All jokes aside, 99% of the world population is not in any way remotely a threat to an aircraft or the other people on board.
As for our elected representatives, I would argue that they are more likely to draw the attention of a terrorist (or a nutcase with a political agenda). Their mere presence on an aircraft is at least a minor threat to the people on board.
I don't care as much about direct democracy as I do that our representatives are the ones we want. But today, money votes for the nominees, and we vote against the guy we dislike most.
We need the ability to select backup candidates if ours favorite fails.
What if I modified a public domain work, and asserted a copyright of my own on it? Will I still have the copyright? A "no" answer would seem to invoke ex post facto.
This is good enough for me. IE 6 was an abomination and was a main representative of Microsoft back in the old days without enough competition to force compliance to the various HTML-related standards. Firefox started a good fight during this very long period, and eventually led to Microsoft creating IE 7, 8, and 9 with much better standards compliance.
But how much money is the government entitled to? 25%? 50%? All? The amount that I specifically owe for government services I received?
If they take all, I'll stop working.
And before you take the highest percentage that will keep me working, consider this... dollar for dollar, is the government going to do more with the money? The government is well known for its bureaucracy, debt, and inefficiency. (Oblig xkcd. Look closely, right hand image... the amount of annual improper federal payments almost equals what it would cost to send every US child to university for free.)
Mod parent up. I've also seen in other countries a flashing green signal that warns you that the signal will turn yellow soon, giving the driver more time to make a decision.
But knowing that drivers do what they do, are you willing to risk a collision (and your safety, along with your passengers' safety) when you see someone is following too closely? Or would you risk the ticket? What if the person behind you is underinsured?
The problem isn't fault, it's the consequences of a collision. Even a minor crash can result in injury, and thousands of dollars of damage and medical bills during a recession economy. Even if insurance covers you, your rates may increase.
Now add in the camera fines. Most cities get a small cut of the fines, typically not enough to cover court costs on all the cases that get thrown out.
The camera vendor is the only one to make money in this deal. Profits get larger by convincing the city to decrease yellow times, and by manipulating the cameras to catch people who were behind the line by inches but posed no danger.
The economy suffers in order to make a government vendor rich... is that what we want?
It has nothing to do with security, the world and their dog knows Win PCs are the haven of pirates and copyright infringed media.
Your claim is that Windows computers have been used to store a lot of pirated media. What does that have to do with the effectiveness of security or DRM in relation to the OS?
I mean, I agree that the Netflix excuse of requiring the right hardware/software for working with their DRM is a lie. But assuming it were not... the difference in it being Windows or Linux, from a DRM perspective, would likely favor Windows (particularly Windows 7).
Your act of coding is a service. The music production is sold as a product (but, yes, sometimes it is sold as a service via subscription). This is an apples to oranges comparison.
I have no personal ownership or copyright for the code I produce. But I get paid many thousands of dollars for that work. If my company bought my work as a product on the market, it would become a customer instead of a boss. The software might only be worth a few hundred dollars to them, since I would have the copyright and have the ability to sell it to other customers. I would be the one who makes all the decisions about the product, so none of my customers would necessarily be able to demand new features or fixes.
And remember, I don't just get thousands of dollars for the code I produce. I get a computer to produce it with. I get an office and electricity and heat and air conditioning. I get a decent chair and a desk. I get learning materials and servers and various software to help my productivity. I get administrative help to manage my paycheck and taxes that are taken out. But, I don't get to say I own the code.
Your analogy is weak. Most mass transportation systems offer the ability to go from one specific point to another specific point, economizing on stops that are close to the path between. In a major city, there's not just one bus route that goes to every stop. There are many. They are timed. You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
I would like to see this concept scaled up to a national level. What I mean is, you have a personal vehicle that takes you from arbitrary points to transportation hubs. Then, you board a train or bus or plane (or combination due to changeover points) to get you to another transportation hub, and then you have a personal vehicle waiting for you on the other side that can take you to your arbitrary destination. For large cities this can basically be done now since you can walk to a bus stop, but for everywhere else we need a vehicle on each end to move us to the nearest mass transportation hub.
why bother bringing the plane down when there are large lines of people waiting in line to go through the security checkpoint that are all vulnerable to attack
Because terrorists want western society to become a police state, or dictatorship, or whatever isn't free. Their goal is to incite fear of freedom, and to make society beg their government to make them less free (in exchange, of course, for something like security).
