A week or so after the Intel switch announcement I went to VMWare's forums. The most requested feature was an OS X version of the workstation product. It is pretty foolish to ignore that kind of demand in that particular market. Parallels beat them to market, but with a lot of missing functionality that may or may not be important to the customer base. So we have VMWare and Parallels with VMs using the Intel processor's emulation hardware. We have two WINE Windows API re-implementations, and we have Xen and MS with potential solutions as well. The only real unknown quantity is Apple themselves. If they release VMs built into OS X the market segment will adopt that standard. If they do it using a cross-platform standard, it will boost that standard considerably. If they don't release a built-in VM, the market segment will fragment with some companies using the re-implementation technologies to make quick ports and some users using each of the VM solutions and dual booting to cater to their own needs for running other OS's
Getting back to what the parent AC poster was saying, it's not free. It's tax payer funded. There is a difference.
It is free in that no one has to directly pay money for it. Someone from Florida who comes on vacation pays nothing for it. Also, from what I've heard the higher speed accounts will be what is funding the low speed access for all, not tax dollars after the initial investment. Finally, since this is a way to bypass the local monopolies that are bleeding us dry, for many of us it will be costing negative dollars. I need internet access at home for my job. If I use this service and it saves me $15-$20 a month in bills, but raises my taxes by $60 a year, I just saved hundreds of dollars while the county got wireless. The perception of "free" needs to be taken in more detailed context if it is to have any real meaning.
The way I read it is that there'd be a $35/mo. fee for anything but dialup-level speeds, so it's not free.
Dial-up speeds are free for everyone and that is fine for checking your e-mail our doing a little Web browsing from a restaurant, cafe, bus station, park, bar, or whatever. Considering how many people are crammed into the local library to use the public terminals, I'm guessing this will be used a lot. As for the non-free higher speeds, the cheapest you can get cable modem access is about $50/month. The cheapest you can get DSL is about $75/month. So both free low speeds and the more expensive high speeds are a lot better than what we have now.
People are acting like the money is free. Trouble is a great many people in that county are going to be taxed for a service that a good number will never get to use.
So? A great many people never go down to the public parks, or use the public baseball fields or drive on that county road out in the middle of farm country. The question is not whether everyone will use it, but whether the benefit to the people will be greater than the expense. Will the people benefit by the increased tourism, real estate sales, and reduced cost to local businesses this will provide even if they don't use it directly? It seems likely.
Sorry, if even one trailer exist at a local school it should the first thing addressed.
The public schools in Washtenaw country are well funded.
Quit diverting money from projects already starved of cash.
What projects would those be that people want more?
Internet access at reasonable speeds in Washtenaw county as in many places is provided by the Cable company ($60/month) or the phone company (DSL is $70/month). These outrageous prices hurt everyone. I'm happy the county is instituting public wireless. It saves me money and my neighbors' money and local businesses' money. The general public may not need internet access, but they don't need parks either. The public does want it and so do the businesses. It will almost certainly be cheaper than the current system. I'd rather some of my tax dollars were wasted subsidizing internet access for the poor and those in more rural areas than help fund the monopoly telecos that are bleeding me for money now.
If this thing works and developers including Blizzard licenses it, Mac gaming industry (yes it exists,creates miracles) is totally gone.
So you're arguing that you think it likely that Blizzard will move away from their current portable, best practices code using OpenGL and dual development and switch to a DirectX version that limits their portability to Nintendo and Playstation and for which they will have to pay an extra licensing fee and which will run more slowly. And you think they might do this because of why again?
This is aimed at quick and dirty ports for devs who successfully brought a game to the Windows market and now want to quickly blow some money and get it on the mac too. It won't change anything for big players that know their games are going to be successful and plan for the cheapest longterm solution even if the up front dev cost is slightly higher.
I REJECT and say I will buy a PS3 if there are no games...
Sony moved to OpenGL and an open standard called COLLADA for the PS3. Both Sony and Apple are members of the consortium that sets those standards. If they can port it to PS3, the chances are they just did 80%+ of the work to port it to OS X.
No, it won't, but nothing will bring them back. Putting the criminal in jail is helping you; its one less person you have to worry about killing someone.
So you admit this measure does not significantly reduce the chances of someone I care about being killed, but you still think it is the best way to prevent it? Yeah, that makes sense.
You could stop crime by installing cameras in everyone's home too. Again, that doesn't mean its a solution we should use, because of the high cost (our freedoms).
So taxing you for socialist programs for less money instead of taxing you for more money for the other costs associated with violent crime is too high of a price to pay?
Finally, since you seem to love statistics so much, you DO realize that violent crime rates have been dropping across the board since the 1970s, right?
Yes. It means we only have 10 times the violent crime Finland does instead of 11 times. How is this relevant?
You're much less likely to be murdered or assulted now than 40 years ago.
...But drastically more likely than if we took reasonable measures to reduce the incentives for crime. I still don't see how this is an argument against reducing the chances even further.
If you can't understand that crime rates are dropping (since crime seems to be your motiviating factor for socialism), I think you need to look at your critial thinking skills. Something must be going right; crime dropping for 40 years isn't just some random occurance.
Yeah, we repealed prohibition and the organized crime families have been losing power since. More recently we legalized abortion preventing tens of thousands of people from growing up in the worst of conditions; conditions that coincidentally correlate exactly with the likelihood of committing crimes and crime started dropping again just as we reached the time when those people would have reached about 17 years of age. How does this argue that we should not take further steps to reduce crime?
Please, shut up already about crime; you're trying to use fear of crime to change my belief to your point of view and its not going to work since I actually know the facts on crime rates. You have this illogical fear of being a victim of crime, when if you really DID look at the statistics you'd see there really ISN'T anything to worry about.
Its hard to avoid the topic of crime when that was the focus of the entire discussion, how to reduce it. As for, nothing to worry about, if for less money (negative cost) we can reduce the number of people killed by violent crimes by an order of magnitude you don't think we should do that because that number is not big enough for you to begin with? I don't think anyone would buy your argument.
Your measures though trample on other people's rights.
Which tramples on your rights more, paying 25% of your income in taxes, much of which is spent on police, courts, and prisons, or paying 22% of your income in taxes, much of which is spent on preventing crime via socialist programs that also provide you personally with free food, clothing, and shelter?
You're excusing violent behavior; that makes you the biggest problem this country has every seen.
I excused nothing. Taking action to remove a temptation does not imply in any way approval of those who give in to said temptation. Suppose in a society where clothing is very expensive, giving away clothing reduces rape by 50%. Does giving clothing away in any way imply that rape is acceptable? No, it does not.
Several towns have enacted laws REQUIRING every home own to own and be trained in hand gun use. After such laws, crime drops in those areas.
You're referring to Lott's study which sadly, was conducted very unscientifically. Please, there is no need to reference such poorly contrived studies when there are more reputable ones. In any case, the drop in crime when guns are made available everywhere and training is co
The point is that the state/commune must have complete power over the economic life of the individual.
Again, I disagree. To function a commune need only have complete control over shared resources, not all aspects of a person's economic situation.
On the other hand, I know of not one example of an economically succesful or sustainable commune. Nor have I ever heard of a self-sustaining monastery.
How odd. There are fourteen long running, well known communes in this particular town, the oldest of which dates back to the 50's. I used to live a few miles away from a communal monastery 600 miles from here that was entirely self-sustaining and in fact paid for their own land and buildings by selling crops they grew (honey, preserves, beer, wine, and other low volume goods). They sent money to their church every year in addition to providing for themselves (they even had a big screen TV).
And they are always authoritarian.
The local communes mostly follow a democratic model. New members need to be voted in by a majority and all decisions are democratic. Most of the people simply work normal jobs and donate an equal share of the communal money which goes into a fund that pays for the housing, utilities and food all of which can be bought cheaper in bulk. A few of the communes are wholly invested in that all moneys are pooled. All of them seem quite stable and have waiting lists to get in since it offsets so many of the high cost of living in the area.
Wow, who would have expected RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY from a COMMUNIST??? The Pilgrims were neither zelots, nor dangerous, nor antisocial, nor exiled.
It is true they were not exactly exiled, but they certainly were religious zealots by most definitions of the term. As for dangerous, ask the people and animals they hung for copulation. All of this is pretty academic, however. The point is, the society they lived in and the technological level of their society was quite different from society in the US today and thus using them as a test case provides far to many variables to be useful compared to the many more current examples.
(Note, I'm not exactly a communist, but rather someone who likes to evaluate all economic models and combinations of models. I've never seen any economy that did not blend elements of socialism, communism, and capitalism and any attempt to create one would likely be disastrous. It is my opinion that increasing the size of the communist cells we now have would probably be more efficient and beneficial. That no more makes me a communist than it makes me a socialist or a capitalist.)
There is a need for violence??
You seem to have misread my statements. I spoke of a need to make a choice to commit violence or not, not a need for violence which is outside the scope of this discussion.
The error is in thinking that violence has an economic cause. It does not.
Statistics show a strong correlation between violence and not only poverty, but wealth disparity in particular. Since wealth disparity has a common psychological effect and since modern sociologists have been able to study these traits numerous cultures including transitions of wealth disparity, I don't think it is at all reasonable to conclude that there is no economic cause of violence. In point of fact, reducing wealth disparity tends to greatly reduce violence.
While I agree it's not up to the government to instill morality, immorality is nevertheless the cause of violence.
It is pointless to argue morality. It is, by definition, subjective. As for common ethics, it is a matter of which ethical code is subscribed to. Shooting a rapist attacking you is violent. The ethics of it, however, are a matter of debate. None of this is an issue that can be solved by a government, however, which is why the government must balance freedom with practical effects upon living conditions.
While I also agree that it's the responsibility of the governm
It helps you because that person can no longer harm anyone again.
