To be fair, that is nothing more than a workaround for several other major security issues:
1. The referrer header itself. This header serves no useful purpose, and leaks information that the destination website has no need to know. There is no way to use the referrer information securely, since it can be trivially forged, but it does serve as an invaluable tool for malicious attacks and unwanted tracking.
2. Session IDs should be validated to prevent hijacking. At the very least the session ID should be ignored if it comes from a different IP address than the one which created the session. It's not a perfect solution, given dynamic IPs, NAT, and proxies, but it would block most attacks without inconveniencing normal users.
3. No private information, including session IDs, should ever go in the URL. HTTP POST requests or cookies are a better solution here. (Naturally, cookies should be valid only until the end of the session unless the user explicitly indicates otherwise.)
(I know, I know—don't feed the trolls. I just can't help it.)
I'm fairly sure you've never had any software development experience.
Actually, I'm a professional embedded software developer as well as a hobbyist programmer. I've been working with software in general, and Linux in particular, for over a decade. I run Linux exclusively on my home PC and build and install my own kernels regularly. In other words: yes, I do know exactly what I'm talking about. And you don't have to install "updated system libraries" to use a modern Linux kernel.
Userspace binary compatibility is actually quite good under Linux; old applications will generally run unchanged provided you have the original dynamic libraries (or static binaries). Binary formats haven't changed much, and remain backward-compatible. All the old system calls are still supported. In short, you can indeed upgrade a Linux kernel in most cases without changing the rest of the system. Changes which break normal userspace applications are few and far between.
I'd be willing to bet actually that the number of people interested in DX11 on Linux is considerably lower than those on XP.
Agreed. This makes my statement more likely, not less.
Which is roughly as likely to happen as my fixing Windows XP without the source.
On the contrary, it probably wouldn't even be all that hard. The graphics modules are already designed to be compiled outside the kernel tree, so at most you might have to work around some minor kernel API changes—trivial for anyone familiar with low-level software development. I would really like to see you or anyone else try to backport the graphics driver support required for DX11 from Vista or Windows 7 without access to the source code. I can be done, of course, but it would certainly be much more difficult.
What? Seriously what do you mean? You're saying that you can upgrade Linux... but not really upgrade it at the same time? But you can't do that with XP? Please explain how they are different?
I already explained this, but for the benefit of the slow-witted: Yes, you can upgrade the kernel component of a Linux distribution to a version which supports this DX11 project without changing any of the user-space applications the user actually interacts with. There is no way to upgrade just the kernel and drivers of an XP installation to those shipped with Vista or Windows 7 without also replacing the entire desktop environment and the bundled system utilities. You want DX11, or any other core feature, you have to accept the entire package.
Windows 7 Home Premium is only $99 from Newegg. Actually $89 today on sale.
Fair enough, although a comparable Linux system would have Enterprise/Ultimate features which were omitted from the Home Premium edition. The Ultimate edition is priced over $200.
I don't think that it can be said to support DirectX better than Microsoft when it can't run on a version that dates back to XP days.
Irrelevant. The latest Linux kernel is available for free, and can be upgraded without any compatibility issues or changes to the UI. Why would this project waste time redoing all the work which has already gone into kernel development? The odds that anyone would be interested in DX11 on Linux and simultaneously have a good reason not to upgrade their kernel are rather slim.
Not to mention that the whole kernel is open-source, so if you really wanted to make it work you could probably backport the necessary DRI changes to an older kernel.
There are good reasons for retaining XP on existing systems, not least of which are the facts that upgrading would cost several hundred dollars and force a major change in the user interface. You can't upgrade an XP system to a Vista or Windows 7 kernel with DX11 support while leaving the rest of the system intact. The situations are not comparable.
You'll still have the option of printing out a paper boarding pass. The airlines aren't quite stupid enough to exclude the majority of customers without the expensive smart-phone or PDA required to use the new system.
Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)
Exactly. The marginal producers are driven out of the market, which lowers the supply. The same demand combined with a lower supply results in an increase in the price of the good. The actual increase depends on a number of factors, and can be anywhere from zero to the full increase in cost (but is generally somewhere in between). Part of the cost increase is thus born by the producers, and part by the consumers. Similarly, lower production costs allow marginal producers to enter the market, increasing the supply and driving down the price.
