Except that, unlike acids, enzymes are catalysts—they aren't used up in the reaction. Ergo, the enzymes can ideally continue turning plants into sugar so long as the enzymes and plants remain in contact. The only real limits (apart from source materials) are contamination, dispersion, and chemical breakdown.
Moreover, these enzymes aren't being used by themselves; they're produced inside fungi and bacteria. If these hosts should happen to escape, there is at least the possibility that they could multiply in the wild, producing and using the enhanced enzymes for the benefit of their own population at the expense of existing plant life. It's unlikely, though, as genetically-engineered organisms modified to be more useful to humans tend to be less fit than their "natural" relatives at survival outside the lab.
If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.
It may simply be a poor chose of phrase, but taken at face value this would mean that no innocent person is ever a suspect in a crime, ergo all suspects are guilty. The whole point of having a distinction between suspect and convict is that people who are actually innocent of a crime do sometimes end up as suspects, at least until their names are cleared. (For that matter, some people who are actually innocent find themselves becoming convicts, not just suspects.)
Somalia is a bad example for your position. There is more government meddling in Somalia than in the average first-world state. To begin with you have the native Somalian government, distributed among the various tribal elders, which effectively form a number of tiny territories each ruled by its own mostly-hereditary dictator. On top of that you have the attempts of various "civilized" nations to set up some sort of centralized government they can relate to, against the wishes of those they would rule over, with varying degrees of failure. Each attempt further destabilizes the region. Finally you have the outright criminals and/or warlords in the region who attempt to rule over various areas in exactly the same manner as a government would, but without the false cover of "legitimacy" which the tribal elders and well-meaning outside nations can claim.
Somalia is a mess—on that much we can agree. However, they aren't exactly suffering from a lack of government; too many governments would be closer to the truth. A single, strong central government might be able to bring some stability to the region by putting an end to the existing chaotic interference of multiple types and levels of government, internal and external, but it would be even better to put an end to that interference, and all other forms of aggression, without allowing a new government to take its place.
I think you're being overly generous in assigning a full half-share to the father. Compared to the mother's contribution to the process, the father's part is negligible. Some minor compensation may be in order, but certainly nothing more. Moreover, regardless of the division of ownership, no one has any right to demand that someone else use their body in a certain way; that includes continuing a pregnancy. At most you can seek compensation for a broken contract, assuming you can show that one existed in the first place.
I admit that the correlation is suspicious (224 * 1024**3 ~= 240 * 1000**3). The difference between 240GB and 224GB could be a result of abusing SI's decimal prefix definitions with non-SI base units like "byte", if one assumes the article was in error regarding 224GB being available after formatting. The actual NAND flash appears to be measured in standard binary units (256GB total, or 16GB per device), which would be consistent with my own experience with raw NAND. Assuming two of the 16 NAND devices are set aside, there would be 224GB or about 240e+9 bytes left for the operating system to use, which the unscrupulous could attempt to pass off as 240GB of "formatted" space.
One the other hand, the difference could actually be due to partition and filesystem overhead. Seven percent of the reported drive size would not be unreasonable for many filesystems.
Either way, the 240GB and 224GB figures do not include the 16GB or 32GB of reserved space, respectively, which is internal to the SSD.
Putting aside the MB/GB mixup, the larger 240GB figure does not include redundancy internal to the SSD. The drive reports 240GB of usable space; 224GB is what you have left over after subtracting partitioning and filesystem overhead (presumably based on FAT or NTFS). Redundancy, ECC, wear-leveling, etc. come out of the remaining 16GB (256GB - 240GB) not reported to the OS.
The only way anybody has any expectation of what an 'Apple iPhone' is is because it is a BRAND (ie trademarked).
Because it is a brand, yes. Not because of trademarks. It's easy to see how you came to confuse the two, as brand names are generally trademarked, but the two are not the same. One can establish brand identity—association in the public's mind between a particular word or phrase and a specific manufacturer or product—without the artificial exclusivity of a trademark. Take personal names, for example; I doubt you've gone to the trouble of trademarking your name, and yet it still identifies you, not just "a person". If someone just happens to have the same name as you they are free to use it, but if they take advantage of the similarities in your names to misrepresent themselves as you for the purpose of inducing someone else to enter into a contract, perhaps to take out a loan in your name, then they are committing fraud.
In the same way, if a business chooses to go by the name "Apple", and over time the term "Apple" becomes known in their field as a reference to their business, and someone else comes along and uses the term to deceptively misrepresent themselves as the original business, then they would be committing fraud.
