Nice generalization. Of course, most of us "anti-government" types, are not actually "anti government"! Instead, we favor a government limited to its proper functions, none of which involve the initiation of force against innocents.
And, to anticipate your brilliant retort - yes, I will take back whatever measly social security payments that remain when it is my turn, since the money was taken from me without my consent for all of those years. I will also use the public roads, which I never asked to be built, and the public schools, for which I have paid my share - against my will - many times over. I will do this knowing that I would have been more than happy had the government never got involved in any of these illegitimate functions, and that the free enterprise replacements for these would have been much more efficiently created and managed, had not the government monopolized these in the only way monopolies can actually exist - by the threat of the gun.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with OP. Shilling actively lobbied in favor of the loan, showing he did not disagree with the notion on principle. He was/is a hypocrite.
Um, the main issue here was not a tax break, but a government loan guarantee. At least as bad, if not worse, since the moral hazard is blatantly obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense: Heads, we pay back the loan and keep all of the profits for our shareholders; the citizens of the sponsoring state get bupkis. Tails we declare bankruptcy, and the citizens of the sponsoring state get stuck with the loss from the loan.
Um, "Jim Crow" is short for "Jim Crow Laws". Any such legal institutionalization of racism would last about 3 seconds today, and rightly so. As for stores refusing to serve black customers, or businesses refusing to hire black workers, I doubt it, but, you would be free to organize a boycott of those establishments, and I bet it would be very effective (since you are such a dedicated, persuasive, articulate defender of justice)!
If the mayor and the sheriff were not protecting the lives, liberty and property of the peaceful citizens voluntarily engaging in trade, then they would be at least derelict if not criminally culpable. The state, or, if necessary, federal government would then be justified in intervening to restore the rule of law. The (non-anarchist) libertarian position is that the government MUST defend individual rights. But, these include the right of private individuals to be assholes on their own property.
Even if we stipulate that the majority was racist (it doesn't follow logically from the fact the government passed racist laws - think about it), there were undoubtedly non-racist individuals in the minority, and some of these owned businesses. Were the government prevented from impeding _those_ business owner's rights, they could have exploited the economic advantage in attracting black customers and/or employees. Perhaps this could have convinced the "borderline" or "go along to get along" racists to open their doors as well. This is the dynamic that was shunted by Jim Crow.
If government is reduced to its proper role of protecting individual rights (none of which include a job or counter service provided by someone else), the rational actors in a society are empowered, and rationality will eventually win out.
Figure 6 predicts a 0.45 degrees Celsius rise from 1979 to 2012, which matches well with the Wood For Trees global temperature index. However, Figure 6 does not predict that all of that rise will occur prior to 1998, with a flat-to-falling trend since then. Indeed, since the model has an exponential behavior (due to feedback/"sensitivity", I'm guessing), it actually shows quite the opposite behavior, with very little rise early in the period, followed by a much greater (linearly-approximated) slope in the last decade. The conclusion is that this model got very lucky this year, and does not well reflect the underlying physics.
The greenhouse effect is real, the earth has warmed over the past 30 years (though not much, if at all, over the last 13), and human behavior may be contributing to this warming by contributing slightly to the greenhouse effect. However the model presented in this paper is not a good explanation for the details of this process, and therefore cannot be relied on to estimate the magnitude of AGW. It therefore has no value as a policy tool, never mind that it has nothing to say about the economic costs of proposed policy solutions (or even its hypothesized environmental impacts).
Yes, and if you attach real probability estimates to the various events in question, you will still come out with the expected bad outcomes per KwH from nuclear energy being lower than those for any other power source. Just because the bad outcomes are per-occurrence less severe and less news worthy for the dilute energy sources does not change the math.
So your point reduces to the contention that we should ignore reality in favor of perception.
Was the Declaration of "Independents" written by Ross Perot?
OK, I'll forgive your typo. I agree that the Declaration of Independence is an essential document; it in fact establishes the philosophical framework for the Constitution. Can you point out to me the clause that grants us all a right to a job? Or, a right to not be asked questions we find insulting?
That's right, they protect our non-existent "right" to a job (provided by someone else), or privacy (in a public setting in which we have voluntarily engaged), or some other such made up rights. Meanwhile, they violate the business owner's _actual_ rights to freedom of association, contract, and speech. You obviously think these made up rights are more important than the actual ones, which are clearly delineated in the U.S. Constitution. To you, a privately owned business is sort of like a public utility and we all get to vote on how they behave.