To say that the entire change in cost will necessarily be passed on to consumers is obviously false. However, it is just as false to claim that "pricing is utterly unrelated to... cost". Cost controls supply, which in turn controls pricing.
That's why the buyer should lose the house and it should go back to its original owner.
No, the reason the buyer(s) should lose the house to the original and current owner is that no property can legitimately change ownership without the current owner's consent. The legitimate owner of the house was not involved in the fraudulent "sale", ergo any transfer of ownership is void.
You make good points, but the ultimate reason the would-be buyer(s) cannot take possession of the house is that the house was never sold to them (i.e. by the owner) in the first place.
Right, any given point on the Earth's surface cannot be considered to be an inertial frame of reference due to the Earth's rotation. However, the Earth itself (taken as a point, i.e. center-of-mass) is in free-fall and thus can be considered an inertial frame. I assume CrimsonAvenger was referring to the latter, i.e. that Earth can be seen as having a stationary center-of-mass about which it continues to rotate, not that Earth could be completely stationary with the universe rotating around it.
Parent is not a troll. The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field—curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space. Using the principles of General Relativity, "a stationary Earth as a frame of reference works just as well in Einsteinian physics as a non-stationary Earth."
It's pretty clear you don't understand that this article is specifically about EULAs, not distribution licenses. Yes, they both have "license" in the name, and no, it's not at all relevant. Words have multiple meanings which must be interpreted in context.
All software is distributed under some kind of distribution license, unless you received it directly from the copyright holder, but when someone says "licensed rather than sold" they can only mean that use of the software is licensed via an EULA. Unlike EULAs, distribution licenses are not alternatives to sale.
In particular, you don't need to agree to a distribution license (like the GPL) to transfer an existing copy of anything to someone else. You only need it to make new copies or derivative works, a fact with follows directly from copyright law. EULAs operate on entirely different principles—contracts, not copyrights (and a corrupted understanding of contracts at that).
GPL software is not licensed; it's sold (or given away). You actually own the copies you receive. There is no EULA prohibiting transfer of those existing copies to others.
What software do you currently have that's not licensed to you rather than sold?
How about any software distributed under the terms of the GPL (i.e. nearly all of it)? The text of the GPL makes it clear that it's only a distribution license, in case someone wants to distribute copies of the software. It explicitly rejects the concept that any special license is required to make use of existing copies already in one's possession.
From the GPLv3:
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies. You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so. [emphasis added]
Most other Free / Open Source licenses in common use work the same way, although few make it quite so explicit. Restrictions imposed on end-users (i.e. EULAs), as opposed to distributors, are antithetical to the Free / Open Source philosophy.
I mean a wealthy person can only buy 7 or 8 houses and 15 or 20 TV's and a dozen or so cars.... 100 people making the same income are going to buy 100 houses, 200 TV's, and a couple hundred cars.
What makes you think "high demand/consumption" implies "good economy"? It's good for taxes, sure, since taxes are collected every time the money changes hands; ditto for arbitrary metrics like GDP. But in terms of standard-of-living, improvements come from saving and investment, not consumption.
Demand for goods and services is higher when more people have the money to spend.
That is a tautology. "Demand" is just another word for "money people have to spend." If $13 million worth of goods are produced and sold then there is a corresponding $13 millions worth of demand for other goods, regardless of how the income is distributed. The only question is whether this second set of goods will be for immediate consumption or investment. You need some of both, of course—the whole point of investment is enabling future consumption—but the more resources reserved for investment now, the better the standard of living (economy) will become in the future.
That tax cut is $1 trillion bucks over 5 years. That is going to help a lot with the deficit.
I assume you mean "tax hike", since lower taxes generally increase the deficit, all else being equal. That said, the deficit isn't really the problem; spending is. Spending $1 trillion over five years is going to have about the same negative effects regardless of whether it's covered by taxes, credit, or inflation. The difference comes down to whether the cost will be born mainly by current taxpayers ("the rich", mostly), future taxpayers, or those currently holding dollars (you—the rich invest).
The way to fix the deficit is to spend less, not tax more. For most of the history of this country the federal government managed to get by on less than a tenth of its current revenues without borrowing extra; there is no excuse for failing to maintain a balanced budget now.
Of course I have a right to do so. It's a democracy. As soon as 51% of us decide it is so, then taxes go up, the ability to export jobs goes down.
