Oh? If they're really easily enumerable, pray tell, which DNS name does the following hash point to?
c0ff3e297157c1e60bc2a2bedb5f6532
I have no idea, but even you must be able to see that it would be trivial to put together a lookup table of the top million or so domain names indexed on their corresponding hashes. From that you can easily work out the domain name from the hash, without actually reversing the hash function.
That doesn't really solve problem #3, because while clients can still connect they won't actually be serviced until the daemon finishes restarting, with up to several minutes of downtime. However, I think you could use the ExecReload option to implement the "fast-restart" mode. It would need to send a signal to the main process, causing it to fork and exec a new instance of itself. When the new instance is ready to take over it would then signal its parent process to exit. This appears to work provided that you set Type=forking and GuessMainPID=no in the [Service] section, otherwise systemd will stop the child process automatically when the main process exits.
If you're a billionaire, and you have yachts and diamonds and silks, you have those things and somebody else does not. It is binary. Those things didn't magically appear when you became rich; they are the product of (a very large number) of other people's labour. That labour was directed solely at making you happy, and not at making someone else happy- that too is binary.
You're completely ignoring the other side of the equation. If you have a billion dollars to spend, where did they come from? People are only doing things to make you happy because in the past you did things to make them happy. Unless you obtained your money through theft or fraud or by otherwise violating other people's property rights—an accusation which must be backed by hard evidence and not vague generalizations—the money you earned and what you can buy with it are merely a fair trade for the wealth you, or some very generous benefactor, have managed to produce for others.
If you have the money to buy up a billion dollars' worth of goods and waste them, it's only because you contributed a billion dollars' worth of extra production which wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's not like the world would have been better off if you hadn't earned the money in the first place, and while you could certainly have chosen to be more altruistic, the proceeds of your labor are yours to do with as you please.
The bad about SystemD compared to upstart and Apple's or Sun's event driven systems:... - no text files
What do you mean by that? The database used by journald may be binary (with the ability to export to text), but systemd unit files are simple text files with an INI-style layout. There are some other systemd configuration files with different formats for historical reasons, but to my knowledge all of them are still text.
Unfortunately, if you have a sevice that needs another service 100% functional before it can run, systemd has no way to describe that in the dependency files nor to test it.
All systemd uses to define a "running" service is that a process doesn't throw an immediate error upon startup. And, that's all it can ever have, unless the service is specially coded to be systemd-aware or does something like create a file in/var/run after it has fully initialized, and the dependency can be written using file existence.
That isn't true. Putting aside the systemd-specific sd_notify() API for reporting just how completely the service has been initialized, and the socket activation model which allows other services to connect while startup is still in progress, systemd also supports traditional "forking" daemons which complete their initialization before the main process exits. You can also use the ExecStartPre and ExecStartPost fields to inject arbitrary commands into the startup process separate from the daemon itself.
The best case short of actual systemd integration is that the service already does the right thing with the fork-and-exit model, so that it's ready to be used before any other services are started which depend on it. But even if that isn't the case there are ways to deal with it under systemd, up to and including custom shell scripts for the really complex cases.
Whether or not you are protected from a fraudulent transaction is fairly meaningless while you watch all your checks bounce and you have no cash because your account is empty.
What you're actually looking for here is "don't keep all your money in one account". The same thing could happen with a credit card when (not if) the thief reaches your credit limit. Your protection in having two separate accounts (credit and checking), not in using a credit card. Just use a separate account for your debit card, with most of your money elsewhere, and you won't have this problem.
The tx-id does, in fact, uniquely identify a particular transaction. It's basically just the hash of the completed transaction record. The problem is that it isn't the entire transaction record that you're signing when you send bitcoins, just the input you provided and the set of outputs. This is done so that multiple independent parties can all contribute to the same transaction, but it also means that someone can modify other fields to create a new, equally valid transaction with the same inputs and outputs but a different tx-id.
Rather than the tx-id or the rather arbitrary (amount, address, timestamp) tuple recommended in the article, exchanges should be using the same data they signed to identify the transaction in the blockchain. The simplest way to do that would be to index the table on the signature itself. When a transaction shows up in the blockchain with that signature on one of the inputs you know the transfer went through, regardless of the eventual tx-id.
... why, if news stories are any indication, there seems to be such a high percentage of money laundering activity or the like compared to what happens with other forms of currency?
It only seems that way because when (several orders of magnitude more) money laundering happens on a regular basis involving any of the national currencies, it doesn't generally make the news, whereas anything involving bitcoins is apparently newsworthy—including some rather careless individuals getting arrested for knowingly participating in a crime which had very little to do with cryptocurrencies. (In this case the buyers reportedly said that they wanted the bitcoins for the purpose of buying stolen credit cards, and the sellers chose to go through with the transaction anyway.)
Face it, money laundering isn't very interesting on its own. It mostly comes down to failure to file the right paperwork. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is something new and different, so it's no surprise that the news covers Bitcoin-related money laundering and not USD-related money laundering, even though the latter is far more commonplace.
