I think this analogy may, in fact, be true. However, a computer is not a human being. Putting a bullet proof shield right beneath the skin would provide protection against the things bullet proof vests normally protect against. We cannot engineer such a thing in a human, but we can in a computer. Also, let's not consider "the computer" as being the same thing as "the person." We can't just replace a brain like we can a kernel. A computer is a modular device of discrete components (hardware, various programs, etc) which is programmed to perform functions. Having a portion of it protect the rest is no crazier than having a person defend themselves against attack rather than depend exclusively on the police.
The problem with property taxes is that it's very finite. Townships which are unable to levy income taxes have this problem all the time. Incomes can grow faster than property values.
Why is this a problem? Why should government's income grow as fast as the income of people who produce value for other people? It seems to me that if incomes explode, and property values don't, then the people in an area are going to be much more prosperous than they otherwise would be. That sounds like a good thing to me.
This would really not be an issue if the government weren't so heavily involved in science. End all government funding and interference in science, and the good stuff will rise to the top. The alternative is to make science subject to politics, just like everything else the government controls.
But you get some wanna be Gansta Rapper to can make a cheesy @$$ album and sell a million copies because one song is good on it and make millions. Do these people really deserve that money? Hell no. They go blow it on Hummers and Mansions. They can eat me.
If they don't deserve the money which comes from sales of their albums, who does deserve that money? People are buying them after all. Would you rather all the money go to record executives at the label, or would you prefer some kind of industry wide socialism to support artists who can't make a living at selling CDs? Of course 50 Cent deserves his money. He sells a bunch of albums. People spend their hard (and not so hard) earned money to buy them. The free market is the only way to determine who deserves to get that money, and how much of it they deserve to get. Sure, IP laws make for artificial scarcity, and I would love to see them go away, but I can't think of any parties I would rather have get the money than those who actually had a hand in producing the product which was sold.
Seriously, what are the downsides of whoelheartedly throwing our economby behind making less polluting technologies? Seriously, I want to know. Is there really a non-cynical answer that doesn't involve the government being in the pocket of the oil companies?
It's not "our economy" in the sense of being able to control what everyone does anymore than it is "our lives" or "our Internet." We are all individuals. The economy is not something owned by an individual. To mobilize an economy requires a totalitarian state. The totalitarian state is really only good at one thing: killing people. This sort of collectivist "let's modernize/improve" ideology leads to mass death, as seen in Cambodia, China, and numerous other places. I have no desire to see these tragedies revised for American consumption.
Huh? You think that you're "serving the public" in a private sector job? Why exactly?
That's the only real way to be sure you really are serving the public. They stop buying if you aren't. The government doesn't have to worry much about customer satisfaction since taxes aren't voluntary.
Sorry, I understand people want to paint Wal-Mart as a corporation of pure evil, and it's quite possible there are reasons to do so, but in this case, if there's blame to be placed, it's solely on the governments who are doling out the pork against the will of their electorate.
I'm not so sure it is against the will of the electorate. Not that it matters to me. The electorate doesn't own the property, so they shouldn't be able to decide who gets it. What if the electorate decided they didn't want certain people in the town? Eminent domain is an evil policy not because it is anti-democracy, but because it takes stuff from someone who doesn't want to give it. The fact that a lot of people want it doesn't make it right.
While I certainly believe the government is the main party at fault here, Wal-Mart is not free of culpability. If you knowingly buy stolen goods, you are expanding and/or creating the market for stolen goods. Governments would do this sort of thing a lot less often if companies weren't lining up to feed at the trough.
Communism looks good on paper but just try to implement it in real life with real people in the mix and you'll quickly see how it goes south in a hurry.
This is one of those oft-spoken phrases which simply is not true. Communism look abominable on paper, and works even worse in real life. If communism were all about voluntary association, it would look great on paper, but it just looks like totalitarianism on paper to me. If you think communism looks great on paper, how about your religion as the official state religion. How about mine? What makes that any more or less desireable? Indeed, secular governments have been the biggest killers, so maybe a theocracy wouldn't be so bad . . .
IIRC, versions 5 and 6 were also put out for Linux. Shouldn't the title then be, "Adobe continues to support Linux"? Though why they would discontinue such support is beyond me, since the OS is more popular now than ever. Must *really* be a slow news day to let this one slip in on the front page.
Why don't some of those clamoring for space travel go ahead and pony up their money and pay for the thing. Why make everyone pay for your thirst for knowledge. Some people have trouble enough getting by month to month. It is the height of hubris to then say to them "We are going to take some of your money to go to other planets." Let the (relatively) rich geeks pay for their own toys.
I find it hilarious and sad that the two examples given, betamax/vhs and firewire/usb, are both cases where the market decided which standard would become dominant, and in both cases, the market chose the inferior product.
Do we really want the ten million monkeys to decide what's best?
Well, as one of the "monkeys" in question, I feel that the consumer is the only entity which should decide. Betamax was inferior to VHS in a very critical way, in as much as the market was concerned. Sony tried to exert too much control over it, not unlike IBM with microchannel. That was enough to trump any technical advantages. The government should remove any laws preventing reverse engineering or modifying files or equipment, but aside from that, butt out. The government is probably the only reason DRM actually works, because they make it illegal for companies like Real to circumvent limitations. Fewer laws, not more, are the answer.
