If you can't count on your backups to be there when you need them, why have them at all? To me, that suggests a problem with the backup procedures more than a reason not to rely on having backups. But to each his own.
You're right about the difficulty of actually getting good, reliable backups. I've had too much experience with files that should have been good, on drives that had no history of errors, suddenly going bad on their own to just "store and forget". If you never actually read the data the drive has no opportunity to scrub correctable errors, so they tend to accumulate until they become uncorrectable; and when the files are measured in gigabytes, and the drives in terabytes, even "unlikely" errors start to become rather commonplace. The built-in SMART tests can help here, but there is generally no way to access the individual drives' SMART interfaces once they've been installed into an external enclosure. Personally, I have a script to verify the MD5 checksums of each file every 90 days on a rotating schedule, both to make sure nothing has changed and to give the drives a chance to detect and correct any minor (single-bit) errors, or potential errors, that may have cropped up. Hopefully some of the newer filesystems designed for large disks (like btrfs) will include online scrubbing so that this doesn't have to remain ad-hoc. Occasionally I do remove a drive from the array to check the SMART status with a SATA/USB docking bridge, which gives me a change to examine the old-age and pre-fail indicators.
Perhaps the insistence on "real" backups is part of the problem—if you save your data on tapes (for example), and stick those tapes on a shelf somewhere, they're likely to accumulate errors just sitting there and become completely useless by the time you need them. Online copies have issues as well, of course, but at least they're available for automated verification so that you can detect problems early enough to do some good.
Most of my data is replaceable, given enough time, so I deem one extra known-good copy sufficient, but more critical data is backed up in daily/weekly/monthly increments (and then mirrored) in case I need to recover an earlier version, or get back something I deleted. For truly essential data, I would still have more confidence in multiple independent mirrors than in RAID1/4/5/6 arrays of the same capacity.
I never said anything about "leaking" trade secrets. Even if everyone adheres to their NDAs, it is still likely that the invention will be rediscovered independently or reverse-engineered by someone with no privileged inside information.
Anyway, NDAs and non-compete clauses are standard even with patents. No one puts all the details in the patent application if they can avoid it.
When you get 2 hard drives together in a RAID 0, either one could die and cause total data loss, meaning you've doubled your chances of losing all the data on that RAID. There are consumer-grade RAIDs now offering 4 drives, which means that if you use a RAID 0 there, you've quadrupled your chances. This is a problem, because it's really not all that rare for a hard drive to fail.
First, a minor point about probability: Doubling/quadrupling the number of drives does not double/quadruple the probability of a failure. If it did, and a single-drive failure had a probability of, say, one in three, then four drives would fail 133% of the time. The actual formula, with single-drive failure probability p, overall probability P, and number of drives N, is:
P = 1 - (1 - p)^N
Which would give ~80% for this example. That said, the probability of any failure does go up for more drives, and with RAID0 (spanning or striping) any loss implies a complete restore from backups.
However, if the drives were independent rather than part of a RAID array, you would still be restoring the particular drive that failed from backup, so the additional hardship of a full restore isn't necessarily significant. The benefits of a unified filesystem well may be worth the additional restore time.
Since the point is to add space, I'll assume that RAID1 isn't a realistic option. For the cost of doubling your expenditures on new drives (plus an enclosure capable of more than just SPAN and RAID0/1), you can create a RAID array with 1/3 parity, which protects you from the failure of a single drive (out of three rather than two), but not problems with the controller or the host PC. Adding extra space later will also be more problematic compared to a simple SPAN setup, since the array must be rebuilt—a risky operation in itself—and there is no guarantee that the data layout will be usable with a different controller.
So, is it worth it? I consider myself fairly paranoid about data loss, but I decided that a simple SPAN arrangement, with an identical rsync mirror, was sufficient to protect against drive failure along with most other potential issues. Your requirements and conclusions may vary, of course.
RAID0 means you don't care if your data goes away. Period.
Agreed. And most home users really don't care if the data in the RAID0 goes away, provided they have reliable backups, which they need anyway, no matter what level of RAID they use.
