Not at all, without an existing, legally meaningful definition of "facebooking" that is not so broad as to make it illegal to call a tow truck or your insurer.
This is a civil suit. Illegality isn't necessary or sufficient to determine liability here. If she were using facebook to contact her insurer then the jury can take that into account, but that sounds a lot like the guy who hits the homeless man with his BMW and spends 20 minutes talking to his lawyer before calling the cops -- these people usually are found negligent; "reasonable care" for most people usually means preserving life before caring about legal liability or insurance. Negligence isn't a matter of literal laws to determine, to a great extent it's left up to the judge and jury to determine in the particular situation.
Content from competitors will come along when there is an opening.
Right, but content is only worth something if you can get it in front of eyeballs -- network operators aren't just dumb pipes, they're what make content valuable. If you have a 10 second video of your dog barking at a dalek, 20 years ago that'd be worth absolutely nothing, but now it's worth thousands of dollars in monetized advertising. The only reason that it's worth something is because networks put the video in front of eyes. You need both content and delivery in order to have a saleable product.
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. All that is required is preponderance of evidence that driver was negligent, without regard for any statutes obeyed or broken.
But of course, lurking in the back of everyone's mind is the simple possibility that it might not be possible to pay for a non-tiered, flat-rate, uniform quality-of-service internet of sufficient capacity to deliver on-demand HD video or SIP telephone from any particular content provider in the US, independent of geography and service provider, to every terminal in the United States with flat monthly or even per-byte pricing on either end. The costs of building and maintaing the system simply don't map to consumption of the system's resources. Some parts of such a price structure are really lucrative for a network operator and some of them don't pay off for decades.
And if there were ways of doing it this way, it would require a hell of a lot more regulation than mere mandatory "Net Neutrality."
If you are making a case against uncouth behavior, sure, but last I checked thats not illegal.
"Negligence" is a failure to exercise reasonable care. Hitting someone and then Facebooking about it before calling 911 is pretty plainly negligent and would be a slam dunk with a jury.
It doesn't have to be centralized authority, in this case the patient's general practitioner would hold a copy of the key and release it in such a circumstance according to the terms of a legal advance directive, like a limited power of attorney or living will. You just need a central repository of the encrypted data, and a directory service to help an ER find the patient's GP or kin, allow the keyholder to validate the patient's unconscious condition, or that their condition meets the terms of the directive, and then release the records.
If the patient is dying on the table and the communication with the referent of the "security directive" or whatever isn't available, they just have to proceed without records for the time being. Happens all the time.
It's striking how many people are willing to die for things they don't understand, let alone converse about them.
I was struck in Wired for War by the stories of EOD units in Iraq who would name their bomb-defusing robots, give them ranks, promotions, and ribbons, and, touchingly, would mourn their robot's destruction. There's one story about an operator who was literally bawling to a support rep at iRobot, asking if they could please somehow repair their bot. They were real creatures to them, and they were completely unintelligent. What really made the robots alive to them is that they were balky, seemed to have a personality in difficult situations (operator's confirmation bias at work), and had saved the operator's lives many, many times. It didn't matter that the robot didn't "understand" why it was being destroyed, the operators were often in a similar situation... what mattered was its (nominal) selflessness and heroism, something the operator's were required to display as well in a war situation.
I mean like, the Chinese Room is interesting, but the dark secret is that, when it comes to the way human beings confer personhood on other things, it makes it so there is no door to the Chinese Room. Only a mail slot, and it's impossible to see what's on the other side. An an unknowable truth is no truth at all.
The reason I know I'm different in the way I grasp the birth date of John of Gaunt is because I can generalize the concept of birth date in ways that a machine cannot.
