I suppose the difference between us is that I don't see any significant difference (in the online world) between "leaving [my] stuff in [my] house" without a good lock and "leaving [my] stuff on the curb." In a real neighborhood, of course, there is a difference: stuff left on the curb is considered "abandoned" and free for the taking, whereas something taken from inside your house will probably be returned to you eventually by law enforcement. In other words, stuff left on the curb is plain-text, unencrypted data. I wouldn't call observing unencrypted traffic an "attack" in the first place, even a trivial one.
Stuff left in the house (locked or otherwise) would be encrypted data, information that you would prefer remained secret. However, unlike the physical neighborhood, you can't rely on local law enforcement to catch the online thief. In most cases, you don't even know that a "thief" was listening in. Even if you could catch the interceptor, we're talking about information, not physical items that can be returned or replaced. Once the data is intercepted "the genie's out of the bottle" and there's no way to keep that information from being used by someone else. As a result, an unlocked (or poorly locked) "house" provides no more protection than the curb.
The only thing that unauthenticated encryption can really prevent is accidental evesdropping. You could accomplish that by just ROT13'ing the message. I don't know about you, but if I encrypt something it's because I don't want anyone listening in -- particularly if they're listening in on purpose. The only way to ensure that is to be sure of who I'm communicating with before I start giving away my secrets. Fingerprint authentication "is way better than nothing - it eliminates an entire (trivial) form of attack." Without it no amount of encryption will protect against an intentional evesdropper.
Encryption means you don't trust the machines between you and your destination. Virtually all protocols should use it. Fingerprinting means you are worried that your destination may be swapped out; it is a lot more work, and a lot harder to understand. It would be nice to use it, but I just don't think it's likely for "the masses."
It's not just the endpoints that you should be worried about. Even if the system you're trying to reach is uncompromised, one of the untrusted systems in the communications path could be intercepting and forwarding the connection (a "man-in-the-middle" attack). The fingerprint ensures that you really are communicating directly with the intended server. By failing to check the fingerprint you make it possible for one of the untrusted intermediate systems to act as the destination machine; you could end up transmitting your secrets directly to the attacker.
Encrypting traffic without verifying the endpoints is at least as good as closing your front door - versus leaving your stuff on the curb and hoping someone doesn't take it. I'd argue it is at least as good as locking your front door.
The point of a lock is just as much authentication as it is protection. Encryption without authentication is like a strong lock that accepts any key: you don't have to break the lock to get inside. Similarly, encryption is useless for secure communication in the absence of correspondingly strong authentication. I agree that there's no point in waiting for "perfect" security -- there is no such thing. All encryption can be broken; all authentication can be forged. The point is to make doing so as difficult as possible. Relying on the false sense of security that unauthenticated encryption provides is ultimately worse than not using any sort of encryption in the first place.
The original wording was "life, liberty, and property." They changed it because a few of the signers were worried that it would imply that everyone deserved to own "their share" of property, not just that property rights would be protected. The intention, however, was that private property rights would be respected under the Constitution. The phrase "pursuit of happiness" is actually only a rephrasing, not a fundamental change from the original intent. It refers to a pattern of individual voluntary exchanges and contracts intended to maximize each individual's subjective utility (happiness), a.k.a the "free market", which is something that cannot exist in the absence of property rights.
The natural result of minimum-wage laws is inevitably unemployment. A worker cannot receive more in wages than that same worker produces for the employer. If the minimum wage exceeds the worker's DMVP (discounted marginal value product, or "productivity"), then that worker will remain unemployed as a direct result of the minimum wage. Furthermore, the real minimum wage -- the total cost to the employer -- is much higher than the "official" minimum (50% higher at least) due to payroll taxes, mandantory employment benefits, and overhead. Of course, those workers who do manage to maintain their employment will be able to demand a higher wage as a result of the restricted supply of employable workers, but their gains will not exceed the detrimental effects of the artificial unemployment.
For a more thorough discussion of the economic effects of price controls (including minimum wage laws), see this analysis by Murray N. Rothbard.
Care to provide a source for that comment about the forest industry? Everything I've run across indicates that privately owned forest lands are doing at least as well as their government-owned counterparts.[1]
Fortunately, "in the real world," companies tend to invest a portion of their short-term profit in renewing their capital to ensure their long-term survival. In the process they are far more likely to fulfill the goals of conservation than any government edict.
