Several posters seem to think you're factually wrong; I don't know one way or the other, so I'll leave that aside.
I'll only mention in passing the fallacy of saying "X led to Y, so if X hadn't happened there would by no Y"; we don't know what other paths might have been followed.
Instead I'll just point out that flat panel TV's are in part derived from NASA research, but that doesn't mean they bundle in a space shuttle when you buy one.
1) The cases you tend to think about where "the public" cracks encryption implemented by corporations are DMCA violations. However, that's not (as you imply) because of who's doing it or who implemented the encryption; it's because of what function the encryption is serving. If I crack the boot password on your laptop, DMCA violations aren't what I'm guilty of.
2) Yes, there are many, many things that are permissable when done by the government but illegal if done by a private citizen. There always have been, there always will be. Probably the majority of things done in the investigation of suspected crimes fall into this category, and unsurprisingly this is one of them.
Now if I go by recent track record of how people respond when called on bs while trying to sound anti-establishment chic around here, you'll tell me your comment was just a joke, as though that would somehow make it any less full of crap.
Depends what method of autofocus is used. I haven't been able to find any reference to which type of AF it uses, and I guess that isn't surprising as most people using a phone as a camera probably don't know or care much about the differences between AF methods...
Most of those responding are hung up on the typo, but really it's the factual errors that need a bit of attention.
A flawless, clean mirror might reflect 95% of the beam energy. It's going to have to be awfully durable to remain flawless and clean for very long while absorbing 5% of the energy from laser weapon.
If you do deploy a mirror shield that reflects enough energy to keep from being destroyed, a clever opponent will either hit it with a projectile first and then aim the laser at the resulting cracks, or splatter the shield with something (anything non-reflective) and aim at that. Either technique will increase the amount of energy converted to heat before you get the chance to reflect it, causing further damage to the shield.
I suspect in a battlefield situation a mirror might by you a few seconds against an opponent with a laser.
Not so. You can characterize the idea that all of the light from a laser is moving parallel as a simplification or an idealization, but not as reality.
Now, I do agree that GP is applying the wrong principles and the wrong formula, but the idea of a perfectly-contained beam of light energy that remains "small" over any distance is simply fiction.
Equivalence of taxes on buyer and seller is an economic observation, not a legal one. I could just as well claim that corporate income tax levied on Wal-Mart by the state of Arkansas is really a tax on me as a Wal-Mart customer, because they could lower prices even more if they didn't have to pay income tax.
Why, I'm not a resident of Arkansas; how is this legal? Well, it's legal because no matter the economic effect the tax has on me, I am nonetheless not the party being taxed.
Moreover, economic equivalence doesn't really apply to sales taxes unless you're changing the base price charged for the item in response to the sales tax on that particular transaction. In other words, if you're charging the guy in TX the same as the guy in NY, even though the sales taxes for those sales differ, then you can not claim the effect is the same as though you were the one being taxed.
Calling every burden placed on an individual by the government a "tax" is a neat distraction tactic. Why, I bet if we generalize every word's meaning enough, we can probably make it impossible for anyone we disagree with to say anything!
I think we are all aware that, based on how difficult it would historically have been for mail-order businesses to collect sales tax, the current legal structure is to put the burden on the buyer in interstate sales. I think we are also aware that this system does not work very well, and that when the justification for the system is ease of implementation it is perfectly valid to revisit that decision as technology advances.
As technology stands today, the government could with relative ease implement a system that would allow collection through the seller without an unreasonable burden. I bet it wouldn't take long for the system to pay for itself in more effective collection of taxes.
But fear not. As long as this isn't done, your state will get by without the lost revenue by simply raising the taxes they are able to collect. As long as you don't mind that ultimately you're paying a share of the cost to make up for lost taxes on your neighbor's out-of-state purchases, it's a great system.
Do you currently collect sales tax when you make an eBay sale in your home state? Because by your logic, that would already be required even without the Amazon "precedent" you're worried about. (It's not the magic of being online that makes a sale exempt from collection of sales tax; it's being out of state.)
