The basic premise of capitalism and market economy is if it's a necessity, then people will pay for it. It's "luxury" for the states to provide (kinda like farm subsidies—just because you are against farm subsidy, would anyone suppose that you are against farms themselves?), but because it is a necessity in the modern world, the private sector will provide for it, and often, better than the governments can.
Why do you think the best colleges in the nation are private colleges?
Or, at lower levels, why do charter school students and Catholic school (one of the largest groups of private schools) students perform better than public school students?
I agree with reducing the government to 5% of it's current size. Let's limit the government to:
1. Full education and healthcare for all children 2. Regulation of companies and financial industries to prevent practices that put our health, food supply, and economy at risk 3. Public mass transit (subways, light rail, bike lanes, etc..)
Did you pick the same 5% or was your 5% mostly concerned with sending money to Haliburton, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and Lockheed Martin?
You picked the wrong 5%. There are only two basic obligations that any government should have to its population: defend its borders and stop crime within its borders (with strict limit on what it can define as "crime").
And doing that alone (without all the contractors that's become necessary in our military interventionism) would pretty much exhaust the 5% (of current spending) allowance we should give to the government. There is no room in the government for such luxuries as mass transit or micromanaging of private firms (or bailing them out, for that matter).
I think I'm somewhat sympathetic to providing education and benefits for children (say, under 15 years), but even that, I think, should be classified as luxury—to be provided by state governments, if they feel like it and can afford it, rather than by the federal government.
OK, I hadn't considered that being more liberal might lead one to a career in science, but why not. I was hypothesizing the converse, that being a "scientist" made them likely to be more liberal than the average citizen. Perhaps due to education level, exposure to a particular subculture, something like that.
No, that's too broad a statement. The statement that I may agree to, as a grad student who agrees mostly with libertarian philosophy, is "being more liberal might lead one to a career in academia" (i.e. scientists in universities and national labs).
Since WWII, scientific research in universities has been heavily dominated by federal government funding (i.e. all those NSF grants), so it's natural that people who stay to do scientific research in universities wouldn't have problem accepting this government funding (which, as a libertarian, I would categorize as money stolen from people as "tax") and wouldn't have problem advocating for increasing the sources of these funding, i.e. tax.
People who would advocate smaller role of the government in everything, as it must be for a federal government bound by our Constitution, and people who would have the logical mind necessary for science, well, these people would see the contradiction in having their livelihood dependent on the government funding and advocating for smaller government and do one of two things eventually: i) get out of the career that imposes this contradiction on them; or ii) become a Democrat.
"Hate crime" is a blanket term for laws that regulate speech with the intent of suppressing racism.
Not just speech. It is also used to make sentencing heavier for violent crimes such as battery, assault, or murder, if the crime was supposedly based on racial hatred—as if it's wronger for a white man to kill a black man than it is for a white man to kill another white man, all other circumstances being equal.
Fortunately in U.S., in terms of speech protection we are not as completely overrun by statists as Europe (and U.K.) is, which is probably why these men wanted to be under the First Amendment protection (although not successfully). Here in U.S., you won't be prosecuted based on speech alone, unless you incite specific acts of violence against very specific people rather than general group.
Privacy aside, couldn't they at least use a platform that's better suited to long-term surveillance, such as a small (drone-sized), unmanned airship?
You mean like this one? Or wait, I guess you wanted a small airship, not a blimp the size of a football stadium...
When someone mentioned this kind of technology (spy blimp) potentially being used within U.S. border, I thought they were dead wrong, but I guess now I stand corrected. There are disgusting statists in California who will treat their own citizen like terrorists or enemies of the state in their own city.
The chap who designed the "appropriate zener diode, or transistor, or whatever" may well have had to understand avalanche breakdown.
Loads of stuff can be used with relatively limited knowledge, which is great; but that doesn't obviate the need for the knowledge of how they work.
On the other hand, there are such things as accidental discoveries. If I remember correctly, for the first few decades that we have been making transistors, no one could explain, from basic physical principles, why they work the way they do.
