What is truth, what is a fact?... Science and religion share the need to define this, and they simply have different methods of determinging what the meaning of "truth" is. However, since science always changes the values of true, and since science admits we can not know everything, how can science say that god does not exist?
Science is not concerned with "truth". Science is concerned with observation, hypotheses, and falsifiable predictions. You observe the universe, develop a model which fits your observations, and use the model to synthesize falsifiable predictions ("if the model is true then we should observe result A with probability P"). You then make further observations which either contradict the model (i.e. render it unlikely, in which case you invent a better model) or remain consistent with it. In that latter case it doesn't mean that the model is "true", just that it makes useful predictions within a certain domain. If the tested predictions form a representative sample distinct from the observations the model was based on, this means that future predictions are more likely to be correct.
Science gives us informed expectations regarding cause and effect within our universe. It is supremely unconcerned with underlying truth, if such a thing even exists. If you're interested in "truth", look to philosophy, not science.
Science doesn't say that god(s) don't exist. It says that there is no scientific reason to believe that god(s) do exist. That is, insofar as our observations are concerned, it makes no difference whatsoever whether god(s) exist or not; the existence or non-existence of god(s) has no observable effect on our universe.
This is hardly surprising, since religions inevitably define their god(s) as being beyond human power and understanding, meaning that no matter what we observe there is always a simpler explanation (i.e. one with fewer variable/assumptions) than the existence of god(s).
As Pascal's wager says, acting as if god exists costs you nothing.
Actually, it can cost quite a bit. The loss in personal integrity alone is substantial, and not necessarily outweighed by an arbitrarily small possibility of "infinite" reward as posited by Pascal. It also gains you nothing, since it's the belief that counts—pretending to be a Christian won't do you any good. Finally, that argument breaks down entirely in the presence of competing religions, since even if "acting as if god exists" were enough, you would have to choose one religion and reject the rest, and if you pick the wrong one you may end up even worse off than a simple non-believer.
The company will not hire employees it doesn't need, no matter what the tax rates are. So, if you lower taxes, that money is going to go straight to their bottom line -- they are NOT going to increase their expenses if they don't have to, and if they have to do it, then they'll do it regardless of tax breaks.
There is one case where a company will increase its expenses voluntarily—when doing so will enable it to increase its revenues even more.
Lowering corporate taxes helps in two ways. First, shifts marginal suppliers from unprofitable to profitable, which increases both the supply of goods and the demand for labor to produce them. Second, the increase in profitability of the incumbent suppliers gives them the capital reserves necessary to expand their operations, which also increases their demand for labor. (Naturally one can expand by borrowing as well, but it's more profitable to invest one's own revenues, and that can make all the difference when it comes to marginal investments.)
A purchase is an investment if and only if you rationally expect it to be worth more in the future than its opportunity cost. Spending money on "what if" scenarios without any cost/benefit analysis does not qualify as investment, even if it happens to turn out for the best in the end. It also depends on your point-of-view; parents spending money on antibiotics for their children, without any expectation of return, is mostly consumption, while a government doing the same because the future tax revenues will more than pay back the cost of the medicine is an investment (disregarding the coercion).
Borrowing for consumption isn't necessarily a bad choice from time to time. Sometime the ability to have something now rather than later really is worth the increased cost. It just isn't a good habit to get into.
In addition there is no evidence that such tax reductions have in fact increased revenues. All revenue increases post such tax reductions are explainable by secular economic growth.
Congratulations, you seem to have completely missed the point. The tax reductions cause the "secular economic growth", which in turn cause the increase in "revenues" (if the money taken in by a protection racket can really be called "revenue"; it's not all that closely related to the same term in a commercial context).
While there is obvious a point of diminishing returns (e.g. 0% means no "revenues", regardless of the amount of growth), it has nothing to do with whether the marginal rates are greater than or less than 50%. What matters is whether the increase in economic activity is sufficient to offset the decrease in the rate, which depends on many factors, most of which are very difficult to estimate in advance. In particular, some of the difference may be purely psychological, and some depends on just how badly the government was mismanaging its stolen resources compared to leaving them with their rightful owners.
You're both overreacting. The complaint was about comments which describe what the code is doing, which should be perfectly obvious to anyone qualified to be working with it. We agree that "class-level and function-level docs are perfectly OK", and natural language documentation for mathematical expressions comes closer to documentation for software functions than for individual statements. You don't write out an expression and then annotate it with "add variable 'x' to constant 'C' and multiply by factor 'y'"; in code, as in math, the comments should explain why you're doing this, what the result means, and/or what side-effects it causes. If you have to put this inside your functions rather than in a header at the beginning it's probably a sign that your functions are too large, and should be broken into more manageable pieces. Well-chosen variable names and function identifiers can also be considered a form of natural-language annotation, where mathematical expressions tend to use opaque single-letter names requiring separate explanation.
