If you were to read it rather than just skim the chapter titles you'd notice that on page 186 of the PDF (printed numbering) they specify why they focused on Hoover: FDR's policies were mostly just continuations of the programs that Hoover set in motion. References to FDR and later events are interspersed throughout the book, but the focus is on the events and times that set the stage for the rest of the Depression -- which didn't really end until WWII made further domestic intervention impossible, whatever those in charge might've preferred.
They intervened right at the start of the Depression -- within a few weeks of the stock market crash -- with massive inflation, make-work programs, and price controls. It wasn't "before" the Depression, but it wasn't "after" it either. They anticipated a recession following the crash and moved to "mitigate" it, using the same policies (mainly inflation) that had created the boom period (1921-1929), and thus indirectly the crash itself. I would call that "proactive" with regards to the anticipated recession (later renamed the Depression). The crash itself is a separate matter; at that point there wasn't much they could do about it, proactive or reactive. A rational, proactive mitigation of the crash would have required ending the progressive inflation earlier, when the malinvestment wasn't so pronounced. Obviously that didn't happen.
That's what is happening now to credit, and upshot is that the Fed is losing control of the money supply, and that is very, very bad because controlling the money supply is the main way we have avoided having economic downturns spiral out of control ever since the Great Depression.
You were doing so well up until this point. The Fed's control over the money supply is what kept us on the verge of spiraling out of control since before the Great Depression. In particular, the 1921-1929 "boom" period leading up to and effectively causing the 1929 stock market crash, and the length and depth of the Depression itself, were both largely the result of their inflationary policies.
But because the general public has the *perception* that this is "the worst economic crisis since the depression" then something had to be done.
Is that true? From what I can tell most citizens were against the bailout. That certainly isn't evidence of any widespread panic. If anything it seems to me that the politicians were attempting to manufacture a panic where there originally was none, in order to justify the bailout.
Anyway, the only reason perception has so much influence is that they've consistently driven interest rates into the ground, to the point where the only way to protect your retirement savings from rapid devaluation was to move them from time accounts (CDs and the like, investments with steady returns) into the stock market. Most people simply don't have the capacity to choose winning companies, so they follow whatever happens to be the latest (perception-driven) investment fad. With so much of the market essentially randomized, even those who do have that entrepreneurial ability are forced to pay an inordinate degree of attention to passing fads rather than fundamentals.
Where are you getting all this from? It's like you're from some alternate reality. The government way "proactive" during the Great Depression, right from the start. That's why it lasted as long as it did. If you want to know what really happened, here's a full analysis of the contributing factors: America's Great Depression. You don't have to agree with the economics, but at least pay attention to the historical aspects, which are fully cited.
Nothing you've said is quite false, but none of it counters the GP's point, either. The policy of encouraging/forcing sub-prime loans was put into place because at the time certain politicians were able to argue that refusing these loans was indistinguishable from discrimination due to similarities in the demographics. That may no longer be the case, but it was the original reason for the sub-prime lending.
Note that the borrowers also have some culpability here; when one takes out a loan one has an obligation to pay it back. It is at least as much the borrower's responsibility to determine that he or she is not taking on an obligation in excess of his or her means as it is the lender's responsibility to determine that borrower can reasonably afford to repay the loan.
Later on we get to Mortgage-Backed Securities, where the risks of these sub-prime loans were incorrectly discounted. Before the loans were risky, but at least the risk was somewhat accounted for. Now we have securities that everyone thinks are backed up by stable loans, but in reality the backing isn't so stable after all. The situation thus goes from bad to worse.
There are other contributing factors; an error this large cannot be the result of any one (or two) cause(s). FactCheck.org has a decent evaluation of the issues; there is a partial list of contributors near the end.
An encryption scheme with the same properties as cash (and no accountability) can be easily created.
Go ahead and try. It's no so easy as you appear to think. To get you started, try answering this question: How do I know that this "e-cash" hasn't been duplicated (spent more than once) without a central database tying each unit to its current owner?
Cash works because it's tied to physical matter, and because effective counterfeiting is hard (and incurs highly disproportionate penalties). Even assuming that e-cash cannot be counterfeited per se (each "e-note" being securely signed by the issuer) you still have the problem that receiving an e-note does not in any way imply that the sender no longer possesses said e-note. They can send it to someone else and it will appear just as genuine to them as it did to you.
