Except the law doesn't say that they HAVE to give access to those sites to adults.
If librarians, school officials, etc., are worried about going to jail under a federal law if a kid goes on myspace or slashdot, then they are probably going to ban those sites for everyone under the justification that "it is better safe than sorry". If *I* was a librarian at a public library, I would definitly not let anyone, of any age, for no reason whatsoever access anything even remotely like slashdot or myspace or whatever... not because I support this kind of censorship - but because my ass is not going to risk going to prison in order to bring people Slashdot.
Lets not forget that Democrats are rabidly pro-censorship also. If anything, censorship is one thing that brings together the left and right and lets them find common ground. This is all part of the bigger "lets protect the children" attitude that people all over the left-right spectrum seem to have. Banning soda machines in highschools... creating "gun-free" and "drug-free" zones around schools that result in draconian enforcement and the loss of constitutional rights... and a whole slew of other restrictions to "protect" children... and now restricting Internet access.
I personally consider YOU part of the problem. When the next election comes, you will vote wholehearted for the Democrats... you will figure out some excuse why it is OK ("well, they are still better than the Respublicans... there are other issues besides censorship we need to think about... blah, blah, blah")... but regardless, you will be putting your full support behind a party that can't seem to get enough of censorship, and is trying to out-family-value the Rebpublicans for the next election.
If you vote Democrat (or Republican for that matter), you are pro-censorship - plain and simple. Your willingness to vote for horribly authoritarian candidates, because of some partisan fear of "the other side winning", is the whole reason why things have gotten so bad. If it wasn't for all the sell-out people on the left, or the ones who want "political correctness", or to "protect the children", there wouldn't be things like this happening. You need to blame yourself for the present situation, first and foremost!
but why would PC gamers pay to play on Live when they can play on free servers elsewhere?
Nearly every single Live Player has a voice communication mike. You don't have to deal with cheaters on live (I have never encountered a cheater on live, and I am not aware of any cheating software - the only kind of cheating I am aware of is sometimes player intentionaly lower their bandwidth to cause themselves to lag... but there is no software they lets people see through walls or aimbots or whatever like on the PC)... every player has an ID tied to their credit card, so people are less likely to engage in racist/stupid behavior, and when they do I can permanently ban them from my games. I can maintain an integrated list of all the players I like, send them an invitation to play directly from the game, I can see what games they are playing directly from the game.
It is definitly worth the $60 a year for the service they offer.
You are assuming that the episodic content has zero cost to develop, and would be availabe in the origional game if it wasn't being sold. While that COULD be the case, if the content was "Unlock a new car" or something like that, it also could be the case that this is real, significant content beyond the game... much like PC games often sell extra mission expansions as a seperate package.
If they sold a pack of say 20 missions, for $20... then it would be worth it.
Lets face it, only a huge corporation can afford the vast amounts of capital and manpower in order to make sure all their products work flawlessly for disabled people.
The so-called activists for the disabled, who push for laws that make "disabled access" manditory, are funded by companies that charge a lot of money to provide those kinds of services, or large corporations like Microsoft who see it as a way to harm competition, or contractors who can charge lots of money adding elevators and such into buildings.
These laws and regulations have nothing to do with helping the disabled, because everyone knows that it would cost way less money to provide everyone in a wheelchair with one that can climb stairs for free, than it would cost to put an elevator in every place of buisness. It would be way cheaper and easier to develop a screen reader or similiar technology that can read all websites and documents properly, regardless of their design, than to develop every website, product, or document to work with a screen reader.
These kind of "activism" against the OpenDocument format is about driving out of buisness small companies, free software, and those that compete with a handful of big corporations.
China is not Communist, by any stretch of the imagination. Have you ever been to China? China is more free-market than most so-called "free-market" countries, such as the United States. And there censorship is comparible to North America or Western Europe.
If we have anything to learn from China, it is that free markets (or free-er markets, at least) work.
Not really... China has a middle class that is going to be bigger than the U.S. middle class in less than 5 years. And China, unlike the U.S., is seeing an increase in the standard of living that rivals any period in U.S. history.
