When's the last time you've condemned Western human rights violations against muslims and Arabs?
Yesterday. Any more stupid questions?
That was Osama bin Laden's argument
And you can't deny that the US bred this enemy themselves. The Taliban would have never appeared without them, and a lot o the weapons they had were US-supplied.
So the attacks on the Pentagon and White House - yeah, I can see that. Accepting some "collateral damage" is what the americans do all the time. But I can't remember France bombing skyscrapers in Syria.
"Good" religious people are nevertheless the breeding ground for evil terrorists.
Where is the fatwa that declares all terrorism un-islamic and cleares up that terrorists won't go to get 72 virgins and in fact they'll go to the deepest pits of hell (or whatever the islam equivalent, I'm not an expert)?
The Iranian Prime Minister was among the first to speak out clearly against these attacks, and I respect him for it. But all this jabbering about how these fuckers who are through-and-through religious nutjobs have nothing to do with the very religion that they themselves use to justify their actions is just pathetic.
Of course there is a link. Stop denying it. We can discuss the nature of the link, that there are various interpretations of the holy texts and only some of them lead to violence and so on. But I'm not even taking anyone seriously anymore who categorically denies that there is a link between this terrorism and islam. Of course there is.
What too many people don't get is basic logic. That for terrorism islam by itself isn't enough, there are other preconditions. Social inequality seems to be one of them. Cultural influences, and so on. But even if the religion is not the only reason, it is one of the reasons.
It's because what is happening in their "major cities" in many, many times worse than what's happening in Paris.
Yes, it is. But one doesn't justify, excuse or reduce the impact of the other. And that we care more about events close by, affecting people more similar or even related to us, is an absolutely normal human reaction that we should not have to be sorry for.
I'm more or less neutral on the situation, though I think it is handled poorly by an incompetent government that spent the last decade crawling up big business asses and is completely unprepared for any real-world crisis, but that said:
And the costs of providing social security etc is going to cost enormous sums of money which simply is not available for long term
That is bullshit. Yes, we'll spend a few billions. But compared to the amounts that we just burned playing casino with the financial system, it's a tiny amount. If we had gone the Iceland way and let the banks fail, jail those responsible, and protect the normal people from the worst, we would be so awash in money that we would be thankful that the refugees give us something useful to spend it on.
What kind of secrets do you have that are more important than keeping your balls, or eyes?
The threat scenario is law enforcement in civilized countries. They can legally take your fingerprints. They cannot legally cut off your balls and poke out your eyes.
Every time something becomes too dominant, we should not celebrate, we should worry. Doesn't matter if it's Windows, or IE or Oracle or the iPhone or Apache - we need competition to move and innovate.
In the CMS world, there is fierce competition, fortunately, but there are also high barriers already. A new CMS system will not be used in many commercial projects, no matter the merits, because the customers know a few big ones and if you don't drop their names, your pitch is out.
Almost 60% is quite terrible, especially with a project that has always had serious security issues.
But their expected growth was in the double-digits.
e-books have a place. But the hype is over and now they are settling into a normal market. And they haven't replaced printed books. They are like DVDs to cinemas, not like cars to horse carriages.
Let's talk again in 5 years, when your e-book reader is outdated and DRM prevents you from moving your books to a new one.
Tell me that you can be 100% sure that you will still be able to read those books in 50 years, then name one computer program from 1965 that you can get running.Â
convenient reading on cellphones, e-readers and tablets.
Strangely, most people seem to disagree with that very idea. Reading not convenient on electronic devices. Paper still is the best medium for books. If I have the book, why would I want to read it digitally?
The one thing an electronic library is good for is rapid searching. If you need a vast amount of knowledge available at a fingertip, and on the road, not in your library, then it's great.
For everything else, I and most other people prefer to turn around, take the book from the shelf and look it up there.
It's a basic fact of the universe that things have to come from somewhere.
Not in the world of finance. Money already gets created out of thin air. Both central banks and all other banks have been doing that for decades.
But even assuming that (for good reasons) you want a closed cycle. That doesn't mean taxes only. For example, a basic income system would also replace the existing state pension system, which in my country dwarfs social welfare expenditures by an entire order of magnitude.
However:
source of money are the corporations and their owners.
That is kind of the idea, yes. Corporate welfare makes social welfare look like a piss in the ocean. For example, a recent study estimates that international corporations more-or-less legally trick the EU out of one trillion Euros every ear. That's 4000 Euros per person living in Europe right there.
The second source is the basic income itself. You see, what do normal people do with money they get? Hint: Not put it into tax havens. They spend it, which generates more income for people providing services and goods, and thus tax income. The more money people have to spend, the more taxes get collected.
almost nobody works for a living (why work if you can get money for free?)
