when the stimulus kicked in jobs recovered, when it began to phase out, job growth stalled
You do realize that means it didn't work, right? The level of borrowing and inflation necessary to fund the "stimulus" was never sustainable over the long-term; it was only supposed to provide a kick-start. If the recovery stops as soon as the free money runs out (as the credible economic models predicted from the beginning), then the "stimulus" was a complete waste. Why would anyone in their right mind want to repeat that sort of failure?
Any way you look at it, the only reason to wish to post anonymously is to avoid some form of repercussion...
Or perhaps you just believe anonymity improves the quality of the discussion—since you don't know who anyone is, there is less basis for personal attacks and more pressure to debate the substance of an argument, rather than the person who made it. The fact that you can participate in discussions without revealing your ethnicity or gender has always been one of the online community's strengths; forcing people to reveal their real names undermines that implied equality.
A "real name" policy also tends to favor those with popular names (John Smith), who remain effectively anonymous, at the expense of those whose names are relatively unique.
And if the stack is read-only you basically get 1 instruction, the address for a return/jump/etc.
I think you meant "non-executable". A read-only stack would be nearly useless. (It would at least be practically invulnerable to stack-based buffer overflows, but only because no buffers could be stored on the stack.)
The fundamental difference is, to use your words, things need to "add up", and by definition has to remain continually viable with each "addition".
I don't know where you got that idea. Many "additions" are fatal during early development; of the rest, they are just as likely, or perhaps more likely, to be harmful or neutral rather than beneficial. If there is a benefit, it may not show up for generations, masquerading as a neutral or even slightly harmful change until the population's environment changes enough to put the mutation in a more positive light.
Of course, the "neutral" mutation could just as easily make it harder to adapt. The thing is, the organisms which inherit the more harmful mutations die out, and thus fail to influence future generations, while those with beneficial mutations are able to adapt and survive. As a result, we only see the positive changes. In a sense, every organism alive today is "lucky" beyond belief, compared to all the potential organisms which didn't make it; however, a world where those others survived would be even less likely.
We can argue about the degree of difference, but the standard response there is "no difference" here is essentially the same as saying "There's no difference between winning a coin flip and winning the lottery, they're both just randomness".
To be more precise, there is a contradiction in believing in "micro-evolution" and not in "macro-evolution". Repeated "micro-evolution" leads to "macro-evolution", given sufficient time, and a couple of billion years is sufficient time.
If you repeat a random event enough times, even the improbable outcomes are likely to occur at some point. Play the lottery once, and the odds against winning are astronomical. If you play it a billion times, though, it would be surprising if you didn't win at least once.
One problem with the concept of "macro-evolution" is that it presumes that the differences between species are more fundamental than they really are. For example, the human genetic code is only about 6.6% different from that of baboons, which aren't even our closest genetic relative. (That would be chimpanzees, at about 1.2%.) Considering that most of the human genome (99%) is non-coding and has no known function, you can see that it doesn't take much mutation at all to create very visible differences in appearance and behavior, to the point of clearly demarcating different species.
Enumerate the set of predictable scientific causal factors that produce the specific values of random in "random mutation". Yes, I do know what I'm asking for there--do you?... That way, I'll know that "random" isn't, as an absolutely core premise of the theory, an "uncaused cause" pseudoscience, and that it isn't just a placeholder word for "we don't know the full causes".
I certainly hope you know what you're asking, because it isn't at all clear from the way you phrased the question.
The causes of "random mutation" are well-known, and mainly consist of recombination (mixing of genes from multiple hosts during procreation, for species which do that), transcription errors (the copy created during mitosis doesn't match the original DNA), and horizontal gene transfer (when viruses pick up DNA from one host and inject it into a different one). For more information, consult any competent biology textbook.
That species mutate—that children are not exact replicas of their parent(s)—is not at all surprising. It's a natural consequence of entropy. It would be far more surprising to find that there was no "random mutation", or that organisms could never mutate beyond a fixed amount from their distant ancestors, forcing them to remain the same species. Evolution is the only outcome one could reasonably expect in the absence of something to actively prevent it.
I think that you'll find the more intelligent ones make a distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
If they were really intelligent, they would realize that there is no fundamental difference between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution". Over a few billion years, "micro-evolution" tends to add up. Eventually you get a population which can no longer interbreed with the original to produce fertile offspring, and a brand new species is born.
