Let's not forget a key point.. Some argue that MS is not doing any harm in making a new extension to Windows... They're saying they _can_ support other platforms, but the target is obviously windows.
I can't believe that the SUN folks missed the gun, however. They are arguing that this will undermine Java by MSing network applications while maintaining control.. HOWEVER, the real danger is that MS makes the number one browser. They completely control what gets put into it. It's one theing to fight over HTML standards, it's another to fight over plugin standards.
Currently, if you want compatible cool stuff on you web page, you use flash (who's goal is to reach every platform and desktop). MS has tried various techniques to make sure that the only browsers out there are MS, and that the "best" place to run their browsers is Windows. Ideally, many features would only work if you had their full Office suite, which is where they can really tie in the money.
IF, they succeede in making everyone love C# as the code-base, along with.NET utilities, then it's only a matter of time before people start to use C# in place of applettes. They made heavy reference to the security box.. This is mainly useful in web-downloaded ActiveX / Applet components.. Meaning they would absolutely love to lock browsers into the latest and greatest feature sets.. To do cool 3D things, you'd need a good hardware card. To do cool multi-media things, you'd need the latest version of Windows. To do productive things, you'd need the latest version of Office.. So long as these are prolific, (say 80% of the market), venue's or company's can require that all their customers / clients have windows xxx, Office xxx, MS-feature friendly hardware xxx.
As with the above, the only reason MS would want an open standard on things like IE or C# or even.NET is to say.. Yes, take the sample drug.. Learn to like it.. See how wonderful life _can_ be.. Oh.. what's the matter? It doesn't do everything on that platform? Well, you know, they're a second rate place.. Come to us.. We'll give you a fix... There.. See how much better a one Solution Vendor works?
MicroSoft - Incredibly small, yet powerful. Just like the virus.
Re:what the electoral college REALLY means...
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Before you dispute the system.. Please read the Federalist papers (as you should have in High school).
The point of the electorate is to prevent mob rule.. A candidate could listen to focus groups and determine ONE issue that 51% of the population likes (and would vote over), and they'd win the election. It's not as simple with an electorate. You can't just win with the east coast, or with the south coast, or with the poor, or with one religion. You can't just focus on highly populated areas (ignoring farm-land areas).
The federalist papers suggest (as I whole-heartedly support) that a president should not exclusively represent the majority, but instead some faction of _every_ citizen. We're not arians(sp?), or Protistant(sp?).
The mathematician went on to describe how in a very close race, only the larger states really matter (but minority interest groups may affect one or more of these large states). Sparce elections however, - say 80/20 - place value on the smaller states. If, for example, someone knows they'll dominate by 80%, so they discount the needs of smaller states, then a person with otherwise 20% support might win ALL the smaller states and thus win the election.
It's not a perfect system, but we can't fully appretiate the benifits since we've become accustomed to our freedom. We haven't had to live in Tyranny such as in Serbia (as the mathematician explains).
Re:Problems with the system
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My Goodness.. How much money do you think these polling places have anyway? Remember, a given state that implements this may have hundreds of districts, each with 5 - 20 such interfaces. Plus you'd have all the complexity and insecurity of a computer kiosk.
Delaware have a electric type-writer type technology with basically a board with lots of buttons everwhere.. We have a matrix where rows are the offices and columns are the parties.. You can't possibly screw it up.. Look for your favorite O'Reilly animal and punch down the column.
There are no electronic registers (just turn dials on the back). Simple, clean, and chepear than a touch-screen system I'd imagine.
-Michael
Re:The problems are...
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Once they confirm, the token is rendered invalid (for example, a magnetic signature could be wiped)
Umm. Try NO. Magnetism has memory.. All erasing something does is reduce it's magnetic field below a threshold. Hysteresis curves are never really at zero, so given data as simple as voting-info should be trivial to recover.
I don't think you're fully understanding the evils that can be commited by such a system.
First and foremost, elections are purely up to the states.. If they so chose, they could elect to not let their citizens vote. The only thing the constitution says is that each state chooses.. So there can be no nationally mandated voting system - and I absolutely agree with this. Let each state try it's own system.. Some will work, some will fail.
Delaware, for example, uses electronic counting machines with push buttons instead of punch cards.. It's electronic, anonymous, and fast albeit expensive. I personally like the system.. You have a lock and key box which is secure up to the point that you don't have a corrupt hacker / technitian.. But with security guards around them all the time, the likelyhood of being hacked is slight.. But since other states do things different, if there was a hack one day, only Delaware (and like states) would be affected.
Given that you want a web system so that you don't have to leave your home: First, as you pointed out, there must be a fallback for those that either don't understand computers (yes they still exist) or can't afford the web. Some military computers aren't allowed to use the computer, so those over-seas military votes wouldn't be able to count anyway (unless they mangaed some sort of secured Kiosk).
Next, the transaction can not be anonymous. You must provide your social or voter registration nubmer (depending on your state I suppose). An obvious security solution is a password, but I highly doubt the entirety of a country can be trusted with passwords.. A simple cracking program could probably successfully determine a good number of voter's passwords (user-id, user-name, real name, etc ).. A phone book might be all that's needed to hack the system.
The randomly generated password might be better, BUT, as you said, it would have required a snail mail.. This is totally unacceptible.. Consider this VERY real case.. You have Chuck {political-party} wife beater. In current elections, the wife is allowed to vote in complete anonymity so that Chuck never can truely know who his wife voted for (and thus not bring down his firey reign). But now, Chuck has everything he needs to know in order to VOTE FOR HIS WIFE as soon as the mail comes. Likewise, any intercepted mail by anyone can allow an anonymous vote in place of that person. There are no signatures, no traced records, no nothing, and potentially millions of people can be cheated out of their votes.. This is not likely to affect the outcome of an election, but it definately takes away the rights of several people. The public (myself included) will not be tolarent.
The best I can imagine is to have the voter attain a password at the time of registration.. The means of registration can vary.. Either requiring to be in person. The key is that you have months to register, so you can do it at your convinience.. Then on voting day, you can do it anywhere and everywhere given appropriate access.
Next problem, how to secure the server.. In tallied votes, or mechanical ones (like in Delaware) physical number dials are used which can be designed to only allow incremental operations.. Meaning that a vote can physically only affect a single turn of the dial, as opposed to updating an internal state register to any new value. It's like the physical write-protect tab on your floppy drive. In this way electronic hacking is nearly impossible.. And the $20/hr security guard can faithfully prevent corruption.
A system is only as strong as it's weakest link, and computers are highly fallible. The software could be hacked, the data could be hacked, the interfaces for transmittion of the data could be hacked, and the network itself could be hacked.. Someone organization could hack ANY point along he path to thward the system (DNS faking, for example, at a company, school or what-have-you). This in addition to the inexperience of casual users (notice I didn't say stupididy.:), means that an intelligent individual or organization can abuse the system or individual(s). Abuse cancome from a domineering spouse, a biased organzation (that provides internet services), or even a devious political party (but we don't know of any that would stoop so low do we? I've never heard of the dead rising for one last vote.:).
The best form of security is centralization. Put the server in a locked room with no external IO.. Give people with valid access keys and authentication (a like Mission Impossible). The worst you can do is over-extend yourself, like allow anonymous telnet access from the web. Somewhere in between is a happy compromise.
The.gov web has possibilities, but we can't neglect the hundreds of years of experience that says we can't trust people to be good on their own.
Aren't there laws, similar to child stalking laws, that prevent any institution from targeting children in a certain type of way including polling them? Meaning that, short of publishing these logs on the web, a commercial institution would not be given access (much like a child's school records are not publicly accessible).
It would be trivial to circumvent this of course.. If anyone parent worked for such an organization, they could easily demand the records.
The election official that they aired on CNN mentioned that it was an official process. But that it wasn't required if the candidates didn't want it. He didn't quote the law though - just said what was likely to happen.. Point is moot, however, since candidates _do_ actually want a recount.
Unfortunately, unless congress passes leglislation that prohibits the restrictions quickly being imposed on the internet by entertainment industries (limit( 1/x: x -> infinity)), our civil society will let the Music industry do whatever they want with their copyrights and licenses.
The law is on their side. The record company's had all the artists first borns signed over, and the atrotious "what if's" can scare enough business people (across most industries) to support legislation that enhances copyright restriction in the new digital age.
On the one hand we have the Wild Wild Web, which is still lawless, and vandels can run around anonymously producing whatever mischivousness (or lawlessness) that they desire. For example: Kiddi pr0n, nuclear bomb blue prints, pirated software (including music), DOS attacks, generally accessible objectionable material by minors...
The average person, when faced with these might get a little scared and say, "oh yeah, we should try and stop those". In the next decade or two, we're going to see the Internet infultrate our lives, which will require it's regulation. Sadly, we, the techni's, will be a minority influence on what we will and will not be allowed to do on the global network. Most likely, there will be licenses, jailable laws, monitors at every node, etc.
The regulations involving copyrighted music distribution on the net are really too soon to see the outcome. On the one hand, hands off government (aside from contractual enforcement), will allow the music industry to keep their cash cow. I don't think the general public is all too concerned if one industry looses revenue, but as with the above, I think the general public is concerned with autonomy and security on the internet - They'll vote on what-ever they have to.. Or whatever they're made to believe that they have to.
