The reason medical bills appear so expensive in the US are because we're still actually billed, and we get to see the results of a giant socialization of healthcare. The majority of people receive some sort of government assistance in part or in full, and the majority of everyone else still receives some form of third-party-payer care.
Parts of the industry where insurance programs aren't regulated or provided, like cosmetic surgery, LASIK eye surgery, and veterinary care, have been declining in price and cost for quite some time.
Other countries don't have lower costs. They're just hidden away. They do, however, have longer lines. (I can't name very many other countries where I can get an MRI next day.)
Perhaps there could have been a slightly better numbering system, like using a period to separate the components (e.g. 4.4 for 404). But this takes up an extra byte once you get to e.g. "4.10 Gone", and you can't have a scheme that can take up an arbitrary number of bytes, so you may as well specify it as three bytes.
HTTP also depends on the numbering scheme to facilitate graceful degradation: any status code can safely be handled the same way it would be handled by the x00 code, but without caching (if any, which 200 OK allows).
In practice, there's almost no chance we'll ever run out of HTTP status codes. Saving the extra byte times trillions of HTTP requests is probably worth it.
A science class with proper SI units would be using kelvins - C poses problems when doing math.
And for day to day use, Fahrenheit is explicitly based off of the human body temperature, and scaled such that the difference between the freezing point and boiling point of water is 180 (hence "degrees" Fahrenheit).
It seems you missed the memo, but "The Jungle" was an out-on-out, pants-on-fire lie. The courts never found any evidence of that kind of conduct. Roosevelt decided not to release the actual government investigation, which couldn't corroborate Sinclair's account - it would have hurt his Pure Food and Drug Act legislation, and he had to maintain the image that he was doing something. The government also brought suits against Ketchup producers and Coca-Cola for being "adulterated" products (That's right, they said tomatoes were poisonous, people just couldn't make informed decisions, etc).
And in any case, such a situation would be fraud, which can be settled without a military spread out across hundreds of countries.
Roads have historically been provided by private individuals. The government didn't invent roads, you know (they did invent canals, how's that working out as a form of transportation?). They didn't invent firefighting services either. Just because you've lived your entire life with the government spoon-feeding you these services, you can't imagine a world any other way.
But for the sake of argument, lets say we need to socialize roads, firefighting, police, military, quality control, and I'll even give you space exploration. Well great, that's about 30% of my Federal through local spending per capita (and half of THAT is only because I'm giving you every last deployed troop by the US, even to Germany), what of the other 70% that's actually being critiqued here? Nice straw man though.
The Web is fairly well-defined. If there's another mechanism that a user can be identified by, the same conclusion applies: Stop sending personally identifiable information. If the user agent is actually leaking information where it's not intended to be leaked, that's a security hole and a bug, you can't fault a website for using it to track you, and the solution is engineering, not force.
Somehow it is unethical to use your own time and resources to collect publicly available data? Or even if I didn't ask for any data, just data of my own that I've accumulated... Somehow, I'd have to dig up my financial records and destroy them after two years. Which is a rather arbitrary number, isn't it? Certainly in violation of records-keeping requirements for taxes. I'm not allowed to know what transactions I've made if they're more than two years old, really? It's my data. What you're proposing is criminalizing possession of one's own belongings! I don't think I've heard this before.
There is no surrender. This is a solution in search of a problem. Your solution doesn't stop the Government spying (compelled under threat of violence). It does, however, empower the Government to order people around on how they operate. It would require some sort of audit system in place. There'd be arbitrary and unevenly enforced rules on what would be "acceptable" and what is "unethical". And of course, how are we so sure that these are the rules that would be enforced? Government audits means mandatory government access to your data, which is far worse.
I'm sorry, what? A business model can somehow "not have a right to exist"? I hate to break it to you, but business models don't have rights. People, individuals have rights.
You have a right to browse Websites. You have a right to use whatever user-agent you want.