VNC can also forward individual applications, though I can't comment on how well it works. For an example see v11vnc with the "-appshare" option. I tend to use xpra for that myself, even on LANs.
The API which Wayland exposes to client applications should make this sort of thing much easier to implement. (Clients aren't expected to know how they're layed out on the screen; they just send surfaces to the compositor, so the compositor knows exactly which images to compress and forward.)
"licence terms" which is different to the copyright you are complaining about.
The "right" to set license terms derives from copyright. Without copyright no one needs a license, so there are no license terms. Everything is public domain.
The point, in case you missed it, is that the foundation of free software is a community of developers who want software to be free, not "respect for license terms", which is something many in the free software camp do not have. Copyleft is first and foremost a pragmatic tool to be used against others who do want licenses to be respected (so that they can set restrictive terms). The rules are theirs, not ours; we're just twisting them to our advantage.
the very thing free software is built upon - respect for the licence terms that the person who has provided the software asks for.
Oh, please. Copyleft is a reaction against copyright, not an endorsement of it. Free software is built on the idea that users should have free access to the source code for the software they use and the right to modify it as they choose, and redistribute the modifications under the same terms. The only reason to choose copyleft over public domain, if you happen to fall into that camp, is the fear that some company will take the software, develop and promote it to the point that no one uses the original version, and then use copyright to impose their own more restrictive terms, infringing on the user's freedom. In short, without copyright there would be no need for copyleft.
No doubt there are a few other license fanatics like yourself in the free software community, but for the most part I think most free software developers only care about respect for license terms to the extent they deem necessary to protect against the imposition of unreasonable license terms by others. The important thing is that the software and its source code get to users in the freest form possible.
You say Orwellian, but it's also what everybody on Star Trek lives with.
Not everybody on Star Trek, just those in Star Fleet, an all-volunteer quasi-military organization. I would hardly consider Star Trek's "Federation of Planets" a perfect society, but the handful of ordinary citizens who appeared on the show seemed to enjoy quite a bit more privacy and independence than the average member of Star Fleet.
What's funny about the I-185 toll road is how absolutely bad things are:
1) There is almost no mileage/time savings vs the primary highways
2) The tolls have skyrocketed over the past few years because it's basically a useless road (It now costs $6 cash to go end-to-end to save no time and no miles)
While this case does sound particularly bad—I would say 50 cents is on the steep side for a 17-mile stretch of toll road, much less $6—it still amazes me how anyone could expect a toll road to compete on a level playing field with tax-funded roads. If you choose to take the toll road, you have to pay the tolls plus the fuel taxes and other costs associated with the public roads, and yet none of that goes to fund the construction or maintenance of the toll road.
If the public roads were funded with precise user fees, charged to each user in proportion to how much they used the roads, then toll roads might have a chance. You would have a choice between paying for the privately-operated toll road or the public road. As it stands, the only way a toll road can work is if there is no reasonable route via public roads to the same destinations—and even if that is the case when the road is built, the circumstances can always change.
The same problem can exist with municipal Internet service. In general I have no problem with community-driven Internet providers, but I do have a problem with municipalities funding such ventures out of tax receipts or tax-backed municipal bonds, or favoring their own system with special permits or the like which other providers don't have access to. I would prefer a strict division between the organization providing the Internet service (on a self-funded basis) and the municipality setting the terms and conditions which any provider must meet, with a fair bidding process open to all.
Since the founding fathers hung traitors, those who exercised their freedom of speech in ways harmful to the cause, it is pretty evident that even the framers of the constitution recognized that it doesn't trump everything else.
All that means is that the founding fathers were human beings, and not perfect. All of them failed to follow the principles expressed in the Constitution at one point or another.
For instance, the right to bear arms is not violated by not allowing convicted criminals to own firearms while on probation.
The conditions of their probation are something they agreed to to stay out of jail after being convicted of some crime which justified putting them in jail in the first place (or so one would hope—a topic for another day). They still have the right to keep and bear arms, but if they choose to exercise that right then they're violating the terms of their probation and back to jail they go, not as punishment but because that's where they would have been anyway without the probation.
,,, the basic principle of these rights are for the betterment of society still stand and any freedoms must be viewed in that context.
Wrong. The basic principle is that all people are "endowed by their Creator" with these inalienable rights. It is better that society recognizes and protects these rights rather than violating them, but the rights themselves are not granted by society to be removed on a whim.
The flaw in that argument is in thinking that freedom of speech trumps everything.
Freedom of speech is supposed to trump everything else, when it comes to restrictions on or punishment for speech as such. Yes, that does mean that copyright law is probably unconstitutional—the courts actually came very close to throwing it out on First Amendment grounds at one point, but settled for a compromise between principles and short-sighted pragmatism which imposed some restrictions on copyright but still fell short of full compliance with the Constitution. "Information that has been deemed protected" is an even more obvious conflict.
Right, and I'm not disputing that, but no one's going around saying "Hey, if we fight each other and wreck a bunch of our ships, it will create a bunch of jobs and we'll both end up better off in the end." Naturally, in the original Broken Window Fallacy, the glassmakers and so on end up better off. The problem is that the benefit to them ends up being balanced out, and then some, by the negative externality to the person who's perfectly good window was broken. If you don't care about the losses to others then you can still turn a tidy profit by going around breaking windows.
