Except modern drive recovery can restore the blanked out sector.
Uh, no.
It has never, despite it being 'common wisdom', been possible to recover overwritten sectors on a hard drive.
No one has ever demonstrated it in the entire history of hard drives.
It was a theoretical attack a long time ago, on pre-IDE 'MFM' hard drives.But we moved off that sort of drive in 1986.
And even then, it didn't work. It was a theory that said with a very poorly build hard drive, it might be possible to recover some data. Like I said, no one's ever actually shown this.
And with IDE, we moved to RLL encoding which means, statistically, you couldn't get anything. With an MFM encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you had 25% of the data and might possibly come up with something, although, like I said, no one ever has managed this.
But with RLL encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you have nothing. It is not really possible to get a partial byte.
No that anyone has ever demonstrated reading anything from a '
The idea that you need to do anything more than overwrite a sector to make it unreadable is one of those zombie lies that simply cannot die.
The only way to recover a lost sector is if it was going bad at some point, so the hard drive made a copy of it and remapped that sector to the copy. Which means the original might still be there. (OTOH, the original was going bad, so who knows if it's still readable.) The odds of this happening are astronomical.
That's one of the reasons why I said to cut the power if any USB device is plugged in while the screen is locked. (The obviously assumes you're using a USB keyboard.)
The other reason is, obviously, that firewire can be used to make disk copies, and that buggy USB drivers can be used to introduce a rootkit.
It is probably theoretically possible to splice a data grabber into a USB cable while it's plugged in, but that seems unlike to happen.
Likewise, I've never understood the whole 'They can shut down your computer and make copy of memory' worry. Yes, that's a fun theoretical worry, but in actual reality, if you have the computer rigged to shut down on disconnect of USB devices, they're almost certainly going to trigger that simply getting the computer out where they can do that. And it's easy enough to make that required. Hell, I have a computer where that would happen by accident. (I have USB cables run to the next room, through the floor, along with s-video, so I can watch TV in bed.)
And, of course, there are accelerometers and case locks and stuff like that, instead of rigging something. Or, and here's a fun idea: A 3G receiver that simply keeps track of the nearest towers.
Yes, it's all good and clever they've invented a way to splice into the power so they don't have to shut the computer off when running it, which stops the utterly accidental problem of cutting the computer off. However, it's rather trivial to make it where you can't move a computer without the computer itself knowing, and cutting itself off.
In a scenario in which you are compelled to give up your password (e.g. a country where that is the law), I imagine they could slap you with something to the effect 'conspiracy to tamper with evidence'.
First, a person cannot commit 'conspiracy' solely by their own actions. Conspiracies require, by definition, two people.
Second, failing to create evidence in the form they want isn't tampering with evidence. They can't arrest you for failing to possess evidence. If they could do that, they'd just charge you with a crime if they did a search and didn't find anything.
Perhaps more to the point, it is not illegal to commit legal actions that cover up a crime of yours. People always assume that must somehow be illegal. It is perfectly legal to, for example, after a murder, to wash the blood off your clothing. It only becomes illegal after a search warrant has been issued or they get into evidence some other way. (It is, however, illegal to wash blood off someone else's clothes if you know they murdered someone. That is accessory to murder.)
I'm always a little astonished when people apparently watch too much TV and think the police can threaten you because a legal action you did before any investigation is somehow 'tampering with evidence' or 'impeding an investigation'.
This is something law enforcement officers threaten on TV, and possibly in real life, all the time, but is entirely without any grounds at all.
Encrypted drives do not, obviously, use the password to decode the files. They use the password to decode a key and use that to encode the files.
So I always thought it would be interested to have a computer that, on startup, wipes that part of the disk with 0s, sticking a copy somewhere else on the drive. (Which is not a security risk, because the other parts of the drives are, obviously, encrypted with that key, and you can't open box with a box cutter inside it.)
And during safe shutdown, it puts it back. Or have a program you have to run to put it back, then shutdown.
For safety purposes, you give a copy of the key to someone else for safekeeping. Bonus points if they're out of the country.
Then you leave your computer on, and the screen locked, at all times. Bonus points if you rig it to an alarm where if someone breaks in, it cuts the power. (Also have it do the same if someone inserts firewire or USB while the screen is locked.)
Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer, make a disk image...and you'll tell them the damn password all they want, but you are rather at a loss as to how they think that will work, considering the part of the drive with the key stored is has apparently been filled with 0s. (You'll need a lawyer able to explain that what they are asking cannot work.)
Now, like I said, you can lie and pretend you don't know what's going on...or you can wait until they get a court order to have you decrypt, and then tell them what's going on. By which point your friend has hopefully already destroyed the key.
And the joke is, even if you explain everything that happened, this is entirely legal. You have not destroyed any evidence, because the key was already missing from the unencrypted part of the drive when the warrant showed up. (Unlike some of the automated 'destroy data' traps that people try to come up with.) And you have cooperated fully, you literally cannot get to the data. And your friend didn't destroy evidence, because the search warrant was for your stuff, he can delete of his own files he wants until he is told otherwise.
She deliberately harmed someone with the intent of causing harm, and resulted in death.
Yes, that is voluntary manslaughter.
However, I think the 'harm' required there is actual physical harm. I don't think the connection works if you intend to cause emotional harm and that results in death. (Because emotional harm is not, per se, illegal to cause.)
But, if they can't get that, they have involuntary manslaughter, because a misdemeanor resulted in someone's death. That doesn't require any intent to cause harm at all.
And the hacking charges are just utterly idiotic, and are very very risky. It's possible to think of a scenario where lying online could result in someone's death, but it shouldn't be illegal.
For example, let's say that I lies on an online dating forum, thus a woman decides to go on a date with me, and the date ends in the woman gets hit by a meteor and killed. I think we can agree that, despite the lie that originally resulted in the date, no criminal charges are due against me.
If lying online is 'hacking', I'm failing to see any meaningful differences between my 'hacking' and this woman's 'hacking'. Both were for the purpose of misleading someone, both were against the TOS, both resulted in a death.
The only differences is that one intended harm and the other didn't, and there was misdemeanor harassment in one and the other didn't have that. But neither of those were related to the 'hacking'. Hacking's not only illegal if you intend to hurt someone else, or if you later go on to harass someone!
So, what? We're going to only press these charges if someone 'deserves' them?
I a free-ish market, the cost of labor is precisely the value of one new person doing that job. How could it be otherwise? Obviously that's the result of supply or demand, but what people bid on is that one marginal worker.
I remind you exactly what I was objecting to: The work of the mind is more valuable than the work of the body
I have at no point talked about the 'cost of labor'. I have talked about the value that any specific work gives a specific company, which is utterly unrelated to what a person does, or how much that person gets paid. You remove the cashier from a store, it doesn't matter how much they got paid or where on the totem poll they were...without a fucking cashier the store makes no money at all.
Go the guys who design the infrastructure and organize the effort and provide the capital for it to happen are important then? That was pretty much the central premise of Atlas Shrugged.
Ah, yes. Collect all of society's money, so you can 'provide the capital' and be the hero. Or not provide the capital and let everyone die.
Well, I never read her non-fiction, but that would seem like an odd thing to write, and a likely thing to make up about someone you dislike, but I'll take your word on it for now. It doesn't come through in her fiction, though, where people who work for her heros are presented as valuable and distinct from the people who want to be paid for not working, who are the "leeches."