Also, every electronic system which has come anywhere close to the anonymity of cash has been shut down for "money laundering". Cash itself only survives because it remains political suicide to even consider doing away with it.
That's basically right. Except for the house's cut the game is zero-sum, so if some win others must lose. The losers aren't necessarily "suckers", though, as not everyone plays with the expectation of winning overall. A modest loss may be considered fair compensation for the opportunity to compete, and possibly learn a bit. The amount one can acceptably risk toward that end is up to the individual player.
It's impossible to not gamble when you have money.
Or anything else. Life is full of risk; only the dead can be absolutely certain of their future.
Some behaviors and circumstances are riskier than others, of course. In my opinion, dealing directly in the stock market without the rare entrepreneurial ability to pick successful companies is closer to gambling than it is to investing, and so far as I can see even most fund managers don't have that ability.
In an inflationary economy pure saving is a guaranteed loss. Inexpert "investments" -- the long-term "dollar cost averaging" others have mentioned -- may, at best, keep your assets from depreciating quite as quickly in real terms (purchasing power), but only at the expense of a great deal of unwanted risk.
The safe answer for retirement finds used to be time accounts -- CDs and the like -- but the general policy of driving interest rates into the ground put an end to that. They wanted to drive people to "invest" in the market, whether or not said individuals had the ability to do so wisely; well, this is the result.
Perhaps because when the government has done this sort of thing with our money in the past, it has usually actually turned a profit?
[Citation needed]. Make sure to count profit as the private sector would -- subtracting foregone interest and externalized costs (regulations, licensing, monopolies, etc.)
As for the rest, I mostly agree. It's way off-topic, but I'm against government spending as much as I'm against taxation. Both create imbalances by transferring wealth from some groups to others, but only spending can directly waste significant non-monetary resources. On the other hand, the government can only deficit-spend because their lenders trust their ability to tax in the future. Take away that power and the easy credit would dry up overnight.
Your real concern, however, is that you'll eventually be taxed more to pay the interest on the deficit, which is an objection to taxation (present and future), not spending per se.
Only if your testing involves every possible combination of inputs, which is impractical for any non-trivial program. Otherwise you have some evidence that your program works -- a lack of observed bugs in likely locations -- but you haven't proved that the program correctly implements all its requirements under all circumstances.
All of this assumes that the tests themselves are correctly implemented with respect to the program's written requirements, and that the written requirements are correct with respect to the customer's needs and expectations (which may not match). The need for testing is necessarily recursive.
Writing software is akin to designing a process. It is 100% design; the implementation only occurs after the software has been written and released, when it runs in a production environment. Unit testing is similar to building models or prototypes of a component or subsystem to verify that things fit together as intended. Integration testing is like building a full-scale prototype to study its overall characteristics, with the results fed back into the design process.
Only when the design is complete -- including any models and prototypes required along the way to show that the design is sound -- is the end result actually implemented in a production environment.
The other thing to keep in mind is that computers make complex processes ridiculously cheap... to implement. Software design doesn't scale the same way. The average piece of software is far more complex, in terms of component interdependencies, conditional behavior and time-variant signals, among other things, than most other kinds of engineering design.
A computer can implement all this complexity without even breaking a sweat, so to speak, but designing a complex process to work in a wide range of environments, to accept invalid (or even malicious ) input without breaking down, to always conform to a dazzling array of human-written (conflicting, incomplete, misleading, etc.) requirements -- it's a bit amazing that non-trivial applications manage to function at all, much less that they work as well as they do. The insistence on abstraction, clean interfaces between components, and layered testing has a large part to play in that success.
Close, but not quite. Legacy software is software which has entered into the "Long-Term Support" phase of development. In other words, software which is no longer targeted at new installations, but which remains in use and must be supported and maintained.
Software generally enters the "legacy" phase once a newer version of it has been released for general use.
"int main()" and "int main(void)" are the same thing
In a function definition that is correct. In a C prototype, however, the former is "a function with an unspecified parameter list returning an int" and the latter is "a function with an empty parameter list returning an int", so they aren't the same thing in all circumstances.
If "int main()" was a permitted signature (type) for main, any function which returned an int would be valid regardless of its parameter list.
Do I get to choose whether or not I'm part of the $700,000,000,000 Wall Street bailout? That was private enterprise too.
The bailout itself is a mandatory government program, not private enterprise. If you're upset about your hard-earned income being taxed away to prop up failed corporations -- and why shouldn't you be? -- then place the blame squarely on those responsible: the politicians.
