IIRC, in Germany anyone can bring suit to enforce a copyright, not just the owner. In fact, I seem to recall that they can even do it when the owner of the copyright declines to enforce it. And that they can claim a share of the winnings for enforcing it. And that there are some companies of lawyers that do almost nothing else.

It was a few years ago, so the details are hazy, but I read about it on Slashdot, and I seem to recall that they were enforcing one of SuSE's pattents against the will of the company.

There ARE competent people doing C. Then there are the others. For some applications it's the right choice for a language to write in. But often it's "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". C is often used in inappropriate contexts. It's an excellent portable assembler, and it's usually appropriate where assembly code would otherwise be appropriate. But it's a poor choice for a complex program, and it encourages bad habits. There are other valid criticisms, but almost all of them are directed at the poor fit between the design of C and the thought processes of humans. It's an excellent language to compile a "higher" language into. ("Higher" here means that it deals with concepts that are more difficult to map into assembler.)

I agree with your points about code written in C by programmers, however...

You can't do much better than C by going to assembler, so C is a good target language. But much code written in many languaged could be improved by an automated translation into C with concurrent optimization. (The optimization needs to be done before it hits C, because you lose too much information in the process of translation.) The automatic translation avoids the difficulties of bounds checking, etc. If done properly it would (optionally) implement bounds checking wherever it couldn't prove that it could be omitted, etc.

Also, native C garbage collectors are inherently inefficient, because the C language doesn't reliably separate pointers from integers (etc.). But the translator, knowing the original language, could do this much more efficiently in the process of compiling from the original language to C.

So there's no reason not to standardize on C at the base level. And, of course, C compilers can optimize the C code.

FWIW, I dislike programming in C for multiple reasons. One of them is how it handles unicode. Another is the difficulty of implementing "class instance variables". (Class variables are easy, though. You just have one "class" per file, and static variables are equivalent of class variables.) I also prefer to have a good garbage collector. I dislike using pointers to reference structures. (In C++ I prefer to pass references as parameters rather than pointers to structs.) Etc. Of the languages that I'm familiar with, D is my preferred language, but it's missing a lot of library support, so I often use Python. Vala would be an excellent choice, if it coudl ever get it's documentation even to a beta level. (Do note that valac, the Vala compiler, has an option to allow you to generate C code.)

Not clear. The current computers aren't being used at nearly their optimum.

E.g., imagine an application that would take a program written for a virtual machine, and compile it to native code, and then optimize that code. If that seems unreasonable, you should not that LISP was originally an interpreter, and it was originally believed that it couldn't be compiled. Now almost all LISP implementations are compilers. (I have no idea how good they are at optimizing.)

So you need something that will do this for JavaScript, HTML, etc. Nobody bothers, because really it's not the CPU that's the bottleneck most of the time, but if there were a lot of multiprocessing applications around, this would start to be important.

Please note: For the purpose of this post I'm presuming that CPU/GPU development is frozen at it's current level, and that only software continues to develop. That is obviously false. But my estimate is that computers are used in a way that averages less than 50% of optimal. (This is, again obviously, a Wild Ass Guess. But I don't think you can do any better right now. And my secondary guess is that it's more likely to be too high than too low.)

Not really. This same kind of article pops up whenever a change in technologies starts to become appropriate. I.e., what we have installed now can't make the new stuff, and it's too expensive to build a new factory.

It's not that there isn't some validity to it's points, either. It's just that it's a short term perspective. The curve is bumpy, has been bumpy, and will continue to be bumpy. Sometimes it changes faster than Moore's law predicts, sometimes slower. The average is about right (though if I recall correctly, it's been adjusted in the past to speed it up).

It's also true that EVENTUALLY Moore's law (and it's associates) must end. When is an unanswerable question, though one can be fairly sure it will be before atomic level gates. (The noise level would be too high. You need to bring it down by dealing with multiple atoms. N.B.: This noise level has been a problem since at least the days of vacuum tubes. I'm not sure it was a major problem with gear driven calculators.)

By being wealthier, or more politically connected, than his opponent.

And if she buys a second ticket, and she's refused flight again? She probably doesn't have enough money to go on that merry-go-round several times. She's already out the cost of one plane ticket without recompense.

Thank you. That is clear. Now I can check what you said.

No. You are overestimating how unfree the populace (outside prisons) is in the US. The number of people in the "least free" (non-prison) population has increased, but they are freer now that the "least free" (non-prison) population was in the past.

It's more like one end of the curve has contracted towards the mean.

The '60s and '70s were in many ways freer than now. But there's a distinction between free and freer. That was also the period when the border with Mexico became, essentially, militarized, and when the border with Canada became more difficult to cross. This process has increased. That was the period when the government increased domestic spying. That was the period when the federal governent increased its control over the state governments. Etc.

