Honest question: Let's say I take a 2 year old laptop. I know for sure that I can install windows, and that after installation, I will have sound, wifi and a decent screen. Is the same true for linux if I grab a commonly available distro?
Anecdotally... I just ran a Debian live image (from a USB stick) on a roughly two year old laptop to image the hard drive and begin diagnosing an intermittent loss-of-communication issue with the WiFi. The live image immediately started up to a GUI desktop with the proper graphics drivers and perfectly functional WiFi. This was not one of the "user-friendly" desktop distros, and the laptop was not selected for its Linux compatibility, yet—with zero time spent configuring it for that machine—Linux worked better than the Windows environment installed by the manufacturer. (The WiFi issue was eventually fixed by manually deleting and reinstalling the drivers.)
Now, there are systems out there with unsupported WiFi, unsupported graphics chips, and/or firmware that will refuse to boot anything without Microsoft's seal of approval, so I would recommend investigating a bit before making a purchase to ensure there aren't any major Linux incompatibilities. However, these are the exception rather than the rule. Most systems will work out of the box, especially if they have Intel or AMD graphics chips. (Systems with nVidia graphics may require additional closed-source drivers for full acceleration support, depending on the distro.)
Most people would recognizes that lighthouses are needed, but if governments did not build them, who would?
Not the best example, perhaps, since private lighthouses have existed, as pointed out by R. H. Coase in his article The Lighthouse in Economics in the October 1974 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics. There are any number of ways that so-called "public goods" can be provided without resorting to force.
By the way, the situation you described is not "the tragedy of the commons", which is invariably a product of interference in the market, but is rather generally referred to as the "free rider problem". Commons are not a naturally stable phenomenon. The tragedy of the commons is solved very simply by privatizing (i.e. homesteading) the commons, and thus giving someone a vested interest in maintaining it. A tragedy results only when the commons is forced to remain common, with no owner to decide how it will be used. (When a government "solves" the tragedy of the commons it does so merely by seizing the commons and acting in place of the owner. However, since the government claims to represent both present and future users of the property, while lacking any means of economic calculation, the result tends toward irreconcilable conflicts of interest.) The "free rider problem" is somewhat less tractable in cases where exclusion is not an option, but nonetheless force is not the answer.
Whitespace is good. Hell, Haskell is one of my favourite languages.
Same here, but the way Haskell handles whitespace is a bit different from Python. In Python the whitespace is part of the syntax and there is no other way to achieve the same result. Haskell syntax, on the other hand, is really fairly similar to C—anything that takes a list of declarations (module/where/let), expressions (do), or patterns (case) is defined to surround the list with curly braces and separate items with semicolons. If you write it this way then whitespace is ignored. There is an optional rule that allows the braces and semicolons to be inserted automatically if they are omitted, and it is only in this case that whitespace becomes significant.
The fact that Haskell does not require whitespace to be significant is useful, for example, when providing code samples in a forum which does not preserve leading indentation. Or, for that matter, any situation where you may need to fit a moderately complex piece of code on a single line.
It helps that Haskell code is also less ambiguous than Python, so incorrect indentation tends to cause compile-time errors. I have seen too many Python programs where indentation was the only factor separating a correct program from one with valid syntax but incorrect runtime behavior.
To my knowledge GCC doesn't have any ISO26262/IEC61508/DO-178 certifications meaning you're not going to be using it anywhere that is life or death.
Sorry, but that simply isn't true. I regularly work on DO-178 DAL-A software for the aerospace industry—primarily flight deck operating systems for everything from business jets to the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A380—and every platform I've worked on over the last decade has employed a version of GCC. True, GCC was not developed with DO-178 certification in mind. That doesn't matter, though, because GCC is not the software that is being certified for use on the aircraft. The released binaries will be subject to requirements-based testing, object code analysis, link analysis, and other verification steps which together demonstrate that the final product works as intended, regardless of any issues which may or may not exist in the compiler.
BTW, you mentioned the PowerPC e200 as a chip you've used—there is, in fact, a GCC-based toolchain from Freescale which targets that microarchitecture. My own experience is more along the lines of the PPC 7447 CPU and the PPC 440H6 and e500 SoC cores, and as I've said these were used exclusively with derivatives of GCC.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your feelings on whether absolute privacy is compatible with a safe and civil society.
The real question is whether mandatory backdoors are compatible with a safe and civil society. And since backdoors render people unsafe, and mandating them would be uncivil, the answer to that question is "no". You cannot have a safe and civil society with mandatory encryption backdoors. The very means employed would preclude the ends.
On the other hand, a society where no one could be forced to do anything against their will would be exceedingly safe and civil. Crime would be impossible, and government would be nonexistent. We don't have that option in the physical world, unfortunately, but strong encryption can get us very close to that ideal when it comes to our data.
The one exception would be when the roads are iced over. But then again, cars don't drive then either.
