You should only need root to install the Xposed framework for XPrivacy as a system app, not to use it. So if this is really a concern for you, just uninstall your root app after installing XPrivacy, and then you won't have to worry about it granting root access to some random app without your consent.
So once people say we will limit "abusive patent litigation" what does that mean?
The canonical example of "abusive patent litigation" would be the case where someone else with the same problem came up with the same solution independent of your efforts, and you sued them simply because you happened to register your solution with the patent office first. This covers in particular all the cases of "submarine patents" where someone anticipates a problem and patents all sorts of half-baked variations on possible solutions without actually putting in any of the effort to make them work, and then waits for someone else to do the actual innovation and bring a product to market before suing for infringement.
Independent invention should be an affirmative defense against claims of patent infringement. Put simply, if you developed a solution yourself, you shouldn't need anyone else's permission to use it. Naturally, the problem is proving that the solutions were really independent, since—unlike copyrights, for the most part—patents cover a very broad domain and two machines or manufacturing processes based on the same work need not show an obvious resemblance. A better solution would be to eliminate patents entirely. They don't really work to encourage innovation, they can't be implemented without violating people's natural rights, and they distort the entire economy for the sake of a mere incentive program.
I'm sorry, were you going for +1, Funny or -1, Naive? What you stated is indeed the standard line in support of patents, but unfortunately for that argument there is little evidence to suggest that patents actually foster innovation. There is, on the other hand, plenty of evidence to support the opposite position, that patents, like pretty much every other monopoly imposed by law, have a tendency to impede natural innovation and raise barriers to entry. Innovation occurred before patents, and would continue to occur if we eliminated all patents tomorrow. Perhaps not exactly the same kind or to the same extent, but rather the kinds and extent of innovation which make sense given supply and demand in the absence of artificial subsidies—the kind where innovators profit by enriching society rather than wasting resources in pursuit of monopoly rent-seeking.
I think that constantly having to refocus from looking 15' away to 1" away would be a one-way ticket to some serious eye strain.
It would be if that were how Glass actually worked. Fortunately, the optics create a virtual image focused "at infinity", so the strain would be minimal. It's similar to looking at the reflection of a distant object in a nearby window—your focus is on the reflection, which appears far away, not on the surface of the window.
You are missing the point. Without a credible promise of confidentiality, they won't tell anyone. That means that they still won't be prosecuted. The criminals aren't the ones who need these agreements upheld; we are. Refusing the honor confidentiality agreements would just mean that the rest of us are left guessing about what actually happened, rather than (eventually) having access to first-hand accounts.
Overruling confidentiality for the sake of prosecution is a trick that works perhaps once or twice. After that people stop trusting such agreements, and the information is simply lost for good. It's a very limited short-term gain for law enforcement, at the expense of a permanent loss of knowledge about our past. That's a poor trade no matter how you look at it.
No, you're supposed to recognize that if these subpoenas are upheld then no one can trust a library's promise of confidentiality in exchange for disclosure, meaning that this sort of information is more likely to be permanently lost in the future rather than placed into a sealed archive to be revealed at a later date.
The point isn't to shield wrongdoers, it's to ensure that history is preserved for future generations. If those involved can't trust that the information will remain sealed as agreed, then they won't reveal it to anyone—including law enforcement. It's better to have the information preserved, even if law enforcement can't immediately benefit from it.
While it wouldn't be perfectly precise, you could perhaps enforce a requirement to perform calculations which will take a certain amount of time in order to derive a decryption key. Of course, you'd probably need to put just as much time into deriving the encryption key beforehand.
1. Apply a key derivation function (e.g. scrypt) to a random seed with an iteration count high enough to take at least 10 years.
2. Use the result as a key to encrypt your data.
3. Destroy the plaintext and the key (but keep the seed).
4. Anyone who wants to decrypt the data will need to put in ~10 years of continuous serialized computation to re-derive the key.
