Every time you close a factory in the US so you can open one in a country where the peasants work for pennies -- yes, that's theft because you're working to drive wages down to keep the profit.
Every time you break a union so you can pay workers stagnant wages while inflation continues on -- yes, that's theft.
Every time you mass layoff so you can hire different workers at lower wages -- yes, that's theft big-time.
You apparently have no idea what theft actually is. You have merely given several examples of what is know colloquially as "competition". Theft is when you actually own something and someone else takes it from you, depriving you of it without your consent.
Do you consider it "theft" to buy an identical produce from a less-expensive store rather than a more-expensive one, all else being equal? No, of course not. There is no moral imperative to pay the maximum price for any good—and that includes labor.
You elaborated on why you thought your scheme would one day become necessary. You did not explain—and still have not explained—why people "should" continue to receive wages for jobs others no longer need them to perform.
We could debate whether your "no jobs" scenario is likely to materialize in reality, but that's beside the point. Either way, your solution suffers from the fundamental flaw of being immoral. One has no moral right to the fruits of others' labor—including the automated labor of their machines.
No one is lying. Everyone qualifies for exactly the same UBI payment, so it is in fact universal. For that matter, many UBI schemes call for a flat-rate tax on all non-UBI gross income, with no exemptions, deductions, or loopholes, which would make that part universal as well.
What is not universal is the amount of non-UBI income everyone earns, and thus the amount of tax everyone pays.
That's a bullshit way of... basically stealing some of my hard work to support my family and giving it to somebody else.
Exactly like any other tax, yes. Now you're getting it. No one is lying about this; redistributing wealth is exactly what the UBI is intended to do. It's a (potentially) more efficient welfare system. It was never intended as a way to let you keep more of your hard-earned income for yourself.
Personally I think UBI might be marginally better than the system we have now, but that's a long way from claiming it as some kind of ideal, or for that matter even accepting it as moral. Theft is theft, even when it goes by the name "income tax", but if some would-be Robin Hood is going to steal from me in the name of fighting poverty I'd prefer that they at least try to use the funds efficiently and not waste a large portion of it on needless bureaucracy.
Your job can be automated and it should be, as it is more efficient. But you still should get money.
Why, exactly? You didn't do anything to earn it. The companies' owners where the ones who contributed the resources necessary to automate production, and consequently deserve (all of) the profits.
If you want income from automation, invest in the companies that are investing in automation. Become one of those who owns the robots and profits from their productive capacity. It won't come for free, though—you'll have to save and invest just like the existing owners of these companies did to earn your share.
It's all their [millionaires' and billionaires'] fault for being successful.
Can we please quit referring to theft as "success"?
Sure, once you prove these allegations of theft. Wealth is not, in and of itself, evidence of theft or any other crime, and around here individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Wealth, rightfully earned, is a perfectly legitimate measure of success. If you think it wasn't rightfully earned, then don't just insinuate as much—prove it.
Where do the X dollars come from for every citizen deemed eligible?
Everyone is deemed eligible; that's why it's called "universal". It's just that the vast majority of citizens end up paying more in taxes on their non-UBI "extra income" than they get from UBI.
If you're not under the poverty level now, don't expect UBI to increase your net income much, if at all. You'll end up paying more than enough extra income tax to completely offset your UBI payment. The cost savings, if any, are projected to come from eliminating the beaurocratic overhead associated with the myriad means-based welfare programs UBI is intended to replace: everyone gets the same amount without regard for how much or little they actually need.
Then look at that transaction, get the receiver and mine the block chain for all transactions to that receiver.
And here you hit your first major roadblock: There is only one such transaction, yours, because the address you sent your payment to was unique to you. You see, it's cheap and easy to use a different Bitcoin address for every transaction, and this is both the recommended mode of operation and the default for every modern Bitcoin wallet.
You can try to follow the trail further; you might get lucky. Then again, the funds might change hands several times before you manage to link them to a real-world identity, who may be out of your jurisdiction and/or may not know any more than you do about the sender.
Has no one ever heard the term "common carrier"? You don't get to pick and choose what speech you allow on your little safe space AND be free from liability if someone commits crimes or otherwise does "bad things" on your services.
