But it also wouldn't be balanced anymore, would it? Because, as you may or may not know, the federal budget is not balanced.

You don't know it wouldn't be balanced. If it's important to you to balance your budget (as is the case if you're a state legislator but not the case if you're a US congresscritter) then you'll get it done. You'd have to confront the difficulties that are currently denied and instead turned into costs elsewhere.

But of course a state government also has overhead; better dissolve it as well.

I am not advocating dissolving anything, not even the feds. (Though yes, some of their powers should be re-dispersed.) I'm merely saying that it's not like the states are getting some kind of magic windfall that makes their balanced budgets unrealistically achievable. All that "free money" ultimate came from themselves. It's not pixie dust.

That's true for hosting content, but not the DNS issue. There's nothing in DMCA about registrars being required to fuck with domain names in response to someone complaining that the domain references a host that might be hosting alleged infringing material. Registrar coercion isn't in the league of legality (whoa, that's acatchy phrase) as host coercion.

The problem with that is, is if was sent to your email address, you are the intended recipient.

This is incorrect, and yet, the error does not matter.

Intent is known only by the sender. From the recipient's point of view, it does make sense to assume that an email addressed to you, is intended for you. That asumption is sometimes wrong, but it's a rare occurance. And whenever you're wrong, you won't know until you've already read some of the email. This really is the best any recipient can be reasonably expected to do.

The sender has all the power here (they get to decide whether or not to encrypt, for example, and which key to use (typically looked up by intended-recipient's name!!)) so I think they should have all the responsibility.

Every state gets money from the federal government for things like roads and law enforcement grants. No state has to maintain a military. If states run balanced budgets only because the federal government is handing them money and giving them services for free, is balancing the state budget really that much of an accomplishment?

All that "free" money was collected from the taxpayers, and they all live (or exist on paper) in some state. They could have just as easily paid their taxes to their state capitols instead of Washington DC.

Sure, if your state stopped getting highway money from the feds, the resulting consequences would look bad on the state's books. ("All these roads and no money to repair them! All these assets and we can't afford a military to guard them!") But if your state stopped receiving that money and its residents stopped paying the federal taxes for those uses, and instead those taxes were paid directly to the state, then it doesn't really look all that bad on the books, does it? ("All these roads and look at all this state income tax to pay for them! All these assets and look at all the money this state's residents have paid to hire guards!")

(On average. I realize that on a state-by-state basis there is variance, but add up all 50 and the fed's contribution is less than zero, or exactly zero if they just happen to magically have no overhead at all.)

I agree with the stringent requirements London has for taxi drivers. I think this should be a requirement. You should be able to tell me at least three ways to get to any one place -- without a map, without GPS, without tech aids. Can't? Then you have no experience as a driver and I should, by default, not trust you. Uber drivers don't know the cities like taxi drivers do. Some shortcuts will get you killed.

Would you favor a more general raising-of-the-bar for drivers licenses for all drivers? The stuff you're talking about sounds pretty important and I can't think of any reasons that only people who do it for pay would be affected by it. And plenty of them do have passengers (or other cars' drivers and passengers!) in their hands. I doubt anyone would be able to make a connection between money and the safety issues that you bring up.

BTW, I loved your bit about how anyone who wants to save a few bucks on cabs, is now an "Ayn Rand capitalist." I know a whole bunch of drunks who are going to be very amused to learn that about themselves. Half of them probably mistakenly think they're on the left end of the political spectrum.

A good way for the government to circumvent the law, would be to change the wording at the top of the list from "these people are banned" to "we have concerns about these people."

If an undesirable (hippie, NRA member, unflattering editorialist, Planned Parenthood employee, Planned Parenthood protester, Defcon presenter) wishes to board a plane, the government could ask or recommend the airline to refuse service, without saying why. The airline, since they would be easily subject to various forms of unprovable harassment, would "voluntarily" comply.

Then nobody is banned; the government is merely making suggestions.

Being near drivers using phones is bad enough, do you really want to be near drivers who are confused about why it just cut off and are now trying to redial!?

