That's the thing, we could keep the number of brackets constant, and adjust the range each bracket covers. Probably wouldn't do well to do that year to year, as it would make retirement planning much more difficult, but I could see adjusting them every five years or so, with the option to adjust sooner if there's an economic necessity.
You don't understand the theory of evolution. We are no improved monkeys. Every species living today is the pinnacle of its own evolution.
I'd bet that most of the time, "monkeys" is used instead of "primates" because of the derision that started around the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the nomenclature stuck.
...for a long time now. IIRC, the 250K top tax bracket dates back to almost the beginning of the income tax system, when 250K was legitimately rich, and the earner of 250K would likely be a millionaire due to cash reserves from earning that kind of money for years.
Nowadays, 250K is still a very, very good income, but inflation has curtailed its spending power significantly. New brackets every so often that account for inflation, or else a periodic adjustment of all brackets for inflation would probably be good for the country.
As far as those who want to argue that "job creators" in the form the of the wealthy wouldn't create jobs if their personal income were taxed higher, the simple solution would be to offer tax breaks for the demonstrable creation of jobs. This mainly would affect small companies where only a handful of people actually own the companies in question, as they could say, "I didn't take $XX salary because instead I reinvested $XX in the company for salaries for workers" with the ability to produce those figures from the payroll books...
The only countries that had internal revolution and then self-identified as Communist were all agrarian, not industrial as Marx had discussed. Of those countries, Vietnam is still agrarian, North Korea is barely functional and is definitely more agrarian than anything else, China has only become Industrial because they're willing to do business with everyone not Communist and have really abandoned Communism to a weird form of totalitarian oligarchy, Cuba doesn't have much manufacturing and is more tourist and agrarian, and the USSR industrialized but collapsed due to the rapidity and lack of forethought in their industrialization.
Honestly, if the USA didn't have hundreds of TV channels I'd pick us as a very likely candidate to evolve into true Communism, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, and if we didn't have so many distractions to keep people looking at reality a lot of people would be very much angrier than they are now. It's worse in today's climate with so much desire by a mainstream-fringe to take away safety nets and other social programs that help keep people above water.
I don't want to see true Communism, but I also think Socialism in a proto form is essential to keep people from feeling that they have to throw the whole thing out. A lot of wealthy people don't seem to understand that if they take away everything from a group of people, that such a group would have nothing to lose by literally hunting them down and murdering them to get it back.
They don't have the same opportunities because there are lots of people with money who would not do business with someone who doesn't have money, regardless of how good the idea may be. Private clubs like country clubs and day clubs are proof of that. If you can't get in, you don't get the opportunity that someone who starts out wealthy would have.
There never has been a free market, anywhere in the entire world and the entire history of mankind. There has always been some kind of market manipulation by government officials. Sometimes it's beneficial for companies, sometimes for the people, sometimes for no one, and sometimes for both.
The airlines seem to have gone to hell after being deregulated. They claim they don't make money, while we as passengers suffer.
On the other hand, who should own society, as society is so heavily based on the media we're surrounded by?
I fully agree with reasonable patents, trademarks, and copyrights. I think the current seventeen year patent is perfectly appropriate. What gets patented is another story.
I very much disagree with indefinite copyright, especially with mass-market distribution. I'd redefine copyright protection to a defined number years, probably something like fifteen or twenty after the creator's death, assuming that the creator lived to fifty. If the creator didn't live to fifty, then the copyright would expire on the creator's seventieth birthday. I don't really care who now owns the copyright, or if the work was done for someone else or for a company.
Capitalism is simply economic survival of the fittest. In a laissez-faire economy, its is might that makes right. Problem is, manipulating the markets themselves are just as important as one's actions within a market.
I think it's funny that concepts like patents, trademarks, and copyrights are actually anti-laissez-faire, in that they're outside regulation, yet they're used to hold innovation hostage by the same people who rant about too much regulation.
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship, either for victims' rights like in the case of the exploitation of minors, there will be boards whose jobs are to try to make censorship work.
The only way to make it work truly fairly, in my opinion, is to make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the content to be censored is of a crime yielding a victim, and the presence of the content itself is the cause of victimization. Voyeurism, pornography of minors, the outright celebration of violence, and the real and demonstrable threat of violence are the only major criteria that I would really censor for everyone. For those that are adults, they can choose what to look at and what to avoid, and parents should take the initiative to deal with their childrens' viewing habits.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
Can't tell if sarcastic, or really thinks that putting a few humans on Moon for a bit is more valuable than huge amounts of data.