If you'd been on Jeopardy! and told Alex his question was meaningless because John of Gaunt wasn't named John of Gaunt when he was born, I suspect you'd be the one accused of being the computer. Computers give responses that appear over-generalized all the time -- wether the answer is useful depends on the situation, which is why I sorta carefully said "particularly in the domain of how you know trivia." People often over-generalize or give overly-specific answers, too; they often avoid some of the dumber mistakes Watson does, because they have common sense gleaned from decades of high-bandwidth stimulus, but when it comes to abstract rules and concepts, people often are careless and use lessons learned in situations which aren't germane or appropriate to the situation. Look at how little children draw animals, with human eyes and sexual dimorphism. They take what they know and apply it to new things, and produce inaccurate output. These sorts of inconsistencies contain their own internal truth, like "animals are like people" and "the boy turtle thinks the girl turtle is yucky!" and that's the interesting content, because we cannot understand the mind and these outputs are the only window we have into the mind of others. In a similar way, Watson's associations sometimes give you fascinatingly wrong answers, but they reflect an internal truth, like "People in the news talk way too much about 9/11 and anyone that reads enough news will associate it with disparate concepts." This internal truth isn't interesting to anyone, though, because, unlike children, we can see how Watson works.
I mean generally, when someone says "we know the computer doesn't understand something" it's because we understand the computer. Any creature who's cognitive faculty can be disassembled down to its bolts, by definition, cannot understand concepts itself. The only reason we claim that any particular human being "understands" something is because they produce responses that align with our own model of the concept, and because we cannot see how their brain works. I think if you could actually see how people thought about things, with a Thought X-Ray, you'd be shocked at how differently people modeled concepts, to the point where someone with such an ability would conclude that no one really knows anything, and that all knowledge is emergent from collaboration.
Of course I can't prove that, it's all rather fanciful, but that's just as good as asserting a negative, like:
While it may be possible to train a machine to make similar generalizations, it is not possible to train a machine to generalize any arbitrary concept.
Of course, that probably won't stop Scientologists from calling the author a child molester and sending private detectives out to his house to harass him and try to dig up dirt on him. They don't seem to do measured responses very well.
They have 35 years worth of audits, they don't have to hire PIs to keep their own people quiet.
I do. When I don't have the information needed, my brain doesn't stop processing things and put up an "ERROR".
You have to understand the semantic meaning of an error in computing. An error is something that is generated by an implementation upon the failure of a test at some level of the system -- it indicates the system has entered a state where further inputs will no longer map to the "desired" outputs. The issue is in how we define "desired," and we find that this is always defined semantically by the humans designing the system, a priori. A computer cannot divide a number by zero, or dereference a null pointer, because we say so, because we apply that abstract truth to the system. We do so because hardware and software form an entity that requires internal consistency to respond to inputs, and when that internal consistency is lost the system no longer is useable.
Humans make errors all the time, it's just that we do not generally halt when we make them. We have other ways of reconciling errors, things we call "rationalization" or "denial" or "learning." Human beings have very limited a priori desired outputs and exception states, and none of them apply to symbolic reasoning -- a coma might be an example of an exception state, and it's brought about by "recoverable device failures." The human brain and cognitive system is also much more finely engineered and rigorous than a computer system, inputs and outputs are always "sane," the states of the system, such as they are, are highly distributed in time and between functional units, and on most levels of operation the global system cannot lose internal consistency in a way that jeopardizes operation.
Abstract thought has not yet been conclusively proven in the animal world, but is that even possible to prove or disprove?
Well, the Nova ScienceNow that directly preceded the Watson episode was all about animal cognition (probably not coincidentally), and they had several rather unsettling demonstrations of a dog that could remember dozens of toys by name, and collect novel toys given nothing but the novel toy's name; a parrot that could count to eight and construct declarative phrases of nouns and modifiers; and dolphins with functional vocabularies that were provably communicating with each other through their squeaks to collaborate on a trick that they invented themselves.
Most creature's brains are capable of abstraction to a degree, but the physical attributes that are associated with humanity, like the opposable thumb, bipedal walking, and particularly a voice, have the effect of creating enormous selection pressures upon the brain. A hand grabbing a pole can kill one animal a year or a hundred, depending on how smart the brain behind it wields it. It may take one individual one lifetime to teach one other individual how to make a tool, or in the same time teach ten-thousand, completely depending on how well they use speech. Because birds and dolphins and dogs can't really manipulate their environment to the degree a creature with a hand can, the selection pressures fall upon other parts of their physiognomy.
What makes you think you're so different, particularly in the domain of how you know trivia? It's not like you have a particularly more concrete grasp of birthdate of John of Gaunt than a machine does.
