So if I have the opportunity to make $10 million this year, I shouldn't bother going for it, because with all these horrible tax increases I'll end up with only $6.5 million instead of $7 million? I definitely see your point. Seriously, I'd only get $6.5 million? Fuck that, then.
You're ignoring the dynamics of the situation. You can't assume that the rich will mindlessly seek income to the exclusion of all other concerns. They chose to make $10M, rather than $12M, because taking home $7M (of $10M) was worth the cost (in stress and lost leisure time, among other things) and the after-tax equivalent of $12M wasn't.
If taxes increase, then they're still spending the same amount of effort to make that $10M, but only taking home $6.5M. Since the previous take-home of $7M was marginal, $6.5M is likely to be insufficient to justify the same effort, so they may well choose to make just $8M (pre-tax), at less effort, because they prefer the resulting leisure time (or decrease in stress) to the—now decreased—potential after-tax income.
Putting this into more accessible terms:
So if I have the opportunity to buy 10 CDs this year for $120 (ignoring sales tax), I shouldn't bother going for it, because with all these horrible sales tax increases I'll end up with only 7 CDs instead of 8?
Doesn't sound quite so unreasonable now, does it? You may have been willing to buy 8 CDs at $15/ea., but after sales tax increases raise the cost to $17.14/ea. you may well decide to spend some of that money elsewhere, on something that provides more entertainment per dollar. You'll still buy the CDs worth more than $17.14, but will save your money rather than buy the rest.
In the same way, income tax raises the cost of a unit of income. The law of diminishing returns tells us that not all income is worth the same amount; the more income you already have, the less any additional unit of income is worth. When the cost of income increases there comes a point where additional income would have been worthwhile at the old cost, but no longer is due to the increase. This remaining income will no longer be earned.
Since most software contains anti-piracy measures however, it often requires modification to work illegally. Thus, the counterfeit argument makes a lot more sense for software. If you get a pirated copy of Windoze and it crashes due to modifications made to disable the DRM (something real windows never does), it would besmirch Microsoft's flawless reputation for making stable, secure products, so counterfeit makes a lot more sense as a label.
All true, but just as with physical counterfeits, it's only fraud if there is deception, i.e. if the buyer is not informed. It shouldn't be illegal to sell (or otherwise distribute) fake brand-name merchandise provided the recipient knows they're not getting the real thing.
They would not have no obligations, provided they didn't advertise to Massachusetts residents, such as via the Internet, national newspapers or television networks.... Their actions—advertising—did occur within the boundaries of Massachusetts.
Even allowing for the moment that the advertising does occur within Massachusetts, it's not like mere advertising gives them any data about the customer. Massachusetts could say "you can't advertise here unless you follow all our laws", since we're considering that an action within the state, but IMHO that's the end of it. Mass. has no legitimate jurisdiction over the trade itself, since that is occurring outside of the state.
In this I'm only considering advertising that can reasonably be said to occur in Mass., i.e. billboards, local television/radio ads broadcast from within Mass., etc. Perhaps online ads, if they're hosted from servers within Mass. Advertising served from an out-of-state server does not occur within Mass., and thus would not count.
Conversely, if a company based in one state... sells goods to residents of the other state, ships goods there, takes orders from citizens there, etc., why shouldn't they be held to the same consumer protection standards of business that are based there?
Um... perhaps because none of that is taking place within the state?
As for shipping goods, that does occur across state lines, but the goods belong to the resident from the moment they're handed off to the shipper. Any interstate shipping involves just the resident and the shipping company, e.g. UPS, FedEx, or USPS, not the seller.
Receiving orders is similar: while crossing state lines the orders belong to the buyer, and are carried by the communications or delivery company. The seller doesn't receive them until they are in the seller's state.
In short, if you place an online order or mail-order with a company in another state, it should be considered no different than if you had traveled to that state, placed the order there, and then traveled back with the goods, none of which should cause the company you bought the goods from to become subject to your home state's laws.
If you're a company that doesn't do business within the boundaries of the state, then you're not part of this law. It requires the encryption only when you're storing personal information on Mass. residents. And if you don't do business with a Mass. resident, then wtf do you have their personal information?
Not doing business within the boundary of Mass. is not the same thing as not doing business with a Mass. resident.
For example, let's say the Mass. resident traveled to another state, purchased something, and then traveled back home. On what justification would Mass. be permitted to impose obligations on the seller, who was never in Mass. in the first place?
Mail-order and online commerce is no different. The buyer sends an order request to the company, which receives it in their state (outside of Mass.). The property changes ownership in the company's state, and then the customer's property is shipped back to Mass., which only involves the seller at the point of origin (again, outside of Mass.). At no point did any of the company's actions occur within the boundaries of Mass., so why should they be subject to Mass. state law?
Sane NAT works by looking at the 5-tuple protocol, src address, dst address, src port, dst port.
You're right, of course. Still, Comcast can't have all their subscribers behind a single public IP, if only for routing purposes. Even if they did, it would be far more efficient to subdivide their network with additional public IPs, each of which could accommodate another 16 million subscribers in a 10.0.0.0/8 private network—that's (optimistically) the entire world population with just two public/24s—rather than using public IP allocations for their subscribers directly. Perhaps that's what they are doing, but I read "had to get ARIN allocations to keep signing new customers up" to mean they are using ARIN allocations instead of the private 10.0.0.0/8 range for new customers, not in addition to it.
Why would Comcast need a unique private address for every subscriber? They already need a different public address for each region, just for routing purposes, and each public address can be associated with its own private network in the 10.0.0.0/8 subnet. Over 16 million addresses per region should be more than enough room.