Either you're a dumb data carrier who isn't responsible for the data being carried, or you're an active participant liable for what you transmit. Can't have it both ways, fools.
You're only an "active participant" if you're specifically promoting that kind of traffic. There is no just basis for holding anyone responsible for generic traffic they don't promote and have no reason, or even any realistic ability, to identify or single out just because there are other kinds which they do. Certainly Verizon would have to be careful about the businesses they accept payment from for better service—knowingly accepting payment to give illegal traffic preferential treatment would be a legitimate liability—but at the same time it is perfectly reasonable for them to remain a "dumb carrier" regarding everything else.
So congress introduced Common Carrier status, in which telecommunications companies could then be NOT held responsible for data that simply passes through their network.
Common Carrier status is a red herring. Under what reasonably theory could carriers be held responsible for content they did not originate in the first place? That they are mere carriers, and not originators, is a simple fact; there is no rational justification for attaching legal strings to recognition of that fact. Even without formal Common Carrier status, there is no just basis for holding any telecommunication company responsible for someone else's libel or slander, or any other legally dubious act of communication of which they have no special knowledge.
That said, the "free speech" argument being made by Verizon is frankly ridiculous. As you say, this isn't their speech. They're just the carrier. The Fifth Amendment argument has a far better basis in fact; being forced to provide services and/or access to their property against their will clearly does amount to taking it for public use, and they have not been offered any compensation. (Not that "just compensation" is really something which can be decided in the context of a forced sale, as the only authoritative source for the value of a good is its current owner, but that hasn't stopped them yet.)
You can't complain about people walking across your private property if you are charging them specifically TO walk across your private property.
Sure you can. You can set limits on the conditions under which people are allowed to walk across your property, including but not limited to time, place, frequency, and purpose, and you have every right to complain if those conditions are violated. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, and rarely is in practice.
Not really - only a material with a lower melting point and which does not bond to the plastic can be used.
That's not universally true, due to materials like green sand and ceramics which can be molded at the low temperatures needed for the plastic, and yet still hold their shape after setting when exposed to molten metal.
The lost wax casting method, which makes use of both green sand and ceramics, has already been mentioned; there have also been some promising experiments with the simpler "lost foam" process, using ultra-low-density plastic prints in place of foam. Low-temperature metals like pewter can also be poured into a plaster of Paris negative, cast in turn around a positive model printed in plastic.
Still? You guys want to have a word with your banks about that, we got rid of that particular unnecessary delay four years ago and transfers are now more or less instant in the UK.
Yes, it really takes that long to transfer between banks in the U.S. However, even then the transfers are reversible for a very long time (several months), so the money isn't really yours, it just shows up in your account. That's true in the U.K. as well. With Bitcoin, the transfer is irreversible in practice within about ten to twenty minutes of announcing then transaction to the network (after one confirmation), and by the end of an hour a reversal isn't even worth considering as a theoretical possibility.
It's not a Bitcoin hack because it's only possible if the person on the receiving end doesn't follow the Bitcoin protocol, which is to wait for at least one confirmation before treating a transfer as legitimate, with six confirmations being recommended. Most vendors wait three to six confirmations (30-60 minutes average), which is still a lot better than an ACH transfer at three-plus days, but one is more than enough to offset any reasonable risk of reversal for normal purchases.
If you don't have any confirmations then the transaction isn't part of the block chain, which means it might as well not exist so far as the rest of the Bitcoin network is concerned. At that point the signed transaction is just a declaration of intent, not an accomplished fact.
I'd like to believe that "Congress shall make no law..." includes tax law. Thus you could not prohibit (via tax) speech, right to assembly, voting, etc.
The thing is, I'm not sure it would be considered a prohibition. It isn't even really a tax on speech per se, since strictly speaking the tax applies to everyone. Those who lack the government's favor simply don't get a rebate to offset the tax.
If the government can use this approach to fine people for not doing something which they otherwise do not have any authority to compel them to do, I see no reason why they cannot use it to fine people for doing something (like speaking in certain ways) which they lack the power to prohibit by law.
A tax which need not be apportioned evenly is equivalent, in the end, to unlimited political power. That is why the original Constitution required taxes to be divided evenly—either a fixed fraction of the value of the good in the case of a direct tax, or a certain amount per capita based on the last census for indirect taxes—and part of the reason why the Income Tax amendment, which lifted that requirement in regard to taxes on income, was such a major blow against liberty.
