Trust a representative of a "'socialist' welfare state" (your words) to fail to understand the Broken Window fallacy.
When you impair efficient economic activity via aggression (e.g. by coercing others into reducing CO2 emissions without substantial evidence of harm) you inevitably create a wealth of opportunities for commerce related to working around or repairing the damage. At a naive first glance this looks like an improvement; visible activity exists as a direct result of your actions. The problem, of course, is that this activity is far from free. Had you just left things well enough alone the resources being spent on workarounds and repairs would have been available for more productive ends; because you could not resist the impulse to "help", however, all must bear the costs of first deliberately breaking a working system, and then fixing it (assuming it is even possible to do so in full), and the resources thus expended are gone forever.
Aggression can sometimes bring wealth to those who employ it, but only at an even greater expense to others. It can never result in a net improvement for all involved.
IEEE 802.11s defines a mesh-networking protocol which "extends the IEEE 802.11 MAC standard by defining an architecture and protocol that support both broadcast/multicast and unicast delivery using 'radio-aware metrics over self-configuring multi-hop topologies.'"
This seems to be a common complaint, but it's hardly specific to PayPal. Merchants accepting credit cards get stuck with charge-backs all the time, and from what I can tell (from second-hand reports, anyway) the credit-card dispute resolution process isn't much better for sellers than PayPal's.
The simple fact is that PayPal has no way of knowing which side is in the right. Maybe you did send an empty box, and the apparent change in story was just a misunderstanding. After all, the buyer did consistently claim not to have received the item; perhaps they simply didn't consider an empty box worth mentioning until you brought up the tracking number. The only way to avoid this sort of issue is to have a mutually-trusted third-party mediate the transaction rather than dealing directly with the buyer/seller. Unfortunately, that's only a practical solution for relatively expensive items. For everything else, well--sellers are fewer in number, deal in higher volumes, and are generally regarded as being more capable of absorbing the cost of proving their side of the dispute, or otherwise taking the occasional loss. This isn't a great solution, but it's the best available at present.
If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends.
What makes you think our views regarding software differ at all from those regarding other media? Software simply isn't the main focus of the copyright debates at present, so you don't hear as much about it. Any of the proposed changes to copyright law would affect software as much as anything else.
P.S. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value"; that debate was lost a long time ago. All value is subjective. To illustrate with a counter-example: some software packages have no ROI whatsoever in a commercial context, whereas a well-chosen bit of music or video can sometimes make or break a business (e.g. for marketing or advertising). The textbook case for subjective value is that diamonds normally command a very high price while few would pay much at all for water--but to someone dying of thirst in the desert their relative values are reversed. Intrinsic value cannot explain this, but subjective value can: the value of a good to an individual is a product of subjective circumstance, not a fixed property of the good itself.
Everyone has things they legitimately want to hide. I think the GP is aware of this, and was simply pointing out the double-standard involved in law enforcement claiming protection for their own secrets while treating any attempt by a private citizen to achieve the same protection of privacy as an admission of guilt.
On the other hand, if one wishes to keep one's information private one must work to ensure that it stays that way. No one--whether private citizen or law enforcement--has any right to prevent others from distributing information once it becomes known.
Finally, if this woman could uncover undercover operatives so easily then how much more readily could the criminals themselves do so? After all, they have much more incentive, and won't bother to restrict themselves to publicly-accessible databases. If anything, she did the police a favor by demonstrating how weak their operational security is. They should be thanking her, not arresting her.
On the contrary, Fair Use is what little remains of a much more extensive natural right which was violated to create the force-backed monopoly privilege known as copyright. The right remains, of course, but is no longer recognized by the law or upheld by those charged with enforcing the same.
It's true that most ad blockers look only at the URL. However, ads can also be blocked by their position and attributes within the structure of the page (DOM and CSS). Ad Block Plus already employs this form of filtering. Assuming your site gets enough visitors to be worth advertising on, any advantage to be had from eliminating the URL hints would pass quickly. Also, the more effort you put into making your site's advertising scheme unique the smaller your selection of potential advertisers becomes, and the less revenue you stand to receive from those ads which make it through. Finally, you're spending all this effort to show ads to a group of visitors who are intrinsically much less likely to follow up on any ads they do see, which in turn will drive down your conversion rate and thus the revenue you receive per ad.