You might be surprised to learn that in a significant portion of the U.S. the roads tend to be iced over for several months every winter—and people still need to travel despite the conditions. In warmer climates that rarely see snow and ice people may just stay home for a few days and wait it out, but that isn't practical everywhere.
If you define efficiency according to the emissions from transporting the same number of people (1) the same distance (an obviously more useful metric), his scooter will outscore your car handily.
I think you mean the same people and cargo. If it takes three or four trips to the store to carry a week's worth of groceries with the scooter, which the car could have carried in one trip, then that means several times the emissions. Even if the scooter emits half as much per trip it still loses when you consider the entire job, and given the efficiency of modern cars and their tighter emissions controls the margin is probably much smaller. Not every trip will be like that, of course, but it's common enough to make it impractical to ditch the car—and if you do take the scooter somewhere and later discover that you need the car, any gains you might have otherwise made are more than offset by the extra trip to switch vehicles. That isn't even considering the safety factor, or the risk of inclement weather. Better, IMHO, to have a single reasonably efficient (30+ MPG) enclosed passenger+cargo vehicle that can handle 99% of all trips.
It also won't suffer from the increasing scarcity problem.
There is no "increasing scarcity problem."
Bitcoin keeps surging because it is hard to create more by design. It's like having one pie and as people come to the table you have to keep dividing it into smaller pieces. A true money does not have this limitation, as people work they create more pieces of pie, using the bitcoin philosophy they just work to divide the existing pie.
The closer you get to "true money" (i.e. a good valued solely for its marketability rather than direct use) the less important the units become. The "pie" is not the quantity of bitcoins, which is fixed, but rather their purchasing power. As more individuals "come to the table", bringing goods to trade, this pie automatically grows. Supply and demand creates a dynamic balance between the purchasing power of all the bitcoins in circulation and the total value of all the goods available for purchase. These changes in purchasing power are an important economic metric relating to the relative values of present and future consumption. Attempts to "regulate" the purchasing power of the currency through deliberate inflation of the money supply invalidate this metric, frustrating economic calculation and destroying wealth by promoting premature investment in uneconomic ventures.
It sure seems like a simple idea, but if it was obvious, why wasn't Samsung using it before Apple? And why did they copy it afterwards? It must have been commercially valuable for them to copy it, since they wouldn't have done so otherwise; and if it was commercially valuable and obvious, they would have done it earlier, since hey, free money. So maybe it wasn't obvious until Apple did it.
It was obvious how to do it, but not why. Patents are only meant to cover the "how". The fact that no one else saw a commercial advantage in this form of user interface before Apple did it does not imply that there was anything non-obvious about the implementation. For that matter, there may not have been any commercial advantage to be had from implementing slide-to-unlock until Apple did it, at which point it became valuable simply because it was what people were used to from using Apple products. Apart from this network effect, slide-to-unlock is not inherently superior to other interfaces for unlocking devices. On the other hand, the proliferation of pointlessly different user interfaces has a definite cost to the users and to society as a whole.
HDMI has 19 pins, which means a reversible version of the connector would need almost twice as many....
Not necessarily. It could work by detecting which direction the cable is inserted and rerouting the pins. Or, since most of the pins are for differential pairs, they might not even need to be rerouted per se—just put them on opposite sides and reverse the polarity as required. Duplicating just the non-differential pins would result in a 26-pin cable. (I am assuming that the four "shield" pins are interchangeable. If not, these would also need to be duplicated or rerouted.)
When Chrome throws up a warning that you haven't paid your CA for a license to put a web page online and people will be scared away from your site if you don't, its enabled by default.
Apparently you've never heard of Let's Encrypt? No one is required to pay for a "license" to put a secure web page online these days; you can get CA domain-validation certificates for free. There is no excuse left for not using properly signed certificates.
"self determination" is not "personal determination,"
And yet when it comes to enforcement, it is you, personally, and not some group, who will be on the receiving end of someone else's idea of "self-rule". So, no. They only way a group can consent to anything is if every single member of the group consents. If you don't have "personal determination" then you don't have "self determination".
Democracy is not inherently "good". It can easily devolve into "tyranny of the majority" and partisan politics. The 51% imposing their will on the 49% is not "self determination"; that's just the "power in numbers" version of "might makes right". To get self-determination you need not just the support of the majority, but also the consent of the minority. The way to get that consent is via compromise and consensus-building. It also helps to avoid extreme and/or polarizing proposals which are very good for some and very bad for others, or more generally treating a subset of your population primarily as a source of income to pay for others' benefits.
But if your ancestors made that choice and the political unit you're a part of was joined willingly by the community, and is largely intact, then your community has the right of self-determination because you already made that determination.
Not you, your ancestors. That is a critical distinction. You did not make that determination, someone else did. There are limits to the degree to which parents can consent on behalf of their children. In general, a parent's prior consent counts for very little once the children enter adulthood.