So any mandate is fine as long as you call the penalty "tax".
Exactly. Personally, I think the USSC is wrong here, and a 5-4 ruling is a rather slim margin for the constitutionality of such a critical piece of legislation. It basically came down to one person's opinion. The constitutionality of the law should be clear-cut; a mere 56% vote of confidence is simply unacceptable.
However, going by the reasoning in this ruling, there is absolutely nothing preventing the government from taxing everyone a perfectly egalitarian $1,000,000 per person per year to fund "public discourse enhancement" or whatever they care to call it, and then offering an equivalent rebate to anyone who says only things the government approves of. That's just within the government's power to tax, right? There are no 1st Amendment issues involved. You are still free to say whatever you want, you just won't get the rebate... and if you can't or won't pay up, the IRS has broad powers over those convicted of "tax evasion". One can imagine similar tax/rebate rules for gun owners, people who value their privacy against unwarranted search and/or seizure, etc. As others have already pointed out, under this ruling there is no real limit to the government's power, and we might as well throw out the Constitution entirely.
You can't, any more, blow off getting insurance without penalty.
You couldn't do that before, either, because by that point it would be considered a pre-existing condition and thus (quite properly) not covered. If you already have a condition you can't afford to treat, you don't need insurance; you need charity. The ACA is trying to force insurers to act as involuntary "charities", with predictable complications and inefficiencies.
The individual mandate is a poor workaround for the fact that the prohibition on excluding pre-existing conditions would otherwise bankrupt the insurers, as people would naturally put off paying insurance premiums until they were actually sick, and the insurers wouldn't have any choice but to accept them, even though the premiums are only intended to cover the risk of an otherwise healthy individual needing medical care.
The correct solution is to drop the requirement to provide "insurance" for pre-existing conditions, thus eliminating the reason for the individual mandate, and find a different, non-insurance-based solution (such as private, voluntary charity) to deal with the tiny minority of cases where pre-existing conditions were actually a legitimate issue.
Private ownership must be the critical part. Perhaps the entire capitalism can be derived from just private ownership. "Means of production" seems almost superficial.
Not really. There are systems with private ownership of consumer goods, but where most or all of the means of production are controlled by the state.
Of course, it's rare to have privately-owned capital goods without privately-owned consumer goods. However, there are systems with some private ownership which are not capitalistic.
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so.
That's not true. Anything which is scarce has a de facto owner in the form of the person(s) with the right to consume it. In the case of a house, that means living in it (since only a limited number of people can do that at any given time) or altering it in any way, up to and including destroying it. The idea of a persistent owner is somewhat artificial—though not actually dependent on government as you implied—but the only alternative to someone (or everyone) having the right to consume a scarce good is that no one does, which would render the good useless.
Without scarcity, however, there is no need for an owner. Superabundant goods, including anything digital, are not capable of being consumed (used up), so there is no rivalry involved. Any number of individuals can benefit from them to the fullest without depriving any of the others, so there is no need to arbitrate between them by considering a digital good the property of some, to the exclusion of others.
I've had no trouble with Intel's integrated graphics, ever.
I've also found that to be true in general, but it's worth noting that there is an entire series of Intel-branded integrated graphics chips with PowerVR-based GPUs which have no Linux drivers worth mentioning. Even 2D support for these chips is quite limited at present.
The server would regard the data as a binary blob with a source and destination. You know, just like a router does. Except the data is encrypted, so the only useful data that can be recovered is where it's going, and where it's coming from.
You don't even need to give up that much information. If the messages are encrypted, then the server can just send all of them to every client, and only the intended recipients will know which ones correspond to their private keys. As for the sender, that can be disguised with public proxies or onion routing (Tor or I2P).
The idea is simple. At both ends of the wire, random data modulated with content is being emitted. At any point on the wire, you see the sum of two random sources. But each end knows their own random data, and can subtract it out.
Actually, the proposal (which you linked to) does not involve transmitting the content on the wire at all. The circuit consists of a loop with resistors in two places, and no power source. The random signal consists of induced current from thermal noise or an external noise source; the power distribution of the noise is affected by the resistors. Supposedly there is no way to know from measuring the noise where each resistor is in the circuit.
I'm not prepared to claim that the system is as secure as the paper suggests, but I think you need to look more closely before saying it's flawed.
Unless a portion of the crime takes place in the physical world, it is very difficult to gather the evidence required to obtain a warrant.
