I've worked a couple of places where fired admins sabotaged their network on the way out.
Lesson: Lock them out before you send them out the door.
And since this means that you can't give any advance warning or notice, the morale of the rest of the staff will go through the floor, not to mention the precautionary actions they have just been given a huge incentive to take and a perfect excuse to carry less ethical of them out.
The real lesson is: if you make enemies, you will eventually take a beating. Not that the businesses are capable of learning that, apparently...
If we see a.1% variation over that relatively small distance, how different would the rate be at 100AU, or half-way to the nearest star? How do we know that radioactive isotopes decay at all if you get them far enough away from a star?
Maybe we should include a fusion reactor in these probes, to ensure that the isotopes keep decaying in the primary power source ?-)
Coming to think of it: could you use a fusor to "burn" radioactive waste into harmless slug and generate electricity simultaneously ? Could you use a fusor to burn even unenriched uranium in a plant ? As unenriched uranium is not significantly radioactive, this could open doors for small-scale nuclear power. Nuclear-power cars, anyone ?
The US Military's computer systems were bought to its knees by a bloody hairdresser?
Yes ! But not just any hairdresser, but a terrorist hairdresser, covered from head to toe with the blood of the innocent victims of his campaign of hair-raising terror ! A vile, vicious man, out to destroy freedom and the American Way by secretly giving important persons bad haircuts !
Who knows, this loathsome creature might even have combed some family members hair for free at some time, making him a communist too !
It's capitalistic math - enforced monopolies are not as efficient (or innovative) as competition.
"Efficiency" in this sense means that they can deliver their service with the lowest possible cost. This happens because a company which wastes money gets outcompeted by a company which doesn't. However, this also means that a company which puts some of its profits into research is going to be outcompeted by a company which puts them into expansion instead.
The simple fact that if the sun were to nova tomorrow, the universe wouldn't notice. This can be shown by the fact that stars die all the time, and given the high occurrance, it's likely another planet like earth has been devoured by a nova or supernova.
Universe doesn't care about inhabited planets being destroyed by novas. We know this because it has likely happened, since the universe doesn't care.
Holy circular reasoning, Batman.
In any case, you're wrong. Life-bearing planets couldn't appear until nucleosynthesis had produced sufficient concentrations of heavy elements to build lifeforms (or solid planets, for that matter), and life takes time to develop, so it requires a long-burning (small) star. Universe simply isn't old enough that there has been many opportunities for civilizations to get wiped out.
Related to this is another fun fact: aiming. It took billions of years on Earth to go from bacteria to multicellular life; it then took hundreds of millions of years to go to reasonably intelligent lifeforms, and finally just a million or so to go from sentience to space age; a few hundred years more and we can likely evacuate the planet to other planetary systems in the case of impending nova or other similar catastrophe. What I'm trying to get to is that, in order to wipe out anything more than bacteria, the star has to explode at just the right moment. To get anything capable of feeling fear or pain - I'm being overly generous here and assuming here that that includes anything with a central nervous system - it would have to aim at a 500 million year window; to get a sentient being, a 5 million year window - again, I'm being generous - and to get a civilization, a 500,000 year window. Since it took about 5 billion years to get from the birth of the Sun to space age, these allow 10%, 0.1% and 0.01% margin for error, respectively.
What I'm getting into, is that in order for such tragedies to happen, the universe would pretty much have to not only notice, care and be actively malicious, but also one hell of a marksman. Unless, of course, you consider lots of bacteria dying to be a tragedy, and even then it has unlikely to have happened, due to the previously mentioned young age of the universe.
Everything that you and every human has ever done will be meaningless.
So, in the hypothetical and very unlikely scenario that the Sun blows up tomorrow, our existence will have been "meaningless", presumably in some metaphysical sense of the word because my existence is certainly meaningful to me right now. What, exactly speaking, does this have to do with subjectivity/objectivity of ethics ?
If our sun was just a bit bigger, it would be doubly so, becuase it would collapse into a black hole instead of a white dwarf.
