Someone who recognizes you, even if you are not name, sees you in a compromising photo. You are cooked.
This, here, is the real problem. Not that your info is findable, but that you can't take a single step without worrying how your Masters see it. In what way are we not slaves?
Something must be done; and frankly, I don't think that "free market" can survive the kind of surveillance society modern technology enables without becoming a living Hell.
There's a slight distinction between engineers who create things and users who use things.
Most programmers aren't engineers, but that doesn't stop them from having delusions of being one. Most drivers aren't good, but that doesn't stop them from having delusions of being so. And so forth. That was my point.
Your analogy is worse than a car analogy.
Then I have properly and accurately reflected the C++ philosophy and the culture of nerd machismo that surrounds it:).
- You could vote for Libertarian-republicans (like Ron Paul) who would end all wars, bring all soldiers home, and end the military-government hegemony.
Rather than lose China, I'd comply with the government's wishes and obey the law (i.e. filter). Nice guys who "do no evil" ultimately finish last.
It's not a matter of being nice. It's a matter of having a spine and not selling your principles the second it becomes convenient to do so. And actually bragging that you would... well. I guess you just set the new record for being pathetic. Congratulations.
I could also comment on how your eagerness to cooperate with the Chinese dictatorship combines with your frequent implications of libertarian leanings to create the picture of a truly pitiful individual, one completely devoid of any values besides personal gain and completely undeserving of any freedom yourself since you're willing to help remove it from others for money, but frankly, why bother? You're not going to care, and anyone else has sufficient knowledge to ignore you and your worthless opinions from now on.
That a theory is just a tool for understanding and predicting reality.
But a theory is more than just that, it's a mental model of reality, the context for sensory input. Einstein's General Relativity and Newton's Laws of Motion are fundamentally different: Newton took time and space to be a passive background, while Einstein made spacetime an active participant in events. The two theories don't just differ a little bit on their results, they represent fundamentally different ways of looking at reality.
But in a way your professor was right: a theory is "just a" tool for understanding reality, in the same way as you brains "just" allow you to think.
The inevitable crumbling of centrally planned economies under authoritarian states - China, for example, is attempting to move to a market economy while maintaining the political structure they have.
So basically, the successes of USSR aren't evidence that communism works, because USSR wasn't really communist, but the failures of USSR are evidence tha communism doesn't work. It's not communist when it succeeds, but it's communist when it fails.
I get the feeling that you aren't so much trying to analyze economic systems, but have decided beforehand which you prefer and are trying to fudge evidence to support it by discrediting all others.
Given taht the USSR, former east Europe, etc. have all undergone radical change and a move away from central planning, all within a few decades, I'd say history has shown it to have failed. Miserably.
As you noted, these were authoritarian states - dictatorships, in other words. Would it just perhaps be possible that it's the brutal oppression that they're rejecting, rather than central planning?
The USSR, China and Cuba are authoritarian, not communist, states where production was / is controlled by the state - and simply prove an authoritarian state can accomplish a lot at the expense of its people.
Then what evidence were you referring to, when you claimed that "history has shown it doesn't work"?
This would be relatively trivial to achieve, so can you tell me of any single damn reason why an eventual flying car should require more input than "take off and take us to school"?
It's the same reason why some people insist on using C/C++ by default: Manly Men Manage Memory Manually.
Many pilots have stayed with their plane risking (or even losing) their lives without ejecting because they know their plane would kill others if they ejected. That's the degree of professionalism and responsibility I'd want from someone whose allowed to fly a multi-ton vehicle above a densely populated city on a regular basis.
So in short, to get flying cars, invest in AI research.
I've personally done several years of Scriptural studies, can read and write in Biblical Greek and Hebrew and find nothing to support this strange idea of yours.
To be fair, attributing strange ideas to God is a time-honored tradition amongst believers and unbelievers both. For reference, see: pretty much any argument where religion came up ever.
Actually, that is capitalism - you're free to do what you want with the fruits of you labor; as well as decide what to do in the first place.
No. The very grievance communism had against capitalism (and tried to change) is that under capitalism, most people work for someone else, and only get a tiny fraction of the fruits of their labour.
It ain't perfect; but it is better than anything else (to paraphrase a famous quote)
It's sad that an economic system is being likened to the principle that rulers should be accountable to the ruled (which is what representational democracy is, at heart).