However, the nations that undertook it proved(with varying degrees of tenacity) that the theory was false. Even by the time the US was founded, the less jingoistic Brits were getting tired of paying very high taxes for the privilege of having an empire upon which the sun never set.
Shorter: Britain's 400-year international preeminence, wealth, world leadership in finance, academics and culture "didn't work."
It's easy to say that something abstract like "mercantilism" doesn't work or isn't practical given certain constraints, and particularly if they economic situation in the third world today precludes it, but it made at least 8 generations of Britons literally the masters of the world -- if you were in the bourgeois class in England in 1600, mercantilism and empire would pay off for you and your great-great-great-great grandchildren just fine. Most of Britain's great achievements and contributions to world history, it's military, it's scientific discoveries, its inventions, its economic power, can be directly attributed to its imperial project. Imperialism is of course bad by the rules we use to judge it today, but by the same token I shudder to think of what people 300 years from now will think of "neoliberal capitalism." And I wonder what horrors they will be employing to create their wealth...
History never renders final verdicts on economic theories, and mercantilism worked just great for lifetimes of individuals. You should never try to evaluate such things on the basis of eternal sustainability, because nothing is eternally sustainable. Most of the modern condemnation mercantilism gets is in the service of nervous libertarians, who are anxious to damn the state cartels and public-private corporations were at the vanguard of wealth creation in Europe for centuries.
it's not the best "technology" has to offer. It's the business "business" and "the law" want to offer us for now.
What part of my post, after the word "assuming," didn't you understand?
Without legal regimes to create copyrights, there'd be no mass media to buy content from, you'd have a high-speed no-physical-media perfectly-interoperable system to deliver the best content creators would have to offer under such a system, which would be:
30 second videos of cats peeing on things
1 minute Star Trek parodies (that go on far too long even at that)
5 minute screencasts showing you how to python script your word processor
two-hour university lectures given by pointy-headed media academics who spend their whole lecture pompously asserting how advanced modern society is now that authors are unable to collect royalties, and how he's going to have to stop posting the videos unless more people stop auditing his class and start taking it for credit, because he's gotta eat.
People are legitimately concerned that a particular store/DRM regime may disappear one day, which is why Amazon UnBox, iTunes and the various MS marketplaces offer terms for rental:) Don't have to worry about DRM expiring when you only have the movie for 3 days.
If you want to OWN a movie, to be able to watch it on demand, without Internet or company interference, your only option remains ordering the disk. Sorry, that's the best the technology can offer, assuming we exclude the plainly illegit methods, like torrents.
Copyrighting your own name is an important part of the sovereign citizen "redemption" process/conspiracy theory -- if you've ever heard of the gold fringe on a flag equals Admiralty court theory, or the idea that your name spelled in all caps is different from your real name, it's the same thing. Though I doubt this is exactly what she had in mind, it's quite an interesting dog-whistle to the Ruby Ridge types.
Based on what I've read, the architecture, the event and view models, at least from the client's perspective are very similar. Events go on a queue, get dispatched down a data structure that identifies the targeted UI element, MVC workflow, etc. I am aware that Android, at this present juncture, does very little hardware acceleration, and almost none in 2D, and it doesn't really affect the UX right up to the moment the user tries to scroll, though of course users judge the whole touch experience by the scrolling...
One can imagine how this sort of thing happens... the Apple engineer hands the prototype to the Steve, and the first time it stutters he gets smacked, The Google engineer hands the prototype to whatever-his-name-is, and the first time it stutters they say, "oh well, it'll ship, it's up to the HTC guys to come up with a fast enough processor." Nice to just do the OS, huh?
Everything you describe is fair in the open market. There is no fraud. Fraud is something one party does to another, it's a crime. One party "assuming" something isn't a crime.
The fraud comes in the assumption that stock prices can go on rising indefinitely.
A Ponzi scheme is where the bucket shop promises you it will rise indefinitely. Nobody's promising long AAPL investors anything here, they know they could lose their shirt and they're willing to take the risk. The fraud of a Ponzi scheme is that they don't disclose the risks.
