Common sense would be to realize that not everyone with ill intent is going to be sneaking around looking suspicious. What better cover story for a terrorist casing a site than claiming to be an amateur photographer?
On the other hand, common sense would also be to realize that most people claiming to be amateur photographers really are amateur photographers, and not terrorists.
But who gets to decide what "known foreign enemies of the US" means? The ones performing the search? I don't think so. That's what the warrent is for: it ensures that some (theoretically) impartial observer agrees that the search is not unreasonable.
Actually, it says "These are the things that the Government is allowed to do." Anything that the Constitution doesn't specifically grant the Legislature, the Executive, or the Judiciary is entirely outside their authority. Unfortunately, however, the framers of the Constitution employed a number of ambiguous phrases, such as the "elastic clause", which can be (mis)interpreted to grant nigh-infinite powers to various Government branches, limited only by the few explicit statements of rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights themselves.
1) Great argument here. So, basically, you're saying that it's perfectly fine for governments (but probably not individuals) to simply provide whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services) to pay an arbitrarily high price for them, whether or not they actually benefit, effectively preventing them from spending their money on things that they would find more productive? Perhaps they should extend this ability to the private sector as well -- I'm sure I could benefit from the ability to force everyone else to pay me a 1% income tax to fund some random "public service" of my choice. Exchange is either voluntary for both parties, or it's theft, even if both parties get something out of the deal. If I steal $50 from you, I can't repay you by providing something that you value less than the $50 I took, whether or not that item or service would cost you $50 to acquire. Nearly everyone understands that on an individual level, but for some reason most people just give up when governments do exactly the same thing.
2) IMHO, the entire graduated-income-tax system is unconstitutional, whatever the courts might say on the matter, even assuming that the government had any right to impose it by force. However, for the purposes if this argument, let's assume that it is both ethical and constitutional to impose a non-uniform direct tax on "income", and that the IRS' definition of "income" makes any kind of economic sense (which isn't the case). Under those assumptions, you still have the fact that the owners (or shareholders) of the company already pay, out of their own income taxes, for the protection of their persons and their property -- as you admitted yourself -- which just so happens to include their shares in any company they might choose to invest in. Thus, they already paid, as individuals, for the protection of those companies' assets, and taxing the companies (and thus the individuals, indirectly) for the same service is nothing more than a ploy to hide the real cost imposed.
3) I didn't say that Google should have its own military, only that it could enter into a reasonable deal with an existing government, something like an extradition treaty, which would protect Google from illegal activities (as defined in the agreement) performed by that government's citizens. Google would obviously have to make some kind of concession on their part -- probably monetary -- but since the cost of actually enforcing the agreement would be much less than what they're currently paying in taxes, they would probably come out ahead on the deal. I don't expect them to do this, but there's no economic reason that they couldn't (there are certainly political obstacles, of course).
1) I don't disagree with the point that Google has benefitted from both government and private investments in infrastructure, and continues to do so. I do not, however, believe that those investments are worth the millions of dollars a company of Google's size pays in taxes every year. In most cases, the wide-scale networking potential of the infrastructure (particularly in the case of the telephone infrastructure) was only incidental to the primary use, and by now those initial investments must have paid for themselves many times over.
2) I realize that the GP was including all levels of government in his/her statement. I, on the other hand, was pointing out that a significant portion of the income and/or capital-gains taxes a company like Google would pay would be directed toward the federal government. Frankly, we could do well enough without government-assigned IP addresses and TLDs, and it is quite debatable whether their influence on the system has been positive or negative. That essentially leaves military defense as the only significant, semi-legitimate service provided to large corporations by the federal government, and I don't think that corporations should be forced to pay so much more than any individual for that protection, particularly when the individuals which make up the corporations also pay for that defense. In effect, the company's shareholders are forced to pay twice for the same service, once as individuals and again as a group.
3) Most large corporations (Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) have resources equivalent to those of some (minor) countries. I'm certain that they could work out some kind of civil-defense arrangement with the relevant governments, probably on much more reasonable terms than those they presently have. A major infrastructure provider (such as an Internet search directory) would have a fair amount of bargaining power, even when dealing with a "sovereign" government like the USA's. There would be no reason for Google to run their own enforcement agency so long as they could "outsource" the work (for a price) to the local government, just as most modern nations manage to maintain justice without placing their own police forces in every other country.
I agree that it's fairly unlikely that Google (or any other US corporation) is likely to "strike out on its own" like that; I'm just saying that it's feasable, and that corporations carry enough of the tax burden at present that it would probably be economical for them to do so, if no political problems were involved. As that is not the case, I doubt any US corportation wants to be the first to try such an arrangement, however beneficial it might be.
I agree that the federal government had routinely exceeded its authority in such matters by interfering in state affairs, but IMHO that isn't an excuse for them to exceed their (intended, if not legal) Constitutional authority even further by levying taxes to pay for their interference.
Do you happen to have a source for that? As I recall, the infrastructure of the Internet (land-lines, routers, servers, etc.) is almost entirely privately owned. The government (DARPA, specifically) may indeed have performed some of the initial research and development work, but by far the largest investments in the Internet have been made by private citizens and corporations. I'm not saying that Google didn't benefit greatly from the present of the Internet, just that the Internet does not owe its existance to the government. There's no way that the minimal R&D investment DARPA made decades ago in any way justifies the kind of taxes I'm sure Google is forced to pay every year.