If no part of the "crime" takes place in the physical world, then perhaps the problem is with your definition of "crime" rather than the absence of built-in back doors into people's private communications.
Whatever the content, communication per se is not a legitimate crime. There are no cases where fighting crime requires the ability to listen in on others' conversations.
And technically, price discimination is the ideal for the seller - instead of sales measured at where supply meets demand..., price discrimination allows them to take the larger area under the supply curve as revenue.
It can also be good for the buyer. Without price discrimination, only those who can afford the product at the single, optimal price point can receive the good. Price discrimination means that some buyers pay more, true, but also that other buyers pay less, which makes the product available to more people. Keep in mind that charity is a form of price discrimination—full price for those who can pay, discounts for those who can't.
Price discrimination works purely because of assymetrical flow of information....
Not necessarily. Even with symmetrical information, you can still have price discrimination in any case where people can't (or won't) simply turn to a competitor. Natural monopolies, for example, including any specialized skilled labor (at least in the short term). It can also occur when the discounts are subsidized via donations, or when people choose to overpay as a form of donation. A competitor could offer a lower price, but without the charitable component they wouldn't necessarily get the customers.
Maybe you don't want to say that gum drops are a currency, but surely in this scenario gum drops have value (they are worth X worms).
They have value, but a good isn't a currency until you start using it for indirect exchange. For that you need at least three people, so let's say that in addition to you and your friend there is a third member of this economy who runs a restaurant serving cooked fish. He buys fish from you, cooks it, and sells meals to you and your friend. You and the restaurant owner have no personal interest in gum drops, but you need them to buy worms, and he needs to pay you for the fish somehow. Ergo, you set up an indirect exchange where fish, cooked meals, and fish bait can all be traded for gum drops. Now gum drops have taken on the function of a currency, because you and the restaurant owner will accept them as payment simply to trade them again for what you really want, and not for direct use. (Your friend uses them both directly and indirectly, to eat and to pay for cooked meals.)
Yes, a loan is normally a net gain for both the lender and the borrower, just like any other trade, and if the rate of inflation is known in advance, that will simply be taken into account when setting the interest rate. It would be more precise to say that inflation in excess of that predicated at the time the interest rates were fixed rewards debtors at the expense of savers/lenders.
Of course, a completely predictable rate of inflation, where the new money is distributed evenly to all currency holders, has no effect at all. The overall quantity of currency has almost no effect on the economy; we could trade in our dollars for micro-dollars or kilo-dollars and nothing would change, provided all the prices and contracts were updated accordingly. The only reasons to have inflation in the first place are to trick people into accepting lower revenues (e.g. reducing the real value of wages while maintaining the nominal rate, in lieu of a visible pay cut), to transfer wealth from debtors to savers or visa-versa by manipulating the rate, and to transfer wealth from existing currency holders to the well-connected who receive the new currency first and can spend it before it affects prices. Only the last case has any effect when the rate of inflation is known well in advance (due to the uneven distribution of new currency).
Dell, the most popular vendor "these days" always includes a restore CD.
My last computer purchase was a Dell. It didn't come with a restore disc. There was an option to purchase restore media with the computer, for those willing to pay extra, but the expected method was to use the included backup software to make your own restore DVDs.
The bright side of that approach is that you get a chance to strip out all the adware and trialware they pre-install before committing the original Windows image to disc and starting over with Linux.
What would you prefer? That men in guns stopped you from pulling out of your driveway if you didn't pay the toll for the road you were planning to drive on? That men in guns stopped you from entering a hospital unless you had enough money to pay?
Sure, so long as they're just protecting their own property from trespassing, staying within the bounds of proportional response, and not externalizing the cost of that protection onto others. It's their property, and they have the right to keep out trespassers.
That men in guns stopped you from getting into the polls if you couldn't pay the fee to cover the cost of poll staff, vote counters, and the rented space?
I would say the same here, but why would there be polls in the first place?
You weren't planning on just freeloading in an anarchist society, were you?
Not freeloading, no.
I'd much rather deal with a single known evil than every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*.
