Off topic: theadvancedapes, Have you given any thought to the legal repercussions of a "Global Brain" and what type of new legal challenges it will bring?In contrast, our new media organization will have the First Amendment at its core, and will make very different decisions if faced with government pressure not to publish or retaliation after the fact.
-This is encouraging to hear. The key will be to hold on to these declared moral intents even as NewCo grows. "At it's core" is promising though.A denial of service attack is damaging and costly. Many of PayPal's customers rely on PayPal for their livelihood. An interruption in service can have serious consequences: those customers may lose income that may cause them to become late on rent payments, medical expenses, etc. These are serious impacts that must not be ignored. An attack on PayPal's servers hurts these vulnerable people far more than it hurts a multinational company.
-This is something that I don't think most people realize. PayPal at a corporate level was likely not hurt much by this protest. Financially it didn't do much to them, however I agree with Omidyar that the people using PayPal for their businesses were likely hurt. If the intent of the protesters was to hurt PayPal, then they failed. If it was to garner publicity and bring an injustice to light, then I think they succeeded.I believe justice requires leniency. In my view, they should be facing misdemeanor charges and the possibility of a fine, rather than felony charges and jail time.
This is pretty lenient. As our society progressively moves more and more online, having individuals assume the power of 6000 people becomes a pretty scary thing. I'm not sure a misdemeanor is much of a deterrent. That said, I'm not sure that prison is either. It's amazing how much our legal system is going to have to change because of the Internet. We are literally at the beginning of all of this still.
That is starting to look like a major aspect of my current research position and potentially a major direction of my PhD. At the moment the Global Brain Institute's main priority is coming up with "most likely GB scenarios" and all involve planning for a post-government and post-corporate planet of distributed, non-hierarchical intelligence. Bringing this world into existence will require reducing social and physical friction and increasing social and physical stigmergy to the highest degrees possible (as described by Francis Heylighen in "Accelerating Socio-technological evolution" a must-read IMO).Have you given any thought to the legal repercussions of a "Global Brain" and what type of new legal challenges it will bring?
If anyone else was looking for a link without missing pages: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.CY/0703004.pdf