It has historically been considered an undue burden, but technology has passed the point where that reasoning could be deemed obsolete.

The question to me is at what point it becomes regulation of interstate commerce. The Courts have held that the tax itself is not such a regulation (within certain criteria), but saying "to sell here you must act as our tax agent" might cross a line even if the burden is made minimal by technology.

...except the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the supreme law of the land and who serves as the higest authority on the matter, says you're wrong.

As long as the use tax on an interstate sale to someone in the state is no higher than the sales tax that would be charged for an in-state purchase, the Court does not regard it as a tarrif.

Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the Court already took up that issue.

Yes, a state may tax an interstate sale of goods received in its territory so long as the tax is no greater than the sales tax that would apply if the sale took place entirely within the state. If the use tax were higher, it would be an illegal restraint on interstate commerce, but up to that point it is not.

I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from, or where you think I'm coming from, so allow me to clarify this point:

As I said, I disagree with the ruling. I'm just saying that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with every criticism of the ruling and those who made it, and I think GGP's comment about it being an incomplete law is out of line.

I know many people find this hard to comprehend in a society that's so immersed in the polarized bitch-fests that pass for discourse these days, but that's how I roll.

Riiiiight.

First, you're misusing the idiom of calling an occurance "convenient". Before that idiom applies, you need a coincidence of the alarms being offline with some other event such that, taken together, the two might point to a plot.

Second, to GP's question, yes they did inspect and the warheads are still in place.

Third, only certain alarms were off-line. Many other safeguards were still active and an attempt to steal a warhead would've been suicidal.

Fourth, root cause analysis is currently pointing to a mode of hardware failure that's been seen before. There is little reason to suspect malice.

Do we really need to continue with the reasons your paranoia makes no sense?

Right, exactly.

Except the ICBM complexes have far more failsafes than just the UPS you have. And (headilne and summary notwithstanding) it wasn't a power issue (nor had anything to do with a backhoe or a bottle of Jager), so a UPS is beside the point. And the missiles weren't unusable even during the brief outage, so the "free world" was at no elevated risk.

But apart from those minor details, you're spot on.

Please lay out a global strategic plan for nuclear deterrant and defense to set an upper bound on the number of ICBM's "anyone" needs. Don't forget that some nukes will probably be duds, and in many threat scenarios some will be taken out in their silos. ...Oh, you're not a military strategist? Then why are we listening to your estimate of how many missiles "anyone" needs?

Before you start, I'm also not a military strategist - hence I'm not citing a number of ICBM's I think we need. However, while the Cold War is in the past, it would be a foolish assumption that we'd never have a stand-off with another concentrated nuclear power.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Actually, it's not. It says 50 missiles is 1/9 of our missile stockpile; it says nothing about our total number of warheads. (In fact TFA claims that some of the ICBM's have multiple warheads. I don't know if that's true in the current configuration; others have pointed out that it isn't supposed to be.)

Saying we have 450 missiles is still vaguely inaccurate. 1/9 of our ICBM stockpile would (I believe) be correct, but those things on subs that aren't coutned in the 450 are, in many cases, also missiles.

Right, 450 missiles; and while I doubt that we're really only loading one warhead per missile, surely we're not loading an average of over 12.

However, not every U.S. warhead is on an ICBM.

Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.

The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.

While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".

I'm always amused by people who think 'real property rights' are anything other than legal privileges.

That fact that you can't hold this discussion without invoknig superlatives to tell me how much you disagree says everything I need to know about the value of continuing to participate. Go on believing that the rights you most prefer are the only ones that count, and wonder why your will is not reflected in the law.

TFA simplified the math a bit by showing how it would work if the numbers ran from 1 to N. But note earlier in the article it mentions that the allies had figured out the pattern of the serial numbers. There probably wasn't a German tank #1 or even #100; but there probably was a serial number that, based on their understanding of the information encoded in the serial number, the allies could estimate was the 100th built in a given timeframe (or perhaps at a given factory, etc.).

Starting at the 50th number in the sequence instead of the 1st wouldn't help much. Additional analysis could be done based on the density of the numbers seen to estimate upper and lower bounds.