You don't seem to understand tantrums. It's not about maximizing your score. It's about lowering someone else's, and some personal sacrifice can be justified if that leads to further suffering for the adversary.

It's perfectly fine to take the possible safety hit of your adversary getting confused and colliding with you, because even though it poses a risk to you, it poses an even greater risk to them (it's not certain they're going to swerve in your direction, is it?). And on top of that, their call got dropped, hopefully inconveniencing them. Mitigating all this, is that you know exactly when it's going to happen and are ready for it (but this aspect isn't terribly important; remember this is about the consequences to them, not you).

Childish behavior is a basic skill that anyone can learn. You can train this skill, by whenever you need to make a decision, ignoring any negative consequences to you. Look solely at other peoples losses, and your gains. Never other peoples gains or your losses. And don't ever cooperate.

Millions of people would be happy to commit murder, rape, theft, and other crimes if there were no consequences.

If there were really no consequences, we would be ok with people committing murder, rape and theft! Welcome to Valhalla, where we hack each other to death with axes and then wake up the next morning and happily feast together.

The reason that murder, rape and theft are crimes, is that there are consequences. If you could address them (though you can't), then you would have eliminated some crimes.

You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.

The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports, and you did it, but you were angry at your boss so you passive-aggressively wrote all the TPS reports in Swahili, and your boss doesn't know Swahili. The boss somehow got an unpaid volunteer with a weird sexual fetish to translate the reports into English. (Somehow, this person gets off by translating Swahili to English, and is quite happy to do it for pleasure or glory or whatever the hell is going on there. People are weird!)

On the surface, the process appears to work so perfectly (the boss is actually very happy with his unobfuscated TPS reports) that he fires you, because he forgot that the new guy was really just repairing the deliberately-sabotaged TPS reports, not actually providing the reports' content. All because you insisted on being a total dick, and also all because there are some really weird people out there who are happy to clean up after you.

Long-term this looks like a bad situation. OTOH, it seems that eventually someone else comes along and writes more TPS reports (but in enciphered Swahili) for a single pay period. Then they get fired too. So you report-writers are making money, but a lot less than if you could just stop being a dick and hold a steady job. And the bosses are sort of happy because they're getting their reports, but they can't help but think that if they could find employees worth keeping who weren't dicks, the company would be more productive. Everyone is losing (except the fetishists), and things aren't working well, but somehow we're all getting by.

(Further complication and analogy-repair: There are really two bosses, in different departments, and there's a broken accounting system. Only one of the bosses' budgets are actually having to pay the paychecks for the high-turnover dick TPS report-writers, but the other boss whose budget never gets hit, also gets to read the repaired TPS reports from the volunteers. So we're not all paying evenly for this broken system. The "pirate boss" get a free ride and the "chump boss" who keep hiring dicks, is getting visciously shafted. Some people think the pirate boss or the volunteer translators are the problem here, but I think the dick report-writer is the problem, and yet, solving the problem requires that we all start talking to the chump bosses, explaining "Stop being a chump, and stop paying those dicks. Let's just put 'reports must be in English' into the hiring contract, and so the dicks don't get even a single paycheck." If we can all agree to stop being chump bosses, the dicks will get selected out of the job market and either starve to death or change their behavior, and we can start hiring employees who write unobfuscated TPS reports. That seems to be the everyone-wins scenario, though I'm not sure how the fetishist translators will occupy their time, after that.)

It's unnecessary to post something like this.

It was just as unnecessary to post the superstitious comment that SuricouRaven replied to, but you didn't call that AC an asshole, nor did you say to them, "Who cares if you're praying?" No, you just wanted to single one of the "unnecessary" comments out for "you're an asshole" treatment. Ok, let's probe deeper into that.

Someone is begging for real help with a serious real-life problem, and they got an AC reply that was pretty much the same as "I'll get flak for this, but have you tried applying nipple clamps to the patient and then standing over her while you masturbate?" and someone shot back, "I predict that won't work," (in a tone suggesting some offense at the idea even being suggested). Now look at which of those two you just flamed: was it the silly/offensive suggestion, or was it productive comment to try to correct, cull, or (yes) mock that silly/offensive suggestion?