In the case of EVE, of course, such externalities are just part of the game. We wouldn't expect anyone to step in from outside the game to put a stop to them even if the virtual assets being destroyed do have real-world value. The players know what they're getting into before they spend time and money acquiring these assets, and understand that they "own" them only so long as the rules of the game say they do.
The destruction of ships is one of the major drivers of demand in the Eve economy.
Wow. Someplace where the Glazier's Fallacy isn't a fallacy. It figures it would be in the economy of an MMO.
No, it's still a fallacy. However, the fallacy isn't in the idea that destruction drives demand for replacements. That's generally true. The fallacy is in the idea that the economic activity which results from the destruction will leave you better off than you were before. In fact, after all that activity you've only managed to get back what you lost, and in the process you've consumed resources which could have been used to better your position if you hadn't been forced to start over instead.
In this case the $200,000 worth of virtual ships weren't destroyed in hope if improving the in-game economy, so the fallacy doesn't apply. They were consumed in the course of providing hours of entertainment for some 2,200 players. That's a bit pricey at $90 or more per player—and that's assuming every player was involved for the duration of the entire battle—but it's certainly not the most expensive way you could choose to entertain yourself for an entire day. Some people pay that much just to sit in a stadium and watch others play professional sports for a fraction of the time.
My battery life has improved a bit. Also recently uninstalled Google Talk (now called "Hangouts (Replaces Google Talk)") because it started asking for access to my text messages as well.
That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since Hangouts is the app for text messaging these days. I just upgraded to a new Nexus 5, for example, and there is no separate Messaging app. Hangouts handles that function by default.
Moving back on-topic, App Ops X is a good start, and I'm disappointed with Google for removing this function from the base system and making it increasingly difficult to install and use. Ideally I'd prefer for users to have complete control over permissions, in a way which is completely transparent to the app. The app doesn't need to know that network access is blocked; it just gets a "no signal" response, or "destination unreachable" when attempting to access particular domains. It doesn't need to know that you've restricted access to the contact list; it just gets its own, private contact list. It doesn't need to know you've restricted location access, it just sees "acquiring GPS signal...". And so on. If the app can see what you've restricted, then the app can be designed to refuse to function until you've removed the restriction, which defeats the whole point. The sandbox approach is the only reasonable way to have fine-grained permissions under the user's control.
And as the USA claim always to stay up for human rights:... [un.org]
Here's one of your bigger problems: we do believe in human rights, but we don't define them the same way the UN does. In particular, our background and beliefs reflect negative rights (freedom from interference by others) rather than positive rights (the right to goods or services which others in turn have an obligation to supply—slavery by any other name).
So, applying this to the situation at hand, we believe that people living in Detroit have the right to leave—no one has the right to hold them there—but not that anyone has any (legal) obligation to help them do so. People have the right to work—if two people choose to enter an employer-employee relationship under mutually agreeable terms, no one has the right to step in and prevent it—but not that anyone is obligated to offer any particular person a job. And so on for housing, education, health care... you are free to seek these for yourself, without interference, alone or working together with other like-minded individuals, but no one else is obligated to provide them for you.
Lest this seem callous, keep in mind that this is only the legal side. Socially, the same groups which most closely adhere to the traditional American values of liberty, independence and self-reliance are also the ones which have historically done the most to support those who find themselves in need of assistance, both privately and through donations to private-sector charitable organizations. The more personal the assistance, the more effective it is at restoring the recipient's status as an equal and effective member of society, as opposed to remaining forever dependent on public handouts. The distinction is important psychologically; an impersonal entitlement does nothing to boost your confidence or encourage you to get back on your feet so you can repay the favor, whereas private assistance means that someone has chosen to take an interest in you and believes that you are worth helping.
But it should not be possible to just remove the responsibility of the father without providing a second person that steps in.
Why? I see no reason whatsoever that a single parent (with the necessary means) should not be able to have a child, with sole custody and parental rights and responsibilities, via artificial insemination. It's legal (though uncommon) for a single parent to adopt a child with the same end result(*), so why not this?
"Due process" doesn't mean much by itself; the process needn't be fair or just, merely consistent. Rights don't end just because some arbitrary process was followed. On the contrary, you have your rights so long as you respect the rights of others. The moment you act in a way which violates someone else's rights, you implicitly take the position that those rights do not exist, which frees the other party to act in the same way toward you. Due process is about establishing that this has taken place for all to see, vs. just going off and punishing someone on your own without any public proof of wrongdoing.
Inflation is driven by the change in the supply of money against the demand for money.
Right. We're assuming the supply is fixed (as with Bitcoin in the long run), so inflation and deflation mainly reflect changes in the demand for money. In other words, a smaller or larger supply of goods and services available for purchase.
Deflation is often associated with recessions.
