While I agree that copyrights should not be eternal, your justification for why it's wrong is flawed and a slippery slope unless you think we should get rid of inheritances all together.
Inheritance isn't even close to the same thing. As a scarce resource, for an inheritance to bring you any benefit you have to choose to either spend it or invest it. To the extent that you spend it, it isn't eternal—you're using it up. On the other hand, if you invest it then any returns you receive are the product of that investment, which is your own new contribution. Just stuffing your inheritance in a mattress and sitting on it won't do you any good in the current inflationary economy, despite the fact that even that would benefit others indirectly since you are choosing not to bid up prices for goods they want to buy.
Copyright by contrast isn't a scarce material good and can't be "used up" no matter how many copies are made. The copyright holder's revenue is derived purely from artificial restrictions which copyright law places on others to prevent them from providing themselves with new copies of existing works, which they could otherwise do on their own without any cost to the creator or copyright holder.
If a creator wants to save what they've earned from their labor of creating and publishing new works and eventually give those savings as a gift to their children (or anyone else), there is no problem with that. Anyone who receives income is free to make that choice. The issue here is not the ongoing benefit to copyright holders but rather the ongoing burden which copyright imposes on the rest of society.
Frankly, if you're going to attack people for copying something you created then I believe we'd all be better off if you just kept it to yourself, or at least only shared it with people who explicitly opted in to your terms (with recourse limited to those who actually agreed to the terms if they should happen to be broken, as with any other contract). The concept that you would be permitted to impose restrictions on everyone else through a unilateral act of publication is insane.
I think gun-control proponents are more likely to get their way by examining the phrase "A well regulated Militia".
They can examine that phrase all they like; it doesn't have any bearing whatsoever on the actual restriction placed on the government, which is simply that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".
Even if it were restricted to the Militia, that wouldn't do much: the Militia includes every able-bodied male citizen between 17 and 45 years of age, plus females who are members of the National Guard. Trying to restrict firearm ownership to the Militia is basically equivalent to barring older male citizens and all females who are not in the Guard from owning weapons. I'm sure that would go over real well...
x32 was only ever a userspace ABI; the kernel is still using x86_64 and has access to the full 64-bit address space. Only applications are limited to 4GB of virtual memory per process, just like ordinary 32-bit x86 apps under a 64-bit kernel.
It's not quite as large a difference as you suggest. Assuming a 5% rate of return on the market, if you invested the $10k you would indeed have about $43.2k at the end of 30 years. However, if you spent the $10k on solar panels up front and invested the $52.78 you're expected to save in energy costs each month at that same 5% rate then you would have $43k at the end of 30 years, plus some 30-year-old solar panels which may or may not be worth something. Disregarding any residual value in the used panels, that means buying solar panels only costs you about $200 after 30 years compared to investing the same money in the market, which is practically zero given all the approximations and unknowns involved.
Of course, the expected market rate of return makes a huge difference. At 4.75% APY the panels come out $950 ahead; at 5.25% the investment wins by $1400. The 5% rate used as a baseline is very nearly the breakeven point (~4.96%). Similarly, a 5% variance in the energy savings (~$50-55 vs. the estimated $52.78) would shift the balance by around $2100.
No part of the IPv6 requires the MAC address to be part of, or even related to, the IPv6 address. It has always been possible to assign arbitrary addresses manually using any suffix you prefer. It is true that many implementations use EUI64 for auto-generated addresses by default, which embeds the MAC address in the IPv6 address suffix as an easy way to make it both stable and unique. However, if you want to avoid sharing your MAC address you can turn on privacy extensions—the relevant RFC dates back to 2007, and is widely implemented—or else enable RFC7217-style stable-but-opaque address assignment based on a GUID and the subnet prefix. In the former case the address suffixes will be random and ephemeral, and will be rotated periodically to thwart tracking. RFC7217 address suffixes by contrast are based on a hash of an arbitrary 128-bit persistent GUID and the network prefix, so they don't change so long as the network remains the same, but if you connect to a different network you'll get a different suffix.
And THEN ponder once more whether you really want THESE people to vote on important issues. Issues that will in the end affect you and your life.
Regardless of how little you think of them and their decision-making abilities, they have the right to have some say in the externalities that others are proposing to impose on them, whether in the form of taxes or regulations—just as you have the right to fight back against the externalities they want to impose on you. If there's one thing representative democracies have in common it's the fact that elected "representatives" really only represent themselves and those who fund their campaigns; their official constituents are only a means to an end, a source of votes to be manipulated by any means available. The right answer here is a direct democracy with voting weighted according to who will be asked to pay the cost. Anyone can make a proposal, but if you aren't proposing to pay for it yourself then you don't get a say in whether it passes. This fixes the primary flaw with one-person-one-vote direct democracy, which is people voting themselves largess from "the Treasury" (i.e. their more responsible neighbors).
