Does Piriform's request have merit? Do I need a lawyer? What is a good response to avoid any ugly situation?
No, maybe, no sure-fire answer. The first option would be to plainly ignore it, which is probably what I would have picked until I got any more formal but since you've already publicly acknowledged receiving it that's out the window. I'd probably reply:
"Your terms of service is an agreement between your company and your users, as BleachBit is not a party to this agreement we see no legal basis for your request and have not evaluated your claims further."
Most likely, you'll hear nothing and it'll go away but they can always send a lawyer after you, in which case you might want one too. But I think this answer should be fairly safe since the only thing you're saying is that you never agreed to any terms of service.
So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.
Is that the plural of anecdote being data? That huge survey that Google released showed that SMART warning signs was a good indicator it would fail soon, but most drives still failed without warning. Not difficult if 5% of your drives show SMART issues with a 50% chance to fail, but 95% of your drives look fine with a 3% chance to fail. And that was Google who mostly run their disks 24x7, for home users who power cycle their drives more often the usual failure mode is that they work fine until a reboot and never spin up again. To add my own anecdote, over the years the disks that have died on me with warning signs has been the exceptions, not the rule.
There's more to a hard drive than the platters. What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
And that's just the production, you still have the same costs on packaging, distribution, support, warranty returns etc. no matter if it's a 250GB or 1TB drive you're selling. I see the same thing here with for example broadband, there's a price floor just to operate a service to you no matter if the flow is a trickle or a torrent.
Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.
There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.
If you want more security, the best way is more copies. With HDDs you could have triple backups with far less effort than making one DVD backup set. If you have the bandwidth make multiple online backups, don't trust one backup service. Of course in theory you could have supervirus wiping all your disks and logging into all your backup services and deleting all your files, but that's why you have a disconnected HDD. And if you're robbed blind or the house burns to the ground they'll all go unless you've taken one offsite, but your online backups will still be there. The chance of both on- and offline backups disappearing at the same time is practically none.
Prices are already down and below pre-flood prices for 3TB HDDs, so I'm not sure what the fuss still is. Here's the price development on a Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB 6Gb / s, scroll down to "Full history" and you can see the whole history from pre-flood to today. The prices are in NOK so forget the absolute values but pre-flood it cost about 1000 NOK, peaked at 1700, returned to 1000 around Christmas and now it sells for 921, wiithout VAT that's about $135. Bulk storage has never been cheaper than now.
If there's no union contract and no law to protect teachers' jobs, then the employer can simply say "by showing up for work after __REASONABLY_FAR_IN_THE_FUTURE_DATE__ you agree to __NEW_CONDITIONS_OF_EMPLOYMENT__.
For things actually in the work contract, I've never seen that happen without a signature agreeing to the new terms. What happens when it goes to court and you say "Please provide proof I agreed to or was even aware of these new terms." and they can't? Things that are only company policies though can change at any time, the work contract just contains the very basics.
Depends on how it works, if it sends a list of installed software to Apple to check it's bad, but if it downloads a list of plugin signatures to disable because they're outdated and insecure that's not any worse or different than the antivirus downloading virus signatures. I don't see the privacy implications of that, would you elaborate?
android has more then 1 app store IOS and windows need to copy that.
Apple: Why? Microsoft: We'd love to get a cut of most app sales.
Why do we need app stores that make software 40%+ more expensive (assuming a 30% cut, to make $10 you must charge $14.29)? Can't people sell their own software like on Windows and OS X today?
This isn't true for any current compiler available under GPL, why would it be true for thier compiler?
Because it's been explicitly exempted. When you write something that's not directly 1:1 mapped to an machine instruction, the compiler will either a) link you with a dynamic library with the low level code, b) provide a static library with the the low level code or c) inline the low-level code directly into your code. That low level code is copyrighted and all of the above will make your code a derived work of that low-level code. I don't know if anyone has tried the "I compiled it against my own library stub and so it's not derivative of the GPL library, it just happens to work with it" but I doubt that would work in court and only if they solely use method a). Methods b) and c) would make their code part of your executable directly, for example the library loading code to load the other core libraries.
