Yeah, "living document" was definitely a rhetorical fraud or at least a rhetorical mistake made at some point. The constitution is valueless if it can be simply interpreted
Welcome to living in a Commonlaw country. The snacks and dip are over there.
In this country we don't write our laws down in one place. Instead, we write down a framework of values which frame the laws and then bring several hundred years of precedent to bear on determining how that framework applies to any given situation. When the combination of precedent and framework doesn't suit our national discourse we pass laws to clarify.
To quote Wikipedia because I'm too tired to combat this nonsense anymore:
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Bush [...] was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas [...] As a child, Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he completed seventh grade. He then went to The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Houston, for two years. [...] and finished his high school years at Phillips Academy, a boarding school (then all-male) in Andover, Massachusetts
Yes, he's a Texan as much as I'm a New Englander, even though I was born in L.A. His family has spent a good deal of time in New England and Texas and it would be entirely fair for him to claim to be either.
Now, the contrary point is reasonable. You can certainly say that when Bush referred to people from the east coast as if he wasn't one of them that that was disingenuous because he was born here and spent much of his later educational years here.
It was satire of the recent Google CEO comment: If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, said Schmidt.
No, actually, that was just his lead-in to his actual point:
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
In other words, you have a CEO of a major, public corporation saying, "you can't trust us to keep your data private because, good intentions aside, the feds will slap us with a national security note and it's game over." Funny how I don't recall Yahoo!, Microsoft or any of the other major players pushing this point. Perhaps Google is the only one that gets these requests... or perhaps Schmidt is the only one telling you anything.
You would be surprised how little impact that has these days. Slashdot continues to be popular with its core demographic, but that Internet has grown by orders of magnitude since being Slashdotted meant something. Now, if this had been posted to a World of Warcraft forum...;-)
I'd happily take a few days of agony over potentially years of solitary confinement with who knows what diminished cognitive capacity and what kind of torment that would lead to.
Reasonable, but note that my argument was for a quick painless death vs. an agonizing one, not what you reference above.
I understand, and it's a reasonable thing. The problem is that what you suggest is illegal. The law gets murky when you talk about NOT providing medical care (e.g. turning off the machines), but doctors certainly do wander into a shitstorm of trouble if they actively kill a patient.
Do I think the laws should allow for doctors killing patients when they feel its in the patients' best interests? Maybe... It's a tough call because the potential for abuse is so high. But yes, in general terms, I do think there's a time and a place.
The BSD crowd shouldn't care about that, Apple can do almost what they want with the code. But for Linux not getting the drivers for 3D accelerators, SOC models or other kind of hardware, just because Google have to reinvent the wheel, is really sad.
You're confused.
This isn't a licensing issue. Google has released the code. What's being said here is that it can't be mainlined because it a) hasn't been updated with fixes requested by the Linux mainline developers and b) it relies on userland components that will cause it to fail to build without them and needs to be stubbed out appropriately so that that isn't a concern. Both the former and latter could be resolved by anyone who wants to resolve them. There is no licensing angle here.
Now, I should be clear. I believe that it's actually not Google but the Open Handset Alliance that controls Android, and that includes developers from Google and 64 other companies. So technically, this isn't something that Google alone could address.
Opt out is evil. It's evil when spammers do it and it's evil when google does it
If spammers provided a single opt-out for all spam ever that they actually obeyed, no one would be unhappy.
The reason opting out isn't workable is that you'd have to opt out of every spammers efforts and almost no spammers actually obey opt-out requests (some actually do, believe it or not, because they're not in the business of spamming, but rather of maintaining mailing lists of likely suckers, the value of which they increase by removing people who request it).
The only concern I'd have, here is if Google did get this through and then failed to share their opt-out list with other organizations that did the same. Now, I realize that the word "evil" just magically works its way into any conversation about Google, but are you really saying that you're willing to devalue that word by suggesting that Google is doing "evil" by creating a situation which relies on their ability to share information?!
I'd happily take a few days of agony over potentially years of solitary confinement with who knows what diminished cognitive capacity and what kind of torment that would lead to.
Today, you would probably have more luck getting disconnected if you just ignored the questions and pretended to be dead.
Of course, the astute doctor will realize this and convey to the patient what the stakes are and what the likely outcomes are before establishing the patient's state definitively. That way the patient can make an informed choice and simply remain silent if that's what they want.
