some_guy_there's comments

From what I can find online[1,2], for a dual-income family earning 250k CAD/ 250k USD, tax in BC Canada[1,2] is 33% Federal + 16.80 % State = 49.8%. For California it is 24% Federal + 9.3% State = 33.3%. Is there a big difference in other taxes (like Payroll/Social Security) between California and BC that makes the overall marginal tax same?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...

[2] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/income-taxes/person...

A preprint of the paper can be found on ArXiv here https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02047

I agree with you. Though I do think that this is not an unsolvable problem with the right incentives. As I noted, the people at company X might be the best people at heart, but the current legal system does not encourages drafting of a contract that precisely (and easily) describes the terms being agreed between the two parties. This is not even a unique feature of contract law, the same to true to various extend for all branches of the law.

My gut feeling (of which I have no proof) is that the current legal system is costing more money to the society than is necessary. For one thing, it is decreasing the trust in the legal system, since people now (correctly) assume that in many facets of modern life, they are agreeing to things they don't understand, that they are giving up more rights than they should, and that there is no reasonable solution to this problem yet.

Some complication in the law is necessary since the world is a complex creature, but I think that the common person (say at least half of the population) should have reasonable understanding of the legal language. One way to approach it is to have a requirement for simpler contract, but I don't know if it is _the_ way to deal with this problem. I am not a lawyer after all. All I know is that something is broken, and if not fixed, will lead to more problem down the line. A system like this where no-one trusts nobody is clearly not sustainable. It's just not a good way to organize as a society.

> which are absolutely nothing like what Imgur intends

But how do we know this? If they intend something, they should write that down in the contract. I am having hard time imagining that their lawyers cannot draw a contract which waives only the copyright requirement for the purposes of image hosting and restricts the images from being used for other things. The principle of charitable interpretation tells me to believe what people/company write in their contract. In my opinion, the expansive definition in the contract is there to

a) Save their ass when they do something which does not seems kosher to the public.

b) Allows them to pivot to other use of the data which might have nothing related to their current business model.

c) It is cost effective to draw up the contract in this way, given the current legal system and its requirements.

Note that I am not saying that Imgur is doing something immoral or whatever. I am just saying that if they wrote down this

> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.

as the simplified legalese, that it is the current interpretation. I contend that the average Joe will have better understanding of the _current_ contract with the simplified statement. I also think that Imgur (and other services) will find money to draft a better contract if they were required to make a simplified language version.

> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.

But isn't it precisely what the legalese means? I mean, unless otherwise restrict by some law other than the copyright laws, Imgur can use those images for anything. The statement does not limits the use to "reasonable business activities". Why will it be severely misleading to write it that way?

>Relativistic effects weren't known to be reality at the time this theory was proposed.

Umnn, Michelson–Morley and Maxwell equations were enough experimental evidence before Einstein. Einstein work was reconciling Mechanics to confirm with electromagnetism, and not the other way round.

EDIT: Not to say there isn't some physics theory developed independent of experiments. But relativity is not a good candidate.

Take this comment as what I think 5th amendment should imply, not how it is currently applied by the courts.

The concept of forgone conclusion is very weird. Imagine that I tell someone that I maintain a diary with log of all the events everyday. Then I tell this to my friends, family, (the police), etc.

Let's say the prosecution can prove that I was at a spot where something illegal happened. If they knew I wrote a diary everyday, they can compel me to produce my diary, which will then be used against me (if needed).

If on the other hand, I tell everyone (and the police) that I have photographic memory and remember anything I see and do, that information is protected by fifth amendment. So in this case, I won't provide something that will be used against me.

It is very weird that when the plain words of the amendment read "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", it is only thought to include literal production of testimony from mind as confession, while on the other hand, the first amendment is not read literally to allow only freedom of (say) owning a press, the press being a physical printing press.

That seems a bit too much storage, considering that Seagate only shipped around ~ 250 Exabytes worth of HDD in 2015[1]. Being extremely generous for world supply of Hard drive, we might have had only 1000 Exabytes of storage shipped in a year.

Assuming 2 Petabyte per user, mere 500,000 user will consume entire storage produced every year. May be they do, but 2 PB/user seems improbable. That's also $14k per person of data (assuming no discount from Google to this company).

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10098/market-views-2015-hard-d...

The authority asserted by President Trump in the executive order does not arise from the TTPA. It derives from INA (viz. 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) ). The fact that this order uses the country listed in TTPA does not negate the fact that the executive has asserted the authority to negate already existing visa from any country that they wish to. (Well technically they still have the visa, but what use is it if there is a blanket ban.)