At any rate, even if one did personally consent to join, remaining a member of a community is an ongoing process. If you personally joined of your own free will there may be obligations and responsibilities related to your time in the community which you cannot simply abandon, but you nonetheless retain the right to leave; and the others who remain in the community have no claim on you for choices made and actions undertaken after you've left.
A quick reminder to the moderators: Overrated is not meant to serve as a substitute for (-1, Disagree). There is no reason to apply Overrated (or Underrated) metamoderation to a comment which has yet to receive any other moderation. (The fact that this is even permitted by the system is a bug; based on its official purpose, metamoderation ought to be restricted to cancelling out prior normal moderation.)
Currencies may not be pegged to Gold anymore, but that doesn't mean they are limitless. A limitless currency has no value. Growth has to be restricted for it to be useful, and if only a small percentage of the population consume all of that growth (or more than the growth, as is the case today) then those billionaires will prevent you from living a better life than your parents.
Inflation is not growth. A superabundant currency would indeed be useless, but there is no reason why growth must be restricted. For all their wealth and (in some cases) "conspicuous consumption", the amount that billionaires actually consume is insignificant compared to the rest of society—there simply aren't enough of them to make that much of a difference, and if their rate of consumption increased in proportion to the amount they produce they wouldn't have become wealthy in the first place. Most of their wealth is in the form of investments, making more money for them by... wait for it... making more goods and services available for everyone else. We receive an external benefit from their net worth.
Wealth inequality would be greatly reduced greatly if they (or someone else, e.g. the government via taxes) took all that accumulated capital investment and redirected it toward consumption, but don't try to pretend that this would make the rest of us better off. We'd just be equally poor together once the goods already on the shelves ran out.
These were major shocks to accrued wealth globally, breaking apart, or inflating away the value of, most family fortunes.
Unless those families were sitting on a hoard of cash (or fixed-rate loans / bonds), inflation wouldn't hurt them very much. If you own $50M of capital equipment and the value of the dollar drops by half, you now own $100M in capital equipment with no change in purchasing power. Destruction of infrastructure and high tax rates are a different matter, at least for those not directly profiting from the war effort.
I think I would be happy/satisfied if, unlike the way it is today, everyone simply had a fair shot at making good. Just that, a fair chance. Then it really would be on "you" to succeed or fail.
If you're above the official poverty level in a developed nation today then you've already "made good"—you're better off than the majority of people alive today, and doing better than all but the very richest individuals who lived a century ago. Most ruling monarchs in human history didn't have it so well.
If your criteria for the "basic goal" of "upward mobility" is to have a reasonable chance of moving from the bottom 1% to the top 1% in a single generation through your own personal efforts, i.e. without winning the lottery or similar low-probability windfalls, then I think you're being unrealistic. The people in the top 1% now did not get there in a single generation. That kind of advancement requires a multi-generational strategy and significant sacrifices in the present for the sake of a better future. Can it be done? Sure. But how many people are willing to make those sacrifices, knowing that even if it all pans out it will be not them but their children and grandchildren who reap the rewards? (At a guess... around 1%. Thus the "wealth disparity".)
(Not to mention, there's no such thing as an inalienable right. That's stupid. Inalienable rights come and go as society deems them appropriate.)
Inalienable rights are not defined by society, but rather by nature. Your right to your own body is inalienable, for example, because you can't stop controlling your own body or give control of it to someone else. Without your body you aren't you. The same goes for rights which are yours simply due to your existence as a sentient being, such as the rights to homestead unowned land, own property, and enter into contracts. (Rights to specific property are alienable, of course.) There aren't many things like that, however, and a number of rights which are often claimed to be inalienable aren't. Anything right which you can choose to transfer to another person, thus severing it from yourself, is not an inalienable right.
Whether a right is inalienable is academic, of course, if the person in question does not choose to alienate the right. "Alienable" does not mean "optional" or "so long as others consent". Alienable rights are not any less important or worthy of respect than inalienable rights; they are simply rights which the right-holder can choose to forfeit at will.
(I think you may be confusing conservatives with libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.)
"Corporate dictatorship" is an oxymoron. If an organization is behaving as a dictatorship then they are either a government (if they are claiming "legitimacy") or a criminal organization, not merely a corporation. Either way, libertarians would be opposed. Libertarians are not anti-government specifically, they are anti-aggression. Governments just happen to be the most influential organizations around which practice aggression on a broad scale—and unlike other, less successful, aggressive organizations, are unaccountably given a free pass about it by society at large—so they get all the attention.
"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
That is a remarkably stupid quote. It is completely irrelevant whether you "like" to pay taxes. No one is stopping you or anyone else from "buying civilization" with your own money, if that is what you want. You don't need taxes for that. The purpose of taxes is make other people pay for your idea of "civilization", whether they want it or not.