Not really. Deflation is often blamed, but the only real correlation is the American Great Depression. In other words, deflation caused by a sudden drop in the money supply due to a credit contraction. The contraction (which was evidence of previous malinvestment to begin with) was responsible for both the deflation and the recession. See also this study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
No, the reason why you invest in a venture is because the projected risk adjusted returns are higher than your required return.
The only reason your "required return" is less than the average rate of return in the first place is the money supply is manipulated to avoid deflation. Remove that manipulation and we're saying the same thing.
There are obviously other factors besides short-term average returns which affect the demand for money; the desire for "safe" forms of saving in response to economic uncertainty would be one example. While these other factors are not as systemic, they are still important signals regarding the need for immediate consumption and investment vs. saving up resources for the future which we ignore or overrule at our peril.
having a chilling effect on economic growth as people refuse to invest in projects that are unlikely to provide better returns than the deflationary increase in value
The difference in our positions is that where you're saying that the loss of these investments will have a chilling effect on economic growth, I'm saying that the investments themselves would have a chilling effect on economic growth—one that the deflation and resulting tendency to "hoard" rather than (mal)invest helps to prevent.
There's plenty of other projects out there, and in the US at least anything less than 3% or so is flat out losing money. By your argument all that money could instead be invested in higher-yield projects to generate a better economic outcome for everyone, so why isn't it?
Higher-yield projects are hard to find, reliably. First, yield can only be estimated at the time you're making the decision, and every investment involves some indeterminate amount of risk. Finding the right investments is a skill not everyone has; the same goes for risk tolerance.
Inflation is supposed to mean that the economy is shrinking. We need more investment—even at a loss in real terms, provided it's above the rate of inflation—to build up our productive capacity and slow or reverse the decrease in economic output. However, when you have a growing economy and price inflation together, thanks to changes in the money supply, you get a perverse situation where a below-average investment (presumably the best a particular investor could find, though not the best available) is better than the inflation for the individual investor, but still results in a net decrease in the rate of growth for the economy as a whole.
Let us use big numbers to illustrate this point. You can invest in a new business and get a 10% real return. You expect deflation to be 10%. If you invest $100 you wind up with $99 at the end (100*1.1*(1-.1)), but you are better off in real terms by $9. Or you could burry your cash. At the end of the period you would have exactly the same $100, but you would be better off by $10. Better not to invest.
In this case the result is marginal, since 10% is the average rate of return. You can invest $100 worth of resources in the business with 10% real return and get $100 (not $99) at the end, worth $110 in pre-deflation units, or you could "hoard" the money instead of investing, and still end up with $100 at the end. Your investment at 10% is displacing some other investment at 10%, so it doesn't make any real difference.
Let's consider a more interesting scenario. You can invest in a new business and get a 8% real return. You expect deflation to be 10%. If you invest $100 you wind up with $98.18 at the end (100*1.08/1.1), but you are better off in real terms by $8. Alternatively, you could bury your cash. At the end of the period you would have exactly the same $100, but you would be better off by $10. Better not to invest—for everyone. Expected deflation of 10% means that the economy is growing by 10%. The average rate of return, therefore, is 10%. The $100 you invest in a project earning only 8% takes $100 worth of resources away from a group of projects earning, on average, 10%. By enabling this project, you're bringing down the average rate of growth. If you "hoard" your money instead, then you're effectively loaning the resources you could have consumed with that money to everyone else, including investors better able to pick the truly profitable ventures; the rate of deflation amounts to the interest you've earned on that loan.
Remember, it's not the money that's important; it's what you can buy with it. Economically it makes no difference whether you hand the money off to a bank to be distributed evenly in loans to everyone holding a dollar or simply hold onto it. Either your money is out in the economy being spent on things, or the remaining money which is out there is more valuable by the same amount since it's not competing with yours for goods and services. The only reason to invest in some specific venture (apart from being forced into it via inflationary monetary policies) is that you think you can do better than the average rate of return.
At 10:35AM you will post a copy of a 10BTC number on the gang's Facebook page, and the clock is counting. They need to be paid and gone as soon as possible, because by 10:40AM they will get caught.
Target will know about the double-spend attempt long before 10:40AM. The transactions might not make it into a block for about 10 minutes on average, but unconfirmed transactions are still broadcast to the entire network within a few seconds. When you go to double-spend the 10 BTC, Target can look at the unconfirmed transaction list and see that the transaction you're providing overlaps with another transaction entered a few seconds ago. By the time you'd reached the door they'd know something is up, since this sort of thing rarely occurs by accident. Even better, their payment processor could make you wait 5-10 seconds after broadcasting the new transaction to see if any conflicts show up before considering the transaction successful.
Check out this page sometime. It includes a live stream of new transactions as they're received by the site. Even including latency from their server to my PC, the latest transactions are only a few seconds old.
Serious double-spend attacks depend on having control over enough of the miner network to ensure your preferred transaction (to yourself, generally) is included in the next block without broadcasting it to everyone first, or somehow disrupting the communication between Bitcoin nodes. Or a naive payment processor, of course, but I hardly think Target is likely to make that mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh? If they're really easily enumerable, pray tell, which DNS name does the following hash point to?
c0ff3e297157c1e60bc2a2bedb5f6532
I have no idea, but even you must be able to see that it would be trivial to put together a lookup table of the top million or so domain names indexed on their corresponding hashes. From that you can easily work out the domain name from the hash, without actually reversing the hash function.
