Eliminate caps entirely. Bill me based on usage just like my other utilities, but make it reasonable, not $5 per MB used. I have a decent setup, I can track bandwidth use on my local network and divvy up the bill between my roommates just fine.
The problem is that the reasonable price is so close to zero as makes no difference. The cost of capacity upgrades, amortized over the many years they're good for, is a small part of your bill. Most of it comes from staffing a fleet of service trucks to make the network keep running whenever there is a storm or a fool with a backhoe, call centers, etc. Things that don't increase in cost when people use more bandwidth.
Plus, you're ignoring why the ISPs want caps (or even usage billing): They want to discourage you from using the network, which they have a double incentive to do. First, it pushes out the day when they have to expand capacity, which increases this year's quarterly profits at the expense of the future of the company. Second, and probably more importantly, it severely screws over Netflix and Hulu in favor of the ISP's IPTV or cable television service.
That, or you just get complete displacement. Someone posts on twitter: "Praise Allah, Osama bin Laden is dead." That's the story. There is no link to a "real" "news" website, you just read it and go celebrate.
That is only an efficiency improvement. It isn't at all the equivalent of having multiple wires because it doesn't work if the network nodes in contention for bandwidth are in proximity to one another. If I want to have a dozen laptops practically sitting on top of each other on a conference room table, it isn't going to help.
There is no more spectrum. You can't manufacture it, you can only reallocate it. There still comes a point at which all of the allocated spectrum is consumed and there is no more, and that scarcity means that it isn't exactly cheap.
Efficiency has the same limits. If you already have something which is 50% efficient (i.e. 50% of the Shannon limit), it is physically impossible to more than double your available bandwidth through efficiency improvements, and in practice you can't even do that.
People are apparently having trouble understanding that there is a finite amount of spectrum allocated to wireless and you have to share it between all the devices in range. At some point all the bandwidth is used up, and if you want more, you need wires.
Of course, the relevance of these figures depends on whether you think the court should be striving for a reasonable chance of eliminating errors, versus keeping the error-to-non-error ratio at a reasonable level.
It seems clear to me that reducing the absolute number of errors has to be the goal, because the base of the ratio is determined solely by the plaintiffs. It is totally unacceptable to rope in thousands of innocent people merely because one plaintiff decided to accuse tens of thousands of defendants, to say nothing of the idea that a plaintiff could just as easily list millions of defendants. The plaintiff should either choose one defendant or should have to provide enough evidence as to each defendant so that the chance of there being any innocent people in the pool of defendants is less likely than not.
If the VPR has a list of IP addresses of users sharing out their copyrighted material, it may be true that not literally all of those infringers are living in the household that the IP address has been assigned to — but what percentage of them probably are? 90% or more?
It seems to me the first problem is that you're just making up numbers. Where does 90% come from? Keep in mind that the question you're asking isn't the probability that some undifferentiated traffic comes from the account holder for an internet account, it's the probability that someone engaged in criminal or infringing activity would choose to piggy back on someone else's internet connection instead of using their own.
It also seems like you're asking the question the wrong way. Suppose the chances are actually as high as you speculate: 90%. They're trying to subpoena some 1000 names. With that 10% error rate you can expect some 100 false results. In this single lawsuit. That seems like a high probability -- even a near certainty -- that the court would be wrongly turning over a substantial number of names.
"Could expedited discovery be used to wrest quick settlements, even from people who have done nothing wrong? The embarrassment of public exposure might be too great, the legal system too daunting and expensive, for some to ask whether VPR has competent evidence to prove its case." Now these are actually all fair points. The logical error is that they apply to any lawsuit — Judge Baker makes no argument why these problems would be more pronounced in a lawsuit against 1,000 John Does.
The Judge might not explicitly spell out why they're more pronounced, but those reasons exist: Both the prospective penalty and the cost of litigation here is vastly disproportionate to the actual harm to plaintiffs, and in consequence to the settlement terms. If everyone is offered e.g. a $5000 settlement and the alternative for the innocent person is to prove their innocence at the cost of several times that amount in legal fees compounded with the risk that they will not succeed and have to pay several hundred times that much in statutory damages. Most normal lawsuits don't have that characteristic because the settlement terms are not likely to be so incredibly divergent from the expected outcome if the case was tried in court. Moreover, most normal lawsuits are over business matters or the like, whereas pornography is something that people have a special aversion to having their name associated with in the public record -- especially if they're innocent.
