My comments regarding government are mostly directed at mostly directed at American government and it's hegemonic foreign policies. It effectively exerts its influence over much of the world despite the fact most of the world does not get to vote in U.S. elections and even though most of the U.S. electorate does not support its foreign policy.
Furthermore, democracy not the criteria by which one determines what is ethical. For instance, Germany was a model democracy during the rise of Hitler. People are easily confused by politicians about what truly is ethical, and one of the deceptions not paying taxes is unethical as opposed to being simply unwise. If you reject the utility of the government and most of its expenditures, there's nothing unethical about not paying taxes.
Tax evasion amounts to stealing from everyone who is paying the full amount of their owed taxes, and saying that said theft is ok because it doesn't affect you is similar (in principle) to an arsonist saying that it is ok for him to burn down things randomly
Actually, it's nothing like that because taxation is government seizing resources by force. No one pays taxes because they actually want to, otherwise it would voluntary. If you think government is all about about doing the public some sort of favor, you're getting only 10 percent of the picture. The other 90 percent is what you don't see on the news. Government, as an institution, has always been more about power than public service.
So ethically it's wrong - assuming... the system actually does significant good
The problem is not the good that the government does, it is the evil that it does. If you were exposed to every instance of State violence inflicted upon unwitting civilians that occurs every single day, it would be shocking.
But that isn't even the real issue. You have to stop looking at government in terms of "good" or "bad" but rather as a monopoly of force. It's not about "doing good", it's about power. If you can avoid it, more power to you.
In fact, I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to me.
That's fine, it just becomes a matter businesses' attempt to avoid paying taxes versus government's attempts to collect them. Understand that most people won't go along involuntary seizure of goods and services regardless of whether they are rich or poor unless they are convinced it's unethical for them not to. If you reject the utility of government, there's nothing unethical with dodging taxes. Just make sure you get away with it.
It's pretty clear cut that tax evasion illegal from political standpoint, but I'm addressing it from a strictly ethical standpoint. Ethically, there's really no problem with dodging taxes since it's something that's taken from you involuntarily in the first place.
It really doesn't hurt me, if you decide not to pay taxes. It hurts the government since they may not be able to provide their "services" as well, but that suits me just as well since I don't really care for most of them. Maybe if I lived in Sweden or Japan, I would have different opinion of the utility of government, but as of right now I still reject it outright.
I understand what a public good is, and most of what the government spends its money on simply does not qualify. As long as taxes remain involuntary, I see no moral problem with people doing whatever they can to avoid paying them.
The point is that it's all involuntary. No one asks me what I want to pay for. Say I don't want to pay for cops or national defense, there's no way for me to do that.
The article makes it sound as if it's mostly super rich businesses that are doing this when it's probably mostly people just struggling to make it. Business aren't cheating the government out of anything. Really the only thing businesses owe goverment for is the use of their currency because as the current state of affairs stand citizens don't exactly get to decide what they want to pay for in government, and politicians think they can get a away with spending hundreds of billions of dollars for things most people simply don't want. I wouldn't really say that the government has the moral high ground here.
"Heaven is where the Police are British, the Chefs are French, the Mechanics are German, the Lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the Chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the Police are German and it's all organised by the Italians."
I concede that here was one claim in that entire article about the prevention an actual terrorist attack. However, there was no evidence that said individuals were actually going to carry out an attack other than the fact that they said something in an online chat room. Everyting else was mostly involved posing as a terrorist onine and seeing if they could someone to say something stupid.
As for the other stuff about summarizing Osama Bin Laden's speeches, that's neat but it's not something any Arabic speaker couldn't do in 5 minutes. Why would you pay for that?
These organizations have not contributed to the prevention of single terrorist act and exist mainly to monitor people on an arbitrary basis. Who pays for this crap?
It's somewhat interesting that there was a spike in editing for Sarah Palin's wiki, but that information is hardly predictive of McCain's decision. Regardless of what everyone thought about the kind of VP she would make, the pick itself was a genuine surprise just about everyone including Palin herself. Personally, I had my bets on Lieberman and I still think he would have been made McCain the most competitive against Obama and Biden given the Republican base consists mostly of men.
I don't know what exactly you mean by economic freedom, but I definitely think that banks should not be deregulated so that they can give out high risk loans with the assurance that they will get bailed out by the government if people start defaulting on them.
If you are properly regulating the economy you're not taking away economic freedom, you are saving taxpayers a hell of a lot of money. Bailing out all these banks is going to cost taxpayers over $100 billion and it would not have happened were it not for the deregulatory policies of the current administration.
Biden's political record is fairly typical of strong government Democrats. It's really the Republicans who are supposed to be more on the side of smaller government and stronger civil liberties.