Nonetheless, people knew how to make them (i.e. how to dope the substrates in a particular way and combine them) and they knew how they would work. Knowing why they work that way was, well, simply not required, even for the people who took out patents on the device.
I believe this is still the way it works in much of chemistry and biology, where the subject matter is too complicated to understand from ground up so the best way to go forward is by trial and error—if you understand your results completely, great; if you don't, that doesn't mean you can't still use what you found out from the trials.
Only consume music that can be purchased directly from the artists themselves.
Well, if you are going to say that, at least provide a few places where you can either buy music from artists directly or donate to them directly.
At the moment, I mostly get my music from Jamendo, and I guess before that, I used to buy music from Magnatune, but I'm sure there are other good places as well.
Er, when did I say anything about there being no opportunity to the graduate students? I am no "student" of economics, but I did take basic high school economics. I know that, by attending graduate school in physics for 5, 6 years, I am giving up the salary I may have earned during those years.
However, what the GP claimed was that the international students actually *paid* tuition. All I claimed was that they didn't actually pay any tuition.
As real as opportunity cost is, it hasn't actually been actualized yet—for one, the courts won't let you recover damages calculated in terms of "opportunity cost" beyond wages lost (i.e. things that are absolutely for certain, not, e.g. wages that I *might* have earned)—and it's dishonest to talk about opportunity cost as if it's actual, real, already-happened cost.
As for the rest of your post, it's a baloney based on a complete misunderstanding of mine, so I don't think it deserves a response.
What the hell kind of contract with the DoD is only $6K?
There must be a typo somewhere. My travel grant to India this year is not too far off from that amount.
Or, if there was no mistake, that's probably the consulting fee personally paid to the professor himself (usually grants pay for grad students, postdocs, and equipments, not the professor's salary, although probably his travel expenses and such).
P.S. According to the AP article linked from TFA, "Roth, 71, testified at trial that he didn't believe he broke the law because the research had yet to produce anything tangible. He said he received only about $6,000 from the contract."
So $6k is the amount disbursed so far; there's no mention of how much was the grant itself.
at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers all because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
'Hate to pull you down from your clouds, but you are way off. First of all, none of these graduate students, at least in physical sciences, actually "pay tuition". Usually in one way (working as teaching assistant or research assistant) or another (grants and fellowships), they will not only attend the school tuition-free, they will also get paid living expenses. I should know, I'm one of these graduate students (although not an international one).
In fact, if it's a public institution, these foreign graduate students actually cost the department extra in the "out-of-state fee", because the department usually ending up paying for these (usually in the amount of $10,000 per year) which foreign graduate students have to pay until they pass their qualifiers (or some such mark which happens on the third or fourth year, if they are on track to graduate fast), whereas domestic students, even if they are not from within the state, would qualify for in-state tuition within a year. This is often used as a justification for having a higher standard for foreign student admission.
Also, if you want to argue about intellectual freedom, don't pull a double standard and argue against the whole idea of classified projects and all those informations that are supposedly too sensitive for taxpayers to know and yet cost them money. I might agree with you there.
Once you have accepted the existence of classified information, well, why should these foreign graduate students have access to these when most of the population with actual vested interest in this country cannot get access to this information, and not without going through some sort of clearance process?
It's easy to talk about "intellectual freedom" and "freedom of information" (BTW, none of these are fundamental rights protected by the Constitution, the way freedom of speech is, especially if you accept classifying information as being constitutional) when you ignore the reality, just like it's easy for liberals to talk about "spreading the wealth" and having a "safety net" that lets the unemployed live in luxury, as long as they ignore the realities of the real world economics.
When you are ready to come back down to earth and discuss in earnest with the limitations of the real world in mind, then perhaps your arguments will make more sense.
P.S. BTW, this isn't about the academia. This is about a defense contractor sharing information he shouldn't. Do you think Lockheed-Martin should freely share information about all the bombers and stealth fighters they build?
