someone they can't make a living by running a pretty darn good service sounds awfully wrong to me.