I sincerely doubt that the people who wrote your constitution had the noble aim of allowing their citizens to call each other "poopyheads" in mind.
No, I think that's exactly what they had in mind. Something along the lines of, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
If the founders had wanted to protect the right to specifically annoy other people, they would have written something like: "The right of citizens to throw balloons full of dog shit at each other shall not be infringed".
This is exactly why some of the founders opposed the creation of the Bill of Rights: they worried that people would misinterpret it as an exhaustive listing of the people's (and the states') rights. It is not. It merely lists some of the things the federal government is explicitly, no-really-I-mean-it not allowed to do; but everything not mentioned is supposed to be left up to the people, or to the states. In fact, there's even an amendment saying precisely that:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
So since the founders did not put any language into the Constitution granting the federal government the power to prevent people from generally being assholes to each other, the federal government isn't allowed to do it. I leave as an exercise for the reader the task of finding in the Constitution language that grants the federal government the power to establish Social Security and other forms of welfare, the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and so on.
In any case, it doesn't matter. These people are either unemployed or not making a living wage. That means there either aren't enough jobs (for the unemployed) or the jobs that *are* available, don't pay a living wage. Since the unemployment rate varies due to economics, this rather proves *this isn't by choice.* These people did not *choose* to be unemployed, or to work for wages that can't really support them.
First, what does "available" mean in this context? The supply of jobs is not fixed: if I go into business on my own, I have just created a new job that did not exist before.
Second, it is entirely possible to choose either unemployment or a sub-"living wage" job. In the case of unemployment, even though we restrict the term to include only those who are seeking work, there may be many jobs that a given job-seeker would be unwilling to accept. For example, if I were fired tomorrow, it might take me some time to find another programming job, during which time I'd be unemployed. But I would be unemployed by choice, since there are plenty of other jobs I could potentially take in other fields (not to mention going into business on my own). Similarly for the "living wage": setting some arbitrary income threshold does not magically mean a person earning less than that has no choice in the matter.
So, not everyone has opportunity. Not everyone is offered a wad of cash. Further, many who *are* offered a wad of cash, are offered a wad of cash smaller than needed to decently live on.
It's not a question of someone walking up to you by chance and offering you some money. You have to work to convince people to give their money to you, and that's an opportunity that absolutely everyone has. Whether you are successful at it or not depends on many things, including both internal and external factors; but failure does not mean you never had the opportunity. Who can say what is possible with ingenuity and hard work, even in the direst of circumstances? For example, see the work that Nobel-winner Muhammad Yunus is doing with microcredit in Bangladesh.
The total US economy (or world economy, if you wish to go global) is limited. There is only a certain amount of money to go around.
You are conflating money with wealth. They are not the same. Even if the global supply of money remains constant, new wealth can still be created. Indeed, nearly every voluntary economic transaction creates wealth, since both sides consider themselves better off after the trade. The main point here is that a person can better himself economically while leaving others at least as well off as they were before.
Money. Is. Power. I won't say the US government is totally corrupt, but I do assert that big business (and the ultra-rich) have far more influence in government, trade, and culture, than the vast numbers of poor. And that influence has led to barriers for the poor to become moderately well-off, let alone super rich.
You did not make the connection to government in your original post; had you done so I might have agreed more with you. But you seem to be painting all capitalists with the same brush, rather than concentrating on those who abuse the power of the state in such a fashion. The free market is not inherently exploitative; the state is.
We replaced lords and kings with the super-rich. The major difference between then and now is perception.
You honestly don't see a major difference between pointing a gun (or sword) at someone, and handing someone a wad of cash? Because the latter is what economic power comes down to: all you can do with money is offer it to people in exchange for things. You can't shoot someone with money, or burn down his house, or steal his property (even if you bribe the government to do it for you, it's the guns held by the police that do the forcing, not the money). The kind of "economic pressure" people so often talk about really amounts to saying to someone, "I offer you this good or service in exchange for something of yours. Take it or leave it." Offering to make a voluntary exchange with someone doesn't make that person worse off than he was before, while pointing a gun at him certainly does.