And likewise, I have a right to send those Set-Cookie headers. You can honor them or not.
How is a business owner just supposed to "not track" someone? You realize every time you pay with a Credit card, that's tracked, right? Are business owners just supposed to magically forget about all the transactions they've ever processed, somehow? If you don't want that, pay with cash or don't purchase the product.
Ponzi schemes are unethical because they are fraud. It's making a promise that cannot possibly be sustained. If I were completely honest -- "This portfolio is a ponzi scheme! You may not get any of your money back!" -- that is completely ethical (but no one in their right mind would do that with any significant amount of money, hence the lies typically associated with Ponzi schemes).
Despite your completely arbitrary assertion, there is nothing unethical about keeping logs of activity sent to ones own server, or requesting -- not even forcing, but politely asking via a Set-Cookie header -- that a customer identify themselves with a unique token. It is ethical because it is completely voluntary. If you don't want the tracking, don't send the Cookie header in your request. It's really as simple as that.
Your idea of a "fix" doesn't fix anything, it ignores the Web security model and naively assumes that there's some hard distinction between "The user wanted to perform this action" and "some non-user performed this action acting as the user" when, to the user-agent and end server, there's really no distinction.
On the Web, only user-agents make requests. If they're doing this because a human requested it or because a program or robot made the request is immaterial. Requests should must be secure under all these conditions.
And to be clear: It's not actually DRM. It's just an API. And it's not that much different than Encrypted XML: It's just another standard to encrypt stuff, storing the key separately, to be recombined later. It doesn't proscribe access restrictions or much of anything else that people associate with DRM. I can imagine using it to efficiently encrypt a voice or video chat session between multiple people, for instance.
If the Government actually owned an ISP to be able to copy data, that would be one discussion.
But no, the government here is compelling providers to hand over information without a warrant. I cannot do that, you cannot do that, Google could not order that, and neither can the Government.
(The so-called expectation of privacy not only prevents the government from searching/taking private property without a warrant, it it also prevents them from bugging public or publicly accessible property where there is otherwise an expectation of privacy - in the original court case that established this, this was a phone booth.)
The 4th amendment doesn't just protect houses. It protects companies like Facebook. It protects everyone in their own business from unlawful force.
I never mentioned the first amendment. You read that in yourself.
If someone were to break into your house and demand you not say that ever again, that would be a violation of free speech, just not by the government, nor in violation of the first amendment (just numerous other crimes).
Nor did I say public libraries. I really mean all libraries.
You can't cite yourself as a source, that doesn't prove anything.
There's a knock one day at your door. There's a man at the door, he says "You must give me your money, you don't have a choice in the matter, but don't worry, I'm going to give it away in your name."
You wouldn't trust a crackpot like that with your property, why should you place trust when that crackpot is the government?
"...doesn't qualify 'on a constitutional level' as invasive to our personal privacy."
Besides being completely wrong, it shows how little the government thinks of property rights. The information belongs to your phone providers/Facebook/etc, it's their hard drives, you need a narrowly-scoped warrant to compel them to hand over that information, end of discussion.
But even suppose there were no property rights in this context. Could a regular person, or even a well funded company like Facebook, possibly get away with demanding personal records from other companies? No? Then it's not really public information, is it?
Free speech is the right that no coercive force will be used to stop speech. It mostly applies to government, but could apply to anyone being physically threatened for what they say.
Censorship, as is commonly used, isn't limited to free speech, but also in instances where there was an implied liberty to speak one's mind. If a television show bleeps someone out, that's called "censorship". If a library removes a book over interest group pressure, that's "censorship". If a newspaper fires a columnist for something they wrote, that's "censorship" (if said newspaper refuses to print someone's letter to the editor, though, that's distinctly not censorship).
And if Tumblr is changing their policy to restrict more forms of speech, that would be censorship.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but JSON isn't usually RESTful (there's no hypertext).
