New Testingstan

Oxymoron wrote:It was a cheap shot, yes, considering the whole "bad implementation" thing you were talking about. Kinda burns me from the idea, especially when I come from a background where higher education is mostly free.

But more seriously, yeah, applying the principle to child support may be interesting, but the problem is going to be to implement it. If your guy who's still studying or just entered the workforce has to take a "child support loan" while he's already subject to a student loan ; and if the interest rates are not strictly enforced to be as low as possible... well, he's in for a ride.

You could say it's another way to encourage people to act responsibly. The end result for the child will be better, but for the situation to also be better on the guy's side you'll have to watch pretty closely the interest rates and all the side fees.

As for the "university which is good at everything", given you commentary I suppose it's not in Massachusetts. Probably not Florida either... Something in the Midwest ?

Oxymoron wrote:Private Universities ? I don't know of any private "campus". On the other hand, there's quite a number of private schools in a number of different domains, mostly things to do with the tertiary sector : Commerce (management, accounting, marketing, etc...), Informatics, things to do with Hotels and Restaurants, a shitload of professional formations (plumbing, etc...)...

As for "free", well, I meant from the point of view of the "end user". The fact that costs are displaced... well, yes, that's the goal. In the end, it's just a question of knowing what amount of wealth redistribution you want the State to partake in.

Personally, I advocate for a pretty radical solution : From the total pool of revenues collected by the State (taxes, dividends, etc...), take a portion, and redistribute it to EVERYONE. Ideally, every citizens and immigrants who live here and pay taxes would touch a monthly income corresponding to something like 60-80% of the poverty threshold (to still encourage people to get jobs, you shouldn't be able to live completely off that) - minors would see this stipend be put on a locked account that they and they alone would be allowed to unlock at their majority.

In return, social spendings across the board would be reduced as pertinent. The only ones which would be left unchanged would be things like the aids given to people with disabilities and reduced autonomy (including disabled and old people).

The idea being that as EVERYONE get their "free money" from the taxes everyone pay, no one can argue that they aren't seeing the colour of their taxes.

Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.

While not currently permitted under U.S. law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defense that allows companies not only to stabilize a situation but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder’s networks, or even destroying the information within an unauthorized network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system’s camera, implanting malware in the hacker’s network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker’s own computer or network.

xon wrote:It is rather clear that you haven't actually read the report then. The figures they give for copyright infringement "loses" are larger than all the other "loses" for every other IP violation type they list combined.

Also, the context is they are not talking about what is currently legally permissiable on corperate devices but external intrusions. And some of thier crap they "recommend" is likely not even posible without compromissing every computer connected to the internet.

From your first quote wrote:Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.