It's not the only form of programming, but it's a way of organizing the whole software and non-OOP tends to break that which is why they don't mix well. When I program in Qt pretty much everything is an object, objects have child objects and all the state, all the data is placed in member variables. It is fairly similar to a file tree, directories have subdirectories and files. Delete a file and it's cleaned up, delete a whole directory and it goes away, always and without exception no matter how much I refactor the code. Code that allocates something in one place and relies on clean-up code somewhere else either in the same class - except destructors that are always called, a different class or a global function breaks that analogy, I can delete a file and be left with dangling inodes and I'm fscked.
I think analogies like that are really important if you want human beings to wrap their head around what's going on. I can work with other models, like the "memory as untyped boxes" used in assembler or C. I find it easiest to imagine them as storage lockers at a station, they're all numbered and you better stick to those that are yours, you can ask for more but you'd better release them when you're done or you'll be "using up" them leading to an ever increasing rental bill - that is memory usage. It's a lot of micromanagement, no type checks, no object boundaries to easily see isolated parts and a lot of storage locker number math, but it's doable.
I also understand streaming programming, it's easiest to imagine them as massively parallel highways (yay car analogy) using road signs to split the streams - many of them dead ends so we continue with just a subset - and functions applying changes to anything passing through a stretch of the road. Ideally there's no state, input data just keeps flowing in one end and output data out the other. A good example is rendering, everything inside this triangle of points (x1,y1) (x2, y2), (x3,y3) should be colored red. You have a flow of pixels in, divert those inside the boundary and paint them red like in a drive-through car paint.
I also know that streaming programming is not the same as threaded programming that I do sometimes in Qt, where streams have many cars driving in parallel the threaded version is like having a multi-lane highway but with each car picking its own path depending on traffic. I can set off cars in one order and they come back in a completely different order and I have to make sure they don't crash or jam. In streaming programming you don't have deadlocks, livelocks or locking order issues, but here you do and there's a million different ways of solving this with mutexes and semaphores and synchronization to make sure nobody steps on anyone else's toes.
The trouble is stateless and stateful programming, synchronized and unsynchronized parallelization are all diametrical opposites, and the whole point of OOP is to abstract yourself away from the memory-as-boxes model. If you mix them it's like throwing all the colors of a painting kit together, you don't get a rainbow you get an ugly looking mess. Yet reality doesn't always fit into one of those cute little boxes so they all try doing a little of what the others are doing, but they always end up like alien little pieces. If I have to call C code with the new/free pattern from C++, I typically box it so it acts like a "proper" object that cleans up after itself. Because if I'm doing the OOP model, that's how I want everything to act.
More FUD. AMD's chips are full cores that just share an FPU/SMID unit, you do not need a FPU unit to have a core. Most CPU's made do not have FPUs to begin with, so nobody doubts those are not CPU's.
Nobody claimed they weren't CPUs, but nice strawman. The better question is whether one Bulldozer module is one core with SMT or two cores with SMP. Here's at least one claim to the difference between SMT and SMP:
Multithreading CPUs have hardware support to efficiently execute multiple threads. These are distinguished from multiprocessing systems (such as multi-core systems) in that the threads have to share the resources of a single core: the computing units, the CPU caches and the translation lookaside buffer (TLB).
A Bulldozer module shares computing units, CPU caches and the TLB. It doesn't share integer units and having an FPU is not necessary to be a CPU, but it is still relevant. Imagine if we're trying to determine if two twins are Siamese twins or not. If they had no legs, we'd still recognize them as twins. But if they do have legs and share a leg, then they are Siamese twins. Likewise a core doesn't have to have a FPU, but if it has one and shares it with other threads it's not a separate core.
A basic income goes to everyone whether they work or not. If you work, you get whatever you earn (less taxes) on top of the basic income. So, it is not the same as the current welfare system where you lose "benefits" if you work. That is one reason it is a much better idea. There is no explicit disincentive to work with a basic income for all as opposed to income-dependent welfare or unemployment insurance.
That is not the kind of basic income that has been suggested around here, it has only been about a guaranteed minimum income level but I guess all is possible if you tax more and pay out more. Your version of basic income would cost about 10x as much as the current social security budget and you want to tax it by taxing wealth but at those tax levels it'd be completely impossible to gather or sustain any wealth. It exceeds the expected return on bank interest, bonds, stocks, everything. It'd work for a short while people still have wealth to drain and then it'd collapse as there's nobody left with wealth to tax and nobody makes any savings or investments.