And if, out of over 1,000 defendants, there are at least several dozen who decide to fight the case, they'd be more likely to be able to split the costs of hiring a good lawyer than if only one defendant was named who had to pay all the costs on their own. Both embarrassment and legal fees are less of a burden when you can share them with hundreds of other people.
That only works if some nontrivial number of defendants refuse to settle. It seems to me past cases have shown that this does not happen. Do you have any evidence to show that it would?
I don't think cube is right, but there is definitely something there: Think about an ice road. For a given thickness of ice, you can support a certain weight. At some particular thickness you might be able to drive a 4000 pound SUV over the ice thousands of times, but drive a 20,000 pound semi over it only once or twice and you'll crack the road. I imagine the same general principle applies to pavement.
Roads cost money to build and maintain. Why not charge people based on how much they use the roads.
Because road repair costs track miles driven very badly. The predominant cause of potholes is water getting into small cracks in the road and freezing, which happens regardless of miles driven. Moreover, transportation is the heart of commerce. If you try to make miles driven the primary source of revenue for road repairs, you discourage transportation disproportionately with the cost the additional traffic imposes on the government. Which discourages commerce and screws up almost every sector of the economy.
On top of that, tracking miles driven requires a massive invasion of privacy. The government has to track where you go in order to know how far you've gone, otherwise you could trivially just lie to them. If you want to tax something like miles driven, we already have fuel tax. Which has the advantage of charging almost exactly in proportion to the weight of the vehicle, which is what causes that portion road wear caused by vehicles rather than weather. And on top of that, it has the advantage of a built in subsidy for high-efficiency and electric vehicles.
There is literally no benefit in having this tax. It is nothing but a facade for building a nationwide tracking system.
That's the point. Find the thing people actually do which is CPU-bound, don't just fudge a GPU-limited thing until you get different numbers for different CPUs.
Not stupid at all. It shows that if your video is not a factor or you upgrade to an adequate video card when one is available,the better cpu to buy is X.
Assuming that GPUs are available that are so fast they move the bottleneck back to the CPU, the way to do it would then be to use one of those GPUs and use normal resolutions. If even the fastest GPUs still result in the GPU as the bottleneck, just find a different benchmark. There is no lack of synthetic benchmarks that someone could use without misleading people into thinking they need a super fast CPU for a heavily GPU-bound game.
This is especially true now that integrated GPUs are becoming respectable. Someone on a budget may be very interested to know whether AMD CPU + integrated AMD GPU is faster than Intel CPU + integrated Intel GPU, but you don't get an accurate picture if you skew the settings to make it CPU bound.
That seems like a stupid way to benchmark. It encourages people to be misinformed by thinking that they can get better frame rates by buying a faster CPU even though under real world conditions the game will be GPU bound and the CPU is irrelevant. Why not stick to benchmarking using applications that are actually CPU bound under normal usage?
The difference is that WINE is just the API. Its only purpose is to allow Windows programs for which there is no Linux version to run on Linux. Everyone understands that it is preferable to release a native Linux version of a program than to use the Windows version using WINE.
The problem with Mono is that it doesn't work that way. It isn't marketed as a stopgap for programs that don't have a native Linux version. People are promoting it as a non-transient platform for Linux software development. If WINE is destroyed, you're not any worse off than if you had never had it to begin with. If Mono is destroyed after people have written a large body of software for it, you lose all of that software along with it, and that's the problem.
First, if they had done what I suggested and included a patent grant for all of the patents that the Microsoft implementation uses, it would only have implicated the FAT long filename patent (or any given other patent) if Microsoft's implementation had used it. And if Microsoft did use it for something in their implementation, the idea that a third party implementation that did the same thing wouldn't be covered is the whole thing people are concerned about.
Second, what you are describing is the trade off between false positives and false negatives and what you are saying is that Microsoft chose an alternative that causes edge cases to result in Microsoft being able to use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge. To me that does not seem to be a good strategy to alleviate concerns that Microsoft will use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge.