That depends on what the humans in space achieve versus what the huge amounts of data are used for.
Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not power. Application of knowledge is power. If we don't use our knowledge to put humans, and likely other life forms representative of Earth, to live permanently off-planet, then it's really no different than all of the various sea-faring cultures that supposedly discovered the American continents in the centuries before Columbus but didn't really do anything with that knowledge. Right now, we're on that cusp, in that we've gone somewhere, but rather than continuing to develop that ability to keep going, we've pulled back. Perhaps pulling back for a time is wise and warranted, as the entire method employed to go to the moon was very highly specialized for only that particular mission and would be terribly ill-suited to going farther, but at some point we need to take all of that data from the other planets, from how our probes move through the solar system, and we need to actually go out there in the flesh.
Maybe if we're smart we won't destroy what we find when we get there.
At any given moment it is a pie though, as at any given moment thousands of children are being born to parents who can't feed them. And it also doesn't matter that farm techniques using heavy equipment, water management, and crop rotation exist when those farmers can't afford heavy equipment and still rely on ox or mule to plow a field. Unless you're willing to pay for their farming equipment and to help multiple groups of subsistence farmers organize to allow for the practical use of such equipment and techniques on their farms.
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation, and it's extremely cut and dried when using children, or incredibly long shifts, or other techniques like Company Scrip instead of an open market for employees to buy their basic necessary goods, or when companies use other countries to engage in environment-harming practices that are patently illegal in the market that the good is targeted toward. That kind of exploitation goes on all over the place.
As for illegal immigration, fifteen million people did not appear in a single month. They drifted in over years and years, and in many instances were encouraged to come by businessmen who wanted cheaper labor than they would get by hiring normal domestic workers. Some came to work agriculture, picking fruit, cotton, cabbage, or other grunt work paid by the bushel or load rather than by the hour, some came to work textiles where they're paid by output, not by the hour, some came to work second and third shift jobs as cleaning and maintenance staff, essentially out of sight and out of mind to the normal Americans they served. They came because these shit jobs and shit living conditions are better than their home countries, so we import third-world workers, illegally and with a wink and a nudge, because if we don't, then we have to actually *gasp!* pay people more to do these terrible jobs. Instead, we increase the labor pool with desperate people and congratulate ourselves on our savings, despite what we do to our social systems in the process.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes. I figure that since our immigration courts are backed up to hell and gone, partially because of the blocking of the appointment of Federal judges, and partly because it's not cut-and-dried throwing out an illegal immigrant in a situation like having American children or an American spouse, and because business really does love its cheap labor. I see it as a lesser of evils. I don't doubt that others think I'm wrong on this. Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway. Once the real criminals are gone, then look into those whose principal infraction is coming here without a visa.
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
For all those that like to include their religious beliefs in moral discussions with others, here's an alternate concept for Original Sin for you. Sure, it's unfair that babies and other children die of malnutrition, or that simple, inexpensive medications, vaccines, and treatments aren't available to the majority of the world even when they're commonplace in the first world, but as has been stated time and again, Life Isn't Fair. In the developed world it's easy to ignore the problems of those in abject poverty even when we benefit, exploiting that abject poverty to get shoes, clothes, and lately, cheap consumer goods and cheap electronics at prices that would be unheard of if we had to pay people living at our own level to make them.
Some can argue, and probably successfully in specific cases, that this economic imperialism that we engage in benefits workers in these countries, since they make a wage and can use money to buy some of what they need as opposed to living by subsistence farming or sharecropping, but I'd bet that in many cases, lots of people in these situations don't make living wages even for the economics of their region, despite doing a dirty, or dangerous, or unhealthy job.
Meanwhile, first-world families that play their economic cards right end up owning more and more of the pie. My parents' house is paid off. My brother will probably have his house paid off by the time he's 50. We own two houses, one almost paid off with a tenant paying more than the mortgage, and our residence will be paid off quickly once the rental is paid off. My wife's parents' house is paid off. As a family group not interested in lots and lots of children, we stand to benefit our descendants greatly, with advantages from birth in control of real property and, depending on how many children, real property that provides significant income. If we're intelligent stewards of what we own, and if children and further generations are intelligent stewards of what they inherit, our family stands to rise economically above our fellows quite dramatically.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen, but the concept of a population the size of Mexico City leaving third-world Asia and Africa and migrating to Europe and North America in such scale that it's impossible to stop them short of mass-murder is scary, and the further the first world gets ahead if the third world, with more and more breeding in the third world coupled with less and less in the first, the more plausible this scenario becomes.