Take the word 'aspirin'. What does it mean?
This is actually a good example. As you pointed out, the term "aspirin" is no longer trademarked. Anyone can use it. However, it still has a specific meaning: the chemical which was the active ingredient in the original Bayer medicine of the same name. It would be fraud to attempt to sell a medicine as "aspirin" which was not based on that ingredient. If you knew that describing your product simply as "aspirin" would lead potential buyers to expect an aspirin-based medicine produced by Bayer, and yet described your own product that way with deliberate intent to mislead, you would be committing fraud. On the other hand, if potential buyers of "aspirin" only expect an aspirin-based medicine, such as the product you provide, and not necessarily the one produced by Bayer, then no fraud has occurred.
Through frequent association with a particular attribute ("common use") it becomes obvious what buyers expect when they hear a certain word or phrase used to describe a product, and it is fraudulent to knowingly use that word or phrase to deceive your customers regarding the nature of your product. It need not be specific to a particular manufacturer, and terms which once referred to a specific brand can mutate over time to refer to an entire category of products—or vice-versa. That is simply the nature of language. What matters is the association the term holds for your potential customers, and whether you are using it to accurately describe your product from their point-of-view or using your knowledge of that association in an attempt to deceive them.
How would it be fraud?... Without trademark protection the words "Apple iPhone" mean absolutely nothing.
Are you seriously suggesting that words and phrases (and thus language in general) cannot have any meaning apart from trademarks? The term "water" is not a trademark, but selling someone "water" (or even "Water(TM)") which is actually ammonia is still fraud. Trademarks grant one exclusive control over the commercial definition of a term, but they don't actually define it; for the question of fraud, the definitions that matter are those which exist within the minds of the parties to the contract. If these definitions are not substantially similar then the contract is void, as there was no real agreement on the terms—and if one party deliberately contributed to that state in order to gain another party's agreement to the contract then they have committed fraud.
In more concrete terms, if you know that potential customers will associate the phrase "Apple iPhone" with a certain device, and you tell them that they will be receiving an "Apple iPhone" in exchange for their money, but supply some other device instead, then you are committing fraud: what you actually meant and what you intended for them to understand are clearly not the same, ergo there is no meeting of the minds, ergo the contract is void. As the misunderstanding was a deliberate result of your actions, you additionally owe your customer(s) restitution for any harm which may have resulted from your deception.
Even without trademarks there would still be the question of deliberate deception to sell a product, i.e. fraud. If the name "Apple iPhone" denotes a specific brand of phone, and you try to sell something else under that name hoping to deceive potential buyers (and succeed), then the sales contract is void due to lack of "meeting of the minds" and you owe them their money back, plus further compensation for the trouble you caused them.
The difference is that fraud is a matter between buyers and sellers, while trademark infringement is considered a matter between the user of the trademark and the trademark's "owner". However, trademark infringement is not necessarily fraud, and even in the cases where it is, the harm result not to the "owner" of the trademark but rather to the defrauded buyer(s). Ergo, trademarks have the potential to create harm where none would otherwise exist, and in the event of actual harm award damages to the wrong party.
I agree 100% that "app" is just as specific to OS X / iOS as "executable" and "program" are to Windows and Linux, respectively. That is to say, not specific at all—these three terms are perfectly interchangeable and in no way specific to any one operating system. "App" is nothing more or less than shorthand for "application", and "application" is a common term describing any end-user, non-system executable software program, not just those designed for OS X / iOS.
Yes, that is perfectly fair. I thought of that after I hit 'submit', but hoped no one else would notice.;-)
OS/2 was written in 1987, and support was discontinued by IBM in 2006. By way of Wikipedia:
According to the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 Section 2.3 (p. 6): "Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack."
So it seems most hard drives used with OS/2 probably would have required multiple overwrites for secure deletion. However, modern hard drives can be erased byond practical recovery with just a single pass. (This assumes you overwrite the entire drive, including any bad/spare sectors—but you would have the same issue with multiple passes.)
Unless your drive is 15 or 20 years old, there is no point in repeated overwrites. One pass with zeros places the data beyond practical recovery. If you need greater assurance than that, physically destroy the drive. It's the only way to be sure.
But are you telling me that you see no difference between someone's right to state their beliefs and someone downloading Iron Man 2?
Assuming that by "beliefs" you meant "political beliefs", there are all kinds of differences between the two, but none where it counts: neither act harms anyone, and thus neither act should be punished. Of course, Free Speech is not limited to political expression; it need not even be about one's true beliefs, although even that would be enough to cover communication of sufficiently-detailed facts to reconstruct the audiovisual elements of a movie. No act of communication alone, regardless of content, is deserving of punishment.
