Wealth is proportional and relative to the disparity between the rich and poor. A space station completely cutoff from Earth severs that that tie between the rich and poor. There for, the "rich" have no wealth.
Wealth can be measured against people who live or have lived in other places and times, not just between contemporary members of the same society. Residents of a completely isolated space station can still be wealthy when compared to those living on Earth, or to historical norms.
Consistently bad laws are worse than inconsistently bad laws. Consistency is only something to be sought after when it means improving the bad parts, not when it means corrupting the good (or not-so-bad) parts.
You aren't secure against reasonable searches, only unreasonable ones.
We are in agreement that the purpose of the amendment is only to prevent "unreasonable" searches. That still leaves the necessity of defining which searches are "reasonable", which is the purpose of the second half.
And no, the next clause doesn't say it is the only way to define "reasonable", it deals with the requirement for warrants.
Yes, exactly: the requirement for warrants, which are nothing more or less than the legal authority to search or seize someone's property. If you don't have a warrant, you don't have any legal authority to perform a search or seizure.
There are two independent requirements in this amendment: first, people have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures; second, no searches or seizures can legally take place without first establishing probable cause. The second part is the formal mechanism which ensures that the right in the first part is respected. This is all perfectly consistent with established legal principles at the time the amendment was written, which disapproved of warrantless searches in general with the one notable exception of a search performed as part of a lawful arrest (which is a borderline case; your personal and property rights are not rendered void simply because you've been arrested, however legally).
There are numerous examples of expedient searches that do not require warrants because they have been declared to be reasonable a-priori.
Such a declaration would be equivalent to issuing a general warrant, and thus directly violates the 4th amendment. A search is not reasonable until it's been proved reasonable in the specific case.
Note that the concept of "reasonable" searches didn't even appear in the first version of the amendment. The original amendment only concerned itself with the requirements for issuing warrants. What few changes there were between that version and the one which was ratified are considered purely stylistic.
It doesn't matter in the slightest how you define "unreasonable", because that term only appears in the rationale part of the amendment. The actual requirement is that the government doesn't get permission to search or seize someone's property (i.e. a warrant) without specific, documented probable cause.
The only definition consistent with the Constitution is that if no legal warrant has been issued, the search or seizure must be presumed unreasonable by default. If it were reasonable, they would have been able to make their case to a judge and get a warrant.
The SC can change how the Constitution is interpreted. SO we can go from everyone has a right to a gun to only those in the National Guard have a right to a gun.
Even if the SC were to "interpret" the 2nd amendment to only apply to the Guard, demonstrating either willful blindness or an abysmal lack of reading comprehension, it wouldn't change anyone's rights or what is constitutional. It would just mean that the SC refused to do its job and enforce the Constitution as written and ratified by the states.
That will help if it's merely a bit of file contents which were lost, but what do you do if the error is in the filesystem metadata? You need to be able to access the filesystem to read the PAR2 files, along with the rest of the disc's content. If you lose an inode or superblock then a PAR2 file would be out of reach, even if you can recover the remaining blocks from the disk image.
Is there a way to add PAR2 data to a raw disc image while still allowing the disc to be read with standard tools?
Every money is fiat money. Even a Gold standard. The value of Gold exists only in the mutual agreement that Gold should be valuable, because it looks nice if used for decoration.
The "fiat" label mean more than just that the price is determined by the market. As you know, all prices are ultimately determined by the market; there would be no point in calling it "fiat" if that was all it meant. Fiat money is money which is marketable at least in part due to government decree; for example, by being declared legal tender, meaning that people are obligated to accept it for settlement of a debt in lieu of whatever form of payment was actually negotiated. Federal reserve notes are fiat because you are required to accept them; no one is required to accept gold, so gold is not fiat money. Both are forms of base money, meaning that they trade on their own merits rather than as claims on other goods, like paper money under the gold standard.
You make several very goods points in favor of eliminating subsidies favoring the telecom providers. I wholly agree. I'm just saying that the competition shouldn't get any special privileges either, even if that competition happens to be a cooperative community ISP.
The U.S government paid billions in subsidies to get broadband up and running
People keep saying this. Apparently the government really messed up, if they actually handed out that much money and yet can't seem to sue for breach of contract when the service isn't provided. I've heard conflicting versions of just what they were supposed to provide; it certainly wouldn't include modern multi-Mbps connections to every home. I would want to see the contract before making any accusations. In any case, this was all a very long time ago. It's time to move on.