I personally consider any society which legitimizes taxation to be uncivilized. Buying civilization by imposing taxes on others is a contradiction.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The key point that people consistently fail to understand is that a warrant is not just a piece of paper, or one of several ways to show that a search is "reasonable". It is instead synonymous with the legal authority to perform the search—or more generally, to overrule someone's property rights for the sake of law enforcement. No warrant equals no legal authority to make someone submit to a search or stand aside while law enforcement seizes their property. A law enforcement officer without a warrant has no more authority over others' property than a private security guard. And per the 4th Amendment, you cannot be issued that warrant unless you first state for the record specifically what you intend to do and why you believe it to be justified.
This is all really rather obvious if you think about it a bit, since the "no Warrants shall issue" half of the amendment would be meaningless if "reasonableness" was sufficient on its own to make a search or seizure legal.
A currencies maximum cash out cant be any more than whats been put into the system to start with.
This is obviously false, because (in the case of Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies) there were no US dollars put into the system to start with. The "maximum cash out" is limited not by what has already been put in, but rather what people are willing to pay for it now—which can in principle include all other goods and services in the market, not just other currencies.
cryptocurrencies are only backed up by "fiat" currency
Nonsense. The value of (most) cryptocurrencies is not tied to the value of any "fiat" currency. If "fiat" currency becomes worthless (e.g. through hyperinflation) then that makes Bitcoin more valuable, not less—there would be less competition, perhaps even an opportunity for Bitcoin to become the dominant currency. Bitcoins are perfectly usable for trade even if there is no "fiat" currency to exchange them with. Approaching the topic from another angle, the Euro is not "backed" by the US dollar, or vice-versa; they are in competition with each other. If confidence in one currency falls, others take up the slack. The relationship between Bitcoin and "fiat" currencies is no different.
... if your morality is based on something like doing harm, the key question becomes "would I be willing to pay for this to begin with?"
That is not the key question. Just think about it a bit—by that standard, if at any point you did not pay the maximum amount you would be willing to pay for any good then you would be "stealing" the difference. There could be no such thing as "consumer surplus". For that matter, there could be no luxury goods (such as entertainment) since every scrap of income would go toward absolute necessities—people are willing to pay whatever they must in order to live. In practice people routinely (i.e. almost always) obtain goods for less than the amount they would be willing to pay. This is natural and expected and does not constitute harm.
One does not measure harm by simply comparing one's situation with what could have been if others made different choices. In particular, you are not harmed merely because others fail to take actions which might have benefitted you. You are harmed only when others take actions which make you materially worse off than you were before. Copyright infringement is neutral; you don't gain anything, but you don't lose anything either. (The same cannot be said for copyright enforcement, which does cause actual harm by making people worse off than they would have been in the absence of copyright, even if that meant the copyrighted material never existed in the first place.)
Those who derive their income from copyright have a problem, and that problem is not "piracy". Their problem is that their income comes from doing something that no one actually needs them to do, namely distributing information. If they charged a reasonable price for their labor, or for access to never-before-published material, there would be no problem. People will pay for that so long as there is desire for new content. Content providers chose instead to inject themselves as unwanted gatekeepers and toll-collectors in the distribution chain, which has become less and less viable, and increasingly costly to society, as the capacity for distributing information widely and cheaply has become ubiquitous. It's time to abandon that failing model and go back to charging for the useful work of creating new content.
This can lead to hoarding of the coins that are appreciating in value (Gresham's law).
Gresham's Law only applies when merchants are required to accept both kinds of coins at a fixed exchange rate. The solution is simple; don't do that. There is no risk of hoarding if the exchange rate is allowed to float to balance supply and demand.
In concrete terms, if the natural exchange rate is 20 silver to 1 gold but the law mandates that a good be sold for either 16 silver or 1 gold—the merchant isn't allowed to accept only one type of coin, or to set distinct prices—then customers are obviously going to want to pay for it with 16 silver rather than the gold equivalent of 20 silver, and vice-versa if the mandated rate is 24:1. This is the source of all the problems historically associated with bimetallism in the United States; both gold and silver were legal tender, at a fixed exchange ratio, and the natural ratio obviously varied over time. As a result it was always the case that either gold or silver was overvalued, and the other metal undervalued, with significant disruption whenever their roles reversed. However, if prices were to be set based on the natural exchange ratio then there would be no reason to prefer one over the other (in general) and no hoarding would take place.
Counterfeiting and debasement are bigger problems, though there are advanced anti-counterfeiting techniques for metal coins just as there are for paper notes, and ways to detect debasement. That's one of gold's advantages, actually; as a relatively heavy metal there aren't that many cheaper materials you can replace it with to reduce the gold content of the coin while maintaining the same volume and density. Tungsten is about the only practical option, depleted uranium not being so commonly available to the public, and even then it will differ in other properties (sound/resonance, x-ray florescence) which will reveal it as counterfeit to a careful observer.