If you want to help the third world, encourage those living in it to innovate. If you provide money via charity, you need to ensure that the money stays local, that the innovator stays local and doesn't just use the opportunity to escape, and that lots and lots of ideas, even if most fail, get seeded. Most companies that start up in the West end up failing, and most ideas or inventions prove unworkable, but those that do stick around often become revolutionary and profitable. The third world will evolve into something better only by engaging the people in it to do something about it, and it makes a lot more sense to empower locals than it does to try for foist our inexperienced ideas upon them.
Hydrogen cars are the future exactly because the well-funded oil companies want to see the next ethnology to win use some kind of fueling infrastructure. Which is fine by me, since I like range and you can really only get that from a system that's much quicker to refuel than just electricity.
Thing is, many people won't need infrastructure for their fuel for the vast majority of their driving. Homebrew, like biodiesel, takes the oil companies out of the loop. It's easier to electrolyze water though, and probably safer in the sense that a single appliance-type machine with two major subassemblies, analogous to an air conditioner, would allow people to simply plug in the hose and turn on the flow to refuel their cars. On trips people would have to buy fuel, but that's not exactly a daily occurrence for most people in the western world.
Nope. Unlike many people who subscribe to such theories, I've played with carburetors quite a bit, and I know that there's a stoichiometric mix of reactants needed to achieve optimal burn, and with optimal burn one should get optimal power. Yes, there are efficiency problems in carburetors outside of optimal vacuum, but to an extent that can be overcome with multiple barrel configurations, multiple needle and seat configurations in those barrels, and maintaining proper fuel pressure in the bowls. Combine that with combustion chamber design, cylinder design, total engine design, transmission design, and total gear ratio across the system, relative to the weight of the vehicle, and there are limits as to what can be achieved with a given set of technology.
One can revise things though, and through those revisions, figure out other revisions, which lead to still further revisions, ultimately culminating in new tech. We're finally starting to get there relative to carbureted designs of the seventies and eighties, as automakers finally stop using, by and large, their engine blocks and rotating assemblies of old in favor of newer designs.
Heh. There's an entirely different truth in this statement.
If this truly works, and the ability to produce hydrogen is, cost-wise, limited to the initial purchase cost of the equipment, the roof space, and the water bill, I wouldn't be surprised if some very, very powerful and rich companies that are currently making the bulk of their money by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground work as hard as they can to purchase and/or stomp in to the ground a technology potentially this revolutionary.
Remember, fossil fuels are cheap because we don't hold extractors to the true cost of extracting, refining, distributing, and using fossil fuels. The subsidies are massive. Additionally, with a large-scale existing distribution and infrastructure system for fossil fuels, it's difficult to overcome the inertia to get a new distribution system for a new fuel in place.
If this truly works, this suddenly becomes easier than biodiesel, in that once the equipment is installed and properly set up, one just pumps water into it. Of course, one needs a hydrogen-powered car, which currently are not in any sort of production beyond prototypes and limited beta testing.
It's likely I have the roof space on my house to generate all of the hydrogen I'd need for all of my vehicles. Depending on the efficiency of the panels, possibly for my whole house. Arguably, this could be a lot more efficient, per square foot, than photovoltaic. If it were more efficient to generate hydrogen to then put through a generator that runs on hydrogen, we might see energy independence for individual structures, not just for cars.
If it really works, and if the powers who have a lot to lose don't manage to kill it off.
It isn't that the original owner authorized it, it's that the owner authorized it.
Every bit of data (in the literal sense) on the computer is potentially evidence of the crime and the criminals.
As to your line, "this isn't any different than if a landlord puts a secret camera in an apartment.", your argument is a straw man. It's a more accurate analogy to say that a landlord or property owner put a camera in their own space that no one else was entitled to live in, and then that camera caught proof of unauthorized (and thus illegal) occupation. That is perfectly legal and has lots of court precedent to back it up.
If the rightful owner of the computer can demonstrate that fact, the police probably wouldn't even need a warrant. They'd be acting on behalf of the legitimate owner of the computer.
Mind you, that's probably not a good idea for the legitimate owner, as if they've done anything shady then they'd essentially be waiving their right to fourth amendment privacy by granting access to the police, but since in this case a third-party company is involved that acts as a buffer.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, with Jobs leaving as the day-to-day brains behind the company, and especially on his eventual death, that will change.
