Actually, that's exactly the same as a physical book. If you lend someone a book, you're trusting that they will give it back to you when you request it, but you have no way of enforcing it, save for breaking into their home, finding it, and taking it back.
The difference is in whether you would be justified in taking it back. If they refuse to return a loaned book they have, in effect, stolen it from you, and you can legitimately compel them not only to return it but also to compensate you for being derived of the book in the interim. If you had actually given the book to them that would not be an option—the book would be theirs to keep, and if you tried to take it back you would be the thief.
You could, of course, treat loaned e-books exactly the same way, and make owners go through the courts to get their e-books back (if possible; what if the recipient lost their key and thus can't transfer it back?), but why not just allow e-book owners to revoke their outstanding loans at will, or at least set a time limit?
I can lend my book to someone else. But I have to transfer the ownership to them so that I no longer can read it or lend it to anyone else. That seems fair in the way that it emulates the rights I have for physical property I own.
It's close, but not quite the same. If you lend someone a physical book you still own the book, and can demand that they return it. If you actually transferred the ownership (gave it to them, rather than lending) they would have no obligation to give it back. A limited transfer with the possibility of revocation would probably go over better.
It still seems a shame, though—we have this great technology which can provide everyone in the world with their own personal copy of anything they might ever care to read, and what do we do with it? Look for ways to make it act like a scarcity-driven physical distribution model! What a waste!
Aside, of course, from the essential property that the bar be made of real gold, and not other materials that lack some or all of the properties of gold.
And are those properties determined by decree?
They are determined by collective voluntary agreement between the users of gold-based commodity currencies, just as the properties of bitcoins are determined by voluntary agreement between those who use them.
It didn't happen spontaneously - someone had to declare what a valid BitCoin is, and people had to listen to him.
And what about that makes it any less spontaneous? No one is compelled to trade in bitcoins, or to follow the developer's recommended protocols. They choose to do so, spontaneously, because they see value in it.
For BitCoins to retain their value, people have to keep agreeing on arbitrary definitions and the protocols used to exchange the coins. Perhaps it's not a decree in the proper sense, but it's substantially different from the way gold gains its value.
It is exactly the same as the way a gold-based currency gains its value. In the beginning someone has to start accepting gold in trade for other goods. They specify, "by decree" if you wish, what forms will be acceptable: minimum purity, assayers marks, bars or coins, denominations, etc. If others wish to trade in this budding currency they must follow to these "arbitrary" definitions and protocols. As the currency spreads the definitions become a matter of agreement within the community, not just those who were active from the beginning. (The bitcoin currency has the potential to undergo the same evolution via third-party modifications to the client software.)
...nobody has decreed the properties for a gold bar, or that only certain types of bars can be used for payment...
Aside, of course, from the essential property that the bar be made of real gold, and not other materials that lack some or all of the properties of gold.
... people just spontaneously find bars made of gold more valuable than bars made of, for example, lead.
Just as people spontaneously find valid bitcoins more valuable than pseudo-bitcoins which lack some or all of the properties of actual bitcoins.
But someone has decreed that a valid BitCoin needs to have certain properties and that only those should be accepted as payment.
It is a stretch to call that a "decree"; it's not like the BitCoin developers have any dictatorial powers. The client program is open source, and the protocol decentralized, so you can modify it to accept or reject "bitcoins" with different properties if you wish. The only constraint is that you need others to accept your altered "bitcoins" if they are to be useful, and there is currently no real value in changing the rules.
That is just another property of the system, no different from the requirement that the hash of a bitcoin meet certain conditions to be considered valid. It is no more "by fiat" than the fact that a commodity-gold currency must be made of actual gold, not brass or wood.
It would be "scarcity by decree" if you could make more bitcoins which would be perfectly acceptable to others, indistinguishable from any other bitcoins, but someone used force (or threats thereof) to enforce an artificial limit on the supply. The BTC limit doesn't work that way, however—the definition is such that there can only be 21 million valid bitcoins. You cannot exceed that limit and still call the result a "bitcoin"; it would be no different than trying to pass off a "bitcoin" with an invalid hash, or any other invalid property.
Fiat currency is called fiat currency specifically because it *is not* backed by anything.
To be more precise, fiat currency is called such because its scarcity (and thus value) is "by fiat" rather than natural. A commodity-gold currency is not "backed" by anything, but is not a fiat currency either, because the gold itself is naturally scarce. A representational (e.g. paper, electronic) currency which is "backed by" gold—that is, which is accompanied by a promise from the issuer of some fixed amount of gold in exchange—is scarce for the same reason; gold is scarce, so the (honest) promise of gold is also scarce.
An unbacked paper currency like the U.S. dollar, on the other hand, is scarce only because anti-counterfeiting laws prohibit anyone but the Treasury from making more, artificially limiting the supply; there is nothing naturally scarce about the currency itself.