Three times bigger, actually. But please explain why having my remains sucked into a black hole would make my existence more meaningless than merely being blown to space dust ?
I believe you could have a healthy society that defines its laws based on logic (and its own best interest) without sugar coating it with terms like 'right' or 'wrong'.
Doing that would lead to rampant corruption. After all, while it is in the best interests of the society that for example a police officer turns away a bribe, it is in said officer's own best interests to accept it. The harm due to accepting the bribe is distributed amongst every member of the society, while the benefit comes to the officer. While the total harm far outweigths the benefit, the benefit to the guy who makes the decision is greater than the harm, and so he accepts the bribe - unless he thinks that doing so would be wrong.
So while I don't believe there is absolute evil, I do believe allowing any person to rape/kill any other random person is logically unhealthy to society and therefore should be outlawed in some way or another.
Has that stopped piracy ? And did the prohibition stop the consumption of alcohol ? You can outlaw whatever you want, but it is simply impossible enforce such rules when Joe Average doesn't believe that whatever was outlawed was wrong. Laws are only useful when they only need to deal with the few oddball psychopaths; they're a waste of paper if everyone - including the enforcers - break them whenever they can do so without getting caught. Not that getting caught would really matter, in this scenario, since they could simply bribe themselves free. And of course, even if they actually followed these laws, the enforcers could fake evidence and demand a protection fee anyway.
Societies work because most of their members play nice, and the exceptions are rare enough that they can be treated as such. Convince the majority that there is no right and wrong, though, and you've just given them a perfect excuse to silence their conscience and follow their more destructive impulses. The society can't take that, it has no means whatsoever to deal with almost everyone being a criminal.
Honestly though, ethics are just a high-level justification for behavioural tendancies and emotional programming that is a result of genetics.
One could also view ethics as a tool. As a human being, I have multiple instinctual drives, and sometimes they conflict. Ethics is a set of algorithms for solving this conflict, by determining which drive takes priority in the given circumstance.
There is no objective truth to any ethical truth we present, beyond "because that's how humans act"
Making an assertion doesn't make it true. So, can you offer either proof or supporting logic/evidence ?
Who am I, you, anyone to morally judge somebody else's morals/ethics?
Since such judgement can't - according to yourself - be wrong, on the grounds that wrong doesn't exist, the answer is simple: someone who happens to want to.
Moral relativism is a fascinating view, but it's advocates don't tend to look at it's logical consequences. If there is no right nor wrong, then no action can be wrong, and that includes forcing one's personal moral code on others. Or any arbitrary code for that matter, after all hypocrisy can't be wrong either.
Moral relativism, if taken seriously rather than just used as an excuse to ignore evil deeds by, say, one's trading partners, leads to an unlivable world really fast. Since there is no right nor wrong, every moral code is equivalent to every other, and thus there is no reason why one shouldn't redefine one's moral code to allow one to do anything one can get away with. In other words, chaos and anarchy.
Then allow the health insurance companies to price risk accordingly. Let them charge smokers more money. Let them offer incentives for people to lose weight.
And with all this done, the chimneynoses and tubegirls are still dead and the economy, as a whole, is diminished, since it is denied the input they could had contributed had they stayed healthy.
Individual choices affect other people. That means that other people have a say in them.
Don't try and give the Government control over yet one more aspect of our life.
From my point of view, there's little difference between a government and a huge corporation, with the exception that the government has nominal obligation to listen to me while the corporation doesn't.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Notice which got listed first ?
I'm just sick of the nanny state and people who try to legislate morality and behavior.
And I'm sick of people who promote a wicked stepmother state in it's stead. Why the hell would rule by corporations be better than rule by government ?
The Founding Fathers never envisioned the Federal Government trying to regulate what people can put into their bodies. Do you really think that's an appropriate role for Government?
Appeal to authority is a fine rhetorical tool, but somewhat ironic when used to argue against another authority. And yes, it is the role of government to try and keep its citizens alive and well. That's the very reason it exist.
