The only border with long-term practical effectiveness is space, and light-years of it. There is no way to implement a practically infallible border-enforcement system that is both effective in the long term (and keep in mind as time increases, probability of failure approaches 1), and also decentralized (non-dictatorial), within an ever-smaller (due to technology) Earth. On the other hand, barring the extremely improbable FTL, technology in the foreseeable future will not make taking over multiple light-years-away colonies practical, especially when taking into account the possibility of mobile colonies which are forever accelerating away from others. Of course, the main impetus for colonizing outer space is redundancy, as any system that may be implemented eventually on Earth, including the one I suggested, is more likely to fail than not. With a dozen, chances are probably good that at least one or two will make it beyond 500 years without extreme dystopia such as degeneracy into a mass of nanomachines and no recognizable traces of "individuals".
Strong enough practical concerns will always trump ideological considerations. As technology progresses, it becomes increasingly easier for an ever smaller group to do more and more damage to more and more people. In the limit (which is not at infinity, but just around the corner), any free person would have the ability to destroy all of humanity. Of course, this infringes on the freedom of others and is unacceptable in even the most libertarian system that can be envisioned. However, libertarianism provides no mechanism to prevent someone acting in this way. If the would-be destroyer is on their own land, free to do as they please, in secret, when they activate their plan (say, release of bio- or nano-engineered plague) it will be too late to stop it. In general, defense is much more difficult than offense, and this asymmetry makes, at the very least, pervasive surveillance a surety in our future--and I mean zero privacy, likely eventually even in terms of thought processes (eventual integration between mind and machine means direct physical action by an individual will not be necessary to initiate armageddon in a connected world). So by necessity a fundamental right will be removed--the right to privacy, even for your thoughts. If not, then other rights will have to be infringed, such as preventing access to technology that allows the creation of anything not pre-approved as safe--an extreme version of the oft-cited "walled garden" approach. I'll also point out that besides practical considerations, democracy is a failure on theoretical grounds as well since Arrow proved (and won the Nobel prize for it) that the most fundamental process of democracy cannot satisy a small set of features that are self-evident to any reasonable person. The basic reason for the failure is that voting is based on the seemingly intuitive but really nonsensical idea that an aggregate can always be meaningfully assigned a preference by aggregating individual preferences. There's no solution to this problem since the question itself is wrong. The real problem is the assumption that democracy or something very much like it is workable on either a theoretical or practical level. If individuals are actually individuals, then it is not. The "final solution" of the left is to erase individuality. The "final solution" of the right is a dictator (that would preferably act only when consensus is not being reached--akin to certain tie-breaker type mechanisms in the brain). I'll let the reader decide which way seems better. For me, the question is whether we have the balls and time to build/create/engineer/breed a benevolent dictator [system] while there are still people around.
Said property is owned, and in some cases, jointly shared between many individuals. The value said individuals place on various property varies with their state of mind, which is influenced by a number of internal and external factors, both dynamic and oftentimes exhibiting swings of significant magnitude. Combined with the differences between the individuals and the factors affecting them, one must ask whether it even makes sense to aggregate to a total "net worth"--it is silly to suppose you can trivially sum various people's inconsistent valuations of property. This question is not that dissimilar to the question of whether preferences can be aggregated in a consistent and meaningful manner (also known as "voting"), and the latter was of course proven to be impossible by Arrow quite a few decades ago (for which he won the Nobel Prize). The best we can do with an aggregate "net worth" in these circumstances is to have some approximation. That approximation should be chosen from among all possible ones to have some practical significance, no less so than because there's no other compelling selection criterium we can ask for to allow one to possibly try to estimate a total "net worth". My point is that monetary value is that approximation, and no one here has proposed a reasonable alternative. Now, all else being equal, doubling the currency and pricing everything double at the same time does not reflect any more "intrinsic net worth". However, all else is never equal--not even close. The rate of change of money supply has very significant consequences, as does the exact manner in which it is increased, and so it ends up affecting "intrinsic net worth" by altering productivity, aggregate demand, and many other factors. The thing is, there's no good way to measure such "intrinsic net worth" due to its highly subjective nature. In fact, the original poster's use of the term "net worth" is a misnomer exactly because the concept is in objective terms rather inaccessible and amorphous. Monetary value is the only way to crystallize any viewpoint of it that can be actually called "net worth".
All the links I posted, which are all written by well-regarded academics (including the blog links), fully back up what I have posted on this topic. The problem is that when people are too lazy to read, they continue arguing from a standpoint of ignorance and it is unfair to push the other side to do all the hard work of summarizing and addressing points that have been already addressed in the locations I've linked to--if you'd only bother to read.