That is the oldest and weakest argument against basic income. You can read entire books of debunking for free online. The very fast summary is: a) people work for many other reasons except money. b) basic income is just that, if you want to drive an expensive car, live in a nice house or go on interesting holidays, you will have to get additional income. c) experiments and studies conducted so far show proof that people do indeed not stop working. d) a lot of new jobs would appear, that right now are thin ice because they are too risky or income too shabby. Especially in the area of arts, for example.
All of your assumptions are unproven and I dare say wrong. Why would this only be sustainable by taxing the rich? The money needed for the basic income already exists. This is not so much free money, as a different way of assigning it. We already have welfare systems, but we spend a huge amount of effort and money into the whole management of it in an attempt to make it "fair".
Your assumption that normal tax income cannot finance a basic income scheme needs proof, and you've not provided any.
1) It will be much harder to find individuals willing to do certain categories of high risk or menial labor. You would end up having to pay a LOT more.
Which is the whole idea, and the real revolution. For the past 20 years, we've seen a push into low-wage jobs, by cuts of benefits and other "reforms". If you strip away the rhetorics, politics are forcing people to work for low wages.
A conditionless basic income would force employers to pay wages not based on "what will people to do not starve", but on "what do I need to pay so someone voluntarily does this". You would see a lot of jobs changing their location in the wage pyramid.
We were at this point already in the 70s. Some names were different but the basic idea that a modern society where a lot of work is being done by robots can break away from the work == income scenario is almost two generations old now.
Just that it happened only for the very top. The financial markets have since left behind any relation to production, productivity or even actual products. But anyone who's not in the top 0.1% is still slavishly tied to those.
- Developers and IT guys are expensive. I know, let's call Infosys/Tata/Accenture/HP/IBM, all I have to do is write them a check and all my IT problems disappear offshore!
This. Hiring Accenture because you think your in-house IT is too expensive. It's a bit like burning dollar bills because you want to save on heating expenses.
Price tags are nonsense for non-daily-purchase articles. What your examples have in common is that they sell mass-market low-price items (even IKEA, though that's a borderline case). A car is not such a thing, neither is a house.
But even for everyday items, you can almost always haggle. I'm slowly learning that from my girlfriend who is brilliant at that, sometimes simply because she has the chuzpe to ask for less. That's all there is to it, it's amazing. "can you make the price lower?" - "I can give you 10 bucks off, but no more."
I completely agree with you that the arab style of haggling is crazy. First inflate prices by 500% and as soon as someone says "too expensive", drop the price by 400%, from there start haggling. Been there, done that, insane waste of time.
But turning the table on a sales guy and reminding him that he wants you money just as much if not more than you want his product is just fair game.
It's funny or not, but it does illustrate a real problem. We've seen the discussion about whether or not URLs should have unicode support. Yes it's nice to non-western languages. But it introduces the same kind of problems and suddenly you are not on the website you think you are on anymore.
The more I look at it, the more I decide that Unicode is simply evil.
I think it is generally known and trivially obvious to anyone who has done any research or statistics on this subject at all that the requirement of special characters is a total failure and where enforced it actually reduces the search space instead of enlarging it, due to human nature and the simple heuristics you can use.
This is exactly what we need. An approach that tells users who strong their passwords actually are in real-life scenarios, and not how well they conform to some arbitrary policy.
The alternative, that's been used by some for more than a decade, is to run your own password cracker at night, and everyone whose password it cracks by morning is sent a mail telling them to change it.
We desperately need to get away from these awful policies that try to make passwords as random as possible for two reasons. One, they are a total failure, people are very inventice when it comes to finding a password that will satisfy the stupid computer but still be easy to remember (and guess). Two, if you make it complicated enough, people will just re-use and write down passwords more. Congratulations, one step forward, two steps back.
The bigger discussion is when the fetus is considered a human with all of the liberties and rights of other humans.
Which is total bullshit with one purely semantic argument pro, namely that if you think in binary terms you have to start the attribution somewhere and every other point is just as arbitrary, so you can just as well choose conception.
We were not discussing "the world", we were discussing a single action.
The single action is absolutely trivial until you start seing it in context, and only then all these complexities come in. Your action is not seperate from the world. Without the liberties and rights of humans, that you mention, abortion isn't even an issue at all. Without the conditions of the woman involved, it isn't even an issue. It is these circumstances, ethics, cultural and religious factors that make it into an issue at all. Without them, the discussion would be very short. "Nancy want's an abortion." - "Yes. And?"
