If a police department has shown probable cause to a judge and obtained a warrant to search a particular device with a particular owner,...
... then the owner is expected to stand aside while the police department searches and/or seizes the device, the legal system having decided to disregard the owner's property rights to the extent they deem necessary to conduct their investigation. That's it. Nothing about a warrant entitles law enforcement to the active assistance of the device's owner in either unlocking the device or translating any enciphered data into plaintext. That is not what warrants are for. The only thing a warrant gets them, legally, is license to ignore the owner's property rights over the device. Everything else, from locating the device to taking it into custody to making sense of whatever data it may contain, is their responsibility.
If a warrant were sufficient to guarantee the owner's active cooperation they would just issue a warrant compelling the accused to declare his or her guilt or innocence. After all, that's the information they're really searching for.
Is being locked out a problem if you have trillions of IPv6 addresses to try from?
They're not going to block one throwaway IP address at a time; not if they're being smart about it, anyway. They'll block the entire prefix assigned to your account. No one should be allocated a subnet smaller than/64 (it would break automatic address assignment, among other things) so this is roughly equivalent to blocking a single IPv4 address.
The discounts can't be very big since the whole point of insurance is that non-claimants pay the premiums to cover the less numerous claimants. If you keep lowering premiums for the lower risk categories, where does the money to pay out claims come from?
Low-risk customers subsidizing high-risk customers is not how insurance is supposed to work. If you have lower risks then you should be paying lower premiums. Now it is true, in hindsight, that the premiums paid by non-claimants cover the costs incurred by claimants, but this should average out so that each customer's expected future cost (the cost if the risk is realized multiplied by the probability that the risk will be realized) at any given point in time is in line with the premiums. Otherwise, given a chance, the overpaying low-risk customers will switch to an insurer offering them a better deal (or self-insure) and the original insurer will be forced to either raise rates to suite the higher expected cost of the customers they have left or else go out of business. Unless the government intervenes to prevent low-risk customers from leaving, of course—but at that point what you have is no longer insurance but rather an awkwardly structured welfare program, funded through artificially high premiums on low-risk individuals in place of taxes.
This would be like a joyrider giving the car back and you saying it should be given to the neigbour.
Not even close. Both Ireland and Apple assert that the money belongs to Apple, not Ireland. The EU is stepping in and saying that Ireland must take more of Apple's money in order to comply with EU treaties. In effect the EU is acting as if this money belong to the EU, not Apple or Ireland, to allocate as the EU sees fit.
The EU's problem is with their treaty partner—which is Ireland, not Apple—but their response to this supposed treaty violation is apparently to hand the offender—Ireland—an extra $16 billion. This makes no sense. From an incentive point of view (and disregarding the moral issues with taxation in general) if the EU wants to set a tax floor then the EU should just claim the difference between what Ireland actually collected in taxes and what the EU treaties say they should have collected for itself so that other member countries won't be tempted to make similar arrangements. The precedent set by this Ireland case is that it can be profitable for member countries to violate the treaties; in the end they get the money and an established corporate headquarters.
Easier to throw out hours and minutes entirely and just use the official metric base unit for time as it is. One kilosecond (16.7 minutes) would be the primary interval for scheduling purposes; 7 AM would become 25ks, 1:30 PM would be 50ks, and 9 PM would be 75ks. The 8-5 workday would run from 30-60ks. Tenths (0.1ks = 100s) would take the place of minutes.
The length of the day varies anyway depending on leap seconds and the like. Approximately 86.4ks is good enough IMHO.
One interesting variation would be to define zero as sunrise rather than midnight (plus or minus 2-3ks to keep nearby areas on the same time, similar to time zones), which would mean that the length of the day, measured from sunrise to sunrise, would vary throughout the year. Negative numbers would denote earlier times (-4ks ~= an hour before sunrise). This is a bit more complex, but since it naturally follows the start of daylight it avoids the need for sharp adjustments to either timekeeping or schedules between summer and winter.
Same reason we don't show the port number - it's usually pointless information that is irrelevant.