An enterprise might well care about the array itself, since losing the contents of the RAID array means downtime they could have avoided, even if they can recover everything from the backups. That downtime probably equates to more than the cost of a good RAID controller (as there's no point in using the cheaper ones that can cause data loss if power is interrupted) and a spare drive or two. For a home user, not so much. An off-site backup (or two or three) with a fast local cache will more than suffice.
I invested in a NAS Drive which has Raid 0 AND I back it up once a month offsite
FYI, RAID 0 isn't very safe.
The "safe" RAID levels are good when you need to recover quickly from a single-drive failure, or when the drives are being updated with essential data faster than you can make backups. This is mainly an enterprise feature, not something you'd really benefit from at home. RAID won't help you when a software or (non-HDD) hardware fault causes filesystem corruption, for example, since that affects all the drives at the same time.
The GP is probably just using RAID 0 to combine the drives for increased space (with possible striping for speed), with the off-site backup covering the "safety" aspect.
Trade secrets would be preferable. At least then you could use whatever you can learn from reverse-engineering.
Very few trade secrets have ever been kept successfully for long. Some inventions might be locked up indefinitely, but most would probably be re-discovered or reverse-engineered long before a hypothetical patent would have expired.
The distinction is only significant when the transaction was voluntary to start with. In a normal transaction, the other party can't leave you worse off than you started should you choose not to pursue the discount; at worse they can choose not to sell to you at all. A fine, on the other hand, is either something you already agreed to as part of a contract, or repayment for some harm or another which you caused. It may be result of a previous voluntary agreement, but at the time the fine takes effect you have no choice but to pay it.
When it comes to taxes, however, there is no meaningful difference between a "discount" for behaving "correctly" and a "fine" for failing to do so. Either way, you have to do as they ask just to keep (some of) what is rightfully yours.
Are you saying that you are the sole judge of what general Welfare means? Or are you going to leave that up to the people who actually have that responsibility, which is the Supreme Court?
The meaning of the Constitution is not up to the Supreme Court. That would be ridiculous, since the Court's power is itself derived from the Constitution. At most the Court has the (self-appointed) power to restrict the other branches of government from taking actions which, in its view, are not authorized by that document. In other words, to declare (or decline to declare) any action of the government unconstitutional. It is not within their purview to declare anything constitutional, any more than a normal court can declare someone "innocent"—only "not (proven) guilty".
The powers granted by the Constitution are, in turn, derived from the People. If there is any legitimacy to the government or the Constitution at all, it exists only at the sufferance of the People. Only they can possibly have the authority to affirm the constitutionality of any judicial, executive, or legislative act.
It's not even that. Any unbiased reading of the passage would show that it is merely a power of taxation—just because Congress has the power to collect taxes does not mean they have the power to spend the money so collected on anything they choose. That is what the remaining clauses are for. "[C]ommon defence and general Welfare" is just a summary of the other enumerated powers—the reason the taxes are collected—not a power in its own right.
If this first clause were sufficient to take any action "for the common defense and general Welfare", as opposed to merely imposing "Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises", the remaining powers would never have been enumerated; what would be the point?
But capitalism is supposed to be about voluntary transactions, where the seller has just as much right to not sell as the buyer has to not buy.
True, but you're ignoring the other side of capitalism: that everyone has the right to act and to use their own property in any manner which does not harm others, i.e. which does not prevent them from continuing to use their own property as is has been used in the past, subject to the same condition. Copyright enforcement is decidedly in violation of this rule, and thus anti-capitalistic.
Copying information in your possession is something you already had the right to do. Copyright takes this right away involuntarily, and then forces you to give up something else to get it back. The second deal may be perceived as "voluntary" only if you ignore the first. What it actually amounts to is an agreement under duress.
Nor does it make him a useful investor: banking on the current "mood" means he's actually inflating the dangerous cycles of emotionally driven, short-term investment decisions rather than making any kind of long-term decisions.
