Is, that, at the end of the day, the right wing American President George Bush will have been the guy to have the LEAST onerous security impositions out of any of the western nations.
The base is: Citizens are allowed to do anything not forbidden, for the state it is the other way around, anything they do must be allowed by law first.
My God, if only Americans understood the US Constitution as well as you do, with that statement.
Hey, I don't mean to sound like a troll, but I'm thinking that Bush should just go all out and roust up a private little army, and go and arrest all the Democrats and liberal leaning supporters in sort of a knight of the long knives. You know, all the Republicans would have guns would, on some night, just go and break the back of the Democratic party and kill off the leaders. The worst part of Bush these days is that no one on the left even really fears attacking him. But, if he say had a pistol and shot Harry Reid and gunned down the Senate ala Al Capone's massacre, then, you know, you could give the guy his props. Yeah, diversity would go out the window, but we could be much more efficient with a mono culture.
Er, no. I do believe there are more copies of GCC out there. Dollar sales yes, but not copies. Oh, and I do believe it was you who misread my post this time
Absolutely not. For every C++ Unix programmer, there are probably 10 VB Windows programmers.
So wait... VS lets you build your project into a whole VM with no distribution costs or restrictions now? That might be interesting. Which version allows that? That might be worth a try.
That doesn't address the point that virtual machines make portability obsolete.
Bjarne Stroustroup. Was that a rhetorical question?
Well, he's wrong. Too bad. If he cared about portability so much, he should have done something about the sizes of ints and longs when he had the chance.
I don't think you're in the odd category of programmers this article is discussing. I'm also surprised you think this is worth mentioning. I had thought by now software tools that did not offer this were a historical oddity long forgotten.
Uh, you need to stop believing your own b.s. and look at facts. Microsoft sold 9.5 billion dollars in tools over the last 9 months. Visual Studio is by far the most successful, in terms of copies distributed, of all time. I wish I could be such a historical oddity.
So... These free and paid for tools - how are their cross platform capabilities? Can you write once and compile for various platforms? Note - by "various platforms" I am not referring to "all the modern versions of Windows."
WHO CARES ABOUT PORTABILITY WHEN WRITING C++!!!!
1) Virtual machines makes portability obsolete. These days, you can run virtual platforms on increasingly everything, so there's no need to write portable code at all, when virtualization is just a mouse click away. Any platform is a problem solved by the operating system, not the applications developer, and that's just the way it is.
2) Besides, just look at what you propose....You take a -systems- like C++ language and you write a bunch of compromise code that can't take advantage of a platform. If you want to write portable code, then pick a language like Java or something, and accept the crappy result for the dumb vision of running everywhere. I mean, why would take a ferrari and stuff groceries in the back of it?
You can't just take someone's commercial software, extend it and start selling copies either.
But yes, I can. I do not have to pay a royalty to develop for Windows, at all. Microsoft gives up free redistributables for me to target it my application and, although I can't look at them, I can pretty much write whatever I want.
In fact, the free developer tools Microsoft provides for RAD are far better than the tools that are out there for Linux. It's really only in Linux that C++ has a developer tool lead and that's mostly because Linux got a head start on x86-64 and Microsoft is putting everything into.NET.
I agree. It's not like we see companies like IBM, Sony, HP, Sun, Dell, etc investing billions of dollars in open source software and systems
Yep, and Apple, with its closed software, is selling more computers than Dell right now, who, incidentally, still is primarily a Windows company, and IBM is out of the PC business altogether (remember Lenovo?), and Sun is on its way to being another x64 motherboard recycler. That's some alliance you got there.
While many posters might quibble about the technicalities of the article, does anyone really quibble about the spirit?
Open source software is at adds with making a profit off of software. It just is. If the spirit of the Open source license is to make sure that the software and the derived works are free, then, it has to be free.
Even if the GPLv3 does nothing to compel web sites who hide their sources behind their pages, to open up, it was considered and it is ultimately coming down the pike from the FOSS community. Even if the GPLV3 does nothing to prevent someone from making a closed application on Linux, such activities are at odds with the spirit of the FOSS community and again, such restrictions are coming.
So the author's central warning is entirely accurate, even if his anecdotal evidence fails to match on some autistic level of detail.
