The constitution itself says that treaties with foreign governments are the highest law of the land.
The Constitution says that at the Constitution, U.S. law, and treaties are (together) the highest law of the land—in that order. It also says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". That doesn't change regardless of what any treaty might say; a treaty is not a Constitutional amendment. If a treaty says that we have to pass an unconstitutional law, well, we'll just have to break that treaty, because Congress cannot grant itself powers specifically forbidden them in the Constitution through a mere treaty, any more than Congress could pass a law to the same effect.
Patents are supposed to be open, and should explain exactly how to do something to someone skilled in the art. In terms of knowledge, patents are much better than trade secrets this way.
That's the theory, but it fails on both the openness of patents and the effectiveness of trade secrets. "Best practice" for patent applicants is to do everything you can to ensure that the patent provides insufficient detail to recreate the invention, while still remaining enforceable. In exchange they provide they get a 20-year de jure monopoly, during which time whatever information they deigned to provide cannot be used by anyone else without their permission. By contrast, while the holder of a trade secret doesn't have to publish anything, the burden of keeping the trade secret is entirely on them, and in the modern world hardly anything about a product can truly remain secret for 20 years.
Having the choice of a patent or trade secret ensures that the invention will be kept out of the public domain for either 20 years or however long it can be kept as a trade secret, whichever is longer. To assume that the patent system would bring inventions into the public domain faster than trade secrets alone presumes that inventors are either irrational actors or incapable of producing reasonable estimates for how long they can maintain their trade secrets in the absence of patent protection.
TL;DR: Patents are neither necessary nor sufficient to speed up the passage of trade secrets into the public domain.
A freedom to do something is no protection from social enforcement of the consequences of you exercising that freedom.
Ridiculous. By that argument, everyone has the freedom to do absolutely anything they want—they might just get thrown in jail if it happens to violate a law. This makes a mockery of the very word "freedom".
If the law says that an action can lead to you being put in jail, fined, or otherwise deprived of your legal rights, you aren't free to do it. "Free" means "no strings attached". Within the legal domain, naturally; the freedom of speech has never included protection against possible social consequences. Others have every right to respond with speech of their own, or to withhold their support or association depending on how they feel about what you've said.
It's funny how everyone turns to the "fire in a crowded theater" case when discussing the limits of freedom of speech, because in addition to being logically unsound, that ruling was politically motivated with the clear intent of suppressing political speech by war protesters (Schenck v. United States). In other words, exactly the opposite of what freedom of speech is supposed to stand for, even by the strictest standards.
If the speech is false, and deliberately intended to manipulate others as tools for causing harm, not by their choice but by the choice of the speaker, and the actions these others chose to take based on the speech would not have been harmful if the speech had been true—then we can discuss whether a punishment is justified, not for the speech per se but for the harm that the speaker deliberately set out to achieve. But "(falsely) shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" is not that case. Whatever the speaker's intent, the actions of the listeners were not reasonable or justified even by the standard of what they believed to be true, and it is those unjustifiable actions which resulted in the harm, not the false speech.
... that treaty would trump any laws of a government in the USA. According to the Constitution, it would even trump the Constitution.
A common misconception. Treaties don't "trump" the U.S. Constitution, they form the highest law of the land alongside the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Treaties do take precedence over state constitutions and laws. The only thing that would trump the U.S. Constitution, however, would be an amendment or constitutional convention. The federal government cannot bypass its own constitutional limits by entering into treaties any more than it can grant itself unconstitutional powers by passing laws. Only the states can do that, by amending or replacing the Constitution.
Software development is quite a lot like low volume custom manufacturing for a complex product which is actually the kind of manufacturing my company does. Most of my time is actually spent engineering and specifying the product....
You may call it "manufacturing", but what you describe sounds like R&D to me, with manufacturing as the final step. That's a bit like referring to the entire process of specifying, designing, writing, and deploying a new software package as "software deployment".
âoeWe arenâ(TM)t seeking a backdoor approach. We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law,â FBI chief James B. Comey said at the Brookings Institution in October.
The "front door" is exactly where it's always been: you obtain a subpoena against the owner of the device requiring them to turn over the information in their possession.
There is no way to use a "front door" in secrecy, or without the cooperation (willing or otherwise) of the owner. Mechanisms for bypassing the owner's access controls or accessing the owner's property without the owner's knowledge are rightfully referred to as "back doors".
(Note: Not a warrant, a subpoena. A warrant would merely give them permission to seize the physical device and search it for information themselves; it wouldn't guarantee them access to the plaintext if the storage is encrypted. A subpoena would allow them to demand that you provide the decrypted data.)
Do you really think you could scrape up 10 or 20 percent of voters (at least 43 members of the House of Representatives, or 10 senators) willing to commit political suicide by opposing an acknowledged "essential function" for no better reason than to cause trouble?