Yeah, but if you include the word "password", "admin" or in your tests, you usually get the answer in a lot fewer than 2^119 test keys.
The way AES algorithms are usually used, you are going to find very few passphrases that look like that. For one, it's not a hash algorithm so it's not used to obscure passwords (so no one would choose "admin"), and people who know enough to use it, i.e. for either loopback device encryption or even full disk encryption know enough not to use "password" for passphrase—at worst, they are going to use "passphrase" for passphrase.
On top of that, the implementation of cryptsetup in GNU/Linux (which is what people who use LUKS for full disk encryption mostly use) wouldn't even let you pick a password fewer than 20 characters (or was it 25 characters?).
So, if you test 100 "average" cases where AES algorithm was used, I would be surprised if you find even 10 where passphrases can be found by garden variety dictionary attack.
I've had to deal with sales tax in both Virginia and North Carolina. The truth of the mater is they don't want you to know what the current tax rate is because they make more money when they audit your small business and apply fines a couple years later.
I guess as it was once said,
"You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. Your fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system...that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be easier to deal with."
It is not the online retailers that are leaching, it is the people who buy from them and don't pay the tax themselves. Do you have any idea what a nightmare it would be for a small online retailer if they had to figure out what sales tax to charge on every transaction in every locality in the country.
The buyers are not leeches either. Do you have any idea what a horrible inconvenience it would be to keep a record of everything I buy online (and keep record of whether I paid tax on it already or not) so that I can pay a lump sum at the end of the year? As a resident of a state with one of those useless "use tax" (California), I can say that no one without an accounting department pays for those things or bothers listing it in the tax return.
The real leech is the state governments. Instead of curbing their excesses, they are trying to live off of those who do not rely on their so-called "services". As someone else mentioned, the only thing online retailers cost the state is infrastructure for roads and internet—and I am sure all the shipping companies and ISPs based in the state pay their fair share of the tax necessary for maintaining those infrastructures, if any, and the fair share for the out-of-state sellers and in-state buyers is zero.
By not having any particular roots, they can dictate the rules.
They are not dictating the rules. They were operating the rules in place when they started—states have no power to tax interstate commerce, and we have no federal sales tax (and I'm not sure if the federal government actually has power to levy sales tax; all I know for sure is that they had the power to impose tariffs and duties on imports since the beginning and they can tax income, after the 16th amendment).
They do have the flexibility to change the range of their operation, but by no means they are dictating the rules, no more than the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany (and the whole Europe) were "dictating the rules" of their living condition.
To the contrary, the United States was set up as a nation of laws and with the assumption that there would be taxes. There's nothing that excuses smugglers from the legal system.
And ignore the Boston tea party? Ignore all the opposition to the stamp act? Ignore all the sentiments that actually brought this nation into existence?
You are right that United States was set up as a nation of law with one supreme law of the land, the Constitution—but that supreme law was meant to restrain the government from hurting her people, not the other way around. In fact, if we undo a lot of damages to the constitution done in the last century, we shouldn't even have income tax—and at least around the time when they passed the 16th amendment, people felt strongly enough about the constitution that they recognized, under the existing constitution, the federal government had absolutely no right to tax personal (or corporate) income—just as NC has no right to tax an entity incorporated in the state of Washington (if they want to tax NC affiliates selling to NC buyers, well, do that—they have no authority to drag in Amazon or anyone else not in the state). These days we just "reinterpret" the Constitution and let the federal government ban whatever they want and regulate whatever they want, whether they are authorized by the Constitution or not (by the 10th amendment, if it's not in the Constitution, then the federal government cannot do it).
United States is definitely an anti-tax, anti-welfare-state nation (at least it was until the turn of last century). The "rule of law" that we are so fond of is meant as a restraint on those in power, not an iron boot upon the faces of the citizens at large (to which every private entrepreneur belongs, regardless of how rich he is).
Some other company in North Carolina, assuming they can survive under the tax, and assuming that they can compete with Amazon with retailer.