One should not need a special common carrier status to avoid liability for a crime that one did not actively and knowingly participate inâ"if only to the point of willful negligence. Common carrier status is nothing more than a way for the government to exercise control over neutral service providers by threatening them with unjust punishment for the crimes of others unless they comply.
Did Facebook have positive knowledge of these specific terrorist activities? No! Is Facebook's service used primary for such activities? No! Would it have been reasonable to expect Facebook to spy on, index, and data-mine its users' private (or even semi-private) and predominantly innocent communications to the extent that would be necessary to reliably detect this activity, at significant cost and no benefit to itself? Again, no! Case dismissed, and kindly stop wasting the court's time with frivilous lawsuits.
Common carriers are shielded from liability if someone uses their network to plan or commit nefarious activities.
One should not need a special common carrier status to avoid liability for a crime that one did not actively and knowingly participate in—if only to the point of willful negligence. Common carrier status is nothing more than a way for the government to exercise control over neutral service providers by threatening them with unjust punishment for the crimes of others unless they comply.
Did Facebook have positive knowledge of these specific terrorist activities? No! Is Facebook's service used primary for such activities? No! Would it have been reasonable to expect Facebook to spy on, index, and data-mine its users' private (or even semi-private) and predominantly innocent communications to the extent that would be necessary to reliably detect this activity, at significant cost and no benefit to itself? Again, no! Case dismissed, and kindly stop wasting the court's time with frivilous lawsuits.
Two coffee shops, one with coffee that costs X, another with coffee that costs more than X. So which coffee shop sells more coffee?
So I ask, "which one is closer|more convenient to get to?" Not Relevant
It's unfortunate that your professor was apparently unable to explain this in a way you would understand, but the reason that these extra factors are not relevant is that for the purpose of the illustration they have already been included in the cost. To take your example:
If there's a coffee shop downstairs (in the cafeteria) with $2 coffee, and there's coffee for $1 - 5 blocks away, that takes 30+ mins round trip, then it doesn't matter much that coffee is cheaper.
The cost of the first cup is $2 and a walk downstairs, while the cost of the second cup is $1 and 30 minutes of travel. Which one is cheaper overall depends on how each individual values money vs. convenience. You can be sure, however, that—given equivalent products—the customers are each going to pick the one that they perceive as having the lower cost. Demand is not higher for the more expensive coffee; rather, the coffee with the lower advertised price is actually the more expensive one due to the distance aspect.
Classes on economics tend to make the simplifying assumption that all costs are in the form of currency for practical reasons, to keep the class productively focused on the main principles rather than chasing irrelevancies. These extra factors almost always have an equivalent value in currency, so it makes sense to phrase everything in those terms. (E.g.: How much would you be willing to pay to avoid the 30 minute round trip? OK, add that amount to the cost of the more distant cup and then disregard the travel.)
In the more advanced classes you should learn how to apply these same fundamental principles to the unsimplified scenarios, but from the sound of it you probably gave up before reaching that point.
NO libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight.
FTFY. Some people who think they are libertarians, but actually aren't, hold the mistaken belief that an organization defined by its deliberate use of non-defensive force has any legitimate role to play. Not only is this belief not shared by "ALL libertarians", it isn't even compatible with the defining characteristic of libertarian ideology, the Non-Aggression Principle, which can be summarized briefly as the position that the use of non-defensive force is never legitimate. Anyone who holds this belief in a "legitimate" role for government cannot, by definition, be a consistent libertarian.
The name for this particular branch of inconsistent almost-libertarianism is "minarchism".
I applaud the usage of watermarks to enable catching copyright infringers without harmingmlegitimate uses of the material.
Watermarking favors piracy. If you get a copy of a watermarked file from a pirate site you have very little to worry about, since it's not your ID in the watermark. Someone would have to inspect the file on your PC to determine that it wasn't authorized. On the other hand, if you buy a copy of the file from the publisher using your own ID and your computer later gets infected, or a guest makes a copy, or installs a file-sharing program, or the file otherwise ends up on the Internet without your knowledge, you're going to take the blame for every download since all those copies have your ID embedded in them. As with the other, more intrusive, forms of DRM, the pirates offer a better product, this time in the form of anonymity.
