To me there are two important distinctions you have missed.... The first is that for some forms of art, the act of creating the art is obscene.
Under the second definition, sure. Depending on the person, any act, expression, or even thought might be "offensive to moral principles" or "repugnant". That's even more subjective than "accepted standards of morality and decency", which itself is hardly an objective classification. However, in the context of freedom of expression, it is the portrayal or description which matters, not how it came to exist.
The second distinction is that words come at you more slowly. When they start to portray an obscene image you can simply stop reading or, if it is someone talking, you can leave. If you are trying to decide whether to read something that might be obscene, you read a bit, perhaps skim, and get a good idea of whether you want to read the details.
When someone is talking you might be able to leave, but probably not so rapidly that you miss whatever they were going to say, and the choice to leave may cost you. You also can't skim ahead in a live conversation; by the time you decide you don't want to hear whatever is being said, most of the "damage" is already done.
Finally, it doesn't necessarily require many words to evoke an "obscene" mental image; a single sentence, or even just a few words, may suffice, occupying no more time than that required to observe a picture or a scene from a movie.
And no, I don't believe words can be just as obscene as artwork.
What you believe is your business, but...
obscene
1. (of the portrayal or description of sexual matters) Offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency.
2. Offensive to moral principles; repugnant.
What part of that can apply to artwork but not words? A picture may be harder to ignore, if you have a particularly dull imagination, but words can easily convey the same idea, and it's generally the idea which is offensive or disgusting, not the means of presentation. Why should a painting be considered more obscene than a series of words which evoke the same mental image?
Yes, and people have the right to assemble peaceably into organizations. That doesn't mean that the organization has rights. The people making up the organization have rights, which they can exercise on behalf of the organization.
(Of course, the same principle says that a government, as one form of organization, does not have rights per se; only the members of the government have rights, as individuals. A person acting on behalf of a government thus has no special right to act in ways which have not been explicitly delegated to that government by someone who does have the right. Good luck getting them to agree to that.)
I think they're focus was on words and not on things like artwork (which they knew could be obscene).
Are you implying that they didn't know that words can be just as "obscene" as artwork?
Also, people may speak exclusively in words, but a printing press can just as easily print graphics as words. You mentioned the possibility of woodcut illustrations yourself. Freedom of the press must naturally extend to printed images as well as printed words. Recorded audio had yet to be invented, of course, but lyrics and printed sheet music would have been covered, as would the scripts for plays. Sculptures were omitted, true, but that seems more like an oversight than deliberate intent.
Finally, it would not be sufficient to show only that the 1st Amendment only covers words; you would also need to point out where in the Constitution any branch of the U.S. government is granted the power to censor images, music, plays, sculptures, or the formal descriptions of algorithms colloquially known as software.
Right now, we don't actively censor people who wish to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. For what if there was a fire in said theater? Instead, we let everything be said and then if it is felt that libel, slander, criminal intent, death threats, etc were said, you may bring it to the attention of a court of law.
Punishing someone for speech after the fact is still censorship. In fact, censorship in practice, at the level of law, consists almost exclusively of punishing someone after the fact for unwanted speech. The presumption that speech involving libel, slander, etc. will be met with punishment is no less censorship than the presumption that speech criticizing the government will be met with punishment.
Libel and slander are not properly a matter for courts. First, one does not have a right to one's reputation, which would amount to a right to how other people think of you. Damage to your reputation is thus not something you should have legal standing for. Second, suing over libel or slander is counter-productive; it serves only to show how much you want to shut someone up. The more force you bring to bear against someone defaming you, the more credibility you lend to their statements. If the defamation is true then the damage to your reputation is deserved; if not, then the correct response is to educate and persuade, not to make threats.
In the case of "criminal intent" or other threats, you're not being punished for the speech; the response is pure self-defense. If you claim that you are going to harm someone, it is reasonable for them to believe that you will actually carry through with it and respond accordingly. (This could possibly be interpreted as a form of estoppel.) Naturally, the normal rules for preemptive self-defense apply: imminent threat of irreversible harm.
Like the GP said, with so many exceptions, the UK effectively has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. What it has is "free speech so long as it's speech we approve of".
What kind of "libertarians" have you been talking to? Ayn Rand's Objectivist variety, though quite vocal, has always been on the fringe of libertarian thought, and pro-IP libertarians in general are becoming rarer every day. Neither Objectivists nor the pro-IP faction are representative of modern libertarians.
No libertarian thinks that the government should grant no monopolies. All libertarians think that the government should enforce monopolies on property. That's the essential difference between libertarians and anarcho-socialists.
And anarcho-capitalists, agorists, etc., who make up a significant fraction of libertarians, contrary to your generalizations. We do at least agree that governments should respect property rights. You will find the idea that the government should grant property rights hotly contested, however, and very few libertarians would equate property rights with monopolies.
stop me from imposing my will over your intellectual property
Short of hitting you over the head, or otherwise interfering in your exercise of your actual property rights, there is nothing anyone can do to interfere with your use of your so-called intellectual property. The actions you are claiming the government should stop are impossible to begin with. What you are asking for is not a property right but a monopoly, the difference being that a property right is the right to use something, while a monopoly is a guarantee that others will be prevented from using it, by force, even when their use does not in any way infringe on your own.