I think you're too hung up on the idea that a share of stock should have some intrinsic value based on the income it generates or something. In the market nothing has intrinsic value, the only thing that matters is that someone will pay what you're willing to accept. The fact that new investors with new money arriving in the market every day drives appreciation, because more dollars chase fewer shares, some shares more than others. Wether or not AAPL shares will pay off, and in what way, for the individual investors is nobody's business but the investors, as long as no one is lying.
Where is the "fraudulent investment" in buying stock for appreciation? You put cash in and get a share back, and then you give someone a share and get more money in return. Free exchange with perfect information. Who's lying to you?
Do you really believe that the stock exchange is a fraud? It might be a stupid investment, but they don't lie to you about what they do with your money. A Ponzi scheme would be MADF, where they told investors they were investing in equities but they were just transferring cash around, or the original Franklin Syndicate, where they claimed they were investing in postal arbitrage.
People get this wrong a lot. A Ponzi scheme is when someone takes your money and promises you a return and lies to you about how they're going to get that return. A Ponzi scheme is a kind of fraud. When you're holding a piece of property for appreciation, you know exactly what you have and how you're trying to make money.
I'm entitled to disagree with one throwaway sentence in an otherwise-useful wikipedia article, particularly one that lacks citation or justification. Guess what, people use wikipedia to puke out out their B.S. politico-social theorizing all the time.
The word "federalism" never appears in Maastricht or the EU constitution, despite significant agitation on the part of very large member states for its inclusion -- I suspect the distinction means quite a bit to the Europeans, even if it's "all the same" to folks like random Wikipedia contributors and Belial6.
I read the link quite well. I disagree with Wikipedia's exegesis of "federalism," and consider it's theory reductive and ahistorical. Subsidiarity is a global principle applied to local institutions: the greater body creates an obligation for local control, and devolves authority down. Federalism, at least in the American experience, is a local principle where a sovereign entity relinquishes some of its competencies to the global entity, and evolves authority up. Under both systems the constituents retain plenary authority but under subsidiarity the global authority maintains the discretion to decide what is global and what is local; under American Federalism the distinction between the two is considered constitutional and must be specifically enumerated in law.
If you look at the EC Treaty it requires the European Parliament to undertake a consultative procedure to decide when its Acts are not in alignment with subsidiarity, and requires that legislative Acts be justified in their draft language (something US laws don't need to do), and specifically creates a procedure to judge the legitimacy of rules that breach Subsidiarity; this is done because Subsidiarity is an ideological concept and requires subjective judegment. The US Constitution has no such procedures because the limits of the federal government are stated in objective terms (coin money, post offices, and "necessary and proper").
The reason that Subsidiarity and US Federalism are so similar in the modern era is because every activity, down to the breath you take, in the modern world falls under the definition of "interstate commerce." The outcome is similar but the historical justification and the production is very, very different and will definitely produce different outcomes under different circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a civil suit. Illegality isn't necessary or sufficient to determine liability here. If she were using facebook to contact her insurer then the jury can take that into account, but that sounds a lot like the guy who hits the homeless man with his BMW and spends 20 minutes talking to his lawyer before calling the cops -- these people usually are found negligent; "reasonable care" for most people usually means preserving life before caring about legal liability or insurance. Negligence isn't a matter of literal laws to determine, to a great extent it's left up to the judge and jury to determine in the particular situation.
Right, but content is only worth something if you can get it in front of eyeballs -- network operators aren't just dumb pipes, they're what make content valuable. If you have a 10 second video of your dog barking at a dalek, 20 years ago that'd be worth absolutely nothing, but now it's worth thousands of dollars in monetized advertising. The only reason that it's worth something is because networks put the video in front of eyes. You need both content and delivery in order to have a saleable product.
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. All that is required is preponderance of evidence that driver was negligent, without regard for any statutes obeyed or broken.
You laugh.
But of course, lurking in the back of everyone's mind is the simple possibility that it might not be possible to pay for a non-tiered, flat-rate, uniform quality-of-service internet of sufficient capacity to deliver on-demand HD video or SIP telephone from any particular content provider in the US, independent of geography and service provider, to every terminal in the United States with flat monthly or even per-byte pricing on either end. The costs of building and maintaing the system simply don't map to consumption of the system's resources. Some parts of such a price structure are really lucrative for a network operator and some of them don't pay off for decades.
