So.... what are the reasons for 98.5% of the population not using Linux on the desktop? It's certainly not the price. Is it really all just catch-22, no users so no apps, no apps so no users?
Everybody wants the cool job of being one of the original coders. Nobody wants the not-so-cool job of actually maintaining it over the long-term, writing documentation for it, supporting it, etc. That's what often separates the OSS stuff from the commercial stuff, especially over the long-haul (and why companies are willing to spend extra money on commercial, proprietary software even when an OSS alternative exists).
I think that's very variable, there is a lot of proprietary code that happens to solve their one particular use case as long as you use it exactly that way, but if you want to use it some other way you can't. Open source is used by many different people with many different needs so you usually get flexible solutions. Like for example WordPress has become the most popular CMS because it can morph into almost anything. Linux runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers. Long haul you very rarely see a market revert back from open source to more proprietary once it's first taken hold, no matter how fantastic you make it.
I'm not sure this is accurate. If it were, why would anyone choose to be a maintainer, stuck fixing small bugs for years on end and having little to do with the movements forward?
Hardly anybody starts as a maintainer, it just creeps up on you. Like some years ago I was busy trying to get some games to work under WINE, filed some bug reports and found various tweaks to make them work. Since there wasn't a maintainer in the appdb, I signed up. And then it just became a habit to fire up the games when new versions came out, even some I'd grown tired of just to check that it was still working or if there were regressions, if the tweaks were still necessary and so on. Once they totally broke some games and I bisected it back to the commit and it got fixed. Maintenance is what keeps things working, you do it a little bit for yourself and a little bit for the public good.
Guys - when you've sampled the compiled, optimised binary output (with all debug info stripped) of a million coders all using different compilers on different architectures and are getting at least a 99% accuracy rate, get back to us. In the meantime, I'm sure you'll get some nice marks from your supervisors but I won't be losing any sleep.
I wouldn't call it totally useless, imagine you found an unknown binary running on some internal server and it turns out to be a custom inside hack job deployed with stolen credentials. Maybe you even know the thief must have physically been in the victim's office. You now have a relatively limited set of suspects, a binary and a lot of source to compare with. If we're talking classified information, industrial espionage or some other really high end material this could be one lead in the investigation.
Welfare Social security Unemployment benefits Disability benefits Minimum wage Healthcare support for low-wage earners (US medicaid, for example) Food stamps Parental leave pay Subisidized housing
BIC is so many things to so many people, it's hard to argue against every variation. But there's a few things I think is plain wrong: 1) We'll never accept that the single mom of three in a wheel chair after a traffic accident will be stuck for her entire adult life at the same income as the deadbeat high school drop out who wants to play WoW in mom's basement for a while. There'll be programs and requirements and bureaucracy and fraud. 2) If you give everyone BIC and remove minimum wage, like hell no people are not going to work for an extra $3/hour. If they do work it'll be black labor, that will be massively more profitable under the obscene tax rates required to support BIC. 3) If BIC is not enough to live by, the whole "simplification" is null and void because everybody needs to supplement it with something which will be just as complex as today. If it is enough to live by, nobody's going to work low pay dead end jobs eroding the tax base.
The main reason there are so many strange effects is that we have hard cut-offs. Thus you get situations like:
$0-19,999: $3000 $20,000-inf: $0 Earn one dollar, lose $3000.
If there were soft cut-offs like: $0-17,000: $3000 $17-23,000: ($23,000 - x)/2 = $3000...0 at 50 cent per dollar earned $23,000: $0 Then it just wouldn't happen. Every dollar earned is a bit more in your wallet. But it would require planners who understood a little bit of math.
Our economy depends on consumption. Local consumption to boot because another thing that is true for our economy is that it is highly dependent on the tertiary sector, i.e. services. Services are really tough to export. But also rather hard to import. Services are also the first thing people cut down on when money gets tight. For obvious reasons, if you're running out of money, what are you going to pay for, food so you can eat another day or the plumber to fix that dripping faucet? My guess would be that the faucet has to keep dripping for a while longer.
Sure. And if you had a magic well to pour funding into the economy that would be nice, but for the most part being able to put money into the economy involves pulling the same money out of the economy through taxes. The net effect is really to encourage or discourage savings, which can temporarily affect the total flow of money. That is to say in good times you want to encourage people to save excess capital rather than spend it and in bad times you want to encourage spending rather than savings. Which is why the main control is interest rate, if you get high interest you save more and low interest you spend more. Not everybody of course, but the fraction of the population who are in a position to choose.
The problem is that many politicians think the interest rate is the ends, rather than the means. If people have been encouraged for a long time to spend, spend, spend people are already at the limit of their spending. Those with money in the bank have already given up on bank saving and the ones living on credit knows another credit crunch will come and don't want to bankrupt themselves on "free" loans. You've outplayed the temporary measures and you have go back to the basics and create long-term economic growth. And that's a slow and tedious process that can't just be willed into existence by the law, but must be nurtured like a farmer tending his crops.