Wow, you really do have blinders on, don't you? 'There's no bigotry against the French in this book. There are some good French in addition to the vast majority that run around eating and raping each other.'
Here's a hint: She made up those leeches. She invented a universe where a very tiny fraction of people are the important people. Yes, some of the unimportant people are willing to serve the important people, and they're good people too.
The rest are all parasites attempting to steal all their stuff, so those important people, and people loyal to them, run away, and this somehow works.
You realize this is imaginary, right? An outright lie about how the world actually functions, right?
I centainly think tha people who make new technology happen deserve much, as they've done more to make our lives better than every redistribution scheme ever imaged does. I have so many nice things today that no king or ruler could possibly buy even 200 years ago.
...aaaand it's at this point that I exit this conversation as the crazy has taken over.
I don't know why you think I'm defending the harasser here.
I had not heard the theory that she was intending to cause the girl to commit suicide. If that can actually be demonstrated, yes, of course it's murder. (And it's premeditated, at that.)
However, saying 'you should kill yourself' doesn't really prove that. That is clearly intended to cause pain, but generally asking someone to commit suicide is not literally intended as a request that they do so, and hence isn't actually murder. (Which requires intent to result in death, as opposed to manslaughter.)
But, hey, if you think that can be proven, I've got no problem with it.
Of course, none of this is what my comments were actually about, which was that harassment is unlawful, and hence harassing someone until they kill themselves is at minimum manslaughter already, so we don't need any stupid 'violating TOS is illegal' nonsense even in the specific instance it's been proposed for.
I have no objection if we can get her for something worse, this was a pretty horrific act and there needs to be a clear deterrence sent out: Messing with people to the extent they kill themselves will result in you serving at least some time in prison. (And, hell, we should make some specific rules about adults messing with teenagers, who are exceptionally vulnerable to that.)
But the government only really comes into the book as a tool for the "losers" to attack the "winners" with. Given her youth in an oppressive totalitarian state, I think we can forgive Rand her distrust of government power.
It is not my job to forgive or condemn anyone for any of their beliefs. I don't really care what Ayn Rand is up to in her books.
It is, however, my job (as a citizen who is partially in charge of how his government operates) to point out that such beliefs are a fucking stupid philosophical foundation for a government.
As a business philosophy I find in narrow but apt: I've only ever really worked in companies that had somehting to do with software, but from that narrow view, places where the culture was blame-avoidance-oriented were hellholes I was happy to leave, while places that were process-improvement oriented were OK, though not always successful by any means.
Those are not really the only options, and plenty of organizations are a mixture of the various kinds. Im fact, blame-avoidance is not really a management style, but probably more a symptom of other problems. (Like poorly defined job responsibilities.)
And one look at the job market will show that manual labor pays much less than software, or other design/invention/creation oriented jobs. Do you really think that's somehow unfair and inapproapriate? These days, of course, mindless labor (even the white collar sort) is being very rapidly replaced by automation, so I expect in my lifetime that such jobs will be quite marginal in th overall economy.
The cost of labor is entirely due to worldwide supply and worldwide demand, and is unrelated to the value of any specific job in a specific organization.
Without the air condition repair guy working on the server room AC, the servers, and hence entire company, will seize up and die...but that's not what dictates his pay. What dictates his pay is how replaceable he is.
Problems arise when leaders think the fact someone is more replaceable than others means their job is also less important for the success of the company. Those two things are almost completely unrelated, and making that mistake is a good way to blow up an entire well-functioning company fail, because the leader wants to save 0.02% and decides to cut back on some 'unimportant' job.
And it's the same at a societal level. For example, without people keeping infrastructure functional, a good 80% of the population would starve to death. That is, objectively, 'more valuable' than some guy who designs a new skyscraper. The workers are less important, as they are easily replaceable, but the work is more important.
And that above was me talking in an objective sense as if I didn't know who Ayn Rand was. With her, this is an utterly idiotic.
Ayn Rand is a believer in the ubermench, in the idea that a tiny fraction of society are much much better and smarter than everyone else, who is essentially a parasite. In her world, there are a few thousand important people (And by 'people' I mean 'men', but getting into Rand's weird gender dysphoria and self-loathing is beyond this post.) that deserve everything, that invent everything, and create everything, which is this magical unique process that only they can do.
This is sheer idiotic nonsense. That isn't slightly how anything work in the actual world at all.
Someone pushes you, and you stumble until you fall off the bridge and die.
Pushing someone isn't just a tort....it's also assault.
Although that's not really relevant as the pushing actually caused a death, and hence it's manslaughter to start with.
The stuff I was talking about was when a death was the side effect of a misdemeanor, not the actual result. When your misdemeanor causes a situation that you should know to be dangerous, that you should know could cause harm, like driving without headlights at night, or making a building that isn't up to code that then collapses and kills someone.
But actual criminal assault, which accidentally results in death, is just straight up voluntary manslaughter at least. Which is worse than involuntary manslaughter.
If they knew you were clumsy and intended to kill you with the push, would it matter?
Participating in any chain of events with the intent of someone dying is murder, full stop. It doesn't matter if some part of the situation already existed to help it along. If someone builds a lethal deathtrap in park you know about and you make a vague suggestion to them that they, who do not know the deathtrap, visit that park with the hope they'll get killed, even that's murder, if anyone can prove it.
The 'misreading things as saying what you intended them to say' isn't dyslexia. Everyone does that. If you wrote a 'the', you'll often read it as a 'the', even if it's actually a 'teh'. That's because our brain over-optimizes and doesn't bother reading things when it already knows what they say.
Perhaps you do it more than others...but that's not dyslexia, which is an inability to convert words into meanings. (If anything, you're converting them a bit too easy.)
And ease of reading, and poor writing, isn't dyslexia, which is a reading disorder. Actually, some forms of dyslexia can include hearing, but all forms of it are an inability to translate words to meanings.
What you have sounds like dysgraphia, which is the inverse of dyslexia and is an inability to turn meanings into words. (And is a lot poorer understood and diagnosed.)
No, that just implies our visual pattern-matchers don't require a perfect match. (Or possibly a prefect match.)
However, I'm a little baffled as to how this was news. Of course we recognized words by shape. (Or possibly by snape. Strangely, that doesn't work, probably because of the top of the h.) How else would we recognize them?
The question is really 'How much do we recognize each individual letter' vs 'How much do we recognize the entire word', and I thought it was somewhat already accepted that the faster you read, the more you 'grouped'.
It's not 'harm' per se that makes it manslaughter.
For a farcical example, if we have an agreement that requires me paying you X dollars today, and I do not, I have committed a tort against you and harmed you, and you could certainly sue, but I can't be charged with manslaughter even if that harm results in your inability to pay your loan shark, who then kills you. (However, you might be able to collect both any interest you had to pay, and medical bills or even funeral expenses as 'damages' my lack of payment caused.)
However, it's different if I commit a misdemeanor and that misdemeanor results in your death, and there was some possibility I could have foreseen that as a result. It is called 'constructive manslaughter', a form of involuntary manslaughter. It's like a misdemeanor version of the felony murder rule. (As I pointed out above in a post above, this is what they charge idiots with who jaywalk and cause lethal car accidents.)
And, of course, there are laws against harassment. Stuff like 'repeated communications which are anonymous, made at extremely inconvenient times, or in offensively coarse language'. It varies state-by-state, but often explicitly includes things like deliberately lying about a person to harm their reputation and misleading people about your relationship with them.