As regards your argument about copyright infringement doing no harm, I note that you slipped in a caveat about people downloading as compared to not buying. What about where people download something instead of buying?
That wasn't a caveat. If someone chooses to buy a copy of a work, the seller benefits. If someone chooses not to buy a copy the prospective seller is no better or worse off than they were before; they obviously receive no benefit, but neither to they suffer any harm. This is true regardless of whether the potential buyer chose to do without or simply obtained a copy by other means. It is also true regardless of whether the availability copies from other sources influenced the decision not to buy. Harm is measured by comparison to your state before the action, not the result which appears ideal from your point of view; otherwise competition and choosing to do without would have to be considered "harmful" as well.
A good rule-of-thumb for "harm" is this: If you cannot tell that an action has occurred by considering only the state of your own property, the action cannot be considered harmful to you. Harm only occurs when someone affects the state of your property without your permission, interfering with your right to continue to use your property as you have in the past. Copyright infringement clearly fails this test; you cannot even know that it has occurred without examining the property of those accused of infringement.
Free Speech was about people being able to safely speak their beliefs, not about distributing Dragon Age II or Iron Man for free.
Free Speech is about speech (i.e. communication) in itself not being a crime, regardless of the content. It is a specific instance of the more general principle that the only actions deserving of punishment are those which cause harm to others. Copyright infringement is nothing but a specific case of communication, and does not harm anyone—a copyright holder is no worse off if people 'pirate' his or her work than he or she would be if they simply did without it, and may even benefit as a side-effect of the public exposure. To punish someone for such an act is a clear case of aggression.
I wasn't asking what you would do, or even what you think others should do; the question was "how would most people respond?", and if you think that sort of pressure (a) would be punished without hard evidence or (b) wouldn't have at least some effect on the result of the vote, I'd really like to know what color the sky is in your world, because it clearly isn't the same as mine. Right now being unemployed is a Big Deal, and it's not hard to see why short-term political expression could easily take a distant second to providing for one's family.
Regarding absentee ballots, your example is one of the main reasons most places don't allow one to vote absentee without a reasonable excuse for not voting in person on election day—and even for those places where anyone can vote absentee, every employee of a certain business voting absentee would set off major red flags.
Many people just want to live their lives, not run someone else's...
Which fully supports the GP's position. Voting is a form of political action, i.e. a way to run other people's lives, or at least to decide how they will be run. If you do not want to run other people's lives then you have no realistic choice other than to abstain, and thus withhold your consent.
Showing up to vote because you're angry at the government is self-destructive. The best way to undermine a government is to render it irrelevant, so just ignore it as much as possible and learn to interact with others on a voluntary basis, rather than a political one.
The problem with non-anonymous voting isn't people being "embarrassed about [their] politics", but rather the prospect of intimidation. If anyone can see how you voted then your vote may be influenced by how others want you to vote, rather than by how you actually feel. For example, you may feel yourself to be immune to such pressure, but how do you think most people would react if their employer told them (off the record, without any actionable evidence) that those who don't vote for candidate A will receive lower scores at their next performance review, and probably lose their jobs? If there is no way to prove how you voted to others such threats are meaningless; there would be no way for the boss to know how anyone voted for sure.
Of course, there is a positive side to public voting: you would know exactly who to blame for that last tax hike, or the new regulation that put you out of work. Aggressors-by-proxy would be unable to hide within the anonymous "majority".
Generally the scheme is designed such that you don't need all of the pieces to recover a working private key. They use a variant of erasure code to divide the key into N pieces, where any M pieces (M < N) are sufficient to reconstruct the original data. (This is the same technique used for forward error correction on CDs and DVDs, in the Tahoe-LAFS distributed filesystem, and in many other protocols. A ratio of eight pieces required out of ten generated is typical, allowing recovery with up to two lost pieces.) So a single holdout, or even several (depending on M and N), would not be a problem, but if enough keys were lost the votes would indeed become unreadable.
Not only that, but when DST was first introduced the main driver of energy use was artificial lighting. In that context DST makes at least some sense, as more usable daylight means less need for artificial light (even though it would make even more sense to just get up earlier and leave the time alone). However, the main driver of electricity use today during the DST interval is not lighting, but air conditioning—and sending people home earlier in the day, when the temperature is higher, increases the demand for less efficient residential air conditioning.
Recent studies in the U.S. have confirmed that switching to DST not only fails to save energy, but actually increases the demand for electricity when compared to maintaining the same time year-round.
