One of the more stupid blog-level postings I've read. I use "blog-level" as an insult, btw. because blogs are generally a source of shallow thinking, because it just is too convenient to publish some thoughts. When it is more trouble, you're also forced to polish them more.
Firstly, to understand the difference between trying to do and "trying to do", read some Dennett. If correctly understood, anthropomorphisms like the attribution of intention to a non-intentional entity can be extremely helpful.
Secondly, not even his example is anywhere near what he's trying to explain. Yes, the analogy breaks down but it has nothing to do with the convulted reasoning he's applying. The cause for the analogy to break down is that there's no equivalent to walking to the classroom in his example. All of his code simply assigns a classroom number, without any equivalent of the walking part. As soon as you add that - magic ! - the analogy works again.
Because only morons use the same tool for everything. Experts use the best tool for the job at hand.
And besides, most of us use SSH for a lot of things. For remote management, copying files, for accessing our git repositories and probably 20 other things.
Wrong. On some estimates so far, that group is actually a minority of the small and microbusinesses affected by these measures. It certainly isn't "most".
Really. Maybe I learnt something new today, or maybe we're talking about different things. You see, I'm not talking about Grandma's Handmade Socks or the local pizza delivery service - they're not worried about cross-border commerce. These businesses are the vast majority of microbusinesses. But they are not affected by this measure.
the rules for issuing VAT invoices, which again differ widely among the 28 EU states.
However, you are effectively now subject to audit by any of the 28 states' national tax authorities
Again, maybe I will learn something new today, but so far I assumed that existing cooperations of the tax authorities would make it so that only your countries tax agency will ever audit you, however it may do so on request from another tax authority.
Some? We have 35 different VAT regimes here... And VAT changes regularely. Try to integrate that into your webshop.
If your business is creating webshop software, then that's part of what your customers pay you for.
If your business is selling socks and your webshop software doesn't do proper tax handling, then wtf are you paying for?
Why?
Because you should be happy that your taxes go to your country and not to some 3rd world tax haven where the local druglord will spend them on whores and guns, you moron.
Send your thank yous to the multinational corporations who dodge taxes by putting their "headquarters" into low-tax countries and then attributing all their sales to them instead of being honest participants in the societies that they derive their revenue from.
"Country hunters"
True, that's going to be a problem. But only for purely digital items. And a partial solution is better than no solution.
read and understand 28 different national tax laws regarding VAT
Which isn't half as much trouble as you make it out. Firstly, most people who are half-way serious about selling something online use some kind of merchant service that will manage that for them. Secondly, you don't need to read the whole law. You only need to understand what the tax rate for your product is. If you're a small company or hobbyist, you're unlikely to have more than one class of products.
And in the long run get extradited to bulgaria.
Total nonsense. To be a crime, and not just a misdemeanor, you have to commit tax fraud intentionally. You won't get extradited for a misdemeanor.
What I don't understand is this: Bitcoin is a distributed network. We know (or can know) which bitcoins were "lost" in MtGox. What is "true" in the Bitcoin world is determined by the "opinion" of the network.
So couldn't the top 5 or 10 players in the network, who collectively have something like 75% of the computing power, collude and simply invalidate the transactions out of MtGox?
Transnational companies are systems that help us eventually to reduce government power over people by connecting us in more ways than ever possible previously.
It will also drive average salaries down near zero, because that's what efficient companies do - reduce costs.
You obviously don't understand the basic hostility of a corporation towards its environment. Like predators, it will gladly eat all of the prey and then starve.
by lowering costs to as few as possible (including cost of government, cost of taxes, cost of regulations, cost of inflation, cost of doing business).
You forgot a lot of costs in there. Cost of labour, most importantly, but also cost of not harming the enviornment, both natural and social.
To say that a local company is better because... what, it has to care about that locality?
Exactly. A local company lives within the community, and it suffers if the community suffers. If education in the community fails, the company will have less skilled labour to hire or has to pay the costs of education itself. If security fails, it has more crime to suffer from or has to pay for higher security itself.
As such, it has an interest in keeping the local community functioning, because it's a part of it.
A transnational corporation will just move wherever by chance or external factors the situation is better.
and in process they eliminate as many rules and barriers and taxes as possible.