Most uses of property are exclusive due to scarcity; two people cannot consume the same scarce good. Exclusivity does not apply, however, when there is no natural scarcity; it is not a fundamental aspect of property.
Unfortunately, they stuck that word "unreasonable" in there. All you have to do is assert reasonableness, and the whole thing goes away.
Only to those completely lacking in reading comprehension. The word "unreasonable" is merely part of the introductory phrase, describing the intent of the amendment. The mechanism by which reasonableness is ensured is the requirement for a warrant (which is another way of saying "permission to perform a search or to seize property"--no warrant equals no permission) and the restrictions imposed on issuing such warrants.
In a sense you're correct in that all you have to do is establish reasonableness, but only insofar as you follow the procedure for establishing reasonableness, which is to apply for a warrant. If no warrant is issued then reasonableness has not been legally established. It is not sufficient to merely assert that a given search or seizure is "reasonable".
To pay for the corporate taxes, the guy's employer has to drop his salary to $35k/yr. Or they have to raise their prices, meaning that the $50k the guy takes home can now only buy as much as $35k used to buy when he was paying $15k in personal income taxes.
Nope! If they were bringing in $1,000,000 before his salary of $50k, they would end up paying taxes on the $950,000. Any money spent that is essential for the operation of a business, is not taxed.
Irrelevant. The change is stipulated to be "revenue-neutral", i.e. the tax is supposed to bring in the same share of GDP whether it is individuals or corporations being taxed. The fact that the tax does not apply to essential business expenses just means that the rate must be increased to compensate. The net effect is the same—closure of marginal businesses leads to lower salaries and higher prices, canceling out any increase in the employee's take-home pay.
You know I really cannot understand why the Republicans would take issue with this report. I mean really, you'd think they'd like to know that their domestic policy is specious so that they can find real solutions. Unless, perhaps they already understood the reality of their talking point...
When has it ever been a goal of the Republic Party to attempt to minimize income disparity or concentration of income? Equalizing outcomes, regardless of merit, is the goal of the Democrats. The typical republican position is that there is nothing wrong with receiving an income well above the national average, provided it is freely given and not acquired by theft or fraud. If this report turns anyone away from the Republican Party, it can only be because they were never ideologically aligned with the Republican position in the first place.
Personally, I consider the report's main conclusion to be rather obvious. Naturally, lowering the top tax rates means that the group that earned more income gets to keep more of it. There is a direct, mathematical link between the top tax rates and the share of income retained by the top earners. This does not imply that anyone else's income has decreased in absolute terms.
That the additional retained income did not go into saving or investment does seem rather odd, though there has been a major push toward glamorizing consumption over the same time period. If the extra did go toward consumption rather than investment, or was offset by increased consumption elsewhere in the economy, then it's not surprising that it did little to contribute to productivity growth. Consumption is indeed essential, the whole point of the exercise really, but it's capital investment which boosts productivity.
If a private citizen had trespassed on someone else's private property to install cameras and record others' activities on the property without their consent, they would be asked to destroy the recordings (including any copies) as a simple matter of restitution for the trespass. Police acting without a warrant are no different in this regard than any private citizen, and the information they collect through trespass should not be treated any differently just because they want to claim it as "evidence".
Guarantee that every Wayland app will work at least as well across the network as X11 apps do today and we'll shut the hell up.
What do you want as a guarantee? As someone which is familiar with Wayland's design, though not one of the developers, I have no doubt that any non-trivial remote Gtk or Qt-based application will work at least as well with Wayland on the display side as it currently works with X11. It's basically the same process as X11 apps already use in practice, but with fewer round trips and better compression algorithms.
First, we don't have network transparency now
Funny, I use it every day. NX is a big help, and I agree that X's network transparency isn't ideal. But that's no reason to toss the baby out with the bathwater.
You're missing the point. X works over a network, obviously, but it isn't transparent. Modern toolkits assume that it is cheap to render into pixmaps with DRI and send them (via shared memory) to the server for compositing. This is true in the local case, but not when the client and server are on different systems. When running an X11 app remotely, you don't have direct rendering and pixmaps must be serialized and transferred over the network. The protocol doesn't even allow for compression. NX can cut down on the resource requirements, but once again, that's something you have to manage yourself, on top of the X11 protocol; it isn't transparent.
Then how can you guarantee that every Wayland app will be compatible with whatever remote rendering protocol becomes standard, if any?
The current plan for arbitrary Wayland apps is to have two Wayland compositors, one on the client and one on the server. The app supplies frames to the client-side compositor, which compresses them and sends the compressed video to the server. A Wayland app on server decompresses the video and sends it to the server-size Wayland instance, which composites it onto the display. Any app which supports the local Wayland protocol can be remoted in this manner. In this scenario the app does not require any remote rendering protocol; all the rendering is local, and can take advantage of the client's GPU via DRI2.
