Just like it makes no sense for Americans to bomb the Bikini Atoll, or run new ships on trips around the world. The goal isn't to destroy a Pacific paradise or to wear out the engines, but rather to announce to the political world that we have a new capability, and we're ready to use it as we see fit.

The "petty targets" may be convenient places to point this "Great Cannon"... They provide a noticeable target, and apparently can be analyzed enough to provide some basic details to the rest of the world. Assuming China is behind the attack, we now know that China can run at least this level of attack, and there's no reason to expect that in a full-scale conflict, it wouldn't be turned against more serious targets. We don't know whether the attack can be made even bigger, or if it has different operational modes, or even how quickly such an operation can scale... and that's enough uncertainty to make it a deterrent weapon. It's all political posturing, and from outward appearances, it seems China is showing itself to be fairly powerful, but not yet openly aggressive.

Contrast that with North Korea, which has persistently demonstrated impotent aggression, and our main concern is that they might actually develop a real offensive capability that affects us.

...except that a significant part of their daily business has now been null-routed. It's going to be hard to keep that great American economy moving when manufacturers can't contact their contracted suppliers. Without that continuous economic movement, we're facing yet another financial crash, which the United States government probably doesn't want to have happen just yet.

On the contrary, an openly-hostile and traceable act (like cleanly disconnecting a major nation) would be the first strike in a bigger escalating conflict, as each side accuses the other of being the guy who really started the fight. Throw in a few false-flag operations and stage a few "exposed" false-flag operations, and it's not a very big leap to having a real war with real weapons and real death.

Frankly, I'd rather just have the political games.

My post assumes that $60K income is a baseline for a leisure society. The exact numeric value is subject to inflation, arbitrary labor valuations, and many similar factors, but the economy scales uniformly.

We can redefine "leisure society" to require driving a cardboard car and eating ramen twice a day, which would significantly lower the economic cost of the redefined leisure. However, if we set the bar at a current American middle-class lifestyle, silly desires and all, then $60K is reasonable.

We really don't have the productive capacity for it. I've done the math before.

The short version is that there are so many people in the world that we each get a very tiny amount of raw materials, and the mass production systems we have now really only support a small fraction of the population. To support a leisure society for everyone, we need to increase global production efficiency by a few hundred percent.

Well, yes... The Soviet Union's advancements in rocketry and spaceflight let to some very nice technological advancements, which were primarily useful after some further social and political advancements in the region.

For a 10-hour workweek to be productive enough to support a "leisure society with resources for all" will require significant advances in materials, economics, physics, engineering, and especially politics.

Putting a few folks on Mars is a far simpler goal, and the technology we develop along the way will help your preferred utopia, as well.

Perhaps you ought to re-read some of Orwell's works...

The problem in Orwell's world of 1984 isn't the "statist enforcement", but rather that the state enforces rules for the purpose of oppressing the majority of the population. Ingsoc's rules and systems are not in themselves harmful. In fact, several times throughout the book, some of the most vile mechanisms are described only as the result of rumors.

Here in the real world, there is no absolute freedom. There is only what you want to do and what others want you to do. When those desires are opposed, someone's freedom will be impeded. If you want to kill me, and I want to live, we turn to the state (as an embodiment of the consensus of the submitting population) to decide who will be able to fulfill their desires. If you want to build a networking monopoly and charge high rates for access to popular web sites, and I want cheap access to everything, we again turn to the state, who has now declared a preference for cases like this.

While reading, be sure to note how the Inner Party is not subject to most of the oppressive rules of the system. They are not subject to the state; the state is subject to their whims.

They just have to claim No True Scotsman first.

Break any rule in the Microsoft-written standards (possibly even to provide better compatibility with Microsoft's own runtime, which is not required to comply with the written documentation), and now you're not a ".NET Runtime"... just something real close. Since the MSDN part of the description itself is dynamic and hosted by an interested party, there's precisely nothing preventing Microsoft from "clarifying" features in the documentation, with the side effect of changing the legality of other implementations.

The promise not to sue would be a good thing, but from a legal perspective, the license is a landmine. Words like "all" are scary in such a license. Now, if it said something like "a substantial majority" or "a reasonable amount", that would give a judge the room to declare an implementation to be close enough, then I'd be far less paranoid about this.

Yes, Microsoft killed my Pappy. Why shouldn't I be worried when that smoking gun is still pointing at me? As the author of your linked article said:

I'd say that a weak protection falls into that category. Some group successfully pushed to open the runtime, but the legal team in charge of the license language doesn't understand why the GPL and BSD licenses are appealing to open-source projects. It isn't because of the promises made by the authors; it's because in the event that a lawsuit does happen, the defendants have very clear ammunition in the license ready for use. This doesn't provide that reassurance.

Internal affairs investigators, oversight committees, shift managers, prosecutors, defense attorneys... there are just about as many people watching the watchmen as there are watchmen themselves.

This depends on what you mean by "progressive".

A consumption-based tax is very simple and easy to tie to consumption, by attaching it to goods as we already do with sales tax. That matches well with the definition of "progressive" that refers to having more tax come from those who use more.

Unfortunately, if you're looking for a "progressive" definition related to making progress in the areas of social justice and economic fairness, consumption taxes are disproportionately burdensome on lower-income demographics. It turns out that people only eat so much and have so much time for nonessentials. The rich often literally have so much money that they make more (usually from investments) than they can spend. With a consumption tax, their effective tax rate is a far smaller percentage of what they make than the effective tax rate of a less-wealthy individual.

