When you say "we need to keep Americans safe", what I think is "Americans need to be kept safe from you."
Every "law" enforcement agency has proven that it has bad apples who will abuse any authority given to them. The FBI can not be trusted with master keys.
If a million bitcoins were transferred, then wouldn't that show up in the block chain? If they weren't transferred, then doesn't he still have them? Can the estate digitally sign something that at least proves original ownership?
... was shot over just two weeks - way shorter than the months a movie usually takes.
The shooting ratio with film is typically 6:1, with video it's 20:1. YMMV. This isn't because they spend less time doing a scene, it's because they keep the camera's rolling even during the stuff they "know" they're going to cut out later. I.e. they shoot more video because video is cheaper.
There's setup (getting everyone in the right place, facing the right way, with the right props and the right lighting), retakes, and alternates (when you shoot video multiple ways because you don't know which one you like yet.) Those things make a bigger difference to the length of production than the kind of camera used. And all of it pales in comparison to things like "writing a good script", and "selecting and permitting the locations".
Much Ado About Nothing (the 2012 film) was shot in about the same amount of time - because it was a single location, and the actors didn't need to rehearse much, not because they used digital cameras.
Some level of rent-seeking is good for the economy
The difference between medicine and poison is dosage. Some level of rent-seeking being good says nothing about whether the current level of rent-seeking is good.
Rent-seeking on intangibles is much less defensible than on tangible assets.
I'm curious how you define tangible and intangible. For example, is land a tangible asset? Does it degrade if you it let someone grow crops on it? Why should a land "owner" be allowed to charge for it's use?
Long-term loans aren't the problem either,
My assertion is that if money can make money, then money will concentrate. I agree that the term of the loan isn't the problem, the problem is that people are taking out a loan, period. The higher the interest rate, the greater the concentration of wealth. Check the interest rates on loans, and you'll see that 30 year loans carry a higher interest rate than 20. We've gone so far down the rabbit hole of lender propaganda that some people actually think debt is a good thing.
not everything worth doing has a 20-year ROI
Business loans are typically far less than 20 years, or even 10. It's not hard to refinance. If you have an actual, money making, use for capital it's easy enough to get it.
Eliminating long term loans doesn't make it impossible to continually rent money. But it does make it harder. Make something harder, and you reduce the amount of it.
The problem isn't wealth, it's that wealth generates income. If money can make money, then money will concentrate.
The problem, in a word, is rent.
A large number our current problems could be fixed by simply outlawing loans greater than 20 years. (impede renting money long term). We could also create a special (extra) tax on rental income, and on interest income (impede renting and renting money).
But in general, "we" aren't going to do anything which stops the rich from become richer until the rich have less say about what we do than "we" do.
actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion,...
If Alice's car and Bob's drives them to work, the cars park in their office parking lot, and waits for them to finish work.
If an Uber car drives Alice to work, and then drives to Bob, and then drives Bob to work, then it's driving more miles per capita. One drive for Alice, one drive for Bob, and one drive between Alice's work and Bob's home.
This might improve parking, but it will make traffic congestion worse, and increase fuel consumption.
Reading protected memory through speculative execution by itself is no problem.
It's a problem if you have memory mapped I/O, and reading it causes something to happen. For example, status registers frequently auto-clear when read.
... built-in protections against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks...
Hey Intel! It's not an attack, it's a demonstration of why your design is broken. It's fundamentally broken to read protected memory without permission. If your chip can read protected memory without permission at any time, for any reason, it's broken. Don't try to mitigate the "attack", just fix your damn broken design.
Apple didn't start out in S.F. Google didn't start out in S.F.
Companies that big can locate their offices anywhere they want. Pick almost any city along route 5, and the housing prices for your employees would be an order of magnitude less.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it's only value comes from what you can trade it for. Given that, what is the "right" price for a bitcoin? I ask, because I don't see any reason to think that $10,000 a coin is "too high". Don't get me wrong, I don't see any reason to think $10,000 a coin is "right' or "too low" either.
The thing I note about better programming languages is that they mostly aren't better.
I've occasionally thought "This would be much easier to write in Perl than C." I've never thought "This would be much easier to write in C++ than C".
Fewer lines of code doesn't mean much. Thousands of line of assembler, is roughly as hard to write as hundreds of C. A six line function can often replace a 500 line table. Copy and paste code instead of using subroutine calls, and you too can be writing 500 lines of code a day.
It isn't significantly harder to write in assembly, that is not why we avoid writing assembly code.