You also seem to believe that coercively circumscribing the questions which a business owner may ask a job applicant will actually cause that business owner to approach the world differently; that preventing a bigot from asking about these forbidden classifications will somehow make them a good person to work for. I prefer unfettered voluntary relationships among consenting adults, so that the idiots will be more easily identifiable. With modern communication technology, voluntary boycotts of such idiots will be far more effective at punishing them for their erroneous ideas.
Siri supports US English (speaks in the default female voice everyone as heard), UK English (low pitched male voice), AU English (different female voice, better than the US voice, in my opinion), French (effeminate-sounding male voice, as you would expect from any French guy), and German (the best sounding female voice in my opinion).
You are confusing synthesis with recognition.
Siri and Evi both use Nuance's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. This technology can support both US and UK English (among many others), depending on which models are used. Presumably, this can be configured by the application software, based on the location of the device and/or user setup (I do not have a smart phone, so I'm not sure if the latter is supported). The Nuance technology also adapts to the user's acoustics and word usage over time, so, in theory, a UK-accented speaker could start with the US English model and it (their speaker-dependent model) would eventually have "moved over" into their space. Not optimal, but it can certainly work, with patience on the user's part. With the correct model and/or adaptation, the vast majority of adult speakers will be able to get their "words recognized" by the ASR technology.
You are correct that the localization issues impact the ability to then respond intelligently to map queries, etc. But that's not all.
The "natural language understanding" (NLU) layer - which includes more general query processing - is also extremely location/domain dependent, and the adaptation technology here is much less advanced than with ASR. So, the main value-added by the Evi application (relative to Siri) is very likely to be an NLU framework that is regionalized. I'm sure Apple has the capability to make their NLU domain-specific; it's mainly a matter of data collection and training.
Except, if you think about it. Then, you realize that, in a world of finite resources, allocating scarce resources to this security theater means that fewer are available for useful security. For example, you could spend, say, 12% of the $8billion TSA budget to hire and train 10,000 educated, intelligent people to perform the background intelligence gathering and on-premise observation (surreptitious) and verbal screening (ala Israel) that actually identifies legitimate threats. The diminishing returns you cite are real, but that does not mean we could not be doing much better than we are with the travesty that is the current TSA.
the result will be fewer opportunities for the already oppressed (by their government) people of China. If forced to pay more more (in either salary or working conditions) than people are voluntarily willing to accept for their labor, Foxconn will not eat the cost, but will reduce the supply of jobs (or will have it reduced when their contracts become limited by increased costs). As such, the more than 500 million people in rural China living on less than $1/day will be more likely to remain that way.
To the whiners who profess: "but we don't want _that_ outcome, we want just as many more expensive jobs": too bad, the world does not work according to your fantasies. To those that instead say: "I'd rather they not have any job, than these horrible jobs", you can wish that, but you can't escape the consequences of what it really means for these people to not have any job. And, to both of these groups, I will love to see their reaction when the cost of their electronic devices goes up (or doesn't go down as fast as it would have). Somehow, I doubt they will be lauding Apple for this inevitable consequence of a reduced/more-expensive labor supply.
I knew it: my inability to have that Maserati (or Picasso, or Springsteen ticket, or whatever) at a price I am willing and able to pay is a failure of the *market*! So, it behooves the government to change the laws so that I can have them at my price. What, a movie, piece of music, book is different because it's "information"? So are the blueprints for that Maserati, the ideas in Picasso's head, and the sound waves traveling between Bruce's guitar and my ears.
Admit it - you people: you want stuff made by others for free. You are thieves. Be proud of it. The rationalizations are unbecoming.
To slashdot-dom (and much of government-school-brain-addled America) any corporation which achieves success through voluntary trade is deemed "evil". The claim has been made about Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Oracle... the list goes on. The whines range from: "They didn't really invent that technology, they just packaged/marketed it" to "That UI is not to my liking" to "It's not fair that they can exclude my favorite browser from their default offering". There are many variants.
Rationally, these contentions discount individual choice. Emotionally, they represent naked envy. And somehow, the remedies offered always involve government force. Then, when the principle of government force they espoused comes back to bite them in the ass, they conveniently forget about their own complicity in its unleashing.
Yes. congratulations are due to all involved in this righteous endeavor. And, to those who say "the U.S. would consider this an act of war...". Well, of course. It is an act of war. So what? In this case, it is self-defense (and, no, I won't argue that point here), and self-defense is entirely justified.
