That's the clearest sign yet that Wikipedia is fucked - the Foundation which somehow manages to chew through millions of dollars annually can't even ship a goddamn visual editing widget without the whole thing being reverted!
I used to donate to Wikipedia because it's a site I use a lot, but the fact that they can try and fail to do something as basic as make Wikipedia NOT a pain in the ass to edit makes me wish I could ask for my money back.
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment in this thread. The last time I tried to actually make a change to Wikipedia it was the most unbelievably retarded experience I've had for a long time. The fact that that community would try to kill something as basic as a WYSIWYG editor doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Basic summary of experience: The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are, (1) an article in The Register which simply repeats the statement that "Bitcoin has been criticised for having the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme" and links to some random guys blog post which doesn't even make that claim, and (2) an article in Reuters which again says at the top merely that it's been "variously dismissed as a Ponzi scheme or lauded as the greatest invention since the internet".
The problems here are numerous. Firstly, the citations don't actually back up the claim. Even though finding idiots on the internet who don't understand the definition of any given term is trivial, neither citation succeeds in actually doing so. Instead they merely assert that unspecific people believe that, which is circular. Secondly, one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition. So the claim fails basic logic.
There have been raging arguments about this on the Talk page for over a year now, heck maybe over two years. Here's a quote from the current incarnation:
While I agree with your analysis [that the statement is not supported by the citations], both sources are reliable; unless you can find a source that explicitly goes in-depth on how Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme, the cited passage is valid. We're unable to argue with reliable sources as that would be original research.
This is the kind of "what the fuck" statement that just kills interest in editing Wikipedia dead. This guy, who is apparently quite knowledgeable about Wikipedia's policies, agrees that the statement is bogus yet says it cannot be removed due to Wikipedia policy - in flat and total contradiction of common sense.
Previous rounds of this flamewar (that were since deleted) did in fact provide well reasoned arguments that the statement was false, some written specifically for Wikipedia. But it turned out that they were all invalidated by Wikipedia policy because variously, someones blog was not a valid source (whereas an article on the Register was), logic-based discussion on the Talk page was "original research", etc.
When you see pages which are camped by idiots who constantly cite policy as a justification for ignoring basic common sense you quickly realise the entire project is doomed. Something like Wikipedia can only work if there's some kind of strong personality or driving force that actively shapes the community in a positive direction. A rudderless community rapidly devolves into absurd bureaucratic in-fighting of the kind that makes the civil service look proactive and lean. In that regard TFA is completely correct.
Article can be summed up as, "Sending mail people actually want is soooooo hard, I have to do all kinds of privacy-invasive things and that makes me a spammer!"
I've not seen such rambling nonsense for a long time. The guys domains appeared in spamhaus because - reality check - they are open proxies. Every single open URL redirector on the internet gets ruthlessly pillaged by spammers who are trying to avoid domain name blocks, so a URL like "http://my-proxy.com/render?url=http://buy-cheap-meds.info" inevitably lands my-proxy.com on spam-filter blacklists, because they learn that 99% of the time my-proxy.com appears in an email, that email is unwanted. URL shorteners are especially vulnerable to this.
As to the other ideas - hey, here's a great one. How about instead of using image bugs to try and figure out if your last 50 (!!) mails were ignored, why not ask users to re-opt in every so often if they want to continue receiving your mails? Was that really so hard? Keeping a good reputation with spam filters really isn't magic, so it blows me away that people host webinars on the topic - send mail people want. That's pretty much 95% of it. The other 5%? Avoid sharing resources that get abused by spammers - like URL shorteners.
I think Bennet may just have to give up on what he's trying to do here. If his proxies get abused by spammers to work around spam-filter URL domain reputation, then communicating lists of open proxies via email is inevitably going to break.
You're probably very right, but for those of us who know little about medicine, can someone explain where that BILLION dollars would go? I know there will need to be trials run, data studied, scientists paid etc but a billion dollars is an awful lot of money....
