The people primarily hit by higher taxes are regular wage earners. "The one percent" and corporations have many ways of getting around paying taxes, and there is no law that can fix this (short of turning a country into a totalitarian state). That's why it is so fascinating that the "educated middle class" so often votes for tax increases and the politicians that favor them.
Ah, you ask, but what about the people? Very good question. Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
Indeed, the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots, and that will be everybody. The reason you don't have a robot at home is because they are expensive, but in a world in which smart machines can build lots of things for very little money, they can build robots for very little money, and everybody will have them.
Does that sound like scifi? Actually, you can already have a 3D printer at home and manufacture more 3D printers with it. There are some electronic parts and motors you still need to order, but those are cheap generic components.
I live in Europe. Rail tickets in Europe are often also more expensive than flying, and a lot more expensive on long distances. Rail travel also becomes quite slow when you have to change trains (as most people do). It's still a fun way to travel, but it's not really cost-effective or efficient.
A drunk driving conviction does not result in a permanent loss of the driver license; what's prohibited is driving drunk, not being a drinker and getting a license. But what about the non-drunk driver anyway? Anybody could use their car to create horrible carnage of children. Are you going to have psychological tests to have a driver's license? What about sex? People can (and have) committed mass murder by transmitting HIV, and politicians called for locking up anybody with HIV infection. Where is this going to end?
Living in a free society requires that you trust that most of your fellow human beings are well-behaved most of the time. You trust them to operate dangerous machinery, buy dangerous tools and equipment, and read about dangerous ideas. Occasionally, that trust is violated, someone goes crazy and people die, but that's the price of liberty. If you're not willing to have that trust in your fellow human beings, you don't want to live in a democracy, you want to live in the kind of totalitarian regime described in 1984 or Brave New World, imperfectly realized in the GDR and other states like that.
I object to the notion that it is the state's function to divide people into trustworthy and untrustworthy or to prevent its citizens from obtaining anything that might be dangerous to others. In different words, I don't want to own a gun, but I want the right to own a gun.
I have no particular opinion about this case (since I don't know the details). However, to answer your questions in general...
It looks like you are appointing the ISP as the police. But are they?
No, ISPs are not police, they are private businesses and set their own rules and regulations.
Is it really their responsibility to assure that their customers are operating to the standards that YOU define?
No, it is not their "responsibility" in any legal sense. However, it is certainly prudent for them to think about it. It's prudent because it isn't anybody else's "responsibility" to accept mail from them either.
You have ISP customers that choose ISPs, you have ISPs that offer specific products, you have spam detection services that analyze ISPs and create spam lists. All the participants in this market are free to choose who they do business with. If the spam detection company does a good job, lots of ISPs will use it, if it does a bad job, ISPs will not use it because they will end up losing customers. I don't see any problem here that needs fixing, other than that ISPs and users actually both need to use their head.
About as many people die from food poisoning each year in the US as from murder. Threats come from parasites, bacteria, and viruses, and we keep discovering new ones and new ways of transmitting them; of course, as soon as we do, we try to eliminate them, but many of these used to be "normal components" of those foods. Occasionally, old foods are also discovered to have new toxicities, but that's rare. (The sweetener you are thinking of is lead acetate, not mercury oxide).
I really cannot agree. Historically, one of the most common ways to pwn a machine was to exploit buffer overruns. Languages such as Ada and Java are virtually immune to that sort of exploit.
Sounds like you agree completely: Ada addressed a need in the 1980's that doesn't exist anymore; almost all our languages these days are type safe, and many have excellent static type systems that run rings around Ada's.
the amount of time and effort to make a secure, robust application is more or less independent of the programming language used. The difference lies in where you spend your time.
Here too you are pretty much saying what I'm saying: in statically typed languages, the compiler catches a lot of stuff for you, in dynamically typed languages you need to write more tests to achieve the same level of fault detection, and it ends up taking about the same amount of time overall. That means that statically typed languages are good for production but not prototyping, while dynamically typed languages are good for both prototyping and production, and furthermore let you transform a prototype into a production system gradually by adding tests.
Anyway, use statically typed languages if you like, but Ada's static type system is really obsolete and unnecessarily cumbersome.
(And please don't use "strong typing" when you mean "static typing".)
Most of the sea life in the ocean will die. The reefs are a critical component of the food chain for fish of all sizes, including plenty that don't directly live on the reef itself.
Citation? Or did you just pull that out of your ass? Coral reefs, in fact, only exist in very specialized locations. Losing them would be a shame, but it wouldn't kill "most" sea life.
(Incidentally, ocean acidification has happened multiple times before in earth's history, so it's not a completely mystery what would happen.)
None of Ada's facilities have any bearing on the common kinds of bugs that cause web applications to leak private information. And the time you spend satisfying Ada's pointless static checks is time you don't have for developing meaningful security audits and test cases. So, given the same budget and time constraints, it is pretty much a given that an Ada based web application would be worse, not better, in terms of privacy and security.