That says it only covers patents "that are necessary to implement the Covered Specification." How worthless is that? So if you implement it the same way Microsoft did, or in the most natural and straightforward way, but there was some alternative way of doing it that still meets the spec then you're not covered? As in, even if the only alternative is a crap implementation that will require twice as much memory and 10 times as much CPU?
Obviously they couldn't have created a patent grant that says 'you can use any Microsoft patents that cover the Microsoft implementation in order to create your own' because that wouldn't include the trap for the unwary.
That would create a single point of failure. If Novell decided to stop updating Mono (or, say, went out of business) then the community wouldn't be immune to the patents if they chose to pick up the slack.
I think the case of the trouble is the combination of two failures in human reasoning: The lack of objective ground truth and the incapacity for everyone reasoning everything out formally from first principles.
The first is demonstrated by the idea that all chains of reasoning are either circular or not. I assume we are all familiar with the objectivity problems in circular reasoning. However, non-circular reasoning has the same trouble: If you want to support any given conclusion, you have to have some set of prepositions which, if true, necessarily lead to the conclusion. But even if you can establish that the truth of the prepositions would necessary lead to the conclusion, you also need to establish the truth of the prepositions. Each preposition becomes a new conclusion that you must prove in the same way. So at some point up the tree, you come to a preposition that you must prove but that you have no non-circular basis for proving -- there has to be a root to the tree that must be assumed because it cannot be proved non-circularly.
The way we get around this is by assuming certain things as ground truth. We observe a sufficient number of apples falling from trees to the ground to accept on faith that there is an invisible force called gravity which consistently causes them to do so, etc. We accept proof through repeated observation and experimentation rather than mathematics and reasoning.
The trouble comes when the assumptions we make to create ground truth, and the relative strengths we attach to those assumptions, differ from those of other people. If we discover that our understanding of geology contradicts the text of the bible, some people will assume it is because the bible is wrong and others will assume it is because our understanding of geology is wrong.
And this is where the second failure in human reasoning comes in: Nobody has time to consistency-check their assumptions. If you assume that geology is wrong, you are implicitly assuming that one of the bases of geology is wrong. If the geology is well-supported, you may end up having to assume that material and well-accepted aspects of chemistry or physics are wrong in order to reject the geology, which may make you substantially more inclined to reject the religious text than the science. But people don't have the time or inclination to each individually go through that analysis -- generally speaking they look to experts and authorities to do it for them.
And that is all well and good if the experts and authorities are all honest and diligent. But they aren't, so here we are.
OK, let's go through your list and see which of these things would have prevented 9/11.
We can't search passengers before they enter an airliner.
None of the hijackers had firearms and anyone can make a shiv out of a thousand different things that you can easily get past security.
We can't build a border fence or do anything else to secure the borders. We can't create an ID to make non-terrorists easily identifiable nor may we even ask you to ID yourself. We can't place cameras in public.
The hijackers had valid ID and didn't have to do anything suspicious in public until they were already on the plane.
We can't listen in to calls made to Pakistan. We can't read emails to known terrorist.
False. You just need a warrant.
We cant interrogate prisoners.
False. You can interrogate without waterboarding/torture.
We can't take prisoners. We can't hold prisoners.
False. You can take prisoners, you just have to give them a trial.
Holy Shit! What would you suggest we do?
There is a simple solution. We stop burning oil. Oil keeps the dictators in power who cause the oppression that leads to terrorism. Oil money funds terrorism. And on top of all that, we need to transition to something else anyway, because the oil is running out and because of global climate change. So if you want to stop terrorism, take the trillions of dollars we're spending on war and security theater and spend it on windmills and nuclear power.
What this looks like is more akin to patenting the use of gravity to carry an object downward. You.. you can't fucking do that. That's absurd.
Exactly.
I feel like the problem is that software has no real physical constraints. When you invent a new kind of brake for a car, it has physical characteristics. Maybe the materials are less expensive, or light weight, or they allow the car to slow down faster, or don't fade as quickly, or don't wear out as quickly, etc. Anyone else can come up with a new kind of brake design, but their design won't have the same characteristics, and if the patented design has advantages over the alternatives then the patent is worth something.
