No, it's better to guarantee broad national support for the president instead of a few cities deciding who will lead the nation.
That's an admirable goal, but the Electoral College doesn't accomplish it. What you want is a system which selects for candidate acceptable to (but not necessarily preferred by) the most citizens. For example, one option would be to have a "Survival"-style election where candidates are eliminated one at a time over series of votes, with the last candidate left standing being declared the winner. Under this scheme the candidates would be competing to avoid becoming the most disliked, which favors moderate positions and consensus-building. (I suspect neither Trump nor Clinton would have survived the first two elimination rounds... though it would be interesting to see who was voted out first.)
Another option would be to rank candidates based on their lowest individual approval rating among the states. A candidate who didn't get the highest approval in any one state but whose lowest approval rate was 60% would thus win over a candidate who scored highest in almost every state but alienated 80% of the voters in the remainder.
People treated a 3-4% majority off he popular vote as an absolute prediction of victory.
A 3-4% majority shouldn't even be counted as a win. Anything less than a 2/3 supermajority ought to be considered a tie. In effect, this election was decided by a series of coin tosses; the People couldn't decide which candidate they disliked more.
The first-past-the-post voting system is obviously too flawed to continue. I propose instead that voters be asked to rate each candidate as For (+1), Neutral (0), or Against (-1), with the winner being the candidate with the highest positive score. If no candidate receives a positive score the entire process starts over from the beginning with new candidates.
I am aware that this is not the theoretical ideal voting system and will still be subject to a certain degree of strategic voting, but at least it eliminates the "spoiling" effect and the pressure to pretend support for a candidate you actually dislike in order to hurt another candidate you dislike even more. Unlike the ideal systems, this one would be simple to implement, easy to understand, and generalizes to any number of candidates (even those running unopposed—they still need to maintain a positive score).
The election isn't about "getting your way", it's about "crowdsourcing a decision". The crowd chose not to go with Clinton, and there were a lot of votes in support of that decision.
The popular vote was 47.8% to 48.0%. (Yes, Clinton won the popular vote.) This is not a decision, it's a tie. The only reason Trump can claim to have "won" the election is strategic, based on the broken Electoral College system which grants more weight to voters in less populous states plus winner-take-all policies at the state level which award all the state's EC delegates to a candidate who was only ahead by a slight margin. Trump received less than 60% of the vote in 20 of the 30 states he won. In several cases—including Florida—he received less than 50%. Even worse, a significant portion of the votes he did get were from people voting against Clinton, not for Trump (and vice-versa—Clinton wasn't any better). If there were a meaningful "none of the above" option on the ballot, it would have won by a landslide.
The only reasonable response to this situation would be to throw out the results and start over with a new set of candidates.
This transcript really is pretty clear. The concern Obama addressed was legal citizens who count illegal immigrants among their friends and/or family being afraid that someone might look into who they voted for (presumably the candidate less hostile to illegal immigrants) and start investigating their friends and family based on that information, possibly leading to their deportation.
As for the original question, I think the host was referring to illegal immigrants attempting to vote, but that isn't the question the president answered.
I think it is far too short-sighted to expect that everyone have wage income. There is a thriving passive non-wage income economy and we need to get more in touch with it.
Exactly! Labor is becoming less valuable, but labor is hardly the only source of income. In the future, molding children into future employees will become less important than providing them with income-bearing investments and the necessary skills to manage them wisely.
Part of the problem is this ridiculous idea that each generation needs to build itself up from scratch, relying only on individual labor and ingenuity; the same group that supports UBI tends to despise inherited wealth. Most people (should) have a few million dollars saved up by the time the retire. If they arranged to live off of the income from that investment, rather than consuming the principle, then their great-grandkids could start their adult lives with a source of passive income capable of sustaining them indefinitely. After a couple of generations of following that policy we would have the equivalent of UBI without stealing from anyone or wrecking the economy. As production becomes increasingly automated our descendents would naturally inherit a stake in the companies which own the automation, and the lack of a market for labor would become less and less of a concern.
There is still profit to be made in this scenario, and quite a lot of it, because a single corporation only pays in a tiny fraction of the UBI, whereas it can get back a lot more by runing a successful business and thus essentially move money from other corporations to themselves, just as they do currently by taking in money that other corporations have initially paid to their customers as salary.
So how do these less-successful businesses profit from the UBI? You are describing a pyramid scheme, not a functioning economy capable of producing a net economic profit. This is not a sustainable situation. Are you simply assuming an unlimited supply of economically unprofitable ventures to serve as feedstock for the enrichment of the more successful companies? A smart business owner would terminate the company if it isn't profitable, which leaves us back in the situation I described where the (formerly) more successful businesses' revenues are derived solely from what they pay out in UBI. Even if the most stubborn uneconomical businesses choose to continue operating at a loss, they will eventually run out of funds and go bankrupt, leading to the same situation in the end. At some point you run out of other people's money.
