By this logic nothing is stopping you building a house made of solid gold either.

As with the above there actually are practical concerns stopping him, like getting enough user base (both in terms of people using it for validation and in terms of sites using it for listing) for it to be practical.

They've just corrected the directory name: http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/SOPA%20Supporters.pdf

This does not seem like an good argument.

In the case of a murder extradition, the person is extradited to the US if they've committed the murder in the US jurisdiction and then fled to another juridstiction.

In this case of copyright violation, the person is not necessarily ever in US jurisdiction nor is he necessarily targeting the action at the US. I'm not sure why they should be extradited on this basis. If they committed the crime in the US and then fled that would be another matter.

Under your theory of jurisdiction, you wouldn't be able to do anything anywhere in the world because you'd be subject to every law in every country in the world everywhere in it. This does not seem like a good thing.

That the US has actually succeeded on extradition for things of this nature (ie the crime was never committed in US jurisdiction), does not make me like it any better, it more or less proves that the US is a big bully and wants their laws enforced everywhere regardless of how the people of those countries feel about it.

He might be referring to people who confuse the word unlawful with the word immoral and then demand that all unlawful things be considered immoral without considering the impact (no more revolutions for oppressed people, no more ability to question whether or not the law is correct).

I agree civilization requires maintenance, on the other hand the maintenance is done by people from that civilization, if the civilization is self-destructive you're going to get the same self-destructive behavior in the enforcers (actually you'll probably get worse behavior in the enforcers because this is a privileged position which means unscrupulous people who want power will seek it out, and being unscrupulous is generally beneficial in rising in power (at least in the short term).

So the question becomes where does the balance lie ? I don't have an answer to this but I suspect that no perfect one exists because trying to solve human nature using humans is a self-defeating proposition, so chances are you're going to get a wide range of answers from people and I suspect many of them are equally good.

I'm not sure how this "share" of yours works. Either your share is a % of your income (in which case a maximum means that person is giving less, since you've chosen a percentile basis as the share) or your share is a fixed amount (the maximum value since this is the amount you've decided is the actual due to society). I don't object to either assuming they *work*, if you can calculate a persons life time debt to society and have them pay it in some fashion over that lifetime that still works for me (which is essentially what the fixed share would represent).

I do think the latter of which is probably non-tenable since some people simply won't have that money over the course of their life (taxable wealth is essentially a 0-sum game, if someone has more than their expected amount, someone else is going to have less), and almost definitely non-tenable in a society with a sense of compassion (you probably don't want sick people who can't pay their share to die in horrible pain, so not only are they not paying their contribution their absorbing money from the pool, insert other similar compassionate examples).

The clothes thing is not an analogous situation, I want those clothes back because I either need or want to use them. If I had the maximum useful amount of clothes, you would have the excess clothes forever because I would never wish them returned (or to simplify it , if I had more clothes than I would ever use I'd willingly give the excess away).

Actually I really don't have an objection to you using my unworn clothes as long as you're going to return them to me in the same condition you got them in by the time I want to wear them, and you don't expect me to deliver them to you. As you said I have no use for them at the time. I don't gain anything from having them sitting in my drawers except that I can wear them when I need too.

And they should pay so much more because it doesn't effect them at all, if they have so much money they've got the maximum value of luxury available what benefit (to them) justifies them having more than that ? There's an obvious detriment to society in having this money removed from circulation and the monetary system only exists with the tacit approval of said society, so there should be some benefit to someone in the society at least to justify its hoarding, and in this case even the hoarder isn't benefiting, since as we've established they aren't using this money. Alternative way of looking at it: Why should someone else be paying more so that this person can keep more money they can use ? Because in order to let wealthy guy go with a maximum, you're going to have raise the mean rate.

Any maximum that is set high enough to let a flat tax theoretically work, isn't going to be doing anything meaningful for the people who get it, these are people who have more money saved than I am ever likely to see (and thats taking the cumulative value of every piece of money I see in my lifetime). That money does nothing for them (or for anyone else for that matter), it just sits there, possibly in some form of investment, possibly not, making them even more money they have no use for.
<P/>
There are only so many luxury jets and mansions you can own. This is why you don't live magnitudes of order better no matter how much money you have. That benefit doesn't exist, once you max out the lifestyle scale, you've won the game.
<P/>
Or to look at it from the perspective of it seems wrong to have one guy pay for loads of strangers, I doubt that guy is giving a benefit to society proportional to the combined input of the load of strangers he'd be "paying" for either, so why is his income so much higher to start with ?
<P/>
Conversely a maximum thats low enough that it wouldn't just be removing theoretical money would result in so little tax income it would be useless, most of the world's wealth is owned by a very tiny percentage of the population. And thats unlikely to change while you have a "free market" (a truly free market remains free only until the vagaries in the market, or forces outside the market, produce a defacto ruler) system.
<P/>
None of this is to say I think this is a good solution or see a better solution. I've yet to see any social, political or economic measure that is going to survive contact with people. Once you accept that some people aren't going to do the right thing, you need somebody to make sure they will , but these somebodies are people too and no more likely to do the right thing than those who they supervise and given that its easier to accumulate power if you're a liar and a cheat but you look and/or sound good/believable/honest doing it than actually *being* honest, the probability is going to very quickly be that they are on average worse.

That goal is usually something of a pipedream, if you provide the access to the system necessary to execute arbitrary code in a convenient way, you provide the foundation to write the software that executes a backed up or pirated game.

The only way you could disable piracy is to implement clever limits into your software, obfuscate it ferociously and keep it closed source. And even then chances are pretty good it'll get broken, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have all failed to secure a console or handheld for its lifetime since the internet provided ridiculous collaborative power.

Oops , sorry about the block text, apparently /. does not like either Window's linebreaks or IE.

I remain somewhat confused by the console advocacy, there is one major current gen console that cannot run copies of commercial games as I write this post (the PS3), unsurprisingly this is also the console that had the lowest sales in most of the world (hardware and software both). Most consoles were cracked inside 6 months. (Okay, two of the portable consoles do require hardware, but the DS is relatively cheap, and the PSP isn't much more and neither of em set you back more than the price of 1 or 2 games tops. Also the PSP has a slightly less convenient non-hardware method, if you really feel the need for that, the DS doesn't but it also has ~no internal storage or standard memory card, so thats hardly surprising) Given past track records it makes as much sense to assume the reason it hasn't been cracked is that no one cared, especially since once someone did a basic crack arrived pretty fast, nothing commercial has been done yet but I dunno how long you can expect that to last (and Sony is obviously concerned about such given 3.21, which is an update that does nothing except remove features), as it does to attribute it to its rather hard core security setup. Admittedly I may be more tech savvy than the average console consumer but I found none of these things took any real effort on my part, so I doubt thats in any way relevant. I say this as someone who actually buys pretty much all the things I play (basically if I can find it for sale at somewhere close to the original market price, I buy it) whether on PC or Console, but when you import game or don't feel like carring around a sack filled with games for a portable system, or want to be able to read a walkthrough on your secon DS, you still find these things out. TL:DR: Consoles are no more secure than PCs are about 6 months after the system is on sale, and the only reason they last that long is because they never have software based backwards compatability, which is basically a given on PCs.