Isn't it the case that due process is only available for people who submit themselves to it? Due process has _always_ been available to this guy, if he wanted it. All he had to do was turn himself in. He's been on the run from the law, and that's a different situation. I don't see why this is complicated at all, as long as there's been an active indictment against him, or whatever is necessary to effect a legal arrest.
All I know is that they could prick some holes in those big electric pipes, let the 'lectricity out and create a ton of steam bubbles. This will turn the entire coast of Japan into a giant steam bath, achieving all goals simultaneously: Eliminate winter, increase tourism from Scandinavian countries, pirate ships coming out of cool misty effects, and the Japanese can relax for a change.
I don't know about being primarily procedural -- my guess is that it's procedural in the same sense that the reconstruction of a JPEG is a procedural function, based on the composition of transforms. Maybe they've come up with a way of cleanly compressing point fields with a multi-dimensional, hierarchical wavelet set, or something like it. Rendering is then sort of probabilistic, with the caveat that you need to retain frame-to-frame stability. They (breathlessly) repeat the limit on the density of the data they have created. If it was procedural that lower limit wouldn't be there.
When you read AirBNB's current (as of 2:40pm 7/31/2011) FAQ, it's seriously frowned-upon for a host to use the "contact information" they are given to actually make a decision to NOT rent to someone. Step 5 is accept or deny request, at which point you have no information. Step 6 is AirBNB collects the payment. Step 7 sends the real contact info. Step 8 describes when payment will be released. And that's the end of their public process.
There's no step 9 -- what to do if you are unhappy with the details you received. At the end of the FAQ we find "We take host cancellations very seriously, because they pose a huge problem to guests' travel plans and they hurt the reliability of our website. When a host cancels, their ranking in search results is negatively affected." That means AirBNB is going to penalize you, as a host, if you elect not to accept a guest based on the contact information you have received.
Seems to me that AirBNB is going to have to come up with a policy for the "early period", during which time a member is considered "new". A new member should probably have a mandatory security deposit requirement, and any such reservation request should be flagged as a new member request.
I probably forgot to hit submit on my previously-written response to your note. I intended no disrespect to you or Apache's process. I'm just expressing the general frustration that Java programmers everywhere must feel at the prospect of having a broken JDK7 out there, when it seems like it was preventable. Of course, the devil is in the details, as always. Could the bug have been identified earlier? Was the bug exhibited by a failure of an automated test suite within the Apache project, or did it manifest only during exploratory testing?
The real question facing the Java community is understanding what parts of the process can be improved to avoid something like this happening again in the future.
Another way of looking at this is to realize that the pre-release versions of Java 7 have been out there for a long, long time, and nobody from these Apache projects felt like testing their (rather important) open source projects against it, so they could have found and reported the bug earlier.
It seems to me that fault lies in both directions here.
A more correct rewrite of the bug teaser would be, "Don't use Java 7 for anything if you are incapable of passing an extra command line argument to it".
Note that the patent has nothing to do with mobile devices. It's just a very general "recognize a pattern in data" patent. Seems to me that any syntax-aware programming editor from before 1996 would be prior art.
What you (and most others here) seem to have missed is that Dropbox generally has absolutely no idea what your content is. Everything is encrypted. How exactly are they distributing your "copyrighted material" when it can't be decrypted?
In rare cases (specifically those required to cooperate with law enforcement) Dropbox has indicated that they could decrypt. I expect they will do this as rarely as possible, as it opens up questions they'd likely rather leave closed.
If Dropbox does geographically distributed services, they need to be able to replicate your content to other servers. To do that, they need your permission to copy it. You are providing them permission to copy opaque blocks of data, not replicate your tunes around the world. You want to share a link to a file? Dropbox needs your permission to be able to publish your opaque blocks of data on that URL (and decrypt it for use, in such a case).
I'm not sure how you would plan on profiting from blocks of close-to-random data. Maybe you want to sell close-to-random numbers? Profit!
I'm with you until your dumb-ass comment about liberals. Really. Why don't conservatives with less-than-perfect sentence construction skills realize that there are good taxes and bad taxes, and that not all taxes affect the economy in the same way?
It's worth noting that, according to the most recent IRS income statistics, those in the top 0.1% or so have been making do with quite a bit more since the Bush-era top tax rate cuts.