Having read Johnny Got His Gun, I never want to live like that.
Remember we're talking about the android-specific driver code (not code for Android devices, but the android-specific drivers like their user-space configurable oom-killer) that clocks in around 2kloc.
they do regularly open source their products (though mostly minor ones, as you rightly pointed out)
And if we look at reality:
Conservatively, we've released about 14 million lines of code. Android tops 10 million lines of code, and then you have Chrome (2 million lines of code), GWT (300,000 lines of code), and about a project released every week over the last five years. Then you have a couple hundred Googlers patching on a weekly or monthly basis.
It's hard to imagine that doing a quick Google search (or Yahoo or Bing or whatever if you feel that there's a conflict of interest) would have hurt, here.
What's sad is that, here on Slashdot, we run with the worst possible interpretation of everything.
So, what started as one non-Google developer deleting some Android-specific drivers from Linux (mind you, leaving in massive amounts of upstreamed work from Google, this is just the small Android-specific bits) becomes "Google is abusing the open source community and is now evil."
Oh come on, was it really a surprise to anyone that Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't. All of their own sites, business and back-end technology is just as closed as Microsoft's.
Point 1) how is not pushing to mainline code "dropping out" of open source development exactly?
Point 2) The Common Android Kernel tree is browsable, and looks to be fairly easy for anyone to take advantage of. The complaint here seems to be that Google isn't putting in enough work to merge their Linux kernel changes into the mainline, not that they have failed to release anything in a usable way. I find it somewhat disingenuous to slap down an open source contributor for failing to do our work for us.
Point 3) Microsoft's services are just as open?! Great, where is Microsoft's instructions on how I can export all of my data from all of their services in open formats? Google provides that so I'm certain you're aware of where Microsoft publishes such information as well... Oh and while you're at it, how many open source projects do Microsoft projects contribute to? Python, Linux, and dozens of other existing projects get updates from Google and they've released more open source software of their own making than anyone else.
So, what company have you been watching that confused you so badly that you thought Google wasn't the single largest benefactor open source has?
The guy is talking about loudness, i.e. audio levels compression not audio data compression.
No, I don't think he is unless he was confused about what range compression does to audio. When someone says "compressed to shit," I don't think they're talking about dynamic range compression.
You seem to be confusing data compression with audio compression.
I'm not confused at all, but there was no way for me to be sure which was being discussed, so I responded to the one that seemed to make the most sense.
For years now, going back to the analogue days but increasingly over the past decade, audio has been "dynanic-range compressed" to increase the loudness of the song.
Correct.
Interestingly, however, dynamic range compression doesn't actually cause the problems the OP was suggesting. Thus, I turned to data compression which does, when over- or mis-used.
Tort reform is, and always has been, based on exagerrated claims by the insurance companies.
It's interesting that tort reform is the crux of the Republican response on health care.
It solves no problems for the Federal Government nor the people. What it does do is bring down the standard deviation in actuarial tables, which makes insurance more profitable overall.
So you have two proposals. One from the Democrats (actually several which have boiled down to two currently) that proposes stronger controls over insurance companies in order to control costs coming from an industry that has been refusing to cover millions of Americans while raking in unbelievable profits.
The other proposal is essentially crafted by the insurance companies for their benefit and handed to the Republicans.
I don't dislike Republicans, but honestly they're being dumb, here. They know we need to do something to control costs or we're going to go broke(r) and yet they take this poison pill from the insurance companies and smile. What the heck?! You know you can be a conservative and still tell big insurance where to shove it, right?
More importantly, why not lower the price? The economics, I suppose, come down to how much books compete on price rather than on marketing. I honestly don't know what drives the book market these days. Most of my fiction comes from TV or audio (like the tor.com short fiction podcast) and most of my non-fiction comes from Google Reader or technical sources, so I'm totally out of touch with how people shop for a book. Sure, I'll buy the occasional book at the recommendation of a friend, but I'm not the core demographic anymore. The real question is: who is?
Once that question is answered the price tag question should answer itself, and perhaps $15 is the right price-point. Who knows.