Putting all those issues aside, it would still be more profitable for the owners of the companies to do away with UBI, disregard the freeloading consumers, and trade only amongst themselves—thus cutting out the middle-man.
You are missing a key element of the big picture, namely that the economy is not a zero-sum game. There is more to economics than endlessly shuffling money and goods around. The economy functions over the long term only because it produces a net profit. Remove that net profit and the economy will gradually collapse through capital consumption and malinvestment until we are all left with nothing beyond bare subsistence for the lucky few who manage to survive under such primitive conditions.
Luckily, I do think the billionaires themselves will understand this because the math is relatively straightforward and they'll see that if they want to keep running their companies and gaining any income themselves, they need to make sure the consumers have money to get their products.
The math is relatively straightforward, but you've somehow managed to reach the wrong conclusion anyway. There is no profit for these billionaires in giving their goods and services away in exchange for nothing but money that was theirs to begin with, and which in any case can only be spent on their own goods. If these consumers aren't producing anything that the billionaires want, they have no value to said billionaires. After all, in this scenario the billionaires control all the means of production; if they want material goods they can just produce them for themselves without involving anyone else.
The equation only works out in the consumers' favor if the consumers are both able and willing to offer something that the billionaires want in exchange for the goods and services produced by the billionaires.
No, all it takes is for the government to print it. Plenty of downsides, but the impact is higher on people with accumulated wealth.
No, the impact is higher on people with accumulated currency. People with accumulated wealth tend to keep the majority of it in non-currency investments, which are barely impacted by inflation. If you devalue the dollar by 50%, the only effect on someone holding a hundred million dollars' worth of capital goods and/or commodities is that their investments are now worth two hundred million, with no change in purchasing power. They may even benefit from the policy as people flee the depreciating currency, driving up demand for more stable investments.
The people hit hardest by printing money are those with the majority of their savings in currency—those wealthy enough to have some savings, but not wealthy enough to benefit much from investing in the market. In other words, the middle class.
Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies.
The companies (or rather, their shareholders) don't care about the money per se, they care about what they can buy with the money. Handing people money for doing nothing does not increase the amount of goods or services available, it just moves money from people who do produce goods and services to people who do not, which has the exact opposite effect (less reward for production leads to less production, and thus less goods and services available to buy).
If I have something you want, and you have something I want, and we both agree to trade these items voluntarily, both of us can reasonably expect to benefit from the exchange. However, if I have something you want but you have nothing I want, my situation is not improved by you taking a portion of what I already have and offering to trade it back to me in exchange for something else you want. Your situation is improved, at least in the short term, but that improvement comes entirely at my expense. More money in consumers' hands only profits the companies if that money was earned; otherwise they're just getting back a portion of what already belonged to them in the first place.
Murder victims might not appreciate being paid after they die.... Also, what's the fine for murder?
Murder isn't something that can be repaid; no matter how much the perpetrator offers they can never "make the victim whole". As a meagre start on repaying that debt, however—and as an alternative to the death penalty, which would be justifiable retribution for any case of deliberate murder—someone could be appointed to represent the victim's interests, and whatever the victim might have chosen to do given the resources which would reasonably have been available to them becomes the murderer's obligation to provide in their stead. Supporting the victim's family financially would be one obvious example. If at any point the perpetrator finds this burden too onerous, they can always request that the suspended death penalty be reinstated.
Yes, this is similar to indentured servitude—in the same way that putting someone in prison is similar to kidnapping. The nature of the crime justifies the response. If you don't want to find yourself in this position, don't commit murder.
Or is the fine based on % of income? Someone vandalizes your $30,000k car, but because they're poor, they're only fined $20.
The standard for restitution is always "make the victim whole". To accomplish that you must do whatever is necessary to restore the victim to the state which would reasonably have obtained had the crime never been committed. Someone with no wealth or income damages an expensive car? Their restitution isn't complete until they find a way to fix it. Someone wealthy steals a poor family's last $10, unwittingly causing them to go without food, become ill, and incur significant debt for treatment and/or a long-term disability? They're responsible for mitigating all of that, not just returning the (to them) insignificant $10 which was taken.
Percentage of income is a good start but doesn't go far enough, since the effect of a given loss is not a linear function of income. Taking $1 from someone who only has $10 will have much worse and more immediate consequences for the victim than taking $10,000 from someone with $100,000.