They can't have that many subscribers all using the same public address anyway: every NAT'ed connection requires a unique combination of public address and port, and there are only 64k ports to choose from, many of which are reserved. If they used separate subnets for each public IP then they would need, at most, a single/16 private address space, independent of the total number of subscribers—and that's assuming that they only permit one connection at a time from each client on average. They could stretch that a bit further by overbooking each public address (assuming the average number of connections per client is less than one), but not enough to overflow a/8. To put that many clients behind a single public IP would only allow, at most, one active connection for every 256 clients, which is not at all reasonable.
For BitTorrent clients, see this list (sort by the last column). Includes uTorrent, Transmission, Vuze, KTorrent, BitTorrent 6, BitTornado, qBitTorrent, Opera, BitTyrant, and Deluge, among others.
On the tracker side, Opentracker—used by TPB and many others—also supports IPv6.
If you can come up with a way for a group of people to make decisions without having arbitrary two-thirds or simple majority votes, go ahead and try it!
Unanimous Consent. One does not require the approval of the entire (arbitrarily defined) group to act, of course, but anyone who dissents must not be harmed by the action. I.e., the vote must be unanimous among those directly impacted by it.
Right... if people use it. The paranoid ones can always assign themselves random host addresses unrelated to their MAC address. For example, I have IPv6 set up at home (via 6to4 anycast), and my desktop, as the 6to4 gateway, has an external IPv6 address of 2002:a.b.c.d:0::1, which isn't based on any MAC address. Other systems on my WiFi network, however, will default to auto-assigned host addresses in the 2002:a.b.c.d:1::/64 subnet.
Money only has indirect utility, and it only has that because somebody is out there manufacturing bolts.
You might as well say that the bolts only have indirect utility in that others are manufacturing things to be fastened together. In what way would a lone bolt have any direct utility, after all?
Currency is a complementary good. It requires other goods to be useful, yes, but that is no different from many other goods and does not detract from its utility.
If a tribe had zero wealth then it would not need money, nor would it acquire any wealth by printing it.
Yes, and if a tribe had nothing to assemble it would not need bolts, nor would it acquire any wealth by producing them. Currency derives its value from the need for a medium of indirect exchange, just as bolts derive their value from the need for a means of connecting things together.
The addition of counterfeit money does not lower transaction costs; in fact it RAISES them, because now all traders must expend effort to validate the currency they recieve.
The higher transaction costs are not entirely due to the counterfeiters. Validation is only required to comply with anti-counterfeiting laws, which are an artifact of fiat currency. Much of the blame goes to those who would attempt to substitute fiat currency for that which does not require any such validation.
Anyway, we were talking about the utility of currency itself, however it was produced, not the act of counterfeiting per se. Currency has utility as a medium of exchange; for this purpose it doesn't matter whether it is legal or counterfeit. A perfect counterfeit would work just as well as a bill printed by the Treasury. Ergo, your statement "a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does" is false. Both have utility.
Also, I never said I subscribed to the utilitarian position myself; so far as I am concerned the present utility of a good can only be objectively measured by the demand for it; anything else is nothing more than opinion based on one's own subjective preferences.
There is NO demand for counterfeit currency, and everyone rejects it as soon as they become aware of it.
Again, only because of anti-counterfeiting laws. If use of counterfeit bills was not strictly punished, or there was no test which could reliably distinguish between legal and counterfeit bills, no one would care where the bills originated.
You say that counterfeiters are responding to a demand for more currency, yet in today's inflationary climate (in which currency is slightly oversupplied) we see counterfeiters operating nonetheless, which means there is an error in your line of reasoning.
You have a strange definition of "oversupplied". To me, "oversupplied" means that supply of a good is greater than the demand for it, such that the good no longer commands a price capable of offsetting the cost of producing it. Clearly for counterfeiting to be profitable that cannot be the case: the demand for currency is much greater than the cost of producing it.
Inflation implies that the supply of currency is increasing; it does not imply that the currency is oversupplied. In fact, due to anti-counterfeiting laws fiat currency is continually undersupplied, which is where the profitability of counterfeiting arises. There is always profit to be had in circumventing an (effective) production limit.
If fiat currency could remain practical at a market-determined price—one where supply and demand were equal—then without anti-counterfeiting laws the supply would simply rise until counterfeiting was no longer profitable, at which point it would be just as good as any other commodity currency. Unfortunately for fiat currency, its market price is deliberately designed to be nearly zero, which is impractical in any currency. Other commodities would take its place long before that point.
Neither inflation nor deflation have that motivation, because interest rates on loans always take account of the inflation/deflation rate and so neither lender nor borrower is enriched.
Sure, so long as the rate of change is constant, and ownership of alternatives to the fiat currency is not prohibited. In that case, of course, the inflation need have no effect at all, since you can trivially compensate for it by adjusting interest rates and buying non-inflationary assets (read: gold) rather than retaining dollars. As such, why not make things much simpler for everyone and just do away with it?
In practice, of course, just measuring even the past rate of inflation is extremely difficult—just look at how how CPI has been continually redefined over the years, such that one cannot directly compare recent CPI figures with historical ones to get an idea of the actual rate of change over time. The present rate of inflation is essentially unknowable, and you can't compensate for what you don't know. Moreover, if you're trying to match inflation to "creation of new wealth" then you're not even trying to hold the inflation rate constant; frequent transient variations are to be expected, so only long-term loans can really be adjusted to compensate based on a predicted average rate.
This is putting aside the fact that the Treasury mainly prints new money to finance federal debt, making inflation a form of hidden tax on currency.
Yes it is, but it is gain accomplished by the creation of new wealth. Whereas a counterfeiter produces no wealth to offset the inflation he causes.
