> At that point, you may very well be SOL, but as long as you aren't deliberately trying to fuck them over there is plenty of opportunity to solve the problem with minimal inconvenience.
Usually, yes, but not always. A correction, if you make a mistake on your return, is very easy to pay, and there's no substantial penalty--nor should there be, given the complexity of the tax code. But being selected for a tax audit is about as much fun as pulling a Phineas Gage, and sometimes things that shouldn't kick one up do--for example, if you have fifteen children, the number of exemptions you claim will almost certainly cause you to be audited.
Yes, to point out that a thing's technical impressiveness need not preclude its creation of terror.
Recording every voice in the crowd has significant implications for society. Some people will find those implications terrifying--especially people who distrust society because they have been intellectually threatening to often-foolish authority figures for much of their lives. Such people happen to hang out on slashdot.
> How come you get terrified by an array of microphones with an impressive spatial detection capability? The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects.
Well, why would anyone alive during the cold war get terrified about thousands of nukes that would effectively destroy the world? The thing is technically impressive; whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective and that person's tendency toward becoming terrified by mundane objects.
> What do they do, negotiate with the guy on the spot?
This is what firefighters did in ancient Rome.
They have a *very* strong bargaining position.
Realistically, what they should do is put a lien on the person's house, if they save it. They are preserving the person's house, it's fair that they get paid out of the capital. That also bypasses liquidity problems.
> Don't you have the right to remain silent, so as to not incriminate yourself? We have it here in the US.
No, we don't--at least not with regards to documents. Our documents haven't been protected by our right not to incriminate ourselves in... oh, a hundred years or so. Boyd v. United States, maybe?
Sort of. Individuals make campaign donations to get a voice, too.
Bribery vs. legislation is more about the target.
Although the point of the story is kind of silly... we've had phone bills for decades, for example, but we don't have [to my knowledge] a public web site showing the donor phone calls of each senator. And senators spend most of their time making donor phone calls, or donor personal contacts.
> Doesn't it seem wrong for the US gov't to be pushing private companies to censor the internet without due process?"
No--it seems wrong for the US gov't to be pushing private companies to censor the internet *with or without* due process.
Censorship is only legal in relatively narrow situations. Commercial speech that is not truthful, for example. (e.g. "100s of television stations for free" scams.)
Our argument about blocking prescription sites is basically a slippery slope argument--they'll block other things. It's true, they will. But it seems to me there's a more libertarian freedom-to-contract argument that most of the people on slashdot would endorse: buying drugs across borders should be legal. People should have to disclose where the drug is coming for, and maybe someone should have to agree that if they sell to the US, they are subject to US laws regarding their liability if they send the wrong drug or send cyanide instead of codeine. But when a consumer goes to an adequate length to show he or she really wants a drug, and it's not, for example, cocaine, why the hell shouldn't the consumer be able to order it from another country? Maybe it's not approved here yet. There may be good reasons for that. The consumer decides he doesn't care. That should be okay.
Or at least, that's the libertarian/freedom-to-contract/anti-paternalist argument.
(The counter is that it breaks down the entire medical regulatory system.)
> Anything not spelled out in the Constitution as a federal government power is a power belonging to the states... period!
Or to the people.
There's also the issue that state's rights have been primarily about one thing: slavery. Ever since the Constituional Convention, state's rights have been trumpeted not so much out of the purported aim of having local issues decided at home, or for the "states as laboratories" point, but to abridge the freedoms of honorable men and women. First it was slavery, then it was civil rights.
> I don't know what problem you think Discovery causes, but the lack of it would be far far worse.
The lack of it in *every* case might be bad, but in most cases, a very very limited discovery would be sufficient. Notably, in most business disputes, everyone has good records and all of the paperwork. In most other disputes, everyone already *knows* what happened, otherwise they wouldn't be in court. Adding discovery just makes the trial longer and more expensive, which increases the transaction costs of trials, which makes the justice system less accessible.