The scarcity of bitcoins is a mathematical property of the network. New bitcoins are difficult to find, requiring a significant investment of energy and time. No law prohibits the creation of new bitcoins; anyone can run the client and search for more. Ergo, they are not scarce "by fiat", and thus are not a fiat currency. Bitcoins are in the same class as commodity currencies, such as gold and silver, which retain a stable value due to their inherent natural scarcity, not anti-counterfeiting laws. The price of a bitcoin is driven by the cost of "mining" bitcoins, just as the price of a gold coin is driven by the cost of mining gold.
The smallest unit of value people will want to exchange is not one 21 millionth of all the units of value in the world.
That shouldn't be a problem; the protocol allows each BitCoin to be divided by up to six decimal places, so the limit is one 21-trillionth of the world-wide value, not one 21-millionth. The official client only allows two decimal places for now, for practical reasons, but that would be trivial to change.
Secondly, the way the system works affords no transaction anonymity.
This is more of a problem. The system is designed to allow anonymous spenders and recipients, but some simple traffic analysis can show connections between various accounts (some of which may be linked to real-life identity; names, shipping addresses, e-mails, etc.) by following the transfers. However, no one has suggested an alternative with better privacy guarantees. It seems that the transaction history has to be public knowledge if one is to catch attempt at double-spending the same coins. BitCoin remains the most anonymous way of spending money online, as everyone else explicitly tracks your identity. At least with BitCoin some statistical analysis is required to uncover this information, with varying degrees of confidence.
... this isn't really any different than what banks do with fractional reserve banking.
Aside, of course, from the complete lack of anything resembling deposits, loans, or reserves (fractional or otherwise). In other words, no real similarity at all. It's not a con or scam either, of course—merely a protocol for indirect exchange in which certain hard-to-find patterns of bits take the place of scarce physical commodities. As a virtual currency it has many of the attributes which make precious metals so eminently suitable as physical currencies: scarcity, durability, divisibility, and fungibility, to name a few. The protocol may not be perfect, but it is the best I've seen thus far. The limitations mainly relate to scalability and maintaining a consistent state between many decentralized peers—technical issues, not economic ones.
It applies when going the other way—128-bit IPv6 addresses cannot be uniquely encoded into 32-bit IPv4 headers. There are actually at least two ways to represent any IPv4 address as an IPv6 address:::a.b.c.d (deprecated) and::ffff:0:a.b.c.d. However, these encodings aren't used much; even though an IPv6-only peer could technically craft an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 destination address, the IPv4-only recipient wouldn't know what to do with that packet. They're mainly intended to allow applications to store both kinds of addresses in a common structure, not for routing. Alternately, the IPv6 system could try to send an IPv4 packet, but then it wouldn't be able to uniquely encode it's own address for the reply, which is where the Pigeonhole Principle comes in. Any system with extended addresses would run into the same problem regarding bidirectional communication.
IPv6 is backward-compatible with IPv4 in the sense that a host can support both, and thus communicate with both IPv4-only and IPv6-aware peers. Naturally this requires a valid IPv4 address to which IPv4-only peers can reply, which will generally be a private address behind a NAT gateway. Only hosts which need to accept incoming connections from IPv4-only peers will be allocated publicly-routable IPv4 addresses; everyone else can communicate freely over IPv6.
Could you be more specific? E.g., which assertions, and which unspoken assumptions?
For one thing all the arguments I've seen so far... are implying that the limit of F(x) is asymptotically approaching a single value and that's certainly not necessarily true.
Certainly not. For one thing, the limit of a function of one variable with respect to that variable doesn't approach anything; it's either undefined or a specific value. The function itself may approach a value (e.g. F(x) approaches one as x approaches +infinity) but the limit, if it exists, is a constant (e.g. \lim_{x\to\infty}F(x) = 1).
Obviously you and I know that 0.999... is not an approximation, but the people you would show this proof to aren't so sure. Most of the time the point you're really trying to get across is that 0.999... isn't just an approximation, and for that argument this proof, while perfectly true, is no help at all.
In order to understand that 0.999... is not an approximation you pretty much have to understand limits, and anyone who understands limits is not going to have a problem with 0.999... = 1.
Taxes obviously are aggression. Aggression is defined as any non-defensive coercive act, defense being a proportional response to a prior aggressive act, and coercion being any violation of one's natural property rights, which derive from self-ownership and homesteading and may be transferred via voluntary contract. Taxes are clearly coerced—just try not paying them. They are not defense, as the taxpayer is not (in the general case) the aggressor. Ergo, they are aggression.
... we use taxes to pay for civilization.
