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People looks for excuses, and I suppose conflating different things like speed limits, copyright and cryptography is some way to nullify their possible importance. These are not on the same level: * speeding and more generally, driving misbehaviour are directly responsible for deaths. * Pirating software and music never killed anyone, but is about maximizing profits for some corporations. * limiting cryptography is about government control, and is almost only a political matter. Law can change the way people behave, notwithstanding their agreement : Speed limits have been enforced much more severely in France in the past few years and guess what, people are speeding much less now. I, myself, changed too: I used to drive at 180 kph quite casually, and I don't anymore. In the same time, road casualties fell significantly, though of course this is for a large part because cars are much safer than they used to be (thank you to Euro-NCAP).
Almost everybody complains about the speed limits, the radars everywhere, higher fines, but it's hard to deny that the policy was efficient, and that it's good. Now copyright is an entirely different matter. Copyright is only about maximizing profits; extremely tight and severely enforced copyright, or the absence of it, wouldn't change our lives that much, anyway. |
Relative speed kills, and if police were really concerned about safety they would prevent people from driving too slowly for traffic conditions as well as too fast.
I'll give you a similar example from recent news. Over the last few years, many towns have installed red light cameras. However, many local governments have discovered that red light cameras work too well.
After people got used to them, they stopped running red lights, and the revenue from citations dried up.
Guess what happened? Towns started removing red light cameras even though they enforced safer driving.