But the real question is, does anyone care? Or will they only care when it is too late to do anything about it?
The situation you describe is known as "tragedy of the commons", and it occurs whenever private ownership of a scarce resource is prohibited while private use is not. Since the fishing companies share a common resource devoid of any recognized property rights, they have no financial incentive to conserve or improve the resources that they exploit. It makes sense, if you think about it; would you invest your hard-earned savings in trying to improve something that can be taken away from you at any time, which you can't sell to someone else, and which will benefit your competitors just as much as it benefits you? Not when you're forced to justify your investments to a board of directory, certainly. The rational thing would be to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasts. Individuals might protest the exploitation, but in general the ones protesting aren't the ones most affected by the loss. On the other hand, if property rights (exclusive fishing rights, in this case) were generally recognized, the fishing companies would have an incentive to try to conserve the value of their exclusive fishing areas, because doing so would give them an advantage over the competition as well as increase the resale value of their property.
The objection isn't really the price of the food sold at the cinema, it's that the cinema doesn't allow people to bring in food from outside. I'm not saying that they don't have the right to make that rule (it's their property, after all), but it does engender a predictable level of animosity from their audiences. It also provides a significant part of a cinema's revenue, so it will probably be around for a while yet.
BTW, the films-in-restaurants analogy would probably work a bit better if movie-watching was a traditional part of "the restaurant experience" in the same way as popcorn and a drink comprise a traditional part of "the cinema experience" for many individuals. Because of that tradition, many people look at the price of the "package deal" rather than just the price of the ticket alone when evaluating the costs of cinema entertainment.
Actually, if you had to statically link the entire set of Xlibs, Gtk/Gnome/Qt/KDE, glibc, etc. into every application on the system, you'd probably be left with no RAM space for documents or application data. As an example, glibc alone is about 1.4MiB on my system. There are 120 processes using that shared library. In a statically-linked system, that would equate to 168MiB just for glibc. Multiply that by the average number of shared libraries (xterm is using 22 right now), and you have a fairly significant block of memory. A very low estimate, assuming that most libraries are a fraction of that size, would place the extra disk and RAM consumption without shared libraries somewhere between 512MiB and 1GiB each -- and library code is typically accessed too frequently to be well-suited for virtual memory on a process-by-process basis. Still think that shared libraries aren't worth the effort? Also, shared libraries minimize code duplication and make patching a library function relatively simple; you can just install a drop-in (ABI-compatible, same major version) replacement rather than relinking every single program that uses the library.
In any event, static linking wouldn't avoid the issue you described: having copies of all the old versions of the system libraries around to support legacy applications. It would just move those libraries into the applications themselves. The solution is to use a binary package manager, the very point of which is to avoid the wasted effort of making every user recompile everything by hand.
For that matter, the GP's definition could be used to call collecting taxes terrorism. (For the "threat of violence" part, just consider what happens if you decide not to pay.) While I find the similarities somewhat amusing, and don't have much sympathy for tax supporters, that definition is still far too broad. Terrorism is a specific kind of violence, not another name for the entire spectrum of coercive behavior.
I suppose there are legal necessities for civil marriage though--mostly relating to taxes and debt liability.
Taxes weren't an issue (in relation to marriage) until 1913 (creation of the federal income tax); they still wouldn't be an issue if everyone would just file independently, as long as the benefits and/or penalties associated with marital status were removed. Debt liability, inheritance, special priviledges, sharing of assets, etc. could be handled through civil contracts and so-called "power of attorney" without creating special exceptions just for marriage. The fine for changing one's name would probably have to be reduced (or eliminated), since the exception for marriages would no longer apply, but they ought to do that anyway. There really aren't many other compelling reasons to treat marriage any differently from other civil agreements.
Only if it agrees with the rest of the Consitution, both in the letter and the spirit. It's absurd to believe in the legitimacy of a Constitutional amendment that quite obviously conflicts with other elements of the Consitution.
I agree, but I think that this is largely irrelevant. If there is enough support to pass an amendment in the first place, there is probably enough support to bring the rest of the document in line with changes. The amendment need not be compatible with the original Constitution so long as the resulting document is consistent.