That doesn't really solve problem #3, because while clients can still connect they won't actually be serviced until the daemon finishes restarting, with up to several minutes of downtime. However, I think you could use the ExecReload option to implement the "fast-restart" mode. It would need to send a signal to the main process, causing it to fork and exec a new instance of itself. When the new instance is ready to take over it would then signal its parent process to exit. This appears to work provided that you set Type=forking and GuessMainPID=no in the [Service] section, otherwise systemd will stop the child process automatically when the main process exits.
If you're a billionaire, and you have yachts and diamonds and silks, you have those things and somebody else does not. It is binary. Those things didn't magically appear when you became rich; they are the product of (a very large number) of other people's labour. That labour was directed solely at making you happy, and not at making someone else happy- that too is binary.
You're completely ignoring the other side of the equation. If you have a billion dollars to spend, where did they come from? People are only doing things to make you happy because in the past you did things to make them happy. Unless you obtained your money through theft or fraud or by otherwise violating other people's property rights—an accusation which must be backed by hard evidence and not vague generalizations—the money you earned and what you can buy with it are merely a fair trade for the wealth you, or some very generous benefactor, have managed to produce for others.
If you have the money to buy up a billion dollars' worth of goods and waste them, it's only because you contributed a billion dollars' worth of extra production which wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's not like the world would have been better off if you hadn't earned the money in the first place, and while you could certainly have chosen to be more altruistic, the proceeds of your labor are yours to do with as you please.
The bad about SystemD compared to upstart and Apple's or Sun's event driven systems: ... - no text files
What do you mean by that? The database used by journald may be binary (with the ability to export to text), but systemd unit files are simple text files with an INI-style layout. There are some other systemd configuration files with different formats for historical reasons, but to my knowledge all of them are still text.
Unfortunately, if you have a sevice that needs another service 100% functional before it can run, systemd has no way to describe that in the dependency files nor to test it. All systemd uses to define a "running" service is that a process doesn't throw an immediate error upon startup. And, that's all it can ever have, unless the service is specially coded to be systemd-aware or does something like create a file in /var/run after it has fully initialized, and the dependency can be written using file existence.
That isn't true. Putting aside the systemd-specific sd_notify() API for reporting just how completely the service has been initialized, and the socket activation model which allows other services to connect while startup is still in progress, systemd also supports traditional "forking" daemons which complete their initialization before the main process exits. You can also use the ExecStartPre and ExecStartPost fields to inject arbitrary commands into the startup process separate from the daemon itself.
The best case short of actual systemd integration is that the service already does the right thing with the fork-and-exit model, so that it's ready to be used before any other services are started which depend on it. But even if that isn't the case there are ways to deal with it under systemd, up to and including custom shell scripts for the really complex cases.
Whether or not you are protected from a fraudulent transaction is fairly meaningless while you watch all your checks bounce and you have no cash because your account is empty.
What you're actually looking for here is "don't keep all your money in one account". The same thing could happen with a credit card when (not if) the thief reaches your credit limit. Your protection in having two separate accounts (credit and checking), not in using a credit card. Just use a separate account for your debit card, with most of your money elsewhere, and you won't have this problem.
The tx-id does, in fact, uniquely identify a particular transaction. It's basically just the hash of the completed transaction record. The problem is that it isn't the entire transaction record that you're signing when you send bitcoins, just the input you provided and the set of outputs. This is done so that multiple independent parties can all contribute to the same transaction, but it also means that someone can modify other fields to create a new, equally valid transaction with the same inputs and outputs but a different tx-id.
Rather than the tx-id or the rather arbitrary (amount, address, timestamp) tuple recommended in the article, exchanges should be using the same data they signed to identify the transaction in the blockchain. The simplest way to do that would be to index the table on the signature itself. When a transaction shows up in the blockchain with that signature on one of the inputs you know the transfer went through, regardless of the eventual tx-id.
... why, if news stories are any indication, there seems to be such a high percentage of money laundering activity or the like compared to what happens with other forms of currency?
It only seems that way because when (several orders of magnitude more) money laundering happens on a regular basis involving any of the national currencies, it doesn't generally make the news, whereas anything involving bitcoins is apparently newsworthy—including some rather careless individuals getting arrested for knowingly participating in a crime which had very little to do with cryptocurrencies. (In this case the buyers reportedly said that they wanted the bitcoins for the purpose of buying stolen credit cards, and the sellers chose to go through with the transaction anyway.)
Face it, money laundering isn't very interesting on its own. It mostly comes down to failure to file the right paperwork. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is something new and different, so it's no surprise that the news covers Bitcoin-related money laundering and not USD-related money laundering, even though the latter is far more commonplace.
VNC can also forward individual applications, though I can't comment on how well it works. For an example see v11vnc with the "-appshare" option. I tend to use xpra for that myself, even on LANs.