Any actual remote rendering protocol, like X11, would obviously require support from the app itself, which in practice means the major toolkits (Gtk and Qt).
in practice it's likely to require more bandwidth and have more latency issues than simply rendering the window remotely and streaming the result to the local display as compressed video.
Do you have data to back that up?
I don't have benchmarks, but it's obvious if you think about it. Rendering a window with OpenGL, as most modern toolkits do, requires textures, depth buffers, mask layers, etc., which may even be higher resolution and/or higher bit-depth than the window itself. Altogether they represent much more data than the final window. A PCIe connection with gigabits per second of bandwidth is required to process them efficiently. Even regarding basic geometry, I understand that current rendering techniques can require more triangles than there are pixels in the final framebuffer. Sending just the final result—the changes in the final result, after motion estimation and video compression—is bound to require less bandwidth than the raw data required to render the same image.
As for latency, rendering on the server requires copious synchronization and round-trips where a simple video stream needs only one-way communication for display, and perhaps some delay feedback if there is sound involved.
The "network transparency" objection is a red herring, and it's getting rather tiresome. We're not "losing" network transparency. First, we don't have network transparency now; when nearly every application depends on Xshm and direct rendering for anything resembling reasonable display performance, the fact that you can draw obsolete primitives on the server through X11 core rendering protocol requests is hardly relevant. Remote X11 apps have already been reduced to rendering their windows locally and sending uncompressed pixmaps to the X server. The most basic of all possible remoting protocols for Wayland could hardly be worse than what we already have for X11.
Second, Wayland is specifically designed to be a local API, basically a front-end for KMS, DRI2, and the input subsystem. It does not define a rendering protocol, either local or remote. A separate layer for forwarding arbitrary Wayland apps across the network has already been prototyped, and should be far more efficient than sending raw pixmaps as remote X11 do due to the use of video compression algorithms.
As if this wasn't sufficient, it is also possible to implement a remote rendering protocol (like X11 core rendering) which sends only the drawing commands over the network to be rendered locally and then displayed by Wayland. This seems to be what most of the detractors are pushing for, but in practice it's likely to require more bandwidth and have more latency issues than simply rendering the window remotely and streaming the result to the local display as compressed video.
If you thought we would all be wealthier and more productive in the future, you would invest your money in productive ventures, because then your claims to wealth (money) will grow along with the economy. But if you expect us to be poorer and less productive in the future, and still for some reason trust that your claims to wealth will be recognized, it makes sense to hoard rather than invest.
Your argument is backwards. With a stable money supply, the only way you get falling prices is if the economy is more productive, not less. The money is more valuable because its supply is stable, but the demand for it (in the form of goods and services for sale) has increased. A less productive economy would result in rising prices—the same amount of money chasing fewer goods.
All of this is orthogonal to the question of whether or not to invest. One invests in a venture or commodity when it is expected to gain more in value over time than currency, which is to say (given a stable money supply), the general rate of growth in the economy. If nothing is growing in value faster than currency, then it would be a mistake to invest; that is a sign that there is already sufficient capital, and that money should be "hoarded" for eventual purchase of the consumer goods being produced.
If you ignore that signal—for example, by deliberately manipulating the money supply to cause inflation—then you end up encouraging the production of goods which people haven't saved up enough to buy at prices which would justify the investment required to produce them.
You speak as if the Fed isn't a bank. Moving the cash from one bank's vaults to another bank's vaults doesn't really change anything. Your local bank still needs physical assets held in their name in someone's vaults as a reserve in order to loan out their virtual money at interest. When it comes to paying their debts, they would much rather hand out claims on virtual money than the physical cash which contributes to their reserves.
Anyway, the important point was the second one, that saving ("hoarding") is economically equivalent to a loan. Granted, not a fractional-reserve bank loan, since there is no change in the money supply, but those have their own issues.
When you lend someone else (not a fractional-reserve bank) your money, you rent them your share of consumption for a time in exchange for interest. When you "hoard" your money, that same share of consumption becomes available to everyone else. The remaining money becomes more valuable due to the decrease in supply, and prices drop. That both gives you a greater incentive to spend your money (a negative feedback cycle), and rewards you for deferring consumption.
I'm familiar with the fractional-reserve system, thanks. The problem is semantics. You're counting all that virtual money as "dollars"; I am not. Only the reserves--the physical cash--are dollars, and the banks keep as much of that as they can, so that they can lend out more virtual money for real profits at basically zero cost to themselves.
Banks mostly keep their dollars are reserves ("hoarding" them) and loan out virtual money which exists only on paper.
Anyway, "hoarding" currency has the same effect, economically, as loaning it out to every other holder of currency. Since you're deferring spending your currency, reducing the supply, everyone else's currency increases proportionally in value. The resulting deflation is your interest payment for deferring consumption.