Actually, it's just the opposite. To the extent that the "mood" is irrational, and does not reflect long-term value, the best way to profit is to invest against the mood, buying from those cashing out due to irrational fears and selling to those irrationally willing to pay a premium. This tends to dampen the cycles, not inflate them.
Simply copying irrational behaviors would tend to amplify the instability—but that wouldn't help them make a profit. The only way to profit, long-term, is to bring the prices closer to their proper levels, buying when they are irrationally low and selling when they're irrationally high.
Early mover advantage is a broken window for everyone else.
The Broken Window fallacy is about the idea that the economic activity required to replace destroyed property can be counted as a net benefit to society. It is a fallacy because that activity does not create new wealth; instead, it represents an expenditure of resources and effort merely to return to the state before the property was destroyed. If the "window" was not broken, that effort and those resources could have been spent on moving society ahead, rather than regaining what was lost.
In your example (right or wrong), no property has been deliberately destroyed in hopes of an overall benefit from the resulting economic activity, so the Broken Window fallacy clearly does not apply.
That's not very surprising, since copyright was originally seen as a violation of the first amendment. It was only allowed in combination with the exceptions known as Fair Use. (Which, IMHO, do not significantly change the equation. The only reasonable interpretation of "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" is that speech—i.e., communication, of whatever form or complexity—can never be a violation of the law by itself. Copyright obviously violates that by making some forms communication illegal without prior permission.)
When IPv6 finally becomes mainstream and goes in to widespread use it will only get worse, in my opinion. With IPv6 every man, woman, child, dog, and toaster can have its own IP address.
IPv6 includes privacy extensions, and native support for multiple public addresses per interface; you can create random throwaway addresses every few hours if you're that paranoid. The prefix (/64) will remain the same, of course, but that is no different from being allocated a single public IPv4 address and using NAT.
Exactly. The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors, as taxes are imposed whenever money changes hands regardless of whether the exchange is productive. Everyone else benefits most from saving their money until they can make a productive trade, not from compulsively spending it as quickly as possible.
BTC are basically worth a measure of computer cycles. If you invest the same amount of computer cycles you get the same amount of BTC. More actually thanks to revised algorithms.
This is false. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted by consensus such that there is, on average, one solution found every ten minutes—no matter how much total computation goes into finding that solution. Each solution is (currently) worth 50 BTC, plus any fees paid for the transactions included in the block. How much of that ~300 BTC/hr. you are likely to get over the long term is a function of the ratio between your mining capacity and that of the overall network. Early on there was much less competition, so the reward for a given amount of transaction-confirmation (mining) was much higher than it is today.
This is not to say that early adopters have an unfair advantage; they simply took a chance on an unproven, experimental, emerging technology and have been reasonably compensated for helping to make it a success.
The critical difference is that, in your example, the patient is actually taking some of the substance they are allergic to, and increasing the amount over time as the immune system adapts to its presence—a response consistent with rational models we have constructed from empirical evidence. In homeopathy the level of dilution is such that it is statistically unlikely that there is any of the substance left, and the mechanism by which the resulting placebo is to effect a cure amounts to "by magic".
In fact, if this promotes more people to *save* money (and not spend it at all), it could even potentially slow economic growth.
That is exactly backwards. It's not entirely your fault—almost everyone gets this wrong, politicians in particular. However, growth does not result from consumption. It results from saving.
Growth refers to an increase in resource availability and use (i.e. consumption) over time. As such, it is positively correlated with increasing consumption. However, the limiting factor is availability, not how inclined people are to consume. Availability of resources for consumption is driven by investment, and investment is only possible once the necessary resources have been saved up. Ergo, to allow for increased consumption (and economic growth) in the future, one must save and invest in the present.
That would hurt. Lets say you type in http://example.com/ in your browser, but the DNS server responsible for example.com is down. Thus the recursive resolver will never get the reply it needs and will time out and send a server error message back to the browser.
You're right. I run my own recursive resolver, and was thinking more along the links of avoiding only the specific server that originated the error. Since most people depend on their ISP for that function they only have the ISP's server to blame, no matter where the error originates. Short of requiring DNS servers to sign their error messages, there is no way to prove that the ISP was or was not responsible the failure to resolve the domain.