You decided to flame the relatively productive comment.

Perhaps you, sir, are the asshole.

I'm going to "go off" a little here, mainly because I'm trying to talk myself into something. I almost didn't even bother posting this.

can you kindly fill me in on the methodology? .. I'm hoping for a convincing argument that we are not already lost as a country

By actively taking responsibility. And don't wait for, or care about, any arguments as to the future. Whether or not your part of the country is lost, is a decision (not a discovery) that you make.

You see; I'm of the opinion that the government, particularly the federal government, has become so corrupted, so full of bad political influence by monied interests, so controlled by cash (particularly in light of Citizens United and other rulings that claim that money==speech), that the only way I can see to bring the country back to rationality is via armed conflict.

Consider what is required, for armed conflict to viably change policies. (Not counting the policy of over-reactive crackdown; I'll give you, that you can achieve that, if it's your goal. McVeigh was successful in further empowering the feds in this regard; yet another reason to hate him.) I think armed rebellion to end corruption, would require a whole bunch of people, who currently prove every two years that they don't care about anything, to start giving a fuck. And you can't aim gun at another person (especially when you know they're likely to point one back), without first giving a fuck, about what is going to happen next.

I think before you get even a fraction toward that level of giving-a-fuck, you'll be able to accept the lesser burden, of personally running for an office, or bothering to show up and vote for someone who does that, instead of using America's default algorithm (I think the programmer called it "negligentApathy 1.0"), which is "Whose ad budget was the highest, among those who have the correct letter next to his name? I'm voting for that guy." It is way easier to resign to your fate of having to be a US Senator, or a state district representative, or a city councilor, or a neighborhood association board member, or even a father, than it is to go risk your life sniping at people who are invariable better than you at that game. (And that's the hard version. It's even easier to not be that guy, but to write-in his name. And somewhere on the scale of difficulty between these things, is getting that guy onto a ballot so he doesn't have to be written-in.)

Once people get that far (where people vote or run, based on politics rather than ads), all the campaign advertising money in the world will be not quite useless, but nearso. If people give a fuck and become political, then money really will be speech: most of it wasted and dissolving in the uncaring winds, like us two here on Slashdot. Let them impotently spend their money buying television ads that nobody saw anyway. Your current problem isn't that they bought the ads; it's that anyone saw them, or used them for purposes of other than counting them to determine approximations of how badly a candidate must have sold out to someone.

If people start caring about politics, then you're never going to have to kill anyone, because long before then, you're going to get over the lower hurdle of your guys winning their first election. Not because you're a nice guy or because murder is bad, but because it's easier. Maybe not easy but easier than being a revolutionary soldier.

Or to put it another way: winning an armed conflict to overthrow corruption, would itself require some element of civic spirit. You can't achieve it, without passionate people. And once you have the people, you don't even need your guns anymore.

How do we get there? Here begins my bullshit (and I'm going to put some words in your mouth), but actually, I already told you this part.

First, think really hard about whether or not you have actually reached the point of giving-a-fuck. What I mean is, do you honestly care, a whole lot? You mentioned armed conflict, so think about whether or not you would be willing to participate in that (don't worry, you're not really going to have to do this part), and pick up your gun and get yourself killed by professoinals, without making the slightest strategic impact (since that's exactly what you know for certain, is going to happen, if you pick up your gun). Are you willing to make that personal sacrifice, because you're a patriot and this is really important to you?

Yes? Outstanding! I have good news for you. I'm about to ask you to pay a much lesser price.

Run for city council or mayor or state rep or any policy-making position. You. That is what I want you to do. And I want you to win, by talking to a bunch of people and making them realize that you are the right guy for this, not that guy who spent a lot of money on glossy postcards or television ads. You walk house to house, and use the cheap new thing (web) that your grandparents' politicians didn't have.

You. Not me, because I'm not sure I really give a fuck, yet. ;-) But seriously, this is the way. It just takes a bit more serious motivation than posting on Slashdot does.