You actually believe that if I work for you and you don't pay me I shouldn't be able to sue you?
Absolutely. Now, we had a contract, and that contract wasn't followed, that would be grounds for a lawsuit. Sometimes it makes sense for a contract to specify pay in proportion to time or effort expended, but that often isn't the case. In many areas, generally including IT, a fixed salary makes more sense. You don't have to work on those terms, but neither do I have any obligation to meet your preferred terms. Gainful employment can only take place when both sides agree on a set of terms. Forcing either side to accept the other side's terms would be nothing other than slavery.
Here there is an agreement in place, one which specifies a fixed salary, and which probably wasn't at all specific about the amount or kind of work expected in return. Either party is free to back out of the agreement at any time. This agreement is perfectly fair and reasonable.
Unions help when there's a surplus of workers in the market, so that the workers have to use extraordinary means to force the company to improve their condition.
I don't disagree with you, but it's important to emphasis that these incumbent workers -- those who already have jobs -- are "improving their condition" entirely at the expense of those who want to work.
Established suppliers, including workers, always want to restrict all supply other than their own, and cartels (e.g. unions) are one way to do that. Like all cartels, however, unions are unstable unless their members can employ coercion to maintain their stranglehold on supply. I have absolutely no problem with collective bargaining per se, but the history of labor unions is filled with special-interest legislation, forced settlements, and crimes of aggression backed up by the the implicit support of the government.
They don't have to get your fingerprints from the digital hash on the card. Anything you've touched recently will do, including the outer surface of the card itself. Some metal surfaces can even store etched images of fingerprints long after they've been cleaned.
Where is your evidence that reducing copyright will reduce piracy?
Well, in the simplest case, eliminating copyright would also necessarily eliminate piracy by definition.
I don't care much for the "business method" argument myself -- how "outdated" one's business plan is should have no bearing on its legality. However, it is the pro-copyright group that is claiming that specific actions, which they cannot demonstrate to have caused any direct harm, ought to be illegal. Either prove that copyright infringement harms copyright holders -- interferes with their use of their homesteaded or contractually-acquired property -- or demonstrate why actual harm should not be a prerequisite for restitution and/or retribution.
Sure they exist. However, even if you assume that every single case of "piracy" is, in fact, a "lost sale", the cost of the "piracy" is still $0. No harm occurs when someone decides not to buy from you -- just think of how ridiculous that would be! Competition itself would be illegal. Open source software, and Creative Commons media, would be illegal, as they let you get something for free that you'd have to pay a lot for elsewhere.
No, to have a just case for reparations the music companies would need to show that copyright infringement causes them direct harm, i.e. interferes with their ability to use their own property (not mere projected revenues). They can't make that case because the nature of copyrighted media precludes any such harm.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Besides the obvious problem that no such person exists, you would also need to take competency into account. Simply put, people have enough trouble running their own lives, and understanding their own preferences and motivations. There isn't a single human being alive capable of running someone else's life -- just one other's, much less a whole country! -- such that the other individual could be guaranteed to consider the result an unqualified improvement.
The first problem is information; each individual knowns his or her own preferences and priorities best. These are not directly observable, cannot be effectively communicated except through uncoerced action, and change over time.
The second problem is that freedom of choice, a.k.a. self-determination, is itself one of the things most people greatly desire. No ruler, no matter how benevolent, can ever provide this good, as it fundamentally conflicts with the ruler's own existence. For this reason alone no centrally-controlled society can ever approach the individual or collective wealth* possible in a free, decentralised society.
I'm sure there are other issue, but these two are the main ones. Furthermore, if they apply to even an idealized benevolent dictatorship then they must apply to any attempt to rule over others, regardless of the form of government or the manner in which the rulers are chosen.
(*) "Wealth" has a particular meaning in this (economic) context: the absence of discomfort. "Discomfort" includes uncertainty about the future, present unhappiness, lack of self-esteem, physical unease (e.g. hunger), etc. Wealth is more than just an accumulation of material goods.
Bandwidth won't be equal. Latency contributes to lower transfer rates, as do dropped packets from buffer overflows on the router. When moving packets onto a bandwidth-limited outgoing link, as is undoubtedly the case here, some packets are always going to get dropped. Lower-priority packets will be dropped more frequently than higher-priority packets.
