For US citizens, well, every one of them who cast a vote for the two big parties or liberalists chose it themselves, and anyone who could vote but didn't quietly accepted it.
Let me get this straight. If you voted, and your candidate won, then you're responsible. If you voted, and your candidate lost, you're responsible. If you didn't vote, you're still responsible. Apparently everyone is responsible for what happens to them, no matter what choices they made. Classic "blame the victim" mentality.
Reality is that the people don't control the system; perhaps it worked that way once, but the system has grown and developed to the point that it's self-sustaining and resistant to outside influence. The career politicians and bureaucrats aren't in control either; they're just along for the ride. You can't blame someone for trying to exercise what little facade of influence they think they have by siding with the least objectionable candidate with a chance of winning. Neither can you blame them for rejecting the rigged game in its entirety.
The only ones who deserve what happens to them are those who advocated forcing those same policies on others.
Foreigners in this country (whether legal or illegal) *do* deserve extra scrutiny from our security services, and they *don't* deserve the same quantity or quality of protections as do US citizens.
Whether you agree with that or not, foreigners both inside and outside this country do deserve the same respect for their rights, including "the right... to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The U.S. government may not have a mandate to actively protect non-citizens, but it does have an obligation to respect universal rights, regardless of citizenship.
You're really pushing this point hard. Sure, the 2nd Amendment could be repealed, assuming anyone was willing to commit political suicide by proposing the repeal of anything in the Bill of Rights, and that three-quarters of the states were willing to ratify the change. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
Anyone in the USA who opposes any change to the second amendment but drinks alcohol is a morally bankrupt hypocrite not worth listening to, which I would imagine is most of them.
This is simply idiotic. Opposing any change to the 2nd Amendment does not equate to opposing the amendment process itself. The fact that the capacity exists to repeal the 2nd Amendment does not automatically make it a good idea. You're just looking for any excuse to tune out those who disagree with you by casting them as hypocrites.
"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"
Nothing about "guns", nothing about "owning"
"Arms" = guns, or more generally any weapon which would typically be carried by infantry. (Yes, this means the amendment is specifically referring to military weapons, not hunting weapons.)
"keep" = own
"bear" = carry in public
The words may be a bit unfamiliar after a few hundred years, but the meaning is obvious to anyone who cares to undertake some honest research.
How would they know the sticks were at a 90 degree angle? Aliens remain the simplest explanation without resorting to geometric constructions(which are hard)...
A right angle is one of the simplest geometric constructions there is. You can construct the perpendicular to a line at any point with three applications of a compass (which can be as simple as a marking device on the end of a string) and one use of a straightedge.
In Texas, and I suspect other states, refusal to blow into a breathalyzer is grounds for arrest and then forcible draw of blood. The probable cause for this is that you refused to breathe into a breathalyzer.
At the very least, "probable cause" should mean that it is more likely than not that the search will turn up incriminating evidence sufficient to justify the violation. I would push for "beyond reasonable doubt" myself—or else hold those responsible for the search accountable for false arrest, assault, theft, etc. in the event they fail to prove their case, just as if the search was unauthorized and they were acting on their own as private citizens.
Is there reason to think that a blood test would show evidence of DUI in the majority of cases where the person refused a breathalyzer test? If the test comes back negative, who is going to compensate the injured innocent party whose rights were violated for no reason?
You started out trying to show that libertarians failed to uphold their own standard of not acting to cause harm to anyone. Ergo, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you were not playing semantic games and interpreting "harm" to mean something different that what it has always meant in that context: the violation of one's self-ownership and/or property rights. If you redefine "harm" to include actions which violate no one's rights, that simply means people sometimes have the right to act in ways which cause "harm".
Semantic games aside, discrimination is perfectly consistent with libertarian philosophy and the Non-Aggression Principle. Being forced to associate with someone against your will is not.
If a person uses force to continue to occupy property which is no longer theirs, because they have lost title to it in order to secure payment of their debts...
Except that there was no debt, the property is legitimately still theirs, they are being wrongfully evicted, and their response to that wrongful eviction is basic self-defense. Nice try.
