Of course, such a device has to be under the control of the customer. Not the ISP.
This can easily be rolled into a little box that gets updates regularly from its maker, with the current markers for bot traffic, not unlike how we deal with malware on computers already. Just that this time the box is not prone to user idiocy, clicking "yeah, go on" whenever some trojan wants a new home.
So on the one hand, you say you want to put control into the hands of the user to avoid the ISPs. Then you follow that by saying you want to put control into the hands of the maker to avoid the idiocy of the users.
This doesn't quite make sense to me. Why should we assume the makers of an anti-botnet box are any better than ISPs?
Well, to start with, the ISP can cut you off from the internet, possibly with a false allegation. The maker of the bot detection box can... stop sending you updates? If you have problems with the box, you probably have more choice than with your ISP, not to mention that you can just remove the box from teh loop if it is giving you problems. It is much harder to remove your ISP from the loop, particularly when they are the only service provider in your area...
As for Global Warming, I think statistics and physics have proven quite nicely much of these climate change theories are on the right track. The planet is getting warmer overall - it's a fact. That's not to say the ice caps will melt [...]
Why not? There were no ice-caps in the times of the dinosaurs and with the warm wet climate there was a huge amount of biological diversity.
Might as well hang on and invest in a good air conditioner...and then heater when we inevitably dip back into an ice age.
We have been in an ice-age for the whole of human history, it would be nice to get warmer again. "Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.[1] By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
Too much of our water is locked up in ice and these cold temperatures limit the useful productivity of our main energy harvesting system(chlorophyll). The fact that this ice-age seems to go on for ever may just be our short human memory, and perhaps it is related to the gradual decline in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere since the middle of the mesozoic. ( http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html )
In any case, while melting the ice-caps would no doubt be a substantial blow to a lot of infrastructure, we as humans would adapt and go on. Also, once the planet has warmed up a little we should have a veritable explosion in vegetative productivity and then general biological diversity as there is more and more energy available so that species that are less efficient can still procreate thus increasing the amount of genetic drift.
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
This. I play paper and pencil games with someone who had his department basically cut in half. Over the past few months a lot of their tasks were made more automated and they were being sent home early due to a lack of work. Apparently there was a cost/productivity metric that was calculated for each of them and the more expensive ones were let go. And according to him, the severance packages were nice enough that it was clear that this was not a 'we can't afford you any more' type situation.
So... knowingly screwing future generations to buy votes in the current round of elections(and perhaps the next few rounds as well) is not fraud? I am not sure either way on the technicalities, but it sure sounds close enough for that to be a useful label. I rather expect that if a private company tried to run a retirement system the way social security is run, that that company would probably be shut down for fraud.
If you want to find intentional fraud, take a good hard look at the notion that the average working person has sufficient excess income AND sufficient investment expertise AND sufficient good luck to not have the economy and those investments collapse right before retirement.
Um, there has never been an 18 month period where the stock market is down. Even at the lowest point of the stock crashes, they are still higher than they were a year and a half prior.(this is not the case for individual stocks, but it has been true for the market as a whole, and can be seen in large indexes like the DJIA) Safe investing is easy, just buy one or more of the index funds that get shown on the news every night from a big-name investment company. You can try to do better than that if you like, but broad index funds are the safe-bet.
A whole new area of spectrum is only needed if you are broadcasting at powers that blanket the whole countryside.
Cellular towers have a certain pattern of spectrum reuse (I think the standard pattern requires 8 sets of distinct frequencies), so if you need more bandwidth in a certain area, just make the towers closer together(they already do this in cities vs the countryside, you need not even change the operating voltage). As an added benefit, the phones will use less power because the tower will be closer and have a stronger signal.
It may bee 'too expensive' to provide the improved coverage needed to handle the bandwidth requirements, but there is no real technical reason they could not do it with the bandwidth already in use...
... then you are going to end up defining sports fans as being a religion...
I take it that you have never been to Texas. Football *is* the state religion.
Just because most of those fans also attend one church or another does not make their devotion for football any less.