People like to talk about Chinese slave labor, and it is true that they do use prison labor (by the way, so does the U.S.), but that is not, in any way shape or form represent a significant amount of their labor force.
OK, but are you part of the mainstream? There have always been audiophiles that spend more than a car on their stereo system... and nowadays there are videophiles who do the same thing with video.
But the average person would rather listen to a song, encoded in 128kb on their ipod, than to hear it in much higher quality on a high end CD walkman... even though the CD walkman will produce a lot better sound.
We are at the point where the video and audio technology are so good, that people now want other features that just "better picture" or "better sound".
OK, I understand that a higher storage capacity DVD is always good for computer users for backups and such... so I am not complaining there.
But seriously, how many people really want a higher def DVD player? How many people are going to really care about the difference?
The new "format" that is going to beat both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be the net. How many people are buying high-end CD walkmans? Do they even make high end CD walkmans any more? Everyone wants an I-Pod or some sort of MP3 player! And how many people are gonna go out and spend $600 on a new DVD player, when clearly Tivo (or a Tivo like service) and Movies On Demand service is what people really want.
I see now, in car commercials, cars are being built with ipod docks, and with XM or Sirius satalite recievers. In audio, people are choosing quantity and choice over quality.
If you gave people a choice of renting super high-def movies in the traditional model from blockbuster, or getting a old-school res movie instantly by pressing a button at home - for half the price - I am afraid you are going to find that no-one but the audiophiles and video geeks really care that much.
So I think that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be duds.
Even in the console wars, the winner will be the one with the best online service.
I would say it is more of a Klepotracy now, since the U.S. government consumes more GDP than supposedly "socialist" countries like Sweden. (35% for U.S. federal government, 28% for Sweden)
The people viewing it are creating the demand for it, thus being inextricably linked to the cycle.
Yes, but are the people viewing it, which is a very small number of people, that dangerous that we need to violate the rights of innocent people to stop them?
I mean, there is a lot of things we could do that would seriously reduce crime. We could get rid of trials, for one, and lock everyone up for life based on suspicion. We could have constant 24/7 monitoring of all people everywhere. I garantee you that it would reduce crime. But most people don't find crime bad enough to resport to blatent facism... at least not yet and not completly.
What kind of rights are you willing to give up, how many innocent people are you willing to lock in jail, what extreme measures are you willing to take, for a crime "epidemic" that doesn't exist? There is no reason to believe that pedophilia is any more common than Satanists sacrificing children. Yeah, in a country of 300 million people, plus another billion outside the U.S., there are going to be a few Jefferey Damners out there. But the whole pedophilia thing is hysteria! It is fear mongering! Sorry, but there just isn't an army of perverts out there waiting to fuck your kids!
The hysteria is being fed by people who want to control the internet, and realize that people will lose all sense of reason if you say their children are being threatened. And if you claim that a political action is to "stop pedophiles", what politician is going to take a chance being seen as being "easy on pedophilia".
In the current model of social democracy, it is the job of the government to protect everyone from possible risks. It is the government's job to make sure you wear a seat belt, don't smoke in public... that companies don't market soda and junk food during kid's cartoons... that people can't advertise a candidate 60 days from an election... that you eat a diet the government wants you to eat, etc. etc.
The internet as it currently exists, is dangerous. People can do illicit things anonymously, people can instantly send information all around the world, and people can even spread sick things like child pornography. Freedom of information is dangerous, and it cannot be made safe! There is NO WAY to make the free, unrestricted, untracked, and anonymous exchange of information without any risks.
People want safety and a nanny state to protect them from everything. There is not going to be some sort of special exception for the Internet. The internet has risks. It is not 100% safe.
Eventually, the Internet is going to have to be controlled by a few government regulated institutions. Websites will have to be licenced. Speech on the internet will have to be regulated. Social democracy is about deciding what is best for society at a collective level, and that isn't compatible with the decentralization and anarchist individualism of the internet.
I wasn't singling out Christianity for not supporting putting chips in people... Or for selling out their religion (which everyone seems to do nowadays) I was saying that Christianity would be the deal breaker. If the vast majorty of wealthy people in America and Western Europe refuse to get a chip, then it doesn't matter what poor people in the middle east will do - because they aren't the big market for financial services. It is the middle class (largely Christian) American or Western European who will really decide on the fate of installing chips into people for ID.