The more comments the better...
On the contrary, comments have a cost in readability (more distractions, harder to keep all the useful information on one screen), maintenance (keeping comments synchronized with the code), and accuracy (when you inevitably fail to do so), in addition to the simple cost of writing them. The value of a given comment needs to be high enough to justify the cost. Code filled with low-quality comments, particularly ones which say nothing more than what the code is doing, is worse than code with no comments. However, as you say, a few informative or insightful comments in strategic places can prove invaluable to anyone trying to understand the code—even the original author.:-)
Why should people with no kids pay school taxes? Why should people with no children in college fund public universities? Why should people who live outside the city pay tax on their cars to subsidize a subway system 90 miles away? Why should I fund state or national parks if I don't use them?
All very good questions to which there are no good answers. People shouldn't be forced to pay for things they don't use, including all these examples and more.
People in my area (100 miles from NYC) have an extremely heavy burden in the form of draconian land-use restrictions in order not to harm the water supply to the city. Is that fair?
No, it's not fair. It's your land, and it's not like anyone from NYC has a legitimate claim on the source of the water or the water table itself. If supplying water to the city is a problem they are welcome to collect it closer to the source and have it shipped in.
You do realize that the people who 'choose' to live in the country are the ones providing YOU with your most basic needs, like food and energy, right?
To the extent that they do, they are payed for the service. That's all the "subsidy" they need or deserve. To forcibly increase their compensation leads to overproduction, misallocation of resources, and a net loss for society as a whole.
It is reasonable to argue that the tracker is complicit in copyright infringement, so the point is somewhat moot.
Not really, as most trackers only have a hash of the torrent data, a list of peers, and some high-level statistics—they don't necessarily know anything about the content of the torrents they coordinate. An open tracker that can be used for any torrent is no more "complicit" than the various networks the data packets travel through on their way from one peer to another.
So you want a society where noone respects the law?
So long as the law includes copyright, and things like it, yes. Any law which endorses social engineering and aggression doesn't deserve respect.
I want a society where people respect each other, and each others' natural rights—which start with the right to be left alone unless you choose otherwise, and the right to interact with others on a mutually voluntary basis free of any outside interference. The written law has no legitimacy unless it parallels those natural rights. Copyright subverts natural rights on a massive scale in an attempt to engineer a society with artificially heightened production of "creative" works.
What the GP describes is "lawlessness", not Libertarianism or Anarchy. From your own link: "When used in this sense, anarchy may or may not imply political disorder or lawlessness within a society." There are many varieties of Anarchism, including some of the more consistent variations on Libertarianism. Some are indeed lawless, but the factor which sets all forms of Anarchy apart is the absence of rulers, not the absence of rules.
What sets Libertarianism apart, of course, is the Non-Aggression Principle. This means that, unlike Anarchy, which may include lawlessness, Libertarianism implies the rule of law. (What confuses people is that Libertarianism distinguishes between the rule of law and the mechanism by which laws are commonly enforced, namely government.)
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous?
Can they attach such a device to you, or your clothing? Why should your car be any different?
Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act...
What you mean, of course, is that in the interest of "efficient" law enforcement they get as close to the line as they can possibly get, and frequently cross over it only to be forgiven by courts which are ultimately part of the same organization and biased toward their side.
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient?
There's only one constitutional standard: Probable Cause. "Reasonable" is something you establish by getting a warrant. If you haven't been issued a warrant then you haven't established that the search is reasonable. More to the point, authorization to perform a search or seizure is a warrant, and a declaration that an entire class of searches or seizures is authorized as "reasonable" without reference to specific persons or property and probably cause is strictly in violation of the second half of the 4th Amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There are plenty of weapons of that type that are much shorter, but how modern the P-90 is apparently scares the regulators.
Regulators who shouldn't even exist, as the 2nd Amendment uses clear and uncompromising language which allows no room for regulatory interpretation. Are these weapons "arms"? Would one who sells them be an "arms dealer"? Then the right of the people to keep and bear them shall not be infringed. Period.
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
"Reasonable" is very much open to interpretation, so it's a good thing that thinking something is "reasonable" isn't sufficient justification by itself. The only sensible way to interpret that clause is to recognize first and foremost that a warrant is the sole mechanism by which searches and seizures can be authorized. If you think a particular search or seizure is "reasonable", you establish that legally by getting a warrant. Declaring an entire class of searches or seizures "reasonable" is no different from issuing an extremely broad warrantâ"but that is prohibited by the second half of the amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
As you say, they've modified your tire by doing that—your property. No one but the owner has the right to authorize modification of their property. it's no different, qualitatively, than if they'd come up to your car and spray-painted a big X on it to mark it, or gouged the paint. In any event, attaching a GPS tracker is much more invasive than your example of a mere chalk-mark. At least the chalk-mark is in plain sight, and won't be mistaken for a bomb.