They will also eliminate as much of humanity as possible. The human existence doesn't consist of consumption alone. There is art and politics, stories and music, society and culture. What you want is the total dominance of commerce as the only human activity worth considering.
You know, about 150 years ago those borders did not exist much either.
What a pile of nonsense. There are caricatures from the middle ages about the insanity of borders. True, it wasn't nation states, it was kingdoms and duchies and baronies - but between some cities that we consider neighbours today you would pay tariffs three different times.
You're an idiot. As a German, I can go anywhere in Germany. Big surprise. So can french do in France, or chinese in China.
But nowhere in the world can you travel between 26 different countries with no border controls, visas, travel papers or any other kinds of bureaucracy.
I much rather see transnational companies and transnational people
I don't like transnational companies one bit. They are parasites. I respect local companies a lot, where the owner is a person and not an abstract conglomerate of shareholders, most of which are themselves corporations.
without business rules, without business related laws
I shiver at the thought of that tyranny. It would make Stalin Russia look like a really nice place to be.
...the total dissolation of all national borders is always 20, or 50 or whatever years in the future.
My GF is from Russia. We know first-hand how real borders are, with all the residence permits, visas and other paperwork we need to go through all the time. Things have become easier compared to 20 years ago or so, when my parents went to Russia for a holiday, and russians were barely able to visit Europe. But it's not because of technology. It's because of politics. Within Europe, the creation of the Schengen zone (basically: Every EU citizen can travel to any EU country without paperwork) has done more to make national borders become invisible than any technology ever. I could go to the airport right now and book a random flight to any EU country and just go there, with zero preparation, zero paperwork and no border controls. Show me the technology that has accomplished something comparable.
A governing body for each continent controlling local policies
you need to look up the word "local" in a dictionary. The continent of Asia is home to 3 billion people, give or take a few, including places as diverse as tech-crazy geeky Tokio and Taliban Afghanistan. You want to govern them with one governing body? Good luck.
The EU has the right idea, even if lots of it is flawed: To keep and respect local identies, but build a unifying structure above it.
There is little that people fight harder then attempts to take away their identity
This is why I still think they should make "Science and Sanity" or something else about general semantics required reading in school.
Confusing the map with the territory, are we? The imagination with the real? The what-I-can-describe-in-words with the what-exists-in-the-world?
Science will eventually be the death of religion not because of Darwin or space flight, but because it provides and alternative solution. The space of magic, mysticism and religion (in historical order) always was to provide answers where we couldn't find any. Science isn't just brilliant in finding answers we couldn't find before, it also offers a new alternative to answers we don't yet know. Instead of wonder and amazement at an assumed superior force that must be responsible, we have wonder and amazement and the complexity and depth of the universe per se. With a history and culture (and most likely psychology) deeply rooted in an agent assumption (i.e. "if it is there, someone must be responsible") we have trouble switching, but exposure to science makes it easier to understand that not every apple that's falling from a tree was thrown down by someone.
Look, some genius "analyst" has figured out that people don't buy ten tablets per person. Next up: The food market collapses because people do not increase their daily food amount constantly.
This fixation on "growth" as if by magic everything would grow indefinitely is the primary evil in our world today. I've seen perfectly healthy companies with good revenue and solid profits being closed because they're not growing to the amount the corporate owners wish for.
Eventually the Asians will run out of people to steal from.
The same way the Americans ran out of books from the UK to copy illegally, and therefore the entertainment industry crashed and never recovered?
You don't understand that every master ever in the history of the world began by copying his teachers or inspirational sources. First you copy, then you improve, then you innovate. Progress has been like that for as long as we have historic records.
But there's no reason that with advancing technology this couldn't turn into a large screen on a pedestal that WAS the PC
It is much more likely that the PC will advance. Look at a modern iMac, it already is basically a thick screen. The machine that we called a PC 20 years ago has already disappeared, visually.
The real shock is going to be the death of the PC.
Again? Didn't it already die two dozen times? Oh wait, those were all predictions that didn't come true.
Keep an eye on Chinese companies,
mod parent +1 insightful just for that sentence. The stupid assumption that will ruin most of the predictions I've read so far is that US companies will continue to dominate the tech industry. But real innovation out of the USA has become scarce. Uber and crap are not innovators, they're basically the Internet equivalent of software patents - you take something that's been known for centuries and add "with a computer program" to it, voila, new patent. Same with most US-based "revolutionary" startups. Take something old and boring, add "over the Internet" to it, voila, investor capital.