As much as I hate how bad the conditions in some prisons may be, there really isn't a better alternative.
Prison isn't an alternative to restitution at all, unless you're referring to debtor's prison. It does nothing to "make the victim whole." In terms of retribution, most crimes which carry a prison sentence don't actually justify locking the perpetrator up as a proportional response. (Exceptions would include kidnapping and murder, of course, but not much else.) It might be offered as an non-proportional alternative for offenses like assault or theft, provided the victim and the offender both agree to it in lieu of corporal punishment or fines, respectively. The only other argument in favor of imprisonment might be that the prisoner poses an eminent threat of irreversible harm to members of the public, and thus must be restrained to ensure their safety, but if that is the justification for locking someone up then it doesn't make sense to let them out after serving an arbitrary term without clear evidence that they are no longer a threat.
Including public records and obeying rules based on them won't require closing the source in any way.
Without strict control over the firmware there is little point in including the prisons in a built-in geofence list. The threat vector this proposal is meant to address is people deliberately using the drones to deliver prohibited items into prisons, which is already illegal with serious penalties. If the restriction is not made extremely difficult to bypass (DRM, not just closed-source firmware) then anyone interested in using drones for illicit prison deliveries would simply modify the firmware to disable the geofencing. Doing so would not significantly increase the penalty for getting caught compared to smuggling the items inside in the first place—and if they aren't caught then no one will ever know that the firmware was modified, making non-technological enforcement infeasible.
The real way to compare it isn't to say you spend 20k use up front, save 1k a year and in 20 years you break even, it's you alternatively invest the 20k you wouldn't spend in some investment vehicle at 5% which lets say compounds monthly. You better save over 54k in 20 years to break even.
That isn't quite correct. You can invest the money you're saving each month, leaving you with 34k at the end of 20 years rather than 20k—the same as the interest on the investment vehicle at 5% APY. However, this still leaves you short 20k (under the assumption that the panels are worthless at the end of their 20-year lifespan) since the investment vehicle returns your original 20k in principle in addition to 34k in interest. The panels would need to save 7.875% of their up-front cost annually to break even ($1,575 per year).
Factors which can further reduce the difference include a lifespan longer than 20 years, any residual resale or recycling value of the panels at end-of-life, and the cost of non-solar roof installation if the solar panels serve in place of a traditional roof.
It is notable however that they had superconducting at 350C because of this phase transition.
They annealed the material at 350C. The superconducting critical temperature of the resulting material was "relatively low", which in this context probably means that it requires cooling with liquid nitrogen or helium. If they had managed to create a superconductor that worked at 350C this would be much bigger news—we still don't know of any materials which superconduct at room temperature, much less a bit above the melting point of lead. The highest-temperature superconductor on record is hydrogen sulfide at 203K (-70C).
However, if you load up your torrent manager and say "download please!" you are making your own copy, which is then stored locally, just like pushing the button on a copy machine.
Only if you actually made a durable copy of the file, and they won't have any evidence of that from the network traffic. All they know is that someone else sent a copy of the file to you. That would support a case against the uploader, but not the downloader. It might be enough to get a warrant to examine the downloader's device for a stored copy of the file, but it's unlikely anyone would go to the effort of actually serving a warrant to recover, at most, a small multiple of the retail value of one copy of a single work, and until they do so there is nothing to support a charge of copyright infringement.
Of course the root of the problem is copyright. This is just one of the more notably absurd, and yet inevitable, consequences of trying to impose artificial scarcity on something that can be duplicated by anyone at effectively zero cost.
Suppose I download a song to the same computer twice, as can easily happen. Technically because the thing I did wrong was copying,...
No, you're making the same mistake as the judge in the article. The one who makes the copy and distributes it across the Internet is always the uploader, not the downloader. You didn't make a copy, the person who uploaded the file to you made a copy. The DMCA should not be considered applicable to "mere downloaders" because "mere downloaders" aren't doing anything which would infringe on copyright, namely making or distributing copies or publicly performing the work. That's all on the uploaders.
You do make a very good point, however, about the way the impact to the copyright holder for each copy is grossly overestimated when calculating "damages".
Flying a drone is not considered as if you are holding the camera. If you could fly in such a way that you only film your property, it would be allowed.