And that will bring my mother or girlfriend back to life? And what about the children that person left behind? They are even poorer and even more likely to commit a crime in the future and kill off whichever of said people I mentioned was not already killed. PUTTING THAT PERSON IN JAIL HELPS ME NOT AT ALL. It is not a solution to the problem. It is too little too late.
Personally I'd think that losing 30 years of my life in prison as opposed to 10 is losing more, not less.
The problem is violence committed against those I care about. Whether some individual spends 10 years or 30 years or 40,000 years in prison is immaterial to the problem of stopping people in general from hurting those I care about. If you can't understand that, you need to seriously look into a book on critical thinking and logic. Unless you can show that people convicted of a crime spending more time in prison makes it less likely that violence will be committed then you've missed the point.
The point is to force people to responsible for themselves, which would reduce violence.
This is the logical fallacy, "implicit assumption." You're assuming that forcing them to take responsibility reduces violence significantly. This is provably untrue.
You claim the junkie is acting out of desperation, yet you then imply they're thinking logically. They're so desprate[sic] they are beyond reason
Some are acting reasonably and some are simply reacting, but it makes no difference because we know how they are reacting and to what it correlates. Ignoring that and trying to use measures that have been shown not to change the behavior is just dumb.
Sure you are; you're blaming drugs and society instead of the person who violated anothers rights.
You are 100% wrong. I'm not blaming society and I'm not blaming drugs and I'm not blaming god or physics or human nature. I'm not blaming anyone or anything. I'm just looking at what actions are likely to be most effective in stopping the problem because that is what I care about. Obviously it is not what you care about. You'd rather blame people than solve the problem which makes you part of the problem.
Since you acknowledge that your socialst measures won't eliminate crime, the answer in preventing your mother of girlfriend from having to deal with crime is to train in self defense, and be armed.
There are plenty of places where everyone is well armed and trained. Guess what, that means criminals are too. Since they have the element of surprise, they still have an advantage. Training them in self defense is a good idea and if it is universal it will result in a decrease in violent crime, by up to 10%. Socialist policies in other countries have reduced violent crime by up to 80% from the levels in the US. In Britain they've removed guns from the hands of most everyone and even have restrictions on pocket knives now. Despite this, they still have less than 1/3 the violent crime the US has. Guns and training alone will not solve the problem.
The 'additional steps' you want to take though come at the expense of others, which is unreasonable.
Your choice is pay more money to hire additional police, courts, and prisons to deal with ever increasing crime or pay less money on taxes and pay for socialist programs that will remove the need for more police, courts, and prisons. For me, I'd rather pay less taxes and have less violence than pay more taxes and have more violence. But them, I'm sort of practical, rather than some sort of idealist.
Let people suffer the full consequences of their actions.
Yeah that has been tried. It results in a greater chance of me or mine being killed by violence.
I never even said they'd be killed in response to a crime; just being a known junkie could be enough.
And this is functionally different than being a junkie is a crime punisha
Lets not forget, people CHOOSE to go into debt. They do it by buying houses they can't afford
Okay, so here are my housing options. I can rent for about $700 a month. I can take out a loan and buy a home for $550 a month, $225 of which I get back in the form of equity and losing the opportunity to make $3 a month in interest on the down payment. Thus going into debt saves me a net total of $472 a month. Do you have any idea how a big a chunk of an average person's income that is? Going into debt to buy a home can be the only viable way to live in many places without going into much greater debt, like credit card debt. A lot of people can't afford not to go into debt if they want to feed their kids and provide them with shelter instead of living illegally in a tent or car somewhere.
But at the end of the day, there people CHOOSE to open that line of credit.
Do I buy groceries on credit and have enough to pay the rent or pay cash for the groceries and move the kids into my car. Yup, they made the choice. What morons.
...the inventor can walk away and find someone offering a deal more to his liking...
First, you've been using "investor" and "inventor" interchangeably, causing great confusion. Second, look at the people who actually brought almost every advance in the last few decades to the people. None of them got better deals than that. The choice is not to look for a better deal, but to take a deal like that or get nothing while your idea does not go on to benefit mankind.
Yes, I've read what you're been writing. You claim that people are starving or in such desperate need of housing that they are committing crimes.
No. I never made such a claim and this claim is refuted in the paragraph you quoted from me just before you typed this.
There's nothing you can do when the goverment focibly steals from you.
Yes, but since death and taxes are a given, you have no choice. This is a matter of whether they allocate the money they stole from you for cops and courts or removing the need for that many cops and courts.
Its not revenge I want, its fairness.
So you propose a different, unfair system? I think what you mean is you want life to be fair for you above and beyond making it fair for others. Taxing you to take punish people who are suffering because our current economic system has made them suffer disproportionally all their lives and then they turned to crime is not fair because the system made them suffer wealth disparity in the first place. It is not fair that one person starts life with billions of dollars and powerful government connections while another starts life with medical problems from their mother's addictions, no money, no chance at a public education and the necessity of going into debt just to get by. Until that unfairness is corrected, you are a hypocrite to demand that those people are then punished because you think it is unfair to you to spend your tax dollars to help them.
You totally ignore that most of these 'poverty' people ARE on welfare, ARE being fed, ARE having their housing paid for (or the rent greatly reduced), and ARE STILL COMMITTING CRIMES.
First, most of them aren't committing crimes. Second, it is not the lack of these that causes them to commit crimes, it is the disparity of opportunity that this type of poverty demonstrates. Third, we aren't providing all the necessities including medical care and treatment for drugs. Fourth, we're still putting them in prisons for drug offenses, thus further forcing them to associate with other criminal elements and conditioning them that breaking the law is not always wrong. All of these add up to a huge crime and violent crime problem in the US and the way to treat it is not to continually increase taxes to spend more and more on police and courts and prisons. That is like spending more and more money on better hospitals because your neighbors keep shooting you. The more effective
We already know what happens when we bombard users with dialog-boxes. They are perceived as noise. As disturbances. As something standing between the user and what he/she wants to do.
Yes, the Windows implementation is a horrible one and a standard example of what not to do. They break numerous UI conventions and basically use operant conditioning to make users click, "OK." whenever they see such a dialogue box.
Do not, however, confuse this with dialogue boxes being impossible to correctly implement. First, they need to be as rare as possible. You have to eliminate all of the ones that that don't present real choices to the users. Second, you have to write them in plain English and provide enough granularity of control so that the user can actually select the option they want. Jails like these aid in that. Third, you have to present actual actions as buttons, with different ones for every situation. OK/Cancel is not acceptable.
WRONG: 45iffaddr.exe is an executable file (OK)(Cancel)
RIGHT: The program "Spaceblaster" wants to read your e-mail address book (Stop it from reading my addresses)(Let it read my addresses once)(Always stop it from reading my addresses)(advanced Options)
In the former case the user doesn't know what is happening and will most likely just click "OK" to make the dialogue go away so they can play the game they just downloaded. In the second case, the user knows what program is trying to do what and simply reading the the buttons in order to pick which one they are going to click on gives them the information they need. They have no option to click "OK" to make it just all go away. Better yet, in a proper implementation, none of the choices will hinder them in playing their game, if that is what it really is. The OS can grant access to a dummy set of e-mail addresses if the permission is denied and the program won't even know. As a result, it is very difficult for malware writers to deny access to a real program used as a lure.
Basically, if you actually follow good UI design practices, the problem Windows has with OK/Cancel dialogues goes away. Unfortunately, looking at the Vista betas they don't seem to have learned this lesson yet or they just don't care enough to do it right.
The market for a game is *not* the number of Mac/Linux purchasers. Yeah, that sounds odd but hang on a minute. The market is really only those who refuse to dual boot or emulate and won't buy unless they have a native port.
You're making an unrealistic market distinction. Users for the most part don't care if a port is native or using Cider. All of that is behind the scenes and most users won't ever know if it is using a re-implementation of the Windows API. What they will know is how well the port works. As for the portion of the market that will be dual booting or running an emulator, this is not the Linux market. That number is going to be pretty insignificant unless the mac market grows a lot to encompass such people.
Today Mac has the advantage over Linux that Mac gamers have a proven track record of spending money. If developers can get Mac gamers to to accept Cider in large enough numbers then native Mac ports will no longer occur.
This may or may not be the case depending upon a number of factors. First, I doubt Blizzard or ID is going to stop their practice of using portable OpenGL code, especially given the recent moves by Sony to promote open standards that can be applied to Mac Games, Windows games, and Playstation 3 games simultaneously. Second, we'll have to see the popularity/viablility of Cider when compared to other solutions like Parallels running Windows and ReactOS, and possibly a built-in emulation from Apple (just a rumor right now). Third, we have to consider the size of the mac market. The vast majority of games that are considered successful make their way onto the mac, because it is a profitable, proven market. Games that flop often don't, because they are not written as portable to start with and the expense would be more than the trouble. If this move to virtualization, dual booting, and Windows re-implementations significantly increases the size of the market, we'll be seeing more companies take the Mac into account in their initial plans, not fewer. If Cider proves a reliable way to make a quick and dirty port, I imagine it will be quite popular (I predicted this as soon as Intel procs were announced). If it is not up to snuff, those games will be poorly received by the somewhat picky mac audience and other methods will be used by companies competing for those dollars.
The other problem is that a scheme like this requires that someone determine what privileges a particular application needs.
The answer to this is good defaults, possibly based upon templates. First, provide an official service for licensing and registration, that is locked down. Next give all new (not factory installed) apps access to their own registry and source files, that licensing service, and the ability to write new files in the users docs, but not read or overwrite existing ones. If it wants internet access it can ask. If it wants to read other files, it can ask. If it wants to read my e-mail address book or modify another program or the core os or read my IM buddy list, it can ask.