The only sensible way to interpret that clause is to recognize first and foremost that a warrant is the sole mechanism by which searches and seizures can be authorized. If you think a particular search or seizure is "reasonable", you establish that legally by getting a warrant. Declaring an entire class of searches or seizures "reasonable" is no different from issuing an extremely broad warrant—but that is prohibited by the second half of the amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The TSA clearly lacks legal warrants for the searches they perform, ergo their searches are unconstitutional, however "reasonable" they may appear to some.
Fine. You give me the widget you're selling and I owe you a debt of whatever you were selling it for. I pay you in cash, which "is legal tender for all debts, public and private".
No, you give me the payment first. Only then do I give you the widget. You're the one extending credit, so instead of the widget we agreed on I can repay the debt with legal tender, if I don't mind committing fraud and theft under the protection of an unjust law.
In reality, the transaction in a normal sale is a simple, simultaneous trade of goods for payment, with no debt involved, and thus legal tender is irrelevant. However, even if you split up the transaction to artificially create a "debt" that's immediately repaid, the merchant need not be the creditor. It would depend on which comes first, the goods or the payment.
Last time I checked US currency states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private".
That only applies if there is actually a debt involved. If you demand payment before handing over the goods then there is no debt—and the state could probably force you to do that as a condition of a legal sale. I wouldn't be surprised if they could require you to collect the data they want on the debtor whenever the legal-tender law is invoked, either, so long as the debt is still considered paid. Don't give them the data they want, you don't get to keep the cash. Either way the debt is canceled, so the legal-tender status is irrelevant.
"Satoshi"... owns not just half of the bitcoins there currently are, but half of all the bitcoins that can ever be created....
Please stop spreading lies. The limit on the maximum number of bitcoins is 21,000,000. There are currently 150,028 blocks in the chain, each of which awarded 50 new bitcoins to the miner which found it, meaning that there are at most 7,501,400 bitcoins in circulation, less however many have been lost permanently through data corruption, system crashes, deletion, etc.
Satoshi obviously can't hold "half of all the bitcoins that will ever be created" when only ~36% of them have even been mined. As for the fraction of that ~36% which he holds, that's just guesswork--no one can possibly know for sure. As one of the earliest adopters and developers, he's probably lost more bitcoins than most users have seen in one place. Whatever his share is, it will decrease over time due to new mining, or even more so if he chooses to spend those reserves.
So much for providing for common defense and promoting general welfare.
Right! That is spelled out in the Constitution.
"Common defense" is an enumerated power (or rather, there are separate enumerated powers which can be collectively considered "common defense"), but "general welfare" is not. The establishment of "post roads" does fall under Congress' purview, but highways and interstates are much more than mere "post roads".
You may be able to classify them as a military project, since they were originally designed to enable efficient movement of troops and military equipment, but in that case they should be funded entirely out of the defense budget.
And you speak as one former libertarian, and not for the group. So? You even agreed that "most of them... claimed that their beliefs are founded on ethical principles", just as I said.
In practice, however, vast majority of libertarians were claiming that libertarian economy is also the most pragmatic of them all, citing "market efficiency" and whatnot.
I would say that most libertarians do believe this to be true. I certainly do. However, it is not the only or primary reason for libertarians to support a free market and oppose government interference. For someone who identifies as libertarian—interested primarily in liberty—free-market capitalism could be the single least efficient economic system available, and yet still be supported against government interference and aggressive socialism as the only choice compatible with a free society.
The fact that free markets are reasonably efficient under real-world conditions is a bonus, and offered to pragmatists as an argument for at least supporting our policies, if not our ideals. There may be cases where aggression on the part of a government or other entity can result in even greater economic prosperity, at least from some individuals' point-of-view—aggregate preferences are meaningless when aggression is involved—but at what cost?
As for "high taxes on top income bracket correlate with economic growth", which I can only assume is what you meant by "regulated the market in the right and proper manner", it's no surprise that a highly discriminatory tax system leads to short-term economic growth; you're taking the money that would have gone into capital investment and redirecting it toward consumption, and economic growth is measured strictly in terms of short-term consumption. In the process, of course, you're letting your capital infrastructure rot, so over the long term you won't be able to sustain the standard of living you had before, much less improve on it.
Conflating capitalism with free market is a logical fallacy that is often used for ideological purposes, mainly by right-wingers and libertarians via the following chain of logic: historically, western countries have been ahead of others in terms of social development, and this tends to correlate pretty well with them adopting capitalism. By that argument, capitalism is good. If you then artificially conflate capitalism and free market, then obviously free market is good, and any government regulation is therefore bad...
