Er, I meant if they have enough control to dump RAM. Thinko because what I was thinking is that if they can dump RAM they can dump your password database, too (unless user authentication is in the loop and that authentication relies on secrets not in the device).

I'd love to trash Edge, but it's hard to argue against Microsoft's analysis here. It's hard to come up with a practical threat model which Edge would fail but Chrome or Firefox or any other browser with a built-in password manager would meet, unless the browser required authentication for every password retrieval.

If an attacker has enough control of your machine to dump the password database, they have enough control to get it to retrieve the plaintext passwords unless every retrieval requires user authentication in the loop -- which would be pretty annoying, which is why they don't do that.

For that matter, an attacker with that much control over your system can even get your passkeys, unless those are stored in some OS-managed secure enclave and they require user authentication in the loop (e.g. a biometric which is matched in the secure enclave, and ideally with a secure path from scanner to enclave).

Still, if it were me writing the code, I'd do it Chrome's way, just because leaving secrets sitting around in plaintext in RAM makes me uncomfortable.

Property taxes are not levied by the federal government for reasons that are partly constitutional and partly practical.

In order to levy a property tax without a constitutional amendment, the federal government would have to apportion the taxes to the states. In fact, Congress did this several times in the 18th and 19th centuries. The way it worked is that Congress determined a revenue target, apportioned that target among the states proportional to population, then required the states to collect money and hand it over.

Congress could do that again, and could subject different kinds of property to the tax... but it would get very ugly, because the tax would have to be apportioned among the states purely on a population basis. A 2021 analysis of Warren's 2% proposal found that different states would have to apply wildly disparate state wealth taxes to pay their apportioned amount. West Virginia would have to institute a wealth tax 20X higher than DC.

This is why Congress has not instituted apportioned property taxes since the Civil War, because they were pretty unfair. The 16th amendment provided a much cleaner, fairer way to directly tax the population... but only on income.

And as for the Article III point... Moore v United States (2024) pretty strongly indicates that at least the current SCOTUS is very hostile to wealth taxes, and not just the conservatives.

That is indeed an interesting loophole. I think the only reason it passes constitutional scrutiny is because it's optional. You have to choose to take the 475(f) election.

Ah, yes, I missed the different verb. Except "pirating" isn't really a legal concept. What is the specific precedent you're referring to?

I'm inclined to agree, except for one thing: The LLM can be duplicated infinitely, at near-zero cost, while the trained human cannot. That's a crucial difference. In the case of a textbook, for example, an LLM that has learned the whole contents can act as a full replacement for the book, to an arbitrary number of users, which might severely impact the commercial market for the original book. A human who learns it can write their own and sell it to many people, but that takes a lot of effort and significant creativity, especially if the new book wants to displace the original. Or a human who learns it can teach others, but the scale at which they can do this is limited, unlike an LLM.

These two statements are mutually contradictory. Is it infringing or not?

True, though I'll bet the negotiations with dozens of publishers would have dragged on for years.

Although I know what you mean, there is no such thing as "Constitutional Copyright". The Constitution authorizes Congress to set terms for protecting the work of authors and inventors, but it doesn't specify the 14-year term. That was just the first term that Congress chose to enact. It happened not long after the constitution was ratified, but it wasn't in any way part of the constitution.

More precisely, they did something in an undefined gray area and are now hoping the courts decide their way.

Seems like a great business strategy. Propose to build one offshore near one of King Trump's golf courses and then he'll pay you $1B of taxpayer money not to build it. Rinse, repeat.

I'm not sure that gets you there.

Income taxes required an amendment to the constitution (16), precisely because the Constitution says that direct taxes must be apportioned to the states (proportional to population), and so the federal government could not impose a direct, individual income tax. The 16A authorized the income tax, but it did not authorize a wealth tax or other asset tax.

As for welfare, the origin of that power is not Article III, though SCOTUS did have to decide whether to adopt the Madisonian or Hamiltonian intepretation of the General Welfare clause. Hamilton won and the federal government can (and does, extensively!) spend tax money on welfare payments and subsidies.

So income redistribution is constitutional, but wealth redistribution is not, at least at the federal level, and without a constitutional amendment. States probably have more freedom, but they face a competitive risk: wealthy people will leave.

So if AI is a "co-author", but can't be an author, that just leaves the human as the sole author.

DeepMind is the core of Google's AI research, and it began as a UK company that Google purchased. It's still the case that the bulk of their core researchers are there. Ceasing operations in the UK would not only cost them a lot more than the US DoD will ever pay them, it would also cost them a lot of critical AI expertise.

I don't either. Can you spell it out?

To what, exactly? The answer to that question matters quite a bit.