This is what doesn't make sense. You are allowed to photograph public areas, and not just your own property (as long as you don't use a drone). They're putting hobbyist drones in the same category as CCTV cameras and other devices which are left in place to record continuously. Most of the drones affected by this law are not the expensive, semi-autonomous sort which can fly on their own using GPS waypoints, and even those only fly for a short time before the batteries are depleted. You can't just set them up to fly around and record for an extended time while the operator is not present. They require an active pilot. Most of them require line-of-sight, though some might be equipped for FPV. Either way, their presence is obvious from the noise, and the operator has to be fairly close by. To say that these drones would make lousy "surveillance" devices is a massive understatement. A person could accomplish much more effective and privacy-invading "surveillance" by hiding a cheap, disposable smartphone in the bushes. No hobbyist drone is going to be recording anyone surreptitiously.
The ruling of the Swedish administrative courts forbids anyone to fly a drone equipped with a camera as long as its not "... to document crime or prevent accidents...".
The Swedish administrative courts have created a legal paradox. If it is a crime to fly a drone with a camera, then by doing so one is automatically documenting a crime... which apparently makes the drone legal, ergo no crime exists to be documented, ergo flying the camera-drone is illegal. The drone thus exists in a superposition of legal and illegal states, threatening to tear the entire Swedish legal system to pieces. (One can only hope.)
Keys don't change. Fingerprints don't change. A biometric identifier is therefore not affirmative.
Which finger you use to unlock the device, however, can change and should be considered affirmative, just as if it were a (single-digit) PIN code. If they have the authority to collect fingerprint samples and to seize your device then I see no reason why they wouldn't have the authority to use your own device to collect the samples—but they have to decide which finger(s) to press against the sensor, not you, and the device will only allow so many errors before it disables fingerprint unlocking altogether.
It could be done right now using a similar blockchain to the one bitcoin uses. In fact, you could also tie in SSL into the platform, to prevent centralizing services like Verasign from being a weak point. The design is already in my head - just need to build it. Anyone have some free time?
If they're unrelated, why does http://dyndns.org/ redirect to http://dyn.com/? DynDNS is just an obsolete brand name for the same service from the same company, which now refers to itself simply as Dyn.
Not only that, but nuclear plants employ a large number of well paid, skilled, and educated people for that entire duration. They also pay huge amounts in local and state taxes. The contributions back to the tax base and the economy from that is worth billions more.
Billions of dollars are changing hands, but it would be incorrect to say that this brings billions of dollars' worth of benefit to the economy. There is an economic gain from voluntary trade, but it's a small fraction of what either party pays or receives in absolute terms. The gain comes from the differences between the values each party assigns to the items being exchanged (e.g. productivity vs. salary for the employer, or salary vs. time, effort, and "human capital" such as training for the worker). This difference will, of course, be considerably less than the values of the goods being exchanged. Since the trade is voluntary the exchange can be presumed to benefit both parties, but the size of this benefit is difficult to estimate. As a thought-experiment one could consider the range of prices that would be acceptable to both parties (which is, of course, unknowable in any particular instance); the net benefit to the buyer is the highest amount the buyer would have been willing to pay for the same good minus the amount actually paid; or for the seller, the amount actually received minus the least the seller would have been willing to settle for. The net economic benefit of the transaction to society as a whole is the sum of the benefits to the buyer and the seller.
The state and local taxes, on the other hand, are a straightforward involuntary transfer of existing property from one party to another and should not be counted as an economic benefit at all. If anything, the taxed party can reasonably be expected to lose more value than the government gains, for a net economic loss.
Oh, yeah, and we need to pry the wealth from the 1% to.0001% who truly contribute nothing concrete.
This is just an example of failing to value that which you do not understand. Go ahead, seize all those accumulated savings and capital investments and redistribute them for the sake of a few months' worth of short-term consumption among those who have no idea how to save or plan for the future. See what happens afterward. Hint: More money in circulation plus diminished productive capacity equals higher prices everywhere.
Putting more cash in circulation isn't going to help anyone in terms of actual available goods, and redistributing capital from those with a demonstrated ability to put it to profitable use to those who manifestly do not is hardly a recipe for making more efficient use of said capital to produce the goods the masses desire.
You cannot allow revocation of a cast ballot without linking the vote to the person casting it. Ballots need to be secret.
This is no more of a problem than preserving secrecy for normal mail-in ballots, and is handily solved by the widely implemented double-envelope scheme. The outer envelope is labeled with your voter ID. Inside that there is a blank, sealed envelope containing the ballot. After the polls close the sealed inner envelope is removed from the outer envelope and mixed with other ballots to ensure anonymity before the blank envelopes are opened and the ballots are counted. In the event that a voter revokes their ballot only the outer envelope needs to be examined. The inner envelope and ballot can be destroyed while still sealed.
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No, it's better to guarantee broad national support for the president instead of a few cities deciding who will lead the nation.
