Um.... do you have any concept of what that would cost? You'd have to be offering a huge pile of money. Right now they can commercially licence their engine for all sorts of projects. Even if those projects don't make money Unity can.
Have a look at their people page, they have probably 110 employees. That's probably 12-13 million a year in revenue alone. Are you going to try and get a kickstarter for 100 million dollars to effectively shut them down, or to guarantee them income to keep working indefinitely?
Don't get me wrong, there need to be more open source game tools (no matter how many you point me to there can always be more). As someone on the teaching side of things in trying to train game developers it's a real problem to know what tools you want to use, because the emphasis shouldn't be on the tools, but fighting with tools puts the emphasis on them. But Unity is pretty good about giving away a free trial, and being a good example of the sort of experience you'll have in industry, with some stuff opened up to you. That's about all we can hope for. Asking for a commercial engine that costs millions of dollars to make and maintain to just give up that kind of money is a pipe dream at best.
Now, trying to get them to pull an id software and release old versions of the engine as open source (say release 2.0 or 3.0 when 4.0 goes live) might be a more realistic goal and would still be awesome.
And by the way, you can negotiate your way into source code for Unity3D. I've never worked with anyone that thought it important enough to try until today, though. I literally advised a company this morning that Unity is probably their best bet for an engine given what they want to do, and they were wondering about source licences, which is the only reason I know that at all. Given that, it wouldn't be a huge shock to see old versions end up open sourced, if nothing else because you can't keep something bottled up indefinitely.
You realize that the UN is, on the scale of things a relatively democratic body right? The UN by itself doesn't ever do anything, it's a handful of staff in a room. The "UN" is a collection of countries in the world with a 1 country, 1 vote system. There is then a practical realization that 5 countries in the world could fuck over plans of anyone else, and they get special treatment on matters related to security.
If the UN was fully democratic, say an election system by population, China and India would be basically running the show as by far the largest power blocks. And they aren't all that fond of a lot of internet freedoms or the way the US behaves in general.
The irony is that the UN has a declaration of human rights that you apparently don't know about (linked in another comment), that does forbid things like censorship. And at least on paper all UN members have signed onto that document. But well. Like politicians everywhere, there are laws and then there are laws we write for other people to follow.
Remember: China 'doesn't censor it's people and there's no great firewall of china. They are a poor country and experience technical difficulties on a regular basis'. Or at least that used to be the official line. Also, as a 'relatively uneducated society they need to protect people from falsehoods which could damage public order and safety' (which actually is true to some degree).
In that situation you should pay off the local government police and or military forces. If you can't pay them more than the local militias or criminals, you shouldn't do business there.
That is, in effect, what happens in civilized countries. You pay taxes for police services, if the services aren't up to the task you pay (technically 'lobby') politicians to write laws for you that will get the police up to the task or out of the way.
cyber security is a different matter. There's no one you can pay unless you're a huge multinational, and even then you may not have a presence wherever the problem initiated from. If you're hacked domestically you have the same recourse as physical security, call the police, if there aren't laws that will cover you, pay politicians to write some. But if you get hacked from a foreign country there's really nothing you can do except build hardened systems in the first place. Counter hacking doesn't seem like a good idea, because they, being criminals, are somewhat less hindered by morals and laws than you are, and can retaliate thusly. I suppose if you're really big you pay politicians in both countries to write treaties for you. But that would just serve to make counter hacking illegal.
Why exactly not? You are at work, aren't you. if you think the breaks you have totally aren't enough, then you should complain about that, not about you not being able to do personal stuff at work.
So your employee telephone should never have received calls from your wife or been used for calls home or to your kids?
This has actually been dragged through courts in a lot of places, and interpretations seem to vary wildly.
The first problem you bring up is in 'breaks'. Can an employee use work equipment for non work activities if it only at a marginal cost to the employer (browsing/. or making local telephone calls for example). The second is whether or not you are able to do any 'personal stuff' at work, which naturally you are, you're a person first and a faceless corporate drone second. But the degree of leeway on how much varies wildly. In that sense one could turn the argument around and ask 'well when am I not working?' if you have e-mail or a telephone you're expected to answer at any time.
The last notion you indirectly bring up is this 19th century faceless corporate drone view of labour. Does it actually waste productive time if you read/. for 5 minutes? If you're worried about the state of your banking, or rushing to be out the door exactly at 5pm so you can be home at 5:17 to order that thing you're waiting on you're not focused at work. Better to let you get it over with and get back to paying attention to work. When your job is an assembly line job, and you look away for 2 minutes and that equates to one less bumper being installed then sure, I suppose you could fairly claim that running off to a computer or pulling out your phone to check for text messages from that hot girl you met last night is costing you productive time. But those jobs are becoming fewer and far between. Most of us have a lot of dead time between periods of intense application of brain power, and doing 'personal stuff' unencumbers the brain from personal problems to focus on work problems when it's actually needed.
I'm not sure 100 dollars per course or 100 dollars per degree changes the argument much. A degree right now costs, on the low end, 25k not counting living expenses, drop that to 4k or 100 dollars and you're still completely transforming the system.
A lecture with quizzes is still a quiz. Who marks the quiz? What happens if you get it wrong? How do you learn to improve?
I picked the analogy of a textbook for a reason. Textbooks have sample questions (and sample answers), the trick with all education is how you verify that the person did the work, and how do you help them fix what they get wrong.
Ya, this is more an exercise in wondering how large classroom sizes could be, if you could seat 160k people in a room, and how much interaction you need with a human being on the other end.
Lots of professors would be quite happy to focus on research full time and not have to teach. Pick out the good teachers, the good textbooks, and just play a video of their lectures in a classroom for people who want to show up and interact with other students. The problem with that plan is that you don't then build personal relationships with professors or grad students or other students. Most of us who have done some sort of technical degree can point to an instance or two of a concept we just didn't get in lecture or from the book, and it took a TA or other students to explain it to us... eventually.
Research still needs to happen with or without the teaching component of universities. But the huge mentoring relationship that happens there, and the social connections, those are a major portion of the experience. How do you know if you want to be a researcher if you don't meet other researchers? A 100 dollar online course is about the same thing as a 100 dollar textbook just more interactive. Did you buy the book? Did you read the book? Or in the new media, did you watch the lecture? It's useful as a reference, it's probably not even bad to teach yourself. But it's not the same as going to university. In the real world you have to teach yourself a lot, whether thats from books or the web or whatever. So in that sense udacity probably will find a significant market in replacing textbooks with at least partially interactive web enabled experiences, for about the same price. It might also enable smaller schools to make available more esoteric topics they don't have expertise in, which is good.