There is no Alan Greenspan in the background regulating how much gold monsters drop or what the auction rates are, the only variable in the amount of gold in ciruclation [sic] is the number of man-hours put into harvesting it; there is literally an infinite supply of gold to be had, limited only by the amount of labor put into finding it.
And therein lies the problem. Real money ought to be something that is subject to natural scarcity (within the rules of the virtual environment, in this case). If the supply of the money commodity is infinite (and in this case it is), the value of the money commodity will approach zero as a result of simple supply and demand. If it was their intention to use "gold" as a stable currency, they should have set a limit on the total amount of "gold" available in the game, just as there is a limit on the amount of real gold in the world, which ensures that its price rises to offset demand.
Short of that, if they wish to prevent players from buying "gold" or game items outside the game, they should make it impossible to transfer items between players inside the game. No amount of real-world money will give anyone an advantage in the game if "property" cannot be transferred within the game itself. However, this solution, while more direct, would be much more intrusive on in-game activities which are currently permitted. It would be more in line with traditional game rules, in that players would be forced to earn their own place in the game rather than purchase one (or receive it as a gift) from someone else.
Since Lincoln's tyrannical war and changes in 1913, we've headed in the direction of empire and socialism -- directly from government that is too powerful, not because of campaign finance.
Lincoln was neither at "war", tyrannical or otherwise, nor making any other "changes", in 1913.
The sentence should be parsed "Since ((Lincoln's (tyrannical war)) and (changes (in 1913)))...". The "changes in 1913" part was an entirely different issue: the creation of the federal income tax, which provided the government with the budget it needed to grow to its present size and level of interference.
Interesting that you should list a proposed amendment as "a Constitutional travesty". After all, the Constitution specifically allows Constitutional amendments, which can take any form Congress chooses (assuming support from a significant majority of representatives). Such an amendment can even completely replace the Constitution, much less modify any individual term therein. If they had tried to pass a Federal Marriage Act, or a Federal Marriage Law, or a Federal Marriage Executive Order, then you might have a case, but a Federal Marriage Amendment would be perfectly in line with established Constitutional procedures.
P.S. Don't assume from my response that I would support such an amendment. I think nearly all the existing amendments should never have been passed, with one or two exceptions (mainly dealing with equality of minorities, on which the original Constitution was strangely schizophrenic), and I would prefer the government stop authorizing/controlling marriage entirely instead of playing word games with the Constitution. I really don't see any reason why they need to be involved in the first place. Of course, that applies to most of the things they're involved in, so I suppose marriage isn't really all that unique in this respect.
I think the issue with the popular views of cell phones on aircraft is the idea that if the interference is a valid issue, then any flight with a cell phone turned on will crash. In reality they're just not sure about the risks, and are trying to minimize the odds that a cell phone might contribute to a crash. As the article itself pointed out, there might not be any direct evidence that cell phones definitely cause plane crashes, but there are crashes where the cause is unknown and cell phones may have contributed. Just because most flights manage to reach their destinations--despite the fact that passengers often leave their cell phones turned on--doesn't mean that it isn't a risk, one that the airlines would prefer not to take, since ultimately the airlines are responsible for the safety of their passengers during the flight.
Human entities will take the path of least resistance to the greatest profit. If you want them to do something else, then you increase the penalty or incentive of one action or another. Humans are not benevolent, heart-warming, mom-and-apple-pie individuals because they want to be (if they are at all) - they are that way because of the current set of penalties and incentives before them.
I mean, let's be fair here -- greed isn't limited to corporations, but is instead a basic fact of human existance. Corporations are only special because they are a result of government regulation granting them priviledges, such as limitation of liability, typically denied to other citizens; do you expect adding even more regulations will improve the situation? Even if it did help, it would be an imperfect solution. Why not just eliminate their protected status entirely?
1) I already apologized for the terminology in a different reply. I also realize that (obviously) no passive system can increase the total energy in the signal. If there is any "amplification", it is in the same sense as the "amplification" listed for a directional antenna -- an increase over the signal strength that would be expected from an omnidirectional point source with no reflections or resonance effects.