All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems.
A better word for what you're describing would be "produced" rather than "earned"—though that isn't quite accurate either since it is entirely possible to produce a durable consumer good now and set it aside for a few decades to be consumed later. Not everything has to be consumed the moment it's produced. Even if we disregard durable goods, however, the mere fact that a good won't be produced until far into the future does not imply that it hasn't already been earned, by producing goods while deferring consumption—a process known colloquially as "saving".
What you're referring to as a "wealth distribution system" is more commonly known as simply "the economy". However, in conflating private saving and investment with tax-funded retirement schemes you're ignoring the basic economic principles of debt and contractual obligation. That's the difference between normal economic function and political wealth redistribution . When you buy or sell a share in a voluntary investment (a retirement fund, for example) there is no change in the distribution of wealth, because wealth includes both what one owes and what one is owed. You're only exchanging one type of asset (a claim on an investment) for another similarly-valued asset (cash or other goods). The same is not true when you receive a payout from a tax-funded program; the government does not consider itself indebted toward you, no matter how much it's taxed you in the past, and considers itself free to revise the terms of the arrangement at any time. Far from an equitable and voluntary exchange of goods and obligations, this is a forced transfer of wealth from one group (net tax-payers) to another (net tax-receivers). Tax-funded programs are inherently zero- or negative-sum; every cent they pay out must first be taken from someone else. Investments are positive-sum: everyone who participates shares a reasonable expectation of deriving some benefit from the arrangement.
I do not see where there is much of a legal argument that Chicago cannot assess taxes like this on their residents
The argument is not that Chicago cannot assess taxes like this on their residents, but rather that they have no authority to force companies outside their own jurisdiction to serve as tax-collectors. If Chicago wants to assess a tax on the citizens of Chicago for playing Sony's games that is strictly between the Chicago government and the people who live there. Sony should have no obligation either to report on the people playing their games or to collect and remit the tax.
If I can restore files from it - guess what, it is a backup.
The point is that there are times when you can't restore files from it—not because the backup drive failed, which is of course a risk with any system, but because of your process. During the week you have a backup copy. Then you destroy your backup copy, by modifying it in place; at some point later you finish creating the new copy. From the start of your sync process until it completes you have no backup. Worse, the interval when you have no backup is exactly the time that the main drive is most likely to fail due to the added stress of creating the new copy.
You do whatever you feel is right. It's your data, and your risk to take. Perhaps I'm just stricter due to having lost data despite sync-external-drive schemes very similar to yours. In my opinion, however, any scheme involving predictable, regular intervals where no complete backup copies exist cannot reasonably be called a backup system. By your definition even RAID-1 is a "backup system", since it improves your chances of data recovery in the event of a drive failure. I'm hardly the only one to disagree with that position.
I bring it in once a week or so to refresh the copy.
And during that time you don't have a copy. You have some blend of the old version and the new version. A single copy which you mutate in place is not a backup system. What happens if your main drive fails halfway through updating your backup drive? (It's not as unlikely as you might think, since the backup process tends to put more stress on the drive than normal use.) You'd be left with neither the original copy nor a backup.
You are discounting the reality where you keep temporary working material in the same directory with other things and then remove it.
That sounds like a workflow issue. Perhaps you have no control over the locations or names of the temporary files; I don't know which applications you're working with. If there is any automatic way to identify the temporary files, however, then it should be possible to exclude them from the backup, though it might require some scripting. The better solution would be to keep temporary files in a different directory, if possible, or at least given them distinct names that can be matched with a glob pattern.
But when you are backing up a nearly full 4TB drive to another 4TB backup you do not have that luxury.
The backup drive needs to be at least somewhat larger than the original data; otherwise you have no choice but to update the sole copy in place, which is not a backup system. A second 4+TB backup drive would be one simple solution. Just cycle between them and you'll always have last week's backup to fall back on if something goes wrong. Another option that doesn't require twice the space would be read-only snapshots (on BTRFS or ZFS), which let you keep as many versions as you want while only storing the differences.
It's simple to remove the Airplane Mode button from the Quick Settings shown on the lock screen—or at least it is on my OnePlus 3T, and I would assume the same is true for most other near-AOSP Android phones. Unfortunately the same tile configuration is also used when the phone is unlocked, so if you want to enable or disable Airplane Mode after making that change you have to do it through the Settings app.