That is entirely beside the point. An independent co-op would get the same opportunity to negotiate with the municipality for right-of-way. The problem is vertical integration with the organization controlling local law and taxes. A private company which has to convince each individual customer to subscribe cannot compete on equal terms with a municipal government which has the option of forcing people to subscribe (or to fund the operation without subscribing, through taxes).
No one wants to sympathize with the telecoms, but they do have a very good point in this case.
In the end it really doesn't matter what the founding fathers meant. What matters is what we'll allow as a society now.
It doesn't matter what the founding fathers meant. What matters is what the state legislatures thought it meant when they ratified it.
What we'll allow as a society now only matters if we pass a new amendment overturning the 2nd. The meaning of the Constitution only changes with the passing of new amendments, not the passing of time.
The companies claim they can't compete against the government entity.
This is an issue if the municipal system is subsidized with taxes, or funded through tax-backed municipal bonds, or receives special access to municipal right-of-ways, or any number of other things normal companies don't have access to. The municipality can easily undercut the competition because they don't have to pay for right-of-ways and, if all else fails, they can force people to pay for their service whether they want it or not. It's the same reason you don't see many private roads; given two otherwise equal roads, one private (toll) and the other public (tax-funded), no one is going to choose the toll road when they have to pay the taxes for the public one anyway, even if the tolls are ultimately less expensive.
Note that I'm not arguing against community-provided Internet access, just the government aspects. If the service was provided by a local co-op with no special ties to the municipal government, competing on equal terms, the company would have no cause for complaint.
The mere fact that the victim is in the film does not imply that the victim owns the film. The property right argument works the other way: whoever owns the film has the right to share it with others.
There are laws regarding the use of someone's image without a model release, but they aren't based on (or even consistent with) property rights.
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
I said the constitution grants a "well regulated militia" the right to bear arms, which is factual.
No, it is not. The Constitution recognizes the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It recognizes this right in part because a "well regulated militia" was deemed necessary, but the right is not limited to the militia (which in any case was every able-bodied male of military age, not a particularly select group).
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Phone records may be considered "protected information", but that cannot be a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment, as nothing is being searched or seized without the permission of the owner. Naturally, Congress is free to impose additional requirements on law enforcement, separate from the 4th Amendment, and the telecoms may be subject to data-protection laws which prohibit them from turning over phone records without a warrant.
Seriously though, the 4th Amendment is against 'search and SEIZURE'. Their collection of data is most definitely 'seizure'.
It's a 'search' if the government compels someone to allow them to examine their property. It's a 'seizure' if someone is compelled to turn their property over to the government. If the owners of the property—in this case the telecommunications companies—voluntarily participate in the program, then there is no search or seizure, and the 4th doesn't apply. This is no different from the case where the police don't need a warrant to use anything in plain sight as evidence if you choose to let them into your house, whereas they would need a warrant to enter without your permission.
Of course, if contractual obligations or data-protection laws prohibit the telecom from turning over this data to others without a warrant then they could still be sued for their participation. If there was a warrant it wouldn't be up to them, but voluntarily turning over the data is a different matter. The government could even technically get in trouble for inducing them to break the contract (or other law), just not under the 4th.
a constitutional republic that exists to provide for the common defense, the peaceful mediation of disputes, and holds only limited and specifically enumerated powers derived from the consent of the governed such that it may not infringe upon the unalienable rights of the people
There is a contradiction in your requirements. Even "limited and specifically enumerated powers" will inevitably infringe people's unalienable rights. The best you can do, short of giving up on government in general, is try to keep that infringement to a minimum.
Anyway, you don't need government to provide for common defense or to mediate disputes peacefully. You only need government to force people to participate in your particular arrangement for defense or mediation, which in both cases completely misses the point of defending people and peacefully mediating disputes by making the defender/mediator the aggressor which other must defend themselves against.
You were shouting in my face so I pushed you, you pushed me so I hit you, you hit me so I shot you. All self defence?
If you're escalating the situation then you're not practicing self-defense. That said, there is a difference between "he hit me so I shot him" and "he was about to kill or irreparably injure me so I shot him". The situation may be exactly the same, but the former reasoning is escalation, whereas the latter is (preemptive) defense.
To counter an imminent threat of irreversible harm, preemptive defense may be both necessary and justified. However, that path carries significant risks should others happen to disagree with your threat assessment.
including it in HTML5 would at least standardize it somewhat and allow one product to be patched for security holes.
Except that isn't how it works. The part which has been proposed for inclusion in HTML5 isn't any particular DRM scheme, but rather a generic API for linking various unspecified DRM schemes with the audio and video tags via Javascript. The implementation is either a non-standard DRM extension built into the web browser or a non-standard DRM plugin. Either way, different web sides can require different DRM schemes, which probably won't be portable to different web browsers, not to mention different platforms. Each implementation will have its own unique security issues, just as plugins do now.
