If nobody gets more than half the electoral votes cast (270) the house of representatives decides, one vote per state, out of the top three electoral-vote winners.
It's not illegal for a private citizen to follow someone in public (in the absence of a restraining order). What's illegal is to crawl under someone's car and attach things to it, and more importantly in this case, to make threats that you will kill that someone. It's not a case of privacy violation but of indimidation. (the tracking device was to facilitate "running into" the stalkee at various public places)
Another difference between this case and security cameras/RFID paranoia is that security cameras and RFID tags are generally used openly, while the entire point of this guy's tracking system was to surreptitiously monitor his target. You can be against that sort of deceit without believing in a right of public privacy.
Those dollars are a bit overpriced--you should be able to get U.S. mint 1oz silver bullion dollar coins for well less than $10; and unlike the liberty dollar they also have the interesting property of being US$1 legal tender even if the bottom drops out of the silver market.
I wonder if anyone offers a fractional-reserve private paper currency so that the system can be subsidized by the float instead of having to pay a premium to have your silver sitting in a warehouse somewhere?
But the 'deflation' of the post-invasion dinar (relative to the USD and the price of goods) represented a real underlying change in the iraqi economy. USD had been hard to get for some time, and as the war started the price of goods shot up in anticipation of things being hard to come by for some time (salam pax wrote about it at the time in his blog), and a stack of paper with Saddam's face on it doesn't do you too much good in a war zone. When the invasion ended USD stopped being impossible to get and people (correctly) assumed the US buy out the old iraqi dollar for some new currency, so its value went (back) up.
Trying to fight these symptoms (of real scarcity and real surplus) by controlling the dinar supply would just make things worse, even if you managed to do it 'correctly' you're still robbing people of important pricing information and de-valuing the money as a useful medium of exchange.
I think the article author would claim that the Iraqi dinar would maintain its value even if the prospects of a new government coming along to honor it were dim. I think that's more wishful thinking by someone who wants a painless way out of a fiat currency than based in reality, though.
But why would any Jews have survived after reaching the camps, let alone survived long enough to be rescued, if the camps were actually designed specifically to kill groups of people together and suddenly? Why would they build sneaky devices to kill people with when they could kill them simply by failing to provide adaquately for them?
The Nazi death machine was primarily limited by the rate they could cremate bodies, and secondarily by transportation. They switched over from simply mistreating the prisoners and waiting for them to die to transporting people to centralized death camps where they could be executed and creamated in batches because it was less expensive and labor intensive.
The Nizkor Project does and excellent job of explaining the practical justification for the strange seeming behavior and refuting the major misconceptions about the Holocaust.
The Vatican is hardly "The most conservative body in the civilized world", unless your definition of the "the civilized world" is "anything no more conservative than the Vatican". Most of the people who think Harry Potter is the tool of the Liberal-Commie-Satan axis probably think the Vatican is too, or wouldn't be at all surprised to find them in league.
So only the sacred librarian is allowed to have an opinion on what books should be in any given library?
Also, where did you learn that most of the books on this list were banned? The ALA page says "Although they were the targets of attempted bannings, most of the books featured during BBW were not banned, thanks to the efforts of librarians to maintain them in their collections."
I also can't find anything on the page distinguishing between complaints about proposed book purchases and demands that books be removed to keep people from seeing them (for example, is saying "I think it'd be better to spend our limited school library funds on Watership Down than The New Joy of Gay Sex" a "challenge"?)
Well, considering that economics is poorly-understood to start with, I find it hard to imagine how governments can distort economics worse than corporations distort economics.
If your point is just that the phrase "distort economics" is silly and assumes there is some sort of ideal natural state called "economics" that mankind has fallen from, then I agree with you. The rest of your post makes me believe otherwise, so in that case I would suggest getting a better understanding of economics (the academic discipline), or at least a more active imagination.
In the corporate model, a select few in charge get to make up the wages paid.