She was committing a misdemeanor, and got someone killed directly as a result of that lawbreaking, in a foreseeable manner. (Suicide is, in fact, the third leading cause of death among teens, so it's hard to argue it's a surprise.) It's involuntary manslaughter. Throw her in jail for a few months.
The real problem appears to be that even if I put up a sign saying 'It is against the rules to commit murder in this house', and someone comes in and murders me...
...they will now be arrested and charged with...trespassing? Uh, what? Hey, dumbasses, how about charging them with murder, instead?
People who break rules in real life are not trespassing. People who break rules on web sites are not committing unauthorized computer access. Those specific crimes are when you jump a gate or pick a lock or guess a password. When you are clearly not allowed to be there, and have bypassed some sort of indication of that.
They are not when you walk in the open door and start acting like an ass, as long as you leave when asked to leave.
It doesn't matter if the property is real or virtual, or if they are trespassing or legally there...if we want to outlaw things, we need to, you know, actually outlaw the thing, not hope it happens on some website where such a thing is against the rules. (And not via, for example, email.)
As other have pointed out, harassing others is a misdemeanor already, and causing a death while committing a misdemeanor is often illegal, called 'misdemeanor manslaughter' or 'constructive manslaughter' which is like a weaker version of the felony murder rule. (I.e., if you jaywalk and cause a car accident where someone dies, you're getting locked up for some form of involuntary manslaughter.)
If this happened in a state without such a law, or without a law making harassing someone (online or otherwise) a misdemeanor, then they need to make that law and stop trying to make horrific caselaw about TOSs to get someone locked up.
I'll step forward and say I strongly disagree with pretty much all of that as a political philosophy.
It's pretty pretentious as a business leadership philosophy, but could be mangled into some actual shape.
The problem is the government is not a fucking business. It does not exist to 'reward effort'. And it is not a fucking 'organization' in that sense of the word.
Here's, let's just dissect this single line: Winners focus on results, and believe success should be rewarded; losers focus on intentions, and believe effort should be rewarded.
What, exactly, is success for the government? Not having people die in the streets? So the government...reward themselves for that? Or the voters reward them by reelecting them? But that's other people rewarding them, not them rewarding people.
It's complete and utter gibberish as a political position.
As a business philosophy, it's a half-assed version of what is usually called 'result-oriented leadership'. Except that it's decided that magically everyone is either competent or incompetent and the way to solve the problem is to...um...quit your job if you're in charge of incompetents, which is not really a functional leadership style.
And it's utter FAIL in the last line...every job is exactly as important as that specific job is, no more, no less. Everything that is done should be considered as an independent entity. Assuming that certain types of work are more important than others in general is a very good way to make a huge management mistake when you discover that the menial mail-delivery job you just cut back introduced delays throughout the entire company.
Ya know, as much as i thought Ayn Rand was batshit her often used criminal quote is starting to look highly prophetic.
Actually, that just sorta proves she was even more batshit insane.
I mean, she saw this coming, and yet still has no problem with everyone having absolute power to make any sort of contracts they want and have the government enforce them. Which, of course, in the actual world means 'Human beings are forced to sign contracts, that corporations write, for everything'.
I will give her credit though, in her world, violating TOSs and other contracts would not be illegal. Instead, websites would simply put something like 'You owe us a billion dollars if you violate this TOS' and then seize everyone's property.
Unauthorized computer access is supposed to be limited to accessing places that have been barred to you, usually with a password. (Although some of the 'using proxies to get around country IP bans' is probably enough to count.)
That's it. That's where it needs to end.
If a web site has a problem with a user who does have such access granted, they need to revoke the access.
It's pretty much exactly like trespassing laws. No, you cannot climb in the bathroom window to get into the club. (Aka, breaking in through a security vulnerability.) That is, in fact, trespassing.
It is also trespassing if you make a copy of someone else's key, and enter through a locked door that way. (Aka, using their login credentials.) That is also trespassing.
However, it's completely legal to lie and say you're with the band at the door, and walk right in. Or claim you were just in there and already paid. That is not trespassing.
It's also completely legal if, for example, they bar external food and drinks, and you to sneak them in anyway. That is also not trespassing.
We do not want such things to be trespassing. It is far too dangerous to give random people the ability to have people arrested for breaking private rules. Because such rules are often very vague, and, unlike the law, no one is required to know the rules of every place they visit.
Of course, it's also completely legal for them to demand you leave when they figure out you've broken a rule, and for them to have you arrested if you refuse. That is how it is supposed to work.
Indeed. Unauthorized access should be 'using the site when you are clearly forbidden to'. Aka, when you hack someone else's password or something.
It is exactly analogous to trespass, but with trespass law, we have very clear laws. And people can't put up signs that say 'You can only enter if you do eight thousand different things I will specific in this fine print here or you're trepassing'.
No. They can say 'No trespassing' or 'Authorized access only', and people must assume they need to get permission first. They can put up a gate or lock a door, and people must assume they need to get permission first.
They can't have a fricking path and post rules saying 'you can use this path only if you do X', and then have people arrested for trespass who break the rules. That is not possible under current law. And they certainly can't stand there and have a doorman let people in (You know, like automatically making an account.) and then have the person arrested for trespassing later.
Breaking rules is not trespassing. And it is not unauthorized computer access if someone breaks rules. The only rule is 'Was there some indication that people were barred in general? If not, were you somehow specifically barred from access?'
And, no, you're not required to do any math there...they can't say 'You are barred if you break the rules.' You have to actually be specifically barred. This isn't some goddamn logic problem.
Hell, in the real world, sometimes you can ban 'certain things' from your property, like 'solicitors'...and this requires a law defining what those are and that people can rightfully ban them. People aren't allowed to make up their own restrictions and sic the police on people who don't agree with what that restriction means. There are specific rules about how and what the few things you can put on a sign. (Hours of access are a common one.) And this sign must be publicly posted in a specific way.
Or, in another example, casinos can't post a sign saying 'No card counters allowed', and have card counters arrested for trespassing. They can have a rule against that, and throw them out, and have them arrested for trespassing if they come back...but not for breaking the 'access rule' in the first place.
But, apparently, we've decided that web sites should have near infinite power to have any visitor arrested. All they have to do is come up with some vague rule, or, hell, a rule that every visitor violates, like 'This site may only be accessed between using IE 5', and they can have people arrested at will.
If you want to know when Congress really started to go down the shithole in recent years, look no further than the "one-vote win" policy that the Republican leadership in Congress began to aggressively follow sometime around the turn of the century -- the policy of suppressing debate, and crafting laws that compromised *just* enough to win by exactly one single vote, and nothing more.
That's not really what the problem is. A lot of stuff is reasonable to pass by one vote.
What the problem is that is that none of this happens in the open. It happens that 51% manipulates a bill until enough like it, and they propose and pass it. No debate at all.
Well, let's be honest. That's what the Republicans do. Or, rather, did, when they were in power.
When they're out of power, they oppose everything as a unified block, and nothing can be added to bills to get them to vote for them. And now they fillibuster everything.
I understand a sort of reflexive action to blame both parties, but it's really just the Republicans fucking up how an assembly is supposed to operate. The Democrats are doing it exactly right...and can't get anything passed.