History would suggest that the net is going to become beurocratic to the point of unproductivity. The "Free lunch" we've been given will be abused and spoiled for the whole lot of us. Industry will win, resistance will be futile, you know, the whole bit. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.:) Key point, keep a low profile. I can't believe that slashdot hasn't been flagged yet (with varoius posters submitting 'illegal' links, or saying 'naughty' things).
Can we form an anti-corporate party yet? Or is it too soon?
Being one of the many that stayed up last night, apparently it isn't a law to perform a recount if less than.5% difference, but instead it's the default action. If neither party cares (such as if the winner would not be effected), then nobody bothers.
Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb and risk pride in saying I intuitively disagree with you. I've taken physics, but I don't deal with fluid mechanics (disclaimer). The "weight" of the water or air is totally irrelevant, as far as I can understand. It's the viscosity... resistance to movement that's different.
When in water, you can lift much heavier things.. Partly due to boyancy, and partly because the dynamics of the fluid system can act like aerodynamic lift on steroids... Namely, movement in water will have a much greater lift than movement in air. This is because the same principles of flight are amplified in a thicker system (pressure differentials are more pronounced).
Being independant of the validity of atmospheric differences back then, thicker air would not have "impeded" life forms back then in any way other than to slow them down. And in my admitedly limited knowledge in this field, it should enhance their ability for flight and even motion of larger beasts..
The first part should be obvious. The second part, however, deals with the fact that they'd have a thicker cushion of air.. Greater resistance in the air acts like a soft pillow brushing against them.. Think about trying to run through water.. yes it's difficult - requiring lots of muscle / drag (which would facilitate an aerodynamic body even for ground creatures). When you run through water, however, you're less likely to fall flat down and smack your face hard against the ground, though thick air isn't as extreme as water. This property would enhance the life of massive creatures; It would deminish the negative effects of falling, and actually help them stand up (in the presence of any sort of breeze.. just as you can easily stand on your hands under water).
In my mind (mulling this over).. If it were the case that we had denser air back then, then it could only have helped the development of avions. It is possible that animals needed size back then to live (I'd have to brain storm to qualify this more), they developed the aerodyanmics of fish, etc.. Features would help in the general lift of their heavy bodies (being able to attain some sort of lift even in the simplest of breezes).. Some actually advanced to the point of take-off, others simply had incredible jumping capabilities... As the air thinned (along with any other natural catastrophys), the creatures needed to shrink in order to survive. Those that didn't died out.. Those that were left were more than suited for air flight. The turkey must have been one of the straglers, too large in our thin our to fly, but wasn't too large to be naturally selected for extinction.
Last time we talked about Dinosaurs, I was pointed in the direction of "Saturn Theory", which is an interesting mental exercize in physics.. It's also good to turn everything you know upside down on occasion, just to keep you honest... So here's the first link I could find.
Some have brought out the point that you lose ownership of an app when it's remote.. Well, just because you put it on a web server doesn't mean it HAS to be remote.. One of the things we were looking into was putting a web server at a client facility. We would remotely maintain it, but it would be their hardware, their wiring, etc. We're not their IT department, just providing a service.
We purchased a piece of software (written in python, incidently) that did time-tracking. It came with it's own version of apache, postgres, python, and it's proprietary code packaged in a tgz file.. You downloaded the whole app and ran the install script, after paying via credit card.
You could easily install this on your machine, though you'd be plagued with compatibility issues.. So the web model CAN work.
So long as you can support Red Hat, Solaris and Windows, you a big market, and I'm pretty sure Apache, and postgres work on those three platforms.. I make assumptions about python.. I KNOW perl does.. but then you have the issue of people stealing your code... If you only sell to businesses though, then the chances of it getting stolen are less (since businesses are _somewhat_ nicer about using legal software).
The above wasn't supposed to be a plug, but I figured someone might be interested.. We're at www.ironhilltech.com and www.ironhill.net (two pseudo seperate parts of the company) (I was even nice enough to mark this down to be nice to those that don't care:) Please don't mind the uglyness of the web site.. Our cool stuff never seems to have gotten on to the front page.. I don't do graphics, just the perl stuff.:)
Too many buzz words for my wittle brain.. But we've been doing what we call web-services or ASPing.
Basically we're trying to do a bunch of pseudo-open-source type projects around our name IronX (hehe, trying to do like MS did with DirectX). We're doing customized bug trackers, ToDo lists, inventory management, "requirements databases", customized organization, hardware connectivity matrixes, document control systems, etc. One of our goals is to truely make the paperless office for a certain set of clients / developers. Basically our current model is to have an organization pay us to build them a web site that we host (and can thus maintain). Most of our clients are regional (NJ area), and they're mostly trying to feel the waters with the web. The advantage is a write once, run anywhere with data-reliability (Postgres or Oracle, depending on how much money the organization has).
We've looked at various OpenSource pieces and took functional descriptions of them, and tried to write custom apps for our clients (and ourselves).. We've done 90% of it in perl, Apache, Postgres. We had some failed attempts at Servlets (the development time was not cost effective compared to that of perl).
We're one of the few ASP services that doesn't make use of advertisements, since we recoup our costs in the labor and the run 200% charging for the run-time cost.. So long as our clients don't require a lot of BW, we come out ahead (consolidating all servers and net connections). We're a small company (15 people total), with a specific niche of people that are old-style engineers and thus not able to handle the web on their own.
I don't know that this style is very profitable, but it's definately fun for us developers.. Working with all the latest buzz words, trying on different hats, OS's, etc.
Ok, then we take the revenue expenditure of the government, divide it by the number of people, minus the poor.. Let's see, that makes roughly $10,000 / person ( 1 trillion / 100 million working ).. Correct the numbers if I'm wrong.
Ok, well, obviously a person that makes $25,000 is in the hole, so we need to raise it to say $30,000 minimum income.. But oh damn, that means that a person earning $29,999 had better not accept a tip, or they're out 30% of their income.. Damn that's a #$@%.
Ok, well, shoot, lets see, we can graduate this puppy.. Say between $25,000 and $100,000 we graduate it to that $10k / year.. But, well,err.. this IS a flat tax isn't it? Well, we're just making an exception for the poor.. We're just redefining who's poor.
Ok, but damn, now we've lost 90% of the population, that means that we're going to have to raise the overall tax.. to say $20k / year.. Again, drop off the lower part, keep the graduation.. Hmm. Maybe if we use differential calculous we'll come up with the right number. GOT IT.. Ok, now let's see.
approx $22k / year ( fictitious number ) for $100K / year and above.. And we graduate it to zero at some point below. But now let's take a look shall we.
A person that makes $100K and below pays out about 22% tax.. Ok, that's not TOO bad.. Especially since we cut out that horrible bearacracy right? ( all of what fraction of a percentage of federal expendatures? ). But now, how about someone that makes $100Million / year. He only pays out 2.2%. Damn!!! That's not right
Ok ok.. So the truely "fair" system of equal rationing doesn't seem to hold mustard, lets try the percentages approach.. Everybody pays out x%.
Again, we cut off the poor (we'd have to pay them welfare anyway). I have absolutely no idea what the x would be. I have rough ideas of government expenditures, and revenue, but there are too many factors to figure it out-right.. So instead let me make some observations.
Currently, a low income family of $25k or more, pays out something along the lines of 20-33%. I suppose that higher incomes come out to about 30-60%. The ONLY thing a flat tax does is even out those percentages. If the government spends the exact same amount (which is almost always independant of taxation since they can always sell bonds to make up the difference), then a reduction in the higher end will mean an increase in the lower end.
Thus, the only affect in "fairness" is to raise the taxes for the middle income (and some of the lower income). But, raising taxes for the middle income reduces the overall quality of life for the country (increases the propensity for inner city living, pessimistic feelings, which combined promotes crime).. Not to mention, you reduce the income for college bound families.. Which has the effect of reducing their likelihood for seeing college through.. This hurts the american worker with respect to foreign ones.
Now let's look at the wealthy.. What did they do with their new found "wealth".. Well, it couldn't have gone down too much.. A person that makes 100Mil paying out say 50% going down to say 35% means an additional burden on the middle class of $15 million. With an average american paying out $9 - $16K / year, that would mean the entire taxes of roughly 1,000 americans. But what happens to the wealthy American.. Meaning that there has to be roughly 1k workers to compensate for 1 reduced wealthy person. (Heavy use of approximation since most wealthy make less than $100M, but we also have to take into account the raise in taxes of existing tax payers)
The wealthy guy must already have lived comfortably at $100Mil minus taxes. If you give him an additional $15 million a year, then you've just inflated the economy.. Stock market explosions, luxury items grow in sales.. Essentially, the rich will suddenly get a lot richer (for free), and the economy will inflate..
Then you have the middle class who get a double wammy.. First they get an immediate tax increase (which is absolutely required by a flat tax), THEN, they get inflation.. Worse, they'll have less spending capability, which will hurt the very sorts of small businesses the lower income people promote. But, any industry that a poor person has in common with a wealthy person will become inflated... Property value / tax, for example will shoot up again.. Automobiles in the upper 20's and beyond will increase in expense.... The costs of education.. etc.
In an economic stabalizing system, you want to provide resistence to highly profitable ventures. The fed does this by raising the interest rates when we're infalting too quickly (or to ease them off when we need to encourage investment). The government sometimes can do this by raising taxes for the wealthy when we want to slow down the economy, and to reduce taxes for the majority middle class, to increase consumption.