Sorry, I mangled that (by not paying attention to html rules):
The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a less-than-1% phenomenon based on such a small sample. This bastard deserved most of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.
... whether fraudulent or not, was based on 12 subjects. The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a 75% of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.
"And I will go with the latter not because I can prove it to be true, but because it's the only thing that can give me causality between action and reaction. "
But, given the rest of your statement, you can not possibly claim any certainty that a given action will result in a a given reaction. Or, is that not what you mean by "causality".
Rand explains this contradiction clearly, which is (I suspect) why those making ad hominem arguments against her do so - if Objectivism is correct, it invalidates so much philosophic babbling that people find to be so cool.
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government?
In this way: the government can point a gun at you to force you to behave in a particularly way. If you don't like what a corporation is doing, you can simply walk away. What? But you want the service the corporation is offering, you just want it your way? Tough.
If you are arguing against the government monopolies granted to (some) ISPs and TelCos, then you have my full support. But be clear that it is government action to which you are objecting, and that this action always comes with the threat of force.
The equivocation of government power with economic power is the equivocation of force with trade. It is a category error which leads to perverse conclusions.
You show little understanding of the Middle Eastern psyche. Read Bernard Lewis. Incompetence is not rewarded, it is is looked on with disparagement. Being strong and saving face are critical. Indeed, the regime has been extremely reluctant to admit *any* impact from the attack. If they were going to pursue your strategy, they would bemoan the actions of the "imperialists". I bet they never will, because of the culture of "face".
In all contexts? Should the Allies have broadcast their D-Day plans, because the public has a "right to know"? If we have ops aimed at disabling the Iranian nuclear program, should the details of these ops be public knowledge? Is the FBI "corrupt" because it doesn't publish its trade craft in the New York Times?
This is sloppy thinking. A legitimate government is duty-bound to protect the individual rights of its citizens, and, in a world with bad (TM) people, this sometimes requires secrecy. Is there danger that this secrecy will lead ('down a slippery slope') to denial of some individual rights? Of course, but the hard work of political science and philosophy is to discriminate between the good and bad uses of secrecy. If you are unwilling to grant these principles, then you should stop calling yourself a "conservative" (or even a "libertarian"). You are an anarchist.
While this leak demonstrates Assange's malevolent nihilism, it is _not_ the one that should have prompted prosecution. If the U.S. state department feels the need for secrecy in its communications, it is _their_ responsibility to maintain that secrecy (of course, if we had a proper, rational foreign policy, there would be no need for such secrecy). That they were incompetent in this respect is a problem, but it would be crossing a very bright line for Assange to bear the responsibility for this incompetence.
However, the previous leak of _military_ communications, where he explicitly endangered the lives of pro-U.S. informants in Afghanistan, should have put a price on Assange's capture and lead to his prosecution. That was an act of blatant espionage, and he should be held accountable for the damage he did to freedom and the lives he threatened.
As for PayPal, if they are acting on their own initiative (and have not been coerce by the U.S. government), they are doing so too late, but better late than never. It is an expression of the freedom of the individuals who own and operate that company to cease doing business with a bastard like Assange. Good for them!
I agree that flying on a commercial airline is not a right (though there is a right to build one's own aircraft and fly it in "common" air space, so long as one obeys reasonable safety restrictions regarding other traffic, but that's another post).
What commercial flying is, however, is a contractual arrangement between the passenger and the airline, and the government has no business interfering with that contract. The entire regime of commercial airline security is a blatant overstepping of the power granted to the government by the U.S. constitution.
How could air travel be safe, without this intrusion, you ask? Um, who has more interest in striking the correct balance between security and convenience than the airlines themselves, and the passengers that choose to contract with them? Some airlines would install a completely laissez-faire regime, and passengers who value convenience (or are easily embarrassed, or whatever) will choose to take that risk. Other airlines will promise colonoscopies and the fearful or very extroverted will select that carrier. Most likely, the airlines will spend lots of money on hiring very good people to staff and lead this increasingly important part of their business, and we would all benefit greatly from the higher quality and choice that would ensue.
Then, the government could focus on doing what it does best, which is bringing the fury of the U.S. armed forces to bear on the states that harbor and support the groups that actually perpetrate these acts, before they are able to organize and implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice generalization. Of course, most of us "anti-government" types, are not actually "anti government"! Instead, we favor a government limited to its proper functions, none of which involve the initiation of force against innocents.