Why not just get the user password by brute force attack to begin with since it will unlock the encrypted files for you?
Because the user's password won't let you unlock the encrypted files, at least not on its own. The password works in conjunction with a much stronger key randomly generated by the device itself. To decrypt the files you need both the device key and the user's password. The key is normally only available to software running inside the TrustZone, which limits the number and frequency of authentication attempts. This exploit allows an attacker to retrieve the device-specific key from the TrustZone, but they still need the password to use it. Fortunately for the attacker, human-memorable passwords are comparitively simple to break. The alternative would be brute-forcing the decryption key directly, which is effectively impossible—the human race would probably go extinct first, even assuming theoretically ideal computers and the dedication of every resource at our disposal with single-minded focus toward breaking this one key.
But if you ask "Why would I need a 5300Mbps router when my internet is 50Mbps?" The only reason to buy a router with such a high rating is that you will probably get a fraction of that actual speed.
Sure, if you're only going to use the router to access the Internet (and you don't have one of the fancy 1Gbps residential internet plans offered in some markets). On the other hand, if you're using your WiFi to stream data from a local file server then every Mbps counts. DLNA, Steam(TM) remote streaming, high-resolution WiFi security cameras... there are plenty of plausible use cases for a fast local network regardless of the speed of your internet link.
Also, don't forget that in dense urban areas with more routers than distinct channels you may end up dividing that bandwidth with the neighbors. A faster instantaneous transmit rate means you can send your data and get off the channel that much quicker, leaving more time for everyone else while also ensuring that you can actually use your 50Mbps connection to its fullest even when the channel is otherwise occupied 90% of the time. The newer protocols also have side-benefits such as better noise rejection, allowing more reliable communication in congested environments.
Why not a moratorium on laws? Require a current law to drop for every new law passed?
Unfortunately that would just lead to longer "omnibus" laws. To be effective we would need to limit the total content of the laws, including anything included by reference, not just the number of laws. (For example, the FCC/FAA/FDA/etc. might still come up with the actual regulations but they couldn't take effect until approved by Congress as a replacement for some existing set of laws of equal or greater length.)
I would actually go a bit further and say that as we have far too many laws and regulations already, the rule should be that Congress must repeal at least two units of existing law for every one unit that they pass. We can consider changing that rule to 1:1 replacement at such time as the entire legal code is compact enough to be taught effectively and in full to a typical child by the time they graduate high school such that they can predict with reasonable confidence and accuracy how it will be applied to specific cases.
The 1st amendment however does not exempt the speaker from the consequences of their speech.
It does exempt the speaker from some potential consequences of their speech, namely legal ones—with exceptions, some of which (e.g. defamation, copyright) may well be in violation of the amendment. The freedom of speech is fundamentally about prohibiting laws which would allow speech to be countered with disproportionate force, e.g. fines, imprisonment, capital punishment, etc.
As you correctly point out, however, it does not shield anyone from social consequences. People have the right to choose not to associate with you for any reason (or no reason), and those sort of consequences are merely the product of others exercising their own right to freedom of association. If you want your employer, for example, to continue to associate with you then you need to consider how your manager(s) will react to your speech.
They're called "variables" because they can vary between different invocations of the same function. This is analogous to the use of the term "variable" in mathematics. For example, in f(x) = 2x^2 + 7x - 1 the "x" is a variable, but it represents the same value throughout the definition. "Constants", on the other hand, are (mathematically speaking) values which are the same in every invocation of the function, like 2, 7, or 1 in f(x)—or the function f(x) itself.
The misuse of the term in imperative languages to refer to memory cells with contents that change over time within the same function is far from intuitive and causes no end of confusion among new programmers (and sometime not-so-new programmers, esp. as it relates to multithreading and concurrency). It means that "variables" in imperative languages are actually time-varying functions or sequences of values which may interact with external code in unpredictable ways, especially if they are global or passed by reference, whereas true variables would be fully determined by the function's arguments.
The "American Dream" doesn't have anything to do with copyright infringement. It has to do with owning your own home and building a nice life for yourself, free of all but the minimal government interference.
One major form of which is copyright, so copyright infringement penalties and the "American Dream" are actually very closely (and negatively) correlated, especially in this case. Copyright is a strong contender for the primary manner in which many governments currently interfere with the everyday lives of private citizens.
