Disqus - Latest Comments for MikeT

Re: And the Prize for Best Reporting in a 19th Century Medium Goes to…

MikeT — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:08:23 -0000

Egads, you guys switched to WordPress? What's the world coming to?!

Re: Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” is really just paternalism

MikeT — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:18:18 -0000

The idea is not entirely without merit, provided it is done outside of the state. My employer by default starts all new hires out with a 2% contribution to the conservative investments in its 401K. You can opt-out if you know what you are doing, but this sort of paternalism does help new hires out of college, many of whom are irresponsible with saving for retirement.

I've been investing since I got out of college, and in 2.5 years, I've saved quite a bit by voluntarily doing between 6-8% of my paycheck, but some of my coworkers think it's stupid. Why? They don't care that I am getting an addition few thousand bucks a year invested for me, all they know is that that additional money out of their paycheck can't go to fun stuff like big TVs and video games.

The sad truth is that these sort of people will be the ones whining and complaining 20 years from now about how expensive the cost of living is, and how they'll never be able to retire. Now, this'd be no problem in a society in which they can't vote, but since they can vote, it's probably good that our employer is nudging them in a direction that will make them less likely to end up destitute later on in life.

Be all that as it may be, libertarian paternalism will invariably require even more government, and in that sense, I think it certainly disqualifies the "libertarian" adjective in any meaningful sense of the word.

Re: You Can’t Make an Omelette without Breaking a Few Eggs

MikeT — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:56:58 -0000

I would rather see them hang for murder, rather than get a few years in prison. This is no less morally negligent than a police officer stopping someone carrying someone who is having a heart attack to the hospital, and insisting on writing them a parking ticket right now as opposed to after the operation. I don't think it matters that they didn't intend to kill this child--any reasonable human being would have seen at that time that such a course of action might kill the child, therefore they are utterly responsible for that child's death in every meaningful sense as a murderer on the street would be.

Re: No Intelligence Allowed

MikeT — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:06:23 -0000

What many defenders of TENS cannot accept is that ideas have consequences. You cannot teach survival of the fittest as the primary means by which our own damn species came into existence, and then look askance at someone who looks down on those they consider unfit for survival, without looking like you have not fully embraced the worldview you teach is the basic truth of life. Dawkins himself pointed out that he would hate to live in a society that embraced TENS as a fundamental truth about how life and nature are ordered.

I'm inclined to agree with the atheists, even though I am a Christian myself, who despise "Christian atheists" like Dawkins, PZ Myers, Dennet and Hitchens. You cannot on the one hand teach that the fundamental truth about how species advance is that the sick and unfit die off, and then fall back on Christian morals on providing for the sick and weak. It's a real cognitive dissonance that comes from the fact that most supporters of TENS base their arguments on how society should function if TENS be true, almost entirely on emotion rather than reason. It's emotion that causes the reaction in Dawkins that says that he would not like to live in a society that runs itself according to how TENS alleges the entire natural world operates.

I could understand the argument that we need to rise above nature, but both religion and science tend to agree that man is a slave to his nature. It's philosophers who, without any serious evidence, tell us that we can aspire to be fundamentally more than what we are by nature.

From where I stand, most TENS supporters in America try to live a version of Christianity. They try to live our truth by denying everything that TENS would tell them about nature and themselves, while preaching TENS. I think it is because they are scared shitless of what it would feel like to actually embrace the worldview that is natural if you truly believe that TENS explains the mysteries of life.

Re: Free Culture and Libertarianism, Again

MikeT — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:19:21 -0000

Libertarians should be skeptical of arguments for strengthening intellectual property law because of how much new government intervention is required. It seems like every few years, more laws, more regulations, have to be added in order to keep the system from falling apart.

This is not to say that we should throw the baby out with the bath water, but the PFF is blithely dismissive of the sheer amount of government intervention required to protect copyrighted goods today. For example, I don't buy for a minute the arguments that James DeLong used to make when he worked for PFF that without government protection of DRM running rough shod over our property rights in our computers, the music industry would collapse. As a libertarian, I see a greater evil in the government taking up residence in my OS and hardware to protect big media, than in seeing little artists never making it as full time artists because their goods get pirated here and there.

First principles for libertarians should always be property rights, freedom of thought, and ownership of self. These principles seem to get sold down the river progressively as copyright and IP in general are expanded.

Re: Insulting Our Intelligence

MikeT — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:38:05 -0000

The biggest difference in terms of freedom between Vietnam and America is the ability of the government to effectively execute its laws. Vietnam is, no doubt, far less efficient at executing its tyrannical laws than the United States, thus reducing many of them to being little more than bloviating as far as many average Vietnamese need concern themselves with the law. I hear that Italy is the same way; more repressive on paper than America, but due to corruption, inefficiency and general unwillingness to fully obey the law, much less in-your-face in practice than American government.

