No car analogy will work here. The ongoing, mandatory maintenance costs of a car simply aren't comparable to the costs of keeping the ISS in its current orbit, even in a deactivated storage mode, or moving it somewhere more stable. The amount of resources that have been poured into the project is irrelevant; if the projected cost of not de-orbiting the ISS is greater than the projected value to be had from keeping it in orbit, then the correct choice is to de-orbit it. Apparently NASA--and the other ISS participants--agreed during the design phase that this crossover point would be reached in 2016, and decided that the project was still worthwhile (a much easier conclusion to arrive at when it's other people's money you're proposing to spend).
No one has a right to "safety". Each individual has a right to their own person and property. When and if one's ability to continue using one's person and/or property is impaired through the actions of others, then one's rights have been infringed. Speech alone is incapable of violating anyone's rights. If others act on such speech, they are the ones infringing others' rights and they are the ones who should be held responsible, not the speaker.
We should be free to do what we please, so long as we do not infringe on other people's rights to do the same.
Exactly. Too bad you can't see how this contradicts the rest of your comment. Hint: Speech alone does not interfere with anyone else's freedom of action, or self-ownership, or property. Laws against speech, however, do.
Freedom of speech is the right to speak to anyone whatsoever, about anything whatsoever, true or false, without incurring any legal consequence. Cases involving the right to free speech naturally tend to concern themselves with highly controversial speech, and the outcomes tend to reflect personal and/or social biases rather than justice. Nonetheless, the U.S. Constitution makes no exception for any specific form of speech; all speech is protected. The U.S. Constitution aside, no punishment thus far proposed as a response to unwanted speech meets the simple test of being proportional to the supposed offense. No formal judgment is needed to respond in kind, and no court has the authority to hand down a disproportionate penalty for any offense, real or imagined.
In the case of fraud, certain false statements inhibit the "meeting of the minds" required for a valid contract, making any contract based on such false claims void. This is not a punishment for false speech, but rather a recognition that the contract was never valid to begin with. None of the other examples should be illegal, and making them so contradicts the First Amendment in the U.S., no matter how much certain judges and lawmakers might prefer otherwise.
I would argue that the "fire in a crowded theater" ruling was wrong from the beginning, and directly contradicts the First Amendment. Speech alone, true or false, should never incur any form of legal consequence. Those who trample others in their haste to reach the exits are responsible for the harm they've caused whether or not the fire is real. Regarding the specific case of fraud, false statements inhibit the necessary "meeting of the minds", and thus prevent any valid contract from forming in the first place; the contract being declared void by a civil court is merely recognition of this fact, and not a punishment for the fraudulent speech.
On the other hand, the owner of the facilities can set conditions on entry to his or her property, including disrupting the performance / causing a panic with false speech. The differences are that these conditions are voluntarily accepted by each patron in a contract with the owner, and that the patrons are agreeing in advance to give up specific property, not their inalienable right to speak.
No one is suggesting that the president should be open to a lawsuit over every minor disagreement over how the government is run. It makes perfect sense, however, that all politicians--the president included--should be held liable for the promises they make during their campaigns, to at least the same extent that commercial entities are held liable for their advertising promises. Promising something to get elected and failing to carry out that promise afterward can reasonably be considered a form of fraud.
Also, no suggestion has been made that the government should fund the legal defense, so no additional taxpayer money would be wasted. They made their campaign promises as individuals, ergo ensuring that those promises are carried out is also their responsibility as individuals.
As I understand the issues, that's a problem for the artists, not the broadcasters. SoundExchange can collect royalties and issue statutory licenses for any artist, whether or not the artist registers to receive royalties from them, but broadcasters are free to ignore SoundExchange if they so choose. Such broadcasters must negotiate with the copyright holders on their own for the necessary licenses to operate legally.
For example, it shouldn't be necessary to deal with SoundExchange if you only play Creative Commons music, as you already have a license and don't require the higher-cost statutory licenses they're offering.