Even if they did, so what? The bill just gets reintroduced after the next election. There is no government function so essential that losing it for a few years would mean the end of the world.
It's no different in manufacturing, construction or any other complex field.
Unless you're doing something extraordinarily boring, like porting existing software to a new (but well-understood) platform with few, if any, unknowns, software development isn't like manufacturing or construction—it's research and development. The analogue to manufacturing or construction would be software deployment, which actually does tend to meet predictable cost and schedule targets. But when has R&D ever been known to follow a fixed schedule?
Result would be large "omnibus" packages of laws as a single bills
Add a requirement for a 4/5 majority to pass any bill and those "omnibus" bills would be dead in the water. For that matter, a 9/10 minimum would not be unreasonable; the law should be written so as to enjoy widespread support, and not cater to a small majority at the expense of minorities. If 10 to 20 percent of the population objects to a bill, it probably shouldn't be on the books. Leave such provisions to smaller, more homogeneous areas—states, counties, municipalities—where consensus on such matters is not out of reach.
The more complex the bill, the harder it is to achieve consensus. Mix in lots of complex or controversial elements and everyone will be able to find some reason to vote against it. The only way to get a bill passed would be to make it small and focused and leave out anything controversial.
Basic income has exactly the same flaw, but worse. If you have an income of $100k/yr, basic income will not be very valuable to you, it may represent only 5% of your income.
That isn't the same flaw at all. The problem with basic services compared to basic income is that with basic services you have a gap or "cliff" which must be overcome before any effort you put in to improve your situation will be rewarded; a small effect may even make your situation worse. We see this issue today with welfare, where getting a regular job can disqualify you from welfare, creating a disincentive to work. This gap is most noticeable at the low end of the income scale, where basic income/services are most significant.
The problem of diminishing and/or negative returns for higher-income individuals is a problem with government and taxes in general, and has nothing to do with basic income or basic services in particular. It is thus out of scope for this thread. For the record, I'm opposed to both basic income and basic services (and taxes, public services, and government in general). But given a choice between three poor options, the current system, pure basic income, or pure basic services, I would pick basic income.
The Constitutional amendment, however, is an absolute necessity. There is no point whatsoever to implementing a basic income or basic services, or almost any other major reform (e.g. the so-called "Fair Tax"), unless you simultaneously repeal the old system and guarantee that the new one won't simply devolve back into the mess we have today. Without an amendment any talk of basic income or services is just so many empty campaign promises. If they did manage to get either implemented, but in addition to the current system and not as a replacement, I expect that it would make the situation worse rather than better.
Any argument on this subject that starts with "Americans won't do the work" is a lie.
Perhaps a more precise wording would be: "Some Americans won't permit other Americans to do the work." Certainly there are some who would be willing to do the same job for the same pay & benefits, and would see it as a step up from their present condition, but that isn't allowed because the offered terms aren't "good enough". So instead of a job on (arguably) poor terms they get no job at all.
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income.
While I sympathize with your intent, a major point of the "basic income" concept is that everyone starts out with the same basic income and anything they earn on their own is in addition to that. While you can say that in your proposal everyone starts out with the same basic services, not everyone will benefit from those services equally. For example, if you want something better than the minimal basic housing and pay for it yourself, you don't benefit at all from the basic housing service. This creates a threshold you must overcome before you can see any improvement. Under basic income, if you get $1000/mo. and out of that can afford minimal housing at, say, $500/mo., upgrading to better housing at $600/mo. just means that you need to go out and earn the additional $100/mo. Everything else stays the same. Under a basic services scheme, however, you would need to give up the basic housing service (effectively losing $500/mo.) and earn an extra $600/mo. to pay the full cost of the better housing.
Despite this problem, I do believe I could support either basic income or basic services, or a blend of the two, funded by a completely flat and Constitutionally limited VAT on manufactured goods (no penalties, no deductions, no exceptions) as an improvement over the current system, provided it fully replaced the current system for all provision of public services and all taxation, and that this exclusivity was written into the Constitution as an amendment. Otherwise I fear it is far too likely that this would come to merely co-exist with the current system and the primary benefits, simplicity and political neutrality, would be lost.
... as such it's an investment by the government on behalf of current taxpayers to increase tax revenue in the future; so sure, say free education isn't free, but amortized over the tax paying life of the student it costs YOU nothing.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it ignores changes in who the actual taxpayers are over time. There is also the fact that not everyone pays equal amounts of tax or receives a proportional share in the returns. The up-front cost of this so-called "investment" is payed by the current group of taxpayers in proportion to their tax rates, but the benefits, if any, will accrue to a different group sometime in the future, proportioned according to different criteria. Even over the life of the "loan", and assuming a competitive return-on-investment, you cannot reasonably claim that there will be no negative impact to any particular taxpayer.