Dedicated hardware and improvements in technology might get that time down a bit, but since each step depends on the result from the previous step the problem can't simply be broken down and distributed across multiple cores, and single-threaded performance isn't increasing nearly as quickly as it used to.
Of course, all this assumes that people believe that whatever data you've encrypted is worth spending a decade of computing time to decode.
Google's driverless car is a robot. Does it really need to know what is and is not human? It's just trying to go from point A to point B. Running over things, like people, would impede this goal.
There are situations where it would matter. For example, let's say the car is driving along and suddenly two objects of approximately equal mass, coloration, and composition appear out of a blind spot heading toward the space in front of the vehicle, such that it cannot avoid hitting one of them. One happens to be someone's pet and the other is a small child. To make the same choice most humans would make, the car has to be able to discern which one is the pet and which one is the child.
Uhm... what? That's totally unnecessary and adds extra work for the developer; this is about *not* requiring extra work form the developer.... The APK subsystem can already do what I'm suggesting! Simple to implement, at that point.
It would only require different work, not extra work, and the difference would be entirely behind the scenes. The developer signs one thing now (the APK) and they would still sign one thing under my proposal (the manifest). In exchange, the end user's device doesn't need to download APKs stuffed full of dozens of megabytes' worth of files for other architectures which they'll never need, and which would only be deleted after download.
Complexity of implementation is pretty much a wash. In both cases all the basic elements are already implemented. In your version you'd need to add the ability to selectively delete files from downloaded APKs on the target device, with heuristics to determine which files are actually needed for a given architecture, and significant problems when it guesses wrong. In mine you'd need to parse the manifest and perform signature verification in individual files rather than the whole APK, a relatively trivial change; modifications would not need to occur on the device, and developers would be free to specify which files are necessary.
the inability to safely and securely share repacked APKs is a benefit, not a hinderance... it would be nice for pirates.
This is a non-sequitur. The only repacking anyone could do while retaining the developer's signature would be to remove files not required for the target architecture. Any other change, such as to remove a DRM check, would result in the files failing to match the signed manifest. On the other hand, if anyone were inclined to share modified versions of the software in either scheme, they need only generate a new signature which their users will trust; the lack of a signature from the original developer would not be a significant obstacle.
If you're going to go that far, why not just have developers sign a manifest which lists each file in the original APK, the architecture(s) it's required for, and a hash of the file? Then anyone could repack the APK to strip out some or all of the extra files, and the end user could still verify that they have all the right files for their architecture, and that all the files present correspond to the hashes in the manifest.
Except those who complain about it and not pay, generally get very angry when they happen to need it.
That may be the case, but it doesn't excuse forcing them to pay. People are often upset at the consequences of their own decisions. That doesn't mean we should take away their freedom to make those decisions.
Property should not be seizable unless as a punishment from the judge and it should go to general government.
Punishment is not the only consideration here. If you cause harm to someone else, deliberately or accidentally, you incur a debt to make the other party whole. Failure to repay that debt can reasonably result in the forfeiture of property, just like defaulting on any other debt.
When it comes to punishment, if your crime happened to involve infringement of others' property rights, a fitting punishment would be for you to be denied protection for your own property. You cannot legitimately claim rights you do not afford to others. That means anyone can seize your (former) property, with the government simply standing aside and letting them get away with it.
If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll see that it came about as advice for implementing the TCP protocol.
Yes, and I did say that it can result in a mess if misapplied. The right time to consider what to accept and how to interpret it would have been when writing the TCP standard, not at the implementation stage, but we can't always have what we want. It's still a good idea to be liberal in what you accept, perhaps especially so when the standard is lacking in detail, since you never know just how the sender might interpret a particular section. You need to make your software work with all other reasonable implementations of the standard, not only those who interpret it the precise way you do. Just don't stretch it to the point of making up arbitrary data where the input is unclear.
While I agree that the principle can result in a mess if misapplied, my interpretation has always been that "be liberal in what you accept" only means that you should avoid defining rigid input formats full of arbitrary rules. If there are a number of different ways to say the same thing, such that it's still clear what was meant, accept them all as equivalent. Allow independent modifiers to be written in any order; don't put artificial restrictions on which characters can be used in a name, or the specific type or amount of whitespace needed to separate symbols. That sort of thing.