It didn't "work", it hasn't even had as much penetration as some offline pyramid schemes
Apples and oranges, they wanted an investment and were scammed. As an investment, Bitcoin might still end up being a scam. But if you just want to sell something for BTC and buy something else, it works quite well. It's easily traded to USD or some other "real" currency, you don't have to get bids on eBay and you won't get stuck with it. You do run a bit of currency risk but if you make many small transactions you'll lose some and win some, it's a quite okay facilitator of trade. If it's seen limited use it's probably more because it's entirely unregulated and unsecured and given the nature of the system if you're hacked or scammed or the exchange or payment processors vanishes in a puff of smoke or declares bankruptcy the cops are just going to say too bad for you, the money is gone.
If you think something is going to be worth a lot more in the future than today, you buy it. It's called investing. If you can't/won't do it in your own name, start a trust, get an accomplice and so on - it's not illegal because you're not under stock market rules, no such thing as insider knowledge or insider trading. I think I read that the first Bitcoin transaction was something like 25000 BTC for a pizza. That was the market value at the time, if you knew it was going to be worth $1000/BTC maybe you wouldn't have. So in practice, if they think they can pull it off all it takes is a few pizza's worth and you have a secret stash to get rich.
The alternative would be to offer the cryptocurrency through some form of IPO, where everybody gets to jump in at the same price. Of course then the question is why should anybody trade hard currency for a cryptocurrency you pulled out of your ass. Maybe if you used the pay-in to form some kind of fund that'd back the currency, I don't know. But Bitcoin really only worked because they were first and everyone was pulling in the same direction, everything since seems like "get rich quick" copycats.
x86 compatibility, perhaps. If they cram an Atom into a phone then when docked you've got a desktop PC in your pocket, with the full win32 back catalogue.
That is what I'm hoping for, they saw how Surface tablets/convertibles with ARM processors and WinRT tanked. The one reason to buy Microsoft products is compatibility with the vast, vast amounts of x86 software. If this is yet another ARM phone, just call it a Lumia. It's not a terrible brand and it's an established as a non-x86 platform. They've finally unfucked their brands, if they do it again by launching a new non-x86 product under the Surface name their marketing department should be fired. Out of a cannon.
There are kids around here who think nothing of hauling out a Plastic Card to buy a 50 cent Candy bar. Typically, a Cashless Society has a lot of hidden overhead, and those who promote the concept the most tend to benefit from that overhead.
Moving bits around is really, really cheap. In Norway almost all domestic transactions happen via the BankAxept part of the card, which is an online debet-only no-frills system owned by the banks that costs the store ~2 cents per transaction regardless of size. The only reason the rest of the world thinks 1-3% is normal is because VISA/MasterCard/AmericanExpress/DinersClub have tons of extras in forms of "free" credit, kickbacks, insurance and so on. That is far, far below the cost of handling cash, including but not limited to security, no chance of embezzlement and so on. In other countries, the stores hate plastic. Here most would go all-plastic the moment they got permission. And since we do chip and PIN and online there's Verified by Visa it's really hard to do fraud, most people like it too.
The other big thing in Norway at least is electronic billing (eFaktura), that may or may not include automatic payment (AutoGiro). Basically, instead of getting it in the mail it shows up in my online bank, both the specification attached as a PDF and you can simply say "pay this bill", you don't have to fill in everything. It's much cheaper, less error prone and there's no risk it gets lost in the mail, which saves a lot of frustration and late fees. I'm sure the businesses like it too as most people pay on time. Since you can set up limits and I'm notified every time, I've set most everything to just pay itself too. Rent, insurance, public utilities, cable bill, gym subscription, spotify, whatever I rarely have to do anything unless there's some error in billing.
Here on/. you might get the impression that this is some kind of unwanted change that has more or less been pushed on consumers. It is no more unwanted than carrying a smartphone pretty much everywhere we go, sure there's privacy implications but it's so damn convenient. Don't get me wrong, it's very useful to have cash in my pocket as a reserve just in case, but they're mainly collecting dust. Card, PIN, done. That is if I'm even out in the real world, if I'm shopping online then of course I'm paying online. And with hardly any effort I can log in to my online bank and get a break-down of what I spent money on, I can compare it to a budget and so on. Sure I could do that manually with receipts and spreadsheets but seriously, it wouldn't get done.
I think it's simpler than this, because the computer will never with 100% accuracy predict the future. For example, if there's an object in the road is it an inanimate object that dropped off a truck? Is it a child running across the road after a ball? Is it a wild animal that could run scared? And the manufacturer don't want any legal liability for making the accident worse. So I think even if it's 99,9% "change into oncoming traffic and it'll be okay" and 0,1% "giant manslaughter fuck-up" they'll default to just hitting the brakes, simply because it's the legally safest thing to do.
My question is, how in heaven's name can the courts tolerate this? By what twisted reasoning can such an obvious travesty upon the Constitution be allowed to stand? Surely at least one case has come before a court in which the judge ruled that the assets must be returned within 20 minutes or the sheriff has to lock himself up for contempt?
It has, all the way to the top and upheld. This is from the 1974 Supreme Court judgement, which is the start of forfeiture for drugs.