They shouldn't be able to check against all your old passwords, but at least for the most recent one you generally need to enter both the old and new passwords together in order to implement a password change, to prove that you're the rightful owner of the account. Thus they don't need to have the old password on file to check for similarity, they can simply compare against what you just sent them.
Of course, a really secure system wouldn't include sending them the password at all—it should be used on the client to complete a zero-knowledge proof, and only the proof sent back to serve as authentication. Any similarity checks in that case would need to be done on the client, and could thus by bypassed by a determined enough user. But in practice the password is generally sent to the server for authentication, and if you're really lucky the connection is reasonably well encrypted and the server avoids storing the password in plaintext (or a functionally-equivalent weak cipher).
If I wanted to hold [$100,000] in Bitcoins, what is the recommended way?... How do I prove that a virus in a flash add on a website doesn't break in and start reading local data looking for a bitcoin wallet?
Get a TREZOR hardware wallet. During setup be sure to write the seed down on the included paper and store it in a secure place (a safe or deposit box). For extra peace-of-mind, combine this with a multi-signature address.
However, anytime someone faces consequences for their speech, whether from the government or private parties, it interferes with their freedom of speech, primarily through self-censorship.
The term "consequences" is too vague to be useful in this context. Every action has consequences in some form or another. Your freedom is not impacted unless those consequences include a change in your legal status, e.g. loss of property, or restrictions on your (non-aggressive) behavior or movement. In particular, your freedom does not extend to how others choose to think of you (reputation) or voluntarily interact with you. The freedom of speech is not infringed simply because someone else does not choose to help you distribute your message. Neither is it infringed by your own choice to impose self-censorship. It would be infringed by a threat of involuntary fines or imprisonment based in any way on the content of your speech.
Why should there be an incentive for people to grow their $5 million to $25 million? It no longer makes any difference to them.
You make a decent point. Having reached the point where money is "just a way of keeping score" and not directly correlated with quality of life, why do most rich individuals put in the effort to invest their funds into projects which ultimately benefit, not the investors, but rather a society at large which clearly doesn't appreciate them? Why not simply direct their accumulated savings into consumption, thus bidding up prices on consumer goods? Is it just force of habit, or is altruism perhaps more prevalent among the wealthy than the prevailing biases would suggest?
The biggest problem I personally have with C++ is operator overloads, which I think are just a bad idea.
The problem isn't so much operator overloads as it is C++-style overloading in general. Operators are just another kind of function. The problem with overloading them is that there is no common type signature or interface definition binding the various overloads together. That, and the limited set of available operators, which drives developers to reuse operator names for unrelated tasks. Even the STL sets a poor example by overloading bit-shift operators for I/O.
Contrast that with user-defined operators in Haskell, where overloading is only allowed in the context of a typeclass instance:
-- Monoid laws: -- x <> mempty == x -- mempty <> y == y -- (x <> y) <> z == x <> (y <> z) class Monoid a where { mempty:: a; (<>):: a -> a -> a; }
instance Num a => Monoid (Sum a) where { mempty = Sum 0; Sum x <> Sum y = Sum (x + y); }
instance Monoid [a] where { mempty = []; x <> y = x ++ y; }
There can be any number of instances of the Monoid typeclass, but for every implementation of the (<>) operator the arguments and result must be the same type, and (per the Monoid laws—which admittedly are only convention, and not enforced by the type system) the implementation must be associative and have mempty as its left and right identity. The same overloading rules apply to the named function mempty and the operator (<>). Since Haskell permits arbitrary sequences of symbols as operator names, there is little pressure to abuse existing operators to new purposes, and while Haskell libraries tend to make extensive use of custom operators one rarely encounters them same issues that C++ project face with operator overloading.
The nearest C++ equivalent would be to define the built-in operators as members of various abstract base classes, and only allow a named function or operator to be redefined in classes which inherit their interface from the relevant base class. This unfortunately runs into some issues regarding polymorphism due to limitations of C++'s type system; for example, the implementation of mempty needs to be selected based on its return type, while C++ only supports selecting a class based on the type of the implicit parameter "this".
Another approach would be breakable encryption with an auditable trail such that anyone who breaks an individual's encryption would have to defend such actions in court.
Fantasies don't count as viable alternatives.
First problem: A backdoor key which is available to law enforcement—who have every reason to view protecting your privacy as an extra expense with no benefit to them—might as well be public knowledge. Only you have the proper incentives to protect your private keys.