...the current poor have no real chance to better themselves. Some do, certainly, but there are only a few slots available for betterment.
This is an outright lie, based on the false assumption that an economy is a zero-sum game. Voluntary trades are almost by definition not zero-sum: both sides expect to benefit from the trade, or they would not have made it. There are no limited "slots" for economic betterment; and while having money can make it easier for one to make more money, it does not stop anyone else from doing so.
Now, property rights might not belong to those with the biggest swords or guns, but they *do* belong to those with the biggest bank account.
Actually, they do belong to those with the biggest guns: the government. In most countries and in every real sense of the word, the government actually owns everything. The fact that it tells you otherwise, or that it is nominally bound by various restrictions (from votes to constitutions), doesn't fundamentally change this. In that sense, I agree with you that things are not much different from the days of "lords and kings." But you are misplacing the blame by concentrating on those who gain their wealth by voluntary trade, rather than on those who do so by force.
sorry, but stuff like Linux only works BECAUSE of copyright... The only reason if i modify the kernel source and distribute the binary, that I HAVE to give the source with it, is because of copyright. Otherwise I could just take the code that was released, make a closed source software, and watch as people interested are forced to decompile it to figure out my changes.
You're absolutely right. Something like Linux, but without the requirement to distribute changes to the source code, could never be a successfulopen sourceproject.
If someone tells me that they think the country is headed in the wrong direction and they're leaving, what reason do I have to listen to their thoughts on the matter?
If anything, the fact that someone is willing to uproot himself and his family over problems with his country should make you pay more attention to his complaints. Moving to another country is a huge deal for most people, even if it's only "across the border."
If they're so uncommitted to the country they're obviously not invested in the future of the country so their opinion means nothing to me.
Do you feel the same way about people who leave bad jobs in search of better ones? Why or why not?
I've taken to kicking up windows that can't be dismissed unless they type some code, like: "I don't mind losing data" or "yes I want to delete this forever", or "I am liable for the information I'm about to lose". No, not that long, but you get the idea. If the end user can't dismiss the window without reading the message on it, maybe they'll read it.
Please don't do this. Clueful users will despise you for it, and others will learn to ignore it soon enough anyway. Seriously, at a certain point you just have to accept that some of your users are out to get you, and learn to deal with it without letting it affect everyone else.
It still is a great resource for me and for many others. Can you tell us about some specific cases where Wikipedia lacked information you were looking for, or are you just trolling?
...but lately all I hear is admins talking about ways to block useless information...
Why do you care what the admins are talking about? Why don't you judge Wikipedia by its content, and not by rumors about what's going on behind the scenes?
The free market model operates on several key principles:
a very large number of sellers;
a very large number of buyers;
completely transparent and complete information;
all agents (buyers and sellers) act independently
It would be more correct to say that the free market operates "better" the more buyers and sellers there are, and the better the available information is. Your bullet points are not absolute requirements for the market to function. Furthermore, things like monopolies and uninformed market participants only distort a naive, simplistic analysis of the free market (of which many libertarians are no doubt guilty). They do not hamper the operation of the market itself; in fact they are completely normal and healthy components of it.
Take monopolies, for example: laissez-faire economists do not claim that monopolies cannot exist in a free market. Instead, they claim that the free market tends to eliminate monopolies, and does so more efficiently than government regulations can do, since regulations always introduce their own inefficiencies.
Just as it is naive to assume an idealized free market, it is also naive to point out certain inefficiencies in the free market and then blithely assume the existence of a similarly idealized form of government intervention to "fix" these inefficiencies. All government actions distort the market, and as a result they often do not achieve their stated ends; but many laissez-faire opponents ignore this.
A voice recording don't prove anything either, unless you can prove that your recording isn't forged. But in any case, you are correct that OTR cannot prevent the other party from intentionally incriminating you, given sufficient planning (for example, having an FBI agent present during the conversation). That's not the point. OTR instead tries to make it impossible for someone who gains access to one of the parties' private keys after the fact to prove that the conversation in question actually happened. From the OTR FAQ:
How is this different from the pidgin-encryption plugin?