Legally it might indeed be required that you collect such tax on in-state eBay sales; I'm not sure how your state's sales tax law is written. But do you do it? Has anyone ever knocked down your door demanding you pay up on those tax bills? If not, then this sounds like a red herring.
More precisely, it's an orthogonal issue. Whether the rule should apply to out-of-state sales has nothing to do with whether the rule should apply to individuals engaged in private transactions.
"If New York State wants to block us Ebayers from selling our used games, videos, whatever from crossing the NY Border, I'm okay with that"
Too bad; the U.S. Constitution isn't. Again, your preferences aren't what sets the rules for being part of the Union.
"How is New York going to enforce this tax on us? Is the NY Militia going to cross three states (PA, MD, and VA) in order to come arrest me? That's called invasion"
Oh my God, you're right! Why, all anyone has to do to get by with committing a crime in one state is to hide out in a different state! Oh, except that's completely false as there is interstate cooperation in law enforcement. Your failure to identify the Constitutional mechanism for this happening doesn't change the fact that it happens every day.
"And finally taxation of a person who has no representation in the NY Legislature is non-democratic"
Good thing they aren't taxing you, as has been pointed out numerous times.
And you wonder why you get marked Troll.
"If I think New York's 8% sales tax is an onerous burden upon my business (i.e. excessive paperwork and reduced sales), there is no way for me to protest it."
Of course there is; you can refuse to sell there. But then, why is it any of your business? If the people paying the tax - those being the buyer - think an 8% sales tax is worth what the state provides them , that's none of your business. The fact that you would be called on as an agent to collect said tax does not give you a legitimate voice in deciding how high the tax should be.
You think every state's sales tax is a single flat rate? Good luck with that. Now it is true that it's a less-than-overwhelming amount of data, but if you haven't thought the problem through enough to know that it's not just a table of 50 rates, then you shouldn't be trying to estimate the difficulty.
A more serious issue is that any state can change its tax laws without any particular schedule or required notice. Realistically the states would have to be responsible for broadcasting this information in a mutually-agreed-upon form.
A system like that probably would work. Note that in my above quote, I didn't say "it isn't reasonable..."; I said "the supreme court doesn't consider it reasonable". With the modern state of technology, I think that's a bogus argument, but it is the current law.
You can't have it both ways. You're exactly right that they can't collect tarrifs because they're members of the Union, not foreign countreis; and thus your arguments comparing them to foreign powers trying to tax you are inapplicable.
The rules for taxation within the Union are set by the Federal government, not by your sense of fairness. The government says that they can impose taxes on their customers for all goods purchased and used in the state, so long as the tax isn't higher for goods from other states.
Which brings us back to the key point - they aren't taxing you. The debate isn't about whether they can tax you, it's about whether they can compell you to collect a tax for them and send it along in exchange for letting you do business with people who would owe said taxes.
Why should you be subject to the hassle? Because that's the price the state sets for doing business with them or their citizens. You want to sell to NY people, you help make sure they pay their taxes to NY. Not really that different from a corporation that calls MO home but employs people who are working in CA having to help CA make sure they get their state income taxes from those workers.
Currently the Supreme Court has set some limits around the degree to which that can be required. Since states can't regulate interstate commerce, they can't impose tarifs against other states; so I beileve that's interpreted to mean that their out-of-state sales tax (or use tax) can't exceed their in-state sales tax. And - the provision currently under debate - currently the supreme court doesn't consier it reasonable to expect a business to go through the hassle of knowing 50 states' tax laws; but that has absolutely nothing to do with representation in the state's government.
To your first question - if I were to guess, I'd say you're probably being marked troll by reputation. You've certainly make many specious arguments in the other threads I've seen you in, and so the moderators are probably not inclined to believe you could possibly be serious with this.
I don't know; I suppose you could argue for changing the rules on when a company has to collect sales tax to include (1) being in-state, or (2) having a business partner for whom you calculate in-state tax. What I don't think you can argue for is singling Amazon out and treating it differently from the general rule. If the rule is that it's presumed too burdensome for an out-of-state business to collect sales tax, then that's that.