Pretty much every 'fair' or 'just' aspect of our economic system was put in place because the powerful didn't want to worry about angry mobs taking over the political system or confiscating their property.
This.
Guys, at some point it really stops mattering what the 'laws' are. You break the country where enough people are hungry and homeless, the laws will change. You rig the system where the laws can't change, they will just start taking stuff.
It's actually a little astonishing watching all this actually happen, and how the superrich seem to have no idea what's going on, probably because they live in their own little bubble.
Yes, but there's a difference between emergency unexpected situations, and standard operating procedure.
The phone system might get overloaded in a disaster and everyone understands that, but I sure as hell would be pissed if, to make a phone call normally, I had to wait in queue for two minutes until a line opened up.
Phone companies: We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 2% is normally in use, so everything works except for emergencies.'
ISPs: 'We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 25% is in use normally, so we've decided to stop actually supplying the service we've sold to people we think are over-using it, and in fact we've built automated systems to do this.'
Everyone understands things fall apart in disasters, or even in expected fringe times. There's a reason, back when pizza places did '30 minutes or it's free' stuff, they always exempted holidays and sporting events. But we're not talking about any sort of unique event. ISPs are throttling all the time, they have are, quite simply, completely overselling their capacity. At all times.
Hell, no one would really care if throttling showed up at, oh, eight in the evening because everyone was on Hulu. Or the net connection was a little slow over Thanksgiving. People would bitch, but we'd understand.
But there's a difference between 'can be slow at peak times' and 'throttled all the time because we don't even have enough capability for normal usage'.
If ISPs don't want to buy more capacity, all they would have to do is stop claiming to provide stuff they don't. Which probably will require actual laws, because some ISPs being honest will result in the lying ISPs gettting the customers.
In the US, at least in the city I live, we pay our protection money "en masse" from the mafia. I assume GEMA is similar. This was a HUGE BOON to us. We didn't have to work out individual protection relationships with individual thugs. We didn't have to negotiate with individual groups. We didn't have to try and account for "now, who gets paid exactly?" for every sale. We didn't have to track every extortion we payed and be auditable. All we had to agree is "OK, we're operating a business. Here's a check. You deal with who gets what."
If you're a bar, or a small performance space, or a "special event" space, or or someone else operating a business in town, this is a HUGE time and headache saver. You get a license from the mafia that allows you to operate as long as you give them a cut, and then just cut a check once a month.
Admittedly, if you're a protectee, and you wind up with a less profits a certain month, you wind up paying the mafia too much when they overestimate profits. You know what? It's still WAY cheaper and WAY less hassle than trying to account for every individual sale. It's WAY less hassle than the mafia coming in and busting up shit because they didn't believe your claim that you had a 25% decrease in revenue this money and can't afford your protection money.
If you sell stuff in a street controlled by a protection racket, you pay their fees if you're selling stuff. Any stuff. If you didn't understand that, you either got ripped off by the space owner, or didn't do your homework. Because their agreement with the mafia says that's what THEY pay, and they pass it along. No space owner in their right mind wants the hassle of trying to deal with protection payments themselves.
Sorry, but I just can't feel sorry for these folks. They chose the wrong place to hold their event, and/or didn't ask the other shopowners.
I'm saying copyrights and patents are not property, they're bans.
All property is is 'bans'. Property ownership is the right to prevent others from using something. That's all it is. Everyone has a basic inherent right to do anything to anything, and property laws allow people to restrict others from doing things to specific objects. If you own a piece of property, you can prevent others from living there, if you own a car, you can prevent others from using it.
That is not saying I disagree with you. Copyright lets people ban others from doing stuff with things that the government otherwise completely agrees are their own property, which is not all that common.
And the other circumstances that sort of thing is banned it, like shooting your gun inside city limits, or burning your leaves during summer, have obvious safety issues. Or involve things you're not allowed to own in the first place, like illegal drugs.
And no other law I can think of lets random third parties, instead of the government, ban what you can do with what the government admits is your property.
Actually, wait, there is. Spectrum ownership. Copyright operates almost identically to spectrum ownership.
Of course, with spectrum ownership, you just can't claim part of. We recognize it's a common good, and we sell it to the highest bidder, often requiring specific rules about the use. Whereas with copyright, we not only give it away for free (having dropped any actual registration requirements.) but we apparently don't think we ever need to end ownership, either.
I'm struggling a bit to see how shares can change hands without a "market". How are sellers and buyers supposed to find each other ?
They aren't. If you need money in some sort of emergency, you go to your bank or your stockbroker, they see you have X shares that they're think are going to be worth about Y dollars at the end of the quarter. So they'll give you a loan for 95% or whatever of $Y.
I don't want a 'market' outside of every three months. But I have no problem with some places giving people a short-term loan based on an asset they hold. (As long as, like I said, the place can't turn around and sell the loan.) Presumably people would find this place the way they find a place to get a loan based on their next paycheck, or a loan based on their car.
Where I am, gambling winnings are not taxed. Capital gains are taxed as income unless the asset has been held for more than 12 months (strictly speaking there is a capital gains discount on assets held greater than 12 months).
Uh, really? Where the hell are you?
In the US, you can, technically deduct the 'cost of gambling' as an expense. I.e., if you buy $400 worth of tickets and win $500, you technically only own taxes on $100. The problem is, this does not actually work. It requires keeping track of gambling at a level that is very difficult, or risk an audit. What's worse, if you do document, the government will assume, instead of just trying to cheat on your taxes, that you're laundering money.
But I've never heard of anywhere where you don't pay income tax on gambling winnings. Are you somewhere where the only legal place to gamble is with the government? (In which case, I suggest that there is a tax, it's just hidden.)
What I would like to see is a greater use of capital gains tax to both combat HFT and encourage investing. Say, CGT started at something like 95% and tailed off at 1% for each day for the first month, then 5% for every 6 months after that until it was half whatever your marginal income tax rate was.
That decreasing amount is an impossibly unwieldy version of capital gains tax. That would be so hard to keep track of it's not funny. Different rates for different days?
How about a compromise? The stock transactions get run once a day, at midnight. Anyone who's held the stock for less than 30 days pays a 5% tax on the transaction to sell it. (Not on the profit, on the entire amount of it, paid at the time of the transaction, not on income taxes.) And also would pay any capital gains on the profit later, assuming they made any, which would be damn hard.
These reduces to 3% after 30 days, and 1% after 60 days, and 90 days, it's just capital gains. After either six months or a year of holding, capital gains gets cut in half. Whereas before that point it was at the marginal tax rate.
Or, to put it an entirely different and perhaps saner way than having multiple 'rates': You can deduct half the profit from stocks you have held for a certain amount of time. And to perhaps makes this even more sane, perhaps this deduction should apply to additional investments besides just stocks.
Actually, you could do this in a quasi-fair way by simply letting people count inflation when figuring it out for investments over a year, which is the reason long-term cap gains needs to be lower than income tax. (If you invest $100 and get $101 dollars a year later, they have probably lost money, not made it.) If an investment yielded 4% return, but inflation was 2%, well, perhaps they only owe taxes on the 2% left over. If the government only lets them count inflation in 'yearly blocks', like from July 3 to July 3, then they'll be incentivized to only buy and sell in yearly blocks. Or it could be in quarterly blocks instead.
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Except modern drive recovery can restore the blanked out sector.
Uh, no.
It has never, despite it being 'common wisdom', been possible to recover overwritten sectors on a hard drive.