The port number is only hidden when it's equal to the standard port number. If you see an HTTP or HTTPS URL without an explicit port number you still know exactly what the port is. The same is not true for domain names: with this UI change, "example.com" in the address bar could represent either "example.com" or "www.example.com", which do not necessarily refer to the same content, or even the same server.
I don't see this as "simplifying" the UI. A better term would be "simplistic". UIs should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". The rule that "www.example.com" can be shortened to "example.com" is too simple; that transformation loses information, and in doing so misleads the user about which site they're visiting, unless they're sophisticated enough to ignore what Chrome chooses to shows them and instead double-click on the address bar to get the real URL.
If the goal is to simplify URLs, Google would do better to start an information campaign encouraging webmasters to drop the "www." prefix in links and marketing materials and implement a server-side redirect to the unadorned name in case users type it in anyway. However, the real problem isn't an obsolete prefix in the domain name but rather the long and cryptic path and/or query string which typically follows it.
...my Gmail account name is very similar to another person's... Our email addresses are different by a single dot. To make it worse, I frequently forward his mail to him; but it bounces back to my account...
Gmail doesn't consider the dots significant: jane.doe@gmail.com, janedoe@gmail.com, and j.a.n.e.d.o.e@gmail.com all refer to the same account. You've been "forwarding" these emails to yourself.
It's the state that keeps the money and gives interest to citizens.
What interest? Real interest—a positive return on investment after adjusting for inflation—requires that the investments themselves be productive and contribute to overall economic growth. It's easy to give away "free" money (just print more), but it's a lot harder to give away "free" goods and services. Someone still has to produce them, and they're going to want something of value (i.e. not worthless "free" money) in exchange.
It doesn't matter whether the middle-men in this scenario are banks or the federal government; if everyone is trying to throw a few million dollars into "safe" index funds then the supply of money in the stock market will far outstrip demand and return-on-investment will be minimal.
I really don't care if you secede from society and pay no taxes. Strangely enough, people who want to refuse to pay taxes still feel entitled to use facilities and services paid for with their tax money.
FTFY. You aren't given the option of refusing. Even if you would prefer not to pay taxes, and advocate for the same, there is nothing hypocritical about continuing to use facilities and services which you are are, in fact, still paying for, however much you would prefer otherwise. And then, of course, there all the rules and regulations which prevent you from providing many of these services on your own—you can hardly complain that someone turns to public services when you actively prevent them from being provided any other way.
Ayn Rand raged against social security all her life but ended her life on social security which makes her a hypocrite.
She was forced to pay social security taxes all her life, even while advocating against it, and those taxes prevented her from investing that money for her own retirement. There is nothing hypocritical about expecting something in return.
What the government did do was to garnish their wages.
And how exactly did they enforce that, if not with guns? (Literally or metaphorically—any direct or indirect use or threat of force counts, whether or not it actually involves firearms.)
XDA has a total of 6.6m users in total. Lets ignore that most of those users are inactive, and that most of them won't be about huawei phones. Lets also assume people buy a phone every 2 years.... That means that, in a completely ridiculous use case which we know is overblown, under %2 of their user base will be effected.
Besides the assumptions other have already commented on, what makes you think only active XDA users care about unlocking their phones? I don't have an account on XDA, but just the same I've passed over otherwise attractive phones before because they couldn't be unlocked without begging permission from the manufacturer. (Huawei was already disqualified due to requiring device-specific unlock codes, which they could stop providing at any time.)
Right. It doesn't matter whether you're making it to sell for cash, for barter, or as a gift. The GP claimed that it couldn't be sold at all, so I limited my response to that subject, but the main point is that it has to be made for your own personal use. Once it's been legally manufactured for your own use, however, there is no restriction against trading it or giving it away if you so choose.
Good point. The thread started out talking about the 2nd Amendment, but it's the 1st that refers to "abridging the freedom of speech". The 2nd Amendment is considerably more direct with "shall not be infringed".