The libertarians I know of don't follow that logic chain at all. As you can infer from the name, libertarianism is mainly about liberty. It has very little to do with the principle-free, pragmatic, outcome-based reasoning you present here.
A social/political philosophy based on maximizing individual liberty naturally implies that one is free to utilize one's person and property in any way which does not interfere with the equivalent rights of others. This in turn implies a free market, since voluntary trade is one such use, and a social framework well-suited for capitalism. Collective ownership is also possible, of course, but only by unanimous consent, so large-scale socialism is unlikely in a free market.
Government interference is bad not because the market is good in its own right, or even because the market is more efficient without the interference (although that is generally true), but because it is contrary to the ideal of liberty which is central to libertarianism.
TLDR: Libertarians tend not to think like pragmatists. To understand us, you have to allow for placing principles, like maximizing liberty, above pragmatic concerns.
I'm curious about which provision requires tax to be levied equally? Got any articles on that for me?
I suspect the GP was referring to the first paragraph of Section 8, specifically: "all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States". (A sales tax would be an Excise, a tax on the manufacture, sale, or consumption of a good.)
I wonder if the free marketeers on here think that limited liability, that outrageous interference in the market, should be done away with.
There is more than one aspect to limited liability. Limitations on liability for harm done to people who did not choose to involve themselves with your company is clearly a problem. If someone harms you, even by accident, you have a right to be "made whole", and in the case of a corporation you should be able to hold not just the organization but the people behind it responsible for the injury.
Fortunately, in the cases where monetary compensation is insufficient and/or the organization lacks the resources to pay compensation on behalf of its owners, it is generally possible to "pierce the corporate veil" and go after the owners directly. Ergo, this is rarely an issue as such. The bigger problem here is that there is a monopoly on justice in the form of the government-run court system, and these courts tend to favor those with the most to spend on legal representation. Justice should be blind to wealth, or lack thereof, but clearly that is not the case.
Moving on, the other aspect of limited liability is limitations on liability for debt to creditors. This is simply a matter of private contract wherein creditors agree to limit their claims to the assets of the organization, rather than the personal assets of the owners. This form of limited liability is perfectly compatible with an interference-free market.
So additional income from money you invest is not income?
What the GP left out is that this increase has already been taxed at the corporate tax rate. Capital gains tax is levied on top of the taxes already paid on the corporation's profits.
Not only that, but investors are taxed (individually and corporately) on the nominal increase in monetary value, even when there is no actual increase in purchasing power. That makes inflation a double-tax (devaluing currency and artificially driving up nominal values), in addition to the double-taxation of corporate profits and capital gains.
What makes your online sync not a "real" backup isn't that it's online, but that it's always up-to-date.
That isn't entirely correct. New and/or changed files (based on mtime and size) get copied over, and files I've deleted from the main copy are removed from the mirror. None of the files tend to change often, and I get a chance to preview the differences before any changes are made to the mirror. If a file were to become corrupted on the main copy it wouldn't automatically replace the version on the mirror. Due to the way rsync works, if an error occurs while copying a file to the mirror the original file will be preserved—it's only replaced after the transfer is completed.
True, no attempt is made to preserve old versions (unless I do so manually), but in general there are no old versions to save. This is the normal case for storage of media files, as we are addressing in this Ask Slashdot article. If changes were an issue, I could use the built-in features of rsync to preserve multiple versions, with hard-links for deduplication.
Anyway, this all comes down to whether you have more confidence in your RAID array or your backups. Apparently you have no confidence in your backups, so you prefer to trust in RAID. I trust my backups, so I don't see RAID reducing the risk of data-loss sufficiently to offset the extra cost and complexity.
Anyone designing something expensive, as in your examples, will need the resources to construct prototypes (probably many prototypes) for testing, if the design is to advance beyond the theoretical stage. If you can afford to have prototypes built you can probably afford a model already in production as well. Anyway, it's not like you have to keep the model after you're done studying it—buy it used, and sell it afterward in essentially the same condition.
Not to mention, of course, that people tend not to design improvements for things they've only read about in patent applications. They mostly enhance what they already have access to.
Patents are unjust to the core, and always have been. Inherent to the concept of the patent is the application of physical coercion via the law to punish someone for using what knowledge they have, whether independently discovered, taught, or leaved through reverse-engineering. So far as I am concerned, the use of physical coercion for any cause short of a response to deliberate harm is clearly wrong, however noble the intent.
Slashdot Mirror
What is truth, what is a fact?... Science and religion share the need to define this, and they simply have different methods of determinging what the meaning of "truth" is. However, since science always changes the values of true, and since science admits we can not know everything, how can science say that god does not exist?