And if there were ways of doing it this way, it would require a hell of a lot more regulation than mere mandatory "Net Neutrality."
"Negligence" is a failure to exercise reasonable care. Hitting someone and then Facebooking about it before calling 911 is pretty plainly negligent and would be a slam dunk with a jury.
It doesn't have to be centralized authority, in this case the patient's general practitioner would hold a copy of the key and release it in such a circumstance according to the terms of a legal advance directive, like a limited power of attorney or living will. You just need a central repository of the encrypted data, and a directory service to help an ER find the patient's GP or kin, allow the keyholder to validate the patient's unconscious condition, or that their condition meets the terms of the directive, and then release the records.
If the patient is dying on the table and the communication with the referent of the "security directive" or whatever isn't available, they just have to proceed without records for the time being. Happens all the time.
It's striking how many people are willing to die for things they don't understand, let alone converse about them.
I was struck in Wired for War by the stories of EOD units in Iraq who would name their bomb-defusing robots, give them ranks, promotions, and ribbons, and, touchingly, would mourn their robot's destruction. There's one story about an operator who was literally bawling to a support rep at iRobot, asking if they could please somehow repair their bot. They were real creatures to them, and they were completely unintelligent. What really made the robots alive to them is that they were balky, seemed to have a personality in difficult situations (operator's confirmation bias at work), and had saved the operator's lives many, many times. It didn't matter that the robot didn't "understand" why it was being destroyed, the operators were often in a similar situation... what mattered was its (nominal) selflessness and heroism, something the operator's were required to display as well in a war situation.
I mean like, the Chinese Room is interesting, but the dark secret is that, when it comes to the way human beings confer personhood on other things, it makes it so there is no door to the Chinese Room. Only a mail slot, and it's impossible to see what's on the other side. An an unknowable truth is no truth at all.
If you'd been on Jeopardy! and told Alex his question was meaningless because John of Gaunt wasn't named John of Gaunt when he was born, I suspect you'd be the one accused of being the computer. Computers give responses that appear over-generalized all the time -- wether the answer is useful depends on the situation, which is why I sorta carefully said "particularly in the domain of how you know trivia." People often over-generalize or give overly-specific answers, too; they often avoid some of the dumber mistakes Watson does, because they have common sense gleaned from decades of high-bandwidth stimulus, but when it comes to abstract rules and concepts, people often are careless and use lessons learned in situations which aren't germane or appropriate to the situation. Look at how little children draw animals, with human eyes and sexual dimorphism. They take what they know and apply it to new things, and produce inaccurate output. These sorts of inconsistencies contain their own internal truth, like "animals are like people" and "the boy turtle thinks the girl turtle is yucky!" and that's the interesting content, because we cannot understand the mind and these outputs are the only window we have into the mind of others. In a similar way, Watson's associations sometimes give you fascinatingly wrong answers, but they reflect an internal truth, like "People in the news talk way too much about 9/11 and anyone that reads enough news will associate it with disparate concepts." This internal truth isn't interesting to anyone, though, because, unlike children, we can see how Watson works.
I mean generally, when someone says "we know the computer doesn't understand something" it's because we understand the computer. Any creature who's cognitive faculty can be disassembled down to its bolts, by definition, cannot understand concepts itself. The only reason we claim that any particular human being "understands" something is because they produce responses that align with our own model of the concept, and because we cannot see how their brain works. I think if you could actually see how people thought about things, with a Thought X-Ray, you'd be shocked at how differently people modeled concepts, to the point where someone with such an ability would conclude that no one really knows anything, and that all knowledge is emergent from collaboration.
Of course I can't prove that, it's all rather fanciful, but that's just as good as asserting a negative, like:
They have 35 years worth of audits, they don't have to hire PIs to keep their own people quiet.