Ada tried to address a problem that really existed in the 1980's: the lack of an efficient, strongly typed language. That ceased to be a problem long ago, and Ada is kind of a relic now.
The oldest code I've wrote that I know of which is still currently in daily use is now at the 22 years old mark
The oldest code I have written that's in production today is older than that; there's a chance you may actually have a few lines of my code on your machine.
And that, dear readers, is why I really hate what passes for programmers nowadays.
Give it another decade or so of experience and perhaps you too will figure out why languages like Ada make the wrong tradeoffs.
Big thing with ADA is the focus on reducing errors
Ada forces programmers to think about errors, but you pay a high price for that. If you have DoD-like budget, well-specified requirements, a project spanning decades, high reliability requirements, and a large pool of mediocre programmers, Ada is a good choice because that's what it was designed for. But most products are created by small teams of programmers, have a lifetime of a few years, don't need to be anywhere as reliable, and need to be able to accommodate new requirements on short notice.
Regular USB ports don't have enough power. Many USB chargers deliver extra power over regular USB connectors and cables, but regular connectors and cables cannot transmit arbitrary amounts of power safely. Also, people like to be able to dock and get power, audio, and video without having to connect extra cables.
USB 3 provides pretty good answers to all of these issues (audio and video could just be transmitted via the USB protocol). Let's hope the next generations of phones and tablets offer USB 3.
That's a European law, and Apple is complying with it by including a USB-to-proprietary adapter in Europe (and probably jacking up the price a little too).
I'm glad ACTA didn't make it. But the copyright lobby in Europe remains extremely powerful. For example, in Germany, they have successfully pushed the government to try to implement a copyright on snippets. This follows a long list of pretty hair-raising special rights and fees that different failing industries managed to carve out for themselves.
I think the successful fight against ACTA in Europe has less to do with a respect for liberties and privacy and more with simple economic realities: ACTA would primarily have benefited US companies doing business in Europe; European companies are already well protected by draconian European laws.
You don't need cloning for that. If you wanted a replacement body, you could start with any fetus and modify its immune system not to reject your brain. And for transplanting individual organs, there will likely be cheaper and simpler ways of (1) preventing rejection of foreign organs or (2) growing them from your own stem cells within a decade or so without having to go through the expense of cloning.
Slashdot Mirror
The people primarily hit by higher taxes are regular wage earners. "The one percent" and corporations have many ways of getting around paying taxes, and there is no law that can fix this (short of turning a country into a totalitarian state). That's why it is so fascinating that the "educated middle class" so often votes for tax increases and the politicians that favor them.
But if your business has a lot more negative reviews than other businesses, then there's probably something wrong with your business.
Indeed, the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots, and that will be everybody. The reason you don't have a robot at home is because they are expensive, but in a world in which smart machines can build lots of things for very little money, they can build robots for very little money, and everybody will have them.
Does that sound like scifi? Actually, you can already have a 3D printer at home and manufacture more 3D printers with it. There are some electronic parts and motors you still need to order, but those are cheap generic components.
I live in Europe. Rail tickets in Europe are often also more expensive than flying, and a lot more expensive on long distances. Rail travel also becomes quite slow when you have to change trains (as most people do). It's still a fun way to travel, but it's not really cost-effective or efficient.
So? Those pissed off reviews are still useful, and it's not hard to tell usually whether something was an accident or a common occurrence.
A drunk driving conviction does not result in a permanent loss of the driver license; what's prohibited is driving drunk, not being a drinker and getting a license. But what about the non-drunk driver anyway? Anybody could use their car to create horrible carnage of children. Are you going to have psychological tests to have a driver's license? What about sex? People can (and have) committed mass murder by transmitting HIV, and politicians called for locking up anybody with HIV infection. Where is this going to end?
Living in a free society requires that you trust that most of your fellow human beings are well-behaved most of the time. You trust them to operate dangerous machinery, buy dangerous tools and equipment, and read about dangerous ideas. Occasionally, that trust is violated, someone goes crazy and people die, but that's the price of liberty. If you're not willing to have that trust in your fellow human beings, you don't want to live in a democracy, you want to live in the kind of totalitarian regime described in 1984 or Brave New World, imperfectly realized in the GDR and other states like that.
I object to the notion that it is the state's function to divide people into trustworthy and untrustworthy or to prevent its citizens from obtaining anything that might be dangerous to others. In different words, I don't want to own a gun, but I want the right to own a gun.
And this is different from having locks, fences, and armed police... how exactly?
No, ISPs are not police, they are private businesses and set their own rules and regulations.
No, it is not their "responsibility" in any legal sense. However, it is certainly prudent for them to think about it. It's prudent because it isn't anybody else's "responsibility" to accept mail from them either.