There I was replying to one guy saying that the odds of being killed in an airplane hijacking were nil.
If you make it easy enough for al qaeda they'll probably go back to attacking aircraft. Whatever they decide to do, you need to the tools to respond to that. If you find out they're planning to attack a mall...well you already have police so the only thing you could ever do in that situation is drive a swat team over. If they've smuggled anti aircraft missiles into the US and are planning to use them to shoot down aircraft that's much more serious.
Privatizing the TSA runs a lot of risks. Mostly in cost cutting (either reduced staff or reduced equipment) and liability, and the big one which would be that no one wants to be liable for a fuckup. Missing a successful aircraft bombing would cost an insurer billions and would make a lot of things cost prohibitive. You also still need some government agency to coordinate and distribute information to the various airports about what the latest threats are if and when there are any. And you need to make sure every airport has certain skillsets in case they are needed.
And sure, it's not really clear why they want to go after aircraft. But they do. They've tried numerous times, including with a number of ridiculous plans (shoebomber, underwear bomber). Whether that's a good plan for them or not, if that's what they're trying to do you need to deal with it. To use the WW2 example, it wasn't likely to work out too well for the Japanese when they attacked the US. Everyone knew that wasn't a great plan on their part. But they did it anyway. You have to respond to the enemy you have, not the enemy you'd think he should be. And the enemy you have has tried on at least 5 or 6 occasions to attack aircraft, and if you read richard clarkes book 'against all enemies' there's some evidence they may have been responsible for several aircraft attacks where the airplane was just destroyed in the lead up to sept 11. Their big ones seem to be truck bombings of buildings, bombing of subways and attacking aircraft. Whether or not they plan to add to the repertoire is hard to say, though they clearly didn't like the press they got for killing a lot of civilians in Iraq.
And the thing is, I think the insurance situation for aircraft security will have changed due to sept 11. The scale of potential liability could bankrupt a lot of insurance companies, so they won't do it. Even if you wipe out Al Qaeda there's still the timothy mcveigh (sp?) types, insofar as he wasn't affiliated with al qaeda (which he might have been, at least in bomb making), and no insurance company will want some unknown random risk that could be astronomically expensive. Enforcing random rules about shoes and underwear probably isn't helping a whole lot. The TSA doesn't do evidence based decision making. But it could. If it did it might actually be cost effective too.
or maybe it's about time the US get dragged into the 20th century. We'll give you some time still for the 21st.
Like it or not, the US is stuck with everyone else in the world and what they want. Whether you do that through the UN or not. It's not like the US doesn't use it's privileged position in the UN to try and bully the rest of the world when it feels like it. That power works both ways (thought mostly to US benefit until the invasion of Iraq).
So the invasion of Iraq might well have been illegal, but the US is a permanent security council member, and it could veto any sanctions against itself. The Security council is like that. The UN recognizes power, no one likes it, but as a practical matter any of the 5 permanent security council members could seriously fuck with the plans of any of the others, and there is, interestingly, no one else who has emerged that is that capable yet (though india is getting there, but is still largely regional, germany, japan, brazil, nigeria and south africa are all major regional powers but they they are almost purely regional).
As to the rest of it. maybe the UN isn't a friend of the US, because the US are doing bad things? The UN is just a glorified room for people to talk at each other, and a giant archive to file treaties multiple parties have agreed to. It has no deeper capability than it's member states, the UN itself isn't really anything. If you think it actually is anything else then you're believing rhetoric claiming they're capable of something they aren't. The UN has a handful of staff who are mostly paper pushers or otherwise tasked with providing information to the UN, or moving money to people, and pretty much everything else it does is up to the member states and funded by the member states separately from the UN budget.
The US could withdraw, but it would still be bound by all of the treaties it agreed to, it would still need to make agreements with all of the countries in the world, and it would further weaken the US reputation as a relatively honest broker (given the available choices) of freedom, human 'rights' and democracy. It would also be hanging israel out to dry. Which might be a good thing, but you could do that without leaving the UN.
The UN only spends about 2.7 billion dollars a year (http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/12/25/un-budget.html, although they budget in 2 year blocks for some reason). Of which the US pays about 415 million. That is, on the scale of things, basically free, and given than everything the US does through the UN it would have to do on its own anyway you're not really losing anything.
Quite honestly I have no idea what argument you were making. You don't seem to have made an argument. You had a some random gibberish and a link about a secure version of linux, which has nothing to do with what I was saying.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said clearly that MS handed over everything to the NSA, and that the government can easily hire former MS employees. There's no secret that that would give them basically full access to windows. What they do with linux is a separate matter.
What educational institutions, or governments have source code to windows? As far as I know even Waterloo students can't get important windows source code. You *can* get pieces of windows source if you have a project. We had a guy here who got access to some source related to their UI for a disabilities device project, but I'm not sure how much of that is available elsewhere (or whether any of that code could even have security vulnerabilities that would matter), I would think it's all stuff that's available with their usual developer licences. But as far as I know we couldn't get source to anything important in windows if we asked for it.
I'm not sure dead americans per dollar is their metric. I doubt anyone knows their metrics. That depends on what exactly their goals are (which are more broadly ideological), and then it's a question of whether or not their methods meet their goals.
It's not even really clear what they thought they were getting out of blowing up the world trade centre (either time). Most press per dollar? Most press per likelyhood of success? hard to say.
Especially in the middle east they're balancing the risk of sending an al qaeda terrorist to the US versus just handing him a gun and telling him to go shoot americans in Iraq. If the guy dies, you pick up his gun, hand it to someone else. Not very life effective, but cost effective.
I don't really know what the reality is, but if there really is a large number of crazy terrorists out there wanting to kill as many Americans as possible, they don't need to get on planes to do it.
You pretty much made my argument. Their most effective method today is to go after americans in afghanistan, and to go after american 'puppets' (from their perspective) elsewhere. Getting on a plane is high risk for them right now. With no security whatsoever that would probably change.
They've tried a lot of things. They've blown up schools, crashed planes into the oceans, crashed planes into buildings, tried to fight a ground war in iraq and Afghanistan, piracy off Somalia, truck bombings of buildings, insurgencies in more countries than I care to list. Their world view is different fundamentally than ours. To them the the goal of attacking the US is to weaken support for the local regimes that aren't islamic enough (or whatever exactly it is). But the prize isn't to have a Mosque replace the white house, it's to build an islamic caliphate that will preserve the territorial integrity of the 'muslim' peoples or something. If they think blowing up airplanes is the most cost effective way to accomplish that they will. But right now it's not. But you could cut the TSA budget by 70% and stop 90% of what they do and not change that calculation. But you still need some sort of airport security, or it will be in their interests to go back to blowing up aircraft.
