and anyone not from the UK will obviously need an interpreter.
Or alternatively, a passing knowledge of "history" and "geography" (if you are an American, you may wish to look up those words in the dictionary).
No one, regardless of age, should be loitering outside this guy's store.
Why the hell shouldn't they? Is standing around in a public space illegal these days or something? If the store owner doesn't wan't people standing in a particular place, that's too bad for him unless he owns the space in question. Of course, there are some obvious exceptions (you can't stand just outside his door physically blocking people from entering, for example), but if people are standing around in the general area outside his store, too bad for him.
I apologize in advance for being a bit thick, but what does predictability have to do with this?
Scientific theories have to be falsifiable, and in order to be falsifiable they have to make predictions.
Also, it's true that God cannot be completely comprehended, but the fact that an ordered, non-capricious God created the universe, and He called it good - that fact tells us that the universe should be expected to be ordered and possible to be studied.
But we don't know that God has those properties, or more to the point that he exists at all. Even if ID was correct (which it isn't, of course) the most we'd know about the nature of God is that he was sufficiently powerful to create the universe. That doesn't imply that he's good, kind, nice, etc.
The fact that we are here as a result of an intelligent designer makes scientific study a possibility. If everything was random chance, no ideas would have structure or meaning!
That just doesn't make any sense. What makes scientific study possible is that some phenomena seem to be rule-governed (e.g. the motion of the planets). The fact that some phenomena have this property doesn't mean that there's a designer. If rule-governed phenomena could only come about through the work of a designer, then God himself would require a designer (and God's designer would also require a designer, and so on).
Creationism is another theory based on philosophy and the same physical evidence.
Creationism isn' based on any physical evidence, because it doens't make predictions about the physical world (as I've already pointed out). You can use physical evidence to create problems for evolution, but even if evolution turned out to be wrong that wouldn't justify creationism.
Gould contended that scientists have an 'a priori commitment to naturalism' which in my view prevents scientists from considering whether something supernatural might be the primary cause.
Actually, the difference between the "natural" and "supernatural" doesn't exist a prioi -- we just consider anything which has a scientific explanation to be "natural". So before Newton came up with overwhelming evidence for gravity, the idea of action at a distance (i.e. forces, etc.) was considered to be supernatural (Newton himself was troubled by the need to make use of "occult forces" in his explanations).
The trouble with creationism, then, isn't that it relies on supernatural explanations (whatever they are exactly), but that it doesn't make any predictions. Let's assume that God created life on Earth. What does that tell you about life on Earth? Nothing, since God is inscrutable and he could have made life in whatever form he wanted to. Evolution, on the other hand, does make predictions. For example you predict that organisms will be highly modular and structured, that organisms will show clear similarities owing to their having a common ancestor, etc.
But what is the big difference between the situation in colonial America and the situation in France? There are lots and lots of differences of course, but I don't see a relavent difference. In both cases, people are dissatisfied with the treatment they have been receiving from the governmen/police/armed forces for various reasons. If dissatisfaction with the government can justify rioting/rebelling, it can do so in France as well as in America. Sure, you might argue that the colonists in America were suffering more repression (though that's not necessarily true), but then again the American colonists had a full on rebellion, whereas these guys are just burning a few cars. You really seem to have your patented American patriot blinders on.
(in most cases, choosing not to vote, not to learn the local language, etc)
Any evidence that this is the case in the French situation? I thought that most of these people were 2nd/3rd generation immigrants who speak French as a first language.
On one hand you've got colonists living, working, and risking it all to set up shop under circumstances that are being continually (and sometimes brutally) altered by the parent country. On the other hand you've got people who leave their own country and travel to another country to live in a place where the social structure, economy, laws and current events are plainly known.