Communism, on the other hand, you would have to produce whatever the people decided (at least in Marx's viewpoint); of course 'communist' states are really authoritarian where the state, not the people, decide what to produce.
Under communism, whoever does the labour should receive all the fruits of his labour, and that's only possible if he owns the means of production necessary for that labour. Collectivism only enters into it because factories can't be operated by a single person.
At any rate, you would not be free to produce what you wanted in either scenario.
You are never free to do what you want unless you're independently wealthy.
In short, history has shown it doesn't work.
History has shown it works just fine: Russia went from a failed state to a global superpower in a few decades under communism, even with a paranoid lunatic at charge hindering it, and stayed that way for 70 years. China is still around and on its way to surpass the USA. Even Cuba is still around.
What history has shown is that blind adherence to an ideology tends to produce unpleasant consequences, and this recent financial crisis shows - once again - that this applies to free-market capitalism too.
(Cue a hundred libertarians explaining how USA is not a free market, how it's the last few bits of regulation preventing banks from coming up with even more convoluted schemes that caused the crisis, how it's all a plot about the huge international conspiracy of climate scientists because global warming is obviously a myth since it suggests enviromental regulation might be a good idea and is caused by sunspots and regulation besides, and other typical inane libertarian ramblings.)
Although English uses possessive forms everywhere, that doesn't mean that anyone owns all those things. You do not own "your friends" or "your children".
And even more dramatically, a car doesn't own "its owner".
Stealing is when you deny someone their just reward for goods or services rendered. My services were books, almost a dozen of them.
So basically, you have been stealing from other authors: after all, they wrote books, yet they received less than they otherwise would had because their books competed with yours.
That's the problem with trying to widen the definition of "stealing" to cover all activity that might lead to someone getting less profit they otherwise might: it leads to ridiculous conclusions.
Nonetheless, I still own the copyrights, and they're still my effort; they can be justly compared to making a car that I rent out, keep serviced, until no one wants to rent them-- but I still own the car and its design.
A car is a physical object, the contents of a book is not. If I take your car, you lose it; if I copy the contents of your book, you still have them. Your analogy is not correct.
The Canadians are somewhat visionary in some areas, copyright being one of them, but they haven't completed the ecosystem where artists, content creators, and others are rewarded monetarily and systematically.
The attempt to abstract tangible from intangible assets, however, is a rationalization on your part. You stole.
It is you who keeps confusing tangible and intangible assets. They are fundamentally different: a physical artifact vs. an artifically enforced monopoly. He didn't steal, he infringed copyright.
I hate to tell you this, but BP has more incentive than anyone to actually fix the problem, since they are going to be paying for the damages for the next 20 years.
No, they won't. They'll ask and receive bailouts, use those bailouts to pay bonuses to the CEO, "sell" all the assets to a "new" corporation and finally let the "old" one go bankrupt while the directors move to the "new" one.
Personal responsibility is for peasants, not for plutocrats.
Except apparently they are bumping into things they aren't supposed to be.
They drilled too deep. Now they are using the robots to try and contain that which they have released. The oil is not the remains of long-dead plants and animals, but the black poisonous ichor that runs in the veins of... It's not completely free yet, but the borehole is widening, despite their efforts to close it. It's breaking its chains and clawing its way up towards the seafloor, then the surface. And when it reaches the waves and sunlight...
Humans are not the first masters of the Earth. Prepare. For your mortgage has been rate-hiked.
If a cow starts hurting people, and the owner refuses to control it, though luck: he'll be out of milk soon. Maybe that will teache him to control his animals rather than letting them run wild in the future.
How the FUCK can you justify the current situation where 1% of the population pays 40% of the taxes?
Easily: they control more than 40% of the nation's wealth.
Yea, I get it, you're jealous that someone has more than you.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't invalidate anything I've said. Perhaps you should analyze your own position, and ask yourself why you felt the need to resort to such illogical rethorical tactics to defend it.
However, there's absolutely no possible way to claim it's "fair" or "just" for most of the population to pay little to no taxes (it's currently around 50% of the people in the US don't pay any income tax) and a small portion pay almost all of the taxes.
It is both fair and just that those who control most of nation's economy also pay most of its maintenance costs.
The map for Civ 6 is going to be based on Penrose tiles.
Or prevent the "the" from it, allow multiple maps in the same game, and let me colonize Moon!