A society with only "minimal government interference" would have no copyright laws.
I learned that there are often two sets of books in businesses: one for the public/Auditors, and one for the top executives/owners. You can guess the numbers reflected in the public books. It's funny how the 2 books never seem to match.
Not too surprising, really. One set of books is tracking everything according to the legal definitions, which are designed around the requirements of the IRS and the SEC. The other set is used as the basis for business decisions, which have entirely different requirements, and thus benefit from a different organization. Why would you expect them to be the same? Different requirements, different metrics. The same transactions end up in both sets of books, they're just categorized differently.
Not all Democrats are for a complete ban on guns (which would involve repealing the second amendment)... Most of the push is for greater controls and restrictions, which shouldn't be unreasonable - and yet it is, apparently, even for minor ones.
Even those "minor" controls and restrictions would require a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. When the Constitution says that a right "shall not be infringed", it ought to go without saying that this means you can't control or restrict the exercise of the right in any way. The authority to impose conditions is a subset of the authority to ban outright; if you don't have the latter then you cannot have the former. (If you don't have the authority to say "you can't do that", you obviously don't have the authority to say "you can't do that unless...".)
(Before someone chimes in claiming that this means there can't be laws against murder: that's wrong. The prohibition of murder isn't about how you use your gun, or anything else that belongs to you; it's about how you use someone else's body, which belongs to them. You can legitimately do whatever you want with your own property, and any law to the contrary is a violation of your natural rights as a sentient being. However, you can't do anything at all with anyone else's property unless they agree to it, as that would be a violation of the exact same rights of the other property owner.)
Libertarianism is a response to national level governments. Libertarianism has no objection to government on the local level.
No, libertarianism is an ideology founded on, and ultimately defined by, the Non-Aggression Principle. All governments by their nature incorporate acts of aggression which they deem "legitimate"—taxes and regulations being the most obvious examples. The claim that their acts of aggression are "legitimate"—whether based on the "divine right" of kings, the mythical "social contract", popular acclaim, or any other excuse—is what sets governments apart from other organizations, both law-abiding (no aggression) and criminal (no claim of legitimacy). As such, consistent libertarians oppose governments of all forms and levels; there is no exception for "local" government.
Of course, the larger and more intrusive the government, the more vehement the opposition, so libertarians tend to focus most on the federal government. The long-term plan, however, is to maintain this opposition against the highest extant level of government until individual liberty is eventually achieved.
I was only referring to the ability to disable permissions for the system Location Service, as on iOS devices. If Facebook wants to implement its own location service based on passive observation of nearby devices there probably isn't much anyone can do about that, at least short of disabling network access entirely, which would defeat the point of having a Facebook app. Even if you're not using the store's WiFi, I suspect a simple traceroute could uniquely identify the cell tower you're connected to—a store could even install their own picocell to make the identification easier.
Disabling location tracking? If you're using an Apple iDevice, then yes, this is possible. If you are using an Android, then no, it's not possible, because Google has specifically and conspicuously not granted users fine-grained controls over what an application is allowed to do.
That statement is false for Android M (6.0) and later, which introduced revocable permissions (including Location). This version has been available since October of 2015 (8 months ago), and has about 7% market share as of May 2016.
While it is unfortunate that the pre-6.0 versions lacked any official way to revoke permissions, I'm not sure what you expect Google to do about it now (short of inventing time travel). They already released a fix for the issue. If an update to Android M is not available for your phone—and the hardware is not thoroughly obsolete—then your problem is not with Google, but rather the manufacturer and/or carrier.
If you're OK with only have the SD card available part of the time, something like the Dash Micro microSD card reader for USB OTG devices might be a solution. It's relatively cheap ($13 at Amazon), small enough to keep on a keychain, and plugs directly into the phone's USB OTG port.
No, atheists believe that all religious supernatural claims are unfounded due to lack of evidence. Some of them, perhaps a majority, may well be considered false due to either internal contradictions or contrary evidence. The rest are not known to be false but can still be dismissed as irrelevant until such time as they come up with supporting evidence to back their supernatural claims.