REST is a perfectly fine network architecture, it's designed to support forward-comparability and be self-documenting. But most people have no clue what it means.
Like Twitter. Their website is more RESTful than their so-called REST API, it's despicable.
If that's the only thing you can hate the governor for, there's others who've done worse who are far more deserving of your scorn. Do you think mandatory vaccinations are unusual?
The view is not inconsistent; the output of software programs is plainly not copyrightable (that is, there is no new copyrightable work being produced, only the component works that may go into it, which retain their respective licenses).
If you're going to talk law, then you have to adopt the law vocabulary. It's the same in any other field or science.
The law has a name for the particular kind of people you're describing, they're called individuals. People, on the other hand, form a larger group of members that include corporations.
I hope you do realize this is a good thing, because if a corporation was not a person, then the Government would have no authority to prosecute them under the law. This probably is the complete opposite effect of what you intend.
Do you have a superior suggestion? Sure there's a few problems with what corporations do nowadays, mostly as a result of corporatist laws and such (government granting special favors that an individual or other corporations couldn't attain), but by and large the fundamental corporation model has been around for centuries and isn't surpassed in it's ability to satisfy consumer demand.
What's profit have to do with it? Profit, other things being equal, is good (ask any economist). Would you prefer losses? That's the only alternative.
What's wrong is violating private property rights: Infecting other people's crops, selling nonfunctional seeds, or other forms of fraud and force. Manufacturers do, in fact, have a reputation to uphold, especially bigger manufacturers.
The whole point of GM crops is they're supposed to resist famine, disease, and malnutrition. Regular crops are just as susceptible to the possibilities that you name, if not more. If you're basing your decisions on what could possibly happen, I've got some news for you...
The beef most people want you to have with Monsanto is that they're out to monopolize crop planting and eliminate organic food, or something like that, or that GM crops are somehow unhealthy. It's not so much beef as BS.
As far as I can tell, the beef Slashdot collectively has with Monsanto is that they think, like software patents, that they can patent just about anything and sue anyone purportedly using it, even if there's never been any commercial transaction, even if it's an organic farm.
I believe I did link to the actual price index starting at 1910, did I not? See for yourself what prices looked like. I even linked to the log-scale plot, which greatly exaggerates changes in prices compared to a linear plot.
I didn't claim otherwise. A money is a medium of exchange, period. I don't know which "magic" you refer to.
Usually inflation is what hurts people: It depletes savings and hurts people on fixed incomes. It gives people close to the source of the generated money, meanwhile the people at the end of the chain -- usually those in the service sector, receive the effects of the inflation last, and live relatively poorer than they otherwise would. Do keep in mind that prices don't increase uniformly, they have to trickle their way throughout.
Again, if people anticipated rising prices, prices would already be that high. This isn't an Econ 200 concept, this is Econ 101 right here. Do I look uneducated in this area, or is it more likely we have a disagreement?
Price levels change for a number of reasons. If prices suddenly go up, it's may be because of a fundamental increase in costs (maybe a natural disaster or something else disrupted production), or there was a risk of prices not going up (maybe depending on the outcome of an election), and speculators bid accordingly. This is when changing prices are good: It reflects the new cost of goods in the marketplace. Or if prices suddenly go down, perhaps there's abundant new natural resources or improved production techniques. This sort of changing prices does not affect one's ability to pay off the mortgage, it means you can enjoy more goods with the same wage.
Adjusting the money supply to change prices is bad: The total amount of goods on the market hasn't changed, but instead some person benefits at the expense of others (usually, the money creator at the expense of the working class).
Slashdot Mirror
This so much.
They're just upset that people might actually call them out when they're wrong. Oh, the horror.
I thought being skeptical was a virtue. Apparently I'm supposed to blindly agree with PopSci and everything they say, though.
It's a public key. Of course the government has it. Or any attacker, for that matter, all they have to do is look at any of your encrypted messages.