Yeah, that's great, except that in the real world apps like Gmail have to support all kinds of wacky browsers, including old ones that get kicked to "legacy" UIs, mobile browsers, browsers that are technically standards compliant but are much faster or slower than other browsers and so on.
I used to work on a server that vended browser specific code based on the user-agent (for a variety of reasons it had to be browser specific choices on the server side). It was a server that vended some self contained code that got embedded into lots of different web sites and properties. Anyway, the most painful browser to support was by far Internet Explorer. It blew my mind how badly they managed to screw this up. It's not that modern IE's are bad browsers, you see, they aren't really - after letting the web rot for years they finally reacted to their retreating market share by staffing up the IE team again, and nowadays it can render things nice and fast. The problem is their totally broken compatibility architecture.
Modern Internet Explorers are not a single browser. They're actually a wrapper around multiple different versions of the IE rendering engine, along with a horrific pile of heuristics, hacks and magical downloaded lists to try and select the right one. There's actually a giant flow chart that tries to describe what combination of bugs IE will try to emulate in any given situation, although that dates from 2010. Undoubtably it's now even more complicated. This is a total disaster. Firstly, IE isn't capable of always doing the right thing - a notorious example being the case where a top level document requests one kind of "document mode" (i.e. Trident version) and then an iframe requests a different kind, well, Trident can't recursively embed old versions of itself, so the iframe'd document just doesn't get the docmode it requested. If your code is run inside an iframe the only way to find out what docmode you're actually running in is to test it on the client side using JavaScript! If you then discover you have the wrong version of your JS loaded because IE lied to you, well, tough luck. Time to go reload it.
Combine this with trying to run code iframed into sites like Blogger where users are allowed to control their own toplevel HTML, and you can just forget about anything sane happening. But it gets even more confusing, because new versions of the rendering engine still have "quirks mode". You pretty quickly find yourself having to draw up giant matrices of how IE might behave in any given scenario.
What's worse, there are lots of different ways to ask IE for a specific mode. There are META tags, magic HTTP headers, DOCTYPE tags, and this Microsoft compatibility list which can override those in various situations, except that it works on a per domain basis and sites like google.com have tons of different apps hanging off different endpoints, some of which might no longer be really maintained, requiring a "flag day" where everyone co-ordinates to prepare for changes in the compatibility list. Oh yes, and users can and do modify their browser settings (as we see in this story), resulting in yet another column in the compatibility matrix.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera... none of these browsers were such a nightmarish acid trip. Microsoft managed a seemingly impossible feat - dramatically improving the quality of their core rendering engine and yet STILL being the most horrible browser for web devs in existence! They snatched defeat from the claws of victory!
Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin.
Actually, no. That is, as you said, "standard financial scams" which usually rely on convincing people to give up control of their money. The whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to random untrustworthy third parties. The fact that P2P financial technology is in its infancy and some holders of that currency choose to do so anyway, says more about the importance of decentralising all aspects of finance than it does about Bitcoin itself.
For instance, online wallet services - again, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to a bank. Some idiots do so anyway, because, well, they can't be bothered downloading a wallet app and using it themselves. Or maybe they're just so used to the idea of giving their money to someone else for safe keeping they can't quite let go. Who knows? Lots of people who use Bitcoin managed to avoid all such scams by the simple expedient of understanding the goal of the project and keeping their own money.
Crooked escrow providers? The protocol allows for dispute mediators that can't steal your money, all they can do is decide whether a payment should clear through to the merchant or be refunded. It doesn't get used today because P2P financial technology is hard, and the code needed to do this kind of low-trust dispute mediation isn't finished. Give it a few years and I'm sure it will be.
In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money.
Directly? No, as is also the case for most other banking crises. Indirectly, yes of course they lost money as did many other people. Banks cannot misallocate vast quantities of resources and there be no impact of that. The losses were merely socialised through other means.
Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy that almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate.