There IS a business risk in investing in open source systems. Businesses invest in property, and if software is not property, or, what you invest in is made to be not property, then, in the sense that a business can earn an advantage and a return off of it, then, why should they invest in it?
Yes, the left is more socialistic. I'd be glad to respond to an argument as to why that might be a bad thing, but I'm afraid that "goofy" doesn't quite suffice.
Socialism doesn't work for two reasons. Public ownership is a myth and trading rationing for scarcity is not really an improvement.
Public ownership is a myth. Someone does own the property that is made public and that is the institutions that administrate it. They use that property to dole out favors and powers and so it creates a tremendous abuse in the allocation of resources, which, is generally what we see in countries that have gone socialist.
Both socialism and capitalism try to deal with the fundamental problem of scarcity. Capitalism says that whoever has the most money gets the resource, that is, prices go up on it. We see this in America today - the price of oil goes up as the commodity becomes scarce. Socialism, by contrast, takes the same finite resource and merely redistributes based on some idea of fairness as determined by the bureaucracy.
What happens, though, is that, because there is no price incentive, there tends not to be any reason to solve the problems of that shortage of the resource. That there is a bureacracy means that advancement is political and is disconnected from solving the economic problems at hand. So what you get in socialism is a lot of finger pointing, a reduction in the amount of the available resource, then dishonesty and finally some increasing degree of repression as the government must crush anyone who dissents from their world view.
history has shown, again and again, that socialism fails, so, its not even about the bile distaste for those who are like the idea of ceding one's economic freedom to a "like minded" bureaucrat. It simply doesn't work.
Much like cutting off school fees by parents of their 10 yr old, because their 10 yr old refused to goto bed on time.
So much crying sour grapes. University enrollment is at an all time high and educational expenses have risen even more quickly than health care or petroleum over the last 30 years.
Reagan didn't want his surgeon general to talk about AIDS.
AIDS is a disease that you can avoid by how you live.
He increased military science funding for Star Wars by atleast 300%.
Yeah, and guess what, thanks to that research, we actually have some options to defend America now that every country on the planet is working to get the atomic bomb and the ballistic missile. The Democratic belief in science, on this point, is to argue that it is impossible, and simply not even bother to try and save millions of lives.
The funding cut was a purely political move. Both sides wanted it because it makes BOTH sides look bad. This wasn't done by the Democrats, it was done by DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS!
Bush requested full funding. As the majority party in the Senate and the House, the Democrats control what goes before a committee, and what goes through the committee, before a piece of legislation makes it to the floor.
I'm hardly an animal rights advocate, but has anyone stopped to ask what sort of ethics has us cracking open a monkey's head to perform these experiments?
You know everyone here is blaming Bush for slashing science, with the implicit thought that only the supposedly erudite liberals are the ones that ever fund science. Yet, if these people actually had 1/10th of the curious mind that George Bush has, they might have actually gone and compared Fermilab's 2000 Budget of 277 million dollars versus the currently requested Fermilab budget of 377 million dollars and realized the Bush has asked for significantly more money for Fermilab. Then, instead of moaning about the Republican approach to science, we might observe that is in fact DEMOCRATS who control the Congress, and DEMOCRATS who cut the Fermilab budget.
The fact of the matter is, DEMOCRATS are the ones, right now, who are slashing science spending. DEMOCRATS are the ones who want to put a stop to manned space exploration, curtail unmanned space exploration, already killed an unmanned mission to look for life on Europa and nuclear powered spacecraft. Everyone bashes Bush on energy research, but Clinton didn't do jack shit for 8 years on alternative energy. In contrast, Bush has massively funded every sort of bio-energy science that there is, and put the subsidies in place to speed adoption, and now, it's actually -working-.
Yeah, some REpublicans might be a bit goofy about evolution. Big deal. Evolution doesn't make any consumer products and information complexity theory is a better foundation for biology than evolution is anyway. But, Democrats are way more goofy about government as a redistribution of wealth vehicle and about fighting technological progress so that they can create more manual jobs. Yeah, Democrats can go on about how much they love science, but they never want to actually PAY FOR IT. You can bash Republicans as much as you want, when it comes to every major technology initiative over the last three decades, its been your friendly neighborhood warmongering right wing lunatics that have laid the conceptual framework for the Internet, funded all sorts of applied physics and chemistry, funded pretty much anything that looks like it would be a good consumer product, and the numbers -prove it-.