Perhaps you think that's what you're doing, but you undermine your own goal. One aspect of civilization is the absence of aggression. To the extent you endorse aggression, including taxes, you cannot have civilization. Moreover, civilization can exist without resorting to taxes. (This is good, as otherwise civilization would be impossible.)
... if taxes were voluntary we would return to caves.
Well, if that's what you want.... no one's stopping you. Have fun. Personally, I prefer civilization, which is why I oppose aggression in all its forms. Every act of aggression pushes us one step backward toward those caves.
social care for disabled, firesquads, foster homes, police etc. I do not see how you could sustain that without taxes.
First, I personally don't really care whether any of that can be sustained. If it requires taxes to exist then we're better off without it. However, I'll continue under the assumption that we expect me to persuade those who do care that such services are sustainable anyway.
Second, aside from Social Security and Medicare (a small part of "social care for disabled"), none of the services you listed are handled by the federal government. Fire, police, roads, schools, etc. are all paid for by the states, counties, and/or municipalities in which they reside. Ergo, eliminating federal income taxes would have approximately zero effect on any of the traditional public services used to justify them.
The only major public service left is national defense, and—given that our geography lends us as good a natural defense as you'll find outside of large island nations like Australia—our per-capital nation defense costs ought to be among the lowest anywhere. That they consume a significant fraction of the GDP is a consequence of the fact that the military spends most of its time playing World Police rather than concentrating solely on defense.
Third, it's not like the money itself goes away if you eliminate the taxes. It's still there to be spent on comparable services and/or donations if that's how people choose to use it. The only difference is that the choice would be made by those who actually earned the money, rather than by those empowered to take it.
Look at some rich corporations like Apple for example, they (Apple) haven't donated a dime in the last decade.
Which means their shareholders were left with more to donate on their own. Personally, I'd rather the surplus were distributed to the shareholders (via dividends or growth in assets / share price). It's less morally ambiguous. The board should invest, and leave it to the individual shareholders to donating their shares of the proceeds if they choose.
I've never seen a poor person trying to lower his taxes...
That's probably because "poor people" don't pay net taxes in the first place. You can't lower your taxes much beyond zero, and it's probably not worth the cost to hire a tax accountant to look for the odd refundable rebate which may apply.
...and I've never seen a healthy nation without a high tax rate.
I think you've got that backwards. High taxes are a disease which tends to afflict formerly-healthy nations—the rate goes up as more citizens can afford the taxes, and therefore have less personal interest in fighting it. They developed their "healthy" status before the high taxes set in.
Plenty of third-world countries have cripplingly high taxes; it doesn't seem to have helped them much.
How about you stop stealing from them first? It's kind of unfair to demand that they be self-sufficient when you're taking from them the means with which to do so.
Taxes and public services go hand-in-hand. It's no more reasonable to keep taking taxes while simultaneously demanding that objectors not use the public services they're paying for than it would be for the objectors to demand public services without offering to pay for them. Of course, if they offer to pay for what they use then you don't need a tax; an ordinary contract will do just fine. The tax is only necessary because you want them to pay for more than they need, on your terms.
So the thief washes your windows when he's done emptying your safe—it's still theft, as you aren't permitted to opt out. Moreover, taking advantage of services you're compelled to pay for, whether you use them or not, does not mean you've opted in. If nothing else, you should at least recognize that it is unfair to expect anyone to provide such services for themselves when the money which would pay for them has already been taken by force. You can speak of self-sufficiency after the money's been returned, not before.
True, civilized society is not free of financial cost. However, the moment you legitimize the use of aggression, e.g. in the form of taxes, you no longer have a civilized society; you have a primitive society dominated by the use of force.
Tax is not theft.... Black is not white, whatever you libertarians might like to believe.
Strangely enough, it's the libertarians who insist on calling things by their rightful names, and you who is insisting that "black is white". Tell me, what is the significant difference between "tax" and "theft"? Apart from the obvious fact that one is an action performed by the government, and the other is performed by a private citizen, there is none, and the identity of the actor does not change the nature of the act. Theft is theft, even when it's called a "tax".
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
An unfortunately popular quote, which happens to miss the point completely. You're quite welcome to pay whatever "taxes" you want, but you have no right to compel others to fund your "civilization". What you really like is making other people pay taxes, so that you can have what you want at their expense.
How is that any better than putting everything in one file, perhaps with a comment separating the declarations from the definitions? Splitting one header file into two does not appear, IMHO, to add much value. So far as the language itself is concerned everything in the ".inl" file is just as visible to client code as the top-level header; there is nothing to prevent declarations in the ".inl", and in fact if you should happen to leave out one or more stand-alone declarations at the top level you probably won't even get a warning.
The Java version, on the other hand, avoids the redundancy of manually storing type information in two separate source files, and you can still get the overview you want—guaranteed to match the class it was generated from—via a standard command-line JDK tool every Java developer has access to.