The nature of science is to generate and disprove hypotheses, not produce 'truth'. There's an illusion that science is progressing and converging toward truth. But the more hypotheses we generate, the more contradictory alternatives we actually have in our minds, and the less able to respond to the world we become.
This is misleading at the best. Physics, for example, is converging towards the truth by introducing more and more accurate models about how reality operates. The theories about Neanderthals are, in all likelihood, becoming more accurate over time, as some hypotheses gets more evidence behind them and others against them. You might have more alternatives, but they aren't equal.
It's a little like Windows patches. If you keep having to retroactively fix things, you're doing it wrong.
Science would be more like Wine than Windows: we aren't engineering the universe, we're reverse-engineering it.
Ah, but she's not distracted or threatened (we assume) so she can just take 10.
But is that applicable to opposed check, which a dancing contest would most likely be ? It is a contest situation, rather than an ordinary everyday action, after all.
Then, for bonus security. Anyone who participates in stopping a highjacking gets to fly for free for life, a shiney trinket, and maybe a nice check too.
That's a bad idea. It gives incentive for every passenger to join every fight just in case either participant happens to be a terrorist. That would be the biggest problem this airline would face, anyway - lots of armed people, knowing that they must put any hijacking attempt down quick since the hijackers will almost certainly have efficient weapons, looking for anything odd with an unhealthy amount of paranoia.
One million slashdot otaku? It sure beats your mother's basement, but...
A ha ! I got an idea ! Instead of making it a ziggurat that sticks from the ground, dig it into the ground. Not only does this make it a lot harder to destroy it - since it's the surrounding bedrock which provides the support, rather than some wimpy beam - and less disruptive to outside ecosystems, but you can also name it "Mama's Basement" for instant geek/otaku appeal.
However, the danger there is that when you subsidize laziness, you encourage people not to do anything with their lives.
I might be cynical here, but... is that a bad thing ? "Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut", as one demotivator put it. If everyone bases their lives around trying to accomplish things, in the financial sense, then most people will lose constantly - after all, there can only be so many winners, and someone has to flip the burgers too. The temptation to cheat - arrange your competitors to have "accidents" in extreme cases - is quite high in such an environment. I see the constant unethical or outright illegal behavior of various companies and can't help but wonder if the (impossible to fulfil) requirement that they increase their profits constantly is mostly to blame.
This of course doesn't mean that all people couldn't accomplish something, only that only a few of them can be financial successes. Most people are mediocre, by definition; and some fall beneath that. If they all have burning ambition and refuse to settle for their position, "cutthroat competition" gets a whole new meaning.
Remember, "bread and circuses" was meant to keep the masses complicit - to make them lazy, to put it bluntly.
a Libertarian with common sense, what a shock!
It is, here on Slashdot at least. I think that the libertarians in general would enjoy a far greater success if they'd keep the people who refer to people as "crotchfruit" and go on about the evil of taxes and the government on leash, and concentrated on talking about liberty. This is especially true when said rant is posted on a discussion forum in a government-built tax-funded Internet:).
In a way, it's a pity. Libertarians actually have a lot of good ideas (or at least ideas I agree with;), they simply tend to take them to the point where the reduction positive freedom starts negating the increase of negative freedom. Not to mention the return to feudalism, which will happen if the central government is weakened too much, since there's no longer anything to stop the local land/factory/whatever owners from throwing their weight around.
I just don't want to see people get trapped in multi-generational dependency on the government.
One way to avoid this is to ensure that you can improve yourself regardless of your parent's financial situation. For example, here in Finland, not only is education up to and including university level (up to Doctorate, I think) free (paid by the government), but it actually subsidizes the students - just barely enough to live by, but still enough that anyone who honestly wants to better his position in life can go study. Of course keeping on getting this subsidy is dependent on showing continued progress in one's studies.
It's one reason why I think private charities are better suited to handle that sort of thing, since they can place requirements on their charity.
Government can and does place requirements on receiving the benefits. As I see it, the problems with relying on private charities are:
You can't mandate that they actually care for everyone, so what happens if there isn't enough ? With state-provided welfare, you can simply make it a legal obligation of the state.