Choosing from among candidates is action, no matter which way you slice it.... Choosing to discriminate based on irrelevancies is intentionally harming another person.
Whether harm exists doesn't depend on your reasons, only your actions. If there was harm in choosing someone else, then there would be harm no matter why the decision was made. The person who wasn't hired is no worse off than they were before they applied. Their rights were not violated in any way. They requested a voluntary employer/employee relationship, and were turned down. No harm was done on either side.
I'm not saying that it's a good idea to discriminate based on irrelevant attributes. As a rule I'm opposed to discrimination and would prefer to see the right person hired for the job based on their individual abilities rather than a manager's prejudices. I feel discrimination is a poor policy both socially and economically. However, that doesn't mean I would force someone to hire (or otherwise associate with) anyone they didn't want to, for whatever reason.
If someone paid wages (especially under contract), they have the right to your labor or penalty of breaking the contract (a tax).
No, that's backward. If you freely enter into a contract to provide labor in exchange for property, and fulfill your part of the contract, then the other party owes you the agreed-upon wages. If you break the contract then they owe you nothing, and you may owe them compensation for non-performance depending on the jurisdiction and the specific form of the contract. In no case does either party owe the other labor. Labor is inalienable, and contracts only govern the exchange of alienable property. Claiming ownership of someone else's labor is the essence of slavery.
Choosing not to hire someone is non-action, not action. Choosing not to associate with someone is non-action. Forcing someone to hire against their will, or associate against their will, is action, and harmful action at that.
People may not act to harm one another. That doesn't mean anyone is compelled to act to make anyone else better off. It also doesn't mean that you have to treat everyone equally.
Remoting of individual native Wayland applications has already been demonstrated. The protocol is similar to VNC, capturing changes in the per-window rendering surface, compressing them, and sending them over the network. "Similar to VNC" does not mean remoting a whole desktop; a VNC-like protocol is merely used to transfer the contents of the window, in the absence of shared memory.
Modern X11 toolkits do more or less the same thing, but without the change tracking and compression. Having been designed to take advantage of fast, local, shared memory, they render each frame into a buffer (probably without GPU acceleration, since DRI isn't available) and send it in full, uncompressed, across the network. Remote wayland clients should offer significantly better performance.
The Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination reads:
"nor shall be COMPELLED in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" (emphasis added)
The benefit is that the government can't torture a confession out of you.
Not just torture, but the government can't tack on additional charges or punishment for failing to confess. Sometimes people are wrongly convicted on circumstantial evidence, and making it illegal not to confess would raise the incentive for the accused to cave in and confess to something they didn't do in order to avoid further penalties.
At some point your economic rights can deprive me of my liberties.
That's silly. Unless your view of liberty means free stuff for you, paid for by others.
For instance a monopoly provider of X can decide not to serve group Y.
That falls under the category of "free stuff for you, paid for by others". They paid for it, which means it's theirs. If you want it you'll have to convince them to give it to you of their own free will. Your liberties do not extend to taking it from them without their consent. That would deprive them of their liberties.
Action depends on the ownership and consumption of property. What use is the freedom to speak, without the right to a place to gather people to hear your speech? Without the right to save up a surplus so that you have the opportunity to speak, as opposed to spending all your time providing for your own basic needs? What use is the freedom to live and pursue happiness, without the right to ownership of the products of your labor with which to provide for your own future? Liberty without economic rights is a contradiction. Of the two, economic rights are more fundamental. If you have economic rights then you have liberty; if you do not, then your liberty will always be subject to the whim of those who control the allocation of property.
If they were really serious about converting to metric they wouldn't be using heretical non-base-10 units like minutes and hours. The speed limit would be 25 meters per second (~55 MPH), and a 20 kilometer trip would take 8 kiloseconds.
No, it doesn't point to anything.... So a void pointer isn't a pointer. Clear as mud.