No one has ever demonstrated it in the entire history of hard drives.
It was a theoretical attack a long time ago, on pre-IDE 'MFM' hard drives.But we moved off that sort of drive in 1986.
And even then, it didn't work. It was a theory that said with a very poorly build hard drive, it might be possible to recover some data. Like I said, no one's ever actually shown this.
And with IDE, we moved to RLL encoding which means, statistically, you couldn't get anything. With an MFM encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you had 25% of the data and might possibly come up with something, although, like I said, no one ever has managed this.
But with RLL encoded drives, if you got 50% of the data with 50% accuracy, you have nothing. It is not really possible to get a partial byte.
No that anyone has ever demonstrated reading anything from a ' The idea that you need to do anything more than overwrite a sector to make it unreadable is one of those zombie lies that simply cannot die.
The only way to recover a lost sector is if it was going bad at some point, so the hard drive made a copy of it and remapped that sector to the copy. Which means the original might still be there. (OTOH, the original was going bad, so who knows if it's still readable.) The odds of this happening are astronomical.
That's one of the reasons why I said to cut the power if any USB device is plugged in while the screen is locked. (The obviously assumes you're using a USB keyboard.)
The other reason is, obviously, that firewire can be used to make disk copies, and that buggy USB drivers can be used to introduce a rootkit.
It is probably theoretically possible to splice a data grabber into a USB cable while it's plugged in, but that seems unlike to happen.
Likewise, I've never understood the whole 'They can shut down your computer and make copy of memory' worry. Yes, that's a fun theoretical worry, but in actual reality, if you have the computer rigged to shut down on disconnect of USB devices, they're almost certainly going to trigger that simply getting the computer out where they can do that. And it's easy enough to make that required. Hell, I have a computer where that would happen by accident. (I have USB cables run to the next room, through the floor, along with s-video, so I can watch TV in bed.)
And, of course, there are accelerometers and case locks and stuff like that, instead of rigging something. Or, and here's a fun idea: A 3G receiver that simply keeps track of the nearest towers.
Yes, it's all good and clever they've invented a way to splice into the power so they don't have to shut the computer off when running it, which stops the utterly accidental problem of cutting the computer off. However, it's rather trivial to make it where you can't move a computer without the computer itself knowing, and cutting itself off.
In a scenario in which you are compelled to give up your password (e.g. a country where that is the law), I imagine they could slap you with something to the effect 'conspiracy to tamper with evidence'.
First, a person cannot commit 'conspiracy' solely by their own actions. Conspiracies require, by definition, two people.
Second, failing to create evidence in the form they want isn't tampering with evidence. They can't arrest you for failing to possess evidence. If they could do that, they'd just charge you with a crime if they did a search and didn't find anything.
Perhaps more to the point, it is not illegal to commit legal actions that cover up a crime of yours. People always assume that must somehow be illegal. It is perfectly legal to, for example, after a murder, to wash the blood off your clothing. It only becomes illegal after a search warrant has been issued or they get into evidence some other way. (It is, however, illegal to wash blood off someone else's clothes if you know they murdered someone. That is accessory to murder.)
I'm always a little astonished when people apparently watch too much TV and think the police can threaten you because a legal action you did before any investigation is somehow 'tampering with evidence' or 'impeding an investigation'.
This is something law enforcement officers threaten on TV, and possibly in real life, all the time, but is entirely without any grounds at all.
Encrypted drives do not, obviously, use the password to decode the files. They use the password to decode a key and use that to encode the files.
So I always thought it would be interested to have a computer that, on startup, wipes that part of the disk with 0s, sticking a copy somewhere else on the drive. (Which is not a security risk, because the other parts of the drives are, obviously, encrypted with that key, and you can't open box with a box cutter inside it.)
And during safe shutdown, it puts it back. Or have a program you have to run to put it back, then shutdown.
For safety purposes, you give a copy of the key to someone else for safekeeping. Bonus points if they're out of the country.
Then you leave your computer on, and the screen locked, at all times. Bonus points if you rig it to an alarm where if someone breaks in, it cuts the power. (Also have it do the same if someone inserts firewire or USB while the screen is locked.)
Now it doesn't matter how much you're ordered to comply with the police. They come in, cut the power to your computer, make a disk image...and you'll tell them the damn password all they want, but you are rather at a loss as to how they think that will work, considering the part of the drive with the key stored is has apparently been filled with 0s. (You'll need a lawyer able to explain that what they are asking cannot work.)
Now, like I said, you can lie and pretend you don't know what's going on...or you can wait until they get a court order to have you decrypt, and then tell them what's going on. By which point your friend has hopefully already destroyed the key.
And the joke is, even if you explain everything that happened, this is entirely legal. You have not destroyed any evidence, because the key was already missing from the unencrypted part of the drive when the warrant showed up. (Unlike some of the automated 'destroy data' traps that people try to come up with.) And you have cooperated fully, you literally cannot get to the data. And your friend didn't destroy evidence, because the search warrant was for your stuff, he can delete of his own files he wants until he is told otherwise.
More importantly, people tend to frown on you giving people cancer.
She deliberately harmed someone with the intent of causing harm, and resulted in death.
Yes, that is voluntary manslaughter.
However, I think the 'harm' required there is actual physical harm. I don't think the connection works if you intend to cause emotional harm and that results in death. (Because emotional harm is not, per se, illegal to cause.)
But, if they can't get that, they have involuntary manslaughter, because a misdemeanor resulted in someone's death. That doesn't require any intent to cause harm at all.
And the hacking charges are just utterly idiotic, and are very very risky. It's possible to think of a scenario where lying online could result in someone's death, but it shouldn't be illegal.
For example, let's say that I lies on an online dating forum, thus a woman decides to go on a date with me, and the date ends in the woman gets hit by a meteor and killed. I think we can agree that, despite the lie that originally resulted in the date, no criminal charges are due against me.
If lying online is 'hacking', I'm failing to see any meaningful differences between my 'hacking' and this woman's 'hacking'. Both were for the purpose of misleading someone, both were against the TOS, both resulted in a death.
The only differences is that one intended harm and the other didn't, and there was misdemeanor harassment in one and the other didn't have that. But neither of those were related to the 'hacking'. Hacking's not only illegal if you intend to hurt someone else, or if you later go on to harass someone!
So, what? We're going to only press these charges if someone 'deserves' them?
I a free-ish market, the cost of labor is precisely the value of one new person doing that job. How could it be otherwise? Obviously that's the result of supply or demand, but what people bid on is that one marginal worker.
I remind you exactly what I was objecting to: The work of the mind is more valuable than the work of the body
I have at no point talked about the 'cost of labor'. I have talked about the value that any specific work gives a specific company, which is utterly unrelated to what a person does, or how much that person gets paid. You remove the cashier from a store, it doesn't matter how much they got paid or where on the totem poll they were...without a fucking cashier the store makes no money at all.
Go the guys who design the infrastructure and organize the effort and provide the capital for it to happen are important then? That was pretty much the central premise of Atlas Shrugged.
Ah, yes. Collect all of society's money, so you can 'provide the capital' and be the hero. Or not provide the capital and let everyone die.
Well, I never read her non-fiction, but that would seem like an odd thing to write, and a likely thing to make up about someone you dislike, but I'll take your word on it for now. It doesn't come through in her fiction, though, where people who work for her heros are presented as valuable and distinct from the people who want to be paid for not working, who are the "leeches."