Either way, the GP's bizarre statement that it's OK to set conditions and limitations on these rights (1st or 2nd Amendment) so long as a "path" or "bridge" is left open to exercising them is obviously nonsense. Any conditions or limitations Congress might attach to the exercise of these rights would both abridge and infringe them.
That is not what "abridge" means. Even considering archaic versions. The origin of "abridge" according to Merriam-Webster is:
Middle English abreggen, abriggen "to reduce, diminish, shorten," borrowed from Anglo-French abreger, going back to Late Latin abbreviare, from Latin ad- + breviare "to shorten, abridge," verbal derivative of brevis "short"
As you can see, it has nothing at all to do with bridges or paths.
The legal definition is "to diminish or reduce in scope". As in: the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be diminished or reduced in scope.
It's illegal to make a gun and sell it.. But, what if you make the gun, use it for 20 years, give it to your son, and he sells it?
It's illegal to make a gun for the purpose of selling it unless you're licensed. However, it's perfectly legal to make one for yourself and later sell it, though the burden of proof will be on you to show that you didn't make it specifically for resale. In your example the gun was clearly made for personal use, with twenty years of use between manufacture and sale, so the son shouldn't encounter any difficulties.
Choosing to yell fire with the intent to cause panic is not [legal].
Lest we forget... that conclusion is based on a single poor ruling the Supreme Court made only under duress, whose real purpose was to justify the suppression of political speech opposing the draft, an obvious violation of the First Amendment. The ruling was wrong with respect to speech against the draft, and it was equally wrong with respect to the analogy about falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The only ones justly responsible for any harm caused by panicked people trampling others in their attempt to exit the theater are the ones who panicked. If they had not lost control of themselves then the incident would have ended with nothing worse than some wasted time—enough to get the instigator banned from the theater by its management, perhaps, but nothing more.
Prices are ALWAYS controlled by the whim of the seller.
That's only true when the seller has a monopoly on the product, or to a lesser extent when the product is controlled by a cartel. In a competitive market sellers don't get to set prices according to their own whims; if the price is much above the cost of production, resulting in an economic profit, then more producers will join in until the extra supply drives down the price.
The problem is copyright, a mechanism specifically designed to create monopolies in the market for distribution of creative works. Without copyright the service of distributing existing works would be essentially free, and supply and demand would dictate the prices for the creation of new works, which is a fairly competitive market.
enough concrete to guarantee that a direct hit by a jumbo jet won't cause a nuclear explosion
A direct hit by a jumbo jet wouldn't cause a nuclear explosion even without the concrete. It's actually fairly difficult to get nuclear fuel to reach critical mass and explode—a nuclear bomb does it by packing enriched fuel inside a shell of high explosives very carefully shaped to focus the force of the explosion and maximize the pressure. We're not talking about nitroglycerin here; simple impact isn't enough to set it off. In a power plant the fuel is spread out and mixed with neutron moderators, not compacted together in one place, and the entire design is based around keeping the reaction going without allowing any part of the fuel to reach critical mass. Which is not to say that a jet crashing into a nuke plant wouldn't be an issue, but the risk would be loss of containment followed by a gradual release of radioactive materials into the environment, not an explosion; a major cleanup effort, not a smoking crater where the power plant used to be.
To begin with, no one should be legally liable for anything that is said
Oh, you're a nut job. Nevermind.
Care to explain? I always thought you supported the freedom of speech. Perhaps I was wrong about that, but I'm hoping you simply misunderstood.
One is not free to speak if one can legally be punished for what one said.
There's only one carve-out in the law for not being liable for content you distribute...
Yeah—the First Amendment, which applies to everyone, even Facebook. Regardless of whether it's considered Facebook's speech or the users' speech, it's still speech.
... is Facebook a common carrier, carrying everything legal without discrimination and free from liability, or is it a publisher, exercising editorial discretion, and thus liable for libel and incitement?
Or is it a private service offered voluntarily to members of the public so long as they follow the service provider's terms, with the freedom to kick people out (or not) at their own discretion for violating those terms and no undue liability for what other people may choose to say?