This means few existing programs and even fewer new programs will ever legitimately run afoul of these rules. As an added bonus VMs that can run programs from other OS's can use the same mechanism.
That may work well for businesses or high-security environments, but it's not going to fly at home, where most machines are administered by someone who knows enough to insert a CD and run install but not much else...
I disagree. Unless they run malware, most people will never hit any restrictions on default settings other than the occasional app that needs to use the internet and that is pretty self explanatory. So long as the UI is well written, this should be less confusing than what people deal with now and more in line with user expectations for their computer. Less than one in ten people I talk to realize that their computer does not already restrict programs they run. A common reaction is, "well why would it let some game send spam e-mail without telling me?" Can you think of a way in which a program would need (not currently does but with a good design) to violate the defaults I've described that would confuse a user?
The poverty rate in the US is 12.7%, or 37,000,000.
That is income, not wealth. It does not take into account any holding or debts. According to the best estimates between holdings, income and debt the bottom 50% of the US breaks even with debt and holdings about equal (actually I think for 2004 it went up to +.6% or something).
Wrong. The investor is free to walk away.
What the hell are you talking about?
Pretty much any poor person can get to a food shelter or get on food stamps, and this is what happens.
Did you even read what I wrote earlier? Crime correlates to wealth disparity, not just poverty as measured by income. You see when a poor person reasonable concludes that the guy living in the mansion across town does not work 16000 times harder than they do, to earn the disproportionally higher amount of wealth that person has, they lose the primary motivating factor that prevents crime... ethical/moral restrictions. They feel justified, sort of a robinhood thing, you know? And I'm not sure that I blame them. When the average person, however, has everything they need to survive they feel both less justified in committing crime and less willing to risk what they have. As a result, crime drops.
How exactly is investing in an invention "sucking money away from those that didn't have it to begin with"? You can take money from someone that doesn't have any!
You can take money by accumulating debt they owe you and which they have to pay you whenever they make any money. Those that do have money, you can take a chunk. Here's an example. You're born poor, but work hard, get a good job and try to build a life for yourself. You best long-term housing option is buying a house (since renting costs even more). You have 10K in savings and a 50K a year job. You put your savings down as a down payment and buy the house over the course of the next 20 years (say a $100K house). Over the course of that 20 years you pay nearly $100K for the house and another $100K to someone who happened to have the money to lend. They just made $100K for doing basically nothing and letting their money work for them. The same goes for all sorts of interest. So a person born with a $20 million dollar inheritance will make $2 million a year on it with no work while an average hard working guy makes $50K working their ass off. At the end of 50 years of life one is up hundreds of millions of dollars having never worked in their life and one is up $100K for a lifetime of backbreaking labor. At this rate the money will be equitably divided among the rich and poor based upon how hard they work when?
Seems like the socialist ones are having the problems; China, the EU formed because, individually, the Western European countries weren't doing that hot (which the exception of Britian, which is why they didn't adopt the Euro). All economoic models (captialist or not) are flawed, because they can't account for human nature. Its simply not possible.
You do know every household in the US owes approximately $400K in debt mostly to Europe and China taken out as a loan on our behalf right? As for violent crime, the EU has us beat by a mile. As for human nature, capitalism works because it relies upon human nature to drive it, but without using socialism for balance, it is ignoring another aspect of human nature. Economic models do not ignore human nature, they utilize it.
Ugh. The bank foreclosed because he couldn't pay the fucking mortgage. BEFORE that situation came about, he could have sold it. Trust me, I know from experience.
You can't always sell a house for enough to cover the remainder of the mortgage. That means you're in debt on the street.
To say that being violated is justification for harming some other 3rd party is stupid.
There you go again. It isn't about justifying actions, it is about finding and removing motivations for them. I don't care if what some individual does is right or wrong. I care abo
The number one predictor of poverty is the income of your parents. I don't think it is reasonable to assume poverty is solely based upon individual achievement in a country where half of the wealth is controlled by a tiny minority that inherited it.
Tough shit if you were stupid enough to get hooked on an addictive substance. If you commit a crime because you were high, your sentence should be tripled.
And when a desperate junkie stabs my girlfriend or shoots my mother tripling their sentence helps me how? The point is to prevent the violence that results for the good of all, not to punish people more harshly. Punitive measures are weak as preventatives because junkies are desperate. Draconian punitive measures just mean the junkie has less to lose and it is more reasonable for them to kill victims to reduce the dangers associated with being caught.
Blame the people taking the drug, not the drug itself.
Blame? I'm not interested in blaming anyone, just in preventing my mother or girlfriend or myself from having to deal with the crime that results.
I'm sure the same arguement was made to keep prohibition.
It isn't an argument to keep drugs criminalized, its an argument to decriminalize them and take additional steps to solve the rest of the problem.
Technically just killing the addict outright is the cheapest solution.
Capital punishment works very poorly as a deterrent by all counts and it costs more to execute someone than to keep them housed in a a prison for 10 years. Suppose robbing a person to feed your habit is punishable by death. What incentive does an addict now have to leave their mugging victim alive as a possible witness? What incentive to they have to surrender to police instead of killing the hostage they took, or shooting it out with the cops? None. This means we have more violent crime and murder, not less.
If you choose to experiment with a drug that can get such power over you, I fail to see WHY anyone should help you and not just put you on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
Because using my tax dollars to help them benefits me by reducing crime, especially violent crime, reducing the amount of my taxes that has to be spent on courts and police and makes my neighborhood a better place to live. I don't want socialized medicine to provide for addicts because they deserve it, I want them because it costs me less total tax dollars and results in a better place to live for me and mine.
I have no had 1 single issue of spyware, malware, or virus problems on my machine. I keep everything up-to-date and I know who, what, when, and where I'm downloading all my files from the internet.
An up-to-date Windows install running Firefox and anything but Outlook will protect you from the lion's share of what is out there. There have, however, been several zero day worms that do not involve user interaction that can quietly have their wicked way with your Windows box while it is sitting idle but connected. Without antivirus, it is doubtful you'll ever know if you've been infected with one of these worms. Most of these are pretty high profile with well defined signatures. I'd recommend just running ClamAV every now and again, from a read only device. If your corporate security guys are on the ball (and have the dough) they will probably also notice your machine trying to propagate said worm on their network, but that is not always something you can count on.
To summarize, you're probably right, but you don't actually know for certain that your statement is true.
Why don't programs run as separate users with separate priviliges?
You can do this today on Solaris using containers or on FreeBSD using jails, or obtain the functional equivelent. None of them are well integrated into the UI portion of the OS yet and I don't think there is a well established set of defaults and description of violations yet. I expect this to be the direction of the industry for security so expect it to be integrated into every OS except Windows within the next five years. I'm actually crossing my fingers and hoping Apple jumps on this grenade. The UI is the hard part for most developers and whatever problems they have had, they are still above average for good UI design.
A sermon-writing application? Word doesn't have a Insert->Scripture option?
Actually, on OS X you can add a Word->Services->Insert Scripture option by adding a service, and it should work in most of your other applications as well.
Socialism isn't the answer; forcing the government to acknowledge that what I do with my own body is none of their business is the solution.
I disagree. I think people should be free to put whatever they want in their own bodies, but addiction results in serious negative effects for society, including increased poverty and crime. For a centralized government to ignore this is foolish. Decriminalizing drugs reduces the problem, but does not eliminate it. Socialist programs to treat drug addiction along with other health problems and to provide the basics for those in need so they don't have to steal to eat because they spent all their money on crack is another important part of the solution that has worked in other countries. Giving heroin addicts enough heroin to stop them from losing it and enough food to eat and a place to stay is cheaper for society than housing them in prisons or leaving them loose and desperate on the streets to commit crimes.
With a family unit, absolutely. But in a family unit, there is typically a head of the household who is ultimately responsible for the family's economic wellbeing, who will impose work upon family members who should be contributing, but are not. Beyond that, family members have a different kind of moral responsibility to each other than do mere acquaintances, which makes this relationship more fitting.
Actually, this model works well in more democratic households as well. Modern families without a single head, but who talk things out still don't have problems with this kind of model. There need not be a matriarch or patriarch, just a working system. Further, proposing that you are either family members bound together or mere acquaintances (as you imply) is a false dichotomy. The communist model has worked well in the past for entire communities (hence the name). Tightly bound communities often act at least partially in this way, with everyone helping to raise the children of the others and communal resources like wells and public grazing shared by all.
A commune of even 50 or less could only work if it was under a strict authoritarian rule, such as the former tribes of American Indians.
That is an interesting assertion, but I disagree. Their is no reason a single ruler, rather than a town council or even a direct democracy cannot manage a communist community of some size.
There were once 105 people who formed an independent communist government in Massachusetts.
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but it hardly applies in this day and age and their is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show it did not apply in the past. Think of all the monasteries that flourished and flourish around the world.
This one paints the picture: "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
This demonstrates that they lacked a proper decision making method and enforcement of equality, not that the model is flawed. I hardly think citations from a bunch of religious zealots who were exiled for their dangerously antisocial behavior is an appropriate test case.
Indeed, if the communities are families, that works great. It existed in America, until less than 100 years ago, when the "New Deal" enabled children to relinquish responsibility for their older parents, and move out with their own children. And subsequent changes in law and society made marriage itself no longer a permanent institution, and we became a nation of individuals, rather than families.
If the only reason you maintain family ties is because of legal repercussions, then the problem is a social one. Personally, I blame the impersonalization of relationships on the capitalist model, corporatism, and resulting social ramifications. People treat everyone according to the rules of self-interest just as they have been taught to for business. The phrase, "its just business" has caused more damage than anything else to American culture, justifying unethical behaviors every moment of every day.