Production of non-currency goods creates non-currency with no increase in currency, and thus devalues the goods produced while fulfilling the demand for said goods (creating wealth). Production of currency (counterfeiting or legal printing) creates currency with no increase in non-currency, and thus devalues the currency while fulfilling the demand for it (also creating wealth). The situations are symmetric.
As I said above, a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does. Do you not see the difference? Or have you come up with a marvelous new use for small green pieces of fabric?
Utility is in the eye of the beholder (or in this case, owner). Subjectively, those "small green pieces of fabric" have utility to me so long as others are willing to accept them in exchange for other goods, which is why I accept them myself. Objectively, as with any other good, the utility (value) of currency is defined by the demand for it, and you can hardly claim that there is no demand for currency. Any other measure is subjective, and thus meaningless in this context.
Use as a medium for indirect exchange is a perfectly valid form of utility, BTW, even by utilitarian standards. Indirect exchange depends on a medium (currency), and creates wealth relative to direct exchange by allowing transactions which would otherwise not occur.
Overproduction would not create wealth, but counterfeiting is not overproduction: it only occurs because there is more demand for currency than there is supply. The problem is that those in power want to keep it this way, rather than allow supply and demand to come into balance, because fiat currency (unlike commodity currencies, e.g. gold) has a natural price approaching zero. If supply were permitted to rise to match demand people would migrate to another currency—one the politicians can't control so easily.
Those rules already existed and they were, and are, quite obvious to anyone in our society that isn't brain damaged or so socially inept they must be kept under supervision.
I'm so glad that you decided to keep this thread civil...
The constitution codifies social rules for privacy in order to limit the authorized powers of the feds.
Only because the feds are granted powers private citizens don't have. To limit abuses of these powers they are required to get a court to sign off of on violating the property rights of others before they can legally mandate that others grant them access to their private property for search or seizure—something which private citizens are not permitted to do under any circumstances. This has nothing to do with "social rules for privacy".
In the context of your original comment I read "justification" to mean "legal justification", as in: if you don't have justification then the action is unconstitutional. I still think this reading was reasonable. However, if all you meant was "justification for breaking a social convention", feel free to disregard my reply on that point; I really don't care about your mere social conventions in the first place, much less what you feel would or would not justify breaking them, so there is no point in arguing over it.
You are not welcome to walk in my door just because I have not put a lock upon it; the social boundary is obvious.
Sure, if it's just a matter of there not being a lock. I'd have to open the door, which is your private property. It's a different matter if there is no door, however, or if the door is already open. In these cases it is neither generally illegal nor clearly wrong to enter.
Regardless of whether I encrypt (or employ other hardening), interception of private communications is understood to be wrong, and obviously so.
Obviously not by everyone; reasonably people can and do disagree. You are extrapolating your personal sense of morality into a universal code which simply does not exist.
Inflation is a desirable practice precisely because it discourages people from treating their dollars as a stable store of value.
Desirable to who? Certainly not those currently holding dollars, who would prefer that their currency increase in value. If someone else would prefer less valuable dollars, and has the capacity to achieve this by creating more, fine—as I said, inflation is not damage; I have no problem with increases in the supply of fiat currency. Those who wish to avoid the effects should choose a more stable store of value.
Obviously this means I am opposed to forcing anyone to use fiat currency, as was done by President Roosevelt under Executive Order 6102 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, in which the federal government confiscated privately-owned gold coin, bullion, and certificates and made ownership of and trade in gold illegal until the Act was repealed by President Ford after 1974.
However, should public monetary policy really be motivated by a desire to enrich some (mainly borrowers) entirely at the expense of others (potential lenders)? If so, why?
P.S. In a deflationary economy, "hoarding" currency is a real investment, in the same way that "hoarding" collectibles which one expects to increase in value is an investment. It increases net wealth through saving—present production financing future, not present, consumption—which is the only means of doing so aside from unpredictable technological windfalls. The fear surrounding currency deflation is irrational.
Meanwhile, counterfeiting is wrong because it is the use of inflation for personal private gain.
And other increases in the supply of goods leading to their devaluation—such as production in general—aren't "for personal private gain"? If I manufacture a bolt (for example) then I inflate the supply of bolts, leading to a small but real decrease in the value of (at least) all compatible bolts held by others. Manufacture of this bolt is motivated by profit: my own personal, private gain. Is this wrong? If so, why? If not, why does your answer change after substituting "twenty-dollar bill" for "bolt"?
If counterfeiting is wrong because it inflates the supply of currency, then production in general is also wrong, as it inflates the supply of the goods produced. There is absolutely no difference.
Inflation—more generally, any increase in the supply of any good leading to its devaluation—is not damage. Everyone has a right to their dollars, but, as with any good, no one has a right to receive any specific price for those dollars in the marketplace.
The problem is that people, with the strong encouragement of governments, insist on treating as a stable store of value objects which have essentially no direct use valued in proportional to the price paid for them, not even as raw material, and which thus only command a nonzero price due to the artificial scarcity granted them via enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws and restraint on the part of the Treasury (as limited as that may be...).
With the ability to read the constitution - and reason above a third grade level - it is 100% clear that spying on a US citizen's communications without probable cause AND a warrant is not an authorized power for the US government or a US state.
But then you had to go and ruin it:
It is also doubtful that there exists, or can exist with constitution as currently constructed, a justification for a private citizen exercising such a power.
The Constitution does not apply to private citizens. It is a document which enumerates the powers granted (or explicitly withheld from) the federal government and the states. It may be argued (though I would disagree) that the Constitution permits the federal government to prohibit private citizens from sending or receiving the radio signals required to eavesdrop on the cell phone system. If so, this would be in the domain of the FCC. However, nothing in the Constitution requires the federal government to prohibit such actions.