You ignore the fact that most "goldbugs" would say that anything but a full-reserve policy on demand (i.e. checking) accounts is an obvious case of fraud, since the bank has committed itself to allowing you to withdraw your money at any time, but does not actually have the reserves on hand to meet all their obligations. Time accounts (CDs and savings accounts) are a different matter, since the bank is not obligated to return the money on demand—it effectively belongs to the bank until the time is up.
Anyway, there is still a limit tied to the amount of actual currency in circulation. The reserve ratio cannot become arbitrarily low; at the very least there must be enough reserves to meet the projected day-to-day demand from customers and other banks. By contrast, there is no effective limit to degree by which a fiat currency can be diluted, even before fractional reserves are taken into account.
Of course the piece needs to cointain 100 grams of gold, but it doesn't make much difference for the value if that gold is diluted with 1 gram of lead or 100 grams of lead. The value hinges on the amount of gold, not the adherence to conventions.
Obviously if you know that a random 100-gram lump of metal is 10% gold and 90% lead, and the cost of separating them is insignificant, then you can simply price it about the same as a 10-gram lump of pure gold. However, it's not exactly practical to test the composition of every unit of currency every time it happens to be used in trade. What occurs in practice is that those accepting gold declare the minimum purity they are willing to accept, and those offering it certify (via assayers' marks or other means) that their gold meets or exceeds the required purity. A gold-based currency without a minimum purity standard would not be fungible, as every unit—the part you can actually handle and measure, not just the gold inside it—must be considered unique, and a non-fungible currency is something of a contradiction.
The only difference is that the properties of BitCoins which make them useful as an exchange medium are determined by convention, while the properties of gold which makes it useful as an exchange medium are given beforehand.
In other words, naturally-occuring gold just so happens to have the right properties to serve as a currency, while bitcoins were created artificially with those specific properties in mind. So? We know this already. It has no practical effect on the use of either as money. The properties are the same whether they came about by nature or by "convention".
No, all that has to happen is for authors to accept that they have a perfectly reasonable right to demand payment in exchange for the initial authorship and/or publication of their work—i.e., their actual labor—after which it is out of their hands and further distribution, free or otherwise, is none of their concern. There are plenty of ways to make money from intellectual work without resorting to legal distribution monopolies backed by completely unjustified threats of force.
It seems that we at least agree that bitcoins are not a fiat currency, which is the main point I was attempting to make. I also agree that the manner in which bitcoins acquired their initial value differs from gold and most other non-fiat currencies in that they were not valued on their own merits prior to becoming a currency; however, so long as they have value now it shouldn't make very much difference how that initial value came about.
100 grams of gold has value with or without... the minimum purity
Here I would have to disagree. I would not give nearly as much for 100 grams of "gold" which is actually mostly lead. I may not demand.9999 purity, but for any given price there is a minimum standard which must be met.
BitCoins, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on conventions for its usefulness as a medium of exchange, and has no value if the conventions are broken.
In some ways that is kind of like saying that gold has no value apart from the convention of accepting only gold, and not, say, an equal weight of lead. As you pointed out, some of the traditional properties of a gold currency are optional, like assayer's marks; they increase the value somewhat, but you can do without them. Other conventions, however—such as demanding that units of the currency possess the physical and chemical properties of gold—are more essential.
Some of the bitcoin conventions are essential to its value, like the minimum required proof-of-work. Others, like the 21-million-bitcoin limit, are more flexible; even it that limit went away it would still require effort to find new bitcoins, so they would remain scarce. (Personally I don't think the limit is really necessary, but I don't see it causing problems either.)
Not necessarily. For one, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that both parties agree that the transfer was a loan, and the recipient is simply refusing to return the book. Short of that, it really comes down to persuading a judge and/or jury that you are, in fact, more likely to be the legitimate owner of the book. This would be a civil case, where the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt". A reliable witness to the transaction would certainly help, but there are other factors which may persuade the court to rule one way or the other. For example, a history of failing to return books (or of "giving" them away and demanding them back later), or a more general comparison of character references.
In the case of e-books, of course, there need not be any question as to the terms of the transfer. It can simply be labeled as a loan or permanent transfer of ownership up front. Avoiding the ambiguity of court trials over "verbal agreements" is just one more reason to distinguish between revocable/time-limited loans and permanent gifts or sales, rather than treating a loan like a transfer of ownership which just happens to be reciprocated later.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that, unlike acids, enzymes are catalysts—they aren't used up in the reaction. Ergo, the enzymes can ideally continue turning plants into sugar so long as the enzymes and plants remain in contact. The only real limits (apart from source materials) are contamination, dispersion, and chemical breakdown.