The pidgin-encryption plugin provides encryption and authentication, but not deniability or perfect forward secrecy. If an attacker or a virus gets access to your machine, all of your past pidgin-encryption conversations are retroactively compromised. Further, since all of the messages are digitally signed, there is difficult-to-deny proof that you said what you did: not what we want for a supposedly private conversation!
The 5th amendment only applies if you in particular are charged with a crime. If you are subpoenaed or being sued and the court orders you to reveal the password, you will go to jail for contempt of court if you refuse to submit it.
Source? IANAL, but my understanding is that you may invoke the Fifth whenever your testimony could be used to convict you of a crime, whether the testimony in question would occur in a civil or criminal case, and whether or not you actually stand accused of a crime.
Even when charged with a criminal offense, not being testimony as to your actions, it may well hold up in court to charge you.
Insofar as the act of producing the password to an encrypted document can be used to establish the authenticity of the document, I believe it can indeed constitute self-incriminating testimony. See United States v. Hubbell.
However, while encryption can protect against "big brother", you can never eliminate the risk from the other end of the line. What happens if the person you are talking to has a rootkit, or prints out the conversation, or otherwise compromises the data? There's no real way to protect your entire conversation.
Uh, no shit? Obviously you're screwed if the other party is untrustworthy, since the whole point of the communication in question is to transmit your sensitive information to that party. Keep in mind, though, that a plaintext log or printout doesn't prove you said anything; one of the neat things about OTR is that it preserves this deniability while still allowing the other party to verify during the conversation that you are who you say you are.
Unless you're in the administration, that will get you tossed in jail. Normal citizens require plausible deniability.
I don't know about where you're from, but here in the U.S. we still (for now, at least) have something called the Fifth Amendment. You just have to change your answer from "I do not recall" to "on the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer the question based on the protection afforded to me under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution."
There isn't a business model that could truly work, at least not a direct one.
How do you know this? Have we tried all possible business models already? Hell, can we even enumerate all possible business models? It is arrogance to assume that your inability to imagine such a business model means such a model must not exist.
Americans seem to be brainwashed when it comes to the free market, they been told that goverment regulation is bad and will scream about it at every opportunity...
This is completely, utterly wrong. Have you even talked to an American recently? Most of us are just as ga-ga for government intervention as are people in other, supposedly more "socialist" countries. Sure, we sometimes pay lip service to the concept of "limited government," but just look at our two ruling parties: both strive for bigger and bigger government, and they reflect what people want.
As for your flamebait about "this proves the free market sucks!", why don't you tell us what country you are from, and what the population density is where you live? I'd bet that places in the U.S. with a similar population density have at least as much choice in the broadband market as you do.
Re:Python is part of the answer
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Open Source Math
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My immediate thought when seeing the title to the article was "Python is the answer."
Be honest-- that was your reaction when reading "Moby Dick" too, wasn't it?
The sum of every individual's utility across the entire population.
You're assuming that we can somehow assign numbers to people's preferences, and that we can get a meaningful quantity by adding them together. The second assumption in particular is problematic, since it requires some sort of consistent, external unit in which to express individual preferences. This, in turn, necessarily constitutes a value judgment about the relative worth of different individuals' preferences, which is one of the reasons many economists have abandoned the concept of cardinal utility altogether.
What about property rights over land?
I support property rights over land, like property rights over other physical goods. What I do not support is using the coercive force of government to secure those rights, nor indeed for any purpose whatsoever. I recognize that most people are not likely to accept an anarcho-capitalist system any time soon, however, so I often settle for arguing that governments should at most secure physical property rights-- the classical "minarchist" position.
You claim that there is a "socially optimal" level of music production. I challenge you to show how we are to determine that level, or even to prove that such a level exists in the first place.