You could, but it would still be idiotic. Spending altogether too much on luxury cars has no significant effect on the amount of food available or the price at which it's sold. If anything, such behavior should be encouraged--given the GP's obvious goals--as it redistributes wealth from the super-rich to those who designed and manufactured the vehicle, along with all its parts and raw materials. Given that their second choice wasn't "donate it all to charity", the trade in luxury goods is one of the more efficient ways to close the gap between rich and poor, the more luxurious the better. The higher the mark-up the more efficiently the wealth is transferred.
Bicycles aren't allowed on interstates in the U.S. Even ignoring the 'no cyclists allowed' signs, most interstates have a minimum speed limit of at least 45 MPG. If you decide to take your bike onto the interstate anyway, blatently ignoring the signs posted at every on-ramp, extreme personal danger is an obvious consequence.
If you can't keep up with the traffic, stay off the road.
The problem with applying Malthusian population arguments to human beings is that humans have always distinguished themselves from most other animals by having fewer children than their environment could support at a subsistence level. The resources thus saved are invested in other areas: preparation for the future, peace/civilization, comfort, convenience, etc. Malthusian population dynamics conclude that any population will increase to the maximum possible given the available resources, but that manifestly is not the case for humans.
It doesn't matter whether the person in question is a customer, employee, or visiting dignitary. The only criteria that matters is that they entered the property willingly, knowing the conditions. That is as true for employees as it is for customers.
That fact that the business in your anecdote settled doesn't mean they would have been found liable in court--or that they were actually liable, which isn't always the same thing. The customer was liable, if anyone, for breaking the glass and thus creating the situation. However, it doesn't look good for employees to sue customers even when doing so would be justified, so I'm not particularly surprised that the employer settled the matter itself as an act of goodwill.
I'm sure people in NC would agree to pay rather than stop doing business. There is something fishy in this case.
The "something fishy" is that NC wants to tax Amazon--not the local associates--as if they had a presence in the state, based on their relationships with local associates (who are undoubtedly already paying NC taxes). Ergo, Amazon is severing its NC-based associate relationships to avoid any appearance of a taxable in-state presence.
I doubt that these taxes on out-of-state businesses are even remotely Constitutional, but I don't blame Amazon for playing it safe.
I think you need to make your sarcasm a bit more obvious. Someone might get the impression that you actually agreed with NC on this issue. That would, of course, be utterly ridiculous--but given the kinds of people one meets online it's hard to be certain, and not every detects sarcasm well.
Would you want to liable for a regular patron that contracted lung cancer after breathing smoke in your establishment?
I would certainly hope that it isn't possible to incur liability for exposure to conditions the customer is fully aware of before walking in the door. Subjecting customers to unexpected or hidden risk would be one thing, but when someone goes into a place of business knowing in advance that they'll be exposed to second-hand smoke the responsibility for any potential consequences is theirs alone. A warning sign for new customers might be in order--though it would be difficult to argue that any significant damage could be incurred in the time it takes to observe the conditions and leave.
You'd already have some liability if your smoking customer spilled a drink and the same non-smoking patron slipped on it.
Citation, please? Any reasonable theory of liability depends on the liable individual contributing in some way to the damage, by action or negligence. Neither is the case here, unless you're leaving something important out of your description.
This can be answered without any specific knowledge of the protocol. In order to start downloading that first piece, you have to know where to direct the request. That means you need information (an IP address and port) for at least one peer before the first block can be downloaded.
In practice BT makes no attempt to hide connection information from other peers. Transport encryption is only used to limit third-party observation and filtering, e.g. by an ISP. The trackers will happily hand out every peer's IP address to anyone who asks--perhaps not all at once, depending on the implementation, but that just forces one to issue multiple requests. The only way to avoid publishing your real IP address for all to see is to use a proxy or darknet for all communications (tracker and peer). Private trackers can limit your exposure somewhat, but they're high-profile targets, and only work so long as no unwanted observers are granted entry.