If you don't already completely distrust the government to the point that you expect little other than mismanagement at best and death at worst, you're not very smart in the first place. Why would anyone trust a government which could do something as heinous as the Tuskegee experiments? And the sad thing is that is not even as bad as it gets. Sure, this isn't the Soviet Union under Stalin, but saying we're better than mass murderers seems to be damning faint praise.
Abortions in the third trimester are generally considered unethical (if it could have been avoided) because the (baby|fetus) is to the "viability" point... it is possible that it could survive
on its own outside of the mother.
Truth be told, most of us can't really do that until we are several years old, and some never develop to that level. You really mean "survive with the aid of someone other than the mother." This is an important distinction, because this technology will likely get more and more advanced, along with non-invasive surgical techniques, and abortions will either be considered unethical at earlier and earlier points, or, I think more likely in the West, people will point out that the point really is reproductive control, and life really begins at birth, and the taboo will be eroded to the point that it won't be considered unethical to abort at any time short of actual labor.
Truly, if we could insure that most children could survive with the aid of someone other than the mother from a few weeks after conception, that would have tremendous moral implications. Mothers might actually have the unexpected equality of not being able to be the final decision maker on having a child. This, along with cloning, really could be a big deal socially.
There was a nice BBS called the Timewarp BBS in Atlanta back in the day. I've never found an online community which was quite as interesting, though E2 does come close sometimes. BBSes, with the games, like Trade Wars 2002 and various forums, really gave you some interesting things to do. Since modems weren't as popular, and one had to know where to dial any way, there was much more of a regular community, so you got to know people better than is generally true with Internet web boards. I think I liked Timewarp better than I do the Internet today.
I enjoyed the net when it was nothing but students and military people, and I think I will still enjoy it after a bunch of portals and other sites start charging, and I stop visiting them. I find very little on the Internet that I would pay for. The few things I would pay for give me some kind of return on investment. I could not imagine paying for any Internet service which does not ultimately allow me to make more money than I would have made without it. Slashdot is a possibility, but Salon, no way. I would consider www.swynk.com worth paying fore if I were planning to be an NT/Windows 2000 guy forever.
If MS really makes it extraordinarily difficult to pirate software, this will only drive people to software which is easier to pirate, or is free, such as Linux and *BSD. This will be a good thing in the end. It will make Windows people either stick with older products or suffer some annoyances, which will hopefully cause them to look at alternatives. I think this could make for a much more competitive OS market, meaning more cross platform programs and platform independent solutions. I think this will be a good thing.
I've heard that the moons of such planets are the more likely repositories of life. The moons would have liquid water, and a gas giant might be a source of additional heat if they emit more heat than they take in like Jupiter does in this solar system. I do wonder about sunlight, though, with a gas giant providing eclipses.
No one is forcing anyone to use the browser, and people are free to modify it to eliminate whatever portions they find objectionable. No one is forcing you to go the Netscape.com against your will. They want to be a portal and get this project to generate revenue. I don't see a problem with it.
Utterly irrelevant. Can't you distinguish from "personal use" and "making money from"? Should copyright law forbid me to learning a song by The Smashing Pumpkins at home by playing along with the album? No. That'd be stupid. Should it forbid me earning money from use of this song without permission? Yes, it should, and does.
I have often heard bands being paid in clubs do covers of songs they did not write. Happens pretty often, as far as I can tell.
I thought that/. was a haven for libertarians, but hardly a peep about Browne has issued forth before now - was there a big Browne five month cruise that I missed or something?
Slashdot is nowhere near as libertarian as you think. Most Slashdotters, like most people in general, are perfectly content to accept government handouts when it benefits them. Besides, a lot of people agree with Libertarian positions on a lot of specific issues, but take exception with the near religious principles upon which the party is founded. That is my issue, in fact. I voted for Browne, but I was more than a bit conflicted, because there is a significant element in the Libertarian Party who believe in the "no initiation of force" slogan, and believe in only their interpretation of that slogan. I liken it to the religious right in Republican party. They believe in the Bible, and their specific interpretation of it to boot, with literally religious zeal. That is a dangerous type of group to put in power. Even if some people have different, and just as unprovable, ideas, there is no reasoning and no compromise with them.
I don't think that this was just a random fluke. Kasparov clearly is losing/lost his edge and getting it back at his age would be incredibly difficult.
Whoa, is chess like football or boxing or something? Are guys over the hill in their mid thirties? Dude is only 37. That's not even mid-life crisis age. He could have kids and completely change his outlook on life over the next twenty years. I think it's a bit early to write him off.
Well, to be fair, I don't think people would be making the big deal out of video games or drinking if a big, government agency trained you in how to do it and how to take orders regarding it as the Army did regarding machine guns and tactical nuclear missiles. So we're not talking about quite the same thing here.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this means that we'll all qualify to be Green Lanterns in the near future.