The problem with software is that those kind of constraints just don't exist. If two implementations have the same function, that's all anyone cares about. The cost of producing another instance of the software is zero, the bits never wear out, etc. In theory some implementations may use less CPU or memory than others, but in the large majority of cases the difference is not enough to care about. So the problem with patenting software is that unless you can get some incredibly overbroad claims that basically cover any possible way of doing the same thing, the patent can be trivially avoided because alternative implementations have no material disadvantage over the patented ones. But a patent on all possible ways of doing something gives the patent holder more than he deserves and causes all of the problems we see with software patents.
The cost of living in the USA is the lowest in the Western World. Essentials like cars, petrol, housing and food cost literally 1/3 to 1/2 as much in the USA as they do in pretty much every other first-world country.
Yes, if you exclude all of the countries with a lower cost of living than the US, the US has a lower cost of living than the remaining countries. What does that have anything to do with the idea that if you can further reduce the cost of living then you can increase your competitiveness and reduce unemployment?
No, the problem is that "some people" don't get paid enough to actually save a meaningful amount, because the people who are their employers are taking all the money for themselves.
If you are literally at the threshold of starvation, all social security is going to do is take enough out of your paycheck to push you over the edge and cause you to starve to death before you ever get old enough to collect. If you are not at the threshold of starvation then you make enough money that you could save some if social security did not exist -- at least the amount that you currently pay in social security tax.
This is graphically illustrated by the phenomenally large (and growing) gap in earnings and wealth between the "rich" and "everyone else".
The relative difference in net income or net asset value has little practical consequence. The large majority of the wealth of rich people exists only on paper. The question is whether poor people today are better off than poor people historically. The answer is clearly that they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Eliminate caps entirely. Bill me based on usage just like my other utilities, but make it reasonable, not $5 per MB used. I have a decent setup, I can track bandwidth use on my local network and divvy up the bill between my roommates just fine.
The problem is that the reasonable price is so close to zero as makes no difference. The cost of capacity upgrades, amortized over the many years they're good for, is a small part of your bill. Most of it comes from staffing a fleet of service trucks to make the network keep running whenever there is a storm or a fool with a backhoe, call centers, etc. Things that don't increase in cost when people use more bandwidth.
Plus, you're ignoring why the ISPs want caps (or even usage billing): They want to discourage you from using the network, which they have a double incentive to do. First, it pushes out the day when they have to expand capacity, which increases this year's quarterly profits at the expense of the future of the company. Second, and probably more importantly, it severely screws over Netflix and Hulu in favor of the ISP's IPTV or cable television service.
That, or you just get complete displacement. Someone posts on twitter: "Praise Allah, Osama bin Laden is dead." That's the story. There is no link to a "real" "news" website, you just read it and go celebrate.
That was the cost of dealing with the whole Tsunami. Stop trolling.
That is only an efficiency improvement. It isn't at all the equivalent of having multiple wires because it doesn't work if the network nodes in contention for bandwidth are in proximity to one another. If I want to have a dozen laptops practically sitting on top of each other on a conference room table, it isn't going to help.
There is no more spectrum. You can't manufacture it, you can only reallocate it. There still comes a point at which all of the allocated spectrum is consumed and there is no more, and that scarcity means that it isn't exactly cheap.
Efficiency has the same limits. If you already have something which is 50% efficient (i.e. 50% of the Shannon limit), it is physically impossible to more than double your available bandwidth through efficiency improvements, and in practice you can't even do that.
People are apparently having trouble understanding that there is a finite amount of spectrum allocated to wireless and you have to share it between all the devices in range. At some point all the bandwidth is used up, and if you want more, you need wires.
Of course, the relevance of these figures depends on whether you think the court should be striving for a reasonable chance of eliminating errors, versus keeping the error-to-non-error ratio at a reasonable level.