Besides data loss cases like yours (backups!), it's likely that quite a few were lost in the early days simply because they weren't worth very much. People installed the client, ran the miner for a while, and then lost interest. For a long time, 1000 BTC was worth perhaps ten dollars; IIRC, at one point someone spent that much on a pizza. It would buy about $12,000 now, but at the time it would probably not have been considered worth preserving unless one was both far-sighted and optimistic about Bitcoin's prospects.
It's also worth remembering that the Bitcoin protocol requires that the entire balance of an account be spent whenever the account is used in a transaction. The change could be returned to the original address, but generally it's sent to a new account. (This is an extra security measure, since it's more difficult to perform cryptoanalysis on a mere hash of the public key than on the key itself. The full public key is revealed only when the balance is spent.)
In other words, it's not at all surprising that most accounts with balances have never been used as the input for a transaction. That's the normal state. What's more surprising is that the number isn't higher.
You say "do not blame government -- blame the parents", but you also say "the government *is* the parents." You can't have it both ways.
To the extent that the parents actively support and endorse these policies, and have been granted the authority to mandate their enforcement, blaming the government *is* blaming the parents. With or without official titles, those who command the "legitimate" use of force against non-aggressors are the government, in every way that matters. Blaming the government is equivalent to blaming those who make its decisions and carry out its policies, and vice-versa.
This wasn't big government forcing it on me; it was my parents' contemporaries.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Your parents' contemporaries may be been making the decisions, but it was support for "big government" that gave them the power to enforce those decisions. In essence, they were "big government".
which substantially violates a creator's right to pick their own business model
There may be a right to pick your own business model, but there is no right which obligates anyone to make sure that business model succeeds. For example, my business model might be that I expect everyone else to pay me for the privilege of breathing. If so, I should expect that business model to fail. Other people breathing without my permission does not cause me any harm, so there is no legitimate basis for preventing it by force, and no one is going to voluntarily pay me for something they can do on their own for free.
Like breathing, copyright infringement is an action which harms no one, and a business model predicated on expecting others to voluntarily pay you to make or share copies is just as obviously doomed to failure.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. Obviously different traders will have different latency between their own computers and the trading floor / central computer. Those with better connections may well be able to take advantage of opportunities others further away do not have access to, because the opportunity is over before they can find out about it and respond. I have no problem with that. However, if all incoming orders are serialized and matched up by the exchange (and what other purpose is there for an exchange?) then there should not be any opportunity for HFTs to find out about two existing orders and "get between them" before they can "find each other". The instant an order comes in, it should be matched up with the best compatible order already in the order book. The HFT only finds out about pending orders when there is no immediate match.
If the exchange doesn't maintain the order book or match up buyers and sellers—if it just acts as a communications nexus and leaves the most critical part of the exchange to the individual market participants—then it has failed to do its job. As I said, you would have to be insane (or malicious) to design an exchange system that way.
Latency shouldn't even be an issue, at least not in this sense. New orders should be sent directly to the central computer handling trades for that commodity, which either matches them with existing orders or adds them to the order book. The changes to the order book would then be distributed to all traders. That way, no one (aside from the central computer, which is presumed neutral) would get a chance to see orders before they're executed, no matter how well-connected they may be.
HFT algorithms will not make trades that don't have a profitable buyer and a seller found. They make trades before buyer and seller find each other.
How is this even possible? Don't the buy and sell orders go into the same order book? Wouldn't the trade take place the moment the second order is placed, well before any HFT algorithm has the opportunity to interfere? It seems insane to me to implement a market any other way.
If the HFT gets advance notice of orders being placed before they are reconciled with the official order book, that's an obvious design flaw. On the other hand, if the HFT is just discovering someone's actual best ask, and then executing the order at that price in anticipation of a future bid, then there is nothing wrong beyond the incorrect expectation that it is reasonable or practical to keep your actual limit price a secret.
No... more like if you leave an open suitcase of cash on your front lawn while you go out (assuming there is no wind), where anybody walking by can see it, and make absolutely no effort to secure any of it inside your own home, then you should bear some responsibility for the fact that when you come back after a few hours, it's not all going to be there.... even though other people broke the law by stealing your property, you were still negligent in how you managed it.
Negligent or not, it's still your property, and you still have the right to get it back and to punish those who stole it. You'll just have a harder time convincing anyone to help you.
Now, if someone was so foolish as to try to prevent you from recovering your property on your own (as governments routinely do), then they would be taking on the responsibility to do so in your stead, to the best of your ability, no matter how negligent you may have been. To do otherwise would be to actively assist the thief in getting away with your property, and thus become an accessory to the crime.
The only real good thing about inflation is that in limited amounts, it encourages spending instead of hoarding.
Which is useful.
Actually, no, it isn't. There is a correct balance between consumption and saving ("hoarding"), determined by supply and demand, and inflation, like any other tariff or subsidy, distorts that balance. The result is a net loss to society.