First, "every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*" is nothing more than scare-mongering, especially compared to obvious injustice and violation of natural rights inherent in the nature of every government. Second, I'd rather deal with the responsibilities of liberty, even if it does mean dealing with some "evil", than personally participate in and legitimize a known evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Where exactly have you seen prices for 1Gbps Internet access that make $70/month seem high?
when the stimulus kicked in jobs recovered, when it began to phase out, job growth stalled
You do realize that means it didn't work, right? The level of borrowing and inflation necessary to fund the "stimulus" was never sustainable over the long-term; it was only supposed to provide a kick-start. If the recovery stops as soon as the free money runs out (as the credible economic models predicted from the beginning), then the "stimulus" was a complete waste. Why would anyone in their right mind want to repeat that sort of failure?
Any way you look at it, the only reason to wish to post anonymously is to avoid some form of repercussion...
Or perhaps you just believe anonymity improves the quality of the discussion—since you don't know who anyone is, there is less basis for personal attacks and more pressure to debate the substance of an argument, rather than the person who made it. The fact that you can participate in discussions without revealing your ethnicity or gender has always been one of the online community's strengths; forcing people to reveal their real names undermines that implied equality.
A "real name" policy also tends to favor those with popular names (John Smith), who remain effectively anonymous, at the expense of those whose names are relatively unique.
And if the stack is read-only you basically get 1 instruction, the address for a return/jump/etc.
I think you meant "non-executable". A read-only stack would be nearly useless. (It would at least be practically invulnerable to stack-based buffer overflows, but only because no buffers could be stored on the stack.)
The fundamental difference is, to use your words, things need to "add up", and by definition has to remain continually viable with each "addition".
I don't know where you got that idea. Many "additions" are fatal during early development; of the rest, they are just as likely, or perhaps more likely, to be harmful or neutral rather than beneficial. If there is a benefit, it may not show up for generations, masquerading as a neutral or even slightly harmful change until the population's environment changes enough to put the mutation in a more positive light.
Of course, the "neutral" mutation could just as easily make it harder to adapt. The thing is, the organisms which inherit the more harmful mutations die out, and thus fail to influence future generations, while those with beneficial mutations are able to adapt and survive. As a result, we only see the positive changes. In a sense, every organism alive today is "lucky" beyond belief, compared to all the potential organisms which didn't make it; however, a world where those others survived would be even less likely.
We can argue about the degree of difference, but the standard response there is "no difference" here is essentially the same as saying "There's no difference between winning a coin flip and winning the lottery, they're both just randomness".
To be more precise, there is a contradiction in believing in "micro-evolution" and not in "macro-evolution". Repeated "micro-evolution" leads to "macro-evolution", given sufficient time, and a couple of billion years is sufficient time.
If you repeat a random event enough times, even the improbable outcomes are likely to occur at some point. Play the lottery once, and the odds against winning are astronomical. If you play it a billion times, though, it would be surprising if you didn't win at least once.
One problem with the concept of "macro-evolution" is that it presumes that the differences between species are more fundamental than they really are. For example, the human genetic code is only about 6.6% different from that of baboons, which aren't even our closest genetic relative. (That would be chimpanzees, at about 1.2%.) Considering that most of the human genome (99%) is non-coding and has no known function, you can see that it doesn't take much mutation at all to create very visible differences in appearance and behavior, to the point of clearly demarcating different species.
Enumerate the set of predictable scientific causal factors that produce the specific values of random in "random mutation". Yes, I do know what I'm asking for there--do you? ... That way, I'll know that "random" isn't, as an absolutely core premise of the theory, an "uncaused cause" pseudoscience, and that it isn't just a placeholder word for "we don't know the full causes".
I certainly hope you know what you're asking, because it isn't at all clear from the way you phrased the question.
The causes of "random mutation" are well-known, and mainly consist of recombination (mixing of genes from multiple hosts during procreation, for species which do that), transcription errors (the copy created during mitosis doesn't match the original DNA), and horizontal gene transfer (when viruses pick up DNA from one host and inject it into a different one). For more information, consult any competent biology textbook.
That species mutate—that children are not exact replicas of their parent(s)—is not at all surprising. It's a natural consequence of entropy. It would be far more surprising to find that there was no "random mutation", or that organisms could never mutate beyond a fixed amount from their distant ancestors, forcing them to remain the same species. Evolution is the only outcome one could reasonably expect in the absence of something to actively prevent it.
I think that you'll find the more intelligent ones make a distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
If they were really intelligent, they would realize that there is no fundamental difference between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution". Over a few billion years, "micro-evolution" tends to add up. Eventually you get a population which can no longer interbreed with the original to produce fertile offspring, and a brand new species is born.