Private charities can naturally place any requirements of their charity, such as "you must support the teaching of creationism in the science class to get this benefit".
Since the private charity is not anyone's legal obligation, it could dry up at any moment, for any arbitrary reason or no reason at all. Consequently, you can't plan ahead if you're getting it, and thus it becomes even harder to escape poverty. After all, if you save some money (which is often the first step of improving your position in life), the charity-givers could well decide that y
Why should I have to involuntarily pay for things other people take advantage of and I don't?
Because you live in a society, not a deserted island, so you can't always have your way.
I pay way more into the system than I get back.
On the other hand, by providing a basic living to the poor, you keep them from getting desperate enough to decide that they have nothing to lose since they're going to die of hunger anyway and can thus as well kill you and loot your corpse for spare change.
Social welfare keeps financial inequality from destroying the society. Humans are beasts, and starving beasts are dangerous. It's much more practical and cheaper too to simply feed them rather than trying to control them by force of arms.
Besides, all the rights you have are ultimately based on your perceived value as a human being. A society which doesn't value humans is unlikely to respect their rights either, and a society which lets its members starve to death obviously doesn't value them much. So, to answer your question: you have to pay taxes that support the weak because you live in a nice, touchy-feely bleeding-heart near-utopia rather than the hellpits of ancient Rome or modern-day third-world nations. You poor bastard.
Oh, sorry: even the Roman emperors provided bread to the poor, so they wouldn't riot and kill them. I guess modern-day libertarians can't quite live up to Caligula's or Nero's standards of morality and statesmanship skills.
And yes, that last bit was pure flamebait, triggered after reading one too many "My taxes support the poor ! Waaah !" post.
"New anti-hacking methods developed. You drive to the web host's datacenter and sit down at the server that contains the site you want and open the HTML files from there"
But what if the attacker changes the roadsigns on the way, so that you end up at his MitM datacenter instead ?
$15 and a phone call to get a signed cert really is too much to ask. Some people have a difficult time understanding that.
How to fix it? I dunno.
Actually it's very simple: have every domain name come with a certificate, signed by the domain provider (chaining all the way up to the root name servers) and good for signing any subdomain/machine in the domain. Problem solved.
But of course if you do that, then Verisign is going to go "WAAA ! We're losing profits !", so it won't happen.
They will also be wondering how people with such primitive beliefs were able to produce such a nice piece of technology. We deserve to be embarrassed for allowing religion to have such a role in world affairs. Actually, the more I think of it a biblical quote is the perfect thing to represent how insane we have become.
Well, at least they won't be seeing this Slashdot discussion. Upon hearing of this undertaking, most of the reactions are complaints about the inclusion of religious text, nevermind that that was the rational thing to do for translational reasons.
Fundamentalist atheism isn't any less pathetic than any other kind of fundamentalism, it seems.
I think it's more that they don't quite understand the clearing process. Most people think that once a cheque has cleared the money's in their account for good and aren't aware that their bank can take it back later - with no time limit. The banks haven't gone out of their way to make that clear, either.
This would seem to indicate that the foolishness was in keeping the money in the bank in the first place. Money doesn't just "disappear" from a good safe, or from a reasonably good hiding place.
That's just a comparison of the desirability of living in those places. No, it's more accurate to compare state government fiscal responsibility between California and Ohio.
More accurate in what way ? The purpose of a government is to serve the population. If California is a more desirable place to live than Ohio, then Californian government is doing a better job than that of Ohio.
The fact that the economy in California continues to be able to support ruinously idiotic government that continually spends more than it takes in is part of what keeps the idiots in charge, in charge. If California were a marginal rust-belt state, it's residents would have thrown those morons in the legislature out long ago.
So... California has an idiotic government and is on its way to economic destruction, but nonetheless has a strong enough economy to support heavy spending. Is it just me, or does there seem to be a conflicting message here ?
Slash does not allow a comment to have more than one parent. How should I have made it clearer that I was replying to both your comment and mabhatter654's comment?