The API which Wayland exposes to client applications should make this sort of thing much easier to implement. (Clients aren't expected to know how they're layed out on the screen; they just send surfaces to the compositor, so the compositor knows exactly which images to compress and forward.)
"licence terms" which is different to the copyright you are complaining about.
The "right" to set license terms derives from copyright. Without copyright no one needs a license, so there are no license terms. Everything is public domain.
The point, in case you missed it, is that the foundation of free software is a community of developers who want software to be free, not "respect for license terms", which is something many in the free software camp do not have. Copyleft is first and foremost a pragmatic tool to be used against others who do want licenses to be respected (so that they can set restrictive terms). The rules are theirs, not ours; we're just twisting them to our advantage.
the very thing free software is built upon - respect for the licence terms that the person who has provided the software asks for.
Oh, please. Copyleft is a reaction against copyright, not an endorsement of it. Free software is built on the idea that users should have free access to the source code for the software they use and the right to modify it as they choose, and redistribute the modifications under the same terms. The only reason to choose copyleft over public domain, if you happen to fall into that camp, is the fear that some company will take the software, develop and promote it to the point that no one uses the original version, and then use copyright to impose their own more restrictive terms, infringing on the user's freedom. In short, without copyright there would be no need for copyleft.
No doubt there are a few other license fanatics like yourself in the free software community, but for the most part I think most free software developers only care about respect for license terms to the extent they deem necessary to protect against the imposition of unreasonable license terms by others. The important thing is that the software and its source code get to users in the freest form possible.
You say Orwellian, but it's also what everybody on Star Trek lives with.
Not everybody on Star Trek, just those in Star Fleet, an all-volunteer quasi-military organization. I would hardly consider Star Trek's "Federation of Planets" a perfect society, but the handful of ordinary citizens who appeared on the show seemed to enjoy quite a bit more privacy and independence than the average member of Star Fleet.
What's funny about the I-185 toll road is how absolutely bad things are:
1) There is almost no mileage/time savings vs the primary highways
2) The tolls have skyrocketed over the past few years because it's basically a useless road (It now costs $6 cash to go end-to-end to save no time and no miles)
While this case does sound particularly bad—I would say 50 cents is on the steep side for a 17-mile stretch of toll road, much less $6—it still amazes me how anyone could expect a toll road to compete on a level playing field with tax-funded roads. If you choose to take the toll road, you have to pay the tolls plus the fuel taxes and other costs associated with the public roads, and yet none of that goes to fund the construction or maintenance of the toll road.
If the public roads were funded with precise user fees, charged to each user in proportion to how much they used the roads, then toll roads might have a chance. You would have a choice between paying for the privately-operated toll road or the public road. As it stands, the only way a toll road can work is if there is no reasonable route via public roads to the same destinations—and even if that is the case when the road is built, the circumstances can always change.
The same problem can exist with municipal Internet service. In general I have no problem with community-driven Internet providers, but I do have a problem with municipalities funding such ventures out of tax receipts or tax-backed municipal bonds, or favoring their own system with special permits or the like which other providers don't have access to. I would prefer a strict division between the organization providing the Internet service (on a self-funded basis) and the municipality setting the terms and conditions which any provider must meet, with a fair bidding process open to all.
Since the founding fathers hung traitors, those who exercised their freedom of speech in ways harmful to the cause, it is pretty evident that even the framers of the constitution recognized that it doesn't trump everything else.
All that means is that the founding fathers were human beings, and not perfect. All of them failed to follow the principles expressed in the Constitution at one point or another.
For instance, the right to bear arms is not violated by not allowing convicted criminals to own firearms while on probation.
The conditions of their probation are something they agreed to to stay out of jail after being convicted of some crime which justified putting them in jail in the first place (or so one would hope—a topic for another day). They still have the right to keep and bear arms, but if they choose to exercise that right then they're violating the terms of their probation and back to jail they go, not as punishment but because that's where they would have been anyway without the probation.
,,, the basic principle of these rights are for the betterment of society still stand and any freedoms must be viewed in that context.
Wrong. The basic principle is that all people are "endowed by their Creator" with these inalienable rights. It is better that society recognizes and protects these rights rather than violating them, but the rights themselves are not granted by society to be removed on a whim.
The flaw in that argument is in thinking that freedom of speech trumps everything.
Freedom of speech is supposed to trump everything else, when it comes to restrictions on or punishment for speech as such. Yes, that does mean that copyright law is probably unconstitutional—the courts actually came very close to throwing it out on First Amendment grounds at one point, but settled for a compromise between principles and short-sighted pragmatism which imposed some restrictions on copyright but still fell short of full compliance with the Constitution. "Information that has been deemed protected" is an even more obvious conflict.
Right, and I'm not disputing that, but no one's going around saying "Hey, if we fight each other and wreck a bunch of our ships, it will create a bunch of jobs and we'll both end up better off in the end." Naturally, in the original Broken Window Fallacy, the glassmakers and so on end up better off. The problem is that the benefit to them ends up being balanced out, and then some, by the negative externality to the person who's perfectly good window was broken. If you don't care about the losses to others then you can still turn a tidy profit by going around breaking windows.