In practice, the federal government is significantly more capable of creating an airtight total destruction of some individual it wants to, than the Vietnamese government because not only does our government have the laws, it has the means to enforce them with brutal efficiency. Just look at how the FBI and IRS were used under the Clinton administration for a basic idea of what I am talking about.

Re: Ideology

MikeT — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:51:07 -0000

Open standards, but not open source, are the dominating factor I would say.

Re: Free Software vs. the Tax Man

MikeT — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:12:30 -0000

I think you severely underestimate just how easily the government can tax and regulate free software. All it has to do is pass a law assigning it a value, and then tax it. Furthemore, laws like CALEA are not inherently defeated by free software. All it would take would be additional regulations put into place.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

MikeT — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:53:50 -0000

250GB is quite generous, but it would probably work out better for their users to start out at something like 25GB for $20, with each additional GB going for an additional $0.25. Right now, most people will never come close to needing 250GB a month, and are just subsidizing the bigger bandwidth consumers at those rates.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » New York’s Ambitious Sales Tax Law — Broader than Amazon and the Internet?

MikeT — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:46:50 -0000

Then just answer the question I have asked: What jurisdiction has authority? Just answer that question!

The federal government, for one, but you obviously realized that and were just speaking rhetorically, right?

I, for one, cannot really take someone seriously if their views on freedom include that claptrap that democracy and freedom are intertwined, since modern democratic states are frequently far more invasive into the lives of their people than anything in the ancien regime.

Re: Selling out Online Advertising

MikeT — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:52:02 -0000

Ryan,

Let's cut to the chase. Many sites, including blogs, have their own ads on them. We should not be competing for ad eyes with our readers' ISPs. Furthermore, those who decide that they don't want to ads shouldn't have them added to their page.

Bottom line is: you add advertisements to my pages without permission, you are creating a derivative work of my HTML without my permission for your profit. If that isn't copyright infringement, I don't know what is.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Why Are Some Muni WiFi Experiments Failing?

MikeT — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:08:41 -0000

It probably doesn't help things that there are people squeamish about getting on a government network for personal use. Being "public property," the government can easily argue that you don't have any claim to fourth amendment protections against intrusive surveillance of anything you connect to their wifi network.

Re: Everiss on Kids, Government, and Grand Theft Auto

MikeT — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:34:51 -0000

When will nannystate liberals allow parents to be parents? When parents have to watch over their shoulders because spanking their kid can get them accused of child abuse, parents can only take so much responsibility.

Re: Reversing the Course of a River

MikeT — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:25:47 -0000

One of the critical reforms that we need is to make those who maintain large databases partially liable for identity theft when they get hacked and their data is used against the public. Responsibility should be on the large institutions, not the individual, when they are the ones who are enabling the crime. It should also be this way with credit cards. If a bank lets someone sign up for a credit card in my name, the bank should be not only liable for all damages, but should be legally liable for clearing my good name with the credit bureaus.

Re: Reversing the Course of a River

MikeT — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:56:50 -0000

Identity theft is largely the fault of these institutions. There have been reports that ripped up credit card applications were actually processed when someone tested the system by taping them together and sending them in. Unacceptable. It is way too easy for people to get these institutions to take financial action without proving the identity of the person making the request.

Re: Kerr Defends the Third-Party Doctrine

MikeT — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:32:05 -0000

Professor Kerr should have no objection to the federal government monitoring every single last action he takes that doesn't happen entirely in his own home. The moment he communicates or interacts with the outside world, the monitoring starts. Everything from grocery records, to bank statements, to emails, all monitored.

It's the third party rule writ large. He shouldn't have any reason to complain.

Re: Princeton Paper on Government Transparency

MikeT — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:39:04 -0000

Don,

You're comparing two separate things. The portal is what the VP gets to interact with, the RSS is the data stream for the content. It's like trying to show off gas to a car buyer and get them impressed with your product. To the VP, the novelty of the RSS is when you tell them in passing that in that format the content can be used by a myriad number of company assets and customers without modification---more bang for the corporate buck.

Re: Spectrum and the Specter of Central Planning

MikeT — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:44:31 -0000

Remind me again why we really need the FCC at all?..

Re: Cuban on bandwidth hogs and tiered broadband

MikeT — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:45:10 -0000

There is a reason why leaving your PC connected to the internet, downloading 24/7, is called "leeching..."

Re: Debugging the Pledge of Allegiance

MikeT — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:46:45 -0000

I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and the republic that it established. One nation, out of many peoples, with liberty and justice for all.

I think that's even better.

