It's a persecuted community.... and I'm a bit of a security freak. I use FreeBSD for my personal web server, and OpenBSD for my small business. I don't use MSFT products for the most part (certainly no office, mail or web apps). I happen to know some people who have shown me just how bad security holes can be. And as someone else pointed out, religious communities also have confidential personal information such a counselling that, while not an obvious target for attack, would still be damaging to those involved if it was compromised.
I've just started learning XUL and I'm already wishing that IE supported it. It seems like a fabulous way to build applications. I'm working on a calendar app for my religious community, and although xhtml, css and javascript are mostly good enough, I'm moving it over to XUL because it's better and because I can get access to system resources. I understand the security implications of this, but for my application, there are security implications in the other direction: I don't want community information that might be confidential put on a web server that could possibly be compromised. Instead, the web server will serve the application code, and the calendaring details will be stored locally. (the software is for producing printed calendars, not shared online calendars)
It's child-like behavior to blot out the competition. Funny, cause it really only ends up hurting MSFT in the long term. Maybe not in a big way, but those few who might be wavering in the evil/good empire assessment might finally tip over the the MSFT-is-definitely-evil side:-)
Not exactly a ton of info on the site, but it is a very cute robot. Much smaller than I expected. I don't work in robotics, so it is cool and suprising to see how small actuators must be to enable this sort of machine.
You may be right about this... I guess we'll see:-) Personally, I'm not going for it. Maybe when my kids are a bit older they might be interested. Who knows.
I don't think it does make a difference to my argument: it's still two senses instead of one, and the sense that we use for a large proportion of our information gathering. It is hard for people to multi-task when their eyes are involved... and I would wager that music videos, being full of technical events, make that even harder.
For a few reasons, I have a hard time believing that video on an iPod (or any other device) will be nearly as popular as music. The main thing is that people have lots of time to _listen_ while they work/drive/exercise/stroll/relax/sleep, but very little time when they can dedicate their most important sense to recreation. DVD's sell well, it's true, but while in my own case I might listen to a CD 20 or 30 times (and sometimes way more), I only watch a movie a few times (and maybe up to 10 times). This is primarily because of the bandwidth of time and attention, not for lack of interest.
I expect that ultimately customers will decide that DRM and related tech will fail. There will always be new companies and new products that can break into a market that is underperforming for people's needs and wants. Particularly in the age of blogging, this type of breakthrough is getting easier: access to publicity is much much lower. The big companies like MSFT etc. all are probably quite afraid of this... and therefore trying to come up with anti-competitive schemes. Some of these schemes are technology based, some feature based, and some legislative. Only the legislative schemes should be feared. All the others can be fairly easily defeated by consumers. As for the legislated schemes of protection, even those can be circumvented by sufficiently interesting innovation. The problem there is keeping ahead of the legislative encroachment. In the software world, open source is a great way to do this. Hardware-wise it's a bit more difficult.
Managing for creativity requires deep recognition of the fact that people are creators. Not only that, but the constant change of circumstances should be embraced as a fertile ground for creativity. And finally, it is very important to realize that the way people perceive reality is critical to them being empowered to be creative... and for their contributions to be valued. I write about this kinda stuff all the time - hopefully in a predominantly practical way - on my blog: Agile Advice.
Although I use the web for a huge amount of my research and entertainment reading these days, I still also depend heavily on "textbooks" for more in-depth treatment of material. While I'm sure that using good old-fashioned books will not actually stop, I wonder if the lack of emphasis is a bit of a slippery slope: less demand for textbooks will lead to less production of good textbooks which will feed back to less demand for textbooks. Even with such projects as Gutenberg, Wikibooks, and others, is it possible to have the same quality of material online? Different types of material surely (e.g. multimedia), but I think that the format, physicality of books is something that we need to hold onto.