Appellants next argue that the District Court erred in holding that the forfeiture statutes unconstitutionally authorized the taking for government use of innocent parties' property without just compensation. They urge that a long line of prior decisions of this Court establish the principle that statutory forfeiture schemes are not rendered unconstitutional because of their applicability to the property interests of innocents (...) We agree. The historical background of forfeiture statutes in this country and this Court's prior decisions sustaining their constitutionality lead to that conclusion. (...) But '(l)ong before the adoption of the Constitution the common law courts in the Colonies - and later in the states during the period of Confederation - were exercising jurisdiction in rem in the enforcement of (English and local) forfeiture statutes (...) And almost immediately after adoption of the Constitution, ships and cargoes involved in customs offenses were made subject to forfeiture under federal law, as were vessels used to deliver slaves to foreign countries, and somewhat later those used to deliver slaves to this country. The enactment of forfeiture statutes has not abated; contemporary federal and state forfeiture statutes reach virtually any type of property that might be used in the conduct of a criminal enterprise.
Despite this proliferation of forfeiture enactments, the innocence of the owner of property subject to forfeiture has almost uniformly been rejected as a defense. Thus, Mr. Justice Story observed in The Palmyra, 12 Wheat. 1, 6 L.Ed. 531 (1827), that a conviction for piracy was not a prerequisite to a proceeding to forfeit a ship allegedly engaged in piratical aggression in violation of a federal statute: (...) But this doctrine never was applied to seizures and forfeitures, created by statute, in rem, cognizable on the revenue side of the Exchequer. The thing is here primarily considered as the offender, or rather the offence is attached primarily to the thing; (...) (T)he practice has been, and so this Court understand the law to be, that the proceeding in rem stands independent of, and wholly unaffected by any criminal proceeding in personam.'
Examples listed: Palmyra, pirate vessel (1829) Brig Malek Adhel, pirate vessel (1844) Dobbins's Distillery, production of moonshine (1878) Goldsmith-Grant, taxicab for moonshine (1921) Van Oster, car used by wrongdoer (1926) ... and a few more.
The worst is actually this part:
But in this case appellee voluntarily entrusted the lesses with possession of the yacht, and no allegation has been made or proof offered that the company did all that it reasonably could to avoid having its property put to an unlawful use.
And from the dissenting opinion:
(...) Moreover, the owner had included in the lease a prohibition against use of the yacht for an unlawful project. If the yacht had been notoriously used in smuggling drugs, those who claim forfeiture might have equity on their side. But no such showing was made; and so far as we know only one marihuana cigarette was found on the yacht. We deal here with trivia where harsh judge-made law should be tempered with justice. I realize that the ancient law is founded on the fiction that the inanimate object itself is guilty of wrongdoing. (...) But that traditional forfeiture doctrine cannot at times be reconciled with the requirements of the Fifth Amendment.
Why would our universe be special? Who is to say that "our" universe it not the only universe? And, in that case, special compared to what?
This universe? There's about 3.6 billion people (2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and a few Jews) that think all of Creation revolves around this planet and the human race, at least according to Genesis. We could start with the idea that Earth and humans aren't all that special first, before moving on to this universe maybe not being the center of the multiverse.
The reason is that while apt is a critical piece of infrastructure, incremental apt really isn't. The use case is that you're supposed to download a smaller diff, apply the diff and install the updated version either faster or cheaper if you're on a metered line. If you don't have a compatible earlier version, you have to use the traditional package anyway. So you can always fall back to that, it's only nice-to-have. The people on broadband don't care, the ones on really slow lines probably want their updates offline by some other channel. But for those who do care, usually around 56k dial-up speed or so it has mostly been solved by making modular packages that depend on a main package so you only update the parts that are needed. Incremental packages would be even more fine grained, but is of relatively little importance, which is why few people care and code probably hasn't been reviewed much for performance.
Simple answer: is the asset one that the actual criminal owns (or controls, in the case of leases or mortgages)? No? Then the actual owner - not involved in the activity - gets the asset back. Id even go so far as to say that assets of the criminal's immediate family are also fair game (trying to claim that a wife didn't materially participate or benefit from the criminal actions of her husband would be a stretch).
Ah, there's a funny one. There was a man arrested for soliciting a prostitute in their jointly owned car, which happened to be illegal in that state. The courts seized the car for being used in a crime, the wife sued to get at least her half of the car back and lost. I'm really not making this shit up, see Bennis v. Michigan, 516 U.S. 442 (1996) if you want to fact check.
its still censorship, its just legal censorship. they have the right to set the rules on their site that is 100% correct. but its not fair to claim its not censorship
I'm an atheist. I don't demand equal time with the priest in church, if they want a forum by Christians for Christians that's fine and I don't consider it censorship but don't call it public debate. It's when you've driven away all the dissenting opinions by forced registration, real name policies, labeling them "trolls" and moderating them away and still pretend that what you have is a public debate that I disagree. It's a sanitized, whitewashed debate where hardly anybody would voice personal information or opinions their family, friends, employer, landlord or anybody else would take offense from.
And not because they're doing anything wrong, if you interviewed one of the daughters of Muslim immigrants on equality of the sexes, hijab, forced marriage, female genital mutilation etc. I bet roughly 99% would give different answers under promise of anonymity than under full name, published for the world and everyone they know to see. Just because the government isn't going to throw me in jail over it, doesn't make free speech advisable.