Science is not concerned with "truth". Science is concerned with observation, hypotheses, and falsifiable predictions. You observe the universe, develop a model which fits your observations, and use the model to synthesize falsifiable predictions ("if the model is true then we should observe result A with probability P"). You then make further observations which either contradict the model (i.e. render it unlikely, in which case you invent a better model) or remain consistent with it. In that latter case it doesn't mean that the model is "true", just that it makes useful predictions within a certain domain. If the tested predictions form a representative sample distinct from the observations the model was based on, this means that future predictions are more likely to be correct.
Science gives us informed expectations regarding cause and effect within our universe. It is supremely unconcerned with underlying truth, if such a thing even exists. If you're interested in "truth", look to philosophy, not science.
Science doesn't say that god(s) don't exist. It says that there is no scientific reason to believe that god(s) do exist. That is, insofar as our observations are concerned, it makes no difference whatsoever whether god(s) exist or not; the existence or non-existence of god(s) has no observable effect on our universe.
This is hardly surprising, since religions inevitably define their god(s) as being beyond human power and understanding, meaning that no matter what we observe there is always a simpler explanation (i.e. one with fewer variable/assumptions) than the existence of god(s).
As Pascal's wager says, acting as if god exists costs you nothing.
Actually, it can cost quite a bit. The loss in personal integrity alone is substantial, and not necessarily outweighed by an arbitrarily small possibility of "infinite" reward as posited by Pascal. It also gains you nothing, since it's the belief that counts—pretending to be a Christian won't do you any good. Finally, that argument breaks down entirely in the presence of competing religions, since even if "acting as if god exists" were enough, you would have to choose one religion and reject the rest, and if you pick the wrong one you may end up even worse off than a simple non-believer.
The company will not hire employees it doesn't need, no matter what the tax rates are. So, if you lower taxes, that money is going to go straight to their bottom line -- they are NOT going to increase their expenses if they don't have to, and if they have to do it, then they'll do it regardless of tax breaks.
There is one case where a company will increase its expenses voluntarily—when doing so will enable it to increase its revenues even more.
Lowering corporate taxes helps in two ways. First, shifts marginal suppliers from unprofitable to profitable, which increases both the supply of goods and the demand for labor to produce them. Second, the increase in profitability of the incumbent suppliers gives them the capital reserves necessary to expand their operations, which also increases their demand for labor. (Naturally one can expand by borrowing as well, but it's more profitable to invest one's own revenues, and that can make all the difference when it comes to marginal investments.)
A purchase is an investment if and only if you rationally expect it to be worth more in the future than its opportunity cost. Spending money on "what if" scenarios without any cost/benefit analysis does not qualify as investment, even if it happens to turn out for the best in the end. It also depends on your point-of-view; parents spending money on antibiotics for their children, without any expectation of return, is mostly consumption, while a government doing the same because the future tax revenues will more than pay back the cost of the medicine is an investment (disregarding the coercion).
Borrowing for consumption isn't necessarily a bad choice from time to time. Sometime the ability to have something now rather than later really is worth the increased cost. It just isn't a good habit to get into.
In addition there is no evidence that such tax reductions have in fact increased revenues. All revenue increases post such tax reductions are explainable by secular economic growth.
Congratulations, you seem to have completely missed the point. The tax reductions cause the "secular economic growth", which in turn cause the increase in "revenues" (if the money taken in by a protection racket can really be called "revenue"; it's not all that closely related to the same term in a commercial context).
While there is obvious a point of diminishing returns (e.g. 0% means no "revenues", regardless of the amount of growth), it has nothing to do with whether the marginal rates are greater than or less than 50%. What matters is whether the increase in economic activity is sufficient to offset the decrease in the rate, which depends on many factors, most of which are very difficult to estimate in advance. In particular, some of the difference may be purely psychological, and some depends on just how badly the government was mismanaging its stolen resources compared to leaving them with their rightful owners.
You're both overreacting. The complaint was about comments which describe what the code is doing, which should be perfectly obvious to anyone qualified to be working with it. We agree that "class-level and function-level docs are perfectly OK", and natural language documentation for mathematical expressions comes closer to documentation for software functions than for individual statements. You don't write out an expression and then annotate it with "add variable 'x' to constant 'C' and multiply by factor 'y'"; in code, as in math, the comments should explain why you're doing this, what the result means, and/or what side-effects it causes. If you have to put this inside your functions rather than in a header at the beginning it's probably a sign that your functions are too large, and should be broken into more manageable pieces. Well-chosen variable names and function identifiers can also be considered a form of natural-language annotation, where mathematical expressions tend to use opaque single-letter names requiring separate explanation.