I was also speculating if the Christian Right would be for or against chips though. The Christian Right tends to support all sorts of state interventions that don't have anything to do with Christianity - such as the war in iraq, death penalty for drug dealers, rounding up and deporting imigrants etc. Would the Christian Right be against chips on the fact that they are "the mark of the beast", or would they go along with it if some "conservative" leader promised that it was for stopping terrorists, or stopping illegal immigration, or something like that?
But perhaps you, as a Christian, can answer my questions/speculation.
1. Would the typical American Christian be opposed to using implanted chips as ID for religious reasons?
2. Would it be OK, from a biblical standpoint, to get a chip in your buttocks, or elbow, or foot, or some place that clearly isn't your right hand or forehead, as it mentions in revelations? The book of Revelations is very specific. Will you be saved if you get a chip implanted in your left thumb?
It is not a flamewar with me, because I don't really care that much about what the rules in Christianity are. But before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, early Christians would choose to die rather than participate in military service. The whole "Turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" thing seems pretty clearly pacifist to me. Even when Jesus was going to be murdered, his disiples were forbidden from saving him.
And when it comes to the death penalty, you can look at the story in the Gospel of John, when the adulterur was to be killed by stoning, and Jesus said "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
After Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire, Christianity was kind of re-interpreted to support the goals of the Empire. But I think you have to seriously stretch the message of the Gospel in order to come to the conclusion that Jesus would approve of military service, war, or the death penalty.
You could argue maybe that self-defense is justifyable under Christianity, but there is a big difference between having a military guarding U.S. borders, and launching a full scale global offensive as the modern Christian-right tend to support.
I am athiest, so I am not really sure... but wouldn't Christians be upset by being chipped? Doesn't it make people nervous about the whole "Mark of the Beast" thing? I would think that the whole issue of implants would be a non-starter in the U.S., and probably many parts of Europe. But maybe Christians don't mind, if it is implanted in their butt, or their foot, or elbow, or somewhere other than their forehead or right hand. Or maybe Christians don't mind, because in modern U.S. politics the Christian-right supports a lot of things forbidden in Christianity (war and military service, death penalty, etc.)
Seems to me, using fingerprints, or retina scans, or some other "god given" form of ID would be more socially acceptable to Christians... and not really any more difficult to implement than an implate. And it would be harder to fake a retina or fingerprint than a chip.
Don't blame "market forces" for people's bad habits. Fresh fruits and vegetables, whole ingredients, and healthy foods have never been easier or cheaper to get in history. I am a vegetarian, so I hardly eat pre-packaged food (most of it has animal products), and I can tell you a healthy, all-natural, home-cooked gourmet meal is probably half the price of a pre-packaged food item.
People eat crap, because people LIKE crap, and they are too lazy to stop. It isn't the fault of "market forces" that people eat crap, because the market has made it cheaper and easier than ever before to eat healthy.
First of all, free and fair markets existed in a lot of places without the government protection you are talking about (even the Soviet Union had a thriving black market economy). And second of all, we don't have a free and fair market here in the U.S. with all of our government protection.
The protection that the government gives is a lot like the "protection" that the mafia gives. In that case, yes, we must pay for protection.
Except that there are many countries that maintain their soveignty with virtually non-existant militaries. For example, Luxembourg spends 0.8% of GDP on military... Switzerland spends 1.8% GDP on military. Since 9% of U.S. GDP already goes to charitable contributions, there is no reason why a modern defense force couldn't be funded entirely by voluntary contributions.
While most governments may not make 100% efficient use of tax dollars, how else do you think roads get made? Police get paid? Firefighters get paid? Public Transportation get made? Laws get made for the purpose of proecting your own private property?
Roads, police, public transit, etc., could all be funded for a miniscule fraction of what we pay in taxes... and could be done on a local level through non-intrusive things like user fees, sales tax, etc.
Right now, the government in the U.S. consumes more than 50% of GDP. We are talking some Soviet Union style government. That isn't "supporting roads and police". Roads and police take maybe 1% of GDP.