Of the "standard responses" you mentioned, only the army (or the military in general) is paid for by national taxes. Police, roads, fire protection, schools--almost everything else, in fact--is the state or county's responsibility. In any event, I'm certain that Google could probably have provided all of the services it desired for its own protection for far less than a quarter of its annual income, and probably does so anyway (most major companies seem to employ their own security forces, for example), which means that Google is forced to pay for services it will probably never need to use.
I wouldn't steal from them, but that's because (as in all these IP-is-real-property red-herring arguments) it's their property, and if I steal it they won't be able to use it anymore. I would, however, be disinclined to buy from anyone I knew was taking undue advantage of their employees, and would probably look for someone able to provide the same thing on different terms (which, if applied to patented or copyrighted material, would be considered infringement). There is no correspondance between theft of real property and infringement of copyrights or patents, and I wish people would stop trying to say that they're the same thing. Creating and/or inventing, by themselves, do not give anyone the right to control how others use their property. I, personally, would rather that those who demand copyright and patent "protections" stopped creating and inventing altogether. I do not consider their contributions worth the price they are asking, and do not appreciate being forced to pay that price against my will.
Agreed. Oh, sure, you can have a "monopoly", in the sense that you could have a market served by just one individual or company, but that can only remain stable only so long as no one else can match their efficiency. Some markets really are best served by a natural monopoly.
Furthermore, placing limits on products not only restricts the producers, but the consumers as well. What if I value the lower price more than the loss of privacy? If the seller can't use these RFID tags, then I'm going to pay the price. Also, the lack of information (or time required for research) is really a "red herring", because if people were really concerned about the problem they'd make sure other people knew about it, and stop buying from that retail stores that failed to clearly label RFID-tagged products. They'd probably also set up a "products with RFIDs" database, further reducing the cost of avoiding the tags. Information really is one of the easiest things to dissiminate, and one of the hardest to control (as the RIAA and MPAA are discovering). Lack of information isn't really a major obstacle.
Judging from the response, I also think the GP and I are using different definitions of the word "democracy". The GP seems to be saying that the concentrated power of government should be directed by a simple majority vote in some semi-random subset of the population, a form of government frequently labelled "tyrany of the majority", not without reason. I am of the opinion that the power of government should not be concentrated in the first place, but should remain limited by the rights of the individuals who support it. Why can't people see that the only difference between theft and taxes[1] is one of scale? If an individual doesn't have the right to rob me to pay their debts, then how can they have the right to ask others (the government, usually) to rob me on their behalf, no matter how many people agree with them? What's mine is mine, and no other has any right to it.
[1] "Taxes", as used here, includes enforced nonmonetary costs, like the proposed RFID restriction.
[2] I'm not saying that I'm in favor of this use of RFID tags (or against it). I'm just opposed to the use of aggressive force against individuals or their property, which is implied in the enforcement of any such restriction.
The original wording was rather inflamitory ("The market has spoken"), but the idea is not invalid because of that. Obviously, there really is no such thing as "the market", at least not as an independent entity. The "market" for a product is nothing more or less than the sum of all of the people interested in that product. Your proposal to simply make rules against what some people obviously choose to buy is completely undemocratic. The concept of a "free market" is nothing more than a recognition of the basic fact that no individual, or group of individuals, whatever their title, position, or popular backing, has the right to force another individual to conform to their will. That is the essence of democracy, and it is a basic fact derived from the basic equality of human beings, and anything that attacks that equality is promoting slavery: the idea that some humans, being better or more deserving than others, have the right to make everyone else follow their orders against their will.
You want the government (a set of people with different interests than those that make up "the market", but only individuals never the less, with no more inherent authority than any other group of individuals) to step in and force everyone else to play by your rules. Unless you're claiming you're somehow better than those who disagree with your views (which I doubt you intended), you do not have the right to make anyone else help you accomplish your goals, whatever those goals or the motivations for them might be, and neither does any self-styled "government".
As a writer, you don't have anything to be worried about. If you were a distributor, or a publisher, then I would probably agree with your concern. However, the need for writers isn't disappearing anytime soon, and as long as people need you to write you will be compensated for it. People can't just go around you like they can go around the distributors and publishers. At some point, they have to turn to you to get what they want, and that gives you a huge amount of bargaining power. Remember that in any system other than outright slavery, your right to be compensated is backed by your ability to refuse to write for less than what you consider your work is worth, and limited by how much your customers believe it's worth. As long as demand for your work exists, and you don't cling desperately to the existing business model, you'll probably be even better off than your are now.
If we eliminated copyright law today, there might be a short-term drop in demand for writers, artists, etc. as people took advantage of all the works which have been held back for so long. However, once those items become commonplace, the demand for new ones would return, and the market for your services would return in proportion to the continuous demand for new media, which is currently artificially depressed by the added cost of an inefficient and outdated distribution system. In other words, the total price (per buyer, over time) of any given work would probably fall, increasing demand, but the writers would take a larger share of the revenue (again over time), improving their own overall compensation for each work. The final result would, ultimately, be a positive one for professional writers, IMHO.