This is correct, but incomplete (assuming by "the corporate model" you mean, more or less, the current situation in the US). Ignoring the minumum wage fr a moment, both the employer and the employee are free to go around demanding whatever wages they want. If you don't think a company pays enough, don't work there.
there is no lack of people willing to work at pretty much anything, for almost nothing (comparatively speaking).
If this were true, then the wages for pretty much everything would be almost nothing. That clearly isn't happening, why not?
Meanwhile, those who fix the game (upper management) ensure their own positions are not outsourced, while paying very little to everyone else.
You should go into upper management then, and help drive down the wages. Or better yet, start an upper-management outsourcing firm. Surely there are at least *some* companies where the top guy would be happy to fire the rest of management and pocket most of their large salaries for himself.
Meanwhile, those with the money are able to influence government policy to a much greater degree than those without much money. This also shifts the balance of power just a little more to those running corporations. Whether the DMCA, the INDUCE act, or the consolidation of giant media, the individual loses out, while the corporations gain.
Yes. Corporate welfare and protectionism benefit the people owning the companies targeted at the expense of pretty much everyone else, and they're anti-free market as well.
But you can't build a functioning market around a negative-sum game of robbing Peter to subsidize Paul. If you try to create a system where everyone benefits from special laws and protectionism, the primary economic activity will be attempting to curry favor with the government and the only people who will win are the lobbyists, politicians, and lawyers. The solution is to attack the problem itself.
Nor is there any indication that the free market is a good model to start with, let alone the best model. The only thing we've discovered so far is that empirically is better than fuedalism, socialism, monocracies [...], hegemonies, and bozocracies
Since all economic systems are apparently unworthy, what are we supposed to do, sit around banging rocks together? If you can't actually describe a system that will work better than the free market (or a practical approximation of it), then we should probably wait until one comes along before attempting to switch to it, shouldn't we?
a lot of that depends heavily on how much of the quality of human vision is actually in the eye, and not in the extensive post-processing done in the brain, and how well the brain adapts to off-brand peripherals.
There's nothing wrong with making back-of-the-envelope computations with numbers you pretty much pulled from your ass. However, this paper violates the custom of using numbers and assumptions that err against the point you're trying to make, rather than for it.
Assuming that a hash-cash or other POW system is only useful if, working alone, it reduces the spam in your inbox from ~50% to ~0.1%, that the average machine sends 75 legitimate unsolicited mails (that is, non-spam mails to people outside your organization that you've never gotten a message from before) per day, that the top 1% mail senders on a random ISP are legitmate users who should not be inconvienenced rather than the spammers that this entire system is designed to inconvienience, that currently underutilized zombies will be aggressively used by spammers if POW is established, but will continue to go unused (contrary to current trends) if POW is not established...
Yeah, given that highly realistic model, it "probably doesn't work".
There's an issue with including the hash of the document in the hash itself, but if you fix that it's only hard on the sending end. There's no need to use the entire message as the challenge, just concatenate today's date to the destination address:
target: "18102004-foo@bar.com" sha1(target string): "a766a602b65cffe773bcf25826b322b3d01b1a97" (clien t works trying to break the hash) solution: "2684ef53" sha1(solution): "a766a60e3e3b4b7f53fe376224c08e47e959b2bc"
so the client has a 28-bit hash collision (a fair amount of work on a modern machine iirc), and puts target and solution in the header. All the recipient has to do is confirm that target is legitimate (actually the recpient's address, date within a reasonable range of reciept time), that hash(target) and hash(solution) collide on a reasonable number of bits, and that it hasn't seen solution used recently.
The only thing you lose from not having a server-challenge is that there's nothing to prevent the sender from spending a long time precomputing solutions that will work on a single address on a single day--patient DoSers can still make trouble, but I don't think it helps spammers.