The more comments the better...
On the contrary, comments have a cost in readability (more distractions, harder to keep all the useful information on one screen), maintenance (keeping comments synchronized with the code), and accuracy (when you inevitably fail to do so), in addition to the simple cost of writing them. The value of a given comment needs to be high enough to justify the cost. Code filled with low-quality comments, particularly ones which say nothing more than what the code is doing, is worse than code with no comments. However, as you say, a few informative or insightful comments in strategic places can prove invaluable to anyone trying to understand the code—even the original author. :-)
Why should people with no kids pay school taxes? Why should people with no children in college fund public universities? Why should people who live outside the city pay tax on their cars to subsidize a subway system 90 miles away? Why should I fund state or national parks if I don't use them?
All very good questions to which there are no good answers. People shouldn't be forced to pay for things they don't use, including all these examples and more.
People in my area (100 miles from NYC) have an extremely heavy burden in the form of draconian land-use restrictions in order not to harm the water supply to the city. Is that fair?
No, it's not fair. It's your land, and it's not like anyone from NYC has a legitimate claim on the source of the water or the water table itself. If supplying water to the city is a problem they are welcome to collect it closer to the source and have it shipped in.
You do realize that the people who 'choose' to live in the country are the ones providing YOU with your most basic needs, like food and energy, right?
To the extent that they do, they are payed for the service. That's all the "subsidy" they need or deserve. To forcibly increase their compensation leads to overproduction, misallocation of resources, and a net loss for society as a whole.
It is reasonable to argue that the tracker is complicit in copyright infringement, so the point is somewhat moot.
Not really, as most trackers only have a hash of the torrent data, a list of peers, and some high-level statistics—they don't necessarily know anything about the content of the torrents they coordinate. An open tracker that can be used for any torrent is no more "complicit" than the various networks the data packets travel through on their way from one peer to another.
So you want a society where noone respects the law?
So long as the law includes copyright, and things like it, yes. Any law which endorses social engineering and aggression doesn't deserve respect.
I want a society where people respect each other, and each others' natural rights—which start with the right to be left alone unless you choose otherwise, and the right to interact with others on a mutually voluntary basis free of any outside interference. The written law has no legitimacy unless it parallels those natural rights. Copyright subverts natural rights on a massive scale in an attempt to engineer a society with artificially heightened production of "creative" works.
What the GP describes is "lawlessness", not Libertarianism or Anarchy. From your own link: "When used in this sense, anarchy may or may not imply political disorder or lawlessness within a society." There are many varieties of Anarchism, including some of the more consistent variations on Libertarianism. Some are indeed lawless, but the factor which sets all forms of Anarchy apart is the absence of rulers, not the absence of rules.
What sets Libertarianism apart, of course, is the Non-Aggression Principle. This means that, unlike Anarchy, which may include lawlessness, Libertarianism implies the rule of law. (What confuses people is that Libertarianism distinguishes between the rule of law and the mechanism by which laws are commonly enforced, namely government.)
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous?
Can they attach such a device to you, or your clothing? Why should your car be any different?
Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act...
What you mean, of course, is that in the interest of "efficient" law enforcement they get as close to the line as they can possibly get, and frequently cross over it only to be forgiven by courts which are ultimately part of the same organization and biased toward their side.
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient?
There's only one constitutional standard: Probable Cause. "Reasonable" is something you establish by getting a warrant. If you haven't been issued a warrant then you haven't established that the search is reasonable. More to the point, authorization to perform a search or seizure is a warrant, and a declaration that an entire class of searches or seizures is authorized as "reasonable" without reference to specific persons or property and probably cause is strictly in violation of the second half of the 4th Amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There are plenty of weapons of that type that are much shorter, but how modern the P-90 is apparently scares the regulators.
Regulators who shouldn't even exist, as the 2nd Amendment uses clear and uncompromising language which allows no room for regulatory interpretation. Are these weapons "arms"? Would one who sells them be an "arms dealer"? Then the right of the people to keep and bear them shall not be infringed. Period.
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
"Reasonable" is very much open to interpretation, so it's a good thing that thinking something is "reasonable" isn't sufficient justification by itself. The only sensible way to interpret that clause is to recognize first and foremost that a warrant is the sole mechanism by which searches and seizures can be authorized. If you think a particular search or seizure is "reasonable", you establish that legally by getting a warrant. Declaring an entire class of searches or seizures "reasonable" is no different from issuing an extremely broad warrantâ"but that is prohibited by the second half of the amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
As you say, they've modified your tire by doing that—your property. No one but the owner has the right to authorize modification of their property. it's no different, qualitatively, than if they'd come up to your car and spray-painted a big X on it to mark it, or gouged the paint. In any event, attaching a GPS tracker is much more invasive than your example of a mere chalk-mark. At least the chalk-mark is in plain sight, and won't be mistaken for a bomb.