Moreover, these enzymes aren't being used by themselves; they're produced inside fungi and bacteria. If these hosts should happen to escape, there is at least the possibility that they could multiply in the wild, producing and using the enhanced enzymes for the benefit of their own population at the expense of existing plant life. It's unlikely, though, as genetically-engineered organisms modified to be more useful to humans tend to be less fit than their "natural" relatives at survival outside the lab.
The problem is the last sentence:
If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.
It may simply be a poor chose of phrase, but taken at face value this would mean that no innocent person is ever a suspect in a crime, ergo all suspects are guilty. The whole point of having a distinction between suspect and convict is that people who are actually innocent of a crime do sometimes end up as suspects, at least until their names are cleared. (For that matter, some people who are actually innocent find themselves becoming convicts, not just suspects.)
Somalia is a bad example for your position. There is more government meddling in Somalia than in the average first-world state. To begin with you have the native Somalian government, distributed among the various tribal elders, which effectively form a number of tiny territories each ruled by its own mostly-hereditary dictator. On top of that you have the attempts of various "civilized" nations to set up some sort of centralized government they can relate to, against the wishes of those they would rule over, with varying degrees of failure. Each attempt further destabilizes the region. Finally you have the outright criminals and/or warlords in the region who attempt to rule over various areas in exactly the same manner as a government would, but without the false cover of "legitimacy" which the tribal elders and well-meaning outside nations can claim.
Somalia is a mess—on that much we can agree. However, they aren't exactly suffering from a lack of government; too many governments would be closer to the truth. A single, strong central government might be able to bring some stability to the region by putting an end to the existing chaotic interference of multiple types and levels of government, internal and external, but it would be even better to put an end to that interference, and all other forms of aggression, without allowing a new government to take its place.
I think you're being overly generous in assigning a full half-share to the father. Compared to the mother's contribution to the process, the father's part is negligible. Some minor compensation may be in order, but certainly nothing more. Moreover, regardless of the division of ownership, no one has any right to demand that someone else use their body in a certain way; that includes continuing a pregnancy. At most you can seek compensation for a broken contract, assuming you can show that one existed in the first place.
I'd love to have widely adopted secure end-to-end non-reputable email...
We already have non-reputable email; most of it is known as "spam". I believe you meant non-repudiable.
I admit that the correlation is suspicious (224 * 1024**3 ~= 240 * 1000**3). The difference between 240GB and 224GB could be a result of abusing SI's decimal prefix definitions with non-SI base units like "byte", if one assumes the article was in error regarding 224GB being available after formatting. The actual NAND flash appears to be measured in standard binary units (256GB total, or 16GB per device), which would be consistent with my own experience with raw NAND. Assuming two of the 16 NAND devices are set aside, there would be 224GB or about 240e+9 bytes left for the operating system to use, which the unscrupulous could attempt to pass off as 240GB of "formatted" space.
One the other hand, the difference could actually be due to partition and filesystem overhead. Seven percent of the reported drive size would not be unreasonable for many filesystems.
Either way, the 240GB and 224GB figures do not include the 16GB or 32GB of reserved space, respectively, which is internal to the SSD.
Putting aside the MB/GB mixup, the larger 240GB figure does not include redundancy internal to the SSD. The drive reports 240GB of usable space; 224GB is what you have left over after subtracting partitioning and filesystem overhead (presumably based on FAT or NTFS). Redundancy, ECC, wear-leveling, etc. come out of the remaining 16GB (256GB - 240GB) not reported to the OS.
The only way anybody has any expectation of what an 'Apple iPhone' is is because it is a BRAND (ie trademarked).
Because it is a brand, yes. Not because of trademarks. It's easy to see how you came to confuse the two, as brand names are generally trademarked, but the two are not the same. One can establish brand identity—association in the public's mind between a particular word or phrase and a specific manufacturer or product—without the artificial exclusivity of a trademark. Take personal names, for example; I doubt you've gone to the trouble of trademarking your name, and yet it still identifies you, not just "a person". If someone just happens to have the same name as you they are free to use it, but if they take advantage of the similarities in your names to misrepresent themselves as you for the purpose of inducing someone else to enter into a contract, perhaps to take out a loan in your name, then they are committing fraud.
In the same way, if a business chooses to go by the name "Apple", and over time the term "Apple" becomes known in their field as a reference to their business, and someone else comes along and uses the term to deceptively misrepresent themselves as the original business, then they would be committing fraud.