That's two very sketch assumptions there (and I wasn't being thorough)—if I had to guess, I'd say no one else will be able to fill that niche, at least not in a way that benefits residents of North Carolina, compared to the days when Amazon had business "in the state" sans tax.
I mean it's bad enough that the sound waves of my keystrokes are floating around telling people my password. Sorry to go all tinfoil hat on you there.
This is why I started using a password database like pwsafe. I generate the password randomly, and whenever I need to put the password in, I recall the password from the database encrypted with a master password. The password never leaves the RAM of my computer (and even there it stays only until I copy it out of clipboard or primary). I never actually see the password (esp. if I close my eyes while the password is being generated).
As long as this password database and the machines on which I dare decrypt it remain secure, all my passwords remain secure.
And you can ban it. At least in XFCE, it's a standard option whether to give newly created windows focus or not (I leave it on because I find that behavior more intuitive than a window popping up and me having to move my mouse over it to start typing in it).
If you can't configure this basic option in your window manager, well, maybe it's time to change your WM?
Right, because we've already figured out everything about cloud computing and it's a totally stable environment ready to be deployed in every company around the globe. Time to take it to the next step.
One might argue that this is one of the pieces we had to figure out before cloud computing could become more widespread.
After all, who would entrust third party computers to do the computation unless the confidentiality of data could be guaranteed? Projects that generate no profit such as SETI and other scientific projects apparently have no issue with this, but no company would ever use cloud computing in a commercial project without somehow ensuring that their data is protected.
No one's claiming that this is the entire solution to every problem in cloud computing, or even the last piece of the puzzle—but somebody is claiming that this is a solution to a significant part of the problem, and I frankly agree.
I assumed they were talking about a single particle, as in a single proton coming from the accelerator has enough energy to get through 30 meters of copper before it is eventually stopped, as that's the only case that makes any sense.
If you want time for that, it'll probably be close to 100 ns, for the particle that's getting through—if the copper itself is getting deformed somehow, that should take much longer, being limited by speed of sound in copper, not speed of light.
I think you misunderstood on whom "compulsory" applied. In actual compulsory licensing, I always understood "compulsory" to apply to the copyright owner, as they are required by law to license their work for these particular uses. Normally they would've been free to set the terms of the license—or not license their work at all.
Compulsory licensing trades rights and privileges of authors and copyright owners for more... freedom in use of their work for particular cases.
I guess what I'm saying is I doubt Doctorow's idea (which isn't all that new anyway) will ever work if copyright owners were left free.
And of course, this whole scheme is nothing but compulsory licensing, except without the "compulsory" part as required by the government.
I wonder if it would ever catch on without government action. It would be good if it could, but then, I don't know of any existing example of when it did.
However, they just have to make sure that good, decent citizens don't run into prostitutes on the street corner or while looking for apartments to rent.
Except, you know, if that's what they wanted, this is the very exact opposite of what they should've done.
The reason erotic services category existed at all is the same reason rants and raves section exists: so that all the filth has a single gathering place. Currently, only people actually seeking erotic services (i.e. in the erotic services category) see these ads, but when this disappears without a comparable replacement (for the new "adult services" section, I wonder who does the screening—Craigslist doesn't have any manpower for such task), these ads, especially the ones that are in legally gray area, will pop up all over the place, like in the "gigs" section or "community" section.
Without an actual erotic services section, it becomes even more likely for someone looking for apartment to rent or looking for temporary jobs or looking for some area events to come across a hooker advertisement.
But then, nobody said that police departments are known for intelligence or consideration of unintended consequences.
To clarify what I mean, Bush administration invented term because they had to.
They had to call these guys something, and they had to do something about these guys. Perhaps some of the things Bush administration did weren't the best they could have done in the hindsight, but then, no one claimed they were perfect.
To set the record straight, no American started "the craze". Some 19 terrorists did. What we did was by no means unprovoked—and, for some time, the world agreed with us.