Nobody expected the EU rules to be less bureaucratic, but at least you're dealing with one set of rules instead of 27 sets of rules. I see all the special cases or rules our bureaucrats would like to make if EU would let them and going our separate ways would clearly have its disadvantages too.
Lots of reasons I'm sure, but not because they don't get basic income. If you're poor you'll probably keep working since the basic income is well.... basic. If you're filthy rich, it doesn't matter. It's the middle class who'll take the opportunity to not work because it costs them less. The examples in your essey seem excessively high, I don't know if you realized but nobody will work for minimum wage if you can sit on your bum ass all day and still make the same. If basic income was set at $20k, you probably couldn't need closer to $30k to get anyone hired as otherwise people would more earn more on basic income and use their 2000 hours worth of spare time to live cheaper.
I disagree. I think that anonymity just brings out the human condition in general.
Have you ever experienced in the real world that someone is being a total asshole seemingly for no other reason than being an asshole, just to show off who has power and is important or popular or rich and that you're not? Generally people only do that when it's free of consequences. Anonymity makes it free of consequences so finally people have an outlet for all that rage and bile, they can finally be the ones slinging dirt without retaliation. It's not the full person you see on the Internet, it's all the sides that's repressed in daily life which makes people seem excessively rude, bigoted, aggressive, selfish and arrogant. After you come home from work wishing you could have told your boss/client/colleague/customer to fuck off, it's very tempting to go online and tell someone to fuck off - just because you can.
Basic income will not happen any time soon, and the reason is people like me. I make pretty good money, I pay quite a lot of taxes and while I could possibly take the burden of a sabattical year myself the financial impact on the rest of my life isn't worth it. Give me a decent basic income and I'll easily take a year off for a double whammy to the tax system, not only do you not get my tax income you'll be paying me instead. The theory is of course that you'll get someone else off basic income to take my job and pay the same taxes I did, but I really doubt it's going to work that way in practice.
Touring is mostly meat grinder work, getting on location, getting all the gear in place, connecting all the equipment and sound testing, rigging down equipment, on to the next location or back home. The actual performance is not the hard work, or rather all the hard work behind it you'd have to do in order to record an album too. If you want to argue that producing great music without travelling around to play it is failing to cash in on it that's fine, but it's not quick or easy. I know a few musicians and it's practice, practice, practice, both solo and with the band - you think sounding that good comes for free even if you have talent? It doesn't. And not everyone can or will spend most of the year on the road, even if they're willing to work 2000+ a year on their music. What they can offer is to create music, if the market puts any value on that. Or not, it's a free market.
The radio plays it for free, go cry somewhere else
The radio doesn't play the songs you want when you want to hear them, even if you have a zillion channels you still have to zap through them trying to find something good. The radio was never a replacement for buying CDs but most people I know who subscribe to music services do that instead of buying CDs. I've never been to a party where we listen to the radio (no really, tapes, CDs, MP3s, but never radio), but I've been to many parties where they use Spotify or something similar. The biggest issue for the subscription services is that they're like an all-you-can-eat buffet with very different appetites. The people who used to use thousands don't and yet the average person is only so music interested compared to all the other forms of entertainment that are easily available.
So if a disgruntled Microsoft employee decided to upload the Windows source code to Mega, they'd lose all copyright on it? I don't think that's how the law works, no matter what the terms of service says he's not authorized to sign that away. And if you try going after only authorized attack dogs then worst case they'll turn on whatever cyber thugs they hired and claim they overstepped their bounds had no right to upload that to Mega, but as the copyright holder they're not going to sue for damages so all that leaves Mega with is a terms of service breach by the cyber thugs. It's a bit the same as GPL violation, you can ask for source as a settlement but you can never force them to release the source. You can sue them for statutory or actual damages, but then you "only" get cash.
You're confusing two very different concepts, you can have a chess grandmaster try to implement his logic - it's pretty hard for humans to actually express how they're thinking - which would indeed be very complex but the computer is just crunching numbers, if there's a flaw in that logic it'll lose the same way every time. The other extreme is to create an application that doesn't have any rules, but that rewrites itself finding its own metrics and algorithms to play by - that could find ways to evaluate play the programmer didn't know anything about. By that I don't mean that it could calculate moves faster but that it could potentially play fundamentally *better* than the person who developed it.