Meanwhile, in Asia a thousand companies have been working on evolutionary progress quietly for a decade. Such evolutionary progress is very often the predecessor to revolutionary advances, as it reaches a critical mass.
As an author, this right there would be much more interesting than a new revenue model. If I knew that x% of readers stop around page 50, I knew where to look towards improving my writing.
You mean, just like almost every other chat out there?
If it'd be P2P, fully anonymous onion-routed, torrent-based or even slightly innovative, I might have a yawn for it. As the announcement stands, a sack of rice falling overy in China has a higher news value. Or maybe the/. editors forgot that it's 2014, not 1994.
How much is Dice getting paid for its constant ass-kissing every time Kimble farts? Am I the only person here that sees the fucker is addicted to publicity?
why did we need an empty, symbolic regulation to show that ad companies are tracking people?
Because without it, they would say: "[bogus study] shows that most people actually want to be tracked, believe it or not, because of [bogus reason]. The minority that doesn't want - they'll just have to tell us, we'll stop doing it because we're good people."
Been there, done that, they are liars and we have evidence now.
until MS made the default setting on
Which gave them a welcome excuse and that's it. Please, understand PR a little.
Additionally, the NAI has long had an opt out system:
Which does squat. The first thing the page tells you is that it only works if you allow 3rd party cookies - the very first thing anyone with any brain cells disables.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more stupid blog-level postings I've read. I use "blog-level" as an insult, btw. because blogs are generally a source of shallow thinking, because it just is too convenient to publish some thoughts. When it is more trouble, you're also forced to polish them more.
Firstly, to understand the difference between trying to do and "trying to do", read some Dennett. If correctly understood, anthropomorphisms like the attribution of intention to a non-intentional entity can be extremely helpful.
Secondly, not even his example is anywhere near what he's trying to explain. Yes, the analogy breaks down but it has nothing to do with the convulted reasoning he's applying. The cause for the analogy to break down is that there's no equivalent to walking to the classroom in his example. All of his code simply assigns a classroom number, without any equivalent of the walking part. As soon as you add that - magic ! - the analogy works again.
Why Aren't We Using SSH For Everything?
Because only morons use the same tool for everything. Experts use the best tool for the job at hand.
And besides, most of us use SSH for a lot of things. For remote management, copying files, for accessing our git repositories and probably 20 other things.
Yes, adhering to those laws is now an unbearable burden.
Then stop doing business there, problem solved.
It is literally not commercially viable for microbusinesses and even quite a few larger but still small businesses to operate across Europe today.
Yet strangely, thousands of businesses do just that. Apparently, they're all idiots for not listening to /. user #457657.
Plenty of vendors have, at least temporarily, closed their doors to international sales as a direct result.
Most of the crying comes from the UK, however, because of a special rule there which exempts most small business from registering for VAT at all.
Wrong. On some estimates so far, that group is actually a minority of the small and microbusinesses affected by these measures. It certainly isn't "most".
Really. Maybe I learnt something new today, or maybe we're talking about different things. You see, I'm not talking about Grandma's Handmade Socks or the local pizza delivery service - they're not worried about cross-border commerce. These businesses are the vast majority of microbusinesses. But they are not affected by this measure.
the rules for issuing VAT invoices, which again differ widely among the 28 EU states.
Really. Apparently I was dreaming when a 30-second Google search turned up this informative overview that includes, among other things, a bullet list of what an invoice has to contain.
However, you are effectively now subject to audit by any of the 28 states' national tax authorities
Again, maybe I will learn something new today, but so far I assumed that existing cooperations of the tax authorities would make it so that only your countries tax agency will ever audit you, however it may do so on request from another tax authority.
Some? We have 35 different VAT regimes here... And VAT changes regularely. Try to integrate that into your webshop.
If your business is creating webshop software, then that's part of what your customers pay you for.
If your business is selling socks and your webshop software doesn't do proper tax handling, then wtf are you paying for?
Why?
Because you should be happy that your taxes go to your country and not to some 3rd world tax haven where the local druglord will spend them on whores and guns, you moron.