This attempt to force a choice between "common carrier" vs. "liable for what other people say" is a false dichotomy. To begin with, no one should be legally liable for anything that is said—that's a fundamental part of freedom of speech, that liability follows only for what one does, not what one says. The service provider cannot be an "accessory" to a speech-crime which does not, and cannot, exist in our legal system according to the Constitution. In addition, failing to stop someone from speaking, even when one has the technical capability to do so, is not even remotely close to the same thing as endorsing or promoting that speech. Each participant is clearly speaking on their own behalf, not on behalf of the service provider. The closest traditional equivalent would be something like "letters to the editor". There is no obligation to publish every such letter one receives, but even letters containing hateful speech might be published (unconditionally or selectively) for the purpose of providing context for a response, or in order to give the public a chance to respond, without making the platform responsible for the content of the letter.
Land ownership is a weak excuse used to deprive others of a say in how things are run.
Perhaps, but lack of ownership is a great reason to deprive others of a say in how the landowners' property is used.
If the landowners are getting together to pass laws and impose their own rules on non-landowners (with or without some token "representation", which doesn't matter as long as the landowners have the final say) then that's a problem. However, it's just as much a problem if the non-landowners band together to take the landowner's property or set restrictions on how it can be used. The problem is this underlying assumption that one group (whether landowners, royalty aristocracy, or democratic majority) has the right to impose their will on another group (non-landowners, commoners, minorities). Either convince the other group(s) to work with you voluntarily or leave them—and their property—alone.
There is a thing in socioeconomics called the "Mackenroth thesis". It says that the social expenditure of a given time period can only be generated in the same time period.
That's interesting, but what does it have to do with the real world, where goods can be produced and saved for the future rather than being consumed immediately? It is true that there are some perishable goods which cannot be saved, but these are in the minority. It is perfectly possible, albeit not very efficient, to purchase and store all the durable goods one will need during retirement while one is working, including capital equipment to aid in the production of necessary non-durable goods, instead of saving up money. Those goods will be generated during one time period (while one is working) and expended during another (after one retires).
... and it plays no role if the money is printed on paper or coined in precious metals, because precious metals also have only the value we give them at the time we exchange them, as they have no intrinsic value.
All value is extrinsic. No good or service has any "intrinsic" value beyond what we give it. Precious metals do have intrinsic properties which tend to make them valuable for purposes other than trade. For that matter, even paper money has some intrinsic utility (as decorated paper), though it's considerably less suited to industrial or aesthetic uses than gold or silver. For example, you could paper the walls of your house with it, or even use the fibers for structural features with the right binder. Of course, a $20 bill doesn't have much more utility than a $1 bill for non-monetary purposes, unlike $20 worth of gold vs. $1 worth of gold; that's the difference between artificial and natural scarcity.
Providing non-working people, may they be retired, too young for work, sick or just unemployed, with goods and services is always a redistribution of wealth.
If you ignore the economic value of money (and the distinction between voluntary exchange and theft) then every indirect exchange is going to involve some degree of "redistribution". That is a consequence of putting on blinders and ignoring half of the exchange. In fact no redistribution is occurring; both sides agreed to the trade voluntarily and, on average, received goods of equal or greater value (from their own point of view) to those they offered in exchange. If either side did not expect to receive something of equal or greater value to what they were giving up the trade would not take place.
Exchanging goods for money is not redistribution of wealth. Saving money while working in order to spend it during retirement is not redistribution. This is just the ordinary, voluntary original distribution of goods which occurs in any unfettered market economy. Redistribution only occurs when goods are taken by force from the group to which they were naturally and voluntarily distributed and handed to some other group to which they were not naturally distributed.
Slashdot Mirror
If a police department has shown probable cause to a judge and obtained a warrant to search a particular device with a particular owner, ...