Either you're a dumb data carrier who isn't responsible for the data being carried, or you're an active participant liable for what you transmit. Can't have it both ways, fools.
You're only an "active participant" if you're specifically promoting that kind of traffic. There is no just basis for holding anyone responsible for generic traffic they don't promote and have no reason, or even any realistic ability, to identify or single out just because there are other kinds which they do. Certainly Verizon would have to be careful about the businesses they accept payment from for better service—knowingly accepting payment to give illegal traffic preferential treatment would be a legitimate liability—but at the same time it is perfectly reasonable for them to remain a "dumb carrier" regarding everything else.
So congress introduced Common Carrier status, in which telecommunications companies could then be NOT held responsible for data that simply passes through their network.
Common Carrier status is a red herring. Under what reasonably theory could carriers be held responsible for content they did not originate in the first place? That they are mere carriers, and not originators, is a simple fact; there is no rational justification for attaching legal strings to recognition of that fact. Even without formal Common Carrier status, there is no just basis for holding any telecommunication company responsible for someone else's libel or slander, or any other legally dubious act of communication of which they have no special knowledge.
That said, the "free speech" argument being made by Verizon is frankly ridiculous. As you say, this isn't their speech. They're just the carrier. The Fifth Amendment argument has a far better basis in fact; being forced to provide services and/or access to their property against their will clearly does amount to taking it for public use, and they have not been offered any compensation. (Not that "just compensation" is really something which can be decided in the context of a forced sale, as the only authoritative source for the value of a good is its current owner, but that hasn't stopped them yet.)
You can't complain about people walking across your private property if you are charging them specifically TO walk across your private property.
Sure you can. You can set limits on the conditions under which people are allowed to walk across your property, including but not limited to time, place, frequency, and purpose, and you have every right to complain if those conditions are violated. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, and rarely is in practice.
Not really - only a material with a lower melting point and which does not bond to the plastic can be used.
That's not universally true, due to materials like green sand and ceramics which can be molded at the low temperatures needed for the plastic, and yet still hold their shape after setting when exposed to molten metal.
The lost wax casting method, which makes use of both green sand and ceramics, has already been mentioned; there have also been some promising experiments with the simpler "lost foam" process, using ultra-low-density plastic prints in place of foam. Low-temperature metals like pewter can also be poured into a plaster of Paris negative, cast in turn around a positive model printed in plastic.
ACH transfer at three-plus
Still? You guys want to have a word with your banks about that, we got rid of that particular unnecessary delay four years ago and transfers are now more or less instant in the UK.
Yes, it really takes that long to transfer between banks in the U.S. However, even then the transfers are reversible for a very long time (several months), so the money isn't really yours, it just shows up in your account. That's true in the U.K. as well. With Bitcoin, the transfer is irreversible in practice within about ten to twenty minutes of announcing then transaction to the network (after one confirmation), and by the end of an hour a reversal isn't even worth considering as a theoretical possibility.
It's not a Bitcoin hack because it's only possible if the person on the receiving end doesn't follow the Bitcoin protocol, which is to wait for at least one confirmation before treating a transfer as legitimate, with six confirmations being recommended. Most vendors wait three to six confirmations (30-60 minutes average), which is still a lot better than an ACH transfer at three-plus days, but one is more than enough to offset any reasonable risk of reversal for normal purchases.
If you don't have any confirmations then the transaction isn't part of the block chain, which means it might as well not exist so far as the rest of the Bitcoin network is concerned. At that point the signed transaction is just a declaration of intent, not an accomplished fact.
I'd like to believe that "Congress shall make no law..." includes tax law. Thus you could not prohibit (via tax) speech, right to assembly, voting, etc.
The thing is, I'm not sure it would be considered a prohibition. It isn't even really a tax on speech per se, since strictly speaking the tax applies to everyone. Those who lack the government's favor simply don't get a rebate to offset the tax.
If the government can use this approach to fine people for not doing something which they otherwise do not have any authority to compel them to do, I see no reason why they cannot use it to fine people for doing something (like speaking in certain ways) which they lack the power to prohibit by law.
A tax which need not be apportioned evenly is equivalent, in the end, to unlimited political power. That is why the original Constitution required taxes to be divided evenly—either a fixed fraction of the value of the good in the case of a direct tax, or a certain amount per capita based on the last census for indirect taxes—and part of the reason why the Income Tax amendment, which lifted that requirement in regard to taxes on income, was such a major blow against liberty.