It's probably true that you get more hateful opinions with anonymity/pseduo-anonymity, but I don't think there's any reason to believe they're less true. There's a saying at least in Norway "from children and drunken men you hear the truth" and I think that is because they don't think about consequences. The emperor's new clothes and all that. The only free exchange of opinion is the one free from consequence, the question is if you want to hear it or not. And the world is trending towards no, thank you.
Unfortunately, many assets are seized and kept without charges even being brought. Seizing assets should only be accompanied by an actual criminal charge (per the 4th Amendment), and kept by the Government only if a conviction is upheld (8th Amendment). Any other seizure and retention is patently unconstitutional.
That would be a start, but it wouldn't come close to solving the real issue. The real issue is if your property is unknowingly or unwillingly - assuming we give you the presumption of innocence - used in relation to a crime, does your private property rights go before the victim's or government's right to compensation. Like say you own a rental car shop, all is nice and dandy and the paperwork in order and you're not in any way being accused of being an accessory or accomplice to crime. But your car was used in smuggling drugs And for the sake of argument, we have convictions and confessions to that effect. Should the car be returned to you? I think most people would say yes. But the law says no. The cops have seized motels because of one guest. Taken the whole family's home because the son was selling drugs. Ceased a whole sail boat because those who rented it had one joint.
They built the law this way because there are items that are considered "close" to the crime, like pirate ships, moonshine stills or meth labs. It would get rather odd if the police had to return all the chemicals and equipment to make meth, short of the actual product. And the owner would of course rent it out again, not knowing to what purpose *wink wink nudge nudge*. The other part would be about seizing the profits of the crime. But rather than proving the crime and seizing assets in proportion, the way it actually works is that they seize all your assets and claims it's the result of a crime, you prove otherwise.
I have a friend who was nabbed for a small drug conviction, so much was true. Granted he was a little bit more than a user, also supplying a few friends that also liked the stuff though they never proved that but it crossed a size threshold that let them assume it was for sale. The cops pretended he was some sort of drug kingpin, stole everything he couldn't trace with paychecks and receipts to legal money. And when there's no lower limit on the items you need bookkeeping for, no statute of limitations and the courts refuse to accept anything bought with cash as genuine, he was well and truly fucked. They stole far, far more from him than he ever earned, it was grand theft and as far from justice as you can come.
Most people who file for bankruptcy often do so under forced circumstances and not reckless spending.
Depends on how you count the people living paycheck to paycheck, I guess. I know a few people who were never genuinely living beyond their means, and they weren't exactly poor and it wasn't frivolous luxury either but any disposable cash they had was burning in their pocket. They could have scraped together a nest egg but didn't, live today and worry about tomorrow when it comes. But how often do you really go through life without any unexpected loss of income or major expense? It sounds like you got shafted pretty bad and in excess of what reasonable precautions should cover. But I would argue that is not most people, many choose to live on the edge where a small push can knock them over.
Maybe I'm just being arrogant coming from a somewhat more privileged position, for me it's never been about making the next paycheck but more like an expensive momentary pleasure now is going to cut into the savings for major purchases like house, car and so on. Or how ridiculously expensive it is to pay 15% interest on a credit card loan as opposed to 3% on my mortgage, even though it means I could get it NOW NOW NOW. Then again I've had to do witness first hand people dealing with the social embarrassment of poverty, if I was in their shoes maybe I'd try to fake it too. But going by the number of non-visible to visible signs of wealth, I don't think that's the full explanation.
Nothing, if they're well-designed and ACID compliant, which journald is not:
It's rare that I choose to defend systemd, but ACID compliance does not mean you never have to deal with a corrupt database. It is a software technique to make sure transactions complete in an atomic, consistent, isolated and durable way but it still presumes a "perfect" system and if a bit flip happens in memory or on disk outside the programming logic then ACID will fail. That is why you have ECC, RAID1/5/6 and ZFS, but even they fail and sometimes you have genuinely "impossible" results like you've added $2+$2 to the account and the result is $5 (bit flip from 0x0100 to 0x0101). If you're using plain text and UTF-8 this can happen there as well, there are combinations that are simply illegal to use. You expect the parser to ignore the "impossible" and carry on, apparently that's what journald is doing too.
It's still a problem. The due process of law doesn't happen until AFTER the assets are taken. The due process is to happen before. Filling out a form is NOT anything like due process.
You also get your trial (due process) after your person has been seized (arrested), so I'm not really getting the basis of your argument. There's a lot of other things wrong with civil forfeiture, that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Actually, this whole asset forfeiture thing was an invention of George H.W. Bush's War On Drugs, but don't let facts get in your way.
If you're going to let facts get in your way, civil forfeiture was part of seizing naval vessels and during prohibition, long before Bush. But yes, the whole grabbing property without proving a primary crime was committed using it is largely a modern invention.
The same way having hundreds of friends on Facebook gives the illusion of popularity participating in hundreds of Facebook protests gives the illusion of activism. I think lazy activism is the wrong term, because that implies they're aware it's ineffective but can't be arsed to do more. It's more like homeopathic activism, the participants think it works but it is so diluted that the only result is a placebo effect.
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So.... what are the reasons for 98.5% of the population not using Linux on the desktop? It's certainly not the price. Is it really all just catch-22, no users so no apps, no apps so no users?