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Every time you close a factory in the US so you can open one in a country where the peasants work for pennies -- yes, that's theft because you're working to drive wages down to keep the profit.
Every time you break a union so you can pay workers stagnant wages while inflation continues on -- yes, that's theft.
Every time you mass layoff so you can hire different workers at lower wages -- yes, that's theft big-time.
You apparently have no idea what theft actually is. You have merely given several examples of what is know colloquially as "competition". Theft is when you actually own something and someone else takes it from you, depriving you of it without your consent.
Do you consider it "theft" to buy an identical produce from a less-expensive store rather than a more-expensive one, all else being equal? No, of course not. There is no moral imperative to pay the maximum price for any good—and that includes labor.
You elaborated on why you thought your scheme would one day become necessary. You did not explain—and still have not explained—why people "should" continue to receive wages for jobs others no longer need them to perform.
We could debate whether your "no jobs" scenario is likely to materialize in reality, but that's beside the point. Either way, your solution suffers from the fundamental flaw of being immoral. One has no moral right to the fruits of others' labor—including the automated labor of their machines.
No one is lying. Everyone qualifies for exactly the same UBI payment, so it is in fact universal. For that matter, many UBI schemes call for a flat-rate tax on all non-UBI gross income, with no exemptions, deductions, or loopholes, which would make that part universal as well.
What is not universal is the amount of non-UBI income everyone earns, and thus the amount of tax everyone pays.
That's a bullshit way of ... basically stealing some of my hard work to support my family and giving it to somebody else.
Exactly like any other tax, yes. Now you're getting it. No one is lying about this; redistributing wealth is exactly what the UBI is intended to do. It's a (potentially) more efficient welfare system. It was never intended as a way to let you keep more of your hard-earned income for yourself.
Personally I think UBI might be marginally better than the system we have now, but that's a long way from claiming it as some kind of ideal, or for that matter even accepting it as moral. Theft is theft, even when it goes by the name "income tax", but if some would-be Robin Hood is going to steal from me in the name of fighting poverty I'd prefer that they at least try to use the funds efficiently and not waste a large portion of it on needless bureaucracy.
Your job can be automated and it should be, as it is more efficient. But you still should get money.
Why, exactly? You didn't do anything to earn it. The companies' owners where the ones who contributed the resources necessary to automate production, and consequently deserve (all of) the profits.
If you want income from automation, invest in the companies that are investing in automation. Become one of those who owns the robots and profits from their productive capacity. It won't come for free, though—you'll have to save and invest just like the existing owners of these companies did to earn your share.
It's all their [millionaires' and billionaires'] fault for being successful.
Can we please quit referring to theft as "success"?
Sure, once you prove these allegations of theft. Wealth is not, in and of itself, evidence of theft or any other crime, and around here individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Wealth, rightfully earned, is a perfectly legitimate measure of success. If you think it wasn't rightfully earned, then don't just insinuate as much—prove it.
Where do the X dollars come from for every citizen deemed eligible?
Everyone is deemed eligible; that's why it's called "universal". It's just that the vast majority of citizens end up paying more in taxes on their non-UBI "extra income" than they get from UBI.
If you're not under the poverty level now, don't expect UBI to increase your net income much, if at all. You'll end up paying more than enough extra income tax to completely offset your UBI payment. The cost savings, if any, are projected to come from eliminating the beaurocratic overhead associated with the myriad means-based welfare programs UBI is intended to replace: everyone gets the same amount without regard for how much or little they actually need.
Then look at that transaction, get the receiver and mine the block chain for all transactions to that receiver.
And here you hit your first major roadblock: There is only one such transaction, yours, because the address you sent your payment to was unique to you. You see, it's cheap and easy to use a different Bitcoin address for every transaction, and this is both the recommended mode of operation and the default for every modern Bitcoin wallet.
You can try to follow the trail further; you might get lucky. Then again, the funds might change hands several times before you manage to link them to a real-world identity, who may be out of your jurisdiction and/or may not know any more than you do about the sender.
Has no one ever heard the term "common carrier"? You don't get to pick and choose what speech you allow on your little safe space AND be free from liability if someone commits crimes or otherwise does "bad things" on your services.