So any mandate is fine as long as you call the penalty "tax".
Exactly. Personally, I think the USSC is wrong here, and a 5-4 ruling is a rather slim margin for the constitutionality of such a critical piece of legislation. It basically came down to one person's opinion. The constitutionality of the law should be clear-cut; a mere 56% vote of confidence is simply unacceptable.
However, going by the reasoning in this ruling, there is absolutely nothing preventing the government from taxing everyone a perfectly egalitarian $1,000,000 per person per year to fund "public discourse enhancement" or whatever they care to call it, and then offering an equivalent rebate to anyone who says only things the government approves of. That's just within the government's power to tax, right? There are no 1st Amendment issues involved. You are still free to say whatever you want, you just won't get the rebate... and if you can't or won't pay up, the IRS has broad powers over those convicted of "tax evasion". One can imagine similar tax/rebate rules for gun owners, people who value their privacy against unwarranted search and/or seizure, etc. As others have already pointed out, under this ruling there is no real limit to the government's power, and we might as well throw out the Constitution entirely.
You can't, any more, blow off getting insurance without penalty.
You couldn't do that before, either, because by that point it would be considered a pre-existing condition and thus (quite properly) not covered. If you already have a condition you can't afford to treat, you don't need insurance; you need charity. The ACA is trying to force insurers to act as involuntary "charities", with predictable complications and inefficiencies.
The individual mandate is a poor workaround for the fact that the prohibition on excluding pre-existing conditions would otherwise bankrupt the insurers, as people would naturally put off paying insurance premiums until they were actually sick, and the insurers wouldn't have any choice but to accept them, even though the premiums are only intended to cover the risk of an otherwise healthy individual needing medical care.
The correct solution is to drop the requirement to provide "insurance" for pre-existing conditions, thus eliminating the reason for the individual mandate, and find a different, non-insurance-based solution (such as private, voluntary charity) to deal with the tiny minority of cases where pre-existing conditions were actually a legitimate issue.
Private ownership must be the critical part. Perhaps the entire capitalism can be derived from just private ownership. "Means of production" seems almost superficial.
Not really. There are systems with private ownership of consumer goods, but where most or all of the means of production are controlled by the state.
Of course, it's rare to have privately-owned capital goods without privately-owned consumer goods. However, there are systems with some private ownership which are not capitalistic.
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so.
That's not true. Anything which is scarce has a de facto owner in the form of the person(s) with the right to consume it. In the case of a house, that means living in it (since only a limited number of people can do that at any given time) or altering it in any way, up to and including destroying it. The idea of a persistent owner is somewhat artificial—though not actually dependent on government as you implied—but the only alternative to someone (or everyone) having the right to consume a scarce good is that no one does, which would render the good useless.
Without scarcity, however, there is no need for an owner. Superabundant goods, including anything digital, are not capable of being consumed (used up), so there is no rivalry involved. Any number of individuals can benefit from them to the fullest without depriving any of the others, so there is no need to arbitrate between them by considering a digital good the property of some, to the exclusion of others.
I've had no trouble with Intel's integrated graphics, ever.
I've also found that to be true in general, but it's worth noting that there is an entire series of Intel-branded integrated graphics chips with PowerVR-based GPUs which have no Linux drivers worth mentioning. Even 2D support for these chips is quite limited at present.
The server would regard the data as a binary blob with a source and destination. You know, just like a router does. Except the data is encrypted, so the only useful data that can be recovered is where it's going, and where it's coming from.
You don't even need to give up that much information. If the messages are encrypted, then the server can just send all of them to every client, and only the intended recipients will know which ones correspond to their private keys. As for the sender, that can be disguised with public proxies or onion routing (Tor or I2P).
The idea is simple. At both ends of the wire, random data modulated with content is being emitted. At any point on the wire, you see the sum of two random sources. But each end knows their own random data, and can subtract it out.
Actually, the proposal (which you linked to) does not involve transmitting the content on the wire at all. The circuit consists of a loop with resistors in two places, and no power source. The random signal consists of induced current from thermal noise or an external noise source; the power distribution of the noise is affected by the resistors. Supposedly there is no way to know from measuring the noise where each resistor is in the circuit.
I'm not prepared to claim that the system is as secure as the paper suggests, but I think you need to look more closely before saying it's flawed.
Unless a portion of the crime takes place in the physical world, it is very difficult to gather the evidence required to obtain a warrant.