Seriously, just go get spreadsheets, and compare Clinton's science budgets, with Bush's, Carter's science budgets with Reagan's, and even Nixon's science budgets with Johnson's, and you will find that for the most part, Republicans spend far more on research and development than scientists do.
And finally, yes, every major university should be kissing Republican ass because it was Republicans that allowed private universities to become cash cows by filing for patents on research paid for by federal dollars.
My prediction is thus: Barrack Obama pulls the plug entirely on NASA, if he is elected. Yeah, Democrats are all in favor of science, they just don't want to ever actually do it.
The native Americans were not poor, like most native people they had no concept of money or individual land ownership, but had all they needed so were not poor, they had plentiful food, clean water, shelter and all they needed
Ah, romanticizing the noble savage and the missing the stone ages. How quaint! Unfortunately, its not true at all. Food and water and shelter were not plentiful by any stretch of the imagination. And, most importantly of all, they certainly had land ownership, because, tribes used to war among each other to retain it.
go and ask all those office workers who long for the simple life
Yeah, the simple life. Those retards want to trade sitting in an air conditioned office stuffing your face with all the possible foods and drinks you could eat imported from around the world, in exchange for watching your children die during a harsh winter because Uncle Bob got gored in the thigh by a wild bore and so the animal that everyone was going to eat got away. People that long for the "simple life" should try it some time.
No, that's not all that matters. Your answer was to let Saddam Hussein completely off the hook for invading Kuwait.
Honestly, the right thing for the USA to do would have been to let Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait, not intervened in 1991, and let the arabs fight it out in a war amongst themselves. The United Nations would have died, then, unable to find the strength to even live up to its own charter, rather than continue on like the charade that it is. I will never support any American intervention against any dictator attacking any country on this planet, ever again. If the world is so outraged that we got rid of Saddam, then, let the world have a dozen more of them, that's what I say.
There is no reason we should pay attention to your paranoid ravings
You never answered the question. Knowing that Saddam was already kicked out of Iraq once after a botched assassination, that he battled back from pretty dire circumstances to ultimately lead Iraq, that he did actually set out once to make WMD and the only reason he did not was because he was afraid of the USA, what says he's going to not make them once the USA lifts the gloves off?
Seriously, answer this. If you are Saddam, in 2001, and George Bush, instead of invading Iraq, decides to lift the sanctions and resume normal diplomatic relations, in exchange for some oil concessions, then, why wouldn't you take that soon to be $150/bbl oil money and go build yourself a nuke?
If you're looking for an example of a more balanced and stable economy/society, look to the European countries with the high standards of living.
Except that Europe is slowly dying. The population on the continent is in sharp, seemingly irreversible decline. So, it's all good on paper, but, your culture dies. That sucks.
The answer is simple. We use property taxes to ensure that land is kept productive in the USA, otherwise, the property is confiscated by the state and auctioned off to someone who will enforce that claim. Or, the owner may transfer the land to the public domain - usually the county or state. For example, Annenberg donated a large part of New Jersey's natural woodlands for this reason and now they exist for the public benefit.
The same should be done with intellectual property. If someone files a copyright or a patent, have them pay taxes on it, annually. If they can't pay the taxes, they are not entitled to the claim, and they can either have the IP confiscated by the state for auction, transfer ownership to a charitable organization, sell it, or give it to the people in the form of public domain.
That lets people get stinking rich off of new ideas, which encourages innovation, but also discourages rent seeking, which promotes stagnation.
I'm surprised that liberals have not thought of this already. Of all great ironies, here it is the conservative Republican reminding you liberals of actually why property taxes were invented, and you invented them. They solved the problem before, and can solve it again.
The solution to that isn't to force them to give their money to welfare mothers, it's to teach them to help their fellow human beings.
That sounds good, but, can you really teach Paris Hilton anything? When has there ever been a time in human history when a nobility that received what it got by birth, rather than by earning it, ever long existed to genuinely serve humanity rather than their own selfish ends?
Right now, it seems like the only British Royal worth a damn is Prince Harry, and that's largely because he chose to try and EARN the respect of his country by going to fight in a war that his country didn't even want. And what rich man's son in America has really accomplished anything? Do we really think that Bill Gate's kids are going to have the same geeky love of early computers that Bill did? Are they going to be in the right place at the right time with the right skill set to lead the next computer revolution and do they have a right to inherit the control of a company built on the backs of the people that earned their place there? I think the answer is no!