Unauthorized interception of someone's physical mail, or tapping into a wired communication system, is prohibited under common law as a violation of another party's property rights (in the mail or the wires, not the content--note that it is up to the owner of the wires to guarantee communications privacy to the end-users). Transmitting radio signals so as to alter the behavior of the cell system could be argued to fall under the same heading. However, nothing in the common law would prevent anyone from passively receiving and decoding the signals that system transmits over the air. If that is a problem, either (a) encrypt your over-the-air communications, or (b) communicate through a channel over which—unlike free-space radio—one can legitimately claim property-rights.
A completely open space is, indeed, far harder to attack than a wall. However, it does not fulfill the purpose for which walls are designed, namely: to protect the things behind the wall.
Except that, regardless of who you're voting for, one thing about that person is certain based simply on the fact that they're on the ballot: they are a politician. Being a politician—running for political office—means that one endorses the use of political means (aggression) to achieve one's goals, in short: to dictate how other people may employ (only) their own private property.
Voting for individuals who demonstrably cannot fully recognize private property may help you get a bit closer to your goal in the short term, but at the same time undermines any possibility there might be of achieving your ultimate goal, full recognition of all private property rights.
However, unlike an engine, prime mover(moover?) ends up being edible so you don't have the problem of "burning food for fuel" that your corn burning engine would have.
Yes, you do. The food the cow is burning to drive the treadmill is not simultaneously available to help to cow grow. Unless, of course, you meant that in a political sense, rather than a thermodynamic one, in which case the argument makes perfect sense: most people won't understand that there is no energy advantage to be had from burning corn in a cow vs. in a car, so this approach gives you advantages of ethanol without provoking the "burning food for fuel" protesters.
Violations of freedom #6 do detract from the advantages of open software. Among other issues, it prevents you (and others) from porting such code to FOSS projects, or making use of GPL-only libraries. It's also more difficult to get a company to even allow use, much less adaptation, of software under a non-OSI-approved license; they'll be forced to treat it as a unique case, the same as any proprietary software license, unlike FOSS licenses where use and verbatim distribution are never an issue.
If you're willing to accept all of that in exchange for—maybe—a few commercial licenses, fine; just don't underestimate what you're giving up relative to a fully Open Source license, or claim that your project is FOSS when it falls short of the definition of Open Source.
One problem: The family of licenses you link to are not FOSS licenses, as they do not guarantee all of the freedoms in the Open Source Definition. In particular:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
If you want to restrict commercial use you'll have to do more than just avoid GPL and BSD. No FOSS license, however worded or structured, can specify separate terms for commercial use.
What makes you so sure that the hardware (FPGA) implementation is "deserving" of a patent? If a mathematical algorithm can be translated in a straightforward manner into HDL, which can then be automatically converted into a bitstream for an FPGA, then I would say that the resulting hardware design is just as obvious as the equivalent software running on a computer, and similarly ineligible.
You might have a better case if you had to invent a novel and non-obvious process to map the algorithm to an FPGA bitstream, or if you employed a new, more efficient way of mapping parts of the algorithm to hardware. However, if all you did was translate a known algorithm into a logic circuit using well-known techniques, then there really is nothing new, process-wise, to be patented.
As for patenting the algorithm itself, independent of any hardware or software implementation, that path leads inevitably to thought-crime: if the patent were to cover the algorithm itself, then calculating RSA in your head would infringe on the patent just as much as implementing it in an FPGA or computer software. This is one of the reasons pure math is not subject to patents in the first place.
Well by that standard, why are we a "free market economy" where as Cuba is not.
They do have a thriving black market, and by your standards that would mean they have a thriving free market as well?
No country that I know of today really has a "free market economy". That said, when one claims that a country has a certain type of economy they generally refer to the economic structure deliberately permitted, encouraged or imposed by the government of that country, so the black market really wouldn't count. In that sense, above-ground free trade between individuals and organizations is much more prevalent in the US or EU than in Cuba, where the government attempts to wield tightly centralized control over the economy, including employment, and common household goods (such as computers) and services (such as Internet access) are prohibited to all but a select few.
The free market consists of both legal and underground trade, and in all likelihood Cuba's black market, even if "thriving", is insufficient to make up for its limited legal trade. If nothing else, being forced to deal in a market whose member are, by definition, criminals tends to raise transaction costs quite a bit above those found in legal markets for the same goods. Higher transaction costs mean more costly goods overall, and correspondingly less trade.
However, for unauthorized transfers involving only your debit card number (not the loss of the card), you are liable only for transfers that occur after 60 days following the mailing of your bank statement containing the unauthorized use and before you report the loss.
You don't have to check your bank balance daily—just make sure you don't lose the physical card, and review your monthly statements. You would have to do just as much for a credit card.
The bar's employees have just as much choice regarding whether to work in that particular bar, or for that matter any bar, as the bar's customers have regarding whether to patronize it. Yes, I am saying that "you shouldn't be able to legislate that someone provide a [workplace] you prefer." Employment is not some sort of unique good deserving of different treatment than other products or services. Supporting OSHA for employee protection is just as much a mistake as supporting smoking bans for customer protection, and for the same reasons.
You are the final authority on your own understanding, and often enough there is no one else who could testify as to whether or not you read the contract. If you have any significant doubt at all as to your understanding of the terms, the right choice is to refuse to sign. If enough people make that choice then the contracts will be rewritten in clearer language.
All we're asking is that you tell the truth. How can you possibly object to that?