1 - A retail store doesn't ask about exemptions, and neither should an internet business. It's the individual's responsibility. 2. Irrelevant, and up to the individual. Just like a retail store. 3. Combo box for state -> tax rate. Wow, that was hard. 4. You have a point here, and the states should unify through a clearing house that makes it very easy for the business to pay the tax. Credit card companies should offer state tax payments as a service to their business clients. Virtually all of these transactions are credit-card based, anyway.
I always wanted Google to calculate page ranks by gauging "Page Crap Factor". Of course, I'd really like Page Crap to include Google ads too. I won't hold my breath!
It's against the law to send the spam. Visa is aiding and abetting the crime by handling the transfer payments from US banks to the foreign banks through its payment network. If this study is accepted, it will be hard for them to deny accurate and full knowledge of their role in the crime. Each link in the financial chain is explicitly aware of nature of the transaction, save the originating bank in the US.
I don't believe it is a simple thing to set up a new credit card processor, at these scales. Doesn't Visa have to authorize each credit card processor? Spammers won't be able to create credit card processors on the same scale as their URL creation. Visa has solid statistics on processor creation now. They can watch for skews to understand unusual new processor applications.
Visa should be running a constant program of low-level buys from spammers, tracing the transactions through, just like these researchers did. Visa would then have complete and accurate data on the pipeline, and they could shut it down completely.
Unless they don't want to, of course. Which is exactly true. The only thing that will force it to happen is legislation.
You speak as if current programming languages are as rich an environment as natural language. Please. Natural language is vastly more expressive, and it error corrects.
You're right in that ideograms aren't the way to go. Nobody wants to program in something that looks like Chinese.
The real question here isn't whether Waterbear is particularly good or not, for some given purpose. I think it does hit its intended audience (non-specialist programmers) quite nicely. Scratch has worked effectively for its target audience as well.
The real question is whether there exists some N-dimensional visual representation of programming that's just as powerful as conventional text syntax. Text syntax is generally a linear string of symbols. Humans are good at certain kinds of visual perception (pre-attentive attributes). Why hasn't anyone come up with a good visual syntax that takes advantage of that?
More to the point, is one possible? I think it is, and the dream is still alive. I think it will be a relatively small number of "symbols", with meanings attached to pre-attentive attributes, using something along the lines of tessellation concepts (semantic tessellation) to maintain a comprehensible level of detail, under observation.
What does an N-dimensional core form look like? How many do we need?
Overspending on a government web site? Sure. Could it be done cheaper? Probably.
Take a look at data.gov before you say too much, though. It doesn't matter what side of the political divide you're on, because it comes down to something pretty simple: An open, free, and electronically accessible financial and regulatory posture, subject to review and analysis by the general public, combined with a free (and ethical) press, is the only way out of the current morass.
There are some seriously entrenched interests out there that want to shut down things like data.gov as fast as possible, because they give visibility into stuff that's only been behind closed doors, and only for those on the inside.
Some dipshit 23 year old political intern probably axed these from the budget without thinking about what they really mean for the future of government.
The goal should be to have every single line item of financial information, at all levels of government, maintained in XBRL format, or something like it that supports automated analysis. All of it should be freely available through web-based APIs, and for browsing by the general public. Do that, and millions of armchair accountants will start taking care of the corruptions and inefficiencies at the heart of the system.
Pipe dream? Maybe. I can't think of another pathway to responsible government, though.
An opera has music, movement/dance, visual theater...its components are art, and so is the whole presentation. A new work of art is formed from its components.
Creating a virtual world, composed of many artistic components, is itself an art. This is an exercise in composition.
Art can teach. It can affect. It can draw you into another world of experience. Video games can definitely do this last one. Looking at old paintings from masters, we can marvel at the incredible technique that allows them to render light. We can look at some modern video games in the same way, and admire the techniques used to create ever-more immersive worlds.
The argument isn't really about video games versus other art forms. It's about interactive versus non-interactive art. I don't think there are very many examples of interactive art that are considered "great", in any medium. When mastery and control give way to interactivity, something is lost. You go from saying something, to saying nothing.
I think what we fail to do is convey to children just how serious a false accusation is. Chances are, the kids who did this wouldn't dream of, say, stealing computers from their school. They know that's wrong, and if they did that, we'd expect (and the child would expect) an expulsion from the school, and criminal proceedings.