In particular, nothing in TTPA barred entry to people who have helped American armed forces, or legally enrolled students from those country, which this order does. Again, not by authority of TTPA, but under INA. Taking the executive order at face value, the executive can ban any and all countries. The fact that they used the list from TTPA is political convenience.

It definitely will (refuse orders), especially if Trump gives an at-face unconstitutional order (say shooting the protesters at Dakota pipeline). In normal times, the Congress will impeach the President, removing him from office. But as norms erode, that might not be the case.

The officers of US Armed forces take an oath for the constitution, and not the President. Now for this special case right now, military refusing orders will be a "good" thing. But in long run, it only means that civilian institution have eroded so far that having military deciding what is constitutional might appear to be a "good thing". So the idea isn't that military personal will use force against citizens, but rather they will not, and that will erode the system regardless.

That never has been the case yet. While the President after as President has tried to stretch his authority (while Congress receded), we haven't reached a point of resistance from extra-governmental organizations. But that's the logical direction where this is headed.

> User space software stack is not aware of it, the frameworks know only of scale 1, 2 and 3 (on iOS). Nothing between it. That's why it is integer scaling.

Well whatever the case might be, whether it's kernel's fault, GNOME's fault, Wayland's fault or device driver fault, fact of matter is that one can easily get 1920x1200 resolution on Retina Macbook 15" with sharp font and images, and cannot on Fedora. This is why perhaps people are making "a fuss".

OS X CAN do fractional scaling as far as user is concerned (doesn't matter who scales it up or down), while Fedora cannot (with Wayland, at least).

I wouldn't be so worried yet. Verlinde's theory is quite fresh and it will take time to conclusively rule out Standard Cosmological model. As of yet, no one has properly worked out entropic gravity equivalent of various gravitational effects that arise in General Relativity such as gravitational lensing, a part of which was used in the paper discussed in the article.

Never the less, Verlinde's ideas are more interesting and reasonable than other proposed modification of gravity, but that's just my opinion.

The efficiency is around 4%, as in Figure 2 from the paper. SFE is solar-to-fuel efficiency.

From the paper, " We also calculated the solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency (SFE) for our photochemical process (Fig. 2C), obtaining a value of ~4.6% limited by the maximum efficiency of the PV-a-si-3jn cell (~6.0%) (13, 20). This SFE is higher than that of the water-splitting reaction (~2.5%) previously measured using an identical triple-junction photovoltaic (PV-a-si-3jn) cell (20). "

https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/sci/353/6298/4...

This isn't really a wrong picture to imagine. In a way, this is what the experiments are trying to measure. You have a mirror and a laser at two points of your lattice (the space itself), and the "region" between them compresses and expands, which makes the laser take a slightly different time to bounce back.

Far away in linear approximation (which is what we saw here), the lattice picture is quite appropriate as a first order analogy.

Thanks. So only recourse for highly resourced adversary will be to decode key via hardware imaging (not sure if any research has been done on this), and after that they will still have to bruteforce the passphrase used to secure the phone, the effectiveness of which depends on the entropy of passphrase.

I wonder what how Apple can help the law enforcement here.

Wouldn't Apple (or the manufacturer) know the key of the security enclave?

Well at least they lost this case. Good common sense showed by the Jury.

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84aea8bb-af1b-...

Someone like Bernie Sander[1], who is a self described socialist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

Canadian federal government has much more power than US feds can ever imagine to have. The criminal law is entirely up to the Canadian Parliament, and this is highly unlikely to ever fly in US. Further more, the courts have held that Canadian federal government can spend its money any way it likes to influence provincial policy. While the US Supreme court has allowed some percentage of money to be tied to state legislation (viz 21 year drinking age), it has also struck down laws which forces states to take up new spending or lose all the earlier grant from federal government (viz Medicare expansion in Obamacare). Each US state maintains its own Constitution and individual Judiciary, while the Canadian Supreme Court sits on top of any case of controversy in Canada,

US is much more federal than Canada, except may be for legal fiction where each Canadian province has their own relation to Crown. While Canadian federal government cannot outright strike out a state law, they almost never have to, as the power of Canadian federal government are almost endless where it really matter viz. criminal law, tax and spending.

While the magic number might take some time to arrive at, nothing stops California to run its own system of federalization inside the state if they think they are too big to manage. The cities usually handle their own police force, for example, and can also pass quite a few laws within power structure of California.