Re:He's already knighted, but can't use Sir...
on
That's Sir Tim to You
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· Score: 1
The "title of nobility" clause only prevents the US government or a state from granting a title of nobility (cough drug tzar cough), and it also prevents government employees from accepting gifts or titles of any kind from foreign countries (without permission of congress), but it doesn't prevent US citizens from accepting titles or gifts.
There was an attempt at amending the constitution to extend the restriction to all citizens, but hasn't been ratified by enough states.
Perhaps people are so used to software being promoted as exactly the opposite of what it actually is, that a program doing what its name implies is a surprise.
No search engine, and very little chance of ever having one.
Spider the network, generate lookup tables appropriate for search, insert them into the network, and have a client-side script that takes the user's query and responds with the list of results. No changes to the network necessary.
This currently is held back by the unavailability of client side scripting (which is not fundamental, it's just unimplemented) and the current network not having sufficent performance for such a tool to be faster than just going to an index and browsing.
just to nitpick further, SCOTUS isn't interpreting the law, they're interpreting the US Constitution to allow the law. They have to use the interpretation of the state law the Nevada Supreme Court gave them.
Oh, and don't forget the other Constitutional crime, questioning the validity of the public debt of the United States (see Amendment 14, Section 4.)
What this court ruling really means is that the police no longer need to have a reason to "see some ID,"...
a) this case says the police need reasonable suspicion; which they clearly had b) this case wasn't about providing identification documents, all Hiibel had to do was state his name.
... I urge you to Vote Bush this year. Make your fellow countrymen so sick of what that moron has done to this country...
How exactly do you blame the Bush administration for 5 judges who weren't appointed by him upholding a state law last amended in 1995?
I still don't quite know what made the police officer suspect that Hiibel committed or witnessed assault.
I haven't seen explained in news reports about the case but in the opinion there's this:
The sheriff's department in Humboldt County, Nevada, received an afternoon telephone call reporting an assault. The caller reported seeing a man assault a woman in a red and silver GMC truck on Grass Valley Road. Deputy Sheriff Lee Dove was dispatched to investigate. When the officer arrived at the scene, he found the truck parked on the side of the road. A man was standing by the truck, and a young woman was sitting inside it. The officer observed skid marks in the gravel behind the vehicle, leading him to believe it had come to a sudden stop.
[...]
We now know that the man arrested on Grass Valley Road is Larry Dudley Hiibel.
I don't think either side disputes that the officer had "reasonable suspicion" allowing him to do a stop and ask questions, and that Hiibel, in general, does not have to answer them.
The dispute is whether or not Nevada is allowed to make an exception to that rule allowing the officer to demand his name and punish him for refusing to provide it.
I think that there is a difference between "incriminating" (in the 5th Amendment sense) and "useful to the police". In particular, finding out that an individual is wanted for another offense is not evidince that supports a conviction or leads to other evidince; it is simply a way of tracking down people who are attempting to flee prosecution.
Your name, and the fact that you have an outstanding warrant, don't have any bearing on the crime the warrant refers to.
In the same way, information that a person has mental disorders or a history of violence (neither illegal in themselves of course) is useful to know for the personal safety of the officer and others, and will affect the way the police officer interacts with him.
But, like the other response to your post says, Justice Stevens sees a contradiction there too.
There is no Federal law requiring police to ask people who are stopped their name, nor does the Supreme Court say that police have a right to demand the names of people stopped. All the Supreme Court did was say that a Nevada law permitting Nevada police to demand the name of a person who had been stopped by the police was not unconstitutional. If the Nevada Legislature changed their mind and repealed the law, the Nevada police couldn't demand people's names anymore, and there is nothing the Federal Government, or the US Supreme Court, could do about it. In many (most?) states, this is already the legal situation.
But most people don't drive their car until it falls apart anyway. People get a new car after a few years because they want to be driving a new(er) car, or because their lifestyle has changed and they need a different car, not because their old car fell apart. Witness the popularity of the car lease.
Besides, how often does a modern car rust apart anymore before it simply becomes more expensive to keep running than replace?