Says you. By the way, I like how you use the word legitimate and then immediately imply that people trying to escape capital controls is up there with ponzi schemes.
No, their supposed to be spying on every other government and country. They are all spying on us as well. It's the dirty little secret of diplomacy, everyone is spying on everyone else.
I love how people try to sound wise when talking about this stuff, "of course" the USA spies on everyone, everyone knows "everyone spies on everyone else".
Except they don't. Do you really think Brazil or Mexico is running operations hacking President Obama's email account? Do you think Germany is? If "everyone" was doing this stuff the spies would constantly be tripping over each other as they all tried to get access to Obama's email simultaneously.
The brutal reality is that only a few countries seem to be doing this stuff, probably because most countries don't have governments that split the world into "domestic" and "foreign" but rather, have some notion of "allies" vs "enemies".
The decision about what to publish or not is up to the newspapers. Obviously Der Spiegel, being a German newspaper, doesn't really give a shit about what the NSA thinks or whether its spy operations on its neighbours get busted. After all the USA didn't hesitate to hack foreign news firms, would it?
In 2-3 generations the cost of providing welfare will have plummeted far below what it is today. That's rather the nature of progress.
However, for now, "importing labour" a.k.a. allowing immigration doesn't seem like a terrible way to raise the tax base, now does it? Especially as most northern European countries are getting immigration from eastern European countries where the dominant religions do not involve burqas.
That's your debunking? That Somalia was (according to some guy who wrote a paper) a shithole before anarchy, and is marginally less of a shithole afterwards, therefore anarchy is good?
This is why the ultra-hard libertarian arguments always come across as so flaky. There aren't any examples of places that are both nice to live and stateless.
Not that I'm a fan of anarcho-capitalism (at all), but your points would have fairly ready responses from the crowd that is - obviously, their envisioned utopia doesn't have banks or PayPal equivalents, rather all money is in the form of Bitcoin which cannot be arbitrarily seized like that.
Also, re: power supplies, it often isn't necessary for governments to impose particular technical standards. For instance the internet has developed all kinds of protocols and standards without any government mandates.
I think if you want a fundamental, theoretical justification for the state, the right place to start is fighting of crime.
Who knows? Perhaps his DHCP lease expired and he got reassigned to an IP previously used by a curvy woman?
A lot of these ad systems are based on somewhat black box machine learning models or statistical correlation engines. Even the people who run them can't always explain why a certain choice was made, just that overall it seems to do the right thing.
"Legitimate" companies like Google, who then sell your information to third parties?
I am a Google user. My email address is in my Slashdot profile. Please go buy my personal data from Google and then show it to me. I'll be waiting when you get back.
The solution would have been for Apple to be slapped, hard, when it started claiming that nobody could build tablets or phones anymore even though none of their patents were technically "essential". Then it would have never escalated to that point. However neither the US nor the EU managed to achieve even basic common sense with regards to Apples rampant abuse of the courts, and are focusing on the Korean company instead.
This coming after Obama stepped in personally to ensure Apple wouldn't have to pay up? It sends a bad message, a very bad message to the rest of the world indeed. Basically whichever company is "cooler" gets to win, no matter what the rules of the game were meant to be.
Well, according to that wikipedia page, that weapons system was in service since 1980. The missiles I'm talking about are these ones and are much more modern. I have read that Russia got significantly further ahead than the US in the area of anti-ship missiles and as such, the US defences against them have never been tested for real.
My understanding was based on articles like this one. Can you point me to evidence that the Moskit's can be destroyed by this ships anti-missile defences?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that anti-ship missile technology has been ahead of defence systems now for quite some time, such that basically any ship that gets within range of them is basically always sunk. What's more, Russia, Iran and China all have such missiles. What exactly are these ships being built for, beyond the jobs they produce?