LOL. Wait a minute, didn't those colonists also choose to leave their own country and travel to another country? That's why they're called colonists, non? Sure, many of the colonists were born in America, but many of these rioters were born in France. Hence, your injunctions against immigrants to France (i.e. don't bitch about the situation since you chose to go there) apply just as much to the American colonists. Nice touch to round off your rant with some generic blathering about the "work ethic".
Oh well, this is the sort of level of argument you expect on Slashdot I guess.
So, in your own words, these people have no choice. They are told where to live. Those who have a choice, live elsewhere.
Really? If the government provides low-cost housing, it is "forcing" people to live there? What rubbish. In your original post you said "they live where they are told", which is clearly not true, and is what the grandparent was responding to. But it seems you have no respect for the facts.
That may be all they can get away with now, but what makes you think they would stop there if they could exert influence over the name system in other countries?
Becuase censorship can't be effected via DNS, you twit.
Science is the natural explanation of phenomena.
ID is a supernatural explanation of phenomena.
Of course I agree that ID/creationism is bullshit and shouldn't be taught in schools, but this is a rather spurious distinction. Newton's laws of motion were initially criticised for positing supernatural or "occult" forces since they relied on action at a distance (gravity), but these days they're thought to be the paradigm case of successful scientific explanation. The distinction between natural and supernatural doesn't come a priori: what's natural is merely whatever we can explain scientifically with our current level of understanding. For this reason, the definition of science as "the natural explanation of phenomena" is actually circular.
The reason that ID isn't science is that it doesn't make testable predictions. The idea that it's bad because it posits supernatural forces is a red herring.
Most government-driven industrial failures do not involve design but execution, e.g. Yugoslav and Soviet peacetime designs were good enough, it was the execution that was shoddy, as was the lack of finish (somewhat like the Gnome/KDE desktops, really...). It is execution that improves dramatically at gunpoint (pun intended).
I find this argument hard to follow. Clearly, if it is possible for a government organisation to come up with a good design, it is possible for them to execute it well. Your distinction between design and execution is utterly spurious in this case, based on apparently no evidence whatsoever. I've already given you some examples of successful government programs in nontotalitarian societies, but you're going to ignore them because they cause you problems. Here's one more example: the NHS. It had a dramatic effect in increasing the overall health of postwar Britian, and despite it's problems (which I don't deny) 60% of the population find it satisfactorary (compared to 49% of Americans for their health system).
So the BBN and Berkeley guys who worked on TCP/IP were government employees. Wow. Thank you for completely misunderstanding the nature of research grants.
Those guys wouldn't have been able to do their research if the government hadn't payed for it. So I repeat, except in a technical legal sense, they're government employees. The government gave them a lot of freedom to pursue their own interests, but that just goes to show that the government can foster innovation as well as creating beurocracy and waste.
.. Considering that the NHS problems in Wales even made it to CNN here, I'd say you're not bullshitting, you're just ignorant. Or English;-)
I am English, but I don't see what you're getting at. You seemed to be making out that a shortage of dentists for little old ladies in Wales was the result of having a national health service, or at least was an example of some endemic problem (which I can refute through my personal experience and that of people I know). The shortage of dentists in Wales is no doubt a problem for the NHS in that area, and one which needs to be fixed. I expect if I did the research I could find some corners of the US which don't have enough dentists either, and blame it on your absurdly inefficient health insurance system. But I'm not quite so inclined to cheap propaganda as you are.
Stop changing the argument. The legal system has NOTHING to do with setting up a putative Federal Software Development Authority. You are just arguing for the heck of it.
Erm, you said the free software movement could do without government help. I showed why that was a silly thing to say. No need to be bitter;)
but *I* expect everyone to obey the laws of economics
Fatal mistake. The "laws of economics" are based on assumptions which rarely hold in the real world. As I've repeatedly said, the empricial evidence (as for example provided in the PDF linked to by an earlier poster) shows that the private US health system isn't any better than the NHS in terms of cost and outcomes (in some ways better, in some ways worse). So time to come up with some new laws of economics which actually make the right predictions! And the fact remains, though you continue to ignore it, that everyone in this country has guaranteed access to basic healthcare [*], whereas 15.7% of your population do not (or at least, have access only because hospitals agree to treat people without insurance in some cases). Does that follow from your laws of economics which we're all supposed to obey?