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So if I have the opportunity to make $10 million this year, I shouldn't bother going for it, because with all these horrible tax increases I'll end up with only $6.5 million instead of $7 million? I definitely see your point. Seriously, I'd only get $6.5 million? Fuck that, then.
You're ignoring the dynamics of the situation. You can't assume that the rich will mindlessly seek income to the exclusion of all other concerns. They chose to make $10M, rather than $12M, because taking home $7M (of $10M) was worth the cost (in stress and lost leisure time, among other things) and the after-tax equivalent of $12M wasn't.
If taxes increase, then they're still spending the same amount of effort to make that $10M, but only taking home $6.5M. Since the previous take-home of $7M was marginal, $6.5M is likely to be insufficient to justify the same effort, so they may well choose to make just $8M (pre-tax), at less effort, because they prefer the resulting leisure time (or decrease in stress) to the—now decreased—potential after-tax income.
Putting this into more accessible terms:
So if I have the opportunity to buy 10 CDs this year for $120 (ignoring sales tax), I shouldn't bother going for it, because with all these horrible sales tax increases I'll end up with only 7 CDs instead of 8?
Doesn't sound quite so unreasonable now, does it? You may have been willing to buy 8 CDs at $15/ea., but after sales tax increases raise the cost to $17.14/ea. you may well decide to spend some of that money elsewhere, on something that provides more entertainment per dollar. You'll still buy the CDs worth more than $17.14, but will save your money rather than buy the rest.
In the same way, income tax raises the cost of a unit of income. The law of diminishing returns tells us that not all income is worth the same amount; the more income you already have, the less any additional unit of income is worth. When the cost of income increases there comes a point where additional income would have been worthwhile at the old cost, but no longer is due to the increase. This remaining income will no longer be earned.
Since most software contains anti-piracy measures however, it often requires modification to work illegally. Thus, the counterfeit argument makes a lot more sense for software. If you get a pirated copy of Windoze and it crashes due to modifications made to disable the DRM (something real windows never does), it would besmirch Microsoft's flawless reputation for making stable, secure products, so counterfeit makes a lot more sense as a label.
All true, but just as with physical counterfeits, it's only fraud if there is deception, i.e. if the buyer is not informed. It shouldn't be illegal to sell (or otherwise distribute) fake brand-name merchandise provided the recipient knows they're not getting the real thing.
They would not have no obligations, provided they didn't advertise to Massachusetts residents, such as via the Internet, national newspapers or television networks. ... Their actions—advertising—did occur within the boundaries of Massachusetts.
Even allowing for the moment that the advertising does occur within Massachusetts, it's not like mere advertising gives them any data about the customer. Massachusetts could say "you can't advertise here unless you follow all our laws", since we're considering that an action within the state, but IMHO that's the end of it. Mass. has no legitimate jurisdiction over the trade itself, since that is occurring outside of the state.
In this I'm only considering advertising that can reasonably be said to occur in Mass., i.e. billboards, local television/radio ads broadcast from within Mass., etc. Perhaps online ads, if they're hosted from servers within Mass. Advertising served from an out-of-state server does not occur within Mass., and thus would not count.
Conversely, if a company based in one state ... sells goods to residents of the other state, ships goods there, takes orders from citizens there, etc., why shouldn't they be held to the same consumer protection standards of business that are based there?
Um... perhaps because none of that is taking place within the state?
As for shipping goods, that does occur across state lines, but the goods belong to the resident from the moment they're handed off to the shipper. Any interstate shipping involves just the resident and the shipping company, e.g. UPS, FedEx, or USPS, not the seller.
Receiving orders is similar: while crossing state lines the orders belong to the buyer, and are carried by the communications or delivery company. The seller doesn't receive them until they are in the seller's state.
In short, if you place an online order or mail-order with a company in another state, it should be considered no different than if you had traveled to that state, placed the order there, and then traveled back with the goods, none of which should cause the company you bought the goods from to become subject to your home state's laws.
If you're a company that doesn't do business within the boundaries of the state, then you're not part of this law. It requires the encryption only when you're storing personal information on Mass. residents. And if you don't do business with a Mass. resident, then wtf do you have their personal information?
Not doing business within the boundary of Mass. is not the same thing as not doing business with a Mass. resident.
For example, let's say the Mass. resident traveled to another state, purchased something, and then traveled back home. On what justification would Mass. be permitted to impose obligations on the seller, who was never in Mass. in the first place?
Mail-order and online commerce is no different. The buyer sends an order request to the company, which receives it in their state (outside of Mass.). The property changes ownership in the company's state, and then the customer's property is shipped back to Mass., which only involves the seller at the point of origin (again, outside of Mass.). At no point did any of the company's actions occur within the boundaries of Mass., so why should they be subject to Mass. state law?
Sane NAT works by looking at the 5-tuple protocol, src address, dst address, src port, dst port.
You're right, of course. Still, Comcast can't have all their subscribers behind a single public IP, if only for routing purposes. Even if they did, it would be far more efficient to subdivide their network with additional public IPs, each of which could accommodate another 16 million subscribers in a 10.0.0.0/8 private network—that's (optimistically) the entire world population with just two public /24s—rather than using public IP allocations for their subscribers directly. Perhaps that's what they are doing, but I read "had to get ARIN allocations to keep signing new customers up" to mean they are using ARIN allocations instead of the private 10.0.0.0/8 range for new customers, not in addition to it.
Why would Comcast need a unique private address for every subscriber? They already need a different public address for each region, just for routing purposes, and each public address can be associated with its own private network in the 10.0.0.0/8 subnet. Over 16 million addresses per region should be more than enough room.