And, as I said, if you want to separate interfaces from implementations in Java there are, well, interfaces for that. Just put the public API in one file, and the class implementing that interface in another. The use of interfaces is good practice in any event, and much more flexible than simply separating declarations and definitions as in C++.
I find header files absolutely fantastic, especially for getting an overview of a class and its capabilities _WITHOUT_ using an IDE. In C# and Java, this is impossible without wading through the entire implementation file...
It's pretty much impossible in C++ too, if the header declares any templates or inline functions, since their definitions have to go into the header file along with the declarations. The STL, for example, consists almost entirely of (dense) header files mixing interfaces with implementation details. It's not always that bad, of course, but then you have mandatory duplication, complex preprocessing, multiple-inclusion and related issues to deal with.
In Java, at least, the public API(s) of a class should be defined in one or more interfaces, which are easy enough to scan through, and all you need care about regarding the class itself is that it implements certain interfaces conveniently listed on the first line of the class definition. If you happen to need an overview of a class file for which you lack source code all you have to do is provide it to javap, no IDE required:
$ javap -classpath/usr/share/java/hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Database
public class org.hsqldb.Database extends java.lang.Object{
int databaseID;
java.lang.String sType;
java.lang.String sName; //...
public synchronized org.hsqldb.lib.FileAccess getFileAccess();
public synchronized boolean isStoredFileAccess();
}
Are you assuming that violation of the N.A.P. is not in anyone's enlightened self interest?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that aggression can never serve any individual's self-interest, particularly in the short term. That depends quite a bit on whether one can get away with it, and on how likely it is to spark further aggression. I would, however, say that situations where aggression offers any real, long-term benefit are few and far between. Aggressors may beat the odds occasionally, but it's not a strategy I would recommend.
One of the flaws I see in many people's thinking is the confusion between coercion and persuasion, between acting to harm and choosing not to help.
I couldn't agree more.
An imposition is inherently incompatible with the non-agression [sic] principle.... Your terms play into that confusion I think.
Which terms are you referring to? Did you perhaps hit the wrong reply button? If you're referring to the part where I said "the strongest individual or group is the one most able to impose its own preferences on the world around it", (a) I never said that all behavior of this sort would be compatible with the N.A.P., only that those able to get their way are, by definition, the strongest, and (b) "to impose... on the world" is not the same thing as "an imposition". The former may not even involve other people, whereas the latter always does. Either form may or may not involve coercion. If coercion is involved (against non-aggressors) then the action is obviously aggressive, and thus incompatible with the N.A.P., but that is not necessarily the case.
Terminology does matter—as does reading comprehension.
I think I lost track of which parts of my comment you are responding to. The N.A.P. is a bit similar to the Golden Rule, yes, although you seem to be a bit confused on that point: the Golden Rule is "treat others as you would want to be treated", not "as you expect to be treated". I think you'll find that correcting that definition suffices to address both of your examples.
The N.A.P. is close, but not quite the same. It represents a boundary rather than a prescription for action. In simple terms it could be stated as "you may treat others as they have treated you, but no worse, without incurring just punishment". So long as you stay within that boundary there remains a significant difference between their actions and yours: they were acting unilaterally, while you were simply responding in kind to their prior action. If you were to go beyond that limit then your actions would also be a unilateral escalation.
And let's just not open the can of worms that is religious morality, especially Sharia law... ugh.
I agree, particularly given that "religious morality" is dangerously close to being an oxymoron.
That would suggest that 'self-interest' is basically a null concept - it is so broad that everything, including sacrificing one's life for another, would fall under it and nothing could be excluded.
It's not quite that broad. Obviously it would exclude any action which increases one's present discomfort. But yes, even self-sacrifice could be included in one's self-interest. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where the projected discomfort of life after letting someone else die—one's child, perhaps—would outweigh the projected discomfort of self-sacrifice.
The kind of 'self-interest' that I reject is the one what defines itself exclusively as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest.
Well, you're safe there, since not even purely material self-interest is exclusively defined as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest. For example, voluntary trade is always mutually beneficial ex ante, and generally ex post as well (though there is always the possibility of error).
P.S. I should point out that I don't really agree with Rand most of the time. We share certain conclusions, but typically differ on the derivation. (I tend to side with Mises/Rothbard and classical liberalism rather than what little I've seen of Objectivism.) I have always taken her anti-altruism stance as something of a truism, that no one chooses to act against their own self-interest, given an inclusive definition of "self-interest" as described above; however, not everyone takes her writing the same way. Perhaps that's why it's so popular—you can often read it to suit your own views.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's exactly the same as a physical book. If you lend someone a book, you're trusting that they will give it back to you when you request it, but you have no way of enforcing it, save for breaking into their home, finding it, and taking it back.