This is a principle that should be applied when defining the format, not just when implementing the parser. Once you have the format defined, input which is not in compliance should trigger a warning at the minimum. It remains much better to reject ambiguous input with an error rather than silently guessing at the intent and getting it wrong.
One area where "be liberal in what you accept" does affect the implementation is that a program should accept every valid input defined by the standard, not just the most common patterns. Accepting only a subset of the valid inputs is an easy way to introduce incompatibility.
This is such a silly concept. If the employer needs someone in order to make its business work, then it will hire someone.
That assumes that every business must be made to work, and that every potential job is essential to some business.
Any given business makes a certain amount of profit, on average, for each hour it remains in operation. Even if the continued operation of the business were absolutely dependent on hiring a certain employee, if hiring that employee would reduce the business's profits below the opportunity costs of the investment, the business would simply fold rather than hire that additional person.
More commonly, the business can do without the extra employee at a certain cost, which sets an upper limit on what they would be willing to pay. If your job would contribute $19/hr. to the company, but minimum wage, taxes, benefits, and overhead add up to $20/hr., they're not going to hire you—they would be losing money for every hour you worked.
The problem with fixing the price of a commodity at a high rate is that one hurts the consumers of the commodity.
Not just the consumers... keep in mind that there is a price point at which you maximize revenue. Being forced to set the price above that point hurts the supplier (the employee in this case) by reducing the quantity sold. This is true even when you hold a monopoly, but even more so when your competition (e.g. automation and/or outsourcing) is not operating under the same constraints.
If you want to improve people's lives, you need to give them more options, not less. Rather than forbid working for less than some arbitrary minimum wage, try offering an alternative.
And "being rich" is a worthwhile accomplishment, why?
Becoming rich is a worthwhile accomplishment because (barring negative externalities imposed by you on others) it means you've contributed significantly more to society in the form of goods and services than you've taken for yourself. Wealth is accumulated by doing things for others which they consider useful enough to pay for, and then saving the surplus rather than spending it on goods and services for your own consumption.
A negative net worth is just the opposite, of course—it means you've consumed more goods and services than you've contributed (again, barring negative externalities imposed on you by others).
Inherited wealth isn't an accomplishment, of course—it's a gift, and an opportunity. It's up to the recipient to do something worthwhile with the inheritance.
None of this is meant to imply that your financial net worth is equivalent to your overall value as a person. A number of important forms of value are not readily quantifiable. It is, however, an important aspect to consider along with other, less objective, factors.
Freedom of speech does not include the freedom of consequences. Whatever you say can, and often will, have consequences.
True, but it is important to keep in mind that not all consequences are compatible with freedom of speech. A "freedom of speech" where you could say whatever you wanted in theory, but could be fined or imprisoned for it after the fact, would be meaningless. In particular, freedom of speech means that you can speak without placing your natural rights in jeopardy. On the other hand, your freedom of speech does not overrule others' freedom of association or property rights—total ostracism, where no one is willing to trade with you or otherwise interact with you in any way, is well within the scope of permissible consequences, much less the loss of a job or future prospects.
Even if you did pretend there are absolute rights, you'd have to figure out what happens when absolute rights collide.
Absolute rights don't collide. They can't, because the only absolute rights are the negative ones, which compose perfectly. If you have a situation where it seems that "absolute rights collide", at least one of them isn't actually absolute, or a right. In this case, that would be the so-called "right to be forgotten".
The one system I REALLY dislike is the only positive system of upvotes. The most obvious problem is there's little means to correct information that turns out to be innaccurate.
The system Disqus recently adopted represents a reasonable compromise. While logged-in users can still upvote and downvote, only the upvotes are shown publicly. Downvotes still affect the placement of the comment on the page, but since you can't see whether your comment has been downvoted the negative feedback effect described in the article is probably averted.