It really all comes down to your ability to come up with innovative anti-ad-blocking schemes vs. the cumulative incentive of every visitor to your site to block the ads, and (with a few rare exceptions) there are a lot more of them than there are of you.
They're not intercepting your communications with any outside server. You asked them for the IP address linked to a given domain name, they asked a higher-level DNS server that returned NXDOMAIN to them, and instead of just returning the same NXDOMAIN to you like everyone else would they returned a pointer to the server hosting their search page. Underhanded? Sure. But intercepting and modifying your communications? Not really. Your communications were with the ISP to being with, not the upstream DNS servers, and nothing really obligates the ISP to return the standard response.
You could configure your system to query one of those upstream DNS servers directly. If they messed with that, then they would be interfering in your communications.
It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government.
What's really funny is that some people think it actually matters which one controls the other, when the point is that under either system government and "big business" amount to a single entity.
I'm no expert, but I believe the FSF's position is that the derivative work is created when you design your software to be linked against a GPL library (making it a derivative of the library's API), not when the actual dynamic linking happens at runtime. If true, that would mean that even the un-linked binaries could only be distributed under the terms of the GPL. The only exception would be in cases where you could potentially link against a non-GPL library with the same API (e.g. motif vs. the GPL'd lesstif), since in that case the API isn't specific to the GPL library.
Note that the FSF's position on dynamic linking is very much on the fringe, and far from unopposed.
Government-funded research is just one form of funding-by-monopolist, which has already been covered. The only difference is that in the government's case the monopoly is established and maintained through the active and continual application of aggressive coercion, whereas most private monopolies are either natural--meaning the market will only support a single provider--or merely the result of good business instincts.
The expression "sizeof(string)" will give you either the size of the pointer type on your platform (if string is a char*) or the size of the array allocated to hold the string, regardless of the amount of space actually used. Neither would be very helpful. Also, assert() statements are no-ops outside of development builds and thus not suitable for this sort of runtime test.
I think we have a terminology issue here. NUL characters are indeed permitted in DNS "labels", one element of a DNS identifier, but the CA is issuing certificates for not just DNS labels but actual Internet (ARPANET) hostnames. As described in RFC 1035, Internet hostnames are further constrained to "start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen." No NUL characters are permitted.
I would also like to note that, as the hostname listed in the certificate is invalid, the CA cannot have properly verified, even minimally, that the recipient actually owned the hostname in question.
The problem is that the certificate, being written in ASN.1 format, does use a Pascal-style length-delimited string, whereas the browser is using C-style strings. When the ASN.1 string is converted into a C-style string the early NUL terminator is preserved, truncating the domain, and this truncated domain is then used to verify that the certificate matches the URL. This wouldn't be an issue if the same string format was used in both places, whether Pascal-style or C-style.
There are multiple aspects to this vulnerability. No certificate should have been issued for an invalid domain name (NUL characters are not permitted in DNS identifiers). Given the sensitivity of the field, the domain name should not have been converted from ASN.1 format to a C-style string without some runtime verification that the resulting string is equivalent to the original, including the length. Finally, it would have made more sense to store and compare the domain name starting from the TLD; that way, if the name somehow did get truncated, the part which was verified would be the most important part and not some arbitrary subdomain.
Well, strictly speaking the money they bought the computers with wasn't theirs to spend, so the computers aren't their property. However, who else would set the rules if they didn't? We can worry about the local network rules after we've addressed the minor matter of dealing in stolen goods.
No, fraud can still be regulated. You are free to claim anything, but you must back them up. Contracts similarly should be free for anything, but you must not lie in them.