A computer is just a computer, though. Such serious, false accusations could follow a teacher around for the rest of his life. So how have we arrived at a place where a child knows that stealing is wrong, but doing massive damage to a teacher's life is bad behavior, but perhaps in a grey zone of some kind. It's because too many adults (their parents included) think the same way.
If the child's parents proceed in a lawsuit against the school, it's only fair that the teacher be allowed to sue the parents. They are responsible for their children's behavior.
If you think OO is as "good" as MS Office 2010, you're on crack. Have you ever actually used these various word processors to create documents? Maybe documents that involve a lot of structure, embedded graphics of various types, and size?
My personal rank of word processors:
1. Lyx (good for me) 2. MS Word 3. Pages
OO doesn't even make the list, and isn't likely to. No polish, awkward UI...
Oh look! MS Word lets me save as ODT! I guess I could use that...never. It makes nice PDFs. Oooo, but then the person who receives it might accidentally use an evil non-free PDF viewer, from Adobe!
There's such a thing as good software, and there's bad software. Somewhere in the middle there's lots of indifferent. OO falls squarely into the middle category.
I don't think government should be expressing a preference for or against open source, or similarly against commercial software. Make decisions, but don't skew the process from the outset. Past the software used to create them, there's nothing wrong with mandating open formats, of course.
So we have to build bombs, in order to detect bombs?
Re:A Microsoft Nokia bad-analogy award
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 1
Are you on crack?
There's this thing called the internet. On it, you can look up these things called "key statistics" about public companies, like Microsoft and Apple. You should especially pay attention to "revenue", "profit margin", and "operating margin". Those are incredibly good numbers for "dead". Unless you feel the real statistic we should all be relying on is positive blogosphere and twittering, instead of making money.
Microsoft has been making a ton of money building stuff that businesses buy, like SharePoint.
Can't disagree on Nokia, though. Knockout success in phones these days requires fantastic industrial design AND software. The question is, does it need to be a completely integrated approach? The iPhone needed to be integrated because it brought a significant advance in interaction (touch) and fully realized it. That takes both. Looking forward from here, the hardware end of that is going to end up as a commodity, like all hardware does. The software is the differentiator.
I think Nokia made the right move here. WP7 can be a competitor to iOS, after it matures. Microsoft needs to focus on a seamless, strong and innovative shared experience from WP7 to the desktop, to corporate environments. They need to pull out all the stops and bring some intense creativity to that cross-environment space.
Versus iOS, Microsoft's programming environment is superior, but their api design is weak and much less complete.
1. Works fine. 2. Who cares. 3. Disable/uninstall, like any other chrome extension. 4. Are you a moron? Don't install it. 5. None I can see.
Yes, you're full of crap. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a similar plugin on Mac (using its H.264 playback), or Linux, or anything else. The point here is that it's possible to inject support for H.264 into Chrome, even if Google doesn't do it.
I don't think you're looking at the numbers correctly. The key here is the distribution of uploaders versus the distribution of downloads. It doesn't matter if there are 3.6 million torrents out there. The vast majority of downloads (say over 99%) will take place on a tiny fraction of the uploads(say 1%). What I interpret this article to mean is that by taking action against the seeders of that 1% of highly downloaded material, you can have an impact. Others have mentioned "release groups". Their ongoing existence relies on anonymity. Disrupting that anonymity means a significant cost (in time or materials) to resume "safe" practice. Of course, other actors may step into the vacated role of a release group; they will have the same requirement of anonymity. If they've got any brains at all, they'll be at least slightly worried about the repercussions of what they're doing. After all, there's a reason why the release groups are anonymous, and hide their tracks.
I don't think there's an unlimited supply of well-funded, skilled entities or organizations that are capable of hiding their tracks for a long time. Such groups definitely exist because they've developed skill at, well, continued existence, in an increasingly hostile environment.
Any idiot can rip a DVD and upload it somewhere. If he repeats that activity without major protections in place, there'll be a knock on the door, someday. At least in copyright-respecting countries.
What I'm saying is that payroll taxes are simply dropped into the general funds, and spent that way. There is no lockbox, and no special money. Since that revenue isn't any different from general tax revenue, it shouldn't look any different on the collections side either.