... then the owner is expected to stand aside while the police department searches and/or seizes the device, the legal system having decided to disregard the owner's property rights to the extent they deem necessary to conduct their investigation. That's it. Nothing about a warrant entitles law enforcement to the active assistance of the device's owner in either unlocking the device or translating any enciphered data into plaintext. That is not what warrants are for. The only thing a warrant gets them, legally, is license to ignore the owner's property rights over the device. Everything else, from locating the device to taking it into custody to making sense of whatever data it may contain, is their responsibility.
If a warrant were sufficient to guarantee the owner's active cooperation they would just issue a warrant compelling the accused to declare his or her guilt or innocence. After all, that's the information they're really searching for.
Let's just use paper ballots
Good news! They already took your advice. This article is about a problem with a voting machine which tallies paper ballots.
Is being locked out a problem if you have trillions of IPv6 addresses to try from?
They're not going to block one throwaway IP address at a time; not if they're being smart about it, anyway. They'll block the entire prefix assigned to your account. No one should be allocated a subnet smaller than /64 (it would break automatic address assignment, among other things) so this is roughly equivalent to blocking a single IPv4 address.
The discounts can't be very big since the whole point of insurance is that non-claimants pay the premiums to cover the less numerous claimants. If you keep lowering premiums for the lower risk categories, where does the money to pay out claims come from?
Low-risk customers subsidizing high-risk customers is not how insurance is supposed to work. If you have lower risks then you should be paying lower premiums. Now it is true, in hindsight, that the premiums paid by non-claimants cover the costs incurred by claimants, but this should average out so that each customer's expected future cost (the cost if the risk is realized multiplied by the probability that the risk will be realized) at any given point in time is in line with the premiums. Otherwise, given a chance, the overpaying low-risk customers will switch to an insurer offering them a better deal (or self-insure) and the original insurer will be forced to either raise rates to suite the higher expected cost of the customers they have left or else go out of business. Unless the government intervenes to prevent low-risk customers from leaving, of course—but at that point what you have is no longer insurance but rather an awkwardly structured welfare program, funded through artificially high premiums on low-risk individuals in place of taxes.
This would be like a joyrider giving the car back and you saying it should be given to the neigbour.
Not even close. Both Ireland and Apple assert that the money belongs to Apple, not Ireland. The EU is stepping in and saying that Ireland must take more of Apple's money in order to comply with EU treaties. In effect the EU is acting as if this money belong to the EU, not Apple or Ireland, to allocate as the EU sees fit.
The EU's problem is with their treaty partner—which is Ireland, not Apple—but their response to this supposed treaty violation is apparently to hand the offender—Ireland—an extra $16 billion. This makes no sense. From an incentive point of view (and disregarding the moral issues with taxation in general) if the EU wants to set a tax floor then the EU should just claim the difference between what Ireland actually collected in taxes and what the EU treaties say they should have collected for itself so that other member countries won't be tempted to make similar arrangements. The precedent set by this Ireland case is that it can be profitable for member countries to violate the treaties; in the end they get the money and an established corporate headquarters.
[...metric time...]
Easier to throw out hours and minutes entirely and just use the official metric base unit for time as it is. One kilosecond (16.7 minutes) would be the primary interval for scheduling purposes; 7 AM would become 25ks, 1:30 PM would be 50ks, and 9 PM would be 75ks. The 8-5 workday would run from 30-60ks. Tenths (0.1ks = 100s) would take the place of minutes.
The length of the day varies anyway depending on leap seconds and the like. Approximately 86.4ks is good enough IMHO.
One interesting variation would be to define zero as sunrise rather than midnight (plus or minus 2-3ks to keep nearby areas on the same time, similar to time zones), which would mean that the length of the day, measured from sunrise to sunrise, would vary throughout the year. Negative numbers would denote earlier times (-4ks ~= an hour before sunrise). This is a bit more complex, but since it naturally follows the start of daylight it avoids the need for sharp adjustments to either timekeeping or schedules between summer and winter.
If he is, you should change your Gmail password so that he can no longer read your email.
Same reason we don't show the port number - it's usually pointless information that is irrelevant.