2) I also realize (and acknowledged elsewhere) that the odds of a consumer electronic device causing any significant malfunction are essentially negligible. Aircraft electronics do undergo significant EMI hardening during development; they take the possibility of external interference very seriously. On the other hand, if passengers were aware of just how hard it is to get any kind of avionics device certified for use on an aircraft, even devices that have nothing at all to do with actually flying the plane (in-flight entertainment systems, for example), they would probably cease to wonder why the use of uncertified, uncontrolled, two-way radio equipment (like cell phones) is prohibited during flight.
My apologies. I think the effect I was thinking of was reflection rather than resonance. You're right about the resonance frequences; the opportunities for resonance at cell-phone frequencies would be quite limited. However, there is still the fact that the body of the cabin would tend to concentrate the signal by reflecting EM radiation back into the cabin. The effect isn't as strong as resonance would make it, but it should still be greater than that of a cell phone operating in open space, which could result in greater interference in certain locations depending on the specific frequencies involved and the overall design of the aircraft. Either way, a cell phone isn't going to get great reception from a plane, and it's probably better to just turn it off during the flight (even if it's only to avoid annoying the other passengers).
Personally, I'd be more interested in the possibility of using WiFi on a flight rather than cell phones, since -- unlike a cell phone -- it's possible to use a WiFi adapter (hopefully linked to an AP on the plane itself) without disturbing anyone else in the process.
Just for the record, I agree that the odds of cell-phone use leading to a crash are essentially nonexistant. For that matter, a competent pilot ought to be able to avoid crashing even in the event of a total failure of all the navigational systems, as long as environmental conditions (cloud cover, low visibility) aren't an issue. However, the question of whether or not cell phones interfere with aircraft systems still isn't quite as simple as it would appear from an informal test conducted on the ground with consumer-grade GPS equipment. For example, one rule in designing aircraft systems is to avoid doing anything that might distract or mislead the pilot. By that rule, even a temporary glitch in a relatively unimportant navigation system could be considered significant if it manages to draw the pilot's attention away from other, more important functions.
One reason that is often overlooked is that the metal body of the cabin makes a very nice resonance cavity, and thus amplifies the signal considerably. As a result, a small source inside the plane has a much better chance of interferring with the sensitive on-board electronics than a strong external source. Also, tolerances for failure are significantly lower for a GPS unit on an aircraft than for a hand-held GPS device on the ground. What might be considered insignificant interference for a consumer GPS unit would be completely unacceptable for aircraft equiptment, with reliability requirements on the order of 10**(-9) or better.
IANAEE, but I work for a major manufacturer of aircraft electronics.
It's not like those images are live video feeds, and there simply aren't enough satallites out there to continually monitor the entire planet; the cost of putting enough system in orbit for that would be prohibitive, even for the government. It might be possible for someone in control of the satallite to direct it at a fixed position for a live feed, but doing so would require exclusive use of the satallite, and would probably significantly shorten its lifespan (they only carry so much fuel). Even if the maps were actually detailed enough to see individual people, there would be no real way for just any random individual to use them to time an attack, or to actively monitor anyone, and that won't change any time soon.
I think we're on the same side here. I also dislike systems that tax "the rich" more than others, at least as far as above-poverty spending is concerned. However, I do think that the proposed system would result in a so-called "progressive" tax schedule, where those with greater expenditures (and thus greater income) pay a (reasonably) greater portion of the tax, both as a dollar amount and as a fraction of their total expenditures. Of course, they may choose not to spend in proportion to their income (although their expenditures will still, no doubt, be higher than average). Such behavior must result in either greater investment in the economy (with benefits that simple taxation could not achieve), or increased savings, which must eventually lead to either consumable expenditures (and thus taxation) or further investment. This would appear to be a win-win situation, since all income must eventually lead to either taxed consumable expenditures, or investments in the economy.
They can be "progressive", if you add in an offset matched to the poverty level, like the FairTax system would. The basic idea is that any taxes on purchases up to the poverty level are refunded, regardless of total spending. That way, if your spending is less than the poverty level, you get a (small) refund; if it's at the poverty level, you pay no net sales taxes. Otherwise, if your spending is above the poverty level, you pay a tax on the difference (not the total amount). The amount of tax paid asymptotically approaches the flat tax level as total spending increases. Also, a sales tax, unlike an income tax, would tend to encourage those with the means to do so to invest their untaxed income in capital (thus increasing production and lowering prices throughout the economy) rather than spend it on taxed consumables.
