Cite?

I just did some searching and found dozens of articles that put that rule of thumb at 15 years, and a fair number that put it at 20, but none that said 10.

Granted that as applied to Lucas' development it's a distinction without a difference, because Lucas would have to use a rule of thumb of about 150 years.

A more interesting question for those who would say "yes", if you could get them to answer it, is "Suppose that everything was true, except that they were there illegally, and they were white Canadians?". I think the truth that most who sneer at illegals won't admit to is that it's not just about their illegal status, and in fact it's not even mostly about their illegal status. It's mostly about race and culture.

If that weren't the case, why not fix the illegals' status by providing good options for them to get on the right side of the law? Because the law isn't really the issue.

Grid-tie inverters that do all of that are necessary for this to work at all, long before you get to questions about supply and demand management.

I don't know, but it's certainly higher than "beyond a reasonable doubt", which is the standard for legal conviction.

With that said, if you want to establish "beyond a shadow of a doubt" as the standard for capital punishment, I'm good with it in theory. In practice it'll be even more expensive than what we do now, and odds are you'll never execute anyone because the standard is impossible to meet. Which I guess may make it inexpensive, because no one will bother trying. But I don't think abolishing capital punishment is what you actually want.

So you're recommending that we solve the problem that the standard of proof is uncomfortably low for taking irreversible action by lowering the standard of proof. Keep in mind that the standard includes not just the stated standard for the one trial, but also the structure of the system of appeals, etc., which is in place to ensure that that trial was conducted correctly, and the appellate process also deals in shades of gray.

Lowering the standard as a way to solve the cost problem is fine for you, since you apparently have no doubts about the possibility of convicting innocent people, but it will inevitably increase the percentage of the population that opposes capital punishment, because they do have doubts. Again, I think that's not what you want.

Bah. I form my own opinions, and my opinion is that the current process with all of the appeals in place is fairly good but very expensive. It's still not perfect, mind you, as evidenced by the number of death row convictions that have been overturned (often MUCH more than one year after the conviction), but I don't believe perfection is possible, and I don't believe that we should do nothing just because we can't do it perfectly. So, if cost is irrelevant, then I don't object overmuch to the system we have, and I also wouldn't object to your "beyond a shadow of a doubt" system, assuming you could build one that works.

I'm largely in agreement with your arguments, but this claim is nonsense. Confidence isn't boolean, it's a continuum. It makes perfect sense to talk about degree of confidence, and one can have enough confidence to imprison but not to execute.

FWIW, my opinion is that I have no moral problem with execution following a proper trial with an appropriate standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt is good), but I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's a waste of money. It ought to be cheaper than life imprisonment, but because execution is final we add a raft of additional legal processes, with the idea that they help to raise our confidence in the correctness of the conviction enough that we're okay with taking this irreversible step. There are two problems with that: First, the additional processes still don't actually increase our confidence enough and second, they actually cost more than caring for the accused for the remainder of his or her natural life.

That second point is, IMO, fatal to the concept of capital punishment. If it's cheaper and easier to just lock them up until they die then the only possible justification for the death penalty is the theoretical deterrent effect, but no one has ever shown any compelling evidence that the effect is significant.

On the other hand if there aren't any silly laws in place preventing your from selling your goods at 10X the normal price, maybe you will only keep aside what your family really needs and sell the rest, thus making important goods available to the public when they're really needed. But if that's illegal, yeah, might as well keep them for yourself. When things get back to normal you can continue selling whatever you didn't use at the normal price -- same as you were able to sell it for during the emergency, but without taking the risk of selling something you might need.

Restrictions on scarcity pricing are a bad idea and serve only to create even more scarcity.

Assuming the copyright owner can be found, and is willing to sell.

The basis for Eldred v Ashcroft was that the celluloid of many old films is rapidly degrading but because the copyright ownership is muddled it's impossible to find anyone from which the right to republish the films can be purchased, so the films are being lost forever.

For that matter, it seems perfectly reasonable to require the homeowner to install such a meter as part of a solar installation, as a condition of being able to sell power to the utility -- or even to push power into the grid at all.

I disagree. To me there's at least one really compelling reason: To push universal encryption. One of my favorite features of QUIC is that encryption is baked so deeply into it that it cannot really be removed. Google tried to eliminate unencrypted connections with SPDY, but the IETF insisted on allowing unencrypted operation for HTTP2. I don't think that will happen with QUIC.

But there are other reasons as well, quite well-described in the documentation. The most significant one is performance. QUIC achieves new connection setup with less than one round trip on average, and restart with none... just send data.

True, but TCP is very hard to change. Even with wholehearted support from all of the major OS vendors, we'd have lots of TCP stacks without the new features for a decade, at least. That would not only slow adoption, it would also mean a whole lot of additional design complexity forced by backward compatibility requirements. QUIC, on the other hand, will be rolled out in applications, and it doesn't have to be backward compatible with anything other than previous versions of itself. It will make its way into the OS stacks, but systems that don't have it built in will continue using it as an app library.

So improve and use those protocols. You may even want to look to QUIC's design for inspiration. Then you can figure out how to integrate your new ideas carefully into the old protocols without breaking compatibility, and then you can fight your way through the standards bodies, closely scrutinized by every player that has an existing TLS or TCP implementation. To make this possible, you'll need to keep your changes small and incremental, and well-justified at every increment. Oh, but they'll also have to be compelling enough to get implementers to bother. With hard work you can succeed at this, but your timescale will be measured in decades.

In the meantime, QUIC will be widely deployed, making your work irrelevant.

As for using TCP without encryption so you don't have to pay for something you don't need, I think you're both overestimating the cost of encryption and underestimating its value. A decision that a particular data stream doesn't have enough value to warrant encryption it is guaranteed to be wrong if your application/protocol is successful. Stuff always gets repurposed and sufficient re-evaluation of security requirements is rare (even assuming the initial evaluation wasn't just wrong).

Only for restarts. For new connections you still have all the TCP three-way handshake overhead, followed by all of the TLS session establishment. QUIC does it in one round trip, in the worst case, and zero in most cases.

There was much valid (IMO) criticism of SPDY, that it really only helped really well-optimized sites -- like Google's -- to perform significantly better. Typical sites aren't any slower with SPDY, but aren't much faster, either, because they are so inefficient in other areas that request bottlenecks aren't their problem, so fixing those bottlenecks doesn't help. But QUIC will generally cut between two and four RTTs out of every web browser connection. And, of course, it also includes all of the improvements SPDY brought, plus new congestion management mechanisms which are significantly better than what's in TCP (so I'm told, anyway; I haven't actually looked into that part).

I'm not saying the approach you prefer couldn't work. It probably could. In ten to twenty years. Meanwhile, a non-trivial percentage of all Internet traffic today is already using QUIC, and usage is likely to grow rapidly as other browsers and web servers incorporate it.

I think the naysayers here have forgotten the ethos that made the Internet what it is: Rough consensus and running code first, standardization after. In my admittedly biased opinion (some of my friends work on SPDY and QUIC), Google's actions with SPDY and QUIC aren't a violation of the norms of Internet protocol development, they're a return to those norms.

Not really.

I'd say there's a good argument that all of the information I give Google actually exceeds what a personal assistant would know about me. The real difference (thus far) lies in the assistant's ability to understand human context which Google's systems lack. But that's merely a problem to be solved.

Note, BTW, that I'm not saying everyone should want what I want, or be comfortable giving any search engine enough information to be such an ideal assistant. That's a personal decision. I'm comfortable with it... but I'm not yet getting the search results I want.