Hell, let the states set up online services for state tax calculation and just require any business making a sale to use that service to calculate tax; then it's not an undue burden for anyone and you can do away with unenforcable use taxes entirely.
The argument about benefit from public services seems off to me; at most it would convince me that Amazon should pay in the 17 states where it is present, yet TFA seems to imply that because Amazon's argument is "disingenuous" that somehow supports the idea that they shoudl pay in all 50. A better counter is that the point is moot. If we want to talk about what the state is "giving" the company in exchange for the service of collecting taxes... how about access to the consumer market in that state? That seems like a fair deal; after all, what the company gains by not collecting the tax isn't the ability to legally sell at a lower price; it's the ability to give customers the opportunity to evade the tax. "If you're going to encourage law-breaking in our state, you can't do business here" wouldn't offend me one bit.
But this business about Amazon's motive for arguing the point... what difference does that make? Either the reason they give is a valid reason or it isn't a valid reason; whether it's the reason that motivates Amazon simply doesn't matter.
1) Just because you weren't around to see the stupid thigns humans have done in the past, doesn't mean that they're somehow less stupid than the stupid thigns we're doing today. A vocal but very small minority could topple civilization, but not by means of self-destructive ignorance and worry.
2) The 2012 myth is not reaction to the movie; the movie is reaction to the 2012 myth. The 2012 myth takes many forms, and each of those forms have some elements that resonate wtih some people. The movie has magnified and publicized that resonance to a larger audience, although even so the vast majority do understand it to be fiction.
Don't get me wrong, I think the initial "this isn't a practical problem" response to the SSL reneg vulnerability is a serious mistake. A major facet of security is knowing what the system is doing; if the system is doing something unexpected that none of the legitimate users can anticipate, then there is a potential for severe security problems. This is one of the big reasons why I wish people who think "it works so I don't have to know why" would leave the programming industry and do something more suited to that way of thinking.
HOWEVER, the people who should be really embarrased from a security standpoint are twitter. Why does their API have a function that causes the user's password to be written to anywhere in cleartext?!? That's just bat-shit crazy. And as I understand it their workaround is to disable reneg instead of addressing the application-level problem? (If they'd done both, I'd say the response were at least on the ball...)
To be clear - if there's a feature of twitter that depends on writing out user credentials in cleartext, feel free to enlighten me; but my response will assuredly be "then that feature is not worth the risk and should not exist".
Something that doesn't seem to come through clearly in the above analysis IMO...
If a light water reactor is economical with $40/lb uranium contributing 0.2 cents / kWh, then a light water reactor could also be used with $400/lb uranium (from seawater) increasing the cost per kWh by 1.8 cents. Now, as cheap as that may sound, it could mean nearly 20%-40% increase in electricity costs if we assume all fuels are currently on par cost-wise; I don't see how to extract that with certainty from the provided numbers.
So not as good as the numbers with a breeder, but not nearly as bad as some scenarios we talk about with conventional fuels running scarce. It seems that if we seriously put light-water reactor deployment in gear, we'd be limiting the worst-case scenario to a 40% increase in energy costs.
That's without the political and practical security problems of a breeer. However, it is not without costs. Light water reactors do leave behind a lot of radioactive waste since they have a loose definition of "spent" fuel.
"Check the definition of "prohibit". It WAS around before the US used it, you know."
You didn't read my entire comment, did you? (Why am I bothering to ask; the moron posted AC so he/she surely won't bother to check back and read this...)
"Noncommercial sharing of copyrighted works is prohibited under the latest interpretation of copyright laws"
That's like saying that murder is a "prohibition law" because it "prohibits" killing someone. If that's what you mean by "prohibition law", then the term you're actually looking for is "law".
Incidentally, what is today called "noncommercial sharing" of copyrighted material was prohibited under every interpretation of every version of copyright law. The only thing whose interpretation has changed is the word "sharing" when abused in this context.