Everybody wants the cool job of being one of the original coders. Nobody wants the not-so-cool job of actually maintaining it over the long-term, writing documentation for it, supporting it, etc. That's what often separates the OSS stuff from the commercial stuff, especially over the long-haul (and why companies are willing to spend extra money on commercial, proprietary software even when an OSS alternative exists).
I think that's very variable, there is a lot of proprietary code that happens to solve their one particular use case as long as you use it exactly that way, but if you want to use it some other way you can't. Open source is used by many different people with many different needs so you usually get flexible solutions. Like for example WordPress has become the most popular CMS because it can morph into almost anything. Linux runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers. Long haul you very rarely see a market revert back from open source to more proprietary once it's first taken hold, no matter how fantastic you make it.
I'm not sure this is accurate. If it were, why would anyone choose to be a maintainer, stuck fixing small bugs for years on end and having little to do with the movements forward?
Hardly anybody starts as a maintainer, it just creeps up on you. Like some years ago I was busy trying to get some games to work under WINE, filed some bug reports and found various tweaks to make them work. Since there wasn't a maintainer in the appdb, I signed up. And then it just became a habit to fire up the games when new versions came out, even some I'd grown tired of just to check that it was still working or if there were regressions, if the tweaks were still necessary and so on. Once they totally broke some games and I bisected it back to the commit and it got fixed. Maintenance is what keeps things working, you do it a little bit for yourself and a little bit for the public good.
Guys - when you've sampled the compiled, optimised binary output (with all debug info stripped) of a million coders all using different compilers on different architectures and are getting at least a 99% accuracy rate, get back to us. In the meantime, I'm sure you'll get some nice marks from your supervisors but I won't be losing any sleep.
I wouldn't call it totally useless, imagine you found an unknown binary running on some internal server and it turns out to be a custom inside hack job deployed with stolen credentials. Maybe you even know the thief must have physically been in the victim's office. You now have a relatively limited set of suspects, a binary and a lot of source to compare with. If we're talking classified information, industrial espionage or some other really high end material this could be one lead in the investigation.
Welfare
Social security
Unemployment benefits
Disability benefits
Minimum wage
Healthcare support for low-wage earners (US medicaid, for example)
Food stamps
Parental leave pay
Subisidized housing
BIC is so many things to so many people, it's hard to argue against every variation. But there's a few things I think is plain wrong:
1) We'll never accept that the single mom of three in a wheel chair after a traffic accident will be stuck for her entire adult life at the same income as the deadbeat high school drop out who wants to play WoW in mom's basement for a while. There'll be programs and requirements and bureaucracy and fraud.
2) If you give everyone BIC and remove minimum wage, like hell no people are not going to work for an extra $3/hour. If they do work it'll be black labor, that will be massively more profitable under the obscene tax rates required to support BIC.
3) If BIC is not enough to live by, the whole "simplification" is null and void because everybody needs to supplement it with something which will be just as complex as today. If it is enough to live by, nobody's going to work low pay dead end jobs eroding the tax base.
The main reason there are so many strange effects is that we have hard cut-offs. Thus you get situations like:
$0-19,999: $3000
$20,000-inf: $0
Earn one dollar, lose $3000.
If there were soft cut-offs like:
$0-17,000: $3000
$17-23,000: ($23,000 - x)/2 = $3000...0 at 50 cent per dollar earned
$23,000: $0
Then it just wouldn't happen. Every dollar earned is a bit more in your wallet. But it would require planners who understood a little bit of math.
Because they didn't by the pro version and have to use the Microsoft account.
This is simply false. So far, at least.
Wall Street primarily cares about high-end, high-margin products like Apple. There's very little profit in the poor either way.
Our economy depends on consumption. Local consumption to boot because another thing that is true for our economy is that it is highly dependent on the tertiary sector, i.e. services. Services are really tough to export. But also rather hard to import. Services are also the first thing people cut down on when money gets tight. For obvious reasons, if you're running out of money, what are you going to pay for, food so you can eat another day or the plumber to fix that dripping faucet? My guess would be that the faucet has to keep dripping for a while longer.
Sure. And if you had a magic well to pour funding into the economy that would be nice, but for the most part being able to put money into the economy involves pulling the same money out of the economy through taxes. The net effect is really to encourage or discourage savings, which can temporarily affect the total flow of money. That is to say in good times you want to encourage people to save excess capital rather than spend it and in bad times you want to encourage spending rather than savings. Which is why the main control is interest rate, if you get high interest you save more and low interest you spend more. Not everybody of course, but the fraction of the population who are in a position to choose.
The problem is that many politicians think the interest rate is the ends, rather than the means. If people have been encouraged for a long time to spend, spend, spend people are already at the limit of their spending. Those with money in the bank have already given up on bank saving and the ones living on credit knows another credit crunch will come and don't want to bankrupt themselves on "free" loans. You've outplayed the temporary measures and you have go back to the basics and create long-term economic growth. And that's a slow and tedious process that can't just be willed into existence by the law, but must be nurtured like a farmer tending his crops.