Desperation does not lead to violence. Desperation leads to action. The nature of the action, especially desperate action, is the nature of the actor. No person who is immoral when they are poor becomes moral by becoming rich.
Since it is not the place of government to instill any given morality, nor is it the place of any other to make moral judgments for another, we must concentrate on preventing negative effects, not beliefs. Thus, regardless of whether the choice an individual makes is moral or ethical, if we can reduce violence by removing the need for individuals to make that choice, we have succeeded in our goal to reduce violence.
It is important not to fall into the trap of assigning blame, when looking to solve a problem. Look only at what can be done and what the results
3,000,000 is not a lot of people compared to 150,000,000 who have nothing at all.
And guess who's fault it is if an inventer only negotiates 10% of the profit from bringing the invention to market?
The economic system that places all the power in the hands of people who inherited money. You'll be lucky to get such a deal in our current system. Take a look at the people who invented some of the biggest new inventions of the last few decades. Notice how none of them are wealthy as a result? That is because they had to borrow the resources to develop their ideas or they would never even have existed.
The investor out 3 million if the product tanks. That risk is exactly why the investor gets 90%.
Some investments will tank, others will pay out. In general the wealthy simply invest in the market broadly and let it earn them money while sucking it away from the people who didn't have money to start with. And why do they have that money to invest? Because their parents did for the most part. Money is power. Have you ever heard the saying "it takes money to make money?" It is true, which is why money always consolidates in the capitalist market.
So the correct interpritation is that the reason the bottom 50% are just "breaking even" is because they aren't working to do anything to better themselves, or mismanaging their money. Kinda their fault, isn't it?
Mismanaging what? They have no money. Mostly they have debt which they are managing and which means since they started with less than nothing they have to work harder to pay interest on the loans they need to get by.
They'd still be mugging me; not for food, but for Nike's or an XBox.
Statistically, this does not seem to be true.
An economy could collapse because of a devistating illness or drought which kills much of the crops.
Sure the economy could collapse, but all the economic models of capitalism predict it certainly will collapse due to this, just as it has always done in the past.There is a difference between maybe something will happen outside our control and choosing a plan that results in something happening.
You don't understand human nature do you; people want what they don't have regardless of whether they ACTUALLY need it.
But they are more likely to commit crimes if they do actually need it.
People on welfare learn the same lesson and start expecting handouts. Go ask a psychologist what giving handouts with no strings to people does to them.
Please. It works just fine in a lot of countries. What makes you think it wouldn't work in the US?
People WANT luxuries, yes, but they'd rather NOT have to work for them.
True, but most people won't commit crimes to get them, while most people will commit crimes to get necessities.
The fact that most people see work as the only way to get what they want is only thing that keeps them working.
Bullshit. In Japan workers have been known to keep working for months after a plant closes with no hope of getting paid for it. People want to do things and accomplish things. People want to associate themselves with a profession. Plenty of people work for free or work when they have so much money they don't have to. You are oversimplifying.
Really? Care to explain why two people have been recommended death for killing someone to get an Xbox? They appear pretty well fed to me. What happened there?
People are violent and dangerous and kill each other all the time. People commit more violent crimes when they are subjected to poverty. Will eliminating poverty eliminate crime? No. Does that mean it is useless for reducing crime? No. A lot of the time people steal or kill because they are desperate and then are more likely to do so again. A lot of times people feel they are being treated unethically by a system that grants privilege to some and not others and it re
If the invisible object does not reflect light, and absorbs it instead, what will the outsiders see when looking at it? A dark spot?
Yes. Lack of light looks like something black.
But since the approach being discussed is not about transparency, it employs the absorbtion or rays instead.....
The article I read talked about bending light waves around an object, like water moving around a rock in a stream, except with water flowing towards it in all directions simultaneously. I'm not sure where you got the idea that this was about absorbing them.
Yes, I've had management express concerns that I was not "showing commitment" because I hadn't bought a new car.
Ouch! Run for the hills my friend. My managers are too solicitous if anything. "Are you interested in moving into management?" No, no, no! Where I work they really do take good care of us and place a lot of trust in us. I think one person was fired, ever. Several have been moved to lesser responsibilities and even encouraged to look for work elsewhere, but they just don't fire people. As a result of treating us well, they attract a lot of really good talent; people smart enough to know if they're spending a third of their life working, it is worth $10K to have it a fun, pleasant place. Heck, now Google has started poaching from us. It is weird that more companies don't understand this whole concept.
Stays with technical solutions.
Yeah, and it did not do a stellar job of them. I've played with a piece of software that builds a relational model of the network including resources and then will alert for aberrant behavior (like worm propagation or an SSH connection from a workstation that never SSH's into that server). It will even automatically or manually stop said traffic, or even freeze all traffic not labeled as critical within certain network segments. We use it here to profile who has the most slashdot visits each week:) I'll gladly read an article about those solutions and how to deploy, operate and staff them most effectively. This one, however, was a lot less useful.
The numbers as I recall are the top 1% controls 30%, the top 10% of people controls more than 50% of the total wealth, the next 40% controls the rest and the bottom 50% breaks even between debt and assets. Further, I think in 2004 there were 8 people in the top 1% that had not been born into that position (inheritance). There are lots of studies out there that show numbers on this and the US census data supports the trend although they ignore incomes over 1 million dollars and just assume anyone making more than 1 million makes exactly 1 million for historical reasons.
Hard work includes bettering yourself, by learning, and also includes inventing something.
I think you haven't been paying attention. Most inventors make very little profit compared to the financiers. Assuming you invent something cool, all on your own, in order to get it to market and manufacture you're looking at giving up maybe 90% of the profit. As a result, for every dollar you make someone who has done nothing except inherit a pile of money to finance your venture is making nine dollars. This is called monetary condensation. People with money make more money with that money by doing nothing and money slowly consolidates into fewer and fewer hands until there is a revolution and the poor take it and redistribute it.
That's likely what that statistic is showing.
You need to take some basic economics. Monetary condensation is pretty much established as a fact of the marketplace.
No, its not fine. The basics aren't free, and I fail to see why I should have to pay for some fatass to sit in their trailer (which is also being paid for by me) to eat potato chips...
Because otherwise they are mugging you. Or because otherwise, once all the money has consolidated, they are burning down your house and taking back the money you did not earn. Or because regardless of how hard you work, you become one of them when the economy collapses and there is no work for you.
Give everyone the basics, and you'll have a huge majority of people doing nothing but being provided those basics by the hard working minority.
Yeah because no one works for luxuries... oh wait yes they do. People want to work and do things. If they have no desperate need to work, they are simply more likely to be choosy about what they do and are a lot more likely to take chances which results in more innovation and more progress.
Starvation is a pretty good motivator to get a job, I would say.
No it isn't because to get that job you have to apply, which is uncertain and wait an amount of time. Starvation is good motivation to kill you and take your wallet.
decides to break into your house to steal your TV. See, people WON'T just be happy being given the basics.
Except that is not what happens in places with more socialism than the US. Their crime rates are amazingly lower than ours. People commit crimes when they are desperate more than anything else. If a person has their basic needs, they are not desperate and the risk/reward scenario becomes a lot harder for them. I read about an old man last year who shot the mailman so the police would put him in jail. He was losing his house and was going to be out on the street. He didn't want to hurt anyone particularly, he was just scared and wanted to be fed and sheltered and provided medical care. It is sad that he was driven to such desperate measures, but a lot of people are driven to violence by even less. Ask the mailman if he would rather have had 5
% of his taxes go to taking care of such people rather than to one of the many projects the government wastes our money on.
Really? Where's the greater risk?
Look to the example above. If you are going to be living on the streets, robbery and possibility of jail is not so bad. If you already have a home and food, the possibility of losing your freedom is much more important to you.
sadly and unfortunatly I don't see this vision being implemented. anywhere. ever.
You're probably correct, although it could be implemented in a smaller community of hippies:)
I don't see any group of people being at once social enough to decide that people need basic stuff, and yet being so anti-social as to stigmatise[sic] those that aren't working for a living.
This is a point we view differently. I see no reason to stigmatize anyone. I don't see anything wrong with people not working. Our current culture is very job centric. People are judged almost entirely based upon their occupations. You should have seen the reactions from people talking to my girlfriend change when she quit her job as a biochemist and started working in a bookstore. I think this is purely a social issue. People work jobs for luxuries because they feel they are supposed to, but realistically, we can produce enough food, clothing, and shelter for everyone on the planet with modern technology using a tiny amount of our resources. 90% or more of the world's wealth is spent on luxuries. I, personally don't care if people sponge off of us workers for that small a slice of the pie. Maybe they will invent new art forms or entertainment or just become very politically active and spend their time paying attention to what politicians are doing and voting them out when they abuse their power.
but to give tokens/credits/whatever instead. A second set of money that is only good for food, but not smokes and beer.
This demostrably does not work. We need to give away food and clothing directly or it will end up on the black market. The idea is to make basic food and clothing have no market value and thus be worthless in trade for smokes.
Or! we create an entire food delivery system for these people which costs more as well...
It depends upon the organizational levels. Centralized growing and free distribution of food and clothing is easy. We can make enough so that we can just give it away all we want without any real controls. For housing, maybe just public apartments that are simple and anyone can check into, although these have more real cost associated.
I'm just not convinced that any social program that results in people getting paid not to work won't be abused, and won't result in a cycle for their offspring.
I don't know. Kids rebel against parents as part of human nature. A lot might go off and get a job and become materialistic, while children of very materialistic people might do the opposite.