That's a bit of an over-simplification. It's true that if we hadn't stopped developing nuclear energy tech, we might have more fuel sources and we'd surely have more prodcution capacity (though the latter would only have been short-term cheap / long-term expensive unless the former panned out as well).
"More energy out than in" is not a goal unique to fusion. It is the goal for fusion because it describes every viable power plant. A gadget that doesn't put out more energy than you put into it isn't a power plant.
The only reason this isn't a violation of thermodynamics is that when we say "more energy out than in", we're not counting the energy bound up in the fuel we put in. The long-term expense associated with energy from a given source is the availability of the fuel. (A bit more complex than that for wind, hydro, solar - there it's about plant upkeep since the fuel is free but fixed in quantity for a given plant setup.)
Bottom line, we're using coal, oil, natural gas, and even uranium at a rate based on econimic viability (subject to politics and manipulation). We can produce X amount of oil at $Y/unit. Add some sort of fusion fuel to the economy, and what happens depends on how much of that fuel you can produce at $Y/unit or below. Of course, $Y is going to trend upward as long as we keep using oil (and coal, and natural gas, etc.).
If, as many seem to believe, we can figure out sources of fusion fuel that produce more energy than we need at (or maybe even near) $Y/unit, then there will be an energy revolution; but the cost of those new fuels will never be 0, so even though we might be able to produce as much as we have demand for, it will still cost and the investors will indeed get paid off in the process.
The hurdles are technical (and to some extent political), not economic.
Not sure I quite understand your last statement... I know of two meanings for "prohibition" that could be used to describe a law.
One usage would involve the laws that were actually called prohibition - banning of liquor. I don't honestly see how that's applicable to copyright infringement; I've heard this meaning stretched to include current laws forbidding recreational drugs besides alcohol, but it seems to me that stretching it any further than that bleeds into the other meaning...
The other meaning, of course, being 'a law that prohibits something', which can be shortened to 'a law' without any loss of meaning.
If your argument is that any unpopular law cannot succeed, I first refer you to laws against speeding - yes, some people speed regardless, but then many don't; and even the speeders go slower when the limit is more restrictive. So perhaps it depends on how you define "succeed".
Come to think of it, if the government were to decide that copyright infringement in the form of p2p music sharing were so common that it made sense to enforce it like a traffic infraction, things could get much uglier than they are today. But enough car analgies for now...
My second observaton would be, as vocal as the anti-copyright community is, if you take a look at the population as a whole you'll find that copyright isn't all that unpopular.
Hmm... from m-w.com, bribe : money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust
What exactly is the "position of trust" in which you envision these companies acting as they decide whether to use google's services? Not every case of "person X pays person Y to do something" is bribery, even if the motives are underhanded.
That would be "a bitchy person"; subset of "bitchy people"
"an A/O rating from the ESA,"
The rating system being nothing more than a way for one group to tell others what they think of the game, that would be - you guessed it - bitchy people.
"you'd have a de facto ban from retailers afraid of enraging a bunch of teabaggers."
Individual business would make a business decision about what products they want to carry? Oh, the humanity! Whatever; still just people being bitchy.
"In reality, it'd be the same effect"
Well, not really. You don't need retailers to distribute electronic media, and in fact many things are widely available - at the click of a mouse even - in spite of the fact that no mainstream retailer would even consider stocking them.
"order it from specialty online stores, but that's probably the same thing happening in Russia."
You think there are online sellers defying a government ban? I doubt it, but let's assume so. That means everyone playing the game in Russia would be a criminal, as is everyone who provided them a copy to play. You really don't see how that's different from having to buy the game from an online store (but then being able to buy and play it without being a criminal)?
Freedom doesn't mean that there's always someone making it convenient for you to get what you want. It means that if/when you do get what you want, provided it's within the bounds of your freedoms, the government doesn't interfere.
Slashdot Mirror
Several posters seem to think you're factually wrong; I don't know one way or the other, so I'll leave that aside.
I'll only mention in passing the fallacy of saying "X led to Y, so if X hadn't happened there would by no Y"; we don't know what other paths might have been followed.