The difference is in whether you would be justified in taking it back. If they refuse to return a loaned book they have, in effect, stolen it from you, and you can legitimately compel them not only to return it but also to compensate you for being derived of the book in the interim. If you had actually given the book to them that would not be an option—the book would be theirs to keep, and if you tried to take it back you would be the thief.
You could, of course, treat loaned e-books exactly the same way, and make owners go through the courts to get their e-books back (if possible; what if the recipient lost their key and thus can't transfer it back?), but why not just allow e-book owners to revoke their outstanding loans at will, or at least set a time limit?
I can lend my book to someone else. But I have to transfer the ownership to them so that I no longer can read it or lend it to anyone else. That seems fair in the way that it emulates the rights I have for physical property I own.
It's close, but not quite the same. If you lend someone a physical book you still own the book, and can demand that they return it. If you actually transferred the ownership (gave it to them, rather than lending) they would have no obligation to give it back. A limited transfer with the possibility of revocation would probably go over better.
It still seems a shame, though—we have this great technology which can provide everyone in the world with their own personal copy of anything they might ever care to read, and what do we do with it? Look for ways to make it act like a scarcity-driven physical distribution model! What a waste!
Aside, of course, from the essential property that the bar be made of real gold, and not other materials that lack some or all of the properties of gold.
And are those properties determined by decree?
They are determined by collective voluntary agreement between the users of gold-based commodity currencies, just as the properties of bitcoins are determined by voluntary agreement between those who use them.
It didn't happen spontaneously - someone had to declare what a valid BitCoin is, and people had to listen to him.
And what about that makes it any less spontaneous? No one is compelled to trade in bitcoins, or to follow the developer's recommended protocols. They choose to do so, spontaneously, because they see value in it.
For BitCoins to retain their value, people have to keep agreeing on arbitrary definitions and the protocols used to exchange the coins. Perhaps it's not a decree in the proper sense, but it's substantially different from the way gold gains its value.
It is exactly the same as the way a gold-based currency gains its value. In the beginning someone has to start accepting gold in trade for other goods. They specify, "by decree" if you wish, what forms will be acceptable: minimum purity, assayers marks, bars or coins, denominations, etc. If others wish to trade in this budding currency they must follow to these "arbitrary" definitions and protocols. As the currency spreads the definitions become a matter of agreement within the community, not just those who were active from the beginning. (The bitcoin currency has the potential to undergo the same evolution via third-party modifications to the client software.)
...nobody has decreed the properties for a gold bar, or that only certain types of bars can be used for payment...
Aside, of course, from the essential property that the bar be made of real gold, and not other materials that lack some or all of the properties of gold.
... people just spontaneously find bars made of gold more valuable than bars made of, for example, lead.
Just as people spontaneously find valid bitcoins more valuable than pseudo-bitcoins which lack some or all of the properties of actual bitcoins.
But someone has decreed that a valid BitCoin needs to have certain properties and that only those should be accepted as payment.
It is a stretch to call that a "decree"; it's not like the BitCoin developers have any dictatorial powers. The client program is open source, and the protocol decentralized, so you can modify it to accept or reject "bitcoins" with different properties if you wish. The only constraint is that you need others to accept your altered "bitcoins" if they are to be useful, and there is currently no real value in changing the rules.
That is just another property of the system, no different from the requirement that the hash of a bitcoin meet certain conditions to be considered valid. It is no more "by fiat" than the fact that a commodity-gold currency must be made of actual gold, not brass or wood.
It would be "scarcity by decree" if you could make more bitcoins which would be perfectly acceptable to others, indistinguishable from any other bitcoins, but someone used force (or threats thereof) to enforce an artificial limit on the supply. The BTC limit doesn't work that way, however—the definition is such that there can only be 21 million valid bitcoins. You cannot exceed that limit and still call the result a "bitcoin"; it would be no different than trying to pass off a "bitcoin" with an invalid hash, or any other invalid property.
Fiat currency is called fiat currency specifically because it *is not* backed by anything.
To be more precise, fiat currency is called such because its scarcity (and thus value) is "by fiat" rather than natural. A commodity-gold currency is not "backed" by anything, but is not a fiat currency either, because the gold itself is naturally scarce. A representational (e.g. paper, electronic) currency which is "backed by" gold—that is, which is accompanied by a promise from the issuer of some fixed amount of gold in exchange—is scarce for the same reason; gold is scarce, so the (honest) promise of gold is also scarce.
An unbacked paper currency like the U.S. dollar, on the other hand, is scarce only because anti-counterfeiting laws prohibit anyone but the Treasury from making more, artificially limiting the supply; there is nothing naturally scarce about the currency itself.