You certainly bring up some good points, but none of them are fundamental problems as I see them, except getting such a system established in the first place, given the existing keepers of the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
A week or so after the Intel switch announcement I went to VMWare's forums. The most requested feature was an OS X version of the workstation product. It is pretty foolish to ignore that kind of demand in that particular market. Parallels beat them to market, but with a lot of missing functionality that may or may not be important to the customer base. So we have VMWare and Parallels with VMs using the Intel processor's emulation hardware. We have two WINE Windows API re-implementations, and we have Xen and MS with potential solutions as well. The only real unknown quantity is Apple themselves. If they release VMs built into OS X the market segment will adopt that standard. If they do it using a cross-platform standard, it will boost that standard considerably. If they don't release a built-in VM, the market segment will fragment with some companies using the re-implementation technologies to make quick ports and some users using each of the VM solutions and dual booting to cater to their own needs for running other OS's
Getting back to what the parent AC poster was saying, it's not free. It's tax payer funded. There is a difference.
It is free in that no one has to directly pay money for it. Someone from Florida who comes on vacation pays nothing for it. Also, from what I've heard the higher speed accounts will be what is funding the low speed access for all, not tax dollars after the initial investment. Finally, since this is a way to bypass the local monopolies that are bleeding us dry, for many of us it will be costing negative dollars. I need internet access at home for my job. If I use this service and it saves me $15-$20 a month in bills, but raises my taxes by $60 a year, I just saved hundreds of dollars while the county got wireless. The perception of "free" needs to be taken in more detailed context if it is to have any real meaning.
The way I read it is that there'd be a $35/mo. fee for anything but dialup-level speeds, so it's not free.
Dial-up speeds are free for everyone and that is fine for checking your e-mail our doing a little Web browsing from a restaurant, cafe, bus station, park, bar, or whatever. Considering how many people are crammed into the local library to use the public terminals, I'm guessing this will be used a lot. As for the non-free higher speeds, the cheapest you can get cable modem access is about $50/month. The cheapest you can get DSL is about $75/month. So both free low speeds and the more expensive high speeds are a lot better than what we have now.
People are acting like the money is free. Trouble is a great many people in that county are going to be taxed for a service that a good number will never get to use.
So? A great many people never go down to the public parks, or use the public baseball fields or drive on that county road out in the middle of farm country. The question is not whether everyone will use it, but whether the benefit to the people will be greater than the expense. Will the people benefit by the increased tourism, real estate sales, and reduced cost to local businesses this will provide even if they don't use it directly? It seems likely.
Sorry, if even one trailer exist at a local school it should the first thing addressed.
The public schools in Washtenaw country are well funded.
Quit diverting money from projects already starved of cash.
What projects would those be that people want more?
Internet access at reasonable speeds in Washtenaw county as in many places is provided by the Cable company ($60/month) or the phone company (DSL is $70/month). These outrageous prices hurt everyone. I'm happy the county is instituting public wireless. It saves me money and my neighbors' money and local businesses' money. The general public may not need internet access, but they don't need parks either. The public does want it and so do the businesses. It will almost certainly be cheaper than the current system. I'd rather some of my tax dollars were wasted subsidizing internet access for the poor and those in more rural areas than help fund the monopoly telecos that are bleeding me for money now.
If this thing works and developers including Blizzard licenses it, Mac gaming industry (yes it exists,creates miracles) is totally gone.
So you're arguing that you think it likely that Blizzard will move away from their current portable, best practices code using OpenGL and dual development and switch to a DirectX version that limits their portability to Nintendo and Playstation and for which they will have to pay an extra licensing fee and which will run more slowly. And you think they might do this because of why again?
This is aimed at quick and dirty ports for devs who successfully brought a game to the Windows market and now want to quickly blow some money and get it on the mac too. It won't change anything for big players that know their games are going to be successful and plan for the cheapest longterm solution even if the up front dev cost is slightly higher.
I REJECT and say I will buy a PS3 if there are no games...
Sony moved to OpenGL and an open standard called COLLADA for the PS3. Both Sony and Apple are members of the consortium that sets those standards. If they can port it to PS3, the chances are they just did 80%+ of the work to port it to OS X.
No, it won't, but nothing will bring them back. Putting the criminal in jail is helping you; its one less person you have to worry about killing someone.
So you admit this measure does not significantly reduce the chances of someone I care about being killed, but you still think it is the best way to prevent it? Yeah, that makes sense.
You could stop crime by installing cameras in everyone's home too. Again, that doesn't mean its a solution we should use, because of the high cost (our freedoms).
So taxing you for socialist programs for less money instead of taxing you for more money for the other costs associated with violent crime is too high of a price to pay?
Finally, since you seem to love statistics so much, you DO realize that violent crime rates have been dropping across the board since the 1970s, right?
Yes. It means we only have 10 times the violent crime Finland does instead of 11 times. How is this relevant?
You're much less likely to be murdered or assulted now than 40 years ago.
...But drastically more likely than if we took reasonable measures to reduce the incentives for crime. I still don't see how this is an argument against reducing the chances even further.
If you can't understand that crime rates are dropping (since crime seems to be your motiviating factor for socialism), I think you need to look at your critial thinking skills. Something must be going right; crime dropping for 40 years isn't just some random occurance.
Yeah, we repealed prohibition and the organized crime families have been losing power since. More recently we legalized abortion preventing tens of thousands of people from growing up in the worst of conditions; conditions that coincidentally correlate exactly with the likelihood of committing crimes and crime started dropping again just as we reached the time when those people would have reached about 17 years of age. How does this argue that we should not take further steps to reduce crime?
Please, shut up already about crime; you're trying to use fear of crime to change my belief to your point of view and its not going to work since I actually know the facts on crime rates. You have this illogical fear of being a victim of crime, when if you really DID look at the statistics you'd see there really ISN'T anything to worry about.
Its hard to avoid the topic of crime when that was the focus of the entire discussion, how to reduce it. As for, nothing to worry about, if for less money (negative cost) we can reduce the number of people killed by violent crimes by an order of magnitude you don't think we should do that because that number is not big enough for you to begin with? I don't think anyone would buy your argument.
Your measures though trample on other people's rights.
Which tramples on your rights more, paying 25% of your income in taxes, much of which is spent on police, courts, and prisons, or paying 22% of your income in taxes, much of which is spent on preventing crime via socialist programs that also provide you personally with free food, clothing, and shelter?
You're excusing violent behavior; that makes you the biggest problem this country has every seen.
I excused nothing. Taking action to remove a temptation does not imply in any way approval of those who give in to said temptation. Suppose in a society where clothing is very expensive, giving away clothing reduces rape by 50%. Does giving clothing away in any way imply that rape is acceptable? No, it does not.
Several towns have enacted laws REQUIRING every home own to own and be trained in hand gun use. After such laws, crime drops in those areas.
You're referring to Lott's study which sadly, was conducted very unscientifically. Please, there is no need to reference such poorly contrived studies when there are more reputable ones. In any case, the drop in crime when guns are made available everywhere and training is co
How are Mac-users going to play RTS games without rightclick...
Umm, how about the warcraft and starcraft series? They already play just fine one the mac using either chording or a multi-button mouse.
The point is that the state/commune must have complete power over the economic life of the individual.
Again, I disagree. To function a commune need only have complete control over shared resources, not all aspects of a person's economic situation.
On the other hand, I know of not one example of an economically succesful or sustainable commune. Nor have I ever heard of a self-sustaining monastery.
How odd. There are fourteen long running, well known communes in this particular town, the oldest of which dates back to the 50's. I used to live a few miles away from a communal monastery 600 miles from here that was entirely self-sustaining and in fact paid for their own land and buildings by selling crops they grew (honey, preserves, beer, wine, and other low volume goods). They sent money to their church every year in addition to providing for themselves (they even had a big screen TV).
And they are always authoritarian.
The local communes mostly follow a democratic model. New members need to be voted in by a majority and all decisions are democratic. Most of the people simply work normal jobs and donate an equal share of the communal money which goes into a fund that pays for the housing, utilities and food all of which can be bought cheaper in bulk. A few of the communes are wholly invested in that all moneys are pooled. All of them seem quite stable and have waiting lists to get in since it offsets so many of the high cost of living in the area.
Wow, who would have expected RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY from a COMMUNIST??? The Pilgrims were neither zelots, nor dangerous, nor antisocial, nor exiled.
It is true they were not exactly exiled, but they certainly were religious zealots by most definitions of the term. As for dangerous, ask the people and animals they hung for copulation. All of this is pretty academic, however. The point is, the society they lived in and the technological level of their society was quite different from society in the US today and thus using them as a test case provides far to many variables to be useful compared to the many more current examples.
(Note, I'm not exactly a communist, but rather someone who likes to evaluate all economic models and combinations of models. I've never seen any economy that did not blend elements of socialism, communism, and capitalism and any attempt to create one would likely be disastrous. It is my opinion that increasing the size of the communist cells we now have would probably be more efficient and beneficial. That no more makes me a communist than it makes me a socialist or a capitalist.)
There is a need for violence??
You seem to have misread my statements. I spoke of a need to make a choice to commit violence or not, not a need for violence which is outside the scope of this discussion.
The error is in thinking that violence has an economic cause. It does not.
Statistics show a strong correlation between violence and not only poverty, but wealth disparity in particular. Since wealth disparity has a common psychological effect and since modern sociologists have been able to study these traits numerous cultures including transitions of wealth disparity, I don't think it is at all reasonable to conclude that there is no economic cause of violence. In point of fact, reducing wealth disparity tends to greatly reduce violence.
While I agree it's not up to the government to instill morality, immorality is nevertheless the cause of violence.
It is pointless to argue morality. It is, by definition, subjective. As for common ethics, it is a matter of which ethical code is subscribed to. Shooting a rapist attacking you is violent. The ethics of it, however, are a matter of debate. None of this is an issue that can be solved by a government, however, which is why the government must balance freedom with practical effects upon living conditions.