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The basic premise of capitalism and market economy is if it's a necessity, then people will pay for it. It's "luxury" for the states to provide (kinda like farm subsidies—just because you are against farm subsidy, would anyone suppose that you are against farms themselves?), but because it is a necessity in the modern world, the private sector will provide for it, and often, better than the governments can.
Why do you think the best colleges in the nation are private colleges?
Or, at lower levels, why do charter school students and Catholic school (one of the largest groups of private schools) students perform better than public school students?
I agree with reducing the government to 5% of it's current size. Let's limit the government to:
1. Full education and healthcare for all children
2. Regulation of companies and financial industries to prevent practices that put our health, food supply, and economy at risk
3. Public mass transit (subways, light rail, bike lanes, etc..)
Did you pick the same 5% or was your 5% mostly concerned with sending money to Haliburton, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and Lockheed Martin?
You picked the wrong 5%. There are only two basic obligations that any government should have to its population: defend its borders and stop crime within its borders (with strict limit on what it can define as "crime").
And doing that alone (without all the contractors that's become necessary in our military interventionism) would pretty much exhaust the 5% (of current spending) allowance we should give to the government. There is no room in the government for such luxuries as mass transit or micromanaging of private firms (or bailing them out, for that matter).
I think I'm somewhat sympathetic to providing education and benefits for children (say, under 15 years), but even that, I think, should be classified as luxury—to be provided by state governments, if they feel like it and can afford it, rather than by the federal government.
OK, I hadn't considered that being more liberal might lead one to a career in science, but why not. I was hypothesizing the converse, that being a "scientist" made them likely to be more liberal than the average citizen. Perhaps due to education level, exposure to a particular subculture, something like that.
No, that's too broad a statement. The statement that I may agree to, as a grad student who agrees mostly with libertarian philosophy, is "being more liberal might lead one to a career in academia" (i.e. scientists in universities and national labs).
Since WWII, scientific research in universities has been heavily dominated by federal government funding (i.e. all those NSF grants), so it's natural that people who stay to do scientific research in universities wouldn't have problem accepting this government funding (which, as a libertarian, I would categorize as money stolen from people as "tax") and wouldn't have problem advocating for increasing the sources of these funding, i.e. tax.
People who would advocate smaller role of the government in everything, as it must be for a federal government bound by our Constitution, and people who would have the logical mind necessary for science, well, these people would see the contradiction in having their livelihood dependent on the government funding and advocating for smaller government and do one of two things eventually: i) get out of the career that imposes this contradiction on them; or ii) become a Democrat.
"Hate crime" is a blanket term for laws that regulate speech with the intent of suppressing racism.
Not just speech. It is also used to make sentencing heavier for violent crimes such as battery, assault, or murder, if the crime was supposedly based on racial hatred—as if it's wronger for a white man to kill a black man than it is for a white man to kill another white man, all other circumstances being equal.
Fortunately in U.S., in terms of speech protection we are not as completely overrun by statists as Europe (and U.K.) is, which is probably why these men wanted to be under the First Amendment protection (although not successfully). Here in U.S., you won't be prosecuted based on speech alone, unless you incite specific acts of violence against very specific people rather than general group.
Privacy aside, couldn't they at least use a platform that's better suited to long-term surveillance, such as a small (drone-sized), unmanned airship?
You mean like this one? Or wait, I guess you wanted a small airship, not a blimp the size of a football stadium ...
When someone mentioned this kind of technology (spy blimp) potentially being used within U.S. border, I thought they were dead wrong, but I guess now I stand corrected. There are disgusting statists in California who will treat their own citizen like terrorists or enemies of the state in their own city.
The chap who designed the "appropriate zener diode, or transistor, or whatever" may well have had to understand avalanche breakdown.
Loads of stuff can be used with relatively limited knowledge, which is great; but that doesn't obviate the need for the knowledge of how they work.
On the other hand, there are such things as accidental discoveries. If I remember correctly, for the first few decades that we have been making transistors, no one could explain, from basic physical principles, why they work the way they do.