Try including the text "This is in reply to both you and the grandparent" at the top of your message. It's part of the archaic protocol known as "English";).
Slashdot Mirror
And since this means that you can't give any advance warning or notice, the morale of the rest of the staff will go through the floor, not to mention the precautionary actions they have just been given a huge incentive to take and a perfect excuse to carry less ethical of them out.
The real lesson is: if you make enemies, you will eventually take a beating. Not that the businesses are capable of learning that, apparently...
Maybe we should include a fusion reactor in these probes, to ensure that the isotopes keep decaying in the primary power source ?-)
Coming to think of it: could you use a fusor to "burn" radioactive waste into harmless slug and generate electricity simultaneously ? Could you use a fusor to burn even unenriched uranium in a plant ? As unenriched uranium is not significantly radioactive, this could open doors for small-scale nuclear power. Nuclear-power cars, anyone ?
Yes ! But not just any hairdresser, but a terrorist hairdresser, covered from head to toe with the blood of the innocent victims of his campaign of hair-raising terror ! A vile, vicious man, out to destroy freedom and the American Way by secretly giving important persons bad haircuts !
Who knows, this loathsome creature might even have combed some family members hair for free at some time, making him a communist too !
Such as ?
"Efficiency" in this sense means that they can deliver their service with the lowest possible cost. This happens because a company which wastes money gets outcompeted by a company which doesn't. However, this also means that a company which puts some of its profits into research is going to be outcompeted by a company which puts them into expansion instead.
Universe doesn't care about inhabited planets being destroyed by novas. We know this because it has likely happened, since the universe doesn't care.
Holy circular reasoning, Batman.
In any case, you're wrong. Life-bearing planets couldn't appear until nucleosynthesis had produced sufficient concentrations of heavy elements to build lifeforms (or solid planets, for that matter), and life takes time to develop, so it requires a long-burning (small) star. Universe simply isn't old enough that there has been many opportunities for civilizations to get wiped out.
Related to this is another fun fact: aiming. It took billions of years on Earth to go from bacteria to multicellular life; it then took hundreds of millions of years to go to reasonably intelligent lifeforms, and finally just a million or so to go from sentience to space age; a few hundred years more and we can likely evacuate the planet to other planetary systems in the case of impending nova or other similar catastrophe. What I'm trying to get to is that, in order to wipe out anything more than bacteria, the star has to explode at just the right moment. To get anything capable of feeling fear or pain - I'm being overly generous here and assuming here that that includes anything with a central nervous system - it would have to aim at a 500 million year window; to get a sentient being, a 5 million year window - again, I'm being generous - and to get a civilization, a 500,000 year window. Since it took about 5 billion years to get from the birth of the Sun to space age, these allow 10%, 0.1% and 0.01% margin for error, respectively.
What I'm getting into, is that in order for such tragedies to happen, the universe would pretty much have to not only notice, care and be actively malicious, but also one hell of a marksman. Unless, of course, you consider lots of bacteria dying to be a tragedy, and even then it has unlikely to have happened, due to the previously mentioned young age of the universe.
So, in the hypothetical and very unlikely scenario that the Sun blows up tomorrow, our existence will have been "meaningless", presumably in some metaphysical sense of the word because my existence is certainly meaningful to me right now. What, exactly speaking, does this have to do with subjectivity/objectivity of ethics ?
Three times bigger, actually. But please explain why having my remains sucked into a black hole would make my existence more meaningless than merely being blown to space dust ?
Doing that would lead to rampant corruption. After all, while it is in the best interests of the society that for example a police officer turns away a bribe, it is in said officer's own best interests to accept it. The harm due to accepting the bribe is distributed amongst every member of the society, while the benefit comes to the officer. While the total harm far outweigths the benefit, the benefit to the guy who makes the decision is greater than the harm, and so he accepts the bribe - unless he thinks that doing so would be wrong.