You have to understand the semantic meaning of an error in computing. An error is something that is generated by an implementation upon the failure of a test at some level of the system -- it indicates the system has entered a state where further inputs will no longer map to the "desired" outputs. The issue is in how we define "desired," and we find that this is always defined semantically by the humans designing the system, a priori. A computer cannot divide a number by zero, or dereference a null pointer, because we say so, because we apply that abstract truth to the system. We do so because hardware and software form an entity that requires internal consistency to respond to inputs, and when that internal consistency is lost the system no longer is useable.
Humans make errors all the time, it's just that we do not generally halt when we make them. We have other ways of reconciling errors, things we call "rationalization" or "denial" or "learning." Human beings have very limited a priori desired outputs and exception states, and none of them apply to symbolic reasoning -- a coma might be an example of an exception state, and it's brought about by "recoverable device failures." The human brain and cognitive system is also much more finely engineered and rigorous than a computer system, inputs and outputs are always "sane," the states of the system, such as they are, are highly distributed in time and between functional units, and on most levels of operation the global system cannot lose internal consistency in a way that jeopardizes operation.
Well, the Nova ScienceNow that directly preceded the Watson episode was all about animal cognition (probably not coincidentally), and they had several rather unsettling demonstrations of a dog that could remember dozens of toys by name, and collect novel toys given nothing but the novel toy's name; a parrot that could count to eight and construct declarative phrases of nouns and modifiers; and dolphins with functional vocabularies that were provably communicating with each other through their squeaks to collaborate on a trick that they invented themselves.
Most creature's brains are capable of abstraction to a degree, but the physical attributes that are associated with humanity, like the opposable thumb, bipedal walking, and particularly a voice, have the effect of creating enormous selection pressures upon the brain. A hand grabbing a pole can kill one animal a year or a hundred, depending on how smart the brain behind it wields it. It may take one individual one lifetime to teach one other individual how to make a tool, or in the same time teach ten-thousand, completely depending on how well they use speech. Because birds and dolphins and dogs can't really manipulate their environment to the degree a creature with a hand can, the selection pressures fall upon other parts of their physiognomy.
What makes you think you're so different, particularly in the domain of how you know trivia? It's not like you have a particularly more concrete grasp of birthdate of John of Gaunt than a machine does.
A suffciently-functional weak AI is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Shorter: Britain's 400-year international preeminence, wealth, world leadership in finance, academics and culture "didn't work."
It's easy to say that something abstract like "mercantilism" doesn't work or isn't practical given certain constraints, and particularly if they economic situation in the third world today precludes it, but it made at least 8 generations of Britons literally the masters of the world -- if you were in the bourgeois class in England in 1600, mercantilism and empire would pay off for you and your great-great-great-great grandchildren just fine. Most of Britain's great achievements and contributions to world history, it's military, it's scientific discoveries, its inventions, its economic power, can be directly attributed to its imperial project. Imperialism is of course bad by the rules we use to judge it today, but by the same token I shudder to think of what people 300 years from now will think of "neoliberal capitalism." And I wonder what horrors they will be employing to create their wealth...
History never renders final verdicts on economic theories, and mercantilism worked just great for lifetimes of individuals. You should never try to evaluate such things on the basis of eternal sustainability, because nothing is eternally sustainable. Most of the modern condemnation mercantilism gets is in the service of nervous libertarians, who are anxious to damn the state cartels and public-private corporations were at the vanguard of wealth creation in Europe for centuries.
What part of my post, after the word "assuming," didn't you understand?
Without legal regimes to create copyrights, there'd be no mass media to buy content from, you'd have a high-speed no-physical-media perfectly-interoperable system to deliver the best content creators would have to offer under such a system, which would be:
People are legitimately concerned that a particular store/DRM regime may disappear one day, which is why Amazon UnBox, iTunes and the various MS marketplaces offer terms for rental :) Don't have to worry about DRM expiring when you only have the movie for 3 days.
If you want to OWN a movie, to be able to watch it on demand, without Internet or company interference, your only option remains ordering the disk. Sorry, that's the best the technology can offer, assuming we exclude the plainly illegit methods, like torrents.
You can't copyright something that cannot be copied. For something to be protected under copyright, it must originate from a reproducible medium.