Instead I'll just point out that flat panel TV's are in part derived from NASA research, but that doesn't mean they bundle in a space shuttle when you buy one.
1) The cases you tend to think about where "the public" cracks encryption implemented by corporations are DMCA violations. However, that's not (as you imply) because of who's doing it or who implemented the encryption; it's because of what function the encryption is serving. If I crack the boot password on your laptop, DMCA violations aren't what I'm guilty of.
2) Yes, there are many, many things that are permissable when done by the government but illegal if done by a private citizen. There always have been, there always will be. Probably the majority of things done in the investigation of suspected crimes fall into this category, and unsurprisingly this is one of them.
Now if I go by recent track record of how people respond when called on bs while trying to sound anti-establishment chic around here, you'll tell me your comment was just a joke, as though that would somehow make it any less full of crap.
Depends what method of autofocus is used. I haven't been able to find any reference to which type of AF it uses, and I guess that isn't surprising as most people using a phone as a camera probably don't know or care much about the differences between AF methods...
Most of those responding are hung up on the typo, but really it's the factual errors that need a bit of attention.
A flawless, clean mirror might reflect 95% of the beam energy. It's going to have to be awfully durable to remain flawless and clean for very long while absorbing 5% of the energy from laser weapon.
If you do deploy a mirror shield that reflects enough energy to keep from being destroyed, a clever opponent will either hit it with a projectile first and then aim the laser at the resulting cracks, or splatter the shield with something (anything non-reflective) and aim at that. Either technique will increase the amount of energy converted to heat before you get the chance to reflect it, causing further damage to the shield.
I suspect in a battlefield situation a mirror might by you a few seconds against an opponent with a laser.
"does not diverge in the first place"
Not so. You can characterize the idea that all of the light from a laser is moving parallel as a simplification or an idealization, but not as reality.
Now, I do agree that GP is applying the wrong principles and the wrong formula, but the idea of a perfectly-contained beam of light energy that remains "small" over any distance is simply fiction.
Equivalence of taxes on buyer and seller is an economic observation, not a legal one. I could just as well claim that corporate income tax levied on Wal-Mart by the state of Arkansas is really a tax on me as a Wal-Mart customer, because they could lower prices even more if they didn't have to pay income tax.
Why, I'm not a resident of Arkansas; how is this legal? Well, it's legal because no matter the economic effect the tax has on me, I am nonetheless not the party being taxed.
Moreover, economic equivalence doesn't really apply to sales taxes unless you're changing the base price charged for the item in response to the sales tax on that particular transaction. In other words, if you're charging the guy in TX the same as the guy in NY, even though the sales taxes for those sales differ, then you can not claim the effect is the same as though you were the one being taxed.
Calling every burden placed on an individual by the government a "tax" is a neat distraction tactic. Why, I bet if we generalize every word's meaning enough, we can probably make it impossible for anyone we disagree with to say anything!
I think we are all aware that, based on how difficult it would historically have been for mail-order businesses to collect sales tax, the current legal structure is to put the burden on the buyer in interstate sales. I think we are also aware that this system does not work very well, and that when the justification for the system is ease of implementation it is perfectly valid to revisit that decision as technology advances.
As technology stands today, the government could with relative ease implement a system that would allow collection through the seller without an unreasonable burden. I bet it wouldn't take long for the system to pay for itself in more effective collection of taxes.
But fear not. As long as this isn't done, your state will get by without the lost revenue by simply raising the taxes they are able to collect. As long as you don't mind that ultimately you're paying a share of the cost to make up for lost taxes on your neighbor's out-of-state purchases, it's a great system.
"Guess what... EVERY tax falls back on the customer"
And in a transaction where I sell to a guy in New York, the customer is... the guy in New York. Way to botch your argument.
Do you currently collect sales tax when you make an eBay sale in your home state? Because by your logic, that would already be required even without the Amazon "precedent" you're worried about. (It's not the magic of being online that makes a sale exempt from collection of sales tax; it's being out of state.)