Re: Orin Kerr: Not an Empty Vessel and Not Responsive to my Point

MikeT — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:47:55 -0000

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I would imagine that "papers and effects" would reasonably be construed by our founding fathers to include communications stored outside of our persons and homes, but in a location that is generally deemed private. What Kerr is arguing that is that our founding fathers would have been a-ok with the government rifling through our papers and effects stored at a local business (the 19th century equivalent to 3rd party storage), something that I think you and I both know that they would have been outraged over.

Re: Ending The War on File Sharing Doesn’t Mean the End of Copyright

MikeT — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:53:44 -0000

The threat of viruses is a good motivator to not use P2P, and the copyright cartels could take advantage of that by quietly unleashing some pretty horrible ones like ones that corrupt the BIOS.

Re: File-sharing at Cato Unbound

MikeT — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:53:28 -0000

If copyright law would just treat copyrighted works similar to physical property, things would be a lot easier. All the law really needs to do is enforce artificial scarcity. To that end, if local and state police could arrest someone for theft for engaging in certain types of copyright infringement, that would be a powerful deterrent.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Cell Phone Contracts & Contradictions

MikeT — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:00:59 -0000

It would be better to have a policy in place that says that if Apple does not get a written contract with its users, it cannot render their phone unusable based on a user's relationship with AT&T. Meaning that if Apple doesn't have a written contract with me that I signed at the Apple Store, and my plan runs out after a year, and I want to use my iPhone as a more capable iPod Touch, Apple cannot just shut off my property.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Cell Phone Contracts & Contradictions

MikeT — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:02:30 -0000

Or cripple it.

I don't object to them refusing to activate it without a service, what I object to is the idea that if you get it activated one way or another, and they didn't have a written contractual agreement with you on how you would use it, they cannot legally cripple or shut off your property.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Cell Phone Contracts & Contradictions

MikeT — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:02:55 -0000

cannot should be "should not be able to"

Re: Copyright Industrial Policy

MikeT — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:58:23 -0000

Indeed. I'll do you one better than the jukebox. I can convert a DVD into a MPEG4 video of identical quality easily using Handbrake. The new file will take up about 2.25GB of hard drive space, and have no discernible loss in quality from the original data. Without the DMCA, Apple could have easily built features into iTunes to allow me transfer any movie I want from my DVD shelf to my Apple TV for convenience.

Re: The More Things Change…

MikeT — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:35:44 -0000

This is why we need real law-and-order US Attorneys. When my dad was a treasury agent, he got a number of people busted because he found a US Attorney who was a no-nonsense guy on enforcing federal law related to wiretapping abuses, and turned over the evidence needed to prosecute some of his colleagues for running a dragnet. The US Attorney was all over those guys like white on rice when he got that information, and most of them went to prison.

The problem is that most "law-and-order" people actually believe that "law-and-order" applies to the people only, unless government agents really embarrass the government.

Re: The FBI and Politics

MikeT — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:01:00 -0000

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?

Re: Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare

MikeT — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:32:31 -0000

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.

Re: The FISA Bill Was Not Progress

MikeT — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:24:37 -0000

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."

Re: Is Open Government Anti-Corporate?

MikeT — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:41:31 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:01:46 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:11:56 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:22:41 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:42:24 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:43:49 -0000

MikeT, ask Tim where he lives.

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

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:54:46 -0000

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.

Re: Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest

MikeT — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:57:35 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » It’s Never Been More Clear

MikeT — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:29:53 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Excellent discussion on broadband metering

MikeT — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:20:35 -0000

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

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » If Bandwidth Is Abundant, It Can’t Be Scarce, So Why Can’t We Have Net Neutrality?

MikeT — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:32:57 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Bandwidth Cartels, Public and Private

MikeT — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:55:52 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Easing China’s Transition to - Nationalism?

MikeT — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:15:35 -0000

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.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Regulation begets Regulation

MikeT — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:41:47 -0000

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...

Re: What the Media Reformistas Really Want

MikeT — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:40:32 -0000

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.

Re: Enough anti-iPhone rants… just get another phone!

MikeT — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:17:03 -0000

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.

Re: PFF Aspen Summit: An Important Premise Unexplored?

MikeT — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:47:23 -0000

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.

Re: DMCA takedown notices should take fair use into consideration

MikeT — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:35:39 -0000

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.

Re: DMCA takedown notices should take fair use into consideration

MikeT — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:07:49 -0000

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?

Re: Biden on Tech Policy

MikeT — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:48:57 -0000

"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.

Re: An Unnatural Modern Fascination with Murder and Celebrities?

MikeT — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:36:29 -0000

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.

Re: 7 Mac Programs That Helped Me Switch From Windows Vista

MikeT — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:13:46 -0000

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.

Re: 2009-07-06 12:00:00 - Reddit's Entitlement Complex

MikeT — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:40:00 -0000

You're an idiot! (For expecting intelligent responses from Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc.)

j/k (You're just naive)