Make someone produce what they're going to use, unless they can make a good showing for why that's not sufficient.
Discovery is also something that's a pain to efficiency nerds, because it is so frequently an incredible waste of resources and duplication of work. Both sides paying lawyers to review tens of thousands or millions of the same pages, when ninety-nine out of a hundred times the case could be resolved the same way without the expenditure if neither side were able to do discovery.
You can get access to a huge amount of non-public data about the other party. It's called "discovery," and in civil cases you are supposed to turn over even things that will clearly make the other side win. (Nothing like the fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination applies).
That being said, the discovery requests theoretically are supposed to have something to do with the case. Depending on the case, FB information may or may not be relevant. But keep in mind that Judge's also don't *Want* to get involved in fights over discovery, as a rule, so if the lawyers can't work it out he might just rule against the party that is being the most stubborn.
Incidentally, discovery is a huge part of the reason our justice system is as bad as it is. It has advantages--makes it easier to go after a corporation that has done something evil, for example--but it makes going to court *a LOT* more expensive, which makes the courts less accessible to small and medium-sized businesses and to individuals.
> I hope this isn't one of those M$ style tests that find the bits that their own software does well and others badly and test that.
Although that can be a propaganda tool, there can be legitimate reasons for it, too: if you think about it, a company should find particular kinds of functionality the most important, and should stress those in both its browser design and its benchmarks. If two browser authors select different areas, then you'll have browsers that are good at different things--and benchmarks that reflect that.
Nobody honest says we shouldn't hurt a company because it will hurt shareholders. Companies *Are* liable for the damage they cause, usually--it's just that there are enough complexities and problems with our judicial systems that they can often get away paying less than the damage they produced actually costs. The other point here is that Oil Companies make a *lot* of money. Even if BP were to spend twenty billion dollars on cleanup, which is unlikely, BP would still be a *very* good buy on the market right now if you were holding for the long-term. This spill was preventable, and for that BP should have to pay more than the cost of cleanup--but even preventable accidents happen. The activity will still continue so long as it generates more wealth than it costs: that's the whole point of holding businesses liable for injury caused by their products or their workers. It internalizes the cost into the cost of the product, and if the profit generated doesn't offset the loss, then the business (in this case, BP's business) is a net loss to society under an economic model and should not continue.
We do say that shareholders won't be liable if the company goes bankrupt. Otherwise, there would be a lot more hardship and the economy would function much worse. But that mostly effects small businesses, and professionals who get sued--usually but not always illegitimately. The latter case is problematic--if you took away the liability shield, a doc could work for 20 years, not screw up but run into a jury that likes the patient who the doc couldn't help, the insurance company finds a way off the hook (which sometimes happens), and suddenly the doc and his family have nothing. The former case is problematic because it makes it much riskier to invest, which raises risk for *everything* that happens in the economy, and creates a domino-effect when bad things happen. Limited Liability is a kind of insurance that says negative externalities of a business shouldn't force the person trying to make a go of it to sell his house if the business goes wrong. He just doesn't get the money to keep making payments on his house, maybe.
Facebook is not secure. Facebook has servers in the US. The FBI can watch cleartext entering or leaving the country, pursuant to the border search doctrine. Unless someone comes up with a very good argument why that's unreasonable, and that someone takes the case to the Supreme Court. But it would have to be very good, because the First Congress approved border searches AND wrote the Bill of Right--so we know that they considered them "reasonable," and it's only unreasonable searches that are forbidden.
> Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
> I thought that was exactly what you should NOT expect.
No, and no. There is no expectation of privacy, but there is an expectation that your information isn't worth someone's time, usually.
But the thing slashdotters care about is whether there should be an expectation of privacy, and whether people should respect it. We tend to think the answer is yes, because we were all slightly unusual growing up, and we all had issues of one sort or another with some of the dumber authority figure in our lives, so we don't trust people in authority when they interfere with what we consider our sphere of liberal autonomy.