Slashdot Mirror
If nobody gets more than half the electoral votes cast (270) the house of representatives decides, one vote per state, out of the top three electoral-vote winners.
Have you checked your car? Maybe you have one and don't know it yet.
It's not illegal for a private citizen to follow someone in public (in the absence of a restraining order). What's illegal is to crawl under someone's car and attach things to it, and more importantly in this case, to make threats that you will kill that someone. It's not a case of privacy violation but of indimidation. (the tracking device was to facilitate "running into" the stalkee at various public places)
Another difference between this case and security cameras/RFID paranoia is that security cameras and RFID tags are generally used openly, while the entire point of this guy's tracking system was to surreptitiously monitor his target. You can be against that sort of deceit without believing in a right of public privacy.
So why is the USD so much more popular than metal currencies?
Those dollars are a bit overpriced--you should be able to get U.S. mint 1oz silver bullion dollar coins for well less than $10; and unlike the liberty dollar they also have the interesting property of being US$1 legal tender even if the bottom drops out of the silver market.
I wonder if anyone offers a fractional-reserve private paper currency so that the system can be subsidized by the float instead of having to pay a premium to have your silver sitting in a warehouse somewhere?
But the 'deflation' of the post-invasion dinar (relative to the USD and the price of goods) represented a real underlying change in the iraqi economy. USD had been hard to get for some time, and as the war started the price of goods shot up in anticipation of things being hard to come by for some time (salam pax wrote about it at the time in his blog), and a stack of paper with Saddam's face on it doesn't do you too much good in a war zone. When the invasion ended USD stopped being impossible to get and people (correctly) assumed the US buy out the old iraqi dollar for some new currency, so its value went (back) up.
Trying to fight these symptoms (of real scarcity and real surplus) by controlling the dinar supply would just make things worse, even if you managed to do it 'correctly' you're still robbing people of important pricing information and de-valuing the money as a useful medium of exchange.
I think the article author would claim that the Iraqi dinar would maintain its value even if the prospects of a new government coming along to honor it were dim. I think that's more wishful thinking by someone who wants a painless way out of a fiat currency than based in reality, though.
Funny how protesting against "liberals" isn't likely to get you arrested.
During the Gray Davis recall here in California, it had a tendency to get you beaten up by his "Workers Against Recall" union-organized thugs.
But why would any Jews have survived after reaching the camps, let alone survived long enough to be rescued, if the camps were actually designed specifically to kill groups of people together and suddenly? Why would they build sneaky devices to kill people with when they could kill them simply by failing to provide adaquately for them?
The Nazi death machine was primarily limited by the rate they could cremate bodies, and secondarily by transportation. They switched over from simply mistreating the prisoners and waiting for them to die to transporting people to centralized death camps where they could be executed and creamated in batches because it was less expensive and labor intensive.
The Nizkor Project does and excellent job of explaining the practical justification for the strange seeming behavior and refuting the major misconceptions about the Holocaust.
The Vatican is hardly "The most conservative body in the civilized world", unless your definition of the "the civilized world" is "anything no more conservative than the Vatican". Most of the people who think Harry Potter is the tool of the Liberal-Commie-Satan axis probably think the Vatican is too, or wouldn't be at all surprised to find them in league.
Like, for example, Jack Chick, whose lovely comic books claim:
Harry Potter turns kids into witches(the Harry Potter angle is near the bottom)
The Catholic Church is pagan and/or in league with Satan
So only the sacred librarian is allowed to have an opinion on what books should be in any given library?
Also, where did you learn that most of the books on this list were banned? The ALA page says "Although they were the targets of attempted bannings, most of the books featured during BBW were not banned, thanks to the efforts of librarians to maintain them in their collections."
I also can't find anything on the page distinguishing between complaints about proposed book purchases and demands that books be removed to keep people from seeing them (for example, is saying "I think it'd be better to spend our limited school library funds on Watership Down than The New Joy of Gay Sex" a "challenge"?)