From the section on copyright, pp 51-53, bolding mine wrote:In 1999, a political scientist was in an economically well-developed area of China studying, ironically, intellectual property rights. While interviewing an official who worked in the Office of the Education, Science, Culture, and Public Health Committee of the Provincial People’s Congress, the researcher mentioned that he was interested in purchasing a CD-ROM set of China’s national and local laws, but even at the reduced price of $1,000, this was more than the academic could afford. The government official took the researcher to a market notorious for openly selling pirated software. The researcher walked away with the entire set for roughly $1.50.1
Copyright law protects original works of authorship that are in a fixed, tangible form of expression.2 Put another way, copyright protects the expression of ideas.3 Like patent protection, copyright was one of the early forms of IP protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution.4 While such protection originally covered tangible items like books and paintings, over time Congress and the courts have extended it to include audio recordings, movies, and computer software.5 A common form of copyright infringement is the production of pirated goods, which are any goods made without the consent of the copyright holder. These may take the form of physical books or DVDs in a market in Shenzhen or digital downloads made available to a broader audience via the Internet.6 The purpose of copyright protection, again similar to patent protection, is to maintain a positive incentive to write, create, and publish new works, since such innovation is generally seen as an overall benefit to society.7
The USITC estimates that copyright infringement is the most costly form of IP loss for the United States with respect to China, costing U.S. producers nearly $24 billion in 2009.8 Not surprisingly, IP theft has hurt the information services industry the most, with losses in 2009 of nearly $26 billion.9 Globally, some estimates place the commercial value of software theft at over $60 billion.10 Yet the true cost remains unknown for numerous and sometimes contradictory reasons. First among these is the unknown substitution rate.11 Many studies simply calculate how many versions of a particular piece of software are currently installed on computers and compare it with how many copies were sold.12 They then multiply that figure by the retail price to determine “lost revenues,” or the valuelost if all software installations had been purchased legally. The problem with this approach is that if piracy were not an option, some of these consumers, particularly in low-income economies, would never purchase the software because it is priced too high.13
On the other hand, studies that use survey methods to estimate losses may provide estimates that are too low because many companies opt to not report their losses for financial and business reasons.14 As an example, one high-tech software company that the Commission spoke to in its investigation reported that it had sold a single copy of a piece of software to a bank in China. Later, 30 million copies of software traced to that single license contacted the corporate servers of this company for software updates. Between this anecdote and countless others, it is clear that the true loss to companies from piracy is difficult to accurately measure but unarguably substantial.
China is not alone in its high piracy rates; software piracy is in fact a global problem. In 2011, many countries exceeded China’s piracy rate of 77%, including Vietnam (81%), Pakistan (86%), and Venezuela (88%).15 Yet though the higher piracy rates in these and other countries should not be ignored, the sheer size of the Chinese market makes it the most significant focus for improvement. In 2011, China had the second-largest commercial value of pirated software at nearly $9 billion. Russia was third with $3.2 billion, while first place belonged to the United States, with a commercial value of pirated software approaching $10 billion. However, with a piracy rate of only 19%, the United States had nearly $39 billion more in legitimate sales.16
Ukraine was recently declared to be a “priority foreign country” by the U.S. Trade Representative in its annual Special 301 Report—the first country given this designation in seven years.17 The report cites Ukraine’s persistent failure to combat online piracy as a primary reason for its 301 status. Most striking, however, is the pervasive use of illegal and unlicensed software within the Ukrainian government itself. Industry reports show similar findings. According to a study by the Business Software Alliance, the country’s piracy rate has hovered around 85% since 2007 and has shown no improvement.18 In contrast, Ukraine is not listed by the BSA as one of the top-twenty possessors of pirated software as measured by commercial value. Presumably, this is due to the relatively small size of the Ukrainian software market.19
While pirated software is the most highly publicized form of international and domestic copyright infringement, the entertainment industry also experiences significant losses from piracy. A 2007 study estimates that the U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion in total output annually due to piracy of sound recordings.20 A similar 2007 study estimates that movie piracy now results in total lost output among all U.S. industries of $20.5 billion annually.21 As with similar software piracy studies, however, these estimates are limited by uncertain substitution rates.22 In China, 99% of all music downloads are illegal. The total music revenue in the country for 2010, including both digital and physical sales,was only $64 million. To put this figure in perspective, it is less than total sales in Thailand, which registered $68 million in sales in 2010.23 Thailand has a population and GDP (based on purchasing power parity) twenty times smaller than that of China. If China had purchased the same amount of music on a per capita basis as Thailand, a country not known for staunch IP protections, sales would have been nearly $1.4 billion.