On the bright side, at least with DNSSEC they can't outright lie to you and claim NXDOMAIN when the domain actually exists.
What the client will do when getting this error is to use the DNS search path provided by the DHCP server along with the DNS server IP.
The search path isn't used for fully-qualified domains (anything ending in ".", e.g. "example.com."), so the solution is simple: stop abusing relative domain references when the full domain is known. The browser can also help by always showing the full domain name returned by the resolver, and not just the portion entered by the user.
It wouldn't hurt to make "server failed" messages more painful, either—for example, whenever a server reports an internal failure of that sort, the resolver could refuse to use it for the next five minutes or so (or until DNS is reconfigured). That should make any ISP reluctant to generate fake failure messages, without causing too much additional trouble when a server really fails.
Exactly. The market will not help you curtail others' natural rights to suit your own "moral" code. That sort of thing requires organized, "legitimized" aggression, i.e. a government.
Libertarians, almost without variance, believe in property rights...
This part is certainly correct. The defining characteristic of a consistent libertarian is adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle, which is based around property rights derived from and inclusive of self-ownership. A libertarian who does not place property rights first, to the exclusion of all other laws, is in a state of contradiction.
... and common law.
This is more controversial. Common law offers a starting point, but it has also been subject to abuse: biased and/or illogical rulings, bad precedents, etc. It represents a law based on consensus and "keeping the peace" without any grounding in principles. A more libertarian model would be for every ruling to be decided on its own merits, starting from the Non-Aggression Principle, with past decisions providing a helpful guide but in no way binding on future rulings. A favorable ruling from a judge is meaningless if you haven't actually proven your case.
This sort of thing necessitates peace officers, national defense, and court systems (among other things).
This is where I and many other libertarians would strongly disagree, at least if you're referring to these as "public goods" which require involuntary funding. Private security and arbitration can serve just as well as government police and courts, and various strategies, including diplomacy, voluntary militias, guerrilla tactics, and locally-funded defense forces can serve in place of national standing armies to deter or outright repel foreign invaders.
I am a minarchist—I believe that there should be no more government than is absolutely necessary. I also happen to believe that the amount of government necessary to ensure a free, ordered, civilized society is "none". So far as I am concerned, that is the only position consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle, and libertarian ideals in general.
Any competent forensics examiner works on a copy of the data. The copy is often made using hardware that is read-locked on the source to prevent accidental alteration during the copying process. aka "forensics-grade ide/sata to usb adapter"
It wouldn't be particularly difficult to make it impossible to decrypt the data anywhere but the original PC, after verifying that there is no additional hardware involved. The (password-encrypted) key could be stored in a TPM chip which makes use of secure boot protocols. The secure boot software could additionally confirm that the drive accepts and processes write commands before releasing the key. If the drive is removed from the original PC, or connected via a read-only adapter, the data is inaccessible even with the password. It could even wipe the key from the TPM chip if an adapter is detected—and a good lawyer could probably argue that the loss was a result of their unauthorized modifications, not anything you did.
Reflective surfaces tend to be ineffective at the energies employed by a weaponized laser. Even if 99.99% of the energy is reflected, 0.01% is still plenty to raise the temperature of the surface, and even the most reflective surfaces tend to become dull as the temperature increases. Coating every potential target with the premium optics-grade mirrors necessary to deflect enough of the beam to avoid such heating would most likely be far more expensive than the laser you're defending against.
Personally, I would draw the line at treating governments any different from normal private co-ops. In other words, if an agency causes damage you sue them directly, and if they can't pay up out of their own resources (or insurance, etc.) then they go bankrupt. Those who want their services pay them directly, and anyone who doesn't has no obligation to do so. No externalized costs or special immunity.
Short of that, yes, I would advocate holding people directly and publicly responsible for who they empower at the voting booth. Secret votes cause more problems than they solve.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't count on your backups to be there when you need them, why have them at all? To me, that suggests a problem with the backup procedures more than a reason not to rely on having backups. But to each his own.