The non-religious version of atheism would be called 'Agnostic' (as in don't know/don't care) Otherwise you have a system of belief with regards to one or more deities. (in this case a system that says that all deities do not exist)
Actually, from what I understand, the vast majority of SUVs are driven by small females. Especially the really big ones. I am a pretty big guy who does not fit into compact cars, and one time I was out car shopping, frustrated with not finding anything I could safely drive without having my legs cut off at the knee, I thought I would try to see if an SUV would fit. I tried a few that had even less leg room than the cars I had been looking at, then I tried the really big one(like 7' tall I think) and I could not even close the door because my legs did not fit inside the vehicle. On top of that, all of the SUVs I looked at had the optional feature of bringing the pedals up closer to the driver in case they have short legs. It seems that the expected driver size-range for an SUV is from 4'6" to 5'6", with the larger vehicles aimed at the smaller frames.
(Since then I have discovered that used luxury sedans are about as cheap as I can get if I want a vehicle that actually fits me, the only other option being vans)
Obviously life would just *seem* longer. No electronic games, toiling sun up to sun down, staying up all night to keep watch for hostiles who want the fruits of your labor, watching baby after baby die from lack of food, clean water or medicine, burying 3/4 of your children before they get to be of marriageable age(this would go back down to 14-15, possibly younger).
Sure you won't actually live as long, but look at all of those experiences you will have to make it *seem* like unending drudgery!
No more of this 'time flies when you are having fun', unless perhaps you enjoy watching your pa cut the head off that chicken that got too old to lay eggs so you can watch it run around spurting blood everywhere.
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Well, they could always just put up more towers. In rural areas they are more widely spaced because they have fewer users to service. In urban areas they are more closely spaced to handle the higher load. I know of no reason besides cost to not put one up every city block, more for dense places like New York. Can't provide enough service in this area? Make the coverage denser in that area.
Every few months I speculate that perhaps some day I will go through the bother of getting a digital converter so that my rabbit ears will work again.(never had cable or satellite TV)
Then I kill the impulse with a DVD or some Netflix.
(I may not be up to date on this, but as far as I know one cannot simply download video from Netflix and watch it on a laptop).
Streaming Netflix to a computer is easier than streaming to your TV(the browsing interface is easier to use than using my WII for example) Last I checked it is also available for a variety of mobile platforms(pads and phones). Sure you need internet access, but that is not particularly hard to come by unless you are in a cellular dead zone...
In Quozl, it was not games specifically, it was all of their art. From still-life to video to a form of social competition that involves martial arts counting coup where you try to almost hit and any actual contact is a shaming loss. No doubt due in part to the aliens all experiencing a sort of blood-rage where drawing blood/having blood drawn will send them into a homicidal rage unless they exercise the control to prevent it. (one of the main characters must fight down this rage after being scratched by a rival)
Then again, they also consider it unhealthy to have sex less than 3-4 times a day, usually with virtual strangers.(only social out-casts must make do with 1-2 times a day, which is considered inadequate for proper mental health)
I thought the point was to help until you didn't need help anymore.
Since when? That is just what they say to the people who don't like it. Everyone knows the primary reason for every type of 'social security' is to buy votes and lock those voters in so that they are afraid to vote for anyone else lest they 'lose everything'
Why else would they extend unemployment benefits again and again, so that they end just after the next election?
Sure each individual program has a shallow ramp so that if you are only on one program you can slowly climb out of the program until you no longer qualify, but people are usually not on just one program. If you are on food stamps, housing assistance, and medicaid, then above a rather small level of income, you lose perhaps $1.50 in benefits for every extra dollar you earn.
And you dare not vote for anyone who would do anything except add more funding to those programs, lest you risk losing your benefits.
Also, it does not matter how much you fund such programs, because anything that is not immediately handed out will be lost to waste/graft/inefficiency/bureaucracy causing any increase in demand, or even a return to previous levels after reduced demand, to be 'more than we can afford with current funding'.
Sure IP is important, but by no means the last thing the US has to export.
IP just shows up disproportionately in the news because it is a sizable revenue stream based on an artificial scarcity that is rapidly evaporating, so if they spend 80% of their revenue on laws to slow that evaporation, that is still profitable for the owners.(or at least their lawyers)
The 'flat tax' as being referenced here is a specific percent(20-30%, 50% and 55% have all been mentioned)
So long as you somehow block the ability of the rich to pay for tax-loopholes, it it is neither progressive nor regressive, everyone pays the same percentage.