I'm not sure you understand what "persistent" means. If they really were out there and wanted to kill people or disrupt the American way of life, they could easily do so at any of tens of thousands of locations where lots of people hang out every day. Israel has had real problems with terrorists. England and Northern Ireland has had them with the IRA. I hope things like that never come to the U.S., but that's what things look like when you have real motivated terrorists willing to maximize casualties on any soft target... there's no evidence for the scenario you suggest.
Depends on your perspective on northern ireland actually. If you're the IRA the British army is occupying ireland and you wanted them out. They only occasionally blew up things in London, most of the fighting was in Northern Ireland. In the same vein Al Qaeda view Israel, the House of Saud, Mubaraks government in Egypt, the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan (etc. etc. etc.) as all essentially the same thing. And they've certainly being trying to put up a fight in a lot of those places, and still are.
I'm not sure you understand the scope of Al Qaeda or their worldview. Which makes sense. They're crazy. They're also playing a long game. They want the US to run out of money and political will so they can transform the muslim world into a more muslim world or something like that. And if to them fighting in Iraq, afghanistan, chechnya (and yes, it's an affiliated group), running pirate operations off somalia, propaganda and an insurgency from Yemen, control of tribal regions of Pakistan etc. then they've been very very persistent. And that's been the problem. As time has gone on they've folded different groups with differing goals and methods into their fold, and the US really has done a terrible job understanding where they are, or what they're trying to do.
Well international laws are merely ones that more than one nation has agreed to.
If Saudi Arabia agrees it's going to ban the burka (how bizarre would that be?) then you expect them to follow through, and should enforce that. The UN is no more than a collection of states agreeing to things. If they agree that genocide or mistreatment of women or whatever should be outlawed then... they should be outlawed. That's what we all agreed to.
And yes, that means we agree to stupid things like allowing Qaddafi's Libya and North Korea to sit on humans rights councils etc.
But they are actual rules. The rules are intentionally vague, in that a breach of the rules lands in the hands of the security council and they get to decide what to do about it, but they are laws. International laws are merely laws multiple states agree to follow.
In terms of the roles of women, sure, it's a matter of degree. I don't think we should be aiming to invade the US over the fact that women still get paid less than men. (Nor is it easily possible to legally justify war on a security council member as they can veto any action against themselves, and you'd have to vote to kick them off the council first). But what about forced abortions, stoning for adultery, etc.. there's a line somewhere. Though I suppose we'd all draw the line differently.
I don't see how it's flawed. Al Qaeda sees itself as sovereign entity, (think sovereign order of malta), fighting to liberate the occupied areas of arabia, the 'islamic magreb' etc. They were also being directly supported by the Taliban who were a state, albeit not a legally recognized one by most countries, but definitely a state.
How widely dispersed they are and how many supporters they have determines how much of a threat they have. No more than the US cared all that much about being at war with Siam (thailand) when the Japanese declared war. The post I was replying to suggested that there's no risk in flying. My argument is that thats true, but only because Al Qaeda doesn't figure it's worth the cost/effort, abandoning all aircraft security would make them look like more viable targets (but not nearly in the way the TSA is envisioning).
Al Qaeda have more sophisticated metrics than just body counts. But as you may recall their affiliates did attack a school with suicide bombers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis.
So it's not like they haven't tried a more bloody and terrifying version of what you're suggesting. It just didn't meet whatever their metrics for success are.
Right, but a PhD in something, even if they're a 'teacher' is really on a 40/40/20 contract or similar. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% administrative. There are only so many places it's worth trying to build any research program and course selection, so you can only absorb so many graduates. A professor isn't a 'teacher' like a high school or public school teacher, you teach a handful of classes a year and the rest of the time do research. Whereas a teacher is teaching, or preparing for teaching or marking from teaching full time.
Strictly speaking comp sci would have the same problem, we graduate as many PhD's as we have faculty/researchers - and that's every year were it not for the massive industry sink of 'go make software for a living'. So we'd be over supplied for faculty positions by about a factor of 30, though smaller schools can't grant PhDs so it's harder to do the math and be sure. Either way. If you don't have research grant money for faculty there's no point in training future faculty.
Now the question with biomedical research I would think is why aren't there industry jobs, and what's been happening to the graduates? It's possible this 'problem' is fabricated, and the US is just serving as the worlds training centre for biomedical science and that they're just going back to home countries or are going into non reporting areas (where they do broadly biomedical work but not specifically talked to by the NIH). From the looks of the report there's a 5 year backlog between getting a PhD and getting a faculty position, that's a problem by itself, but it's not clear if that's getting worse or better from the report. It's also possible that industry is just not doing biomedical research in the US (are the graduates being given bad skillsets, overpriced etc?), and I would think the other option is that there just isn't the money to support this many grads anywhere, and they should cut back. That's unfortunate, but better to tell people 'go do something else' sooner rather than later.
that, and there's an international framework for turfing out a government. On the scale of the middle east, Iraq was pretty good to women. Which might be a sad commentary, but there are rules about these things.
Ok. So lets look at some of the things the US has done that pissed off Al Qaeda.
Supporting israel. The existence at all of israel. That's a deliberate choice. If you disagree with it that's fine, and US politicians don't ever really present a choice to the american public to abandon israel (nor is it clear what would happen in that event, would the europeans step back up the plate, someone else, etc.). That Israeli US relationship does have its benefits as well. I'm not an american, not my value judgment to make.
The US honoured its recognition of the independence of Kuwait. Sure, it was basically about oil. But it's much more complicated than that. Kuwait was a sovereign recognized state. Allowing one country attack and annex another without UN authorization would be a disaster of a precedent. The US, as part of the world had a vested interest in that not happening (otherwise you get into problems with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Yemen, Oman, Eritrea, Brunei, Singapore, Panama, Belgium, Laos etc.etc. etc. ) . Nor would it have been good for anyone if the Iraqi's had invaded Saudi. But that's not the point. Al Qaeda and it's precursors and the US were completely in agreement on these points. What they disagreed on was that Al Qaeda thought it should be a bunch of islamic mujahadeen defending saudi from Iraq and liberating Kuwait. The saudi's wanted a plan that wasn't going to take 15 years, and nor did anyone else. The mistake I think, was telling al qaeda we'd pass on their participation at all. No one thought they'd take it so hard.
The US supports the House of Saud. Much like support for israel, there are pros and cons.
The US is rich. Sort of by definition when you have 25% of the worlds money you're going to influence everyone else. Hence the world trade centre as a target.