The government is in an expressly better position for solving problems that are defined by its populous as equal rights issues, where investment will make society better as a whole. I personally believe that education is such an issue. Having only a portion of our populous educated will not serve our nation well in the future. Thus, it should not be left completely to the free market.
But I believe that the market can still differentiate between "good enough" education and "very good" education, so that as a parent my investments in life could send my kids to better schools. I also believe in the voucher system, so my tax dollars aren't used for someone else's education while I'm struggling to send my kids to a better institution.
And you are correct in saying that those rights should be enshrined in the constitution. Unfortunately, in recent history we have been very hands-off with the constitution.
Incorrect. The server as a complete unit (multiple processors, motherboard, disks, memory, power supply, etc.) is the property. At any moment, 1000 processes are being held in memory and/or paged to disk, and a few processes are being served by different cores. Given that each process is designated to a single user, 1000 arbitrary people are essentially using the same physical property at the same time.
The need for lawyers who have studied for years or decades indicates that our legal system is too complex. There are so many laws, there exist laws that even the best lawyers are unaware of. There is a huge amount of case law that many times, but not always, provides direction in cases that are ambiguous in the law. We have laws from 2011 that override some part of laws from 2003 that override some part of laws from 1987 that override some part of laws from 1972, etc. to the beginning of time. I don't know the solution to all of this, but I think there has to be one.
And the free lawyer is rarely as good as the paid lawyer. Otherwise, they would be working for higher pay in the private sector.
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget...?
Perhaps because the military is a natural common-good of the entire nation, but these others are not so much and can be moved to a more local level.
Now, I've answered your question from my guess of his point of view. But my point of view is that some of those other departments provide some common-good, and the remainder can and should be localized. And also, a decent chunk of the military budget is some kind of waste (whether in inefficiency or in idealogy).
So I don't agree with all of what Ron Paul is saying, but there is some truth to it. There's truth to what you are implying as well.
Experiment: You measure 1 meter out, and then turn 90 degrees to your right, measure 1 meter out, turn 90 degrees right, and measure 1 meter, how far will you be from the starting point? Answer: 1 meter
Similar experiment: You measure 1 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: 1 km
Similar experiment: You measure 10,000 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: Approx. 0 km (Why? Because the earth is nearly spherical with a circumference of around 40,000 km, and you have traversed 1/4 of that distance along 3 geodesics, leading back to your starting position.)
This is why that quote by Tesla is incorrect. You cannot assume that local flat measurements mean that space is naturally flat. It may be naturally curved. If your assumption is that the earth is flat, you might reject the third experiment. But the third experiment helps to verify that the earth is naturally round. Likewise if you assume that space is Euclidean, then you might reject large-scale measurements that seem inconsistent with local measurements. But there is the problem again: you reject measurements that are out of line with your assumptions. (In fact, a property of any Reimannian manifold is that it is smooth, meaning it is possible to "zoom in" far enough anywhere such that local measurements would be consistent with a flat manifold.)
(A long time ago in a galaxy far... nope, right here, 10 years ago...) IE 6: Hey, guys. Suck it. Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We want a good, free, open-source browser that can become popular and bring us true choice and extensions and get rid of crappy non-standard HTML sites.
I for one am glad that I have a real choice in 2011. We've come a long ways since the dark ages of the Internet.
Yeah, I understand all of that, but (after a little more research) it doesn't make any difference when all parties are in the same inertial reference frame. It makes a difference when you add another inertial reference frame. I like the explanation at http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html, which begins with the situation I proposed with Alice and Bob transmitting with an ansible (which would be equivalent to instantaneous transmission via some mechanism like quantum teleportation).
By itself, this single use of the ansible doesn’t create a causality violation. If Bob transmits a signal back towards Alice using a conventional light-speed transmitter, she receives it a later time than when she signalled to Bob. Even if Bob re-transmits with his ansible, Alice receives the reply just a little after she sent out her signal. The problems arise when we bring another inertial frame into play. Let’s suppose that we have another pair of inertial observers, Carol and Dave, who are moving with respect to Alice and Bob, and who have a pair of ansibles of their own. As Carol flies past Bob at event Q, Bob gives her the message from Alice and she transmits it to Dave as soon in the diagram . . .