Why not just do a re-set on the existing tax code like Regan did? Wipe the slate clean and start with just a definition of the levels and rates(and by getting rid of all the exceptions you can lower most of the base rates). Congress will just start adding exceptions again, but if we do it often enough it will eventually no longer be cost-effective to do so.
If you can develop an explanation on how and why everyone must sacrifice to the common good that is understandable and acceptable to: a) a moron b) a small child c) an intellectual who will pick apart every aspect of your argument d) someone who is suffering for the betterment of their neighbors due to your system e) the intellectually lazy f) someone who feels they have been wronged and wants to kill the SOB who wronged them(such as a father who had his daughter tortured, raped and murdered) g) a parent who's child will die because there are not enough organs/resources/etc to save them
And does not resort to anything that cannot be unequivocally proven by easily reproduced experiments even when performed by those hoping to disprove your arguments, more power to you.
If you can convince the intellectually lazy to think about your arguments instead of just doing what comes easy, great for you.
You can then build up a society where faith in your fellow man does not rely on a fear of supernatural punishment. Perhaps you can even do it with fewer problems than any religion-based system tried to date, but forgive me if I don't hold my breath.
On the other hand, if you want a system that works in the real world and with real people, you will probably need to resort to an argument form authority from time to time, and that works best with the highest possible authority.
In any case, what makes you so certain that they are lies? There is no proof one way or the other, so you cannot make a definite claim that there is not some extra-dimensional being who caused this universe to come into being, even if it is just the janitor at some computer-simulation center who plugged the system back in after he tripped over the cord.
While I understand that there is no scientific proof for the existence of an omnipotent deity, and that by Occam's razor the likely case is that there is no such hyper-dimensional entity, I still support organized religion.
Most people are intellectually lazy and do not bother to spend a great deal of time contemplating philosophy or the underpinnings of civilization. Most people also do not understand the concept of an opportunity cost and are bad at judging the actual risk involved in a low-probability high-cost scenario. Also, generally speaking, biological organisms are greedy and selfish(with various exceptions for family/offspring/symbiosis).
Put these together and what reason does the hungry man have not to kill you for your sandwich? If he gets away with shop-lifting a few times, why should he not continue? The same with robbery, assault, murder, etc.
Assuming that the 10% least intelligent do not really understand the consequences of being put in jail or the risk of being caught and all that that entails, what is to stop them if there is not some all-knowing being out there that knows everything that they do and will make sure that they will get punished for such actions?
Simply put civilization as we know it is built on a scaffold of morality that is constructed of faith and held together by organized religion. Some people have the philosophical understanding of how we all benefit by following the rule of law, many lack that level of understanding and rely primarily on their faith that bad people will be punished for doing bad things.
Not all religions are created equal, but the 'good' ones are those that cause a general improvement in the human condition. There will of course be lapses, any organization run by humans will have problems, but in general, the positive effects of organized religion far outweigh the costs. (remember, back when there was no 'one true god' most 'civilizations' believed it was just to kill over an insult, and wipe out an entire family to avenge a death)
And if you break you leg the first day on the construction job? You haven't had time to 'provide' for yourself yet. What do you do?
Same thing you would do if you accidentally crashed your car and could not afford another one out of pocket: Get a loan to fix things based on the income you will earn once things are fixed.
Now that is hardly fair, in 100 miles you are bound to cross dozens of creeks. You can tell because the average grain-size is nearly twice that of the surrounding area... and there is a very slight dip.(the likelihood of finding one with actual water in it can be dismissed as noise)
As an aside, it'll be quite fascinating to see what impact this has on the heavy-lift debate currently going on in Congress. For those unfamiliar with it, Congress is currently trying to pressure NASA to spend several billion dollars of its funding over several years into building a 70mt rocket from shuttle-legacy components/infrastructure. It's now looking like SpaceX will build a rocket with nearly the same capability using its own funding, which will be ready to launch several years before the Congress-mandated rocket. Hmm.
That project is about jobs in some congress-critters district. If this is seen as a threat to those jobs then the congress-critter will probably change the criteria just enough so that this is not suitable. Hopefully the fact that it is privately funded will prevent having this project interfered with as one method of making it unsuitable.