The scarcity of bitcoins is a mathematical property of the network. New bitcoins are difficult to find, requiring a significant investment of energy and time. No law prohibits the creation of new bitcoins; anyone can run the client and search for more. Ergo, they are not scarce "by fiat", and thus are not a fiat currency. Bitcoins are in the same class as commodity currencies, such as gold and silver, which retain a stable value due to their inherent natural scarcity, not anti-counterfeiting laws. The price of a bitcoin is driven by the cost of "mining" bitcoins, just as the price of a gold coin is driven by the cost of mining gold.
The smallest unit of value people will want to exchange is not one 21 millionth of all the units of value in the world.
That shouldn't be a problem; the protocol allows each BitCoin to be divided by up to six decimal places, so the limit is one 21-trillionth of the world-wide value, not one 21-millionth. The official client only allows two decimal places for now, for practical reasons, but that would be trivial to change.
Secondly, the way the system works affords no transaction anonymity.
This is more of a problem. The system is designed to allow anonymous spenders and recipients, but some simple traffic analysis can show connections between various accounts (some of which may be linked to real-life identity; names, shipping addresses, e-mails, etc.) by following the transfers. However, no one has suggested an alternative with better privacy guarantees. It seems that the transaction history has to be public knowledge if one is to catch attempt at double-spending the same coins. BitCoin remains the most anonymous way of spending money online, as everyone else explicitly tracks your identity. At least with BitCoin some statistical analysis is required to uncover this information, with varying degrees of confidence.
... this isn't really any different than what banks do with fractional reserve banking.
Aside, of course, from the complete lack of anything resembling deposits, loans, or reserves (fractional or otherwise). In other words, no real similarity at all. It's not a con or scam either, of course—merely a protocol for indirect exchange in which certain hard-to-find patterns of bits take the place of scarce physical commodities. As a virtual currency it has many of the attributes which make precious metals so eminently suitable as physical currencies: scarcity, durability, divisibility, and fungibility, to name a few. The protocol may not be perfect, but it is the best I've seen thus far. The limitations mainly relate to scalability and maintaining a consistent state between many decentralized peers—technical issues, not economic ones.
It applies when going the other way—128-bit IPv6 addresses cannot be uniquely encoded into 32-bit IPv4 headers. There are actually at least two ways to represent any IPv4 address as an IPv6 address: ::a.b.c.d (deprecated) and ::ffff:0:a.b.c.d. However, these encodings aren't used much; even though an IPv6-only peer could technically craft an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 destination address, the IPv4-only recipient wouldn't know what to do with that packet. They're mainly intended to allow applications to store both kinds of addresses in a common structure, not for routing. Alternately, the IPv6 system could try to send an IPv4 packet, but then it wouldn't be able to uniquely encode it's own address for the reply, which is where the Pigeonhole Principle comes in. Any system with extended addresses would run into the same problem regarding bidirectional communication.
IPv6 is backward-compatible with IPv4 in the sense that a host can support both, and thus communicate with both IPv4-only and IPv6-aware peers. Naturally this requires a valid IPv4 address to which IPv4-only peers can reply, which will generally be a private address behind a NAT gateway. Only hosts which need to accept incoming connections from IPv4-only peers will be allocated publicly-routable IPv4 addresses; everyone else can communicate freely over IPv6.
Could you be more specific? E.g., which assertions, and which unspoken assumptions?
For one thing all the arguments I've seen so far ... are implying that the limit of F(x) is asymptotically approaching a single value and that's certainly not necessarily true.
Certainly not. For one thing, the limit of a function of one variable with respect to that variable doesn't approach anything; it's either undefined or a specific value. The function itself may approach a value (e.g. F(x) approaches one as x approaches +infinity) but the limit, if it exists, is a constant (e.g. \lim_{x\to\infty}F(x) = 1).
Obviously you and I know that 0.999... is not an approximation, but the people you would show this proof to aren't so sure. Most of the time the point you're really trying to get across is that 0.999... isn't just an approximation, and for that argument this proof, while perfectly true, is no help at all.
In order to understand that 0.999... is not an approximation you pretty much have to understand limits, and anyone who understands limits is not going to have a problem with 0.999... = 1.
The problem with that approach is that it's circular: it's true if 0.999... is exactly equal to one, but false if it's only an approximation:
Let x = 0.999...9 (any finite number of 9's);
then 10x - x = 9x = 8.999...1.
Dividing both sides by 9, x = 0.999...9 != 1.
Taxes are not aggression.
Taxes obviously are aggression. Aggression is defined as any non-defensive coercive act, defense being a proportional response to a prior aggressive act, and coercion being any violation of one's natural property rights, which derive from self-ownership and homesteading and may be transferred via voluntary contract. Taxes are clearly coerced—just try not paying them. They are not defense, as the taxpayer is not (in the general case) the aggressor. Ergo, they are aggression.