Wow, you really do have blinders on, don't you? 'There's no bigotry against the French in this book. There are some good French in addition to the vast majority that run around eating and raping each other.'
Here's a hint: She made up those leeches. She invented a universe where a very tiny fraction of people are the important people. Yes, some of the unimportant people are willing to serve the important people, and they're good people too.
The rest are all parasites attempting to steal all their stuff, so those important people, and people loyal to them, run away, and this somehow works.
You realize this is imaginary, right? An outright lie about how the world actually functions, right?
I centainly think tha people who make new technology happen deserve much, as they've done more to make our lives better than every redistribution scheme ever imaged does. I have so many nice things today that no king or ruler could possibly buy even 200 years ago.
They were planning disrupting Wall Street. In other words, they were threatening the economy and even Bloomy can't allow that.
Huh? How is it even possible for a small group like that to be "threatening the economy"?
I think it's be adequately demonstrated that a small group of people in control of Wall Street can, in fact, utter destroy the economy.
I don't know why you think I'm defending the harasser here.
I had not heard the theory that she was intending to cause the girl to commit suicide. If that can actually be demonstrated, yes, of course it's murder. (And it's premeditated, at that.)
However, saying 'you should kill yourself' doesn't really prove that. That is clearly intended to cause pain, but generally asking someone to commit suicide is not literally intended as a request that they do so, and hence isn't actually murder. (Which requires intent to result in death, as opposed to manslaughter.)
But, hey, if you think that can be proven, I've got no problem with it.
Of course, none of this is what my comments were actually about, which was that harassment is unlawful, and hence harassing someone until they kill themselves is at minimum manslaughter already, so we don't need any stupid 'violating TOS is illegal' nonsense even in the specific instance it's been proposed for.
I have no objection if we can get her for something worse, this was a pretty horrific act and there needs to be a clear deterrence sent out: Messing with people to the extent they kill themselves will result in you serving at least some time in prison. (And, hell, we should make some specific rules about adults messing with teenagers, who are exceptionally vulnerable to that.)
But the government only really comes into the book as a tool for the "losers" to attack the "winners" with. Given her youth in an oppressive totalitarian state, I think we can forgive Rand her distrust of government power.
It is not my job to forgive or condemn anyone for any of their beliefs. I don't really care what Ayn Rand is up to in her books.
It is, however, my job (as a citizen who is partially in charge of how his government operates) to point out that such beliefs are a fucking stupid philosophical foundation for a government.
As a business philosophy I find in narrow but apt: I've only ever really worked in companies that had somehting to do with software, but from that narrow view, places where the culture was blame-avoidance-oriented were hellholes I was happy to leave, while places that were process-improvement oriented were OK, though not always successful by any means.
Those are not really the only options, and plenty of organizations are a mixture of the various kinds. Im fact, blame-avoidance is not really a management style, but probably more a symptom of other problems. (Like poorly defined job responsibilities.)
And one look at the job market will show that manual labor pays much less than software, or other design/invention/creation oriented jobs. Do you really think that's somehow unfair and inapproapriate? These days, of course, mindless labor (even the white collar sort) is being very rapidly replaced by automation, so I expect in my lifetime that such jobs will be quite marginal in th overall economy.
The cost of labor is entirely due to worldwide supply and worldwide demand, and is unrelated to the value of any specific job in a specific organization.
Without the air condition repair guy working on the server room AC, the servers, and hence entire company, will seize up and die...but that's not what dictates his pay. What dictates his pay is how replaceable he is.
Problems arise when leaders think the fact someone is more replaceable than others means their job is also less important for the success of the company. Those two things are almost completely unrelated, and making that mistake is a good way to blow up an entire well-functioning company fail, because the leader wants to save 0.02% and decides to cut back on some 'unimportant' job.
And it's the same at a societal level. For example, without people keeping infrastructure functional, a good 80% of the population would starve to death. That is, objectively, 'more valuable' than some guy who designs a new skyscraper. The workers are less important, as they are easily replaceable, but the work is more important.
And that above was me talking in an objective sense as if I didn't know who Ayn Rand was. With her, this is an utterly idiotic.
Ayn Rand is a believer in the ubermench, in the idea that a tiny fraction of society are much much better and smarter than everyone else, who is essentially a parasite. In her world, there are a few thousand important people (And by 'people' I mean 'men', but getting into Rand's weird gender dysphoria and self-loathing is beyond this post.) that deserve everything, that invent everything, and create everything, which is this magical unique process that only they can do.
This is sheer idiotic nonsense. That isn't slightly how anything work in the actual world at all.
Someone pushes you, and you stumble until you fall off the bridge and die.
Pushing someone isn't just a tort....it's also assault.
Although that's not really relevant as the pushing actually caused a death, and hence it's manslaughter to start with.
The stuff I was talking about was when a death was the side effect of a misdemeanor, not the actual result. When your misdemeanor causes a situation that you should know to be dangerous, that you should know could cause harm, like driving without headlights at night, or making a building that isn't up to code that then collapses and kills someone.
But actual criminal assault, which accidentally results in death, is just straight up voluntary manslaughter at least. Which is worse than involuntary manslaughter.
If they knew you were clumsy and intended to kill you with the push, would it matter?
Participating in any chain of events with the intent of someone dying is murder, full stop. It doesn't matter if some part of the situation already existed to help it along. If someone builds a lethal deathtrap in park you know about and you make a vague suggestion to them that they, who do not know the deathtrap, visit that park with the hope they'll get killed, even that's murder, if anyone can prove it.
The 'misreading things as saying what you intended them to say' isn't dyslexia. Everyone does that. If you wrote a 'the', you'll often read it as a 'the', even if it's actually a 'teh'. That's because our brain over-optimizes and doesn't bother reading things when it already knows what they say.
Perhaps you do it more than others...but that's not dyslexia, which is an inability to convert words into meanings. (If anything, you're converting them a bit too easy.)
And ease of reading, and poor writing, isn't dyslexia, which is a reading disorder. Actually, some forms of dyslexia can include hearing, but all forms of it are an inability to translate words to meanings.
What you have sounds like dysgraphia, which is the inverse of dyslexia and is an inability to turn meanings into words. (And is a lot poorer understood and diagnosed.)
No, that just implies our visual pattern-matchers don't require a perfect match. (Or possibly a prefect match.)
However, I'm a little baffled as to how this was news. Of course we recognized words by shape. (Or possibly by snape. Strangely, that doesn't work, probably because of the top of the h.) How else would we recognize them?
The question is really 'How much do we recognize each individual letter' vs 'How much do we recognize the entire word', and I thought it was somewhat already accepted that the faster you read, the more you 'grouped'.
It's not 'harm' per se that makes it manslaughter.
For a farcical example, if we have an agreement that requires me paying you X dollars today, and I do not, I have committed a tort against you and harmed you, and you could certainly sue, but I can't be charged with manslaughter even if that harm results in your inability to pay your loan shark, who then kills you. (However, you might be able to collect both any interest you had to pay, and medical bills or even funeral expenses as 'damages' my lack of payment caused.)
However, it's different if I commit a misdemeanor and that misdemeanor results in your death, and there was some possibility I could have foreseen that as a result. It is called 'constructive manslaughter', a form of involuntary manslaughter. It's like a misdemeanor version of the felony murder rule. (As I pointed out above in a post above, this is what they charge idiots with who jaywalk and cause lethal car accidents.)