If no part of the "crime" takes place in the physical world, then perhaps the problem is with your definition of "crime" rather than the absence of built-in back doors into people's private communications.
Whatever the content, communication per se is not a legitimate crime. There are no cases where fighting crime requires the ability to listen in on others' conversations.
And technically, price discimination is the ideal for the seller - instead of sales measured at where supply meets demand ..., price discrimination allows them to take the larger area under the supply curve as revenue.
It can also be good for the buyer. Without price discrimination, only those who can afford the product at the single, optimal price point can receive the good. Price discrimination means that some buyers pay more, true, but also that other buyers pay less, which makes the product available to more people. Keep in mind that charity is a form of price discrimination—full price for those who can pay, discounts for those who can't.
Price discrimination works purely because of assymetrical flow of information....
Not necessarily. Even with symmetrical information, you can still have price discrimination in any case where people can't (or won't) simply turn to a competitor. Natural monopolies, for example, including any specialized skilled labor (at least in the short term). It can also occur when the discounts are subsidized via donations, or when people choose to overpay as a form of donation. A competitor could offer a lower price, but without the charitable component they wouldn't necessarily get the customers.
Maybe you don't want to say that gum drops are a currency, but surely in this scenario gum drops have value (they are worth X worms).
They have value, but a good isn't a currency until you start using it for indirect exchange. For that you need at least three people, so let's say that in addition to you and your friend there is a third member of this economy who runs a restaurant serving cooked fish. He buys fish from you, cooks it, and sells meals to you and your friend. You and the restaurant owner have no personal interest in gum drops, but you need them to buy worms, and he needs to pay you for the fish somehow. Ergo, you set up an indirect exchange where fish, cooked meals, and fish bait can all be traded for gum drops. Now gum drops have taken on the function of a currency, because you and the restaurant owner will accept them as payment simply to trade them again for what you really want, and not for direct use. (Your friend uses them both directly and indirectly, to eat and to pay for cooked meals.)
Yes, a loan is normally a net gain for both the lender and the borrower, just like any other trade, and if the rate of inflation is known in advance, that will simply be taken into account when setting the interest rate. It would be more precise to say that inflation in excess of that predicated at the time the interest rates were fixed rewards debtors at the expense of savers/lenders.
Of course, a completely predictable rate of inflation, where the new money is distributed evenly to all currency holders, has no effect at all. The overall quantity of currency has almost no effect on the economy; we could trade in our dollars for micro-dollars or kilo-dollars and nothing would change, provided all the prices and contracts were updated accordingly. The only reasons to have inflation in the first place are to trick people into accepting lower revenues (e.g. reducing the real value of wages while maintaining the nominal rate, in lieu of a visible pay cut), to transfer wealth from debtors to savers or visa-versa by manipulating the rate, and to transfer wealth from existing currency holders to the well-connected who receive the new currency first and can spend it before it affects prices. Only the last case has any effect when the rate of inflation is known well in advance (due to the uneven distribution of new currency).
Dell, the most popular vendor "these days" always includes a restore CD.
My last computer purchase was a Dell. It didn't come with a restore disc. There was an option to purchase restore media with the computer, for those willing to pay extra, but the expected method was to use the included backup software to make your own restore DVDs.
The bright side of that approach is that you get a chance to strip out all the adware and trialware they pre-install before committing the original Windows image to disc and starting over with Linux.
What would you prefer? That men in guns stopped you from pulling out of your driveway if you didn't pay the toll for the road you were planning to drive on? That men in guns stopped you from entering a hospital unless you had enough money to pay?
Sure, so long as they're just protecting their own property from trespassing, staying within the bounds of proportional response, and not externalizing the cost of that protection onto others. It's their property, and they have the right to keep out trespassers.
That men in guns stopped you from getting into the polls if you couldn't pay the fee to cover the cost of poll staff, vote counters, and the rented space?
I would say the same here, but why would there be polls in the first place?
You weren't planning on just freeloading in an anarchist society, were you?
Not freeloading, no.
I'd much rather deal with a single known evil than every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*.
First, "every possible shade of evil caused by the private ownership of *everything*" is nothing more than scare-mongering, especially compared to obvious injustice and violation of natural rights inherent in the nature of every government. Second, I'd rather deal with the responsibilities of liberty, even if it does mean dealing with some "evil", than personally participate in and legitimize a known evil.