Slashdot Mirror
To me there are two important distinctions you have missed.... The first is that for some forms of art, the act of creating the art is obscene.
Under the second definition, sure. Depending on the person, any act, expression, or even thought might be "offensive to moral principles" or "repugnant". That's even more subjective than "accepted standards of morality and decency", which itself is hardly an objective classification. However, in the context of freedom of expression, it is the portrayal or description which matters, not how it came to exist.
The second distinction is that words come at you more slowly. When they start to portray an obscene image you can simply stop reading or, if it is someone talking, you can leave. If you are trying to decide whether to read something that might be obscene, you read a bit, perhaps skim, and get a good idea of whether you want to read the details.
When someone is talking you might be able to leave, but probably not so rapidly that you miss whatever they were going to say, and the choice to leave may cost you. You also can't skim ahead in a live conversation; by the time you decide you don't want to hear whatever is being said, most of the "damage" is already done.
Finally, it doesn't necessarily require many words to evoke an "obscene" mental image; a single sentence, or even just a few words, may suffice, occupying no more time than that required to observe a picture or a scene from a movie.
And no, I don't believe words can be just as obscene as artwork.
What you believe is your business, but...
obscene
1. (of the portrayal or description of sexual matters) Offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency.
2. Offensive to moral principles; repugnant.
What part of that can apply to artwork but not words? A picture may be harder to ignore, if you have a particularly dull imagination, but words can easily convey the same idea, and it's generally the idea which is offensive or disgusting, not the means of presentation. Why should a painting be considered more obscene than a series of words which evoke the same mental image?
An organization is a peaceful assembly of people.
Yes, and people have the right to assemble peaceably into organizations. That doesn't mean that the organization has rights. The people making up the organization have rights, which they can exercise on behalf of the organization.
(Of course, the same principle says that a government, as one form of organization, does not have rights per se; only the members of the government have rights, as individuals. A person acting on behalf of a government thus has no special right to act in ways which have not been explicitly delegated to that government by someone who does have the right. Good luck getting them to agree to that.)
I think they're focus was on words and not on things like artwork (which they knew could be obscene).
Are you implying that they didn't know that words can be just as "obscene" as artwork?
Also, people may speak exclusively in words, but a printing press can just as easily print graphics as words. You mentioned the possibility of woodcut illustrations yourself. Freedom of the press must naturally extend to printed images as well as printed words. Recorded audio had yet to be invented, of course, but lyrics and printed sheet music would have been covered, as would the scripts for plays. Sculptures were omitted, true, but that seems more like an oversight than deliberate intent.
Finally, it would not be sufficient to show only that the 1st Amendment only covers words; you would also need to point out where in the Constitution any branch of the U.S. government is granted the power to censor images, music, plays, sculptures, or the formal descriptions of algorithms colloquially known as software.
Right now, we don't actively censor people who wish to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. For what if there was a fire in said theater? Instead, we let everything be said and then if it is felt that libel, slander, criminal intent, death threats, etc were said, you may bring it to the attention of a court of law.
Punishing someone for speech after the fact is still censorship. In fact, censorship in practice, at the level of law, consists almost exclusively of punishing someone after the fact for unwanted speech. The presumption that speech involving libel, slander, etc. will be met with punishment is no less censorship than the presumption that speech criticizing the government will be met with punishment.
Libel and slander are not properly a matter for courts. First, one does not have a right to one's reputation, which would amount to a right to how other people think of you. Damage to your reputation is thus not something you should have legal standing for. Second, suing over libel or slander is counter-productive; it serves only to show how much you want to shut someone up. The more force you bring to bear against someone defaming you, the more credibility you lend to their statements. If the defamation is true then the damage to your reputation is deserved; if not, then the correct response is to educate and persuade, not to make threats.
In the case of "criminal intent" or other threats, you're not being punished for the speech; the response is pure self-defense. If you claim that you are going to harm someone, it is reasonable for them to believe that you will actually carry through with it and respond accordingly. (This could possibly be interpreted as a form of estoppel.) Naturally, the normal rules for preemptive self-defense apply: imminent threat of irreversible harm.
Like the GP said, with so many exceptions, the UK effectively has no legal recognition of the right to free speech. What it has is "free speech so long as it's speech we approve of".
What kind of "libertarians" have you been talking to? Ayn Rand's Objectivist variety, though quite vocal, has always been on the fringe of libertarian thought, and pro-IP libertarians in general are becoming rarer every day. Neither Objectivists nor the pro-IP faction are representative of modern libertarians.
No libertarian thinks that the government should grant no monopolies. All libertarians think that the government should enforce monopolies on property. That's the essential difference between libertarians and anarcho-socialists.