Another option might be to limit negative moderation to well-moderated replies. When replying to another comment, you could check a box to say that the parent is misinformation, based on a logical fallacy, etc. As your comment is moderated up, the parent comment is automatically docked a corresponding number of points. (It would probably be best to take the maximum of the contrary replies here, rather than the sum.)
As for spam, off-topic comments, and other items which don't merit a response, it would probably be sufficient to give a small temporary boost to recently posted comments, or simply mix some recent comments in with the rest regardless of their score. The comments which don't attract any moderators will thus eventually fall to the bottom of the heap with any further intervention, while those which are worth reading get a chance for some upvotes.
It costs no more or less for Comcast to have data running over a line (not even the cost of electricity.. once it's on it's on).
Sure there's a cost: both the capacity of the local link and the ISP's upstream links can only support so much total bandwidth, significantly less than the peak for all their customers at once. If you're using it, that reduces the amount available to serve other customers.
Think of it like renting a car or condominium; as the owner, my costs are the roughly same whether the good is rented out or not, but I'm still not going to rent it out for unlimited use at a flat rate. The amount renters pay depends on the opportunity cost—how much their use prevents the owner from renting the same resource out to others.
The Square payment service isn't going away. Neither is Square Cash, the person-to-person money transfer service. Only Square Wallet is being discontinued. Square Wallet was an app for buyers to use in lieu of a credit card at Square point-of-sale terminals; it wasn't related to accepting credit card transactions.
Off the top of my head I have no idea how to actually calculate PI from scratch.
You can get a good approximation using the Monte Carlo method. Pick N points uniformly in the square between (0,0) and (1,1). Count how many are inside a circle centered at (0,0) with radius equal to one unit ($x^2 + y^2 <= 1^2$) and divide the result by N. As N increases, the result approaches the area of the upper-right quadrant of the circle. Since the area of the full unit circle is $Pi * 1^2 = Pi$, multiplying the area of the quadrant by four gives you Pi.
One benefit of taking this approach in an interview would be that it leverages an otherwise rather boring question to demonstrate knowledge of the Monte Carlo method, which is applicable to far more interesting problems than just calculating an approximation for Pi.
As you hinted discussions of "fairness" tend to leave out clear definitions of what they mean by fair - fair in what sense?
I believe the "Fair Tax" proponents mean "fair" in the "equality under the law" sense. Instead of the current system with its varying rates and myriad special taxes and special exceptions and special rebates affecting different classes of people differently, you have, at least in theory, just two aspects applied universally to everyone: a flat tax on the consumption of new goods, and a relatively flat rebate based on standardized poverty level figures for the size of the household.
Regarding being "regressive on income", a progressive consumption tax than a progressive income tax. If they must exist at all, taxes should compensate for external costs, not penalize the production of external benefits. Income which is profitably invested is a net positive for society; it means you're helping to put the available goods and services to their best possible use, curtailing waste. Even income which is simply "hoarded" still represents a surplus of productivity over consumption and isn't actively competing for goods and services, leaving more for others to enjoy. Consumption, on the other hand, means that there's less available for others.
You would have a point if there were not a great number of people who recover after a suicide attempt, who go on to wish they'd never attempted suicide.
That's a problem to be solved with education and support. I'm not saying that everyone who happens to consider suicide should die, I'm saying that if they choose to make the attempt it's not anyone else's place to prevent it by force—even if it's not the best decision and they would later end up regretting it (if unsuccessful). People have the right to make the wrong decisions regarding their own lives, even fatal ones. The place to interfere is before they choose to make the attempt.
You also seem to claim that people don't buy guns for self-defense, as that purpose would most certainly entail using it on a person.
I didn't ignore that case at all. That was the part about "to have it on hand in case of an emergency". The purpose there is to acquire the ability to defend yourself with lethal force if necessary, which is nothing like buying a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person.
For those rare cases where the use of a gun in legitimate self-defense does result in a "gun death", see my previous remarks regarding suicide.