That's the thing, we could keep the number of brackets constant, and adjust the range each bracket covers. Probably wouldn't do well to do that year to year, as it would make retirement planning much more difficult, but I could see adjusting them every five years or so, with the option to adjust sooner if there's an economic necessity.
I'd bet that most of the time, "monkeys" is used instead of "primates" because of the derision that started around the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the nomenclature stuck.
...for a long time now. IIRC, the 250K top tax bracket dates back to almost the beginning of the income tax system, when 250K was legitimately rich, and the earner of 250K would likely be a millionaire due to cash reserves from earning that kind of money for years.
Nowadays, 250K is still a very, very good income, but inflation has curtailed its spending power significantly. New brackets every so often that account for inflation, or else a periodic adjustment of all brackets for inflation would probably be good for the country.
As far as those who want to argue that "job creators" in the form the of the wealthy wouldn't create jobs if their personal income were taxed higher, the simple solution would be to offer tax breaks for the demonstrable creation of jobs. This mainly would affect small companies where only a handful of people actually own the companies in question, as they could say, "I didn't take $XX salary because instead I reinvested $XX in the company for salaries for workers" with the ability to produce those figures from the payroll books...
The only countries that had internal revolution and then self-identified as Communist were all agrarian, not industrial as Marx had discussed. Of those countries, Vietnam is still agrarian, North Korea is barely functional and is definitely more agrarian than anything else, China has only become Industrial because they're willing to do business with everyone not Communist and have really abandoned Communism to a weird form of totalitarian oligarchy, Cuba doesn't have much manufacturing and is more tourist and agrarian, and the USSR industrialized but collapsed due to the rapidity and lack of forethought in their industrialization.
Honestly, if the USA didn't have hundreds of TV channels I'd pick us as a very likely candidate to evolve into true Communism, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, and if we didn't have so many distractions to keep people looking at reality a lot of people would be very much angrier than they are now. It's worse in today's climate with so much desire by a mainstream-fringe to take away safety nets and other social programs that help keep people above water.
I don't want to see true Communism, but I also think Socialism in a proto form is essential to keep people from feeling that they have to throw the whole thing out. A lot of wealthy people don't seem to understand that if they take away everything from a group of people, that such a group would have nothing to lose by literally hunting them down and murdering them to get it back.
They don't have the same opportunities because there are lots of people with money who would not do business with someone who doesn't have money, regardless of how good the idea may be. Private clubs like country clubs and day clubs are proof of that. If you can't get in, you don't get the opportunity that someone who starts out wealthy would have.
There never has been a free market, anywhere in the entire world and the entire history of mankind. There has always been some kind of market manipulation by government officials. Sometimes it's beneficial for companies, sometimes for the people, sometimes for no one, and sometimes for both.
The airlines seem to have gone to hell after being deregulated. They claim they don't make money, while we as passengers suffer.
On the other hand, who should own society, as society is so heavily based on the media we're surrounded by?
I fully agree with reasonable patents, trademarks, and copyrights. I think the current seventeen year patent is perfectly appropriate. What gets patented is another story.
I very much disagree with indefinite copyright, especially with mass-market distribution. I'd redefine copyright protection to a defined number years, probably something like fifteen or twenty after the creator's death, assuming that the creator lived to fifty. If the creator didn't live to fifty, then the copyright would expire on the creator's seventieth birthday. I don't really care who now owns the copyright, or if the work was done for someone else or for a company.
Capitalism is simply economic survival of the fittest. In a laissez-faire economy, its is might that makes right. Problem is, manipulating the markets themselves are just as important as one's actions within a market.
I think it's funny that concepts like patents, trademarks, and copyrights are actually anti-laissez-faire, in that they're outside regulation, yet they're used to hold innovation hostage by the same people who rant about too much regulation.
In Capitalism, Man exploits Man.
In Communism, it's the other way around.
I'd bet that censor is on stun right now...
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship, either for victims' rights like in the case of the exploitation of minors, there will be boards whose jobs are to try to make censorship work.
The only way to make it work truly fairly, in my opinion, is to make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the content to be censored is of a crime yielding a victim, and the presence of the content itself is the cause of victimization. Voyeurism, pornography of minors, the outright celebration of violence, and the real and demonstrable threat of violence are the only major criteria that I would really censor for everyone. For those that are adults, they can choose what to look at and what to avoid, and parents should take the initiative to deal with their childrens' viewing habits.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
Yeah, well REDACTED the censors! They can go REDACTED a REDACTED fat REDACTED!