And anarcho-capitalists, agorists, etc., who make up a significant fraction of libertarians, contrary to your generalizations. We do at least agree that governments should respect property rights. You will find the idea that the government should grant property rights hotly contested, however, and very few libertarians would equate property rights with monopolies.
stop me from imposing my will over your intellectual property
Short of hitting you over the head, or otherwise interfering in your exercise of your actual property rights, there is nothing anyone can do to interfere with your use of your so-called intellectual property. The actions you are claiming the government should stop are impossible to begin with. What you are asking for is not a property right but a monopoly, the difference being that a property right is the right to use something, while a monopoly is a guarantee that others will be prevented from using it, by force, even when their use does not in any way infringe on your own.
Most uses of property are exclusive due to scarcity; two people cannot consume the same scarce good. Exclusivity does not apply, however, when there is no natural scarcity; it is not a fundamental aspect of property.
Unfortunately, they stuck that word "unreasonable" in there. All you have to do is assert reasonableness, and the whole thing goes away.
Only to those completely lacking in reading comprehension. The word "unreasonable" is merely part of the introductory phrase, describing the intent of the amendment. The mechanism by which reasonableness is ensured is the requirement for a warrant (which is another way of saying "permission to perform a search or to seize property"--no warrant equals no permission) and the restrictions imposed on issuing such warrants.
In a sense you're correct in that all you have to do is establish reasonableness, but only insofar as you follow the procedure for establishing reasonableness, which is to apply for a warrant. If no warrant is issued then reasonableness has not been legally established. It is not sufficient to merely assert that a given search or seizure is "reasonable".
To pay for the corporate taxes, the guy's employer has to drop his salary to $35k/yr. Or they have to raise their prices, meaning that the $50k the guy takes home can now only buy as much as $35k used to buy when he was paying $15k in personal income taxes.
Nope! If they were bringing in $1,000,000 before his salary of $50k, they would end up paying taxes on the $950,000. Any money spent that is essential for the operation of a business, is not taxed.
Irrelevant. The change is stipulated to be "revenue-neutral", i.e. the tax is supposed to bring in the same share of GDP whether it is individuals or corporations being taxed. The fact that the tax does not apply to essential business expenses just means that the rate must be increased to compensate. The net effect is the same—closure of marginal businesses leads to lower salaries and higher prices, canceling out any increase in the employee's take-home pay.
You know I really cannot understand why the Republicans would take issue with this report. I mean really, you'd think they'd like to know that their domestic policy is specious so that they can find real solutions. Unless, perhaps they already understood the reality of their talking point...
When has it ever been a goal of the Republic Party to attempt to minimize income disparity or concentration of income? Equalizing outcomes, regardless of merit, is the goal of the Democrats. The typical republican position is that there is nothing wrong with receiving an income well above the national average, provided it is freely given and not acquired by theft or fraud. If this report turns anyone away from the Republican Party, it can only be because they were never ideologically aligned with the Republican position in the first place.
Personally, I consider the report's main conclusion to be rather obvious. Naturally, lowering the top tax rates means that the group that earned more income gets to keep more of it. There is a direct, mathematical link between the top tax rates and the share of income retained by the top earners. This does not imply that anyone else's income has decreased in absolute terms.
That the additional retained income did not go into saving or investment does seem rather odd, though there has been a major push toward glamorizing consumption over the same time period. If the extra did go toward consumption rather than investment, or was offset by increased consumption elsewhere in the economy, then it's not surprising that it did little to contribute to productivity growth. Consumption is indeed essential, the whole point of the exercise really, but it's capital investment which boosts productivity.
If a private citizen had trespassed on someone else's private property to install cameras and record others' activities on the property without their consent, they would be asked to destroy the recordings (including any copies) as a simple matter of restitution for the trespass. Police acting without a warrant are no different in this regard than any private citizen, and the information they collect through trespass should not be treated any differently just because they want to claim it as "evidence".
Guarantee that every Wayland app will work at least as well across the network as X11 apps do today and we'll shut the hell up.
What do you want as a guarantee? As someone which is familiar with Wayland's design, though not one of the developers, I have no doubt that any non-trivial remote Gtk or Qt-based application will work at least as well with Wayland on the display side as it currently works with X11. It's basically the same process as X11 apps already use in practice, but with fewer round trips and better compression algorithms.
First, we don't have network transparency now
Funny, I use it every day. NX is a big help, and I agree that X's network transparency isn't ideal. But that's no reason to toss the baby out with the bathwater.
You're missing the point. X works over a network, obviously, but it isn't transparent. Modern toolkits assume that it is cheap to render into pixmaps with DRI and send them (via shared memory) to the server for compositing. This is true in the local case, but not when the client and server are on different systems. When running an X11 app remotely, you don't have direct rendering and pixmaps must be serialized and transferred over the network. The protocol doesn't even allow for compression. NX can cut down on the resource requirements, but once again, that's something you have to manage yourself, on top of the X11 protocol; it isn't transparent.
Then how can you guarantee that every Wayland app will be compatible with whatever remote rendering protocol becomes standard, if any?
The current plan for arbitrary Wayland apps is to have two Wayland compositors, one on the client and one on the server. The app supplies frames to the client-side compositor, which compresses them and sends the compressed video to the server. A Wayland app on server decompresses the video and sends it to the server-size Wayland instance, which composites it onto the display. Any app which supports the local Wayland protocol can be remoted in this manner. In this scenario the app does not require any remote rendering protocol; all the rendering is local, and can take advantage of the client's GPU via DRI2.