If you had only bothered to read my links (all written by well-regarded academics--including the blog links), you would see that floating currency exchange is addressed. I've spent a good effort trying to summarize various points but since you're insistent on pushing your argument, then it is appropriate that you should first inform yourself so that we can have a common starting point for our discussion in terms of awareness of current economics knowledge. This would save going over things that have already been dealt with by others in great detail.
Your statement is meaningless, since net worth is something defined on the basis of a currency. There is no other way to measure it: I dare you to try. You might attempt to derive the relative values of things based on a "what-if" thought experiment replacing bartering for money, but bartering valuations are inconsistent and the exchange relations are intransitive in value, so you cannot converge to any meaningful measure of net worth.
Tax and government spending are not related operationally. Taxes in the same amount that is spent elsewhere is coincidental rather than causal. It is the same with issuing government debt in the same amount as spending, creating the illusion of borrowing. Same with “redistribution of wealth” because there is no intrinsic connection though a transmission mechanism. Taxes do not fund spending and debt issuance does not finance spending either, and conversely spending cuts does not fund tax cuts and austerity measures do not reduce debt.
The question is always what level of fiscal balance is appropriate given the sectoral balances in order to sustain output and employment. This is an economic issue. The proportion of taxation and expenditure in the appropriate fiscal balance economically is determined by the size and type of government desired, given different notions of public purpose. This is a political issue. There are other issues involved with expenditure and taxation in addition to the fiscal balance, since they can be used as economic tools and policy instruments, e.g. to affect incentives as well as distribution.
The mistake you're making is arguing that military spending should be cut because it's a waste of tax money. However, there is no operational connection between tax money and any soft of spending. The correct argument is that government should not be pushing so much of the productive capacity of the country to military purposes. This is a political decision and has nothing to do with taxes.
Tax dollars are not paying for it. That's a common misunderstanding of modern monetary systems. Government is not revenue constrained as it creates money ex nihilo, given its the monopoly issuer of its currency, and does not have to rely on public or foreign borrowing (that some of the debt is owed to the public and foreign countries is purely a political choice; much of the debt is not real debt but an accounting fiction between treasury and central bank). Taxes are what government uses to 1) enforce usage of its currency ( since you can only pay your taxes with said currency), and 2) remove excess currency from circulation. See for example http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625 and http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=11218
In regards to the point you are making, the correct way to put it is that government spending power is being wasted on the wrong reasons.
Despite the obvious, which you've pointed out in your post, there seem to be many reactionary self-hating Canadians on slashdot that plainly can't understand how meaningless it is to try to reduce emissions when you're a mouse compared to China and India.
This is plain wrong. Under a quantum-computer attack, AES256 is as strong as AES128. Thus, you simply need to double your key size. Most symmetric ciphers are safe. Most public-key, on the other hand, is indeed broken by quantum-computation. People often forget that for most things, quantum algorithms can only provide a quadratic speedup--not an exponential one!
He did make it up. The speed-up is polynomial, not exponential. You still cannot effectively solve large NP-hard problems. Most algorithms that are susceptible to quantum-computing speedup end up running in O(sqrt(original_time)).
That's false; the power increases polynomially, not exponentially (usually power of two). This is the reason quantum computers can't solve NP-hard problems asymptotically faster than classical ones.
And with recent articles we see Android security is even worse than iOS. QNX is definitely the way to go, but now it's up to RIM not to fuck it up and that, unfortunately, is not a given.
Citation not needed--QNX has been running high-reliability embedded systems from medical devices to military equipment for ages. Would you feel safe if your cancer-treating gamma knife was running Android? It also works well as a desktop operating system, and I've run it on my desktop a few years ago (with the most responsive graphical interface I've ever used). Smartphones and tablets fall somewhere between embedded systems and desktops, and given that QNX covers the full range well, there's every reason to believe it can be made into a great mobile OS--as long as RIM doesn't fuck it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The only border with long-term practical effectiveness is space, and light-years of it. There is no way to implement a practically infallible border-enforcement system that is both effective in the long term (and keep in mind as time increases, probability of failure approaches 1), and also decentralized (non-dictatorial), within an ever-smaller (due to technology) Earth. On the other hand, barring the extremely improbable FTL, technology in the foreseeable future will not make taking over multiple light-years-away colonies practical, especially when taking into account the possibility of mobile colonies which are forever accelerating away from others. Of course, the main impetus for colonizing outer space is redundancy, as any system that may be implemented eventually on Earth, including the one I suggested, is more likely to fail than not. With a dozen, chances are probably good that at least one or two will make it beyond 500 years without extreme dystopia such as degeneracy into a mass of nanomachines and no recognizable traces of "individuals".