Really? Let me check, certificate-based systems are entirely designed around a chain of signatures. GPG signatures are... uh... well, if it's in your keychain, it will be accepted. The workaround is to sign the package that contains the public keys.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Debian approach, it's practical and it works. But I think you are being a little too ideological.
Of course you an massage the facts all you want. But here's some points to consider on your end:
In the animal kingdom, sometimes the male and sometimes the female of the species is bigger and stronger. So much for the muscles argument.
Even in human societies, the distribution of labor is by no means identical everywhere. There are a couple indigenous people still around where women take what we consider male roles, while males are closer (but not identical) to what we would consider female - up to jungle versions of make up.
Yes, woman breed children and breast-feed them. I don't see why there is a contradiction with anything I said. It especially doesn't explain why abortion should be a decision made by the man. On the contrary, it strengthens my arguments.
Good that you spot the contradictions. Here is the point: Yes, the world is complex and complicated. But to act, you need to stop overthinking and focus on the main point.
The person most affected by pregnancy is the woman (you could argue the child, but biologically, at this point, they are one and the same). If the man wants a baby very much, he can just go and fuck the next woman the next day. He has more options. That is why her decision is more important. She is more affected and has less options.
The more likely scenario when you encounter an apparently holy person is that they've hidden the bodies well. We are all humans and we all make mistakes. When I know which mistakes you've made and what flaws you have, I know what I'm getting myself into. When I don't see it, I cannot calculate the risks.
And I don't say that all good people are bad. I say that "good" and "bad" are reductionist terms that are not appropriate to a complex world.
not even microsoft or apple, no matter how they try, can replicate this audit trail,
Yes, it can. My OS X understands signed installs just like my Debian does. Both will not let me install an unsigned package without me explicitly saying "ok, do it".
Which is exactly what this and any other malware will do. It will not be signed, it will need a user to click an ok button, and most users will do it, because 10+ years of useless windows popup-windows with pointless "are you sure?" cover-your-ass messages have trained them to hit the green "ok, whatever" button.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but if you have a correlation, you need to explain it.
If you say it is not causation, then what is it? Third variable? Which?
Islam, like Christianity, doesn't have one leader who can just issue fatwas.
I believe their leaders can talk, and know how to use a telephone, maybe they've even heard of the Internet, yes?
Either they are all agains terrorism, then explain to me why they couldn't set up a conference call and agree to publicly denounce it, together.
Or at least some of them are not against terrorism.
When's the last time you've condemned Western human rights violations against muslims and Arabs?
Yesterday. Any more stupid questions?
That was Osama bin Laden's argument
And you can't deny that the US bred this enemy themselves. The Taliban would have never appeared without them, and a lot o the weapons they had were US-supplied.
So the attacks on the Pentagon and White House - yeah, I can see that. Accepting some "collateral damage" is what the americans do all the time. But I can't remember France bombing skyscrapers in Syria.
"Good" religious people are nevertheless the breeding ground for evil terrorists.
Where is the fatwa that declares all terrorism un-islamic and cleares up that terrorists won't go to get 72 virgins and in fact they'll go to the deepest pits of hell (or whatever the islam equivalent, I'm not an expert)?
The Iranian Prime Minister was among the first to speak out clearly against these attacks, and I respect him for it. But all this jabbering about how these fuckers who are through-and-through religious nutjobs have nothing to do with the very religion that they themselves use to justify their actions is just pathetic.
Of course there is a link. Stop denying it. We can discuss the nature of the link, that there are various interpretations of the holy texts and only some of them lead to violence and so on. But I'm not even taking anyone seriously anymore who categorically denies that there is a link between this terrorism and islam. Of course there is.
What too many people don't get is basic logic. That for terrorism islam by itself isn't enough, there are other preconditions. Social inequality seems to be one of them. Cultural influences, and so on. But even if the religion is not the only reason, it is one of the reasons.
It's because what is happening in their "major cities" in many, many times worse than what's happening in Paris.
Yes, it is. But one doesn't justify, excuse or reduce the impact of the other. And that we care more about events close by, affecting people more similar or even related to us, is an absolutely normal human reaction that we should not have to be sorry for.
I'm more or less neutral on the situation, though I think it is handled poorly by an incompetent government that spent the last decade crawling up big business asses and is completely unprepared for any real-world crisis, but that said:
And the costs of providing social security etc is going to cost enormous sums of money which simply is not available for long term
That is bullshit. Yes, we'll spend a few billions. But compared to the amounts that we just burned playing casino with the financial system, it's a tiny amount. If we had gone the Iceland way and let the banks fail, jail those responsible, and protect the normal people from the worst, we would be so awash in money that we would be thankful that the refugees give us something useful to spend it on.