It's only called class warfare when the lower class fights back. Otherwise, it's what, "measures to ensure profitability"?
RE: taxation - I only agree because the top 10% pays zero (ZERO) taxes in America, with our 35% tax rate.
Making that more sane is the first step, but no matter what happens corporations have to step up and pay for doing business in America. Period.
Really? According to the 2005 tax data released by the IRS, the top 1% of wage earners pay 39% of all income tax paid in the US. and the top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of all income tax paid in the united states.
I can only assume that when you say the 'top 10%' you are not talking about the wage earners but instead are talking about people on trust-funds, or living off investments. (I doubt Paris Hilton pays much income tax for example)
Which was nobody's business other than Bill and Hillary. Bill getting a blowjob was not the conspiracy she was talking about. Turning that blowjob into the country's business, and trying to impeach him... that's the conspiracy she was talking about.
If Bill had some mistress he went to go see on the weekends, that is between him and his wife unless he ran on some moral high-ground(as far as I remember he did not, and so would be fine).
If the President coaxes an intern who has volunteered to help server her country into performing sexual acts with him in the oval office while they are both supposedly 'on the clock', that sounds a lot more like misuse of presidential authority to me.
I see this as the difference between your boss trying to fire you because you took a vacation to Vegas and slept with a hooker, as opposed to trying to fire you because you have been having sex in your office with your secretary.
One is misusing your own resources(buying a prostitute), the other is misusing the resources the company gave you(office, position, secretary), and probably on 'company time' to boot.
With the stated reason of: "so that users can trust their service", the important part is being able to examine the source-code. Admittedly the GWT generated JavaScript is not very reader-friendly, but it is all there for you to look at if you should choose.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, such a device has to be under the control of the customer. Not the ISP.
This can easily be rolled into a little box that gets updates regularly from its maker, with the current markers for bot traffic, not unlike how we deal with malware on computers already. Just that this time the box is not prone to user idiocy, clicking "yeah, go on" whenever some trojan wants a new home.
So on the one hand, you say you want to put control into the hands of the user to avoid the ISPs. Then you follow that by saying you want to put control into the hands of the maker to avoid the idiocy of the users.
This doesn't quite make sense to me. Why should we assume the makers of an anti-botnet box are any better than ISPs?
Well, to start with, the ISP can cut you off from the internet, possibly with a false allegation.
The maker of the bot detection box can... stop sending you updates?
If you have problems with the box, you probably have more choice than with your ISP, not to mention that you can just remove the box from teh loop if it is giving you problems.
It is much harder to remove your ISP from the loop, particularly when they are the only service provider in your area...
As for Global Warming, I think statistics and physics have proven quite nicely much of these climate change theories are on the right track. The planet is getting warmer overall - it's a fact. That's not to say the ice caps will melt [...]
Why not?
There were no ice-caps in the times of the dinosaurs and with the warm wet climate there was a huge amount of biological diversity.
Might as well hang on and invest in a good air conditioner...and then heater when we inevitably dip back into an ice age.
We have been in an ice-age for the whole of human history, it would be nice to get warmer again.
"Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.[1] By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
Too much of our water is locked up in ice and these cold temperatures limit the useful productivity of our main energy harvesting system(chlorophyll).
The fact that this ice-age seems to go on for ever may just be our short human memory, and perhaps it is related to the gradual decline in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere since the middle of the mesozoic. ( http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html )
In any case, while melting the ice-caps would no doubt be a substantial blow to a lot of infrastructure, we as humans would adapt and go on. Also, once the planet has warmed up a little we should have a veritable explosion in vegetative productivity and then general biological diversity as there is more and more energy available so that species that are less efficient can still procreate thus increasing the amount of genetic drift.
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
This.
I play paper and pencil games with someone who had his department basically cut in half.
Over the past few months a lot of their tasks were made more automated and they were being sent home early due to a lack of work.
Apparently there was a cost/productivity metric that was calculated for each of them and the more expensive ones were let go.
And according to him, the severance packages were nice enough that it was clear that this was not a 'we can't afford you any more' type situation.
Ponzi schemes are intentional fraud.
So... knowingly screwing future generations to buy votes in the current round of elections(and perhaps the next few rounds as well) is not fraud?