Now causality is in real trouble, as we can see if we consider the pair of transmissions (from Alice to Bob, then from Carol to Dave) . . .
Notice that we’ve arranged for Dave to receive the signal from Carol as he’s flying past Alice. Notice too that he receives it before Alice has sent her first signal! This means that Alice can transmit information into her own past by way of Bob, Carol, Dave, some spaceships, and two pairs of ansibles. And that’s why faster than light travel or communication, special relativity and causality cannot coexist.
I don't get the point of your post, or why you claim I don't understand relativity. I never claimed that anything would actually travel FTL, or that I have made some huge discovery.
You even confirmed what I did say, that it is possible to observe separation speeds of at-or-near 2C without violating relativity or the principle of invariant light speed. My post was a response to a post that assumed that I was talking about the speed of any single particle relative to another point in space... which isn't true, I was talking about separation speed of two particles in two different frames observed by a third frame.
Ok, but even if Alice and Bob found a way to transmit new information instantly, I'm still not seeing how a paradox could exist. Alice could send Bob a message, and Bob could calculate a response and send it back. Alice would receive the calculated response before light-speed would allow, but that wouldn't seem to violate causality by creating a paradox... from what I can tell, it would only violate the principle that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. But instantaneous information transfer (FTL) is the supposition, therefore nothing has been proven.
I'm not trying to be difficult... seriously, just trying to get how some of these concepts aren't just circular definitions.
Slashdot Mirror
All jokes aside, 99% of the world population is not in any way remotely a threat to an aircraft or the other people on board.
As for our elected representatives, I would argue that they are more likely to draw the attention of a terrorist (or a nutcase with a political agenda). Their mere presence on an aircraft is at least a minor threat to the people on board.
I don't care as much about direct democracy as I do that our representatives are the ones we want. But today, money votes for the nominees, and we vote against the guy we dislike most.
We need the ability to select backup candidates if ours favorite fails.
And we need to take money out of elections.
What if I modified a public domain work, and asserted a copyright of my own on it? Will I still have the copyright? A "no" answer would seem to invoke ex post facto.
(Modified public domain works may be copyrighted: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/8-b.html)
google, amazon, ebay et al - its their task. they need to start buying congressmen/senators, and start buying laws, now.
The fact that I can agree with you makes me hate our "democracy" even more.
I'm not sure what you're looking at. Its latest report is January 13, 2012.
http://datalossdb.org/index/latest
True, it doesn't mention Zappos yet.
Nobody really believes that the candidates are all the exact same. Most believe there is a lesser of two evils.
We need a new voting system. I need to be able to specify more than one candidate, in case my primary choice fails.
Ha, watched the DS9 episode on Netflix just yesterday.
This is good enough for me. IE 6 was an abomination and was a main representative of Microsoft back in the old days without enough competition to force compliance to the various HTML-related standards. Firefox started a good fight during this very long period, and eventually led to Microsoft creating IE 7, 8, and 9 with much better standards compliance.
Good riddance.
But how much money is the government entitled to? 25%? 50%? All? The amount that I specifically owe for government services I received?
If they take all, I'll stop working.
And before you take the highest percentage that will keep me working, consider this... dollar for dollar, is the government going to do more with the money? The government is well known for its bureaucracy, debt, and inefficiency. (Oblig xkcd. Look closely, right hand image... the amount of annual improper federal payments almost equals what it would cost to send every US child to university for free.)
Mod parent up. I've also seen in other countries a flashing green signal that warns you that the signal will turn yellow soon, giving the driver more time to make a decision.
But knowing that drivers do what they do, are you willing to risk a collision (and your safety, along with your passengers' safety) when you see someone is following too closely? Or would you risk the ticket? What if the person behind you is underinsured?
You're right legally. But legality != reality.
The problem isn't fault, it's the consequences of a collision. Even a minor crash can result in injury, and thousands of dollars of damage and medical bills during a recession economy. Even if insurance covers you, your rates may increase.