Well, considering that economics is poorly-understood to start with, I find it hard to imagine how governments can distort economics worse than corporations distort economics.
If your point is just that the phrase "distort economics" is silly and assumes there is some sort of ideal natural state called "economics" that mankind has fallen from, then I agree with you. The rest of your post makes me believe otherwise, so in that case I would suggest getting a better understanding of economics (the academic discipline), or at least a more active imagination.
In the corporate model, a select few in charge get to make up the wages paid.
This is correct, but incomplete (assuming by "the corporate model" you mean, more or less, the current situation in the US). Ignoring the minumum wage fr a moment, both the employer and the employee are free to go around demanding whatever wages they want. If you don't think a company pays enough, don't work there.
there is no lack of people willing to work at pretty much anything, for almost nothing (comparatively speaking).
If this were true, then the wages for pretty much everything would be almost nothing. That clearly isn't happening, why not?
Meanwhile, those who fix the game (upper management) ensure their own positions are not outsourced, while paying very little to everyone else.
You should go into upper management then, and help drive down the wages. Or better yet, start an upper-management outsourcing firm. Surely there are at least *some* companies where the top guy would be happy to fire the rest of management and pocket most of their large salaries for himself.
Meanwhile, those with the money are able to influence government policy to a much greater degree than those without much money. This also shifts the balance of power just a little more to those running corporations. Whether the DMCA, the INDUCE act, or the consolidation of giant media, the individual loses out, while the corporations gain.
Yes. Corporate welfare and protectionism benefit the people owning the companies targeted at the expense of pretty much everyone else, and they're anti-free market as well.
But you can't build a functioning market around a negative-sum game of robbing Peter to subsidize Paul. If you try to create a system where everyone benefits from special laws and protectionism, the primary economic activity will be attempting to curry favor with the government and the only people who will win are the lobbyists, politicians, and lawyers. The solution is to attack the problem itself.
Nor is there any indication that the free market is a good model to start with, let alone the best model. The only thing we've discovered so far is that empirically is better than fuedalism, socialism, monocracies [...], hegemonies, and bozocracies
Since all economic systems are apparently unworthy, what are we supposed to do, sit around banging rocks together? If you can't actually describe a system that will work better than the free market (or a practical approximation of it), then we should probably wait until one comes along before attempting to switch to it, shouldn't we?
a lot of that depends heavily on how much of the quality of human vision is actually in the eye, and not in the extensive post-processing done in the brain, and how well the brain adapts to off-brand peripherals.
There's nothing wrong with making back-of-the-envelope computations with numbers you pretty much pulled from your ass. However, this paper violates the custom of using numbers and assumptions that err against the point you're trying to make, rather than for it.
Assuming that a hash-cash or other POW system is only useful if, working alone, it reduces the spam in your inbox from ~50% to ~0.1%, that the average machine sends 75 legitimate unsolicited mails (that is, non-spam mails to people outside your organization that you've never gotten a message from before) per day, that the top 1% mail senders on a random ISP are legitmate users who should not be inconvienenced rather than the spammers that this entire system is designed to inconvienience, that currently underutilized zombies will be aggressively used by spammers if POW is established, but will continue to go unused (contrary to current trends) if POW is not established...
Yeah, given that highly realistic model, it "probably doesn't work".
There's an issue with including the hash of the document in the hash itself, but if you fix that it's only hard on the sending end. There's no need to use the entire message as the challenge, just concatenate today's date to the destination address:
n t works trying to break the hash)
target: "18102004-foo@bar.com"
sha1(target string): "a766a602b65cffe773bcf25826b322b3d01b1a97"
(clie
solution: "2684ef53"
sha1(solution): "a766a60e3e3b4b7f53fe376224c08e47e959b2bc"
so the client has a 28-bit hash collision (a fair amount of work on a modern machine iirc), and puts target and solution in the header. All the recipient has to do is confirm that target is legitimate (actually the recpient's address, date within a reasonable range of reciept time), that hash(target) and hash(solution) collide on a reasonable number of bits, and that it hasn't seen solution used recently.