Second problem: Compliance would essentially be voluntary. Until the warrant is issued you would have no way to know whether the backdoor was actually implemented. The data could even be encrypted without a backdoor, then re-encrypted with one just to fool whatever technical measure you're using to detect non-backdoored encryption. The worst you could do would be to punish someone after the fact if it's discovered that they used an unapproved encryption scheme, but at that point you could already punish them for refusing to confess (or, equivalently, for refusing to turn over their decryption keys).
In short, mandatory backdoors would compromise everyone's security without actually guaranteeing law enforcement access.
So, other than being incomplete, it's complete, right?
No, it's complete, period. It may not contain every bit of software in the world, like Google's proprietary apps, but AOSP builds are usable on actual hardware in their own right. This is quite unlike the open-source fragments of iOS, which are just that: fragments.
Sure, both Android and iOS as shipped on most consumer devices contain some open-source parts and some proprietary parts, but let's not make a false equivalency here. Android, even without Google's applications, is a fully usable operating system for smartphones and tablets. Depending on the specific hardware in that smartphone or tablet you might need some closed-source drivers to enable functionality like graphics acceleration or Wi-Fi—which Google provides—but you do have the option of running AOSP on equivalent hardware which does have open-source drivers (e.g. Android on x86). iOS, on the other hand, is a predominately closed-source operating system with a few open-source components. The bits of iOS available as open source aren't even enough to give you a basic iOS-style user interface; none of the graphical parts are included, and even if they were, there are no publicly-available drivers which would allow you to run the open source parts on Apple's own hardware the way that Google supplies the drivers necessary to run AOSP builds with full functionality on the Nexus line of smartphones and tablets.
So, can you really expect to compile that and end up with something that you can load into your phone (and have it work?). No.
Yes, actually. The AOSP builds should work out of the box in the sense that you can load them onto an Android-compatible phone (with an unlocked bootloader) and run normal Android applications with the stock Android user interface. Some additional functionality may require the installation of closed-source drivers, most notably accelerated graphics and Wi-Fi. The closed-source drivers needed to run AOSP with full functionality on various Nexus devices are distributed for free by Google.
By contrast, while there are some open-source components in iOS, they only extend up to the UNIX core (Darwin) and do not include any of the user interface components. If you tried to build the open-source parts of iOS the result would not only be lacking support for various standard hardware (with no drivers available, open source or otherwise), it wouldn't even be an image you could load on your iPhone, and even if you manage to get a loadable image it wouldn't have a user interface. AOSP may lack the proprietary Google applications and open-source versions of some device drivers, but it otherwise comprises a complete operating system.
While I have a basic understanding about one-time pads and how they work, I realize that there must be something wrong with this idea but I don't know enough to figure out what.
There are vast amounts of publicly available documents on the Internet. Why can't Alice and Bob agree that they will use the text of the first article posted on Slashdot after noon Central Standard Time each day that they have a message to send as their one time pad?
That isn't a One-Time Pad. In OTP the pad is secret; in the scenario you just described, the content of the "pad" is public. The encryption key is thus not the pad itself, but rather just the identification of the pad ("1st article on Slashdot after noon CST"). Putting aside the fact that an article has relatively low entropy per character, someone with access to just one cyphertext could conceivably test it against a large database of likely public documents and identify the pad simply by looking for a document which decrypts the cyphertext into something intelligible. Given a couple of cyphertexts they could derive the rule you use to select your "pads". In a true OTP setup there is no way to determine whether a given pad decrypts the cyphertext since every possible plaintext has an equally plausible random pad, and even knowing both cyphertext and plaintext for the same message gets you no closer to being able to decode future messages.
So, if your potential boss or landlord or police officer doesn't recognize that people change, what the heck do you do?
For the first two, obviously, you either persuade them or you find someone else to work for / rent from. Freedom of association means that they have no obligation to hire you or rent out their property to you, regardless of the reason. Hiding information about your past which you know would be considered relevant amounts to fraud.
If your treatment by a police officer or any other representative of the government acting in an official capacity is influenced by outdated posts on social media sites, or anything else apart from your current standing under the law, you've got bigger issues. In any case, odds are that a law permitting you to delete your information from the Internet, even if it could somehow be implemented effectively, would not prevent the police from learning about your youthful indiscretions.
If you expect to need it, create the file/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq with the contents set to 1. This makes the key combo active by default, and survives rebooting.
The/proc directory is a virtual filesystem; nothing in there survives rebooting. If you want the sysrq keys to remain enabled after a reboot you need to write to that file from an init script.
There's nothing wrong with wanting it gone, perhaps, but what's wrong about enforcing that desire by law is that it amounts to trying to censor factual information about the past. You don't have to tell anyone about your more embarrassing historical moments, but it's wrong to forcibly prevent others from sharing what information they possess.