Now add in the camera fines. Most cities get a small cut of the fines, typically not enough to cover court costs on all the cases that get thrown out.
The camera vendor is the only one to make money in this deal. Profits get larger by convincing the city to decrease yellow times, and by manipulating the cameras to catch people who were behind the line by inches but posed no danger.
The economy suffers in order to make a government vendor rich... is that what we want?
It has nothing to do with security, the world and their dog knows Win PCs are the haven of pirates and copyright infringed media.
Your claim is that Windows computers have been used to store a lot of pirated media. What does that have to do with the effectiveness of security or DRM in relation to the OS?
I mean, I agree that the Netflix excuse of requiring the right hardware/software for working with their DRM is a lie. But assuming it were not... the difference in it being Windows or Linux, from a DRM perspective, would likely favor Windows (particularly Windows 7).
Your act of coding is a service. The music production is sold as a product (but, yes, sometimes it is sold as a service via subscription). This is an apples to oranges comparison.
I have no personal ownership or copyright for the code I produce. But I get paid many thousands of dollars for that work. If my company bought my work as a product on the market, it would become a customer instead of a boss. The software might only be worth a few hundred dollars to them, since I would have the copyright and have the ability to sell it to other customers. I would be the one who makes all the decisions about the product, so none of my customers would necessarily be able to demand new features or fixes.
And remember, I don't just get thousands of dollars for the code I produce. I get a computer to produce it with. I get an office and electricity and heat and air conditioning. I get a decent chair and a desk. I get learning materials and servers and various software to help my productivity. I get administrative help to manage my paycheck and taxes that are taken out. But, I don't get to say I own the code.
Your analogy is weak. Most mass transportation systems offer the ability to go from one specific point to another specific point, economizing on stops that are close to the path between. In a major city, there's not just one bus route that goes to every stop. There are many. They are timed. You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
I would like to see this concept scaled up to a national level. What I mean is, you have a personal vehicle that takes you from arbitrary points to transportation hubs. Then, you board a train or bus or plane (or combination due to changeover points) to get you to another transportation hub, and then you have a personal vehicle waiting for you on the other side that can take you to your arbitrary destination. For large cities this can basically be done now since you can walk to a bus stop, but for everywhere else we need a vehicle on each end to move us to the nearest mass transportation hub.
why bother bringing the plane down when there are large lines of people waiting in line to go through the security checkpoint that are all vulnerable to attack
Because terrorists want western society to become a police state, or dictatorship, or whatever isn't free. Their goal is to incite fear of freedom, and to make society beg their government to make them less free (in exchange, of course, for something like security).
The government is in an expressly better position for solving problems that are defined by its populous as equal rights issues, where investment will make society better as a whole. I personally believe that education is such an issue. Having only a portion of our populous educated will not serve our nation well in the future. Thus, it should not be left completely to the free market.
But I believe that the market can still differentiate between "good enough" education and "very good" education, so that as a parent my investments in life could send my kids to better schools. I also believe in the voucher system, so my tax dollars aren't used for someone else's education while I'm struggling to send my kids to a better institution.
And you are correct in saying that those rights should be enshrined in the constitution. Unfortunately, in recent history we have been very hands-off with the constitution.
the property (a CPU core)
Incorrect. The server as a complete unit (multiple processors, motherboard, disks, memory, power supply, etc.) is the property. At any moment, 1000 processes are being held in memory and/or paged to disk, and a few processes are being served by different cores. Given that each process is designated to a single user, 1000 arbitrary people are essentially using the same physical property at the same time.
The need for lawyers who have studied for years or decades indicates that our legal system is too complex. There are so many laws, there exist laws that even the best lawyers are unaware of. There is a huge amount of case law that many times, but not always, provides direction in cases that are ambiguous in the law. We have laws from 2011 that override some part of laws from 2003 that override some part of laws from 1987 that override some part of laws from 1972, etc. to the beginning of time. I don't know the solution to all of this, but I think there has to be one.
And the free lawyer is rarely as good as the paid lawyer. Otherwise, they would be working for higher pay in the private sector.
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget...?
Perhaps because the military is a natural common-good of the entire nation, but these others are not so much and can be moved to a more local level.