Slashdot Mirror
Honest question: Let's say I take a 2 year old laptop. I know for sure that I can install windows, and that after installation, I will have sound, wifi and a decent screen. Is the same true for linux if I grab a commonly available distro?
Anecdotally... I just ran a Debian live image (from a USB stick) on a roughly two year old laptop to image the hard drive and begin diagnosing an intermittent loss-of-communication issue with the WiFi. The live image immediately started up to a GUI desktop with the proper graphics drivers and perfectly functional WiFi. This was not one of the "user-friendly" desktop distros, and the laptop was not selected for its Linux compatibility, yet—with zero time spent configuring it for that machine—Linux worked better than the Windows environment installed by the manufacturer. (The WiFi issue was eventually fixed by manually deleting and reinstalling the drivers.)
Now, there are systems out there with unsupported WiFi, unsupported graphics chips, and/or firmware that will refuse to boot anything without Microsoft's seal of approval, so I would recommend investigating a bit before making a purchase to ensure there aren't any major Linux incompatibilities. However, these are the exception rather than the rule. Most systems will work out of the box, especially if they have Intel or AMD graphics chips. (Systems with nVidia graphics may require additional closed-source drivers for full acceleration support, depending on the distro.)
Most people would recognizes that lighthouses are needed, but if governments did not build them, who would?
Not the best example, perhaps, since private lighthouses have existed, as pointed out by R. H. Coase in his article The Lighthouse in Economics in the October 1974 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics. There are any number of ways that so-called "public goods" can be provided without resorting to force.
By the way, the situation you described is not "the tragedy of the commons", which is invariably a product of interference in the market, but is rather generally referred to as the "free rider problem". Commons are not a naturally stable phenomenon. The tragedy of the commons is solved very simply by privatizing (i.e. homesteading) the commons, and thus giving someone a vested interest in maintaining it. A tragedy results only when the commons is forced to remain common, with no owner to decide how it will be used. (When a government "solves" the tragedy of the commons it does so merely by seizing the commons and acting in place of the owner. However, since the government claims to represent both present and future users of the property, while lacking any means of economic calculation, the result tends toward irreconcilable conflicts of interest.) The "free rider problem" is somewhat less tractable in cases where exclusion is not an option, but nonetheless force is not the answer.
Whitespace is good. Hell, Haskell is one of my favourite languages.
Same here, but the way Haskell handles whitespace is a bit different from Python. In Python the whitespace is part of the syntax and there is no other way to achieve the same result. Haskell syntax, on the other hand, is really fairly similar to C—anything that takes a list of declarations (module/where/let), expressions (do), or patterns (case) is defined to surround the list with curly braces and separate items with semicolons. If you write it this way then whitespace is ignored. There is an optional rule that allows the braces and semicolons to be inserted automatically if they are omitted, and it is only in this case that whitespace becomes significant.
The fact that Haskell does not require whitespace to be significant is useful, for example, when providing code samples in a forum which does not preserve leading indentation. Or, for that matter, any situation where you may need to fit a moderately complex piece of code on a single line.
It helps that Haskell code is also less ambiguous than Python, so incorrect indentation tends to cause compile-time errors. I have seen too many Python programs where indentation was the only factor separating a correct program from one with valid syntax but incorrect runtime behavior.
To my knowledge GCC doesn't have any ISO26262/IEC61508/DO-178 certifications meaning you're not going to be using it anywhere that is life or death.
Sorry, but that simply isn't true. I regularly work on DO-178 DAL-A software for the aerospace industry—primarily flight deck operating systems for everything from business jets to the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A380—and every platform I've worked on over the last decade has employed a version of GCC. True, GCC was not developed with DO-178 certification in mind. That doesn't matter, though, because GCC is not the software that is being certified for use on the aircraft. The released binaries will be subject to requirements-based testing, object code analysis, link analysis, and other verification steps which together demonstrate that the final product works as intended, regardless of any issues which may or may not exist in the compiler.
BTW, you mentioned the PowerPC e200 as a chip you've used—there is, in fact, a GCC-based toolchain from Freescale which targets that microarchitecture. My own experience is more along the lines of the PPC 7447 CPU and the PPC 440H6 and e500 SoC cores, and as I've said these were used exclusively with derivatives of GCC.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your feelings on whether absolute privacy is compatible with a safe and civil society.
The real question is whether mandatory backdoors are compatible with a safe and civil society. And since backdoors render people unsafe, and mandating them would be uncivil, the answer to that question is "no". You cannot have a safe and civil society with mandatory encryption backdoors. The very means employed would preclude the ends.
On the other hand, a society where no one could be forced to do anything against their will would be exceedingly safe and civil. Crime would be impossible, and government would be nonexistent. We don't have that option in the physical world, unfortunately, but strong encryption can get us very close to that ideal when it comes to our data.
The one exception would be when the roads are iced over. But then again, cars don't drive then either.