The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established. (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 286)
The Great Being saith: O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity. This is the straight Path, the fixed and immovable foundation. Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure. (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 214)
There is hope, but there is also no easy solution. Peace doesn't just happen. It requires a fundamental change in people's perception: a recognition of the unity of humanity. I see that slowly happening. Partly through the positive forces of education, the debatable forces of globalization, and the tragedies of war, terrorism, poverty and environmental degredation. We'll get there, I have no doubt, but at what cost?
Wikipedia: Art. There's actually some good and relevent info in there. To wit: "Art, in its broadest meaning, is the expression of creativity or imagination, or both." Based on that, I'd say that programming has a strong artistic component.
I grew up in a family of artists
on
Is Programming Art?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And as a programmer (the black sheep of the family), I strongly believe that programming is an art form. The article talks about finding examples of software that are "art"... but I think every instance of programming is art. I recently got into a fairly in-depth discussion about this topic: Programming: Technical or Artistic.
I think one very interesting point is that both software and "normal" art have an audience. The programmer creates a work of art in the medium of a programming language and a physical computer system. The audience, the customer/user of the created software system, may appreciate the software or not: there is no objective measure to say that software is "correct". Software, like art, does what it does, and the audience determines its value, beauty, utility, and esthetics.
concrete about the pili themselves. It would be neet to know something about their molecular structure.
Another thing about this article that hit me: genetic engineering really is going strong. I still think of it in some ways as a future technology. But their description of turning of the genes that result in the pili as well as the idea of manipulating those genes to produce pili with various characteristics really points out a high degree of sophistication in genetic engineering techniques.
Oops... that bit about the Universal Declaration was a dropped thought:-) Where was I going with that? Well, my thinking was that if anything deserved to be supported by taxation, it is the rights set out in that Declaration. I accidentally stream-of-consciousnessed into the whole car insurance thing.
Why is freedom of choice a defining factor? I really don't understand what that has to do with anything. Also, I still don't understand how taxation is necessarily a governmental function. In another part of this thread someone brought up another example of non-governmental taxation: a homeowners association fee. Perhaps we should try to agree on a definition of taxation. Here's my go at it: "Taxation is the imposition of an obligatory remittance of resources to an organization responsible for using those remittances to improve the common good." I know that that definition is biased in a number of ways... For comparison, here's a dictionary definition: "The act or practice of imposing taxes." and then "taxes":
1. A contribution for the support of a government required of persons, groups, or businesses within the domain of that government.
2. A fee or dues levied on the members of an organization to meet its expenses.
3. A burdensome or excessive demand; a strain.
(Dictionary.com)
So I don't think my definition is really all that far off... I just add the part about "for the common good" (my bias).
I am sorry to have used the phrase "please educate yourself". As soon as I hit the submit button I regretted it and I agree completely that it was inappropriate.
Your original statement about third world nations:
I suspect that under your proposed world government everything would run about as well as a typical third world nation
made a very strong implicit statement that a typical third world nation is run poorly. Assuming (possibly incorrectly) that that implication was indeed intended, then my comment that you have a significant mis-conception about the third world stands. I believe that mis-conception to be that third world nations are typically run poorly due to mis-management. On the contrary, the evidence (presented in "The End of Poverty" and elsewhere) suggests that third world nations are poorly run because they do not have the funds to deal with unavoidable externalities such as virulent strains of Malaria, poor geography for international trade, and the biggest one, the apathy and cynicism of the international community (partly a result of long-standing prejudices).
After all this, I admit that my proposal was not terribly well thought out. In fact, I think that solving the problem of a fair tax system is beyond my ability. However, I do think that there are two components that must be incorporated: a global vision of social good, and voluntary contributions. I am not personally impressed by the idea of taxes that are backed up by punishment.
Please take the time to read "The End of Poverty". I did not mention a world government. All that is required is a world administration. Not only that, but you have a very significant mis-conception about typical third world nations and why they run poorly. Please educate yourself.
Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I beg to differ that insurance is not taxation. It is just another mechanism of providing essential services but done through private organizations. Car insurance is a great example. It is technically true that I could probably do without owning a car. However, if I own a car and drive it, I am obligated (by the government in its capacity as lawmaker) to pay the insurance tax to some entity. In some countries/regions, auto insurance is government run. In others, it is privately run. But it is mandatory and therefore a tax. I would like to see you tell a police officer/victim of an accident/court that you didn't get auto insurance because you didn't think it was worth it. I didn't stretch the definition of tax to include everything I spend money on. Only those things that are either legislated as obligatory and/or necessary to protect and sustain my rights.
Roads: being part of a network of roads provides a larger return on investment, the larger the network is.
Local Schools: pre-fab buildings, standardized curriculum both contribute to efficiencies of scale.
Potable Water: manufacture of water filtration systems, science and technology R&D to develop better water systems also are susceptible to efficiencies of scale.
When I paid a tax that went to someone who used public health care, when I paid a tax that went to someone who used a public road, when I paid a tax that went to foreign aid, when I paid a tax that when to a business subsidy...
Perhaps more significantly, when I paid vehicle insurance, when I paid health insurance, when I paid life insurance, when I paid business insurance, I paid a tax that went to a business. Just depends how you define "taxation".
Government is only a mechanism for organizing the flow of certain types of economic and social mechanisms. It is true that a part of all that taxation is used by the overhead of administration, but that is the case for any economic transaction.
True enough... have you read "The End of Poverty"? It's a great book (well-written, interesting, good stories) about a very pragmatic approach to eliminating poverty given the current economic and political framework. It's only marginally related to this thread: in the book the author talks a little about the purpose of taxation.
The public sector [funded through taxation] should be mainly focused on five kinds of investments: human capital (health, education, nutrition), infrastructure (roads, power, water and sanitation, environmental conservation), natural capital (conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems), public institutional capital (a well-run public administration, judicial system, police force), and parts of knowledge capital (scientific research for health, energy, agriculture, climate, ecology). (page 251)
When it comes to large infrastructure needs and the network effects caused by them, I do think there is evidence to support the idea that a global administration (doesn't have to be government) would be more efficient. It's just the simple idea of efficiencies of scale, plus efficiency multipliers based on network effects.
But more seriously, I don't see how this applies. Sovereignty has very little to do with taxation... or does it? If it does, why is that the case? Why does a group of people have to be taxed by their governmental representatives for that group to be considered sovereign?
Here's what I think: one global tax to deal with humanity's common infrastructure needs (health, communication, travel, upholding basic rights, defence and policing), and a voluntary contribution fund to deal with local, regional and national ongoing expenses and special projects. This business of sales taxes etc. in different localities just doesn't work in a world where communication/commerce is instant anywhere to anywhere, and travel/living is extremely flexible. Income taxes based on residency/citizenship just don't make sense for lots of people any more. A voluntary contribution would sure make governments pay attention to how they were providing service to their employers (the people).
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It's a persecuted community.... and I'm a bit of a security freak. I use FreeBSD for my personal web server, and OpenBSD for my small business. I don't use MSFT products for the most part (certainly no office, mail or web apps). I happen to know some people who have shown me just how bad security holes can be. And as someone else pointed out, religious communities also have confidential personal information such a counselling that, while not an obvious target for attack, would still be damaging to those involved if it was compromised.
I've just started learning XUL and I'm already wishing that IE supported it. It seems like a fabulous way to build applications. I'm working on a calendar app for my religious community, and although xhtml, css and javascript are mostly good enough, I'm moving it over to XUL because it's better and because I can get access to system resources. I understand the security implications of this, but for my application, there are security implications in the other direction: I don't want community information that might be confidential put on a web server that could possibly be compromised. Instead, the web server will serve the application code, and the calendaring details will be stored locally. (the software is for producing printed calendars, not shared online calendars)
It's child-like behavior to blot out the competition. Funny, cause it really only ends up hurting MSFT in the long term. Maybe not in a big way, but those few who might be wavering in the evil/good empire assessment might finally tip over the the MSFT-is-definitely-evil side :-)
Not exactly a ton of info on the site, but it is a very cute robot. Much smaller than I expected. I don't work in robotics, so it is cool and suprising to see how small actuators must be to enable this sort of machine.