Having a majority in a democracy doesn't make your actions right, just popular. Your 51% could vote to murder the other 49%, too; it's still murder. Others have a right to their property just as much as to their lives; both are aspects of self-ownership. You have no more right to take one than the other, no matter how many others may agree with your actions.
I think you would agree if they have 100% of the resources and income that the rest of society is not going to stand for it (and it's a bad thing).
I disagree that it would be a bad thing. There is nothing inherently good or bad about any particular allocation of resources. Unlike theft, for example, which is always wrong.
It's bad for the wealthy too- once they get too excessive, there is a revolt, everything they have is taken and a lot of them are killed.
I agree that this is bad, although the blame lies squarely with the aggressors, not the wealthy. It's also purely destructive; people are generally no better off after the revolt than they were before, in absolute terms. They may live a bit better for a while, but only by borrowing heavily against their own future productivity.
You swear an oath stating that you'll abide by the rules. It's still an agreement. The judge... can put in you jail if you fail to comply.
Can you even hear yourself? If the alternative is coercion—personal injury, detainment, loss of property, etc.—directed at you or others there can be no "agreement". You can choose to comply or not, but any oath extracted under duress is meaningless.
I was assuming the $1 million from the first case was the minimum required to maintain existing capital investments, so $13 million, less $4 million consumption, less $1 million capital maintenance, leaves $8 million for capital improvement. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit.
No, now they are hiding them out in treasury bonds, which you get to pay them interest for.
That's a political issue, not an economic one. Feel free to petition your representatives in government to stop spending so much.
People without money can't buy products.... Once 1% of the population has EVERY FRIKKIN LAST DIME then your utopia sort of breaks down.
Dollars are only used as a medium of exchange because they happen to be convenient. If 1% of the population were to monopolize the supply of dollars some other currency would take their place. So long as people remain able to produce, and have their property and contract rights fully recognized by the law, the ability to trade productive labor for immediate goods and services is in no danger.
The top 1% can get by fine with a mere 20% of all the wealth and 40% of all the income and share just a little bit with the rest of society.
Perhaps they can, but you certainly have no right to coerce them into doing so. If you really feel it's in their best interest to forfeit part of their well-earned wealth for the sake of egalitarianism, feel free to persuade them to donate to your cause voluntarily. Of course, they may disagree.
Who is better for the economy - one person earning $13 million and spending $4 million or 260 people earning $13 million and spending $12 million?
The former, obviously. If you produce $13 million worth of goods and services, and consume $12 million worth, you only have $1 million to invest in maintaining the capital goods which made that level of productivity possible; at that point you are most likely consuming capital, ensuring your standard of living will gradually decline. You're certainly not going to improve it much. On the other hand, if you produce $13 million worth of goods and services and consume only $4 million worth you have $8 million left over to invest in the capital goods necessary to improve your future productivity and standard of living.
Heck, I'd suggest children be taught on turing machines, and step through _in their head_ their own code.
Not a bad idea, except that Turing machines are not much like any real-work system they're likely to work with. Perhaps they should start with lambda calculus instead. Both systems are Turning-complete, but lambda calculus is much closer to how developers actually write software.
Of course, both Turing machines and lambda calculus have a very steep learning curve, perhaps too much so for an introductory course. Even something as simple as adding (or just representing!) two numbers can become a major undertaking. If you want children to learn how computers actually work you'd probably be better off teaching them a simplified assembly language with something like SPIM, along with binary arithmetic and the basics of discrete mathematics.
In many jurisdictions, you have to pay a fee to use your right to bear arms.... If you contest a ticket, you have to pay a fee to use your right to a jury trial. You have to pay liquor taxes despite the repeal of prohibition.
These examples are equally absurd. The first case is a plain violation of the 2nd Amendment. Trials, jury or otherwise, should be free to the winner; if you contest and win, the one making false accusations should bear the full cost. Anything less is a grave injustice.
"Repeal of prohibition" is not a (constitutional) right in the first place, any more than the lack of prohibition on just about everything else. I find the concept of "legitimate" taxes in general absurd, and special "sin taxes" doubly so, but since there is no constitutional "right to liquor" these taxes have no bearing on the current subject.
If you want to protest in the streets, your city might ask you to pay a fee to exercise your right to peaceably assemble.
That's rent for use of "their" roads, not a fee for exercising your right of assembly. You can assemble without fees on private property (with the owner's permission, of course).