That depends on what the humans in space achieve versus what the huge amounts of data are used for.
Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not power. Application of knowledge is power. If we don't use our knowledge to put humans, and likely other life forms representative of Earth, to live permanently off-planet, then it's really no different than all of the various sea-faring cultures that supposedly discovered the American continents in the centuries before Columbus but didn't really do anything with that knowledge. Right now, we're on that cusp, in that we've gone somewhere, but rather than continuing to develop that ability to keep going, we've pulled back. Perhaps pulling back for a time is wise and warranted, as the entire method employed to go to the moon was very highly specialized for only that particular mission and would be terribly ill-suited to going farther, but at some point we need to take all of that data from the other planets, from how our probes move through the solar system, and we need to actually go out there in the flesh.
Maybe if we're smart we won't destroy what we find when we get there.
At any given moment it is a pie though, as at any given moment thousands of children are being born to parents who can't feed them. And it also doesn't matter that farm techniques using heavy equipment, water management, and crop rotation exist when those farmers can't afford heavy equipment and still rely on ox or mule to plow a field. Unless you're willing to pay for their farming equipment and to help multiple groups of subsistence farmers organize to allow for the practical use of such equipment and techniques on their farms.
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation, and it's extremely cut and dried when using children, or incredibly long shifts, or other techniques like Company Scrip instead of an open market for employees to buy their basic necessary goods, or when companies use other countries to engage in environment-harming practices that are patently illegal in the market that the good is targeted toward. That kind of exploitation goes on all over the place.
As for illegal immigration, fifteen million people did not appear in a single month. They drifted in over years and years, and in many instances were encouraged to come by businessmen who wanted cheaper labor than they would get by hiring normal domestic workers. Some came to work agriculture, picking fruit, cotton, cabbage, or other grunt work paid by the bushel or load rather than by the hour, some came to work textiles where they're paid by output, not by the hour, some came to work second and third shift jobs as cleaning and maintenance staff, essentially out of sight and out of mind to the normal Americans they served. They came because these shit jobs and shit living conditions are better than their home countries, so we import third-world workers, illegally and with a wink and a nudge, because if we don't, then we have to actually *gasp!* pay people more to do these terrible jobs. Instead, we increase the labor pool with desperate people and congratulate ourselves on our savings, despite what we do to our social systems in the process.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes. I figure that since our immigration courts are backed up to hell and gone, partially because of the blocking of the appointment of Federal judges, and partly because it's not cut-and-dried throwing out an illegal immigrant in a situation like having American children or an American spouse, and because business really does love its cheap labor. I see it as a lesser of evils. I don't doubt that others think I'm wrong on this. Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway. Once the real criminals are gone, then look into those whose principal infraction is coming here without a visa.
Repeat after me:
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
For all those that like to include their religious beliefs in moral discussions with others, here's an alternate concept for Original Sin for you. Sure, it's unfair that babies and other children die of malnutrition, or that simple, inexpensive medications, vaccines, and treatments aren't available to the majority of the world even when they're commonplace in the first world, but as has been stated time and again, Life Isn't Fair. In the developed world it's easy to ignore the problems of those in abject poverty even when we benefit, exploiting that abject poverty to get shoes, clothes, and lately, cheap consumer goods and cheap electronics at prices that would be unheard of if we had to pay people living at our own level to make them.
Some can argue, and probably successfully in specific cases, that this economic imperialism that we engage in benefits workers in these countries, since they make a wage and can use money to buy some of what they need as opposed to living by subsistence farming or sharecropping, but I'd bet that in many cases, lots of people in these situations don't make living wages even for the economics of their region, despite doing a dirty, or dangerous, or unhealthy job.
Meanwhile, first-world families that play their economic cards right end up owning more and more of the pie. My parents' house is paid off. My brother will probably have his house paid off by the time he's 50. We own two houses, one almost paid off with a tenant paying more than the mortgage, and our residence will be paid off quickly once the rental is paid off. My wife's parents' house is paid off. As a family group not interested in lots and lots of children, we stand to benefit our descendants greatly, with advantages from birth in control of real property and, depending on how many children, real property that provides significant income. If we're intelligent stewards of what we own, and if children and further generations are intelligent stewards of what they inherit, our family stands to rise economically above our fellows quite dramatically.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen, but the concept of a population the size of Mexico City leaving third-world Asia and Africa and migrating to Europe and North America in such scale that it's impossible to stop them short of mass-murder is scary, and the further the first world gets ahead if the third world, with more and more breeding in the third world coupled with less and less in the first, the more plausible this scenario becomes.