And, of course, there are laws against harassment. Stuff like 'repeated communications which are anonymous, made at extremely inconvenient times, or in offensively coarse language'. It varies state-by-state, but often explicitly includes things like deliberately lying about a person to harm their reputation and misleading people about your relationship with them.
She was committing a misdemeanor, and got someone killed directly as a result of that lawbreaking, in a foreseeable manner. (Suicide is, in fact, the third leading cause of death among teens, so it's hard to argue it's a surprise.) It's involuntary manslaughter. Throw her in jail for a few months.
The real problem appears to be that even if I put up a sign saying 'It is against the rules to commit murder in this house', and someone comes in and murders me...
People who break rules in real life are not trespassing. People who break rules on web sites are not committing unauthorized computer access. Those specific crimes are when you jump a gate or pick a lock or guess a password. When you are clearly not allowed to be there, and have bypassed some sort of indication of that.
They are not when you walk in the open door and start acting like an ass, as long as you leave when asked to leave.
It doesn't matter if the property is real or virtual, or if they are trespassing or legally there...if we want to outlaw things, we need to, you know, actually outlaw the thing, not hope it happens on some website where such a thing is against the rules. (And not via, for example, email.)
As other have pointed out, harassing others is a misdemeanor already, and causing a death while committing a misdemeanor is often illegal, called 'misdemeanor manslaughter' or 'constructive manslaughter' which is like a weaker version of the felony murder rule. (I.e., if you jaywalk and cause a car accident where someone dies, you're getting locked up for some form of involuntary manslaughter.)
If this happened in a state without such a law, or without a law making harassing someone (online or otherwise) a misdemeanor, then they need to make that law and stop trying to make horrific caselaw about TOSs to get someone locked up.
I'll step forward and say I strongly disagree with pretty much all of that as a political philosophy.
It's pretty pretentious as a business leadership philosophy, but could be mangled into some actual shape.
The problem is the government is not a fucking business. It does not exist to 'reward effort'. And it is not a fucking 'organization' in that sense of the word.
Here's, let's just dissect this single line: Winners focus on results, and believe success should be rewarded; losers focus on intentions, and believe effort should be rewarded.
What, exactly, is success for the government? Not having people die in the streets? So the government...reward themselves for that? Or the voters reward them by reelecting them? But that's other people rewarding them, not them rewarding people.
It's complete and utter gibberish as a political position.
As a business philosophy, it's a half-assed version of what is usually called 'result-oriented leadership'. Except that it's decided that magically everyone is either competent or incompetent and the way to solve the problem is to...um...quit your job if you're in charge of incompetents, which is not really a functional leadership style.
And it's utter FAIL in the last line...every job is exactly as important as that specific job is, no more, no less. Everything that is done should be considered as an independent entity. Assuming that certain types of work are more important than others in general is a very good way to make a huge management mistake when you discover that the menial mail-delivery job you just cut back introduced delays throughout the entire company.
Ya know, as much as i thought Ayn Rand was batshit her often used criminal quote is starting to look highly prophetic.
Actually, that just sorta proves she was even more batshit insane.
I mean, she saw this coming, and yet still has no problem with everyone having absolute power to make any sort of contracts they want and have the government enforce them. Which, of course, in the actual world means 'Human beings are forced to sign contracts, that corporations write, for everything'.
I will give her credit though, in her world, violating TOSs and other contracts would not be illegal. Instead, websites would simply put something like 'You owe us a billion dollars if you violate this TOS' and then seize everyone's property.
I'm all for them being sued.
That's not the same thing as it being a crime.
Unauthorized computer access is supposed to be limited to accessing places that have been barred to you, usually with a password. (Although some of the 'using proxies to get around country IP bans' is probably enough to count.)
That's it. That's where it needs to end.
If a web site has a problem with a user who does have such access granted, they need to revoke the access.
It's pretty much exactly like trespassing laws. No, you cannot climb in the bathroom window to get into the club. (Aka, breaking in through a security vulnerability.) That is, in fact, trespassing.
It is also trespassing if you make a copy of someone else's key, and enter through a locked door that way. (Aka, using their login credentials.) That is also trespassing.
However, it's completely legal to lie and say you're with the band at the door, and walk right in. Or claim you were just in there and already paid. That is not trespassing.
It's also completely legal if, for example, they bar external food and drinks, and you to sneak them in anyway. That is also not trespassing.
We do not want such things to be trespassing. It is far too dangerous to give random people the ability to have people arrested for breaking private rules. Because such rules are often very vague, and, unlike the law, no one is required to know the rules of every place they visit.
Of course, it's also completely legal for them to demand you leave when they figure out you've broken a rule, and for them to have you arrested if you refuse. That is how it is supposed to work.
Indeed. Unauthorized access should be 'using the site when you are clearly forbidden to'. Aka, when you hack someone else's password or something.
It is exactly analogous to trespass, but with trespass law, we have very clear laws. And people can't put up signs that say 'You can only enter if you do eight thousand different things I will specific in this fine print here or you're trepassing'.
No. They can say 'No trespassing' or 'Authorized access only', and people must assume they need to get permission first. They can put up a gate or lock a door, and people must assume they need to get permission first.
They can't have a fricking path and post rules saying 'you can use this path only if you do X', and then have people arrested for trespass who break the rules. That is not possible under current law. And they certainly can't stand there and have a doorman let people in (You know, like automatically making an account.) and then have the person arrested for trespassing later.
Breaking rules is not trespassing. And it is not unauthorized computer access if someone breaks rules. The only rule is 'Was there some indication that people were barred in general? If not, were you somehow specifically barred from access?'
And, no, you're not required to do any math there...they can't say 'You are barred if you break the rules.' You have to actually be specifically barred. This isn't some goddamn logic problem.
Hell, in the real world, sometimes you can ban 'certain things' from your property, like 'solicitors'...and this requires a law defining what those are and that people can rightfully ban them. People aren't allowed to make up their own restrictions and sic the police on people who don't agree with what that restriction means. There are specific rules about how and what the few things you can put on a sign. (Hours of access are a common one.) And this sign must be publicly posted in a specific way.
Or, in another example, casinos can't post a sign saying 'No card counters allowed', and have card counters arrested for trespassing. They can have a rule against that, and throw them out, and have them arrested for trespassing if they come back...but not for breaking the 'access rule' in the first place.
But, apparently, we've decided that web sites should have near infinite power to have any visitor arrested. All they have to do is come up with some vague rule, or, hell, a rule that every visitor violates, like 'This site may only be accessed between using IE 5', and they can have people arrested at will.
If you want to know when Congress really started to go down the shithole in recent years, look no further than the "one-vote win" policy that the Republican leadership in Congress began to aggressively follow sometime around the turn of the century -- the policy of suppressing debate, and crafting laws that compromised *just* enough to win by exactly one single vote, and nothing more.
That's not really what the problem is. A lot of stuff is reasonable to pass by one vote.
What the problem is that is that none of this happens in the open. It happens that 51% manipulates a bill until enough like it, and they propose and pass it. No debate at all.
Well, let's be honest. That's what the Republicans do. Or, rather, did, when they were in power.
When they're out of power, they oppose everything as a unified block, and nothing can be added to bills to get them to vote for them. And now they fillibuster everything.