Seriously: Undersea cities, orbital habitats, space-based weaponry, Moon colonies... Call to Power tried some of this stuff, so why not expand the scope of the game to hypothethical future worlds? It would be a lot of fun being able to retreat to the moons of Jupiter and prepare to retake the Inner System while they are sabotaging your attempts to extract hydrogen fuel from the gas giants for your interstellar spacecraft... Or establish a colony on Mars, only to have them rebel and fight for independence. Or a hundred other sci-fi scenarios.
It's about time for Civilization to take a real leap forward.
Do you think that maybe, MAYBE they're going to include a "compatibility" or "classic" mode alongside the new rules...
If you have Civ 4 savegames, the chances are you have Civ 4. If you have Civ 4, why would you want to play Civ 5 modded to work like Civ 4 instead of just playing Civ 4?
I'll read your link later, but as of now, the Fair Tax seems the best option - tax on what you spend, not on what you earn.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are. -- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Taxing consumption rather than income means that the rich, who spend a smaller proportion of their income than the poor, also end up paying a smaller fraction of it as taxes. It's actually worse than mere flat tax, as it's an outright regressive tax - your tax rate goes up as your earnings go down.
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This, here, is the real problem. Not that your info is findable, but that you can't take a single step without worrying how your Masters see it. In what way are we not slaves?
Something must be done; and frankly, I don't think that "free market" can survive the kind of surveillance society modern technology enables without becoming a living Hell.
How about "think before you marry"?
Most programmers aren't engineers, but that doesn't stop them from having delusions of being one. Most drivers aren't good, but that doesn't stop them from having delusions of being so. And so forth. That was my point.
Then I have properly and accurately reflected the C++ philosophy and the culture of nerd machismo that surrounds it :).
"Rather than lose China, I'd comply with the government's wishes and obey the law (i.e. filter). Nice guys who "do no evil" ultimately finish last."
Sorry, but I don't trust your advice, and don't think that anyone should.
"Rather than lose China, I'd comply with the government's wishes and obey the law (i.e. filter). Nice guys who "do no evil" ultimately finish last."
Sorry, but I don't trust your advice, and don't think that anyone should.
Yeah: take the advice of someone who's publicly stated that he's willing to screw over others for profit, or don't.
Things have consequences, and we all know that you wouldn't want to finish last.
It's not a matter of being nice. It's a matter of having a spine and not selling your principles the second it becomes convenient to do so. And actually bragging that you would... well. I guess you just set the new record for being pathetic. Congratulations.
I could also comment on how your eagerness to cooperate with the Chinese dictatorship combines with your frequent implications of libertarian leanings to create the picture of a truly pitiful individual, one completely devoid of any values besides personal gain and completely undeserving of any freedom yourself since you're willing to help remove it from others for money, but frankly, why bother? You're not going to care, and anyone else has sufficient knowledge to ignore you and your worthless opinions from now on.
Crawl back to under the rock you came from, worm.
But a theory is more than just that, it's a mental model of reality, the context for sensory input. Einstein's General Relativity and Newton's Laws of Motion are fundamentally different: Newton took time and space to be a passive background, while Einstein made spacetime an active participant in events. The two theories don't just differ a little bit on their results, they represent fundamentally different ways of looking at reality.
But in a way your professor was right: a theory is "just a" tool for understanding reality, in the same way as you brains "just" allow you to think.
So basically, the successes of USSR aren't evidence that communism works, because USSR wasn't really communist, but the failures of USSR are evidence tha communism doesn't work. It's not communist when it succeeds, but it's communist when it fails.
I get the feeling that you aren't so much trying to analyze economic systems, but have decided beforehand which you prefer and are trying to fudge evidence to support it by discrediting all others.
As you noted, these were authoritarian states - dictatorships, in other words. Would it just perhaps be possible that it's the brutal oppression that they're rejecting, rather than central planning?
Then what evidence were you referring to, when you claimed that "history has shown it doesn't work"?
It's the same reason why some people insist on using C/C++ by default: Manly Men Manage Memory Manually.
So in short, to get flying cars, invest in AI research.
To be fair, attributing strange ideas to God is a time-honored tradition amongst believers and unbelievers both. For reference, see: pretty much any argument where religion came up ever.