If I didn't notice the data loss for a week, or I it happened the day before my sync, then I could easily sync my blackup [sic] out of existence without noticing.
No, because what you have is not a backup system. At the very least it fails to qualify because you have no complete copy of the data during the weekly interval while the sync process is running—during that time your "backup" is a mix of the old version and the new version. You need at least one complete and stable archive on hand to restore from at all times.
The problem is you can't just have a policy of "never delete" without a lot of wasted space if you move things often or have projects with large temporary by-products you do not want to keep.
A decent incremental backup system should be able to record that files were moved or copied without duplicating the data. You don't need to include temporary files in the backups either as long as you're OK with recreating them in the event of data loss. Again, any decent backup system will provide a way to designate folders (or perhaps even individual files) to be excluded.
If the latter, then one can argue pretty clearly that they've "stolen" revenue from HBO.
One cannot "steal" something that was never HBO's in the first place. One does not "own" potential revenues.
The only real criteria is whether your actions involving the other party make them worse off than they would have been in your absence. For theft the answer is yes: if the thief didn't exist they would still have their property, so the presence of the thief makes them worse off. For copyright infringement the answer is no: if the infringer didn't exist they still wouldn't get any revenue, so the presence of an infringer doesn't make them any worse off.
Food, water, shelter is essential, to more than just humans. That's real intrinsic value.
All value is extrinsic, not intrinsic. One who has abundant food to eat, water to drink, and a nice place to stay will not place any great value on additional food, water, or shelter. The fact that humans need some amount of these essentials is an intrinsic property of humans. The fact that these things are needed by humans is not an intrinsic property of food, water, or shelter. The facts that they can satisfy thirst and hunger and protect one from the elements are intrinsic properties, but this only gives them value so long as the means of fulfilling those needs remain scarce.
Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required.
You say that as if it were obvious, but the kind of work you do may well be a factor in quickly and accurately diagnosing your condition. Should it be a required field? Maybe, maybe not—but if it's not required then they're less likely to have that information available when it would be genuinely useful.
Supply and demand are both essential. Supply without demand lacks purpose; demand without supply is futile. There is no point in arguing over which side is more important.
You give poor people more money and they spend it.
Zooming out a bit to see the full picture: You take money from the rich and give it to the poor just so that they can give it back to the rich. This gets the money moving, which is good for the government (taxes), but it doesn't benefit the rich at all; they are forced to expend resources producing goods just to get back the money which was already theirs at the beginning. They could have traded much more profitably amongst themselves, producing goods for their own consumption. For that matter they could have just donated the goods to the poor directly, cutting out the middle-man, and still come out ahead.
It's only profitable to trade with someone when they have something of their own to offer in return.
Alternately, it could be interpreted "foreigners; aliens who belong to the families of...".
Not really, because then you'd have an unnatural pause (comma) between "aliens" and "who" to explain away. Even if you did change it that way I don't see how that would change the overall meaning of the sentence; you'd just equate "foreigners" with "aliens who belong to the families of..." which is an odd way to define "foreigners" but the end result is still to only excludes the families of diplomats.
If all foreigners were exempt then there would be no point in mentioning aliens—which is just a more precise legal term for foreigners—or the families of diplomats, who are also foreigners. Even ignoring punctuation altogether, and the fact that there is no conjunction, there is no natural way to read "foreigners aliens [and]... the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers" which does not make at least one element of the list redundant.
This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.
So if the court were to use original intent (emphasized above) as opposed to relying on precedence, there's a good chance it could be overturned.
To me your quote regarding the original intent reads as being in agreement with the established precedent: the only exceptions to birthright citizenship intended by Senator Howard are "foreigners... who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers", who are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States due to their special status as foreign diplomats. Overturning precedent would thus imply throwing out the original intent of the amendment.
(For those less familiar with English, Senator Howard did not list foreigners, aliens, and families of diplomats as three different excluded groups. If this were a list then the third item would not start with "who". An alternative typesetting which preserves the meaning and is perhaps easier to read would be: "foreigners (aliens) who belong to the families..."; of course, parentheses don't carry over well into speech, so here they have been replaced with commas to mark the Senator's pauses.)
Where did you hear that? Bitcoin mining is asymptotic, not linear. Every four years the block reward is cut in half. In 40 years (more or less) we'll reach block 2,730,000, and at that point we'll still be adding about 300 BTC per year to the total. The last bitcoin isn't projected to be mined until 2140.