There is no doubt, that when we begin having conversations about how the government is going to tax our Monopoly money, that taxes are completly out of hand.
No, because if you are Democrat, you aren't going to vote for a Republican in order to vote against the blacklisted politician. And if you are a Republican, you are not going to vote for a Democrat. Either way you will make some excuse why it is OK to vote for the pro-DRM candidate ("Well, I gotta vote for Fienstien or otherwise the Republicans will win, and we can't let that!").
Why do we even need ID cards? Why do people need one centralized identity that can be tracked? For credit? For any significant credit you are going to have to have collateral anyway. For government services like health care? Well, if health care truly was "Universal" like the government propoganda wants you to believe, then there wouldn't need to be health cards because everyone would have free unlimited access to health care by default. For tracking criminals? Criminals can make/steal ID, so you have to use fingerprints to ID them anyway.
A centralized ID system exists to track people, and control people. If you need an ID card for government services, it is not so that government can give you services (because it would be easy enough to give you services, like medical care, without an ID), it is so they can DENY certain people services. It isn't so they can tax you, because they could just earn revenues with a sales tax and it would be completly anonymous.
If, there was some special reason you DID need an ID for something (say, a passport), you could just issue that based on biometric information (your passport would be tied to a hash of your fingerprint instead of a national ID number).
I agree with you... up until you started to bring up Ralph Nader. Ralph, unintentionally of course, is one of the biggest allies of the big corporations... by promoting expensive regulation that makes doing buisness unaffordable for anyone by huge corporations who can afford the initial capital investment to comply with regulations. Also, in his dream world, most of the economy and society would be controlled by the government (which is as bad or worse than having a few corporations control everything). Remember, the government IS a corporation, it is simply a corporation that can use violence to maintain it's monopoly, and can charge you for services against your will.
You could compile your source code to some sort of abstracted binary code (similiar to a java virtual machine), and then compile that into your real machine code on the local machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the law doesn't say that they HAVE to give access to those sites to adults.
If librarians, school officials, etc., are worried about going to jail under a federal law if a kid goes on myspace or slashdot, then they are probably going to ban those sites for everyone under the justification that "it is better safe than sorry". If *I* was a librarian at a public library, I would definitly not let anyone, of any age, for no reason whatsoever access anything even remotely like slashdot or myspace or whatever... not because I support this kind of censorship - but because my ass is not going to risk going to prison in order to bring people Slashdot.
Lets not forget that Democrats are rabidly pro-censorship also. If anything, censorship is one thing that brings together the left and right and lets them find common ground. This is all part of the bigger "lets protect the children" attitude that people all over the left-right spectrum seem to have. Banning soda machines in highschools... creating "gun-free" and "drug-free" zones around schools that result in draconian enforcement and the loss of constitutional rights... and a whole slew of other restrictions to "protect" children... and now restricting Internet access.
I personally consider YOU part of the problem. When the next election comes, you will vote wholehearted for the Democrats... you will figure out some excuse why it is OK ("well, they are still better than the Respublicans... there are other issues besides censorship we need to think about... blah, blah, blah")... but regardless, you will be putting your full support behind a party that can't seem to get enough of censorship, and is trying to out-family-value the Rebpublicans for the next election.
If you vote Democrat (or Republican for that matter), you are pro-censorship - plain and simple. Your willingness to vote for horribly authoritarian candidates, because of some partisan fear of "the other side winning", is the whole reason why things have gotten so bad. If it wasn't for all the sell-out people on the left, or the ones who want "political correctness", or to "protect the children", there wouldn't be things like this happening. You need to blame yourself for the present situation, first and foremost!
but why would PC gamers pay to play on Live when they can play on free servers elsewhere?
Nearly every single Live Player has a voice communication mike. You don't have to deal with cheaters on live (I have never encountered a cheater on live, and I am not aware of any cheating software - the only kind of cheating I am aware of is sometimes player intentionaly lower their bandwidth to cause themselves to lag... but there is no software they lets people see through walls or aimbots or whatever like on the PC)... every player has an ID tied to their credit card, so people are less likely to engage in racist/stupid behavior, and when they do I can permanently ban them from my games. I can maintain an integrated list of all the players I like, send them an invitation to play directly from the game, I can see what games they are playing directly from the game.