One should not need a special common carrier status to avoid liability for a crime that one did not actively and knowingly participate inâ"if only to the point of willful negligence. Common carrier status is nothing more than a way for the government to exercise control over neutral service providers by threatening them with unjust punishment for the crimes of others unless they comply.
Did Facebook have positive knowledge of these specific terrorist activities? No! Is Facebook's service used primary for such activities? No! Would it have been reasonable to expect Facebook to spy on, index, and data-mine its users' private (or even semi-private) and predominantly innocent communications to the extent that would be necessary to reliably detect this activity, at significant cost and no benefit to itself? Again, no! Case dismissed, and kindly stop wasting the court's time with frivilous lawsuits.
Common carriers are shielded from liability if someone uses their network to plan or commit nefarious activities.
One should not need a special common carrier status to avoid liability for a crime that one did not actively and knowingly participate in—if only to the point of willful negligence. Common carrier status is nothing more than a way for the government to exercise control over neutral service providers by threatening them with unjust punishment for the crimes of others unless they comply.
Did Facebook have positive knowledge of these specific terrorist activities? No! Is Facebook's service used primary for such activities? No! Would it have been reasonable to expect Facebook to spy on, index, and data-mine its users' private (or even semi-private) and predominantly innocent communications to the extent that would be necessary to reliably detect this activity, at significant cost and no benefit to itself? Again, no! Case dismissed, and kindly stop wasting the court's time with frivilous lawsuits.
Two coffee shops, one with coffee that costs X, another with coffee that costs more than X. So which coffee shop sells more coffee?
So I ask, "which one is closer|more convenient to get to?" Not Relevant
It's unfortunate that your professor was apparently unable to explain this in a way you would understand, but the reason that these extra factors are not relevant is that for the purpose of the illustration they have already been included in the cost. To take your example:
If there's a coffee shop downstairs (in the cafeteria) with $2 coffee, and there's coffee for $1 - 5 blocks away, that takes 30+ mins round trip, then it doesn't matter much that coffee is cheaper.
The cost of the first cup is $2 and a walk downstairs, while the cost of the second cup is $1 and 30 minutes of travel. Which one is cheaper overall depends on how each individual values money vs. convenience. You can be sure, however, that—given equivalent products—the customers are each going to pick the one that they perceive as having the lower cost. Demand is not higher for the more expensive coffee; rather, the coffee with the lower advertised price is actually the more expensive one due to the distance aspect.
Classes on economics tend to make the simplifying assumption that all costs are in the form of currency for practical reasons, to keep the class productively focused on the main principles rather than chasing irrelevancies. These extra factors almost always have an equivalent value in currency, so it makes sense to phrase everything in those terms. (E.g.: How much would you be willing to pay to avoid the 30 minute round trip? OK, add that amount to the cost of the more distant cup and then disregard the travel.)
In the more advanced classes you should learn how to apply these same fundamental principles to the unsimplified scenarios, but from the sound of it you probably gave up before reaching that point.
NO libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight.
FTFY. Some people who think they are libertarians, but actually aren't, hold the mistaken belief that an organization defined by its deliberate use of non-defensive force has any legitimate role to play. Not only is this belief not shared by "ALL libertarians", it isn't even compatible with the defining characteristic of libertarian ideology, the Non-Aggression Principle, which can be summarized briefly as the position that the use of non-defensive force is never legitimate. Anyone who holds this belief in a "legitimate" role for government cannot, by definition, be a consistent libertarian.
The name for this particular branch of inconsistent almost-libertarianism is "minarchism".
I applaud the usage of watermarks to enable catching copyright infringers without harmingmlegitimate uses of the material.
Watermarking favors piracy. If you get a copy of a watermarked file from a pirate site you have very little to worry about, since it's not your ID in the watermark. Someone would have to inspect the file on your PC to determine that it wasn't authorized. On the other hand, if you buy a copy of the file from the publisher using your own ID and your computer later gets infected, or a guest makes a copy, or installs a file-sharing program, or the file otherwise ends up on the Internet without your knowledge, you're going to take the blame for every download since all those copies have your ID embedded in them. As with the other, more intrusive, forms of DRM, the pirates offer a better product, this time in the form of anonymity.