They can't have that many subscribers all using the same public address anyway: every NAT'ed connection requires a unique combination of public address and port, and there are only 64k ports to choose from, many of which are reserved. If they used separate subnets for each public IP then they would need, at most, a single /16 private address space, independent of the total number of subscribers—and that's assuming that they only permit one connection at a time from each client on average. They could stretch that a bit further by overbooking each public address (assuming the average number of connections per client is less than one), but not enough to overflow a /8. To put that many clients behind a single public IP would only allow, at most, one active connection for every 256 clients, which is not at all reasonable.
For BitTorrent clients, see this list (sort by the last column). Includes uTorrent, Transmission, Vuze, KTorrent, BitTorrent 6, BitTornado, qBitTorrent, Opera, BitTyrant, and Deluge, among others.
On the tracker side, Opentracker—used by TPB and many others—also supports IPv6.
If you can come up with a way for a group of people to make decisions without having arbitrary two-thirds or simple majority votes, go ahead and try it!
Unanimous Consent. One does not require the approval of the entire (arbitrarily defined) group to act, of course, but anyone who dissents must not be harmed by the action. I.e., the vote must be unanimous among those directly impacted by it.
Right... if people use it. The paranoid ones can always assign themselves random host addresses unrelated to their MAC address. For example, I have IPv6 set up at home (via 6to4 anycast), and my desktop, as the 6to4 gateway, has an external IPv6 address of 2002:a.b.c.d:0::1, which isn't based on any MAC address. Other systems on my WiFi network, however, will default to auto-assigned host addresses in the 2002:a.b.c.d:1::/64 subnet.
Money only has indirect utility, and it only has that because somebody is out there manufacturing bolts.
You might as well say that the bolts only have indirect utility in that others are manufacturing things to be fastened together. In what way would a lone bolt have any direct utility, after all?
Currency is a complementary good. It requires other goods to be useful, yes, but that is no different from many other goods and does not detract from its utility.
If a tribe had zero wealth then it would not need money, nor would it acquire any wealth by printing it.
Yes, and if a tribe had nothing to assemble it would not need bolts, nor would it acquire any wealth by producing them. Currency derives its value from the need for a medium of indirect exchange, just as bolts derive their value from the need for a means of connecting things together.
The addition of counterfeit money does not lower transaction costs; in fact it RAISES them, because now all traders must expend effort to validate the currency they recieve.
The higher transaction costs are not entirely due to the counterfeiters. Validation is only required to comply with anti-counterfeiting laws, which are an artifact of fiat currency. Much of the blame goes to those who would attempt to substitute fiat currency for that which does not require any such validation.
Anyway, we were talking about the utility of currency itself, however it was produced, not the act of counterfeiting per se. Currency has utility as a medium of exchange; for this purpose it doesn't matter whether it is legal or counterfeit. A perfect counterfeit would work just as well as a bill printed by the Treasury. Ergo, your statement "a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does" is false. Both have utility.
Also, I never said I subscribed to the utilitarian position myself; so far as I am concerned the present utility of a good can only be objectively measured by the demand for it; anything else is nothing more than opinion based on one's own subjective preferences.
There is NO demand for counterfeit currency, and everyone rejects it as soon as they become aware of it.
Again, only because of anti-counterfeiting laws. If use of counterfeit bills was not strictly punished, or there was no test which could reliably distinguish between legal and counterfeit bills, no one would care where the bills originated.
You say that counterfeiters are responding to a demand for more currency, yet in today's inflationary climate (in which currency is slightly oversupplied) we see counterfeiters operating nonetheless, which means there is an error in your line of reasoning.
You have a strange definition of "oversupplied". To me, "oversupplied" means that supply of a good is greater than the demand for it, such that the good no longer commands a price capable of offsetting the cost of producing it. Clearly for counterfeiting to be profitable that cannot be the case: the demand for currency is much greater than the cost of producing it.
Inflation implies that the supply of currency is increasing; it does not imply that the currency is oversupplied. In fact, due to anti-counterfeiting laws fiat currency is continually undersupplied, which is where the profitability of counterfeiting arises. There is always profit to be had in circumventing an (effective) production limit.
If fiat currency could remain practical at a market-determined price—one where supply and demand were equal—then without anti-counterfeiting laws the supply would simply rise until counterfeiting was no longer profitable, at which point it would be just as good as any other commodity currency. Unfortunately for fiat currency, its market price is deliberately designed to be nearly zero, which is impractical in any currency. Other commodities would take its place long before that point.
Neither inflation nor deflation have that motivation, because interest rates on loans always take account of the inflation/deflation rate and so neither lender nor borrower is enriched.
Sure, so long as the rate of change is constant, and ownership of alternatives to the fiat currency is not prohibited. In that case, of course, the inflation need have no effect at all, since you can trivially compensate for it by adjusting interest rates and buying non-inflationary assets (read: gold) rather than retaining dollars. As such, why not make things much simpler for everyone and just do away with it?
In practice, of course, just measuring even the past rate of inflation is extremely difficult—just look at how how CPI has been continually redefined over the years, such that one cannot directly compare recent CPI figures with historical ones to get an idea of the actual rate of change over time. The present rate of inflation is essentially unknowable, and you can't compensate for what you don't know. Moreover, if you're trying to match inflation to "creation of new wealth" then you're not even trying to hold the inflation rate constant; frequent transient variations are to be expected, so only long-term loans can really be adjusted to compensate based on a predicted average rate.
This is putting aside the fact that the Treasury mainly prints new money to finance federal debt, making inflation a form of hidden tax on currency.
Yes it is, but it is gain accomplished by the creation of new wealth. Whereas a counterfeiter produces no wealth to offset the inflation he causes.