I am not sure either way on the technicalities, but it sure sounds close enough for that to be a useful label.
I rather expect that if a private company tried to run a retirement system the way social security is run, that that company would probably be shut down for fraud.
If you want to find intentional fraud, take a good hard look at the notion that the average working person has sufficient excess income AND sufficient investment expertise AND sufficient good luck to not have the economy and those investments collapse right before retirement.
Um, there has never been an 18 month period where the stock market is down. Even at the lowest point of the stock crashes, they are still higher than they were a year and a half prior.(this is not the case for individual stocks, but it has been true for the market as a whole, and can be seen in large indexes like the DJIA)
Safe investing is easy, just buy one or more of the index funds that get shown on the news every night from a big-name investment company. You can try to do better than that if you like, but broad index funds are the safe-bet.
A whole new area of spectrum is only needed if you are broadcasting at powers that blanket the whole countryside.
Cellular towers have a certain pattern of spectrum reuse (I think the standard pattern requires 8 sets of distinct frequencies), so if you need more bandwidth in a certain area, just make the towers closer together(they already do this in cities vs the countryside, you need not even change the operating voltage). As an added benefit, the phones will use less power because the tower will be closer and have a stronger signal.
It may bee 'too expensive' to provide the improved coverage needed to handle the bandwidth requirements, but there is no real technical reason they could not do it with the bandwidth already in use...
... then you are going to end up defining sports fans as being a religion ...
I take it that you have never been to Texas.
Football *is* the state religion.
Just because most of those fans also attend one church or another does not make their devotion for football any less.
The non-religious version of atheism would be called 'Agnostic' (as in don't know/don't care)
Otherwise you have a system of belief with regards to one or more deities. (in this case a system that says that all deities do not exist)
Actually, from what I understand, the vast majority of SUVs are driven by small females. Especially the really big ones.
I am a pretty big guy who does not fit into compact cars, and one time I was out car shopping, frustrated with not finding anything I could safely drive without having my legs cut off at the knee, I thought I would try to see if an SUV would fit.
I tried a few that had even less leg room than the cars I had been looking at, then I tried the really big one(like 7' tall I think) and I could not even close the door because my legs did not fit inside the vehicle.
On top of that, all of the SUVs I looked at had the optional feature of bringing the pedals up closer to the driver in case they have short legs.
It seems that the expected driver size-range for an SUV is from 4'6" to 5'6", with the larger vehicles aimed at the smaller frames.
(Since then I have discovered that used luxury sedans are about as cheap as I can get if I want a vehicle that actually fits me, the only other option being vans)
Obviously life would just *seem* longer.
No electronic games, toiling sun up to sun down, staying up all night to keep watch for hostiles who want the fruits of your labor, watching baby after baby die from lack of food, clean water or medicine, burying 3/4 of your children before they get to be of marriageable age(this would go back down to 14-15, possibly younger).
Sure you won't actually live as long, but look at all of those experiences you will have to make it *seem* like unending drudgery!
No more of this 'time flies when you are having fun', unless perhaps you enjoy watching your pa cut the head off that chicken that got too old to lay eggs so you can watch it run around spurting blood everywhere.
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Well, they could always just put up more towers.
In rural areas they are more widely spaced because they have fewer users to service.
In urban areas they are more closely spaced to handle the higher load.
I know of no reason besides cost to not put one up every city block, more for dense places like New York.
Can't provide enough service in this area? Make the coverage denser in that area.
Every few months I speculate that perhaps some day I will go through the bother of getting a digital converter so that my rabbit ears will work again.(never had cable or satellite TV)
Then I kill the impulse with a DVD or some Netflix.
Without an absolute unit of measurement "%" means almost nothing. If I had a wii it would probably be used almost 100% for streaming.
Wait, are you saying my Wii can do something other than stream Netflix?
Hmm, that might explain why those Wii branded optical disks don't seem to work in my DVD player...
(I may not be up to date on this, but as far as I know one cannot simply download video from Netflix and watch it on a laptop).
Streaming Netflix to a computer is easier than streaming to your TV(the browsing interface is easier to use than using my WII for example)
Last I checked it is also available for a variety of mobile platforms(pads and phones).
Sure you need internet access, but that is not particularly hard to come by unless you are in a cellular dead zone...