Legally it might indeed be required that you collect such tax on in-state eBay sales; I'm not sure how your state's sales tax law is written. But do you do it? Has anyone ever knocked down your door demanding you pay up on those tax bills? If not, then this sounds like a red herring.
More precisely, it's an orthogonal issue. Whether the rule should apply to out-of-state sales has nothing to do with whether the rule should apply to individuals engaged in private transactions.
"If New York State wants to block us Ebayers from selling our used games, videos, whatever from crossing the NY Border, I'm okay with that"
Too bad; the U.S. Constitution isn't. Again, your preferences aren't what sets the rules for being part of the Union.
"How is New York going to enforce this tax on us? Is the NY Militia going to cross three states (PA, MD, and VA) in order to come arrest me? That's called invasion"
Oh my God, you're right! Why, all anyone has to do to get by with committing a crime in one state is to hide out in a different state! Oh, except that's completely false as there is interstate cooperation in law enforcement. Your failure to identify the Constitutional mechanism for this happening doesn't change the fact that it happens every day.
"And finally taxation of a person who has no representation in the NY Legislature is non-democratic"
Good thing they aren't taxing you, as has been pointed out numerous times.
And you wonder why you get marked Troll.
"If I think New York's 8% sales tax is an onerous burden upon my business (i.e. excessive paperwork and reduced sales), there is no way for me to protest it."
Of course there is; you can refuse to sell there. But then, why is it any of your business? If the people paying the tax - those being the buyer - think an 8% sales tax is worth what the state provides them , that's none of your business. The fact that you would be called on as an agent to collect said tax does not give you a legitimate voice in deciding how high the tax should be.
You think every state's sales tax is a single flat rate? Good luck with that. Now it is true that it's a less-than-overwhelming amount of data, but if you haven't thought the problem through enough to know that it's not just a table of 50 rates, then you shouldn't be trying to estimate the difficulty.
A more serious issue is that any state can change its tax laws without any particular schedule or required notice. Realistically the states would have to be responsible for broadcasting this information in a mutually-agreed-upon form.
A system like that probably would work. Note that in my above quote, I didn't say "it isn't reasonable..."; I said "the supreme court doesn't consider it reasonable". With the modern state of technology, I think that's a bogus argument, but it is the current law.
You can't have it both ways. You're exactly right that they can't collect tarrifs because they're members of the Union, not foreign countreis; and thus your arguments comparing them to foreign powers trying to tax you are inapplicable.
The rules for taxation within the Union are set by the Federal government, not by your sense of fairness. The government says that they can impose taxes on their customers for all goods purchased and used in the state, so long as the tax isn't higher for goods from other states.
Which brings us back to the key point - they aren't taxing you. The debate isn't about whether they can tax you, it's about whether they can compell you to collect a tax for them and send it along in exchange for letting you do business with people who would owe said taxes.
Why should you be subject to the hassle? Because that's the price the state sets for doing business with them or their citizens. You want to sell to NY people, you help make sure they pay their taxes to NY. Not really that different from a corporation that calls MO home but employs people who are working in CA having to help CA make sure they get their state income taxes from those workers.
Currently the Supreme Court has set some limits around the degree to which that can be required. Since states can't regulate interstate commerce, they can't impose tarifs against other states; so I beileve that's interpreted to mean that their out-of-state sales tax (or use tax) can't exceed their in-state sales tax. And - the provision currently under debate - currently the supreme court doesn't consier it reasonable to expect a business to go through the hassle of knowing 50 states' tax laws; but that has absolutely nothing to do with representation in the state's government.
To your first question - if I were to guess, I'd say you're probably being marked troll by reputation. You've certainly make many specious arguments in the other threads I've seen you in, and so the moderators are probably not inclined to believe you could possibly be serious with this.
I don't know; I suppose you could argue for changing the rules on when a company has to collect sales tax to include (1) being in-state, or (2) having a business partner for whom you calculate in-state tax. What I don't think you can argue for is singling Amazon out and treating it differently from the general rule. If the rule is that it's presumed too burdensome for an out-of-state business to collect sales tax, then that's that.