And, to anticipate your brilliant retort - yes, I will take back whatever measly social security payments that remain when it is my turn, since the money was taken from me without my consent for all of those years. I will also use the public roads, which I never asked to be built, and the public schools, for which I have paid my share - against my will - many times over. I will do this knowing that I would have been more than happy had the government never got involved in any of these illegitimate functions, and that the free enterprise replacements for these would have been much more efficiently created and managed, had not the government monopolized these in the only way monopolies can actually exist - by the threat of the gun.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with OP. Shilling actively lobbied in favor of the loan, showing he did not disagree with the notion on principle. He was/is a hypocrite.
Um, the main issue here was not a tax break, but a government loan guarantee. At least as bad, if not worse, since the moral hazard is blatantly obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense: Heads, we pay back the loan and keep all of the profits for our shareholders; the citizens of the sponsoring state get bupkis. Tails we declare bankruptcy, and the citizens of the sponsoring state get stuck with the loss from the loan.
Um, "Jim Crow" is short for "Jim Crow Laws". Any such legal institutionalization of racism would last about 3 seconds today, and rightly so. As for stores refusing to serve black customers, or businesses refusing to hire black workers, I doubt it, but, you would be free to organize a boycott of those establishments, and I bet it would be very effective (since you are such a dedicated, persuasive, articulate defender of justice)!
If the mayor and the sheriff were not protecting the lives, liberty and property of the peaceful citizens voluntarily engaging in trade, then they would be at least derelict if not criminally culpable. The state, or, if necessary, federal government would then be justified in intervening to restore the rule of law. The (non-anarchist) libertarian position is that the government MUST defend individual rights. But, these include the right of private individuals to be assholes on their own property.
Even if we stipulate that the majority was racist (it doesn't follow logically from the fact the government passed racist laws - think about it), there were undoubtedly non-racist individuals in the minority, and some of these owned businesses. Were the government prevented from impeding _those_ business owner's rights, they could have exploited the economic advantage in attracting black customers and/or employees. Perhaps this could have convinced the "borderline" or "go along to get along" racists to open their doors as well. This is the dynamic that was shunted by Jim Crow.
If government is reduced to its proper role of protecting individual rights (none of which include a job or counter service provided by someone else), the rational actors in a society are empowered, and rationality will eventually win out.
Figure 6 predicts a 0.45 degrees Celsius rise from 1979 to 2012, which matches well with the Wood For Trees global temperature index. However, Figure 6 does not predict that all of that rise will occur prior to 1998, with a flat-to-falling trend since then. Indeed, since the model has an exponential behavior (due to feedback/"sensitivity", I'm guessing), it actually shows quite the opposite behavior, with very little rise early in the period, followed by a much greater (linearly-approximated) slope in the last decade. The conclusion is that this model got very lucky this year, and does not well reflect the underlying physics.
The greenhouse effect is real, the earth has warmed over the past 30 years (though not much, if at all, over the last 13), and human behavior may be contributing to this warming by contributing slightly to the greenhouse effect. However the model presented in this paper is not a good explanation for the details of this process, and therefore cannot be relied on to estimate the magnitude of AGW. It therefore has no value as a policy tool, never mind that it has nothing to say about the economic costs of proposed policy solutions (or even its hypothesized environmental impacts).
Yes, and if you attach real probability estimates to the various events in question, you will still come out with the expected bad outcomes per KwH from nuclear energy being lower than those for any other power source. Just because the bad outcomes are per-occurrence less severe and less news worthy for the dilute energy sources does not change the math.
So your point reduces to the contention that we should ignore reality in favor of perception.
Was the Declaration of "Independents" written by Ross Perot?
OK, I'll forgive your typo. I agree that the Declaration of Independence is an essential document; it in fact establishes the philosophical framework for the Constitution. Can you point out to me the clause that grants us all a right to a job? Or, a right to not be asked questions we find insulting?
That's right, they protect our non-existent "right" to a job (provided by someone else), or privacy (in a public setting in which we have voluntarily engaged), or some other such made up rights. Meanwhile, they violate the business owner's _actual_ rights to freedom of association, contract, and speech. You obviously think these made up rights are more important than the actual ones, which are clearly delineated in the U.S. Constitution. To you, a privately owned business is sort of like a public utility and we all get to vote on how they behave.