It depends what you really want when you say, "boost the economy". The reason so many EU economies are trashed right now is because they were fundamentally weak for a long time, ever since the flight of manufacturing to Asia really, and this weakness was covered up through extremely large amounts of borrowing and government deficit spending. In the UK for instance large parts of the north were almost being kept afloat by large deficits run up under Labour. In Spain a lot of employment came from an unsustainable housing bubble that triggered over-construction - construction being an industry loved by politicians because it employs lots of relatively low-skilled labourers.
So these economies were already "boosted" for a long time on what amounts to economic caffeine, and like all caffeine-fuelled energy streaks eventually it comes to an end and the drinker has to crash for a while to catch up on sleep and get things back to normal. People that were being pointlessly employed through bubbles or government jobs programs have to find something more useful to do, which is often really hard and involves complicated retraining, assuming they can even afford that, and then of course such huge amounts of resources were misallocated for so long who even says there are jobs for them to take? In fact there often aren't. This "crashing out on the sofa for 24 hours" is a recession.
Meanwhile tax takes drop, interest payments go up due to the cost of banking bailouts and thus deficit spending rises still further. But that process of adjustment is still required.
The US economy is doing marginally better than most EU economies (except maybe Germany?) because it is still jacked up on caffeine, it never had the crash, specifically, it's jacked up on massive government work programs and the resulting secondary employment, like all the towns that revolve around military contractors working on pointless boondoggle projects. Common sense tells you that the US does not need to sink so many resources into advanced weapons programs or building yet more jets or aircraft carriers. But those people and resources get directed towards such projects anyway, partly because the excuse of national security means it's easy to exclude foreign contractors and get Americans working. American can afford this much longer than most countries can because the dollar is very large, US Treasuries have a privileged place in the worlds financial system, and the Fed has basically broken the US bond markets by buying vast amounts of government debt using newly created money. Theory tells us this should cause inflation. In practice it hasn't become a huge problem yet because the dollar is such a very very deep currency, so it's possible to print more money without impacting the overall supply, and because so many prices are indirectly connected to the price of food and fuel, both of which are very cheap in America.
You do understand the reason that companies like Apple come up with such convoluted tax arrangements, right? It's because the US tax system is fundamentally broken in a very important way - it tries to tax income regardless of where it was earned or who earned it - for people this is "citizenship based taxation", for companies what it means is if they earn money overseas and spend that money overseas, not only does the overseas government take a slice but the US wants a slice too. That's not how other tax systems work. If this was actually enforced properly then every US company would get double taxed on foreign-earned income, which would make them less competitive against foreign companies that only pay tax on income where it's earned. The reason it's NOT enforced properly, is exactly because closing this "loophole" would be very harmful.
Generally the rule is that if a US company brings the income home, then it gets double taxed. So big tech companies which are very profitable end up stockpiling profits outside the USA. They don't want to bring it back to the US because then they'd lose a lot of it, after it was already taxed once. But they don't have anything to spend it on outside the US either. They instead sit it out and hope for a "tax holiday". From time to time politicians grant these because it doesn't make any sense for the money to be sitting around outside the reach of the IRS waiting for investment opportunities abroad, when it could be spent inside the US instead.
Companies that are not US based don't have this problem.
British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is to start conversations in government about how to update the legal oversight of the UK's security services in the light of disclosures by the Guardian that powerful new technologies appear to have outstripped the current system of legislative and political oversight.
The writing random bytes thing, but only on Windows, is rather puzzling. It seems like one way to build confidence that's faster than setting up a deterministic build (which at any rate, would not necessarily be accepted by the TrueCrypt authors it seems), would be to open up the binaries in IDA Pro and figure out if the bytes written there on Windows truly are random or if they are not.
The article explicitly says this does not appear to be based on the co-operation of US providers but rather international fibre taps - presumably placed or operated by compliant intelligence agencies that are merely extensions of the NSA. The US might be a ringleader in this activity, but other countries have out of control security services as well. After a long period of political silence in the UK we finally got some discussion this week, after senior cabinet members who served on the national security committees admitted they had no clue anything like that was happening. Cameron's response was priceless, he said the agencies would have told them about it if they'd asked!