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You should only need root to install the Xposed framework for XPrivacy as a system app, not to use it. So if this is really a concern for you, just uninstall your root app after installing XPrivacy, and then you won't have to worry about it granting root access to some random app without your consent.
So once people say we will limit "abusive patent litigation" what does that mean?
The canonical example of "abusive patent litigation" would be the case where someone else with the same problem came up with the same solution independent of your efforts, and you sued them simply because you happened to register your solution with the patent office first. This covers in particular all the cases of "submarine patents" where someone anticipates a problem and patents all sorts of half-baked variations on possible solutions without actually putting in any of the effort to make them work, and then waits for someone else to do the actual innovation and bring a product to market before suing for infringement.
Independent invention should be an affirmative defense against claims of patent infringement. Put simply, if you developed a solution yourself, you shouldn't need anyone else's permission to use it. Naturally, the problem is proving that the solutions were really independent, since—unlike copyrights, for the most part—patents cover a very broad domain and two machines or manufacturing processes based on the same work need not show an obvious resemblance. A better solution would be to eliminate patents entirely. They don't really work to encourage innovation, they can't be implemented without violating people's natural rights, and they distort the entire economy for the sake of a mere incentive program.
I'm sorry, were you going for +1, Funny or -1, Naive? What you stated is indeed the standard line in support of patents, but unfortunately for that argument there is little evidence to suggest that patents actually foster innovation. There is, on the other hand, plenty of evidence to support the opposite position, that patents, like pretty much every other monopoly imposed by law, have a tendency to impede natural innovation and raise barriers to entry. Innovation occurred before patents, and would continue to occur if we eliminated all patents tomorrow. Perhaps not exactly the same kind or to the same extent, but rather the kinds and extent of innovation which make sense given supply and demand in the absence of artificial subsidies—the kind where innovators profit by enriching society rather than wasting resources in pursuit of monopoly rent-seeking.
I think that constantly having to refocus from looking 15' away to 1" away would be a one-way ticket to some serious eye strain.
It would be if that were how Glass actually worked. Fortunately, the optics create a virtual image focused "at infinity", so the strain would be minimal. It's similar to looking at the reflection of a distant object in a nearby window—your focus is on the reflection, which appears far away, not on the surface of the window.
You are missing the point. Without a credible promise of confidentiality, they won't tell anyone. That means that they still won't be prosecuted. The criminals aren't the ones who need these agreements upheld; we are. Refusing the honor confidentiality agreements would just mean that the rest of us are left guessing about what actually happened, rather than (eventually) having access to first-hand accounts.
Overruling confidentiality for the sake of prosecution is a trick that works perhaps once or twice. After that people stop trusting such agreements, and the information is simply lost for good. It's a very limited short-term gain for law enforcement, at the expense of a permanent loss of knowledge about our past. That's a poor trade no matter how you look at it.
No, you're supposed to recognize that if these subpoenas are upheld then no one can trust a library's promise of confidentiality in exchange for disclosure, meaning that this sort of information is more likely to be permanently lost in the future rather than placed into a sealed archive to be revealed at a later date.
The point isn't to shield wrongdoers, it's to ensure that history is preserved for future generations. If those involved can't trust that the information will remain sealed as agreed, then they won't reveal it to anyone—including law enforcement. It's better to have the information preserved, even if law enforcement can't immediately benefit from it.
While it wouldn't be perfectly precise, you could perhaps enforce a requirement to perform calculations which will take a certain amount of time in order to derive a decryption key. Of course, you'd probably need to put just as much time into deriving the encryption key beforehand.
1. Apply a key derivation function (e.g. scrypt) to a random seed with an iteration count high enough to take at least 10 years.
2. Use the result as a key to encrypt your data.
3. Destroy the plaintext and the key (but keep the seed).
4. Anyone who wants to decrypt the data will need to put in ~10 years of continuous serialized computation to re-derive the key.