Dropped packets indirectly cause the transmitter to slow down until the incoming traffic is within the link's capacity. Lower-priority streams slow down more, and thus get less of the overall capacity.
If you have a 250GB a month limit, you should be able to use the speeds you are paying for until you reach that limit.
This just goes to show that some people can never be satisfied. Look, to implement your proposal the ISP would have to reserve peak bandwidth for every user: 1000 users * 6Mbps ~= 6Gbps. Every user could (potentially) run through their 250GB download cap in about 92 hours, or about four days, and the rest of the month the lines would be idle -- in other words, wasted.
If you can do some tests and determine that 99.9% of the time you have less than 50 active users, and 80% of the time less than 25, then you can allocate just 25 * 6Mbps = 150Mbps overall bandwidth, allowing much lower monthly fees, with confidence that everyone can get their full speed 80% of the time, and no less than 3Mbps 99.9% of the time. That's about the best you can do with a stateless allocation scheme. Those who download continuously have more opportunity to use the service than intermittent/interactive users, and contribute significantly to slowdowns during prime time -- just when the intermittent users want to get their own share of the service they also paid for.
By taking accumulated use into account, the proposed system is much more fair: with proper tuning, each user has equal opportunity to benefit from the service over time. Those who want to do bulk data transfer can still use their full 250GB; they just can't use it all at once when it would slow things down for other users. ("Low priority" is still full-speed when there is sufficient bandwidth to go around.) Intermittent users get higher priority at any given time, but as you've already gotten more use out of the service than they have there's no cause for complaint.
There are indeed two preexisting rights violations that affect this case:
Mandatory attendance*
Tax-based school funding
Rather than argue that the school shouldn't be able to suspend students, I prefer to take the position that they shouldn't be permitted to mandate attendance or use coercion to secure funding. Doing both -- suspending the students while still making the parent fund the school -- is a bit worse than the previous situation, but not by much. The problem was that they were given a free pass to coerce funding and attendance in the first place.
(*) Mandatory attendance doesn't apply while you're suspended, right? Otherwise they'd be responsible for forcing you to break the law....
Slashdot Mirror
If you were to read it rather than just skim the chapter titles you'd notice that on page 186 of the PDF (printed numbering) they specify why they focused on Hoover: FDR's policies were mostly just continuations of the programs that Hoover set in motion. References to FDR and later events are interspersed throughout the book, but the focus is on the events and times that set the stage for the rest of the Depression -- which didn't really end until WWII made further domestic intervention impossible, whatever those in charge might've preferred.
They intervened right at the start of the Depression -- within a few weeks of the stock market crash -- with massive inflation, make-work programs, and price controls. It wasn't "before" the Depression, but it wasn't "after" it either. They anticipated a recession following the crash and moved to "mitigate" it, using the same policies (mainly inflation) that had created the boom period (1921-1929), and thus indirectly the crash itself. I would call that "proactive" with regards to the anticipated recession (later renamed the Depression). The crash itself is a separate matter; at that point there wasn't much they could do about it, proactive or reactive. A rational, proactive mitigation of the crash would have required ending the progressive inflation earlier, when the malinvestment wasn't so pronounced. Obviously that didn't happen.
That's what is happening now to credit, and upshot is that the Fed is losing control of the money supply, and that is very, very bad because controlling the money supply is the main way we have avoided having economic downturns spiral out of control ever since the Great Depression.
You were doing so well up until this point. The Fed's control over the money supply is what kept us on the verge of spiraling out of control since before the Great Depression. In particular, the 1921-1929 "boom" period leading up to and effectively causing the 1929 stock market crash, and the length and depth of the Depression itself, were both largely the result of their inflationary policies.
For more information about the Depression, see America's Great Depression by Morray Rothbard.
But because the general public has the *perception* that this is "the worst economic crisis since the depression" then something had to be done.
Is that true? From what I can tell most citizens were against the bailout. That certainly isn't evidence of any widespread panic. If anything it seems to me that the politicians were attempting to manufacture a panic where there originally was none, in order to justify the bailout.
Anyway, the only reason perception has so much influence is that they've consistently driven interest rates into the ground, to the point where the only way to protect your retirement savings from rapid devaluation was to move them from time accounts (CDs and the like, investments with steady returns) into the stock market. Most people simply don't have the capacity to choose winning companies, so they follow whatever happens to be the latest (perception-driven) investment fad. With so much of the market essentially randomized, even those who do have that entrepreneurial ability are forced to pay an inordinate degree of attention to passing fads rather than fundamentals.