A lot of other people, even pro-government-monitoring people, feel the same way about privacy from third-parties. (e.g. the people who think GOV should have more wiretapping authority to find terrorists.) But there are fewer of those on slashdot.
Yes, we have too many laws and there are many things Congress should do differently, and some things that should be done at a state level so that states can operate as "laboratories of democracy" (i.e. evolutionary learning of the best approaches to societal problems). But the increase in workloads doesn't come from that, it comes from the fact that the number of constituents asking for help and writing to explain their views has gone way up, as has the number of constituents in each district.
>...they're trying to get 270% raises and to double the length of their terms.
We can't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing without a lot more information. If they're one-year terms, for example, that could be a problem because it intensifies the election cycle and the slave-to-polls problem--or it could be a good thing, if they're so corrupt that they routinely make horrible decisions as soon as they get into office, and you need to keep them in check.
Likewise with the 270% raises. Congress and the Supreme Court both operate with staffs that are too small do do what they should be doing. I don't know why the court does it--maybe just because it always has. But the Congress does it because it would be politically unpopular to increase their staff or office space. But the job Congressional staffs do has exploded in the last twenty years or so, (looking at the volume of constituent concerns they examine and attempt to reply to), while staff has stayed constant. The result is far less attention to each voter, more automation, more mistakes, and less responsiveness.
In the context you're discussing, a 270% raise may be politically unpopular, but it may make sense if the City Council is heavily underpaid, as compared to other reasonable Government salaries, given the work that they do.
> Slashdot is the culprit now, for pointing out where the data was to be found.
Philosophically, most of slashdot is against security through obscurity, so occasionally an article will pop up saying to everyone in the neighborhood "Hey, look everyone! These fifty thousand front doors are open, even though you might not have noticed driving by!"
I'm not sure whether it's because slashdotters want to incentivize fixing the system or whether they just want to point out how badly it's designed and implemented. (The latter is pointing to an absurdity, the former is sometimes a consequence of the latter, but the latter would also meet other instrumental objectives, such as mockery or intellectual interest.) Probably a combination.
> At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.
True. But at the time our nation was formed, it was formed in response to the problems with the lack of federal authority in the Articles of Confederation. We wanted a powerful central government. (Or at least the federalists did, and they won.) We wanted to limit its power--Virginia was particularly instrumental in that, IIRC--but we wanted enough government power that we would be one nation rather than the loose confederation of states with no unified foreign policy that perpetually warred with itself that we saw in the history of Europe.
It's also important to keep in mind that when we were founded, we were a nation of farmers and frontiersmen and traders in much smaller numbers than we have today, and in a much less complex system. (We knew less science. A lot of things were a lot harder, but a lot of things were also less systemically complex and less numerous.) The modern administrative state (FDR/New Deal/etc...) would be very hard to run locally, particularly without federal taxes. (Because without federal taxes, there's no wealth redistribution to deal with the problems of poor communities or individuals, and the more local the scope of the source of funding, the less egalitarian we are as a nation. Also, the harder it is to ensure against disasters that are local in scope, such as hurricanes or Detroit.)
> Also, empirical evidence is against you, with higher minimum wages actually triggering even more employment since (among other reasons) the lower incomes don't save, they spend.
Do you have a reliable source for this? It's odd, because normally raising a standard makes the supply side go down because of the increased cost. (i.e. when labor costs more, less labor is affordable.) Still, given the right numbers, the effect you describe could counteract that.
Slashdot Mirror
> At that point, you may very well be SOL, but as long as you aren't deliberately trying to fuck them over there is plenty of opportunity to solve the problem with minimal inconvenience.
Usually, yes, but not always. A correction, if you make a mistake on your return, is very easy to pay, and there's no substantial penalty--nor should there be, given the complexity of the tax code. But being selected for a tax audit is about as much fun as pulling a Phineas Gage, and sometimes things that shouldn't kick one up do--for example, if you have fifteen children, the number of exemptions you claim will almost certainly cause you to be audited.