It seems clear to me that reducing the absolute number of errors has to be the goal, because the base of the ratio is determined solely by the plaintiffs. It is totally unacceptable to rope in thousands of innocent people merely because one plaintiff decided to accuse tens of thousands of defendants, to say nothing of the idea that a plaintiff could just as easily list millions of defendants. The plaintiff should either choose one defendant or should have to provide enough evidence as to each defendant so that the chance of there being any innocent people in the pool of defendants is less likely than not.
I didn't. The flaws continue:
If the VPR has a list of IP addresses of users sharing out their copyrighted material, it may be true that not literally all of those infringers are living in the household that the IP address has been assigned to — but what percentage of them probably are? 90% or more?
It seems to me the first problem is that you're just making up numbers. Where does 90% come from? Keep in mind that the question you're asking isn't the probability that some undifferentiated traffic comes from the account holder for an internet account, it's the probability that someone engaged in criminal or infringing activity would choose to piggy back on someone else's internet connection instead of using their own.
It also seems like you're asking the question the wrong way. Suppose the chances are actually as high as you speculate: 90%. They're trying to subpoena some 1000 names. With that 10% error rate you can expect some 100 false results. In this single lawsuit. That seems like a high probability -- even a near certainty -- that the court would be wrongly turning over a substantial number of names.
"Could expedited discovery be used to wrest quick settlements, even from people who have done nothing wrong? The embarrassment of public exposure might be too great, the legal system too daunting and expensive, for some to ask whether VPR has competent evidence to prove its case."
Now these are actually all fair points. The logical error is that they apply to any lawsuit — Judge Baker makes no argument why these problems would be more pronounced in a lawsuit against 1,000 John Does.
The Judge might not explicitly spell out why they're more pronounced, but those reasons exist: Both the prospective penalty and the cost of litigation here is vastly disproportionate to the actual harm to plaintiffs, and in consequence to the settlement terms. If everyone is offered e.g. a $5000 settlement and the alternative for the innocent person is to prove their innocence at the cost of several times that amount in legal fees compounded with the risk that they will not succeed and have to pay several hundred times that much in statutory damages. Most normal lawsuits don't have that characteristic because the settlement terms are not likely to be so incredibly divergent from the expected outcome if the case was tried in court. Moreover, most normal lawsuits are over business matters or the like, whereas pornography is something that people have a special aversion to having their name associated with in the public record -- especially if they're innocent.
And if, out of over 1,000 defendants, there are at least several dozen who decide to fight the case, they'd be more likely to be able to split the costs of hiring a good lawyer than if only one defendant was named who had to pay all the costs on their own. Both embarrassment and legal fees are less of a burden when you can share them with hundreds of other people.
That only works if some nontrivial number of defendants refuse to settle. It seems to me past cases have shown that this does not happen. Do you have any evidence to show that it would?
I don't think cube is right, but there is definitely something there: Think about an ice road. For a given thickness of ice, you can support a certain weight. At some particular thickness you might be able to drive a 4000 pound SUV over the ice thousands of times, but drive a 20,000 pound semi over it only once or twice and you'll crack the road. I imagine the same general principle applies to pavement.
Unless they are electric powered (like hybrids). Then the heavier vehicle might actually burn less gasoline, and pay less tax, than a lighter vehicle.
In which case you get a subsidy for highly fuel efficient vehicles. Sounds like a feature to me.
Roads cost money to build and maintain. Why not charge people based on how much they use the roads.
Because road repair costs track miles driven very badly. The predominant cause of potholes is water getting into small cracks in the road and freezing, which happens regardless of miles driven. Moreover, transportation is the heart of commerce. If you try to make miles driven the primary source of revenue for road repairs, you discourage transportation disproportionately with the cost the additional traffic imposes on the government. Which discourages commerce and screws up almost every sector of the economy.
On top of that, tracking miles driven requires a massive invasion of privacy. The government has to track where you go in order to know how far you've gone, otherwise you could trivially just lie to them. If you want to tax something like miles driven, we already have fuel tax. Which has the advantage of charging almost exactly in proportion to the weight of the vehicle, which is what causes that portion road wear caused by vehicles rather than weather. And on top of that, it has the advantage of a built in subsidy for high-efficiency and electric vehicles.
There is literally no benefit in having this tax. It is nothing but a facade for building a nationwide tracking system.