Even if it were linear we'd still have 5.5 years, not three, given the current block reward of 12.5 BTC per block, 10 minutes per block, and 3.65 million bitcoins remaining to be mined. I can only assume that you thought the reward was fixed at 25 BTC per block, which would work out to ~2.7 years remaining if it hadn't already halved two years ago, with similar reductions scheduled in 2020 and 2024.
... in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block*.
(*) At current prices.
If the value of BTC grows then the reward in USD may not fall quite that much. It's unrealistic, though, to expect the USD/BTC price to double every four years indefinitely (18.9% APY).
The subject was taxing businesses, not taxing business owners. When you tax a business (e.g. via corporate income taxes) the tax becomes just another business expense and the burden falls mainly on the customers in the form of higher prices or less selection, or most typically both. If your goal is to levy the burden of government on the upper class then corporate income taxes are not a productive approach.
The costs of running the nations fell on everyone else.
Even if you taxed the rich at 100% of income (all else being equal, which it wouldn't be) the majority of the cost would still fall on everyone else; there simply aren't that many rich. The majority of people pay the majority of the costs for their own upkeep; that's the only sustainable approach. When governments tax the majority beyond what they can bear in order to funnel resources to a few powerful individuals, however, then the stage is set for revolution. It's more a matter of where the money is being spent than where it comes from.
They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the
Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks
It's clear that these researchers don't understand Bitcoin at all if they think that there is any relationship between the number of transactions and the number of blocks mined. The difficulty is adjusted to ensure that one new block is mined every 10 minutes, on average. That figure is independent of both the number of transactions and the size of the block. Larger blocks and out-of-band systems like the Lightning Network increase the number of transactions which can be processed without altering the total energy used for mining.
The energy cost of mining is driven by competition over block rewards and transaction fees; of the two, fees are currently insignificant compared to the block rewards (<1% of mining revenues). The block rewards halve every four years. Right now the reward is at 12.5 BTC @ 6250 USD/BTC, so the breakeven point for mining is about $80k per block; any miner spending more than that amount per mined block on hardware and electricity is losing money. In 2020 the reward will drop to 6.25 BTC; in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block. The long-term trend is thus for the energy cost of (profitable) mining to decrease over time, at least until transaction fees start to exceed block rewards.
It is clear that, had the people of Chickasaw owned all the homes, and all the stores, and all the streets, and all the sidewalks, all those owners together could not have set up a municipal government with sufficient power to pass an ordinance completely barring the distribution of religious literature.
If the owners of all the homes, stores, streets, and sidewalks were unanimous in their opposition to the distribution of religious literature, they could each ban the distribution of such literature on their own property, which the effect that such literature could not be distributed anywhere inside the town. Anyone who violated that rule would be trespassing on someone's private property. This talk of forming a government and passing ordinances is nothing but a distraction—a municipal government doesn't own all the property inside the city limits, and ordinances are not rules set by the property owner.
Our question then narrows down to this: can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town?
But they are not being denied freedom of the press or religion. What is being denied is access to someone else's property. If they want to exercise their freedom of the press or religion they are welcome to do so on their own property. They knew about these rules and agreed to them as a condition of entering the town. Only their acceptance of the rules set by the property owner grants them the right to be there.
The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.... thus, the owners of privately held bridges, ferries, turnpikes and railroads may not operate them as freely as a farmer does his farm.
This is nothing more or less than the taking of private property for public use without compensation. If the government doesn't care for the restrictions a property owner sets for the use of their own private property the government can very well buy the property from them on behalf of the public at a fair market price acceptable to both parties.
On the other hand, HTTPS sites break the captive portal system used on a lot of wifi networks.
I think you meant to say "captive portal systems break HTTPS sites, along with every other non-HTTP protocol".
Anyway, there has been a standard workaround in place for this problem for a while now. Devices detect captive portals by querying a well-known URL over HTTP; if they get an unexpected response they prompt the user to sign in to the network.
Work is almost by definition misery. If such was not the case then why would anyone ever pay someone to do something instead of doing it themselves.
Because there is more work to be done than one person can do alone? Or because, while you don't find the work miserable, you would rather spend your limited time doing something else?
The other missing piece is that work which appears miserable to one person may be the next best thing to recreation for someone else, to the point where they might even be willing to do it for free. (For example, there exist both people who detest programming and others who do it in their free time as a hobby.) Split the difference somewhere between the most the first person would be willing to pay to avoid it and the least the second person would accept and neither has reason to be miserable.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that copyrights should not be eternal, your justification for why it's wrong is flawed and a slippery slope unless you think we should get rid of inheritances all together.
