While zero government is not a real answer, I am sure that most thinking people will agree that...
1. Government is wasteful. (When the choice is private companies competing or government. Government will always cost more.
Occasionally private companies are extremely inefficient (to sustain the inefficiency requires a market with high barriers to entry... often maintained by the government -- consider the health care payment system in the US), and occasionally governments do a job well. That government will be less efficient is certainly the way to bet.
The interesting thing about this theory (aside from the fact that it assumes only a single independent variable) is that it is only ever trotted out to suggest that taxes are too high and that lowering them will increase revenue. Never to suggest that taxes are too low and that increasing them will increase tax revenue, although unless somebody has successfully plotted the curve (nobody has) then it supports either theory just as well (unless you are already at the 0% or 100% point).
There's no need to bring out the Laffer curve to suggest increasing taxe rates will increase revenue; it's pretty well understood that at a 0% income tax rate, income tax revenue is 0. The non-obvious part of the Laffer curve is that it suggests that there IS a point at which increasing incme tax rates will reduce revenue. While I believe that conclusion is true, I think the reasons for it are usually not those Laffer gave; it's not increasing evasion which reduces revenue (though there are examples of that with other taxes, such as the Canadian cigarette tax), but rather the damage to the economy done by people actually paying the increased taxes.
All Spamhaus would have needed to do is pay for one hour of a lawyer's time to write a motion to dismiss, and let it stand with that as their sole defense. A decent judge would have then thrown it out. I'm sure the EFF or similar would have gladly supplied a free lawyer.
Suppose I got ticked off over something you wrote on Slashdot, and sued you in a foreign jurisdiction. Would you pay for an hour of a foreign lawyer's time to show up and deny jurisdiction?
Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]
Why not?
Suppose I've got my magic tamperproof decryptor box which contains the playkey. I want to read my new copy of _1984_, so I use the tamperproof decryptor box to decrypt _1984_. Now I take the decrypted output and post it on the Internet. Oops. Not only does the playkey have to be protected, everything it decrypts has to be protected.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact proposal before. Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't; you have to protect everything-- the encrypted content, the keys, and the output. It can be done, provided the device you're playing your content on is a sealed box and the content can't be read from the box by some sort of capture device. Problem is, those sealed boxes keep getting unsealed and the capture devices keep getting better.
There are plenty of road circuits (even smaller club tracks) where you can pay to have that thrill in the relative safety of an environment made for it! And it's legal!
Open track days are few and far between and the requirements they place on you and your car put it out of reach for those of us without a lot of spare time and money.
The idea of "teenager" is relatively new (and must be destroyed, IMO), but the idea of people of that age (particularly young men) being more tolerant of risks goes back at least to Roman times.
This is great news because this could help wipe out Afghanistan's poverty, the actual biggest obstacle to a functioning government.
Are there examples of a state which succeeded in lifting itself out of poverty on the strength of its natural resources? Seems to me that a far more common model is that foreigners come in, set up a puppet government, and essentially take the natural resources without enriching the people in general. Also common is that a set of domestic kleptocrats takes over and sells the resources to foreigners for hard cash for themselves, again not enriching the people all that much?
Minerals in Afghanistan = good for US, not so good for China, not necessarily any good for Afghans.
What about the slavery stuff? That slaves were worth only 3/5ths of a person? That's apparently according to you a "great guiding point"?
*sigh*. The pro-slavery South wanted slaves to be counted in full. The anti-slavery North wanted slaves not to be counted at all. The three-fifths compromise says nothing about the worth of the slaves as people; if it did, it would have been the South which wanted the lower number, not the higher.
But the real question is why many people equate the Constitution to a Holy book. The Constitution does discuss slavery as if it were a reasonable institution, and that can be hard for children to deal with.