It didn't "work", it hasn't even had as much penetration as some offline pyramid schemes
Apples and oranges, they wanted an investment and were scammed. As an investment, Bitcoin might still end up being a scam. But if you just want to sell something for BTC and buy something else, it works quite well. It's easily traded to USD or some other "real" currency, you don't have to get bids on eBay and you won't get stuck with it. You do run a bit of currency risk but if you make many small transactions you'll lose some and win some, it's a quite okay facilitator of trade. If it's seen limited use it's probably more because it's entirely unregulated and unsecured and given the nature of the system if you're hacked or scammed or the exchange or payment processors vanishes in a puff of smoke or declares bankruptcy the cops are just going to say too bad for you, the money is gone.
If you think something is going to be worth a lot more in the future than today, you buy it. It's called investing. If you can't/won't do it in your own name, start a trust, get an accomplice and so on - it's not illegal because you're not under stock market rules, no such thing as insider knowledge or insider trading. I think I read that the first Bitcoin transaction was something like 25000 BTC for a pizza. That was the market value at the time, if you knew it was going to be worth $1000/BTC maybe you wouldn't have. So in practice, if they think they can pull it off all it takes is a few pizza's worth and you have a secret stash to get rich.
The alternative would be to offer the cryptocurrency through some form of IPO, where everybody gets to jump in at the same price. Of course then the question is why should anybody trade hard currency for a cryptocurrency you pulled out of your ass. Maybe if you used the pay-in to form some kind of fund that'd back the currency, I don't know. But Bitcoin really only worked because they were first and everyone was pulling in the same direction, everything since seems like "get rich quick" copycats.
x86 compatibility, perhaps. If they cram an Atom into a phone then when docked you've got a desktop PC in your pocket, with the full win32 back catalogue.
That is what I'm hoping for, they saw how Surface tablets/convertibles with ARM processors and WinRT tanked. The one reason to buy Microsoft products is compatibility with the vast, vast amounts of x86 software. If this is yet another ARM phone, just call it a Lumia. It's not a terrible brand and it's an established as a non-x86 platform. They've finally unfucked their brands, if they do it again by launching a new non-x86 product under the Surface name their marketing department should be fired. Out of a cannon.
There are kids around here who think nothing of hauling out a Plastic Card to buy a 50 cent Candy bar.
Typically, a Cashless Society has a lot of hidden overhead, and those who promote the concept the most tend to benefit from that overhead.
Moving bits around is really, really cheap. In Norway almost all domestic transactions happen via the BankAxept part of the card, which is an online debet-only no-frills system owned by the banks that costs the store ~2 cents per transaction regardless of size. The only reason the rest of the world thinks 1-3% is normal is because VISA/MasterCard/AmericanExpress/DinersClub have tons of extras in forms of "free" credit, kickbacks, insurance and so on. That is far, far below the cost of handling cash, including but not limited to security, no chance of embezzlement and so on. In other countries, the stores hate plastic. Here most would go all-plastic the moment they got permission. And since we do chip and PIN and online there's Verified by Visa it's really hard to do fraud, most people like it too.
The other big thing in Norway at least is electronic billing (eFaktura), that may or may not include automatic payment (AutoGiro). Basically, instead of getting it in the mail it shows up in my online bank, both the specification attached as a PDF and you can simply say "pay this bill", you don't have to fill in everything. It's much cheaper, less error prone and there's no risk it gets lost in the mail, which saves a lot of frustration and late fees. I'm sure the businesses like it too as most people pay on time. Since you can set up limits and I'm notified every time, I've set most everything to just pay itself too. Rent, insurance, public utilities, cable bill, gym subscription, spotify, whatever I rarely have to do anything unless there's some error in billing.
Here on /. you might get the impression that this is some kind of unwanted change that has more or less been pushed on consumers. It is no more unwanted than carrying a smartphone pretty much everywhere we go, sure there's privacy implications but it's so damn convenient. Don't get me wrong, it's very useful to have cash in my pocket as a reserve just in case, but they're mainly collecting dust. Card, PIN, done. That is if I'm even out in the real world, if I'm shopping online then of course I'm paying online. And with hardly any effort I can log in to my online bank and get a break-down of what I spent money on, I can compare it to a budget and so on. Sure I could do that manually with receipts and spreadsheets but seriously, it wouldn't get done.
Well, you just try to find out what my real name is, and do send me an email to inform me about it.
Kind Regards.
J
Your name is Will Smith. I guess those props were a bit too realistic...
I think it's simpler than this, because the computer will never with 100% accuracy predict the future. For example, if there's an object in the road is it an inanimate object that dropped off a truck? Is it a child running across the road after a ball? Is it a wild animal that could run scared? And the manufacturer don't want any legal liability for making the accident worse. So I think even if it's 99,9% "change into oncoming traffic and it'll be okay" and 0,1% "giant manslaughter fuck-up" they'll default to just hitting the brakes, simply because it's the legally safest thing to do.
My question is, how in heaven's name can the courts tolerate this? By what twisted reasoning can such an obvious travesty upon the Constitution be allowed to stand? Surely at least one case has come before a court in which the judge ruled that the assets must be returned within 20 minutes or the sheriff has to lock himself up for contempt?
It has, all the way to the top and upheld. This is from the 1974 Supreme Court judgement, which is the start of forfeiture for drugs.