Where are you getting all this from? It's like you're from some alternate reality. The government way "proactive" during the Great Depression, right from the start. That's why it lasted as long as it did. If you want to know what really happened, here's a full analysis of the contributing factors: America's Great Depression. You don't have to agree with the economics, but at least pay attention to the historical aspects, which are fully cited.
Nothing you've said is quite false, but none of it counters the GP's point, either. The policy of encouraging/forcing sub-prime loans was put into place because at the time certain politicians were able to argue that refusing these loans was indistinguishable from discrimination due to similarities in the demographics. That may no longer be the case, but it was the original reason for the sub-prime lending.
Note that the borrowers also have some culpability here; when one takes out a loan one has an obligation to pay it back. It is at least as much the borrower's responsibility to determine that he or she is not taking on an obligation in excess of his or her means as it is the lender's responsibility to determine that borrower can reasonably afford to repay the loan.
Later on we get to Mortgage-Backed Securities, where the risks of these sub-prime loans were incorrectly discounted. Before the loans were risky, but at least the risk was somewhat accounted for. Now we have securities that everyone thinks are backed up by stable loans, but in reality the backing isn't so stable after all. The situation thus goes from bad to worse.
There are other contributing factors; an error this large cannot be the result of any one (or two) cause(s). FactCheck.org has a decent evaluation of the issues; there is a partial list of contributors near the end.
An encryption scheme with the same properties as cash (and no accountability) can be easily created.
Go ahead and try. It's no so easy as you appear to think. To get you started, try answering this question: How do I know that this "e-cash" hasn't been duplicated (spent more than once) without a central database tying each unit to its current owner?
Cash works because it's tied to physical matter, and because effective counterfeiting is hard (and incurs highly disproportionate penalties). Even assuming that e-cash cannot be counterfeited per se (each "e-note" being securely signed by the issuer) you still have the problem that receiving an e-note does not in any way imply that the sender no longer possesses said e-note. They can send it to someone else and it will appear just as genuine to them as it did to you.
Also, every electronic system which has come anywhere close to the anonymity of cash has been shut down for "money laundering". Cash itself only survives because it remains political suicide to even consider doing away with it.
It's legal for the rules of the game to give the house an advantage. However, the house must play by the rules; doing otherwise would be fraudulent.
That's basically right. Except for the house's cut the game is zero-sum, so if some win others must lose. The losers aren't necessarily "suckers", though, as not everyone plays with the expectation of winning overall. A modest loss may be considered fair compensation for the opportunity to compete, and possibly learn a bit. The amount one can acceptably risk toward that end is up to the individual player.
It's impossible to not gamble when you have money.
Or anything else. Life is full of risk; only the dead can be absolutely certain of their future.
Some behaviors and circumstances are riskier than others, of course. In my opinion, dealing directly in the stock market without the rare entrepreneurial ability to pick successful companies is closer to gambling than it is to investing, and so far as I can see even most fund managers don't have that ability.
In an inflationary economy pure saving is a guaranteed loss. Inexpert "investments" -- the long-term "dollar cost averaging" others have mentioned -- may, at best, keep your assets from depreciating quite as quickly in real terms (purchasing power), but only at the expense of a great deal of unwanted risk.
The safe answer for retirement finds used to be time accounts -- CDs and the like -- but the general policy of driving interest rates into the ground put an end to that. They wanted to drive people to "invest" in the market, whether or not said individuals had the ability to do so wisely; well, this is the result.
Perhaps because when the government has done this sort of thing with our money in the past, it has usually actually turned a profit?
[Citation needed]. Make sure to count profit as the private sector would -- subtracting foregone interest and externalized costs (regulations, licensing, monopolies, etc.)
As for the rest, I mostly agree. It's way off-topic, but I'm against government spending as much as I'm against taxation. Both create imbalances by transferring wealth from some groups to others, but only spending can directly waste significant non-monetary resources. On the other hand, the government can only deficit-spend because their lenders trust their ability to tax in the future. Take away that power and the easy credit would dry up overnight.
Your real concern, however, is that you'll eventually be taxed more to pay the interest on the deficit, which is an objection to taxation (present and future), not spending per se.