You're right about the difficulty of actually getting good, reliable backups. I've had too much experience with files that should have been good, on drives that had no history of errors, suddenly going bad on their own to just "store and forget". If you never actually read the data the drive has no opportunity to scrub correctable errors, so they tend to accumulate until they become uncorrectable; and when the files are measured in gigabytes, and the drives in terabytes, even "unlikely" errors start to become rather commonplace. The built-in SMART tests can help here, but there is generally no way to access the individual drives' SMART interfaces once they've been installed into an external enclosure. Personally, I have a script to verify the MD5 checksums of each file every 90 days on a rotating schedule, both to make sure nothing has changed and to give the drives a chance to detect and correct any minor (single-bit) errors, or potential errors, that may have cropped up. Hopefully some of the newer filesystems designed for large disks (like btrfs) will include online scrubbing so that this doesn't have to remain ad-hoc. Occasionally I do remove a drive from the array to check the SMART status with a SATA/USB docking bridge, which gives me a change to examine the old-age and pre-fail indicators.
Perhaps the insistence on "real" backups is part of the problem—if you save your data on tapes (for example), and stick those tapes on a shelf somewhere, they're likely to accumulate errors just sitting there and become completely useless by the time you need them. Online copies have issues as well, of course, but at least they're available for automated verification so that you can detect problems early enough to do some good.
Most of my data is replaceable, given enough time, so I deem one extra known-good copy sufficient, but more critical data is backed up in daily/weekly/monthly increments (and then mirrored) in case I need to recover an earlier version, or get back something I deleted. For truly essential data, I would still have more confidence in multiple independent mirrors than in RAID1/4/5/6 arrays of the same capacity.
I never said anything about "leaking" trade secrets. Even if everyone adheres to their NDAs, it is still likely that the invention will be rediscovered independently or reverse-engineered by someone with no privileged inside information.
Anyway, NDAs and non-compete clauses are standard even with patents. No one puts all the details in the patent application if they can avoid it.
When you get 2 hard drives together in a RAID 0, either one could die and cause total data loss, meaning you've doubled your chances of losing all the data on that RAID. There are consumer-grade RAIDs now offering 4 drives, which means that if you use a RAID 0 there, you've quadrupled your chances. This is a problem, because it's really not all that rare for a hard drive to fail.
First, a minor point about probability: Doubling/quadrupling the number of drives does not double/quadruple the probability of a failure. If it did, and a single-drive failure had a probability of, say, one in three, then four drives would fail 133% of the time. The actual formula, with single-drive failure probability p, overall probability P, and number of drives N, is:
P = 1 - (1 - p)^N
Which would give ~80% for this example. That said, the probability of any failure does go up for more drives, and with RAID0 (spanning or striping) any loss implies a complete restore from backups.
However, if the drives were independent rather than part of a RAID array, you would still be restoring the particular drive that failed from backup, so the additional hardship of a full restore isn't necessarily significant. The benefits of a unified filesystem well may be worth the additional restore time.
Since the point is to add space, I'll assume that RAID1 isn't a realistic option. For the cost of doubling your expenditures on new drives (plus an enclosure capable of more than just SPAN and RAID0/1), you can create a RAID array with 1/3 parity, which protects you from the failure of a single drive (out of three rather than two), but not problems with the controller or the host PC. Adding extra space later will also be more problematic compared to a simple SPAN setup, since the array must be rebuilt—a risky operation in itself—and there is no guarantee that the data layout will be usable with a different controller.
So, is it worth it? I consider myself fairly paranoid about data loss, but I decided that a simple SPAN arrangement, with an identical rsync mirror, was sufficient to protect against drive failure along with most other potential issues. Your requirements and conclusions may vary, of course.
RAID0 means you don't care if your data goes away. Period.
Agreed. And most home users really don't care if the data in the RAID0 goes away, provided they have reliable backups, which they need anyway, no matter what level of RAID they use.