... we use taxes to pay for civilization.
Perhaps you think that's what you're doing, but you undermine your own goal. One aspect of civilization is the absence of aggression. To the extent you endorse aggression, including taxes, you cannot have civilization. Moreover, civilization can exist without resorting to taxes. (This is good, as otherwise civilization would be impossible.)
... if taxes were voluntary we would return to caves.
Well, if that's what you want.... no one's stopping you. Have fun. Personally, I prefer civilization, which is why I oppose aggression in all its forms. Every act of aggression pushes us one step backward toward those caves.
social care for disabled, firesquads, foster homes, police etc. I do not see how you could sustain that without taxes.
First, I personally don't really care whether any of that can be sustained. If it requires taxes to exist then we're better off without it. However, I'll continue under the assumption that we expect me to persuade those who do care that such services are sustainable anyway.
Second, aside from Social Security and Medicare (a small part of "social care for disabled"), none of the services you listed are handled by the federal government. Fire, police, roads, schools, etc. are all paid for by the states, counties, and/or municipalities in which they reside. Ergo, eliminating federal income taxes would have approximately zero effect on any of the traditional public services used to justify them.
The only major public service left is national defense, and—given that our geography lends us as good a natural defense as you'll find outside of large island nations like Australia—our per-capital nation defense costs ought to be among the lowest anywhere. That they consume a significant fraction of the GDP is a consequence of the fact that the military spends most of its time playing World Police rather than concentrating solely on defense.
Third, it's not like the money itself goes away if you eliminate the taxes. It's still there to be spent on comparable services and/or donations if that's how people choose to use it. The only difference is that the choice would be made by those who actually earned the money, rather than by those empowered to take it.
Look at some rich corporations like Apple for example, they (Apple) haven't donated a dime in the last decade.
Which means their shareholders were left with more to donate on their own. Personally, I'd rather the surplus were distributed to the shareholders (via dividends or growth in assets / share price). It's less morally ambiguous. The board should invest, and leave it to the individual shareholders to donating their shares of the proceeds if they choose.
I've never seen a poor person trying to lower his taxes...
That's probably because "poor people" don't pay net taxes in the first place. You can't lower your taxes much beyond zero, and it's probably not worth the cost to hire a tax accountant to look for the odd refundable rebate which may apply.
...and I've never seen a healthy nation without a high tax rate.
I think you've got that backwards. High taxes are a disease which tends to afflict formerly-healthy nations—the rate goes up as more citizens can afford the taxes, and therefore have less personal interest in fighting it. They developed their "healthy" status before the high taxes set in.
Plenty of third-world countries have cripplingly high taxes; it doesn't seem to have helped them much.
How about you stop stealing from them first? It's kind of unfair to demand that they be self-sufficient when you're taking from them the means with which to do so.
Taxes and public services go hand-in-hand. It's no more reasonable to keep taking taxes while simultaneously demanding that objectors not use the public services they're paying for than it would be for the objectors to demand public services without offering to pay for them. Of course, if they offer to pay for what they use then you don't need a tax; an ordinary contract will do just fine. The tax is only necessary because you want them to pay for more than they need, on your terms.
So the thief washes your windows when he's done emptying your safe—it's still theft, as you aren't permitted to opt out. Moreover, taking advantage of services you're compelled to pay for, whether you use them or not, does not mean you've opted in. If nothing else, you should at least recognize that it is unfair to expect anyone to provide such services for themselves when the money which would pay for them has already been taken by force. You can speak of self-sufficiency after the money's been returned, not before.
True, civilized society is not free of financial cost. However, the moment you legitimize the use of aggression, e.g. in the form of taxes, you no longer have a civilized society; you have a primitive society dominated by the use of force.
Tax is not theft. ... Black is not white, whatever you libertarians might like to believe.
Strangely enough, it's the libertarians who insist on calling things by their rightful names, and you who is insisting that "black is white". Tell me, what is the significant difference between "tax" and "theft"? Apart from the obvious fact that one is an action performed by the government, and the other is performed by a private citizen, there is none, and the identity of the actor does not change the nature of the act. Theft is theft, even when it's called a "tax".
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
An unfortunately popular quote, which happens to miss the point completely. You're quite welcome to pay whatever "taxes" you want, but you have no right to compel others to fund your "civilization". What you really like is making other people pay taxes, so that you can have what you want at their expense.
How is that any better than putting everything in one file, perhaps with a comment separating the declarations from the definitions? Splitting one header file into two does not appear, IMHO, to add much value. So far as the language itself is concerned everything in the ".inl" file is just as visible to client code as the top-level header; there is nothing to prevent declarations in the ".inl", and in fact if you should happen to leave out one or more stand-alone declarations at the top level you probably won't even get a warning.