Slashdot Mirror
That's the clearest sign yet that Wikipedia is fucked - the Foundation which somehow manages to chew through millions of dollars annually can't even ship a goddamn visual editing widget without the whole thing being reverted!
I used to donate to Wikipedia because it's a site I use a lot, but the fact that they can try and fail to do something as basic as make Wikipedia NOT a pain in the ass to edit makes me wish I could ask for my money back.
187 people?! What the hell do they do all day?
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment in this thread. The last time I tried to actually make a change to Wikipedia it was the most unbelievably retarded experience I've had for a long time. The fact that that community would try to kill something as basic as a WYSIWYG editor doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Basic summary of experience: The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are, (1) an article in The Register which simply repeats the statement that "Bitcoin has been criticised for having the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme" and links to some random guys blog post which doesn't even make that claim, and (2) an article in Reuters which again says at the top merely that it's been "variously dismissed as a Ponzi scheme or lauded as the greatest invention since the internet".
The problems here are numerous. Firstly, the citations don't actually back up the claim. Even though finding idiots on the internet who don't understand the definition of any given term is trivial, neither citation succeeds in actually doing so. Instead they merely assert that unspecific people believe that, which is circular. Secondly, one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition. So the claim fails basic logic.
There have been raging arguments about this on the Talk page for over a year now, heck maybe over two years. Here's a quote from the current incarnation:
This is the kind of "what the fuck" statement that just kills interest in editing Wikipedia dead. This guy, who is apparently quite knowledgeable about Wikipedia's policies, agrees that the statement is bogus yet says it cannot be removed due to Wikipedia policy - in flat and total contradiction of common sense.
Previous rounds of this flamewar (that were since deleted) did in fact provide well reasoned arguments that the statement was false, some written specifically for Wikipedia. But it turned out that they were all invalidated by Wikipedia policy because variously, someones blog was not a valid source (whereas an article on the Register was), logic-based discussion on the Talk page was "original research", etc.
When you see pages which are camped by idiots who constantly cite policy as a justification for ignoring basic common sense you quickly realise the entire project is doomed. Something like Wikipedia can only work if there's some kind of strong personality or driving force that actively shapes the community in a positive direction. A rudderless community rapidly devolves into absurd bureaucratic in-fighting of the kind that makes the civil service look proactive and lean. In that regard TFA is completely correct.
Google was the first to roll out SSL for everything, the first to do SSL forward secrecy ... it's not like there was nothing done before Snowden.
Article can be summed up as, "Sending mail people actually want is soooooo hard, I have to do all kinds of privacy-invasive things and that makes me a spammer!"
I've not seen such rambling nonsense for a long time. The guys domains appeared in spamhaus because - reality check - they are open proxies. Every single open URL redirector on the internet gets ruthlessly pillaged by spammers who are trying to avoid domain name blocks, so a URL like "http://my-proxy.com/render?url=http://buy-cheap-meds.info" inevitably lands my-proxy.com on spam-filter blacklists, because they learn that 99% of the time my-proxy.com appears in an email, that email is unwanted. URL shorteners are especially vulnerable to this.
As to the other ideas - hey, here's a great one. How about instead of using image bugs to try and figure out if your last 50 (!!) mails were ignored, why not ask users to re-opt in every so often if they want to continue receiving your mails? Was that really so hard? Keeping a good reputation with spam filters really isn't magic, so it blows me away that people host webinars on the topic - send mail people want. That's pretty much 95% of it. The other 5%? Avoid sharing resources that get abused by spammers - like URL shorteners.
I think Bennet may just have to give up on what he's trying to do here. If his proxies get abused by spammers to work around spam-filter URL domain reputation, then communicating lists of open proxies via email is inevitably going to break.
You're probably very right, but for those of us who know little about medicine, can someone explain where that BILLION dollars would go? I know there will need to be trials run, data studied, scientists paid etc but a billion dollars is an awful lot of money ....