You may be right about this... I guess we'll see :-) Personally, I'm not going for it. Maybe when my kids are a bit older they might be interested. Who knows.
I don't think it does make a difference to my argument: it's still two senses instead of one, and the sense that we use for a large proportion of our information gathering. It is hard for people to multi-task when their eyes are involved... and I would wager that music videos, being full of technical events, make that even harder.
For a few reasons, I have a hard time believing that video on an iPod (or any other device) will be nearly as popular as music. The main thing is that people have lots of time to _listen_ while they work/drive/exercise/stroll/relax/sleep, but very little time when they can dedicate their most important sense to recreation. DVD's sell well, it's true, but while in my own case I might listen to a CD 20 or 30 times (and sometimes way more), I only watch a movie a few times (and maybe up to 10 times). This is primarily because of the bandwidth of time and attention, not for lack of interest.
I expect that ultimately customers will decide that DRM and related tech will fail. There will always be new companies and new products that can break into a market that is underperforming for people's needs and wants. Particularly in the age of blogging, this type of breakthrough is getting easier: access to publicity is much much lower. The big companies like MSFT etc. all are probably quite afraid of this... and therefore trying to come up with anti-competitive schemes. Some of these schemes are technology based, some feature based, and some legislative. Only the legislative schemes should be feared. All the others can be fairly easily defeated by consumers. As for the legislated schemes of protection, even those can be circumvented by sufficiently interesting innovation. The problem there is keeping ahead of the legislative encroachment. In the software world, open source is a great way to do this. Hardware-wise it's a bit more difficult.
Managing for creativity requires deep recognition of the fact that people are creators. Not only that, but the constant change of circumstances should be embraced as a fertile ground for creativity. And finally, it is very important to realize that the way people perceive reality is critical to them being empowered to be creative... and for their contributions to be valued. I write about this kinda stuff all the time - hopefully in a predominantly practical way - on my blog: Agile Advice.
Poor excuse, not acceptable in war crimes trials. Read some of the quotes here.
Although I use the web for a huge amount of my research and entertainment reading these days, I still also depend heavily on "textbooks" for more in-depth treatment of material. While I'm sure that using good old-fashioned books will not actually stop, I wonder if the lack of emphasis is a bit of a slippery slope: less demand for textbooks will lead to less production of good textbooks which will feed back to less demand for textbooks. Even with such projects as Gutenberg, Wikibooks, and others, is it possible to have the same quality of material online? Different types of material surely (e.g. multimedia), but I think that the format, physicality of books is something that we need to hold onto.
Wikipedia: Art. There's actually some good and relevent info in there. To wit: "Art, in its broadest meaning, is the expression of creativity or imagination, or both." Based on that, I'd say that programming has a strong artistic component.
And as a programmer (the black sheep of the family), I strongly believe that programming is an art form. The article talks about finding examples of software that are "art"... but I think every instance of programming is art. I recently got into a fairly in-depth discussion about this topic: Programming: Technical or Artistic. I think one very interesting point is that both software and "normal" art have an audience. The programmer creates a work of art in the medium of a programming language and a physical computer system. The audience, the customer/user of the created software system, may appreciate the software or not: there is no objective measure to say that software is "correct". Software, like art, does what it does, and the audience determines its value, beauty, utility, and esthetics.
concrete about the pili themselves. It would be neet to know something about their molecular structure.
Another thing about this article that hit me: genetic engineering really is going strong. I still think of it in some ways as a future technology. But their description of turning of the genes that result in the pili as well as the idea of manipulating those genes to produce pili with various characteristics really points out a high degree of sophistication in genetic engineering techniques.