But the thing is.... you can't be benignly not in peoples business. You buy oil from Saudi, which implicitly supports the house of Saud. But if not, you refuse to buy oil you're also picking a side (and impoverishing the saudi people by cutting off their access to money). By opening trade with china and letting hundreds of billions of investment dollars flow there, you are implicitly (and explicitly in this case) recognizing their claim to be the legitimate government of china. It's utterly impractical to be isolationist in the world. But no matter who you do business with you'll make someone angry. Buying stuff from cheap chinese factories makes people mad that you're allowing workers to be mistreated, not having trade at all makes people mad you're trapping them in poverty. Demanding they have some sort of 'rights' and people complain you're getting in their business. You have to be used to the fact that there are enough people in the world no matter what you do, someone will be angry. The goal is then to have only bad or incompetent people mad at you. But well, it never works out that way.
And the thing is... when you stick your nose in peoples business for the better you don't hear huge swathes of people complaining. I'm sure the Libyans are thrilled you helped oust gaddahfi, the syrians fighting to overthrow assad would appreciate a hand etc.
Since we're on the topic of WW2 lets look at the ethiopia case from just prior to WW2. By refusing to supply arms to Ethiopia we basically handed them to the Italians. Had we gone the other route, and supplied arms to the Italians who knows, maybe the war would have started in 37 rather than 39, or maybe the Italians would have had to go home. You don't know. Action and non action are both impacting peoples lives. Especially in syria right now. You have a whole lot of choices in the spectrum of non action to anything the US could do, and inevitably, you have to pick something, because non action can make as many enemies as anything else.
I think we agree that reasonable safety measures are in order, but that the current situation is ridiculously far from reasonable.
Agreed. I tend to think security belongs under the government, if nothing else because private companies won't want to risk the insurance for it, and governments are capable of evidence based decision making if they so choose. But well.... the TSA is a good example of them deliberately choosing to ignore evidence based decision making.
And because not everyone was a close minded isolationist.
Of course the US knew the japanese were going to attack at some point. One can argue the specifics of the Pearl Harbour attack itself, but there was no secret that Japan and the US were in clashing spheres of influence.
Al Qaeda declared war on the US ages ago. They were pissed about a lot of things not the least of which was the US liberating kuwait rather than Al Qaeda/affiliates. In that sense there was no secret to people paying attention to Al Qaeda that they wanted to attack the US or they tried. They attacked 2 embassies and the USS Cole before the 2001 attacks. Most of the US went "not our problem" and buried their heads in the sand.
So yes, there are strong parallels, everyone knew a fight was inevitable, people on the US side (notably Bill Clinton) wanted the war taken more seriously, but it wasn't. The US didn't really want the Japanese to bomb pearl harbour, that would be stupid. But they wanted US public to come on board with getting involved. Whether the US public wanted to or not, it's involved in Al Qaeda. Just as it was involved with Japan whether it wanted to be or not. (And in the case of Japan the US was far less involved than with Germany at that point).
That's tricky. Terrorists are looking for soft targets. If there's no security on aircraft, they'll attack aircraft. If their most 'dead americans per dollar' is in Iraq then they go to iraq, or afghanistan or whatever. Depends also on what metric they decide to use, and what they think will be successful.
In this day and age it's very unlikely they'd be able to take and keep possession of an airplane. That was a one trick pony, and they seriously under delivered. For probably another 20-30 years hijacking an airplane is simply not going to work for suicide bombing. Passengers will resist, improvise weapons or whatever. Blowing up an airplane... harder to say.
But they *are* looking for ways to kill people. And the TSA is terrible at their job. Those two aren't mutually inclusive or exclusive. You need security looking for bombs, and poison gas, you need to secure airports themselves against ground based lasers and rockets and so on (because god knows, if you can blind a pilot to crash a plane they'll try that). Ultimately security like this is an uninsurable problem, it has to be the government running it. The TSA acts like some lunatics crazy scheme that had no chance of success 7 years ago should dictate the experience for everyone flying today - that's fundamentally flawed in a lot of ways.
You could have made the same argument about pearl harbour. Well the japanese only attacked pearl harbour on one day, so if the US had just ignored it everything would have been fine. And that would be complete nonsense. It's taken 11 years to tear apart al qaeda and they're still not gone, and their ideology, even if not their senior membership, is still resilient. Unlike the death of Stalin (korean war) or the death of Hitler, or Mussolini where everyone proclaimed they were going to continue the fight, and then immediately gave up, Al Qaeda was fully expecting bin laden to be killed, and is ready to carry on without him.
There's nothing silly about taking al qaeda seriously. Taking them seriously doesn't necessarily mean flinging hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, but doing nothing is an invitation for them to cause chaos, and the more chaos they cause the more recruits they get and so on. Having bomb sniffing dogs in airports, making sure the area around airports is secure from anti aircraft missiles, and helping the government of afghanistan (whatever the hell that actually is), fight Al Qaeda is perfectly sensible. Groping 4 year olds and 94 year olds, and using ionizing radiation body scanners on everyone.... not so much.
Remember, they did try and blow up the WTC previous, with a car bomb. And failed. Whatever else they are, they are persistent bastards. Whether that means their focus will move to north africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east and Pakistan from the US for a while I have no idea.
Yes, and if you're buying from a UK business it is essentially the same as traveling there, buying the item and flying home. They aren't actually in your living room.
The moment you access their website you stepped into their jurisdiction the in the virtual space, just as setting foot into canada means you set foot in our jurisdiction, just as the moment you cross into another state you are now in their jurisdiction and have to pay their sales tax.
Also, your 'union' doesn't rule the world. Get over it. Governments have no obligation to provide representation, and can tax however the hell they feel like. If you don't like a governments rules, don't live there, don't travel there, and don't do business there. In other words, don't order online from europe because you are supposed to be charged VAT at 20 odd percent.
Do you think the product you were importing from the UK would somehow be exempt from import tariffs because you ordered it from within the US? Because if so you're completely out to lunch.
The only way the UK company could get out of charging you VAT is if there is a free trade agreement with the US (which there is) and they have a US subsidiary, so when you order an item they import it tax free to their US subsidiary, and the US subsidiary actually sells it to you. Then the company takes care of demanding a VAT refund from their own government. If the UK company doesn't have a US subsidiary then you're SOL.
ya, 20k is probably the point where the government has decided you're doing enough business that this counts as business and needs to be treated as such. Whether 20k is arbitrary or calculated in some way I don't know though.
Slashdot Mirror
EB is owned by the mega giant game company gamestop.
But even then, the world is moving digital. Now you'll be able to list XBL, PSN and Steam/impulse/windows store etc. games that are R18.