The Constitution does NOT discuss slavery as if it were a reasonable institution. It tiptoes around the subject, using euphemism and circumlocution. The two clauses about slavery prior to the 13th Amendment (abolishing it) are the three-fifths compromise, which refers to "all other persons" as opposed to free persons, and a clause which looks like an immigration clause to anyone who doesn't know the history:
Article I Section 9 The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
Define "Arms". Does a knife count? How about a sword? A pistol? A machine gun? A thermonuclear device? Chemical or biological weapons?
All but the last three obviously count. A nuke is just a really big explosive with a few extra side-effects, but sometimes quantity has a quality of its own, and I'd argue nukes do cross that line.
Is the right to keep and bear ammunition included in the right to keep and bear Arms?
Yes. The Constitution is not a contract written by the Devil or Rod Serling. Ammunition for arms is included under arms.
Do you have the right to keep and bear Arms, but not to use them?
IMO, the Second Amendment does not protect the right to use arms, though I'd argue that some use rights (including the use of arms in self-defense) exist among the unenumerated rights. There is no general right to use arms; you can't just go around shooting, stabbing, or clubbing anything or anyone you want to. Even if you really think they deserve it.
Does "shall not be infringed" mean that you can never take Arms away from someone? Not even if they have been tried for a crime by a jury of their peers, convicted, and are currently incarcerated?
No; it's pretty clear that all the inalienable rights were intended to be revokable in the case of incarcerated criminals. This falls under the "not a contract written by the Devil" clause.
adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.
IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.
Sorry, just because your arbitrary deadline has passed does not give you right to aid others in harming others computers.
You're right; the deadline has nothing to do with it. Anyone has every right to publicly release exploit information as soon as he or she discovers it, without informing anyone in advance.
As a practical matter, the policy your post implies -- that one should never publicly release exploit information -- has been tried. It usually results in the bug simply not being fixed.
Easy. Because money is not the only measure of value and success. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's not ME. It's the mortgage company, the jet-rental company (travel without flying commercial is an indicator of success), the electronics companies (geek toys are indicators of success), the escort companies (being seen with attractive women is an indicator of success), the jewelry companies (another way of keeping attractive women around), the car companies, the book companies (a good personal library is a measure of success), even the organic food companies (if you're into that sort of thing). They all want money. Which seems to indicate that if I want to be successful, getting money is part of it.
I once bet my friend a million pounds that I'd become a billionaire before him.
Wouldn't it be smarter to bet your friend a million pounds that he'd become a billionaire before you? That way, either way, you win -- if you become a billionaire first you need merely pay off a small bet; if he becomes a billionaire first, you become a millionaire.
In a real Libertarian Utopia, we are free to defraud one another, even the most desperate and sick.
Eh? Says who? Fraud is on the short list of things most libertarians (aside from the anarchist variety) believe is within the legitimate realm of the state to prevent.
Of course, in the real world we live in, some people are free to defraud us all they want (because the cost of doing anything about it through the legal system is prohibitive) while others have to walk the straight and narrow (because their opponents have lawyers on retainer) and sometimes even that isn't safe.
We have a lot more to fear from a corporate state than we do from a "nanny" state.
What makes you think we can't have both? In fact, the "nanny" state follows from the "corporate" (fascist) state when insurance companies are some of the more powerful corporations.
BTW, janitors can do quite well... plumbers somehow have kept their trade up.
In my area, a plumbers license is apparently a license to steal. I recently bought a disposal and tried to pay to have it installed. $135 was the quoted install cost (and I told them I didn't have a disposal). When they showed up they told me that because I didn't have a disposal already, it would be an additional $165 for the plumbing and I'd have to hire an electrician too. (I didn't pay; I'll install the damn thing myself.)
This means they were prepared to charge $135 for installing a _replacement_ disposal. A job that can be done by one guy in 10 minutes. That's robbery. And since I was having a dishwasher installed at the same time, it's not like they would have had to come out just to do the disposal.
