

Is Internet censorship out of control? - Grape
http://memeburn.com/2011/07/is-internet-censorship-out-of-control/

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brohee
"Arab countries including Iran". I hear fact checking helps with the
credibility of the discourse...

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Produce
I think we have this all backwards in a sense. When the internet was new and
governments were not involved, hackers claimed sovereignty in the anarchistic
universe called cyberspace. Now that controls are being forced upon it, we are
up in arms. Well what about the physical world? There are just as many
arbitrary rules which only exist to protect the interests of the few at the
expense of the many already in place. We should be up in arms about
governments, or anybody who thinks that they have a right to decide anything
but what they do with their own lives, for that matter, not just freedom on
the internet.

Take patents, for example. Are we really so deluded that we think that if
medical patents didn't exist then not one person would have the drive to cure
diseases? Do we really think that compassion does not exist and that profit is
the only reason for doing something for another person?

~~~
bad_user

        Do we really think that compassion does not exist and 
        that profit is the only reason for doing something for 
        another person?
    

That's a straw man.

The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research.
The purpose of patents is also to discourage pharmaceutical companies to
produce yet another variation on acetaminophen and instead spend money on
doing research with huge sunken costs.

That this doesn't happen in real life is yet another story, but to appeal to
human emotion, as you did in your comment, is shortsighted and wrong too.

The reason for that is that -- yes, most humanitarian efforts have egotistical
value, profit being the strongest motive for companies to advance the state of
the art. Surely, other than companies, state-sponsored institutions, like the
army, have been known to produce valuable research, but most such research was
in the context of a war.

~~~
Produce
>The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research.

I would agree with you if it wasn't for this -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent>:

>certain subject areas are excluded from patents, such as business methods,
treatment of the human body, and mental acts

And the fact that we have a culture built on the idea that it's every man for
himself. What's short sighted isn't an appeal to emotion but the social
structures we currently have. Cooperation is a simple and effective way to
combat these issues and an appeal to emotion is the mechanism to encourage it.

Now, before you mention it, I understand that there are physical limitations
which are hindering this change in paradigm, in particular, Dunbar's number -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number> From what I have researched, my
current working model is that this has to do with the amount of serotonin in
people's brains, hence drugs which raise serotonin levels such as MDMA or
stimulate serotonin receptors, such as psychedelics, result in feelings of
being connected to humanity and trigger a marked increase in compassion.
Meditation also has these effects which suggests that it increases serotonin
production. Perhaps when we start to modify our own DNA we can permanently
increase the amount of this neurotransmitter for everyone and raise Dunbar's
number to something more workable (in the sense of triggering said paradigm
shift). Until then, it's up to individuals to do this work.

The bottom line is that the way we are doing things is backwards and can be
improved by orders of magnitude, so I firmly believe that patents of all types
are a transient effect which will disappear as humanity evolves socially.

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maeon3
Internet Censorship is futile. The internet was designed to treat censorship
as system damage, and immediately routes around it.

Trying to censor the internet is like trying to stop birds from migrating
north and south by erecting barriers. The birds fly around the barrier.

~~~
killerswan
What protocol is it that routes around censorship, exactly?

What is the software that automatically prevents a server from being unplugged
by a co-location facility? What about TCP/IP prevents a blogger from being
beaten unconscious in front of his children, then taken away by plainclothes
'police'?

(I sometimes think that only a totalitarian government's propaganda minister
would keep repeating this trope about routing around in the age of China's
firewalls, etc.)

~~~
wladimir
_What protocol is it that routes around censorship, exactly?_

The "global" part. There is always some country in which a certain thing is
not censored. The servers can be placed there, the traffic can be routed
through there.

This does not prevent anyone from beating anyone else up, that's right, but I
don't think anyone ever claimed that the internet would prevent physical
violence. Just censorship of information.