Agreed about decent production values on an album and the need for a studio. *BUT* let's face it the compression that happens in post-production these days makes modern music just as unlistenable as if it were recorded in a truck stop bathroom.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms. When I was young we listened to media that had far, far less fidelity than the music that I have access to today. There are lyrics that I can make out that I never could when I was young (and my hearing was better then).
This is the age-old debate that springs up whenever something new comes along. There's always the crowd that will claim they can "tell the difference" and then proceed to confuse that with the new product being inferior. As I pointed out to a friend who was arguing that vinyl was superior to digital music: of course you can tell the difference. The digital music doesn't skip or hiss. Everything else is colored by the fact that you know which one you're "supposed to like." It's like having a blind taste test between coke and orange juice.
I wrote a longish reply and somehow Slashdot ate it. It just disappeared from the page... sigh.
Anyway, the short of it is that it's a poor choice of words, but the fundamental issue is that you have a middle man in a relationship that no longer needs one. Artists could just go to online retailers now, but the retailers need to take on more of the tasks that publishers and labels have traditionally filled. I just bought myself a pile of Amazon stock because I believe that they understand this. We shall see....
I think it's pretty obvious that western democracies are less free and open than they were around the turn of the millennium.
No, I don't think that's obvious at all.
If we are supposed to set some kind of example for the world, we're doing a lousy job.
The prime example perhaps being USA:s increased and very public spreading of torture.
Which began in the 1990s when Rendition was established as a formal policy of the U.S. government, and let's not forget the School of the Americas in which 1960s-1990s leaders of repressive governments in Central and South America were trained in techniques of supressing their populations including interrogation, crowd and media control and surveillance.
The 00s are a backslide how? Or were you just not paying attention before 2000?
I'm not sure about the GPs analysis that it's all in the name (or spirit) of making more money.
Power (money being one form of power) is the root of all international discourse. There is, in fact, no need for such discourse except to extend, maintain or influence power. So yes, the claim that international abuse is about money (and other forms of power) is quite true.
A year of Pelosi and Reid blocking any Republican bill from the floor is "nonpartisan"? Including blocking THREE Republican health-care bills from discussion while lying their asses off claiming the Republicans were "not offering alternatives"???
This is a rather too often repeated bit of misinformation. The reality is that the fundamental difference between Republican "alternatives" and the health care bills proposed by democrats is that these alternatives were simply bills related to health care (not comprehensive health care alternatives), covered entirely or by one or more of the existing democratic bills. Thus, the functional proposal Republicans were making was: don't do that or, at best, don't do all of that.
There's nothing wrong with thinking we don't need to overhaul the health care system in the U.S. (I think it demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the math involved, since there's no way that the current levels of spending are maintainable, but it's a valid opinion). What's not valid is claiming that there's anything disingenuous in pointing out that these aren't actually alternatives so much as an oft-reiterated "no."
You don't bad-mouth your friends or people you need.
Why would business be any different?
Ah... so your claim, here, is that someone stayed silent? Didn't Google hold a press conference and threaten to pull out of China? Isn't that the ONLY reason we know this happened?
there has been significant progress made in the United States and across the world in regards to the treatment of humanity on an ethical and moral scale.
No, there has not.
I just don't buy it.
the fact remains that countless individuals and organizations refine and better our understanding of sociological problems on a yearly basis, yet world governments pay little to no regard to these developments.
As far as I can tell, this is a null statement. You've actually made no claim here that can be proved or disproved. Care to try again?
In a world that is always increasing its intellectual capabilities through technology, increasing its ability to disseminate academic information, increasing its ability to research, study, examine, and postulate different solutions to different problems, there is a moral and ethical decline in part of the governments, and it is in fact a regression, a back tracking, a one-step-forward-to-steps-back, because it seems regardless of any ideological developments being made, their implementation is residually ignored over time in leu of the motivation of profit.
Your thesis here seems to be "we can communicate better, so the fact that the world hasn't become a better place is an ethical regression." Unless I've misunderstood what you were trying to say, I think you've just re-defined all of your terminology in ways that are not compatible with English.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, "living document" was definitely a rhetorical fraud or at least a rhetorical mistake made at some point. The constitution is valueless if it can be simply interpreted
Welcome to living in a Commonlaw country. The snacks and dip are over there.