An enterprise might well care about the array itself, since losing the contents of the RAID array means downtime they could have avoided, even if they can recover everything from the backups. That downtime probably equates to more than the cost of a good RAID controller (as there's no point in using the cheaper ones that can cause data loss if power is interrupted) and a spare drive or two. For a home user, not so much. An off-site backup (or two or three) with a fast local cache will more than suffice.
I invested in a NAS Drive which has Raid 0 AND I back it up once a month offsite
FYI, RAID 0 isn't very safe.
The "safe" RAID levels are good when you need to recover quickly from a single-drive failure, or when the drives are being updated with essential data faster than you can make backups. This is mainly an enterprise feature, not something you'd really benefit from at home. RAID won't help you when a software or (non-HDD) hardware fault causes filesystem corruption, for example, since that affects all the drives at the same time.
The GP is probably just using RAID 0 to combine the drives for increased space (with possible striping for speed), with the off-site backup covering the "safety" aspect.
Trade secrets would be preferable. At least then you could use whatever you can learn from reverse-engineering.
Very few trade secrets have ever been kept successfully for long. Some inventions might be locked up indefinitely, but most would probably be re-discovered or reverse-engineered long before a hypothetical patent would have expired.
The distinction is only significant when the transaction was voluntary to start with. In a normal transaction, the other party can't leave you worse off than you started should you choose not to pursue the discount; at worse they can choose not to sell to you at all. A fine, on the other hand, is either something you already agreed to as part of a contract, or repayment for some harm or another which you caused. It may be result of a previous voluntary agreement, but at the time the fine takes effect you have no choice but to pay it.
When it comes to taxes, however, there is no meaningful difference between a "discount" for behaving "correctly" and a "fine" for failing to do so. Either way, you have to do as they ask just to keep (some of) what is rightfully yours.
Are you saying that you are the sole judge of what general Welfare means? Or are you going to leave that up to the people who actually have that responsibility, which is the Supreme Court?
The meaning of the Constitution is not up to the Supreme Court. That would be ridiculous, since the Court's power is itself derived from the Constitution. At most the Court has the (self-appointed) power to restrict the other branches of government from taking actions which, in its view, are not authorized by that document. In other words, to declare (or decline to declare) any action of the government unconstitutional. It is not within their purview to declare anything constitutional, any more than a normal court can declare someone "innocent"—only "not (proven) guilty".
The powers granted by the Constitution are, in turn, derived from the People. If there is any legitimacy to the government or the Constitution at all, it exists only at the sufferance of the People. Only they can possibly have the authority to affirm the constitutionality of any judicial, executive, or legislative act.
That's not a police power, it's a spending power.
It's not even that. Any unbiased reading of the passage would show that it is merely a power of taxation—just because Congress has the power to collect taxes does not mean they have the power to spend the money so collected on anything they choose. That is what the remaining clauses are for. "[C]ommon defence and general Welfare" is just a summary of the other enumerated powers—the reason the taxes are collected—not a power in its own right.
If this first clause were sufficient to take any action "for the common defense and general Welfare", as opposed to merely imposing "Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises", the remaining powers would never have been enumerated; what would be the point?
But capitalism is supposed to be about voluntary transactions, where the seller has just as much right to not sell as the buyer has to not buy.
True, but you're ignoring the other side of capitalism: that everyone has the right to act and to use their own property in any manner which does not harm others, i.e. which does not prevent them from continuing to use their own property as is has been used in the past, subject to the same condition. Copyright enforcement is decidedly in violation of this rule, and thus anti-capitalistic.
Copying information in your possession is something you already had the right to do. Copyright takes this right away involuntarily, and then forces you to give up something else to get it back. The second deal may be perceived as "voluntary" only if you ignore the first. What it actually amounts to is an agreement under duress.
Nor does it make him a useful investor: banking on the current "mood" means he's actually inflating the dangerous cycles of emotionally driven, short-term investment decisions rather than making any kind of long-term decisions.