I understand a sort of reflexive action to blame both parties, but it's really just the Republicans fucking up how an assembly is supposed to operate. The Democrats are doing it exactly right...and can't get anything passed.
Pretty much every 'fair' or 'just' aspect of our economic system was put in place because the powerful didn't want to worry about angry mobs taking over the political system or confiscating their property.
This.
Guys, at some point it really stops mattering what the 'laws' are. You break the country where enough people are hungry and homeless, the laws will change. You rig the system where the laws can't change, they will just start taking stuff.
It's actually a little astonishing watching all this actually happen, and how the superrich seem to have no idea what's going on, probably because they live in their own little bubble.
Yes, but there's a difference between emergency unexpected situations, and standard operating procedure.
The phone system might get overloaded in a disaster and everyone understands that, but I sure as hell would be pissed if, to make a phone call normally, I had to wait in queue for two minutes until a line opened up.
Phone companies: We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 2% is normally in use, so everything works except for emergencies.'
ISPs: 'We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 25% is in use normally, so we've decided to stop actually supplying the service we've sold to people we think are over-using it, and in fact we've built automated systems to do this.'
Everyone understands things fall apart in disasters, or even in expected fringe times. There's a reason, back when pizza places did '30 minutes or it's free' stuff, they always exempted holidays and sporting events. But we're not talking about any sort of unique event. ISPs are throttling all the time, they have are, quite simply, completely overselling their capacity. At all times.
Hell, no one would really care if throttling showed up at, oh, eight in the evening because everyone was on Hulu. Or the net connection was a little slow over Thanksgiving. People would bitch, but we'd understand.
But there's a difference between 'can be slow at peak times' and 'throttled all the time because we don't even have enough capability for normal usage'.
If ISPs don't want to buy more capacity, all they would have to do is stop claiming to provide stuff they don't. Which probably will require actual laws, because some ISPs being honest will result in the lying ISPs gettting the customers.
In the US, at least in the city I live, we pay our protection money "en masse" from the mafia. I assume GEMA is similar. This was a HUGE BOON to us. We didn't have to work out individual protection relationships with individual thugs. We didn't have to negotiate with individual groups. We didn't have to try and account for "now, who gets paid exactly?" for every sale. We didn't have to track every extortion we payed and be auditable. All we had to agree is "OK, we're operating a business. Here's a check. You deal with who gets what."
If you're a bar, or a small performance space, or a "special event" space, or or someone else operating a business in town, this is a HUGE time and headache saver. You get a license from the mafia that allows you to operate as long as you give them a cut, and then just cut a check once a month.
Admittedly, if you're a protectee, and you wind up with a less profits a certain month, you wind up paying the mafia too much when they overestimate profits. You know what? It's still WAY cheaper and WAY less hassle than trying to account for every individual sale. It's WAY less hassle than the mafia coming in and busting up shit because they didn't believe your claim that you had a 25% decrease in revenue this money and can't afford your protection money.
If you sell stuff in a street controlled by a protection racket, you pay their fees if you're selling stuff. Any stuff. If you didn't understand that, you either got ripped off by the space owner, or didn't do your homework. Because their agreement with the mafia says that's what THEY pay, and they pass it along. No space owner in their right mind wants the hassle of trying to deal with protection payments themselves.
Sorry, but I just can't feel sorry for these folks. They chose the wrong place to hold their event, and/or didn't ask the other shopowners.
I'm saying copyrights and patents are not property, they're bans.
All property is is 'bans'. Property ownership is the right to prevent others from using something. That's all it is. Everyone has a basic inherent right to do anything to anything, and property laws allow people to restrict others from doing things to specific objects. If you own a piece of property, you can prevent others from living there, if you own a car, you can prevent others from using it.
That is not saying I disagree with you. Copyright lets people ban others from doing stuff with things that the government otherwise completely agrees are their own property, which is not all that common.
And the other circumstances that sort of thing is banned it, like shooting your gun inside city limits, or burning your leaves during summer, have obvious safety issues. Or involve things you're not allowed to own in the first place, like illegal drugs.
And no other law I can think of lets random third parties, instead of the government, ban what you can do with what the government admits is your property.
Actually, wait, there is. Spectrum ownership. Copyright operates almost identically to spectrum ownership.
Of course, with spectrum ownership, you just can't claim part of. We recognize it's a common good, and we sell it to the highest bidder, often requiring specific rules about the use. Whereas with copyright, we not only give it away for free (having dropped any actual registration requirements.) but we apparently don't think we ever need to end ownership, either.
I'm struggling a bit to see how shares can change hands without a "market". How are sellers and buyers supposed to find each other ?
They aren't. If you need money in some sort of emergency, you go to your bank or your stockbroker, they see you have X shares that they're think are going to be worth about Y dollars at the end of the quarter. So they'll give you a loan for 95% or whatever of $Y.
I don't want a 'market' outside of every three months. But I have no problem with some places giving people a short-term loan based on an asset they hold. (As long as, like I said, the place can't turn around and sell the loan.) Presumably people would find this place the way they find a place to get a loan based on their next paycheck, or a loan based on their car.
Where I am, gambling winnings are not taxed. Capital gains are taxed as income unless the asset has been held for more than 12 months (strictly speaking there is a capital gains discount on assets held greater than 12 months).
Uh, really? Where the hell are you?
In the US, you can, technically deduct the 'cost of gambling' as an expense. I.e., if you buy $400 worth of tickets and win $500, you technically only own taxes on $100. The problem is, this does not actually work. It requires keeping track of gambling at a level that is very difficult, or risk an audit. What's worse, if you do document, the government will assume, instead of just trying to cheat on your taxes, that you're laundering money.
But I've never heard of anywhere where you don't pay income tax on gambling winnings. Are you somewhere where the only legal place to gamble is with the government? (In which case, I suggest that there is a tax, it's just hidden.)
What I would like to see is a greater use of capital gains tax to both combat HFT and encourage investing. Say, CGT started at something like 95% and tailed off at 1% for each day for the first month, then 5% for every 6 months after that until it was half whatever your marginal income tax rate was.
That decreasing amount is an impossibly unwieldy version of capital gains tax. That would be so hard to keep track of it's not funny. Different rates for different days?
How about a compromise? The stock transactions get run once a day, at midnight. Anyone who's held the stock for less than 30 days pays a 5% tax on the transaction to sell it. (Not on the profit, on the entire amount of it, paid at the time of the transaction, not on income taxes.) And also would pay any capital gains on the profit later, assuming they made any, which would be damn hard.
These reduces to 3% after 30 days, and 1% after 60 days, and 90 days, it's just capital gains. After either six months or a year of holding, capital gains gets cut in half. Whereas before that point it was at the marginal tax rate.
Or, to put it an entirely different and perhaps saner way than having multiple 'rates': You can deduct half the profit from stocks you have held for a certain amount of time. And to perhaps makes this even more sane, perhaps this deduction should apply to additional investments besides just stocks.
Actually, you could do this in a quasi-fair way by simply letting people count inflation when figuring it out for investments over a year, which is the reason long-term cap gains needs to be lower than income tax. (If you invest $100 and get $101 dollars a year later, they have probably lost money, not made it.) If an investment yielded 4% return, but inflation was 2%, well, perhaps they only owe taxes on the 2% left over. If the government only lets them count inflation in 'yearly blocks', like from July 3 to July 3, then they'll be incentivized to only buy and sell in yearly blocks. Or it could be in quarterly blocks instead.