In this country we don't write our laws down in one place. Instead, we write down a framework of values which frame the laws and then bring several hundred years of precedent to bear on determining how that framework applies to any given situation. When the combination of precedent and framework doesn't suit our national discourse we pass laws to clarify.
Which country did you THINK you lived in?
To quote Wikipedia because I'm too tired to combat this nonsense anymore:
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Bush [...] was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas [...] As a child, Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he completed seventh grade. He then went to The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Houston, for two years. [...] and finished his high school years at Phillips Academy, a boarding school (then all-male) in Andover, Massachusetts
Yes, he's a Texan as much as I'm a New Englander, even though I was born in L.A. His family has spent a good deal of time in New England and Texas and it would be entirely fair for him to claim to be either.
Now, the contrary point is reasonable. You can certainly say that when Bush referred to people from the east coast as if he wasn't one of them that that was disingenuous because he was born here and spent much of his later educational years here.
It was satire of the recent Google CEO comment: If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, said Schmidt.
No, actually, that was just his lead-in to his actual point:
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
In other words, you have a CEO of a major, public corporation saying, "you can't trust us to keep your data private because, good intentions aside, the feds will slap us with a national security note and it's game over." Funny how I don't recall Yahoo!, Microsoft or any of the other major players pushing this point. Perhaps Google is the only one that gets these requests... or perhaps Schmidt is the only one telling you anything.
You would be surprised how little impact that has these days. Slashdot continues to be popular with its core demographic, but that Internet has grown by orders of magnitude since being Slashdotted meant something. Now, if this had been posted to a World of Warcraft forum... ;-)
I'd happily take a few days of agony over potentially years of solitary confinement with who knows what diminished cognitive capacity and what kind of torment that would lead to.
Reasonable, but note that my argument was for a quick painless death vs. an agonizing one, not what you reference above.
I understand, and it's a reasonable thing. The problem is that what you suggest is illegal. The law gets murky when you talk about NOT providing medical care (e.g. turning off the machines), but doctors certainly do wander into a shitstorm of trouble if they actively kill a patient.
Do I think the laws should allow for doctors killing patients when they feel its in the patients' best interests? Maybe... It's a tough call because the potential for abuse is so high. But yes, in general terms, I do think there's a time and a place.
The BSD crowd shouldn't care about that, Apple can do almost what they want with the code. But for Linux not getting the drivers for 3D accelerators, SOC models or other kind of hardware, just because Google have to reinvent the wheel, is really sad.
You're confused.
This isn't a licensing issue. Google has released the code. What's being said here is that it can't be mainlined because it a) hasn't been updated with fixes requested by the Linux mainline developers and b) it relies on userland components that will cause it to fail to build without them and needs to be stubbed out appropriately so that that isn't a concern. Both the former and latter could be resolved by anyone who wants to resolve them. There is no licensing angle here.
Now, I should be clear. I believe that it's actually not Google but the Open Handset Alliance that controls Android, and that includes developers from Google and 64 other companies. So technically, this isn't something that Google alone could address.
Opt out is evil. It's evil when spammers do it and it's evil when google does it
If spammers provided a single opt-out for all spam ever that they actually obeyed, no one would be unhappy.
The reason opting out isn't workable is that you'd have to opt out of every spammers efforts and almost no spammers actually obey opt-out requests (some actually do, believe it or not, because they're not in the business of spamming, but rather of maintaining mailing lists of likely suckers, the value of which they increase by removing people who request it).
The only concern I'd have, here is if Google did get this through and then failed to share their opt-out list with other organizations that did the same. Now, I realize that the word "evil" just magically works its way into any conversation about Google, but are you really saying that you're willing to devalue that word by suggesting that Google is doing "evil" by creating a situation which relies on their ability to share information?!
Actually, libraries are also in support of expanding access to orphaned works for their own use.
Save them from what?
Being dehydrated to death.
I'd happily take a few days of agony over potentially years of solitary confinement with who knows what diminished cognitive capacity and what kind of torment that would lead to.
Today, you would probably have more luck getting disconnected if you just ignored the questions and pretended to be dead.
Of course, the astute doctor will realize this and convey to the patient what the stakes are and what the likely outcomes are before establishing the patient's state definitively. That way the patient can make an informed choice and simply remain silent if that's what they want.
Having read Johnny Got His Gun, I never want to live like that.