There are plenty of tribes that have continued well into the modern world.....Saying that they are all dead and their culture is little more than a legend is just an easy way for your greedy, white culture to continue to comfort itself.
And what did your culture do with what it had?
Absolutely nothing.
Were it not for Europeans, the USA would still be in the stone ages and the people that live here would still be worshipping rocks and trees and the great spirit. You know who is greedy? It is the native American that continues to claim that they are entitled to a continent that they utterly wasted so they can prance half haked in the wilderness and feed a few million people eating wild animals and berries, rather than the billions of people that Americans now feed. Was it wrong to steal the land from native Americans? Yeah, it was, on some level, but, the world is infinitely better off that humanity did. Americans have cured numerous diseases, made advances that have brought clean water and plenty of food to a planet, persuaded the world to adopt an economic system that has, at long last, promises to abolish poverty -planet- wide. And you want to take that away, so you could do what? Native Americans didn't even have calculus when they were discovered, and couldn't even make cast iron, let alone steel.
Is the person who stole the land still alive, or dead? If they are still alive and still posses the property, then it is justified in taking the land back
Suppose instead of killing you, ShieldW0lf would wait after you naturally died, and only then take over your former (now unowned) property. Absolutely no crimes, no violence.
Hmmm, that could be plausible, but then, if my use of the land produces economic growth, then, you would have to weigh his desires with the desires of the society as a whole. Like, what if I built a factory that employed 1,000 people with good, high paying jobs and raised up a people in my community into the middle class?
See, that's really what it boils down to, is that property is something whose ownership implies a desire to use that in a way that is consonent with enriching society over all. We try, through a bizarre mix of partisan politics, to create a property system that not only incents productivity, but requires it.
So, for example, if I am an estate holder with 1,000,000 acres of land doing nothing, and then, thousands of people are packed into cities, then, we have laws in place that tax me enough to require that my land be productive. This, in turn, would force me to divest that land to people, who might be like ShieldW0lf, who would do something productive with it, and so forth.
Now, let's leave aside the obvious environmental problems with that. For example, one being that if wetlands were privately held without property taxes, then the public would not have had to spend billions of dollars of public funds for Katrina clean up. Since there are no known consequences environmental to IP, the idea of enforced productivity for social benefit needs to stand.
So, really, what it boils down it, is, yes, one could envision a regime where copyrights and patents could be owned, and perhaps even indefinitely, but, we could avoid the problems of an enshrined nobility by having a property tax on them, and by varying that tax rate, we can achieve a balance between incenting a public service by requiring people to work, and preventing inequitible distributions of wealth and the meritless nobility they inevitably create.
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference.
But, there is a difference. I didn't kill anyone, and Shew0lf is trying to kill my entire family. See, Shew0lf is committing a crime, murder, an invasion, of sorts. That's today, and you see, the only way he can rationalize it, is by inventing some past ancestor to "even the score".
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too
Absolutely not! First off, what does the past have to do with anything? The people, their cultural framework, everything about them, are dead. We can have a few historians tell a few stories about them that entertains us, but such histories will always be through the viewpoint of our culture. The only way you can deal with property rights with any sort of intelligence or consistency is to look at what property is today.
And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after? I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either
Well, again, you are confused. Property rights exist today. You are either killing someone to take their land, or you are not. The past is entirely irrelevant. Honestly, if you wanted to take this silly "past" approach back, I can always go further back in time. You see, if I have the first oxygen atom in me, that was ever made, and, so, everyone has stolen everything from me. Therefor, I should be Emperor of the Universe.
So how is your right to enforce your property rights with a gun, any different from ShieldW0lf's claim to take by force the (metaphorical or not) land occupied by others before his birth? Both are based with what you can do by sheer force.
No, I'm on my land. I'm making something of it. I'm there. ShieldW0lf argues that he has the right to go break into someone's house, murder a man, his wife, and his children in their sleep, take his food, and house, as his, for some against him that the man arguably had little to do with. I'm a property owner, ShieldW0lf is a murderer, like most communists are.
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Is, that, at the end of the day, the right wing American President George Bush will have been the guy to have the LEAST onerous security impositions out of any of the western nations.
