The "primarily cash economy" with an unregulated money supply was, in fact, a source of not-uncommon paralyzing fear and chaos.
That's utter nonsense. The main economic advantage to having a single currency within a nation or across a trading bloc is that it increases efficiency somewhat. But in terms of stability and robustness, a lot of currencies operating in a free market are clearly better. And private and multiple currencies are a possible solution to many of the economic woes that we are currently seeing in the US and Europe. And they are likely going to happen anyway, whether governments like them or not.
criminality exists in this world. i'm sorry this bothers you, and i'm sorry in your naive rage you blame those who pursue criminality rather than criminality itself
Criminality exists, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It exists in a balance between what we live with, policing, and private mechanisms for curbing it.
but this doesn't change the fact that criminality is real, if unopposed it grows
Many functions that are now handled by public law enforcement used to be handled by private solutions. One can argue about which one is better, but your idea that without ever increasing governmental law enforcement, criminal behavior keeps growing is utter and complete nonsense.
and the vast majority of society has no problem with tactics like this to fight criminal organizations
The vast majority of people in many countries have had no problem supporting monarchs, dictators, and fascists to run their lives; they made bad choices.
so go make your own society, where such controls don't exist
We did. It's called the United States. It was founded by people who tried to escape the stifling and horrific social controls of Europe and the institutionalized and widespread corruption in its governments. You see, if you give too much power to government, the criminals simply move to where the power is, namely government itself. The question is why people like you are here.
welcome to reality deal with it
The reality is that you're a proto-fascist, and that your views on law enforcement and government are extremely naive.
And, of course, like all laws, we know this will be followed scrupulously. Give me a break. Criminals have no problem laundering money, and the main effect of such laws is to hassle law abiding citizens even more. (I'd be curious to know whether there is any evidence that these reporting requirements actually have made a difference in reducing crime.)
And while you're right that the Internet isn't legally special, in practice it is quite different from physical transactions and enables quite different capabilities. These capabilities mean that many laws that work in the physical world simply end up not being practically enforceable.
Android and Chrome teams: "We think it would be good to merge our two codebases. It would make development easier, Android is almost a superset of Chrome already anyway, and would give us a larger base of apps and app developers."
Schmidt: "No, you can't do that! I PROMISED people that the two wouldn't get merged."
Considering that the 'victim' wanted to just drop the whole thing, that's exactly what she should have done.
Victims don't get to decide whether criminal charges are dropped. There are multiple victims involved here, including MIT, JSTOR, US and European publishers, and the public. Prosecutors represent all of them, and their job isn't just to punish the individual, but also to make clear what kind of behavior the public does not tolerate (and that is defined by Congress through laws).
Meanwhile, you're ignoring that it would be a confession to a felony (and so he would be a convicted felon),
I'm not ignoring that. That's the meaning and intent of the CFAA. The prosecutor only had two choices: let him go off free, or charge him with a felony.
and she would 'recommend' 6 months but the judge would still be free to say "thank you very much for confessing, you get 30 years" and then he would be stuck because he plead guilty.
Stop repeating that lie. Federal judges are bound by sentencing guidelines. The maximum the judge could impose was based on damages. A sentence higher than six months was implausible, and higher than a year impossible.
the trial would bankrupt him,
That's a general problem with our justice system. Swartz's prosecution and trial was no different from that of millions of other federal defendants every year. It would have been a perversion of justice if he had been treated differently simply because geeks and progressives like him (I should add: I am a strong supporter of open access, but I disapproved of Swartz's methods). The Swartz case should be a cause for people to complain about the justice system and think about fixing it; pressuring prosecutors to make exceptions in individual cases won't fix these problems.
I have had nothing but technical problems with Contour cameras. I'd been considering switching to GoPro, but not after this stupidity. Fortunately, it seems like there are lots of alternatives on the market now.
I think the only Google products you can rely on sticking around at this point are gmail, drive, search, and Android. Anything else is prone to ending up on the chopping block. One has to wonder what the reason is for all this frugality at Google...