At first glance, I thought the bug picture in the summary was for the IRS...
Yes, to point out that a thing's technical impressiveness need not preclude its creation of terror.
Recording every voice in the crowd has significant implications for society. Some people will find those implications terrifying--especially people who distrust society because they have been intellectually threatening to often-foolish authority figures for much of their lives. Such people happen to hang out on slashdot.
> How come you get terrified by an array of microphones with an impressive spatial detection capability? The thing is technically impressive, whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective, and that person's tendency towards becoming terrified by mundane objects.
Well, why would anyone alive during the cold war get terrified about thousands of nukes that would effectively destroy the world? The thing is technically impressive; whether or not it "terrifies" a certain person is about perspective and that person's tendency toward becoming terrified by mundane objects.
--
Ah, the dreaded comma splice.
> What do they do, negotiate with the guy on the spot?
This is what firefighters did in ancient Rome.
They have a *very* strong bargaining position.
Realistically, what they should do is put a lien on the person's house, if they save it. They are preserving the person's house, it's fair that they get paid out of the capital. That also bypasses liquidity problems.
> Don't you have the right to remain silent, so as to not incriminate yourself? We have it here in the US.
No, we don't--at least not with regards to documents. Our documents haven't been protected by our right not to incriminate ourselves in... oh, a hundred years or so. Boyd v. United States, maybe?
Sort of. Individuals make campaign donations to get a voice, too.
Bribery vs. legislation is more about the target.
Although the point of the story is kind of silly... we've had phone bills for decades, for example, but we don't have [to my knowledge] a public web site showing the donor phone calls of each senator. And senators spend most of their time making donor phone calls, or donor personal contacts.
> Doesn't it seem wrong for the US gov't to be pushing private companies to censor the internet without due process?"
No--it seems wrong for the US gov't to be pushing private companies to censor the internet *with or without* due process.
Censorship is only legal in relatively narrow situations. Commercial speech that is not truthful, for example. (e.g. "100s of television stations for free" scams.)
Our argument about blocking prescription sites is basically a slippery slope argument--they'll block other things. It's true, they will. But it seems to me there's a more libertarian freedom-to-contract argument that most of the people on slashdot would endorse: buying drugs across borders should be legal. People should have to disclose where the drug is coming for, and maybe someone should have to agree that if they sell to the US, they are subject to US laws regarding their liability if they send the wrong drug or send cyanide instead of codeine. But when a consumer goes to an adequate length to show he or she really wants a drug, and it's not, for example, cocaine, why the hell shouldn't the consumer be able to order it from another country? Maybe it's not approved here yet. There may be good reasons for that. The consumer decides he doesn't care. That should be okay.
Or at least, that's the libertarian/freedom-to-contract/anti-paternalist argument.
(The counter is that it breaks down the entire medical regulatory system.)
> Anything not spelled out in the Constitution as a federal government power is a power belonging to the states... period!
Or to the people.
There's also the issue that state's rights have been primarily about one thing: slavery. Ever since the Constituional Convention, state's rights have been trumpeted not so much out of the purported aim of having local issues decided at home, or for the "states as laboratories" point, but to abridge the freedoms of honorable men and women. First it was slavery, then it was civil rights.
> I don't know what problem you think Discovery causes, but the lack of it would be far far worse.
The lack of it in *every* case might be bad, but in most cases, a very very limited discovery would be sufficient. Notably, in most business disputes, everyone has good records and all of the paperwork. In most other disputes, everyone already *knows* what happened, otherwise they wouldn't be in court. Adding discovery just makes the trial longer and more expensive, which increases the transaction costs of trials, which makes the justice system less accessible.
Make someone produce what they're going to use, unless they can make a good showing for why that's not sufficient.