Take the word 'aspirin'. What does it mean?
This is actually a good example. As you pointed out, the term "aspirin" is no longer trademarked. Anyone can use it. However, it still has a specific meaning: the chemical which was the active ingredient in the original Bayer medicine of the same name. It would be fraud to attempt to sell a medicine as "aspirin" which was not based on that ingredient. If you knew that describing your product simply as "aspirin" would lead potential buyers to expect an aspirin-based medicine produced by Bayer, and yet described your own product that way with deliberate intent to mislead, you would be committing fraud. On the other hand, if potential buyers of "aspirin" only expect an aspirin-based medicine, such as the product you provide, and not necessarily the one produced by Bayer, then no fraud has occurred.
Through frequent association with a particular attribute ("common use") it becomes obvious what buyers expect when they hear a certain word or phrase used to describe a product, and it is fraudulent to knowingly use that word or phrase to deceive your customers regarding the nature of your product. It need not be specific to a particular manufacturer, and terms which once referred to a specific brand can mutate over time to refer to an entire category of products—or vice-versa. That is simply the nature of language. What matters is the association the term holds for your potential customers, and whether you are using it to accurately describe your product from their point-of-view or using your knowledge of that association in an attempt to deceive them.
How would it be fraud? ... Without trademark protection the words "Apple iPhone" mean absolutely nothing.
Are you seriously suggesting that words and phrases (and thus language in general) cannot have any meaning apart from trademarks? The term "water" is not a trademark, but selling someone "water" (or even "Water(TM)") which is actually ammonia is still fraud. Trademarks grant one exclusive control over the commercial definition of a term, but they don't actually define it; for the question of fraud, the definitions that matter are those which exist within the minds of the parties to the contract. If these definitions are not substantially similar then the contract is void, as there was no real agreement on the terms—and if one party deliberately contributed to that state in order to gain another party's agreement to the contract then they have committed fraud.
In more concrete terms, if you know that potential customers will associate the phrase "Apple iPhone" with a certain device, and you tell them that they will be receiving an "Apple iPhone" in exchange for their money, but supply some other device instead, then you are committing fraud: what you actually meant and what you intended for them to understand are clearly not the same, ergo there is no meeting of the minds, ergo the contract is void. As the misunderstanding was a deliberate result of your actions, you additionally owe your customer(s) restitution for any harm which may have resulted from your deception.
Even without trademarks there would still be the question of deliberate deception to sell a product, i.e. fraud. If the name "Apple iPhone" denotes a specific brand of phone, and you try to sell something else under that name hoping to deceive potential buyers (and succeed), then the sales contract is void due to lack of "meeting of the minds" and you owe them their money back, plus further compensation for the trouble you caused them.
The difference is that fraud is a matter between buyers and sellers, while trademark infringement is considered a matter between the user of the trademark and the trademark's "owner". However, trademark infringement is not necessarily fraud, and even in the cases where it is, the harm result not to the "owner" of the trademark but rather to the defrauded buyer(s). Ergo, trademarks have the potential to create harm where none would otherwise exist, and in the event of actual harm award damages to the wrong party.
I agree 100% that "app" is just as specific to OS X / iOS as "executable" and "program" are to Windows and Linux, respectively. That is to say, not specific at all—these three terms are perfectly interchangeable and in no way specific to any one operating system. "App" is nothing more or less than shorthand for "application", and "application" is a common term describing any end-user, non-system executable software program, not just those designed for OS X / iOS.
Yes, that is perfectly fair. I thought of that after I hit 'submit', but hoped no one else would notice. ;-)
OS/2 was written in 1987, and support was discontinued by IBM in 2006. By way of Wikipedia:
According to the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 Section 2.3 (p. 6): "Basically the change in track density and the related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from both keyboard and laboratory attack."
So it seems most hard drives used with OS/2 probably would have required multiple overwrites for secure deletion. However, modern hard drives can be erased byond practical recovery with just a single pass. (This assumes you overwrite the entire drive, including any bad/spare sectors—but you would have the same issue with multiple passes.)
Unless your drive is 15 or 20 years old, there is no point in repeated overwrites. One pass with zeros places the data beyond practical recovery. If you need greater assurance than that, physically destroy the drive. It's the only way to be sure.
But are you telling me that you see no difference between someone's right to state their beliefs and someone downloading Iron Man 2?