The right answer here is to simply recognize that people change, that it's normal to have some things in one's past that may be embarrassing (or even outright illegal), that everyone goes through this period of growing up, and that what one said or did as a child—or for that matter, as a younger adult—does not necessarily correlate with one's views or behavior in the present.
Slashdot Mirror
The constitution itself says that treaties with foreign governments are the highest law of the land.
The Constitution says that at the Constitution, U.S. law, and treaties are (together) the highest law of the land—in that order. It also says that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". That doesn't change regardless of what any treaty might say; a treaty is not a Constitutional amendment. If a treaty says that we have to pass an unconstitutional law, well, we'll just have to break that treaty, because Congress cannot grant itself powers specifically forbidden them in the Constitution through a mere treaty, any more than Congress could pass a law to the same effect.
Patents are supposed to be open, and should explain exactly how to do something to someone skilled in the art. In terms of knowledge, patents are much better than trade secrets this way.
That's the theory, but it fails on both the openness of patents and the effectiveness of trade secrets. "Best practice" for patent applicants is to do everything you can to ensure that the patent provides insufficient detail to recreate the invention, while still remaining enforceable. In exchange they provide they get a 20-year de jure monopoly, during which time whatever information they deigned to provide cannot be used by anyone else without their permission. By contrast, while the holder of a trade secret doesn't have to publish anything, the burden of keeping the trade secret is entirely on them, and in the modern world hardly anything about a product can truly remain secret for 20 years.
Having the choice of a patent or trade secret ensures that the invention will be kept out of the public domain for either 20 years or however long it can be kept as a trade secret, whichever is longer. To assume that the patent system would bring inventions into the public domain faster than trade secrets alone presumes that inventors are either irrational actors or incapable of producing reasonable estimates for how long they can maintain their trade secrets in the absence of patent protection.
TL;DR: Patents are neither necessary nor sufficient to speed up the passage of trade secrets into the public domain.
A freedom to do something is no protection from social enforcement of the consequences of you exercising that freedom.
Ridiculous. By that argument, everyone has the freedom to do absolutely anything they want—they might just get thrown in jail if it happens to violate a law. This makes a mockery of the very word "freedom".
If the law says that an action can lead to you being put in jail, fined, or otherwise deprived of your legal rights, you aren't free to do it. "Free" means "no strings attached". Within the legal domain, naturally; the freedom of speech has never included protection against possible social consequences. Others have every right to respond with speech of their own, or to withhold their support or association depending on how they feel about what you've said.
It's funny how everyone turns to the "fire in a crowded theater" case when discussing the limits of freedom of speech, because in addition to being logically unsound, that ruling was politically motivated with the clear intent of suppressing political speech by war protesters (Schenck v. United States). In other words, exactly the opposite of what freedom of speech is supposed to stand for, even by the strictest standards.
If the speech is false, and deliberately intended to manipulate others as tools for causing harm, not by their choice but by the choice of the speaker, and the actions these others chose to take based on the speech would not have been harmful if the speech had been true—then we can discuss whether a punishment is justified, not for the speech per se but for the harm that the speaker deliberately set out to achieve. But "(falsely) shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" is not that case. Whatever the speaker's intent, the actions of the listeners were not reasonable or justified even by the standard of what they believed to be true, and it is those unjustifiable actions which resulted in the harm, not the false speech.
... that treaty would trump any laws of a government in the USA. According to the Constitution, it would even trump the Constitution.
A common misconception. Treaties don't "trump" the U.S. Constitution, they form the highest law of the land alongside the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Treaties do take precedence over state constitutions and laws. The only thing that would trump the U.S. Constitution, however, would be an amendment or constitutional convention. The federal government cannot bypass its own constitutional limits by entering into treaties any more than it can grant itself unconstitutional powers by passing laws. Only the states can do that, by amending or replacing the Constitution.
Software development is quite a lot like low volume custom manufacturing for a complex product which is actually the kind of manufacturing my company does. Most of my time is actually spent engineering and specifying the product....
You may call it "manufacturing", but what you describe sounds like R&D to me, with manufacturing as the final step. That's a bit like referring to the entire process of specifying, designing, writing, and deploying a new software package as "software deployment".
âoeWe arenâ(TM)t seeking a backdoor approach. We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law,â FBI chief James B. Comey said at the Brookings Institution in October.
The "front door" is exactly where it's always been: you obtain a subpoena against the owner of the device requiring them to turn over the information in their possession.
There is no way to use a "front door" in secrecy, or without the cooperation (willing or otherwise) of the owner. Mechanisms for bypassing the owner's access controls or accessing the owner's property without the owner's knowledge are rightfully referred to as "back doors".
(Note: Not a warrant, a subpoena. A warrant would merely give them permission to seize the physical device and search it for information themselves; it wouldn't guarantee them access to the plaintext if the storage is encrypted. A subpoena would allow them to demand that you provide the decrypted data.)