So what is so absurd about this?
What's absurd about it is that it makes constitutionally guaranteed rights into mere privileges. Rights are unconditional. If you must have a license to exercise a "right", and this license can be denied for any reason—including lack of payment—then it's not really a guaranteed right at all.
It doesn't matter which site you pick; they still can't guarantee a minimum end-to-end bandwidth when part of the route is outside their network. The site could be experiencing a DDoS or unusually high load, or undergoing maintenance; the ISP's upstream provider could be having technical difficulties; there could even be a problem with the client's equipment, such as a bad network cable or poor internal wiring. None of that is the ISP's responsibility. The only parts they can reasonably guarantee are their portion of the customer's connection (generally ending outside the premises), their own network equipment, and the terms of their upstream SLA.
The problem with that is that the ISP can't control anything outside of their network. Sure, if you can show that the bottleneck is within the area they control then the minimum works great—but what if it's the other end that's slowing things down, or congestion outside of the ISP's network? How is the ISP supposed to guarantee that you will always be able to receive 500 kbps from any given server?
I don't think I'd mind nearly as much if Idle's comments page wasn't so broken....
Agreed. Fortunately, there is a workaround: change the "idle" part of the hostname to some other word. Any story can be served from any subdomain; only the page layout changes. It doesn't even have to be a normal/. host; for example, here's this story in the asdf subdomain.
You misunderstand. The Xorg bug doesn't require a malicious GUI app; it just requires a perfectly normal GUI app with an exploitable vulnerability. So if OpenOffice.org (or Acrobat Reader, or Firefox, or any other document viewer) has a flaw which can be exploited by a malicious document, the Xorg bug turns that into a privilege-escalation vulnerability, circumventing not only the normal permission mechanisms but also tools such as SELinux sandboxes (which protect against malicious code running in the sandboxed user application, not the X server).
Of course you keep electing them. What choice do you have? It's not like there's a "none of the above" option on the ballots, to leave the position vacant for a term.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, that is nothing more than a workaround for several other major security issues:
1. The referrer header itself. This header serves no useful purpose, and leaks information that the destination website has no need to know. There is no way to use the referrer information securely, since it can be trivially forged, but it does serve as an invaluable tool for malicious attacks and unwanted tracking.
2. Session IDs should be validated to prevent hijacking. At the very least the session ID should be ignored if it comes from a different IP address than the one which created the session. It's not a perfect solution, given dynamic IPs, NAT, and proxies, but it would block most attacks without inconveniencing normal users.
3. No private information, including session IDs, should ever go in the URL. HTTP POST requests or cookies are a better solution here. (Naturally, cookies should be valid only until the end of the session unless the user explicitly indicates otherwise.)
(I know, I know—don't feed the trolls. I just can't help it.)
I'm fairly sure you've never had any software development experience.
Actually, I'm a professional embedded software developer as well as a hobbyist programmer. I've been working with software in general, and Linux in particular, for over a decade. I run Linux exclusively on my home PC and build and install my own kernels regularly. In other words: yes, I do know exactly what I'm talking about. And you don't have to install "updated system libraries" to use a modern Linux kernel.
Userspace binary compatibility is actually quite good under Linux; old applications will generally run unchanged provided you have the original dynamic libraries (or static binaries). Binary formats haven't changed much, and remain backward-compatible. All the old system calls are still supported. In short, you can indeed upgrade a Linux kernel in most cases without changing the rest of the system. Changes which break normal userspace applications are few and far between.
I'd be willing to bet actually that the number of people interested in DX11 on Linux is considerably lower than those on XP.
Agreed. This makes my statement more likely, not less.
Which is roughly as likely to happen as my fixing Windows XP without the source.
On the contrary, it probably wouldn't even be all that hard. The graphics modules are already designed to be compiled outside the kernel tree, so at most you might have to work around some minor kernel API changes—trivial for anyone familiar with low-level software development. I would really like to see you or anyone else try to backport the graphics driver support required for DX11 from Vista or Windows 7 without access to the source code. I can be done, of course, but it would certainly be much more difficult.
What? Seriously what do you mean? You're saying that you can upgrade Linux ... but not really upgrade it at the same time? But you can't do that with XP? Please explain how they are different?