You have ISP customers that choose ISPs, you have ISPs that offer specific products, you have spam detection services that analyze ISPs and create spam lists. All the participants in this market are free to choose who they do business with. If the spam detection company does a good job, lots of ISPs will use it, if it does a bad job, ISPs will not use it because they will end up losing customers. I don't see any problem here that needs fixing, other than that ISPs and users actually both need to use their head.
Restraint of trade is about enforceability of contractual restrictions on trade that you agreed to; I don't see how that applies here.
Prop 37 was defeated in California, in part because nobody actually knows what "adequate labeling" would even mean. Adequate for what?
Peanuts also frequently contain aflatoxins (from mold).
About as many people die from food poisoning each year in the US as from murder. Threats come from parasites, bacteria, and viruses, and we keep discovering new ones and new ways of transmitting them; of course, as soon as we do, we try to eliminate them, but many of these used to be "normal components" of those foods. Occasionally, old foods are also discovered to have new toxicities, but that's rare. (The sweetener you are thinking of is lead acetate, not mercury oxide).
You're safe for the simple reason that, no matter how much warming AGW may cause, it would still take centuries for Antarctica to melt.
Sounds like you agree completely: Ada addressed a need in the 1980's that doesn't exist anymore; almost all our languages these days are type safe, and many have excellent static type systems that run rings around Ada's.
Here too you are pretty much saying what I'm saying: in statically typed languages, the compiler catches a lot of stuff for you, in dynamically typed languages you need to write more tests to achieve the same level of fault detection, and it ends up taking about the same amount of time overall. That means that statically typed languages are good for production but not prototyping, while dynamically typed languages are good for both prototyping and production, and furthermore let you transform a prototype into a production system gradually by adding tests. Anyway, use statically typed languages if you like, but Ada's static type system is really obsolete and unnecessarily cumbersome. (And please don't use "strong typing" when you mean "static typing".)
Citation? Or did you just pull that out of your ass? Coral reefs, in fact, only exist in very specialized locations. Losing them would be a shame, but it wouldn't kill "most" sea life. (Incidentally, ocean acidification has happened multiple times before in earth's history, so it's not a completely mystery what would happen.)
None of Ada's facilities have any bearing on the common kinds of bugs that cause web applications to leak private information. And the time you spend satisfying Ada's pointless static checks is time you don't have for developing meaningful security audits and test cases. So, given the same budget and time constraints, it is pretty much a given that an Ada based web application would be worse, not better, in terms of privacy and security. Ada tried to address a problem that really existed in the 1980's: the lack of an efficient, strongly typed language. That ceased to be a problem long ago, and Ada is kind of a relic now.
The oldest code I have written that's in production today is older than that; there's a chance you may actually have a few lines of my code on your machine.
Give it another decade or so of experience and perhaps you too will figure out why languages like Ada make the wrong tradeoffs.
I don't see anybody calling for Israel to be prevented from doing this. However, the rest of us can still comment on it, can't we?
Well, weapons checks, police presence, etc. is reality in German schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdytTZJhs40
Ada forces programmers to think about errors, but you pay a high price for that. If you have DoD-like budget, well-specified requirements, a project spanning decades, high reliability requirements, and a large pool of mediocre programmers, Ada is a good choice because that's what it was designed for. But most products are created by small teams of programmers, have a lifetime of a few years, don't need to be anywhere as reliable, and need to be able to accommodate new requirements on short notice.
cricket ... crickets ... crickets
Regular USB ports don't have enough power. Many USB chargers deliver extra power over regular USB connectors and cables, but regular connectors and cables cannot transmit arbitrary amounts of power safely. Also, people like to be able to dock and get power, audio, and video without having to connect extra cables. USB 3 provides pretty good answers to all of these issues (audio and video could just be transmitted via the USB protocol). Let's hope the next generations of phones and tablets offer USB 3.
That's a European law, and Apple is complying with it by including a USB-to-proprietary adapter in Europe (and probably jacking up the price a little too).
I'm glad ACTA didn't make it. But the copyright lobby in Europe remains extremely powerful. For example, in Germany, they have successfully pushed the government to try to implement a copyright on snippets. This follows a long list of pretty hair-raising special rights and fees that different failing industries managed to carve out for themselves. I think the successful fight against ACTA in Europe has less to do with a respect for liberties and privacy and more with simple economic realities: ACTA would primarily have benefited US companies doing business in Europe; European companies are already well protected by draconian European laws.
You don't need cloning for that. If you wanted a replacement body, you could start with any fetus and modify its immune system not to reject your brain. And for transplanting individual organs, there will likely be cheaper and simpler ways of (1) preventing rejection of foreign organs or (2) growing them from your own stem cells within a decade or so without having to go through the expense of cloning.