I agree that preventing cheating isn't part of the professor's job. However, detecting cheating is, because the professor's job (or part of it, anyway) is to certify to others that the student either has, or has not, achieved the course objectives. It is, therefore, the professor's job to keep the student from getting away with cheating, and whether the professor fails the student immediately or simply refuses to certify their grade at the end of the course should (IMHO) be up to the individual professor. However, a professor who can't detect when he or she is being deceived cannot be trusted to evaluate his/her students' performance.
On the other hand, I also believe that a professor should be allowed to certify a student who never actually took the course, if that student has already achieved the course objectives anyway. This is a generalization of the idea of "testing out", which some courses do permit. Also, some of the courses currently required should be reconsidered, given the changes in our level of information-retrieval technology. I'm not suggesting that we eliminate courses like History and Literature from the curriculum, but rather that students should be tested on their analytic skills in these areas, rather than their ability to memorize facts and figures. Analytic skills are harder to copy or fake, and more important in everyday life, particular when you can easily look up the details of any book or historical event online.
True on both counts. I guess I've just always found the questions themselves provided sufficient information to "jog my memory" during the test, and outside the test you have the entire textbook for reference. If the professor says something important that I know isn't in the textbook, I mentally associate it with the feeling of forgetting something on the test, which means that my "memory aid" is most useful exactly when it is most needed.
However, my system may not work for just any student. My scholastic habits were far from usual, any that may have influenced my decision to avoid notes. For example, I almost never did any significant review prior to a test, or even an exam, because I wanted the test or exam to reflect what I had actually learned during the semester, and not what I could cram into my brain the night before. Thus, if I did take notes, I almost never looked at them afterward. Also, though I cared about my grades, I didn't make them my entire life like some of my classmates seemed to. Despite that, I didn't do all that badly overall, and I had A's in most of the classes I really cared about (CS/CE combination major, in case you were wondering). The one domain I would make an exception for was history, since there are so many facts, figures, dates, and names to remember when dealing with history that the external storage space became essential. In that case, the notes were more of a "cache memory" I used to adapt to the overload. I'm not sure how much it actually helped, though.
Not to dispute any of your other points (which I agree with completely), but in my case I have always found that when a professor forced me to take notes (for example, required them to be turned in periodically for a grade), I was unable to remember most of what I'd written down unless I read them back again afterward, which in most cases I could have done just as easily by reading corresponding portion of the textbook. In other words, the act of taking notes actually prevented me from remembering the important parts of the lesson. I am sure that for some, and perhaps most, students, your method would help, but there are certainly some students who would have more trouble with a strict regime of note-taking than they would have if they simply paid attention in class without writing everything down.
The reversal I experienced was probably due to my acutely visual memory, combined with the ability to deconstruct and visualize the professor's main points, adapting them to the format my memory was best at. In other words, I was already finding the main points and summarizing the lesson, and writing down the notes merely distracted me from doing so.
Because they don't believe that citizens should be able to own whatever they want, as they're not interested in abstract black-and-white issues but instead in what would make the USA a better place. If they believe that it's not a better place if civilians were allowed to have nuclear weapons then they're unlikely to expend any effort defending anyone attempting to do so, are they?
More damage has been done to our country by people who were trying to "make the USA a better place" than by any outside group. Everyone has a different opinion of what would accomplish that goal, and most of them conflict with each other. The USA was founded on the principle that individuals should have the right to make their own choices in hopes of improving their own lives, provided, of course, that they don't violate the rights of others in the process. If the ACLU wants to "improve" the USA, they have the right to try. However, that doesn't mean that they have the right to force everyone else to accept their version of what makes a "better" USA. The founders of this nation believed that, which is why they placed such stringent limitation on the power of government, limitations that we have consistently and foolishly ignored, to our own detriment.
Furthermore, the powers granted to Congress do not include the right to prohibit the ownership of any item, including weapons of any kind, unless you can call that "provid[ing] for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"[1], which, like the "elastic clause", is one of the less fortunate phrases in the Constitution, in that it can be used to claim Congressional powers far beyond the founders' obvious intentions. The 2nd Amendment, however, written by those same founders, confirms that fact, explicitly declaring laws prohibiting gun ownership to be outside Congress' domain. It was a guarantee, not a change to the Constitution itself; why would the authors of the Constitution wish to change its terms as soon as it was ratified? None of the amendments in the Bill of Rights were intended to change the meaning of the Constitution. They were merely guarantees against misinterpretation, which have themselves been misinterpreted over the years.
What about mapping the domain names to automatically assume a TLD from the first two or three letters of the domain (e.g. slashdot -> slashdot.sla)? That should divide the data set up nicely, while allowing us to do without explicit TLDs. With 8.29e7 domains in.net and.com, and those TLDs making up 47% of all domains, there should be a total of about 1.764e8 domains. There are 17,576 combinations of three alphabetic characters (case-insensitive), so there would be about 1.0e4 names in each three-letter TLD, or 260,900 names in each of the 676 possible two-letter TLDs.
Alternatively, we could use a real distributed database system indexed by a hash of the complete domain name. Associating strings with numbers is hardly a unique problem, and the current DNS system is hardly the optimal solution, however much it may be ingrained into the history of the Internet.
just as its easier for you to understand speech (over text).