Unfortunately, Republicans largely have abandoned their libertarian positions. They have deregulated the economy, but it has led to a financial disaster in the banking and housing sectors.
Had the Republicans taken a stronger stand on civil liberties while advocating a well regulated economy with noninflationary fiscal policies, and consistently low-interest monetary policies, they would not be in the situation they are in right now.
It would nice to see some demos of this with John Resig's Processing.js. It could definitely use the kind performance boost being discussed here.
In addition to a performance considerations, it would also be nice to have addtional some additional bit depth in JavaScript.
I anticipate JavaScript will continue to be very popular, but there are alot a lot of reasons other than performance that people won't want to use the language for writing desktop applications over C/C++/Java. That said, there have been alot of recent developments that have made me cautiously optimistic about the future of the language along these lines.
I agree. HTML is good at rendering documents, not advanced 2D or 3D graphics which is what people seem to want on the web on the web right now. You might be able do this with ECMA Script + HTML5, but you might as well shove a watermelon down a garbage disposal.
If you want graphics on the web, just combine ECMA Script with a runtime environment desgined for rendering graphics. No surprise, this exists in the form of Flash. The only problem with using Flash as the 'view' for web applications is that it isn't very well integrated with DOM. Flash also isn't fast enough yet to do advanced 3D graphics very well yet, but this should change with the next generation.
Standardizing ECMA Script was not a bad idea, but standardzing the ECMA Script 4 draft specification used for Action Script 2 would be a bad idea since it would take the crux of a commercial technology and make into a web standard.
Just because it's not an ECMA standard, however, doesn't mean the technology can't be used by people other than Adobe. If Microsoft or Mozilla want to roll out commercial browsers with an OpenGL style implementations the ES4 draft spec, no one is stopping them.
Although JavaScript is not very good as an application language, it can do some really neat things which makes it very interesting to language nerds which is why it is so popular.
One thing is that functions are also objects which means they can be returned and taken as parameters by other functions. This is called lambda coding. Function pointers do not allow you do to quite the same thing since they can't be dynamically generated and modified. It makes certain kinds of mathematical programming very easy. For instance functions can be dynamically defined to return the derivative function of another function.
Not many languages allow you to do this. Ruby, Python and Perl, JavaScript and ActionScript all allow lambda coding, but Java, C and C++ don't probably for performance reasons since the runtime environment of the compiled program itself requires a compiler. The latest edition of C Sharp I think does though.
In any case, since JavaScript allows this it would nice just have a compiled version of JavaScript with lambda coding and classes. I think that's what they are shooting for with Harmony so I'm not really that disappointed with this decision.
Before I say anything, I suppose I should say that oppose the "war on terror" on the grounds that it doesn't make the U.S. or the world any safer in the long run because it further radicalizes people. Furthermore, it faltered from the very beginning by betraying the very principles it was fighting to protect and just became a thinly veiled attempt to impose a hegemonic world order.
Now to my point. What does this actually have to do with terrorism which needs which can easly stopped through the the law enforcement and intelligence agencies without any need for conventional armed forces. Most of the time the word "terror" is mentiioned it is not related to specific terrorist acts but to the "war on terror". Confusing the issue of terrorism with with Bush's "war on terror" only makes things worse for the U.S. and the world.
I agree with scaling back of software patents with certain reservations. I don't think you should be able to patent abstract concepts such as formulas or even general purpose application software, but you should to make patent claims on certain kinds of software so long as the scope is narrow and there are specific hardware and software specifications.
Software that nonsuperflously extends the basic functionality of a particular device beyond what it was designed to do should be patentable. The best example of this is custom device drivers and but other novel software extensions might also apply.
Furthermore internal network architectures should be patentable. If you have a network that you own and operate, and you have a protocol that you use for that network, you should be able to patent your protocols so that third parties can't operate on your network by reverse engineering your protocols.
The article specifically states:
"The vast bulk of patents on software, business and information technology are thought by some not to be threatened because those innovations are typically implemented on a machine namely, a computer and the tie to a machine would provide security against the agency's contractions of $ 101."
It affects PageRank because that the technology not tied to a specific machine. But according the the article it shouldn't patents which are tied down to a specific hardware and software specification. Apple's iPhone software should be totally patentable. All this does is narrow the scope of patents so that you can't patent some technology for general use all computers.
The article title is also misleading by calling the Judge "Anti Wiretap" when he interpretation of the the law was absolutely correct. Congress can change the law, but it doesn't change the fact that the laws that were on the books at the time were violated.
Slashdot Mirror
My comments regarding government are mostly directed at mostly directed at American government and it's hegemonic foreign policies. It effectively exerts its influence over much of the world despite the fact most of the world does not get to vote in U.S. elections and even though most of the U.S. electorate does not support its foreign policy.