Not directly. That's what it means for them to be "inalienable". However, you can agree to forfeit something alienable (e.g. property) in the event that you do exercise those rights. In the event that you do exercise the right, the loss of property isn't a punishment as it would be had you lost the right itself; it's simply a matter of you keeping up your end of the bargain.
As long as you support or accept the establishment, well, yes.
Thing is, you don't have to.
Quite right—but that has nothing to do with whether you voted or who you voted for. Cast a symbolic vote for the Greens or the Libertarian Party if it makes you feel better, but don't pretend that things would be any different over the long term if they were in power. The Republicans and Democrats didn't start out as they are now either.
If you want to reject the establishment, the first step is to refuse to play their game, and find ways to reduce their practical influence on your life. Getting involved in politics has the opposite effect.
There is also the problem of credit history. If you don't have any, you won't get a loan when you need one. I hope that works for you; but most people need a loan to buy a car, and a mortgage to buy a house. Otherwise they can buy these items only by the age when they don't need them.
I hear this repeated often, but it seems like a myth. I've never owned a credit card, and yet I had no trouble getting a loan for my car or a mortgage for my house, both on favorable terms and at a younger age than most. If you rent for a few years before buying a house, as most people do anyway, and always pay your utility bills on time, that will net you more than enough credit history without relying on credit cards. What they're looking for is a history of making regular on-time payments, and a low debt-to-income ratio.
... the first notes where in fact IOUs for various things including gold...
The gold was already money—a good used for indirect exchange—before there were notes for it. The notes just made it more convenient (while opening up a window for fraud in the form of warehouse owners issuing more receipts for gold than they actually had in storage).
From your own link (emphasis mine):
The history of money begins around 2500 years ago with the first minting of coinage in about the seventh to sixth century BC. Money is any clearly identifiable object of value that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts within a market or which is legal tender within a country.
IOUs are one form of money, but not the only form.
Slashdot Mirror
Wealth is proportional and relative to the disparity between the rich and poor. A space station completely cutoff from Earth severs that that tie between the rich and poor. There for, the "rich" have no wealth.
Wealth can be measured against people who live or have lived in other places and times, not just between contemporary members of the same society. Residents of a completely isolated space station can still be wealthy when compared to those living on Earth, or to historical norms.
but inconsistent laws are worse than bad laws
Consistently bad laws are worse than inconsistently bad laws. Consistency is only something to be sought after when it means improving the bad parts, not when it means corrupting the good (or not-so-bad) parts.
You aren't secure against reasonable searches, only unreasonable ones.
We are in agreement that the purpose of the amendment is only to prevent "unreasonable" searches. That still leaves the necessity of defining which searches are "reasonable", which is the purpose of the second half.
And no, the next clause doesn't say it is the only way to define "reasonable", it deals with the requirement for warrants.
Yes, exactly: the requirement for warrants, which are nothing more or less than the legal authority to search or seize someone's property. If you don't have a warrant, you don't have any legal authority to perform a search or seizure.
There are two independent requirements in this amendment: first, people have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures; second, no searches or seizures can legally take place without first establishing probable cause. The second part is the formal mechanism which ensures that the right in the first part is respected. This is all perfectly consistent with established legal principles at the time the amendment was written, which disapproved of warrantless searches in general with the one notable exception of a search performed as part of a lawful arrest (which is a borderline case; your personal and property rights are not rendered void simply because you've been arrested, however legally).
There are numerous examples of expedient searches that do not require warrants because they have been declared to be reasonable a-priori.
Such a declaration would be equivalent to issuing a general warrant, and thus directly violates the 4th amendment. A search is not reasonable until it's been proved reasonable in the specific case.
Note that the concept of "reasonable" searches didn't even appear in the first version of the amendment. The original amendment only concerned itself with the requirements for issuing warrants. What few changes there were between that version and the one which was ratified are considered purely stylistic.
Now define unreasonable
It doesn't matter in the slightest how you define "unreasonable", because that term only appears in the rationale part of the amendment. The actual requirement is that the government doesn't get permission to search or seize someone's property (i.e. a warrant) without specific, documented probable cause.
The only definition consistent with the Constitution is that if no legal warrant has been issued, the search or seizure must be presumed unreasonable by default. If it were reasonable, they would have been able to make their case to a judge and get a warrant.
The SC can change how the Constitution is interpreted. SO we can go from everyone has a right to a gun to only those in the National Guard have a right to a gun.