IMO the successor to C won't be a higher level language at all. It will be a language that gives as low, or even lower level access, but is more portable. Something that let's me specify endian-ness, or bit rotation, or do atomic operations without the need to invoke a semaphore/system call.
Don't try to make Google to do your censoring. If you really want a censored internet, then publish an Edit Decision List for it, a.k.a. moderation, a.k.a. RBL, a.k.a. boycott list. If your list has value, then other people will use it.
If someone sold food products that killed 5000 people a year...
Deaths from food-borne illness is 10 times that number. Reducing it by an order of magnitude would be a big deal, but not in the way you seem to imply.
If Equifax was holding toxic waste, and they failed to keep it secure and some of it leaked into the environment, what would our response be?
If they can't responsibly hold information secure, then take that information away from them. Force them to delete all data which was "breached" so they can't lose it again. If they're unsure what data was lost, then allow anyone to have "their" data deleted.
If they're advertising online, that means they're providing contact information. Are the police so inept that they can find someone who's advertising that they're doing something illegal? A thing that by it's nature requires them to come into physical contact with you?
Trafficking is forcing someone to do something against their will. Sex Trafficking is forcing someone to do sex work. People who work at the Bunny Ranch do sex work. They aren't trafficked. An online advertisement for the Bunny Ranch isn't illegal (in the U.S.), and shouldn't be illegal.
Granted requiring registration when the US has an all volunteer army is pretty stupid, but as long as men have to and women don't, the question of what transgendered have to do will be there.
And if transgendered don't have to register, then what constitutes being transgendered?
Slashdot Mirror
A link, something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ?
A link is a pointer. It can point to anything - it could even change after the fact.
If there's a link to something bad, then go after what's linked to, not the link itself.
When you say "we need to keep Americans safe", what I think is "Americans need to be kept safe from you."
Every "law" enforcement agency has proven that it has bad apples who will abuse any authority given to them.
The FBI can not be trusted with master keys.
If a million bitcoins were transferred, then wouldn't that show up in the block chain?
If they weren't transferred, then doesn't he still have them?
Can the estate digitally sign something that at least proves original ownership?
What exactly is he claiming was taken?
... was shot over just two weeks - way shorter than the months a movie usually takes.
The shooting ratio with film is typically 6:1, with video it's 20:1. YMMV.
This isn't because they spend less time doing a scene, it's because they keep the camera's rolling even during the stuff they "know" they're going to cut out later.
I.e. they shoot more video because video is cheaper.
There's setup (getting everyone in the right place, facing the right way, with the right props and the right lighting), retakes, and alternates (when you shoot video multiple ways because you don't know which one you like yet.)
Those things make a bigger difference to the length of production than the kind of camera used.
And all of it pales in comparison to things like "writing a good script", and "selecting and permitting the locations".
Much Ado About Nothing (the 2012 film) was shot in about the same amount of time - because it was a single location, and the actors didn't need to rehearse much, not because they used digital cameras.
Some level of rent-seeking is good for the economy
The difference between medicine and poison is dosage.
Some level of rent-seeking being good says nothing about whether the current level of rent-seeking is good.
Rent-seeking on intangibles is much less defensible than on tangible assets.
I'm curious how you define tangible and intangible.
For example, is land a tangible asset?
Does it degrade if you it let someone grow crops on it?
Why should a land "owner" be allowed to charge for it's use?
Long-term loans aren't the problem either,
My assertion is that if money can make money, then money will concentrate.
I agree that the term of the loan isn't the problem, the problem is that people are taking out a loan, period.
The higher the interest rate, the greater the concentration of wealth.
Check the interest rates on loans, and you'll see that 30 year loans carry a higher interest rate than 20.
We've gone so far down the rabbit hole of lender propaganda that some people actually think debt is a good thing.
not everything worth doing has a 20-year ROI
Business loans are typically far less than 20 years, or even 10.
It's not hard to refinance.
If you have an actual, money making, use for capital it's easy enough to get it.
Eliminating long term loans doesn't make it impossible to continually rent money.
But it does make it harder.
Make something harder, and you reduce the amount of it.
The problem isn't wealth, it's that wealth generates income.
If money can make money, then money will concentrate.
The problem, in a word, is rent.
A large number our current problems could be fixed by simply outlawing loans greater than 20 years. (impede renting money long term).
We could also create a special (extra) tax on rental income, and on interest income (impede renting and renting money).
But in general, "we" aren't going to do anything which stops the rich from become richer until the rich have less say about what we do than "we" do.
actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, ...