You might be surprised to learn that in a significant portion of the U.S. the roads tend to be iced over for several months every winter—and people still need to travel despite the conditions. In warmer climates that rarely see snow and ice people may just stay home for a few days and wait it out, but that isn't practical everywhere.
If you define efficiency according to the emissions from transporting the same number of people (1) the same distance (an obviously more useful metric), his scooter will outscore your car handily.
I think you mean the same people and cargo. If it takes three or four trips to the store to carry a week's worth of groceries with the scooter, which the car could have carried in one trip, then that means several times the emissions. Even if the scooter emits half as much per trip it still loses when you consider the entire job, and given the efficiency of modern cars and their tighter emissions controls the margin is probably much smaller. Not every trip will be like that, of course, but it's common enough to make it impractical to ditch the car—and if you do take the scooter somewhere and later discover that you need the car, any gains you might have otherwise made are more than offset by the extra trip to switch vehicles. That isn't even considering the safety factor, or the risk of inclement weather. Better, IMHO, to have a single reasonably efficient (30+ MPG) enclosed passenger+cargo vehicle that can handle 99% of all trips.
It also won't suffer from the increasing scarcity problem.
There is no "increasing scarcity problem."
Bitcoin keeps surging because it is hard to create more by design. It's like having one pie and as people come to the table you have to keep dividing it into smaller pieces. A true money does not have this limitation, as people work they create more pieces of pie, using the bitcoin philosophy they just work to divide the existing pie.
The closer you get to "true money" (i.e. a good valued solely for its marketability rather than direct use) the less important the units become. The "pie" is not the quantity of bitcoins, which is fixed, but rather their purchasing power. As more individuals "come to the table", bringing goods to trade, this pie automatically grows. Supply and demand creates a dynamic balance between the purchasing power of all the bitcoins in circulation and the total value of all the goods available for purchase. These changes in purchasing power are an important economic metric relating to the relative values of present and future consumption. Attempts to "regulate" the purchasing power of the currency through deliberate inflation of the money supply invalidate this metric, frustrating economic calculation and destroying wealth by promoting premature investment in uneconomic ventures.
It sure seems like a simple idea, but if it was obvious, why wasn't Samsung using it before Apple? And why did they copy it afterwards? It must have been commercially valuable for them to copy it, since they wouldn't have done so otherwise; and if it was commercially valuable and obvious, they would have done it earlier, since hey, free money. So maybe it wasn't obvious until Apple did it.
It was obvious how to do it, but not why. Patents are only meant to cover the "how". The fact that no one else saw a commercial advantage in this form of user interface before Apple did it does not imply that there was anything non-obvious about the implementation. For that matter, there may not have been any commercial advantage to be had from implementing slide-to-unlock until Apple did it, at which point it became valuable simply because it was what people were used to from using Apple products. Apart from this network effect, slide-to-unlock is not inherently superior to other interfaces for unlocking devices. On the other hand, the proliferation of pointlessly different user interfaces has a definite cost to the users and to society as a whole.
HDMI has 19 pins, which means a reversible version of the connector would need almost twice as many....
Not necessarily. It could work by detecting which direction the cable is inserted and rerouting the pins. Or, since most of the pins are for differential pairs, they might not even need to be rerouted per se—just put them on opposite sides and reverse the polarity as required. Duplicating just the non-differential pins would result in a 26-pin cable. (I am assuming that the four "shield" pins are interchangeable. If not, these would also need to be duplicated or rerouted.)
When Chrome throws up a warning that you haven't paid your CA for a license to put a web page online and people will be scared away from your site if you don't, its enabled by default.
Apparently you've never heard of Let's Encrypt? No one is required to pay for a "license" to put a secure web page online these days; you can get CA domain-validation certificates for free. There is no excuse left for not using properly signed certificates.
"self determination" is not "personal determination,"
And yet when it comes to enforcement, it is you, personally, and not some group, who will be on the receiving end of someone else's idea of "self-rule". So, no. They only way a group can consent to anything is if every single member of the group consents. If you don't have "personal determination" then you don't have "self determination".
Democracy is not inherently "good". It can easily devolve into "tyranny of the majority" and partisan politics. The 51% imposing their will on the 49% is not "self determination"; that's just the "power in numbers" version of "might makes right". To get self-determination you need not just the support of the majority, but also the consent of the minority. The way to get that consent is via compromise and consensus-building. It also helps to avoid extreme and/or polarizing proposals which are very good for some and very bad for others, or more generally treating a subset of your population primarily as a source of income to pay for others' benefits.
But if your ancestors made that choice and the political unit you're a part of was joined willingly by the community, and is largely intact, then your community has the right of self-determination because you already made that determination.
Not you, your ancestors. That is a critical distinction. You did not make that determination, someone else did. There are limits to the degree to which parents can consent on behalf of their children. In general, a parent's prior consent counts for very little once the children enter adulthood.