Assuming that by "beliefs" you meant "political beliefs", there are all kinds of differences between the two, but none where it counts: neither act harms anyone, and thus neither act should be punished. Of course, Free Speech is not limited to political expression; it need not even be about one's true beliefs, although even that would be enough to cover communication of sufficiently-detailed facts to reconstruct the audiovisual elements of a movie. No act of communication alone, regardless of content, is deserving of punishment.
As regards your argument about copyright infringement doing no harm, I note that you slipped in a caveat about people downloading as compared to not buying. What about where people download something instead of buying?
That wasn't a caveat. If someone chooses to buy a copy of a work, the seller benefits. If someone chooses not to buy a copy the prospective seller is no better or worse off than they were before; they obviously receive no benefit, but neither to they suffer any harm. This is true regardless of whether the potential buyer chose to do without or simply obtained a copy by other means. It is also true regardless of whether the availability copies from other sources influenced the decision not to buy. Harm is measured by comparison to your state before the action, not the result which appears ideal from your point of view; otherwise competition and choosing to do without would have to be considered "harmful" as well.
A good rule-of-thumb for "harm" is this: If you cannot tell that an action has occurred by considering only the state of your own property, the action cannot be considered harmful to you. Harm only occurs when someone affects the state of your property without your permission, interfering with your right to continue to use your property as you have in the past. Copyright infringement clearly fails this test; you cannot even know that it has occurred without examining the property of those accused of infringement.
Free Speech was about people being able to safely speak their beliefs, not about distributing Dragon Age II or Iron Man for free.
Free Speech is about speech (i.e. communication) in itself not being a crime, regardless of the content. It is a specific instance of the more general principle that the only actions deserving of punishment are those which cause harm to others. Copyright infringement is nothing but a specific case of communication, and does not harm anyone—a copyright holder is no worse off if people 'pirate' his or her work than he or she would be if they simply did without it, and may even benefit as a side-effect of the public exposure. To punish someone for such an act is a clear case of aggression.
I wasn't asking what you would do, or even what you think others should do; the question was "how would most people respond?", and if you think that sort of pressure (a) would be punished without hard evidence or (b) wouldn't have at least some effect on the result of the vote, I'd really like to know what color the sky is in your world, because it clearly isn't the same as mine. Right now being unemployed is a Big Deal, and it's not hard to see why short-term political expression could easily take a distant second to providing for one's family.
Regarding absentee ballots, your example is one of the main reasons most places don't allow one to vote absentee without a reasonable excuse for not voting in person on election day—and even for those places where anyone can vote absentee, every employee of a certain business voting absentee would set off major red flags.
Many people just want to live their lives, not run someone else's...
Which fully supports the GP's position. Voting is a form of political action, i.e. a way to run other people's lives, or at least to decide how they will be run. If you do not want to run other people's lives then you have no realistic choice other than to abstain, and thus withhold your consent.
Showing up to vote because you're angry at the government is self-destructive. The best way to undermine a government is to render it irrelevant, so just ignore it as much as possible and learn to interact with others on a voluntary basis, rather than a political one.
The problem with non-anonymous voting isn't people being "embarrassed about [their] politics", but rather the prospect of intimidation. If anyone can see how you voted then your vote may be influenced by how others want you to vote, rather than by how you actually feel. For example, you may feel yourself to be immune to such pressure, but how do you think most people would react if their employer told them (off the record, without any actionable evidence) that those who don't vote for candidate A will receive lower scores at their next performance review, and probably lose their jobs? If there is no way to prove how you voted to others such threats are meaningless; there would be no way for the boss to know how anyone voted for sure.
Of course, there is a positive side to public voting: you would know exactly who to blame for that last tax hike, or the new regulation that put you out of work. Aggressors-by-proxy would be unable to hide within the anonymous "majority".
Generally the scheme is designed such that you don't need all of the pieces to recover a working private key. They use a variant of erasure code to divide the key into N pieces, where any M pieces (M < N) are sufficient to reconstruct the original data. (This is the same technique used for forward error correction on CDs and DVDs, in the Tahoe-LAFS distributed filesystem, and in many other protocols. A ratio of eight pieces required out of ten generated is typical, allowing recovery with up to two lost pieces.) So a single holdout, or even several (depending on M and N), would not be a problem, but if enough keys were lost the votes would indeed become unreadable.
Not only that, but when DST was first introduced the main driver of energy use was artificial lighting. In that context DST makes at least some sense, as more usable daylight means less need for artificial light (even though it would make even more sense to just get up earlier and leave the time alone). However, the main driver of electricity use today during the DST interval is not lighting, but air conditioning—and sending people home earlier in the day, when the temperature is higher, increases the demand for less efficient residential air conditioning.