Recommendation:
Reconcile necessary changes in the law with a changing technical environment.
When theft of valuable information, including intellectual property, occurs at network speed, sometimes merely containing a situation until law enforcement can become involved is not an entirely satisfactory course of action. While not currently permitted under U.S. law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defense that allows companies not only to stabilize a situation but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder’s networks, or even destroying the information within an unauthorized network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system’s camera, implanting malware in the hacker’s network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker’s own computer or network.
The legal underpinnings of such actions taken at network speed within the networks of hackers, even when undertaken by governments, have not yet been developed. Further, the de facto sanctioning of corporate cyber retribution is not supported by established legal precedents and norms. Part of the basis for this bias against “offensive cyber” in the law includes the potential for collateral damage on the Internet. An action against a hacker designed to recover a stolen information file or to degrade or damage the computer system of a hacker might degrade or damage the computer or network systems of an innocent third party. The challenges are compounded if the hacker is in one country and the victim in another.
For these reasons and others, the Commission does not recommend specific revised laws under present circumstances. However, current law and law-enforcement procedures simply have not kept pace with the technology of hacking and the speed of the Internet. Almost all the advantages are on the side of the hacker; the current situation is not sustainable. Moreover, as has been shown above, entirely defensive measures are likely to continue to become increasingly expensive and decreasingly effective, while being unlikely to change the cost-benefit calculus of targeted hackers away from attacking corporate networks.
New options need to be considered. As a first step, corporations need better information, and thus an open, two-way communications flow between companies and U.S. government agencies is more necessary than ever before. Companies cannot be asked to share more information unless they have a reasonable expectation that they will receive useful information in return, and they need protections from lawsuits if they do provide information. The Cyber Information Security Protection Act is an example of a statutory effort to address this problem, and the Commission recommends its passage.
Second, an aggressive assessment of the sufficiency of current legal norms to address the new circumstances needs to be undertaken, and new statutes should be considered. The law needs to be clarified to match common sense. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and law enforcement agencies should have the legal authority to use threat-based deterrence systems that operate at network speed against unauthorized intrusions into national security and critical infrastructure networks.
Finally, new laws might be considered for corporations and individuals to protect themselves in an environment where law enforcement is very limited. Statutes should be formulated that protect companies seeking to deter entry into their networks and prevent exploitation of their own network information while properly empowered law-enforcement authorities are mobilized in a timely way against attackers. Informed deliberations over whether corporations and individuals should be legally able to conduct threat-based deterrence operations against network intrusion, without doing undue harm to an attacker or to innocent third parties, ought to be undertaken.

*, pp 2 wrote:Hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The annual losses are likely to be comparable to the current annual level of U.S. exports to Asia—over $300 billion. The exact figure is unknowable, but private and governmental studies tend to understate the impacts due to inadequacies in data or scope. The members of the Commission agree with the assessment by the Commander of the United States Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, that the ongoing theft of IP is “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Civil War Man wrote:The second part about wanting to legalize backhacking and infecting or disabling the attacking computer also opens a pretty big can of worms, especially since a lot of attacks come from end user computers that are already infected.

Oxymoron wrote:Personally, I advocate for a pretty radical solution : From the total pool of revenues collected by the State (taxes, dividends, etc...), take a portion, and redistribute it to EVERYONE. Ideally, every citizens and immigrants who live here and pay taxes would touch a monthly income corresponding to something like 60-80% of the poverty threshold (to still encourage people to get jobs, you shouldn't be able to live completely off that) - minors would see this stipend be put on a locked account that they and they alone would be allowed to unlock at their majority.

Questor wrote:Oxy, make no mistake, this document isn't about corporations other than tangentially, despite the "on the page" wording. It's advocating pre-emptive cyber warfare on a scale that actually boggles the mind. The cyber equivalent of running gunbattles down city street at one end and the equivalent of nuclear war at the other.

but there's a few diffs with what you said: 1) it should indeed be enough to live off, if modestly. if you want to eliminate welfare payments but still force people to get jobs cuz the income is too small, you just created a new problem because jobs aren't going to ever happen for everyone barring revolution.

it should also be a realistic option for people to just quit their job at any time without being totally destitute. this way if the job is mistreating them they have a little more power to get out, or they can start their own business with less personal risk, and so on.

Of course the incentive to work is still here: you make more money.

Questor wrote:ADR, is this presented as a good/preferred solution, or just the way it works in the society, because, um... wow.

adr wrote:but yeah garbage collectors don't mean "no more memory leak" like ever, especially if you're a sloppy coder like i was in the first version and ppl are amazed to see this)

Dooey Jo wrote:D actually has some scoping rules, although i'm not sure if you can bind a member variable's scope to that of its parent or if it's like C#'s useless "rofl local function is the only scope anyone could possibly need here have a bunch of functions wrapped up in a language construct"

import std.stdio;

struct Test2 {
        ~this() { writeln("test2 dying"); }
}

struct Test {
        ~this() { writeln("test dying"); }
        Test2 t;
}

void main() {
    Test t;
}

Oxymoron wrote:Because Timmy is the perfect example of a man, not a woman, raising kids alone, and where it is for the better interest of the kids that the mother has as little say as possible on their upbringing.

That's the problem : you over-emphasize the role of the mother, denying the father his, on a purely sexist basis.

Oxymoron wrote:Because Timmy is the perfect example of a man, not a woman, raising kids alone, and where it is for the better interest of the kids that the mother has as little say as possible on their upbringing.