The current policy has an inherent cap for payouts, based on the maximum taxable social security wages. Retain that payout cap where it is, but lift the pay-in cap completely, and lower the rate until it's revenue neutral.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it the case that due process is only available for people who submit themselves to it? Due process has _always_ been available to this guy, if he wanted it. All he had to do was turn himself in. He's been on the run from the law, and that's a different situation. I don't see why this is complicated at all, as long as there's been an active indictment against him, or whatever is necessary to effect a legal arrest.
All I know is that they could prick some holes in those big electric pipes, let the 'lectricity out and create a ton of steam bubbles. This will turn the entire coast of Japan into a giant steam bath, achieving all goals simultaneously: Eliminate winter, increase tourism from Scandinavian countries, pirate ships coming out of cool misty effects, and the Japanese can relax for a change.
I don't know about being primarily procedural -- my guess is that it's procedural in the same sense that the reconstruction of a JPEG is a procedural function, based on the composition of transforms. Maybe they've come up with a way of cleanly compressing point fields with a multi-dimensional, hierarchical wavelet set, or something like it. Rendering is then sort of probabilistic, with the caveat that you need to retain frame-to-frame stability. They (breathlessly) repeat the limit on the density of the data they have created. If it was procedural that lower limit wouldn't be there.
When you read AirBNB's current (as of 2:40pm 7/31/2011) FAQ, it's seriously frowned-upon for a host to use the "contact information" they are given to actually make a decision to NOT rent to someone. Step 5 is accept or deny request, at which point you have no information. Step 6 is AirBNB collects the payment. Step 7 sends the real contact info. Step 8 describes when payment will be released. And that's the end of their public process.
There's no step 9 -- what to do if you are unhappy with the details you received. At the end of the FAQ we find "We take host cancellations very seriously, because they pose a huge problem to guests' travel plans and they hurt the reliability of our website. When a host cancels, their ranking in search results is negatively affected." That means AirBNB is going to penalize you, as a host, if you elect not to accept a guest based on the contact information you have received.
Seems to me that AirBNB is going to have to come up with a policy for the "early period", during which time a member is considered "new". A new member should probably have a mandatory security deposit requirement, and any such reservation request should be flagged as a new member request.
I probably forgot to hit submit on my previously-written response to your note. I intended no disrespect to you or Apache's process. I'm just expressing the general frustration that Java programmers everywhere must feel at the prospect of having a broken JDK7 out there, when it seems like it was preventable. Of course, the devil is in the details, as always. Could the bug have been identified earlier? Was the bug exhibited by a failure of an automated test suite within the Apache project, or did it manifest only during exploratory testing?
The real question facing the Java community is understanding what parts of the process can be improved to avoid something like this happening again in the future.
Another way of looking at this is to realize that the pre-release versions of Java 7 have been out there for a long, long time, and nobody from these Apache projects felt like testing their (rather important) open source projects against it, so they could have found and reported the bug earlier.
It seems to me that fault lies in both directions here.
A more correct rewrite of the bug teaser would be, "Don't use Java 7 for anything if you are incapable of passing an extra command line argument to it".
Note that the patent has nothing to do with mobile devices. It's just a very general "recognize a pattern in data" patent. Seems to me that any syntax-aware programming editor from before 1996 would be prior art.
What you (and most others here) seem to have missed is that Dropbox generally has absolutely no idea what your content is. Everything is encrypted. How exactly are they distributing your "copyrighted material" when it can't be decrypted?
In rare cases (specifically those required to cooperate with law enforcement) Dropbox has indicated that they could decrypt. I expect they will do this as rarely as possible, as it opens up questions they'd likely rather leave closed.
If Dropbox does geographically distributed services, they need to be able to replicate your content to other servers. To do that, they need your permission to copy it. You are providing them permission to copy opaque blocks of data, not replicate your tunes around the world. You want to share a link to a file? Dropbox needs your permission to be able to publish your opaque blocks of data on that URL (and decrypt it for use, in such a case).
I'm not sure how you would plan on profiting from blocks of close-to-random data. Maybe you want to sell close-to-random numbers? Profit!
Think, people.
I'm with you until your dumb-ass comment about liberals. Really. Why don't conservatives with less-than-perfect sentence construction skills realize that there are good taxes and bad taxes, and that not all taxes affect the economy in the same way?
It's worth noting that, according to the most recent IRS income statistics, those in the top 0.1% or so have been making do with quite a bit more since the Bush-era top tax rate cuts.
1 - A retail store doesn't ask about exemptions, and neither should an internet business. It's the individual's responsibility.