Um.... do you have any concept of what that would cost? You'd have to be offering a huge pile of money. Right now they can commercially licence their engine for all sorts of projects. Even if those projects don't make money Unity can.
Have a look at their people page, they have probably 110 employees. That's probably 12-13 million a year in revenue alone. Are you going to try and get a kickstarter for 100 million dollars to effectively shut them down, or to guarantee them income to keep working indefinitely?
Don't get me wrong, there need to be more open source game tools (no matter how many you point me to there can always be more). As someone on the teaching side of things in trying to train game developers it's a real problem to know what tools you want to use, because the emphasis shouldn't be on the tools, but fighting with tools puts the emphasis on them. But Unity is pretty good about giving away a free trial, and being a good example of the sort of experience you'll have in industry, with some stuff opened up to you. That's about all we can hope for. Asking for a commercial engine that costs millions of dollars to make and maintain to just give up that kind of money is a pipe dream at best.
Now, trying to get them to pull an id software and release old versions of the engine as open source (say release 2.0 or 3.0 when 4.0 goes live) might be a more realistic goal and would still be awesome.
And by the way, you can negotiate your way into source code for Unity3D. I've never worked with anyone that thought it important enough to try until today, though. I literally advised a company this morning that Unity is probably their best bet for an engine given what they want to do, and they were wondering about source licences, which is the only reason I know that at all. Given that, it wouldn't be a huge shock to see old versions end up open sourced, if nothing else because you can't keep something bottled up indefinitely.
You realize that the UN is, on the scale of things a relatively democratic body right? The UN by itself doesn't ever do anything, it's a handful of staff in a room. The "UN" is a collection of countries in the world with a 1 country, 1 vote system. There is then a practical realization that 5 countries in the world could fuck over plans of anyone else, and they get special treatment on matters related to security.
If the UN was fully democratic, say an election system by population, China and India would be basically running the show as by far the largest power blocks. And they aren't all that fond of a lot of internet freedoms or the way the US behaves in general.
The irony is that the UN has a declaration of human rights that you apparently don't know about (linked in another comment), that does forbid things like censorship. And at least on paper all UN members have signed onto that document. But well. Like politicians everywhere, there are laws and then there are laws we write for other people to follow.
Remember: China 'doesn't censor it's people and there's no great firewall of china. They are a poor country and experience technical difficulties on a regular basis'. Or at least that used to be the official line. Also, as a 'relatively uneducated society they need to protect people from falsehoods which could damage public order and safety' (which actually is true to some degree).
Corporations very much fear the law. The law could dissolve them and arrest their CEO. That's why they buy their way into convenient laws at all.
In that situation you should pay off the local government police and or military forces. If you can't pay them more than the local militias or criminals, you shouldn't do business there.
That is, in effect, what happens in civilized countries. You pay taxes for police services, if the services aren't up to the task you pay (technically 'lobby') politicians to write laws for you that will get the police up to the task or out of the way.
cyber security is a different matter. There's no one you can pay unless you're a huge multinational, and even then you may not have a presence wherever the problem initiated from. If you're hacked domestically you have the same recourse as physical security, call the police, if there aren't laws that will cover you, pay politicians to write some. But if you get hacked from a foreign country there's really nothing you can do except build hardened systems in the first place. Counter hacking doesn't seem like a good idea, because they, being criminals, are somewhat less hindered by morals and laws than you are, and can retaliate thusly. I suppose if you're really big you pay politicians in both countries to write treaties for you. But that would just serve to make counter hacking illegal.
Why exactly not?
You are at work, aren't you. if you think the breaks you have totally aren't enough, then you should complain about that, not about you not being able to do personal stuff at work.
So your employee telephone should never have received calls from your wife or been used for calls home or to your kids?
This has actually been dragged through courts in a lot of places, and interpretations seem to vary wildly.
The first problem you bring up is in 'breaks'. Can an employee use work equipment for non work activities if it only at a marginal cost to the employer (browsing /. or making local telephone calls for example).
The second is whether or not you are able to do any 'personal stuff' at work, which naturally you are, you're a person first and a faceless corporate drone second. But the degree of leeway on how much varies wildly. In that sense one could turn the argument around and ask 'well when am I not working?' if you have e-mail or a telephone you're expected to answer at any time.
The last notion you indirectly bring up is this 19th century faceless corporate drone view of labour. Does it actually waste productive time if you read /. for 5 minutes? If you're worried about the state of your banking, or rushing to be out the door exactly at 5pm so you can be home at 5:17 to order that thing you're waiting on you're not focused at work. Better to let you get it over with and get back to paying attention to work. When your job is an assembly line job, and you look away for 2 minutes and that equates to one less bumper being installed then sure, I suppose you could fairly claim that running off to a computer or pulling out your phone to check for text messages from that hot girl you met last night is costing you productive time. But those jobs are becoming fewer and far between. Most of us have a lot of dead time between periods of intense application of brain power, and doing 'personal stuff' unencumbers the brain from personal problems to focus on work problems when it's actually needed.
I'm not sure 100 dollars per course or 100 dollars per degree changes the argument much. A degree right now costs, on the low end, 25k not counting living expenses, drop that to 4k or 100 dollars and you're still completely transforming the system.
A lecture with quizzes is still a quiz. Who marks the quiz? What happens if you get it wrong? How do you learn to improve?
I picked the analogy of a textbook for a reason. Textbooks have sample questions (and sample answers), the trick with all education is how you verify that the person did the work, and how do you help them fix what they get wrong.
Ya, this is more an exercise in wondering how large classroom sizes could be, if you could seat 160k people in a room, and how much interaction you need with a human being on the other end.
Lots of professors would be quite happy to focus on research full time and not have to teach. Pick out the good teachers, the good textbooks, and just play a video of their lectures in a classroom for people who want to show up and interact with other students. The problem with that plan is that you don't then build personal relationships with professors or grad students or other students. Most of us who have done some sort of technical degree can point to an instance or two of a concept we just didn't get in lecture or from the book, and it took a TA or other students to explain it to us... eventually.
Research still needs to happen with or without the teaching component of universities. But the huge mentoring relationship that happens there, and the social connections, those are a major portion of the experience. How do you know if you want to be a researcher if you don't meet other researchers? A 100 dollar online course is about the same thing as a 100 dollar textbook just more interactive. Did you buy the book? Did you read the book? Or in the new media, did you watch the lecture? It's useful as a reference, it's probably not even bad to teach yourself. But it's not the same as going to university. In the real world you have to teach yourself a lot, whether thats from books or the web or whatever. So in that sense udacity probably will find a significant market in replacing textbooks with at least partially interactive web enabled experiences, for about the same price. It might also enable smaller schools to make available more esoteric topics they don't have expertise in, which is good.