I am building a series of memorial groves for the greatest patriots of our generation: Timothy McVeigh, Andrew Stack, and Marvin Heemeyer. You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "

And tell me, as an innocent person who got harmed, did you have any time to think about people being harmed when McVeigh murdered them, in spite of them being innocent third parties totally unrelated to McVeigh's ostensible oppression, and also completely unrelated to anyone's complaints about the federal government?

Weev, there's something really important that you need to hear, so please pay attention to this: Fuck You.

I'm a fellow government-hater, except.. no. You are too much of a worthless piece of shit asshole for me to want to be a fellow anything with you. Please, please go fuck yourself (preferably with a bullet), so that they rest of us can spread advocacy of moving power back away from DC to more accountable localities, without worthless pieces of shit like you, distracting them with their nutcase "I know how to solve this civics problem: let's murder a bunch of innocent bystanders!" distractions. You are not helping, asshole.

Well, maybe you are helping someone.

I was sorry you got fucked, but your attempt to retroactively earn what happened to you, seems to have nullified the emotional component of that. You just did the feds a big favor; they used to have to worry about having made you a martyr, but now they can sigh with relief. When they falsely arrest the next guy, instead of the public crying out, "oh no you don't, not again!" the people will say, "Oh, another McVeigh clone? I'm glad you feds caught him in time."

We do have a right to be forgotten online, imho.

I think we wish we had a right to be forgotten. We see how, if we had such a right, then things would magically be better. (As someone who has said and done plenty of asinine things, I'm totally with you on this!) It looks like we might enact laws such that things are as though we had such a right. (Apparently I'm not the only person who has said and done asinine things; that's weirdly comforting. So there's lots of support for this idea.)

Yet despite all this, there is little reason to thing we actually have that right, and plenty reason to say we don't have that right.

Whose interests are at greater stake within your own memories, for example? Can you even invent a fictitious scenario, where someone else's "right" to make you forget something, outweighs your right to remember the same thing? I can't. In my head and in my computers, my rights are more important than anyone else's. It's not even "just a little bit" more important, either. We're talking "worth killing people for" level importance. Imagine someone credibly said they're about to perform surgery on you to force you to forget something. You would consider that to be an attack, against both your body and dignity. It simply wouldn't be tolerable, under any circumstances. You would kill someone to prevent that, and you would approve someone else killing to prevent that. It's that important.

So I think this all going to be more about regulating commerce or speech (e.g. Google telling things to people) than actually regulating memories. Google can be allowed to know something, but not allowed to speak it.

If we focus it that narrowly, then there shouldn't be any weird made-up-rights paradoxes. Indeed, it almost could get sucked in to plain libel laws, except being a weird case where the regulated statements happen to be true rather than false, but are otherwise treated as being similarly harmful.

And really, that's going to be enough. It's going to address the problem sufficiently, and also even speech regulation is hard enough for people to swallow, that there will (and should be!!) plenty of opposition to even going that far. This battle plan is quite ambitious enough!

Ooo! How about if I only have to pay $25,000 for a Ferari if I promise to only drive it on shitty roads?

Say I'm a car salesman. I just want to sell you a car and get as much profit as I possibly can. I don't care about promises you make about roads (whatever!), but I'm happy to hear you talk about the shittiness or awesomeness of your roads, in the hopes that it reveals information about you to me, so I know how much money you feel like spending.

Suppose I know that you only have shitty roads to drive on. Would you pay over $25k for a car to drive on them? (Depending on what you mean by "shitty" I might even wonder if you would pay over $2500 for a car.) I would make a relatively cheap car and offer it at a price where I think you might bite. I know that if I offer you a Ferrari for $70k you're going to chuckle and keep walking, to my competitor who makes cars more suitable for your road situation.

Yet, there are other suckers who spend more money on their roads, so not only might they be willing to buy more expensive cars, they've shown they have more money to burn, by spending so much on those roads. That's who my Ferrari brand name is for. No, they're not walking out of my store, having paid only $25k. I am going to soak those chumps.

(Now that we're done talking about Market Segmentation 101, can someone help me find where I enter screen size into couchpotato's preferences? And will entering a higher number hit my block accounts harder?)