Any actual remote rendering protocol, like X11, would obviously require support from the app itself, which in practice means the major toolkits (Gtk and Qt).
in practice it's likely to require more bandwidth and have more latency issues than simply rendering the window remotely and streaming the result to the local display as compressed video.
Do you have data to back that up?
I don't have benchmarks, but it's obvious if you think about it. Rendering a window with OpenGL, as most modern toolkits do, requires textures, depth buffers, mask layers, etc., which may even be higher resolution and/or higher bit-depth than the window itself. Altogether they represent much more data than the final window. A PCIe connection with gigabits per second of bandwidth is required to process them efficiently. Even regarding basic geometry, I understand that current rendering techniques can require more triangles than there are pixels in the final framebuffer. Sending just the final result—the changes in the final result, after motion estimation and video compression—is bound to require less bandwidth than the raw data required to render the same image.
As for latency, rendering on the server requires copious synchronization and round-trips where a simple video stream needs only one-way communication for display, and perhaps some delay feedback if there is sound involved.
The "network transparency" objection is a red herring, and it's getting rather tiresome. We're not "losing" network transparency. First, we don't have network transparency now; when nearly every application depends on Xshm and direct rendering for anything resembling reasonable display performance, the fact that you can draw obsolete primitives on the server through X11 core rendering protocol requests is hardly relevant. Remote X11 apps have already been reduced to rendering their windows locally and sending uncompressed pixmaps to the X server. The most basic of all possible remoting protocols for Wayland could hardly be worse than what we already have for X11.
Second, Wayland is specifically designed to be a local API, basically a front-end for KMS, DRI2, and the input subsystem. It does not define a rendering protocol, either local or remote. A separate layer for forwarding arbitrary Wayland apps across the network has already been prototyped, and should be far more efficient than sending raw pixmaps as remote X11 do due to the use of video compression algorithms.
As if this wasn't sufficient, it is also possible to implement a remote rendering protocol (like X11 core rendering) which sends only the drawing commands over the network to be rendered locally and then displayed by Wayland. This seems to be what most of the detractors are pushing for, but in practice it's likely to require more bandwidth and have more latency issues than simply rendering the window remotely and streaming the result to the local display as compressed video.
If you thought we would all be wealthier and more productive in the future, you would invest your money in productive ventures, because then your claims to wealth (money) will grow along with the economy. But if you expect us to be poorer and less productive in the future, and still for some reason trust that your claims to wealth will be recognized, it makes sense to hoard rather than invest.
Your argument is backwards. With a stable money supply, the only way you get falling prices is if the economy is more productive, not less. The money is more valuable because its supply is stable, but the demand for it (in the form of goods and services for sale) has increased. A less productive economy would result in rising prices—the same amount of money chasing fewer goods.
All of this is orthogonal to the question of whether or not to invest. One invests in a venture or commodity when it is expected to gain more in value over time than currency, which is to say (given a stable money supply), the general rate of growth in the economy. If nothing is growing in value faster than currency, then it would be a mistake to invest; that is a sign that there is already sufficient capital, and that money should be "hoarded" for eventual purchase of the consumer goods being produced.
If you ignore that signal—for example, by deliberately manipulating the money supply to cause inflation—then you end up encouraging the production of goods which people haven't saved up enough to buy at prices which would justify the investment required to produce them.
You speak as if the Fed isn't a bank. Moving the cash from one bank's vaults to another bank's vaults doesn't really change anything. Your local bank still needs physical assets held in their name in someone's vaults as a reserve in order to loan out their virtual money at interest. When it comes to paying their debts, they would much rather hand out claims on virtual money than the physical cash which contributes to their reserves.
Anyway, the important point was the second one, that saving ("hoarding") is economically equivalent to a loan. Granted, not a fractional-reserve bank loan, since there is no change in the money supply, but those have their own issues.
When you lend someone else (not a fractional-reserve bank) your money, you rent them your share of consumption for a time in exchange for interest. When you "hoard" your money, that same share of consumption becomes available to everyone else. The remaining money becomes more valuable due to the decrease in supply, and prices drop. That both gives you a greater incentive to spend your money (a negative feedback cycle), and rewards you for deferring consumption.
I'm familiar with the fractional-reserve system, thanks. The problem is semantics. You're counting all that virtual money as "dollars"; I am not. Only the reserves--the physical cash--are dollars, and the banks keep as much of that as they can, so that they can lend out more virtual money for real profits at basically zero cost to themselves.
Banks mostly keep their dollars are reserves ("hoarding" them) and loan out virtual money which exists only on paper.
Anyway, "hoarding" currency has the same effect, economically, as loaning it out to every other holder of currency. Since you're deferring spending your currency, reducing the supply, everyone else's currency increases proportionally in value. The resulting deflation is your interest payment for deferring consumption.