Furthermore, democracy not the criteria by which one determines what is ethical. For instance, Germany was a model democracy during the rise of Hitler. People are easily confused by politicians about what truly is ethical, and one of the deceptions not paying taxes is unethical as opposed to being simply unwise. If you reject the utility of the government and most of its expenditures, there's nothing unethical about not paying taxes.
Tax evasion amounts to stealing from everyone who is paying the full amount of their owed taxes, and saying that said theft is ok because it doesn't affect you is similar (in principle) to an arsonist saying that it is ok for him to burn down things randomly
Actually, it's nothing like that because taxation is government seizing resources by force. No one pays taxes because they actually want to, otherwise it would voluntary. If you think government is all about about doing the public some sort of favor, you're getting only 10 percent of the picture. The other 90 percent is what you don't see on the news. Government, as an institution, has always been more about power than public service.
So ethically it's wrong - assuming ... the system actually does significant good
The problem is not the good that the government does, it is the evil that it does. If you were exposed to every instance of State violence inflicted upon unwitting civilians that occurs every single day, it would be shocking. But that isn't even the real issue. You have to stop looking at government in terms of "good" or "bad" but rather as a monopoly of force. It's not about "doing good", it's about power. If you can avoid it, more power to you.
In fact, I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to me.
That's fine, it just becomes a matter businesses' attempt to avoid paying taxes versus government's attempts to collect them. Understand that most people won't go along involuntary seizure of goods and services regardless of whether they are rich or poor unless they are convinced it's unethical for them not to. If you reject the utility of government, there's nothing unethical with dodging taxes. Just make sure you get away with it.
It's pretty clear cut that tax evasion illegal from political standpoint, but I'm addressing it from a strictly ethical standpoint. Ethically, there's really no problem with dodging taxes since it's something that's taken from you involuntarily in the first place. It really doesn't hurt me, if you decide not to pay taxes. It hurts the government since they may not be able to provide their "services" as well, but that suits me just as well since I don't really care for most of them. Maybe if I lived in Sweden or Japan, I would have different opinion of the utility of government, but as of right now I still reject it outright.
I understand what a public good is, and most of what the government spends its money on simply does not qualify. As long as taxes remain involuntary, I see no moral problem with people doing whatever they can to avoid paying them.
The point is that it's all involuntary. No one asks me what I want to pay for. Say I don't want to pay for cops or national defense, there's no way for me to do that.
The article makes it sound as if it's mostly super rich businesses that are doing this when it's probably mostly people just struggling to make it. Business aren't cheating the government out of anything. Really the only thing businesses owe goverment for is the use of their currency because as the current state of affairs stand citizens don't exactly get to decide what they want to pay for in government, and politicians think they can get a away with spending hundreds of billions of dollars for things most people simply don't want. I wouldn't really say that the government has the moral high ground here.
"Heaven is where the Police are British, the Chefs are French, the Mechanics are German, the Lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the Chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the Police are German and it's all organised by the Italians."
Here's a hurricane music video...
Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent, by declaring indefinite state of war
Yup, the Bush administration broke the law, and congress retroactively made a law making it legal.
Even if it's ruled unconstitutional, congress would find a way to circumvent the constitution as was done with the warrantless wiretaps.
I concede that here was one claim in that entire article about the prevention an actual terrorist attack. However, there was no evidence that said individuals were actually going to carry out an attack other than the fact that they said something in an online chat room. Everyting else was mostly involved posing as a terrorist onine and seeing if they could someone to say something stupid.
As for the other stuff about summarizing Osama Bin Laden's speeches, that's neat but it's not something any Arabic speaker couldn't do in 5 minutes. Why would you pay for that?
These organizations have not contributed to the prevention of single terrorist act and exist mainly to monitor people on an arbitrary basis. Who pays for this crap?
It's somewhat interesting that there was a spike in editing for Sarah Palin's wiki, but that information is hardly predictive of McCain's decision. Regardless of what everyone thought about the kind of VP she would make, the pick itself was a genuine surprise just about everyone including Palin herself. Personally, I had my bets on Lieberman and I still think he would have been made McCain the most competitive against Obama and Biden given the Republican base consists mostly of men.
I don't know what exactly you mean by economic freedom, but I definitely think that banks should not be deregulated so that they can give out high risk loans with the assurance that they will get bailed out by the government if people start defaulting on them.
If you are properly regulating the economy you're not taking away economic freedom, you are saving taxpayers a hell of a lot of money. Bailing out all these banks is going to cost taxpayers over $100 billion and it would not have happened were it not for the deregulatory policies of the current administration.