That does sound interesting for corporations that want to entice their employees into carrying a corporate device at all times because it doubles well as their private phone, but I don't get the BYOD angle. I don't care one whiff about the business capabilities of my private phone, either the company offers mobile connectivity on it or they can give me a business - and business only - phone at their expense. I don't ever see me buying a BB phone because they like the separate profiles and other "geared for business" features. That smells more like buy your own work tools.
Technically correct but actually wrong. Since intelligence falls on a normal distribution, the mean and median end up being the same.
It doesn't fall on a normal distribution, it is normalized to give an IQ score. It's like taking the time on the 100m dash and say "You run faster than X% of the population", but it doesn't say how fast you run relative to anyone else or how quickly you'd move up or down the list of results. The reason is that we can order people by how much they answer correctly but we have no objective measure of how much smarter they had to be in order to do it.
If proxy services are classified as service providers, expect that laws regarding logging and auditing be ramped up. Every TCP connection you make will be saved and stored for a long time
With some fairly basic mixmaster techniques that will be useless as you can't tell which data belongs to which encrypted stream. Your node has 100 connections in, 100 connections out and they all look just the same. You will have to outlaw it, you can not prevent it even with massive ISP level logging.
You are trying to technically fix a broken law, that won't work. In Germany, someone allready got sued (successfully) for "relaying" a file via retroshare....
But mostly due to a PEBCAK problem trying to use a F2F network as a P2P network.
RetroShare derives its security from the fact that all transfers go through "trusted friends" who users themselves add. In this case, the defendant added the anti-piracy monitoring company as a friend, which allowed him to be "caught."
Besides Germany is fairly special in that they've made you liable for what other people are sharing over your WiFi as well. And none of it would matter if you use it as designed, sharing with friends who share with their friends who share with their friends, six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that. If you're going to connect to random peers, there's already something much better called BitTorrent for that. RetroShare is not TOR or Freenet protecting you from the nodes closest to you, it just hopes to be an impenetrable mass of friends that doesn't talk to any anti-piracy nodes. Quite importantly the only person harmed by adding the anti-piracy company was the fool himself.
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Does Piriform's request have merit? Do I need a lawyer? What is a good response to avoid any ugly situation?
No, maybe, no sure-fire answer. The first option would be to plainly ignore it, which is probably what I would have picked until I got any more formal but since you've already publicly acknowledged receiving it that's out the window. I'd probably reply:
"Your terms of service is an agreement between your company and your users, as BleachBit is not a party to this agreement we see no legal basis for your request and have not evaluated your claims further."
Most likely, you'll hear nothing and it'll go away but they can always send a lawyer after you, in which case you might want one too. But I think this answer should be fairly safe since the only thing you're saying is that you never agreed to any terms of service.
So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.
Is that the plural of anecdote being data? That huge survey that Google released showed that SMART warning signs was a good indicator it would fail soon, but most drives still failed without warning. Not difficult if 5% of your drives show SMART issues with a 50% chance to fail, but 95% of your drives look fine with a 3% chance to fail. And that was Google who mostly run their disks 24x7, for home users who power cycle their drives more often the usual failure mode is that they work fine until a reboot and never spin up again. To add my own anecdote, over the years the disks that have died on me with warning signs has been the exceptions, not the rule.
There's more to a hard drive than the platters. What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
And that's just the production, you still have the same costs on packaging, distribution, support, warranty returns etc. no matter if it's a 250GB or 1TB drive you're selling. I see the same thing here with for example broadband, there's a price floor just to operate a service to you no matter if the flow is a trickle or a torrent.
Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.
There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.
If you want more security, the best way is more copies. With HDDs you could have triple backups with far less effort than making one DVD backup set. If you have the bandwidth make multiple online backups, don't trust one backup service. Of course in theory you could have supervirus wiping all your disks and logging into all your backup services and deleting all your files, but that's why you have a disconnected HDD. And if you're robbed blind or the house burns to the ground they'll all go unless you've taken one offsite, but your online backups will still be there. The chance of both on- and offline backups disappearing at the same time is practically none.
Prices are already down and below pre-flood prices for 3TB HDDs, so I'm not sure what the fuss still is. Here's the price development on a Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB 6Gb / s, scroll down to "Full history" and you can see the whole history from pre-flood to today. The prices are in NOK so forget the absolute values but pre-flood it cost about 1000 NOK, peaked at 1700, returned to 1000 around Christmas and now it sells for 921, wiithout VAT that's about $135. Bulk storage has never been cheaper than now.