No. The very grievance communism had against capitalism (and tried to change) is that under capitalism, most people work for someone else, and only get a tiny fraction of the fruits of their labour.
It's sad that an economic system is being likened to the principle that rulers should be accountable to the ruled (which is what representational democracy is, at heart).
Under communism, whoever does the labour should receive all the fruits of his labour, and that's only possible if he owns the means of production necessary for that labour. Collectivism only enters into it because factories can't be operated by a single person.
You are never free to do what you want unless you're independently wealthy.
History has shown it works just fine: Russia went from a failed state to a global superpower in a few decades under communism, even with a paranoid lunatic at charge hindering it, and stayed that way for 70 years. China is still around and on its way to surpass the USA. Even Cuba is still around.
What history has shown is that blind adherence to an ideology tends to produce unpleasant consequences, and this recent financial crisis shows - once again - that this applies to free-market capitalism too.
(Cue a hundred libertarians explaining how USA is not a free market, how it's the last few bits of regulation preventing banks from coming up with even more convoluted schemes that caused the crisis, how it's all a plot about the huge international conspiracy of climate scientists because global warming is obviously a myth since it suggests enviromental regulation might be a good idea and is caused by sunspots and regulation besides, and other typical inane libertarian ramblings.)
And even more dramatically, a car doesn't own "its owner".
So basically, you have been stealing from other authors: after all, they wrote books, yet they received less than they otherwise would had because their books competed with yours.
That's the problem with trying to widen the definition of "stealing" to cover all activity that might lead to someone getting less profit they otherwise might: it leads to ridiculous conclusions.
A car is a physical object, the contents of a book is not. If I take your car, you lose it; if I copy the contents of your book, you still have them. Your analogy is not correct.
The Canadians are somewhat visionary in some areas, copyright being one of them, but they haven't completed the ecosystem where artists, content creators, and others are rewarded monetarily and systematically.
It is you who keeps confusing tangible and intangible assets. They are fundamentally different: a physical artifact vs. an artifically enforced monopoly. He didn't steal, he infringed copyright.
No, they won't. They'll ask and receive bailouts, use those bailouts to pay bonuses to the CEO, "sell" all the assets to a "new" corporation and finally let the "old" one go bankrupt while the directors move to the "new" one.
Personal responsibility is for peasants, not for plutocrats.
They drilled too deep. Now they are using the robots to try and contain that which they have released. The oil is not the remains of long-dead plants and animals, but the black poisonous ichor that runs in the veins of... It's not completely free yet, but the borehole is widening, despite their efforts to close it. It's breaking its chains and clawing its way up towards the seafloor, then the surface. And when it reaches the waves and sunlight...
Humans are not the first masters of the Earth. Prepare. For your mortgage has been rate-hiked.
Easily: they control more than 40% of the nation's wealth.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't invalidate anything I've said. Perhaps you should analyze your own position, and ask yourself why you felt the need to resort to such illogical rethorical tactics to defend it.
It is both fair and just that those who control most of nation's economy also pay most of its maintenance costs.
I suddenly realized that I live in a world where a headline like this makes perfect sense. Is it just me, or does anyone else find this scary?
Is it very respectful towards Muslims to liken them to children with no self-control?
How about combining that with Master of Orion?
Or prevent the "the" from it, allow multiple maps in the same game, and let me colonize Moon!
Seriously: Undersea cities, orbital habitats, space-based weaponry, Moon colonies... Call to Power tried some of this stuff, so why not expand the scope of the game to hypothethical future worlds? It would be a lot of fun being able to retreat to the moons of Jupiter and prepare to retake the Inner System while they are sabotaging your attempts to extract hydrogen fuel from the gas giants for your interstellar spacecraft... Or establish a colony on Mars, only to have them rebel and fight for independence. Or a hundred other sci-fi scenarios.
It's about time for Civilization to take a real leap forward.
If you have Civ 4 savegames, the chances are you have Civ 4. If you have Civ 4, why would you want to play Civ 5 modded to work like Civ 4 instead of just playing Civ 4?
I won using culture. Granted, I only managed it on lower difficulty settings, but still...
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are. -- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Taxing consumption rather than income means that the rich, who spend a smaller proportion of their income than the poor, also end up paying a smaller fraction of it as taxes. It's actually worse than mere flat tax, as it's an outright regressive tax - your tax rate goes up as your earnings go down.