If you have to do that -- sacrifice your privacy -- hasn't the government already won?
The reason medical bills appear so expensive in the US are because we're still actually billed, and we get to see the results of a giant socialization of healthcare. The majority of people receive some sort of government assistance in part or in full, and the majority of everyone else still receives some form of third-party-payer care.
Parts of the industry where insurance programs aren't regulated or provided, like cosmetic surgery, LASIK eye surgery, and veterinary care, have been declining in price and cost for quite some time.
Other countries don't have lower costs. They're just hidden away. They do, however, have longer lines. (I can't name very many other countries where I can get an MRI next day.)
Perhaps there could have been a slightly better numbering system, like using a period to separate the components (e.g. 4.4 for 404). But this takes up an extra byte once you get to e.g. "4.10 Gone", and you can't have a scheme that can take up an arbitrary number of bytes, so you may as well specify it as three bytes.
HTTP also depends on the numbering scheme to facilitate graceful degradation: any status code can safely be handled the same way it would be handled by the x00 code, but without caching (if any, which 200 OK allows).
In practice, there's almost no chance we'll ever run out of HTTP status codes. Saving the extra byte times trillions of HTTP requests is probably worth it.
A science class with proper SI units would be using kelvins - C poses problems when doing math.
And for day to day use, Fahrenheit is explicitly based off of the human body temperature, and scaled such that the difference between the freezing point and boiling point of water is 180 (hence "degrees" Fahrenheit).
It seems you missed the memo, but "The Jungle" was an out-on-out, pants-on-fire lie. The courts never found any evidence of that kind of conduct. Roosevelt decided not to release the actual government investigation, which couldn't corroborate Sinclair's account - it would have hurt his Pure Food and Drug Act legislation, and he had to maintain the image that he was doing something. The government also brought suits against Ketchup producers and Coca-Cola for being "adulterated" products (That's right, they said tomatoes were poisonous, people just couldn't make informed decisions, etc).
And in any case, such a situation would be fraud, which can be settled without a military spread out across hundreds of countries.
Roads have historically been provided by private individuals. The government didn't invent roads, you know (they did invent canals, how's that working out as a form of transportation?). They didn't invent firefighting services either. Just because you've lived your entire life with the government spoon-feeding you these services, you can't imagine a world any other way.
But for the sake of argument, lets say we need to socialize roads, firefighting, police, military, quality control, and I'll even give you space exploration. Well great, that's about 30% of my Federal through local spending per capita (and half of THAT is only because I'm giving you every last deployed troop by the US, even to Germany), what of the other 70% that's actually being critiqued here? Nice straw man though.
The Web is fairly well-defined. If there's another mechanism that a user can be identified by, the same conclusion applies: Stop sending personally identifiable information. If the user agent is actually leaking information where it's not intended to be leaked, that's a security hole and a bug, you can't fault a website for using it to track you, and the solution is engineering, not force.
Somehow it is unethical to use your own time and resources to collect publicly available data? Or even if I didn't ask for any data, just data of my own that I've accumulated... Somehow, I'd have to dig up my financial records and destroy them after two years. Which is a rather arbitrary number, isn't it? Certainly in violation of records-keeping requirements for taxes. I'm not allowed to know what transactions I've made if they're more than two years old, really? It's my data. What you're proposing is criminalizing possession of one's own belongings! I don't think I've heard this before.
There is no surrender. This is a solution in search of a problem. Your solution doesn't stop the Government spying (compelled under threat of violence). It does, however, empower the Government to order people around on how they operate. It would require some sort of audit system in place. There'd be arbitrary and unevenly enforced rules on what would be "acceptable" and what is "unethical". And of course, how are we so sure that these are the rules that would be enforced? Government audits means mandatory government access to your data, which is far worse.
I'm sorry, what? A business model can somehow "not have a right to exist"? I hate to break it to you, but business models don't have rights. People, individuals have rights.