Again with the deliberately awkward interpretations. A pointer identifies a location in memory. The pointer's type gives the size of each item; the actual number of items (which can be zero) is not recorded anywhere. In the case of a void pointer either there is one item of size zero, or zero items of any size; take your pick. Either way it means "no data at this location". The existence of a pointer doesn't imply that there is anything at that location. Consider:
int array[10]; int *p = &array[10];
The variable p is a pointer to a location in memory, but it's past the end of the array. The item size is sizeof(int), but the number of items is zero. The code is perfectly legal—you're allowed to have a pointer to the location just past the end of an array—but there is nothing there. There may not even be a virtual memory mapping for that location.
The only difference between p and a void pointer, aside from pointer arithmetic, is that the compiler won't stop you from dereferencing p; you'll just get a runtime error, if you're very, very lucky.
So why not reserve the keyword 'address'. And call it that?
Perhaps because we already have this perfectly usable pointer syntax, which identifies both an address and a type, and rather than make up a completely separate "address" type and special-case everything for no reason we can just use a pointer to the existing "void" type, which already means "no data", because if we don't know the type of the data it might as well not exist as far as the compiler is concerned.
Anyone who really wants an "address" keyword for personal reasons can just write "typedef void *address".
Its a pointer. If its initialized then it points to something.
No, it doesn't point to anything. It's just an address. If it pointed to something then that something would have a well-defined (non-zero) size and type.
So void is a type with a sizeof (void) = 0 ?
It should be, but some ancient versions of C allowed pointer arithmetic on void pointers as though they were pointers to bytes or characters, and support for this was retained, at least in the compiler if not the standard, for backward compatibility. The sizeof operator is defined such that (char*)(p + 1) == ((char*)p + sizeof *p), which implies that sizeof(void*) must equal sizeof(char*) for the pointer arithmetic to work out the same. No modern, well-behaved program should be doing pointer arithmetic with void pointers or using sizeof(void).
We know something is there, we have to typecast to tell the compiler what it is.
We know, but that knowledge is not represented by the void pointer type. The type says "nothing is there", and we have to override that with a typecast to say that there is something there after all.
It really seems like you want the use of "void" to be inconsistent, and are deliberately choosing an awkward interpretation (undefined type vs. the more obvious empty type) in order to make it so. The use of "void" meaning "nothing there" is perfectly consistent between void pointers, void functions, and void expressions.
Why does it make sense to reuse the void keyword which literally means "nothing"?
Because, as far as the type is concerned, it is a pointer to nothing. Given just a void pointer, the only safe assumption is that there is nothing there. It's like a pointer to a zero-length array or an empty structure. You have to perform a typecast, and thus tell the compiler that there is actually something there, before you can do anything with it.
The result of the XOR only tells you whether a given bit is the same or different between the two pads, which, by itself, doesn't tell you anything about either pad, so the XOR can be made public. Combined with one of the pads, however, it allows you to infer the value of the other so that you can send your message. Normally each party would just have a copy of the same pad, but this approach gets around the difficulty of creating two pieces of glass with precisely equal (random) optical properties.
I appreciate the argument, but it seems like it would invalidate pretty much every patent.
I would be happy with that result, but I don't think that's the case. The problem with the circuit in the example is that it's really just an abstract formula which happens to be represented in the form of a circuit diagram involving ideal components, and the reduction to a physical chip does not involve anything innovative. (If anything, circuit diagrams are even more obviously math than software is. Any circuit diagram is isomorphic to a system of equations.)
Simply designing or simulating something on a computer would not render it unpatentable. Having nothing innovative to offer beyond the abstract design or simulation would. In essence, I'm saying that the natural laws—including mathematics, and by extension software and abstract circuit designs and anything else equivalent to math—have to be taken as a given when considering obviousness. To be patentable, an invention has to offer something more than just the plain natural laws, such as a particular configuration of matter or a physical process for producing it.
Taking software and running it on a computer is always obvious. Taking an abstract circuit design and implementing it with standard circuit elements is always obvious. A previously unknown configuration of matter which acts as a more efficient transistor may be non-obvious. A new manufacturing process to produce a specific alloy or drug may be non-obvious.
I think there is general agreement that if a person were to encode a program in silicon (i.e., as a custom chip), that invention would be patentable.