Hell, let the states set up online services for state tax calculation and just require any business making a sale to use that service to calculate tax; then it's not an undue burden for anyone and you can do away with unenforcable use taxes entirely.
The argument about benefit from public services seems off to me; at most it would convince me that Amazon should pay in the 17 states where it is present, yet TFA seems to imply that because Amazon's argument is "disingenuous" that somehow supports the idea that they shoudl pay in all 50. A better counter is that the point is moot. If we want to talk about what the state is "giving" the company in exchange for the service of collecting taxes... how about access to the consumer market in that state? That seems like a fair deal; after all, what the company gains by not collecting the tax isn't the ability to legally sell at a lower price; it's the ability to give customers the opportunity to evade the tax. "If you're going to encourage law-breaking in our state, you can't do business here" wouldn't offend me one bit.
But this business about Amazon's motive for arguing the point... what difference does that make? Either the reason they give is a valid reason or it isn't a valid reason; whether it's the reason that motivates Amazon simply doesn't matter.
Yeah, two thigns.
1) Just because you weren't around to see the stupid thigns humans have done in the past, doesn't mean that they're somehow less stupid than the stupid thigns we're doing today. A vocal but very small minority could topple civilization, but not by means of self-destructive ignorance and worry.
2) The 2012 myth is not reaction to the movie; the movie is reaction to the 2012 myth. The 2012 myth takes many forms, and each of those forms have some elements that resonate wtih some people. The movie has magnified and publicized that resonance to a larger audience, although even so the vast majority do understand it to be fiction.
Don't get me wrong, I think the initial "this isn't a practical problem" response to the SSL reneg vulnerability is a serious mistake. A major facet of security is knowing what the system is doing; if the system is doing something unexpected that none of the legitimate users can anticipate, then there is a potential for severe security problems. This is one of the big reasons why I wish people who think "it works so I don't have to know why" would leave the programming industry and do something more suited to that way of thinking.
HOWEVER, the people who should be really embarrased from a security standpoint are twitter. Why does their API have a function that causes the user's password to be written to anywhere in cleartext?!? That's just bat-shit crazy. And as I understand it their workaround is to disable reneg instead of addressing the application-level problem? (If they'd done both, I'd say the response were at least on the ball...)
To be clear - if there's a feature of twitter that depends on writing out user credentials in cleartext, feel free to enlighten me; but my response will assuredly be "then that feature is not worth the risk and should not exist".
Something that doesn't seem to come through clearly in the above analysis IMO...
If a light water reactor is economical with $40/lb uranium contributing 0.2 cents / kWh, then a light water reactor could also be used with $400/lb uranium (from seawater) increasing the cost per kWh by 1.8 cents. Now, as cheap as that may sound, it could mean nearly 20%-40% increase in electricity costs if we assume all fuels are currently on par cost-wise; I don't see how to extract that with certainty from the provided numbers.
So not as good as the numbers with a breeder, but not nearly as bad as some scenarios we talk about with conventional fuels running scarce. It seems that if we seriously put light-water reactor deployment in gear, we'd be limiting the worst-case scenario to a 40% increase in energy costs.
That's without the political and practical security problems of a breeer. However, it is not without costs. Light water reactors do leave behind a lot of radioactive waste since they have a loose definition of "spent" fuel.
"Check the definition of "prohibit". It WAS around before the US used it, you know."
You didn't read my entire comment, did you? (Why am I bothering to ask; the moron posted AC so he/she surely won't bother to check back and read this...)
"Noncommercial sharing of copyrighted works is prohibited under the latest interpretation of copyright laws"
That's like saying that murder is a "prohibition law" because it "prohibits" killing someone. If that's what you mean by "prohibition law", then the term you're actually looking for is "law".
Incidentally, what is today called "noncommercial sharing" of copyrighted material was prohibited under every interpretation of every version of copyright law. The only thing whose interpretation has changed is the word "sharing" when abused in this context.
That's a bit of an over-simplification. It's true that if we hadn't stopped developing nuclear energy tech, we might have more fuel sources and we'd surely have more prodcution capacity (though the latter would only have been short-term cheap / long-term expensive unless the former panned out as well).