[*] With the exception of dentistry in Wales, natch.
I have to pay into the public school system. If I send my child to private school, I pay twice, the coerced government education through taxes, and the voluntary private education I pay for myself.
That's not a monopoly, use a dictionary.
And really, enough of the cliched libertarian moaning about having to pay taxes to support a civilized society. Some of us like having a basic social safety net to improve public health, reduce crime and prevent businesses exploiting people who'd otherwise work for any money whatsoever rather than starve. Paying to support that is part of the social contract you agree to by living in the US (or any other country with similar systems). When the terms of this contract are drawn up democratically, its perfectly legitimate. The only way you can challenge the legitimacy of such a contract is if you regard property as an absolute individual right, but that's absurd, since property is a right defined and protected by the government. If there was no government, you'd have only as much property as you could defend by your own means (i.e., not very much, unless you want to employ your own private army).
By the way, I don't think you can actually go to jail for not paying taxes. At least, in the US you can't really go to jail for owing people money. A court would eventually issue an order to your bank to dock the money from your account, so you wouldn't go to jail. But hey, who needs facts when you've got overblown rhetoric?
just look at other state programs: government education, government retirement (social security), government charity (welfare), government transportation.
Whenever the government gets involved in franchises, subsidies, etc. the end result is a government-created monopoly.
Wtf are you on about? Since when has the US government had a monopoly on education, pensions or charity? You can go to a private school, get a private pension plan and donate to a private (as in non-government-affiliated) charity. Use your head, man!
So the best examples you can come up with are totalitarian societies where you either performed 100% or were ostracized or worse?
You can't have it both ways. Either government is inherently inefficient at doing stuff or it isn't. I've shown it isn't. I don't see that the totalitarian nature of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had much to do with the success of the projects I mentioned -- you can't force people to come up with brilliant designs at gunpoint. Many government programs run by the allies in WW1/2 were successful, anyway (e.g. the SE5A fighter in WW1).
How can you parrot truisms without even realising what you're saying? Government development? Yeah, if you define 'government development' as a DOD-run incubation fudn that funded corporations and academia who worked on (the then revolutionary technology of) packet switching and TCP/IP.
Sure sounds like a government development to me. If you're funded by the government you're essentially (except for legal technicalities) a government employee. Naturally the government is going to employ academics to do certain kinds of research. So what? One things for sure, as soon as something goes wrong with anything that's got the remotest connection with the government, people like you love to blame it on "government beurocracy" or some other canard. Do try to be consistent.
OSS can make it on its own without government assistance
Really? Could it do without the legal system to enforce the GPL?
NHS? reasonably well? *blinks*
Erm, you seem to be assuming that the US healthcare system works better than "reasonably well". If you'd care to aquaint yourself with the facts, you'd see that it doesn't.
even if a little old lady in Wales has to cross three counties to see a dentist, hey she has *access* free at point of use
My dentist lives 15 minutes walk from me, and I live in a medium-sized town. You're bullshiting again, you don't have a clue how easy or difficult it is to get particular forms of treatment in the UK or in any other European country.
but dramatically reduces expectations and brings in a culture of 'good enough'.
Hey, I have higher expectations than you do in the US. I expect that everyone will have access to healthcare, no matter what their circumstances, and pretty good quality healthcare at that. That's more than anyone in the US has any right to expect, so you're talking crap again.
Heck, the Soviets, Yugoslavs and Indians tried their hand at cars built by government-built entities. They sucked. Wonder why...
