We're already seeing calls to ban alcohol due to its "anti-social effects". Alcohol can be demonstrated to cause more harm than tobacco, especially now less people smoke.

But every time we criminalise an activity, we create more criminals. Making tobacco illegal is not going to stop people smoking, it'll just create tobacco-smuggling gangs who will have to shoot cops to survive. The Law of Unintended Effects has killed more people than Philip Morris ever did.

From where I'm standing, I see all of that coming from Christian fundamentalists too.

There are plenty of perfectly reasonable people of all races and religions, and a minority of extremists.

You've got to stop feeding the trolls...

On behalf of Australia I'd like to apologise to the rest of The Internet for our politicians' stupidity.

However, in our defence, we are once again only seeking to win the America's Cup equivalent for the 'world's most ridiculous internet-focused legislation'.
We will, of course, be forced to hand it back very shortly after acquiring it.

If your business is making toast, yes.
If you don't know how every part of your business works, you're vulnerable to changes that you can't foresee, or better-researched competition.
So yes, if you have a toast-making business, you really need to know about toasters.

Most startups fail, yes, but entrepreneurs usually try more than once.
The mantra is 'fail fast': If your current business isn't going to work, then find out fast and do something else.
It is risky, and there is a danger that you'll spend years working very hard for very little actual money, but you only need to get lucky once.

bullshit, I've never met a problem that couldn't be solved elegantly with just a hammer.

your screwdriver fancy-dancy crap is just adding complexity to problems. Screws are just odd-shaped nails after all!

I think I can speak for all men about the punching in the nads thing, yes. It's a common experience and we all perceive it in the same way. Yes, there will be people on the edges of the bell curve who enjoy the pain, but they will still experience the pain in the same way.

The listener also has a choice, which is the bit overlooked. The listener can take offence, or not take offence. They can listen, or not listen. They can interpret the intent behind the words as generously as possible or as meanly as possible. Being punched in the 'nads always hurts, being told you're an idiot can hurt or not hurt depending on how you take it, and the person telling you you're an idiot may have no idea they're about to cause pain rather than laughter.

And I'm drawing on the history of prohibition, when alcohol was criminalised and the majority/large minority of society still drank it, enough to make the rule of law irrelevant.
There's also the outlawing of prostitution, which doesn't prevent prostitution, just makes prostitutes less likely to report crimes against them (such as rape) and makes them more vulnerable because of their criminal status. It's pretty easy to see if you criminalise a common activity, it doesn't prevent the activity, but criminalises otherwise law-abiding people and prevents the reporting of more serious crimes because of the criminal status of the victims.

A punch in the 'nads is perceived by every victim in the same way, and there is a clear intention on behalf of the puncher to cause pain and injury. This is not so clear-cut with trolling and griefing 'offences'. An insult or a taunt is perceived differently by different people, and the 'perpetrator' has no means of knowing in advance how their comment will be received.
Taking too much offence is as much of a problem as giving too much offence, especially when we as a society universally blame the giver not the taker. This gives over-sensitive people immediate 'victim' status, which some people enjoy and therefore court offence so that they can be victims. If we limit the ability to give offence without making some sensible rules about taking offence too, then we end up in a situation where no-one can say anything meaningful, just bland platitudes.

Indeed, and murder, and theft, and so on. We reject the fact that a minority of our community perform these acts, and the punish them if they do. But criminalise too many things (like alcohol for example) and suddenly a majority of our community are criminals, the word 'criminal' ceases to have any negative effect, and it becomes impossible for us to reject them. Then the rapists will have a field day because they're suddenly the criminal majority and aren't being rejected by society. If you really abhor rape, then you'll work hard to prevent attempts to legislate morality because it will dilute the social consequences of rape.

It's the removal of personal judgement that worries me. I'm no longer able to judge for myself 'is this a safe thing to do?' and suffer the consequences. Mostly because of the insurance industry's habit of suing anyone else when a claim is made, so site owners and operators have had to set standard rules for everyone, and set those rules at a low enough level so that idiots won't hurt themselves.
So we now see personal judgement and personal responsibility as a dangerous thing that must be removed from any situation and replaced with standard behaviours. Anything not explicitly forbidden is allowed (and will eventually be mandatory), because if it was harmful or antisocial there'd be a rule against it so it must be OK.
We're starting to see rules against trolling and griefing appear, which is the next logical step.

But morality cannot be enforced by laws, banning something doesn't prevent people from doing it, it just makes them criminals when they do it. If you ban enough things, your entire society becomes criminal and all the laws stop having any meaning or effect.