"Something that facilitates commerce" is not the same as commerce itself. Regulating trade does not imply regulating anything and everything employed toward that end. If it did, the powers of Congress would be effectively unlimited. Furthermore, "the Internet" is not a concrete legal entity, but rather an abstract conglomeration of various independently-owned private networks, many of which do not even cross state lines. The primary purpose of these networks is communication, not trade. Regulating them in the name of "interstate commerce" is indeed quite a stretch.
...deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.
Even if no direct competition arises--and sometimes a given market will only support one producer--it's still better for a profit-oriented entity to be in charge of that production. The prices for that particular good may be the same, but a profit motive ensures that the producer's costs--as in actual scarce resources consumed--will be minimized. That, in turn, helps to drive down the prices of the higher-order goods (fuel, materials, labor, office supplies,...) which would otherwise be required the service less efficiently.
You quote that passage as though the connection were obvious. Please explain, if you can, how a communication line running between two points within the same state is in any way "Commerce... among the several States", much less "with foreign Nations" or "with the Indian Tribes". For that matter, explain how the purely communication aspect of the service can be considered "Commerce" even if it did happen to cross state boundaries.
I certainly hope any such lawsuit would not be successful. There is no such thing as a right to the market value of one's property--which only exists in the minds of others to begin with.
Any secondhand benefits non-drivers may receive are paid for--in full--in the prices of goods and services provided by those who pay for the roads directly. There is absolutely no need to spread the costs of road maintenance to non-drivers, and doing so only inhibits the proper allocation of resources among goods and services relative to their respective demand.
It is sufficient that a free market is at least as efficient as any other system, given the same issues of limited rationality and imperfect information. These issues are a part of every system made up of human actors, and do not unique affect market economies.
In any event, the need for rationality is often overstated. It is enough that most participants practice rational self-interest given subjective--essentially arbitrary--goals. The goals themselves can be perfectly irrational. Failing at rational self-interest itself requires one to deliberately act in a way known to be contrary to one's own goals. Naturally, this is a very rare occurrence. Similarly, free individuals acting via an open market is the only efficient way to answer the question you posed regarding the value of good information relative to the cost of acquiring it.
Depending on your metrics, cheating would result in excellent performance, but is a valid reason to fail a student.
That depends on the direction of the cheating. If the student only passed because they cheated, then that would be a valid reason fail them despite their passing grade. If they only enabled cheating by others, however, then their own grade is perfectly valid and these other should be the ones to fail.
Also, Another post further up insists that all government information be available in free and open standards of formatting. This is one rule you can't express in terms of paper, because there is no equivalent problem in paper media.
A constitution should be technology-agnostic. Framing it purely in terms of paper would be just as bad as framing it purely in terms of digital technology. The problem does exist with paper, in any event; even without computers you need standard processes for recording data, storing it, indexing it, requesting it, communicating it, etc. The means be which these questions would be answered for paper information storage can be applied to digital systems as well.
Anyway, the real problem (as I see it) is that they're only discussing a constitution. Certainly such a fundamental document should be short, clear, and well-written, with as few loopholes and period-specific references as possible. However, you need something more to ensure that it isn't twisted or misinterpreted by others who might not think like you. A large body of case studies is required, demonstrating not only how you mean for it to be interpreted in specific situations, and why, but also the underlying reasoning and principles on which the constitution was based. Analyzing the case studies will also help you to shore up any weaknesses in the constitution itself.
The constitution sets the tone, and summarizes your shared principles. The rest is there to answer the question "How does all this apply to me?", and is arguably the more important of the two documents.
Second, "unconstitutional?" I'd like you to point out the place where it says "The government cannot direct the use of bandwidth used in broadcasting."
I'm not sure how things work in Canada, but around here the burden of proof is on you to point out where the Constitution grants the government regulatory authority over radio broadcasting. Under a strict--but perfectly reasonable and consistent--interpretation of the Constitution, you'll be looking for a very long time.
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The original quote was overly simplistic. The causes of success and failure are both diverse, in families as much as in software.