I realize I may be a bit unusual, but I tend to understand text faster and more accurately than speech. It is certainly faster to speak than it is to write out the text, but I can read an entire paragraph in a second or two, whereas communicating the same information as speech would take much longer. Also, I usually visualize the speech as text in my mind and then "read" it, rather than interpreting the words directly.
The problem with this idea, which has been pointed out before, is that it is impossible to enforce without using completely locked-down hardware. I assume that you want to be able to enforce your restrictions on someone else's PC, since you wouldn't need to remove those capabilities in order to protect the document on your own system. However, any software-based security features can be circumvented by running the system in an emulator, or with hardware designed to thwart the restrictions. For example, you could design a (hardware or software) video card that stored a copy of everything sent to the monitor. I seriously doubt that any DRM system can be made completely secure against hardware emulation, even assuming the presence of "trusted computing" hardware, without requiring all computers to be registered with some central authority for verification -- and even that could probably be circumvented by a determined individual. If you still want to rely on DRM, then I would suggest that you do it at your own cost, and not force the rest of us to carry the burdon of your demand for secrecy.
Furthermore, unless you intend to channel the information directly into the recipient's brain (and wipe his/her memory afterward), you will have to trust the recipient to keep the contents of the documents private, even if you can manage to prevent him/her from keeping a copy of the documents themselves. If you distrust the recipient enough to rely on DRM, you shouldn't be giving him/her that information to begin with. A simple (possibly even hand-made) 35mm camera would make a mockery of any DRM system we could devise, given our current level of technology.
DRM is a bad idea for two reasons: it doesn't solve the problem, and the problem it tries to solve is the wrong problem. The problem, in your case, is that you don't trust the recipient to keep the contents of the documents secret. You want a defense against that, which does not and cannot exist. That potential for betrayal is inherent to human relationships. DRM is designed to break other people's tools in hopes of preventing them from using them against you; it's a legal weapon designed as an offensive preliminary strike, and yet even draconian DRM is ultimately incapable of preventing someone from betraying your secrets.
True, one could use the Mozilla plugin system to execute code. However, I believe that applets are generally prevented from writing to arbitrary files, which would tend to limit their usefulness in a development environment. In any event, I am fairly sure that the JRE plugin depends on the stand-alone JRE executable ($JRE/bin/java) for most of its functionality, so you would still need a copy of the JRE somewhere in executable form. At least, when Firefox is running java applets, a number of processes usually start up with the "java" process name.
An easier method would be to use/lib/ld-linux.so.2 ("/lib/ld-linux.so.2 $JDK/java"), which has the advantage of being very difficult to remove completely without breaking nearly every program on the system. Most people don't realize it, but the loader isn't just a library. It's a complete executable, with its own command-line options and the ability to load and execute any readable (ELF-format) file, whether or not the file is considered executable by the OS. Of course, given the source code for the loader, a particularly clever admin could change that.
P.S. Don't try turning off the execute bit on/lib/ld-linux.so.2 unless you have a rescue disc handy. You won't be able to run chmod to turn it back on (as I just found out...).
Simple: you examine the pattern (the design), and build a new one with your own raw materials. It's the same as for duplicating a book, or a CD, except for the complexity of the pattern.
I take it you've never tried FlashBlock? It's a fairly popular extension which keeps Flash objects from running (or even loading) until they're clicked on.
The "mount" command (which is SUID to root) will only accept command-line mount options from the root account. Normal users can use it to mount / unmount entries listed in/etc/fstab (just the ones with the "user" option), but cannot choose the filesystem or the mount options. Newer systems typically use "pmount" for removable media, and pmount originally supplied the "noexec" option in all cases. However, I just noticed that the developers recently added an "--exec" option which changes this behavior. Perhaps they didn't understand the security risk this created...? Anyway, you can remove the "pmount" command (assuming you're not using USB devices), or edit the code, if you're serious about keeping out unauthorized executables. It won't prevent users from mounting CDs or floppies, but "pmount" is almost essential for USB memory sticks and the like.
P.S. The problem with USB devices is that they show up on "random" device nodes, depending on the order in which they're inserted, and they may be partitioned in ways you can't predict, both of which make their fstab entries difficult to construct. Floppies and CDs don't suffer from this problem.
A fairly typical practice is to have separate $HOME partitions (and/tmp, etc.), mounted with the "noexec" option. You still have write access, and you could extract the JDK (assuming it doesn't exceed your quota), but you couldn't run any of the executable files, which makes the JDK nearly useless. The noexec option is standard for all removable media as well, even on non-hardened desktop installations. I believe that there are custom driver-based tools which allow administrators to do the same for Windows installations, although all the ones I've seen had fairly serious flaws (such as being blacklist-based) that made them much less effective.
Having a higher minimum wage also increases wages all the way up the scale. Say, if we push the minimum wage up from $5.15 to $8, then all the people now making $8 will also want a similar raise to $11. Then, all the people making $11 will want $14. This then ripples throughout the economy.
I'm not going to address all of the points, although I will say that I don't agree with the idea that driving up labor costs would help the economy any, in domestic or foreign markets. However, regarding this one point, I am curious at to what you believe limits us from simply raising the minimum wage to $100/hour and making everyone rich? After all, if a high minimum wage helps the US out in foreign markets, and there are no problems with having a minimum wage in the first place, then what prevents us from seeking the best advantage by setting an arbitrarily high minimum wage? After all, $5.15/hour is, in the end, just as arbitrary as $100/hour, or $1000/hour. Do you think we'd be better off somehow if we raised the minimum wage by 10% every year while maintaining the same productivity?