I had the same thought. After reading their introduction manual, it seems they work by the same model.

In theory this should work.. hire bright, motivated people, set them broad goals to achieve, don't let anything impair their motivation or the ability to achieve their goals, and you should out-perform conventional top-down management structures by an order of magnitude.

It'll be interesting to see how it works in practice as Valve scales up. So far so good, but they're about to come up against the likes of Google and Microsoft with their latest projects, so let's see if the theory holds true...

Well we have no way of proving that, there are areas of the universe that are forever beyond our reach where the laws could be different. And there's the other hypothetical point that there could be many possible laws of physics until we observe one of them to be true. But edge cases aside, you're right.

But moral codes change over time, and it's not a continual smooth evolution towards a 'better' moral code. If there is a universal moral code, we struggle to define it or attain it, and seem to frequently get all turned around and regress from it.

So when does all of that become a new moral code for a specific subculture? There are many examples of subcultures living within the confines of a more permissive society who have defined a culture-specific moral code that is more restrictive (or even more permissive, with say the Swingers or the Nudists). when do we consider those sub-cultures to be proper cultures with proper moral codes of their own that they've defined?
For example, the rural conservative sub-culture would define burning the nation's flag as a deeply immoral act. But for urban progressives, it's a valid form of protest that is illegal but not immoral.
Surely this moral difference is defined by the cultural difference, not that a different 'universal' moral code applies?

So his morals are wrong but yours are right? Interesting...I wonder what he thinks of that.
The majority of theists believe that morals are passed down from whatever deity they believe in, and are therefore perfect, universal and unchangeable. This gets problematic, of course, when different theologies believe that different things are moral/immoral.

Of course, the way we normally cope with this is that visitors adapt to the cultural norms of the place that they're visiting ("when in Rome"). It usually works fine, until you get asshats who are convinced that their $deity-given morals trump your weak western culturally-defined morals and they can behave like they at home regardless of who it upsets.

I'm struggling to see what does define moralily if it isn't culture, or indeed, how you define a culture without including its morality.

Interesting point. Let's equate the nasty brogrammer culture that harrasses women with the nasty muslim culture that harrasses women*.

Given that it's apparently acceptable for a country to define a set of rules or cultural norms based on a religion that allows, even condones, behaviour like this, and OK for members of that country to take those cultural norms on holiday with them, is it therefore also acceptable for a group of people to define a set of rules or cultural norms for an event based on social awkwardness that allows, even condones, a set of behaviours that would be unacceptable outside that event?

Where do you start drawing that line? How small does a subculture get while retaining the right to set cultural norms? Can you have two differently-normed subcultures of a parent subculture attending the same event and respecting each other's cultures?
And how do you get the 'infringing' subculture to behave itself? If a muslim man thinks he has the right to touch up my girlfriend because she's wearing a bikini, but will respond with violence if I burn a Koran in front of him, how do you get him to see that his morals are not absolute and don't cover everyone? If some muppet at a convention thinks he has the right to sexually assault girls, do I have the right to spray-paint his laptop screen with abusive graffiti?

Of course, it could be argued that hacker culture does not, in fact, include the right to randomly assault strangers and 'appreciate it or leave' is not only logically flawed but actually just bullshit posturing.

* I'm not talking about the strange women-only clothing rules, the bizarre 'no driving while in possession of a vagina' rules, or even the exclusion from wide areas of public life for people with matching chromosomes. I'm talking about what muslim men get up to when put in a holiday resort where half the population wear bikinis. It's very similar to what the brogrammers get up to.

Pretty much my thinking too. But the law is not necessarily logical (or concerned with justice but that's another discussion).

Given that the software is probably:
- written by an outsource company in a foreign jurisdiction, and no-one from the 'owning' company has ever examined the code to check that it does what the developer said it does
- running on a transient set of virtual servers rented (and indeed only existing) by the minute from a commercial hosting provider in a foreign jurisdiction
- subject to change at any time without notice by another outsource support provider operating from a foreign jurisdiction

then what gives it the authority to act as a copyright holder in the USA and issue a DMCA notice?

how do you grant a piece of software the authority to act as a copyright holder?
 

Interesting question actually. Not sure that's been tested in law yet.
People doing things as a consequence of their employment are representing a company and the company is responsible.
Officers of a company are vicariously liable for the things that their employees do.
But is a company responsible for the actions of software claiming to represent it?
IANAL, just a business student (in another country), so if there's anyone out there who does know, I'd be interested...