Appellants next argue that the District Court erred in holding that the forfeiture statutes unconstitutionally authorized the taking for government use of innocent parties' property without just compensation. They urge that a long line of prior decisions of this Court establish the principle that statutory forfeiture schemes are not rendered unconstitutional because of their applicability to the property interests of innocents (...) We agree. The historical background of forfeiture statutes in this country and this Court's prior decisions sustaining their constitutionality lead to that conclusion.
(...)
But '(l)ong before the adoption of the Constitution the common law courts in the Colonies - and later in the states during the period of Confederation - were exercising jurisdiction in rem in the enforcement of (English and local) forfeiture statutes (...) And almost immediately after adoption of the Constitution, ships and cargoes involved in customs offenses were made subject to forfeiture under federal law, as were vessels used to deliver slaves to foreign countries, and somewhat later those used to deliver slaves to this country. The enactment of forfeiture statutes has not abated; contemporary federal and state forfeiture statutes reach virtually any type of property that might be used in the conduct of a criminal enterprise.
Despite this proliferation of forfeiture enactments, the innocence of the owner of property subject to forfeiture has almost uniformly been rejected as a defense. Thus, Mr. Justice Story observed in The Palmyra, 12 Wheat. 1, 6 L.Ed. 531 (1827), that a conviction for piracy was not a prerequisite to a proceeding to forfeit a ship allegedly engaged in piratical aggression in violation of a federal statute:
(...)
But this doctrine never was applied to seizures and forfeitures, created by statute, in rem, cognizable on the revenue side of the Exchequer. The thing is here primarily considered as the offender, or rather the offence is attached primarily to the thing; (...) (T)he practice has been, and so this Court understand the law to be, that the proceeding in rem stands independent of, and wholly unaffected by any criminal proceeding in personam.'
Examples listed:
... and a few more.
Palmyra, pirate vessel (1829)
Brig Malek Adhel, pirate vessel (1844)
Dobbins's Distillery, production of moonshine (1878)
Goldsmith-Grant, taxicab for moonshine (1921)
Van Oster, car used by wrongdoer (1926)
The worst is actually this part:
But in this case appellee voluntarily entrusted the lesses with possession of the yacht, and no allegation has been made or proof offered that the company did all that it reasonably could to avoid having its property put to an unlawful use.
And from the dissenting opinion:
(...) Moreover, the owner had included in the lease a prohibition against use of the yacht for an unlawful project. If the yacht had been notoriously used in smuggling drugs, those who claim forfeiture might have equity on their side. But no such showing was made; and so far as we know only one marihuana cigarette was found on the yacht. We deal here with trivia where harsh judge-made law should be tempered with justice. I realize that the ancient law is founded on the fiction that the inanimate object itself is guilty of wrongdoing. (...) But that traditional forfeiture doctrine cannot at times be reconciled with the requirements of the Fifth Amendment.
One. Fucking. Marihuana. Cigarette.
Why would our universe be special? Who is to say that "our" universe it not the only universe? And, in that case, special compared to what?
This universe? There's about 3.6 billion people (2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and a few Jews) that think all of Creation revolves around this planet and the human race, at least according to Genesis. We could start with the idea that Earth and humans aren't all that special first, before moving on to this universe maybe not being the center of the multiverse.
The reason is that while apt is a critical piece of infrastructure, incremental apt really isn't. The use case is that you're supposed to download a smaller diff, apply the diff and install the updated version either faster or cheaper if you're on a metered line. If you don't have a compatible earlier version, you have to use the traditional package anyway. So you can always fall back to that, it's only nice-to-have. The people on broadband don't care, the ones on really slow lines probably want their updates offline by some other channel. But for those who do care, usually around 56k dial-up speed or so it has mostly been solved by making modular packages that depend on a main package so you only update the parts that are needed. Incremental packages would be even more fine grained, but is of relatively little importance, which is why few people care and code probably hasn't been reviewed much for performance.
Simple answer: is the asset one that the actual criminal owns (or controls, in the case of leases or mortgages)? No? Then the actual owner - not involved in the activity - gets the asset back. Id even go so far as to say that assets of the criminal's immediate family are also fair game (trying to claim that a wife didn't materially participate or benefit from the criminal actions of her husband would be a stretch).
Ah, there's a funny one. There was a man arrested for soliciting a prostitute in their jointly owned car, which happened to be illegal in that state. The courts seized the car for being used in a crime, the wife sued to get at least her half of the car back and lost. I'm really not making this shit up, see Bennis v. Michigan, 516 U.S. 442 (1996) if you want to fact check.
its still censorship, its just legal censorship. they have the right to set the rules on their site that is 100% correct. but its not fair to claim its not censorship
I'm an atheist. I don't demand equal time with the priest in church, if they want a forum by Christians for Christians that's fine and I don't consider it censorship but don't call it public debate. It's when you've driven away all the dissenting opinions by forced registration, real name policies, labeling them "trolls" and moderating them away and still pretend that what you have is a public debate that I disagree. It's a sanitized, whitewashed debate where hardly anybody would voice personal information or opinions their family, friends, employer, landlord or anybody else would take offense from.
And not because they're doing anything wrong, if you interviewed one of the daughters of Muslim immigrants on equality of the sexes, hijab, forced marriage, female genital mutilation etc. I bet roughly 99% would give different answers under promise of anonymity than under full name, published for the world and everyone they know to see. Just because the government isn't going to throw me in jail over it, doesn't make free speech advisable.