Inheritance isn't even close to the same thing. As a scarce resource, for an inheritance to bring you any benefit you have to choose to either spend it or invest it. To the extent that you spend it, it isn't eternal—you're using it up. On the other hand, if you invest it then any returns you receive are the product of that investment, which is your own new contribution. Just stuffing your inheritance in a mattress and sitting on it won't do you any good in the current inflationary economy, despite the fact that even that would benefit others indirectly since you are choosing not to bid up prices for goods they want to buy.
Copyright by contrast isn't a scarce material good and can't be "used up" no matter how many copies are made. The copyright holder's revenue is derived purely from artificial restrictions which copyright law places on others to prevent them from providing themselves with new copies of existing works, which they could otherwise do on their own without any cost to the creator or copyright holder.
If a creator wants to save what they've earned from their labor of creating and publishing new works and eventually give those savings as a gift to their children (or anyone else), there is no problem with that. Anyone who receives income is free to make that choice. The issue here is not the ongoing benefit to copyright holders but rather the ongoing burden which copyright imposes on the rest of society.
Frankly, if you're going to attack people for copying something you created then I believe we'd all be better off if you just kept it to yourself, or at least only shared it with people who explicitly opted in to your terms (with recourse limited to those who actually agreed to the terms if they should happen to be broken, as with any other contract). The concept that you would be permitted to impose restrictions on everyone else through a unilateral act of publication is insane.
I think gun-control proponents are more likely to get their way by examining the phrase "A well regulated Militia".
They can examine that phrase all they like; it doesn't have any bearing whatsoever on the actual restriction placed on the government, which is simply that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".
Even if it were restricted to the Militia, that wouldn't do much: the Militia includes every able-bodied male citizen between 17 and 45 years of age, plus females who are members of the National Guard. Trying to restrict firearm ownership to the Militia is basically equivalent to barring older male citizens and all females who are not in the Guard from owning weapons. I'm sure that would go over real well...
x32 was only ever a userspace ABI; the kernel is still using x86_64 and has access to the full 64-bit address space. Only applications are limited to 4GB of virtual memory per process, just like ordinary 32-bit x86 apps under a 64-bit kernel.
It's not quite as large a difference as you suggest. Assuming a 5% rate of return on the market, if you invested the $10k you would indeed have about $43.2k at the end of 30 years. However, if you spent the $10k on solar panels up front and invested the $52.78 you're expected to save in energy costs each month at that same 5% rate then you would have $43k at the end of 30 years, plus some 30-year-old solar panels which may or may not be worth something. Disregarding any residual value in the used panels, that means buying solar panels only costs you about $200 after 30 years compared to investing the same money in the market, which is practically zero given all the approximations and unknowns involved.
Of course, the expected market rate of return makes a huge difference. At 4.75% APY the panels come out $950 ahead; at 5.25% the investment wins by $1400. The 5% rate used as a baseline is very nearly the breakeven point (~4.96%). Similarly, a 5% variance in the energy savings (~$50-55 vs. the estimated $52.78) would shift the balance by around $2100.
The IPv6 is supposed to be the MAC address.
No part of the IPv6 requires the MAC address to be part of, or even related to, the IPv6 address. It has always been possible to assign arbitrary addresses manually using any suffix you prefer. It is true that many implementations use EUI64 for auto-generated addresses by default, which embeds the MAC address in the IPv6 address suffix as an easy way to make it both stable and unique. However, if you want to avoid sharing your MAC address you can turn on privacy extensions—the relevant RFC dates back to 2007, and is widely implemented—or else enable RFC7217-style stable-but-opaque address assignment based on a GUID and the subnet prefix. In the former case the address suffixes will be random and ephemeral, and will be rotated periodically to thwart tracking. RFC7217 address suffixes by contrast are based on a hash of an arbitrary 128-bit persistent GUID and the network prefix, so they don't change so long as the network remains the same, but if you connect to a different network you'll get a different suffix.
And THEN ponder once more whether you really want THESE people to vote on important issues. Issues that will in the end affect you and your life.
Regardless of how little you think of them and their decision-making abilities, they have the right to have some say in the externalities that others are proposing to impose on them, whether in the form of taxes or regulations—just as you have the right to fight back against the externalities they want to impose on you. If there's one thing representative democracies have in common it's the fact that elected "representatives" really only represent themselves and those who fund their campaigns; their official constituents are only a means to an end, a source of votes to be manipulated by any means available. The right answer here is a direct democracy with voting weighted according to who will be asked to pay the cost. Anyone can make a proposal, but if you aren't proposing to pay for it yourself then you don't get a say in whether it passes. This fixes the primary flaw with one-person-one-vote direct democracy, which is people voting themselves largess from "the Treasury" (i.e. their more responsible neighbors).
