From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 22:28:31 MDT
--> Harvey Newstrom
> On Tuesday, May 21, 2002, at 06:38 pm, Reason wrote:
> >
> >> Reason wrote:
> >>
> >>> --> Harvey Newstrom
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> On Monday, May 20, 2002, at 11:38 pm, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> Don't anybody ever tell me I didn't tell you so.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Slashdot is reporting that the Kazaa network has been
> >>>>> hit by its first worm virus:
> >>>>> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/20/2022243
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>> This also points out why spyware is so evil. Not only are they
> >>>> spying
> >>>> on you, but they are opening up holes into your system and subjecting
> >>>> you to their security decisions.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Whatever happened to caveat emptor?
>
> I guess I am missing the point of this remark. Even if we have "caveat
> emptor" does that mean that we should legalize fraud and blame the
> victim when they get swindled? I don't understand how pointing out
> fraud is incompatible with taking personal responsibility.
Well, ok, to be more clear on my original topic of whining, I objected to
one of the subtexts to the original commentaries to the Kazaa post: to wit,
that that it was someone else's job to make sure that person X wasn't caught
napping and defrauded. In my mind, non-napping is entirely the
responsibility of person X.
Legalizing fraud: hmm. In my imaginary ideal society, there would be only
one criminal offence: harming the possessions of another person (body and
existance being counted as possessions). It'd be up to local people to
interpret that, judges for each case randomly assigned from the populace, no
precedence-setting, no lawyers, and a small number of admins to keep the
process moving forward. Local standards prevail on everything.
Appealing to local standards and stripping away the complex and unnecessary
legal system in entirety; i.e. decentralizing the process, removes enormous
inefficiencies in the system. It also, conveniently enough, prevents
centralized attempts to draw a line in that unanswerable question of who is
responsible for a successful gray-area swindle (such as, say, a complex and
unadvertised contract that most people sign without looking at that gives
you the right to harm the signees property in a minor way).
I'm not sure that this one rises to the heights of fraud under our current
societal (~=legal) contract. But then I think that one of the big problems
with our society is that we have a societal/legal contract that's too
complex for most people to understand, that costs huge sums of money to get
answers out of, and that we expect to provide exact, replicable answers to
every question. The continual cost of chasing the definition of this
contract is staggering, and completely unnecessary, IMHO.
Anyway, I rambled. The first paragraph was pretty much the answer.
Reason
CTO, VIPMobile
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