It's probably true that you get more hateful opinions with anonymity/pseduo-anonymity, but I don't think there's any reason to believe they're less true. There's a saying at least in Norway "from children and drunken men you hear the truth" and I think that is because they don't think about consequences. The emperor's new clothes and all that. The only free exchange of opinion is the one free from consequence, the question is if you want to hear it or not. And the world is trending towards no, thank you.
Unfortunately, many assets are seized and kept without charges even being brought. Seizing assets should only be accompanied by an actual criminal charge (per the 4th Amendment), and kept by the Government only if a conviction is upheld (8th Amendment). Any other seizure and retention is patently unconstitutional.
That would be a start, but it wouldn't come close to solving the real issue. The real issue is if your property is unknowingly or unwillingly - assuming we give you the presumption of innocence - used in relation to a crime, does your private property rights go before the victim's or government's right to compensation. Like say you own a rental car shop, all is nice and dandy and the paperwork in order and you're not in any way being accused of being an accessory or accomplice to crime. But your car was used in smuggling drugs And for the sake of argument, we have convictions and confessions to that effect. Should the car be returned to you? I think most people would say yes. But the law says no. The cops have seized motels because of one guest. Taken the whole family's home because the son was selling drugs. Ceased a whole sail boat because those who rented it had one joint.
They built the law this way because there are items that are considered "close" to the crime, like pirate ships, moonshine stills or meth labs. It would get rather odd if the police had to return all the chemicals and equipment to make meth, short of the actual product. And the owner would of course rent it out again, not knowing to what purpose *wink wink nudge nudge*. The other part would be about seizing the profits of the crime. But rather than proving the crime and seizing assets in proportion, the way it actually works is that they seize all your assets and claims it's the result of a crime, you prove otherwise.
I have a friend who was nabbed for a small drug conviction, so much was true. Granted he was a little bit more than a user, also supplying a few friends that also liked the stuff though they never proved that but it crossed a size threshold that let them assume it was for sale. The cops pretended he was some sort of drug kingpin, stole everything he couldn't trace with paychecks and receipts to legal money. And when there's no lower limit on the items you need bookkeeping for, no statute of limitations and the courts refuse to accept anything bought with cash as genuine, he was well and truly fucked. They stole far, far more from him than he ever earned, it was grand theft and as far from justice as you can come.
Most people who file for bankruptcy often do so under forced circumstances and not reckless spending.
Depends on how you count the people living paycheck to paycheck, I guess. I know a few people who were never genuinely living beyond their means, and they weren't exactly poor and it wasn't frivolous luxury either but any disposable cash they had was burning in their pocket. They could have scraped together a nest egg but didn't, live today and worry about tomorrow when it comes. But how often do you really go through life without any unexpected loss of income or major expense? It sounds like you got shafted pretty bad and in excess of what reasonable precautions should cover. But I would argue that is not most people, many choose to live on the edge where a small push can knock them over.
Maybe I'm just being arrogant coming from a somewhat more privileged position, for me it's never been about making the next paycheck but more like an expensive momentary pleasure now is going to cut into the savings for major purchases like house, car and so on. Or how ridiculously expensive it is to pay 15% interest on a credit card loan as opposed to 3% on my mortgage, even though it means I could get it NOW NOW NOW. Then again I've had to do witness first hand people dealing with the social embarrassment of poverty, if I was in their shoes maybe I'd try to fake it too. But going by the number of non-visible to visible signs of wealth, I don't think that's the full explanation.
What's wrong with binary logs?
Nothing, if they're well-designed and ACID compliant, which journald is not:
It's rare that I choose to defend systemd, but ACID compliance does not mean you never have to deal with a corrupt database. It is a software technique to make sure transactions complete in an atomic, consistent, isolated and durable way but it still presumes a "perfect" system and if a bit flip happens in memory or on disk outside the programming logic then ACID will fail. That is why you have ECC, RAID1/5/6 and ZFS, but even they fail and sometimes you have genuinely "impossible" results like you've added $2+$2 to the account and the result is $5 (bit flip from 0x0100 to 0x0101). If you're using plain text and UTF-8 this can happen there as well, there are combinations that are simply illegal to use. You expect the parser to ignore the "impossible" and carry on, apparently that's what journald is doing too.
It's still a problem. The due process of law doesn't happen until AFTER the assets are taken. The due process is to happen before. Filling out a form is NOT anything like due process.
You also get your trial (due process) after your person has been seized (arrested), so I'm not really getting the basis of your argument. There's a lot of other things wrong with civil forfeiture, that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Actually, this whole asset forfeiture thing was an invention of George H.W. Bush's War On Drugs, but don't let facts get in your way.
If you're going to let facts get in your way, civil forfeiture was part of seizing naval vessels and during prohibition, long before Bush. But yes, the whole grabbing property without proving a primary crime was committed using it is largely a modern invention.
The same way having hundreds of friends on Facebook gives the illusion of popularity participating in hundreds of Facebook protests gives the illusion of activism. I think lazy activism is the wrong term, because that implies they're aware it's ineffective but can't be arsed to do more. It's more like homeopathic activism, the participants think it works but it is so diluted that the only result is a placebo effect.