Strong enough practical concerns will always trump ideological considerations. As technology progresses, it becomes increasingly easier for an ever smaller group to do more and more damage to more and more people. In the limit (which is not at infinity, but just around the corner), any free person would have the ability to destroy all of humanity. Of course, this infringes on the freedom of others and is unacceptable in even the most libertarian system that can be envisioned. However, libertarianism provides no mechanism to prevent someone acting in this way. If the would-be destroyer is on their own land, free to do as they please, in secret, when they activate their plan (say, release of bio- or nano-engineered plague) it will be too late to stop it. In general, defense is much more difficult than offense, and this asymmetry makes, at the very least, pervasive surveillance a surety in our future--and I mean zero privacy, likely eventually even in terms of thought processes (eventual integration between mind and machine means direct physical action by an individual will not be necessary to initiate armageddon in a connected world). So by necessity a fundamental right will be removed--the right to privacy, even for your thoughts. If not, then other rights will have to be infringed, such as preventing access to technology that allows the creation of anything not pre-approved as safe--an extreme version of the oft-cited "walled garden" approach. I'll also point out that besides practical considerations, democracy is a failure on theoretical grounds as well since Arrow proved (and won the Nobel prize for it) that the most fundamental process of democracy cannot satisy a small set of features that are self-evident to any reasonable person. The basic reason for the failure is that voting is based on the seemingly intuitive but really nonsensical idea that an aggregate can always be meaningfully assigned a preference by aggregating individual preferences. There's no solution to this problem since the question itself is wrong. The real problem is the assumption that democracy or something very much like it is workable on either a theoretical or practical level. If individuals are actually individuals, then it is not. The "final solution" of the left is to erase individuality. The "final solution" of the right is a dictator (that would preferably act only when consensus is not being reached--akin to certain tie-breaker type mechanisms in the brain). I'll let the reader decide which way seems better. For me, the question is whether we have the balls and time to build/create/engineer/breed a benevolent dictator [system] while there are still people around.
Said property is owned, and in some cases, jointly shared between many individuals. The value said individuals place on various property varies with their state of mind, which is influenced by a number of internal and external factors, both dynamic and oftentimes exhibiting swings of significant magnitude. Combined with the differences between the individuals and the factors affecting them, one must ask whether it even makes sense to aggregate to a total "net worth"--it is silly to suppose you can trivially sum various people's inconsistent valuations of property. This question is not that dissimilar to the question of whether preferences can be aggregated in a consistent and meaningful manner (also known as "voting"), and the latter was of course proven to be impossible by Arrow quite a few decades ago (for which he won the Nobel Prize). The best we can do with an aggregate "net worth" in these circumstances is to have some approximation. That approximation should be chosen from among all possible ones to have some practical significance, no less so than because there's no other compelling selection criterium we can ask for to allow one to possibly try to estimate a total "net worth". My point is that monetary value is that approximation, and no one here has proposed a reasonable alternative. Now, all else being equal, doubling the currency and pricing everything double at the same time does not reflect any more "intrinsic net worth". However, all else is never equal--not even close. The rate of change of money supply has very significant consequences, as does the exact manner in which it is increased, and so it ends up affecting "intrinsic net worth" by altering productivity, aggregate demand, and many other factors. The thing is, there's no good way to measure such "intrinsic net worth" due to its highly subjective nature. In fact, the original poster's use of the term "net worth" is a misnomer exactly because the concept is in objective terms rather inaccessible and amorphous. Monetary value is the only way to crystallize any viewpoint of it that can be actually called "net worth".
All the links I posted, which are all written by well-regarded academics (including the blog links), fully back up what I have posted on this topic. The problem is that when people are too lazy to read, they continue arguing from a standpoint of ignorance and it is unfair to push the other side to do all the hard work of summarizing and addressing points that have been already addressed in the locations I've linked to--if you'd only bother to read.
If you had only bothered to read my links (all written by well-regarded academics--including the blog links), you would see that floating currency exchange is addressed. I've spent a good effort trying to summarize various points but since you're insistent on pushing your argument, then it is appropriate that you should first inform yourself so that we can have a common starting point for our discussion in terms of awareness of current economics knowledge. This would save going over things that have already been dealt with by others in great detail.