That's an admirable goal, but the Electoral College doesn't accomplish it. What you want is a system which selects for candidate acceptable to (but not necessarily preferred by) the most citizens. For example, one option would be to have a "Survival"-style election where candidates are eliminated one at a time over series of votes, with the last candidate left standing being declared the winner. Under this scheme the candidates would be competing to avoid becoming the most disliked, which favors moderate positions and consensus-building. (I suspect neither Trump nor Clinton would have survived the first two elimination rounds... though it would be interesting to see who was voted out first.)
Another option would be to rank candidates based on their lowest individual approval rating among the states. A candidate who didn't get the highest approval in any one state but whose lowest approval rate was 60% would thus win over a candidate who scored highest in almost every state but alienated 80% of the voters in the remainder.
People treated a 3-4% majority off he popular vote as an absolute prediction of victory.
A 3-4% majority shouldn't even be counted as a win. Anything less than a 2/3 supermajority ought to be considered a tie. In effect, this election was decided by a series of coin tosses; the People couldn't decide which candidate they disliked more.
The first-past-the-post voting system is obviously too flawed to continue. I propose instead that voters be asked to rate each candidate as For (+1), Neutral (0), or Against (-1), with the winner being the candidate with the highest positive score. If no candidate receives a positive score the entire process starts over from the beginning with new candidates.
I am aware that this is not the theoretical ideal voting system and will still be subject to a certain degree of strategic voting, but at least it eliminates the "spoiling" effect and the pressure to pretend support for a candidate you actually dislike in order to hurt another candidate you dislike even more. Unlike the ideal systems, this one would be simple to implement, easy to understand, and generalizes to any number of candidates (even those running unopposed—they still need to maintain a positive score).
The election isn't about "getting your way", it's about "crowdsourcing a decision". The crowd chose not to go with Clinton, and there were a lot of votes in support of that decision.
The popular vote was 47.8% to 48.0%. (Yes, Clinton won the popular vote.) This is not a decision, it's a tie. The only reason Trump can claim to have "won" the election is strategic, based on the broken Electoral College system which grants more weight to voters in less populous states plus winner-take-all policies at the state level which award all the state's EC delegates to a candidate who was only ahead by a slight margin. Trump received less than 60% of the vote in 20 of the 30 states he won. In several cases—including Florida—he received less than 50%. Even worse, a significant portion of the votes he did get were from people voting against Clinton, not for Trump (and vice-versa—Clinton wasn't any better). If there were a meaningful "none of the above" option on the ballot, it would have won by a landslide.
The only reasonable response to this situation would be to throw out the results and start over with a new set of candidates.
This transcript really is pretty clear. The concern Obama addressed was legal citizens who count illegal immigrants among their friends and/or family being afraid that someone might look into who they voted for (presumably the candidate less hostile to illegal immigrants) and start investigating their friends and family based on that information, possibly leading to their deportation.
As for the original question, I think the host was referring to illegal immigrants attempting to vote, but that isn't the question the president answered.
I think it is far too short-sighted to expect that everyone have wage income. There is a thriving passive non-wage income economy and we need to get more in touch with it.
Exactly! Labor is becoming less valuable, but labor is hardly the only source of income. In the future, molding children into future employees will become less important than providing them with income-bearing investments and the necessary skills to manage them wisely.
Part of the problem is this ridiculous idea that each generation needs to build itself up from scratch, relying only on individual labor and ingenuity; the same group that supports UBI tends to despise inherited wealth. Most people (should) have a few million dollars saved up by the time the retire. If they arranged to live off of the income from that investment, rather than consuming the principle, then their great-grandkids could start their adult lives with a source of passive income capable of sustaining them indefinitely. After a couple of generations of following that policy we would have the equivalent of UBI without stealing from anyone or wrecking the economy. As production becomes increasingly automated our descendents would naturally inherit a stake in the companies which own the automation, and the lack of a market for labor would become less and less of a concern.
There is still profit to be made in this scenario, and quite a lot of it, because a single corporation only pays in a tiny fraction of the UBI, whereas it can get back a lot more by runing a successful business and thus essentially move money from other corporations to themselves, just as they do currently by taking in money that other corporations have initially paid to their customers as salary.
So how do these less-successful businesses profit from the UBI? You are describing a pyramid scheme, not a functioning economy capable of producing a net economic profit. This is not a sustainable situation. Are you simply assuming an unlimited supply of economically unprofitable ventures to serve as feedstock for the enrichment of the more successful companies? A smart business owner would terminate the company if it isn't profitable, which leaves us back in the situation I described where the (formerly) more successful businesses' revenues are derived solely from what they pay out in UBI. Even if the most stubborn uneconomical businesses choose to continue operating at a loss, they will eventually run out of funds and go bankrupt, leading to the same situation in the end. At some point you run out of other people's money.