I already explained this, but for the benefit of the slow-witted: Yes, you can upgrade the kernel component of a Linux distribution to a version which supports this DX11 project without changing any of the user-space applications the user actually interacts with. There is no way to upgrade just the kernel and drivers of an XP installation to those shipped with Vista or Windows 7 without also replacing the entire desktop environment and the bundled system utilities. You want DX11, or any other core feature, you have to accept the entire package.
Windows 7 Home Premium is only $99 from Newegg. Actually $89 today on sale.
Fair enough, although a comparable Linux system would have Enterprise/Ultimate features which were omitted from the Home Premium edition. The Ultimate edition is priced over $200.
I don't think that it can be said to support DirectX better than Microsoft when it can't run on a version that dates back to XP days.
Irrelevant. The latest Linux kernel is available for free, and can be upgraded without any compatibility issues or changes to the UI. Why would this project waste time redoing all the work which has already gone into kernel development? The odds that anyone would be interested in DX11 on Linux and simultaneously have a good reason not to upgrade their kernel are rather slim.
Not to mention that the whole kernel is open-source, so if you really wanted to make it work you could probably backport the necessary DRI changes to an older kernel.
There are good reasons for retaining XP on existing systems, not least of which are the facts that upgrading would cost several hundred dollars and force a major change in the user interface. You can't upgrade an XP system to a Vista or Windows 7 kernel with DX11 support while leaving the rest of the system intact. The situations are not comparable.
You'll still have the option of printing out a paper boarding pass. The airlines aren't quite stupid enough to exclude the majority of customers without the expensive smart-phone or PDA required to use the new system.
Pricing is entirely based on what people will pay for things, not what it 'costs' to make. (Obviously, companies aren't going to sell things for less than the cost to make them, but that pushes them out of the market entirely, not makes them sell for more.)
Exactly. The marginal producers are driven out of the market, which lowers the supply. The same demand combined with a lower supply results in an increase in the price of the good. The actual increase depends on a number of factors, and can be anywhere from zero to the full increase in cost (but is generally somewhere in between). Part of the cost increase is thus born by the producers, and part by the consumers. Similarly, lower production costs allow marginal producers to enter the market, increasing the supply and driving down the price.
To say that the entire change in cost will necessarily be passed on to consumers is obviously false. However, it is just as false to claim that "pricing is utterly unrelated to ... cost". Cost controls supply, which in turn controls pricing.
That's why the buyer should lose the house and it should go back to its original owner.
No, the reason the buyer(s) should lose the house to the original and current owner is that no property can legitimately change ownership without the current owner's consent. The legitimate owner of the house was not involved in the fraudulent "sale", ergo any transfer of ownership is void.
You make good points, but the ultimate reason the would-be buyer(s) cannot take possession of the house is that the house was never sold to them (i.e. by the owner) in the first place.
Right, any given point on the Earth's surface cannot be considered to be an inertial frame of reference due to the Earth's rotation. However, the Earth itself (taken as a point, i.e. center-of-mass) is in free-fall and thus can be considered an inertial frame. I assume CrimsonAvenger was referring to the latter, i.e. that Earth can be seen as having a stationary center-of-mass about which it continues to rotate, not that Earth could be completely stationary with the universe rotating around it.
Parent is not a troll. The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field—curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space. Using the principles of General Relativity, "a stationary Earth as a frame of reference works just as well in Einsteinian physics as a non-stationary Earth."
It's pretty clear you don't understand that this article is specifically about EULAs, not distribution licenses. Yes, they both have "license" in the name, and no, it's not at all relevant. Words have multiple meanings which must be interpreted in context.
All software is distributed under some kind of distribution license, unless you received it directly from the copyright holder, but when someone says "licensed rather than sold" they can only mean that use of the software is licensed via an EULA. Unlike EULAs, distribution licenses are not alternatives to sale.
In particular, you don't need to agree to a distribution license (like the GPL) to transfer an existing copy of anything to someone else. You only need it to make new copies or derivative works, a fact with follows directly from copyright law. EULAs operate on entirely different principles—contracts, not copyrights (and a corrupted understanding of contracts at that).
GPL software is not licensed; it's sold (or given away). You actually own the copies you receive. There is no EULA prohibiting transfer of those existing copies to others.
What software do you currently have that's not licensed to you rather than sold?