Biden's political record is fairly typical of strong government Democrats. It's really the Republicans who are supposed to be more on the side of smaller government and stronger civil liberties.
Unfortunately, Republicans largely have abandoned their libertarian positions. They have deregulated the economy, but it has led to a financial disaster in the banking and housing sectors.
Had the Republicans taken a stronger stand on civil liberties while advocating a well regulated economy with noninflationary fiscal policies, and consistently low-interest monetary policies, they would not be in the situation they are in right now.
It would nice to see some demos of this with John Resig's Processing.js. It could definitely use the kind performance boost being discussed here.
In addition to a performance considerations, it would also be nice to have addtional some additional bit depth in JavaScript.
I anticipate JavaScript will continue to be very popular, but there are alot a lot of reasons other than performance that people won't want to use the language for writing desktop applications over C/C++/Java. That said, there have been alot of recent developments that have made me cautiously optimistic about the future of the language along these lines.
I agree. HTML is good at rendering documents, not advanced 2D or 3D graphics which is what people seem to want on the web on the web right now. You might be able do this with ECMA Script + HTML5, but you might as well shove a watermelon down a garbage disposal.
If you want graphics on the web, just combine ECMA Script with a runtime environment desgined for rendering graphics. No surprise, this exists in the form of Flash. The only problem with using Flash as the 'view' for web applications is that it isn't very well integrated with DOM. Flash also isn't fast enough yet to do advanced 3D graphics very well yet, but this should change with the next generation.
Standardizing ECMA Script was not a bad idea, but standardzing the ECMA Script 4 draft specification used for Action Script 2 would be a bad idea since it would take the crux of a commercial technology and make into a web standard.
Just because it's not an ECMA standard, however, doesn't mean the technology can't be used by people other than Adobe. If Microsoft or Mozilla want to roll out commercial browsers with an OpenGL style implementations the ES4 draft spec, no one is stopping them.
Although JavaScript is not very good as an application language, it can do some really neat things which makes it very interesting to language nerds which is why it is so popular.
One thing is that functions are also objects which means they can be returned and taken as parameters by other functions. This is called lambda coding. Function pointers do not allow you do to quite the same thing since they can't be dynamically generated and modified. It makes certain kinds of mathematical programming very easy. For instance functions can be dynamically defined to return the derivative function of another function.
Not many languages allow you to do this. Ruby, Python and Perl, JavaScript and ActionScript all allow lambda coding, but Java, C and C++ don't probably for performance reasons since the runtime environment of the compiled program itself requires a compiler. The latest edition of C Sharp I think does though.
In any case, since JavaScript allows this it would nice just have a compiled version of JavaScript with lambda coding and classes. I think that's what they are shooting for with Harmony so I'm not really that disappointed with this decision.
Before I say anything, I suppose I should say that oppose the "war on terror" on the grounds that it doesn't make the U.S. or the world any safer in the long run because it further radicalizes people. Furthermore, it faltered from the very beginning by betraying the very principles it was fighting to protect and just became a thinly veiled attempt to impose a hegemonic world order. Now to my point. What does this actually have to do with terrorism which needs which can easly stopped through the the law enforcement and intelligence agencies without any need for conventional armed forces. Most of the time the word "terror" is mentiioned it is not related to specific terrorist acts but to the "war on terror". Confusing the issue of terrorism with with Bush's "war on terror" only makes things worse for the U.S. and the world.
I agree with scaling back of software patents with certain reservations. I don't think you should be able to patent abstract concepts such as formulas or even general purpose application software, but you should to make patent claims on certain kinds of software so long as the scope is narrow and there are specific hardware and software specifications.
Software that nonsuperflously extends the basic functionality of a particular device beyond what it was designed to do should be patentable. The best example of this is custom device drivers and but other novel software extensions might also apply.
Furthermore internal network architectures should be patentable. If you have a network that you own and operate, and you have a protocol that you use for that network, you should be able to patent your protocols so that third parties can't operate on your network by reverse engineering your protocols.
The article specifically states: "The vast bulk of patents on software, business and information technology are thought by some not to be threatened because those innovations are typically implemented on a machine namely, a computer and the tie to a machine would provide security against the agency's contractions of $ 101." It affects PageRank because that the technology not tied to a specific machine. But according the the article it shouldn't patents which are tied down to a specific hardware and software specification. Apple's iPhone software should be totally patentable. All this does is narrow the scope of patents so that you can't patent some technology for general use all computers.
The article title is also misleading by calling the Judge "Anti Wiretap" when he interpretation of the the law was absolutely correct. Congress can change the law, but it doesn't change the fact that the laws that were on the books at the time were violated.