Replace the employees' options with stock grants and encourage them to sell. Sell the founders' shares. The best play Google could make with respect to its long term health would be to get out of the market altogether and not worry about what the bottom feeders who inhabit that zone think.
I think you have this backward. For Google to "get out of the market", they would need to buy back their shares, not sell them. Before the IPO all the shares were owned by the company's founders; to return to that state the founders would have to buy back all the shares issued in the IPO (or direct the company, as the majority shareholders, to buy back the shares out of company funds). Of course, since the share price is significantly higher than it was at the IPO, and they can't sell their own shares in the process (since it would defeat the entire purpose), they might have some difficulties regaining complete ownership at this point.
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Just for the record, you don't speak for everyone, and the GP knows what he's talking about.
I suppose the difference between us is that I don't see any significant difference (in the online world) between "leaving [my] stuff in [my] house" without a good lock and "leaving [my] stuff on the curb." In a real neighborhood, of course, there is a difference: stuff left on the curb is considered "abandoned" and free for the taking, whereas something taken from inside your house will probably be returned to you eventually by law enforcement. In other words, stuff left on the curb is plain-text, unencrypted data. I wouldn't call observing unencrypted traffic an "attack" in the first place, even a trivial one.
Stuff left in the house (locked or otherwise) would be encrypted data, information that you would prefer remained secret. However, unlike the physical neighborhood, you can't rely on local law enforcement to catch the online thief. In most cases, you don't even know that a "thief" was listening in. Even if you could catch the interceptor, we're talking about information, not physical items that can be returned or replaced. Once the data is intercepted "the genie's out of the bottle" and there's no way to keep that information from being used by someone else. As a result, an unlocked (or poorly locked) "house" provides no more protection than the curb.
The only thing that unauthenticated encryption can really prevent is accidental evesdropping. You could accomplish that by just ROT13'ing the message. I don't know about you, but if I encrypt something it's because I don't want anyone listening in -- particularly if they're listening in on purpose. The only way to ensure that is to be sure of who I'm communicating with before I start giving away my secrets. Fingerprint authentication "is way better than nothing - it eliminates an entire (trivial) form of attack." Without it no amount of encryption will protect against an intentional evesdropper.
It's not just the endpoints that you should be worried about. Even if the system you're trying to reach is uncompromised, one of the untrusted systems in the communications path could be intercepting and forwarding the connection (a "man-in-the-middle" attack). The fingerprint ensures that you really are communicating directly with the intended server. By failing to check the fingerprint you make it possible for one of the untrusted intermediate systems to act as the destination machine; you could end up transmitting your secrets directly to the attacker.
The point of a lock is just as much authentication as it is protection. Encryption without authentication is like a strong lock that accepts any key: you don't have to break the lock to get inside. Similarly, encryption is useless for secure communication in the absence of correspondingly strong authentication. I agree that there's no point in waiting for "perfect" security -- there is no such thing. All encryption can be broken; all authentication can be forged. The point is to make doing so as difficult as possible. Relying on the false sense of security that unauthenticated encryption provides is ultimately worse than not using any sort of encryption in the first place.
The original wording was "life, liberty, and property." They changed it because a few of the signers were worried that it would imply that everyone deserved to own "their share" of property, not just that property rights would be protected. The intention, however, was that private property rights would be respected under the Constitution. The phrase "pursuit of happiness" is actually only a rephrasing, not a fundamental change from the original intent. It refers to a pattern of individual voluntary exchanges and contracts intended to maximize each individual's subjective utility (happiness), a.k.a the "free market", which is something that cannot exist in the absence of property rights.
The natural result of minimum-wage laws is inevitably unemployment. A worker cannot receive more in wages than that same worker produces for the employer. If the minimum wage exceeds the worker's DMVP (discounted marginal value product, or "productivity"), then that worker will remain unemployed as a direct result of the minimum wage. Furthermore, the real minimum wage -- the total cost to the employer -- is much higher than the "official" minimum (50% higher at least) due to payroll taxes, mandantory employment benefits, and overhead. Of course, those workers who do manage to maintain their employment will be able to demand a higher wage as a result of the restricted supply of employable workers, but their gains will not exceed the detrimental effects of the artificial unemployment.
For a more thorough discussion of the economic effects of price controls (including minimum wage laws), see this analysis by Murray N. Rothbard.