Recent studies in the U.S. have confirmed that switching to DST not only fails to save energy, but actually increases the demand for electricity when compared to maintaining the same time year-round.
You ignore the fact that most "goldbugs" would say that anything but a full-reserve policy on demand (i.e. checking) accounts is an obvious case of fraud, since the bank has committed itself to allowing you to withdraw your money at any time, but does not actually have the reserves on hand to meet all their obligations. Time accounts (CDs and savings accounts) are a different matter, since the bank is not obligated to return the money on demand—it effectively belongs to the bank until the time is up.
Anyway, there is still a limit tied to the amount of actual currency in circulation. The reserve ratio cannot become arbitrarily low; at the very least there must be enough reserves to meet the projected day-to-day demand from customers and other banks. By contrast, there is no effective limit to degree by which a fiat currency can be diluted, even before fractional reserves are taken into account.
Of course the piece needs to cointain 100 grams of gold, but it doesn't make much difference for the value if that gold is diluted with 1 gram of lead or 100 grams of lead. The value hinges on the amount of gold, not the adherence to conventions.
Obviously if you know that a random 100-gram lump of metal is 10% gold and 90% lead, and the cost of separating them is insignificant, then you can simply price it about the same as a 10-gram lump of pure gold. However, it's not exactly practical to test the composition of every unit of currency every time it happens to be used in trade. What occurs in practice is that those accepting gold declare the minimum purity they are willing to accept, and those offering it certify (via assayers' marks or other means) that their gold meets or exceeds the required purity. A gold-based currency without a minimum purity standard would not be fungible, as every unit—the part you can actually handle and measure, not just the gold inside it—must be considered unique, and a non-fungible currency is something of a contradiction.
The only difference is that the properties of BitCoins which make them useful as an exchange medium are determined by convention, while the properties of gold which makes it useful as an exchange medium are given beforehand.
In other words, naturally-occuring gold just so happens to have the right properties to serve as a currency, while bitcoins were created artificially with those specific properties in mind. So? We know this already. It has no practical effect on the use of either as money. The properties are the same whether they came about by nature or by "convention".
No, all that has to happen is for authors to accept that they have a perfectly reasonable right to demand payment in exchange for the initial authorship and/or publication of their work—i.e., their actual labor—after which it is out of their hands and further distribution, free or otherwise, is none of their concern. There are plenty of ways to make money from intellectual work without resorting to legal distribution monopolies backed by completely unjustified threats of force.
It seems that we at least agree that bitcoins are not a fiat currency, which is the main point I was attempting to make. I also agree that the manner in which bitcoins acquired their initial value differs from gold and most other non-fiat currencies in that they were not valued on their own merits prior to becoming a currency; however, so long as they have value now it shouldn't make very much difference how that initial value came about.
100 grams of gold has value with or without ... the minimum purity
Here I would have to disagree. I would not give nearly as much for 100 grams of "gold" which is actually mostly lead. I may not demand .9999 purity, but for any given price there is a minimum standard which must be met.
BitCoins, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on conventions for its usefulness as a medium of exchange, and has no value if the conventions are broken.
In some ways that is kind of like saying that gold has no value apart from the convention of accepting only gold, and not, say, an equal weight of lead. As you pointed out, some of the traditional properties of a gold currency are optional, like assayer's marks; they increase the value somewhat, but you can do without them. Other conventions, however—such as demanding that units of the currency possess the physical and chemical properties of gold—are more essential.
Some of the bitcoin conventions are essential to its value, like the minimum required proof-of-work. Others, like the 21-million-bitcoin limit, are more flexible; even it that limit went away it would still require effort to find new bitcoins, so they would remain scarce. (Personally I don't think the limit is really necessary, but I don't see it causing problems either.)
Not necessarily. For one, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that both parties agree that the transfer was a loan, and the recipient is simply refusing to return the book. Short of that, it really comes down to persuading a judge and/or jury that you are, in fact, more likely to be the legitimate owner of the book. This would be a civil case, where the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt". A reliable witness to the transaction would certainly help, but there are other factors which may persuade the court to rule one way or the other. For example, a history of failing to return books (or of "giving" them away and demanding them back later), or a more general comparison of character references.
In the case of e-books, of course, there need not be any question as to the terms of the transfer. It can simply be labeled as a loan or permanent transfer of ownership up front. Avoiding the ambiguity of court trials over "verbal agreements" is just one more reason to distinguish between revocable/time-limited loans and permanent gifts or sales, rather than treating a loan like a transfer of ownership which just happens to be reciprocated later.