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, common sense would also be to realize that most people claiming to be amateur photographers really are amateur photographers, and not terrorists.
But who gets to decide what "known foreign enemies of the US" means? The ones performing the search? I don't think so. That's what the warrent is for: it ensures that some (theoretically) impartial observer agrees that the search is not unreasonable.
Actually, it says "These are the things that the Government is allowed to do." Anything that the Constitution doesn't specifically grant the Legislature, the Executive, or the Judiciary is entirely outside their authority. Unfortunately, however, the framers of the Constitution employed a number of ambiguous phrases, such as the "elastic clause", which can be (mis)interpreted to grant nigh-infinite powers to various Government branches, limited only by the few explicit statements of rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights themselves.
1) Great argument here. So, basically, you're saying that it's perfectly fine for governments (but probably not individuals) to simply provide whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services) to pay an arbitrarily high price for them, whether or not they actually benefit, effectively preventing them from spending their money on things that they would find more productive? Perhaps they should extend this ability to the private sector as well -- I'm sure I could benefit from the ability to force everyone else to pay me a 1% income tax to fund some random "public service" of my choice. Exchange is either voluntary for both parties, or it's theft, even if both parties get something out of the deal. If I steal $50 from you, I can't repay you by providing something that you value less than the $50 I took, whether or not that item or service would cost you $50 to acquire. Nearly everyone understands that on an individual level, but for some reason most people just give up when governments do exactly the same thing.
2) IMHO, the entire graduated-income-tax system is unconstitutional, whatever the courts might say on the matter, even assuming that the government had any right to impose it by force. However, for the purposes if this argument, let's assume that it is both ethical and constitutional to impose a non-uniform direct tax on "income", and that the IRS' definition of "income" makes any kind of economic sense (which isn't the case). Under those assumptions, you still have the fact that the owners (or shareholders) of the company already pay, out of their own income taxes, for the protection of their persons and their property -- as you admitted yourself -- which just so happens to include their shares in any company they might choose to invest in. Thus, they already paid, as individuals, for the protection of those companies' assets, and taxing the companies (and thus the individuals, indirectly) for the same service is nothing more than a ploy to hide the real cost imposed.
3) I didn't say that Google should have its own military, only that it could enter into a reasonable deal with an existing government, something like an extradition treaty, which would protect Google from illegal activities (as defined in the agreement) performed by that government's citizens. Google would obviously have to make some kind of concession on their part -- probably monetary -- but since the cost of actually enforcing the agreement would be much less than what they're currently paying in taxes, they would probably come out ahead on the deal. I don't expect them to do this, but there's no economic reason that they couldn't (there are certainly political obstacles, of course).
1) I don't disagree with the point that Google has benefitted from both government and private investments in infrastructure, and continues to do so. I do not, however, believe that those investments are worth the millions of dollars a company of Google's size pays in taxes every year. In most cases, the wide-scale networking potential of the infrastructure (particularly in the case of the telephone infrastructure) was only incidental to the primary use, and by now those initial investments must have paid for themselves many times over.
2) I realize that the GP was including all levels of government in his/her statement. I, on the other hand, was pointing out that a significant portion of the income and/or capital-gains taxes a company like Google would pay would be directed toward the federal government. Frankly, we could do well enough without government-assigned IP addresses and TLDs, and it is quite debatable whether their influence on the system has been positive or negative. That essentially leaves military defense as the only significant, semi-legitimate service provided to large corporations by the federal government, and I don't think that corporations should be forced to pay so much more than any individual for that protection, particularly when the individuals which make up the corporations also pay for that defense. In effect, the company's shareholders are forced to pay twice for the same service, once as individuals and again as a group.
3) Most large corporations (Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) have resources equivalent to those of some (minor) countries. I'm certain that they could work out some kind of civil-defense arrangement with the relevant governments, probably on much more reasonable terms than those they presently have. A major infrastructure provider (such as an Internet search directory) would have a fair amount of bargaining power, even when dealing with a "sovereign" government like the USA's. There would be no reason for Google to run their own enforcement agency so long as they could "outsource" the work (for a price) to the local government, just as most modern nations manage to maintain justice without placing their own police forces in every other country.
I agree that it's fairly unlikely that Google (or any other US corporation) is likely to "strike out on its own" like that; I'm just saying that it's feasable, and that corporations carry enough of the tax burden at present that it would probably be economical for them to do so, if no political problems were involved. As that is not the case, I doubt any US corportation wants to be the first to try such an arrangement, however beneficial it might be.
I agree that the federal government had routinely exceeded its authority in such matters by interfering in state affairs, but IMHO that isn't an excuse for them to exceed their (intended, if not legal) Constitutional authority even further by levying taxes to pay for their interference.
Do you happen to have a source for that? As I recall, the infrastructure of the Internet (land-lines, routers, servers, etc.) is almost entirely privately owned. The government (DARPA, specifically) may indeed have performed some of the initial research and development work, but by far the largest investments in the Internet have been made by private citizens and corporations. I'm not saying that Google didn't benefit greatly from the present of the Internet, just that the Internet does not owe its existance to the government. There's no way that the minimal R&D investment DARPA made decades ago in any way justifies the kind of taxes I'm sure Google is forced to pay every year.