I don't know about "general agreement", but this is far from unanimous. Where is the non-obvious step in turning an abstract (i.e. non-patentable) circuit diagram or HDL into a custom chip? If you introduce a new type of logic element, like a specially optimized transistor, that's one thing, but a physical chip (FPGA or ASIC) produced by applying standard procedures to an abstract circuit design doesn't seem like something that should be patentable to me.
You've confused their share price (what shareholders own) and their cash balance (shareholders definitely do NOT own).
It is you who is confused. It is true that a person who owns a 1% share in Apple does not own 1% of Apple's assets; instead, they have 1% of the ownership of all of Apple's assets. The difference is that an individual shareholder can't show up at Apple headquarters and demand "their share". When all the shareholders act together, however, they collectively have 100% ownership of Apple's assets, and are free to exercise that ownership as they wish. That includes appointing managers for the company, who then have a duty (as the shareholders' agents) to represent the interests of those who appointed them.
The share price is a historical fact regarding what people have been willing to trade for a share of the company. It is not property; no one owns it, much less the shareholders.
Here's a bit of software:
printf ("Hello, world\n");
Now you write the formula. Let's see how simple it is.
Easy. Given a very simple computer where output consists of ASCII data in RAM, the formula for your program becomes:
RAM = { 72, 101, 108, 111,... }
The specific physical form the output takes is part of the design of the computer, not the software. As far as the software is concerned, assuming the string is considered input, your program can simply be an identity function. (If the string is not input then the program is just a constant.) On a real-world computer the function would be much more complicated, of course, because the I/O interface requires a more complex representation of the original ASCII data, and multiple programs are being interleaved (composed) to perform work in parallel.
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For US citizens, well, every one of them who cast a vote for the two big parties or liberalists chose it themselves, and anyone who could vote but didn't quietly accepted it.
Let me get this straight. If you voted, and your candidate won, then you're responsible. If you voted, and your candidate lost, you're responsible. If you didn't vote, you're still responsible. Apparently everyone is responsible for what happens to them, no matter what choices they made. Classic "blame the victim" mentality.
Reality is that the people don't control the system; perhaps it worked that way once, but the system has grown and developed to the point that it's self-sustaining and resistant to outside influence. The career politicians and bureaucrats aren't in control either; they're just along for the ride. You can't blame someone for trying to exercise what little facade of influence they think they have by siding with the least objectionable candidate with a chance of winning. Neither can you blame them for rejecting the rigged game in its entirety.
The only ones who deserve what happens to them are those who advocated forcing those same policies on others.
Foreigners in this country (whether legal or illegal) *do* deserve extra scrutiny from our security services, and they *don't* deserve the same quantity or quality of protections as do US citizens.
Whether you agree with that or not, foreigners both inside and outside this country do deserve the same respect for their rights, including "the right ... to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The U.S. government may not have a mandate to actively protect non-citizens, but it does have an obligation to respect universal rights, regardless of citizenship.
You're really pushing this point hard. Sure, the 2nd Amendment could be repealed, assuming anyone was willing to commit political suicide by proposing the repeal of anything in the Bill of Rights, and that three-quarters of the states were willing to ratify the change. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
Anyone in the USA who opposes any change to the second amendment but drinks alcohol is a morally bankrupt hypocrite not worth listening to, which I would imagine is most of them.
This is simply idiotic. Opposing any change to the 2nd Amendment does not equate to opposing the amendment process itself. The fact that the capacity exists to repeal the 2nd Amendment does not automatically make it a good idea. You're just looking for any excuse to tune out those who disagree with you by casting them as hypocrites.
"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"
Nothing about "guns", nothing about "owning"
"Arms" = guns, or more generally any weapon which would typically be carried by infantry. (Yes, this means the amendment is specifically referring to military weapons, not hunting weapons.)
"keep" = own
"bear" = carry in public
The words may be a bit unfamiliar after a few hundred years, but the meaning is obvious to anyone who cares to undertake some honest research.
How would they know the sticks were at a 90 degree angle? Aliens remain the simplest explanation without resorting to geometric constructions(which are hard)...