Care to provide a source for that comment about the forest industry? Everything I've run across indicates that privately owned forest lands are doing at least as well as their government-owned counterparts.[1]
Fortunately, "in the real world," companies tend to invest a portion of their short-term profit in renewing their capital to ensure their long-term survival. In the process they are far more likely to fulfill the goals of conservation than any government edict.
[1] One hastily-located source out of many: How Private Ownership Saved the Southern Forest
The situation you describe is known as "tragedy of the commons", and it occurs whenever private ownership of a scarce resource is prohibited while private use is not. Since the fishing companies share a common resource devoid of any recognized property rights, they have no financial incentive to conserve or improve the resources that they exploit. It makes sense, if you think about it; would you invest your hard-earned savings in trying to improve something that can be taken away from you at any time, which you can't sell to someone else, and which will benefit your competitors just as much as it benefits you? Not when you're forced to justify your investments to a board of directory, certainly. The rational thing would be to take advantage of the opportunity while it lasts. Individuals might protest the exploitation, but in general the ones protesting aren't the ones most affected by the loss. On the other hand, if property rights (exclusive fishing rights, in this case) were generally recognized, the fishing companies would have an incentive to try to conserve the value of their exclusive fishing areas, because doing so would give them an advantage over the competition as well as increase the resale value of their property.
The objection isn't really the price of the food sold at the cinema, it's that the cinema doesn't allow people to bring in food from outside. I'm not saying that they don't have the right to make that rule (it's their property, after all), but it does engender a predictable level of animosity from their audiences. It also provides a significant part of a cinema's revenue, so it will probably be around for a while yet.
BTW, the films-in-restaurants analogy would probably work a bit better if movie-watching was a traditional part of "the restaurant experience" in the same way as popcorn and a drink comprise a traditional part of "the cinema experience" for many individuals. Because of that tradition, many people look at the price of the "package deal" rather than just the price of the ticket alone when evaluating the costs of cinema entertainment.
Actually, if you had to statically link the entire set of Xlibs, Gtk/Gnome/Qt/KDE, glibc, etc. into every application on the system, you'd probably be left with no RAM space for documents or application data. As an example, glibc alone is about 1.4MiB on my system. There are 120 processes using that shared library. In a statically-linked system, that would equate to 168MiB just for glibc. Multiply that by the average number of shared libraries (xterm is using 22 right now), and you have a fairly significant block of memory. A very low estimate, assuming that most libraries are a fraction of that size, would place the extra disk and RAM consumption without shared libraries somewhere between 512MiB and 1GiB each -- and library code is typically accessed too frequently to be well-suited for virtual memory on a process-by-process basis. Still think that shared libraries aren't worth the effort? Also, shared libraries minimize code duplication and make patching a library function relatively simple; you can just install a drop-in (ABI-compatible, same major version) replacement rather than relinking every single program that uses the library.
In any event, static linking wouldn't avoid the issue you described: having copies of all the old versions of the system libraries around to support legacy applications. It would just move those libraries into the applications themselves. The solution is to use a binary package manager, the very point of which is to avoid the wasted effort of making every user recompile everything by hand.
For that matter, the GP's definition could be used to call collecting taxes terrorism. (For the "threat of violence" part, just consider what happens if you decide not to pay.) While I find the similarities somewhat amusing, and don't have much sympathy for tax supporters, that definition is still far too broad. Terrorism is a specific kind of violence, not another name for the entire spectrum of coercive behavior.
Taxes weren't an issue (in relation to marriage) until 1913 (creation of the federal income tax); they still wouldn't be an issue if everyone would just file independently, as long as the benefits and/or penalties associated with marital status were removed. Debt liability, inheritance, special priviledges, sharing of assets, etc. could be handled through civil contracts and so-called "power of attorney" without creating special exceptions just for marriage. The fine for changing one's name would probably have to be reduced (or eliminated), since the exception for marriages would no longer apply, but they ought to do that anyway. There really aren't many other compelling reasons to treat marriage any differently from other civil agreements.
I agree, but I think that this is largely irrelevant. If there is enough support to pass an amendment in the first place, there is probably enough support to bring the rest of the document in line with changes. The amendment need not be compatible with the original Constitution so long as the resulting document is consistent.