Production of non-currency goods creates non-currency with no increase in currency, and thus devalues the goods produced while fulfilling the demand for said goods (creating wealth). Production of currency (counterfeiting or legal printing) creates currency with no increase in non-currency, and thus devalues the currency while fulfilling the demand for it (also creating wealth). The situations are symmetric.
As I said above, a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does. Do you not see the difference? Or have you come up with a marvelous new use for small green pieces of fabric?
Utility is in the eye of the beholder (or in this case, owner). Subjectively, those "small green pieces of fabric" have utility to me so long as others are willing to accept them in exchange for other goods, which is why I accept them myself. Objectively, as with any other good, the utility (value) of currency is defined by the demand for it, and you can hardly claim that there is no demand for currency. Any other measure is subjective, and thus meaningless in this context.
Use as a medium for indirect exchange is a perfectly valid form of utility, BTW, even by utilitarian standards. Indirect exchange depends on a medium (currency), and creates wealth relative to direct exchange by allowing transactions which would otherwise not occur.
Overproduction would not create wealth, but counterfeiting is not overproduction: it only occurs because there is more demand for currency than there is supply. The problem is that those in power want to keep it this way, rather than allow supply and demand to come into balance, because fiat currency (unlike commodity currencies, e.g. gold) has a natural price approaching zero. If supply were permitted to rise to match demand people would migrate to another currency—one the politicians can't control so easily.
Those rules already existed and they were, and are, quite obvious to anyone in our society that isn't brain damaged or so socially inept they must be kept under supervision.
I'm so glad that you decided to keep this thread civil...
The constitution codifies social rules for privacy in order to limit the authorized powers of the feds.
Only because the feds are granted powers private citizens don't have. To limit abuses of these powers they are required to get a court to sign off of on violating the property rights of others before they can legally mandate that others grant them access to their private property for search or seizure—something which private citizens are not permitted to do under any circumstances. This has nothing to do with "social rules for privacy".
In the context of your original comment I read "justification" to mean "legal justification", as in: if you don't have justification then the action is unconstitutional. I still think this reading was reasonable. However, if all you meant was "justification for breaking a social convention", feel free to disregard my reply on that point; I really don't care about your mere social conventions in the first place, much less what you feel would or would not justify breaking them, so there is no point in arguing over it.
You are not welcome to walk in my door just because I have not put a lock upon it; the social boundary is obvious.
Sure, if it's just a matter of there not being a lock. I'd have to open the door, which is your private property. It's a different matter if there is no door, however, or if the door is already open. In these cases it is neither generally illegal nor clearly wrong to enter.
Regardless of whether I encrypt (or employ other hardening), interception of private communications is understood to be wrong, and obviously so.
Obviously not by everyone; reasonably people can and do disagree. You are extrapolating your personal sense of morality into a universal code which simply does not exist.
Inflation is a desirable practice precisely because it discourages people from treating their dollars as a stable store of value.
Desirable to who? Certainly not those currently holding dollars, who would prefer that their currency increase in value. If someone else would prefer less valuable dollars, and has the capacity to achieve this by creating more, fine—as I said, inflation is not damage; I have no problem with increases in the supply of fiat currency. Those who wish to avoid the effects should choose a more stable store of value.
Obviously this means I am opposed to forcing anyone to use fiat currency, as was done by President Roosevelt under Executive Order 6102 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, in which the federal government confiscated privately-owned gold coin, bullion, and certificates and made ownership of and trade in gold illegal until the Act was repealed by President Ford after 1974.
However, should public monetary policy really be motivated by a desire to enrich some (mainly borrowers) entirely at the expense of others (potential lenders)? If so, why?
P.S. In a deflationary economy, "hoarding" currency is a real investment, in the same way that "hoarding" collectibles which one expects to increase in value is an investment. It increases net wealth through saving—present production financing future, not present, consumption—which is the only means of doing so aside from unpredictable technological windfalls. The fear surrounding currency deflation is irrational.
Meanwhile, counterfeiting is wrong because it is the use of inflation for personal private gain.
And other increases in the supply of goods leading to their devaluation—such as production in general—aren't "for personal private gain"? If I manufacture a bolt (for example) then I inflate the supply of bolts, leading to a small but real decrease in the value of (at least) all compatible bolts held by others. Manufacture of this bolt is motivated by profit: my own personal, private gain. Is this wrong? If so, why? If not, why does your answer change after substituting "twenty-dollar bill" for "bolt"?
If counterfeiting is wrong because it inflates the supply of currency, then production in general is also wrong, as it inflates the supply of the goods produced. There is absolutely no difference.
The damage from counterfeiting is inflation.
Inflation—more generally, any increase in the supply of any good leading to its devaluation—is not damage. Everyone has a right to their dollars, but, as with any good, no one has a right to receive any specific price for those dollars in the marketplace.
The problem is that people, with the strong encouragement of governments, insist on treating as a stable store of value objects which have essentially no direct use valued in proportional to the price paid for them, not even as raw material, and which thus only command a nonzero price due to the artificial scarcity granted them via enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws and restraint on the part of the Treasury (as limited as that may be...).
You started out so well...
With the ability to read the constitution - and reason above a third grade level - it is 100% clear that spying on a US citizen's communications without probable cause AND a warrant is not an authorized power for the US government or a US state.
But then you had to go and ruin it:
It is also doubtful that there exists, or can exist with constitution as currently constructed, a justification for a private citizen exercising such a power.
The Constitution does not apply to private citizens. It is a document which enumerates the powers granted (or explicitly withheld from) the federal government and the states. It may be argued (though I would disagree) that the Constitution permits the federal government to prohibit private citizens from sending or receiving the radio signals required to eavesdrop on the cell phone system. If so, this would be in the domain of the FCC. However, nothing in the Constitution requires the federal government to prohibit such actions.