Even if the SC were to "interpret" the 2nd amendment to only apply to the Guard, demonstrating either willful blindness or an abysmal lack of reading comprehension, it wouldn't change anyone's rights or what is constitutional. It would just mean that the SC refused to do its job and enforce the Constitution as written and ratified by the states.
PAR2 files.
That will help if it's merely a bit of file contents which were lost, but what do you do if the error is in the filesystem metadata? You need to be able to access the filesystem to read the PAR2 files, along with the rest of the disc's content. If you lose an inode or superblock then a PAR2 file would be out of reach, even if you can recover the remaining blocks from the disk image.
Is there a way to add PAR2 data to a raw disc image while still allowing the disc to be read with standard tools?
Every money is fiat money. Even a Gold standard. The value of Gold exists only in the mutual agreement that Gold should be valuable, because it looks nice if used for decoration.
The "fiat" label mean more than just that the price is determined by the market. As you know, all prices are ultimately determined by the market; there would be no point in calling it "fiat" if that was all it meant. Fiat money is money which is marketable at least in part due to government decree; for example, by being declared legal tender, meaning that people are obligated to accept it for settlement of a debt in lieu of whatever form of payment was actually negotiated. Federal reserve notes are fiat because you are required to accept them; no one is required to accept gold, so gold is not fiat money. Both are forms of base money, meaning that they trade on their own merits rather than as claims on other goods, like paper money under the gold standard.
You make several very goods points in favor of eliminating subsidies favoring the telecom providers. I wholly agree. I'm just saying that the competition shouldn't get any special privileges either, even if that competition happens to be a cooperative community ISP.
The U.S government paid billions in subsidies to get broadband up and running
People keep saying this. Apparently the government really messed up, if they actually handed out that much money and yet can't seem to sue for breach of contract when the service isn't provided. I've heard conflicting versions of just what they were supposed to provide; it certainly wouldn't include modern multi-Mbps connections to every home. I would want to see the contract before making any accusations. In any case, this was all a very long time ago. It's time to move on.
That is entirely beside the point. An independent co-op would get the same opportunity to negotiate with the municipality for right-of-way. The problem is vertical integration with the organization controlling local law and taxes. A private company which has to convince each individual customer to subscribe cannot compete on equal terms with a municipal government which has the option of forcing people to subscribe (or to fund the operation without subscribing, through taxes).
No one wants to sympathize with the telecoms, but they do have a very good point in this case.
In the end it really doesn't matter what the founding fathers meant. What matters is what we'll allow as a society now.
It doesn't matter what the founding fathers meant. What matters is what the state legislatures thought it meant when they ratified it.
What we'll allow as a society now only matters if we pass a new amendment overturning the 2nd. The meaning of the Constitution only changes with the passing of new amendments, not the passing of time.
The companies claim they can't compete against the government entity.
This is an issue if the municipal system is subsidized with taxes, or funded through tax-backed municipal bonds, or receives special access to municipal right-of-ways, or any number of other things normal companies don't have access to. The municipality can easily undercut the competition because they don't have to pay for right-of-ways and, if all else fails, they can force people to pay for their service whether they want it or not. It's the same reason you don't see many private roads; given two otherwise equal roads, one private (toll) and the other public (tax-funded), no one is going to choose the toll road when they have to pay the taxes for the public one anyway, even if the tolls are ultimately less expensive.
Note that I'm not arguing against community-provided Internet access, just the government aspects. If the service was provided by a local co-op with no special ties to the municipal government, competing on equal terms, the company would have no cause for complaint.
The mere fact that the victim is in the film does not imply that the victim owns the film. The property right argument works the other way: whoever owns the film has the right to share it with others.
There are laws regarding the use of someone's image without a model release, but they aren't based on (or even consistent with) property rights.
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
This would actually be useful.
Code that up and get back to us.
Substitute any appropriate 2048-entry word list for WORDS. This code just uses the string forms of the indices.
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
I said the constitution grants a "well regulated militia" the right to bear arms, which is factual.
No, it is not. The Constitution recognizes the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It recognizes this right in part because a "well regulated militia" was deemed necessary, but the right is not limited to the militia (which in any case was every able-bodied male of military age, not a particularly select group).
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Phone records may be considered "protected information", but that cannot be a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment, as nothing is being searched or seized without the permission of the owner. Naturally, Congress is free to impose additional requirements on law enforcement, separate from the 4th Amendment, and the telecoms may be subject to data-protection laws which prohibit them from turning over phone records without a warrant.