And therein lies the problem. Real money ought to be something that is subject to natural scarcity (within the rules of the virtual environment, in this case). If the supply of the money commodity is infinite (and in this case it is), the value of the money commodity will approach zero as a result of simple supply and demand. If it was their intention to use "gold" as a stable currency, they should have set a limit on the total amount of "gold" available in the game, just as there is a limit on the amount of real gold in the world, which ensures that its price rises to offset demand.
Short of that, if they wish to prevent players from buying "gold" or game items outside the game, they should make it impossible to transfer items between players inside the game. No amount of real-world money will give anyone an advantage in the game if "property" cannot be transferred within the game itself. However, this solution, while more direct, would be much more intrusive on in-game activities which are currently permitted. It would be more in line with traditional game rules, in that players would be forced to earn their own place in the game rather than purchase one (or receive it as a gift) from someone else.
The sentence should be parsed "Since ((Lincoln's (tyrannical war)) and (changes (in 1913)))...". The "changes in 1913" part was an entirely different issue: the creation of the federal income tax, which provided the government with the budget it needed to grow to its present size and level of interference.
Interesting that you should list a proposed amendment as "a Constitutional travesty". After all, the Constitution specifically allows Constitutional amendments, which can take any form Congress chooses (assuming support from a significant majority of representatives). Such an amendment can even completely replace the Constitution, much less modify any individual term therein. If they had tried to pass a Federal Marriage Act, or a Federal Marriage Law, or a Federal Marriage Executive Order, then you might have a case, but a Federal Marriage Amendment would be perfectly in line with established Constitutional procedures.
P.S. Don't assume from my response that I would support such an amendment. I think nearly all the existing amendments should never have been passed, with one or two exceptions (mainly dealing with equality of minorities, on which the original Constitution was strangely schizophrenic), and I would prefer the government stop authorizing/controlling marriage entirely instead of playing word games with the Constitution. I really don't see any reason why they need to be involved in the first place. Of course, that applies to most of the things they're involved in, so I suppose marriage isn't really all that unique in this respect.
I think the issue with the popular views of cell phones on aircraft is the idea that if the interference is a valid issue, then any flight with a cell phone turned on will crash. In reality they're just not sure about the risks, and are trying to minimize the odds that a cell phone might contribute to a crash. As the article itself pointed out, there might not be any direct evidence that cell phones definitely cause plane crashes, but there are crashes where the cause is unknown and cell phones may have contributed. Just because most flights manage to reach their destinations--despite the fact that passengers often leave their cell phones turned on--doesn't mean that it isn't a risk, one that the airlines would prefer not to take, since ultimately the airlines are responsible for the safety of their passengers during the flight.
Human entities will take the path of least resistance to the greatest profit. If you want them to do something else, then you increase the penalty or incentive of one action or another. Humans are not benevolent, heart-warming, mom-and-apple-pie individuals because they want to be (if they are at all) - they are that way because of the current set of penalties and incentives before them.
I mean, let's be fair here -- greed isn't limited to corporations, but is instead a basic fact of human existance. Corporations are only special because they are a result of government regulation granting them priviledges, such as limitation of liability, typically denied to other citizens; do you expect adding even more regulations will improve the situation? Even if it did help, it would be an imperfect solution. Why not just eliminate their protected status entirely?
1) I already apologized for the terminology in a different reply. I also realize that (obviously) no passive system can increase the total energy in the signal. If there is any "amplification", it is in the same sense as the "amplification" listed for a directional antenna -- an increase over the signal strength that would be expected from an omnidirectional point source with no reflections or resonance effects.
2) I also realize (and acknowledged elsewhere) that the odds of a consumer electronic device causing any significant malfunction are essentially negligible. Aircraft electronics do undergo significant EMI hardening during development; they take the possibility of external interference very seriously. On the other hand, if passengers were aware of just how hard it is to get any kind of avionics device certified for use on an aircraft, even devices that have nothing at all to do with actually flying the plane (in-flight entertainment systems, for example), they would probably cease to wonder why the use of uncertified, uncontrolled, two-way radio equipment (like cell phones) is prohibited during flight.