The point is that flat taxes are the simple minded person's way out (meaning it's a no brainer, and has immediate benifits for some). In strategy video games, it's like spending time to accumulate battle cruisers and sending them all out in a periodic fashion until you wipe out the enemy. It can work, but leaves you wide open to side attacks. The graduated tax with accompanying deductions is more for the strategist, and hense, thinking man(liken until strategically sending tiny forces here and there to cut off the enemy). Neither system is can sit for too long without needing adjustment.. But my claim is that even if you did go to a flat tax, you'd eventually have to make innumerous ammendments to account for problems with it.. And soon, you'd be right back to a system just a complex and "unfair" as with today.. The difference is that you'd virtually destroy American society and economy for a time in the process.
And just who is this "We" that gets to decide what "we" like and what "we" don't?
It's just this sort of tolerant indifference that puts us in the crap that we're in. If the people say nobody can tell me because logically we're smart enough to realize that there is no perfect solution, then no solutions can be offered and we're left up to self governance.. And that puts those in power with the most influence.. Such as corporations, or organized hate / exploitation.
The way life works is you try something, then evolve it until it successfully accomplishes a goal. There is no perfect solution, no Utopia.. You pundits that think the net is Utopia, think again. Without regulation, eventually the net will be more dangerous than corporate america. Theft, defaiming, unsolicited perversion, stalking... etc. Laisez fair does not work after a certain level.. There _has_ to be some for of given up control on our parts.. This includes things such as morality.. We obviously don't allow killing.. But why? If I want to kill my neighbor, then what business is it of yours? Likewise with theft. But what about intellectual property theft? Or verbal phrase theft? Or hurting a company's profits by say.. selling a competing technology?
As you can see there is NO "solution"... There are temporary solutions that solve immediate goals.. These solutions have to evolve with the thinking man.. But you need to have some.
In order to enforce the various levels of governmental and societal control, the people have to contribute some sort of resources to the collective.. Just like bees in a hive. Now I don't advocate communism in any way.. The worker bee hive works because they're biologically engineered, not becase they feel a sence of self duty. Humans are very suseptible to mood and outlook. So in order to achieve a non communisitic self govenance, we pay taxes..
Unfortunately we're plagued with the false sence of fairness.. Somehow we believe that the "phrase all created equal" has significance that applies to what we deserve in life. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has some merrit, so long as you don't undermine the above mentioned human mood. Living beings work based on the reward/punishment system. Pavlov (sp?) tried to prove something along these lines. Some obey the law because we get to reap the benifits of society (protection, safety net and community services). Some obey divine law because of a similar feeling of community, or more commonly because of the "reward" of heavenly entrance (ill served if you ask me, becuase it allows them to write people off by saying they're going to hell). Children obey their parents partially out of the communal need for acceptance, but also out of fear of punishment or wanting of "treat" rewards.
From this, it makes sence that capitalism works as a productivity tool.. Give a group wealth for successful productivity (meaning productivity that fullfills a need w/in the community), and you've got a thriving system. However, wealth acquisition can be achieved outside of the law and or morality as well. Our system is starting to fall behind in the regulation of this respect because of the very same indifference towards morality that you present.
Beyond that, in taxation, the poor are struggling to live, the middle class are struggling to make ends meet, the wealthy.. well, they're either strugling to make it to the top, or hold on to their standard of living. Arguably, nobody is "content" with their station in life. But here's the difference...
If a poor person is taxed more, then they or their family may not be able to achieve the food, shelter or medical attention required. If a middle class person loses more to taxes, then they'll likely not be able to achieve the education or bettering themselves that would otherwise benifit society as a whole.. Additionally, they may have to move into lowering income housing whose environment will have negative effects on them.. in turn increasing the likelyhood of a less civil society overall.
If you increase the tax on the wealthy, the worst that happens is that they have to move into a smaller house, have a smaller car, take cheaper vacations.. Yes, they'll have less to invest into our economy, but that's not always an issue (such as today, where too many people are investing too great a percentage into the economy).
Now there are side effects, such as if you tax a busniess too much, then they may be forced to lay off people (especialy if you actually raise taxes for them).
The end result of all of this is an evolutionary attempt at government -including- taxation. A first generation may do a flat linearly proportional tax.. But then find that it's pointless to tax the poor, and painful to tax businesses. So then you raise taxes, and leave out important sections.. Then you start twisting the curve, so on and so forth... Eventually you come to a tax code as complicated as ours.. requiring the employment of a good number of people. But is this bad? Maybe.. Here are a couple outcomes.
You increase beuracracy.. You have to hire more government personelle, (which requires a raise in taxes). You have greater chance for fraud, due to people hiding in between the lines... So you have to hire a substantial number of government personelle as well as enforcement agencies..
This causes the IRS to be almost like a mafia... Putting out hits on people that don't pay up.
Medium to high income earners must hire tax consultants, which winds up taking away even more of their funds if they don't neatly fit into the niches.
You wind up in social engineering, which is at the whim of the potentially short sighted government (or public mass mob).
But here are some good parts.
The 20'th century was based around specialization.. Computers were just a natural extension.. "No generality is worth a damn, including this one" - Mark Twain. A general rule is not the best suited. By forming specialists, and people that do nothing but study the outcomes of taxation, you can device more efficient means of collecting monies from people that has the least negative effects. Likewise, people who specialize in minimizing taxes can aid the earner / consumer.
Just like our capitalistic society, of change, advancement, trial and error, taxation perfectly fits into that methodolgy. It would be hypocritical to say let businesses (which affect our live more profoundly than the government) operate as they choose, but limit the influence of the government.
In order to facility the poor that can not afford tax consultants, you put all things that affect them on the easy form, and give them a standard deduction. If they can read, they can fill that out.. No, they can't _optimize_ their returns, but they can almost essentially pay nothing, so what's the difference.. The wealthy, as a general rule, are to be taxed at a greater percentage, but they can afford an entrage of tax consultants to maximize their activities so as to conform to tax-free niches.
So what of beuracracy? Well, that should also be the role of specialists.. To find ways to make the process more efficient.. Computerized returns that allow instant electronic validation? Electronic receipts? Computers, as before are nearly the ultimate in specialized machines (it is afterall a gereral purpose machine:). The point is that it too must evolve.. And if people don't like maphia IRS, then they vote in people who care about reform.
Even in idealist China and Russia, there is no "flat" system.. They've learned that this doesn't work.. They've had to include dozens if not thousands of special cases.. In Econ, I learned of the ticket system, where you _earn_ the right to consume a luxurous good (like a bicycle). Doesn't sound like to each according to his need to me. If I happen to be good, but I already own a bike, then what's the point.. Or if my friend hasn't received recognition, yet they're very far away and could use a bike, isn't this misallocation of resources? An ideal system would have benevolent omnipotent monitors picking off the good and bad and allocating resources wisely. But that 'ain't gonna happen. Life isn't about ideal cases.
So in summary, graduated taxes WORK (look at the 90's). It should not be a static system, and on occasion is must be simplified (typically to more effective generalities), but it will always grow in complexity to handle the special cases.
Think of it as a genetic algorithm.. The algorithm is the tax system, and the parasitic problem is the greedy and needy tax payers.
And without support, a newborn infant will most certainly die. What is your point?
I can't imagine that it's not obvious. That forcing the delivery of a child in an of itself is useless.
.. There is nothing un-natural about death or selected killing (even indiscriminant killing).
Does it follow that anything which is natural(like killing) is moral? No, I do not think it does.
You extrapolate out of context. The point is that death and killing are both natural, and that the threshold of acceptible behavior is situationally dependant. Morality is is abstract concept.
The question becomes what is best for the species, the individual, the particular organ... Or fetus.
Would it be "best for the species" to kill any elderly person who is no longer contributing to society, but just sucking up resources? How about chronic mental patients?
In some cases yes.. It's situationally dependant.. If a bunch of people are on a desert island with limited food, but you know you'll be rescued in due time... It's entirely acceptible for a person to sacrafice themself for the good of the others (namely, to choose not to eat). And though it's "morally" questionable, it's entirely _natural_ for one or more individuals to gang up on others.. to fight for the food. If a person chose not to eat, it would be a painful death.. They may, instead, choose to commit suicide.. Christian ethics condems this, but that's just one variation of ethics... (which is an underlying point).
A mother would barely think twice about putting herself in harms way to save a child. But that's just another type of suicide. Christiantiy condones this (martyrdom). In "the good earth", we learned of a different set of ethics.. No more right or wrong.. Just different. My thesis was that it's a political issue as to where the threshold of right and wrong lie.
but continuing the problem, doesn't it all boil down to random distribution of quantum particles? You had a particle that was created through an interaction of some kind - the electron radiated a photon, or two particles collided/interacted and formed 1 or more resultant particles. Everything about those particles is known to those particles, just not the observer. I understand that you can't "measure" the particle without disturbing it, but the particles themselves aren't magical.. They just move through space and time (and what-ever other curled up dimensions) with the potential to react to one of a discrete set of events.
If two particles are known to have orthogonal properties (such as polarity), then each particle knew all along what they were, they were just created or selected by some special process right? (I don't really know why Einstein calls it a paradox).
Would this work on two pieces of equipment that WEREN'T attached by optical fibers?