If I respectfully, but firmly, require that the cop comply with the law, and he then pepper sprays me, beats me and/or arrests me, I will then find the very best lawyer money can buy and spend the rest of my life sitting on a beach in Kauai drinking fruit-flavored drinks with paper umbrellas out of a tiny straw (well, probably not, but you get the idea).
Except it won't work. The very best lawyer money can by might get you off of the bogus charges the cop levies against you after he attacks and arrests you, but it won't get you a civil case against the cop. Because it's his word against yours, and your word is worth nothing. Any tapes of the incident will mysteriously disappear and/or come up blank, unless you lucked out and a third party recorded it. Been there and done that.
agreed, but it would be odd to develop or debug software that you don't already have the original source for... so really they're intended to develop and debug compilers and platform layers.
I consider them general debugging tools, but then I've done a lot of debugging on platforms without source-level debugging. Basically there's two classes of development tools I've used for breaking DRM. One is a debugger, which allows the program to be run step-by-step with breakpoints and examination of the registers and code. The other is a disassembler, which produces an assembly-language version of the binary code. A hex editor often comes in handy to modify the code, and an assembler for writing patches.
Slashdot Mirror
Occasionally private companies are extremely inefficient (to sustain the inefficiency requires a market with high barriers to entry... often maintained by the government -- consider the health care payment system in the US), and occasionally governments do a job well. That government will be less efficient is certainly the way to bet.
There's no need to bring out the Laffer curve to suggest increasing taxe rates will increase revenue; it's pretty well understood that at a 0% income tax rate, income tax revenue is 0. The non-obvious part of the Laffer curve is that it suggests that there IS a point at which increasing incme tax rates will reduce revenue. While I believe that conclusion is true, I think the reasons for it are usually not those Laffer gave; it's not increasing evasion which reduces revenue (though there are examples of that with other taxes, such as the Canadian cigarette tax), but rather the damage to the economy done by people actually paying the increased taxes.
Suppose I got ticked off over something you wrote on Slashdot, and sued you in a foreign jurisdiction. Would you pay for an hour of a foreign lawyer's time to show up and deny jurisdiction?
But if you drink while playing the racing game and then drive, it's OK, it all cancels out.
Really? The death toll was over 200,000 for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's a pretty high bar for a few run-of-the-mill violent criminals to reach.
Suppose I've got my magic tamperproof decryptor box which contains the playkey. I want to read my new copy of _1984_, so I use the tamperproof decryptor box to decrypt _1984_. Now I take the decrypted output and post it on the Internet. Oops. Not only does the playkey have to be protected, everything it decrypts has to be protected.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact proposal before. Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't; you have to protect everything-- the encrypted content, the keys, and the output. It can be done, provided the device you're playing your content on is a sealed box and the content can't be read from the box by some sort of capture device. Problem is, those sealed boxes keep getting unsealed and the capture devices keep getting better.
Open track days are few and far between and the requirements they place on you and your car put it out of reach for those of us without a lot of spare time and money.
The idea of "teenager" is relatively new (and must be destroyed, IMO), but the idea of people of that age (particularly young men) being more tolerant of risks goes back at least to Roman times.
Back in Soviet Russia, many beautiful hookers available for decadent Western tourists. All KGB, but eh, who cares?
No, Einstein was the sage even at the time, which is why Szilard got him to sign the letter.
There's always a way to find out. But given that all four possibilities are in play, and further she might be a cop, I wouldn't recommend it.
Some of it is less than that. IIRC, during the height of the financial crisis T-bills were selling for 0%.
Are there examples of a state which succeeded in lifting itself out of poverty on the strength of its natural resources? Seems to me that a far more common model is that foreigners come in, set up a puppet government, and essentially take the natural resources without enriching the people in general. Also common is that a set of domestic kleptocrats takes over and sells the resources to foreigners for hard cash for themselves, again not enriching the people all that much?
Minerals in Afghanistan = good for US, not so good for China, not necessarily any good for Afghans.