The Java version, on the other hand, avoids the redundancy of manually storing type information in two separate source files, and you can still get the overview you want—guaranteed to match the class it was generated from—via a standard command-line JDK tool every Java developer has access to.
And, as I said, if you want to separate interfaces from implementations in Java there are, well, interfaces for that. Just put the public API in one file, and the class implementing that interface in another. The use of interfaces is good practice in any event, and much more flexible than simply separating declarations and definitions as in C++.
I find header files absolutely fantastic, especially for getting an overview of a class and its capabilities _WITHOUT_ using an IDE. In C# and Java, this is impossible without wading through the entire implementation file...
It's pretty much impossible in C++ too, if the header declares any templates or inline functions, since their definitions have to go into the header file along with the declarations. The STL, for example, consists almost entirely of (dense) header files mixing interfaces with implementation details. It's not always that bad, of course, but then you have mandatory duplication, complex preprocessing, multiple-inclusion and related issues to deal with.
In Java, at least, the public API(s) of a class should be defined in one or more interfaces, which are easy enough to scan through, and all you need care about regarding the class itself is that it implements certain interfaces conveniently listed on the first line of the class definition. If you happen to need an overview of a class file for which you lack source code all you have to do is provide it to javap, no IDE required:
$ javap -classpath /usr/share/java/hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Database
//...
public class org.hsqldb.Database extends java.lang.Object{
int databaseID;
java.lang.String sType;
java.lang.String sName;
public synchronized org.hsqldb.lib.FileAccess getFileAccess();
public synchronized boolean isStoredFileAccess();
}
Are you assuming that violation of the N.A.P. is not in anyone's enlightened self interest?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that aggression can never serve any individual's self-interest, particularly in the short term. That depends quite a bit on whether one can get away with it, and on how likely it is to spark further aggression. I would, however, say that situations where aggression offers any real, long-term benefit are few and far between. Aggressors may beat the odds occasionally, but it's not a strategy I would recommend.
One of the flaws I see in many people's thinking is the confusion between coercion and persuasion, between acting to harm and choosing not to help.
I couldn't agree more.
An imposition is inherently incompatible with the non-agression [sic] principle. ... Your terms play into that confusion I think.
Which terms are you referring to? Did you perhaps hit the wrong reply button? If you're referring to the part where I said "the strongest individual or group is the one most able to impose its own preferences on the world around it", (a) I never said that all behavior of this sort would be compatible with the N.A.P., only that those able to get their way are, by definition, the strongest, and (b) "to impose ... on the world" is not the same thing as "an imposition". The former may not even involve other people, whereas the latter always does. Either form may or may not involve coercion. If coercion is involved (against non-aggressors) then the action is obviously aggressive, and thus incompatible with the N.A.P., but that is not necessarily the case.
Terminology does matter—as does reading comprehension.
I think I lost track of which parts of my comment you are responding to. The N.A.P. is a bit similar to the Golden Rule, yes, although you seem to be a bit confused on that point: the Golden Rule is "treat others as you would want to be treated", not "as you expect to be treated". I think you'll find that correcting that definition suffices to address both of your examples.
The N.A.P. is close, but not quite the same. It represents a boundary rather than a prescription for action. In simple terms it could be stated as "you may treat others as they have treated you, but no worse, without incurring just punishment". So long as you stay within that boundary there remains a significant difference between their actions and yours: they were acting unilaterally, while you were simply responding in kind to their prior action. If you were to go beyond that limit then your actions would also be a unilateral escalation.
And let's just not open the can of worms that is religious morality, especially Sharia law... ugh.
I agree, particularly given that "religious morality" is dangerously close to being an oxymoron.
That would suggest that 'self-interest' is basically a null concept - it is so broad that everything, including sacrificing one's life for another, would fall under it and nothing could be excluded.
It's not quite that broad. Obviously it would exclude any action which increases one's present discomfort. But yes, even self-sacrifice could be included in one's self-interest. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where the projected discomfort of life after letting someone else die—one's child, perhaps—would outweigh the projected discomfort of self-sacrifice.
The kind of 'self-interest' that I reject is the one what defines itself exclusively as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest.
Well, you're safe there, since not even purely material self-interest is exclusively defined as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest. For example, voluntary trade is always mutually beneficial ex ante, and generally ex post as well (though there is always the possibility of error).
P.S. I should point out that I don't really agree with Rand most of the time. We share certain conclusions, but typically differ on the derivation. (I tend to side with Mises/Rothbard and classical liberalism rather than what little I've seen of Objectivism.) I have always taken her anti-altruism stance as something of a truism, that no one chooses to act against their own self-interest, given an inclusive definition of "self-interest" as described above; however, not everyone takes her writing the same way. Perhaps that's why it's so popular—you can often read it to suit your own views. :)