Of the "standard responses" you mentioned, only the army (or the military in general) is paid for by national taxes. Police, roads, fire protection, schools--almost everything else, in fact--is the state or county's responsibility. In any event, I'm certain that Google could probably have provided all of the services it desired for its own protection for far less than a quarter of its annual income, and probably does so anyway (most major companies seem to employ their own security forces, for example), which means that Google is forced to pay for services it will probably never need to use.
You might also have to escape the occasional quote character if it occurs inside an attribute, like so:
<element attrib="this is "my" text"/>
Without the escapes, that attribute value will fail to parse correctly, since the text appears to end halfway through the string.
I wouldn't steal from them, but that's because (as in all these IP-is-real-property red-herring arguments) it's their property, and if I steal it they won't be able to use it anymore. I would, however, be disinclined to buy from anyone I knew was taking undue advantage of their employees, and would probably look for someone able to provide the same thing on different terms (which, if applied to patented or copyrighted material, would be considered infringement). There is no correspondance between theft of real property and infringement of copyrights or patents, and I wish people would stop trying to say that they're the same thing. Creating and/or inventing, by themselves, do not give anyone the right to control how others use their property. I, personally, would rather that those who demand copyright and patent "protections" stopped creating and inventing altogether. I do not consider their contributions worth the price they are asking, and do not appreciate being forced to pay that price against my will.
Agreed. Oh, sure, you can have a "monopoly", in the sense that you could have a market served by just one individual or company, but that can only remain stable only so long as no one else can match their efficiency. Some markets really are best served by a natural monopoly.
Furthermore, placing limits on products not only restricts the producers, but the consumers as well. What if I value the lower price more than the loss of privacy? If the seller can't use these RFID tags, then I'm going to pay the price. Also, the lack of information (or time required for research) is really a "red herring", because if people were really concerned about the problem they'd make sure other people knew about it, and stop buying from that retail stores that failed to clearly label RFID-tagged products. They'd probably also set up a "products with RFIDs" database, further reducing the cost of avoiding the tags. Information really is one of the easiest things to dissiminate, and one of the hardest to control (as the RIAA and MPAA are discovering). Lack of information isn't really a major obstacle.
Judging from the response, I also think the GP and I are using different definitions of the word "democracy". The GP seems to be saying that the concentrated power of government should be directed by a simple majority vote in some semi-random subset of the population, a form of government frequently labelled "tyrany of the majority", not without reason. I am of the opinion that the power of government should not be concentrated in the first place, but should remain limited by the rights of the individuals who support it. Why can't people see that the only difference between theft and taxes[1] is one of scale? If an individual doesn't have the right to rob me to pay their debts, then how can they have the right to ask others (the government, usually) to rob me on their behalf, no matter how many people agree with them? What's mine is mine, and no other has any right to it.
[1] "Taxes", as used here, includes enforced nonmonetary costs, like the proposed RFID restriction.
[2] I'm not saying that I'm in favor of this use of RFID tags (or against it). I'm just opposed to the use of aggressive force against individuals or their property, which is implied in the enforcement of any such restriction.
The original wording was rather inflamitory ("The market has spoken"), but the idea is not invalid because of that. Obviously, there really is no such thing as "the market", at least not as an independent entity. The "market" for a product is nothing more or less than the sum of all of the people interested in that product. Your proposal to simply make rules against what some people obviously choose to buy is completely undemocratic. The concept of a "free market" is nothing more than a recognition of the basic fact that no individual, or group of individuals, whatever their title, position, or popular backing, has the right to force another individual to conform to their will. That is the essence of democracy, and it is a basic fact derived from the basic equality of human beings, and anything that attacks that equality is promoting slavery: the idea that some humans, being better or more deserving than others, have the right to make everyone else follow their orders against their will.
You want the government (a set of people with different interests than those that make up "the market", but only individuals never the less, with no more inherent authority than any other group of individuals) to step in and force everyone else to play by your rules. Unless you're claiming you're somehow better than those who disagree with your views (which I doubt you intended), you do not have the right to make anyone else help you accomplish your goals, whatever those goals or the motivations for them might be, and neither does any self-styled "government".
As a writer, you don't have anything to be worried about. If you were a distributor, or a publisher, then I would probably agree with your concern. However, the need for writers isn't disappearing anytime soon, and as long as people need you to write you will be compensated for it. People can't just go around you like they can go around the distributors and publishers. At some point, they have to turn to you to get what they want, and that gives you a huge amount of bargaining power. Remember that in any system other than outright slavery, your right to be compensated is backed by your ability to refuse to write for less than what you consider your work is worth, and limited by how much your customers believe it's worth. As long as demand for your work exists, and you don't cling desperately to the existing business model, you'll probably be even better off than your are now.