A perhaps clearer way of looking at fraud is this: All contracts depend on "meeting of the minds", the understanding and agreement of both parties regarding the terms of the contract. If one party deliberately lies to the other in order to get their agreement then there can be no "meeting of the minds," ergo the contract was never valid in the first place. There is no "regulation" of fraud involved.
False claims outside the domain of contracts are simply speech, and not a matter for the legal system. It is up to the listeners to demand evidence to back up questionable claims.
The point of insurance is to distribute costs while holding individual risks constant. Risk is cost times probability; with an insurance plan you take an event which is low-probability but high-cost (e.g. a hospital visit) and trade it for an event which is low-cost but high-probability (periodic premiums). The risk remains the same, aside from the policy's overhead. In general a pool of individuals with similar risks is an important factor in making the insurance possible, but each individual is still responsible for financing their own projected risk. Those expected to use more should pay more.
What passes for "insurance" these days would be more accurately known as inefficient "health savings accounts", with part of the losses going to a charity (of sorts) for high-risk individuals. It would be more manageable (not to mention efficient) to just have real insurance with separate charities for those truly in need.
You can also on those questionaires pretty much lie. If you get a lower rate for the lower expected mileages then it's in your best interest to say the lower amount. It's an ESTIMATE, not a contractually agreed upon limit. If you just happen to "underestimate" how much you drive this year then oh well.
That's not quite true, given a sane judge and legal system. (I'm not a lawyer and am not prepared to vouch for either being the case in practice.) If you happen to underestimate your mileage unintentionally, but believe the estimate to be accurate and have no intention of deceiving the other party, then what you say would generally hold. Deliberately underestimating would be fraud, however, and sufficient cause to void your insurance contract; you don't get a free pass just because it's an estimate. As usual, the difficulty lies in proving the intent.
I'm not going to claim that none of the non-government market participants contributed to 1929. However, the unprecedented influence of the Federal Reserve in the financial sector, together with various other official acts of government, are frequently overlooked. Somehow people have gotten the impression that we had a nearly-free market prior to 1929, and that the government intervened only after things got bad. This simply isn't the case; market intervention started well before 1929, was a major contributor to the crash, and furthermore was one of the primary differences between the Great Depression and the economic aftermath of similar market crashes which proceeded it. For a much more thorough analysis of the events surrounding the crash of 1929 and the Depression itself see America's Great Depression by Morray Rothbard.
But to at least provide one quick counter example to the GP: Anyone remember why the FDIC was founded? Bank runs. They happen when the government doesn't intervene in the banking system.
On the contrary, bank runs happen--are inevitable, really--when banks fail to maintain sufficient reserves to meet their on-demand obligations. Banks have always sought to get away with minimal reserves for their own profit, but the Federal Reserve took significant steps to encourage this irresponsible behavior starting well before 1929 as part of its goal to inflate the money supply.
The free market had nothing to do with 1929. You're ignoring the massive government intervention in multiple areas of the market which built and extended an unsustainable boom period leading (inevitably) to the crash, not to mention the continuation of those same policies after the crash, on a grander scale, which ultimately made the correction as long and difficult as it was.
The total amount downloaded (ignoring re-downloads, which are rare) is capped by the number of users interested in that file, N. The initial copy was brought in from elsewhere, so there are at most N-1 copies uploaded via the P2P network. The mean amount uploaded per-user is thus (N-1 copies) / (N users), which is approximately unity.
A minority of users with faster-than-average upload rates, higher caps, and/or always-on computers do more than their equal share of the uploading, so the median amount uploaded is most likely less than the mean. This does assume that pure "leaching" is uncommon, which is the case with modern P2P networks. (Note that allowing for leaching cuts both ways; it raises the median ratio, but also allows the defendant to argue that they may not have uploaded anything at all.) In the absence of hard data suggesting otherwise it would be reasonable to assume that the median is no greater than the mean.
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Trust a representative of a "'socialist' welfare state" (your words) to fail to understand the Broken Window fallacy.