That's the point. Find the thing people actually do which is CPU-bound, don't just fudge a GPU-limited thing until you get different numbers for different CPUs.
Not stupid at all. It shows that if your video is not a factor or you upgrade to an adequate video card when one is available,the better cpu to buy is X.
Assuming that GPUs are available that are so fast they move the bottleneck back to the CPU, the way to do it would then be to use one of those GPUs and use normal resolutions. If even the fastest GPUs still result in the GPU as the bottleneck, just find a different benchmark. There is no lack of synthetic benchmarks that someone could use without misleading people into thinking they need a super fast CPU for a heavily GPU-bound game.
This is especially true now that integrated GPUs are becoming respectable. Someone on a budget may be very interested to know whether AMD CPU + integrated AMD GPU is faster than Intel CPU + integrated Intel GPU, but you don't get an accurate picture if you skew the settings to make it CPU bound.
That seems like a stupid way to benchmark. It encourages people to be misinformed by thinking that they can get better frame rates by buying a faster CPU even though under real world conditions the game will be GPU bound and the CPU is irrelevant. Why not stick to benchmarking using applications that are actually CPU bound under normal usage?
No one has any idea what you're talking about.
The difference is that WINE is just the API. Its only purpose is to allow Windows programs for which there is no Linux version to run on Linux. Everyone understands that it is preferable to release a native Linux version of a program than to use the Windows version using WINE.
The problem with Mono is that it doesn't work that way. It isn't marketed as a stopgap for programs that don't have a native Linux version. People are promoting it as a non-transient platform for Linux software development. If WINE is destroyed, you're not any worse off than if you had never had it to begin with. If Mono is destroyed after people have written a large body of software for it, you lose all of that software along with it, and that's the problem.
First, if they had done what I suggested and included a patent grant for all of the patents that the Microsoft implementation uses, it would only have implicated the FAT long filename patent (or any given other patent) if Microsoft's implementation had used it. And if Microsoft did use it for something in their implementation, the idea that a third party implementation that did the same thing wouldn't be covered is the whole thing people are concerned about.
Second, what you are describing is the trade off between false positives and false negatives and what you are saying is that Microsoft chose an alternative that causes edge cases to result in Microsoft being able to use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge. To me that does not seem to be a good strategy to alleviate concerns that Microsoft will use patents against third party implementations despite the pledge.
It isn't the judges you bribe. It's the politicians who appoint them in the first place.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx [microsoft.com]
That says it only covers patents "that are necessary to implement the Covered Specification." How worthless is that? So if you implement it the same way Microsoft did, or in the most natural and straightforward way, but there was some alternative way of doing it that still meets the spec then you're not covered? As in, even if the only alternative is a crap implementation that will require twice as much memory and 10 times as much CPU?
Obviously they couldn't have created a patent grant that says 'you can use any Microsoft patents that cover the Microsoft implementation in order to create your own' because that wouldn't include the trap for the unwary.
That would create a single point of failure. If Novell decided to stop updating Mono (or, say, went out of business) then the community wouldn't be immune to the patents if they chose to pick up the slack.
I think the case of the trouble is the combination of two failures in human reasoning: The lack of objective ground truth and the incapacity for everyone reasoning everything out formally from first principles.
The first is demonstrated by the idea that all chains of reasoning are either circular or not. I assume we are all familiar with the objectivity problems in circular reasoning. However, non-circular reasoning has the same trouble: If you want to support any given conclusion, you have to have some set of prepositions which, if true, necessarily lead to the conclusion. But even if you can establish that the truth of the prepositions would necessary lead to the conclusion, you also need to establish the truth of the prepositions. Each preposition becomes a new conclusion that you must prove in the same way. So at some point up the tree, you come to a preposition that you must prove but that you have no non-circular basis for proving -- there has to be a root to the tree that must be assumed because it cannot be proved non-circularly.
The way we get around this is by assuming certain things as ground truth. We observe a sufficient number of apples falling from trees to the ground to accept on faith that there is an invisible force called gravity which consistently causes them to do so, etc. We accept proof through repeated observation and experimentation rather than mathematics and reasoning.