If Alice's car and Bob's drives them to work, the cars park in their office parking lot, and waits for them to finish work.
If an Uber car drives Alice to work, and then drives to Bob, and then drives Bob to work, then it's driving more miles per capita. One drive for Alice, one drive for Bob, and one drive between Alice's work and Bob's home.
This might improve parking, but it will make traffic congestion worse, and increase fuel consumption.
Neither of these flaws allows reading protected memory without permission.
Sometimes you don't need to read protected memory to cause problems, you just need it to be read.
Reading protected memory through speculative execution by itself is no problem.
It's a problem if you have memory mapped I/O, and reading it causes something to happen.
For example, status registers frequently auto-clear when read.
... built-in protections against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks ...
Hey Intel! It's not an attack, it's a demonstration of why your design is broken.
It's fundamentally broken to read protected memory without permission.
If your chip can read protected memory without permission at any time, for any reason, it's broken.
Don't try to mitigate the "attack", just fix your damn broken design.
Apple didn't start out in S.F.
Google didn't start out in S.F.
Companies that big can locate their offices anywhere they want.
Pick almost any city along route 5, and the housing prices for your employees would be an order of magnitude less.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it's only value comes from what you can trade it for.
Given that, what is the "right" price for a bitcoin?
I ask, because I don't see any reason to think that $10,000 a coin is "too high".
Don't get me wrong, I don't see any reason to think $10,000 a coin is "right' or "too low" either.
The thing I note about better programming languages is that they mostly aren't better.
I've occasionally thought "This would be much easier to write in Perl than C."
I've never thought "This would be much easier to write in C++ than C".
Fewer lines of code doesn't mean much.
Thousands of line of assembler, is roughly as hard to write as hundreds of C.
A six line function can often replace a 500 line table.
Copy and paste code instead of using subroutine calls, and you too can be writing 500 lines of code a day.
It isn't significantly harder to write in assembly, that is not why we avoid writing assembly code.
IMO the successor to C won't be a higher level language at all.
It will be a language that gives as low, or even lower level access, but is more portable.
Something that let's me specify endian-ness, or bit rotation, or do atomic operations without the need to invoke a semaphore/system call.
If "identity theft" is obtaining someone's personal information, doesn't that make Equifax is one of the largest criminal organizations in history?
Don't try to make Google to do your censoring.
If you really want a censored internet, then publish an Edit Decision List for it, a.k.a. moderation, a.k.a. RBL, a.k.a. boycott list.
If your list has value, then other people will use it.
If someone sold food products that killed 5000 people a year...
Deaths from food-borne illness is 10 times that number.
Reducing it by an order of magnitude would be a big deal, but not in the way you seem to imply.
If Equifax was holding toxic waste, and they failed to keep it secure and some of it leaked into the environment, what would our response be?
If they can't responsibly hold information secure, then take that information away from them.
Force them to delete all data which was "breached" so they can't lose it again.
If they're unsure what data was lost, then allow anyone to have "their" data deleted.
Monitor the company to insure compliance.
It will be very hard to top this.
Challenge accepted!
Some quick googling yields these facts;
130,000 commercial pilots.
Average salary for a commercial pilot $76,000/yr.
130,000 * $76,000 /yr = 10 billion.
10 billion does not equal 35 billion.
If they're advertising online, that means they're providing contact information.
Are the police so inept that they can find someone who's advertising that they're doing something illegal?
A thing that by it's nature requires them to come into physical contact with you?
Trafficking is forcing someone to do something against their will.
Sex Trafficking is forcing someone to do sex work.
People who work at the Bunny Ranch do sex work. They aren't trafficked.
An online advertisement for the Bunny Ranch isn't illegal (in the U.S.), and shouldn't be illegal.
Real Government doesn't need to spy on it's citizens.
LinkedIn's whole business model is "scraping" information from people. It's not like they pay people to enter that information.
When CDDB tried this sort of B.S. it led to FreeDB. Maybe LinkedIn being assholes will lead to something similar.
Granted requiring registration when the US has an all volunteer army is pretty stupid, but as long as men have to and women don't, the question of what transgendered have to do will be there.
And if transgendered don't have to register, then what constitutes being transgendered?
In other words, "They're making money and I'm not getting any."
Or really, they might be making money and not giving it to me.
I can almost see some justification for actors; their reputation is affected by how many people see their performance.
But for everyone else?
If you don't like it, make your own content and publish it yourself.