Nonetheless, people knew how to make them (i.e. how to dope the substrates in a particular way and combine them) and they knew how they would work. Knowing why they work that way was, well, simply not required, even for the people who took out patents on the device.
I believe this is still the way it works in much of chemistry and biology, where the subject matter is too complicated to understand from ground up so the best way to go forward is by trial and error—if you understand your results completely, great; if you don't, that doesn't mean you can't still use what you found out from the trials.
Only consume music that can be purchased directly from the artists themselves.
Well, if you are going to say that, at least provide a few places where you can either buy music from artists directly or donate to them directly.
At the moment, I mostly get my music from Jamendo, and I guess before that, I used to buy music from Magnatune, but I'm sure there are other good places as well.
Er, when did I say anything about there being no opportunity to the graduate students? I am no "student" of economics, but I did take basic high school economics. I know that, by attending graduate school in physics for 5, 6 years, I am giving up the salary I may have earned during those years.
However, what the GP claimed was that the international students actually *paid* tuition. All I claimed was that they didn't actually pay any tuition.
As real as opportunity cost is, it hasn't actually been actualized yet—for one, the courts won't let you recover damages calculated in terms of "opportunity cost" beyond wages lost (i.e. things that are absolutely for certain, not, e.g. wages that I *might* have earned)—and it's dishonest to talk about opportunity cost as if it's actual, real, already-happened cost.
As for the rest of your post, it's a baloney based on a complete misunderstanding of mine, so I don't think it deserves a response.
What the hell kind of contract with the DoD is only $6K?
There must be a typo somewhere. My travel grant to India this year is not too far off from that amount.
Or, if there was no mistake, that's probably the consulting fee personally paid to the professor himself (usually grants pay for grad students, postdocs, and equipments, not the professor's salary, although probably his travel expenses and such).
P.S. According to the AP article linked from TFA, "Roth, 71, testified at trial that he didn't believe he broke the law because the research had yet to produce anything tangible. He said he received only about $6,000 from the contract."
So $6k is the amount disbursed so far; there's no mention of how much was the grant itself.
at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers all because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
'Hate to pull you down from your clouds, but you are way off. First of all, none of these graduate students, at least in physical sciences, actually "pay tuition". Usually in one way (working as teaching assistant or research assistant) or another (grants and fellowships), they will not only attend the school tuition-free, they will also get paid living expenses. I should know, I'm one of these graduate students (although not an international one).
In fact, if it's a public institution, these foreign graduate students actually cost the department extra in the "out-of-state fee", because the department usually ending up paying for these (usually in the amount of $10,000 per year) which foreign graduate students have to pay until they pass their qualifiers (or some such mark which happens on the third or fourth year, if they are on track to graduate fast), whereas domestic students, even if they are not from within the state, would qualify for in-state tuition within a year. This is often used as a justification for having a higher standard for foreign student admission.
Also, if you want to argue about intellectual freedom, don't pull a double standard and argue against the whole idea of classified projects and all those informations that are supposedly too sensitive for taxpayers to know and yet cost them money. I might agree with you there.
Once you have accepted the existence of classified information, well, why should these foreign graduate students have access to these when most of the population with actual vested interest in this country cannot get access to this information, and not without going through some sort of clearance process?
It's easy to talk about "intellectual freedom" and "freedom of information" (BTW, none of these are fundamental rights protected by the Constitution, the way freedom of speech is, especially if you accept classifying information as being constitutional) when you ignore the reality, just like it's easy for liberals to talk about "spreading the wealth" and having a "safety net" that lets the unemployed live in luxury, as long as they ignore the realities of the real world economics.
When you are ready to come back down to earth and discuss in earnest with the limitations of the real world in mind, then perhaps your arguments will make more sense.
P.S. BTW, this isn't about the academia. This is about a defense contractor sharing information he shouldn't. Do you think Lockheed-Martin should freely share information about all the bombers and stealth fighters they build?
Yeah, but if you include the word "password", "admin" or in your tests, you usually get the answer in a lot fewer than 2^119 test keys.