Remember we're talking about the android-specific driver code (not code for Android devices, but the android-specific drivers like their user-space configurable oom-killer) that clocks in around 2kloc.
It's tiny and Slashdot is misleading. Film at 11.
they do regularly open source their products (though mostly minor ones, as you rightly pointed out)
And if we look at reality:
Conservatively, we've released about 14 million lines of code. Android tops 10 million lines of code, and then you have Chrome (2 million lines of code), GWT (300,000 lines of code), and about a project released every week over the last five years. Then you have a couple hundred Googlers patching on a weekly or monthly basis.
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10354530-16.html
It's hard to imagine that doing a quick Google search (or Yahoo or Bing or whatever if you feel that there's a conflict of interest) would have hurt, here.
Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra--"It's bullshit."
What's sad is that, here on Slashdot, we run with the worst possible interpretation of everything.
So, what started as one non-Google developer deleting some Android-specific drivers from Linux (mind you, leaving in massive amounts of upstreamed work from Google, this is just the small Android-specific bits) becomes "Google is abusing the open source community and is now evil."
Sad, just sad.
Oh come on, was it really a surprise to anyone that Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't. All of their own sites, business and back-end technology is just as closed as Microsoft's.
Point 1) how is not pushing to mainline code "dropping out" of open source development exactly?
Point 2) The Common Android Kernel tree is browsable, and looks to be fairly easy for anyone to take advantage of. The complaint here seems to be that Google isn't putting in enough work to merge their Linux kernel changes into the mainline, not that they have failed to release anything in a usable way. I find it somewhat disingenuous to slap down an open source contributor for failing to do our work for us.
Point 3) Microsoft's services are just as open?! Great, where is Microsoft's instructions on how I can export all of my data from all of their services in open formats? Google provides that so I'm certain you're aware of where Microsoft publishes such information as well... Oh and while you're at it, how many open source projects do Microsoft projects contribute to? Python, Linux, and dozens of other existing projects get updates from Google and they've released more open source software of their own making than anyone else.
So, what company have you been watching that confused you so badly that you thought Google wasn't the single largest benefactor open source has?
The guy is talking about loudness, i.e. audio levels compression not audio data compression.
No, I don't think he is unless he was confused about what range compression does to audio. When someone says "compressed to shit," I don't think they're talking about dynamic range compression.
You seem to be confusing data compression with audio compression.
I'm not confused at all, but there was no way for me to be sure which was being discussed, so I responded to the one that seemed to make the most sense.
For years now, going back to the analogue days but increasingly over the past decade, audio has been "dynanic-range compressed" to increase the loudness of the song.
Correct.
Interestingly, however, dynamic range compression doesn't actually cause the problems the OP was suggesting. Thus, I turned to data compression which does, when over- or mis-used.
Tort reform is, and always has been, based on exagerrated claims by the insurance companies.
It's interesting that tort reform is the crux of the Republican response on health care.
It solves no problems for the Federal Government nor the people. What it does do is bring down the standard deviation in actuarial tables, which makes insurance more profitable overall.
So you have two proposals. One from the Democrats (actually several which have boiled down to two currently) that proposes stronger controls over insurance companies in order to control costs coming from an industry that has been refusing to cover millions of Americans while raking in unbelievable profits.
The other proposal is essentially crafted by the insurance companies for their benefit and handed to the Republicans.
I don't dislike Republicans, but honestly they're being dumb, here. They know we need to do something to control costs or we're going to go broke(r) and yet they take this poison pill from the insurance companies and smile. What the heck?! You know you can be a conservative and still tell big insurance where to shove it, right?
Since you've proven [...] that you never read the alternative bills [...] The Democrats' bill was
Which one? Oh right, you didn't bother to read them.
Most of the republican initiatives were never made public, but they've summarized what they did at:
http://www.gop.gov/solutions/healthcare
And what I said holds true with respect to what they've made public.
Your ball, sir.
More importantly, why not lower the price? The economics, I suppose, come down to how much books compete on price rather than on marketing. I honestly don't know what drives the book market these days. Most of my fiction comes from TV or audio (like the tor.com short fiction podcast) and most of my non-fiction comes from Google Reader or technical sources, so I'm totally out of touch with how people shop for a book. Sure, I'll buy the occasional book at the recommendation of a friend, but I'm not the core demographic anymore. The real question is: who is?