No car analogy will work here. The ongoing, mandatory maintenance costs of a car simply aren't comparable to the costs of keeping the ISS in its current orbit, even in a deactivated storage mode, or moving it somewhere more stable. The amount of resources that have been poured into the project is irrelevant; if the projected cost of not de-orbiting the ISS is greater than the projected value to be had from keeping it in orbit, then the correct choice is to de-orbit it. Apparently NASA--and the other ISS participants--agreed during the design phase that this crossover point would be reached in 2016, and decided that the project was still worthwhile (a much easier conclusion to arrive at when it's other people's money you're proposing to spend).
No one has a right to "safety". Each individual has a right to their own person and property. When and if one's ability to continue using one's person and/or property is impaired through the actions of others, then one's rights have been infringed. Speech alone is incapable of violating anyone's rights. If others act on such speech, they are the ones infringing others' rights and they are the ones who should be held responsible, not the speaker.
We should be free to do what we please, so long as we do not infringe on other people's rights to do the same.
Exactly. Too bad you can't see how this contradicts the rest of your comment. Hint: Speech alone does not interfere with anyone else's freedom of action, or self-ownership, or property. Laws against speech, however, do.
Freedom of speech is the right to speak to anyone whatsoever, about anything whatsoever, true or false, without incurring any legal consequence. Cases involving the right to free speech naturally tend to concern themselves with highly controversial speech, and the outcomes tend to reflect personal and/or social biases rather than justice. Nonetheless, the U.S. Constitution makes no exception for any specific form of speech; all speech is protected. The U.S. Constitution aside, no punishment thus far proposed as a response to unwanted speech meets the simple test of being proportional to the supposed offense. No formal judgment is needed to respond in kind, and no court has the authority to hand down a disproportionate penalty for any offense, real or imagined.
In the case of fraud, certain false statements inhibit the "meeting of the minds" required for a valid contract, making any contract based on such false claims void. This is not a punishment for false speech, but rather a recognition that the contract was never valid to begin with. None of the other examples should be illegal, and making them so contradicts the First Amendment in the U.S., no matter how much certain judges and lawmakers might prefer otherwise.
I would argue that the "fire in a crowded theater" ruling was wrong from the beginning, and directly contradicts the First Amendment. Speech alone, true or false, should never incur any form of legal consequence. Those who trample others in their haste to reach the exits are responsible for the harm they've caused whether or not the fire is real. Regarding the specific case of fraud, false statements inhibit the necessary "meeting of the minds", and thus prevent any valid contract from forming in the first place; the contract being declared void by a civil court is merely recognition of this fact, and not a punishment for the fraudulent speech.
On the other hand, the owner of the facilities can set conditions on entry to his or her property, including disrupting the performance / causing a panic with false speech. The differences are that these conditions are voluntarily accepted by each patron in a contract with the owner, and that the patrons are agreeing in advance to give up specific property, not their inalienable right to speak.
No one is suggesting that the president should be open to a lawsuit over every minor disagreement over how the government is run. It makes perfect sense, however, that all politicians--the president included--should be held liable for the promises they make during their campaigns, to at least the same extent that commercial entities are held liable for their advertising promises. Promising something to get elected and failing to carry out that promise afterward can reasonably be considered a form of fraud.
Also, no suggestion has been made that the government should fund the legal defense, so no additional taxpayer money would be wasted. They made their campaign promises as individuals, ergo ensuring that those promises are carried out is also their responsibility as individuals.
As I understand the issues, that's a problem for the artists, not the broadcasters. SoundExchange can collect royalties and issue statutory licenses for any artist, whether or not the artist registers to receive royalties from them, but broadcasters are free to ignore SoundExchange if they so choose. Such broadcasters must negotiate with the copyright holders on their own for the necessary licenses to operate legally.
For example, it shouldn't be necessary to deal with SoundExchange if you only play Creative Commons music, as you already have a license and don't require the higher-cost statutory licenses they're offering.