Do you really think you could scrape up 10 or 20 percent of voters (at least 43 members of the House of Representatives, or 10 senators) willing to commit political suicide by opposing an acknowledged "essential function" for no better reason than to cause trouble?
Even if they did, so what? The bill just gets reintroduced after the next election. There is no government function so essential that losing it for a few years would mean the end of the world.
It's no different in manufacturing, construction or any other complex field.
Unless you're doing something extraordinarily boring, like porting existing software to a new (but well-understood) platform with few, if any, unknowns, software development isn't like manufacturing or construction—it's research and development. The analogue to manufacturing or construction would be software deployment, which actually does tend to meet predictable cost and schedule targets. But when has R&D ever been known to follow a fixed schedule?
Result would be large "omnibus" packages of laws as a single bills
Add a requirement for a 4/5 majority to pass any bill and those "omnibus" bills would be dead in the water. For that matter, a 9/10 minimum would not be unreasonable; the law should be written so as to enjoy widespread support, and not cater to a small majority at the expense of minorities. If 10 to 20 percent of the population objects to a bill, it probably shouldn't be on the books. Leave such provisions to smaller, more homogeneous areas—states, counties, municipalities—where consensus on such matters is not out of reach.
The more complex the bill, the harder it is to achieve consensus. Mix in lots of complex or controversial elements and everyone will be able to find some reason to vote against it. The only way to get a bill passed would be to make it small and focused and leave out anything controversial.
Basic income has exactly the same flaw, but worse. If you have an income of $100k/yr, basic income will not be very valuable to you, it may represent only 5% of your income.
That isn't the same flaw at all. The problem with basic services compared to basic income is that with basic services you have a gap or "cliff" which must be overcome before any effort you put in to improve your situation will be rewarded; a small effect may even make your situation worse. We see this issue today with welfare, where getting a regular job can disqualify you from welfare, creating a disincentive to work. This gap is most noticeable at the low end of the income scale, where basic income/services are most significant.
The problem of diminishing and/or negative returns for higher-income individuals is a problem with government and taxes in general, and has nothing to do with basic income or basic services in particular. It is thus out of scope for this thread. For the record, I'm opposed to both basic income and basic services (and taxes, public services, and government in general). But given a choice between three poor options, the current system, pure basic income, or pure basic services, I would pick basic income.
The Constitutional amendment, however, is an absolute necessity. There is no point whatsoever to implementing a basic income or basic services, or almost any other major reform (e.g. the so-called "Fair Tax"), unless you simultaneously repeal the old system and guarantee that the new one won't simply devolve back into the mess we have today. Without an amendment any talk of basic income or services is just so many empty campaign promises. If they did manage to get either implemented, but in addition to the current system and not as a replacement, I expect that it would make the situation worse rather than better.
Any argument on this subject that starts with "Americans won't do the work" is a lie.
Perhaps a more precise wording would be: "Some Americans won't permit other Americans to do the work." Certainly there are some who would be willing to do the same job for the same pay & benefits, and would see it as a step up from their present condition, but that isn't allowed because the offered terms aren't "good enough". So instead of a job on (arguably) poor terms they get no job at all.
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income.
While I sympathize with your intent, a major point of the "basic income" concept is that everyone starts out with the same basic income and anything they earn on their own is in addition to that. While you can say that in your proposal everyone starts out with the same basic services, not everyone will benefit from those services equally. For example, if you want something better than the minimal basic housing and pay for it yourself, you don't benefit at all from the basic housing service. This creates a threshold you must overcome before you can see any improvement. Under basic income, if you get $1000/mo. and out of that can afford minimal housing at, say, $500/mo., upgrading to better housing at $600/mo. just means that you need to go out and earn the additional $100/mo. Everything else stays the same. Under a basic services scheme, however, you would need to give up the basic housing service (effectively losing $500/mo.) and earn an extra $600/mo. to pay the full cost of the better housing.
Despite this problem, I do believe I could support either basic income or basic services, or a blend of the two, funded by a completely flat and Constitutionally limited VAT on manufactured goods (no penalties, no deductions, no exceptions) as an improvement over the current system, provided it fully replaced the current system for all provision of public services and all taxation, and that this exclusivity was written into the Constitution as an amendment. Otherwise I fear it is far too likely that this would come to merely co-exist with the current system and the primary benefits, simplicity and political neutrality, would be lost.