You have a right to browse Websites. You have a right to use whatever user-agent you want.
And likewise, I have a right to send those Set-Cookie headers. You can honor them or not.
How is a business owner just supposed to "not track" someone? You realize every time you pay with a Credit card, that's tracked, right? Are business owners just supposed to magically forget about all the transactions they've ever processed, somehow? If you don't want that, pay with cash or don't purchase the product.
Ponzi schemes are unethical because they are fraud. It's making a promise that cannot possibly be sustained. If I were completely honest -- "This portfolio is a ponzi scheme! You may not get any of your money back!" -- that is completely ethical (but no one in their right mind would do that with any significant amount of money, hence the lies typically associated with Ponzi schemes).
Despite your completely arbitrary assertion, there is nothing unethical about keeping logs of activity sent to ones own server, or requesting -- not even forcing, but politely asking via a Set-Cookie header -- that a customer identify themselves with a unique token. It is ethical because it is completely voluntary. If you don't want the tracking, don't send the Cookie header in your request. It's really as simple as that.
Modifying the behavior for "cross-domain" requests doesn't fix a thing. What if I open up a malicious link from my mail client?
https://bank.example.com/transfer?to=mallory&amount=100
Your idea of a "fix" doesn't fix anything, it ignores the Web security model and naively assumes that there's some hard distinction between "The user wanted to perform this action" and "some non-user performed this action acting as the user" when, to the user-agent and end server, there's really no distinction.
On the Web, only user-agents make requests. If they're doing this because a human requested it or because a program or robot made the request is immaterial. Requests should must be secure under all these conditions.
And to be clear: It's not actually DRM. It's just an API. And it's not that much different than Encrypted XML: It's just another standard to encrypt stuff, storing the key separately, to be recombined later. It doesn't proscribe access restrictions or much of anything else that people associate with DRM. I can imagine using it to efficiently encrypt a voice or video chat session between multiple people, for instance.
If the Government actually owned an ISP to be able to copy data, that would be one discussion.
But no, the government here is compelling providers to hand over information without a warrant. I cannot do that, you cannot do that, Google could not order that, and neither can the Government.
(The so-called expectation of privacy not only prevents the government from searching/taking private property without a warrant, it it also prevents them from bugging public or publicly accessible property where there is otherwise an expectation of privacy - in the original court case that established this, this was a phone booth.)
The 4th amendment doesn't just protect houses. It protects companies like Facebook. It protects everyone in their own business from unlawful force.
I never mentioned the first amendment. You read that in yourself.
If someone were to break into your house and demand you not say that ever again, that would be a violation of free speech, just not by the government, nor in violation of the first amendment (just numerous other crimes).
Nor did I say public libraries. I really mean all libraries.
You can't cite yourself as a source, that doesn't prove anything.
There's a knock one day at your door. There's a man at the door, he says "You must give me your money, you don't have a choice in the matter, but don't worry, I'm going to give it away in your name."
You wouldn't trust a crackpot like that with your property, why should you place trust when that crackpot is the government?
Besides being completely wrong, it shows how little the government thinks of property rights. The information belongs to your phone providers/Facebook/etc, it's their hard drives, you need a narrowly-scoped warrant to compel them to hand over that information, end of discussion.
But even suppose there were no property rights in this context. Could a regular person, or even a well funded company like Facebook, possibly get away with demanding personal records from other companies? No? Then it's not really public information, is it?
Free speech is the right that no coercive force will be used to stop speech. It mostly applies to government, but could apply to anyone being physically threatened for what they say.
Censorship, as is commonly used, isn't limited to free speech, but also in instances where there was an implied liberty to speak one's mind. If a television show bleeps someone out, that's called "censorship". If a library removes a book over interest group pressure, that's "censorship". If a newspaper fires a columnist for something they wrote, that's "censorship" (if said newspaper refuses to print someone's letter to the editor, though, that's distinctly not censorship).
