DISQUS

I build Firefox every so often on my MacBook. If you get the prereqs installed via MacPorts, here are some good flags for doing a real build:

--enable-application=browser
--disable-debug
--disable-crashreporter
--disable-tests
--enable-optimize="-03 -g"
--enable-official-branding

Put those in your .mozconfig file and you should be able to build an "official" optimized, nightly build of Firefox. It'll take about 45-50 minutes to build on a newish MacBook Pro (mine is 9 months old). I'm just going from memory on those flags.

You should also try nightly builds of WebKit. Go to webkit.org and download the latest nightly build for MacOS X. They work like a charm, behave exactly like Safari, and there is an updater built into WebKit to download and install the latest nightly build upon request.

True, but the Bible also tends to use those incidents as moral lessons about human behavior. Ironically, if people tended to appreciate just what the Bible says about human nature, it would probably upset them far more than any violent pulp comic or movie.

"Spotty" is a very inappropriately nice way of putting it. Unless the man is an agent provocateur for libertarianism, he's the sort of VP that should make most libertarians shake their heads at Obama as a serious candidate.

Would the government be able to file criminal charges under this precedent someone who abuses the DMCA as a means to shut down a business and prevent it from selling products/services online?

It would seem to me that the DMCA should be updated to make it so that when you send a takedown notice, you are legally held to a standard which assumes that you have consulted a lawyer, and thus are appraised of the legality of the item which the notice targets. Thus, anyone who files an takedown notice against a fair use item can be held liable for perjury if the judge declares that a person reasonably educated in the law would have never considered it an act of infringement.

That may be extreme, but as it is, the DMCA is too "automatic;" it encourages people to file takedown notices because the consequences for shutting someone down when they're not harming you are insignificant in practice.

Sadly, I think he may have a point. Pretty much all of the major open source projects had to get a decent bit of corporate assistance to go from being just novelties to projects with real power. Most of the projects that don't rely on outside support are smaller ones that are less likely to have an impact on the consumer.

They also have a ridiculously tight NDA on the final SDK which apparently prohibits developers from even talking to one another about how to do things right. It's so bad that a lot of people are actually scared to even do something as benign as write tutorials to share best practices and good ideas.

While it is their product, it's generally odious that they would restrict discussion the way that they are.

With Chicago, there is so much corruption for enterprising investigative journalists to investigate and report on that the mandate for more local coverage will have the effect of not only creating more profit for the paper, but seriously holding the city government's butt to the fire. No small part of the reason why the media is falling apart is that it's a toothless watchdog that rarely fails to let government get away with corruption and bad behavior. In Virginia alone, there are two potentially ripe cases for scandal that the media has largely refused to take ahold of: the Rack-n-Roll bar in Manassas Park and Ryan Frederick's police shooting case. Radley Balko of the agitator has done a fine job following both with his own journalistic efforts. Without him and a few others, you'd barely even know that these things were going on.

There is a rule of law issue at play here. As you observed earlier, people have become less inclined to obey the law at all anymore. It is no surprise that this should happen when you have a law that is blatantly for the benefit of one group at the expense of another, and a collapsing industry that refuses to change because it would rather spend its last gasps of breath on bloviating about "its rights."

The MPAA was lucky this summer because some damn good movies came out, but in this weakening economy, movies are a rip off. Money spent on video games provides a much higher bang for the buck; Gears of War II and Too Human will be as stunning and theatrical as any movie, but will provide 10-20 of hours of entertainment in story mode each for $60 new. A new DVD at most retailers will set you back $20-$30 and give you 1.5-2 hours of entertainment.

The fat lady is warming up for her concert...

China is very much not an ethnically homogenous empire. Take the Uighurs, for instance. They're closer to modern Turks than Chinese, and there are something like 10,000,000 or more of them living in the Western part of China (which China conquered and colonized). Same thing with the Tibetans.

Most libertarians and liberals are completely unprepared for the sort of racism and chauvinism they're likely to see in China. One could argue, though, that the nationalism of the Chinese has played a key role in keeping their country's culture going for so long. Unlike the West, the Chinese are quite confident in their own culture and people.

Just look at what is being done to Africa by the Chinese if you want to see what we're up against. It's a combination of colonization, trade and military intervention that is triangulated nearly perfectly to expand Chinese wealth and territory abroad.

OPEC was a bad example for the same reason that all state-owned entities that operate in the market are bad: they skew the market in their favor. When you have the backing of a government, you have a lot of resources to protect you ranging from bail-out assistance, to the possibility of your government using some of its ability to use force in your favor. American oil companies cannot go into these regions without capitulating to the governments' demands, and puts a whole different spin on the relationship.

The common sense solution to the demand issue is metered bandwidth. Metered bandwidth can save everyone money because it would be based primarily on what you do actually use, not what you might use. Therefore, if someone is too busy to download a lot of content one month, their bill may end up actually being lower that month than it would be under an all-you-can-eat plan.

I suppose he also thinks it's evil just EVIIILLL that people pay for the amount of energy they consume per month too!

I believe I addressed that in my second comment. If you want all creative works to be work-for-hire, then say so, and also explain how the routine of cleaning pants meshes with the creative process exercised by individual rightsholders. None of my artist friends could work in an assembly-line world

A simpler explanation for you would be that a lot of people are sick of hearing musicians complain about how they may not collect royalties decades after the original work, when most people who create a product or service won't see anything from their work the moment after it is delivered to their customer and the customer pays them. When you get special intervention from the government that allows you to get new forms of revenue without additional work, people will naturally resent the hell out of you if you complain that they're not enough.

