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The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would be “No”. This is because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.
Cory Doctorow: Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing - Boing Boing

Source: Boing Boing

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Hi, I'm Nick.

I am fascinated by cities and by the Internet, and spend most of my time thinking about how they fit together.

Welcome to the Exobrain - where I think out loud and post clippings from my travels across the interwebs.

I also keep a more tumblr-ish tumblelog, The Slow Hunch.

You can find my blog archives dating back to 2005 at Wrkng.

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