Oh I wasn't in reply to the TFA.
There I was replying to one guy saying that the odds of being killed in an airplane hijacking were nil.
If you make it easy enough for al qaeda they'll probably go back to attacking aircraft. Whatever they decide to do, you need to the tools to respond to that. If you find out they're planning to attack a mall...well you already have police so the only thing you could ever do in that situation is drive a swat team over. If they've smuggled anti aircraft missiles into the US and are planning to use them to shoot down aircraft that's much more serious.
Privatizing the TSA runs a lot of risks. Mostly in cost cutting (either reduced staff or reduced equipment) and liability, and the big one which would be that no one wants to be liable for a fuckup. Missing a successful aircraft bombing would cost an insurer billions and would make a lot of things cost prohibitive. You also still need some government agency to coordinate and distribute information to the various airports about what the latest threats are if and when there are any. And you need to make sure every airport has certain skillsets in case they are needed.
And sure, it's not really clear why they want to go after aircraft. But they do. They've tried numerous times, including with a number of ridiculous plans (shoebomber, underwear bomber). Whether that's a good plan for them or not, if that's what they're trying to do you need to deal with it. To use the WW2 example, it wasn't likely to work out too well for the Japanese when they attacked the US. Everyone knew that wasn't a great plan on their part. But they did it anyway. You have to respond to the enemy you have, not the enemy you'd think he should be. And the enemy you have has tried on at least 5 or 6 occasions to attack aircraft, and if you read richard clarkes book 'against all enemies' there's some evidence they may have been responsible for several aircraft attacks where the airplane was just destroyed in the lead up to sept 11. Their big ones seem to be truck bombings of buildings, bombing of subways and attacking aircraft. Whether or not they plan to add to the repertoire is hard to say, though they clearly didn't like the press they got for killing a lot of civilians in Iraq.
And the thing is, I think the insurance situation for aircraft security will have changed due to sept 11. The scale of potential liability could bankrupt a lot of insurance companies, so they won't do it. Even if you wipe out Al Qaeda there's still the timothy mcveigh (sp?) types, insofar as he wasn't affiliated with al qaeda (which he might have been, at least in bomb making), and no insurance company will want some unknown random risk that could be astronomically expensive. Enforcing random rules about shoes and underwear probably isn't helping a whole lot. The TSA doesn't do evidence based decision making. But it could. If it did it might actually be cost effective too.
or maybe it's about time the US get dragged into the 20th century. We'll give you some time still for the 21st.
Like it or not, the US is stuck with everyone else in the world and what they want. Whether you do that through the UN or not. It's not like the US doesn't use it's privileged position in the UN to try and bully the rest of the world when it feels like it. That power works both ways (thought mostly to US benefit until the invasion of Iraq).
It's not a radical idea, it's a naive one.
So the invasion of Iraq might well have been illegal, but the US is a permanent security council member, and it could veto any sanctions against itself. The Security council is like that. The UN recognizes power, no one likes it, but as a practical matter any of the 5 permanent security council members could seriously fuck with the plans of any of the others, and there is, interestingly, no one else who has emerged that is that capable yet (though india is getting there, but is still largely regional, germany, japan, brazil, nigeria and south africa are all major regional powers but they they are almost purely regional).
As to the rest of it. maybe the UN isn't a friend of the US, because the US are doing bad things? The UN is just a glorified room for people to talk at each other, and a giant archive to file treaties multiple parties have agreed to. It has no deeper capability than it's member states, the UN itself isn't really anything. If you think it actually is anything else then you're believing rhetoric claiming they're capable of something they aren't. The UN has a handful of staff who are mostly paper pushers or otherwise tasked with providing information to the UN, or moving money to people, and pretty much everything else it does is up to the member states and funded by the member states separately from the UN budget.
The US could withdraw, but it would still be bound by all of the treaties it agreed to, it would still need to make agreements with all of the countries in the world, and it would further weaken the US reputation as a relatively honest broker (given the available choices) of freedom, human 'rights' and democracy. It would also be hanging israel out to dry. Which might be a good thing, but you could do that without leaving the UN.
The UN only spends about 2.7 billion dollars a year (http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/12/25/un-budget.html, although they budget in 2 year blocks for some reason). Of which the US pays about 415 million. That is, on the scale of things, basically free, and given than everything the US does through the UN it would have to do on its own anyway you're not really losing anything.
Quite honestly I have no idea what argument you were making. You don't seem to have made an argument. You had a some random gibberish and a link about a secure version of linux, which has nothing to do with what I was saying.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said clearly that MS handed over everything to the NSA, and that the government can easily hire former MS employees. There's no secret that that would give them basically full access to windows. What they do with linux is a separate matter.
What educational institutions, or governments have source code to windows? As far as I know even Waterloo students can't get important windows source code. You *can* get pieces of windows source if you have a project. We had a guy here who got access to some source related to their UI for a disabilities device project, but I'm not sure how much of that is available elsewhere (or whether any of that code could even have security vulnerabilities that would matter), I would think it's all stuff that's available with their usual developer licences. But as far as I know we couldn't get source to anything important in windows if we asked for it.
I'm not sure dead americans per dollar is their metric. I doubt anyone knows their metrics. That depends on what exactly their goals are (which are more broadly ideological), and then it's a question of whether or not their methods meet their goals.
It's not even really clear what they thought they were getting out of blowing up the world trade centre (either time). Most press per dollar? Most press per likelyhood of success? hard to say.
Especially in the middle east they're balancing the risk of sending an al qaeda terrorist to the US versus just handing him a gun and telling him to go shoot americans in Iraq. If the guy dies, you pick up his gun, hand it to someone else. Not very life effective, but cost effective.
I don't really know what the reality is, but if there really is a large number of crazy terrorists out there wanting to kill as many Americans as possible, they don't need to get on planes to do it.
You pretty much made my argument. Their most effective method today is to go after americans in afghanistan, and to go after american 'puppets' (from their perspective) elsewhere. Getting on a plane is high risk for them right now. With no security whatsoever that would probably change.
They've tried a lot of things. They've blown up schools, crashed planes into the oceans, crashed planes into buildings, tried to fight a ground war in iraq and Afghanistan, piracy off Somalia, truck bombings of buildings, insurgencies in more countries than I care to list. Their world view is different fundamentally than ours. To them the the goal of attacking the US is to weaken support for the local regimes that aren't islamic enough (or whatever exactly it is). But the prize isn't to have a Mosque replace the white house, it's to build an islamic caliphate that will preserve the territorial integrity of the 'muslim' peoples or something. If they think blowing up airplanes is the most cost effective way to accomplish that they will. But right now it's not. But you could cut the TSA budget by 70% and stop 90% of what they do and not change that calculation. But you still need some sort of airport security, or it will be in their interests to go back to blowing up aircraft.