It is definitly worth the $60 a year for the service they offer.
You are assuming that the episodic content has zero cost to develop, and would be availabe in the origional game if it wasn't being sold. While that COULD be the case, if the content was "Unlock a new car" or something like that, it also could be the case that this is real, significant content beyond the game... much like PC games often sell extra mission expansions as a seperate package.
If they sold a pack of say 20 missions, for $20... then it would be worth it.
Lets face it, only a huge corporation can afford the vast amounts of capital and manpower in order to make sure all their products work flawlessly for disabled people.
The so-called activists for the disabled, who push for laws that make "disabled access" manditory, are funded by companies that charge a lot of money to provide those kinds of services, or large corporations like Microsoft who see it as a way to harm competition, or contractors who can charge lots of money adding elevators and such into buildings.
These laws and regulations have nothing to do with helping the disabled, because everyone knows that it would cost way less money to provide everyone in a wheelchair with one that can climb stairs for free, than it would cost to put an elevator in every place of buisness. It would be way cheaper and easier to develop a screen reader or similiar technology that can read all websites and documents properly, regardless of their design, than to develop every website, product, or document to work with a screen reader.
These kind of "activism" against the OpenDocument format is about driving out of buisness small companies, free software, and those that compete with a handful of big corporations.
China is not Communist, by any stretch of the imagination. Have you ever been to China? China is more free-market than most so-called "free-market" countries, such as the United States. And there censorship is comparible to North America or Western Europe.
If we have anything to learn from China, it is that free markets (or free-er markets, at least) work.
Not really... China has a middle class that is going to be bigger than the U.S. middle class in less than 5 years. And China, unlike the U.S., is seeing an increase in the standard of living that rivals any period in U.S. history.
People like to talk about Chinese slave labor, and it is true that they do use prison labor (by the way, so does the U.S.), but that is not, in any way shape or form represent a significant amount of their labor force.
OK, but are you part of the mainstream? There have always been audiophiles that spend more than a car on their stereo system... and nowadays there are videophiles who do the same thing with video.
But the average person would rather listen to a song, encoded in 128kb on their ipod, than to hear it in much higher quality on a high end CD walkman... even though the CD walkman will produce a lot better sound.
We are at the point where the video and audio technology are so good, that people now want other features that just "better picture" or "better sound".
OK, I understand that a higher storage capacity DVD is always good for computer users for backups and such... so I am not complaining there.
But seriously, how many people really want a higher def DVD player? How many people are going to really care about the difference?
The new "format" that is going to beat both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be the net. How many people are buying high-end CD walkmans? Do they even make high end CD walkmans any more? Everyone wants an I-Pod or some sort of MP3 player! And how many people are gonna go out and spend $600 on a new DVD player, when clearly Tivo (or a Tivo like service) and Movies On Demand service is what people really want.
I see now, in car commercials, cars are being built with ipod docks, and with XM or Sirius satalite recievers. In audio, people are choosing quantity and choice over quality.
If you gave people a choice of renting super high-def movies in the traditional model from blockbuster, or getting a old-school res movie instantly by pressing a button at home - for half the price - I am afraid you are going to find that no-one but the audiophiles and video geeks really care that much.
So I think that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be duds.
Even in the console wars, the winner will be the one with the best online service.
No, if energy is free, then Google would somehow make a profit giving it away!
I would say it is more of a Klepotracy now, since the U.S. government consumes more GDP than supposedly "socialist" countries like Sweden. (35% for U.S. federal government, 28% for Sweden)
The people viewing it are creating the demand for it, thus being inextricably linked to the cycle.
Yes, but are the people viewing it, which is a very small number of people, that dangerous that we need to violate the rights of innocent people to stop them?
I mean, there is a lot of things we could do that would seriously reduce crime. We could get rid of trials, for one, and lock everyone up for life based on suspicion. We could have constant 24/7 monitoring of all people everywhere. I garantee you that it would reduce crime. But most people don't find crime bad enough to resport to blatent facism... at least not yet and not completly.