If there's no union contract and no law to protect teachers' jobs, then the employer can simply say "by showing up for work after __REASONABLY_FAR_IN_THE_FUTURE_DATE__ you agree to __NEW_CONDITIONS_OF_EMPLOYMENT__.
For things actually in the work contract, I've never seen that happen without a signature agreeing to the new terms. What happens when it goes to court and you say "Please provide proof I agreed to or was even aware of these new terms." and they can't? Things that are only company policies though can change at any time, the work contract just contains the very basics.
Depends on how it works, if it sends a list of installed software to Apple to check it's bad, but if it downloads a list of plugin signatures to disable because they're outdated and insecure that's not any worse or different than the antivirus downloading virus signatures. I don't see the privacy implications of that, would you elaborate?
I think they just proved that 0.33*0.33 = 0.10.
android has more then 1 app store IOS and windows need to copy that.
Apple: Why?
Microsoft: We'd love to get a cut of most app sales.
Why do we need app stores that make software 40%+ more expensive (assuming a 30% cut, to make $10 you must charge $14.29)? Can't people sell their own software like on Windows and OS X today?
This isn't true for any current compiler available under GPL, why would it be true for thier compiler?
Because it's been explicitly exempted. When you write something that's not directly 1:1 mapped to an machine instruction, the compiler will either a) link you with a dynamic library with the low level code, b) provide a static library with the the low level code or c) inline the low-level code directly into your code. That low level code is copyrighted and all of the above will make your code a derived work of that low-level code. I don't know if anyone has tried the "I compiled it against my own library stub and so it's not derivative of the GPL library, it just happens to work with it" but I doubt that would work in court and only if they solely use method a). Methods b) and c) would make their code part of your executable directly, for example the library loading code to load the other core libraries.
It's not the only form of programming, but it's a way of organizing the whole software and non-OOP tends to break that which is why they don't mix well. When I program in Qt pretty much everything is an object, objects have child objects and all the state, all the data is placed in member variables. It is fairly similar to a file tree, directories have subdirectories and files. Delete a file and it's cleaned up, delete a whole directory and it goes away, always and without exception no matter how much I refactor the code. Code that allocates something in one place and relies on clean-up code somewhere else either in the same class - except destructors that are always called, a different class or a global function breaks that analogy, I can delete a file and be left with dangling inodes and I'm fscked.
I think analogies like that are really important if you want human beings to wrap their head around what's going on. I can work with other models, like the "memory as untyped boxes" used in assembler or C. I find it easiest to imagine them as storage lockers at a station, they're all numbered and you better stick to those that are yours, you can ask for more but you'd better release them when you're done or you'll be "using up" them leading to an ever increasing rental bill - that is memory usage. It's a lot of micromanagement, no type checks, no object boundaries to easily see isolated parts and a lot of storage locker number math, but it's doable.
I also understand streaming programming, it's easiest to imagine them as massively parallel highways (yay car analogy) using road signs to split the streams - many of them dead ends so we continue with just a subset - and functions applying changes to anything passing through a stretch of the road. Ideally there's no state, input data just keeps flowing in one end and output data out the other. A good example is rendering, everything inside this triangle of points (x1,y1) (x2, y2), (x3,y3) should be colored red. You have a flow of pixels in, divert those inside the boundary and paint them red like in a drive-through car paint.
I also know that streaming programming is not the same as threaded programming that I do sometimes in Qt, where streams have many cars driving in parallel the threaded version is like having a multi-lane highway but with each car picking its own path depending on traffic. I can set off cars in one order and they come back in a completely different order and I have to make sure they don't crash or jam. In streaming programming you don't have deadlocks, livelocks or locking order issues, but here you do and there's a million different ways of solving this with mutexes and semaphores and synchronization to make sure nobody steps on anyone else's toes.
The trouble is stateless and stateful programming, synchronized and unsynchronized parallelization are all diametrical opposites, and the whole point of OOP is to abstract yourself away from the memory-as-boxes model. If you mix them it's like throwing all the colors of a painting kit together, you don't get a rainbow you get an ugly looking mess. Yet reality doesn't always fit into one of those cute little boxes so they all try doing a little of what the others are doing, but they always end up like alien little pieces. If I have to call C code with the new/free pattern from C++, I typically box it so it acts like a "proper" object that cleans up after itself. Because if I'm doing the OOP model, that's how I want everything to act.