Has that stopped piracy ? And did the prohibition stop the consumption of alcohol ? You can outlaw whatever you want, but it is simply impossible enforce such rules when Joe Average doesn't believe that whatever was outlawed was wrong. Laws are only useful when they only need to deal with the few oddball psychopaths; they're a waste of paper if everyone - including the enforcers - break them whenever they can do so without getting caught. Not that getting caught would really matter, in this scenario, since they could simply bribe themselves free. And of course, even if they actually followed these laws, the enforcers could fake evidence and demand a protection fee anyway.
Societies work because most of their members play nice, and the exceptions are rare enough that they can be treated as such. Convince the majority that there is no right and wrong, though, and you've just given them a perfect excuse to silence their conscience and follow their more destructive impulses. The society can't take that, it has no means whatsoever to deal with almost everyone being a criminal.
One could also view ethics as a tool. As a human being, I have multiple instinctual drives, and sometimes they conflict. Ethics is a set of algorithms for solving this conflict, by determining which drive takes priority in the given circumstance.
Making an assertion doesn't make it true. So, can you offer either proof or supporting logic/evidence ?
Since such judgement can't - according to yourself - be wrong, on the grounds that wrong doesn't exist, the answer is simple: someone who happens to want to.
Moral relativism is a fascinating view, but it's advocates don't tend to look at it's logical consequences. If there is no right nor wrong, then no action can be wrong, and that includes forcing one's personal moral code on others. Or any arbitrary code for that matter, after all hypocrisy can't be wrong either.
Moral relativism, if taken seriously rather than just used as an excuse to ignore evil deeds by, say, one's trading partners, leads to an unlivable world really fast. Since there is no right nor wrong, every moral code is equivalent to every other, and thus there is no reason why one shouldn't redefine one's moral code to allow one to do anything one can get away with. In other words, chaos and anarchy.
And with all this done, the chimneynoses and tubegirls are still dead and the economy, as a whole, is diminished, since it is denied the input they could had contributed had they stayed healthy.
Individual choices affect other people. That means that other people have a say in them.
From my point of view, there's little difference between a government and a huge corporation, with the exception that the government has nominal obligation to listen to me while the corporation doesn't.
Notice which got listed first ?
And I'm sick of people who promote a wicked stepmother state in it's stead. Why the hell would rule by corporations be better than rule by government ?
Appeal to authority is a fine rhetorical tool, but somewhat ironic when used to argue against another authority. And yes, it is the role of government to try and keep its citizens alive and well. That's the very reason it exist.
This is misleading at the best. Physics, for example, is converging towards the truth by introducing more and more accurate models about how reality operates. The theories about Neanderthals are, in all likelihood, becoming more accurate over time, as some hypotheses gets more evidence behind them and others against them. You might have more alternatives, but they aren't equal.
Science would be more like Wine than Windows: we aren't engineering the universe, we're reverse-engineering it.
BGP is what Internet routers use to tell each other what incoming traffic should be routed where. It isn't used for actual user data transmission.
But is that applicable to opposed check, which a dancing contest would most likely be ? It is a contest situation, rather than an ordinary everyday action, after all.
That's a bad idea. It gives incentive for every passenger to join every fight just in case either participant happens to be a terrorist. That would be the biggest problem this airline would face, anyway - lots of armed people, knowing that they must put any hijacking attempt down quick since the hijackers will almost certainly have efficient weapons, looking for anything odd with an unhealthy amount of paranoia.
A ha ! I got an idea ! Instead of making it a ziggurat that sticks from the ground, dig it into the ground. Not only does this make it a lot harder to destroy it - since it's the surrounding bedrock which provides the support, rather than some wimpy beam - and less disruptive to outside ecosystems, but you can also name it "Mama's Basement" for instant geek/otaku appeal.
I might be cynical here, but... is that a bad thing ? "Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut", as one demotivator put it. If everyone bases their lives around trying to accomplish things, in the financial sense, then most people will lose constantly - after all, there can only be so many winners, and someone has to flip the burgers too. The temptation to cheat - arrange your competitors to have "accidents" in extreme cases - is quite high in such an environment. I see the constant unethical or outright illegal behavior of various companies and can't help but wonder if the (impossible to fulfil) requirement that they increase their profits constantly is mostly to blame.