The port number is only hidden when it's equal to the standard port number. If you see an HTTP or HTTPS URL without an explicit port number you still know exactly what the port is. The same is not true for domain names: with this UI change, "example.com" in the address bar could represent either "example.com" or "www.example.com", which do not necessarily refer to the same content, or even the same server.
I don't see this as "simplifying" the UI. A better term would be "simplistic". UIs should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". The rule that "www.example.com" can be shortened to "example.com" is too simple; that transformation loses information, and in doing so misleads the user about which site they're visiting, unless they're sophisticated enough to ignore what Chrome chooses to shows them and instead double-click on the address bar to get the real URL.
If the goal is to simplify URLs, Google would do better to start an information campaign encouraging webmasters to drop the "www." prefix in links and marketing materials and implement a server-side redirect to the unadorned name in case users type it in anyway. However, the real problem isn't an obsolete prefix in the domain name but rather the long and cryptic path and/or query string which typically follows it.
...my Gmail account name is very similar to another person's... Our email addresses are different by a single dot. To make it worse, I frequently forward his mail to him; but it bounces back to my account...
Gmail doesn't consider the dots significant: jane.doe@gmail.com, janedoe@gmail.com, and j.a.n.e.d.o.e@gmail.com all refer to the same account. You've been "forwarding" these emails to yourself.
It's the state that keeps the money and gives interest to citizens.
What interest? Real interest—a positive return on investment after adjusting for inflation—requires that the investments themselves be productive and contribute to overall economic growth. It's easy to give away "free" money (just print more), but it's a lot harder to give away "free" goods and services. Someone still has to produce them, and they're going to want something of value (i.e. not worthless "free" money) in exchange.
It doesn't matter whether the middle-men in this scenario are banks or the federal government; if everyone is trying to throw a few million dollars into "safe" index funds then the supply of money in the stock market will far outstrip demand and return-on-investment will be minimal.
I really don't care if you secede from society and pay no taxes. Strangely enough, people who want to refuse to pay taxes still feel entitled to use facilities and services paid for with their tax money.
FTFY. You aren't given the option of refusing. Even if you would prefer not to pay taxes, and advocate for the same, there is nothing hypocritical about continuing to use facilities and services which you are are, in fact, still paying for, however much you would prefer otherwise. And then, of course, there all the rules and regulations which prevent you from providing many of these services on your own—you can hardly complain that someone turns to public services when you actively prevent them from being provided any other way.
Ayn Rand raged against social security all her life but ended her life on social security which makes her a hypocrite.
She was forced to pay social security taxes all her life, even while advocating against it, and those taxes prevented her from investing that money for her own retirement. There is nothing hypocritical about expecting something in return.
What the government did do was to garnish their wages.
And how exactly did they enforce that, if not with guns? (Literally or metaphorically—any direct or indirect use or threat of force counts, whether or not it actually involves firearms.)
XDA has a total of 6.6m users in total. Lets ignore that most of those users are inactive, and that most of them won't be about huawei phones. Lets also assume people buy a phone every 2 years. ... That means that, in a completely ridiculous use case which we know is overblown, under %2 of their user base will be effected.
Besides the assumptions other have already commented on, what makes you think only active XDA users care about unlocking their phones? I don't have an account on XDA, but just the same I've passed over otherwise attractive phones before because they couldn't be unlocked without begging permission from the manufacturer. (Huawei was already disqualified due to requiring device-specific unlock codes, which they could stop providing at any time.)
And it doesn't matter whether you sell it or not.
Right. It doesn't matter whether you're making it to sell for cash, for barter, or as a gift. The GP claimed that it couldn't be sold at all, so I limited my response to that subject, but the main point is that it has to be made for your own personal use. Once it's been legally manufactured for your own use, however, there is no restriction against trading it or giving it away if you so choose.
Good point. The thread started out talking about the 2nd Amendment, but it's the 1st that refers to "abridging the freedom of speech". The 2nd Amendment is considerably more direct with "shall not be infringed".