More than that, this kind of utilitarian argument bugs the hell out of me. When did we begin to see the coercive force of government as a tool to "improve" society? (Never mind the question of whose definition of "improve" we're to use!)
If it's movies you're looking for, check out Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo and Byousoku 5cm. Both are excellent love stories from the last year or so; and if you like the latter, you should check out more of Makoto Shinkai's work, especially Hoshi no Koe.
If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population...
As others have noted, we're already there if you're just talking about food, clothing and shelter. But as our technology improves, our demand for convenience also increases; so I doubt we'll ever see a "Utopia" such as you describe. We will never "get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants" because our definition of "mundane" is always changing.
...let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs.
It's more fundamental than that: work is a necessary part of human life. By "work" here I don't mean "earning money"; I mean "accomplishing something through effort." Where work is not necessary for survival, we create it. I think this is close to what you were saying, but I wanted to make the distinction because so many people think of work merely as a means to make money.
The first half of your rant is basically irrelevant, elitist mumbling about how John Siracusa isn't "qualified" to offer his opinion on user interface design. Passing over that:
Translucence is part of a real world set of Metaphors.
A metaphor for what, exactly? What does making the menu bar translucent actually accomplish? You can argue that it fits better with the "Gestalt" of the interface as a whole, but unless you can point out specifically how the translucency improves usability, Siracusa's point stands: the translucent menu bar's decreased legibility makes the change a net usability loss.
This is arguably the goal of a tool such as a computer, a Turing Machine, a Robot. Getting closer to real.
A "real" menu bar is what, exactly? More than that, I do not want my computer's interface to be "real"; I want it to be usable. Computers are significantly different from other consumer products, so it stands to reason that the best interface for a computer would not necessarily mirror those of other, physical devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad I could clear that up for you.
Second, it is entirely possible to choose either unemployment or a sub-"living wage" job. In the case of unemployment, even though we restrict the term to include only those who are seeking work, there may be many jobs that a given job-seeker would be unwilling to accept. For example, if I were fired tomorrow, it might take me some time to find another programming job, during which time I'd be unemployed. But I would be unemployed by choice, since there are plenty of other jobs I could potentially take in other fields (not to mention going into business on my own). Similarly for the "living wage": setting some arbitrary income threshold does not magically mean a person earning less than that has no choice in the matter. It's not a question of someone walking up to you by chance and offering you some money. You have to work to convince people to give their money to you, and that's an opportunity that absolutely everyone has. Whether you are successful at it or not depends on many things, including both internal and external factors; but failure does not mean you never had the opportunity. Who can say what is possible with ingenuity and hard work, even in the direst of circumstances? For example, see the work that Nobel-winner Muhammad Yunus is doing with microcredit in Bangladesh.
Take monopolies, for example: laissez-faire economists do not claim that monopolies cannot exist in a free market. Instead, they claim that the free market tends to eliminate monopolies, and does so more efficiently than government regulations can do, since regulations always introduce their own inefficiencies.
Just as it is naive to assume an idealized free market, it is also naive to point out certain inefficiencies in the free market and then blithely assume the existence of a similarly idealized form of government intervention to "fix" these inefficiencies. All government actions distort the market, and as a result they often do not achieve their stated ends; but many laissez-faire opponents ignore this.
The documentary is called "Rise of the Video Game", not "Rise of the Videogame."
As for your flamebait about "this proves the free market sucks!", why don't you tell us what country you are from, and what the population density is where you live? I'd bet that places in the U.S. with a similar population density have at least as much choice in the broadband market as you do.
You claim that there is a "socially optimal" level of music production. I challenge you to show how we are to determine that level, or even to prove that such a level exists in the first place.
More than that, this kind of utilitarian argument bugs the hell out of me. When did we begin to see the coercive force of government as a tool to "improve" society? (Never mind the question of whose definition of "improve" we're to use!)
If it's movies you're looking for, check out Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo and Byousoku 5cm. Both are excellent love stories from the last year or so; and if you like the latter, you should check out more of Makoto Shinkai's work, especially Hoshi no Koe.