2. Irrelevant, and up to the individual. Just like a retail store.
3. Combo box for state -> tax rate. Wow, that was hard.
4. You have a point here, and the states should unify through a clearing house that makes it very easy for the business to pay the tax. Credit card companies should offer state tax payments as a service to their business clients. Virtually all of these transactions are credit-card based, anyway.
I always wanted Google to calculate page ranks by gauging "Page Crap Factor". Of course, I'd really like Page Crap to include Google ads too. I won't hold my breath!
It's against the law to send the spam. Visa is aiding and abetting the crime by handling the transfer payments from US banks to the foreign banks through its payment network. If this study is accepted, it will be hard for them to deny accurate and full knowledge of their role in the crime. Each link in the financial chain is explicitly aware of nature of the transaction, save the originating bank in the US.
I don't believe it is a simple thing to set up a new credit card processor, at these scales. Doesn't Visa have to authorize each credit card processor? Spammers won't be able to create credit card processors on the same scale as their URL creation. Visa has solid statistics on processor creation now. They can watch for skews to understand unusual new processor applications.
Visa should be running a constant program of low-level buys from spammers, tracing the transactions through, just like these researchers did. Visa would then have complete and accurate data on the pipeline, and they could shut it down completely.
Unless they don't want to, of course. Which is exactly true. The only thing that will force it to happen is legislation.
You speak as if current programming languages are as rich an environment as natural language. Please. Natural language is vastly more expressive, and it error corrects.
You're right in that ideograms aren't the way to go. Nobody wants to program in something that looks like Chinese.
The real question here isn't whether Waterbear is particularly good or not, for some given purpose. I think it does hit its intended audience (non-specialist programmers) quite nicely. Scratch has worked effectively for its target audience as well.
The real question is whether there exists some N-dimensional visual representation of programming that's just as powerful as conventional text syntax. Text syntax is generally a linear string of symbols. Humans are good at certain kinds of visual perception (pre-attentive attributes). Why hasn't anyone come up with a good visual syntax that takes advantage of that?
More to the point, is one possible? I think it is, and the dream is still alive. I think it will be a relatively small number of "symbols", with meanings attached to pre-attentive attributes, using something along the lines of tessellation concepts (semantic tessellation) to maintain a comprehensible level of detail, under observation.
What does an N-dimensional core form look like? How many do we need?
I liked the cool Latex typesetting they had back then. Stamped 1869! Man that Knuth guy must be old.
Except for those people who like Mac, and don't mind paying to get a better product, right?
Overspending on a government web site? Sure. Could it be done cheaper? Probably.
Take a look at data.gov before you say too much, though. It doesn't matter what side of the political divide you're on, because it comes down to something pretty simple: An open, free, and electronically accessible financial and regulatory posture, subject to review and analysis by the general public, combined with a free (and ethical) press, is the only way out of the current morass.
There are some seriously entrenched interests out there that want to shut down things like data.gov as fast as possible, because they give visibility into stuff that's only been behind closed doors, and only for those on the inside.
Some dipshit 23 year old political intern probably axed these from the budget without thinking about what they really mean for the future of government.
The goal should be to have every single line item of financial information, at all levels of government, maintained in XBRL format, or something like it that supports automated analysis. All of it should be freely available through web-based APIs, and for browsing by the general public. Do that, and millions of armchair accountants will start taking care of the corruptions and inefficiencies at the heart of the system.
Pipe dream? Maybe. I can't think of another pathway to responsible government, though.
An opera has music, movement/dance, visual theater...its components are art, and so is the whole presentation. A new work of art is formed from its components.
Creating a virtual world, composed of many artistic components, is itself an art. This is an exercise in composition.
Art can teach. It can affect. It can draw you into another world of experience. Video games can definitely do this last one. Looking at old paintings from masters, we can marvel at the incredible technique that allows them to render light. We can look at some modern video games in the same way, and admire the techniques used to create ever-more immersive worlds.
The argument isn't really about video games versus other art forms. It's about interactive versus non-interactive art. I don't think there are very many examples of interactive art that are considered "great", in any medium. When mastery and control give way to interactivity, something is lost. You go from saying something, to saying nothing.
I think what we fail to do is convey to children just how serious a false accusation is. Chances are, the kids who did this wouldn't dream of, say, stealing computers from their school. They know that's wrong, and if they did that, we'd expect (and the child would expect) an expulsion from the school, and criminal proceedings.