Either way, the GP's bizarre statement that it's OK to set conditions and limitations on these rights (1st or 2nd Amendment) so long as a "path" or "bridge" is left open to exercising them is obviously nonsense. Any conditions or limitations Congress might attach to the exercise of these rights would both abridge and infringe them.
Abridge literally means you left no bridge
That is not what "abridge" means. Even considering archaic versions. The origin of "abridge" according to Merriam-Webster is:
Middle English abreggen, abriggen "to reduce, diminish, shorten," borrowed from Anglo-French abreger, going back to Late Latin abbreviare, from Latin ad- + breviare "to shorten, abridge," verbal derivative of brevis "short"
As you can see, it has nothing at all to do with bridges or paths.
The legal definition is "to diminish or reduce in scope". As in: the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be diminished or reduced in scope.
It's illegal to make a gun and sell it.. But, what if you make the gun, use it for 20 years, give it to your son, and he sells it?
It's illegal to make a gun for the purpose of selling it unless you're licensed. However, it's perfectly legal to make one for yourself and later sell it, though the burden of proof will be on you to show that you didn't make it specifically for resale. In your example the gun was clearly made for personal use, with twenty years of use between manufacture and sale, so the son shouldn't encounter any difficulties.
Choosing to yell fire with the intent to cause panic is not [legal].
Lest we forget... that conclusion is based on a single poor ruling the Supreme Court made only under duress, whose real purpose was to justify the suppression of political speech opposing the draft, an obvious violation of the First Amendment. The ruling was wrong with respect to speech against the draft, and it was equally wrong with respect to the analogy about falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The only ones justly responsible for any harm caused by panicked people trampling others in their attempt to exit the theater are the ones who panicked. If they had not lost control of themselves then the incident would have ended with nothing worse than some wasted time—enough to get the instigator banned from the theater by its management, perhaps, but nothing more.
Prices are ALWAYS controlled by the whim of the seller.
That's only true when the seller has a monopoly on the product, or to a lesser extent when the product is controlled by a cartel. In a competitive market sellers don't get to set prices according to their own whims; if the price is much above the cost of production, resulting in an economic profit, then more producers will join in until the extra supply drives down the price.
The problem is copyright, a mechanism specifically designed to create monopolies in the market for distribution of creative works. Without copyright the service of distributing existing works would be essentially free, and supply and demand would dictate the prices for the creation of new works, which is a fairly competitive market.
enough concrete to guarantee that a direct hit by a jumbo jet won't cause a nuclear explosion
A direct hit by a jumbo jet wouldn't cause a nuclear explosion even without the concrete. It's actually fairly difficult to get nuclear fuel to reach critical mass and explode—a nuclear bomb does it by packing enriched fuel inside a shell of high explosives very carefully shaped to focus the force of the explosion and maximize the pressure. We're not talking about nitroglycerin here; simple impact isn't enough to set it off. In a power plant the fuel is spread out and mixed with neutron moderators, not compacted together in one place, and the entire design is based around keeping the reaction going without allowing any part of the fuel to reach critical mass. Which is not to say that a jet crashing into a nuke plant wouldn't be an issue, but the risk would be loss of containment followed by a gradual release of radioactive materials into the environment, not an explosion; a major cleanup effort, not a smoking crater where the power plant used to be.
To begin with, no one should be legally liable for anything that is said
Oh, you're a nut job. Nevermind.
Care to explain? I always thought you supported the freedom of speech. Perhaps I was wrong about that, but I'm hoping you simply misunderstood.
One is not free to speak if one can legally be punished for what one said.
There's only one carve-out in the law for not being liable for content you distribute...
Yeah—the First Amendment, which applies to everyone, even Facebook. Regardless of whether it's considered Facebook's speech or the users' speech, it's still speech.
... is Facebook a common carrier, carrying everything legal without discrimination and free from liability, or is it a publisher, exercising editorial discretion, and thus liable for libel and incitement?