The base is: Citizens are allowed to do anything not forbidden, for the state it is the other way around, anything they do must be allowed by law first.
My God, if only Americans understood the US Constitution as well as you do, with that statement.
Hey, I don't mean to sound like a troll, but I'm thinking that Bush should just go all out and roust up a private little army, and go and arrest all the Democrats and liberal leaning supporters in sort of a knight of the long knives. You know, all the Republicans would have guns would, on some night, just go and break the back of the Democratic party and kill off the leaders. The worst part of Bush these days is that no one on the left even really fears attacking him. But, if he say had a pistol and shot Harry Reid and gunned down the Senate ala Al Capone's massacre, then, you know, you could give the guy his props. Yeah, diversity would go out the window, but we could be much more efficient with a mono culture.
Er, no. I do believe there are more copies of GCC out there. Dollar sales yes, but not copies. Oh, and I do believe it was you who misread my post this time
Absolutely not. For every C++ Unix programmer, there are probably 10 VB Windows programmers.
So wait... VS lets you build your project into a whole VM with no distribution costs or restrictions now? That might be interesting. Which version allows that? That might be worth a try.
That doesn't address the point that virtual machines make portability obsolete.
Bjarne Stroustroup. Was that a rhetorical question?
Well, he's wrong. Too bad. If he cared about portability so much, he should have done something about the sizes of ints and longs when he had the chance.
I don't think you're in the odd category of programmers this article is discussing. I'm also surprised you think this is worth mentioning. I had thought by now software tools that did not offer this were a historical oddity long forgotten.
Uh, you need to stop believing your own b.s. and look at facts. Microsoft sold 9.5 billion dollars in tools over the last 9 months. Visual Studio is by far the most successful, in terms of copies distributed, of all time. I wish I could be such a historical oddity.
So... These free and paid for tools - how are their cross platform capabilities? Can you write once and compile for various platforms? Note - by "various platforms" I am not referring to "all the modern versions of Windows."
WHO CARES ABOUT PORTABILITY WHEN WRITING C++!!!!
1) Virtual machines makes portability obsolete.
These days, you can run virtual platforms on increasingly everything, so there's no need to write portable code at all, when virtualization is just a mouse click away. Any platform is a problem solved by the operating system, not the applications developer, and that's just the way it is.
2) Besides, just look at what you propose....You take a -systems- like C++ language and you write a bunch of compromise code that can't take advantage of a platform. If you want to write portable code, then pick a language like Java or something, and accept the crappy result for the dumb vision of running everywhere. I mean, why would take a ferrari and stuff groceries in the back of it?
You can't just take someone's commercial software, extend it and start selling copies either.
.NET.
But yes, I can. I do not have to pay a royalty to develop for Windows, at all. Microsoft gives up free redistributables for me to target it my application and, although I can't look at them, I can pretty much write whatever I want.
In fact, the free developer tools Microsoft provides for RAD are far better than the tools that are out there for Linux. It's really only in Linux that C++ has a developer tool lead and that's mostly because Linux got a head start on x86-64 and Microsoft is putting everything into
I agree. It's not like we see companies like IBM, Sony, HP, Sun, Dell, etc investing billions of dollars in open source software and systems
Yep, and Apple, with its closed software, is selling more computers than Dell right now, who, incidentally, still is primarily a Windows company, and IBM is out of the PC business altogether (remember Lenovo?), and Sun is on its way to being another x64 motherboard recycler. That's some alliance you got there.
Who has the market advantage?
You do, but you are a hardware company. Of course you don't want to pay for software.
While many posters might quibble about the technicalities of the article, does anyone really quibble about the spirit?
Open source software is at adds with making a profit off of software. It just is. If the spirit of the Open source license is to make sure that the software and the derived works are free, then, it has to be free.
Even if the GPLv3 does nothing to compel web sites who hide their sources behind their pages, to open up, it was considered and it is ultimately coming down the pike from the FOSS community. Even if the GPLV3 does nothing to prevent someone from making a closed application on Linux, such activities are at odds with the spirit of the FOSS community and again, such restrictions are coming.
So the author's central warning is entirely accurate, even if his anecdotal evidence fails to match on some autistic level of detail.
There IS a business risk in investing in open source systems. Businesses invest in property, and if software is not property, or, what you invest in is made to be not property, then, in the sense that a business can earn an advantage and a return off of it, then, why should they invest in it?