If we eliminated copyright law today, there might be a short-term drop in demand for writers, artists, etc. as people took advantage of all the works which have been held back for so long. However, once those items become commonplace, the demand for new ones would return, and the market for your services would return in proportion to the continuous demand for new media, which is currently artificially depressed by the added cost of an inefficient and outdated distribution system. In other words, the total price (per buyer, over time) of any given work would probably fall, increasing demand, but the writers would take a larger share of the revenue (again over time), improving their own overall compensation for each work. The final result would, ultimately, be a positive one for professional writers, IMHO.
I agree that preventing cheating isn't part of the professor's job. However, detecting cheating is, because the professor's job (or part of it, anyway) is to certify to others that the student either has, or has not, achieved the course objectives. It is, therefore, the professor's job to keep the student from getting away with cheating, and whether the professor fails the student immediately or simply refuses to certify their grade at the end of the course should (IMHO) be up to the individual professor. However, a professor who can't detect when he or she is being deceived cannot be trusted to evaluate his/her students' performance.
On the other hand, I also believe that a professor should be allowed to certify a student who never actually took the course, if that student has already achieved the course objectives anyway. This is a generalization of the idea of "testing out", which some courses do permit. Also, some of the courses currently required should be reconsidered, given the changes in our level of information-retrieval technology. I'm not suggesting that we eliminate courses like History and Literature from the curriculum, but rather that students should be tested on their analytic skills in these areas, rather than their ability to memorize facts and figures. Analytic skills are harder to copy or fake, and more important in everyday life, particular when you can easily look up the details of any book or historical event online.
True on both counts. I guess I've just always found the questions themselves provided sufficient information to "jog my memory" during the test, and outside the test you have the entire textbook for reference. If the professor says something important that I know isn't in the textbook, I mentally associate it with the feeling of forgetting something on the test, which means that my "memory aid" is most useful exactly when it is most needed.
However, my system may not work for just any student. My scholastic habits were far from usual, any that may have influenced my decision to avoid notes. For example, I almost never did any significant review prior to a test, or even an exam, because I wanted the test or exam to reflect what I had actually learned during the semester, and not what I could cram into my brain the night before. Thus, if I did take notes, I almost never looked at them afterward. Also, though I cared about my grades, I didn't make them my entire life like some of my classmates seemed to. Despite that, I didn't do all that badly overall, and I had A's in most of the classes I really cared about (CS/CE combination major, in case you were wondering). The one domain I would make an exception for was history, since there are so many facts, figures, dates, and names to remember when dealing with history that the external storage space became essential. In that case, the notes were more of a "cache memory" I used to adapt to the overload. I'm not sure how much it actually helped, though.
Not to dispute any of your other points (which I agree with completely), but in my case I have always found that when a professor forced me to take notes (for example, required them to be turned in periodically for a grade), I was unable to remember most of what I'd written down unless I read them back again afterward, which in most cases I could have done just as easily by reading corresponding portion of the textbook. In other words, the act of taking notes actually prevented me from remembering the important parts of the lesson. I am sure that for some, and perhaps most, students, your method would help, but there are certainly some students who would have more trouble with a strict regime of note-taking than they would have if they simply paid attention in class without writing everything down.
The reversal I experienced was probably due to my acutely visual memory, combined with the ability to deconstruct and visualize the professor's main points, adapting them to the format my memory was best at. In other words, I was already finding the main points and summarizing the lesson, and writing down the notes merely distracted me from doing so.
More damage has been done to our country by people who were trying to "make the USA a better place" than by any outside group. Everyone has a different opinion of what would accomplish that goal, and most of them conflict with each other. The USA was founded on the principle that individuals should have the right to make their own choices in hopes of improving their own lives, provided, of course, that they don't violate the rights of others in the process. If the ACLU wants to "improve" the USA, they have the right to try. However, that doesn't mean that they have the right to force everyone else to accept their version of what makes a "better" USA. The founders of this nation believed that, which is why they placed such stringent limitation on the power of government, limitations that we have consistently and foolishly ignored, to our own detriment.
Furthermore, the powers granted to Congress do not include the right to prohibit the ownership of any item, including weapons of any kind, unless you can call that "provid[ing] for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"[1], which, like the "elastic clause", is one of the less fortunate phrases in the Constitution, in that it can be used to claim Congressional powers far beyond the founders' obvious intentions. The 2nd Amendment, however, written by those same founders, confirms that fact, explicitly declaring laws prohibiting gun ownership to be outside Congress' domain. It was a guarantee, not a change to the Constitution itself; why would the authors of the Constitution wish to change its terms as soon as it was ratified? None of the amendments in the Bill of Rights were intended to change the meaning of the Constitution. They were merely guarantees against misinterpretation, which have themselves been misinterpreted over the years.
What about mapping the domain names to automatically assume a TLD from the first two or three letters of the domain (e.g. slashdot -> slashdot.sla)? That should divide the data set up nicely, while allowing us to do without explicit TLDs. With 8.29e7 domains in .net and .com, and those TLDs making up 47% of all domains, there should be a total of about 1.764e8 domains. There are 17,576 combinations of three alphabetic characters (case-insensitive), so there would be about 1.0e4 names in each three-letter TLD, or 260,900 names in each of the 676 possible two-letter TLDs.
Alternatively, we could use a real distributed database system indexed by a hash of the complete domain name. Associating strings with numbers is hardly a unique problem, and the current DNS system is hardly the optimal solution, however much it may be ingrained into the history of the Internet.