Or is it a private service offered voluntarily to members of the public so long as they follow the service provider's terms, with the freedom to kick people out (or not) at their own discretion for violating those terms and no undue liability for what other people may choose to say?
This attempt to force a choice between "common carrier" vs. "liable for what other people say" is a false dichotomy. To begin with, no one should be legally liable for anything that is said—that's a fundamental part of freedom of speech, that liability follows only for what one does, not what one says. The service provider cannot be an "accessory" to a speech-crime which does not, and cannot, exist in our legal system according to the Constitution. In addition, failing to stop someone from speaking, even when one has the technical capability to do so, is not even remotely close to the same thing as endorsing or promoting that speech. Each participant is clearly speaking on their own behalf, not on behalf of the service provider. The closest traditional equivalent would be something like "letters to the editor". There is no obligation to publish every such letter one receives, but even letters containing hateful speech might be published (unconditionally or selectively) for the purpose of providing context for a response, or in order to give the public a chance to respond, without making the platform responsible for the content of the letter.
Land ownership is a weak excuse used to deprive others of a say in how things are run.
Perhaps, but lack of ownership is a great reason to deprive others of a say in how the landowners' property is used.
If the landowners are getting together to pass laws and impose their own rules on non-landowners (with or without some token "representation", which doesn't matter as long as the landowners have the final say) then that's a problem. However, it's just as much a problem if the non-landowners band together to take the landowner's property or set restrictions on how it can be used. The problem is this underlying assumption that one group (whether landowners, royalty aristocracy, or democratic majority) has the right to impose their will on another group (non-landowners, commoners, minorities). Either convince the other group(s) to work with you voluntarily or leave them—and their property—alone.
A physical book, is harder to take away from you, as even if it becomes illegal, it can be hidden, locked up, but still accessible.
A DRM-free ebook is a lot easier to hide than a physical book. This is an argument against DRM, not in favor of physical books.
There is a thing in socioeconomics called the "Mackenroth thesis". It says that the social expenditure of a given time period can only be generated in the same time period.
That's interesting, but what does it have to do with the real world, where goods can be produced and saved for the future rather than being consumed immediately? It is true that there are some perishable goods which cannot be saved, but these are in the minority. It is perfectly possible, albeit not very efficient, to purchase and store all the durable goods one will need during retirement while one is working, including capital equipment to aid in the production of necessary non-durable goods, instead of saving up money. Those goods will be generated during one time period (while one is working) and expended during another (after one retires).
... and it plays no role if the money is printed on paper or coined in precious metals, because precious metals also have only the value we give them at the time we exchange them, as they have no intrinsic value.
All value is extrinsic. No good or service has any "intrinsic" value beyond what we give it. Precious metals do have intrinsic properties which tend to make them valuable for purposes other than trade. For that matter, even paper money has some intrinsic utility (as decorated paper), though it's considerably less suited to industrial or aesthetic uses than gold or silver. For example, you could paper the walls of your house with it, or even use the fibers for structural features with the right binder. Of course, a $20 bill doesn't have much more utility than a $1 bill for non-monetary purposes, unlike $20 worth of gold vs. $1 worth of gold; that's the difference between artificial and natural scarcity.
Providing non-working people, may they be retired, too young for work, sick or just unemployed, with goods and services is always a redistribution of wealth.
If you ignore the economic value of money (and the distinction between voluntary exchange and theft) then every indirect exchange is going to involve some degree of "redistribution". That is a consequence of putting on blinders and ignoring half of the exchange. In fact no redistribution is occurring; both sides agreed to the trade voluntarily and, on average, received goods of equal or greater value (from their own point of view) to those they offered in exchange. If either side did not expect to receive something of equal or greater value to what they were giving up the trade would not take place.
Exchanging goods for money is not redistribution of wealth. Saving money while working in order to spend it during retirement is not redistribution. This is just the ordinary, voluntary original distribution of goods which occurs in any unfettered market economy. Redistribution only occurs when goods are taken by force from the group to which they were naturally and voluntarily distributed and handed to some other group to which they were not naturally distributed.