Dedicated hardware and improvements in technology might get that time down a bit, but since each step depends on the result from the previous step the problem can't simply be broken down and distributed across multiple cores, and single-threaded performance isn't increasing nearly as quickly as it used to.
Of course, all this assumes that people believe that whatever data you've encrypted is worth spending a decade of computing time to decode.
Google's driverless car is a robot. Does it really need to know what is and is not human? It's just trying to go from point A to point B. Running over things, like people, would impede this goal.
There are situations where it would matter. For example, let's say the car is driving along and suddenly two objects of approximately equal mass, coloration, and composition appear out of a blind spot heading toward the space in front of the vehicle, such that it cannot avoid hitting one of them. One happens to be someone's pet and the other is a small child. To make the same choice most humans would make, the car has to be able to discern which one is the pet and which one is the child.
Uhm... what? That's totally unnecessary and adds extra work for the developer; this is about *not* requiring extra work form the developer.... The APK subsystem can already do what I'm suggesting! Simple to implement, at that point.
It would only require different work, not extra work, and the difference would be entirely behind the scenes. The developer signs one thing now (the APK) and they would still sign one thing under my proposal (the manifest). In exchange, the end user's device doesn't need to download APKs stuffed full of dozens of megabytes' worth of files for other architectures which they'll never need, and which would only be deleted after download.
Complexity of implementation is pretty much a wash. In both cases all the basic elements are already implemented. In your version you'd need to add the ability to selectively delete files from downloaded APKs on the target device, with heuristics to determine which files are actually needed for a given architecture, and significant problems when it guesses wrong. In mine you'd need to parse the manifest and perform signature verification in individual files rather than the whole APK, a relatively trivial change; modifications would not need to occur on the device, and developers would be free to specify which files are necessary.
the inability to safely and securely share repacked APKs is a benefit, not a hinderance... it would be nice for pirates.
This is a non-sequitur. The only repacking anyone could do while retaining the developer's signature would be to remove files not required for the target architecture. Any other change, such as to remove a DRM check, would result in the files failing to match the signed manifest. On the other hand, if anyone were inclined to share modified versions of the software in either scheme, they need only generate a new signature which their users will trust; the lack of a signature from the original developer would not be a significant obstacle.
If you're going to go that far, why not just have developers sign a manifest which lists each file in the original APK, the architecture(s) it's required for, and a hash of the file? Then anyone could repack the APK to strip out some or all of the extra files, and the end user could still verify that they have all the right files for their architecture, and that all the files present correspond to the hashes in the manifest.
Except those who complain about it and not pay, generally get very angry when they happen to need it.
That may be the case, but it doesn't excuse forcing them to pay. People are often upset at the consequences of their own decisions. That doesn't mean we should take away their freedom to make those decisions.
Property should not be seizable unless as a punishment from the judge and it should go to general government.
Punishment is not the only consideration here. If you cause harm to someone else, deliberately or accidentally, you incur a debt to make the other party whole. Failure to repay that debt can reasonably result in the forfeiture of property, just like defaulting on any other debt.
When it comes to punishment, if your crime happened to involve infringement of others' property rights, a fitting punishment would be for you to be denied protection for your own property. You cannot legitimately claim rights you do not afford to others. That means anyone can seize your (former) property, with the government simply standing aside and letting them get away with it.
If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll see that it came about as advice for implementing the TCP protocol.
Yes, and I did say that it can result in a mess if misapplied. The right time to consider what to accept and how to interpret it would have been when writing the TCP standard, not at the implementation stage, but we can't always have what we want. It's still a good idea to be liberal in what you accept, perhaps especially so when the standard is lacking in detail, since you never know just how the sender might interpret a particular section. You need to make your software work with all other reasonable implementations of the standard, not only those who interpret it the precise way you do. Just don't stretch it to the point of making up arbitrary data where the input is unclear.
While I agree that the principle can result in a mess if misapplied, my interpretation has always been that "be liberal in what you accept" only means that you should avoid defining rigid input formats full of arbitrary rules. If there are a number of different ways to say the same thing, such that it's still clear what was meant, accept them all as equivalent. Allow independent modifiers to be written in any order; don't put artificial restrictions on which characters can be used in a name, or the specific type or amount of whitespace needed to separate symbols. That sort of thing.