Yeah, that's great, except that in the real world apps like Gmail have to support all kinds of wacky browsers, including old ones that get kicked to "legacy" UIs, mobile browsers, browsers that are technically standards compliant but are much faster or slower than other browsers and so on.
I used to work on a server that vended browser specific code based on the user-agent (for a variety of reasons it had to be browser specific choices on the server side). It was a server that vended some self contained code that got embedded into lots of different web sites and properties. Anyway, the most painful browser to support was by far Internet Explorer. It blew my mind how badly they managed to screw this up. It's not that modern IE's are bad browsers, you see, they aren't really - after letting the web rot for years they finally reacted to their retreating market share by staffing up the IE team again, and nowadays it can render things nice and fast. The problem is their totally broken compatibility architecture.
Modern Internet Explorers are not a single browser. They're actually a wrapper around multiple different versions of the IE rendering engine, along with a horrific pile of heuristics, hacks and magical downloaded lists to try and select the right one. There's actually a giant flow chart that tries to describe what combination of bugs IE will try to emulate in any given situation, although that dates from 2010. Undoubtably it's now even more complicated. This is a total disaster. Firstly, IE isn't capable of always doing the right thing - a notorious example being the case where a top level document requests one kind of "document mode" (i.e. Trident version) and then an iframe requests a different kind, well, Trident can't recursively embed old versions of itself, so the iframe'd document just doesn't get the docmode it requested. If your code is run inside an iframe the only way to find out what docmode you're actually running in is to test it on the client side using JavaScript! If you then discover you have the wrong version of your JS loaded because IE lied to you, well, tough luck. Time to go reload it.
Combine this with trying to run code iframed into sites like Blogger where users are allowed to control their own toplevel HTML, and you can just forget about anything sane happening. But it gets even more confusing, because new versions of the rendering engine still have "quirks mode". You pretty quickly find yourself having to draw up giant matrices of how IE might behave in any given scenario.
What's worse, there are lots of different ways to ask IE for a specific mode. There are META tags, magic HTTP headers, DOCTYPE tags, and this Microsoft compatibility list which can override those in various situations, except that it works on a per domain basis and sites like google.com have tons of different apps hanging off different endpoints, some of which might no longer be really maintained, requiring a "flag day" where everyone co-ordinates to prepare for changes in the compatibility list. Oh yes, and users can and do modify their browser settings (as we see in this story), resulting in yet another column in the compatibility matrix.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera ... none of these browsers were such a nightmarish acid trip. Microsoft managed a seemingly impossible feat - dramatically improving the quality of their core rendering engine and yet STILL being the most horrible browser for web devs in existence! They snatched defeat from the claws of victory!
What makes you think they aren't going to learn from previous attempts?
Actually, no. That is, as you said, "standard financial scams" which usually rely on convincing people to give up control of their money. The whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to random untrustworthy third parties. The fact that P2P financial technology is in its infancy and some holders of that currency choose to do so anyway, says more about the importance of decentralising all aspects of finance than it does about Bitcoin itself.
For instance, online wallet services - again, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't have to give your money to a bank. Some idiots do so anyway, because, well, they can't be bothered downloading a wallet app and using it themselves. Or maybe they're just so used to the idea of giving their money to someone else for safe keeping they can't quite let go. Who knows? Lots of people who use Bitcoin managed to avoid all such scams by the simple expedient of understanding the goal of the project and keeping their own money.
Crooked escrow providers? The protocol allows for dispute mediators that can't steal your money, all they can do is decide whether a payment should clear through to the merchant or be refunded. It doesn't get used today because P2P financial technology is hard, and the code needed to do this kind of low-trust dispute mediation isn't finished. Give it a few years and I'm sure it will be.
Directly? No, as is also the case for most other banking crises. Indirectly, yes of course they lost money as did many other people. Banks cannot misallocate vast quantities of resources and there be no impact of that. The losses were merely socialised through other means.