... as such it's an investment by the government on behalf of current taxpayers to increase tax revenue in the future; so sure, say free education isn't free, but amortized over the tax paying life of the student it costs YOU nothing.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it ignores changes in who the actual taxpayers are over time. There is also the fact that not everyone pays equal amounts of tax or receives a proportional share in the returns. The up-front cost of this so-called "investment" is payed by the current group of taxpayers in proportion to their tax rates, but the benefits, if any, will accrue to a different group sometime in the future, proportioned according to different criteria. Even over the life of the "loan", and assuming a competitive return-on-investment, you cannot reasonably claim that there will be no negative impact to any particular taxpayer.
They shouldn't be able to check against all your old passwords, but at least for the most recent one you generally need to enter both the old and new passwords together in order to implement a password change, to prove that you're the rightful owner of the account. Thus they don't need to have the old password on file to check for similarity, they can simply compare against what you just sent them.
Of course, a really secure system wouldn't include sending them the password at all—it should be used on the client to complete a zero-knowledge proof, and only the proof sent back to serve as authentication. Any similarity checks in that case would need to be done on the client, and could thus by bypassed by a determined enough user. But in practice the password is generally sent to the server for authentication, and if you're really lucky the connection is reasonably well encrypted and the server avoids storing the password in plaintext (or a functionally-equivalent weak cipher).
If I wanted to hold [$100,000] in Bitcoins, what is the recommended way? ... How do I prove that a virus in a flash add on a website doesn't break in and start reading local data looking for a bitcoin wallet?
Get a TREZOR hardware wallet. During setup be sure to write the seed down on the included paper and store it in a secure place (a safe or deposit box). For extra peace-of-mind, combine this with a multi-signature address.
However, anytime someone faces consequences for their speech, whether from the government or private parties, it interferes with their freedom of speech, primarily through self-censorship.
The term "consequences" is too vague to be useful in this context. Every action has consequences in some form or another. Your freedom is not impacted unless those consequences include a change in your legal status, e.g. loss of property, or restrictions on your (non-aggressive) behavior or movement. In particular, your freedom does not extend to how others choose to think of you (reputation) or voluntarily interact with you. The freedom of speech is not infringed simply because someone else does not choose to help you distribute your message. Neither is it infringed by your own choice to impose self-censorship. It would be infringed by a threat of involuntary fines or imprisonment based in any way on the content of your speech.
Why should there be an incentive for people to grow their $5 million to $25 million? It no longer makes any difference to them.
You make a decent point. Having reached the point where money is "just a way of keeping score" and not directly correlated with quality of life, why do most rich individuals put in the effort to invest their funds into projects which ultimately benefit, not the investors, but rather a society at large which clearly doesn't appreciate them? Why not simply direct their accumulated savings into consumption, thus bidding up prices on consumer goods? Is it just force of habit, or is altruism perhaps more prevalent among the wealthy than the prevailing biases would suggest?
The biggest problem I personally have with C++ is operator overloads, which I think are just a bad idea.
The problem isn't so much operator overloads as it is C++-style overloading in general. Operators are just another kind of function. The problem with overloading them is that there is no common type signature or interface definition binding the various overloads together. That, and the limited set of available operators, which drives developers to reuse operator names for unrelated tasks. Even the STL sets a poor example by overloading bit-shift operators for I/O.
Contrast that with user-defined operators in Haskell, where overloading is only allowed in the context of a typeclass instance:
There can be any number of instances of the Monoid typeclass, but for every implementation of the (<>) operator the arguments and result must be the same type, and (per the Monoid laws—which admittedly are only convention, and not enforced by the type system) the implementation must be associative and have mempty as its left and right identity. The same overloading rules apply to the named function mempty and the operator (<>). Since Haskell permits arbitrary sequences of symbols as operator names, there is little pressure to abuse existing operators to new purposes, and while Haskell libraries tend to make extensive use of custom operators one rarely encounters them same issues that C++ project face with operator overloading.
The nearest C++ equivalent would be to define the built-in operators as members of various abstract base classes, and only allow a named function or operator to be redefined in classes which inherit their interface from the relevant base class. This unfortunately runs into some issues regarding polymorphism due to limitations of C++'s type system; for example, the implementation of mempty needs to be selected based on its return type, while C++ only supports selecting a class based on the type of the implicit parameter "this".
Another approach would be breakable encryption with an auditable trail such that anyone who breaks an individual's encryption would have to defend such actions in court.
Fantasies don't count as viable alternatives.
First problem: A backdoor key which is available to law enforcement—who have every reason to view protecting your privacy as an extra expense with no benefit to them—might as well be public knowledge. Only you have the proper incentives to protect your private keys.
Second problem: Compliance would essentially be voluntary. Until the warrant is issued you would have no way to know whether the backdoor was actually implemented. The data could even be encrypted without a backdoor, then re-encrypted with one just to fool whatever technical measure you're using to detect non-backdoored encryption. The worst you could do would be to punish someone after the fact if it's discovered that they used an unapproved encryption scheme, but at that point you could already punish them for refusing to confess (or, equivalently, for refusing to turn over their decryption keys).