I don't think it has to be fiber.. That's mainly a photonic medium. Theoretically I believe it could be a super-conducting wire, or even a virtual super-conducting channel through space. Essentially it's anything that will not disturb the messenger quantum particle(s). Light is the easiest thing to deal with as far as I know. As an EE undergrad, we've studied electrons out the wazoo, and we know of their relationship to photons, but I never fully got comfortable with them.. They're discrete transmitter energy packets for charged particles. When an electron slows down, it emits it's momentum energy in the form of a photon.. When an electron speeds up, it's because it was hit by a photon. (though it's also possible for physical collisions, which carry momenum in the normal macro-scopic scale.. They're called phonons I believe). The amount of energy released is the frequency of either the photon or phonon. In both cases (I believe), the medium dictacts the ratio of wave-length to frequency (e.g the speed-limit).
From what I understand, a photon travelling through space is affected by forces such as gravity (though I don't think any others), but otherwise travel uni-directionally through space until they collide with another charged particle (quark or lepton / sub-nucleid or electron), where it transfers the energy. It's path however works like a wave.. If you consider the medium to be water, and the wave-front itself to be the photon, then it makes more sence, except that the wave's amplitude is so low that only one thing in the entire ocean will ultimately feel it. If enough discrete particles emite photons (even at random frequencies), then the effect will be more like a river wave-front. I don't fully understand how the wave-particle chooses it's path. It's not really attracted to a charged particle, yet at the same time, it's collision rate is substantially higher than say a neutrino (a nearly mass-less, chargless lepton (a brother of the electron)), who can pass through entire galaxies w/o incident.
The thing that bugs me about quantum physics is the quote, "if it doesnt' completely confound you, then you don't understand it". Well, I've always thought it seemed intuitive, so I must be missing something.. The intuition is that it seems to act very similarly to macro-scopic physics, so long as you consider invisible forces to be virtual springs. For example, the "Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox", where nothing can be known about either photon until one hits it's final polarized destination, and that somehow they're transmitting information back and forth instantaneously.. The idea that I read suggests that they are independant somehow in all ways except that they must be orthoginally poloraized (I guess I'd have to learn more about how you can garuntee their orthogniality). That when they collide, they pull from some localized "random information database" and know what the state of the other one was.. It's supported, I believe because you can not monitor their states without messing up the experiment. But it seems to me that there was prior knowledge between the two states.. At the time of their creation, and that they simply carried their information in seperate directions.
The schrodenger cat experiement (that I recall anyway) said that if you had a cat in a box, and cut the box in half, the cat would be in one of the two boxes (though it was unknown). and that if you seperated the boxes by 100 light years, then opened one, you've immediately transmitted the information to the other box.. The other cat will either be or not be. It's a high level analogy for various quantum properties, but it seems asinine, to suggest that the info was being transmitted only at the time of measurement.. The darn cat _knew_ which box he was in from the beginning. Radomness dictated which box the quantum particle was closer to when they were seperated and they just altered their quantum orbital path to the new confines and inertial frame. The whole abstraction of quantum physics that us lay people get makes it difficult for us to get what's really going on.. All the analogies I've been told do not express the "quantum-wierdness" that everybody always talks about, they're logically founded.
Oh boy.. Do I see the fledgling religious war comming on?
First of all, the "body" inside the womb is the combination and product of two humans. Without the support of at least one of them, that "body" will most certainly die. You can coerce the woman to have the child, and you can even take the child away from her, but you're fighting an uphill battle to bring to child to a worthwhile life.
Beyond that, the fetus does not belong to the mother anymore than the body belongs to the mother. We are in turn products of the earth. Divine significance is left as an exercize to the reader. The point is that there is no such thing as physical ownership. There is only brute force (either psychological or physical) protection of materials. It is the perception of ownership that allows us to commit "atrocities". I own this land, I can burry what-ever I want here.. I own this forest, I can cut it down and make a profit. These are my children, I can discipline them however I choose. This is my wife, I can have sex with her whenever I like (anybody remember this old addage?)
So from that, you should be able to morally justify that a woman can't just claim that this is my fetus, and I can rid myself of it however I choose. You'd be right except for one small detail... Circumstance. Assuming that I can convince you that we do not "own" anything, but merely protect our possessions, then take that every cell in your body is an independant possession. Each of which has had it's destiny mapped out for it.. Depending on what part of the body it happened to start out as, it is designed to have a certain life expectancy.. They are individual life forms, no less significant or magnificant than a fully functional Einstein. Man, in all his knowledge has never reverse engineered cellular life. These cells have been chosen (through divinity or natural selection) to work together as a team, and thus take part in their destiny. Most of these cells will sacrafice themselves for the good of the many. Your epidermous, your hair, your red blood cells.. All of which go through a living stage and will physically die in order to fullfill some organized purpose. In fact, the act of consciousness is little more than a high level functioning machine. The potential supernatural aspect is wholely independant of the mechanical wonders of the mammal's body.
Given this, you _must_ accept that death is a part of life.. That life regularly chooses who among them will die before their time.. There is nothing un-natural about death or selected killing (even indiscriminant killing). The question becomes what is best for the species, the individual, the particular organ... Or fetus. 99% of the time, our conscious selves are shielded from these sorts of descisions.. We don't have to make life-and death descisions (or at least we tend to delegate such authority to a select few). That's fine as a way of handling order and peace. But that is a choice of a particular community. Each of us regularly subconsciosly chooses the death of innumerable living beings.. Everything you eat is evidence of this.. Every wooden structure you utilize, every blade of grass you stomp apon... We think little of it, and so we should.. But we can't neglect that death is around us, and is wholly natural.
Variously religious Dogma's have placed priority on human collective life, as would be expected by any life form... Life always looks after it's own (it's more of that evolutionary/engineered rationalle). We also place heavy emphasis on the new-born... Sub-consciously, this is our hope for survival as a race... The Motherly protective instincts in most of us.
But you have to understand that life is about choices.. That choosing to take a baby into an unwanting family (especially in the cases of rape, or if it caused the death of the mother), will do no species good. In nature, unwanted children are physically killed by their families. You may claim that we have the benifit of a collective peer consciousness, but understand that we don't have all the answers... I make the claim that if we continue on with our "collective" wisdom as we have done for the past 200 years, we will eventually rid the Earth of our grotesque selves. Learning to vote ourselves tax breaks, allowing every human wanting desire to be fullfilled in part or whole... To promote greed, wastefulness, anonymity and thus removal from responsibility... When natural resources are so scarce that we must fight for them, I garuntee you that the fat cats of the world will not gratiously share with one another.. War will be eminant, and life will be scarce thereafter. Heven help us if we learn to travel through space to other colonizable worlds.. Has anyone actually seen Independance day?
In summary. Life is wonderous and prescious, but there are powerful forces that choose expiration dates. We are one of those forces, and it is merely politics (at the personal and pseudo-religious level) that decides who and how we should exercize that right. Never forget that you have Godlike powers across the earth (in terms of the level of control you wield), and with that comes God-like responsibilities. You may very well choose to limit your influence on death, but just as you must eradicate the very much alive cancer and bacteria in your body, you must sometimes allow for sacrafices.. Even of your own kind....
Does that make them non-macros? Lisp hackers would certainly disagree.
Well, then maybe I'm a little fuzzy on the difference between a macro and a compiler. To me, a macro has historically been a named reference to a collection of code (really just more human readible text). M4 and CPP macros translate a name and arguments to some other rearranged set of text.
A compiler, to my knowledge translates human readible code into optimal machine language (though not always assembly code).
What Perl6 looks to do is have multiple front-ends that translate some form of human readible code into [v]machine-readible code. Though I've written a macro processor that translates human text straight to binary assembly, I would hardly call that a compiler. A real compiler will take into account different symantics - it will attempt to assertain the logical meaning of a statement and determine how best to represent it in machine code. If all we did was translate human code to machine code, then yeah, we'd be a macro "lexer". But Perl6 will allow you to write your own -intermediate- code within the dynamic parser to perform the one-time compilation.
If this doesn't resolve the issue, then you'll have to point me to some literature that better describes the distinction.
-Michael
Re:Python to perl interpreter
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Perl 6 Showcase
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It's a valid concern, but it only serves to frustrate the conservative - it fully lies within the stated goals of the language.
If you are an organization, then it is _your_ responsibility to define standards for your developers. You can write very unreadible code in _any_ language..
As for making use of other's works, that's what Perl documentation and OO are for.. Hide the complexities, and publish the interfaces.. Perl works the way Humans do.. We don't understand the complexities of our bosses or employees, and we don't need to - we just need to understand how to interface with them to get desirable results. Let me write my chunk of code in my group's dialect.. Let us debug and have peer review so that we have clean code. Then you only need be concerned with a trivial interface... If someone new comes into the group, then they must be introduced to our style. I've worked with many groups that have successfully accomplished this (In more languages than just Perl).
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh... And just when I thought I was in a good habbit of previewing submittions.. Sigh.. Anyway, the link is
here/a&g t;
Let's not forget a key point.. Some argue that MS is not doing any harm in making a new extension to Windows... They're saying they _can_ support other platforms, but the target is obviously windows.
.NET utilities, then it's only a matter of time before people start to use C# in place of applettes. They made heavy reference to the security box.. This is mainly useful in web-downloaded ActiveX / Applet components.. Meaning they would absolutely love to lock browsers into the latest and greatest feature sets.. To do cool 3D things, you'd need a good hardware card. To do cool multi-media things, you'd need the latest version of Windows. To do productive things, you'd need the latest version of Office.. So long as these are prolific, (say 80% of the market), venue's or company's can require that all their customers / clients have windows xxx, Office xxx, MS-feature friendly hardware xxx.