Yeah the Germans tried that with the Vaulkswagen. Oh wait, that one didn't suck... Did you ever think that maybe there isn't any metaphysical inevitability about the failure of government-run/sponsored programs? To take some more examples, the Soviet Union built some extremely good tanks and planes during WW2 which were at the very least competetive with those built by private American/British companies. As other posters have pointed out, the internet was a government development and it worked out pretty well. FWIW, I could point to a whole load of products produced by private companies which suck, but would that show that private enterprise always fails?
Oh and socialized healthcare? Go and actually look at Europe's state-run healthcare systems sometime, they're tottering and will not last a generation for the countries with declining populations.
*Shrugs* I live in the UK and our socialised healthcare system works reasonably well. At least, we don't have 15.7% of our population without health insurance like you do in the US (census) -- and in the US that figure stands despite considerable government aid to encourage people to get insured. Someone has to pay the additional costs created by shifiting demographics: they don't go away just because the system is privatised! I see no reason why a national health system which was affordable after the economic devastation caused by WW2 should suddely become unaffordable now, just becuase people are living a bit longer and having fewer children. Do you have any actual evidence to back these claims up or are you just bullshitting? Most studies which have looked at healthcare without ideological blinders have shown that national health care is generally more efficient at providing good outcomes to ordinary people (i.e. not necessarily people who can afford to spend $1000s on private care) than a private healthcare system, which is not surprising when you consider the enormous amount of beurocracy created by the health insurance industry. Generally, it is cheaper to nationalise healthcare than to privatise it.
Well yeah, actually, it is. Take a look at the kind of domain specific mini-languages that have been developed on top of Haskell and more recently C++. For example, the Spirit parser library for C++ which is part of Boost. Once you start composing complex expressions, infix operators are virtually required to make the end result anything close to readable. Haskell is a big win over C++ in this respect because (apart from all the advantages it has as a functional language) you can define new operators very easily.
Of course, if you're a Java hack[*] who likes to write programs in plodding imperative style (i.e. a sequence of simple statements), the benefits of being able to express complex structures simply will be lost on you. Pity.
Haskell allows you to define new operators. It works very smoothly and makes it easy to implement concise domain specific languages. As another poster points out, Lisp also (sort of) has this feature, although this is more because it doesn't have infix operators at all. (Note to pedantic Lispkinks: yes, you could extend Lisp using reader macros etc. to add infix operators, but you really wouldn't want to, would you?)
At no time in our history has it ever been in the interests of the United States to nuke anyone, much less China
It was a hypothetical, you twit. If it was in the (supposed) interests of the US to nuke the whole of China, would that make it OK? Or would the fact that (yes!) killing innocent people is wrong perhaps prevent it from being OK?
You're talking as if there's some sort of Ultimate Arbiter who recognizes this right and doesn't recognize that right
In a sense there is: a combination of rival states and public opinion. In any case you don't need an "ultimate arbiter" to establish a precedent. The point is that no-one sane thinks (or has thought) that states ought to be able to do just whatever they please. Since states are, at a certain remove, agents of their populations, they cannot legitimately claim any rights which are not recognised by the majority of their people.
History is written by the winners.
That's not really true, it's just that ignorant folk such as yourself tend to ignore alternative accounts of history.
The only people guilty of "war crimes" are losers - by definition.
Really? Can you cite a definition of war crimes which says so?
Basically, you're very very confused about the nature of morality. Morality is concerned with what people should do. The fact that a state (or any other entity) can do something doesn't mean that they should. You can masturbate over the US power all you like, but you can never justify its application in that way. There is nothing hard-nosed and clever about your pastiche of Real Politik, it's just absurd, insane and abhorant.
to put the interests of the citizens of other countries ahead of the citizens who elected and pay for the government would in fact be an act of treason
So if the interests of America were served by nuking the whole of China (which they might be, in the long run), it would be treason for the US government not to do this? No. That's an utterly bizzare definition of treason which is supported neither by basic morality (i.e., life in China is just as valuable as life in the US) nor historical precedent, which has never recognized the absolute right of governments to follow their national interests with absolute disregard for the human rights of other peoples. Virtually every war crime in history could be justified using your dumb definition of treason, a fact which apparently delights you.