Besides data loss cases like yours (backups!), it's likely that quite a few were lost in the early days simply because they weren't worth very much. People installed the client, ran the miner for a while, and then lost interest. For a long time, 1000 BTC was worth perhaps ten dollars; IIRC, at one point someone spent that much on a pizza. It would buy about $12,000 now, but at the time it would probably not have been considered worth preserving unless one was both far-sighted and optimistic about Bitcoin's prospects.
It's also worth remembering that the Bitcoin protocol requires that the entire balance of an account be spent whenever the account is used in a transaction. The change could be returned to the original address, but generally it's sent to a new account. (This is an extra security measure, since it's more difficult to perform cryptoanalysis on a mere hash of the public key than on the key itself. The full public key is revealed only when the balance is spent.)
In other words, it's not at all surprising that most accounts with balances have never been used as the input for a transaction. That's the normal state. What's more surprising is that the number isn't higher.
You say "do not blame government -- blame the parents", but you also say "the government *is* the parents." You can't have it both ways.
To the extent that the parents actively support and endorse these policies, and have been granted the authority to mandate their enforcement, blaming the government *is* blaming the parents. With or without official titles, those who command the "legitimate" use of force against non-aggressors are the government, in every way that matters. Blaming the government is equivalent to blaming those who make its decisions and carry out its policies, and vice-versa.
This wasn't big government forcing it on me; it was my parents' contemporaries.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Your parents' contemporaries may be been making the decisions, but it was support for "big government" that gave them the power to enforce those decisions. In essence, they were "big government".
which substantially violates a creator's right to pick their own business model
There may be a right to pick your own business model, but there is no right which obligates anyone to make sure that business model succeeds. For example, my business model might be that I expect everyone else to pay me for the privilege of breathing. If so, I should expect that business model to fail. Other people breathing without my permission does not cause me any harm, so there is no legitimate basis for preventing it by force, and no one is going to voluntarily pay me for something they can do on their own for free.
Like breathing, copyright infringement is an action which harms no one, and a business model predicated on expecting others to voluntarily pay you to make or share copies is just as obviously doomed to failure.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. Obviously different traders will have different latency between their own computers and the trading floor / central computer. Those with better connections may well be able to take advantage of opportunities others further away do not have access to, because the opportunity is over before they can find out about it and respond. I have no problem with that. However, if all incoming orders are serialized and matched up by the exchange (and what other purpose is there for an exchange?) then there should not be any opportunity for HFTs to find out about two existing orders and "get between them" before they can "find each other". The instant an order comes in, it should be matched up with the best compatible order already in the order book. The HFT only finds out about pending orders when there is no immediate match.
If the exchange doesn't maintain the order book or match up buyers and sellers—if it just acts as a communications nexus and leaves the most critical part of the exchange to the individual market participants—then it has failed to do its job. As I said, you would have to be insane (or malicious) to design an exchange system that way.
Latency shouldn't even be an issue, at least not in this sense. New orders should be sent directly to the central computer handling trades for that commodity, which either matches them with existing orders or adds them to the order book. The changes to the order book would then be distributed to all traders. That way, no one (aside from the central computer, which is presumed neutral) would get a chance to see orders before they're executed, no matter how well-connected they may be.
HFT algorithms will not make trades that don't have a profitable buyer and a seller found. They make trades before buyer and seller find each other.
How is this even possible? Don't the buy and sell orders go into the same order book? Wouldn't the trade take place the moment the second order is placed, well before any HFT algorithm has the opportunity to interfere? It seems insane to me to implement a market any other way.
If the HFT gets advance notice of orders being placed before they are reconciled with the official order book, that's an obvious design flaw. On the other hand, if the HFT is just discovering someone's actual best ask, and then executing the order at that price in anticipation of a future bid, then there is nothing wrong beyond the incorrect expectation that it is reasonable or practical to keep your actual limit price a secret.
No... more like if you leave an open suitcase of cash on your front lawn while you go out (assuming there is no wind), where anybody walking by can see it, and make absolutely no effort to secure any of it inside your own home, then you should bear some responsibility for the fact that when you come back after a few hours, it's not all going to be there.... even though other people broke the law by stealing your property, you were still negligent in how you managed it.
Negligent or not, it's still your property, and you still have the right to get it back and to punish those who stole it. You'll just have a harder time convincing anyone to help you.
Now, if someone was so foolish as to try to prevent you from recovering your property on your own (as governments routinely do), then they would be taking on the responsibility to do so in your stead, to the best of your ability, no matter how negligent you may have been. To do otherwise would be to actively assist the thief in getting away with your property, and thus become an accessory to the crime.
The only real good thing about inflation is that in limited amounts, it encourages spending instead of hoarding.
Which is useful.
Actually, no, it isn't. There is a correct balance between consumption and saving ("hoarding"), determined by supply and demand, and inflation, like any other tariff or subsidy, distorts that balance. The result is a net loss to society.