Unauthorized interception of someone's physical mail, or tapping into a wired communication system, is prohibited under common law as a violation of another party's property rights (in the mail or the wires, not the content--note that it is up to the owner of the wires to guarantee communications privacy to the end-users). Transmitting radio signals so as to alter the behavior of the cell system could be argued to fall under the same heading. However, nothing in the common law would prevent anyone from passively receiving and decoding the signals that system transmits over the air. If that is a problem, either (a) encrypt your over-the-air communications, or (b) communicate through a channel over which—unlike free-space radio—one can legitimately claim property-rights.
A completely open space is, indeed, far harder to attack than a wall. However, it does not fulfill the purpose for which walls are designed, namely: to protect the things behind the wall.
Don't like it? Start voting.
Except that, regardless of who you're voting for, one thing about that person is certain based simply on the fact that they're on the ballot: they are a politician. Being a politician—running for political office—means that one endorses the use of political means (aggression) to achieve one's goals, in short: to dictate how other people may employ (only) their own private property.
Voting for individuals who demonstrably cannot fully recognize private property may help you get a bit closer to your goal in the short term, but at the same time undermines any possibility there might be of achieving your ultimate goal, full recognition of all private property rights.
See also: the alternative.
However, unlike an engine, prime mover(moover?) ends up being edible so you don't have the problem of "burning food for fuel" that your corn burning engine would have.
Yes, you do. The food the cow is burning to drive the treadmill is not simultaneously available to help to cow grow. Unless, of course, you meant that in a political sense, rather than a thermodynamic one, in which case the argument makes perfect sense: most people won't understand that there is no energy advantage to be had from burning corn in a cow vs. in a car, so this approach gives you advantages of ethanol without provoking the "burning food for fuel" protesters.
Violations of freedom #6 do detract from the advantages of open software. Among other issues, it prevents you (and others) from porting such code to FOSS projects, or making use of GPL-only libraries. It's also more difficult to get a company to even allow use, much less adaptation, of software under a non-OSI-approved license; they'll be forced to treat it as a unique case, the same as any proprietary software license, unlike FOSS licenses where use and verbatim distribution are never an issue.
If you're willing to accept all of that in exchange for—maybe—a few commercial licenses, fine; just don't underestimate what you're giving up relative to a fully Open Source license, or claim that your project is FOSS when it falls short of the definition of Open Source.
One problem: The family of licenses you link to are not FOSS licenses, as they do not guarantee all of the freedoms in the Open Source Definition. In particular:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
If you want to restrict commercial use you'll have to do more than just avoid GPL and BSD. No FOSS license, however worded or structured, can specify separate terms for commercial use.
What makes you so sure that the hardware (FPGA) implementation is "deserving" of a patent? If a mathematical algorithm can be translated in a straightforward manner into HDL, which can then be automatically converted into a bitstream for an FPGA, then I would say that the resulting hardware design is just as obvious as the equivalent software running on a computer, and similarly ineligible.
You might have a better case if you had to invent a novel and non-obvious process to map the algorithm to an FPGA bitstream, or if you employed a new, more efficient way of mapping parts of the algorithm to hardware. However, if all you did was translate a known algorithm into a logic circuit using well-known techniques, then there really is nothing new, process-wise, to be patented.
As for patenting the algorithm itself, independent of any hardware or software implementation, that path leads inevitably to thought-crime: if the patent were to cover the algorithm itself, then calculating RSA in your head would infringe on the patent just as much as implementing it in an FPGA or computer software. This is one of the reasons pure math is not subject to patents in the first place.
Well by that standard, why are we a "free market economy" where as Cuba is not.
They do have a thriving black market, and by your standards that would mean they have a thriving free market as well?
No country that I know of today really has a "free market economy". That said, when one claims that a country has a certain type of economy they generally refer to the economic structure deliberately permitted, encouraged or imposed by the government of that country, so the black market really wouldn't count. In that sense, above-ground free trade between individuals and organizations is much more prevalent in the US or EU than in Cuba, where the government attempts to wield tightly centralized control over the economy, including employment, and common household goods (such as computers) and services (such as Internet access) are prohibited to all but a select few.
The free market consists of both legal and underground trade, and in all likelihood Cuba's black market, even if "thriving", is insufficient to make up for its limited legal trade. If nothing else, being forced to deal in a market whose member are, by definition, criminals tends to raise transaction costs quite a bit above those found in legal markets for the same goods. Higher transaction costs mean more costly goods overall, and correspondingly less trade.
However, for unauthorized transfers involving only your debit card number (not the loss of the card), you are liable only for transfers that occur after 60 days following the mailing of your bank statement containing the unauthorized use and before you report the loss.
You don't have to check your bank balance daily—just make sure you don't lose the physical card, and review your monthly statements. You would have to do just as much for a credit card.
The bar's employees have just as much choice regarding whether to work in that particular bar, or for that matter any bar, as the bar's customers have regarding whether to patronize it. Yes, I am saying that "you shouldn't be able to legislate that someone provide a [workplace] you prefer." Employment is not some sort of unique good deserving of different treatment than other products or services. Supporting OSHA for employee protection is just as much a mistake as supporting smoking bans for customer protection, and for the same reasons.
You are the final authority on your own understanding, and often enough there is no one else who could testify as to whether or not you read the contract. If you have any significant doubt at all as to your understanding of the terms, the right choice is to refuse to sign. If enough people make that choice then the contracts will be rewritten in clearer language.
All we're asking is that you tell the truth. How can you possibly object to that?