At any rate, even if one did personally consent to join, remaining a member of a community is an ongoing process. If you personally joined of your own free will there may be obligations and responsibilities related to your time in the community which you cannot simply abandon, but you nonetheless retain the right to leave; and the others who remain in the community have no claim on you for choices made and actions undertaken after you've left.
A quick reminder to the moderators: Overrated is not meant to serve as a substitute for (-1, Disagree). There is no reason to apply Overrated (or Underrated) metamoderation to a comment which has yet to receive any other moderation. (The fact that this is even permitted by the system is a bug; based on its official purpose, metamoderation ought to be restricted to cancelling out prior normal moderation.)
Currencies may not be pegged to Gold anymore, but that doesn't mean they are limitless. A limitless currency has no value. Growth has to be restricted for it to be useful, and if only a small percentage of the population consume all of that growth (or more than the growth, as is the case today) then those billionaires will prevent you from living a better life than your parents.
Inflation is not growth. A superabundant currency would indeed be useless, but there is no reason why growth must be restricted. For all their wealth and (in some cases) "conspicuous consumption", the amount that billionaires actually consume is insignificant compared to the rest of society—there simply aren't enough of them to make that much of a difference, and if their rate of consumption increased in proportion to the amount they produce they wouldn't have become wealthy in the first place. Most of their wealth is in the form of investments, making more money for them by... wait for it... making more goods and services available for everyone else. We receive an external benefit from their net worth.
Wealth inequality would be greatly reduced greatly if they (or someone else, e.g. the government via taxes) took all that accumulated capital investment and redirected it toward consumption, but don't try to pretend that this would make the rest of us better off. We'd just be equally poor together once the goods already on the shelves ran out.
These were major shocks to accrued wealth globally, breaking apart, or inflating away the value of, most family fortunes.
Unless those families were sitting on a hoard of cash (or fixed-rate loans / bonds), inflation wouldn't hurt them very much. If you own $50M of capital equipment and the value of the dollar drops by half, you now own $100M in capital equipment with no change in purchasing power. Destruction of infrastructure and high tax rates are a different matter, at least for those not directly profiting from the war effort.
I think I would be happy/satisfied if, unlike the way it is today, everyone simply had a fair shot at making good. Just that, a fair chance. Then it really would be on "you" to succeed or fail.
If you're above the official poverty level in a developed nation today then you've already "made good"—you're better off than the majority of people alive today, and doing better than all but the very richest individuals who lived a century ago. Most ruling monarchs in human history didn't have it so well.
If your criteria for the "basic goal" of "upward mobility" is to have a reasonable chance of moving from the bottom 1% to the top 1% in a single generation through your own personal efforts, i.e. without winning the lottery or similar low-probability windfalls, then I think you're being unrealistic. The people in the top 1% now did not get there in a single generation. That kind of advancement requires a multi-generational strategy and significant sacrifices in the present for the sake of a better future. Can it be done? Sure. But how many people are willing to make those sacrifices, knowing that even if it all pans out it will be not them but their children and grandchildren who reap the rewards? (At a guess... around 1%. Thus the "wealth disparity".)
(Not to mention, there's no such thing as an inalienable right. That's stupid. Inalienable rights come and go as society deems them appropriate.)
Inalienable rights are not defined by society, but rather by nature. Your right to your own body is inalienable, for example, because you can't stop controlling your own body or give control of it to someone else. Without your body you aren't you. The same goes for rights which are yours simply due to your existence as a sentient being, such as the rights to homestead unowned land, own property, and enter into contracts. (Rights to specific property are alienable, of course.) There aren't many things like that, however, and a number of rights which are often claimed to be inalienable aren't. Anything right which you can choose to transfer to another person, thus severing it from yourself, is not an inalienable right.
Whether a right is inalienable is academic, of course, if the person in question does not choose to alienate the right. "Alienable" does not mean "optional" or "so long as others consent". Alienable rights are not any less important or worthy of respect than inalienable rights; they are simply rights which the right-holder can choose to forfeit at will.
(I think you may be confusing conservatives with libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.)
"Corporate dictatorship" is an oxymoron. If an organization is behaving as a dictatorship then they are either a government (if they are claiming "legitimacy") or a criminal organization, not merely a corporation. Either way, libertarians would be opposed. Libertarians are not anti-government specifically, they are anti-aggression. Governments just happen to be the most influential organizations around which practice aggression on a broad scale—and unlike other, less successful, aggressive organizations, are unaccountably given a free pass about it by society at large—so they get all the attention.
"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
That is a remarkably stupid quote. It is completely irrelevant whether you "like" to pay taxes. No one is stopping you or anyone else from "buying civilization" with your own money, if that is what you want. You don't need taxes for that. The purpose of taxes is make other people pay for your idea of "civilization", whether they want it or not.