Only if your testing involves every possible combination of inputs, which is impractical for any non-trivial program. Otherwise you have some evidence that your program works -- a lack of observed bugs in likely locations -- but you haven't proved that the program correctly implements all its requirements under all circumstances.
All of this assumes that the tests themselves are correctly implemented with respect to the program's written requirements, and that the written requirements are correct with respect to the customer's needs and expectations (which may not match). The need for testing is necessarily recursive.
Writing software is akin to designing a process. It is 100% design; the implementation only occurs after the software has been written and released, when it runs in a production environment. Unit testing is similar to building models or prototypes of a component or subsystem to verify that things fit together as intended. Integration testing is like building a full-scale prototype to study its overall characteristics, with the results fed back into the design process.
Only when the design is complete -- including any models and prototypes required along the way to show that the design is sound -- is the end result actually implemented in a production environment.
The other thing to keep in mind is that computers make complex processes ridiculously cheap ... to implement. Software design doesn't scale the same way. The average piece of software is far more complex, in terms of component interdependencies, conditional behavior and time-variant signals, among other things, than most other kinds of engineering design.
A computer can implement all this complexity without even breaking a sweat, so to speak, but designing a complex process to work in a wide range of environments, to accept invalid (or even malicious ) input without breaking down, to always conform to a dazzling array of human-written (conflicting, incomplete, misleading, etc.) requirements -- it's a bit amazing that non-trivial applications manage to function at all, much less that they work as well as they do. The insistence on abstraction, clean interfaces between components, and layered testing has a large part to play in that success.
Close, but not quite. Legacy software is software which has entered into the "Long-Term Support" phase of development. In other words, software which is no longer targeted at new installations, but which remains in use and must be supported and maintained.
Software generally enters the "legacy" phase once a newer version of it has been released for general use.
"int main()" and "int main(void)" are the same thing
In a function definition that is correct. In a C prototype, however, the former is "a function with an unspecified parameter list returning an int" and the latter is "a function with an empty parameter list returning an int", so they aren't the same thing in all circumstances.
If "int main()" was a permitted signature (type) for main, any function which returned an int would be valid regardless of its parameter list.
Do I get to choose whether or not I'm part of the $700,000,000,000 Wall Street bailout? That was private enterprise too.
The bailout itself is a mandatory government program, not private enterprise. If you're upset about your hard-earned income being taxed away to prop up failed corporations -- and why shouldn't you be? -- then place the blame squarely on those responsible: the politicians.
You actually believe that if I work for you and you don't pay me I shouldn't be able to sue you?
Absolutely. Now, we had a contract, and that contract wasn't followed, that would be grounds for a lawsuit. Sometimes it makes sense for a contract to specify pay in proportion to time or effort expended, but that often isn't the case. In many areas, generally including IT, a fixed salary makes more sense. You don't have to work on those terms, but neither do I have any obligation to meet your preferred terms. Gainful employment can only take place when both sides agree on a set of terms. Forcing either side to accept the other side's terms would be nothing other than slavery.
Here there is an agreement in place, one which specifies a fixed salary, and which probably wasn't at all specific about the amount or kind of work expected in return. Either party is free to back out of the agreement at any time. This agreement is perfectly fair and reasonable.
Unions help when there's a surplus of workers in the market, so that the workers have to use extraordinary means to force the company to improve their condition.
I don't disagree with you, but it's important to emphasis that these incumbent workers -- those who already have jobs -- are "improving their condition" entirely at the expense of those who want to work.
Established suppliers, including workers, always want to restrict all supply other than their own, and cartels (e.g. unions) are one way to do that. Like all cartels, however, unions are unstable unless their members can employ coercion to maintain their stranglehold on supply. I have absolutely no problem with collective bargaining per se, but the history of labor unions is filled with special-interest legislation, forced settlements, and crimes of aggression backed up by the the implicit support of the government.
They don't have to get your fingerprints from the digital hash on the card. Anything you've touched recently will do, including the outer surface of the card itself. Some metal surfaces can even store etched images of fingerprints long after they've been cleaned.
Where is your evidence that reducing copyright will reduce piracy?
Well, in the simplest case, eliminating copyright would also necessarily eliminate piracy by definition.
I don't care much for the "business method" argument myself -- how "outdated" one's business plan is should have no bearing on its legality. However, it is the pro-copyright group that is claiming that specific actions, which they cannot demonstrate to have caused any direct harm, ought to be illegal. Either prove that copyright infringement harms copyright holders -- interferes with their use of their homesteaded or contractually-acquired property -- or demonstrate why actual harm should not be a prerequisite for restitution and/or retribution.