Discovery is also something that's a pain to efficiency nerds, because it is so frequently an incredible waste of resources and duplication of work. Both sides paying lawyers to review tens of thousands or millions of the same pages, when ninety-nine out of a hundred times the case could be resolved the same way without the expenditure if neither side were able to do discovery.
And look up "e-discovery" for related problems.
You can get access to a huge amount of non-public data about the other party. It's called "discovery," and in civil cases you are supposed to turn over even things that will clearly make the other side win. (Nothing like the fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination applies).
That being said, the discovery requests theoretically are supposed to have something to do with the case. Depending on the case, FB information may or may not be relevant. But keep in mind that Judge's also don't *Want* to get involved in fights over discovery, as a rule, so if the lawyers can't work it out he might just rule against the party that is being the most stubborn.
Incidentally, discovery is a huge part of the reason our justice system is as bad as it is. It has advantages--makes it easier to go after a corporation that has done something evil, for example--but it makes going to court *a LOT* more expensive, which makes the courts less accessible to small and medium-sized businesses and to individuals.
> Commence Star Trek references in 3... 2... 1...
How quaint.
> I don't think I have EVER maxed out the 4gb on my machine. Ever. Who cares about memory usage?
Yeah, but some people are windows users who like to switch between multiple demanding applications and one or more firefox profiles.
> I hope this isn't one of those M$ style tests that find the bits that their own software does well and others badly and test that.
Although that can be a propaganda tool, there can be legitimate reasons for it, too: if you think about it, a company should find particular kinds of functionality the most important, and should stress those in both its browser design and its benchmarks. If two browser authors select different areas, then you'll have browsers that are good at different things--and benchmarks that reflect that.
But the story is not six years old. The diamond is fifty light years away.
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is from 1967. The light they saw six years ago was from about 1954.
It pre-dates Lucy by about 13 years.
Nobody honest says we shouldn't hurt a company because it will hurt shareholders. Companies *Are* liable for the damage they cause, usually--it's just that there are enough complexities and problems with our judicial systems that they can often get away paying less than the damage they produced actually costs. The other point here is that Oil Companies make a *lot* of money. Even if BP were to spend twenty billion dollars on cleanup, which is unlikely, BP would still be a *very* good buy on the market right now if you were holding for the long-term. This spill was preventable, and for that BP should have to pay more than the cost of cleanup--but even preventable accidents happen. The activity will still continue so long as it generates more wealth than it costs: that's the whole point of holding businesses liable for injury caused by their products or their workers. It internalizes the cost into the cost of the product, and if the profit generated doesn't offset the loss, then the business (in this case, BP's business) is a net loss to society under an economic model and should not continue.
We do say that shareholders won't be liable if the company goes bankrupt. Otherwise, there would be a lot more hardship and the economy would function much worse. But that mostly effects small businesses, and professionals who get sued--usually but not always illegitimately. The latter case is problematic--if you took away the liability shield, a doc could work for 20 years, not screw up but run into a jury that likes the patient who the doc couldn't help, the insurance company finds a way off the hook (which sometimes happens), and suddenly the doc and his family have nothing. The former case is problematic because it makes it much riskier to invest, which raises risk for *everything* that happens in the economy, and creates a domino-effect when bad things happen. Limited Liability is a kind of insurance that says negative externalities of a business shouldn't force the person trying to make a go of it to sell his house if the business goes wrong. He just doesn't get the money to keep making payments on his house, maybe.
Table salt is sometimes calcium chloride. Maybe a submitter got confused about equivalence classes.
Facebook is not secure. Facebook has servers in the US. The FBI can watch cleartext entering or leaving the country, pursuant to the border search doctrine. Unless someone comes up with a very good argument why that's unreasonable, and that someone takes the case to the Supreme Court. But it would have to be very good, because the First Congress approved border searches AND wrote the Bill of Right--so we know that they considered them "reasonable," and it's only unreasonable searches that are forbidden.
> Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
> I thought that was exactly what you should NOT expect.