In short, mandatory backdoors would compromise everyone's security without actually guaranteeing law enforcement access.
So, other than being incomplete, it's complete, right?
No, it's complete, period. It may not contain every bit of software in the world, like Google's proprietary apps, but AOSP builds are usable on actual hardware in their own right. This is quite unlike the open-source fragments of iOS, which are just that: fragments.
Sure, both Android and iOS as shipped on most consumer devices contain some open-source parts and some proprietary parts, but let's not make a false equivalency here. Android, even without Google's applications, is a fully usable operating system for smartphones and tablets. Depending on the specific hardware in that smartphone or tablet you might need some closed-source drivers to enable functionality like graphics acceleration or Wi-Fi—which Google provides—but you do have the option of running AOSP on equivalent hardware which does have open-source drivers (e.g. Android on x86). iOS, on the other hand, is a predominately closed-source operating system with a few open-source components. The bits of iOS available as open source aren't even enough to give you a basic iOS-style user interface; none of the graphical parts are included, and even if they were, there are no publicly-available drivers which would allow you to run the open source parts on Apple's own hardware the way that Google supplies the drivers necessary to run AOSP builds with full functionality on the Nexus line of smartphones and tablets.
So, can you really expect to compile that and end up with something that you can load into your phone (and have it work?). No.
Yes, actually. The AOSP builds should work out of the box in the sense that you can load them onto an Android-compatible phone (with an unlocked bootloader) and run normal Android applications with the stock Android user interface. Some additional functionality may require the installation of closed-source drivers, most notably accelerated graphics and Wi-Fi. The closed-source drivers needed to run AOSP with full functionality on various Nexus devices are distributed for free by Google.
By contrast, while there are some open-source components in iOS, they only extend up to the UNIX core (Darwin) and do not include any of the user interface components. If you tried to build the open-source parts of iOS the result would not only be lacking support for various standard hardware (with no drivers available, open source or otherwise), it wouldn't even be an image you could load on your iPhone, and even if you manage to get a loadable image it wouldn't have a user interface. AOSP may lack the proprietary Google applications and open-source versions of some device drivers, but it otherwise comprises a complete operating system.
While I have a basic understanding about one-time pads and how they work, I realize that there must be something wrong with this idea but I don't know enough to figure out what.
There are vast amounts of publicly available documents on the Internet. Why can't Alice and Bob agree that they will use the text of the first article posted on Slashdot after noon Central Standard Time each day that they have a message to send as their one time pad?
That isn't a One-Time Pad. In OTP the pad is secret; in the scenario you just described, the content of the "pad" is public. The encryption key is thus not the pad itself, but rather just the identification of the pad ("1st article on Slashdot after noon CST"). Putting aside the fact that an article has relatively low entropy per character, someone with access to just one cyphertext could conceivably test it against a large database of likely public documents and identify the pad simply by looking for a document which decrypts the cyphertext into something intelligible. Given a couple of cyphertexts they could derive the rule you use to select your "pads". In a true OTP setup there is no way to determine whether a given pad decrypts the cyphertext since every possible plaintext has an equally plausible random pad, and even knowing both cyphertext and plaintext for the same message gets you no closer to being able to decode future messages.
So, if your potential boss or landlord or police officer doesn't recognize that people change, what the heck do you do?
For the first two, obviously, you either persuade them or you find someone else to work for / rent from. Freedom of association means that they have no obligation to hire you or rent out their property to you, regardless of the reason. Hiding information about your past which you know would be considered relevant amounts to fraud.
If your treatment by a police officer or any other representative of the government acting in an official capacity is influenced by outdated posts on social media sites, or anything else apart from your current standing under the law, you've got bigger issues. In any case, odds are that a law permitting you to delete your information from the Internet, even if it could somehow be implemented effectively, would not prevent the police from learning about your youthful indiscretions.
If you expect to need it, create the file /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq with the contents set to 1. This makes the key combo active by default, and survives rebooting.
The /proc directory is a virtual filesystem; nothing in there survives rebooting. If you want the sysrq keys to remain enabled after a reboot you need to write to that file from an init script.
What's wrong with wanting it gone?
There's nothing wrong with wanting it gone, perhaps, but what's wrong about enforcing that desire by law is that it amounts to trying to censor factual information about the past. You don't have to tell anyone about your more embarrassing historical moments, but it's wrong to forcibly prevent others from sharing what information they possess.
The right answer here is to simply recognize that people change, that it's normal to have some things in one's past that may be embarrassing (or even outright illegal), that everyone goes through this period of growing up, and that what one said or did as a child—or for that matter, as a younger adult—does not necessarily correlate with one's views or behavior in the present.