I realize I may be a bit unusual, but I tend to understand text faster and more accurately than speech. It is certainly faster to speak than it is to write out the text, but I can read an entire paragraph in a second or two, whereas communicating the same information as speech would take much longer. Also, I usually visualize the speech as text in my mind and then "read" it, rather than interpreting the words directly.
The problem with this idea, which has been pointed out before, is that it is impossible to enforce without using completely locked-down hardware. I assume that you want to be able to enforce your restrictions on someone else's PC, since you wouldn't need to remove those capabilities in order to protect the document on your own system. However, any software-based security features can be circumvented by running the system in an emulator, or with hardware designed to thwart the restrictions. For example, you could design a (hardware or software) video card that stored a copy of everything sent to the monitor. I seriously doubt that any DRM system can be made completely secure against hardware emulation, even assuming the presence of "trusted computing" hardware, without requiring all computers to be registered with some central authority for verification -- and even that could probably be circumvented by a determined individual. If you still want to rely on DRM, then I would suggest that you do it at your own cost, and not force the rest of us to carry the burdon of your demand for secrecy.
Furthermore, unless you intend to channel the information directly into the recipient's brain (and wipe his/her memory afterward), you will have to trust the recipient to keep the contents of the documents private, even if you can manage to prevent him/her from keeping a copy of the documents themselves. If you distrust the recipient enough to rely on DRM, you shouldn't be giving him/her that information to begin with. A simple (possibly even hand-made) 35mm camera would make a mockery of any DRM system we could devise, given our current level of technology.
DRM is a bad idea for two reasons: it doesn't solve the problem, and the problem it tries to solve is the wrong problem. The problem, in your case, is that you don't trust the recipient to keep the contents of the documents secret. You want a defense against that, which does not and cannot exist. That potential for betrayal is inherent to human relationships. DRM is designed to break other people's tools in hopes of preventing them from using them against you; it's a legal weapon designed as an offensive preliminary strike, and yet even draconian DRM is ultimately incapable of preventing someone from betraying your secrets.
True, one could use the Mozilla plugin system to execute code. However, I believe that applets are generally prevented from writing to arbitrary files, which would tend to limit their usefulness in a development environment. In any event, I am fairly sure that the JRE plugin depends on the stand-alone JRE executable ($JRE/bin/java) for most of its functionality, so you would still need a copy of the JRE somewhere in executable form. At least, when Firefox is running java applets, a number of processes usually start up with the "java" process name.
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 ("/lib/ld-linux.so.2 $JDK/java"), which has the advantage of being very difficult to remove completely without breaking nearly every program on the system. Most people don't realize it, but the loader isn't just a library. It's a complete executable, with its own command-line options and the ability to load and execute any readable (ELF-format) file, whether or not the file is considered executable by the OS. Of course, given the source code for the loader, a particularly clever admin could change that.
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 unless you have a rescue disc handy. You won't be able to run chmod to turn it back on (as I just found out...).
An easier method would be to use
P.S. Don't try turning off the execute bit on
Simple: you examine the pattern (the design), and build a new one with your own raw materials. It's the same as for duplicating a book, or a CD, except for the complexity of the pattern.
I take it you've never tried FlashBlock? It's a fairly popular extension which keeps Flash objects from running (or even loading) until they're clicked on.
The "mount" command (which is SUID to root) will only accept command-line mount options from the root account. Normal users can use it to mount / unmount entries listed in /etc/fstab (just the ones with the "user" option), but cannot choose the filesystem or the mount options. Newer systems typically use "pmount" for removable media, and pmount originally supplied the "noexec" option in all cases. However, I just noticed that the developers recently added an "--exec" option which changes this behavior. Perhaps they didn't understand the security risk this created...? Anyway, you can remove the "pmount" command (assuming you're not using USB devices), or edit the code, if you're serious about keeping out unauthorized executables. It won't prevent users from mounting CDs or floppies, but "pmount" is almost essential for USB memory sticks and the like.
P.S. The problem with USB devices is that they show up on "random" device nodes, depending on the order in which they're inserted, and they may be partitioned in ways you can't predict, both of which make their fstab entries difficult to construct. Floppies and CDs don't suffer from this problem.
A fairly typical practice is to have separate $HOME partitions (and /tmp, etc.), mounted with the "noexec" option. You still have write access, and you could extract the JDK (assuming it doesn't exceed your quota), but you couldn't run any of the executable files, which makes the JDK nearly useless. The noexec option is standard for all removable media as well, even on non-hardened desktop installations. I believe that there are custom driver-based tools which allow administrators to do the same for Windows installations, although all the ones I've seen had fairly serious flaws (such as being blacklist-based) that made them much less effective.
I'm not going to address all of the points, although I will say that I don't agree with the idea that driving up labor costs would help the economy any, in domestic or foreign markets. However, regarding this one point, I am curious at to what you believe limits us from simply raising the minimum wage to $100/hour and making everyone rich? After all, if a high minimum wage helps the US out in foreign markets, and there are no problems with having a minimum wage in the first place, then what prevents us from seeking the best advantage by setting an arbitrarily high minimum wage? After all, $5.15/hour is, in the end, just as arbitrary as $100/hour, or $1000/hour. Do you think we'd be better off somehow if we raised the minimum wage by 10% every year while maintaining the same productivity?