*sigh*. The pro-slavery South wanted slaves to be counted in full. The anti-slavery North wanted slaves not to be counted at all. The three-fifths compromise says nothing about the worth of the slaves as people; if it did, it would have been the South which wanted the lower number, not the higher.
The Constitution does NOT discuss slavery as if it were a reasonable institution. It tiptoes around the subject, using euphemism and circumlocution. The two clauses about slavery prior to the 13th Amendment (abolishing it) are the three-fifths compromise, which refers to "all other persons" as opposed to free persons, and a clause which looks like an immigration clause to anyone who doesn't know the history:
Article I Section 9
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
All but the last three obviously count. A nuke is just a really big explosive with a few extra side-effects, but sometimes quantity has a quality of its own, and I'd argue nukes do cross that line.
Yes. The Constitution is not a contract written by the Devil or Rod Serling. Ammunition for arms is included under arms.
IMO, the Second Amendment does not protect the right to use arms, though I'd argue that some use rights (including the use of arms in self-defense) exist among the unenumerated rights. There is no general right to use arms; you can't just go around shooting, stabbing, or clubbing anything or anyone you want to. Even if you really think they deserve it.
No; it's pretty clear that all the inalienable rights were intended to be revokable in the case of incarcerated criminals. This falls under the "not a contract written by the Devil" clause.
IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.
You're right; the deadline has nothing to do with it. Anyone has every right to publicly release exploit information as soon as he or she discovers it, without informing anyone in advance.
As a practical matter, the policy your post implies -- that one should never publicly release exploit information -- has been tried. It usually results in the bug simply not being fixed.
It's not ME. It's the mortgage company, the jet-rental company (travel without flying commercial is an indicator of success), the electronics companies (geek toys are indicators of success), the escort companies (being seen with attractive women is an indicator of success), the jewelry companies (another way of keeping attractive women around), the car companies, the book companies (a good personal library is a measure of success), even the organic food companies (if you're into that sort of thing). They all want money. Which seems to indicate that if I want to be successful, getting money is part of it.
Wouldn't it be smarter to bet your friend a million pounds that he'd become a billionaire before you? That way, either way, you win -- if you become a billionaire first you need merely pay off a small bet; if he becomes a billionaire first, you become a millionaire.
Eh? Says who? Fraud is on the short list of things most libertarians (aside from the anarchist variety) believe is within the legitimate realm of the state to prevent.
Of course, in the real world we live in, some people are free to defraud us all they want (because the cost of doing anything about it through the legal system is prohibitive) while others have to walk the straight and narrow (because their opponents have lawyers on retainer) and sometimes even that isn't safe.
What makes you think we can't have both? In fact, the "nanny" state follows from the "corporate" (fascist) state when insurance companies are some of the more powerful corporations.
In my area, a plumbers license is apparently a license to steal. I recently bought a disposal and tried to pay to have it installed. $135 was the quoted install cost (and I told them I didn't have a disposal). When they showed up they told me that because I didn't have a disposal already, it would be an additional $165 for the plumbing and I'd have to hire an electrician too. (I didn't pay; I'll install the damn thing myself.)
This means they were prepared to charge $135 for installing a _replacement_ disposal. A job that can be done by one guy in 10 minutes. That's robbery. And since I was having a dishwasher installed at the same time, it's not like they would have had to come out just to do the disposal.
Except it won't work. The very best lawyer money can by might get you off of the bogus charges the cop levies against you after he attacks and arrests you, but it won't get you a civil case against the cop. Because it's his word against yours, and your word is worth nothing. Any tapes of the incident will mysteriously disappear and/or come up blank, unless you lucked out and a third party recorded it. Been there and done that.
I consider them general debugging tools, but then I've done a lot of debugging on platforms without source-level debugging. Basically there's two classes of development tools I've used for breaking DRM. One is a debugger, which allows the program to be run step-by-step with breakpoints and examination of the registers and code. The other is a disassembler, which produces an assembly-language version of the binary code. A hex editor often comes in handy to modify the code, and an assembler for writing patches.