When you impair efficient economic activity via aggression (e.g. by coercing others into reducing CO2 emissions without substantial evidence of harm) you inevitably create a wealth of opportunities for commerce related to working around or repairing the damage. At a naive first glance this looks like an improvement; visible activity exists as a direct result of your actions. The problem, of course, is that this activity is far from free. Had you just left things well enough alone the resources being spent on workarounds and repairs would have been available for more productive ends; because you could not resist the impulse to "help", however, all must bear the costs of first deliberately breaking a working system, and then fixing it (assuming it is even possible to do so in full), and the resources thus expended are gone forever.
Aggression can sometimes bring wealth to those who employ it, but only at an even greater expense to others. It can never result in a net improvement for all involved.
Already taken: IEEE 802.11s.
IEEE 802.11s defines a mesh-networking protocol which "extends the IEEE 802.11 MAC standard by defining an architecture and protocol that support both broadcast/multicast and unicast delivery using 'radio-aware metrics over self-configuring multi-hop topologies.'"
This seems to be a common complaint, but it's hardly specific to PayPal. Merchants accepting credit cards get stuck with charge-backs all the time, and from what I can tell (from second-hand reports, anyway) the credit-card dispute resolution process isn't much better for sellers than PayPal's.
The simple fact is that PayPal has no way of knowing which side is in the right. Maybe you did send an empty box, and the apparent change in story was just a misunderstanding. After all, the buyer did consistently claim not to have received the item; perhaps they simply didn't consider an empty box worth mentioning until you brought up the tracking number. The only way to avoid this sort of issue is to have a mutually-trusted third-party mediate the transaction rather than dealing directly with the buyer/seller. Unfortunately, that's only a practical solution for relatively expensive items. For everything else, well--sellers are fewer in number, deal in higher volumes, and are generally regarded as being more capable of absorbing the cost of proving their side of the dispute, or otherwise taking the occasional loss. This isn't a great solution, but it's the best available at present.
If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends.
What makes you think our views regarding software differ at all from those regarding other media? Software simply isn't the main focus of the copyright debates at present, so you don't hear as much about it. Any of the proposed changes to copyright law would affect software as much as anything else.
P.S. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value"; that debate was lost a long time ago. All value is subjective. To illustrate with a counter-example: some software packages have no ROI whatsoever in a commercial context, whereas a well-chosen bit of music or video can sometimes make or break a business (e.g. for marketing or advertising). The textbook case for subjective value is that diamonds normally command a very high price while few would pay much at all for water--but to someone dying of thirst in the desert their relative values are reversed. Intrinsic value cannot explain this, but subjective value can: the value of a good to an individual is a product of subjective circumstance, not a fixed property of the good itself.
If anyone feels like following me around with a camera--without trespassing, of course--they're quite welcome to waste their time.
Everyone has things they legitimately want to hide. I think the GP is aware of this, and was simply pointing out the double-standard involved in law enforcement claiming protection for their own secrets while treating any attempt by a private citizen to achieve the same protection of privacy as an admission of guilt.
On the other hand, if one wishes to keep one's information private one must work to ensure that it stays that way. No one--whether private citizen or law enforcement--has any right to prevent others from distributing information once it becomes known.
Finally, if this woman could uncover undercover operatives so easily then how much more readily could the criminals themselves do so? After all, they have much more incentive, and won't bother to restrict themselves to publicly-accessible databases. If anything, she did the police a favor by demonstrating how weak their operational security is. They should be thanking her, not arresting her.
But Fair Use isn't a right.
On the contrary, Fair Use is what little remains of a much more extensive natural right which was violated to create the force-backed monopoly privilege known as copyright. The right remains, of course, but is no longer recognized by the law or upheld by those charged with enforcing the same.
People have shown how much they're willing to pay, why charge less?
Larger market share, perhaps? Even Apple's products are subject to competition.