*I* was relatively free during that period. Partially because I was inelgible to be drafted. Many friends weren't. Some of them died from it. Note that the "civil rights movement" worked because it was assisting the federal government in increasing it's control over the states. This increased the freedom for many citizens, at the cost of decreasing the freedom of the intermediate level governments that the citizenry can more easily affect.

Things aren't as simple as you are seeing. During that period an "underground railway" developed to ferry people North who didn't want to go to VietNam. (And why were we even there? That was never explained to my satisfaction. Vietnam as a whole elected the guy that we divided the country to fight against. Stupid. And for WHAT? This was never explained to me.)

Freedom has multiple dimensions. And it's not just a matter of individual rights, but of the social structures that support those rights.

P.S.: Another factor in the 1960's and 1970's being freer is that the bulge of the population age was at that point in the late teens to 20's. People in that age group don't count the cost of their actions the way older people do. And older people tend to be more conservative. (Tend isn't deterministic, but it's close. Populations tend to have "resonant" modes of behavior, where certain activities are reinforced, and what is reinforced depends on the medium through which it passes. A younger population tends to have a more active resonance. So when the bulk of the population is at an active point, expect social activity to increase. War is one of the traditional ways to release this, and I have long felt that that was the reason for the Vietnam war. If so, it didn't work out as intended. Do note, however, that shortly after this period large and powerful interests began buying up new media. And they weren't, and aren't, very profitable. But they are dandy for shaping social movements.)

The implementation is clearly more straightforwards, and the argument about the distribution being monthly rather than yearly is good. I do, however, find that it feels more like a kludge. (OTOH, given the current tax law, that's not much of an argument.)

That's not the same thing at all. I'm not even sure that it's related.

The negative income tax could be implemented by having the tax be a simple:
tax = income * rate + intercept

By adjusting the intercept so that the tax is negative whenever the income is below some value. The relationship of this to the "Earned Income Tax Credit" is not obvious. Do note that this is not a special bonus to low income workers, or some other subset of citizens.

I've now read that article, and to me it implies NOTHING about the lives of factory workers prior to, at minimum 1790, and more plausibly 1800. That's plenty of time to kill off a generation of people who used to have a source of income.

Also it talks largely in terms of averages. When the low extreme is 0 already, the mean is highly sensitive to outliers in the higher extreme, and relatively not much affected by an increase in the number of people moving to the lower extreme. Now they COULD have meant median when they said average, but that would be an unusual use of the term. When it's not otherwise defined, average usually means mean. In this kind of curve, however, the median is a much more useful number, and the second most important measure of central tendency is the mode. The mean is a somewhat distant third in importance. (Common phrases of a from that might have helped would have been "an average worker in a garment factory", and other similar forms.)

I realize that the information that I'm requesting is probably not available, but that's the kind of information that is needed to definitively answer this question. Either that or death rate by year by kind of employment, which is also generally not available.

Wait no longer. It's already happened at least once. (IIRC he was a Representative from New England, but I can't remember which state. They later took his name off the list and appologized to him.)

I think it was around 5 years ago now. Possibly longer.

I think you would actually NEED good evidence before that was a reasonable response. Here we just know that SOMEONE is lying, and we have a pretty strong belief that it's someone among the Feds. But belief isn't proof. The paper could be a fake. It could be something cooked up by the airline, or someone who worked there, perhaps because they overbooked the flight.

Yes, we believe that the Feds are the responsible party. Now prove that the lawyers knew or had reason to know. Even showing that it's probable would be impossible based on public information.

OTOH, the case should clearly not be allowed to proceed. And it should be ensured that the witness is able to come to the trial. AND the court should purchase the airplane ticket. (I can quite understand the witness not wanting to throw good money after bad.) If, after the trial, it is decided that the witness was barred from the first flight because of being present on the no-fly list, triple the cost of the ticket should be assigned to the lawyers who asserted in court that she was not on that list. If it is decided that the witness lied, triple the cost should be assigned to her. (As a fine. Note that so far she is not under oath, so it can't be perjury.) If it's some other party, the court would need to decide what to do depending on the party. (Interfering with a witness is criminal, and this is clearly that. But they may well be outside the jurisdiction of the court.)

But the current decision is silly. If she can't come because she's on the no-fly list, then every time she buys a ticket shes just thrown away her money. Of course she isn't going to buy tickets without a reasonable belief that it will do her any good. And the judge asking her to is being unreasonable. She may not have proof (i.e. sworn evidence) that she's on the no-fly list, but she has good reason to believe it. And the judge has seen a part of that "good reason", so he knows that she has good reason to believe it.