This of course doesn't mean that all people couldn't accomplish something, only that only a few of them can be financial successes. Most people are mediocre, by definition; and some fall beneath that. If they all have burning ambition and refuse to settle for their position, "cutthroat competition" gets a whole new meaning.
Remember, "bread and circuses" was meant to keep the masses complicit - to make them lazy, to put it bluntly.
It is, here on Slashdot at least. I think that the libertarians in general would enjoy a far greater success if they'd keep the people who refer to people as "crotchfruit" and go on about the evil of taxes and the government on leash, and concentrated on talking about liberty. This is especially true when said rant is posted on a discussion forum in a government-built tax-funded Internet :).
In a way, it's a pity. Libertarians actually have a lot of good ideas (or at least ideas I agree with ;), they simply tend to take them to the point where the reduction positive freedom starts negating the increase of negative freedom. Not to mention the return to feudalism, which will happen if the central government is weakened too much, since there's no longer anything to stop the local land/factory/whatever owners from throwing their weight around.
One way to avoid this is to ensure that you can improve yourself regardless of your parent's financial situation. For example, here in Finland, not only is education up to and including university level (up to Doctorate, I think) free (paid by the government), but it actually subsidizes the students - just barely enough to live by, but still enough that anyone who honestly wants to better his position in life can go study. Of course keeping on getting this subsidy is dependent on showing continued progress in one's studies.
Government can and does place requirements on receiving the benefits. As I see it, the problems with relying on private charities are:
Because you live in a society, not a deserted island, so you can't always have your way.
On the other hand, by providing a basic living to the poor, you keep them from getting desperate enough to decide that they have nothing to lose since they're going to die of hunger anyway and can thus as well kill you and loot your corpse for spare change.
Social welfare keeps financial inequality from destroying the society. Humans are beasts, and starving beasts are dangerous. It's much more practical and cheaper too to simply feed them rather than trying to control them by force of arms.
Besides, all the rights you have are ultimately based on your perceived value as a human being. A society which doesn't value humans is unlikely to respect their rights either, and a society which lets its members starve to death obviously doesn't value them much. So, to answer your question: you have to pay taxes that support the weak because you live in a nice, touchy-feely bleeding-heart near-utopia rather than the hellpits of ancient Rome or modern-day third-world nations. You poor bastard.
Oh, sorry: even the Roman emperors provided bread to the poor, so they wouldn't riot and kill them. I guess modern-day libertarians can't quite live up to Caligula's or Nero's standards of morality and statesmanship skills.
And yes, that last bit was pure flamebait, triggered after reading one too many "My taxes support the poor ! Waaah !" post.
Ah, but doing evil things doesn't mean that they've lost their Mojo, it just means that they've gained Jojo ;).
But what if the attacker changes the roadsigns on the way, so that you end up at his MitM datacenter instead ?
Actually it's very simple: have every domain name come with a certificate, signed by the domain provider (chaining all the way up to the root name servers) and good for signing any subdomain/machine in the domain. Problem solved.
But of course if you do that, then Verisign is going to go "WAAA ! We're losing profits !", so it won't happen.
Well, at least they won't be seeing this Slashdot discussion. Upon hearing of this undertaking, most of the reactions are complaints about the inclusion of religious text, nevermind that that was the rational thing to do for translational reasons.
Fundamentalist atheism isn't any less pathetic than any other kind of fundamentalism, it seems.
This would seem to indicate that the foolishness was in keeping the money in the bank in the first place. Money doesn't just "disappear" from a good safe, or from a reasonably good hiding place.
Only near nuclear plants.
More accurate in what way ? The purpose of a government is to serve the population. If California is a more desirable place to live than Ohio, then Californian government is doing a better job than that of Ohio.
So... California has an idiotic government and is on its way to economic destruction, but nonetheless has a strong enough economy to support heavy spending. Is it just me, or does there seem to be a conflicting message here ?
Try including the text "This is in reply to both you and the grandparent" at the top of your message. It's part of the archaic protocol known as "English" ;).