You could, but it would still be idiotic. Spending altogether too much on luxury cars has no significant effect on the amount of food available or the price at which it's sold. If anything, such behavior should be encouraged--given the GP's obvious goals--as it redistributes wealth from the super-rich to those who designed and manufactured the vehicle, along with all its parts and raw materials. Given that their second choice wasn't "donate it all to charity", the trade in luxury goods is one of the more efficient ways to close the gap between rich and poor, the more luxurious the better. The higher the mark-up the more efficiently the wealth is transferred.
Bicycles aren't allowed on interstates in the U.S. Even ignoring the 'no cyclists allowed' signs, most interstates have a minimum speed limit of at least 45 MPG. If you decide to take your bike onto the interstate anyway, blatently ignoring the signs posted at every on-ramp, extreme personal danger is an obvious consequence.
If you can't keep up with the traffic, stay off the road.
The problem with applying Malthusian population arguments to human beings is that humans have always distinguished themselves from most other animals by having fewer children than their environment could support at a subsistence level. The resources thus saved are invested in other areas: preparation for the future, peace/civilization, comfort, convenience, etc. Malthusian population dynamics conclude that any population will increase to the maximum possible given the available resources, but that manifestly is not the case for humans.
It doesn't matter whether the person in question is a customer, employee, or visiting dignitary. The only criteria that matters is that they entered the property willingly, knowing the conditions. That is as true for employees as it is for customers.
That fact that the business in your anecdote settled doesn't mean they would have been found liable in court--or that they were actually liable, which isn't always the same thing. The customer was liable, if anyone, for breaking the glass and thus creating the situation. However, it doesn't look good for employees to sue customers even when doing so would be justified, so I'm not particularly surprised that the employer settled the matter itself as an act of goodwill.
I'm sure people in NC would agree to pay rather than stop doing business. There is something fishy in this case.
The "something fishy" is that NC wants to tax Amazon--not the local associates--as if they had a presence in the state, based on their relationships with local associates (who are undoubtedly already paying NC taxes). Ergo, Amazon is severing its NC-based associate relationships to avoid any appearance of a taxable in-state presence.
I doubt that these taxes on out-of-state businesses are even remotely Constitutional, but I don't blame Amazon for playing it safe.
I think you need to make your sarcasm a bit more obvious. Someone might get the impression that you actually agreed with NC on this issue. That would, of course, be utterly ridiculous--but given the kinds of people one meets online it's hard to be certain, and not every detects sarcasm well.
Would you want to liable for a regular patron that contracted lung cancer after breathing smoke in your establishment?
I would certainly hope that it isn't possible to incur liability for exposure to conditions the customer is fully aware of before walking in the door. Subjecting customers to unexpected or hidden risk would be one thing, but when someone goes into a place of business knowing in advance that they'll be exposed to second-hand smoke the responsibility for any potential consequences is theirs alone. A warning sign for new customers might be in order--though it would be difficult to argue that any significant damage could be incurred in the time it takes to observe the conditions and leave.
You'd already have some liability if your smoking customer spilled a drink and the same non-smoking patron slipped on it.
Citation, please? Any reasonable theory of liability depends on the liable individual contributing in some way to the damage, by action or negligence. Neither is the case here, unless you're leaving something important out of your description.
This can be answered without any specific knowledge of the protocol. In order to start downloading that first piece, you have to know where to direct the request. That means you need information (an IP address and port) for at least one peer before the first block can be downloaded.
In practice BT makes no attempt to hide connection information from other peers. Transport encryption is only used to limit third-party observation and filtering, e.g. by an ISP. The trackers will happily hand out every peer's IP address to anyone who asks--perhaps not all at once, depending on the implementation, but that just forces one to issue multiple requests. The only way to avoid publishing your real IP address for all to see is to use a proxy or darknet for all communications (tracker and peer). Private trackers can limit your exposure somewhat, but they're high-profile targets, and only work so long as no unwanted observers are granted entry.