In the case of EVE, of course, such externalities are just part of the game. We wouldn't expect anyone to step in from outside the game to put a stop to them even if the virtual assets being destroyed do have real-world value. The players know what they're getting into before they spend time and money acquiring these assets, and understand that they "own" them only so long as the rules of the game say they do.
The destruction of ships is one of the major drivers of demand in the Eve economy.
Wow. Someplace where the Glazier's Fallacy isn't a fallacy. It figures it would be in the economy of an MMO.
No, it's still a fallacy. However, the fallacy isn't in the idea that destruction drives demand for replacements. That's generally true. The fallacy is in the idea that the economic activity which results from the destruction will leave you better off than you were before. In fact, after all that activity you've only managed to get back what you lost, and in the process you've consumed resources which could have been used to better your position if you hadn't been forced to start over instead.
In this case the $200,000 worth of virtual ships weren't destroyed in hope if improving the in-game economy, so the fallacy doesn't apply. They were consumed in the course of providing hours of entertainment for some 2,200 players. That's a bit pricey at $90 or more per player—and that's assuming every player was involved for the duration of the entire battle—but it's certainly not the most expensive way you could choose to entertain yourself for an entire day. Some people pay that much just to sit in a stadium and watch others play professional sports for a fraction of the time.
My battery life has improved a bit. Also recently uninstalled Google Talk (now called "Hangouts (Replaces Google Talk)") because it started asking for access to my text messages as well.
That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since Hangouts is the app for text messaging these days. I just upgraded to a new Nexus 5, for example, and there is no separate Messaging app. Hangouts handles that function by default.
Moving back on-topic, App Ops X is a good start, and I'm disappointed with Google for removing this function from the base system and making it increasingly difficult to install and use. Ideally I'd prefer for users to have complete control over permissions, in a way which is completely transparent to the app. The app doesn't need to know that network access is blocked; it just gets a "no signal" response, or "destination unreachable" when attempting to access particular domains. It doesn't need to know that you've restricted access to the contact list; it just gets its own, private contact list. It doesn't need to know you've restricted location access, it just sees "acquiring GPS signal...". And so on. If the app can see what you've restricted, then the app can be designed to refuse to function until you've removed the restriction, which defeats the whole point. The sandbox approach is the only reasonable way to have fine-grained permissions under the user's control.
And as the USA claim always to stay up for human rights: ... [un.org]
Here's one of your bigger problems: we do believe in human rights, but we don't define them the same way the UN does. In particular, our background and beliefs reflect negative rights (freedom from interference by others) rather than positive rights (the right to goods or services which others in turn have an obligation to supply—slavery by any other name).
So, applying this to the situation at hand, we believe that people living in Detroit have the right to leave—no one has the right to hold them there—but not that anyone has any (legal) obligation to help them do so. People have the right to work—if two people choose to enter an employer-employee relationship under mutually agreeable terms, no one has the right to step in and prevent it—but not that anyone is obligated to offer any particular person a job. And so on for housing, education, health care... you are free to seek these for yourself, without interference, alone or working together with other like-minded individuals, but no one else is obligated to provide them for you.
Lest this seem callous, keep in mind that this is only the legal side. Socially, the same groups which most closely adhere to the traditional American values of liberty, independence and self-reliance are also the ones which have historically done the most to support those who find themselves in need of assistance, both privately and through donations to private-sector charitable organizations. The more personal the assistance, the more effective it is at restoring the recipient's status as an equal and effective member of society, as opposed to remaining forever dependent on public handouts. The distinction is important psychologically; an impersonal entitlement does nothing to boost your confidence or encourage you to get back on your feet so you can repay the favor, whereas private assistance means that someone has chosen to take an interest in you and believes that you are worth helping.
But it should not be possible to just remove the responsibility of the father without providing a second person that steps in.
Why? I see no reason whatsoever that a single parent (with the necessary means) should not be able to have a child, with sole custody and parental rights and responsibilities, via artificial insemination. It's legal (though uncommon) for a single parent to adopt a child with the same end result(*), so why not this?
* http://www.parents.com/parenting/adoption/facts/can-a-single-person-adopt/
"Due process" doesn't mean much by itself; the process needn't be fair or just, merely consistent. Rights don't end just because some arbitrary process was followed. On the contrary, you have your rights so long as you respect the rights of others. The moment you act in a way which violates someone else's rights, you implicitly take the position that those rights do not exist, which frees the other party to act in the same way toward you. Due process is about establishing that this has taken place for all to see, vs. just going off and punishing someone on your own without any public proof of wrongdoing.
Inflation is driven by the change in the supply of money against the demand for money.
Right. We're assuming the supply is fixed (as with Bitcoin in the long run), so inflation and deflation mainly reflect changes in the demand for money. In other words, a smaller or larger supply of goods and services available for purchase.
Deflation is often associated with recessions.