Yes, the left is more socialistic. I'd be glad to respond to an argument as to why that might be a bad thing, but I'm afraid that "goofy" doesn't quite suffice.
Socialism doesn't work for two reasons. Public ownership is a myth and trading rationing for scarcity is not really an improvement.
Public ownership is a myth. Someone does own the property that is made public and that is the institutions that administrate it. They use that property to dole out favors and powers and so it creates a tremendous abuse in the allocation of resources, which, is generally what we see in countries that have gone socialist.
Both socialism and capitalism try to deal with the fundamental problem of scarcity. Capitalism says that whoever has the most money gets the resource, that is, prices go up on it. We see this in America today - the price of oil goes up as the commodity becomes scarce. Socialism, by contrast, takes the same finite resource and merely redistributes based on some idea of fairness as determined by the bureaucracy.
What happens, though, is that, because there is no price incentive, there tends not to be any reason to solve the problems of that shortage of the resource. That there is a bureacracy means that advancement is political and is disconnected from solving the economic problems at hand. So what you get in socialism is a lot of finger pointing, a reduction in the amount of the available resource, then dishonesty and finally some increasing degree of repression as the government must crush anyone who dissents from their world view.
history has shown, again and again, that socialism fails, so, its not even about the bile distaste for those who are like the idea of ceding one's economic freedom to a "like minded" bureaucrat. It simply doesn't work.
Much like cutting off school fees by parents of their 10 yr old, because their 10 yr old refused to goto bed on time.
So much crying sour grapes. University enrollment is at an all time high and educational expenses have risen even more quickly than health care or petroleum over the last 30 years.
Reagan didn't want his surgeon general to talk about AIDS.
AIDS is a disease that you can avoid by how you live.
He increased military science funding for Star Wars by atleast 300%.
Yeah, and guess what, thanks to that research, we actually have some options to defend America now that every country on the planet is working to get the atomic bomb and the ballistic missile. The Democratic belief in science, on this point, is to argue that it is impossible, and simply not even bother to try and save millions of lives.
The funding cut was a purely political move. Both sides wanted it because it makes BOTH sides look bad. This wasn't done by the Democrats, it was done by DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS!
Bush requested full funding. As the majority party in the Senate and the House, the Democrats control what goes before a committee, and what goes through the committee, before a piece of legislation makes it to the floor.
I'm hardly an animal rights advocate, but has anyone stopped to ask what sort of ethics has us cracking open a monkey's head to perform these experiments?
You know everyone here is blaming Bush for slashing science, with the implicit thought that only the supposedly erudite liberals are the ones that ever fund science. Yet, if these people actually had 1/10th of the curious mind that George Bush has, they might have actually gone and compared Fermilab's 2000 Budget of 277 million dollars versus the currently requested Fermilab budget of 377 million dollars and realized the Bush has asked for significantly more money for Fermilab. Then, instead of moaning about the Republican approach to science, we might observe that is in fact DEMOCRATS who control the Congress, and DEMOCRATS who cut the Fermilab budget.
The fact of the matter is, DEMOCRATS are the ones, right now, who are slashing science spending. DEMOCRATS are the ones who want to put a stop to manned space exploration, curtail unmanned space exploration, already killed an unmanned mission to look for life on Europa and nuclear powered spacecraft. Everyone bashes Bush on energy research, but Clinton didn't do jack shit for 8 years on alternative energy. In contrast, Bush has massively funded every sort of bio-energy science that there is, and put the subsidies in place to speed adoption, and now, it's actually -working-.
Yeah, some REpublicans might be a bit goofy about evolution. Big deal. Evolution doesn't make any consumer products and information complexity theory is a better foundation for biology than evolution is anyway. But, Democrats are way more goofy about government as a redistribution of wealth vehicle and about fighting technological progress so that they can create more manual jobs. Yeah, Democrats can go on about how much they love science, but they never want to actually PAY FOR IT. You can bash Republicans as much as you want, when it comes to every major technology initiative over the last three decades, its been your friendly neighborhood warmongering right wing lunatics that have laid the conceptual framework for the Internet, funded all sorts of applied physics and chemistry, funded pretty much anything that looks like it would be a good consumer product, and the numbers -prove it-.