Says you. By the way, I like how you use the word legitimate and then immediately imply that people trying to escape capital controls is up there with ponzi schemes.
I love how people try to sound wise when talking about this stuff, "of course" the USA spies on everyone, everyone knows "everyone spies on everyone else".
Except they don't. Do you really think Brazil or Mexico is running operations hacking President Obama's email account? Do you think Germany is? If "everyone" was doing this stuff the spies would constantly be tripping over each other as they all tried to get access to Obama's email simultaneously.
The brutal reality is that only a few countries seem to be doing this stuff, probably because most countries don't have governments that split the world into "domestic" and "foreign" but rather, have some notion of "allies" vs "enemies".
The decision about what to publish or not is up to the newspapers. Obviously Der Spiegel, being a German newspaper, doesn't really give a shit about what the NSA thinks or whether its spy operations on its neighbours get busted. After all the USA didn't hesitate to hack foreign news firms, would it?
Have you actually been to northern Europe? Do you know anything about intra-EU migration, especially from places like Poland, Romania or Bulgaria?
In 2-3 generations the cost of providing welfare will have plummeted far below what it is today. That's rather the nature of progress.
However, for now, "importing labour" a.k.a. allowing immigration doesn't seem like a terrible way to raise the tax base, now does it? Especially as most northern European countries are getting immigration from eastern European countries where the dominant religions do not involve burqas.
That's your debunking? That Somalia was (according to some guy who wrote a paper) a shithole before anarchy, and is marginally less of a shithole afterwards, therefore anarchy is good?
This is why the ultra-hard libertarian arguments always come across as so flaky. There aren't any examples of places that are both nice to live and stateless.
Not that I'm a fan of anarcho-capitalism (at all), but your points would have fairly ready responses from the crowd that is - obviously, their envisioned utopia doesn't have banks or PayPal equivalents, rather all money is in the form of Bitcoin which cannot be arbitrarily seized like that.
Also, re: power supplies, it often isn't necessary for governments to impose particular technical standards. For instance the internet has developed all kinds of protocols and standards without any government mandates.
I think if you want a fundamental, theoretical justification for the state, the right place to start is fighting of crime.
Who knows? Perhaps his DHCP lease expired and he got reassigned to an IP previously used by a curvy woman?
A lot of these ad systems are based on somewhat black box machine learning models or statistical correlation engines. Even the people who run them can't always explain why a certain choice was made, just that overall it seems to do the right thing.
I am a Google user. My email address is in my Slashdot profile. Please go buy my personal data from Google and then show it to me. I'll be waiting when you get back.
The solution would have been for Apple to be slapped, hard, when it started claiming that nobody could build tablets or phones anymore even though none of their patents were technically "essential". Then it would have never escalated to that point. However neither the US nor the EU managed to achieve even basic common sense with regards to Apples rampant abuse of the courts, and are focusing on the Korean company instead.
This coming after Obama stepped in personally to ensure Apple wouldn't have to pay up? It sends a bad message, a very bad message to the rest of the world indeed. Basically whichever company is "cooler" gets to win, no matter what the rules of the game were meant to be.
Well, according to that wikipedia page, that weapons system was in service since 1980. The missiles I'm talking about are these ones and are much more modern. I have read that Russia got significantly further ahead than the US in the area of anti-ship missiles and as such, the US defences against them have never been tested for real.
My understanding was based on articles like this one. Can you point me to evidence that the Moskit's can be destroyed by this ships anti-missile defences?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that anti-ship missile technology has been ahead of defence systems now for quite some time, such that basically any ship that gets within range of them is basically always sunk. What's more, Russia, Iran and China all have such missiles. What exactly are these ships being built for, beyond the jobs they produce?