There's nothing wrong with the original construct of the United States: a group of largely independent states with free trade, limited inter-state enforcement of laws, and free movement of people. The enumerated powers in the Constitution are a reasonable framework for that. If the US broke up, the different parts would simply want to re-form a free trade area similar to what the Constitution originally envisioned. Instead of going through the pain of secession and building a free trade pact, it would make more sense to turn back the clock on this weird and harmful expansion of federal powers.
Are you claiming the law put a gun to his head and removed all prosecutorial discretion?
What should that "discretion" have consisted of according to you? She was already aiming for only six months in prison. What possible justification would she have had to aim for even less or not charge him at all? Swartz physically broke into a wired network on private property, with the intent to commit massive copyright violations. That's a serious offense, and she already proposed a light punishment compared to what other people receive for similar offenses.
What matters isn't the maximum penalty under the law, but the federal sentencing guidelines; they limit the maximum he can "face" based on the circumstances.
CFAA is a bad law because it treats all such cases as felonies, because it inserts the federal justice systems into cases where it doesn't belong, and because it is generally badly written. But don't blame the prosecutors for that, and don't keep writing this nonsense of how many years people supposedly "face".
except that E-beam lithography is in effect lithography,
Don't be so hung up on "lithography"; I didn't actually use the term myself. And, in fact, I think large scale, low-cost VLSI manufacturing will likely be based on a combination of self-assembly and AFM technologies, which people already know how to parallelize.
You should also mention Julian Assange, who has never stepped foot in the United States and has never been subject to its laws. The reason that Assange isn't going to Sweden to face the "sex-by-surprise" charges is that he could not get a guarantee that the Swedes would not immediately turn him over to the US, and he also couldn't get a guarantee from the US that he would receive anything remotely similar to a fair trial.
What trial? Assange hasn't even been indicted or charged in the US.
But indeed: in principle, you can in fact violate the laws of a country you have never set foot in. Many countries have such laws, not just the US.
Aaron Swartz wasn't attacked because of that nonsense copyright infringement charge,
Swartz wasn't charged with copyright infringement, he was charged with computer tampering, and he fulfilled the criteria.
These people are political dissidents in USA, the system is set to destroy them because they attacked the system.
Swartz pretty clearly broke a number of laws, and it was proper to charge him when this became known to the prosecutor. It would have been corrupt if he hadn't been charged because of his politics.
The law under which he was charged is a bad law and should be changed; not all federal cases of computer tampering should be felonies. And the vast expansion of the federal justice system is itself a grave concern. But you can't blame the prosecutor for that; blame the voters who keep wanting such laws and keep voting guys into office who push for them. The idea of "leave it to the states" seems to have become some kind of right-wing fringe ideology to many.
Swartz committed suicide because he had depression. If it wasn't this, something else would have triggered it. If people had known he was suicidal, the correct response would have been to commit him and place him under suicide watch, not to drop charges; suicidal people are still adults.
And except for grandiose press releases, he actually faced a few months in prison, if he had been found guilty at all. Granted, the circus of a large public trial is something to be unhappy about, but Swartz was an Internet activist who had deliberately broken laws, not some bystander who accidentally got sucked into the justice system.
The only monopolies are the ones created by the government, blame them, not the capitalists who are the makers, not the takers. (pukes up on floor) The reason we don't have cheap broadband is because there's no demand!
No, the reason we don't have cheaper broadband is because there are government mandated monopolies on both wired and wireless infrastructure. No amount of sarcasm on your part is going to change that.
Supply and demand mean that if enough people wanted it, someone would get up and do it, and it would be priced competitively.
Supply and demand only operate when there is a free market. The US telecoms market is highly regulated.
Having said that, the US is not that different from big European nations anyway, so all your self-righteous indignation is kind of wasted.
Large scale E-beam is hard! If we wanted to replace photo-lithography with E-beam lithography we would need much brighter sources and much more sensitive resists.
Or we simply need to get the cost down to the point that they become as ubiquitous as printers (and soon 3D printers). With millions of such devices around, it wouldn't matter if it took it a few days to produce a complex chip.
Did I say anything about beer or boiling or alcohol? I talked about how fermentation in general tends to make things safer to eat and healthier, no boiling required.
No "and". They aren't good for mass production because they are slow; that's pretty much the only disadvantage they have.
Sure this technique might be a neat way to make nano-imprint masks, but then again 30nm isn't all that sexy.