I personally consider any society which legitimizes taxation to be uncivilized. Buying civilization by imposing taxes on others is a contradiction.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The key point that people consistently fail to understand is that a warrant is not just a piece of paper, or one of several ways to show that a search is "reasonable". It is instead synonymous with the legal authority to perform the search—or more generally, to overrule someone's property rights for the sake of law enforcement. No warrant equals no legal authority to make someone submit to a search or stand aside while law enforcement seizes their property. A law enforcement officer without a warrant has no more authority over others' property than a private security guard. And per the 4th Amendment, you cannot be issued that warrant unless you first state for the record specifically what you intend to do and why you believe it to be justified.
This is all really rather obvious if you think about it a bit, since the "no Warrants shall issue" half of the amendment would be meaningless if "reasonableness" was sufficient on its own to make a search or seizure legal.
A currencies maximum cash out cant be any more than whats been put into the system to start with.
This is obviously false, because (in the case of Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies) there were no US dollars put into the system to start with. The "maximum cash out" is limited not by what has already been put in, but rather what people are willing to pay for it now—which can in principle include all other goods and services in the market, not just other currencies.
cryptocurrencies are only backed up by "fiat" currency
Nonsense. The value of (most) cryptocurrencies is not tied to the value of any "fiat" currency. If "fiat" currency becomes worthless (e.g. through hyperinflation) then that makes Bitcoin more valuable, not less—there would be less competition, perhaps even an opportunity for Bitcoin to become the dominant currency. Bitcoins are perfectly usable for trade even if there is no "fiat" currency to exchange them with. Approaching the topic from another angle, the Euro is not "backed" by the US dollar, or vice-versa; they are in competition with each other. If confidence in one currency falls, others take up the slack. The relationship between Bitcoin and "fiat" currencies is no different.
... the service will start suspending accounts "for organizations that use violence to advance their cause."
No more government-sanctioned posts on Twitter, then? Good riddance.
... if your morality is based on something like doing harm, the key question becomes "would I be willing to pay for this to begin with?"
That is not the key question. Just think about it a bit—by that standard, if at any point you did not pay the maximum amount you would be willing to pay for any good then you would be "stealing" the difference. There could be no such thing as "consumer surplus". For that matter, there could be no luxury goods (such as entertainment) since every scrap of income would go toward absolute necessities—people are willing to pay whatever they must in order to live. In practice people routinely (i.e. almost always) obtain goods for less than the amount they would be willing to pay. This is natural and expected and does not constitute harm.
One does not measure harm by simply comparing one's situation with what could have been if others made different choices. In particular, you are not harmed merely because others fail to take actions which might have benefitted you. You are harmed only when others take actions which make you materially worse off than you were before. Copyright infringement is neutral; you don't gain anything, but you don't lose anything either. (The same cannot be said for copyright enforcement, which does cause actual harm by making people worse off than they would have been in the absence of copyright, even if that meant the copyrighted material never existed in the first place.)
Those who derive their income from copyright have a problem, and that problem is not "piracy". Their problem is that their income comes from doing something that no one actually needs them to do, namely distributing information. If they charged a reasonable price for their labor, or for access to never-before-published material, there would be no problem. People will pay for that so long as there is desire for new content. Content providers chose instead to inject themselves as unwanted gatekeepers and toll-collectors in the distribution chain, which has become less and less viable, and increasingly costly to society, as the capacity for distributing information widely and cheaply has become ubiquitous. It's time to abandon that failing model and go back to charging for the useful work of creating new content.
This can lead to hoarding of the coins that are appreciating in value (Gresham's law).
Gresham's Law only applies when merchants are required to accept both kinds of coins at a fixed exchange rate. The solution is simple; don't do that. There is no risk of hoarding if the exchange rate is allowed to float to balance supply and demand.
In concrete terms, if the natural exchange rate is 20 silver to 1 gold but the law mandates that a good be sold for either 16 silver or 1 gold—the merchant isn't allowed to accept only one type of coin, or to set distinct prices—then customers are obviously going to want to pay for it with 16 silver rather than the gold equivalent of 20 silver, and vice-versa if the mandated rate is 24:1. This is the source of all the problems historically associated with bimetallism in the United States; both gold and silver were legal tender, at a fixed exchange ratio, and the natural ratio obviously varied over time. As a result it was always the case that either gold or silver was overvalued, and the other metal undervalued, with significant disruption whenever their roles reversed. However, if prices were to be set based on the natural exchange ratio then there would be no reason to prefer one over the other (in general) and no hoarding would take place.
Counterfeiting and debasement are bigger problems, though there are advanced anti-counterfeiting techniques for metal coins just as there are for paper notes, and ways to detect debasement. That's one of gold's advantages, actually; as a relatively heavy metal there aren't that many cheaper materials you can replace it with to reduce the gold content of the coin while maintaining the same volume and density. Tungsten is about the only practical option, depleted uranium not being so commonly available to the public, and even then it will differ in other properties (sound/resonance, x-ray florescence) which will reveal it as counterfeit to a careful observer.