Sure they exist. However, even if you assume that every single case of "piracy" is, in fact, a "lost sale", the cost of the "piracy" is still $0. No harm occurs when someone decides not to buy from you -- just think of how ridiculous that would be! Competition itself would be illegal. Open source software, and Creative Commons media, would be illegal, as they let you get something for free that you'd have to pay a lot for elsewhere.
No, to have a just case for reparations the music companies would need to show that copyright infringement causes them direct harm, i.e. interferes with their ability to use their own property (not mere projected revenues). They can't make that case because the nature of copyrighted media precludes any such harm.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Besides the obvious problem that no such person exists, you would also need to take competency into account. Simply put, people have enough trouble running their own lives, and understanding their own preferences and motivations. There isn't a single human being alive capable of running someone else's life -- just one other's, much less a whole country! -- such that the other individual could be guaranteed to consider the result an unqualified improvement.
The first problem is information; each individual knowns his or her own preferences and priorities best. These are not directly observable, cannot be effectively communicated except through uncoerced action, and change over time.
The second problem is that freedom of choice, a.k.a. self-determination, is itself one of the things most people greatly desire. No ruler, no matter how benevolent, can ever provide this good, as it fundamentally conflicts with the ruler's own existence. For this reason alone no centrally-controlled society can ever approach the individual or collective wealth* possible in a free, decentralised society.
I'm sure there are other issue, but these two are the main ones. Furthermore, if they apply to even an idealized benevolent dictatorship then they must apply to any attempt to rule over others, regardless of the form of government or the manner in which the rulers are chosen.
(*) "Wealth" has a particular meaning in this (economic) context: the absence of discomfort. "Discomfort" includes uncertainty about the future, present unhappiness, lack of self-esteem, physical unease (e.g. hunger), etc. Wealth is more than just an accumulation of material goods.
Bandwidth won't be equal. Latency contributes to lower transfer rates, as do dropped packets from buffer overflows on the router. When moving packets onto a bandwidth-limited outgoing link, as is undoubtedly the case here, some packets are always going to get dropped. Lower-priority packets will be dropped more frequently than higher-priority packets.
Dropped packets indirectly cause the transmitter to slow down until the incoming traffic is within the link's capacity. Lower-priority streams slow down more, and thus get less of the overall capacity.
For an explanation of why this is a fair policy see my earlier comment.
If you have a 250GB a month limit, you should be able to use the speeds you are paying for until you reach that limit.
This just goes to show that some people can never be satisfied. Look, to implement your proposal the ISP would have to reserve peak bandwidth for every user: 1000 users * 6Mbps ~= 6Gbps. Every user could (potentially) run through their 250GB download cap in about 92 hours, or about four days, and the rest of the month the lines would be idle -- in other words, wasted.
If you can do some tests and determine that 99.9% of the time you have less than 50 active users, and 80% of the time less than 25, then you can allocate just 25 * 6Mbps = 150Mbps overall bandwidth, allowing much lower monthly fees, with confidence that everyone can get their full speed 80% of the time, and no less than 3Mbps 99.9% of the time. That's about the best you can do with a stateless allocation scheme. Those who download continuously have more opportunity to use the service than intermittent/interactive users, and contribute significantly to slowdowns during prime time -- just when the intermittent users want to get their own share of the service they also paid for.
By taking accumulated use into account, the proposed system is much more fair: with proper tuning, each user has equal opportunity to benefit from the service over time. Those who want to do bulk data transfer can still use their full 250GB; they just can't use it all at once when it would slow things down for other users. ("Low priority" is still full-speed when there is sufficient bandwidth to go around.) Intermittent users get higher priority at any given time, but as you've already gotten more use out of the service than they have there's no cause for complaint.
There are indeed two preexisting rights violations that affect this case:
Rather than argue that the school shouldn't be able to suspend students, I prefer to take the position that they shouldn't be permitted to mandate attendance or use coercion to secure funding. Doing both -- suspending the students while still making the parent fund the school -- is a bit worse than the previous situation, but not by much. The problem was that they were given a free pass to coerce funding and attendance in the first place.
(*) Mandatory attendance doesn't apply while you're suspended, right? Otherwise they'd be responsible for forcing you to break the law....