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0 pointsnaner14y ago0 comments

You can't invent around policy problems.

0 comments

Sir or madam, with that attitude, I'm surprised you are here, in a place called Hacker News.

A great many of us make good money working around broken systems and architectures. We live for this shit!

And yet when it comes to government enforcement, there seem to be an awful lot of problems we haven't been able to hack around:

- Brokenness of patents causing anti-competitive behavior

- Absurd copyright laws preventing the building of an untold number of innovative products

- The emergence of true competition in the wireless space.

I could go on. We're very good at making end runs around corporations, big and small, but mostly because they can't kick your door down in the middle of the night.

gnaritas14y ago

Yes you can, if you make the invention critical before they realize the consequences.

ecdavis14y ago

The Internet has become critical and "they" are beginning to realise the consequences, which is leading to increasingly invasive and ill-informed policy.

vidarh14y ago

Yet they're still nowhere near putting the genie back in the bottle, and the internet is so embedded in the economy that they can't, they can only try to minimize the impact.

It's time for the next leap - making the internet properly fault tolerant.

1 more reply

billswift14y ago

At least not when the policy is enforced by the people with a willingness to use lethal force, ie government. People invent around policy problems, when the policies are business related all the time.

But I wonder how many of the people complaining about this and SOPA were in favor of Obamacare?

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