It's true that most ad blockers look only at the URL. However, ads can also be blocked by their position and attributes within the structure of the page (DOM and CSS). Ad Block Plus already employs this form of filtering. Assuming your site gets enough visitors to be worth advertising on, any advantage to be had from eliminating the URL hints would pass quickly. Also, the more effort you put into making your site's advertising scheme unique the smaller your selection of potential advertisers becomes, and the less revenue you stand to receive from those ads which make it through. Finally, you're spending all this effort to show ads to a group of visitors who are intrinsically much less likely to follow up on any ads they do see, which in turn will drive down your conversion rate and thus the revenue you receive per ad.
It really all comes down to your ability to come up with innovative anti-ad-blocking schemes vs. the cumulative incentive of every visitor to your site to block the ads, and (with a few rare exceptions) there are a lot more of them than there are of you.
They're not intercepting your communications with any outside server. You asked them for the IP address linked to a given domain name, they asked a higher-level DNS server that returned NXDOMAIN to them, and instead of just returning the same NXDOMAIN to you like everyone else would they returned a pointer to the server hosting their search page. Underhanded? Sure. But intercepting and modifying your communications? Not really. Your communications were with the ISP to being with, not the upstream DNS servers, and nothing really obligates the ISP to return the standard response.
You could configure your system to query one of those upstream DNS servers directly. If they messed with that, then they would be interfering in your communications.
Our government? Try any government.
It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government.
What's really funny is that some people think it actually matters which one controls the other, when the point is that under either system government and "big business" amount to a single entity.
I'm no expert, but I believe the FSF's position is that the derivative work is created when you design your software to be linked against a GPL library (making it a derivative of the library's API), not when the actual dynamic linking happens at runtime. If true, that would mean that even the un-linked binaries could only be distributed under the terms of the GPL. The only exception would be in cases where you could potentially link against a non-GPL library with the same API (e.g. motif vs. the GPL'd lesstif), since in that case the API isn't specific to the GPL library.
Note that the FSF's position on dynamic linking is very much on the fringe, and far from unopposed.
Government-funded research is just one form of funding-by-monopolist, which has already been covered. The only difference is that in the government's case the monopoly is established and maintained through the active and continual application of aggressive coercion, whereas most private monopolies are either natural--meaning the market will only support a single provider--or merely the result of good business instincts.
The expression "sizeof(string)" will give you either the size of the pointer type on your platform (if string is a char*) or the size of the array allocated to hold the string, regardless of the amount of space actually used. Neither would be very helpful. Also, assert() statements are no-ops outside of development builds and thus not suitable for this sort of runtime test.
I think we have a terminology issue here. NUL characters are indeed permitted in DNS "labels", one element of a DNS identifier, but the CA is issuing certificates for not just DNS labels but actual Internet (ARPANET) hostnames. As described in RFC 1035, Internet hostnames are further constrained to "start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen." No NUL characters are permitted.
I would also like to note that, as the hostname listed in the certificate is invalid, the CA cannot have properly verified, even minimally, that the recipient actually owned the hostname in question.
The problem is that the certificate, being written in ASN.1 format, does use a Pascal-style length-delimited string, whereas the browser is using C-style strings. When the ASN.1 string is converted into a C-style string the early NUL terminator is preserved, truncating the domain, and this truncated domain is then used to verify that the certificate matches the URL. This wouldn't be an issue if the same string format was used in both places, whether Pascal-style or C-style.
There are multiple aspects to this vulnerability. No certificate should have been issued for an invalid domain name (NUL characters are not permitted in DNS identifiers). Given the sensitivity of the field, the domain name should not have been converted from ASN.1 format to a C-style string without some runtime verification that the resulting string is equivalent to the original, including the length. Finally, it would have made more sense to store and compare the domain name starting from the TLD; that way, if the name somehow did get truncated, the part which was verified would be the most important part and not some arbitrary subdomain.
Well, strictly speaking the money they bought the computers with wasn't theirs to spend, so the computers aren't their property. However, who else would set the rules if they didn't? We can worry about the local network rules after we've addressed the minor matter of dealing in stolen goods.
Sure, in the same sense that all proprietary licenses are also viral. The difference is that the GPL "virus" doesn't generally kill its hosts.