.NET is to say.. Yes, take the sample drug.. Learn to like it.. See how wonderful life _can_ be.. Oh.. what's the matter? It doesn't do everything on that platform? Well, you know, they're a second rate place.. Come to us.. We'll give you a fix... There.. See how much better a one Solution Vendor works?
I can't believe that the SUN folks missed the gun, however. They are arguing that this will undermine Java by MSing network applications while maintaining control.. HOWEVER, the real danger is that MS makes the number one browser. They completely control what gets put into it. It's one theing to fight over HTML standards, it's another to fight over plugin standards.
Currently, if you want compatible cool stuff on you web page, you use flash (who's goal is to reach every platform and desktop). MS has tried various techniques to make sure that the only browsers out there are MS, and that the "best" place to run their browsers is Windows. Ideally, many features would only work if you had their full Office suite, which is where they can really tie in the money.
IF, they succeede in making everyone love C# as the code-base, along with
As with the above, the only reason MS would want an open standard on things like IE or C# or even
MicroSoft - Incredibly small, yet powerful. Just like the virus.
Before you dispute the system.. Please read the Federalist papers (as you should have in High school).
The point of the electorate is to prevent mob rule.. A candidate could listen to focus groups and determine ONE issue that 51% of the population likes (and would vote over), and they'd win the election. It's not as simple with an electorate. You can't just win with the east coast, or with the south coast, or with the poor, or with one religion. You can't just focus on highly populated areas (ignoring farm-land areas).
The federalist papers suggest (as I whole-heartedly support) that a president should not exclusively represent the majority, but instead some faction of _every_ citizen. We're not arians(sp?), or Protistant(sp?).
As in this/a&g t; article, a mathematician determined that probabilistically (note, that's different than statistically), a minority voter will have the greatest representation if they are scattered throughout many segmented regions. If, for example, you had Gerrimandering(sp?) where all the blacks were put into a single district, then they'd have a single voice in congress which could easily be discounted. Alternatively, if you didn't have the electorial process, then the percentage of blacks would be neglegable for a candidate and thus could be discounted. If, however, there was a 1-10% black population is several districts (as currently is the case), then NO local candidate or district can fully discount the effect of an ethnic voter. Thus _all_ congressmen must act in such a way as to not alienate themselves. Beyond that, a presidential candidate could lose entire states due to strong ethnic representation and human-rights supporters.
The mathematician went on to describe how in a very close race, only the larger states really matter (but minority interest groups may affect one or more of these large states). Sparce elections however, - say 80/20 - place value on the smaller states. If, for example, someone knows they'll dominate by 80%, so they discount the needs of smaller states, then a person with otherwise 20% support might win ALL the smaller states and thus win the election.
It's not a perfect system, but we can't fully appretiate the benifits since we've become accustomed to our freedom. We haven't had to live in Tyranny such as in Serbia (as the mathematician explains).
My Goodness.. How much money do you think these polling places have anyway? Remember, a given state that implements this may have hundreds of districts, each with 5 - 20 such interfaces. Plus you'd have all the complexity and insecurity of a computer kiosk.
Delaware have a electric type-writer type technology with basically a board with lots of buttons everwhere.. We have a matrix where rows are the offices and columns are the parties.. You can't possibly screw it up.. Look for your favorite O'Reilly animal and punch down the column.
There are no electronic registers (just turn dials on the back). Simple, clean, and chepear than a touch-screen system I'd imagine.
-Michael
Once they confirm, the token is rendered invalid (for example, a magnetic signature could be wiped)
Umm. Try NO. Magnetism has memory.. All erasing something does is reduce it's magnetic field below a threshold. Hysteresis curves are never really at zero, so given data as simple as voting-info should be trivial to recover.
I don't think you're fully understanding the evils that can be commited by such a system.
:), means that an intelligent individual or organization can abuse the system or individual(s). Abuse cancome from a domineering spouse, a biased organzation (that provides internet services), or even a devious political party (but we don't know of any that would stoop so low do we? I've never heard of the dead rising for one last vote. :).
.gov web has possibilities, but we can't neglect the hundreds of years of experience that says we can't trust people to be good on their own.
First and foremost, elections are purely up to the states.. If they so chose, they could elect to not let their citizens vote. The only thing the constitution says is that each state chooses.. So there can be no nationally mandated voting system - and I absolutely agree with this. Let each state try it's own system.. Some will work, some will fail.
Delaware, for example, uses electronic counting machines with push buttons instead of punch cards.. It's electronic, anonymous, and fast albeit expensive. I personally like the system.. You have a lock and key box which is secure up to the point that you don't have a corrupt hacker / technitian.. But with security guards around them all the time, the likelyhood of being hacked is slight.. But since other states do things different, if there was a hack one day, only Delaware (and like states) would be affected.
Given that you want a web system so that you don't have to leave your home: First, as you pointed out, there must be a fallback for those that either don't understand computers (yes they still exist) or can't afford the web. Some military computers aren't allowed to use the computer, so those over-seas military votes wouldn't be able to count anyway (unless they mangaed some sort of secured Kiosk).
Next, the transaction can not be anonymous. You must provide your social or voter registration nubmer (depending on your state I suppose). An obvious security solution is a password, but I highly doubt the entirety of a country can be trusted with passwords.. A simple cracking program could probably successfully determine a good number of voter's passwords (user-id, user-name, real name, etc ).. A phone book might be all that's needed to hack the system.
The randomly generated password might be better, BUT, as you said, it would have required a snail mail.. This is totally unacceptible.. Consider this VERY real case.. You have Chuck {political-party} wife beater. In current elections, the wife is allowed to vote in complete anonymity so that Chuck never can truely know who his wife voted for (and thus not bring down his firey reign). But now, Chuck has everything he needs to know in order to VOTE FOR HIS WIFE as soon as the mail comes. Likewise, any intercepted mail by anyone can allow an anonymous vote in place of that person. There are no signatures, no traced records, no nothing, and potentially millions of people can be cheated out of their votes.. This is not likely to affect the outcome of an election, but it definately takes away the rights of several people. The public (myself included) will not be tolarent.
The best I can imagine is to have the voter attain a password at the time of registration.. The means of registration can vary.. Either requiring to be in person. The key is that you have months to register, so you can do it at your convinience.. Then on voting day, you can do it anywhere and everywhere given appropriate access.
Next problem, how to secure the server.. In tallied votes, or mechanical ones (like in Delaware) physical number dials are used which can be designed to only allow incremental operations.. Meaning that a vote can physically only affect a single turn of the dial, as opposed to updating an internal state register to any new value. It's like the physical write-protect tab on your floppy drive. In this way electronic hacking is nearly impossible.. And the $20/hr security guard can faithfully prevent corruption.
A system is only as strong as it's weakest link, and computers are highly fallible. The software could be hacked, the data could be hacked, the interfaces for transmittion of the data could be hacked, and the network itself could be hacked.. Someone organization could hack ANY point along he path to thward the system (DNS faking, for example, at a company, school or what-have-you). This in addition to the inexperience of casual users (notice I didn't say stupididy.
The best form of security is centralization. Put the server in a locked room with no external IO.. Give people with valid access keys and authentication (a like Mission Impossible). The worst you can do is over-extend yourself, like allow anonymous telnet access from the web. Somewhere in between is a happy compromise.
The
-Michael
Aren't there laws, similar to child stalking laws, that prevent any institution from targeting children in a certain type of way including polling them? Meaning that, short of publishing these logs on the web, a commercial institution would not be given access (much like a child's school records are not publicly accessible).
It would be trivial to circumvent this of course.. If anyone parent worked for such an organization, they could easily demand the records.
-Michael
The election official that they aired on CNN mentioned that it was an official process. But that it wasn't required if the candidates didn't want it. He didn't quote the law though - just said what was likely to happen.. Point is moot, however, since candidates _do_ actually want a recount.
-Michael
Wonder if they'll successfully go after telnet, ftp and then CGIs.. laugh.. KILL the enemy.. All of them!!! Even your little dog uucp too.
Unfortunately, unless congress passes leglislation that prohibits the restrictions quickly being imposed on the internet by entertainment industries (limit( 1/x: x -> infinity)), our civil society will let the Music industry do whatever they want with their copyrights and licenses.
:) Key point, keep a low profile. I can't believe that slashdot hasn't been flagged yet (with varoius posters submitting 'illegal' links, or saying 'naughty' things).
The law is on their side. The record company's had all the artists first borns signed over, and the atrotious "what if's" can scare enough business people (across most industries) to support legislation that enhances copyright restriction in the new digital age.
On the one hand we have the Wild Wild Web, which is still lawless, and vandels can run around anonymously producing whatever mischivousness (or lawlessness) that they desire. For example: Kiddi pr0n, nuclear bomb blue prints, pirated software (including music), DOS attacks, generally accessible objectionable material by minors...
The average person, when faced with these might get a little scared and say, "oh yeah, we should try and stop those". In the next decade or two, we're going to see the Internet infultrate our lives, which will require it's regulation. Sadly, we, the techni's, will be a minority influence on what we will and will not be allowed to do on the global network. Most likely, there will be licenses, jailable laws, monitors at every node, etc.
The regulations involving copyrighted music distribution on the net are really too soon to see the outcome. On the one hand, hands off government (aside from contractual enforcement), will allow the music industry to keep their cash cow. I don't think the general public is all too concerned if one industry looses revenue, but as with the above, I think the general public is concerned with autonomy and security on the internet - They'll vote on what-ever they have to.. Or whatever they're made to believe that they have to.