All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems.
A better word for what you're describing would be "produced" rather than "earned"—though that isn't quite accurate either since it is entirely possible to produce a durable consumer good now and set it aside for a few decades to be consumed later. Not everything has to be consumed the moment it's produced. Even if we disregard durable goods, however, the mere fact that a good won't be produced until far into the future does not imply that it hasn't already been earned, by producing goods while deferring consumption—a process known colloquially as "saving".
What you're referring to as a "wealth distribution system" is more commonly known as simply "the economy". However, in conflating private saving and investment with tax-funded retirement schemes you're ignoring the basic economic principles of debt and contractual obligation. That's the difference between normal economic function and political wealth redistribution . When you buy or sell a share in a voluntary investment (a retirement fund, for example) there is no change in the distribution of wealth, because wealth includes both what one owes and what one is owed. You're only exchanging one type of asset (a claim on an investment) for another similarly-valued asset (cash or other goods). The same is not true when you receive a payout from a tax-funded program; the government does not consider itself indebted toward you, no matter how much it's taxed you in the past, and considers itself free to revise the terms of the arrangement at any time. Far from an equitable and voluntary exchange of goods and obligations, this is a forced transfer of wealth from one group (net tax-payers) to another (net tax-receivers). Tax-funded programs are inherently zero- or negative-sum; every cent they pay out must first be taken from someone else. Investments are positive-sum: everyone who participates shares a reasonable expectation of deriving some benefit from the arrangement.
I do not see where there is much of a legal argument that Chicago cannot assess taxes like this on their residents
The argument is not that Chicago cannot assess taxes like this on their residents, but rather that they have no authority to force companies outside their own jurisdiction to serve as tax-collectors. If Chicago wants to assess a tax on the citizens of Chicago for playing Sony's games that is strictly between the Chicago government and the people who live there. Sony should have no obligation either to report on the people playing their games or to collect and remit the tax.
If I can restore files from it - guess what, it is a backup.
The point is that there are times when you can't restore files from it—not because the backup drive failed, which is of course a risk with any system, but because of your process. During the week you have a backup copy. Then you destroy your backup copy, by modifying it in place; at some point later you finish creating the new copy. From the start of your sync process until it completes you have no backup. Worse, the interval when you have no backup is exactly the time that the main drive is most likely to fail due to the added stress of creating the new copy.
You do whatever you feel is right. It's your data, and your risk to take. Perhaps I'm just stricter due to having lost data despite sync-external-drive schemes very similar to yours. In my opinion, however, any scheme involving predictable, regular intervals where no complete backup copies exist cannot reasonably be called a backup system. By your definition even RAID-1 is a "backup system", since it improves your chances of data recovery in the event of a drive failure. I'm hardly the only one to disagree with that position.
I bring it in once a week or so to refresh the copy.
And during that time you don't have a copy. You have some blend of the old version and the new version. A single copy which you mutate in place is not a backup system. What happens if your main drive fails halfway through updating your backup drive? (It's not as unlikely as you might think, since the backup process tends to put more stress on the drive than normal use.) You'd be left with neither the original copy nor a backup.
You are discounting the reality where you keep temporary working material in the same directory with other things and then remove it.
That sounds like a workflow issue. Perhaps you have no control over the locations or names of the temporary files; I don't know which applications you're working with. If there is any automatic way to identify the temporary files, however, then it should be possible to exclude them from the backup, though it might require some scripting. The better solution would be to keep temporary files in a different directory, if possible, or at least given them distinct names that can be matched with a glob pattern.
But when you are backing up a nearly full 4TB drive to another 4TB backup you do not have that luxury.
The backup drive needs to be at least somewhat larger than the original data; otherwise you have no choice but to update the sole copy in place, which is not a backup system. A second 4+TB backup drive would be one simple solution. Just cycle between them and you'll always have last week's backup to fall back on if something goes wrong. Another option that doesn't require twice the space would be read-only snapshots (on BTRFS or ZFS), which let you keep as many versions as you want while only storing the differences.
It's simple to remove the Airplane Mode button from the Quick Settings shown on the lock screen—or at least it is on my OnePlus 3T, and I would assume the same is true for most other near-AOSP Android phones. Unfortunately the same tile configuration is also used when the phone is unlocked, so if you want to enable or disable Airplane Mode after making that change you have to do it through the Settings app.