This is a principle that should be applied when defining the format, not just when implementing the parser. Once you have the format defined, input which is not in compliance should trigger a warning at the minimum. It remains much better to reject ambiguous input with an error rather than silently guessing at the intent and getting it wrong.
One area where "be liberal in what you accept" does affect the implementation is that a program should accept every valid input defined by the standard, not just the most common patterns. Accepting only a subset of the valid inputs is an easy way to introduce incompatibility.
This is such a silly concept. If the employer needs someone in order to make its business work, then it will hire someone.
That assumes that every business must be made to work, and that every potential job is essential to some business.
Any given business makes a certain amount of profit, on average, for each hour it remains in operation. Even if the continued operation of the business were absolutely dependent on hiring a certain employee, if hiring that employee would reduce the business's profits below the opportunity costs of the investment, the business would simply fold rather than hire that additional person.
More commonly, the business can do without the extra employee at a certain cost, which sets an upper limit on what they would be willing to pay. If your job would contribute $19/hr. to the company, but minimum wage, taxes, benefits, and overhead add up to $20/hr., they're not going to hire you—they would be losing money for every hour you worked.
The problem with fixing the price of a commodity at a high rate is that one hurts the consumers of the commodity.
Not just the consumers... keep in mind that there is a price point at which you maximize revenue. Being forced to set the price above that point hurts the supplier (the employee in this case) by reducing the quantity sold. This is true even when you hold a monopoly, but even more so when your competition (e.g. automation and/or outsourcing) is not operating under the same constraints.
If you want to improve people's lives, you need to give them more options, not less. Rather than forbid working for less than some arbitrary minimum wage, try offering an alternative.
And "being rich" is a worthwhile accomplishment, why?
Becoming rich is a worthwhile accomplishment because (barring negative externalities imposed by you on others) it means you've contributed significantly more to society in the form of goods and services than you've taken for yourself. Wealth is accumulated by doing things for others which they consider useful enough to pay for, and then saving the surplus rather than spending it on goods and services for your own consumption.
A negative net worth is just the opposite, of course—it means you've consumed more goods and services than you've contributed (again, barring negative externalities imposed on you by others).
Inherited wealth isn't an accomplishment, of course—it's a gift, and an opportunity. It's up to the recipient to do something worthwhile with the inheritance.
None of this is meant to imply that your financial net worth is equivalent to your overall value as a person. A number of important forms of value are not readily quantifiable. It is, however, an important aspect to consider along with other, less objective, factors.
Freedom of speech does not include the freedom of consequences. Whatever you say can, and often will, have consequences.
True, but it is important to keep in mind that not all consequences are compatible with freedom of speech. A "freedom of speech" where you could say whatever you wanted in theory, but could be fined or imprisoned for it after the fact, would be meaningless. In particular, freedom of speech means that you can speak without placing your natural rights in jeopardy. On the other hand, your freedom of speech does not overrule others' freedom of association or property rights—total ostracism, where no one is willing to trade with you or otherwise interact with you in any way, is well within the scope of permissible consequences, much less the loss of a job or future prospects.
Even if you did pretend there are absolute rights, you'd have to figure out what happens when absolute rights collide.
Absolute rights don't collide. They can't, because the only absolute rights are the negative ones, which compose perfectly. If you have a situation where it seems that "absolute rights collide", at least one of them isn't actually absolute, or a right. In this case, that would be the so-called "right to be forgotten".
The one system I REALLY dislike is the only positive system of upvotes. The most obvious problem is there's little means to correct information that turns out to be innaccurate.
The system Disqus recently adopted represents a reasonable compromise. While logged-in users can still upvote and downvote, only the upvotes are shown publicly. Downvotes still affect the placement of the comment on the page, but since you can't see whether your comment has been downvoted the negative feedback effect described in the article is probably averted.