The technique hasn't been tuned as much as standard lithography. And you can get smaller features with ion beam lithography already. People may just not be able to make light-based lithography work at smaller feature sizes and we'll be forced to switch.
Nonsense. E-beam and ion beam lithography are already standard. They're a lot easier to control and use than mask-based lithography and work in a normal lab. They just are no good for mass production, and they are expensive because there isn't a lot of demand for them.
Domestication of grains starts 2000 years, at latest, from the earliest brewing of beer. The "beer hypothesis" also lacks skeletal evidence,
The hypothesis is about fermented beverages, not beer specifically. Consuming alcohol from fermentation is older than humanity itself; even monkeys and elephants get drunk on fermenting fruit. Mead used to be popular and goes back much further than the domestication of grains.
As to the hypothesis itself, mostly, fermentation probably just served to preserve beverages and kill pathogens.
Slashdot Mirror
That's utter nonsense. The main economic advantage to having a single currency within a nation or across a trading bloc is that it increases efficiency somewhat. But in terms of stability and robustness, a lot of currencies operating in a free market are clearly better. And private and multiple currencies are a possible solution to many of the economic woes that we are currently seeing in the US and Europe. And they are likely going to happen anyway, whether governments like them or not.
Criminality exists, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It exists in a balance between what we live with, policing, and private mechanisms for curbing it.
Many functions that are now handled by public law enforcement used to be handled by private solutions. One can argue about which one is better, but your idea that without ever increasing governmental law enforcement, criminal behavior keeps growing is utter and complete nonsense.
The vast majority of people in many countries have had no problem supporting monarchs, dictators, and fascists to run their lives; they made bad choices.
We did. It's called the United States. It was founded by people who tried to escape the stifling and horrific social controls of Europe and the institutionalized and widespread corruption in its governments. You see, if you give too much power to government, the criminals simply move to where the power is, namely government itself. The question is why people like you are here.
The reality is that you're a proto-fascist, and that your views on law enforcement and government are extremely naive.
And, of course, like all laws, we know this will be followed scrupulously. Give me a break. Criminals have no problem laundering money, and the main effect of such laws is to hassle law abiding citizens even more. (I'd be curious to know whether there is any evidence that these reporting requirements actually have made a difference in reducing crime.)
And while you're right that the Internet isn't legally special, in practice it is quite different from physical transactions and enables quite different capabilities. These capabilities mean that many laws that work in the physical world simply end up not being practically enforceable.
If the average user can't exchange dollars for galactic credits, what good is the dollar?
Android and Chrome teams: "We think it would be good to merge our two codebases. It would make development easier, Android is almost a superset of Chrome already anyway, and would give us a larger base of apps and app developers."
Schmidt: "No, you can't do that! I PROMISED people that the two wouldn't get merged."
Yeah, right.
Victims don't get to decide whether criminal charges are dropped. There are multiple victims involved here, including MIT, JSTOR, US and European publishers, and the public. Prosecutors represent all of them, and their job isn't just to punish the individual, but also to make clear what kind of behavior the public does not tolerate (and that is defined by Congress through laws).
I'm not ignoring that. That's the meaning and intent of the CFAA. The prosecutor only had two choices: let him go off free, or charge him with a felony.
Stop repeating that lie. Federal judges are bound by sentencing guidelines. The maximum the judge could impose was based on damages. A sentence higher than six months was implausible, and higher than a year impossible.
That's a general problem with our justice system. Swartz's prosecution and trial was no different from that of millions of other federal defendants every year. It would have been a perversion of justice if he had been treated differently simply because geeks and progressives like him (I should add: I am a strong supporter of open access, but I disapproved of Swartz's methods). The Swartz case should be a cause for people to complain about the justice system and think about fixing it; pressuring prosecutors to make exceptions in individual cases won't fix these problems.
I have had nothing but technical problems with Contour cameras. I'd been considering switching to GoPro, but not after this stupidity. Fortunately, it seems like there are lots of alternatives on the market now.
Except they will find that they can get an equivalent camera elsewhere, since GoPro has little to distinguish itself from the dozens of clones.
I think the only Google products you can rely on sticking around at this point are gmail, drive, search, and Android. Anything else is prone to ending up on the chopping block. One has to wonder what the reason is for all this frugality at Google...