You also seem to believe that coercively circumscribing the questions which a business owner may ask a job applicant will actually cause that business owner to approach the world differently; that preventing a bigot from asking about these forbidden classifications will somehow make them a good person to work for. I prefer unfettered voluntary relationships among consenting adults, so that the idiots will be more easily identifiable. With modern communication technology, voluntary boycotts of such idiots will be far more effective at punishing them for their erroneous ideas.
Absolutely!
"The U.S. Constitution may not be perfect, but it's better than what we have now."
- Sandy Shaw
Siri supports US English (speaks in the default female voice everyone as heard), UK English (low pitched male voice), AU English (different female voice, better than the US voice, in my opinion), French (effeminate-sounding male voice, as you would expect from any French guy), and German (the best sounding female voice in my opinion).
You are confusing synthesis with recognition.
Siri and Evi both use Nuance's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. This technology can support both US and UK English (among many others), depending on which models are used. Presumably, this can be configured by the application software, based on the location of the device and/or user setup (I do not have a smart phone, so I'm not sure if the latter is supported). The Nuance technology also adapts to the user's acoustics and word usage over time, so, in theory, a UK-accented speaker could start with the US English model and it (their speaker-dependent model) would eventually have "moved over" into their space. Not optimal, but it can certainly work, with patience on the user's part. With the correct model and/or adaptation, the vast majority of adult speakers will be able to get their "words recognized" by the ASR technology.
You are correct that the localization issues impact the ability to then respond intelligently to map queries, etc. But that's not all.
The "natural language understanding" (NLU) layer - which includes more general query processing - is also extremely location/domain dependent, and the adaptation technology here is much less advanced than with ASR. So, the main value-added by the Evi application (relative to Siri) is very likely to be an NLU framework that is regionalized. I'm sure Apple has the capability to make their NLU domain-specific; it's mainly a matter of data collection and training.
Not true!
I think a "robocall" uses robots.
This has no place on /.
"raise the perception of safety"
Except, if you think about it. Then, you realize that, in a world of finite resources, allocating scarce resources to this security theater means that fewer are available for useful security. For example, you could spend, say, 12% of the $8billion TSA budget to hire and train 10,000 educated, intelligent people to perform the background intelligence gathering and on-premise observation (surreptitious) and verbal screening (ala Israel) that actually identifies legitimate threats. The diminishing returns you cite are real, but that does not mean we could not be doing much better than we are with the travesty that is the current TSA.
the result will be fewer opportunities for the already oppressed (by their government) people of China. If forced to pay more more (in either salary or working conditions) than people are voluntarily willing to accept for their labor, Foxconn will not eat the cost, but will reduce the supply of jobs (or will have it reduced when their contracts become limited by increased costs). As such, the more than 500 million people in rural China living on less than $1/day will be more likely to remain that way.
To the whiners who profess: "but we don't want _that_ outcome, we want just as many more expensive jobs": too bad, the world does not work according to your fantasies. To those that instead say: "I'd rather they not have any job, than these horrible jobs", you can wish that, but you can't escape the consequences of what it really means for these people to not have any job. And, to both of these groups, I will love to see their reaction when the cost of their electronic devices goes up (or doesn't go down as fast as it would have). Somehow, I doubt they will be lauding Apple for this inevitable consequence of a reduced/more-expensive labor supply.
I knew it: my inability to have that Maserati (or Picasso, or Springsteen ticket, or whatever) at a price I am willing and able to pay is a failure of the *market*! So, it behooves the government to change the laws so that I can have them at my price. What, a movie, piece of music, book is different because it's "information"? So are the blueprints for that Maserati, the ideas in Picasso's head, and the sound waves traveling between Bruce's guitar and my ears.
Admit it - you people: you want stuff made by others for free. You are thieves. Be proud of it. The rationalizations are unbecoming.
To slashdot-dom (and much of government-school-brain-addled America) any corporation which achieves success through voluntary trade is deemed "evil". The claim has been made about Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Oracle ... the list goes on. The whines range from: "They didn't really invent that technology, they just packaged/marketed it" to "That UI is not to my liking" to "It's not fair that they can exclude my favorite browser from their default offering". There are many variants.
Rationally, these contentions discount individual choice. Emotionally, they represent naked envy. And somehow, the remedies offered always involve government force. Then, when the principle of government force they espoused comes back to bite them in the ass, they conveniently forget about their own complicity in its unleashing.