Why not just get the user password by brute force attack to begin with since it will unlock the encrypted files for you?
Because the user's password won't let you unlock the encrypted files, at least not on its own. The password works in conjunction with a much stronger key randomly generated by the device itself. To decrypt the files you need both the device key and the user's password. The key is normally only available to software running inside the TrustZone, which limits the number and frequency of authentication attempts. This exploit allows an attacker to retrieve the device-specific key from the TrustZone, but they still need the password to use it. Fortunately for the attacker, human-memorable passwords are comparitively simple to break. The alternative would be brute-forcing the decryption key directly, which is effectively impossible—the human race would probably go extinct first, even assuming theoretically ideal computers and the dedication of every resource at our disposal with single-minded focus toward breaking this one key.
But if you ask "Why would I need a 5300Mbps router when my internet is 50Mbps?" The only reason to buy a router with such a high rating is that you will probably get a fraction of that actual speed.
Sure, if you're only going to use the router to access the Internet (and you don't have one of the fancy 1Gbps residential internet plans offered in some markets). On the other hand, if you're using your WiFi to stream data from a local file server then every Mbps counts. DLNA, Steam(TM) remote streaming, high-resolution WiFi security cameras... there are plenty of plausible use cases for a fast local network regardless of the speed of your internet link.
Also, don't forget that in dense urban areas with more routers than distinct channels you may end up dividing that bandwidth with the neighbors. A faster instantaneous transmit rate means you can send your data and get off the channel that much quicker, leaving more time for everyone else while also ensuring that you can actually use your 50Mbps connection to its fullest even when the channel is otherwise occupied 90% of the time. The newer protocols also have side-benefits such as better noise rejection, allowing more reliable communication in congested environments.
Why not a moratorium on laws? Require a current law to drop for every new law passed?
Unfortunately that would just lead to longer "omnibus" laws. To be effective we would need to limit the total content of the laws, including anything included by reference, not just the number of laws. (For example, the FCC/FAA/FDA/etc. might still come up with the actual regulations but they couldn't take effect until approved by Congress as a replacement for some existing set of laws of equal or greater length.)
I would actually go a bit further and say that as we have far too many laws and regulations already, the rule should be that Congress must repeal at least two units of existing law for every one unit that they pass. We can consider changing that rule to 1:1 replacement at such time as the entire legal code is compact enough to be taught effectively and in full to a typical child by the time they graduate high school such that they can predict with reasonable confidence and accuracy how it will be applied to specific cases.
The 1st amendment however does not exempt the speaker from the consequences of their speech.
It does exempt the speaker from some potential consequences of their speech, namely legal ones—with exceptions, some of which (e.g. defamation, copyright) may well be in violation of the amendment. The freedom of speech is fundamentally about prohibiting laws which would allow speech to be countered with disproportionate force, e.g. fines, imprisonment, capital punishment, etc.
As you correctly point out, however, it does not shield anyone from social consequences. People have the right to choose not to associate with you for any reason (or no reason), and those sort of consequences are merely the product of others exercising their own right to freedom of association. If you want your employer, for example, to continue to associate with you then you need to consider how your manager(s) will react to your speech.
They're called "variables" because they can vary between different invocations of the same function. This is analogous to the use of the term "variable" in mathematics. For example, in f(x) = 2x^2 + 7x - 1 the "x" is a variable, but it represents the same value throughout the definition. "Constants", on the other hand, are (mathematically speaking) values which are the same in every invocation of the function, like 2, 7, or 1 in f(x)—or the function f(x) itself.
The misuse of the term in imperative languages to refer to memory cells with contents that change over time within the same function is far from intuitive and causes no end of confusion among new programmers (and sometime not-so-new programmers, esp. as it relates to multithreading and concurrency). It means that "variables" in imperative languages are actually time-varying functions or sequences of values which may interact with external code in unpredictable ways, especially if they are global or passed by reference, whereas true variables would be fully determined by the function's arguments.
The "American Dream" doesn't have anything to do with copyright infringement. It has to do with owning your own home and building a nice life for yourself, free of all but the minimal government interference.
One major form of which is copyright, so copyright infringement penalties and the "American Dream" are actually very closely (and negatively) correlated, especially in this case. Copyright is a strong contender for the primary manner in which many governments currently interfere with the everyday lives of private citizens.