Not really. Deflation is often blamed, but the only real correlation is the American Great Depression. In other words, deflation caused by a sudden drop in the money supply due to a credit contraction. The contraction (which was evidence of previous malinvestment to begin with) was responsible for both the deflation and the recession. See also this study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
No, the reason why you invest in a venture is because the projected risk adjusted returns are higher than your required return.
The only reason your "required return" is less than the average rate of return in the first place is the money supply is manipulated to avoid deflation. Remove that manipulation and we're saying the same thing.
There are obviously other factors besides short-term average returns which affect the demand for money; the desire for "safe" forms of saving in response to economic uncertainty would be one example. While these other factors are not as systemic, they are still important signals regarding the need for immediate consumption and investment vs. saving up resources for the future which we ignore or overrule at our peril.
having a chilling effect on economic growth as people refuse to invest in projects that are unlikely to provide better returns than the deflationary increase in value
The difference in our positions is that where you're saying that the loss of these investments will have a chilling effect on economic growth, I'm saying that the investments themselves would have a chilling effect on economic growth—one that the deflation and resulting tendency to "hoard" rather than (mal)invest helps to prevent.
There's plenty of other projects out there, and in the US at least anything less than 3% or so is flat out losing money. By your argument all that money could instead be invested in higher-yield projects to generate a better economic outcome for everyone, so why isn't it?
Higher-yield projects are hard to find, reliably. First, yield can only be estimated at the time you're making the decision, and every investment involves some indeterminate amount of risk. Finding the right investments is a skill not everyone has; the same goes for risk tolerance.
Inflation is supposed to mean that the economy is shrinking. We need more investment—even at a loss in real terms, provided it's above the rate of inflation—to build up our productive capacity and slow or reverse the decrease in economic output. However, when you have a growing economy and price inflation together, thanks to changes in the money supply, you get a perverse situation where a below-average investment (presumably the best a particular investor could find, though not the best available) is better than the inflation for the individual investor, but still results in a net decrease in the rate of growth for the economy as a whole.
Let us use big numbers to illustrate this point. You can invest in a new business and get a 10% real return. You expect deflation to be 10%. If you invest $100 you wind up with $99 at the end (100*1.1*(1-.1)), but you are better off in real terms by $9. Or you could burry your cash. At the end of the period you would have exactly the same $100, but you would be better off by $10. Better not to invest.
In this case the result is marginal, since 10% is the average rate of return. You can invest $100 worth of resources in the business with 10% real return and get $100 (not $99) at the end, worth $110 in pre-deflation units, or you could "hoard" the money instead of investing, and still end up with $100 at the end. Your investment at 10% is displacing some other investment at 10%, so it doesn't make any real difference.
Let's consider a more interesting scenario. You can invest in a new business and get a 8% real return. You expect deflation to be 10%. If you invest $100 you wind up with $98.18 at the end (100*1.08/1.1), but you are better off in real terms by $8. Alternatively, you could bury your cash. At the end of the period you would have exactly the same $100, but you would be better off by $10. Better not to invest—for everyone. Expected deflation of 10% means that the economy is growing by 10%. The average rate of return, therefore, is 10%. The $100 you invest in a project earning only 8% takes $100 worth of resources away from a group of projects earning, on average, 10%. By enabling this project, you're bringing down the average rate of growth. If you "hoard" your money instead, then you're effectively loaning the resources you could have consumed with that money to everyone else, including investors better able to pick the truly profitable ventures; the rate of deflation amounts to the interest you've earned on that loan.
Remember, it's not the money that's important; it's what you can buy with it. Economically it makes no difference whether you hand the money off to a bank to be distributed evenly in loans to everyone holding a dollar or simply hold onto it. Either your money is out in the economy being spent on things, or the remaining money which is out there is more valuable by the same amount since it's not competing with yours for goods and services. The only reason to invest in some specific venture (apart from being forced into it via inflationary monetary policies) is that you think you can do better than the average rate of return.
At 10:35AM you will post a copy of a 10BTC number on the gang's Facebook page, and the clock is counting. They need to be paid and gone as soon as possible, because by 10:40AM they will get caught.
Target will know about the double-spend attempt long before 10:40AM. The transactions might not make it into a block for about 10 minutes on average, but unconfirmed transactions are still broadcast to the entire network within a few seconds. When you go to double-spend the 10 BTC, Target can look at the unconfirmed transaction list and see that the transaction you're providing overlaps with another transaction entered a few seconds ago. By the time you'd reached the door they'd know something is up, since this sort of thing rarely occurs by accident. Even better, their payment processor could make you wait 5-10 seconds after broadcasting the new transaction to see if any conflicts show up before considering the transaction successful.
Check out this page sometime. It includes a live stream of new transactions as they're received by the site. Even including latency from their server to my PC, the latest transactions are only a few seconds old.
Serious double-spend attacks depend on having control over enough of the miner network to ensure your preferred transaction (to yourself, generally) is included in the next block without broadcasting it to everyone first, or somehow disrupting the communication between Bitcoin nodes. Or a naive payment processor, of course, but I hardly think Target is likely to make that mistake.