While I also agree that it's the responsibility of the governm
It helps you because that person can no longer harm anyone again.
And that will bring my mother or girlfriend back to life? And what about the children that person left behind? They are even poorer and even more likely to commit a crime in the future and kill off whichever of said people I mentioned was not already killed. PUTTING THAT PERSON IN JAIL HELPS ME NOT AT ALL. It is not a solution to the problem. It is too little too late.
Personally I'd think that losing 30 years of my life in prison as opposed to 10 is losing more, not less.
The problem is violence committed against those I care about. Whether some individual spends 10 years or 30 years or 40,000 years in prison is immaterial to the problem of stopping people in general from hurting those I care about. If you can't understand that, you need to seriously look into a book on critical thinking and logic. Unless you can show that people convicted of a crime spending more time in prison makes it less likely that violence will be committed then you've missed the point.
The point is to force people to responsible for themselves, which would reduce violence.
This is the logical fallacy, "implicit assumption." You're assuming that forcing them to take responsibility reduces violence significantly. This is provably untrue.
You claim the junkie is acting out of desperation, yet you then imply they're thinking logically. They're so desprate[sic] they are beyond reason
Some are acting reasonably and some are simply reacting, but it makes no difference because we know how they are reacting and to what it correlates. Ignoring that and trying to use measures that have been shown not to change the behavior is just dumb.
Sure you are; you're blaming drugs and society instead of the person who violated anothers rights.
You are 100% wrong. I'm not blaming society and I'm not blaming drugs and I'm not blaming god or physics or human nature. I'm not blaming anyone or anything. I'm just looking at what actions are likely to be most effective in stopping the problem because that is what I care about. Obviously it is not what you care about. You'd rather blame people than solve the problem which makes you part of the problem.
Since you acknowledge that your socialst measures won't eliminate crime, the answer in preventing your mother of girlfriend from having to deal with crime is to train in self defense, and be armed.
There are plenty of places where everyone is well armed and trained. Guess what, that means criminals are too. Since they have the element of surprise, they still have an advantage. Training them in self defense is a good idea and if it is universal it will result in a decrease in violent crime, by up to 10%. Socialist policies in other countries have reduced violent crime by up to 80% from the levels in the US. In Britain they've removed guns from the hands of most everyone and even have restrictions on pocket knives now. Despite this, they still have less than 1/3 the violent crime the US has. Guns and training alone will not solve the problem.
The 'additional steps' you want to take though come at the expense of others, which is unreasonable.
Your choice is pay more money to hire additional police, courts, and prisons to deal with ever increasing crime or pay less money on taxes and pay for socialist programs that will remove the need for more police, courts, and prisons. For me, I'd rather pay less taxes and have less violence than pay more taxes and have more violence. But them, I'm sort of practical, rather than some sort of idealist.
Let people suffer the full consequences of their actions.
Yeah that has been tried. It results in a greater chance of me or mine being killed by violence.
I never even said they'd be killed in response to a crime; just being a known junkie could be enough.
And this is functionally different than being a junkie is a crime punisha
Lets not forget, people CHOOSE to go into debt. They do it by buying houses they can't afford
Okay, so here are my housing options. I can rent for about $700 a month. I can take out a loan and buy a home for $550 a month, $225 of which I get back in the form of equity and losing the opportunity to make $3 a month in interest on the down payment. Thus going into debt saves me a net total of $472 a month. Do you have any idea how a big a chunk of an average person's income that is? Going into debt to buy a home can be the only viable way to live in many places without going into much greater debt, like credit card debt. A lot of people can't afford not to go into debt if they want to feed their kids and provide them with shelter instead of living illegally in a tent or car somewhere.
But at the end of the day, there people CHOOSE to open that line of credit.
Do I buy groceries on credit and have enough to pay the rent or pay cash for the groceries and move the kids into my car. Yup, they made the choice. What morons.
First, you've been using "investor" and "inventor" interchangeably, causing great confusion. Second, look at the people who actually brought almost every advance in the last few decades to the people. None of them got better deals than that. The choice is not to look for a better deal, but to take a deal like that or get nothing while your idea does not go on to benefit mankind.
Yes, I've read what you're been writing. You claim that people are starving or in such desperate need of housing that they are committing crimes.
No. I never made such a claim and this claim is refuted in the paragraph you quoted from me just before you typed this.
There's nothing you can do when the goverment focibly steals from you.
Yes, but since death and taxes are a given, you have no choice. This is a matter of whether they allocate the money they stole from you for cops and courts or removing the need for that many cops and courts.
Its not revenge I want, its fairness.
So you propose a different, unfair system? I think what you mean is you want life to be fair for you above and beyond making it fair for others. Taxing you to take punish people who are suffering because our current economic system has made them suffer disproportionally all their lives and then they turned to crime is not fair because the system made them suffer wealth disparity in the first place. It is not fair that one person starts life with billions of dollars and powerful government connections while another starts life with medical problems from their mother's addictions, no money, no chance at a public education and the necessity of going into debt just to get by. Until that unfairness is corrected, you are a hypocrite to demand that those people are then punished because you think it is unfair to you to spend your tax dollars to help them.
You totally ignore that most of these 'poverty' people ARE on welfare, ARE being fed, ARE having their housing paid for (or the rent greatly reduced), and ARE STILL COMMITTING CRIMES.
First, most of them aren't committing crimes. Second, it is not the lack of these that causes them to commit crimes, it is the disparity of opportunity that this type of poverty demonstrates. Third, we aren't providing all the necessities including medical care and treatment for drugs. Fourth, we're still putting them in prisons for drug offenses, thus further forcing them to associate with other criminal elements and conditioning them that breaking the law is not always wrong. All of these add up to a huge crime and violent crime problem in the US and the way to treat it is not to continually increase taxes to spend more and more on police and courts and prisons. That is like spending more and more money on better hospitals because your neighbors keep shooting you. The more effective
We already know what happens when we bombard users with dialog-boxes. They are perceived as noise. As disturbances. As something standing between the user and what he/she wants to do.
Yes, the Windows implementation is a horrible one and a standard example of what not to do. They break numerous UI conventions and basically use operant conditioning to make users click, "OK." whenever they see such a dialogue box.
Do not, however, confuse this with dialogue boxes being impossible to correctly implement. First, they need to be as rare as possible. You have to eliminate all of the ones that that don't present real choices to the users. Second, you have to write them in plain English and provide enough granularity of control so that the user can actually select the option they want. Jails like these aid in that. Third, you have to present actual actions as buttons, with different ones for every situation. OK/Cancel is not acceptable.
WRONG: 45iffaddr.exe is an executable file (OK)(Cancel)
RIGHT: The program "Spaceblaster" wants to read your e-mail address book (Stop it from reading my addresses)(Let it read my addresses once)(Always stop it from reading my addresses)(advanced Options)
In the former case the user doesn't know what is happening and will most likely just click "OK" to make the dialogue go away so they can play the game they just downloaded. In the second case, the user knows what program is trying to do what and simply reading the the buttons in order to pick which one they are going to click on gives them the information they need. They have no option to click "OK" to make it just all go away. Better yet, in a proper implementation, none of the choices will hinder them in playing their game, if that is what it really is. The OS can grant access to a dummy set of e-mail addresses if the permission is denied and the program won't even know. As a result, it is very difficult for malware writers to deny access to a real program used as a lure.
Basically, if you actually follow good UI design practices, the problem Windows has with OK/Cancel dialogues goes away. Unfortunately, looking at the Vista betas they don't seem to have learned this lesson yet or they just don't care enough to do it right.
The market for a game is *not* the number of Mac/Linux purchasers. Yeah, that sounds odd but hang on a minute. The market is really only those who refuse to dual boot or emulate and won't buy unless they have a native port.
You're making an unrealistic market distinction. Users for the most part don't care if a port is native or using Cider. All of that is behind the scenes and most users won't ever know if it is using a re-implementation of the Windows API. What they will know is how well the port works. As for the portion of the market that will be dual booting or running an emulator, this is not the Linux market. That number is going to be pretty insignificant unless the mac market grows a lot to encompass such people.
Today Mac has the advantage over Linux that Mac gamers have a proven track record of spending money. If developers can get Mac gamers to to accept Cider in large enough numbers then native Mac ports will no longer occur.
This may or may not be the case depending upon a number of factors. First, I doubt Blizzard or ID is going to stop their practice of using portable OpenGL code, especially given the recent moves by Sony to promote open standards that can be applied to Mac Games, Windows games, and Playstation 3 games simultaneously. Second, we'll have to see the popularity/viablility of Cider when compared to other solutions like Parallels running Windows and ReactOS, and possibly a built-in emulation from Apple (just a rumor right now). Third, we have to consider the size of the mac market. The vast majority of games that are considered successful make their way onto the mac, because it is a profitable, proven market. Games that flop often don't, because they are not written as portable to start with and the expense would be more than the trouble. If this move to virtualization, dual booting, and Windows re-implementations significantly increases the size of the market, we'll be seeing more companies take the Mac into account in their initial plans, not fewer. If Cider proves a reliable way to make a quick and dirty port, I imagine it will be quite popular (I predicted this as soon as Intel procs were announced). If it is not up to snuff, those games will be poorly received by the somewhat picky mac audience and other methods will be used by companies competing for those dollars.
The other problem is that a scheme like this requires that someone determine what privileges a particular application needs.
The answer to this is good defaults, possibly based upon templates. First, provide an official service for licensing and registration, that is locked down. Next give all new (not factory installed) apps access to their own registry and source files, that licensing service, and the ability to write new files in the users docs, but not read or overwrite existing ones. If it wants internet access it can ask. If it wants to read other files, it can ask. If it wants to read my e-mail address book or modify another program or the core os or read my IM buddy list, it can ask.