I'm not sure you understand what "persistent" means. If they really were out there and wanted to kill people or disrupt the American way of life, they could easily do so at any of tens of thousands of locations where lots of people hang out every day. Israel has had real problems with terrorists. England and Northern Ireland has had them with the IRA. I hope things like that never come to the U.S., but that's what things look like when you have real motivated terrorists willing to maximize casualties on any soft target... there's no evidence for the scenario you suggest.
Depends on your perspective on northern ireland actually. If you're the IRA the British army is occupying ireland and you wanted them out. They only occasionally blew up things in London, most of the fighting was in Northern Ireland. In the same vein Al Qaeda view Israel, the House of Saud, Mubaraks government in Egypt, the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan (etc. etc. etc.) as all essentially the same thing. And they've certainly being trying to put up a fight in a lot of those places, and still are.
I'm not sure you understand the scope of Al Qaeda or their worldview. Which makes sense. They're crazy. They're also playing a long game. They want the US to run out of money and political will so they can transform the muslim world into a more muslim world or something like that. And if to them fighting in Iraq, afghanistan, chechnya (and yes, it's an affiliated group), running pirate operations off somalia, propaganda and an insurgency from Yemen, control of tribal regions of Pakistan etc. then they've been very very persistent. And that's been the problem. As time has gone on they've folded different groups with differing goals and methods into their fold, and the US really has done a terrible job understanding where they are, or what they're trying to do.
Pretty much. Al Qaeda wasn't exactly hiding their attempts to kill americans.
Well international laws are merely ones that more than one nation has agreed to.
If Saudi Arabia agrees it's going to ban the burka (how bizarre would that be?) then you expect them to follow through, and should enforce that. The UN is no more than a collection of states agreeing to things. If they agree that genocide or mistreatment of women or whatever should be outlawed then... they should be outlawed. That's what we all agreed to.
And yes, that means we agree to stupid things like allowing Qaddafi's Libya and North Korea to sit on humans rights councils etc.
But they are actual rules. The rules are intentionally vague, in that a breach of the rules lands in the hands of the security council and they get to decide what to do about it, but they are laws. International laws are merely laws multiple states agree to follow.
In terms of the roles of women, sure, it's a matter of degree. I don't think we should be aiming to invade the US over the fact that women still get paid less than men. (Nor is it easily possible to legally justify war on a security council member as they can veto any action against themselves, and you'd have to vote to kick them off the council first). But what about forced abortions, stoning for adultery, etc.. there's a line somewhere. Though I suppose we'd all draw the line differently.
I don't see how it's flawed. Al Qaeda sees itself as sovereign entity, (think sovereign order of malta), fighting to liberate the occupied areas of arabia, the 'islamic magreb' etc. They were also being directly supported by the Taliban who were a state, albeit not a legally recognized one by most countries, but definitely a state.
How widely dispersed they are and how many supporters they have determines how much of a threat they have. No more than the US cared all that much about being at war with Siam (thailand) when the Japanese declared war. The post I was replying to suggested that there's no risk in flying. My argument is that thats true, but only because Al Qaeda doesn't figure it's worth the cost/effort, abandoning all aircraft security would make them look like more viable targets (but not nearly in the way the TSA is envisioning).
Bad press.
Cost of plane tickets.
Al Qaeda have more sophisticated metrics than just body counts. But as you may recall their affiliates did attack a school with suicide bombers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis.
So it's not like they haven't tried a more bloody and terrifying version of what you're suggesting. It just didn't meet whatever their metrics for success are.
Right, but a PhD in something, even if they're a 'teacher' is really on a 40/40/20 contract or similar. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% administrative. There are only so many places it's worth trying to build any research program and course selection, so you can only absorb so many graduates. A professor isn't a 'teacher' like a high school or public school teacher, you teach a handful of classes a year and the rest of the time do research. Whereas a teacher is teaching, or preparing for teaching or marking from teaching full time.
Strictly speaking comp sci would have the same problem, we graduate as many PhD's as we have faculty/researchers - and that's every year were it not for the massive industry sink of 'go make software for a living'. So we'd be over supplied for faculty positions by about a factor of 30, though smaller schools can't grant PhDs so it's harder to do the math and be sure. Either way. If you don't have research grant money for faculty there's no point in training future faculty.
Now the question with biomedical research I would think is why aren't there industry jobs, and what's been happening to the graduates? It's possible this 'problem' is fabricated, and the US is just serving as the worlds training centre for biomedical science and that they're just going back to home countries or are going into non reporting areas (where they do broadly biomedical work but not specifically talked to by the NIH). From the looks of the report there's a 5 year backlog between getting a PhD and getting a faculty position, that's a problem by itself, but it's not clear if that's getting worse or better from the report. It's also possible that industry is just not doing biomedical research in the US (are the graduates being given bad skillsets, overpriced etc?), and I would think the other option is that there just isn't the money to support this many grads anywhere, and they should cut back. That's unfortunate, but better to tell people 'go do something else' sooner rather than later.
that, and there's an international framework for turfing out a government. On the scale of the middle east, Iraq was pretty good to women. Which might be a sad commentary, but there are rules about these things.
Ok. So lets look at some of the things the US has done that pissed off Al Qaeda.
Supporting israel. The existence at all of israel. That's a deliberate choice. If you disagree with it that's fine, and US politicians don't ever really present a choice to the american public to abandon israel (nor is it clear what would happen in that event, would the europeans step back up the plate, someone else, etc.). That Israeli US relationship does have its benefits as well. I'm not an american, not my value judgment to make.
The US honoured its recognition of the independence of Kuwait. Sure, it was basically about oil. But it's much more complicated than that. Kuwait was a sovereign recognized state. Allowing one country attack and annex another without UN authorization would be a disaster of a precedent. The US, as part of the world had a vested interest in that not happening (otherwise you get into problems with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Yemen, Oman, Eritrea, Brunei, Singapore, Panama, Belgium, Laos etc.etc. etc. ) . Nor would it have been good for anyone if the Iraqi's had invaded Saudi. But that's not the point. Al Qaeda and it's precursors and the US were completely in agreement on these points. What they disagreed on was that Al Qaeda thought it should be a bunch of islamic mujahadeen defending saudi from Iraq and liberating Kuwait. The saudi's wanted a plan that wasn't going to take 15 years, and nor did anyone else. The mistake I think, was telling al qaeda we'd pass on their participation at all. No one thought they'd take it so hard.