The only sensible way to interpret that clause is to recognize first and foremost that a warrant is the sole mechanism by which searches and seizures can be authorized. If you think a particular search or seizure is "reasonable", you establish that legally by getting a warrant. Declaring an entire class of searches or seizures "reasonable" is no different from issuing an extremely broad warrant—but that is prohibited by the second half of the amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The TSA clearly lacks legal warrants for the searches they perform, ergo their searches are unconstitutional, however "reasonable" they may appear to some.
Fine. You give me the widget you're selling and I owe you a debt of whatever you were selling it for. I pay you in cash, which "is legal tender for all debts, public and private".
No, you give me the payment first. Only then do I give you the widget. You're the one extending credit, so instead of the widget we agreed on I can repay the debt with legal tender, if I don't mind committing fraud and theft under the protection of an unjust law.
In reality, the transaction in a normal sale is a simple, simultaneous trade of goods for payment, with no debt involved, and thus legal tender is irrelevant. However, even if you split up the transaction to artificially create a "debt" that's immediately repaid, the merchant need not be the creditor. It would depend on which comes first, the goods or the payment.
Last time I checked US currency states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private".
That only applies if there is actually a debt involved. If you demand payment before handing over the goods then there is no debt—and the state could probably force you to do that as a condition of a legal sale. I wouldn't be surprised if they could require you to collect the data they want on the debtor whenever the legal-tender law is invoked, either, so long as the debt is still considered paid. Don't give them the data they want, you don't get to keep the cash. Either way the debt is canceled, so the legal-tender status is irrelevant.
"Satoshi" ... owns not just half of the bitcoins there currently are, but half of all the bitcoins that can ever be created....
Please stop spreading lies. The limit on the maximum number of bitcoins is 21,000,000. There are currently 150,028 blocks in the chain, each of which awarded 50 new bitcoins to the miner which found it, meaning that there are at most 7,501,400 bitcoins in circulation, less however many have been lost permanently through data corruption, system crashes, deletion, etc.
Satoshi obviously can't hold "half of all the bitcoins that will ever be created" when only ~36% of them have even been mined. As for the fraction of that ~36% which he holds, that's just guesswork--no one can possibly know for sure. As one of the earliest adopters and developers, he's probably lost more bitcoins than most users have seen in one place. Whatever his share is, it will decrease over time due to new mining, or even more so if he chooses to spend those reserves.
So much for providing for common defense and promoting general welfare.
Right! That is spelled out in the Constitution.
"Common defense" is an enumerated power (or rather, there are separate enumerated powers which can be collectively considered "common defense"), but "general welfare" is not. The establishment of "post roads" does fall under Congress' purview, but highways and interstates are much more than mere "post roads".
You may be able to classify them as a military project, since they were originally designed to enable efficient movement of troops and military equipment, but in that case they should be funded entirely out of the defense budget.
You can record one 115 bit value, which is very different from 115 bits.
No, storing one arbitrary 115-bit value is exactly equal to storing 115 bits. The relationship is one-to-one:
8-bit value: 10110110 (181/255 ~= 0.713 units)
8 bits: 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0
You speak as one libertarian, not for the group.
And you speak as one former libertarian, and not for the group. So? You even agreed that "most of them ... claimed that their beliefs are founded on ethical principles", just as I said.
In practice, however, vast majority of libertarians were claiming that libertarian economy is also the most pragmatic of them all, citing "market efficiency" and whatnot.
I would say that most libertarians do believe this to be true. I certainly do. However, it is not the only or primary reason for libertarians to support a free market and oppose government interference. For someone who identifies as libertarian—interested primarily in liberty—free-market capitalism could be the single least efficient economic system available, and yet still be supported against government interference and aggressive socialism as the only choice compatible with a free society.
The fact that free markets are reasonably efficient under real-world conditions is a bonus, and offered to pragmatists as an argument for at least supporting our policies, if not our ideals. There may be cases where aggression on the part of a government or other entity can result in even greater economic prosperity, at least from some individuals' point-of-view—aggregate preferences are meaningless when aggression is involved—but at what cost?
As for "high taxes on top income bracket correlate with economic growth", which I can only assume is what you meant by "regulated the market in the right and proper manner", it's no surprise that a highly discriminatory tax system leads to short-term economic growth; you're taking the money that would have gone into capital investment and redirecting it toward consumption, and economic growth is measured strictly in terms of short-term consumption. In the process, of course, you're letting your capital infrastructure rot, so over the long term you won't be able to sustain the standard of living you had before, much less improve on it.