If you want to help the third world, encourage those living in it to innovate. If you provide money via charity, you need to ensure that the money stays local, that the innovator stays local and doesn't just use the opportunity to escape, and that lots and lots of ideas, even if most fail, get seeded. Most companies that start up in the West end up failing, and most ideas or inventions prove unworkable, but those that do stick around often become revolutionary and profitable. The third world will evolve into something better only by engaging the people in it to do something about it, and it makes a lot more sense to empower locals than it does to try for foist our inexperienced ideas upon them.
This is an espresso machine. No, no wait. It's a snow cone maker...
Don't worry... Try to bring too much lube through next time and the TSA will provide you with some...
I donno... I think they'll be waiting for Duke Nukem forever...
Thing is, many people won't need infrastructure for their fuel for the vast majority of their driving. Homebrew, like biodiesel, takes the oil companies out of the loop. It's easier to electrolyze water though, and probably safer in the sense that a single appliance-type machine with two major subassemblies, analogous to an air conditioner, would allow people to simply plug in the hose and turn on the flow to refuel their cars. On trips people would have to buy fuel, but that's not exactly a daily occurrence for most people in the western world.
Nope. Unlike many people who subscribe to such theories, I've played with carburetors quite a bit, and I know that there's a stoichiometric mix of reactants needed to achieve optimal burn, and with optimal burn one should get optimal power. Yes, there are efficiency problems in carburetors outside of optimal vacuum, but to an extent that can be overcome with multiple barrel configurations, multiple needle and seat configurations in those barrels, and maintaining proper fuel pressure in the bowls. Combine that with combustion chamber design, cylinder design, total engine design, transmission design, and total gear ratio across the system, relative to the weight of the vehicle, and there are limits as to what can be achieved with a given set of technology.
One can revise things though, and through those revisions, figure out other revisions, which lead to still further revisions, ultimately culminating in new tech. We're finally starting to get there relative to carbureted designs of the seventies and eighties, as automakers finally stop using, by and large, their engine blocks and rotating assemblies of old in favor of newer designs.
Kai's Power Goo was ahead of its time...
Heh. There's an entirely different truth in this statement.
If this truly works, and the ability to produce hydrogen is, cost-wise, limited to the initial purchase cost of the equipment, the roof space, and the water bill, I wouldn't be surprised if some very, very powerful and rich companies that are currently making the bulk of their money by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground work as hard as they can to purchase and/or stomp in to the ground a technology potentially this revolutionary.
Remember, fossil fuels are cheap because we don't hold extractors to the true cost of extracting, refining, distributing, and using fossil fuels. The subsidies are massive. Additionally, with a large-scale existing distribution and infrastructure system for fossil fuels, it's difficult to overcome the inertia to get a new distribution system for a new fuel in place.
If this truly works, this suddenly becomes easier than biodiesel, in that once the equipment is installed and properly set up, one just pumps water into it. Of course, one needs a hydrogen-powered car, which currently are not in any sort of production beyond prototypes and limited beta testing.
It's likely I have the roof space on my house to generate all of the hydrogen I'd need for all of my vehicles. Depending on the efficiency of the panels, possibly for my whole house. Arguably, this could be a lot more efficient, per square foot, than photovoltaic. If it were more efficient to generate hydrogen to then put through a generator that runs on hydrogen, we might see energy independence for individual structures, not just for cars.
If it really works, and if the powers who have a lot to lose don't manage to kill it off.
It isn't that the original owner authorized it, it's that the owner authorized it.
Every bit of data (in the literal sense) on the computer is potentially evidence of the crime and the criminals.
As to your line, "this isn't any different than if a landlord puts a secret camera in an apartment.", your argument is a straw man. It's a more accurate analogy to say that a landlord or property owner put a camera in their own space that no one else was entitled to live in, and then that camera caught proof of unauthorized (and thus illegal) occupation. That is perfectly legal and has lots of court precedent to back it up.
If the rightful owner of the computer can demonstrate that fact, the police probably wouldn't even need a warrant. They'd be acting on behalf of the legitimate owner of the computer.
Mind you, that's probably not a good idea for the legitimate owner, as if they've done anything shady then they'd essentially be waiving their right to fourth amendment privacy by granting access to the police, but since in this case a third-party company is involved that acts as a buffer.