Once that question is answered the price tag question should answer itself, and perhaps $15 is the right price-point. Who knows.
Agreed about decent production values on an album and the need for a studio. *BUT* let's face it the compression that happens in post-production these days makes modern music just as unlistenable as if it were recorded in a truck stop bathroom.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms. When I was young we listened to media that had far, far less fidelity than the music that I have access to today. There are lyrics that I can make out that I never could when I was young (and my hearing was better then).
This is the age-old debate that springs up whenever something new comes along. There's always the crowd that will claim they can "tell the difference" and then proceed to confuse that with the new product being inferior. As I pointed out to a friend who was arguing that vinyl was superior to digital music: of course you can tell the difference. The digital music doesn't skip or hiss. Everything else is colored by the fact that you know which one you're "supposed to like." It's like having a blind taste test between coke and orange juice.
I wrote a longish reply and somehow Slashdot ate it. It just disappeared from the page... sigh.
Anyway, the short of it is that it's a poor choice of words, but the fundamental issue is that you have a middle man in a relationship that no longer needs one. Artists could just go to online retailers now, but the retailers need to take on more of the tasks that publishers and labels have traditionally filled. I just bought myself a pile of Amazon stock because I believe that they understand this. We shall see....
I think it's pretty obvious that western democracies are less free and open than they were around the turn of the millennium.
No, I don't think that's obvious at all.
If we are supposed to set some kind of example for the world, we're doing a lousy job.
The prime example perhaps being USA:s increased and very public spreading of torture.
Which began in the 1990s when Rendition was established as a formal policy of the U.S. government, and let's not forget the School of the Americas in which 1960s-1990s leaders of repressive governments in Central and South America were trained in techniques of supressing their populations including interrogation, crowd and media control and surveillance.
The 00s are a backslide how? Or were you just not paying attention before 2000?
I'm not sure about the GPs analysis that it's all in the name (or spirit) of making more money.
Power (money being one form of power) is the root of all international discourse. There is, in fact, no need for such discourse except to extend, maintain or influence power. So yes, the claim that international abuse is about money (and other forms of power) is quite true.
A year of Pelosi and Reid blocking any Republican bill from the floor is "nonpartisan"? Including blocking THREE Republican health-care bills from discussion while lying their asses off claiming the Republicans were "not offering alternatives"???
This is a rather too often repeated bit of misinformation. The reality is that the fundamental difference between Republican "alternatives" and the health care bills proposed by democrats is that these alternatives were simply bills related to health care (not comprehensive health care alternatives), covered entirely or by one or more of the existing democratic bills. Thus, the functional proposal Republicans were making was: don't do that or, at best, don't do all of that.
There's nothing wrong with thinking we don't need to overhaul the health care system in the U.S. (I think it demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the math involved, since there's no way that the current levels of spending are maintainable, but it's a valid opinion). What's not valid is claiming that there's anything disingenuous in pointing out that these aren't actually alternatives so much as an oft-reiterated "no."
You don't bad-mouth your friends or people you need.
Why would business be any different?
Ah... so your claim, here, is that someone stayed silent? Didn't Google hold a press conference and threaten to pull out of China? Isn't that the ONLY reason we know this happened?
there has been significant progress made in the United States and across the world in regards to the treatment of humanity on an ethical and moral scale.
No, there has not.
I just don't buy it.
the fact remains that countless individuals and organizations refine and better our understanding of sociological problems on a yearly basis, yet world governments pay little to no regard to these developments.
As far as I can tell, this is a null statement. You've actually made no claim here that can be proved or disproved. Care to try again?
In a world that is always increasing its intellectual capabilities through technology, increasing its ability to disseminate academic information, increasing its ability to research, study, examine, and postulate different solutions to different problems, there is a moral and ethical decline in part of the governments, and it is in fact a regression, a back tracking, a one-step-forward-to-steps-back, because it seems regardless of any ideological developments being made, their implementation is residually ignored over time in leu of the motivation of profit.
Your thesis here seems to be "we can communicate better, so the fact that the world hasn't become a better place is an ethical regression." Unless I've misunderstood what you were trying to say, I think you've just re-defined all of your terminology in ways that are not compatible with English.