Putting all those issues aside, it would still be more profitable for the owners of the companies to do away with UBI, disregard the freeloading consumers, and trade only amongst themselves—thus cutting out the middle-man.
You are missing a key element of the big picture, namely that the economy is not a zero-sum game. There is more to economics than endlessly shuffling money and goods around. The economy functions over the long term only because it produces a net profit. Remove that net profit and the economy will gradually collapse through capital consumption and malinvestment until we are all left with nothing beyond bare subsistence for the lucky few who manage to survive under such primitive conditions.
Luckily, I do think the billionaires themselves will understand this because the math is relatively straightforward and they'll see that if they want to keep running their companies and gaining any income themselves, they need to make sure the consumers have money to get their products.
The math is relatively straightforward, but you've somehow managed to reach the wrong conclusion anyway. There is no profit for these billionaires in giving their goods and services away in exchange for nothing but money that was theirs to begin with, and which in any case can only be spent on their own goods. If these consumers aren't producing anything that the billionaires want, they have no value to said billionaires. After all, in this scenario the billionaires control all the means of production; if they want material goods they can just produce them for themselves without involving anyone else.
The equation only works out in the consumers' favor if the consumers are both able and willing to offer something that the billionaires want in exchange for the goods and services produced by the billionaires.
No, all it takes is for the government to print it. Plenty of downsides, but the impact is higher on people with accumulated wealth.
No, the impact is higher on people with accumulated currency. People with accumulated wealth tend to keep the majority of it in non-currency investments, which are barely impacted by inflation. If you devalue the dollar by 50%, the only effect on someone holding a hundred million dollars' worth of capital goods and/or commodities is that their investments are now worth two hundred million, with no change in purchasing power. They may even benefit from the policy as people flee the depreciating currency, driving up demand for more stable investments.
The people hit hardest by printing money are those with the majority of their savings in currency—those wealthy enough to have some savings, but not wealthy enough to benefit much from investing in the market. In other words, the middle class.
Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies.
The companies (or rather, their shareholders) don't care about the money per se, they care about what they can buy with the money. Handing people money for doing nothing does not increase the amount of goods or services available, it just moves money from people who do produce goods and services to people who do not, which has the exact opposite effect (less reward for production leads to less production, and thus less goods and services available to buy).
If I have something you want, and you have something I want, and we both agree to trade these items voluntarily, both of us can reasonably expect to benefit from the exchange. However, if I have something you want but you have nothing I want, my situation is not improved by you taking a portion of what I already have and offering to trade it back to me in exchange for something else you want. Your situation is improved, at least in the short term, but that improvement comes entirely at my expense. More money in consumers' hands only profits the companies if that money was earned; otherwise they're just getting back a portion of what already belonged to them in the first place.
Murder victims might not appreciate being paid after they die. ... Also, what's the fine for murder?
Murder isn't something that can be repaid; no matter how much the perpetrator offers they can never "make the victim whole". As a meagre start on repaying that debt, however—and as an alternative to the death penalty, which would be justifiable retribution for any case of deliberate murder—someone could be appointed to represent the victim's interests, and whatever the victim might have chosen to do given the resources which would reasonably have been available to them becomes the murderer's obligation to provide in their stead. Supporting the victim's family financially would be one obvious example. If at any point the perpetrator finds this burden too onerous, they can always request that the suspended death penalty be reinstated.
Yes, this is similar to indentured servitude—in the same way that putting someone in prison is similar to kidnapping. The nature of the crime justifies the response. If you don't want to find yourself in this position, don't commit murder.
Or is the fine based on % of income? Someone vandalizes your $30,000k car, but because they're poor, they're only fined $20.
The standard for restitution is always "make the victim whole". To accomplish that you must do whatever is necessary to restore the victim to the state which would reasonably have obtained had the crime never been committed. Someone with no wealth or income damages an expensive car? Their restitution isn't complete until they find a way to fix it. Someone wealthy steals a poor family's last $10, unwittingly causing them to go without food, become ill, and incur significant debt for treatment and/or a long-term disability? They're responsible for mitigating all of that, not just returning the (to them) insignificant $10 which was taken.
Percentage of income is a good start but doesn't go far enough, since the effect of a given loss is not a linear function of income. Taking $1 from someone who only has $10 will have much worse and more immediate consequences for the victim than taking $10,000 from someone with $100,000.
As much as I hate how bad the conditions in some prisons may be, there really isn't a better alternative.