Oops... that bit about the Universal Declaration was a dropped thought :-) Where was I going with that? Well, my thinking was that if anything deserved to be supported by taxation, it is the rights set out in that Declaration. I accidentally stream-of-consciousnessed into the whole car insurance thing.
So I don't think my definition is really all that far off... I just add the part about "for the common good" (my bias).
I am sorry to have used the phrase "please educate yourself". As soon as I hit the submit button I regretted it and I agree completely that it was inappropriate.
Your original statement about third world nations:
made a very strong implicit statement that a typical third world nation is run poorly. Assuming (possibly incorrectly) that that implication was indeed intended, then my comment that you have a significant mis-conception about the third world stands. I believe that mis-conception to be that third world nations are typically run poorly due to mis-management. On the contrary, the evidence (presented in "The End of Poverty" and elsewhere) suggests that third world nations are poorly run because they do not have the funds to deal with unavoidable externalities such as virulent strains of Malaria, poor geography for international trade, and the biggest one, the apathy and cynicism of the international community (partly a result of long-standing prejudices).After all this, I admit that my proposal was not terribly well thought out. In fact, I think that solving the problem of a fair tax system is beyond my ability. However, I do think that there are two components that must be incorporated: a global vision of social good, and voluntary contributions. I am not personally impressed by the idea of taxes that are backed up by punishment.
Please take the time to read "The End of Poverty". I did not mention a world government. All that is required is a world administration. Not only that, but you have a very significant mis-conception about typical third world nations and why they run poorly. Please educate yourself.
Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I beg to differ that insurance is not taxation. It is just another mechanism of providing essential services but done through private organizations. Car insurance is a great example. It is technically true that I could probably do without owning a car. However, if I own a car and drive it, I am obligated (by the government in its capacity as lawmaker) to pay the insurance tax to some entity. In some countries/regions, auto insurance is government run. In others, it is privately run. But it is mandatory and therefore a tax. I would like to see you tell a police officer/victim of an accident/court that you didn't get auto insurance because you didn't think it was worth it. I didn't stretch the definition of tax to include everything I spend money on. Only those things that are either legislated as obligatory and/or necessary to protect and sustain my rights.
Roads: being part of a network of roads provides a larger return on investment, the larger the network is.
Local Schools: pre-fab buildings, standardized curriculum both contribute to efficiencies of scale.
Potable Water: manufacture of water filtration systems, science and technology R&D to develop better water systems also are susceptible to efficiencies of scale.
When I paid a tax that went to someone who used public health care, when I paid a tax that went to someone who used a public road, when I paid a tax that went to foreign aid, when I paid a tax that when to a business subsidy...
Perhaps more significantly, when I paid vehicle insurance, when I paid health insurance, when I paid life insurance, when I paid business insurance, I paid a tax that went to a business. Just depends how you define "taxation".
Government is only a mechanism for organizing the flow of certain types of economic and social mechanisms. It is true that a part of all that taxation is used by the overhead of administration, but that is the case for any economic transaction.
When it comes to large infrastructure needs and the network effects caused by them, I do think there is evidence to support the idea that a global administration (doesn't have to be government) would be more efficient. It's just the simple idea of efficiencies of scale, plus efficiency multipliers based on network effects.
But more seriously, I don't see how this applies. Sovereignty has very little to do with taxation... or does it? If it does, why is that the case? Why does a group of people have to be taxed by their governmental representatives for that group to be considered sovereign?
Here's what I think: one global tax to deal with humanity's common infrastructure needs (health, communication, travel, upholding basic rights, defence and policing), and a voluntary contribution fund to deal with local, regional and national ongoing expenses and special projects. This business of sales taxes etc. in different localities just doesn't work in a world where communication/commerce is instant anywhere to anywhere, and travel/living is extremely flexible. Income taxes based on residency/citizenship just don't make sense for lots of people any more. A voluntary contribution would sure make governments pay attention to how they were providing service to their employers (the people).