No, and no. There is no expectation of privacy, but there is an expectation that your information isn't worth someone's time, usually.
But the thing slashdotters care about is whether there should be an expectation of privacy, and whether people should respect it. We tend to think the answer is yes, because we were all slightly unusual growing up, and we all had issues of one sort or another with some of the dumber authority figure in our lives, so we don't trust people in authority when they interfere with what we consider our sphere of liberal autonomy.
A lot of other people, even pro-government-monitoring people, feel the same way about privacy from third-parties. (e.g. the people who think GOV should have more wiretapping authority to find terrorists.) But there are fewer of those on slashdot.
Yes, we have too many laws and there are many things Congress should do differently, and some things that should be done at a state level so that states can operate as "laboratories of democracy" (i.e. evolutionary learning of the best approaches to societal problems). But the increase in workloads doesn't come from that, it comes from the fact that the number of constituents asking for help and writing to explain their views has gone way up, as has the number of constituents in each district.
> ...they're trying to get 270% raises and to double the length of their terms.
We can't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing without a lot more information. If they're one-year terms, for example, that could be a problem because it intensifies the election cycle and the slave-to-polls problem--or it could be a good thing, if they're so corrupt that they routinely make horrible decisions as soon as they get into office, and you need to keep them in check.
Likewise with the 270% raises. Congress and the Supreme Court both operate with staffs that are too small do do what they should be doing. I don't know why the court does it--maybe just because it always has. But the Congress does it because it would be politically unpopular to increase their staff or office space. But the job Congressional staffs do has exploded in the last twenty years or so, (looking at the volume of constituent concerns they examine and attempt to reply to), while staff has stayed constant. The result is far less attention to each voter, more automation, more mistakes, and less responsiveness.
In the context you're discussing, a 270% raise may be politically unpopular, but it may make sense if the City Council is heavily underpaid, as compared to other reasonable Government salaries, given the work that they do.
> Slashdot is the culprit now, for pointing out where the data was to be found.
Philosophically, most of slashdot is against security through obscurity, so occasionally an article will pop up saying to everyone in the neighborhood "Hey, look everyone! These fifty thousand front doors are open, even though you might not have noticed driving by!"
I'm not sure whether it's because slashdotters want to incentivize fixing the system or whether they just want to point out how badly it's designed and implemented. (The latter is pointing to an absurdity, the former is sometimes a consequence of the latter, but the latter would also meet other instrumental objectives, such as mockery or intellectual interest.) Probably a combination.
> At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.
True. But at the time our nation was formed, it was formed in response to the problems with the lack of federal authority in the Articles of Confederation. We wanted a powerful central government. (Or at least the federalists did, and they won.) We wanted to limit its power--Virginia was particularly instrumental in that, IIRC--but we wanted enough government power that we would be one nation rather than the loose confederation of states with no unified foreign policy that perpetually warred with itself that we saw in the history of Europe.
It's also important to keep in mind that when we were founded, we were a nation of farmers and frontiersmen and traders in much smaller numbers than we have today, and in a much less complex system. (We knew less science. A lot of things were a lot harder, but a lot of things were also less systemically complex and less numerous.) The modern administrative state (FDR/New Deal/etc...) would be very hard to run locally, particularly without federal taxes. (Because without federal taxes, there's no wealth redistribution to deal with the problems of poor communities or individuals, and the more local the scope of the source of funding, the less egalitarian we are as a nation. Also, the harder it is to ensure against disasters that are local in scope, such as hurricanes or Detroit.)
> Also, empirical evidence is against you, with higher minimum wages actually triggering even more employment since (among other reasons) the lower incomes don't save, they spend.
Do you have a reliable source for this? It's odd, because normally raising a standard makes the supply side go down because of the increased cost. (i.e. when labor costs more, less labor is affordable.) Still, given the right numbers, the effect you describe could counteract that.
Also, we have fewer residential total bandwidth caps/lower cost-per-bit than much of the world.