A right angle is one of the simplest geometric constructions there is. You can construct the perpendicular to a line at any point with three applications of a compass (which can be as simple as a marking device on the end of a string) and one use of a straightedge.
http://www.mathopenref.com/constperplinepoint.html
There is also the 3-4-5 right triangle, which only requires the ability to produce edges which are integer multiples of a reference length.
In Texas, and I suspect other states, refusal to blow into a breathalyzer is grounds for arrest and then forcible draw of blood. The probable cause for this is that you refused to breathe into a breathalyzer.
At the very least, "probable cause" should mean that it is more likely than not that the search will turn up incriminating evidence sufficient to justify the violation. I would push for "beyond reasonable doubt" myself—or else hold those responsible for the search accountable for false arrest, assault, theft, etc. in the event they fail to prove their case, just as if the search was unauthorized and they were acting on their own as private citizens.
Is there reason to think that a blood test would show evidence of DUI in the majority of cases where the person refused a breathalyzer test? If the test comes back negative, who is going to compensate the injured innocent party whose rights were violated for no reason?
You started out trying to show that libertarians failed to uphold their own standard of not acting to cause harm to anyone. Ergo, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you were not playing semantic games and interpreting "harm" to mean something different that what it has always meant in that context: the violation of one's self-ownership and/or property rights. If you redefine "harm" to include actions which violate no one's rights, that simply means people sometimes have the right to act in ways which cause "harm".
Semantic games aside, discrimination is perfectly consistent with libertarian philosophy and the Non-Aggression Principle. Being forced to associate with someone against your will is not.
If a person uses force to continue to occupy property which is no longer theirs, because they have lost title to it in order to secure payment of their debts...
Except that there was no debt, the property is legitimately still theirs, they are being wrongfully evicted, and their response to that wrongful eviction is basic self-defense. Nice try.
Choosing from among candidates is action, no matter which way you slice it. ... Choosing to discriminate based on irrelevancies is intentionally harming another person.
Whether harm exists doesn't depend on your reasons, only your actions. If there was harm in choosing someone else, then there would be harm no matter why the decision was made. The person who wasn't hired is no worse off than they were before they applied. Their rights were not violated in any way. They requested a voluntary employer/employee relationship, and were turned down. No harm was done on either side.
I'm not saying that it's a good idea to discriminate based on irrelevant attributes. As a rule I'm opposed to discrimination and would prefer to see the right person hired for the job based on their individual abilities rather than a manager's prejudices. I feel discrimination is a poor policy both socially and economically. However, that doesn't mean I would force someone to hire (or otherwise associate with) anyone they didn't want to, for whatever reason.
For example, without the penalty of a fine (a socially engineering tax) I could dump my trash on your lawn when you're not home.
That's not a fine or a tax; it's restitution for the harm you caused by dumping your trash on his property.
If someone paid wages (especially under contract), they have the right to your labor or penalty of breaking the contract (a tax).
No, that's backward. If you freely enter into a contract to provide labor in exchange for property, and fulfill your part of the contract, then the other party owes you the agreed-upon wages. If you break the contract then they owe you nothing, and you may owe them compensation for non-performance depending on the jurisdiction and the specific form of the contract. In no case does either party owe the other labor. Labor is inalienable, and contracts only govern the exchange of alienable property. Claiming ownership of someone else's labor is the essence of slavery.
Choosing not to hire someone is non-action, not action. Choosing not to associate with someone is non-action. Forcing someone to hire against their will, or associate against their will, is action, and harmful action at that.
People may not act to harm one another. That doesn't mean anyone is compelled to act to make anyone else better off. It also doesn't mean that you have to treat everyone equally.
Remoting of individual native Wayland applications has already been demonstrated. The protocol is similar to VNC, capturing changes in the per-window rendering surface, compressing them, and sending them over the network. "Similar to VNC" does not mean remoting a whole desktop; a VNC-like protocol is merely used to transfer the contents of the window, in the absence of shared memory.