My apologies. I think the effect I was thinking of was reflection rather than resonance. You're right about the resonance frequences; the opportunities for resonance at cell-phone frequencies would be quite limited. However, there is still the fact that the body of the cabin would tend to concentrate the signal by reflecting EM radiation back into the cabin. The effect isn't as strong as resonance would make it, but it should still be greater than that of a cell phone operating in open space, which could result in greater interference in certain locations depending on the specific frequencies involved and the overall design of the aircraft. Either way, a cell phone isn't going to get great reception from a plane, and it's probably better to just turn it off during the flight (even if it's only to avoid annoying the other passengers).
Personally, I'd be more interested in the possibility of using WiFi on a flight rather than cell phones, since -- unlike a cell phone -- it's possible to use a WiFi adapter (hopefully linked to an AP on the plane itself) without disturbing anyone else in the process.
Just for the record, I agree that the odds of cell-phone use leading to a crash are essentially nonexistant. For that matter, a competent pilot ought to be able to avoid crashing even in the event of a total failure of all the navigational systems, as long as environmental conditions (cloud cover, low visibility) aren't an issue. However, the question of whether or not cell phones interfere with aircraft systems still isn't quite as simple as it would appear from an informal test conducted on the ground with consumer-grade GPS equipment. For example, one rule in designing aircraft systems is to avoid doing anything that might distract or mislead the pilot. By that rule, even a temporary glitch in a relatively unimportant navigation system could be considered significant if it manages to draw the pilot's attention away from other, more important functions.
One reason that is often overlooked is that the metal body of the cabin makes a very nice resonance cavity, and thus amplifies the signal considerably. As a result, a small source inside the plane has a much better chance of interferring with the sensitive on-board electronics than a strong external source. Also, tolerances for failure are significantly lower for a GPS unit on an aircraft than for a hand-held GPS device on the ground. What might be considered insignificant interference for a consumer GPS unit would be completely unacceptable for aircraft equiptment, with reliability requirements on the order of 10**(-9) or better.
IANAEE, but I work for a major manufacturer of aircraft electronics.
It's not like those images are live video feeds, and there simply aren't enough satallites out there to continually monitor the entire planet; the cost of putting enough system in orbit for that would be prohibitive, even for the government. It might be possible for someone in control of the satallite to direct it at a fixed position for a live feed, but doing so would require exclusive use of the satallite, and would probably significantly shorten its lifespan (they only carry so much fuel). Even if the maps were actually detailed enough to see individual people, there would be no real way for just any random individual to use them to time an attack, or to actively monitor anyone, and that won't change any time soon.
I think we're on the same side here. I also dislike systems that tax "the rich" more than others, at least as far as above-poverty spending is concerned. However, I do think that the proposed system would result in a so-called "progressive" tax schedule, where those with greater expenditures (and thus greater income) pay a (reasonably) greater portion of the tax, both as a dollar amount and as a fraction of their total expenditures. Of course, they may choose not to spend in proportion to their income (although their expenditures will still, no doubt, be higher than average). Such behavior must result in either greater investment in the economy (with benefits that simple taxation could not achieve), or increased savings, which must eventually lead to either consumable expenditures (and thus taxation) or further investment. This would appear to be a win-win situation, since all income must eventually lead to either taxed consumable expenditures, or investments in the economy.
Why would you want to?
They can be "progressive", if you add in an offset matched to the poverty level, like the FairTax system would. The basic idea is that any taxes on purchases up to the poverty level are refunded, regardless of total spending. That way, if your spending is less than the poverty level, you get a (small) refund; if it's at the poverty level, you pay no net sales taxes. Otherwise, if your spending is above the poverty level, you pay a tax on the difference (not the total amount). The amount of tax paid asymptotically approaches the flat tax level as total spending increases. Also, a sales tax, unlike an income tax, would tend to encourage those with the means to do so to invest their untaxed income in capital (thus increasing production and lowering prices throughout the economy) rather than spend it on taxed consumables.
I think you have this backward. For Google to "get out of the market", they would need to buy back their shares, not sell them. Before the IPO all the shares were owned by the company's founders; to return to that state the founders would have to buy back all the shares issued in the IPO (or direct the company, as the majority shareholders, to buy back the shares out of company funds). Of course, since the share price is significantly higher than it was at the IPO, and they can't sell their own shares in the process (since it would defeat the entire purpose), they might have some difficulties regaining complete ownership at this point.