Another option might be to limit negative moderation to well-moderated replies. When replying to another comment, you could check a box to say that the parent is misinformation, based on a logical fallacy, etc. As your comment is moderated up, the parent comment is automatically docked a corresponding number of points. (It would probably be best to take the maximum of the contrary replies here, rather than the sum.)
As for spam, off-topic comments, and other items which don't merit a response, it would probably be sufficient to give a small temporary boost to recently posted comments, or simply mix some recent comments in with the rest regardless of their score. The comments which don't attract any moderators will thus eventually fall to the bottom of the heap with any further intervention, while those which are worth reading get a chance for some upvotes.
It costs no more or less for Comcast to have data running over a line (not even the cost of electricity.. once it's on it's on).
Sure there's a cost: both the capacity of the local link and the ISP's upstream links can only support so much total bandwidth, significantly less than the peak for all their customers at once. If you're using it, that reduces the amount available to serve other customers.
Think of it like renting a car or condominium; as the owner, my costs are the roughly same whether the good is rented out or not, but I'm still not going to rent it out for unlimited use at a flat rate. The amount renters pay depends on the opportunity cost—how much their use prevents the owner from renting the same resource out to others.
The Square payment service isn't going away. Neither is Square Cash, the person-to-person money transfer service. Only Square Wallet is being discontinued. Square Wallet was an app for buyers to use in lieu of a credit card at Square point-of-sale terminals; it wasn't related to accepting credit card transactions.
Off the top of my head I have no idea how to actually calculate PI from scratch.
You can get a good approximation using the Monte Carlo method. Pick N points uniformly in the square between (0,0) and (1,1). Count how many are inside a circle centered at (0,0) with radius equal to one unit ($x^2 + y^2 <= 1^2$) and divide the result by N. As N increases, the result approaches the area of the upper-right quadrant of the circle. Since the area of the full unit circle is $Pi * 1^2 = Pi$, multiplying the area of the quadrant by four gives you Pi.
One benefit of taking this approach in an interview would be that it leverages an otherwise rather boring question to demonstrate knowledge of the Monte Carlo method, which is applicable to far more interesting problems than just calculating an approximation for Pi.
As you hinted discussions of "fairness" tend to leave out clear definitions of what they mean by fair - fair in what sense?
I believe the "Fair Tax" proponents mean "fair" in the "equality under the law" sense. Instead of the current system with its varying rates and myriad special taxes and special exceptions and special rebates affecting different classes of people differently, you have, at least in theory, just two aspects applied universally to everyone: a flat tax on the consumption of new goods, and a relatively flat rebate based on standardized poverty level figures for the size of the household.
Regarding being "regressive on income", a progressive consumption tax than a progressive income tax. If they must exist at all, taxes should compensate for external costs, not penalize the production of external benefits. Income which is profitably invested is a net positive for society; it means you're helping to put the available goods and services to their best possible use, curtailing waste. Even income which is simply "hoarded" still represents a surplus of productivity over consumption and isn't actively competing for goods and services, leaving more for others to enjoy. Consumption, on the other hand, means that there's less available for others.
You would have a point if there were not a great number of people who recover after a suicide attempt, who go on to wish they'd never attempted suicide.
That's a problem to be solved with education and support. I'm not saying that everyone who happens to consider suicide should die, I'm saying that if they choose to make the attempt it's not anyone else's place to prevent it by force—even if it's not the best decision and they would later end up regretting it (if unsuccessful). People have the right to make the wrong decisions regarding their own lives, even fatal ones. The place to interfere is before they choose to make the attempt.
You also seem to claim that people don't buy guns for self-defense, as that purpose would most certainly entail using it on a person.
I didn't ignore that case at all. That was the part about "to have it on hand in case of an emergency". The purpose there is to acquire the ability to defend yourself with lethal force if necessary, which is nothing like buying a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person.
For those rare cases where the use of a gun in legitimate self-defense does result in a "gun death", see my previous remarks regarding suicide.