The way AES algorithms are usually used, you are going to find very few passphrases that look like that. For one, it's not a hash algorithm so it's not used to obscure passwords (so no one would choose "admin"), and people who know enough to use it, i.e. for either loopback device encryption or even full disk encryption know enough not to use "password" for passphrase—at worst, they are going to use "passphrase" for passphrase.
On top of that, the implementation of cryptsetup in GNU/Linux (which is what people who use LUKS for full disk encryption mostly use) wouldn't even let you pick a password fewer than 20 characters (or was it 25 characters?).
So, if you test 100 "average" cases where AES algorithm was used, I would be surprised if you find even 10 where passphrases can be found by garden variety dictionary attack.
I've had to deal with sales tax in both Virginia and North Carolina. The truth of the mater is they don't want you to know what the current tax rate is because they make more money when they audit your small business and apply fines a couple years later.
I guess as it was once said,
It is not the online retailers that are leaching, it is the people who buy from them and don't pay the tax themselves. Do you have any idea what a nightmare it would be for a small online retailer if they had to figure out what sales tax to charge on every transaction in every locality in the country.
The buyers are not leeches either. Do you have any idea what a horrible inconvenience it would be to keep a record of everything I buy online (and keep record of whether I paid tax on it already or not) so that I can pay a lump sum at the end of the year? As a resident of a state with one of those useless "use tax" (California), I can say that no one without an accounting department pays for those things or bothers listing it in the tax return.
The real leech is the state governments. Instead of curbing their excesses, they are trying to live off of those who do not rely on their so-called "services". As someone else mentioned, the only thing online retailers cost the state is infrastructure for roads and internet—and I am sure all the shipping companies and ISPs based in the state pay their fair share of the tax necessary for maintaining those infrastructures, if any, and the fair share for the out-of-state sellers and in-state buyers is zero.
By not having any particular roots, they can dictate the rules.
They are not dictating the rules. They were operating the rules in place when they started—states have no power to tax interstate commerce, and we have no federal sales tax (and I'm not sure if the federal government actually has power to levy sales tax; all I know for sure is that they had the power to impose tariffs and duties on imports since the beginning and they can tax income, after the 16th amendment).
They do have the flexibility to change the range of their operation, but by no means they are dictating the rules, no more than the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany (and the whole Europe) were "dictating the rules" of their living condition.
To the contrary, the United States was set up as a nation of laws and with the assumption that there would be taxes. There's nothing that excuses smugglers from the legal system.
And ignore the Boston tea party? Ignore all the opposition to the stamp act? Ignore all the sentiments that actually brought this nation into existence?
You are right that United States was set up as a nation of law with one supreme law of the land, the Constitution—but that supreme law was meant to restrain the government from hurting her people, not the other way around. In fact, if we undo a lot of damages to the constitution done in the last century, we shouldn't even have income tax—and at least around the time when they passed the 16th amendment, people felt strongly enough about the constitution that they recognized, under the existing constitution, the federal government had absolutely no right to tax personal (or corporate) income—just as NC has no right to tax an entity incorporated in the state of Washington (if they want to tax NC affiliates selling to NC buyers, well, do that—they have no authority to drag in Amazon or anyone else not in the state). These days we just "reinterpret" the Constitution and let the federal government ban whatever they want and regulate whatever they want, whether they are authorized by the Constitution or not (by the 10th amendment, if it's not in the Constitution, then the federal government cannot do it).
United States is definitely an anti-tax, anti-welfare-state nation (at least it was until the turn of last century). The "rule of law" that we are so fond of is meant as a restraint on those in power, not an iron boot upon the faces of the citizens at large (to which every private entrepreneur belongs, regardless of how rich he is).
Some other company in North Carolina, assuming they can survive under the tax, and assuming that they can compete with Amazon with retailer.
That's two very sketch assumptions there (and I wasn't being thorough)—if I had to guess, I'd say no one else will be able to fill that niche, at least not in a way that benefits residents of North Carolina, compared to the days when Amazon had business "in the state" sans tax.