History would suggest that the net is going to become beurocratic to the point of unproductivity. The "Free lunch" we've been given will be abused and spoiled for the whole lot of us. Industry will win, resistance will be futile, you know, the whole bit. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
Can we form an anti-corporate party yet? Or is it too soon?
-Michael
Being one of the many that stayed up last night, apparently it isn't a law to perform a recount if less than .5% difference, but instead it's the default action. If neither party cares (such as if the winner would not be effected), then nobody bothers.
-Michael
Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb and risk pride in saying I intuitively disagree with you. I've taken physics, but I don't deal with fluid mechanics (disclaimer). The "weight" of the water or air is totally irrelevant, as far as I can understand. It's the viscosity... resistance to movement that's different.
When in water, you can lift much heavier things.. Partly due to boyancy, and partly because the dynamics of the fluid system can act like aerodynamic lift on steroids... Namely, movement in water will have a much greater lift than movement in air. This is because the same principles of flight are amplified in a thicker system (pressure differentials are more pronounced).
Being independant of the validity of atmospheric differences back then, thicker air would not have "impeded" life forms back then in any way other than to slow them down. And in my admitedly limited knowledge in this field, it should enhance their ability for flight and even motion of larger beasts..
The first part should be obvious. The second part, however, deals with the fact that they'd have a thicker cushion of air.. Greater resistance in the air acts like a soft pillow brushing against them.. Think about trying to run through water.. yes it's difficult - requiring lots of muscle / drag (which would facilitate an aerodynamic body even for ground creatures). When you run through water, however, you're less likely to fall flat down and smack your face hard against the ground, though thick air isn't as extreme as water. This property would enhance the life of massive creatures; It would deminish the negative effects of falling, and actually help them stand up (in the presence of any sort of breeze.. just as you can easily stand on your hands under water).
In my mind (mulling this over).. If it were the case that we had denser air back then, then it could only have helped the development of avions. It is possible that animals needed size back then to live (I'd have to brain storm to qualify this more), they developed the aerodyanmics of fish, etc.. Features would help in the general lift of their heavy bodies (being able to attain some sort of lift even in the simplest of breezes).. Some actually advanced to the point of take-off, others simply had incredible jumping capabilities... As the air thinned (along with any other natural catastrophys), the creatures needed to shrink in order to survive. Those that didn't died out.. Those that were left were more than suited for air flight. The turkey must have been one of the straglers, too large in our thin our to fly, but wasn't too large to be naturally selected for extinction.
Last time we talked about Dinosaurs, I was pointed in the direction of "Saturn Theory", which is an interesting mental exercize in physics.. It's also good to turn everything you know upside down on occasion, just to keep you honest... So here's the first link I could find.
saturn theory
Some have brought out the point that you lose ownership of an app when it's remote.. Well, just because you put it on a web server doesn't mean it HAS to be remote.. One of the things we were looking into was putting a web server at a client facility. We would remotely maintain it, but it would be their hardware, their wiring, etc. We're not their IT department, just providing a service.
We purchased a piece of software (written in python, incidently) that did time-tracking. It came with it's own version of apache, postgres, python, and it's proprietary code packaged in a tgz file.. You downloaded the whole app and ran the install script, after paying via credit card.
You could easily install this on your machine, though you'd be plagued with compatibility issues.. So the web model CAN work.
So long as you can support Red Hat, Solaris and Windows, you a big market, and I'm pretty sure Apache, and postgres work on those three platforms.. I make assumptions about python.. I KNOW perl does.. but then you have the issue of people stealing your code... If you only sell to businesses though, then the chances of it getting stolen are less (since businesses are _somewhat_ nicer about using legal software).
-Michael
The above wasn't supposed to be a plug, but I figured someone might be interested.. We're at www.ironhilltech.com and www.ironhill.net (two pseudo seperate parts of the company) (I was even nice enough to mark this down to be nice to those that don't care :) Please don't mind the uglyness of the web site.. Our cool stuff never seems to have gotten on to the front page.. I don't do graphics, just the perl stuff. :)
Too many buzz words for my wittle brain.. But we've been doing what we call web-services or ASPing.
Basically we're trying to do a bunch of pseudo-open-source type projects around our name IronX (hehe, trying to do like MS did with DirectX). We're doing customized bug trackers, ToDo lists, inventory management, "requirements databases", customized organization, hardware connectivity matrixes, document control systems, etc. One of our goals is to truely make the paperless office for a certain set of clients / developers. Basically our current model is to have an organization pay us to build them a web site that we host (and can thus maintain). Most of our clients are regional (NJ area), and they're mostly trying to feel the waters with the web. The advantage is a write once, run anywhere with data-reliability (Postgres or Oracle, depending on how much money the organization has).
We've looked at various OpenSource pieces and took functional descriptions of them, and tried to write custom apps for our clients (and ourselves).. We've done 90% of it in perl, Apache, Postgres. We had some failed attempts at Servlets (the development time was not cost effective compared to that of perl).
We're one of the few ASP services that doesn't make use of advertisements, since we recoup our costs in the labor and the run 200% charging for the run-time cost.. So long as our clients don't require a lot of BW, we come out ahead (consolidating all servers and net connections). We're a small company (15 people total), with a specific niche of people that are old-style engineers and thus not able to handle the web on their own.
I don't know that this style is very profitable, but it's definately fun for us developers.. Working with all the latest buzz words, trying on different hats, OS's, etc.
-Michael
Ok, then we take the revenue expenditure of the government, divide it by the number of people, minus the poor.. Let's see, that makes roughly $10,000 / person ( 1 trillion / 100 million working ).. Correct the numbers if I'm wrong.
Ok, well, obviously a person that makes $25,000 is in the hole, so we need to raise it to say $30,000 minimum income.. But oh damn, that means that a person earning $29,999 had better not accept a tip, or they're out 30% of their income.. Damn that's a #$@%.
Ok, well, shoot, lets see, we can graduate this puppy.. Say between $25,000 and $100,000 we graduate it to that $10k / year.. But, well,err.. this IS a flat tax isn't it? Well, we're just making an exception for the poor.. We're just redefining who's poor.
Ok, but damn, now we've lost 90% of the population, that means that we're going to have to raise the overall tax.. to say $20k / year.. Again, drop off the lower part, keep the graduation.. Hmm. Maybe if we use differential calculous we'll come up with the right number. GOT IT.. Ok, now let's see.
approx $22k / year ( fictitious number ) for $100K / year and above.. And we graduate it to zero at some point below. But now let's take a look shall we.
A person that makes $100K and below pays out about 22% tax.. Ok, that's not TOO bad.. Especially since we cut out that horrible bearacracy right? ( all of what fraction of a percentage of federal expendatures? ). But now, how about someone that makes $100Million / year. He only pays out 2.2%. Damn!!! That's not right
Ok ok.. So the truely "fair" system of equal rationing doesn't seem to hold mustard, lets try the percentages approach.. Everybody pays out x%.
Again, we cut off the poor (we'd have to pay them welfare anyway). I have absolutely no idea what the x would be. I have rough ideas of government expenditures, and revenue, but there are too many factors to figure it out-right.. So instead let me make some observations.
Currently, a low income family of $25k or more, pays out something along the lines of 20-33%. I suppose that higher incomes come out to about 30-60%. The ONLY thing a flat tax does is even out those percentages. If the government spends the exact same amount (which is almost always independant of taxation since they can always sell bonds to make up the difference), then a reduction in the higher end will mean an increase in the lower end.
Thus, the only affect in "fairness" is to raise the taxes for the middle income (and some of the lower income). But, raising taxes for the middle income reduces the overall quality of life for the country (increases the propensity for inner city living, pessimistic feelings, which combined promotes crime).. Not to mention, you reduce the income for college bound families.. Which has the effect of reducing their likelihood for seeing college through.. This hurts the american worker with respect to foreign ones.
Now let's look at the wealthy.. What did they do with their new found "wealth".. Well, it couldn't have gone down too much.. A person that makes 100Mil paying out say 50% going down to say 35% means an additional burden on the middle class of $15 million. With an average american paying out $9 - $16K / year, that would mean the entire taxes of roughly 1,000 americans. But what happens to the wealthy American.. Meaning that there has to be roughly 1k workers to compensate for 1 reduced wealthy person. (Heavy use of approximation since most wealthy make less than $100M, but we also have to take into account the raise in taxes of existing tax payers)
The wealthy guy must already have lived comfortably at $100Mil minus taxes. If you give him an additional $15 million a year, then you've just inflated the economy.. Stock market explosions, luxury items grow in sales.. Essentially, the rich will suddenly get a lot richer (for free), and the economy will inflate..
Then you have the middle class who get a double wammy.. First they get an immediate tax increase (which is absolutely required by a flat tax), THEN, they get inflation.. Worse, they'll have less spending capability, which will hurt the very sorts of small businesses the lower income people promote. But, any industry that a poor person has in common with a wealthy person will become inflated... Property value / tax, for example will shoot up again.. Automobiles in the upper 20's and beyond will increase in expense.... The costs of education.. etc.
In an economic stabalizing system, you want to provide resistence to highly profitable ventures. The fed does this by raising the interest rates when we're infalting too quickly (or to ease them off when we need to encourage investment). The government sometimes can do this by raising taxes for the wealthy when we want to slow down the economy, and to reduce taxes for the majority middle class, to increase consumption.