What kind of secrets do you have that are more important than keeping your balls, or eyes?
The threat scenario is law enforcement in civilized countries. They can legally take your fingerprints. They cannot legally cut off your balls and poke out your eyes.
Every time something becomes too dominant, we should not celebrate, we should worry. Doesn't matter if it's Windows, or IE or Oracle or the iPhone or Apache - we need competition to move and innovate.
In the CMS world, there is fierce competition, fortunately, but there are also high barriers already. A new CMS system will not be used in many commercial projects, no matter the merits, because the customers know a few big ones and if you don't drop their names, your pitch is out.
Almost 60% is quite terrible, especially with a project that has always had serious security issues.
But their expected growth was in the double-digits.
e-books have a place. But the hype is over and now they are settling into a normal market. And they haven't replaced printed books. They are like DVDs to cinemas, not like cars to horse carriages.
Let's talk again in 5 years, when your e-book reader is outdated and DRM prevents you from moving your books to a new one.
Tell me that you can be 100% sure that you will still be able to read those books in 50 years, then name one computer program from 1965 that you can get running.Â
According to other statistics, e-book sales are already levelling off after an initial explosive growth.
Also, people with actual arguments don't need to use insults. That's usually a sign that your argument is so weak you are embarrased of it.
convenient reading on cellphones, e-readers and tablets.
Strangely, most people seem to disagree with that very idea. Reading not convenient on electronic devices. Paper still is the best medium for books. If I have the book, why would I want to read it digitally?
The one thing an electronic library is good for is rapid searching. If you need a vast amount of knowledge available at a fingertip, and on the road, not in your library, then it's great.
For everything else, I and most other people prefer to turn around, take the book from the shelf and look it up there.
It's a basic fact of the universe that things have to come from somewhere.
Not in the world of finance. Money already gets created out of thin air. Both central banks and all other banks have been doing that for decades.
But even assuming that (for good reasons) you want a closed cycle. That doesn't mean taxes only. For example, a basic income system would also replace the existing state pension system, which in my country dwarfs social welfare expenditures by an entire order of magnitude.
However:
source of money are the corporations and their owners.
That is kind of the idea, yes. Corporate welfare makes social welfare look like a piss in the ocean. For example, a recent study estimates that international corporations more-or-less legally trick the EU out of one trillion Euros every ear. That's 4000 Euros per person living in Europe right there.
The second source is the basic income itself. You see, what do normal people do with money they get? Hint: Not put it into tax havens. They spend it, which generates more income for people providing services and goods, and thus tax income. The more money people have to spend, the more taxes get collected.
almost nobody works for a living (why work if you can get money for free?)
That is the oldest and weakest argument against basic income. You can read entire books of debunking for free online. The very fast summary is:
a) people work for many other reasons except money.
b) basic income is just that, if you want to drive an expensive car, live in a nice house or go on interesting holidays, you will have to get additional income.
c) experiments and studies conducted so far show proof that people do indeed not stop working.
d) a lot of new jobs would appear, that right now are thin ice because they are too risky or income too shabby. Especially in the area of arts, for example.
I call bullshit on this.
All of your assumptions are unproven and I dare say wrong. Why would this only be sustainable by taxing the rich? The money needed for the basic income already exists. This is not so much free money, as a different way of assigning it. We already have welfare systems, but we spend a huge amount of effort and money into the whole management of it in an attempt to make it "fair".
Your assumption that normal tax income cannot finance a basic income scheme needs proof, and you've not provided any.
1) It will be much harder to find individuals willing to do certain categories of high risk or menial labor. You would end up having to pay a LOT more.
Which is the whole idea, and the real revolution. For the past 20 years, we've seen a push into low-wage jobs, by cuts of benefits and other "reforms". If you strip away the rhetorics, politics are forcing people to work for low wages.
A conditionless basic income would force employers to pay wages not based on "what will people to do not starve", but on "what do I need to pay so someone voluntarily does this". You would see a lot of jobs changing their location in the wage pyramid.
"again" being the keyword.
We were at this point already in the 70s. Some names were different but the basic idea that a modern society where a lot of work is being done by robots can break away from the work == income scenario is almost two generations old now.
Just that it happened only for the very top. The financial markets have since left behind any relation to production, productivity or even actual products. But anyone who's not in the top 0.1% is still slavishly tied to those.
- Developers and IT guys are expensive. I know, let's call Infosys/Tata/Accenture/HP/IBM, all I have to do is write them a check and all my IT problems disappear offshore!
This. Hiring Accenture because you think your in-house IT is too expensive. It's a bit like burning dollar bills because you want to save on heating expenses.