Fortunately, you are mistaken.
"More energy out than in" is not a goal unique to fusion. It is the goal for fusion because it describes every viable power plant. A gadget that doesn't put out more energy than you put into it isn't a power plant.
The only reason this isn't a violation of thermodynamics is that when we say "more energy out than in", we're not counting the energy bound up in the fuel we put in. The long-term expense associated with energy from a given source is the availability of the fuel. (A bit more complex than that for wind, hydro, solar - there it's about plant upkeep since the fuel is free but fixed in quantity for a given plant setup.)
Bottom line, we're using coal, oil, natural gas, and even uranium at a rate based on econimic viability (subject to politics and manipulation). We can produce X amount of oil at $Y/unit. Add some sort of fusion fuel to the economy, and what happens depends on how much of that fuel you can produce at $Y/unit or below. Of course, $Y is going to trend upward as long as we keep using oil (and coal, and natural gas, etc.).
If, as many seem to believe, we can figure out sources of fusion fuel that produce more energy than we need at (or maybe even near) $Y/unit, then there will be an energy revolution; but the cost of those new fuels will never be 0, so even though we might be able to produce as much as we have demand for, it will still cost and the investors will indeed get paid off in the process.
The hurdles are technical (and to some extent political), not economic.
Not sure I quite understand your last statement... I know of two meanings for "prohibition" that could be used to describe a law.
One usage would involve the laws that were actually called prohibition - banning of liquor. I don't honestly see how that's applicable to copyright infringement; I've heard this meaning stretched to include current laws forbidding recreational drugs besides alcohol, but it seems to me that stretching it any further than that bleeds into the other meaning...
The other meaning, of course, being 'a law that prohibits something', which can be shortened to 'a law' without any loss of meaning.
If your argument is that any unpopular law cannot succeed, I first refer you to laws against speeding - yes, some people speed regardless, but then many don't; and even the speeders go slower when the limit is more restrictive. So perhaps it depends on how you define "succeed".
Come to think of it, if the government were to decide that copyright infringement in the form of p2p music sharing were so common that it made sense to enforce it like a traffic infraction, things could get much uglier than they are today. But enough car analgies for now...
My second observaton would be, as vocal as the anti-copyright community is, if you take a look at the population as a whole you'll find that copyright isn't all that unpopular.
"It's complementary"
'What a lovely counterfeit'?
Academics can worry about which is the "real" problem.
In the real world we have to address which problem we can solve.
Hmm... from m-w.com, bribe : money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust
What exactly is the "position of trust" in which you envision these companies acting as they decide whether to use google's services? Not every case of "person X pays person Y to do something" is bribery, even if the motives are underhanded.
"You'd get more than bitchy people."
Oh, really?
"You'd have the Fox News generation in arms,"
That would be "bitchy people".
"Glenn Beck screaming on the television"
That would be "a bitchy person"; subset of "bitchy people"
"an A/O rating from the ESA,"
The rating system being nothing more than a way for one group to tell others what they think of the game, that would be - you guessed it - bitchy people.
"you'd have a de facto ban from retailers afraid of enraging a bunch of teabaggers."
Individual business would make a business decision about what products they want to carry? Oh, the humanity! Whatever; still just people being bitchy.
"In reality, it'd be the same effect"
Well, not really. You don't need retailers to distribute electronic media, and in fact many things are widely available - at the click of a mouse even - in spite of the fact that no mainstream retailer would even consider stocking them.
"order it from specialty online stores, but that's probably the same thing happening in Russia."
You think there are online sellers defying a government ban? I doubt it, but let's assume so. That means everyone playing the game in Russia would be a criminal, as is everyone who provided them a copy to play. You really don't see how that's different from having to buy the game from an online store (but then being able to buy and play it without being a criminal)?
Freedom doesn't mean that there's always someone making it convenient for you to get what you want. It means that if/when you do get what you want, provided it's within the bounds of your freedoms, the government doesn't interfere.