A society with only "minimal government interference" would have no copyright laws.
I learned that there are often two sets of books in businesses: one for the public/Auditors, and one for the top executives/owners. You can guess the numbers reflected in the public books. It's funny how the 2 books never seem to match.
Not too surprising, really. One set of books is tracking everything according to the legal definitions, which are designed around the requirements of the IRS and the SEC. The other set is used as the basis for business decisions, which have entirely different requirements, and thus benefit from a different organization. Why would you expect them to be the same? Different requirements, different metrics. The same transactions end up in both sets of books, they're just categorized differently.
Not all Democrats are for a complete ban on guns (which would involve repealing the second amendment)... Most of the push is for greater controls and restrictions, which shouldn't be unreasonable - and yet it is, apparently, even for minor ones.
Even those "minor" controls and restrictions would require a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. When the Constitution says that a right "shall not be infringed", it ought to go without saying that this means you can't control or restrict the exercise of the right in any way. The authority to impose conditions is a subset of the authority to ban outright; if you don't have the latter then you cannot have the former. (If you don't have the authority to say "you can't do that", you obviously don't have the authority to say "you can't do that unless...".)
(Before someone chimes in claiming that this means there can't be laws against murder: that's wrong. The prohibition of murder isn't about how you use your gun, or anything else that belongs to you; it's about how you use someone else's body, which belongs to them. You can legitimately do whatever you want with your own property, and any law to the contrary is a violation of your natural rights as a sentient being. However, you can't do anything at all with anyone else's property unless they agree to it, as that would be a violation of the exact same rights of the other property owner.)
Libertarianism is a response to national level governments. Libertarianism has no objection to government on the local level.
No, libertarianism is an ideology founded on, and ultimately defined by, the Non-Aggression Principle. All governments by their nature incorporate acts of aggression which they deem "legitimate"—taxes and regulations being the most obvious examples. The claim that their acts of aggression are "legitimate"—whether based on the "divine right" of kings, the mythical "social contract", popular acclaim, or any other excuse—is what sets governments apart from other organizations, both law-abiding (no aggression) and criminal (no claim of legitimacy). As such, consistent libertarians oppose governments of all forms and levels; there is no exception for "local" government.
Of course, the larger and more intrusive the government, the more vehement the opposition, so libertarians tend to focus most on the federal government. The long-term plan, however, is to maintain this opposition against the highest extant level of government until individual liberty is eventually achieved.
I was only referring to the ability to disable permissions for the system Location Service, as on iOS devices. If Facebook wants to implement its own location service based on passive observation of nearby devices there probably isn't much anyone can do about that, at least short of disabling network access entirely, which would defeat the point of having a Facebook app. Even if you're not using the store's WiFi, I suspect a simple traceroute could uniquely identify the cell tower you're connected to—a store could even install their own picocell to make the identification easier.
Disabling location tracking? If you're using an Apple iDevice, then yes, this is possible. If you are using an Android, then no, it's not possible, because Google has specifically and conspicuously not granted users fine-grained controls over what an application is allowed to do.
That statement is false for Android M (6.0) and later, which introduced revocable permissions (including Location). This version has been available since October of 2015 (8 months ago), and has about 7% market share as of May 2016.
While it is unfortunate that the pre-6.0 versions lacked any official way to revoke permissions, I'm not sure what you expect Google to do about it now (short of inventing time travel). They already released a fix for the issue. If an update to Android M is not available for your phone—and the hardware is not thoroughly obsolete—then your problem is not with Google, but rather the manufacturer and/or carrier.
If you're OK with only have the SD card available part of the time, something like the Dash Micro microSD card reader for USB OTG devices might be a solution. It's relatively cheap ($13 at Amazon), small enough to keep on a keychain, and plugs directly into the phone's USB OTG port.
Atheists believe that all religions are false.
No, atheists believe that all religious supernatural claims are unfounded due to lack of evidence. Some of them, perhaps a majority, may well be considered false due to either internal contradictions or contrary evidence. The rest are not known to be false but can still be dismissed as irrelevant until such time as they come up with supporting evidence to back their supernatural claims.