I mean it's bad enough that the sound waves of my keystrokes are floating around telling people my password. Sorry to go all tinfoil hat on you there.
This is why I started using a password database like pwsafe. I generate the password randomly, and whenever I need to put the password in, I recall the password from the database encrypted with a master password. The password never leaves the RAM of my computer (and even there it stays only until I copy it out of clipboard or primary). I never actually see the password (esp. if I close my eyes while the password is being generated).
As long as this password database and the machines on which I dare decrypt it remain secure, all my passwords remain secure.
focus-stealing windows should be banned.
And you can ban it. At least in XFCE, it's a standard option whether to give newly created windows focus or not (I leave it on because I find that behavior more intuitive than a window popping up and me having to move my mouse over it to start typing in it).
If you can't configure this basic option in your window manager, well, maybe it's time to change your WM?
Right, because we've already figured out everything about cloud computing and it's a totally stable environment ready to be deployed in every company around the globe. Time to take it to the next step.
One might argue that this is one of the pieces we had to figure out before cloud computing could become more widespread.
After all, who would entrust third party computers to do the computation unless the confidentiality of data could be guaranteed? Projects that generate no profit such as SETI and other scientific projects apparently have no issue with this, but no company would ever use cloud computing in a commercial project without somehow ensuring that their data is protected.
No one's claiming that this is the entire solution to every problem in cloud computing, or even the last piece of the puzzle—but somebody is claiming that this is a solution to a significant part of the problem, and I frankly agree.
Yes, this smacks of the joke: "Don't steal. The government hates competition."
Government—especially Russia!—hates monopolists because, well, it wants to be the monopoly and with monopolists around, it can't be.
I assumed they were talking about a single particle, as in a single proton coming from the accelerator has enough energy to get through 30 meters of copper before it is eventually stopped, as that's the only case that makes any sense.
If you want time for that, it'll probably be close to 100 ns, for the particle that's getting through—if the copper itself is getting deformed somehow, that should take much longer, being limited by speed of sound in copper, not speed of light.
I think you misunderstood on whom "compulsory" applied. In actual compulsory licensing, I always understood "compulsory" to apply to the copyright owner, as they are required by law to license their work for these particular uses. Normally they would've been free to set the terms of the license—or not license their work at all.
Compulsory licensing trades rights and privileges of authors and copyright owners for more ... freedom in use of their work for particular cases.
I guess what I'm saying is I doubt Doctorow's idea (which isn't all that new anyway) will ever work if copyright owners were left free.
And of course, this whole scheme is nothing but compulsory licensing, except without the "compulsory" part as required by the government.
I wonder if it would ever catch on without government action. It would be good if it could, but then, I don't know of any existing example of when it did.
However, they just have to make sure that good, decent citizens don't run into prostitutes on the street corner or while looking for apartments to rent.
Except, you know, if that's what they wanted, this is the very exact opposite of what they should've done.
The reason erotic services category existed at all is the same reason rants and raves section exists: so that all the filth has a single gathering place. Currently, only people actually seeking erotic services (i.e. in the erotic services category) see these ads, but when this disappears without a comparable replacement (for the new "adult services" section, I wonder who does the screening—Craigslist doesn't have any manpower for such task), these ads, especially the ones that are in legally gray area, will pop up all over the place, like in the "gigs" section or "community" section.
Without an actual erotic services section, it becomes even more likely for someone looking for apartment to rent or looking for temporary jobs or looking for some area events to come across a hooker advertisement.
But then, nobody said that police departments are known for intelligence or consideration of unintended consequences.
To clarify what I mean, Bush administration invented term because they had to.
They had to call these guys something, and they had to do something about these guys. Perhaps some of the things Bush administration did weren't the best they could have done in the hindsight, but then, no one claimed they were perfect.
To set the record straight, no American started "the craze". Some 19 terrorists did. What we did was by no means unprovoked—and, for some time, the world agreed with us.