Conflating capitalism with free market is a logical fallacy that is often used for ideological purposes, mainly by right-wingers and libertarians via the following chain of logic: historically, western countries have been ahead of others in terms of social development, and this tends to correlate pretty well with them adopting capitalism. By that argument, capitalism is good. If you then artificially conflate capitalism and free market, then obviously free market is good, and any government regulation is therefore bad...
The libertarians I know of don't follow that logic chain at all. As you can infer from the name, libertarianism is mainly about liberty. It has very little to do with the principle-free, pragmatic, outcome-based reasoning you present here.
A social/political philosophy based on maximizing individual liberty naturally implies that one is free to utilize one's person and property in any way which does not interfere with the equivalent rights of others. This in turn implies a free market, since voluntary trade is one such use, and a social framework well-suited for capitalism. Collective ownership is also possible, of course, but only by unanimous consent, so large-scale socialism is unlikely in a free market.
Government interference is bad not because the market is good in its own right, or even because the market is more efficient without the interference (although that is generally true), but because it is contrary to the ideal of liberty which is central to libertarianism.
TLDR: Libertarians tend not to think like pragmatists. To understand us, you have to allow for placing principles, like maximizing liberty, above pragmatic concerns.
I'm curious about which provision requires tax to be levied equally? Got any articles on that for me?
I suspect the GP was referring to the first paragraph of Section 8, specifically: "all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States". (A sales tax would be an Excise, a tax on the manufacture, sale, or consumption of a good.)
I wonder if the free marketeers on here think that limited liability, that outrageous interference in the market, should be done away with.
There is more than one aspect to limited liability. Limitations on liability for harm done to people who did not choose to involve themselves with your company is clearly a problem. If someone harms you, even by accident, you have a right to be "made whole", and in the case of a corporation you should be able to hold not just the organization but the people behind it responsible for the injury.
Fortunately, in the cases where monetary compensation is insufficient and/or the organization lacks the resources to pay compensation on behalf of its owners, it is generally possible to "pierce the corporate veil" and go after the owners directly. Ergo, this is rarely an issue as such. The bigger problem here is that there is a monopoly on justice in the form of the government-run court system, and these courts tend to favor those with the most to spend on legal representation. Justice should be blind to wealth, or lack thereof, but clearly that is not the case.
Moving on, the other aspect of limited liability is limitations on liability for debt to creditors. This is simply a matter of private contract wherein creditors agree to limit their claims to the assets of the organization, rather than the personal assets of the owners. This form of limited liability is perfectly compatible with an interference-free market.
So additional income from money you invest is not income?
What the GP left out is that this increase has already been taxed at the corporate tax rate. Capital gains tax is levied on top of the taxes already paid on the corporation's profits.
Not only that, but investors are taxed (individually and corporately) on the nominal increase in monetary value, even when there is no actual increase in purchasing power. That makes inflation a double-tax (devaluing currency and artificially driving up nominal values), in addition to the double-taxation of corporate profits and capital gains.
What makes your online sync not a "real" backup isn't that it's online, but that it's always up-to-date.
That isn't entirely correct. New and/or changed files (based on mtime and size) get copied over, and files I've deleted from the main copy are removed from the mirror. None of the files tend to change often, and I get a chance to preview the differences before any changes are made to the mirror. If a file were to become corrupted on the main copy it wouldn't automatically replace the version on the mirror. Due to the way rsync works, if an error occurs while copying a file to the mirror the original file will be preserved—it's only replaced after the transfer is completed.
True, no attempt is made to preserve old versions (unless I do so manually), but in general there are no old versions to save. This is the normal case for storage of media files, as we are addressing in this Ask Slashdot article. If changes were an issue, I could use the built-in features of rsync to preserve multiple versions, with hard-links for deduplication.
Anyway, this all comes down to whether you have more confidence in your RAID array or your backups. Apparently you have no confidence in your backups, so you prefer to trust in RAID. I trust my backups, so I don't see RAID reducing the risk of data-loss sufficiently to offset the extra cost and complexity.
Anyone designing something expensive, as in your examples, will need the resources to construct prototypes (probably many prototypes) for testing, if the design is to advance beyond the theoretical stage. If you can afford to have prototypes built you can probably afford a model already in production as well. Anyway, it's not like you have to keep the model after you're done studying it—buy it used, and sell it afterward in essentially the same condition.
Not to mention, of course, that people tend not to design improvements for things they've only read about in patent applications. They mostly enhance what they already have access to.
Patents are unjust to the core, and always have been. Inherent to the concept of the patent is the application of physical coercion via the law to punish someone for using what knowledge they have, whether independently discovered, taught, or leaved through reverse-engineering. So far as I am concerned, the use of physical coercion for any cause short of a response to deliberate harm is clearly wrong, however noble the intent.