Yes. congratulations are due to all involved in this righteous endeavor. And, to those who say "the U.S. would consider this an act of war ...". Well, of course. It is an act of war. So what? In this case, it is self-defense (and, no, I won't argue that point here), and self-defense is entirely justified.
Sorry, I mangled that (by not paying attention to html rules):
The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a less-than-1% phenomenon based on such a small sample. This bastard deserved most of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.
... whether fraudulent or not, was based on 12 subjects. The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a 75% of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.
"And I will go with the latter not because I can prove it to be true, but because it's the only thing that can give me causality between action and reaction. "
But, given the rest of your statement, you can not possibly claim any certainty that a given action will result in a a given reaction. Or, is that not what you mean by "causality".
Rand explains this contradiction clearly, which is (I suspect) why those making ad hominem arguments against her do so - if Objectivism is correct, it invalidates so much philosophic babbling that people find to be so cool.
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government?
In this way: the government can point a gun at you to force you to behave in a particularly way. If you don't like what a corporation is doing, you can simply walk away. What? But you want the service the corporation is offering, you just want it your way? Tough.
If you are arguing against the government monopolies granted to (some) ISPs and TelCos, then you have my full support. But be clear that it is government action to which you are objecting, and that this action always comes with the threat of force.
The equivocation of government power with economic power is the equivocation of force with trade. It is a category error which leads to perverse conclusions.
You show little understanding of the Middle Eastern psyche. Read Bernard Lewis. Incompetence is not rewarded, it is is looked on with disparagement. Being strong and saving face are critical. Indeed, the regime has been extremely reluctant to admit *any* impact from the attack. If they were going to pursue your strategy, they would bemoan the actions of the "imperialists". I bet they never will, because of the culture of "face".
"A secretive government is a corrupt one."
In all contexts? Should the Allies have broadcast their D-Day plans, because the public has a "right to know"? If we have ops aimed at disabling the Iranian nuclear program, should the details of these ops be public knowledge? Is the FBI "corrupt" because it doesn't publish its trade craft in the New York Times?
This is sloppy thinking. A legitimate government is duty-bound to protect the individual rights of its citizens, and, in a world with bad (TM) people, this sometimes requires secrecy. Is there danger that this secrecy will lead ('down a slippery slope') to denial of some individual rights? Of course, but the hard work of political science and philosophy is to discriminate between the good and bad uses of secrecy. If you are unwilling to grant these principles, then you should stop calling yourself a "conservative" (or even a "libertarian"). You are an anarchist.
While this leak demonstrates Assange's malevolent nihilism, it is _not_ the one that should have prompted prosecution. If the U.S. state department feels the need for secrecy in its communications, it is _their_ responsibility to maintain that secrecy (of course, if we had a proper, rational foreign policy, there would be no need for such secrecy). That they were incompetent in this respect is a problem, but it would be crossing a very bright line for Assange to bear the responsibility for this incompetence.
However, the previous leak of _military_ communications, where he explicitly endangered the lives of pro-U.S. informants in Afghanistan, should have put a price on Assange's capture and lead to his prosecution. That was an act of blatant espionage, and he should be held accountable for the damage he did to freedom and the lives he threatened.
As for PayPal, if they are acting on their own initiative (and have not been coerce by the U.S. government), they are doing so too late, but better late than never. It is an expression of the freedom of the individuals who own and operate that company to cease doing business with a bastard like Assange. Good for them!
I agree that flying on a commercial airline is not a right (though there is a right to build one's own aircraft and fly it in "common" air space, so long as one obeys reasonable safety restrictions regarding other traffic, but that's another post).
What commercial flying is, however, is a contractual arrangement between the passenger and the airline, and the government has no business interfering with that contract. The entire regime of commercial airline security is a blatant overstepping of the power granted to the government by the U.S. constitution.
How could air travel be safe, without this intrusion, you ask? Um, who has more interest in striking the correct balance between security and convenience than the airlines themselves, and the passengers that choose to contract with them? Some airlines would install a completely laissez-faire regime, and passengers who value convenience (or are easily embarrassed, or whatever) will choose to take that risk. Other airlines will promise colonoscopies and the fearful or very extroverted will select that carrier. Most likely, the airlines will spend lots of money on hiring very good people to staff and lead this increasingly important part of their business, and we would all benefit greatly from the higher quality and choice that would ensue.
Then, the government could focus on doing what it does best, which is bringing the fury of the U.S. armed forces to bear on the states that harbor and support the groups that actually perpetrate these acts, before they are able to organize and implement them.