The trouble comes when the assumptions we make to create ground truth, and the relative strengths we attach to those assumptions, differ from those of other people. If we discover that our understanding of geology contradicts the text of the bible, some people will assume it is because the bible is wrong and others will assume it is because our understanding of geology is wrong.
And this is where the second failure in human reasoning comes in: Nobody has time to consistency-check their assumptions. If you assume that geology is wrong, you are implicitly assuming that one of the bases of geology is wrong. If the geology is well-supported, you may end up having to assume that material and well-accepted aspects of chemistry or physics are wrong in order to reject the geology, which may make you substantially more inclined to reject the religious text than the science. But people don't have the time or inclination to each individually go through that analysis -- generally speaking they look to experts and authorities to do it for them.
And that is all well and good if the experts and authorities are all honest and diligent. But they aren't, so here we are.
OK, let's go through your list and see which of these things would have prevented 9/11.
We can't search passengers before they enter an airliner.
None of the hijackers had firearms and anyone can make a shiv out of a thousand different things that you can easily get past security.
We can't build a border fence or do anything else to secure the borders. We can't create an ID to make non-terrorists easily identifiable nor may we even ask you to ID yourself. We can't place cameras in public.
The hijackers had valid ID and didn't have to do anything suspicious in public until they were already on the plane.
We can't listen in to calls made to Pakistan. We can't read emails to known terrorist.
False. You just need a warrant.
We cant interrogate prisoners.
False. You can interrogate without waterboarding/torture.
We can't take prisoners. We can't hold prisoners.
False. You can take prisoners, you just have to give them a trial.
Holy Shit! What would you suggest we do?
There is a simple solution. We stop burning oil. Oil keeps the dictators in power who cause the oppression that leads to terrorism. Oil money funds terrorism. And on top of all that, we need to transition to something else anyway, because the oil is running out and because of global climate change. So if you want to stop terrorism, take the trillions of dollars we're spending on war and security theater and spend it on windmills and nuclear power.
What this looks like is more akin to patenting the use of gravity to carry an object downward. You.. you can't fucking do that. That's absurd.
Exactly.
I feel like the problem is that software has no real physical constraints. When you invent a new kind of brake for a car, it has physical characteristics. Maybe the materials are less expensive, or light weight, or they allow the car to slow down faster, or don't fade as quickly, or don't wear out as quickly, etc. Anyone else can come up with a new kind of brake design, but their design won't have the same characteristics, and if the patented design has advantages over the alternatives then the patent is worth something.
The problem with software is that those kind of constraints just don't exist. If two implementations have the same function, that's all anyone cares about. The cost of producing another instance of the software is zero, the bits never wear out, etc. In theory some implementations may use less CPU or memory than others, but in the large majority of cases the difference is not enough to care about. So the problem with patenting software is that unless you can get some incredibly overbroad claims that basically cover any possible way of doing the same thing, the patent can be trivially avoided because alternative implementations have no material disadvantage over the patented ones. But a patent on all possible ways of doing something gives the patent holder more than he deserves and causes all of the problems we see with software patents.
The cost of living in the USA is the lowest in the Western World. Essentials like cars, petrol, housing and food cost literally 1/3 to 1/2 as much in the USA as they do in pretty much every other first-world country.
Yes, if you exclude all of the countries with a lower cost of living than the US, the US has a lower cost of living than the remaining countries. What does that have anything to do with the idea that if you can further reduce the cost of living then you can increase your competitiveness and reduce unemployment?
No, the problem is that "some people" don't get paid enough to actually save a meaningful amount, because the people who are their employers are taking all the money for themselves.
If you are literally at the threshold of starvation, all social security is going to do is take enough out of your paycheck to push you over the edge and cause you to starve to death before you ever get old enough to collect. If you are not at the threshold of starvation then you make enough money that you could save some if social security did not exist -- at least the amount that you currently pay in social security tax.
This is graphically illustrated by the phenomenally large (and growing) gap in earnings and wealth between the "rich" and "everyone else".
The relative difference in net income or net asset value has little practical consequence. The large majority of the wealth of rich people exists only on paper. The question is whether poor people today are better off than poor people historically. The answer is clearly that they are.