Seriously though, the 4th Amendment is against 'search and SEIZURE'. Their collection of data is most definitely 'seizure'.
It's a 'search' if the government compels someone to allow them to examine their property. It's a 'seizure' if someone is compelled to turn their property over to the government. If the owners of the property—in this case the telecommunications companies—voluntarily participate in the program, then there is no search or seizure, and the 4th doesn't apply. This is no different from the case where the police don't need a warrant to use anything in plain sight as evidence if you choose to let them into your house, whereas they would need a warrant to enter without your permission.
Of course, if contractual obligations or data-protection laws prohibit the telecom from turning over this data to others without a warrant then they could still be sued for their participation. If there was a warrant it wouldn't be up to them, but voluntarily turning over the data is a different matter. The government could even technically get in trouble for inducing them to break the contract (or other law), just not under the 4th.
a constitutional republic that exists to provide for the common defense, the peaceful mediation of disputes, and holds only limited and specifically enumerated powers derived from the consent of the governed such that it may not infringe upon the unalienable rights of the people
There is a contradiction in your requirements. Even "limited and specifically enumerated powers" will inevitably infringe people's unalienable rights. The best you can do, short of giving up on government in general, is try to keep that infringement to a minimum.
Anyway, you don't need government to provide for common defense or to mediate disputes peacefully. You only need government to force people to participate in your particular arrangement for defense or mediation, which in both cases completely misses the point of defending people and peacefully mediating disputes by making the defender/mediator the aggressor which other must defend themselves against.
The state must live by the same rules as its subjects.
Not that I'm disagreeing in any way, but if the state actually lived by the same rules as its subjects, there would be no state.
You were shouting in my face so I pushed you, you pushed me so I hit you, you hit me so I shot you. All self defence?
If you're escalating the situation then you're not practicing self-defense. That said, there is a difference between "he hit me so I shot him" and "he was about to kill or irreparably injure me so I shot him". The situation may be exactly the same, but the former reasoning is escalation, whereas the latter is (preemptive) defense.
To counter an imminent threat of irreversible harm, preemptive defense may be both necessary and justified. However, that path carries significant risks should others happen to disagree with your threat assessment.
including it in HTML5 would at least standardize it somewhat and allow one product to be patched for security holes.
Except that isn't how it works. The part which has been proposed for inclusion in HTML5 isn't any particular DRM scheme, but rather a generic API for linking various unspecified DRM schemes with the audio and video tags via Javascript. The implementation is either a non-standard DRM extension built into the web browser or a non-standard DRM plugin. Either way, different web sides can require different DRM schemes, which probably won't be portable to different web browsers, not to mention different platforms. Each implementation will have its own unique security issues, just as plugins do now.
Can inalienable rights be contracted away?
Not directly. That's what it means for them to be "inalienable". However, you can agree to forfeit something alienable (e.g. property) in the event that you do exercise those rights. In the event that you do exercise the right, the loss of property isn't a punishment as it would be had you lost the right itself; it's simply a matter of you keeping up your end of the bargain.
As long as you support or accept the establishment, well, yes.
Thing is, you don't have to.
Quite right—but that has nothing to do with whether you voted or who you voted for. Cast a symbolic vote for the Greens or the Libertarian Party if it makes you feel better, but don't pretend that things would be any different over the long term if they were in power. The Republicans and Democrats didn't start out as they are now either.
If you want to reject the establishment, the first step is to refuse to play their game, and find ways to reduce their practical influence on your life. Getting involved in politics has the opposite effect.
There is also the problem of credit history. If you don't have any, you won't get a loan when you need one. I hope that works for you; but most people need a loan to buy a car, and a mortgage to buy a house. Otherwise they can buy these items only by the age when they don't need them.
I hear this repeated often, but it seems like a myth. I've never owned a credit card, and yet I had no trouble getting a loan for my car or a mortgage for my house, both on favorable terms and at a younger age than most. If you rent for a few years before buying a house, as most people do anyway, and always pay your utility bills on time, that will net you more than enough credit history without relying on credit cards. What they're looking for is a history of making regular on-time payments, and a low debt-to-income ratio.
... the first notes where in fact IOUs for various things including gold ...
The gold was already money—a good used for indirect exchange—before there were notes for it. The notes just made it more convenient (while opening up a window for fraud in the form of warehouse owners issuing more receipts for gold than they actually had in storage).
From your own link (emphasis mine):
The history of money begins around 2500 years ago with the first minting of coinage in about the seventh to sixth century BC. Money is any clearly identifiable object of value that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts within a market or which is legal tender within a country.
IOUs are one form of money, but not the only form.