I think this analogy may, in fact, be true. However, a computer is not a human being. Putting a bullet proof shield right beneath the skin would provide protection against the things bullet proof vests normally protect against. We cannot engineer such a thing in a human, but we can in a computer. Also, let's not consider "the computer" as being the same thing as "the person." We can't just replace a brain like we can a kernel. A computer is a modular device of discrete components (hardware, various programs, etc) which is programmed to perform functions. Having a portion of it protect the rest is no crazier than having a person defend themselves against attack rather than depend exclusively on the police.
This would really not be an issue if the government weren't so heavily involved in science. End all government funding and interference in science, and the good stuff will rise to the top. The alternative is to make science subject to politics, just like everything else the government controls.
If they don't deserve the money which comes from sales of their albums, who does deserve that money? People are buying them after all. Would you rather all the money go to record executives at the label, or would you prefer some kind of industry wide socialism to support artists who can't make a living at selling CDs? Of course 50 Cent deserves his money. He sells a bunch of albums. People spend their hard (and not so hard) earned money to buy them. The free market is the only way to determine who deserves to get that money, and how much of it they deserve to get. Sure, IP laws make for artificial scarcity, and I would love to see them go away, but I can't think of any parties I would rather have get the money than those who actually had a hand in producing the product which was sold.
It's not "our economy" in the sense of being able to control what everyone does anymore than it is "our lives" or "our Internet." We are all individuals. The economy is not something owned by an individual. To mobilize an economy requires a totalitarian state. The totalitarian state is really only good at one thing: killing people. This sort of collectivist "let's modernize/improve" ideology leads to mass death, as seen in Cambodia, China, and numerous other places. I have no desire to see these tragedies revised for American consumption.
While I certainly believe the government is the main party at fault here, Wal-Mart is not free of culpability. If you knowingly buy stolen goods, you are expanding and/or creating the market for stolen goods. Governments would do this sort of thing a lot less often if companies weren't lining up to feed at the trough.
IIRC, versions 5 and 6 were also put out for Linux. Shouldn't the title then be, "Adobe continues to support Linux"? Though why they would discontinue such support is beyond me, since the OS is more popular now than ever. Must *really* be a slow news day to let this one slip in on the front page.
Why don't some of those clamoring for space travel go ahead and pony up their money and pay for the thing. Why make everyone pay for your thirst for knowledge. Some people have trouble enough getting by month to month. It is the height of hubris to then say to them "We are going to take some of your money to go to other planets." Let the (relatively) rich geeks pay for their own toys.
If you don't already completely distrust the government to the point that you expect little other than mismanagement at best and death at worst, you're not very smart in the first place. Why would anyone trust a government which could do something as heinous as the Tuskegee experiments? And the sad thing is that is not even as bad as it gets. Sure, this isn't the Soviet Union under Stalin, but saying we're better than mass murderers seems to be damning faint praise.
Truly, if we could insure that most children could survive with the aid of someone other than the mother from a few weeks after conception, that would have tremendous moral implications. Mothers might actually have the unexpected equality of not being able to be the final decision maker on having a child. This, along with cloning, really could be a big deal socially.
There was a nice BBS called the Timewarp BBS in Atlanta back in the day. I've never found an online community which was quite as interesting, though E2 does come close sometimes. BBSes, with the games, like Trade Wars 2002 and various forums, really gave you some interesting things to do. Since modems weren't as popular, and one had to know where to dial any way, there was much more of a regular community, so you got to know people better than is generally true with Internet web boards. I think I liked Timewarp better than I do the Internet today.
Hey, see if they can get Vonnegut to write something. That would be interesting.
I enjoyed the net when it was nothing but students and military people, and I think I will still enjoy it after a bunch of portals and other sites start charging, and I stop visiting them. I find very little on the Internet that I would pay for. The few things I would pay for give me some kind of return on investment. I could not imagine paying for any Internet service which does not ultimately allow me to make more money than I would have made without it. Slashdot is a possibility, but Salon, no way. I would consider www.swynk.com worth paying fore if I were planning to be an NT/Windows 2000 guy forever.
If MS really makes it extraordinarily difficult to pirate software, this will only drive people to software which is easier to pirate, or is free, such as Linux and *BSD. This will be a good thing in the end. It will make Windows people either stick with older products or suffer some annoyances, which will hopefully cause them to look at alternatives. I think this could make for a much more competitive OS market, meaning more cross platform programs and platform independent solutions. I think this will be a good thing.
I've heard that the moons of such planets are the more likely repositories of life. The moons would have liquid water, and a gas giant might be a source of additional heat if they emit more heat than they take in like Jupiter does in this solar system. I do wonder about sunlight, though, with a gas giant providing eclipses.
No one is forcing anyone to use the browser, and people are free to modify it to eliminate whatever portions they find objectionable. No one is forcing you to go the Netscape.com against your will. They want to be a portal and get this project to generate revenue. I don't see a problem with it.
Well, to be fair, I don't think people would be making the big deal out of video games or drinking if a big, government agency trained you in how to do it and how to take orders regarding it as the Army did regarding machine guns and tactical nuclear missiles. So we're not talking about quite the same thing here.