Now, I've answered your question from my guess of his point of view. But my point of view is that some of those other departments provide some common-good, and the remainder can and should be localized. And also, a decent chunk of the military budget is some kind of waste (whether in inefficiency or in idealogy).
So I don't agree with all of what Ron Paul is saying, but there is some truth to it. There's truth to what you are implying as well.
Experiment: You measure 1 meter out, and then turn 90 degrees to your right, measure 1 meter out, turn 90 degrees right, and measure 1 meter, how far will you be from the starting point? Answer: 1 meter
Similar experiment: You measure 1 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: 1 km
Similar experiment: You measure 10,000 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: Approx. 0 km (Why? Because the earth is nearly spherical with a circumference of around 40,000 km, and you have traversed 1/4 of that distance along 3 geodesics, leading back to your starting position.)
This is why that quote by Tesla is incorrect. You cannot assume that local flat measurements mean that space is naturally flat. It may be naturally curved. If your assumption is that the earth is flat, you might reject the third experiment. But the third experiment helps to verify that the earth is naturally round. Likewise if you assume that space is Euclidean, then you might reject large-scale measurements that seem inconsistent with local measurements. But there is the problem again: you reject measurements that are out of line with your assumptions. (In fact, a property of any Reimannian manifold is that it is smooth, meaning it is possible to "zoom in" far enough anywhere such that local measurements would be consistent with a flat manifold.)
Sorry, didn't read all the rest of your article.
You're forgetting the first one.
(A long time ago in a galaxy far... nope, right here, 10 years ago...)
IE 6: Hey, guys. Suck it.
Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We want a good, free, open-source browser that can become popular and bring us true choice and extensions and get rid of crappy non-standard HTML sites.
I for one am glad that I have a real choice in 2011. We've come a long ways since the dark ages of the Internet.
Yeah, I understand all of that, but (after a little more research) it doesn't make any difference when all parties are in the same inertial reference frame. It makes a difference when you add another inertial reference frame. I like the explanation at http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html, which begins with the situation I proposed with Alice and Bob transmitting with an ansible (which would be equivalent to instantaneous transmission via some mechanism like quantum teleportation).
By itself, this single use of the ansible doesn’t create a causality violation. If Bob transmits a signal back towards Alice using a conventional light-speed transmitter, she receives it a later time than when she signalled to Bob. Even if Bob re-transmits with his ansible, Alice receives the reply just a little after she sent out her signal. The problems arise when we bring another inertial frame into play. Let’s suppose that we have another pair of inertial observers, Carol and Dave, who are moving with respect to Alice and Bob, and who have a pair of ansibles of their own. As Carol flies past Bob at event Q, Bob gives her the message from Alice and she transmits it to Dave as soon in the diagram . . .
Now causality is in real trouble, as we can see if we consider the pair of transmissions (from Alice to Bob, then from Carol to Dave) . . .
Notice that we’ve arranged for Dave to receive the signal from Carol as he’s flying past Alice. Notice too that he receives it before Alice has sent her first signal! This means that Alice can transmit information into her own past by way of Bob, Carol, Dave, some spaceships, and two pairs of ansibles. And that’s why faster than light travel or communication, special relativity and causality cannot coexist.
I don't get the point of your post, or why you claim I don't understand relativity. I never claimed that anything would actually travel FTL, or that I have made some huge discovery.
You even confirmed what I did say, that it is possible to observe separation speeds of at-or-near 2C without violating relativity or the principle of invariant light speed. My post was a response to a post that assumed that I was talking about the speed of any single particle relative to another point in space... which isn't true, I was talking about separation speed of two particles in two different frames observed by a third frame.
Ok, but even if Alice and Bob found a way to transmit new information instantly, I'm still not seeing how a paradox could exist. Alice could send Bob a message, and Bob could calculate a response and send it back. Alice would receive the calculated response before light-speed would allow, but that wouldn't seem to violate causality by creating a paradox... from what I can tell, it would only violate the principle that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. But instantaneous information transfer (FTL) is the supposition, therefore nothing has been proven.
I'm not trying to be difficult... seriously, just trying to get how some of these concepts aren't just circular definitions.