Seriously, just go get spreadsheets, and compare Clinton's science budgets, with Bush's, Carter's science budgets with Reagan's, and even Nixon's science budgets with Johnson's, and you will find that for the most part, Republicans spend far more on research and development than scientists do.
And finally, yes, every major university should be kissing Republican ass because it was Republicans that allowed private universities to become cash cows by filing for patents on research paid for by federal dollars.
My prediction is thus: Barrack Obama pulls the plug entirely on NASA, if he is elected. Yeah, Democrats are all in favor of science, they just don't want to ever actually do it.
Frauds.
The native Americans were not poor, like most native people they had no concept of money or individual land ownership, but had all they needed so were not poor, they had plentiful food, clean water, shelter and all they needed
Ah, romanticizing the noble savage and the missing the stone ages. How quaint! Unfortunately, its not true at all. Food and water and shelter were not plentiful by any stretch of the imagination. And, most importantly of all, they certainly had land ownership, because, tribes used to war among each other to retain it.
go and ask all those office workers who long for the simple life
Yeah, the simple life. Those retards want to trade sitting in an air conditioned office stuffing your face with all the possible foods and drinks you could eat imported from around the world, in exchange for watching your children die during a harsh winter because Uncle Bob got gored in the thigh by a wild bore and so the animal that everyone was going to eat got away. People that long for the "simple life" should try it some time.
Good, because that's all that matters
No, that's not all that matters. Your answer was to let Saddam Hussein completely off the hook for invading Kuwait.
Honestly, the right thing for the USA to do would have been to let Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait, not intervened in 1991, and let the arabs fight it out in a war amongst themselves. The United Nations would have died, then, unable to find the strength to even live up to its own charter, rather than continue on like the charade that it is. I will never support any American intervention against any dictator attacking any country on this planet, ever again. If the world is so outraged that we got rid of Saddam, then, let the world have a dozen more of them, that's what I say.
There is no reason we should pay attention to your paranoid ravings
You never answered the question. Knowing that Saddam was already kicked out of Iraq once after a botched assassination, that he battled back from pretty dire circumstances to ultimately lead Iraq, that he did actually set out once to make WMD and the only reason he did not was because he was afraid of the USA, what says he's going to not make them once the USA lifts the gloves off?
Seriously, answer this. If you are Saddam, in 2001, and George Bush, instead of invading Iraq, decides to lift the sanctions and resume normal diplomatic relations, in exchange for some oil concessions, then, why wouldn't you take that soon to be $150/bbl oil money and go build yourself a nuke?
If you're looking for an example of a more balanced and stable economy/society, look to the European countries with the high standards of living.
Except that Europe is slowly dying. The population on the continent is in sharp, seemingly irreversible decline. So, it's all good on paper, but, your culture dies. That sucks.
The answer is simple. We use property taxes to ensure that land is kept productive in the USA, otherwise, the property is confiscated by the state and auctioned off to someone who will enforce that claim. Or, the owner may transfer the land to the public domain - usually the county or state. For example, Annenberg donated a large part of New Jersey's natural woodlands for this reason and now they exist for the public benefit.
The same should be done with intellectual property. If someone files a copyright or a patent, have them pay taxes on it, annually. If they can't pay the taxes, they are not entitled to the claim, and they can either have the IP confiscated by the state for auction, transfer ownership to a charitable organization, sell it, or give it to the people in the form of public domain.
That lets people get stinking rich off of new ideas, which encourages innovation, but also discourages rent seeking, which promotes stagnation.
I'm surprised that liberals have not thought of this already. Of all great ironies, here it is the conservative Republican reminding you liberals of actually why property taxes were invented, and you invented them. They solved the problem before, and can solve it again.
The solution to that isn't to force them to give their money to welfare mothers, it's to teach them to help their fellow human beings.
That sounds good, but, can you really teach Paris Hilton anything? When has there ever been a time in human history when a nobility that received what it got by birth, rather than by earning it, ever long existed to genuinely serve humanity rather than their own selfish ends?
Right now, it seems like the only British Royal worth a damn is Prince Harry, and that's largely because he chose to try and EARN the respect of his country by going to fight in a war that his country didn't even want. And what rich man's son in America has really accomplished anything? Do we really think that Bill Gate's kids are going to have the same geeky love of early computers that Bill did? Are they going to be in the right place at the right time with the right skill set to lead the next computer revolution and do they have a right to inherit the control of a company built on the backs of the people that earned their place there? I think the answer is no!