There's nothing wrong with the original construct of the United States: a group of largely independent states with free trade, limited inter-state enforcement of laws, and free movement of people. The enumerated powers in the Constitution are a reasonable framework for that. If the US broke up, the different parts would simply want to re-form a free trade area similar to what the Constitution originally envisioned. Instead of going through the pain of secession and building a free trade pact, it would make more sense to turn back the clock on this weird and harmful expansion of federal powers.
What should that "discretion" have consisted of according to you? She was already aiming for only six months in prison. What possible justification would she have had to aim for even less or not charge him at all? Swartz physically broke into a wired network on private property, with the intent to commit massive copyright violations. That's a serious offense, and she already proposed a light punishment compared to what other people receive for similar offenses.
What does any of that have to do with Swartz?
What matters isn't the maximum penalty under the law, but the federal sentencing guidelines; they limit the maximum he can "face" based on the circumstances.
CFAA is a bad law because it treats all such cases as felonies, because it inserts the federal justice systems into cases where it doesn't belong, and because it is generally badly written. But don't blame the prosecutors for that, and don't keep writing this nonsense of how many years people supposedly "face".
Don't be so hung up on "lithography"; I didn't actually use the term myself. And, in fact, I think large scale, low-cost VLSI manufacturing will likely be based on a combination of self-assembly and AFM technologies, which people already know how to parallelize.
What trial? Assange hasn't even been indicted or charged in the US.
But indeed: in principle, you can in fact violate the laws of a country you have never set foot in. Many countries have such laws, not just the US.
Swartz wasn't charged with copyright infringement, he was charged with computer tampering, and he fulfilled the criteria.
Swartz pretty clearly broke a number of laws, and it was proper to charge him when this became known to the prosecutor. It would have been corrupt if he hadn't been charged because of his politics.
The law under which he was charged is a bad law and should be changed; not all federal cases of computer tampering should be felonies. And the vast expansion of the federal justice system is itself a grave concern. But you can't blame the prosecutor for that; blame the voters who keep wanting such laws and keep voting guys into office who push for them. The idea of "leave it to the states" seems to have become some kind of right-wing fringe ideology to many.
Swartz committed suicide because he had depression. If it wasn't this, something else would have triggered it. If people had known he was suicidal, the correct response would have been to commit him and place him under suicide watch, not to drop charges; suicidal people are still adults.
And except for grandiose press releases, he actually faced a few months in prison, if he had been found guilty at all. Granted, the circus of a large public trial is something to be unhappy about, but Swartz was an Internet activist who had deliberately broken laws, not some bystander who accidentally got sucked into the justice system.
No, the reason we don't have cheaper broadband is because there are government mandated monopolies on both wired and wireless infrastructure. No amount of sarcasm on your part is going to change that.
Supply and demand only operate when there is a free market. The US telecoms market is highly regulated.
Having said that, the US is not that different from big European nations anyway, so all your self-righteous indignation is kind of wasted.
Don't forget the pony!
Or we simply need to get the cost down to the point that they become as ubiquitous as printers (and soon 3D printers). With millions of such devices around, it wouldn't matter if it took it a few days to produce a complex chip.
Did I say anything about beer or boiling or alcohol? I talked about how fermentation in general tends to make things safer to eat and healthier, no boiling required.
No "and". They aren't good for mass production because they are slow; that's pretty much the only disadvantage they have.
The technique hasn't been tuned as much as standard lithography. And you can get smaller features with ion beam lithography already. People may just not be able to make light-based lithography work at smaller feature sizes and we'll be forced to switch.
Nonsense. E-beam and ion beam lithography are already standard. They're a lot easier to control and use than mask-based lithography and work in a normal lab. They just are no good for mass production, and they are expensive because there isn't a lot of demand for them.
Which part of "consuming alcohol from fermentation is older than humanity itself" did you not understand?
The hypothesis is about fermented beverages, not beer specifically. Consuming alcohol from fermentation is older than humanity itself; even monkeys and elephants get drunk on fermenting fruit. Mead used to be popular and goes back much further than the domestication of grains.
As to the hypothesis itself, mostly, fermentation probably just served to preserve beverages and kill pathogens.