I try to inform people and apparently what I get is being modded down.
Typo... "any sort of money" not "any soft of money"
You really need to do some reading. The level of ignorance among the public about how fiat systems actually work is staggering.
Your statement is meaningless, since net worth is something defined on the basis of a currency. There is no other way to measure it: I dare you to try. You might attempt to derive the relative values of things based on a "what-if" thought experiment replacing bartering for money, but bartering valuations are inconsistent and the exchange relations are intransitive in value, so you cannot converge to any meaningful measure of net worth.
Tax and government spending are not related operationally. Taxes in the same amount that is spent elsewhere is coincidental rather than causal. It is the same with issuing government debt in the same amount as spending, creating the illusion of borrowing. Same with “redistribution of wealth” because there is no intrinsic connection though a transmission mechanism. Taxes do not fund spending and debt issuance does not finance spending either, and conversely spending cuts does not fund tax cuts and austerity measures do not reduce debt.
The question is always what level of fiscal balance is appropriate given the sectoral balances in order to sustain output and employment. This is an economic issue. The proportion of taxation and expenditure in the appropriate fiscal balance economically is determined by the size and type of government desired, given different notions of public purpose. This is a political issue. There are other issues involved with expenditure and taxation in addition to the fiscal balance, since they can be used as economic tools and policy instruments, e.g. to affect incentives as well as distribution.
The mistake you're making is arguing that military spending should be cut because it's a waste of tax money. However, there is no operational connection between tax money and any soft of spending. The correct argument is that government should not be pushing so much of the productive capacity of the country to military purposes. This is a political decision and has nothing to do with taxes.
Tax dollars are not paying for it. That's a common misunderstanding of modern monetary systems. Government is not revenue constrained as it creates money ex nihilo, given its the monopoly issuer of its currency, and does not have to rely on public or foreign borrowing (that some of the debt is owed to the public and foreign countries is purely a political choice; much of the debt is not real debt but an accounting fiction between treasury and central bank). Taxes are what government uses to 1) enforce usage of its currency ( since you can only pay your taxes with said currency), and 2) remove excess currency from circulation. See for example http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625 and http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=11218
In regards to the point you are making, the correct way to put it is that government spending power is being wasted on the wrong reasons.
Who said she's innocent?
Despite the obvious, which you've pointed out in your post, there seem to be many reactionary self-hating Canadians on slashdot that plainly can't understand how meaningless it is to try to reduce emissions when you're a mouse compared to China and India.
Wow, a reasoned and level-headed post. Am I still on slashdot? *rubs eyes*
Embarrassed to be Canadian? Given the election results, you're the minority. Got any more trolling you want to do?
In fact, speedup is generally quadratic, not exponential. The poster pulled the exponential part out of his ass, and should be modded down.
This is plain wrong. Under a quantum-computer attack, AES256 is as strong as AES128. Thus, you simply need to double your key size. Most symmetric ciphers are safe. Most public-key, on the other hand, is indeed broken by quantum-computation. People often forget that for most things, quantum algorithms can only provide a quadratic speedup--not an exponential one!
He did make it up. The speed-up is polynomial, not exponential. You still cannot effectively solve large NP-hard problems. Most algorithms that are susceptible to quantum-computing speedup end up running in O(sqrt(original_time)).
That's false; the power increases polynomially, not exponentially (usually power of two). This is the reason quantum computers can't solve NP-hard problems asymptotically faster than classical ones.
This is why Alexander Fleming is the most important scientist of the 20th Century; not, as was usually voted in the top-??? lists, Einstein.
You don't even need another computer--just run your work machine as a VM.
LOL dude, you made me spit out my cereal laughing
And what about the Canadians?
Ditto.
I love my Torch 9810 and the control BES gives me, but even I admit the trend has been towards worsening battery life with each new generation.
And with recent articles we see Android security is even worse than iOS. QNX is definitely the way to go, but now it's up to RIM not to fuck it up and that, unfortunately, is not a given.
Citation not needed--QNX has been running high-reliability embedded systems from medical devices to military equipment for ages. Would you feel safe if your cancer-treating gamma knife was running Android? It also works well as a desktop operating system, and I've run it on my desktop a few years ago (with the most responsive graphical interface I've ever used). Smartphones and tablets fall somewhere between embedded systems and desktops, and given that QNX covers the full range well, there's every reason to believe it can be made into a great mobile OS--as long as RIM doesn't fuck it up.