In Quozl, it was not games specifically, it was all of their art. From still-life to video to a form of social competition that involves martial arts counting coup where you try to almost hit and any actual contact is a shaming loss.
No doubt due in part to the aliens all experiencing a sort of blood-rage where drawing blood/having blood drawn will send them into a homicidal rage unless they exercise the control to prevent it. (one of the main characters must fight down this rage after being scratched by a rival)
Then again, they also consider it unhealthy to have sex less than 3-4 times a day, usually with virtual strangers.(only social out-casts must make do with 1-2 times a day, which is considered inadequate for proper mental health)
I thought the point was to help until you didn't need help anymore.
Since when?
That is just what they say to the people who don't like it.
Everyone knows the primary reason for every type of 'social security' is to buy votes and lock those voters in so that they are afraid to vote for anyone else lest they 'lose everything'
Why else would they extend unemployment benefits again and again, so that they end just after the next election?
Sure each individual program has a shallow ramp so that if you are only on one program you can slowly climb out of the program until you no longer qualify, but people are usually not on just one program. If you are on food stamps, housing assistance, and medicaid, then above a rather small level of income, you lose perhaps $1.50 in benefits for every extra dollar you earn.
And you dare not vote for anyone who would do anything except add more funding to those programs, lest you risk losing your benefits.
Also, it does not matter how much you fund such programs, because anything that is not immediately handed out will be lost to waste/graft/inefficiency/bureaucracy causing any increase in demand, or even a return to previous levels after reduced demand, to be 'more than we can afford with current funding'.
IP licensing revenue is estimated between $100B and $200B annually
http://dcipattorney.com/2010/12/the-us173-4b-global-intellectual-property-marketplace/
US Manufacturing was _Measured_ at just under 1.7T in 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41349653/ns/business-us_business/t/despite-chinas-might-us-factories-maintain-edge/
Sure IP is important, but by no means the last thing the US has to export.
IP just shows up disproportionately in the news because it is a sizable revenue stream based on an artificial scarcity that is rapidly evaporating, so if they spend 80% of their revenue on laws to slow that evaporation, that is still profitable for the owners.(or at least their lawyers)
The 'flat tax' as being referenced here is a specific percent(20-30%, 50% and 55% have all been mentioned)
So long as you somehow block the ability of the rich to pay for tax-loopholes, it it is neither progressive nor regressive, everyone pays the same percentage.
Why not just do a re-set on the existing tax code like Regan did?
Wipe the slate clean and start with just a definition of the levels and rates(and by getting rid of all the exceptions you can lower most of the base rates). Congress will just start adding exceptions again, but if we do it often enough it will eventually no longer be cost-effective to do so.
If you can develop an explanation on how and why everyone must sacrifice to the common good that is understandable and acceptable to:
a) a moron
b) a small child
c) an intellectual who will pick apart every aspect of your argument
d) someone who is suffering for the betterment of their neighbors due to your system
e) the intellectually lazy
f) someone who feels they have been wronged and wants to kill the SOB who wronged them(such as a father who had his daughter tortured, raped and murdered)
g) a parent who's child will die because there are not enough organs/resources/etc to save them
And does not resort to anything that cannot be unequivocally proven by easily reproduced experiments even when performed by those hoping to disprove your arguments, more power to you.
If you can convince the intellectually lazy to think about your arguments instead of just doing what comes easy, great for you.
You can then build up a society where faith in your fellow man does not rely on a fear of supernatural punishment. Perhaps you can even do it with fewer problems than any religion-based system tried to date, but forgive me if I don't hold my breath.
On the other hand, if you want a system that works in the real world and with real people, you will probably need to resort to an argument form authority from time to time, and that works best with the highest possible authority.
In any case, what makes you so certain that they are lies? There is no proof one way or the other, so you cannot make a definite claim that there is not some extra-dimensional being who caused this universe to come into being, even if it is just the janitor at some computer-simulation center who plugged the system back in after he tripped over the cord.
While I understand that there is no scientific proof for the existence of an omnipotent deity, and that by Occam's razor the likely case is that there is no such hyper-dimensional entity, I still support organized religion.
Most people are intellectually lazy and do not bother to spend a great deal of time contemplating philosophy or the underpinnings of civilization.