The standard theory is that we tax profit because the public contribution (through governmental support) allowed the individual to profit, and fostered the profit-conducive environment. If that is the case, then people should not be taxed based on their own consumption, but rather on what others had to give up to support their profitable endeavor.

Let's assume I am a billionaire who commutes mainly via private helicopter. It doesn't bother me at all to throw a few thousand dollars toward a local road-improvement project. For a struggling single parent to do the same would be a significant hardship, even though they would be far more likely to actually use and benefit from the improved road. Under a taxation system that encourages a fair distribution of hardship, I would be responsible for a far larger portion of the project, simply because I can afford to without an unfair amount of actual harm.

Unfortunately, judging actual hardship is difficult. Even as a billionaire, I might already be donating all of my incoming profit to charities supporting the global community, so taxing me more would only reduce the amount of good I could do directly. That struggling single parent might not be struggling if they didn't spend so much on cigarettes and alcohol, effectively somewhat-freely choosing their fate.

That's why our tax code is so complicated today. The United States has been trying to define "fair" in a way that covers everyone's situation, and for the most part it's been okay. The modern economic system has thrown a few new wrenches into the machine, and we need to work those out, but it's still trying to be a fair system.

Except, of course, for a custom car that's mostly driven on private roads and tracks for exhibition, but the owner keeps it street-legal just in case he wants to drive it publicly.

Then there's also the uneven usage for cars pulling trailers, which don't have odometers.

Then there are people whose car may not be registered in the same state as the majority of their driving, which is legal in some circumstances.

These are some easy examples. All this idea does is shift the problems from one easily-identified group of people to a large variety of special cases.

I seem to recall discussion of encryption-using terrorists in the 80s and 90s. It's not a new concept.

What is a new concept is having nearly-unbreakable encryption available for $2 at an electronics shop in the nearest major village, ready to be deployed to an untrained operative, and available in a large enough quantity to be sure that every message the organization sends is secure.

That's what's spooked the spooks.

How is it a natural consequence? Is there some law that proves an increase in encryption must happen after a perceived injustice?

Rather, what actually happened is that the spy agencies watched everybody, and by and large didn't care about people who weren't throwing up red flags. If it weren't for Snowden and the Internet-fueled rage he spurred, you'd never know that you'd been investigated at all.

For most of its history, the Fourth Amendment has never been about protecting privacy, but rather protecting against using the state's power to disrupt innocent people's lives. An unobtrusive observation doesn't cause any significant disruption, so the process that is due is minimal. Even accounting for the Katz privacy considerations, the information is being gathered by a service provider, and provided en masse to the investigators. From that perspective, where the surveillance is seen as a reasonable and legal tactic, this new desire to have encryption everywhere is just an obstacle with no real benefit. Sure, there are a few legitimate places to use encrypted channels, like a corporate VPN, but for simple personal messages, it's only getting in the way of legitimate investigations.

That's the investigators' fear, yes. Again, they see the surveillance as being reasonable, and the encryption as a needless obstacle. That's why they're asking that "tech firms ... consider the impact sophisticated encryption software has on law enforcement".

...so they effectively get nothing at all, ever. To use the mandatory Slashdot car analogy, if a police officer asked you first, how often would you grant permission for him to pull you over, regardless of your speed?

By conducting indiscriminate monitoring of the speed of vehicles, he's probing your vehicle's status, and that's invading your privacy. Surely you have a right to keep your vehicular operational tendencies private, right?

Ultimately, there is a middle ground that must be found. Having encryption everywhere will indeed cripple law enforcement to a certain extent, and having no encryption will curtail essential liberty to a certain extent. Given mankind's tendency to overreact to immediate threats, I expect we'll waver between the two extremes, with the public at large demanding that police somehow magically identify criminals while blind, deaf, and impotent. That's a double-edged sword, too, and it'll bite us, as well.

Apparently DistroWatch's source is "Ivan Gotyavich", a developer on the systemd project. A Google search for his name returns no other results, and it's suspiciously a corruption of "I got you", as one would exclaim after successfully perpetrating a hoax.

The AC commenting on every story trying to manufacture a systemd-centered argument is definitely a troll.

In short, Linux fans still have nothing to worry about. A new package provides several new utilities, some distros are choosing to include those utilities and depend on them. That may break a few things and cause disruption for a while, but in short order, the fanatic neckbeards with their bash superpowers will ensure that everything is compatible. It's business as usual in a large software ecosystem.

Apparently DistroWatch's source is "Ivan Gotyavich", a developer on the systemd project. A Google search for his name returns no other results, and it's suspiciously a corruption of "I got you", as one would exclaim after successfully perpetrating a hoax.

Only for very wide definitions of "everyone", including VC investment, R&D, government subsidies, international trade, and every other economic influence, many of which are high-risk investments that effectively dump most of their money into lower-risk investment vehicles.

I'm not suggesting that if everyone invested in a widely-diversified portfolio, they'd be rich. That's ridiculous, since that's exactly what banks do with their abysmally low-return (but very safe) accounts.

I'm saying that if someone wants to invest and have a good chance of a good return rate, they have access to such things.

Well, that's nice, but beyond a thinly-veiled insult, do you have a point?