If I didn't notice the data loss for a week, or I it happened the day before my sync, then I could easily sync my blackup [sic] out of existence without noticing.
No, because what you have is not a backup system. At the very least it fails to qualify because you have no complete copy of the data during the weekly interval while the sync process is running—during that time your "backup" is a mix of the old version and the new version. You need at least one complete and stable archive on hand to restore from at all times.
The problem is you can't just have a policy of "never delete" without a lot of wasted space if you move things often or have projects with large temporary by-products you do not want to keep.
A decent incremental backup system should be able to record that files were moved or copied without duplicating the data. You don't need to include temporary files in the backups either as long as you're OK with recreating them in the event of data loss. Again, any decent backup system will provide a way to designate folders (or perhaps even individual files) to be excluded.
If the latter, then one can argue pretty clearly that they've "stolen" revenue from HBO.
One cannot "steal" something that was never HBO's in the first place. One does not "own" potential revenues.
The only real criteria is whether your actions involving the other party make them worse off than they would have been in your absence. For theft the answer is yes: if the thief didn't exist they would still have their property, so the presence of the thief makes them worse off. For copyright infringement the answer is no: if the infringer didn't exist they still wouldn't get any revenue, so the presence of an infringer doesn't make them any worse off.
Food, water, shelter is essential, to more than just humans. That's real intrinsic value.
All value is extrinsic, not intrinsic. One who has abundant food to eat, water to drink, and a nice place to stay will not place any great value on additional food, water, or shelter. The fact that humans need some amount of these essentials is an intrinsic property of humans. The fact that these things are needed by humans is not an intrinsic property of food, water, or shelter. The facts that they can satisfy thirst and hunger and protect one from the elements are intrinsic properties, but this only gives them value so long as the means of fulfilling those needs remain scarce.
Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required.
You say that as if it were obvious, but the kind of work you do may well be a factor in quickly and accurately diagnosing your condition. Should it be a required field? Maybe, maybe not—but if it's not required then they're less likely to have that information available when it would be genuinely useful.
Supply and demand are both essential. Supply without demand lacks purpose; demand without supply is futile. There is no point in arguing over which side is more important.
You give poor people more money and they spend it.
Zooming out a bit to see the full picture: You take money from the rich and give it to the poor just so that they can give it back to the rich. This gets the money moving, which is good for the government (taxes), but it doesn't benefit the rich at all; they are forced to expend resources producing goods just to get back the money which was already theirs at the beginning. They could have traded much more profitably amongst themselves, producing goods for their own consumption. For that matter they could have just donated the goods to the poor directly, cutting out the middle-man, and still come out ahead.
It's only profitable to trade with someone when they have something of their own to offer in return.
Alternately, it could be interpreted "foreigners; aliens who belong to the families of...".
Not really, because then you'd have an unnatural pause (comma) between "aliens" and "who" to explain away. Even if you did change it that way I don't see how that would change the overall meaning of the sentence; you'd just equate "foreigners" with "aliens who belong to the families of..." which is an odd way to define "foreigners" but the end result is still to only excludes the families of diplomats.
If all foreigners were exempt then there would be no point in mentioning aliens—which is just a more precise legal term for foreigners—or the families of diplomats, who are also foreigners. Even ignoring punctuation altogether, and the fact that there is no conjunction, there is no natural way to read "foreigners aliens [and] ... the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers" which does not make at least one element of the list redundant.
This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.
So if the court were to use original intent (emphasized above) as opposed to relying on precedence, there's a good chance it could be overturned.
To me your quote regarding the original intent reads as being in agreement with the established precedent: the only exceptions to birthright citizenship intended by Senator Howard are "foreigners ... who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers", who are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States due to their special status as foreign diplomats. Overturning precedent would thus imply throwing out the original intent of the amendment.
(For those less familiar with English, Senator Howard did not list foreigners, aliens, and families of diplomats as three different excluded groups. If this were a list then the third item would not start with "who". An alternative typesetting which preserves the meaning and is perhaps easier to read would be: "foreigners (aliens) who belong to the families..."; of course, parentheses don't carry over well into speech, so here they have been replaced with commas to mark the Senator's pauses.)
Bitcoins will be mined out in about 3 years.
Where did you hear that? Bitcoin mining is asymptotic, not linear. Every four years the block reward is cut in half. In 40 years (more or less) we'll reach block 2,730,000, and at that point we'll still be adding about 300 BTC per year to the total. The last bitcoin isn't projected to be mined until 2140.