There are plenty of tribes that have continued well into the modern world.....Saying that they are all dead and their culture is little more than a legend is just an easy way for your greedy, white culture to continue to comfort itself.
And what did your culture do with what it had?
Absolutely nothing.
Were it not for Europeans, the USA would still be in the stone ages and the people that live here would still be worshipping rocks and trees and the great spirit. You know who is greedy? It is the native American that continues to claim that they are entitled to a continent that they utterly wasted so they can prance half haked in the wilderness and feed a few million people eating wild animals and berries, rather than the billions of people that Americans now feed. Was it wrong to steal the land from native Americans? Yeah, it was, on some level, but, the world is infinitely better off that humanity did. Americans have cured numerous diseases, made advances that have brought clean water and plenty of food to a planet, persuaded the world to adopt an economic system that has, at long last, promises to abolish poverty -planet- wide. And you want to take that away, so you could do what? Native Americans didn't even have calculus when they were discovered, and couldn't even make cast iron, let alone steel.
Is the person who stole the land still alive, or dead? If they are still alive and still posses the property, then it is justified in taking the land back
I can agree with that.
Suppose instead of killing you, ShieldW0lf would wait after you naturally died, and only then take over your former (now unowned) property. Absolutely no crimes, no violence.
Hmmm, that could be plausible, but then, if my use of the land produces economic growth, then, you would have to weigh his desires with the desires of the society as a whole. Like, what if I built a factory that employed 1,000 people with good, high paying jobs and raised up a people in my community into the middle class?
See, that's really what it boils down to, is that property is something whose ownership implies a desire to use that in a way that is consonent with enriching society over all. We try, through a bizarre mix of partisan politics, to create a property system that not only incents productivity, but requires it.
So, for example, if I am an estate holder with 1,000,000 acres of land doing nothing, and then, thousands of people are packed into cities, then, we have laws in place that tax me enough to require that my land be productive. This, in turn, would force me to divest that land to people, who might be like ShieldW0lf, who would do something productive with it, and so forth.
Now, let's leave aside the obvious environmental problems with that. For example, one being that if wetlands were privately held without property taxes, then the public would not have had to spend billions of dollars of public funds for Katrina clean up. Since there are no known consequences environmental to IP, the idea of enforced productivity for social benefit needs to stand.
So, really, what it boils down it, is, yes, one could envision a regime where copyrights and patents could be owned, and perhaps even indefinitely, but, we could avoid the problems of an enshrined nobility by having a property tax on them, and by varying that tax rate, we can achieve a balance between incenting a public service by requiring people to work, and preventing inequitible distributions of wealth and the meritless nobility they inevitably create.
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference.
But, there is a difference. I didn't kill anyone, and Shew0lf is trying to kill my entire family. See, Shew0lf is committing a crime, murder, an invasion, of sorts. That's today, and you see, the only way he can rationalize it, is by inventing some past ancestor to "even the score".
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too
Absolutely not! First off, what does the past have to do with anything? The people, their cultural framework, everything about them, are dead. We can have a few historians tell a few stories about them that entertains us, but such histories will always be through the viewpoint of our culture. The only way you can deal with property rights with any sort of intelligence or consistency is to look at what property is today.
And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after? I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either
Well, again, you are confused. Property rights exist today. You are either killing someone to take their land, or you are not. The past is entirely irrelevant. Honestly, if you wanted to take this silly "past" approach back, I can always go further back in time. You see, if I have the first oxygen atom in me, that was ever made, and, so, everyone has stolen everything from me. Therefor, I should be Emperor of the Universe.
So how is your right to enforce your property rights with a gun, any different from ShieldW0lf's claim to take by force the (metaphorical or not) land occupied by others before his birth? Both are based with what you can do by sheer force.
No, I'm on my land. I'm making something of it. I'm there. ShieldW0lf argues that he has the right to go break into someone's house, murder a man, his wife, and his children in their sleep, take his food, and house, as his, for some against him that the man arguably had little to do with. I'm a property owner, ShieldW0lf is a murderer, like most communists are.
So when that group of 20 thugs with guns shows up and takes issue in your property rights, you're going to shoot it out with them
If I have to, yes.