Most people also do not understand the concept of an opportunity cost and are bad at judging the actual risk involved in a low-probability high-cost scenario.
Also, generally speaking, biological organisms are greedy and selfish(with various exceptions for family/offspring/symbiosis).
Put these together and what reason does the hungry man have not to kill you for your sandwich?
If he gets away with shop-lifting a few times, why should he not continue?
The same with robbery, assault, murder, etc.
Assuming that the 10% least intelligent do not really understand the consequences of being put in jail or the risk of being caught and all that that entails, what is to stop them if there is not some all-knowing being out there that knows everything that they do and will make sure that they will get punished for such actions?
Simply put civilization as we know it is built on a scaffold of morality that is constructed of faith and held together by organized religion.
Some people have the philosophical understanding of how we all benefit by following the rule of law, many lack that level of understanding and rely primarily on their faith that bad people will be punished for doing bad things.
Not all religions are created equal, but the 'good' ones are those that cause a general improvement in the human condition.
There will of course be lapses, any organization run by humans will have problems, but in general, the positive effects of organized religion far outweigh the costs.
(remember, back when there was no 'one true god' most 'civilizations' believed it was just to kill over an insult, and wipe out an entire family to avenge a death)
And if you break you leg the first day on the construction job? You haven't had time to 'provide' for yourself yet. What do you do?
Same thing you would do if you accidentally crashed your car and could not afford another one out of pocket:
Get a loan to fix things based on the income you will earn once things are fixed.
Now that is hardly fair, in 100 miles you are bound to cross dozens of creeks. You can tell because the average grain-size is nearly twice that of the surrounding area... and there is a very slight dip.(the likelihood of finding one with actual water in it can be dismissed as noise)
The metal is heated over a fire and folded, adding little bits of carbon to it.
Really they discovered a low-tech way of making high-carbon steel.
As an aside, it'll be quite fascinating to see what impact this has on the heavy-lift debate currently going on in Congress. For those unfamiliar with it, Congress is currently trying to pressure NASA to spend several billion dollars of its funding over several years into building a 70mt rocket from shuttle-legacy components/infrastructure. It's now looking like SpaceX will build a rocket with nearly the same capability using its own funding, which will be ready to launch several years before the Congress-mandated rocket. Hmm.
That project is about jobs in some congress-critters district.
If this is seen as a threat to those jobs then the congress-critter will probably change the criteria just enough so that this is not suitable.
Hopefully the fact that it is privately funded will prevent having this project interfered with as one method of making it unsuitable.
It's only called class warfare when the lower class fights back. Otherwise, it's what, "measures to ensure profitability"?
RE: taxation - I only agree because the top 10% pays zero (ZERO) taxes in America, with our 35% tax rate.
Making that more sane is the first step, but no matter what happens corporations have to step up and pay for doing business in America. Period.
Really?
According to the 2005 tax data released by the IRS, the top 1% of wage earners pay 39% of all income tax paid in the US.
and the top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of all income tax paid in the united states.
I can only assume that when you say the 'top 10%' you are not talking about the wage earners but instead are talking about people on trust-funds, or living off investments. (I doubt Paris Hilton pays much income tax for example)
Which was nobody's business other than Bill and Hillary. Bill getting a blowjob was not the conspiracy she was talking about. Turning that blowjob into the country's business, and trying to impeach him... that's the conspiracy she was talking about.
If Bill had some mistress he went to go see on the weekends, that is between him and his wife unless he ran on some moral high-ground(as far as I remember he did not, and so would be fine).
If the President coaxes an intern who has volunteered to help server her country into performing sexual acts with him in the oval office while they are both supposedly 'on the clock', that sounds a lot more like misuse of presidential authority to me.
I see this as the difference between your boss trying to fire you because you took a vacation to Vegas and slept with a hooker, as opposed to trying to fire you because you have been having sex in your office with your secretary.
One is misusing your own resources(buying a prostitute), the other is misusing the resources the company gave you(office, position, secretary), and probably on 'company time' to boot.
With the stated reason of: "so that users can trust their service", the important part is being able to examine the source-code.
Admittedly the GWT generated JavaScript is not very reader-friendly, but it is all there for you to look at if you should choose.