Actually, it's just the opposite. To the extent that the "mood" is irrational, and does not reflect long-term value, the best way to profit is to invest against the mood, buying from those cashing out due to irrational fears and selling to those irrationally willing to pay a premium. This tends to dampen the cycles, not inflate them.
Simply copying irrational behaviors would tend to amplify the instability—but that wouldn't help them make a profit. The only way to profit, long-term, is to bring the prices closer to their proper levels, buying when they are irrationally low and selling when they're irrationally high.
Early mover advantage is a broken window for everyone else.
The Broken Window fallacy is about the idea that the economic activity required to replace destroyed property can be counted as a net benefit to society. It is a fallacy because that activity does not create new wealth; instead, it represents an expenditure of resources and effort merely to return to the state before the property was destroyed. If the "window" was not broken, that effort and those resources could have been spent on moving society ahead, rather than regaining what was lost.
In your example (right or wrong), no property has been deliberately destroyed in hopes of an overall benefit from the resulting economic activity, so the Broken Window fallacy clearly does not apply.
That's not very surprising, since copyright was originally seen as a violation of the first amendment. It was only allowed in combination with the exceptions known as Fair Use. (Which, IMHO, do not significantly change the equation. The only reasonable interpretation of "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" is that speech—i.e., communication, of whatever form or complexity—can never be a violation of the law by itself. Copyright obviously violates that by making some forms communication illegal without prior permission.)
When IPv6 finally becomes mainstream and goes in to widespread use it will only get worse, in my opinion. With IPv6 every man, woman, child, dog, and toaster can have its own IP address.
IPv6 includes privacy extensions, and native support for multiple public addresses per interface; you can create random throwaway addresses every few hours if you're that paranoid. The prefix (/64) will remain the same, of course, but that is no different from being allocated a single public IPv4 address and using NAT.
Exactly. The only ones who directly benefit from a higher "velocity of money" are the tax-collectors, as taxes are imposed whenever money changes hands regardless of whether the exchange is productive. Everyone else benefits most from saving their money until they can make a productive trade, not from compulsively spending it as quickly as possible.
BTC are basically worth a measure of computer cycles. If you invest the same amount of computer cycles you get the same amount of BTC. More actually thanks to revised algorithms.
This is false. The difficulty of the problem is adjusted by consensus such that there is, on average, one solution found every ten minutes—no matter how much total computation goes into finding that solution. Each solution is (currently) worth 50 BTC, plus any fees paid for the transactions included in the block. How much of that ~300 BTC/hr. you are likely to get over the long term is a function of the ratio between your mining capacity and that of the overall network. Early on there was much less competition, so the reward for a given amount of transaction-confirmation (mining) was much higher than it is today.
This is not to say that early adopters have an unfair advantage; they simply took a chance on an unproven, experimental, emerging technology and have been reasonably compensated for helping to make it a success.
The critical difference is that, in your example, the patient is actually taking some of the substance they are allergic to, and increasing the amount over time as the immune system adapts to its presence—a response consistent with rational models we have constructed from empirical evidence. In homeopathy the level of dilution is such that it is statistically unlikely that there is any of the substance left, and the mechanism by which the resulting placebo is to effect a cure amounts to "by magic".
In fact, if this promotes more people to *save* money (and not spend it at all), it could even potentially slow economic growth.
That is exactly backwards. It's not entirely your fault—almost everyone gets this wrong, politicians in particular. However, growth does not result from consumption. It results from saving.
Growth refers to an increase in resource availability and use (i.e. consumption) over time. As such, it is positively correlated with increasing consumption. However, the limiting factor is availability, not how inclined people are to consume. Availability of resources for consumption is driven by investment, and investment is only possible once the necessary resources have been saved up. Ergo, to allow for increased consumption (and economic growth) in the future, one must save and invest in the present.
That would hurt. Lets say you type in http://example.com/ in your browser, but the DNS server responsible for example.com is down. Thus the recursive resolver will never get the reply it needs and will time out and send a server error message back to the browser.