How about any software distributed under the terms of the GPL (i.e. nearly all of it)? The text of the GPL makes it clear that it's only a distribution license, in case someone wants to distribute copies of the software. It explicitly rejects the concept that any special license is required to make use of existing copies already in one's possession.
From the GPLv3:
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so. [emphasis added]
Most other Free / Open Source licenses in common use work the same way, although few make it quite so explicit. Restrictions imposed on end-users (i.e. EULAs), as opposed to distributors, are antithetical to the Free / Open Source philosophy.
I mean a wealthy person can only buy 7 or 8 houses and 15 or 20 TV's and a dozen or so cars.... 100 people making the same income are going to buy 100 houses, 200 TV's, and a couple hundred cars.
What makes you think "high demand/consumption" implies "good economy"? It's good for taxes, sure, since taxes are collected every time the money changes hands; ditto for arbitrary metrics like GDP. But in terms of standard-of-living, improvements come from saving and investment, not consumption.
Demand for goods and services is higher when more people have the money to spend.
That is a tautology. "Demand" is just another word for "money people have to spend." If $13 million worth of goods are produced and sold then there is a corresponding $13 millions worth of demand for other goods, regardless of how the income is distributed. The only question is whether this second set of goods will be for immediate consumption or investment. You need some of both, of course—the whole point of investment is enabling future consumption—but the more resources reserved for investment now, the better the standard of living (economy) will become in the future.
That tax cut is $1 trillion bucks over 5 years. That is going to help a lot with the deficit.
I assume you mean "tax hike", since lower taxes generally increase the deficit, all else being equal. That said, the deficit isn't really the problem; spending is. Spending $1 trillion over five years is going to have about the same negative effects regardless of whether it's covered by taxes, credit, or inflation. The difference comes down to whether the cost will be born mainly by current taxpayers ("the rich", mostly), future taxpayers, or those currently holding dollars (you—the rich invest).
The way to fix the deficit is to spend less, not tax more. For most of the history of this country the federal government managed to get by on less than a tenth of its current revenues without borrowing extra; there is no excuse for failing to maintain a balanced budget now.
Of course I have a right to do so. It's a democracy. As soon as 51% of us decide it is so, then taxes go up, the ability to export jobs goes down.
Having a majority in a democracy doesn't make your actions right, just popular. Your 51% could vote to murder the other 49%, too; it's still murder. Others have a right to their property just as much as to their lives; both are aspects of self-ownership. You have no more right to take one than the other, no matter how many others may agree with your actions.
I think you would agree if they have 100% of the resources and income that the rest of society is not going to stand for it (and it's a bad thing).
I disagree that it would be a bad thing. There is nothing inherently good or bad about any particular allocation of resources. Unlike theft, for example, which is always wrong.
It's bad for the wealthy too- once they get too excessive, there is a revolt, everything they have is taken and a lot of them are killed.
I agree that this is bad, although the blame lies squarely with the aggressors, not the wealthy. It's also purely destructive; people are generally no better off after the revolt than they were before, in absolute terms. They may live a bit better for a while, but only by borrowing heavily against their own future productivity.
You swear an oath stating that you'll abide by the rules. It's still an agreement. The judge ... can put in you jail if you fail to comply.
Can you even hear yourself? If the alternative is coercion—personal injury, detainment, loss of property, etc.—directed at you or others there can be no "agreement". You can choose to comply or not, but any oath extracted under duress is meaningless.
I was assuming the $1 million from the first case was the minimum required to maintain existing capital investments, so $13 million, less $4 million consumption, less $1 million capital maintenance, leaves $8 million for capital improvement. Perhaps I should have made that more explicit.
No, now they are hiding them out in treasury bonds, which you get to pay them interest for.
That's a political issue, not an economic one. Feel free to petition your representatives in government to stop spending so much.
People without money can't buy products.... Once 1% of the population has EVERY FRIKKIN LAST DIME then your utopia sort of breaks down.
Dollars are only used as a medium of exchange because they happen to be convenient. If 1% of the population were to monopolize the supply of dollars some other currency would take their place. So long as people remain able to produce, and have their property and contract rights fully recognized by the law, the ability to trade productive labor for immediate goods and services is in no danger.
The top 1% can get by fine with a mere 20% of all the wealth and 40% of all the income and share just a little bit with the rest of society.