The point is that flat taxes are the simple minded person's way out (meaning it's a no brainer, and has immediate benifits for some). In strategy video games, it's like spending time to accumulate battle cruisers and sending them all out in a periodic fashion until you wipe out the enemy. It can work, but leaves you wide open to side attacks. The graduated tax with accompanying deductions is more for the strategist, and hense, thinking man(liken until strategically sending tiny forces here and there to cut off the enemy). Neither system is can sit for too long without needing adjustment.. But my claim is that even if you did go to a flat tax, you'd eventually have to make innumerous ammendments to account for problems with it.. And soon, you'd be right back to a system just a complex and "unfair" as with today.. The difference is that you'd virtually destroy American society and economy for a time in the process.
-Michael
And just who is this "We" that gets to decide what "we" like and what "we" don't?
:). The point is that it too must evolve.. And if people don't like maphia IRS, then they vote in people who care about reform.
It's just this sort of tolerant indifference that puts us in the crap that we're in. If the people say nobody can tell me because logically we're smart enough to realize that there is no perfect solution, then no solutions can be offered and we're left up to self governance.. And that puts those in power with the most influence.. Such as corporations, or organized hate / exploitation.
The way life works is you try something, then evolve it until it successfully accomplishes a goal. There is no perfect solution, no Utopia.. You pundits that think the net is Utopia, think again. Without regulation, eventually the net will be more dangerous than corporate america. Theft, defaiming, unsolicited perversion, stalking... etc. Laisez fair does not work after a certain level.. There _has_ to be some for of given up control on our parts.. This includes things such as morality.. We obviously don't allow killing.. But why? If I want to kill my neighbor, then what business is it of yours? Likewise with theft. But what about intellectual property theft? Or verbal phrase theft? Or hurting a company's profits by say.. selling a competing technology?
As you can see there is NO "solution"... There are temporary solutions that solve immediate goals.. These solutions have to evolve with the thinking man.. But you need to have some.
In order to enforce the various levels of governmental and societal control, the people have to contribute some sort of resources to the collective.. Just like bees in a hive. Now I don't advocate communism in any way.. The worker bee hive works because they're biologically engineered, not becase they feel a sence of self duty. Humans are very suseptible to mood and outlook. So in order to achieve a non communisitic self govenance, we pay taxes..
Unfortunately we're plagued with the false sence of fairness.. Somehow we believe that the "phrase all created equal" has significance that applies to what we deserve in life. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has some merrit, so long as you don't undermine the above mentioned human mood. Living beings work based on the reward/punishment system. Pavlov (sp?) tried to prove something along these lines. Some obey the law because we get to reap the benifits of society (protection, safety net and community services). Some obey divine law because of a similar feeling of community, or more commonly because of the "reward" of heavenly entrance (ill served if you ask me, becuase it allows them to write people off by saying they're going to hell). Children obey their parents partially out of the communal need for acceptance, but also out of fear of punishment or wanting of "treat" rewards.
From this, it makes sence that capitalism works as a productivity tool.. Give a group wealth for successful productivity (meaning productivity that fullfills a need w/in the community), and you've got a thriving system. However, wealth acquisition can be achieved outside of the law and or morality as well. Our system is starting to fall behind in the regulation of this respect because of the very same indifference towards morality that you present.
Beyond that, in taxation, the poor are struggling to live, the middle class are struggling to make ends meet, the wealthy.. well, they're either strugling to make it to the top, or hold on to their standard of living. Arguably, nobody is "content" with their station in life. But here's the difference...
If a poor person is taxed more, then they or their family may not be able to achieve the food, shelter or medical attention required. If a middle class person loses more to taxes, then they'll likely not be able to achieve the education or bettering themselves that would otherwise benifit society as a whole.. Additionally, they may have to move into lowering income housing whose environment will have negative effects on them.. in turn increasing the likelyhood of a less civil society overall.
If you increase the tax on the wealthy, the worst that happens is that they have to move into a smaller house, have a smaller car, take cheaper vacations.. Yes, they'll have less to invest into our economy, but that's not always an issue (such as today, where too many people are investing too great a percentage into the economy).
Now there are side effects, such as if you tax a busniess too much, then they may be forced to lay off people (especialy if you actually raise taxes for them).
The end result of all of this is an evolutionary attempt at government -including- taxation. A first generation may do a flat linearly proportional tax.. But then find that it's pointless to tax the poor, and painful to tax businesses. So then you raise taxes, and leave out important sections.. Then you start twisting the curve, so on and so forth... Eventually you come to a tax code as complicated as ours.. requiring the employment of a good number of people. But is this bad? Maybe.. Here are a couple outcomes.
You increase beuracracy.. You have to hire more government personelle, (which requires a raise in taxes). You have greater chance for fraud, due to people hiding in between the lines... So you have to hire a substantial number of government personelle as well as enforcement agencies..
This causes the IRS to be almost like a mafia... Putting out hits on people that don't pay up.
Medium to high income earners must hire tax consultants, which winds up taking away even more of their funds if they don't neatly fit into the niches.
You wind up in social engineering, which is at the whim of the potentially short sighted government (or public mass mob).
But here are some good parts.
The 20'th century was based around specialization.. Computers were just a natural extension.. "No generality is worth a damn, including this one" - Mark Twain. A general rule is not the best suited. By forming specialists, and people that do nothing but study the outcomes of taxation, you can device more efficient means of collecting monies from people that has the least negative effects. Likewise, people who specialize in minimizing taxes can aid the earner / consumer.
Just like our capitalistic society, of change, advancement, trial and error, taxation perfectly fits into that methodolgy. It would be hypocritical to say let businesses (which affect our live more profoundly than the government) operate as they choose, but limit the influence of the government.
In order to facility the poor that can not afford tax consultants, you put all things that affect them on the easy form, and give them a standard deduction. If they can read, they can fill that out.. No, they can't _optimize_ their returns, but they can almost essentially pay nothing, so what's the difference.. The wealthy, as a general rule, are to be taxed at a greater percentage, but they can afford an entrage of tax consultants to maximize their activities so as to conform to tax-free niches.
So what of beuracracy? Well, that should also be the role of specialists.. To find ways to make the process more efficient.. Computerized returns that allow instant electronic validation? Electronic receipts? Computers, as before are nearly the ultimate in specialized machines (it is afterall a gereral purpose machine
Even in idealist China and Russia, there is no "flat" system.. They've learned that this doesn't work.. They've had to include dozens if not thousands of special cases.. In Econ, I learned of the ticket system, where you _earn_ the right to consume a luxurous good (like a bicycle). Doesn't sound like to each according to his need to me. If I happen to be good, but I already own a bike, then what's the point.. Or if my friend hasn't received recognition, yet they're very far away and could use a bike, isn't this misallocation of resources? An ideal system would have benevolent omnipotent monitors picking off the good and bad and allocating resources wisely. But that 'ain't gonna happen. Life isn't about ideal cases.
So in summary, graduated taxes WORK (look at the 90's). It should not be a static system, and on occasion is must be simplified (typically to more effective generalities), but it will always grow in complexity to handle the special cases.
Think of it as a genetic algorithm.. The algorithm is the tax system, and the parasitic problem is the greedy and needy tax payers.
-Michael
Damnit, I hate when that happens...
print <<EOS;
...
EOS
gumble gumble.. less thans... grumble grumble...
I guess to be more OO friendly I could have done.
my $stdout = new IO::File ">-";
$stdout->print( 'slashdot.org:80', Proto => 'tcp';
while ( $xxxx = each xxxx ) {
my $s_comment
}
$slash_sock->print( close();
Just for style:
:)
o n};
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use FocusGroups; # Keep with the standard man
use SlashdotQuestions;
# this script emulates W.
my $ra_slashdot_questions = SlashdotQuestions::getList(); # save some cycles with references
my $rh_what_polled_well_in_the_focus_group = FocusGroups::getQuestionResponses( $ra_slashdot_questions );
my %answers;
foreach my $question (@$ra_slashdot_questions) {
$answers{ $question } =
$rh_what_polled_well_in_the_focus_group->{$questi
}
while ( my ( $slashdot_question, $focusgroup_response ) = each %answers ) {
print EOS;
$slashdot_question
$focusgroup_response
EOS
}
Goes to prove TMTOWTDI.
-Michael
I can't imagine that it's not obvious. That forcing the delivery of a child in an of itself is useless.
You extrapolate out of context. The point is that death and killing are both natural, and that the threshold of acceptible behavior is situationally dependant. Morality is is abstract concept.
In some cases yes.. It's situationally dependant.. If a bunch of people are on a desert island with limited food, but you know you'll be rescued in due time... It's entirely acceptible for a person to sacrafice themself for the good of the others (namely, to choose not to eat). And though it's "morally" questionable, it's entirely _natural_ for one or more individuals to gang up on others.. to fight for the food. If a person chose not to eat, it would be a painful death.. They may, instead, choose to commit suicide.. Christian ethics condems this, but that's just one variation of ethics... (which is an underlying point).
A mother would barely think twice about putting herself in harms way to save a child. But that's just another type of suicide. Christiantiy condones this (martyrdom). In "the good earth", we learned of a different set of ethics.. No more right or wrong.. Just different. My thesis was that it's a political issue as to where the threshold of right and wrong lie.