What kind of rights are you willing to give up, how many innocent people are you willing to lock in jail, what extreme measures are you willing to take, for a crime "epidemic" that doesn't exist? There is no reason to believe that pedophilia is any more common than Satanists sacrificing children. Yeah, in a country of 300 million people, plus another billion outside the U.S., there are going to be a few Jefferey Damners out there. But the whole pedophilia thing is hysteria! It is fear mongering! Sorry, but there just isn't an army of perverts out there waiting to fuck your kids!
The hysteria is being fed by people who want to control the internet, and realize that people will lose all sense of reason if you say their children are being threatened. And if you claim that a political action is to "stop pedophiles", what politician is going to take a chance being seen as being "easy on pedophilia".
In the current model of social democracy, it is the job of the government to protect everyone from possible risks. It is the government's job to make sure you wear a seat belt, don't smoke in public... that companies don't market soda and junk food during kid's cartoons... that people can't advertise a candidate 60 days from an election... that you eat a diet the government wants you to eat, etc. etc.
The internet as it currently exists, is dangerous. People can do illicit things anonymously, people can instantly send information all around the world, and people can even spread sick things like child pornography. Freedom of information is dangerous, and it cannot be made safe! There is NO WAY to make the free, unrestricted, untracked, and anonymous exchange of information without any risks.
People want safety and a nanny state to protect them from everything. There is not going to be some sort of special exception for the Internet. The internet has risks. It is not 100% safe.
Eventually, the Internet is going to have to be controlled by a few government regulated institutions. Websites will have to be licenced. Speech on the internet will have to be regulated. Social democracy is about deciding what is best for society at a collective level, and that isn't compatible with the decentralization and anarchist individualism of the internet.
I wasn't singling out Christianity for not supporting putting chips in people... Or for selling out their religion (which everyone seems to do nowadays) I was saying that Christianity would be the deal breaker. If the vast majorty of wealthy people in America and Western Europe refuse to get a chip, then it doesn't matter what poor people in the middle east will do - because they aren't the big market for financial services. It is the middle class (largely Christian) American or Western European who will really decide on the fate of installing chips into people for ID.
I was also speculating if the Christian Right would be for or against chips though. The Christian Right tends to support all sorts of state interventions that don't have anything to do with Christianity - such as the war in iraq, death penalty for drug dealers, rounding up and deporting imigrants etc. Would the Christian Right be against chips on the fact that they are "the mark of the beast", or would they go along with it if some "conservative" leader promised that it was for stopping terrorists, or stopping illegal immigration, or something like that?
But perhaps you, as a Christian, can answer my questions/speculation.
1. Would the typical American Christian be opposed to using implanted chips as ID for religious reasons?
2. Would it be OK, from a biblical standpoint, to get a chip in your buttocks, or elbow, or foot, or some place that clearly isn't your right hand or forehead, as it mentions in revelations? The book of Revelations is very specific. Will you be saved if you get a chip implanted in your left thumb?
It is not a flamewar with me, because I don't really care that much about what the rules in Christianity are. But before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, early Christians would choose to die rather than participate in military service. The whole "Turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" thing seems pretty clearly pacifist to me. Even when Jesus was going to be murdered, his disiples were forbidden from saving him.
And when it comes to the death penalty, you can look at the story in the Gospel of John, when the adulterur was to be killed by stoning, and Jesus said "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
After Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire, Christianity was kind of re-interpreted to support the goals of the Empire. But I think you have to seriously stretch the message of the Gospel in order to come to the conclusion that Jesus would approve of military service, war, or the death penalty.
You could argue maybe that self-defense is justifyable under Christianity, but there is a big difference between having a military guarding U.S. borders, and launching a full scale global offensive as the modern Christian-right tend to support.
I am athiest, so I am not really sure... but wouldn't Christians be upset by being chipped? Doesn't it make people nervous about the whole "Mark of the Beast" thing? I would think that the whole issue of implants would be a non-starter in the U.S., and probably many parts of Europe. But maybe Christians don't mind, if it is implanted in their butt, or their foot, or elbow, or somewhere other than their forehead or right hand. Or maybe Christians don't mind, because in modern U.S. politics the Christian-right supports a lot of things forbidden in Christianity (war and military service, death penalty, etc.)