This means few existing programs and even fewer new programs will ever legitimately run afoul of these rules. As an added bonus VMs that can run programs from other OS's can use the same mechanism.
That may work well for businesses or high-security environments, but it's not going to fly at home, where most machines are administered by someone who knows enough to insert a CD and run install but not much else...
I disagree. Unless they run malware, most people will never hit any restrictions on default settings other than the occasional app that needs to use the internet and that is pretty self explanatory. So long as the UI is well written, this should be less confusing than what people deal with now and more in line with user expectations for their computer. Less than one in ten people I talk to realize that their computer does not already restrict programs they run. A common reaction is, "well why would it let some game send spam e-mail without telling me?" Can you think of a way in which a program would need (not currently does but with a good design) to violate the defaults I've described that would confuse a user?
The poverty rate in the US is 12.7%, or 37,000,000.
That is income, not wealth. It does not take into account any holding or debts. According to the best estimates between holdings, income and debt the bottom 50% of the US breaks even with debt and holdings about equal (actually I think for 2004 it went up to +.6% or something).
Wrong. The investor is free to walk away.
What the hell are you talking about?
Pretty much any poor person can get to a food shelter or get on food stamps, and this is what happens.
Did you even read what I wrote earlier? Crime correlates to wealth disparity, not just poverty as measured by income. You see when a poor person reasonable concludes that the guy living in the mansion across town does not work 16000 times harder than they do, to earn the disproportionally higher amount of wealth that person has, they lose the primary motivating factor that prevents crime... ethical/moral restrictions. They feel justified, sort of a robinhood thing, you know? And I'm not sure that I blame them. When the average person, however, has everything they need to survive they feel both less justified in committing crime and less willing to risk what they have. As a result, crime drops.
How exactly is investing in an invention "sucking money away from those that didn't have it to begin with"? You can take money from someone that doesn't have any!
You can take money by accumulating debt they owe you and which they have to pay you whenever they make any money. Those that do have money, you can take a chunk. Here's an example. You're born poor, but work hard, get a good job and try to build a life for yourself. You best long-term housing option is buying a house (since renting costs even more). You have 10K in savings and a 50K a year job. You put your savings down as a down payment and buy the house over the course of the next 20 years (say a $100K house). Over the course of that 20 years you pay nearly $100K for the house and another $100K to someone who happened to have the money to lend. They just made $100K for doing basically nothing and letting their money work for them. The same goes for all sorts of interest. So a person born with a $20 million dollar inheritance will make $2 million a year on it with no work while an average hard working guy makes $50K working their ass off. At the end of 50 years of life one is up hundreds of millions of dollars having never worked in their life and one is up $100K for a lifetime of backbreaking labor. At this rate the money will be equitably divided among the rich and poor based upon how hard they work when?
Seems like the socialist ones are having the problems; China, the EU formed because, individually, the Western European countries weren't doing that hot (which the exception of Britian, which is why they didn't adopt the Euro). All economoic models (captialist or not) are flawed, because they can't account for human nature. Its simply not possible.
You do know every household in the US owes approximately $400K in debt mostly to Europe and China taken out as a loan on our behalf right? As for violent crime, the EU has us beat by a mile. As for human nature, capitalism works because it relies upon human nature to drive it, but without using socialism for balance, it is ignoring another aspect of human nature. Economic models do not ignore human nature, they utilize it.
Ugh. The bank foreclosed because he couldn't pay the fucking mortgage. BEFORE that situation came about, he could have sold it. Trust me, I know from experience.
You can't always sell a house for enough to cover the remainder of the mortgage. That means you're in debt on the street.
To say that being violated is justification for harming some other 3rd party is stupid.
There you go again. It isn't about justifying actions, it is about finding and removing motivations for them. I don't care if what some individual does is right or wrong. I care abo
Poverty is soley that person's fault
The number one predictor of poverty is the income of your parents. I don't think it is reasonable to assume poverty is solely based upon individual achievement in a country where half of the wealth is controlled by a tiny minority that inherited it.
Tough shit if you were stupid enough to get hooked on an addictive substance. If you commit a crime because you were high, your sentence should be tripled.
And when a desperate junkie stabs my girlfriend or shoots my mother tripling their sentence helps me how? The point is to prevent the violence that results for the good of all, not to punish people more harshly. Punitive measures are weak as preventatives because junkies are desperate. Draconian punitive measures just mean the junkie has less to lose and it is more reasonable for them to kill victims to reduce the dangers associated with being caught.
Blame the people taking the drug, not the drug itself.
Blame? I'm not interested in blaming anyone, just in preventing my mother or girlfriend or myself from having to deal with the crime that results.
I'm sure the same arguement was made to keep prohibition.
It isn't an argument to keep drugs criminalized, its an argument to decriminalize them and take additional steps to solve the rest of the problem.
Technically just killing the addict outright is the cheapest solution.
Capital punishment works very poorly as a deterrent by all counts and it costs more to execute someone than to keep them housed in a a prison for 10 years. Suppose robbing a person to feed your habit is punishable by death. What incentive does an addict now have to leave their mugging victim alive as a possible witness? What incentive to they have to surrender to police instead of killing the hostage they took, or shooting it out with the cops? None. This means we have more violent crime and murder, not less.
If you choose to experiment with a drug that can get such power over you, I fail to see WHY anyone should help you and not just put you on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
Because using my tax dollars to help them benefits me by reducing crime, especially violent crime, reducing the amount of my taxes that has to be spent on courts and police and makes my neighborhood a better place to live. I don't want socialized medicine to provide for addicts because they deserve it, I want them because it costs me less total tax dollars and results in a better place to live for me and mine.
I have no had 1 single issue of spyware, malware, or virus problems on my machine. I keep everything up-to-date and I know who, what, when, and where I'm downloading all my files from the internet.
An up-to-date Windows install running Firefox and anything but Outlook will protect you from the lion's share of what is out there. There have, however, been several zero day worms that do not involve user interaction that can quietly have their wicked way with your Windows box while it is sitting idle but connected. Without antivirus, it is doubtful you'll ever know if you've been infected with one of these worms. Most of these are pretty high profile with well defined signatures. I'd recommend just running ClamAV every now and again, from a read only device. If your corporate security guys are on the ball (and have the dough) they will probably also notice your machine trying to propagate said worm on their network, but that is not always something you can count on.
To summarize, you're probably right, but you don't actually know for certain that your statement is true.
Why don't programs run as separate users with separate priviliges?
You can do this today on Solaris using containers or on FreeBSD using jails, or obtain the functional equivelent. None of them are well integrated into the UI portion of the OS yet and I don't think there is a well established set of defaults and description of violations yet. I expect this to be the direction of the industry for security so expect it to be integrated into every OS except Windows within the next five years. I'm actually crossing my fingers and hoping Apple jumps on this grenade. The UI is the hard part for most developers and whatever problems they have had, they are still above average for good UI design.
A sermon-writing application? Word doesn't have a Insert->Scripture option?
Actually, on OS X you can add a Word->Services->Insert Scripture option by adding a service, and it should work in most of your other applications as well.
Socialism isn't the answer; forcing the government to acknowledge that what I do with my own body is none of their business is the solution.
I disagree. I think people should be free to put whatever they want in their own bodies, but addiction results in serious negative effects for society, including increased poverty and crime. For a centralized government to ignore this is foolish. Decriminalizing drugs reduces the problem, but does not eliminate it. Socialist programs to treat drug addiction along with other health problems and to provide the basics for those in need so they don't have to steal to eat because they spent all their money on crack is another important part of the solution that has worked in other countries. Giving heroin addicts enough heroin to stop them from losing it and enough food to eat and a place to stay is cheaper for society than housing them in prisons or leaving them loose and desperate on the streets to commit crimes.
With a family unit, absolutely. But in a family unit, there is typically a head of the household who is ultimately responsible for the family's economic wellbeing, who will impose work upon family members who should be contributing, but are not. Beyond that, family members have a different kind of moral responsibility to each other than do mere acquaintances, which makes this relationship more fitting.
Actually, this model works well in more democratic households as well. Modern families without a single head, but who talk things out still don't have problems with this kind of model. There need not be a matriarch or patriarch, just a working system. Further, proposing that you are either family members bound together or mere acquaintances (as you imply) is a false dichotomy. The communist model has worked well in the past for entire communities (hence the name). Tightly bound communities often act at least partially in this way, with everyone helping to raise the children of the others and communal resources like wells and public grazing shared by all.
A commune of even 50 or less could only work if it was under a strict authoritarian rule, such as the former tribes of American Indians.
That is an interesting assertion, but I disagree. Their is no reason a single ruler, rather than a town council or even a direct democracy cannot manage a communist community of some size.
There were once 105 people who formed an independent communist government in Massachusetts.
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but it hardly applies in this day and age and their is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show it did not apply in the past. Think of all the monasteries that flourished and flourish around the world.
This one paints the picture: "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
This demonstrates that they lacked a proper decision making method and enforcement of equality, not that the model is flawed. I hardly think citations from a bunch of religious zealots who were exiled for their dangerously antisocial behavior is an appropriate test case.
Indeed, if the communities are families, that works great. It existed in America, until less than 100 years ago, when the "New Deal" enabled children to relinquish responsibility for their older parents, and move out with their own children. And subsequent changes in law and society made marriage itself no longer a permanent institution, and we became a nation of individuals, rather than families.
If the only reason you maintain family ties is because of legal repercussions, then the problem is a social one. Personally, I blame the impersonalization of relationships on the capitalist model, corporatism, and resulting social ramifications. People treat everyone according to the rules of self-interest just as they have been taught to for business. The phrase, "its just business" has caused more damage than anything else to American culture, justifying unethical behaviors every moment of every day.