What you might want to do is randomly skip numbers in your sequence with some predetermined frequency. You could either do this by a modest factor (to make the enemy over-estimate your production but in any event give them an upper bound) or by a wildly high factor (which would make it clear to your enemy that they are not getting useful information).

Or, you could use a protocol where the unique part of the serial number is actually random (provided you keep track to avoid two tanks getting the same value).

In summary - this works if the enemy hasn't thought about it or doesn't care.

Hmm... so your example of why the law as I think it should be is wrong, is a circumstance that occurs under today's law but could not happen under the law as I think it should be. Typical.

There is no reason that a content producer should have to choose between DRM and copyright protection. That's like saying that a homeowner should have to choose between locking his doors or having legal protection against home invasion.

Fundamentally the fact that I take steps to prevent someone from violating my rights should not take away my legal protection of those rights if someone figures out how to violate them anyway. I stand by my position that the fact they had to take extra steps to overcome my protections should be recognized as an aggrevating factor.

Trade secret vs. copyright is an entirely different situation. The raeson they are mutually exclusive is and always has been that they two bodies of law as originally conceived (and as they should be codified today) serve fundamentally incompatible goals.

No doubt in my mind the anti-circumvention law is broken. It was from day one, and the need for a 3-year review of exclusions demonstrates this. A better law might simply make circumvention an aggrevating factor in an underlying act of infringement. I would even be ok with assigning liability to Person X who circumvents a copyright protection for Person Y, if Person X should reasonably expect that Person Y is going to use the circumvention to infringe a copyright.

However, as of today the law is what it is. The attitude in TFS is ridiculous, and reflects an ignorance of the DMCA exemptions that is perpetuated every time we summarize this particular exemption is the "jailbreaking exemption".

First, the exemption does very specfiically talk about mobile phone handsets and software on that type of device. You can call this arbitrary, but that's the result of overy-focused lobbying.

More to the point, while the law does allow for inconsistencies, I'm not so sure this is one of them. After all, not every act of cell-phone jailbreaking is covered by the exemption, and I doubt a person running a business to jailbreak other peoples' phones would be able to shield himself with the exemption. You can argue whether that activity should be covered, but I'm willing to bet it's not.

I point this out because this guy wasn't busted for jailbreaking his own console; he was busted for selling the service of jailbreaking others' consoles. The exception that covers the "app interoperability" part of jailbreaking specifies narrowly that the purpose must be legal, and while he says (with a wink and a nudge) that he won't aid pirates, I don't know that he can state any narrow purpose when he's not the one making use of the circumvention.

And if that sounds backwards - that he should have to prove non-criminal intent - well, I believe that's the nature of an affirtmative defense, which is essentially what the exemptions are. The prosecution has to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt since this is a criminal charge) that he committed an act of circumvention, then I'm pretty sure it's up to him to prove that an exemption applied.

All of this is a symptom of the underlying broken law, of course; but that's not to say that this guy would walk if the law were "right". If circumvention were a civil matter, and if it were only illegal when linked to an underlying act of infringement, then someone wanting to offer circumvention services might be able to write up contracts requiring the client ot state a legal intent and to indemnify the business against claims resulting from infringement related to the circumvention. I don't get the sense this guy was running that thorough a shop, though, which means he might still have ended up on the hook.

doesn't the curved space-time idea require gravity to affect the body following the path?

I think you have the tail wagging the dog there. The curvature of spacetime is an affect of a single massive object being present; it does not depend on a second object "following a path" at all. Because the Sun is there, the spacetime in the Earth's neighborhood is curved. This curvature would be there with or without the Earth, and it will affect every object in that neighborhood equally.

Starting from a GR model, it's actually harder to understand how the time machine wouldn't experience the same curvature as everything else. In other words, why wouldn't it be affected by gravity?

More generally, your questions seem motivated by the idea that gravitational attraction is an interaction between two objects. According to GR, it's not. A massive object interacts with spacetime; all other objects, when they move through spacetime, are affected by spacetime's now-curved shape in such a way that they appear attracted to the first object.

This is why light, which has no mass and would be "not affected by gravity" in a Newtonian model, is in fact bent by gravity and even trapped by black holes.