-Michael
but continuing the problem, doesn't it all boil down to random distribution of quantum particles? You had a particle that was created through an interaction of some kind - the electron radiated a photon, or two particles collided/interacted and formed 1 or more resultant particles. Everything about those particles is known to those particles, just not the observer. I understand that you can't "measure" the particle without disturbing it, but the particles themselves aren't magical.. They just move through space and time (and what-ever other curled up dimensions) with the potential to react to one of a discrete set of events.
If two particles are known to have orthogonal properties (such as polarity), then each particle knew all along what they were, they were just created or selected by some special process right? (I don't really know why Einstein calls it a paradox).
-Michael
Would this work on two pieces of equipment that WEREN'T attached by optical fibers?
I don't think it has to be fiber.. That's mainly a photonic medium. Theoretically I believe it could be a super-conducting wire, or even a virtual super-conducting channel through space. Essentially it's anything that will not disturb the messenger quantum particle(s). Light is the easiest thing to deal with as far as I know. As an EE undergrad, we've studied electrons out the wazoo, and we know of their relationship to photons, but I never fully got comfortable with them.. They're discrete transmitter energy packets for charged particles. When an electron slows down, it emits it's momentum energy in the form of a photon.. When an electron speeds up, it's because it was hit by a photon. (though it's also possible for physical collisions, which carry momenum in the normal macro-scopic scale.. They're called phonons I believe). The amount of energy released is the frequency of either the photon or phonon. In both cases (I believe), the medium dictacts the ratio of wave-length to frequency (e.g the speed-limit).
From what I understand, a photon travelling through space is affected by forces such as gravity (though I don't think any others), but otherwise travel uni-directionally through space until they collide with another charged particle (quark or lepton / sub-nucleid or electron), where it transfers the energy. It's path however works like a wave.. If you consider the medium to be water, and the wave-front itself to be the photon, then it makes more sence, except that the wave's amplitude is so low that only one thing in the entire ocean will ultimately feel it. If enough discrete particles emite photons (even at random frequencies), then the effect will be more like a river wave-front. I don't fully understand how the wave-particle chooses it's path. It's not really attracted to a charged particle, yet at the same time, it's collision rate is substantially higher than say a neutrino (a nearly mass-less, chargless lepton (a brother of the electron)), who can pass through entire galaxies w/o incident.
The thing that bugs me about quantum physics is the quote, "if it doesnt' completely confound you, then you don't understand it". Well, I've always thought it seemed intuitive, so I must be missing something.. The intuition is that it seems to act very similarly to macro-scopic physics, so long as you consider invisible forces to be virtual springs. For example, the "Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox", where nothing can be known about either photon until one hits it's final polarized destination, and that somehow they're transmitting information back and forth instantaneously.. The idea that I read suggests that they are independant somehow in all ways except that they must be orthoginally poloraized (I guess I'd have to learn more about how you can garuntee their orthogniality). That when they collide, they pull from some localized "random information database" and know what the state of the other one was.. It's supported, I believe because you can not monitor their states without messing up the experiment. But it seems to me that there was prior knowledge between the two states.. At the time of their creation, and that they simply carried their information in seperate directions.
The schrodenger cat experiement (that I recall anyway) said that if you had a cat in a box, and cut the box in half, the cat would be in one of the two boxes (though it was unknown). and that if you seperated the boxes by 100 light years, then opened one, you've immediately transmitted the information to the other box.. The other cat will either be or not be. It's a high level analogy for various quantum properties, but it seems asinine, to suggest that the info was being transmitted only at the time of measurement.. The darn cat _knew_ which box he was in from the beginning. Radomness dictated which box the quantum particle was closer to when they were seperated and they just altered their quantum orbital path to the new confines and inertial frame. The whole abstraction of quantum physics that us lay people get makes it difficult for us to get what's really going on.. All the analogies I've been told do not express the "quantum-wierdness" that everybody always talks about, they're logically founded.
Oh boy.. Do I see the fledgling religious war comming on?
First of all, the "body" inside the womb is the combination and product of two humans. Without the support of at least one of them, that "body" will most certainly die. You can coerce the woman to have the child, and you can even take the child away from her, but you're fighting an uphill battle to bring to child to a worthwhile life.
Beyond that, the fetus does not belong to the mother anymore than the body belongs to the mother. We are in turn products of the earth. Divine significance is left as an exercize to the reader. The point is that there is no such thing as physical ownership. There is only brute force (either psychological or physical) protection of materials. It is the perception of ownership that allows us to commit "atrocities". I own this land, I can burry what-ever I want here.. I own this forest, I can cut it down and make a profit. These are my children, I can discipline them however I choose. This is my wife, I can have sex with her whenever I like (anybody remember this old addage?)
So from that, you should be able to morally justify that a woman can't just claim that this is my fetus, and I can rid myself of it however I choose. You'd be right except for one small detail... Circumstance. Assuming that I can convince you that we do not "own" anything, but merely protect our possessions, then take that every cell in your body is an independant possession. Each of which has had it's destiny mapped out for it.. Depending on what part of the body it happened to start out as, it is designed to have a certain life expectancy.. They are individual life forms, no less significant or magnificant than a fully functional Einstein. Man, in all his knowledge has never reverse engineered cellular life. These cells have been chosen (through divinity or natural selection) to work together as a team, and thus take part in their destiny. Most of these cells will sacrafice themselves for the good of the many. Your epidermous, your hair, your red blood cells.. All of which go through a living stage and will physically die in order to fullfill some organized purpose. In fact, the act of consciousness is little more than a high level functioning machine. The potential supernatural aspect is wholely independant of the mechanical wonders of the mammal's body.
Given this, you _must_ accept that death is a part of life.. That life regularly chooses who among them will die before their time.. There is nothing un-natural about death or selected killing (even indiscriminant killing). The question becomes what is best for the species, the individual, the particular organ... Or fetus. 99% of the time, our conscious selves are shielded from these sorts of descisions.. We don't have to make life-and death descisions (or at least we tend to delegate such authority to a select few). That's fine as a way of handling order and peace. But that is a choice of a particular community. Each of us regularly subconsciosly chooses the death of innumerable living beings.. Everything you eat is evidence of this.. Every wooden structure you utilize, every blade of grass you stomp apon... We think little of it, and so we should.. But we can't neglect that death is around us, and is wholly natural.
Variously religious Dogma's have placed priority on human collective life, as would be expected by any life form... Life always looks after it's own (it's more of that evolutionary/engineered rationalle). We also place heavy emphasis on the new-born... Sub-consciously, this is our hope for survival as a race... The Motherly protective instincts in most of us.
But you have to understand that life is about choices.. That choosing to take a baby into an unwanting family (especially in the cases of rape, or if it caused the death of the mother), will do no species good. In nature, unwanted children are physically killed by their families. You may claim that we have the benifit of a collective peer consciousness, but understand that we don't have all the answers... I make the claim that if we continue on with our "collective" wisdom as we have done for the past 200 years, we will eventually rid the Earth of our grotesque selves. Learning to vote ourselves tax breaks, allowing every human wanting desire to be fullfilled in part or whole... To promote greed, wastefulness, anonymity and thus removal from responsibility... When natural resources are so scarce that we must fight for them, I garuntee you that the fat cats of the world will not gratiously share with one another.. War will be eminant, and life will be scarce thereafter. Heven help us if we learn to travel through space to other colonizable worlds.. Has anyone actually seen Independance day?
In summary. Life is wonderous and prescious, but there are powerful forces that choose expiration dates. We are one of those forces, and it is merely politics (at the personal and pseudo-religious level) that decides who and how we should exercize that right. Never forget that you have Godlike powers across the earth (in terms of the level of control you wield), and with that comes God-like responsibilities. You may very well choose to limit your influence on death, but just as you must eradicate the very much alive cancer and bacteria in your body, you must sometimes allow for sacrafices.. Even of your own kind....
-Michael
Does that make them non-macros? Lisp hackers would certainly disagree.
Well, then maybe I'm a little fuzzy on the difference between a macro and a compiler. To me, a macro has historically been a named reference to a collection of code (really just more human readible text). M4 and CPP macros translate a name and arguments to some other rearranged set of text.
A compiler, to my knowledge translates human readible code into optimal machine language (though not always assembly code).
What Perl6 looks to do is have multiple front-ends that translate some form of human readible code into [v]machine-readible code. Though I've written a macro processor that translates human text straight to binary assembly, I would hardly call that a compiler. A real compiler will take into account different symantics - it will attempt to assertain the logical meaning of a statement and determine how best to represent it in machine code. If all we did was translate human code to machine code, then yeah, we'd be a macro "lexer". But Perl6 will allow you to write your own -intermediate- code within the dynamic parser to perform the one-time compilation.
If this doesn't resolve the issue, then you'll have to point me to some literature that better describes the distinction.
-Michael
It's a valid concern, but it only serves to frustrate the conservative - it fully lies within the stated goals of the language.
If you are an organization, then it is _your_ responsibility to define standards for your developers. You can write very unreadible code in _any_ language..
As for making use of other's works, that's what Perl documentation and OO are for.. Hide the complexities, and publish the interfaces.. Perl works the way Humans do.. We don't understand the complexities of our bosses or employees, and we don't need to - we just need to understand how to interface with them to get desirable results. Let me write my chunk of code in my group's dialect.. Let us debug and have peer review so that we have clean code. Then you only need be concerned with a trivial interface... If someone new comes into the group, then they must be introduced to our style. I've worked with many groups that have successfully accomplished this (In more languages than just Perl).
-Michael