Seems to me, using fingerprints, or retina scans, or some other "god given" form of ID would be more socially acceptable to Christians... and not really any more difficult to implement than an implate. And it would be harder to fake a retina or fingerprint than a chip.
Don't blame "market forces" for people's bad habits. Fresh fruits and vegetables, whole ingredients, and healthy foods have never been easier or cheaper to get in history. I am a vegetarian, so I hardly eat pre-packaged food (most of it has animal products), and I can tell you a healthy, all-natural, home-cooked gourmet meal is probably half the price of a pre-packaged food item.
People eat crap, because people LIKE crap, and they are too lazy to stop. It isn't the fault of "market forces" that people eat crap, because the market has made it cheaper and easier than ever before to eat healthy.
First of all, free and fair markets existed in a lot of places without the government protection you are talking about (even the Soviet Union had a thriving black market economy). And second of all, we don't have a free and fair market here in the U.S. with all of our government protection.
The protection that the government gives is a lot like the "protection" that the mafia gives. In that case, yes, we must pay for protection.
Except that there are many countries that maintain their soveignty with virtually non-existant militaries. For example, Luxembourg spends 0.8% of GDP on military... Switzerland spends 1.8% GDP on military. Since 9% of U.S. GDP already goes to charitable contributions, there is no reason why a modern defense force couldn't be funded entirely by voluntary contributions.
While most governments may not make 100% efficient use of tax dollars, how else do you think roads get made? Police get paid? Firefighters get paid? Public Transportation get made? Laws get made for the purpose of proecting your own private property?
Roads, police, public transit, etc., could all be funded for a miniscule fraction of what we pay in taxes... and could be done on a local level through non-intrusive things like user fees, sales tax, etc.
Right now, the government in the U.S. consumes more than 50% of GDP. We are talking some Soviet Union style government. That isn't "supporting roads and police". Roads and police take maybe 1% of GDP.
There is no doubt, that when we begin having conversations about how the government is going to tax our Monopoly money, that taxes are completly out of hand.
No, because if you are Democrat, you aren't going to vote for a Republican in order to vote against the blacklisted politician. And if you are a Republican, you are not going to vote for a Democrat. Either way you will make some excuse why it is OK to vote for the pro-DRM candidate ("Well, I gotta vote for Fienstien or otherwise the Republicans will win, and we can't let that!").
Why do we even need ID cards? Why do people need one centralized identity that can be tracked? For credit? For any significant credit you are going to have to have collateral anyway. For government services like health care? Well, if health care truly was "Universal" like the government propoganda wants you to believe, then there wouldn't need to be health cards because everyone would have free unlimited access to health care by default. For tracking criminals? Criminals can make/steal ID, so you have to use fingerprints to ID them anyway.
A centralized ID system exists to track people, and control people. If you need an ID card for government services, it is not so that government can give you services (because it would be easy enough to give you services, like medical care, without an ID), it is so they can DENY certain people services. It isn't so they can tax you, because they could just earn revenues with a sales tax and it would be completly anonymous.
If, there was some special reason you DID need an ID for something (say, a passport), you could just issue that based on biometric information (your passport would be tied to a hash of your fingerprint instead of a national ID number).
Can the people who choose not to recieve benifits, also choose not to pay taxes for them?
I agree with you... up until you started to bring up Ralph Nader. Ralph, unintentionally of course, is one of the biggest allies of the big corporations... by promoting expensive regulation that makes doing buisness unaffordable for anyone by huge corporations who can afford the initial capital investment to comply with regulations. Also, in his dream world, most of the economy and society would be controlled by the government (which is as bad or worse than having a few corporations control everything). Remember, the government IS a corporation, it is simply a corporation that can use violence to maintain it's monopoly, and can charge you for services against your will.
You could compile your source code to some sort of abstracted binary code (similiar to a java virtual machine), and then compile that into your real machine code on the local machine.