The only thing you lose from not having a server-challenge is that there's nothing to prevent the sender from spending a long time precomputing solutions that will work on a single address on a single day--patient DoSers can still make trouble, but I don't think it helps spammers.
The "title of nobility" clause only prevents the US government or a state from granting a title of nobility (cough drug tzar cough), and it also prevents government employees from accepting gifts or titles of any kind from foreign countries (without permission of congress), but it doesn't prevent US citizens from accepting titles or gifts.
There was an attempt at amending the constitution to extend the restriction to all citizens, but hasn't been ratified by enough states.
Perhaps people are so used to software being promoted as exactly the opposite of what it actually is, that a program doing what its name implies is a surprise.
No search engine, and very little chance of ever having one.
Spider the network, generate lookup tables appropriate for search, insert them into the network, and have a client-side script that takes the user's query and responds with the list of results. No changes to the network necessary.
This currently is held back by the unavailability of client side scripting (which is not fundamental, it's just unimplemented) and the current network not having sufficent performance for such a tool to be faster than just going to an index and browsing.
just to nitpick further, SCOTUS isn't interpreting the law, they're interpreting the US Constitution to allow the law. They have to use the interpretation of the state law the Nevada Supreme Court gave them.
Oh, and don't forget the other Constitutional crime, questioning the validity of the public debt of the United States (see Amendment 14, Section 4.)
What this court ruling really means is that the police no longer need to have a reason to "see some ID,"...
... I urge you to Vote Bush this year. Make your fellow countrymen so sick of what that moron has done to this country ...
a) this case says the police need reasonable suspicion; which they clearly had
b) this case wasn't about providing identification documents, all Hiibel had to do was state his name.
How exactly do you blame the Bush administration for 5 judges who weren't appointed by him upholding a state law last amended in 1995?
I'm pretty sure police have name badges, and you don't have to be a cop (or impersonating one) to get their names and badge numbers.
Hell, you can probably just look at their car number, call the police department and ask who's driving it.
The Nevada police knowing the names of suspects is going to lead to terrible economic policy and poitically-motivated burglary?
I don't think either side disputes that the officer had "reasonable suspicion" allowing him to do a stop and ask questions, and that Hiibel, in general, does not have to answer them.
The dispute is whether or not Nevada is allowed to make an exception to that rule allowing the officer to demand his name and punish him for refusing to provide it.
I think that there is a difference between "incriminating" (in the 5th Amendment sense) and "useful to the police". In particular, finding out that an individual is wanted for another offense is not evidince that supports a conviction or leads to other evidince; it is simply a way of tracking down people who are attempting to flee prosecution.
Your name, and the fact that you have an outstanding warrant, don't have any bearing on the crime the warrant refers to.
In the same way, information that a person has mental disorders or a history of violence (neither illegal in themselves of course) is useful to know for the personal safety of the officer and others, and will affect the way the police officer interacts with him.
But, like the other response to your post says, Justice Stevens sees a contradiction there too.
There is no Federal law requiring police to ask people who are stopped their name, nor does the Supreme Court say that police have a right to demand the names of people stopped. All the Supreme Court did was say that a Nevada law permitting Nevada police to demand the name of a person who had been stopped by the police was not unconstitutional. If the Nevada Legislature changed their mind and repealed the law, the Nevada police couldn't demand people's names anymore, and there is nothing the Federal Government, or the US Supreme Court, could do about it. In many (most?) states, this is already the legal situation.
Your post is the inaccurate one.
But most people don't drive their car until it falls apart anyway. People get a new car after a few years because they want to be driving a new(er) car, or because their lifestyle has changed and they need a different car, not because their old car fell apart. Witness the popularity of the car lease.
Besides, how often does a modern car rust apart anymore before it simply becomes more expensive to keep running than replace?