Perhaps they can, but you certainly have no right to coerce them into doing so. If you really feel it's in their best interest to forfeit part of their well-earned wealth for the sake of egalitarianism, feel free to persuade them to donate to your cause voluntarily. Of course, they may disagree.
Who is better for the economy - one person earning $13 million and spending $4 million or 260 people earning $13 million and spending $12 million?
The former, obviously. If you produce $13 million worth of goods and services, and consume $12 million worth, you only have $1 million to invest in maintaining the capital goods which made that level of productivity possible; at that point you are most likely consuming capital, ensuring your standard of living will gradually decline. You're certainly not going to improve it much. On the other hand, if you produce $13 million worth of goods and services and consume only $4 million worth you have $8 million left over to invest in the capital goods necessary to improve your future productivity and standard of living.
Heck, I'd suggest children be taught on turing machines, and step through _in their head_ their own code.
Not a bad idea, except that Turing machines are not much like any real-work system they're likely to work with. Perhaps they should start with lambda calculus instead. Both systems are Turning-complete, but lambda calculus is much closer to how developers actually write software.
Of course, both Turing machines and lambda calculus have a very steep learning curve, perhaps too much so for an introductory course. Even something as simple as adding (or just representing!) two numbers can become a major undertaking. If you want children to learn how computers actually work you'd probably be better off teaching them a simplified assembly language with something like SPIM, along with binary arithmetic and the basics of discrete mathematics.
In many jurisdictions, you have to pay a fee to use your right to bear arms.... If you contest a ticket, you have to pay a fee to use your right to a jury trial. You have to pay liquor taxes despite the repeal of prohibition.
These examples are equally absurd. The first case is a plain violation of the 2nd Amendment. Trials, jury or otherwise, should be free to the winner; if you contest and win, the one making false accusations should bear the full cost. Anything less is a grave injustice.
"Repeal of prohibition" is not a (constitutional) right in the first place, any more than the lack of prohibition on just about everything else. I find the concept of "legitimate" taxes in general absurd, and special "sin taxes" doubly so, but since there is no constitutional "right to liquor" these taxes have no bearing on the current subject.
If you want to protest in the streets, your city might ask you to pay a fee to exercise your right to peaceably assemble.
That's rent for use of "their" roads, not a fee for exercising your right of assembly. You can assemble without fees on private property (with the owner's permission, of course).
So what is so absurd about this?
What's absurd about it is that it makes constitutionally guaranteed rights into mere privileges. Rights are unconditional. If you must have a license to exercise a "right", and this license can be denied for any reason—including lack of payment—then it's not really a guaranteed right at all.
It's legalized thievery, not a "tax".
Methinks you misunderstand the meaning of "tax". It has never meant anything but "legalized thievery".
It doesn't matter which site you pick; they still can't guarantee a minimum end-to-end bandwidth when part of the route is outside their network. The site could be experiencing a DDoS or unusually high load, or undergoing maintenance; the ISP's upstream provider could be having technical difficulties; there could even be a problem with the client's equipment, such as a bad network cable or poor internal wiring. None of that is the ISP's responsibility. The only parts they can reasonably guarantee are their portion of the customer's connection (generally ending outside the premises), their own network equipment, and the terms of their upstream SLA.
The problem with that is that the ISP can't control anything outside of their network. Sure, if you can show that the bottleneck is within the area they control then the minimum works great—but what if it's the other end that's slowing things down, or congestion outside of the ISP's network? How is the ISP supposed to guarantee that you will always be able to receive 500 kbps from any given server?
I don't think I'd mind nearly as much if Idle's comments page wasn't so broken....
Agreed. Fortunately, there is a workaround: change the "idle" part of the hostname to some other word. Any story can be served from any subdomain; only the page layout changes. It doesn't even have to be a normal /. host; for example, here's this story in the asdf subdomain.
You misunderstand. The Xorg bug doesn't require a malicious GUI app; it just requires a perfectly normal GUI app with an exploitable vulnerability. So if OpenOffice.org (or Acrobat Reader, or Firefox, or any other document viewer) has a flaw which can be exploited by a malicious document, the Xorg bug turns that into a privilege-escalation vulnerability, circumventing not only the normal permission mechanisms but also tools such as SELinux sandboxes (which protect against malicious code running in the sandboxed user application, not the X server).
Of course you keep electing them. What choice do you have? It's not like there's a "none of the above" option on the ballots, to leave the position vacant for a term.