"Something that facilitates commerce" is not the same as commerce itself. Regulating trade does not imply regulating anything and everything employed toward that end. If it did, the powers of Congress would be effectively unlimited. Furthermore, "the Internet" is not a concrete legal entity, but rather an abstract conglomeration of various independently-owned private networks, many of which do not even cross state lines. The primary purpose of these networks is communication, not trade. Regulating them in the name of "interstate commerce" is indeed quite a stretch.
...deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.
Even if no direct competition arises--and sometimes a given market will only support one producer--it's still better for a profit-oriented entity to be in charge of that production. The prices for that particular good may be the same, but a profit motive ensures that the producer's costs--as in actual scarce resources consumed--will be minimized. That, in turn, helps to drive down the prices of the higher-order goods (fuel, materials, labor, office supplies, ...) which would otherwise be required the service less efficiently.
You quote that passage as though the connection were obvious. Please explain, if you can, how a communication line running between two points within the same state is in any way "Commerce ... among the several States", much less "with foreign Nations" or "with the Indian Tribes". For that matter, explain how the purely communication aspect of the service can be considered "Commerce" even if it did happen to cross state boundaries.
I certainly hope any such lawsuit would not be successful. There is no such thing as a right to the market value of one's property--which only exists in the minds of others to begin with.
Any secondhand benefits non-drivers may receive are paid for--in full--in the prices of goods and services provided by those who pay for the roads directly. There is absolutely no need to spread the costs of road maintenance to non-drivers, and doing so only inhibits the proper allocation of resources among goods and services relative to their respective demand.
It is sufficient that a free market is at least as efficient as any other system, given the same issues of limited rationality and imperfect information. These issues are a part of every system made up of human actors, and do not unique affect market economies.
In any event, the need for rationality is often overstated. It is enough that most participants practice rational self-interest given subjective--essentially arbitrary--goals. The goals themselves can be perfectly irrational. Failing at rational self-interest itself requires one to deliberately act in a way known to be contrary to one's own goals. Naturally, this is a very rare occurrence. Similarly, free individuals acting via an open market is the only efficient way to answer the question you posed regarding the value of good information relative to the cost of acquiring it.
Depending on your metrics, cheating would result in excellent performance, but is a valid reason to fail a student.
That depends on the direction of the cheating. If the student only passed because they cheated, then that would be a valid reason fail them despite their passing grade. If they only enabled cheating by others, however, then their own grade is perfectly valid and these other should be the ones to fail.
Yes, but in the real world it doesn't count against you to present a work written by others with proper attribution.
Also, Another post further up insists that all government information be available in free and open standards of formatting. This is one rule you can't express in terms of paper, because there is no equivalent problem in paper media.
A constitution should be technology-agnostic. Framing it purely in terms of paper would be just as bad as framing it purely in terms of digital technology. The problem does exist with paper, in any event; even without computers you need standard processes for recording data, storing it, indexing it, requesting it, communicating it, etc. The means be which these questions would be answered for paper information storage can be applied to digital systems as well.
Anyway, the real problem (as I see it) is that they're only discussing a constitution. Certainly such a fundamental document should be short, clear, and well-written, with as few loopholes and period-specific references as possible. However, you need something more to ensure that it isn't twisted or misinterpreted by others who might not think like you. A large body of case studies is required, demonstrating not only how you mean for it to be interpreted in specific situations, and why, but also the underlying reasoning and principles on which the constitution was based. Analyzing the case studies will also help you to shore up any weaknesses in the constitution itself.
The constitution sets the tone, and summarizes your shared principles. The rest is there to answer the question "How does all this apply to me?", and is arguably the more important of the two documents.
Second, "unconstitutional?" I'd like you to point out the place where it says "The government cannot direct the use of bandwidth used in broadcasting."
I'm not sure how things work in Canada, but around here the burden of proof is on you to point out where the Constitution grants the government regulatory authority over radio broadcasting. Under a strict--but perfectly reasonable and consistent--interpretation of the Constitution, you'll be looking for a very long time.