It depends what you really want when you say, "boost the economy". The reason so many EU economies are trashed right now is because they were fundamentally weak for a long time, ever since the flight of manufacturing to Asia really, and this weakness was covered up through extremely large amounts of borrowing and government deficit spending. In the UK for instance large parts of the north were almost being kept afloat by large deficits run up under Labour. In Spain a lot of employment came from an unsustainable housing bubble that triggered over-construction - construction being an industry loved by politicians because it employs lots of relatively low-skilled labourers.
So these economies were already "boosted" for a long time on what amounts to economic caffeine, and like all caffeine-fuelled energy streaks eventually it comes to an end and the drinker has to crash for a while to catch up on sleep and get things back to normal. People that were being pointlessly employed through bubbles or government jobs programs have to find something more useful to do, which is often really hard and involves complicated retraining, assuming they can even afford that, and then of course such huge amounts of resources were misallocated for so long who even says there are jobs for them to take? In fact there often aren't. This "crashing out on the sofa for 24 hours" is a recession.
Meanwhile tax takes drop, interest payments go up due to the cost of banking bailouts and thus deficit spending rises still further. But that process of adjustment is still required.
The US economy is doing marginally better than most EU economies (except maybe Germany?) because it is still jacked up on caffeine, it never had the crash, specifically, it's jacked up on massive government work programs and the resulting secondary employment, like all the towns that revolve around military contractors working on pointless boondoggle projects. Common sense tells you that the US does not need to sink so many resources into advanced weapons programs or building yet more jets or aircraft carriers. But those people and resources get directed towards such projects anyway, partly because the excuse of national security means it's easy to exclude foreign contractors and get Americans working. American can afford this much longer than most countries can because the dollar is very large, US Treasuries have a privileged place in the worlds financial system, and the Fed has basically broken the US bond markets by buying vast amounts of government debt using newly created money. Theory tells us this should cause inflation. In practice it hasn't become a huge problem yet because the dollar is such a very very deep currency, so it's possible to print more money without impacting the overall supply, and because so many prices are indirectly connected to the price of food and fuel, both of which are very cheap in America.
You do understand the reason that companies like Apple come up with such convoluted tax arrangements, right? It's because the US tax system is fundamentally broken in a very important way - it tries to tax income regardless of where it was earned or who earned it - for people this is "citizenship based taxation", for companies what it means is if they earn money overseas and spend that money overseas, not only does the overseas government take a slice but the US wants a slice too. That's not how other tax systems work. If this was actually enforced properly then every US company would get double taxed on foreign-earned income, which would make them less competitive against foreign companies that only pay tax on income where it's earned. The reason it's NOT enforced properly, is exactly because closing this "loophole" would be very harmful.
Generally the rule is that if a US company brings the income home, then it gets double taxed. So big tech companies which are very profitable end up stockpiling profits outside the USA. They don't want to bring it back to the US because then they'd lose a lot of it, after it was already taxed once. But they don't have anything to spend it on outside the US either. They instead sit it out and hope for a "tax holiday". From time to time politicians grant these because it doesn't make any sense for the money to be sitting around outside the reach of the IRS waiting for investment opportunities abroad, when it could be spent inside the US instead.
Companies that are not US based don't have this problem.
No, in fairness to Clegg, he has stated he wants to update oversight of the intelligence agencies:
The writing random bytes thing, but only on Windows, is rather puzzling. It seems like one way to build confidence that's faster than setting up a deterministic build (which at any rate, would not necessarily be accepted by the TrueCrypt authors it seems), would be to open up the binaries in IDA Pro and figure out if the bytes written there on Windows truly are random or if they are not.
The article explicitly says this does not appear to be based on the co-operation of US providers but rather international fibre taps - presumably placed or operated by compliant intelligence agencies that are merely extensions of the NSA. The US might be a ringleader in this activity, but other countries have out of control security services as well. After a long period of political silence in the UK we finally got some discussion this week, after senior cabinet members who served on the national security committees admitted they had no clue anything like that was happening. Cameron's response was priceless, he said the agencies would have told them about it if they'd asked!