You're right. I run my own recursive resolver, and was thinking more along the links of avoiding only the specific server that originated the error. Since most people depend on their ISP for that function they only have the ISP's server to blame, no matter where the error originates. Short of requiring DNS servers to sign their error messages, there is no way to prove that the ISP was or was not responsible the failure to resolve the domain.
On the bright side, at least with DNSSEC they can't outright lie to you and claim NXDOMAIN when the domain actually exists.
What the client will do when getting this error is to use the DNS search path provided by the DHCP server along with the DNS server IP.
The search path isn't used for fully-qualified domains (anything ending in ".", e.g. "example.com."), so the solution is simple: stop abusing relative domain references when the full domain is known. The browser can also help by always showing the full domain name returned by the resolver, and not just the portion entered by the user.
It wouldn't hurt to make "server failed" messages more painful, either—for example, whenever a server reports an internal failure of that sort, the resolver could refuse to use it for the next five minutes or so (or until DNS is reconfigured). That should make any ISP reluctant to generate fake failure messages, without causing too much additional trouble when a server really fails.
Exactly. The market will not help you curtail others' natural rights to suit your own "moral" code. That sort of thing requires organized, "legitimized" aggression, i.e. a government.
Libertarians, almost without variance, believe in property rights ...
This part is certainly correct. The defining characteristic of a consistent libertarian is adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle, which is based around property rights derived from and inclusive of self-ownership. A libertarian who does not place property rights first, to the exclusion of all other laws, is in a state of contradiction.
... and common law.
This is more controversial. Common law offers a starting point, but it has also been subject to abuse: biased and/or illogical rulings, bad precedents, etc. It represents a law based on consensus and "keeping the peace" without any grounding in principles. A more libertarian model would be for every ruling to be decided on its own merits, starting from the Non-Aggression Principle, with past decisions providing a helpful guide but in no way binding on future rulings. A favorable ruling from a judge is meaningless if you haven't actually proven your case.
This sort of thing necessitates peace officers, national defense, and court systems (among other things).
This is where I and many other libertarians would strongly disagree, at least if you're referring to these as "public goods" which require involuntary funding. Private security and arbitration can serve just as well as government police and courts, and various strategies, including diplomacy, voluntary militias, guerrilla tactics, and locally-funded defense forces can serve in place of national standing armies to deter or outright repel foreign invaders.
I am a minarchist—I believe that there should be no more government than is absolutely necessary. I also happen to believe that the amount of government necessary to ensure a free, ordered, civilized society is "none". So far as I am concerned, that is the only position consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle, and libertarian ideals in general.
Any competent forensics examiner works on a copy of the data. The copy is often made using hardware that is read-locked on the source to prevent accidental alteration during the copying process. aka "forensics-grade ide/sata to usb adapter"
It wouldn't be particularly difficult to make it impossible to decrypt the data anywhere but the original PC, after verifying that there is no additional hardware involved. The (password-encrypted) key could be stored in a TPM chip which makes use of secure boot protocols. The secure boot software could additionally confirm that the drive accepts and processes write commands before releasing the key. If the drive is removed from the original PC, or connected via a read-only adapter, the data is inaccessible even with the password. It could even wipe the key from the TPM chip if an adapter is detected—and a good lawyer could probably argue that the loss was a result of their unauthorized modifications, not anything you did.
Reflective surfaces tend to be ineffective at the energies employed by a weaponized laser. Even if 99.99% of the energy is reflected, 0.01% is still plenty to raise the temperature of the surface, and even the most reflective surfaces tend to become dull as the temperature increases. Coating every potential target with the premium optics-grade mirrors necessary to deflect enough of the beam to avoid such heating would most likely be far more expensive than the laser you're defending against.
Personally, I would draw the line at treating governments any different from normal private co-ops. In other words, if an agency causes damage you sue them directly, and if they can't pay up out of their own resources (or insurance, etc.) then they go bankrupt. Those who want their services pay them directly, and anyone who doesn't has no obligation to do so. No externalized costs or special immunity.
Short of that, yes, I would advocate holding people directly and publicly responsible for who they empower at the voting booth. Secret votes cause more problems than they solve.