Modern X11 toolkits do more or less the same thing, but without the change tracking and compression. Having been designed to take advantage of fast, local, shared memory, they render each frame into a buffer (probably without GPU acceleration, since DRI isn't available) and send it in full, uncompressed, across the network. Remote wayland clients should offer significantly better performance.
The Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination reads:
"nor shall be COMPELLED in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" (emphasis added)
The benefit is that the government can't torture a confession out of you.
Not just torture, but the government can't tack on additional charges or punishment for failing to confess. Sometimes people are wrongly convicted on circumstantial evidence, and making it illegal not to confess would raise the incentive for the accused to cave in and confess to something they didn't do in order to avoid further penalties.
At some point your economic rights can deprive me of my liberties.
That's silly. Unless your view of liberty means free stuff for you, paid for by others.
For instance a monopoly provider of X can decide not to serve group Y.
That falls under the category of "free stuff for you, paid for by others". They paid for it, which means it's theirs. If you want it you'll have to convince them to give it to you of their own free will. Your liberties do not extend to taking it from them without their consent. That would deprive them of their liberties.
Action depends on the ownership and consumption of property. What use is the freedom to speak, without the right to a place to gather people to hear your speech? Without the right to save up a surplus so that you have the opportunity to speak, as opposed to spending all your time providing for your own basic needs? What use is the freedom to live and pursue happiness, without the right to ownership of the products of your labor with which to provide for your own future? Liberty without economic rights is a contradiction. Of the two, economic rights are more fundamental. If you have economic rights then you have liberty; if you do not, then your liberty will always be subject to the whim of those who control the allocation of property.
If they were really serious about converting to metric they wouldn't be using heretical non-base-10 units like minutes and hours. The speed limit would be 25 meters per second (~55 MPH), and a 20 kilometer trip would take 8 kiloseconds.
No, it doesn't point to anything. ... So a void pointer isn't a pointer. Clear as mud.
Again with the deliberately awkward interpretations. A pointer identifies a location in memory. The pointer's type gives the size of each item; the actual number of items (which can be zero) is not recorded anywhere. In the case of a void pointer either there is one item of size zero, or zero items of any size; take your pick. Either way it means "no data at this location". The existence of a pointer doesn't imply that there is anything at that location. Consider:
The variable p is a pointer to a location in memory, but it's past the end of the array. The item size is sizeof(int), but the number of items is zero. The code is perfectly legal—you're allowed to have a pointer to the location just past the end of an array—but there is nothing there. There may not even be a virtual memory mapping for that location.
The only difference between p and a void pointer, aside from pointer arithmetic, is that the compiler won't stop you from dereferencing p; you'll just get a runtime error, if you're very, very lucky.
So why not reserve the keyword 'address'. And call it that?
Perhaps because we already have this perfectly usable pointer syntax, which identifies both an address and a type, and rather than make up a completely separate "address" type and special-case everything for no reason we can just use a pointer to the existing "void" type, which already means "no data", because if we don't know the type of the data it might as well not exist as far as the compiler is concerned.
Anyone who really wants an "address" keyword for personal reasons can just write "typedef void *address".
Its a pointer. If its initialized then it points to something.
No, it doesn't point to anything. It's just an address. If it pointed to something then that something would have a well-defined (non-zero) size and type.
So void is a type with a sizeof (void) = 0 ?
It should be, but some ancient versions of C allowed pointer arithmetic on void pointers as though they were pointers to bytes or characters, and support for this was retained, at least in the compiler if not the standard, for backward compatibility. The sizeof operator is defined such that (char*)(p + 1) == ((char*)p + sizeof *p), which implies that sizeof(void*) must equal sizeof(char*) for the pointer arithmetic to work out the same. No modern, well-behaved program should be doing pointer arithmetic with void pointers or using sizeof(void).
We know something is there, we have to typecast to tell the compiler what it is.
We know, but that knowledge is not represented by the void pointer type. The type says "nothing is there", and we have to override that with a typecast to say that there is something there after all.
It really seems like you want the use of "void" to be inconsistent, and are deliberately choosing an awkward interpretation (undefined type vs. the more obvious empty type) in order to make it so. The use of "void" meaning "nothing there" is perfectly consistent between void pointers, void functions, and void expressions.