A computer is just a computer, though. Such serious, false accusations could follow a teacher around for the rest of his life. So how have we arrived at a place where a child knows that stealing is wrong, but doing massive damage to a teacher's life is bad behavior, but perhaps in a grey zone of some kind. It's because too many adults (their parents included) think the same way.
If the child's parents proceed in a lawsuit against the school, it's only fair that the teacher be allowed to sue the parents. They are responsible for their children's behavior.
If you think OO is as "good" as MS Office 2010, you're on crack. Have you ever actually used these various word processors to create documents? Maybe documents that involve a lot of structure, embedded graphics of various types, and size?
My personal rank of word processors:
1. Lyx (good for me)
2. MS Word
3. Pages
OO doesn't even make the list, and isn't likely to. No polish, awkward UI...
Oh look! MS Word lets me save as ODT! I guess I could use that...never. It makes nice PDFs. Oooo, but then the person who receives it might accidentally use an evil non-free PDF viewer, from Adobe!
There's such a thing as good software, and there's bad software. Somewhere in the middle there's lots of indifferent. OO falls squarely into the middle category.
I don't think government should be expressing a preference for or against open source, or similarly against commercial software. Make decisions, but don't skew the process from the outset. Past the software used to create them, there's nothing wrong with mandating open formats, of course.
So we have to build bombs, in order to detect bombs?
Are you on crack?
There's this thing called the internet. On it, you can look up these things called "key statistics" about public companies, like Microsoft and Apple. You should especially pay attention to "revenue", "profit margin", and "operating margin". Those are incredibly good numbers for "dead". Unless you feel the real statistic we should all be relying on is positive blogosphere and twittering, instead of making money.
Microsoft has been making a ton of money building stuff that businesses buy, like SharePoint.
Can't disagree on Nokia, though. Knockout success in phones these days requires fantastic industrial design AND software. The question is, does it need to be a completely integrated approach? The iPhone needed to be integrated because it brought a significant advance in interaction (touch) and fully realized it. That takes both. Looking forward from here, the hardware end of that is going to end up as a commodity, like all hardware does. The software is the differentiator.
I think Nokia made the right move here. WP7 can be a competitor to iOS, after it matures. Microsoft needs to focus on a seamless, strong and innovative shared experience from WP7 to the desktop, to corporate environments. They need to pull out all the stops and bring some intense creativity to that cross-environment space.
Versus iOS, Microsoft's programming environment is superior, but their api design is weak and much less complete.
1. Works fine.
2. Who cares.
3. Disable/uninstall, like any other chrome extension.
4. Are you a moron? Don't install it.
5. None I can see.
Yes, you're full of crap. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a similar plugin on Mac (using its H.264 playback), or Linux, or anything else. The point here is that it's possible to inject support for H.264 into Chrome, even if Google doesn't do it.
I don't think you're looking at the numbers correctly. The key here is the distribution of uploaders versus the distribution of downloads. It doesn't matter if there are 3.6 million torrents out there. The vast majority of downloads (say over 99%) will take place on a tiny fraction of the uploads(say 1%). What I interpret this article to mean is that by taking action against the seeders of that 1% of highly downloaded material, you can have an impact. Others have mentioned "release groups". Their ongoing existence relies on anonymity. Disrupting that anonymity means a significant cost (in time or materials) to resume "safe" practice. Of course, other actors may step into the vacated role of a release group; they will have the same requirement of anonymity. If they've got any brains at all, they'll be at least slightly worried about the repercussions of what they're doing. After all, there's a reason why the release groups are anonymous, and hide their tracks.
I don't think there's an unlimited supply of well-funded, skilled entities or organizations that are capable of hiding their tracks for a long time. Such groups definitely exist because they've developed skill at, well, continued existence, in an increasingly hostile environment.
Any idiot can rip a DVD and upload it somewhere. If he repeats that activity without major protections in place, there'll be a knock on the door, someday. At least in copyright-respecting countries.
What I'm saying is that payroll taxes are simply dropped into the general funds, and spent that way. There is no lockbox, and no special money. Since that revenue isn't any different from general tax revenue, it shouldn't look any different on the collections side either.
The current policy has an inherent cap for payouts, based on the maximum taxable social security wages. Retain that payout cap where it is, but lift the pay-in cap completely, and lower the rate until it's revenue neutral.