Send your thank yous to the multinational corporations who dodge taxes by putting their "headquarters" into low-tax countries and then attributing all their sales to them instead of being honest participants in the societies that they derive their revenue from.
"Country hunters"
True, that's going to be a problem. But only for purely digital items. And a partial solution is better than no solution.
And how much in compliance costs?
Because actually adhering to the laws of the countries you are doing business in is now an unbearable burden?
It's all of the compliance work that costs incredible sums of money to keep everything in order.
That's mostly because you let your compliance be designed by consulting companies whose primary business model is to sell you more consulting hours.
read and understand 28 different national tax laws regarding VAT
Which isn't half as much trouble as you make it out. Firstly, most people who are half-way serious about selling something online use some kind of merchant service that will manage that for them. Secondly, you don't need to read the whole law. You only need to understand what the tax rate for your product is. If you're a small company or hobbyist, you're unlikely to have more than one class of products.
And in the long run get extradited to bulgaria.
Total nonsense. To be a crime, and not just a misdemeanor, you have to commit tax fraud intentionally. You won't get extradited for a misdemeanor.
Thanks to you and everyone else for their answers, now I understand the whole thing a lot better.
What I don't understand is this: Bitcoin is a distributed network. We know (or can know) which bitcoins were "lost" in MtGox. What is "true" in the Bitcoin world is determined by the "opinion" of the network.
So couldn't the top 5 or 10 players in the network, who collectively have something like 75% of the computing power, collude and simply invalidate the transactions out of MtGox?
Transnational companies are systems that help us eventually to reduce government power over people by connecting us in more ways than ever possible previously.
It will also drive average salaries down near zero, because that's what efficient companies do - reduce costs.
You obviously don't understand the basic hostility of a corporation towards its environment. Like predators, it will gladly eat all of the prey and then starve.
by lowering costs to as few as possible (including cost of government, cost of taxes, cost of regulations, cost of inflation, cost of doing business).
You forgot a lot of costs in there. Cost of labour, most importantly, but also cost of not harming the enviornment, both natural and social.
To say that a local company is better because ... what, it has to care about that locality?
Exactly. A local company lives within the community, and it suffers if the community suffers. If education in the community fails, the company will have less skilled labour to hire or has to pay the costs of education itself. If security fails, it has more crime to suffer from or has to pay for higher security itself.
As such, it has an interest in keeping the local community functioning, because it's a part of it.
A transnational corporation will just move wherever by chance or external factors the situation is better.
and in process they eliminate as many rules and barriers and taxes as possible.
They will also eliminate as much of humanity as possible. The human existence doesn't consist of consumption alone. There is art and politics, stories and music, society and culture. What you want is the total dominance of commerce as the only human activity worth considering.
You know, about 150 years ago those borders did not exist much either.
What a pile of nonsense. There are caricatures from the middle ages about the insanity of borders. True, it wasn't nation states, it was kingdoms and duchies and baronies - but between some cities that we consider neighbours today you would pay tariffs three different times.
You're an idiot. As a German, I can go anywhere in Germany. Big surprise. So can french do in France, or chinese in China.
But nowhere in the world can you travel between 26 different countries with no border controls, visas, travel papers or any other kinds of bureaucracy.
I much rather see transnational companies and transnational people
I don't like transnational companies one bit. They are parasites. I respect local companies a lot, where the owner is a person and not an abstract conglomerate of shareholders, most of which are themselves corporations.
without business rules, without business related laws
I shiver at the thought of that tyranny. It would make Stalin Russia look like a really nice place to be.
...the total dissolation of all national borders is always 20, or 50 or whatever years in the future.
My GF is from Russia. We know first-hand how real borders are, with all the residence permits, visas and other paperwork we need to go through all the time. Things have become easier compared to 20 years ago or so, when my parents went to Russia for a holiday, and russians were barely able to visit Europe.
But it's not because of technology. It's because of politics. Within Europe, the creation of the Schengen zone (basically: Every EU citizen can travel to any EU country without paperwork) has done more to make national borders become invisible than any technology ever. I could go to the airport right now and book a random flight to any EU country and just go there, with zero preparation, zero paperwork and no border controls. Show me the technology that has accomplished something comparable.
A governing body for each continent controlling local policies
you need to look up the word "local" in a dictionary. The continent of Asia is home to 3 billion people, give or take a few, including places as diverse as tech-crazy geeky Tokio and Taliban Afghanistan. You want to govern them with one governing body? Good luck.