Desperation does not lead to violence. Desperation leads to action. The nature of the action, especially desperate action, is the nature of the actor. No person who is immoral when they are poor becomes moral by becoming rich.
Since it is not the place of government to instill any given morality, nor is it the place of any other to make moral judgments for another, we must concentrate on preventing negative effects, not beliefs. Thus, regardless of whether the choice an individual makes is moral or ethical, if we can reduce violence by removing the need for individuals to make that choice, we have succeeded in our goal to reduce violence.
It is important not to fall into the trap of assigning blame, when looking to solve a problem. Look only at what can be done and what the results
That's QUITE a lot of people.
3,000,000 is not a lot of people compared to 150,000,000 who have nothing at all.
And guess who's fault it is if an inventer only negotiates 10% of the profit from bringing the invention to market?
The economic system that places all the power in the hands of people who inherited money. You'll be lucky to get such a deal in our current system. Take a look at the people who invented some of the biggest new inventions of the last few decades. Notice how none of them are wealthy as a result? That is because they had to borrow the resources to develop their ideas or they would never even have existed.
The investor out 3 million if the product tanks. That risk is exactly why the investor gets 90%.
Some investments will tank, others will pay out. In general the wealthy simply invest in the market broadly and let it earn them money while sucking it away from the people who didn't have money to start with. And why do they have that money to invest? Because their parents did for the most part. Money is power. Have you ever heard the saying "it takes money to make money?" It is true, which is why money always consolidates in the capitalist market.
So the correct interpritation is that the reason the bottom 50% are just "breaking even" is because they aren't working to do anything to better themselves, or mismanaging their money. Kinda their fault, isn't it?
Mismanaging what? They have no money. Mostly they have debt which they are managing and which means since they started with less than nothing they have to work harder to pay interest on the loans they need to get by.
They'd still be mugging me; not for food, but for Nike's or an XBox.
Statistically, this does not seem to be true.
An economy could collapse because of a devistating illness or drought which kills much of the crops.
Sure the economy could collapse, but all the economic models of capitalism predict it certainly will collapse due to this, just as it has always done in the past.There is a difference between maybe something will happen outside our control and choosing a plan that results in something happening.
You don't understand human nature do you; people want what they don't have regardless of whether they ACTUALLY need it.
But they are more likely to commit crimes if they do actually need it.
People on welfare learn the same lesson and start expecting handouts. Go ask a psychologist what giving handouts with no strings to people does to them.
Please. It works just fine in a lot of countries. What makes you think it wouldn't work in the US?
People WANT luxuries, yes, but they'd rather NOT have to work for them.
True, but most people won't commit crimes to get them, while most people will commit crimes to get necessities.
The fact that most people see work as the only way to get what they want is only thing that keeps them working.
Bullshit. In Japan workers have been known to keep working for months after a plant closes with no hope of getting paid for it. People want to do things and accomplish things. People want to associate themselves with a profession. Plenty of people work for free or work when they have so much money they don't have to. You are oversimplifying.
Really? Care to explain why two people have been recommended death for killing someone to get an Xbox? They appear pretty well fed to me. What happened there?
People are violent and dangerous and kill each other all the time. People commit more violent crimes when they are subjected to poverty. Will eliminating poverty eliminate crime? No. Does that mean it is useless for reducing crime? No. A lot of the time people steal or kill because they are desperate and then are more likely to do so again. A lot of times people feel they are being treated unethically by a system that grants privilege to some and not others and it re
If the invisible object does not reflect light, and absorbs it instead, what will the outsiders see when looking at it? A dark spot?
Yes. Lack of light looks like something black.
But since the approach being discussed is not about transparency, it employs the absorbtion or rays instead.....
The article I read talked about bending light waves around an object, like water moving around a rock in a stream, except with water flowing towards it in all directions simultaneously. I'm not sure where you got the idea that this was about absorbing them.
Yes, I've had management express concerns that I was not "showing commitment" because I hadn't bought a new car.
Ouch! Run for the hills my friend. My managers are too solicitous if anything. "Are you interested in moving into management?" No, no, no! Where I work they really do take good care of us and place a lot of trust in us. I think one person was fired, ever. Several have been moved to lesser responsibilities and even encouraged to look for work elsewhere, but they just don't fire people. As a result of treating us well, they attract a lot of really good talent; people smart enough to know if they're spending a third of their life working, it is worth $10K to have it a fun, pleasant place. Heck, now Google has started poaching from us. It is weird that more companies don't understand this whole concept.
Stays with technical solutions.
Yeah, and it did not do a stellar job of them. I've played with a piece of software that builds a relational model of the network including resources and then will alert for aberrant behavior (like worm propagation or an SSH connection from a workstation that never SSH's into that server). It will even automatically or manually stop said traffic, or even freeze all traffic not labeled as critical within certain network segments. We use it here to profile who has the most slashdot visits each week :) I'll gladly read an article about those solutions and how to deploy, operate and staff them most effectively. This one, however, was a lot less useful.
Any statistics or did you just make that up?
The numbers as I recall are the top 1% controls 30%, the top 10% of people controls more than 50% of the total wealth, the next 40% controls the rest and the bottom 50% breaks even between debt and assets. Further, I think in 2004 there were 8 people in the top 1% that had not been born into that position (inheritance). There are lots of studies out there that show numbers on this and the US census data supports the trend although they ignore incomes over 1 million dollars and just assume anyone making more than 1 million makes exactly 1 million for historical reasons.
Hard work includes bettering yourself, by learning, and also includes inventing something.
I think you haven't been paying attention. Most inventors make very little profit compared to the financiers. Assuming you invent something cool, all on your own, in order to get it to market and manufacture you're looking at giving up maybe 90% of the profit. As a result, for every dollar you make someone who has done nothing except inherit a pile of money to finance your venture is making nine dollars. This is called monetary condensation. People with money make more money with that money by doing nothing and money slowly consolidates into fewer and fewer hands until there is a revolution and the poor take it and redistribute it.
That's likely what that statistic is showing.
You need to take some basic economics. Monetary condensation is pretty much established as a fact of the marketplace.
No, its not fine. The basics aren't free, and I fail to see why I should have to pay for some fatass to sit in their trailer (which is also being paid for by me) to eat potato chips...
Because otherwise they are mugging you. Or because otherwise, once all the money has consolidated, they are burning down your house and taking back the money you did not earn. Or because regardless of how hard you work, you become one of them when the economy collapses and there is no work for you.
Give everyone the basics, and you'll have a huge majority of people doing nothing but being provided those basics by the hard working minority.
Yeah because no one works for luxuries... oh wait yes they do. People want to work and do things. If they have no desperate need to work, they are simply more likely to be choosy about what they do and are a lot more likely to take chances which results in more innovation and more progress.
Starvation is a pretty good motivator to get a job, I would say.
No it isn't because to get that job you have to apply, which is uncertain and wait an amount of time. Starvation is good motivation to kill you and take your wallet.
decides to break into your house to steal your TV. See, people WON'T just be happy being given the basics.
Except that is not what happens in places with more socialism than the US. Their crime rates are amazingly lower than ours. People commit crimes when they are desperate more than anything else. If a person has their basic needs, they are not desperate and the risk/reward scenario becomes a lot harder for them. I read about an old man last year who shot the mailman so the police would put him in jail. He was losing his house and was going to be out on the street. He didn't want to hurt anyone particularly, he was just scared and wanted to be fed and sheltered and provided medical care. It is sad that he was driven to such desperate measures, but a lot of people are driven to violence by even less. Ask the mailman if he would rather have had 5 % of his taxes go to taking care of such people rather than to one of the many projects the government wastes our money on.
Really? Where's the greater risk?
Look to the example above. If you are going to be living on the streets, robbery and possibility of jail is not so bad. If you already have a home and food, the possibility of losing your freedom is much more important to you.
sadly and unfortunatly I don't see this vision being implemented. anywhere. ever.
You're probably correct, although it could be implemented in a smaller community of hippies :)
I don't see any group of people being at once social enough to decide that people need basic stuff, and yet being so anti-social as to stigmatise[sic] those that aren't working for a living.
This is a point we view differently. I see no reason to stigmatize anyone. I don't see anything wrong with people not working. Our current culture is very job centric. People are judged almost entirely based upon their occupations. You should have seen the reactions from people talking to my girlfriend change when she quit her job as a biochemist and started working in a bookstore. I think this is purely a social issue. People work jobs for luxuries because they feel they are supposed to, but realistically, we can produce enough food, clothing, and shelter for everyone on the planet with modern technology using a tiny amount of our resources. 90% or more of the world's wealth is spent on luxuries. I, personally don't care if people sponge off of us workers for that small a slice of the pie. Maybe they will invent new art forms or entertainment or just become very politically active and spend their time paying attention to what politicians are doing and voting them out when they abuse their power.
but to give tokens/credits/whatever instead. A second set of money that is only good for food, but not smokes and beer.
This demostrably does not work. We need to give away food and clothing directly or it will end up on the black market. The idea is to make basic food and clothing have no market value and thus be worthless in trade for smokes.
Or! we create an entire food delivery system for these people which costs more as well...
It depends upon the organizational levels. Centralized growing and free distribution of food and clothing is easy. We can make enough so that we can just give it away all we want without any real controls. For housing, maybe just public apartments that are simple and anyone can check into, although these have more real cost associated.
I'm just not convinced that any social program that results in people getting paid not to work won't be abused, and won't result in a cycle for their offspring.
I don't know. Kids rebel against parents as part of human nature. A lot might go off and get a job and become materialistic, while children of very materialistic people might do the opposite.
You certainly bring up some good points, but none of them are fundamental problems as I see them, except getting such a system established in the first place, given the existing keepers of the status quo.