Copyrighting your own name is an important part of the sovereign citizen "redemption" process/conspiracy theory -- if you've ever heard of the gold fringe on a flag equals Admiralty court theory, or the idea that your name spelled in all caps is different from your real name, it's the same thing. Though I doubt this is exactly what she had in mind, it's quite an interesting dog-whistle to the Ruby Ridge types.
One can imagine how this sort of thing happens... the Apple engineer hands the prototype to the Steve, and the first time it stutters he gets smacked, The Google engineer hands the prototype to whatever-his-name-is, and the first time it stutters they say, "oh well, it'll ship, it's up to the HTC guys to come up with a fast enough processor." Nice to just do the OS, huh?
The definitions of "tablet" vs "phone" are arbitrary and mostly dictated by marketing anyway.
The classic blunder of the computer nerd: over-generalization.
Everything you describe is fair in the open market. There is no fraud. Fraud is something one party does to another, it's a crime. One party "assuming" something isn't a crime.
A Ponzi scheme is where the bucket shop promises you it will rise indefinitely. Nobody's promising long AAPL investors anything here, they know they could lose their shirt and they're willing to take the risk. The fraud of a Ponzi scheme is that they don't disclose the risks.
I think you're too hung up on the idea that a share of stock should have some intrinsic value based on the income it generates or something. In the market nothing has intrinsic value, the only thing that matters is that someone will pay what you're willing to accept. The fact that new investors with new money arriving in the market every day drives appreciation, because more dollars chase fewer shares, some shares more than others. Wether or not AAPL shares will pay off, and in what way, for the individual investors is nobody's business but the investors, as long as no one is lying.
Where is the "fraudulent investment" in buying stock for appreciation? You put cash in and get a share back, and then you give someone a share and get more money in return. Free exchange with perfect information. Who's lying to you?
Do you really believe that the stock exchange is a fraud? It might be a stupid investment, but they don't lie to you about what they do with your money. A Ponzi scheme would be MADF, where they told investors they were investing in equities but they were just transferring cash around, or the original Franklin Syndicate, where they claimed they were investing in postal arbitrage.
People get this wrong a lot. A Ponzi scheme is when someone takes your money and promises you a return and lies to you about how they're going to get that return. A Ponzi scheme is a kind of fraud. When you're holding a piece of property for appreciation, you know exactly what you have and how you're trying to make money.
I'm entitled to disagree with one throwaway sentence in an otherwise-useful wikipedia article, particularly one that lacks citation or justification. Guess what, people use wikipedia to puke out out their B.S. politico-social theorizing all the time.
The word "federalism" never appears in Maastricht or the EU constitution, despite significant agitation on the part of very large member states for its inclusion -- I suspect the distinction means quite a bit to the Europeans, even if it's "all the same" to folks like random Wikipedia contributors and Belial6.
I read the link quite well. I disagree with Wikipedia's exegesis of "federalism," and consider it's theory reductive and ahistorical. Subsidiarity is a global principle applied to local institutions: the greater body creates an obligation for local control, and devolves authority down. Federalism, at least in the American experience, is a local principle where a sovereign entity relinquishes some of its competencies to the global entity, and evolves authority up. Under both systems the constituents retain plenary authority but under subsidiarity the global authority maintains the discretion to decide what is global and what is local; under American Federalism the distinction between the two is considered constitutional and must be specifically enumerated in law.
If you look at the EC Treaty it requires the European Parliament to undertake a consultative procedure to decide when its Acts are not in alignment with subsidiarity, and requires that legislative Acts be justified in their draft language (something US laws don't need to do), and specifically creates a procedure to judge the legitimacy of rules that breach Subsidiarity; this is done because Subsidiarity is an ideological concept and requires subjective judegment. The US Constitution has no such procedures because the limits of the federal government are stated in objective terms (coin money, post offices, and "necessary and proper").
The reason that Subsidiarity and US Federalism are so similar in the modern era is because every activity, down to the breath you take, in the modern world falls under the definition of "interstate commerce." The outcome is similar but the historical justification and the production is very, very different and will definitely produce different outcomes under different circumstances.
The EU isn't a federal system, it's a subsidiarity system, which in effect is similar but is based on very different doctrines.