The US supports the House of Saud. Much like support for israel, there are pros and cons.
The US is rich. Sort of by definition when you have 25% of the worlds money you're going to influence everyone else. Hence the world trade centre as a target.
But the thing is.... you can't be benignly not in peoples business. You buy oil from Saudi, which implicitly supports the house of Saud. But if not, you refuse to buy oil you're also picking a side (and impoverishing the saudi people by cutting off their access to money). By opening trade with china and letting hundreds of billions of investment dollars flow there, you are implicitly (and explicitly in this case) recognizing their claim to be the legitimate government of china. It's utterly impractical to be isolationist in the world. But no matter who you do business with you'll make someone angry. Buying stuff from cheap chinese factories makes people mad that you're allowing workers to be mistreated, not having trade at all makes people mad you're trapping them in poverty. Demanding they have some sort of 'rights' and people complain you're getting in their business. You have to be used to the fact that there are enough people in the world no matter what you do, someone will be angry. The goal is then to have only bad or incompetent people mad at you. But well, it never works out that way.
And the thing is... when you stick your nose in peoples business for the better you don't hear huge swathes of people complaining. I'm sure the Libyans are thrilled you helped oust gaddahfi, the syrians fighting to overthrow assad would appreciate a hand etc.
Since we're on the topic of WW2 lets look at the ethiopia case from just prior to WW2. By refusing to supply arms to Ethiopia we basically handed them to the Italians. Had we gone the other route, and supplied arms to the Italians who knows, maybe the war would have started in 37 rather than 39, or maybe the Italians would have had to go home. You don't know. Action and non action are both impacting peoples lives. Especially in syria right now. You have a whole lot of choices in the spectrum of non action to anything the US could do, and inevitably, you have to pick something, because non action can make as many enemies as anything else.
I think we agree that reasonable safety measures are in order, but that the current situation is ridiculously far from reasonable.
Agreed. I tend to think security belongs under the government, if nothing else because private companies won't want to risk the insurance for it, and governments are capable of evidence based decision making if they so choose. But well.... the TSA is a good example of them deliberately choosing to ignore evidence based decision making.
And because not everyone was a close minded isolationist.
Of course the US knew the japanese were going to attack at some point. One can argue the specifics of the Pearl Harbour attack itself, but there was no secret that Japan and the US were in clashing spheres of influence.
Al Qaeda declared war on the US ages ago. They were pissed about a lot of things not the least of which was the US liberating kuwait rather than Al Qaeda/affiliates. In that sense there was no secret to people paying attention to Al Qaeda that they wanted to attack the US or they tried. They attacked 2 embassies and the USS Cole before the 2001 attacks. Most of the US went "not our problem" and buried their heads in the sand.
So yes, there are strong parallels, everyone knew a fight was inevitable, people on the US side (notably Bill Clinton) wanted the war taken more seriously, but it wasn't. The US didn't really want the Japanese to bomb pearl harbour, that would be stupid. But they wanted US public to come on board with getting involved. Whether the US public wanted to or not, it's involved in Al Qaeda. Just as it was involved with Japan whether it wanted to be or not. (And in the case of Japan the US was far less involved than with Germany at that point).
That's tricky. Terrorists are looking for soft targets. If there's no security on aircraft, they'll attack aircraft. If their most 'dead americans per dollar' is in Iraq then they go to iraq, or afghanistan or whatever. Depends also on what metric they decide to use, and what they think will be successful.
In this day and age it's very unlikely they'd be able to take and keep possession of an airplane. That was a one trick pony, and they seriously under delivered. For probably another 20-30 years hijacking an airplane is simply not going to work for suicide bombing. Passengers will resist, improvise weapons or whatever. Blowing up an airplane... harder to say.
But they *are* looking for ways to kill people. And the TSA is terrible at their job. Those two aren't mutually inclusive or exclusive. You need security looking for bombs, and poison gas, you need to secure airports themselves against ground based lasers and rockets and so on (because god knows, if you can blind a pilot to crash a plane they'll try that). Ultimately security like this is an uninsurable problem, it has to be the government running it. The TSA acts like some lunatics crazy scheme that had no chance of success 7 years ago should dictate the experience for everyone flying today - that's fundamentally flawed in a lot of ways.
You could have made the same argument about pearl harbour. Well the japanese only attacked pearl harbour on one day, so if the US had just ignored it everything would have been fine. And that would be complete nonsense. It's taken 11 years to tear apart al qaeda and they're still not gone, and their ideology, even if not their senior membership, is still resilient. Unlike the death of Stalin (korean war) or the death of Hitler, or Mussolini where everyone proclaimed they were going to continue the fight, and then immediately gave up, Al Qaeda was fully expecting bin laden to be killed, and is ready to carry on without him.
There's nothing silly about taking al qaeda seriously. Taking them seriously doesn't necessarily mean flinging hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, but doing nothing is an invitation for them to cause chaos, and the more chaos they cause the more recruits they get and so on. Having bomb sniffing dogs in airports, making sure the area around airports is secure from anti aircraft missiles, and helping the government of afghanistan (whatever the hell that actually is), fight Al Qaeda is perfectly sensible. Groping 4 year olds and 94 year olds, and using ionizing radiation body scanners on everyone.... not so much.
Remember, they did try and blow up the WTC previous, with a car bomb. And failed. Whatever else they are, they are persistent bastards. Whether that means their focus will move to north africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east and Pakistan from the US for a while I have no idea.
Yes, and if you're buying from a UK business it is essentially the same as traveling there, buying the item and flying home. They aren't actually in your living room.
The moment you access their website you stepped into their jurisdiction the in the virtual space, just as setting foot into canada means you set foot in our jurisdiction, just as the moment you cross into another state you are now in their jurisdiction and have to pay their sales tax.
Also, your 'union' doesn't rule the world. Get over it. Governments have no obligation to provide representation, and can tax however the hell they feel like. If you don't like a governments rules, don't live there, don't travel there, and don't do business there. In other words, don't order online from europe because you are supposed to be charged VAT at 20 odd percent.
Do you think the product you were importing from the UK would somehow be exempt from import tariffs because you ordered it from within the US? Because if so you're completely out to lunch.
The only way the UK company could get out of charging you VAT is if there is a free trade agreement with the US (which there is) and they have a US subsidiary, so when you order an item they import it tax free to their US subsidiary, and the US subsidiary actually sells it to you. Then the company takes care of demanding a VAT refund from their own government. If the UK company doesn't have a US subsidiary then you're SOL.
ya, 20k is probably the point where the government has decided you're doing enough business that this counts as business and needs to be treated as such. Whether 20k is arbitrary or calculated in some way I don't know though.