More FUD. AMD's chips are full cores that just share an FPU/SMID unit, you do not need a FPU unit to have a core. Most CPU's made do not have FPUs to begin with, so nobody doubts those are not CPU's.
Nobody claimed they weren't CPUs, but nice strawman. The better question is whether one Bulldozer module is one core with SMT or two cores with SMP. Here's at least one claim to the difference between SMT and SMP:
Multithreading CPUs have hardware support to efficiently execute multiple threads. These are distinguished from multiprocessing systems (such as multi-core systems) in that the threads have to share the resources of a single core: the computing units, the CPU caches and the translation lookaside buffer (TLB).
A Bulldozer module shares computing units, CPU caches and the TLB. It doesn't share integer units and having an FPU is not necessary to be a CPU, but it is still relevant. Imagine if we're trying to determine if two twins are Siamese twins or not. If they had no legs, we'd still recognize them as twins. But if they do have legs and share a leg, then they are Siamese twins. Likewise a core doesn't have to have a FPU, but if it has one and shares it with other threads it's not a separate core.
A basic income goes to everyone whether they work or not. If you work, you get whatever you earn (less taxes) on top of the basic income. So, it is not the same as the current welfare system where you lose "benefits" if you work. That is one reason it is a much better idea. There is no explicit disincentive to work with a basic income for all as opposed to income-dependent welfare or unemployment insurance.
That is not the kind of basic income that has been suggested around here, it has only been about a guaranteed minimum income level but I guess all is possible if you tax more and pay out more. Your version of basic income would cost about 10x as much as the current social security budget and you want to tax it by taxing wealth but at those tax levels it'd be completely impossible to gather or sustain any wealth. It exceeds the expected return on bank interest, bonds, stocks, everything. It'd work for a short while people still have wealth to drain and then it'd collapse as there's nobody left with wealth to tax and nobody makes any savings or investments.
Nobody expected the EU rules to be less bureaucratic, but at least you're dealing with one set of rules instead of 27 sets of rules. I see all the special cases or rules our bureaucrats would like to make if EU would let them and going our separate ways would clearly have its disadvantages too.
Why do many millionaires still "work" then?
Lots of reasons I'm sure, but not because they don't get basic income. If you're poor you'll probably keep working since the basic income is well.... basic. If you're filthy rich, it doesn't matter. It's the middle class who'll take the opportunity to not work because it costs them less. The examples in your essey seem excessively high, I don't know if you realized but nobody will work for minimum wage if you can sit on your bum ass all day and still make the same. If basic income was set at $20k, you probably couldn't need closer to $30k to get anyone hired as otherwise people would more earn more on basic income and use their 2000 hours worth of spare time to live cheaper.
I disagree. I think that anonymity just brings out the human condition in general.
Have you ever experienced in the real world that someone is being a total asshole seemingly for no other reason than being an asshole, just to show off who has power and is important or popular or rich and that you're not? Generally people only do that when it's free of consequences. Anonymity makes it free of consequences so finally people have an outlet for all that rage and bile, they can finally be the ones slinging dirt without retaliation. It's not the full person you see on the Internet, it's all the sides that's repressed in daily life which makes people seem excessively rude, bigoted, aggressive, selfish and arrogant. After you come home from work wishing you could have told your boss/client/colleague/customer to fuck off, it's very tempting to go online and tell someone to fuck off - just because you can.
Basic income will not happen any time soon, and the reason is people like me. I make pretty good money, I pay quite a lot of taxes and while I could possibly take the burden of a sabattical year myself the financial impact on the rest of my life isn't worth it. Give me a decent basic income and I'll easily take a year off for a double whammy to the tax system, not only do you not get my tax income you'll be paying me instead. The theory is of course that you'll get someone else off basic income to take my job and pay the same taxes I did, but I really doubt it's going to work that way in practice.