And if Tumblr is changing their policy to restrict more forms of speech, that would be censorship.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but JSON isn't usually RESTful (there's no hypertext).
REST is a perfectly fine network architecture, it's designed to support forward-comparability and be self-documenting. But most people have no clue what it means.
Like Twitter. Their website is more RESTful than their so-called REST API, it's despicable.
If that's the only thing you can hate the governor for, there's others who've done worse who are far more deserving of your scorn. Do you think mandatory vaccinations are unusual?
Have you tried living in NYC recently?
The view is not inconsistent; the output of software programs is plainly not copyrightable (that is, there is no new copyrightable work being produced, only the component works that may go into it, which retain their respective licenses).
If you're going to talk law, then you have to adopt the law vocabulary. It's the same in any other field or science.
The law has a name for the particular kind of people you're describing, they're called individuals. People, on the other hand, form a larger group of members that include corporations.
I hope you do realize this is a good thing, because if a corporation was not a person, then the Government would have no authority to prosecute them under the law. This probably is the complete opposite effect of what you intend.
Do you have a superior suggestion? Sure there's a few problems with what corporations do nowadays, mostly as a result of corporatist laws and such (government granting special favors that an individual or other corporations couldn't attain), but by and large the fundamental corporation model has been around for centuries and isn't surpassed in it's ability to satisfy consumer demand.
What's profit have to do with it? Profit, other things being equal, is good (ask any economist). Would you prefer losses? That's the only alternative.
What's wrong is violating private property rights: Infecting other people's crops, selling nonfunctional seeds, or other forms of fraud and force. Manufacturers do, in fact, have a reputation to uphold, especially bigger manufacturers.
The whole point of GM crops is they're supposed to resist famine, disease, and malnutrition. Regular crops are just as susceptible to the possibilities that you name, if not more. If you're basing your decisions on what could possibly happen, I've got some news for you...
The beef most people want you to have with Monsanto is that they're out to monopolize crop planting and eliminate organic food, or something like that, or that GM crops are somehow unhealthy. It's not so much beef as BS.
As far as I can tell, the beef Slashdot collectively has with Monsanto is that they think, like software patents, that they can patent just about anything and sue anyone purportedly using it, even if there's never been any commercial transaction, even if it's an organic farm.
Time and labor are limited resources. How you wish to allocate them is your own choice.
That's not my only argument, mind you, it's not even a logical one. If you want a more logical argument, refer to the previous paragraph.
I believe I did link to the actual price index starting at 1910, did I not? See for yourself what prices looked like. I even linked to the log-scale plot, which greatly exaggerates changes in prices compared to a linear plot.
I didn't claim otherwise. A money is a medium of exchange, period. I don't know which "magic" you refer to.
Usually inflation is what hurts people: It depletes savings and hurts people on fixed incomes. It gives people close to the source of the generated money, meanwhile the people at the end of the chain -- usually those in the service sector, receive the effects of the inflation last, and live relatively poorer than they otherwise would. Do keep in mind that prices don't increase uniformly, they have to trickle their way throughout.
Again, if people anticipated rising prices, prices would already be that high. This isn't an Econ 200 concept, this is Econ 101 right here. Do I look uneducated in this area, or is it more likely we have a disagreement?
Price levels change for a number of reasons. If prices suddenly go up, it's may be because of a fundamental increase in costs (maybe a natural disaster or something else disrupted production), or there was a risk of prices not going up (maybe depending on the outcome of an election), and speculators bid accordingly. This is when changing prices are good: It reflects the new cost of goods in the marketplace. Or if prices suddenly go down, perhaps there's abundant new natural resources or improved production techniques. This sort of changing prices does not affect one's ability to pay off the mortgage, it means you can enjoy more goods with the same wage.
Adjusting the money supply to change prices is bad: The total amount of goods on the market hasn't changed, but instead some person benefits at the expense of others (usually, the money creator at the expense of the working class).