Even if it were linear we'd still have 5.5 years, not three, given the current block reward of 12.5 BTC per block, 10 minutes per block, and 3.65 million bitcoins remaining to be mined. I can only assume that you thought the reward was fixed at 25 BTC per block, which would work out to ~2.7 years remaining if it hadn't already halved two years ago, with similar reductions scheduled in 2020 and 2024.
... in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block*.
(*) At current prices.
If the value of BTC grows then the reward in USD may not fall quite that much. It's unrealistic, though, to expect the USD/BTC price to double every four years indefinitely (18.9% APY).
The subject was taxing businesses, not taxing business owners. When you tax a business (e.g. via corporate income taxes) the tax becomes just another business expense and the burden falls mainly on the customers in the form of higher prices or less selection, or most typically both. If your goal is to levy the burden of government on the upper class then corporate income taxes are not a productive approach.
The costs of running the nations fell on everyone else.
Even if you taxed the rich at 100% of income (all else being equal, which it wouldn't be) the majority of the cost would still fall on everyone else; there simply aren't that many rich. The majority of people pay the majority of the costs for their own upkeep; that's the only sustainable approach. When governments tax the majority beyond what they can bear in order to funnel resources to a few powerful individuals, however, then the stage is set for revolution. It's more a matter of where the money is being spent than where it comes from.
They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks
It's clear that these researchers don't understand Bitcoin at all if they think that there is any relationship between the number of transactions and the number of blocks mined. The difficulty is adjusted to ensure that one new block is mined every 10 minutes, on average. That figure is independent of both the number of transactions and the size of the block. Larger blocks and out-of-band systems like the Lightning Network increase the number of transactions which can be processed without altering the total energy used for mining.
The energy cost of mining is driven by competition over block rewards and transaction fees; of the two, fees are currently insignificant compared to the block rewards (<1% of mining revenues). The block rewards halve every four years. Right now the reward is at 12.5 BTC @ 6250 USD/BTC, so the breakeven point for mining is about $80k per block; any miner spending more than that amount per mined block on hardware and electricity is losing money. In 2020 the reward will drop to 6.25 BTC; in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block. The long-term trend is thus for the energy cost of (profitable) mining to decrease over time, at least until transaction fees start to exceed block rewards.
It is clear that, had the people of Chickasaw owned all the homes, and all the stores, and all the streets, and all the sidewalks, all those owners together could not have set up a municipal government with sufficient power to pass an ordinance completely barring the distribution of religious literature.
If the owners of all the homes, stores, streets, and sidewalks were unanimous in their opposition to the distribution of religious literature, they could each ban the distribution of such literature on their own property, which the effect that such literature could not be distributed anywhere inside the town. Anyone who violated that rule would be trespassing on someone's private property. This talk of forming a government and passing ordinances is nothing but a distraction—a municipal government doesn't own all the property inside the city limits, and ordinances are not rules set by the property owner.
Our question then narrows down to this: can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town?
But they are not being denied freedom of the press or religion. What is being denied is access to someone else's property. If they want to exercise their freedom of the press or religion they are welcome to do so on their own property. They knew about these rules and agreed to them as a condition of entering the town. Only their acceptance of the rules set by the property owner grants them the right to be there.
The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it. ... thus, the owners of privately held bridges, ferries, turnpikes and railroads may not operate them as freely as a farmer does his farm.
This is nothing more or less than the taking of private property for public use without compensation. If the government doesn't care for the restrictions a property owner sets for the use of their own private property the government can very well buy the property from them on behalf of the public at a fair market price acceptable to both parties.
On the other hand, HTTPS sites break the captive portal system used on a lot of wifi networks.
I think you meant to say "captive portal systems break HTTPS sites, along with every other non-HTTP protocol".
Anyway, there has been a standard workaround in place for this problem for a while now. Devices detect captive portals by querying a well-known URL over HTTP; if they get an unexpected response they prompt the user to sign in to the network.
Work is almost by definition misery. If such was not the case then why would anyone ever pay someone to do something instead of doing it themselves.
Because there is more work to be done than one person can do alone? Or because, while you don't find the work miserable, you would rather spend your limited time doing something else?
The other missing piece is that work which appears miserable to one person may be the next best thing to recreation for someone else, to the point where they might even be willing to do it for free. (For example, there exist both people who detest programming and others who do it in their free time as a hobby.) Split the difference somewhere between the most the first person would be willing to pay to avoid it and the least the second person would accept and neither has reason to be miserable.