No, fraud can still be regulated. You are free to claim anything, but you must back them up. Contracts similarly should be free for anything, but you must not lie in them.
A perhaps clearer way of looking at fraud is this: All contracts depend on "meeting of the minds", the understanding and agreement of both parties regarding the terms of the contract. If one party deliberately lies to the other in order to get their agreement then there can be no "meeting of the minds," ergo the contract was never valid in the first place. There is no "regulation" of fraud involved.
False claims outside the domain of contracts are simply speech, and not a matter for the legal system. It is up to the listeners to demand evidence to back up questionable claims.
The point of insurance is to distribute costs while holding individual risks constant. Risk is cost times probability; with an insurance plan you take an event which is low-probability but high-cost (e.g. a hospital visit) and trade it for an event which is low-cost but high-probability (periodic premiums). The risk remains the same, aside from the policy's overhead. In general a pool of individuals with similar risks is an important factor in making the insurance possible, but each individual is still responsible for financing their own projected risk. Those expected to use more should pay more.
What passes for "insurance" these days would be more accurately known as inefficient "health savings accounts", with part of the losses going to a charity (of sorts) for high-risk individuals. It would be more manageable (not to mention efficient) to just have real insurance with separate charities for those truly in need.
You can also on those questionaires pretty much lie. If you get a lower rate for the lower expected mileages then it's in your best interest to say the lower amount. It's an ESTIMATE, not a contractually agreed upon limit. If you just happen to "underestimate" how much you drive this year then oh well.
That's not quite true, given a sane judge and legal system. (I'm not a lawyer and am not prepared to vouch for either being the case in practice.) If you happen to underestimate your mileage unintentionally, but believe the estimate to be accurate and have no intention of deceiving the other party, then what you say would generally hold. Deliberately underestimating would be fraud, however, and sufficient cause to void your insurance contract; you don't get a free pass just because it's an estimate. As usual, the difficulty lies in proving the intent.
I'm not going to claim that none of the non-government market participants contributed to 1929. However, the unprecedented influence of the Federal Reserve in the financial sector, together with various other official acts of government, are frequently overlooked. Somehow people have gotten the impression that we had a nearly-free market prior to 1929, and that the government intervened only after things got bad. This simply isn't the case; market intervention started well before 1929, was a major contributor to the crash, and furthermore was one of the primary differences between the Great Depression and the economic aftermath of similar market crashes which proceeded it. For a much more thorough analysis of the events surrounding the crash of 1929 and the Depression itself see America's Great Depression by Morray Rothbard.
But to at least provide one quick counter example to the GP: Anyone remember why the FDIC was founded? Bank runs. They happen when the government doesn't intervene in the banking system.
On the contrary, bank runs happen--are inevitable, really--when banks fail to maintain sufficient reserves to meet their on-demand obligations. Banks have always sought to get away with minimal reserves for their own profit, but the Federal Reserve took significant steps to encourage this irresponsible behavior starting well before 1929 as part of its goal to inflate the money supply.
The free market had nothing to do with 1929. You're ignoring the massive government intervention in multiple areas of the market which built and extended an unsustainable boom period leading (inevitably) to the crash, not to mention the continuation of those same policies after the crash, on a grander scale, which ultimately made the correction as long and difficult as it was.
The total amount downloaded (ignoring re-downloads, which are rare) is capped by the number of users interested in that file, N. The initial copy was brought in from elsewhere, so there are at most N-1 copies uploaded via the P2P network. The mean amount uploaded per-user is thus (N-1 copies) / (N users), which is approximately unity.
A minority of users with faster-than-average upload rates, higher caps, and/or always-on computers do more than their equal share of the uploading, so the median amount uploaded is most likely less than the mean. This does assume that pure "leaching" is uncommon, which is the case with modern P2P networks. (Note that allowing for leaching cuts both ways; it raises the median ratio, but also allows the defendant to argue that they may not have uploaded anything at all.) In the absence of hard data suggesting otherwise it would be reasonable to assume that the median is no greater than the mean.