The EU has the right idea, even if lots of it is flawed: To keep and respect local identies, but build a unifying structure above it.
There is little that people fight harder then attempts to take away their identity
This is why I still think they should make "Science and Sanity" or something else about general semantics required reading in school.
Confusing the map with the territory, are we? The imagination with the real? The what-I-can-describe-in-words with the what-exists-in-the-world?
Science will eventually be the death of religion not because of Darwin or space flight, but because it provides and alternative solution. The space of magic, mysticism and religion (in historical order) always was to provide answers where we couldn't find any. Science isn't just brilliant in finding answers we couldn't find before, it also offers a new alternative to answers we don't yet know. Instead of wonder and amazement at an assumed superior force that must be responsible, we have wonder and amazement and the complexity and depth of the universe per se. With a history and culture (and most likely psychology) deeply rooted in an agent assumption (i.e. "if it is there, someone must be responsible") we have trouble switching, but exposure to science makes it easier to understand that not every apple that's falling from a tree was thrown down by someone.
Look, some genius "analyst" has figured out that people don't buy ten tablets per person. Next up: The food market collapses because people do not increase their daily food amount constantly.
This fixation on "growth" as if by magic everything would grow indefinitely is the primary evil in our world today. I've seen perfectly healthy companies with good revenue and solid profits being closed because they're not growing to the amount the corporate owners wish for.
Eventually the Asians will run out of people to steal from.
The same way the Americans ran out of books from the UK to copy illegally, and therefore the entertainment industry crashed and never recovered?
You don't understand that every master ever in the history of the world began by copying his teachers or inspirational sources. First you copy, then you improve, then you innovate. Progress has been like that for as long as we have historic records.
But there's no reason that with advancing technology this couldn't turn into a large screen on a pedestal that WAS the PC
It is much more likely that the PC will advance. Look at a modern iMac, it already is basically a thick screen. The machine that we called a PC 20 years ago has already disappeared, visually.
The real shock is going to be the death of the PC.
Again? Didn't it already die two dozen times? Oh wait, those were all predictions that didn't come true.
Keep an eye on Chinese companies,
mod parent +1 insightful just for that sentence. The stupid assumption that will ruin most of the predictions I've read so far is that US companies will continue to dominate the tech industry. But real innovation out of the USA has become scarce. Uber and crap are not innovators, they're basically the Internet equivalent of software patents - you take something that's been known for centuries and add "with a computer program" to it, voila, new patent. Same with most US-based "revolutionary" startups. Take something old and boring, add "over the Internet" to it, voila, investor capital.
Meanwhile, in Asia a thousand companies have been working on evolutionary progress quietly for a decade. Such evolutionary progress is very often the predecessor to revolutionary advances, as it reaches a critical mass.
As an author, this right there would be much more interesting than a new revenue model. If I knew that x% of readers stop around page 50, I knew where to look towards improving my writing.
You mean, just like almost every other chat out there?
If it'd be P2P, fully anonymous onion-routed, torrent-based or even slightly innovative, I might have a yawn for it. As the announcement stands, a sack of rice falling overy in China has a higher news value. Or maybe the /. editors forgot that it's 2014, not 1994.
How much is Dice getting paid for its constant ass-kissing every time Kimble farts? Am I the only person here that sees the fucker is addicted to publicity?
but it's a reasonable argument that defaulting DNT to on makes it not a user expression of intent.
Neither is defaulting it to off.
MS did the right thing by making the default that option that, in case of doubt, is better for their customers.
Anyways, cheers for the debate.
ditto.
(first reply mangled because of a bad tag)
why did we need an empty, symbolic regulation to show that ad companies are tracking people?
Because without it, they would say: "[bogus study] shows that most people actually want to be tracked, believe it or not, because of [bogus reason]. The minority that doesn't want - they'll just have to tell us, we'll stop doing it because we're good people."
Been there, done that, they are liars and we have evidence now.
until MS made the default setting on
Which gave them a welcome excuse and that's it. Please, understand PR a little.
Additionally, the NAI has long had an opt out system:
Which does squat. The first thing the page tells you is that it only works if you allow 3rd party cookies - the very first thing anyone with any brain cells disables.