It also doesn't help things that most bands today are really not that prolific in producing works, thus they have to milk each record harder and harder.

And Princeton isn’t in the Beltway either.

I wouldn't accuse it of being in the beltway. The term "beltway libertarian" generally refers to the liberaltarians who turned on the rest of the libertarian movement that tended to support Ron Paul. Tim revealed that tendency when he immediately went into a race attack over immigration.

Sorry for the confusion there.

And services also produce wealth.

They can, but not nearly as much as product-producing endeavors, and law and general medicine are at the bottom of professions that produce wealth. My fear is that if society doesn't pry open these professions first, the only outcome will be stagnate wages for engineers, and even more incentive to join the ranks of the protected services professions.

MikeT, ask Tim where he lives.

Didn't he make the move to Princeton for a MS?

Mike, I don’t disagree; I’d like to see liberalization of the more protected high-skill professions, including lawyers and doctors, as well. But protectionism in one industry isn’t an argument for protectionism in another. Free trade in IT workers’ labor is a good idea whether or not we have free trade in lawyers’ labor.

It is an argument for reevaluating priorities. Seeing as how America is increasingly a country that produces less and less wealth of its own, without foreign labor, it is far more important to focus attention on protected professions that produce no wealth at all. Otherwise what you get is less incentive for Americans to join professions that focus on wealth-production versus service jobs that produce no wealth (medicine, law).

One of the reasons that libertarians are rarely taken seriously is that most libertarians treat all policies as though they are atomic. That's what you're slipping to in your argument here. You fail to see the harm that can be done by a policy that opens up competition only to those who produce wealth, and not to those who are in management or in service professions that produce no wealth like law or medicine.

Marc Grundfest is a case in point. He can not even perceive that free trade in labor might improve the circumstances of everyone in the aggregate. Why? Because it would erode a protectionist subsidy to a class he perceives himself to be a member of. And he wraps it up in one of the most brilliant ideological errors I’ve come across: opposing equality and fairness simply because it’s a fondness of the left. Wow.

The free trade in labor is one-way. When Americans can just as easily move to China and India to start businesses, this argument will have more merit. From the perspective of the average worker, this isn't protectionism, it's correcting a one-sided relationship that harms them, and only benefits business owners.

And Tim, while it may be true that you consider yourself an advocate for greater legal equality, you do so without paying even the slightest attention to history's lessons on political power. Every massive wave of immigration has brought with it political changes, and our own country is no exception. However, I suspect that it doesn't bother you in the least that our country has absorbed closing in on 20,000,000 or more foreigners from socialist countries in the past decade or two. That is the downside to "increased legal equality" for foreigners that you, and the rest of the beltway libertarians, refuse to acknowledge.

I happen to be an advocate of opening up H1B quotas, but only on the basis that it covers **all** disciplines. None should be exempt, especially ones like lawyers. If you can hire an Indian software developer, I want to be able to hire an Indian lawyer certified to practice law in America to represent me at $10/hour plus travel costs while I'm in court.

This would not fly, however, because immigration law is a racket under our current system, and those who stand to benefit from it will not expose themselves. You'll never see management and the legal profession open themselves up to competition. An immigration policy that allowed foreigners to practice American law would probably do far more to free up capital and help our economy than 100,000 visas for engineering staff.

Tim, you are showing your coastal elitism here. Both with your cliche attempt to bring race into this, and this:

I’m sorry, but $80k is more than a “modest middle-class lifestyle.” That income puts you roughly in the top quarter of households, and you’ll probably be in the top 10 percent if your spouse works as well. Outside of a few expensive coastal cities, $300k will buy more than enough house for a family of four to live comfortably. The median home price nationwide is a little over $200k, and about 30 percent of people can’t afford to buy homes at all.

You won't be making $80,000 a year in most areas of the country. Furthermore, $80,000 a year, when adjusted for the cost of living, is not that much money in most of the areas where it's the average software developer's salary. $80,000 in metropolitan D.C. is the equivalent of about $30,000-$35,000 in rural Virginia when adjusted for the cost of living in both areas. It's no easier to have a middle class lifestyle on one income than the other; the $200K house in Rockingham County is equivalent to the $400K-$500K townhouse in Fairfax or Loudon Counties when you adjust for income levels.

Somehow, though, I doubt most of the opponents of H1-Bs are motivated by an excess of concern for immigrants’ welfare.

Why should they be? Does our government exist to serve our interest, or the world's interest?

Furthermore, the excessive concern about income inequality smacks of socialist sentiments, not capitalist ones. Any good libertarian knows that equality beyond legal equality and liberty are mutually exclusive.

I don’t think this is the unfortunate story Teachout believes it to be. More important than the fact that a corporation is using information at its disposal to advance its public policy agenda is the fact that the corporation feels obligated to communicate with Congress through the intermediary of its customers (and presumably shareholders). That’s a move in the direction of openness and democracy.

It'd be even better if this were the only way for an incorporated entity to communicate with Congress. Corporations of any sort, from unions, to non-profits, to companies, should have no legal right to lobby Congress.

Everyone on the right knows they won. Everyone on the left knows they lost.

The National Review and Human Events are hardly indicative of the "right-wing base." While they continue to adore the Republicans, your average conservative has said "to hell with that den of vipers and whores."

WorldNetDaily has a running list of all of the teachers it has seen in the media who got busted for having sex with underage students. If an objective study were done, I bet you would find that the average school has more sexual predators working for it than society in general because predators always flock to where the prey is.

Am I the only one who thinks that the first step here is to elect people who don't do things like commit hit-and-runs with loose women in the car with them?