Why does it make sense to reuse the void keyword which literally means "nothing"?
Because, as far as the type is concerned, it is a pointer to nothing. Given just a void pointer, the only safe assumption is that there is nothing there. It's like a pointer to a zero-length array or an empty structure. You have to perform a typecast, and thus tell the compiler that there is actually something there, before you can do anything with it.
(so (that (can (understand (non dweebs) (your program)))) (is (necessary syntax)))
Here's the equivalent C/C++/Java code:
so(that(can(understand(non(dweebs), your(program)))), is(necessary(syntax)));
Was that any easier to read?
You don't actually need to encrypt the shared key; a simple XOR of the pads from each piece of glass will do:
For Alice to send a message:
For Bob to decode:
The result of the XOR only tells you whether a given bit is the same or different between the two pads, which, by itself, doesn't tell you anything about either pad, so the XOR can be made public. Combined with one of the pads, however, it allows you to infer the value of the other so that you can send your message. Normally each party would just have a copy of the same pad, but this approach gets around the difficulty of creating two pieces of glass with precisely equal (random) optical properties.
I appreciate the argument, but it seems like it would invalidate pretty much every patent.
I would be happy with that result, but I don't think that's the case. The problem with the circuit in the example is that it's really just an abstract formula which happens to be represented in the form of a circuit diagram involving ideal components, and the reduction to a physical chip does not involve anything innovative. (If anything, circuit diagrams are even more obviously math than software is. Any circuit diagram is isomorphic to a system of equations.)
Simply designing or simulating something on a computer would not render it unpatentable. Having nothing innovative to offer beyond the abstract design or simulation would. In essence, I'm saying that the natural laws—including mathematics, and by extension software and abstract circuit designs and anything else equivalent to math—have to be taken as a given when considering obviousness. To be patentable, an invention has to offer something more than just the plain natural laws, such as a particular configuration of matter or a physical process for producing it.
Taking software and running it on a computer is always obvious. Taking an abstract circuit design and implementing it with standard circuit elements is always obvious. A previously unknown configuration of matter which acts as a more efficient transistor may be non-obvious. A new manufacturing process to produce a specific alloy or drug may be non-obvious.
I think there is general agreement that if a person were to encode a program in silicon (i.e., as a custom chip), that invention would be patentable.
I don't know about "general agreement", but this is far from unanimous. Where is the non-obvious step in turning an abstract (i.e. non-patentable) circuit diagram or HDL into a custom chip? If you introduce a new type of logic element, like a specially optimized transistor, that's one thing, but a physical chip (FPGA or ASIC) produced by applying standard procedures to an abstract circuit design doesn't seem like something that should be patentable to me.
You've confused their share price (what shareholders own) and their cash balance (shareholders definitely do NOT own).
It is you who is confused. It is true that a person who owns a 1% share in Apple does not own 1% of Apple's assets; instead, they have 1% of the ownership of all of Apple's assets. The difference is that an individual shareholder can't show up at Apple headquarters and demand "their share". When all the shareholders act together, however, they collectively have 100% ownership of Apple's assets, and are free to exercise that ownership as they wish. That includes appointing managers for the company, who then have a duty (as the shareholders' agents) to represent the interests of those who appointed them.
The share price is a historical fact regarding what people have been willing to trade for a share of the company. It is not property; no one owns it, much less the shareholders.
Here's a bit of software:
printf ("Hello, world\n");
Now you write the formula. Let's see how simple it is.
Easy. Given a very simple computer where output consists of ASCII data in RAM, the formula for your program becomes:
RAM = { 72, 101, 108, 111, ... }
The specific physical form the output takes is part of the design of the computer, not the software. As far as the software is concerned, assuming the string is considered input, your program can simply be an identity function. (If the string is not input then the program is just a constant.) On a real-world computer the function would be much more complicated, of course, because the I/O interface requires a more complex representation of the original ASCII data, and multiple programs are being interleaved (composed) to perform work in parallel.