Because it works.
Price tags are nonsense for non-daily-purchase articles. What your examples have in common is that they sell mass-market low-price items (even IKEA, though that's a borderline case). A car is not such a thing, neither is a house.
But even for everyday items, you can almost always haggle. I'm slowly learning that from my girlfriend who is brilliant at that, sometimes simply because she has the chuzpe to ask for less. That's all there is to it, it's amazing. "can you make the price lower?" - "I can give you 10 bucks off, but no more."
I completely agree with you that the arab style of haggling is crazy. First inflate prices by 500% and as soon as someone says "too expensive", drop the price by 400%, from there start haggling. Been there, done that, insane waste of time.
But turning the table on a sales guy and reminding him that he wants you money just as much if not more than you want his product is just fair game.
It's funny or not, but it does illustrate a real problem. We've seen the discussion about whether or not URLs should have unicode support. Yes it's nice to non-western languages. But it introduces the same kind of problems and suddenly you are not on the website you think you are on anymore.
The more I look at it, the more I decide that Unicode is simply evil.
I think it is generally known and trivially obvious to anyone who has done any research or statistics on this subject at all that the requirement of special characters is a total failure and where enforced it actually reduces the search space instead of enlarging it, due to human nature and the simple heuristics you can use.
This is exactly what we need. An approach that tells users who strong their passwords actually are in real-life scenarios, and not how well they conform to some arbitrary policy.
The alternative, that's been used by some for more than a decade, is to run your own password cracker at night, and everyone whose password it cracks by morning is sent a mail telling them to change it.
We desperately need to get away from these awful policies that try to make passwords as random as possible for two reasons. One, they are a total failure, people are very inventice when it comes to finding a password that will satisfy the stupid computer but still be easy to remember (and guess). Two, if you make it complicated enough, people will just re-use and write down passwords more. Congratulations, one step forward, two steps back.
The bigger discussion is when the fetus is considered a human with all of the liberties and rights of other humans.
Which is total bullshit with one purely semantic argument pro, namely that if you think in binary terms you have to start the attribution somewhere and every other point is just as arbitrary, so you can just as well choose conception.
We were not discussing "the world", we were discussing a single action.
The single action is absolutely trivial until you start seing it in context, and only then all these complexities come in. Your action is not seperate from the world. Without the liberties and rights of humans, that you mention, abortion isn't even an issue at all. Without the conditions of the woman involved, it isn't even an issue. It is these circumstances, ethics, cultural and religious factors that make it into an issue at all. Without them, the discussion would be very short. "Nancy want's an abortion." - "Yes. And?"
Really? Let me check, certificate-based systems are entirely designed around a chain of signatures. GPG signatures are... uh... well, if it's in your keychain, it will be accepted. The workaround is to sign the package that contains the public keys.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Debian approach, it's practical and it works. But I think you are being a little too ideological.
Of course you an massage the facts all you want. But here's some points to consider on your end:
In the animal kingdom, sometimes the male and sometimes the female of the species is bigger and stronger. So much for the muscles argument.
Even in human societies, the distribution of labor is by no means identical everywhere. There are a couple indigenous people still around where women take what we consider male roles, while males are closer (but not identical) to what we would consider female - up to jungle versions of make up.
Yes, woman breed children and breast-feed them. I don't see why there is a contradiction with anything I said. It especially doesn't explain why abortion should be a decision made by the man. On the contrary, it strengthens my arguments.
Good that you spot the contradictions. Here is the point: Yes, the world is complex and complicated. But to act, you need to stop overthinking and focus on the main point.
The person most affected by pregnancy is the woman (you could argue the child, but biologically, at this point, they are one and the same). If the man wants a baby very much, he can just go and fuck the next woman the next day. He has more options. That is why her decision is more important. She is more affected and has less options.
The more likely scenario when you encounter an apparently holy person is that they've hidden the bodies well. We are all humans and we all make mistakes. When I know which mistakes you've made and what flaws you have, I know what I'm getting myself into. When I don't see it, I cannot calculate the risks.
And I don't say that all good people are bad. I say that "good" and "bad" are reductionist terms that are not appropriate to a complex world.
not even microsoft or apple, no matter how they try, can replicate this audit trail,
Yes, it can. My OS X understands signed installs just like my Debian does. Both will not let me install an unsigned package without me explicitly saying "ok, do it".
Which is exactly what this and any other malware will do. It will not be signed, it will need a user to click an ok button, and most users will do it, because 10+ years of useless windows popup-windows with pointless "are you sure?" cover-your-ass messages have trained them to hit the green "ok, whatever" button.