Touring is mostly meat grinder work, getting on location, getting all the gear in place, connecting all the equipment and sound testing, rigging down equipment, on to the next location or back home. The actual performance is not the hard work, or rather all the hard work behind it you'd have to do in order to record an album too. If you want to argue that producing great music without travelling around to play it is failing to cash in on it that's fine, but it's not quick or easy. I know a few musicians and it's practice, practice, practice, both solo and with the band - you think sounding that good comes for free even if you have talent? It doesn't. And not everyone can or will spend most of the year on the road, even if they're willing to work 2000+ a year on their music. What they can offer is to create music, if the market puts any value on that. Or not, it's a free market.
The radio plays it for free, go cry somewhere else
The radio doesn't play the songs you want when you want to hear them, even if you have a zillion channels you still have to zap through them trying to find something good. The radio was never a replacement for buying CDs but most people I know who subscribe to music services do that instead of buying CDs. I've never been to a party where we listen to the radio (no really, tapes, CDs, MP3s, but never radio), but I've been to many parties where they use Spotify or something similar. The biggest issue for the subscription services is that they're like an all-you-can-eat buffet with very different appetites. The people who used to use thousands don't and yet the average person is only so music interested compared to all the other forms of entertainment that are easily available.
So if a disgruntled Microsoft employee decided to upload the Windows source code to Mega, they'd lose all copyright on it? I don't think that's how the law works, no matter what the terms of service says he's not authorized to sign that away. And if you try going after only authorized attack dogs then worst case they'll turn on whatever cyber thugs they hired and claim they overstepped their bounds had no right to upload that to Mega, but as the copyright holder they're not going to sue for damages so all that leaves Mega with is a terms of service breach by the cyber thugs. It's a bit the same as GPL violation, you can ask for source as a settlement but you can never force them to release the source. You can sue them for statutory or actual damages, but then you "only" get cash.
You're confusing two very different concepts, you can have a chess grandmaster try to implement his logic - it's pretty hard for humans to actually express how they're thinking - which would indeed be very complex but the computer is just crunching numbers, if there's a flaw in that logic it'll lose the same way every time. The other extreme is to create an application that doesn't have any rules, but that rewrites itself finding its own metrics and algorithms to play by - that could find ways to evaluate play the programmer didn't know anything about. By that I don't mean that it could calculate moves faster but that it could potentially play fundamentally *better* than the person who developed it.
That does sound interesting for corporations that want to entice their employees into carrying a corporate device at all times because it doubles well as their private phone, but I don't get the BYOD angle. I don't care one whiff about the business capabilities of my private phone, either the company offers mobile connectivity on it or they can give me a business - and business only - phone at their expense. I don't ever see me buying a BB phone because they like the separate profiles and other "geared for business" features. That smells more like buy your own work tools.
Technically correct but actually wrong. Since intelligence falls on a normal distribution, the mean and median end up being the same.
It doesn't fall on a normal distribution, it is normalized to give an IQ score. It's like taking the time on the 100m dash and say "You run faster than X% of the population", but it doesn't say how fast you run relative to anyone else or how quickly you'd move up or down the list of results. The reason is that we can order people by how much they answer correctly but we have no objective measure of how much smarter they had to be in order to do it.
If proxy services are classified as service providers, expect that laws regarding logging and auditing be ramped up. Every TCP connection you make will be saved and stored for a long time
With some fairly basic mixmaster techniques that will be useless as you can't tell which data belongs to which encrypted stream. Your node has 100 connections in, 100 connections out and they all look just the same. You will have to outlaw it, you can not prevent it even with massive ISP level logging.
You are trying to technically fix a broken law, that won't work. In Germany, someone allready got sued (successfully) for "relaying" a file via retroshare....
But mostly due to a PEBCAK problem trying to use a F2F network as a P2P network.
RetroShare derives its security from the fact that all transfers go through "trusted friends" who users themselves add. In this case, the defendant added the anti-piracy monitoring company as a friend, which allowed him to be "caught."
Besides Germany is fairly special in that they've made you liable for what other people are sharing over your WiFi as well. And none of it would matter if you use it as designed, sharing with friends who share with their friends who share with their friends, six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that. If you're going to connect to random peers, there's already something much better called BitTorrent for that. RetroShare is not TOR or Freenet protecting you from the nodes closest to you, it just hopes to be an impenetrable mass of friends that doesn't talk to any anti-piracy nodes. Quite importantly the only person harmed by adding the anti-piracy company was the fool himself.