Prison isn't an alternative to restitution at all, unless you're referring to debtor's prison. It does nothing to "make the victim whole." In terms of retribution, most crimes which carry a prison sentence don't actually justify locking the perpetrator up as a proportional response. (Exceptions would include kidnapping and murder, of course, but not much else.) It might be offered as an non-proportional alternative for offenses like assault or theft, provided the victim and the offender both agree to it in lieu of corporal punishment or fines, respectively. The only other argument in favor of imprisonment might be that the prisoner poses an eminent threat of irreversible harm to members of the public, and thus must be restrained to ensure their safety, but if that is the justification for locking someone up then it doesn't make sense to let them out after serving an arbitrary term without clear evidence that they are no longer a threat.
Including public records and obeying rules based on them won't require closing the source in any way.
Without strict control over the firmware there is little point in including the prisons in a built-in geofence list. The threat vector this proposal is meant to address is people deliberately using the drones to deliver prohibited items into prisons, which is already illegal with serious penalties. If the restriction is not made extremely difficult to bypass (DRM, not just closed-source firmware) then anyone interested in using drones for illicit prison deliveries would simply modify the firmware to disable the geofencing. Doing so would not significantly increase the penalty for getting caught compared to smuggling the items inside in the first place—and if they aren't caught then no one will ever know that the firmware was modified, making non-technological enforcement infeasible.
The real way to compare it isn't to say you spend 20k use up front, save 1k a year and in 20 years you break even, it's you alternatively invest the 20k you wouldn't spend in some investment vehicle at 5% which lets say compounds monthly. You better save over 54k in 20 years to break even.
That isn't quite correct. You can invest the money you're saving each month, leaving you with 34k at the end of 20 years rather than 20k—the same as the interest on the investment vehicle at 5% APY. However, this still leaves you short 20k (under the assumption that the panels are worthless at the end of their 20-year lifespan) since the investment vehicle returns your original 20k in principle in addition to 34k in interest. The panels would need to save 7.875% of their up-front cost annually to break even ($1,575 per year).
Factors which can further reduce the difference include a lifespan longer than 20 years, any residual resale or recycling value of the panels at end-of-life, and the cost of non-solar roof installation if the solar panels serve in place of a traditional roof.
It is notable however that they had superconducting at 350C because of this phase transition.
They annealed the material at 350C. The superconducting critical temperature of the resulting material was "relatively low", which in this context probably means that it requires cooling with liquid nitrogen or helium. If they had managed to create a superconductor that worked at 350C this would be much bigger news—we still don't know of any materials which superconduct at room temperature, much less a bit above the melting point of lead. The highest-temperature superconductor on record is hydrogen sulfide at 203K (-70C).
However, if you load up your torrent manager and say "download please!" you are making your own copy, which is then stored locally, just like pushing the button on a copy machine.
Only if you actually made a durable copy of the file, and they won't have any evidence of that from the network traffic. All they know is that someone else sent a copy of the file to you. That would support a case against the uploader, but not the downloader. It might be enough to get a warrant to examine the downloader's device for a stored copy of the file, but it's unlikely anyone would go to the effort of actually serving a warrant to recover, at most, a small multiple of the retail value of one copy of a single work, and until they do so there is nothing to support a charge of copyright infringement.
Of course the root of the problem is copyright. This is just one of the more notably absurd, and yet inevitable, consequences of trying to impose artificial scarcity on something that can be duplicated by anyone at effectively zero cost.
Suppose I download a song to the same computer twice, as can easily happen. Technically because the thing I did wrong was copying, ...
No, you're making the same mistake as the judge in the article. The one who makes the copy and distributes it across the Internet is always the uploader, not the downloader. You didn't make a copy, the person who uploaded the file to you made a copy. The DMCA should not be considered applicable to "mere downloaders" because "mere downloaders" aren't doing anything which would infringe on copyright, namely making or distributing copies or publicly performing the work. That's all on the uploaders.
You do make a very good point, however, about the way the impact to the copyright holder for each copy is grossly overestimated when calculating "damages".
Flying a drone is not considered as if you are holding the camera. If you could fly in such a way that you only film your property, it would be allowed.
This is what doesn't make sense. You are allowed to photograph public areas, and not just your own property (as long as you don't use a drone). They're putting hobbyist drones in the same category as CCTV cameras and other devices which are left in place to record continuously. Most of the drones affected by this law are not the expensive, semi-autonomous sort which can fly on their own using GPS waypoints, and even those only fly for a short time before the batteries are depleted. You can't just set them up to fly around and record for an extended time while the operator is not present. They require an active pilot. Most of them require line-of-sight, though some might be equipped for FPV. Either way, their presence is obvious from the noise, and the operator has to be fairly close by. To say that these drones would make lousy "surveillance" devices is a massive understatement. A person could accomplish much more effective and privacy-invading "surveillance" by hiding a cheap, disposable smartphone in the bushes. No hobbyist drone is going to be recording anyone surreptitiously.
The ruling of the Swedish administrative courts forbids anyone to fly a drone equipped with a camera as long as its not "... to document crime or prevent accidents...".
The Swedish administrative courts have created a legal paradox. If it is a crime to fly a drone with a camera, then by doing so one is automatically documenting a crime... which apparently makes the drone legal, ergo no crime exists to be documented, ergo flying the camera-drone is illegal. The drone thus exists in a superposition of legal and illegal states, threatening to tear the entire Swedish legal system to pieces. (One can only hope.)
Keys don't change. Fingerprints don't change. A biometric identifier is therefore not affirmative.
Which finger you use to unlock the device, however, can change and should be considered affirmative, just as if it were a (single-digit) PIN code. If they have the authority to collect fingerprint samples and to seize your device then I see no reason why they wouldn't have the authority to use your own device to collect the samples—but they have to decide which finger(s) to press against the sensor, not you, and the device will only allow so many errors before it disables fingerprint unlocking altogether.
It could be done right now using a similar blockchain to the one bitcoin uses. In fact, you could also tie in SSL into the platform, to prevent centralizing services like Verasign from being a weak point. The design is already in my head - just need to build it. Anyone have some free time?
It's been done. The project is called Namecoin.
Okay, but that's a pretty bizarre definition of 'north of' or 'south of'.
Actually it's quite standard, especially when (as in this case) the context makes it obvious that the relevant factor is the difference in latitude.
That's why the big websites are using dyn.com as opposed to dyndns.org.
They're the same thing. The dyndns.org domain has been obsolete for a while now, and redirects to dyn.com.
Dyndns.org is unrelated to dyn.com
If they're unrelated, why does http://dyndns.org/ redirect to http://dyn.com/? DynDNS is just an obsolete brand name for the same service from the same company, which now refers to itself simply as Dyn.
Not only that, but nuclear plants employ a large number of well paid, skilled, and educated people for that entire duration. They also pay huge amounts in local and state taxes. The contributions back to the tax base and the economy from that is worth billions more.
Billions of dollars are changing hands, but it would be incorrect to say that this brings billions of dollars' worth of benefit to the economy. There is an economic gain from voluntary trade, but it's a small fraction of what either party pays or receives in absolute terms. The gain comes from the differences between the values each party assigns to the items being exchanged (e.g. productivity vs. salary for the employer, or salary vs. time, effort, and "human capital" such as training for the worker). This difference will, of course, be considerably less than the values of the goods being exchanged. Since the trade is voluntary the exchange can be presumed to benefit both parties, but the size of this benefit is difficult to estimate. As a thought-experiment one could consider the range of prices that would be acceptable to both parties (which is, of course, unknowable in any particular instance); the net benefit to the buyer is the highest amount the buyer would have been willing to pay for the same good minus the amount actually paid; or for the seller, the amount actually received minus the least the seller would have been willing to settle for. The net economic benefit of the transaction to society as a whole is the sum of the benefits to the buyer and the seller.
The state and local taxes, on the other hand, are a straightforward involuntary transfer of existing property from one party to another and should not be counted as an economic benefit at all. If anything, the taxed party can reasonably be expected to lose more value than the government gains, for a net economic loss.
Oh, yeah, and we need to pry the wealth from the 1% to .0001% who truly contribute nothing concrete.
This is just an example of failing to value that which you do not understand. Go ahead, seize all those accumulated savings and capital investments and redistribute them for the sake of a few months' worth of short-term consumption among those who have no idea how to save or plan for the future. See what happens afterward. Hint: More money in circulation plus diminished productive capacity equals higher prices everywhere.
Putting more cash in circulation isn't going to help anyone in terms of actual available goods, and redistributing capital from those with a demonstrated ability to put it to profitable use to those who manifestly do not is hardly a recipe for making more efficient use of said capital to produce the goods the masses desire.
You cannot allow revocation of a cast ballot without linking the vote to the person casting it. Ballots need to be secret.
This is no more of a problem than preserving secrecy for normal mail-in ballots, and is handily solved by the widely implemented double-envelope scheme. The outer envelope is labeled with your voter ID. Inside that there is a blank, sealed envelope containing the ballot. After the polls close the sealed inner envelope is removed from the outer envelope and mixed with other ballots to ensure anonymity before the blank envelopes are opened and the ballots are counted. In the event that a voter revokes their ballot only the outer envelope needs to be examined. The inner envelope and ballot can be destroyed while still sealed.