Sure, but if you just go by acceptable pairs of words you'll get gibberish like "I sat down the hole", where each pair of adjacent words is perfectly OK. And your system wouldn't get verb/noun agreement in many cases, e.g. "pictures of John were on display" would be marked incorrect because "John" doesn't agree with "were".
Take a huge corpus of grammatically correct text, use it to generate tables of what words follow each other. Then check the user's text against the tables. If your text isn't in there, then warn user that it may not be gramatical.
Finite state models of language just don't work because the grammars of natural languages aren't regular expressions (this has been known at least since Chomsky's early work). Moreover, even if natural language grammars were regular expressions, there'd still be an infinite number of grammatical sentences. "Octopuses eat toast on Ramadan" is a perfectly grammatical sentence but you won't find those sequences of words in any corpus.
Now as to the comment that the Bush administration is the most anti-democratic administration in recent history, in what context? Do town, local, state and Federal elections go on in the US? Yes. In many states in 2004 there were a record number of voter driven referendums, so where do you come up with that statement?
Elections != democracy. The Bush administration works in the interests of the people who fund it, not the people who voted for it. The US is still more democratic than a lot of countries, but it's gradually sliding into Fascism.
Regarding the censorship of the IRA you mention, I didn't realise you referring to censorship in the past. The other poster has eloquently explained why this didn't really make much difference (though I still wouldn't try to justify the censorship). The US is equally bad in this regard anyway (e.g. its censorship of Al-Jazeera by bombing its newsrooms), though admitedly the constitution forces it to pay more lip service to freedom of speech at home. There is also more de facto censorship in the US media since it's even more corporate-controlled than in the UK.
Note I'm not trying to justify any act of censorship either in the US or Britain. But levels of censorship in the US and Britian are pretty comparable over all.
The UK's stance on speech with it's continous censorship of the Northern Ireland situation in the media
There is no government censorship of the media regarding the Northern Ireland situation. If you don't like the stance taken by the BBC (whose editorial line is not government controlled) or other national news channels, that's probably because you're an ignorant American who wants British troops "out of Dublin" and thinks the IRA is funded through cake sales (I exaggerate only slightly). As someone living in Britian, I can tell you quite categorically that we do not care which country the 5 square meters of disputed land belongs to. In fact, most of us would gladly be rid of the Ulster Unionists. However, the majority of people in NI currently want to remain part of the UK (though this will probably change as the demographics shift), so it's difficult to change the situation without pissing off even more people than are already pissed off (just imagine that!). Both sides in the conflict have shown an equal ability to commit acts of unjustifiable violence against civilians, and it's fruitless and misguided to try and make out that one side is significantly more responsible for this than the other. Historically, Britian is certainly responsible for creating the whole mess, but trying to correct centuries-old injustices often does more harm than good.
Regarding the comment by the "British minister in France", take a look at your own administration. Better? No. Probably the most anti-democratic administration in recent Eurpoean and US history.
You have official censors in the US too, you know. If anything there tends to be less censorship in the UK with regard to sex and violence on TV, and roughly the same amount for films as in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
and anyone not from the UK will obviously need an interpreter. Or alternatively, a passing knowledge of "history" and "geography" (if you are an American, you may wish to look up those words in the dictionary).
No one, regardless of age, should be loitering outside this guy's store.
Why the hell shouldn't they? Is standing around in a public space illegal these days or something? If the store owner doesn't wan't people standing in a particular place, that's too bad for him unless he owns the space in question. Of course, there are some obvious exceptions (you can't stand just outside his door physically blocking people from entering, for example), but if people are standing around in the general area outside his store, too bad for him.
I apologize in advance for being a bit thick, but what does predictability have to do with this?
Scientific theories have to be falsifiable, and in order to be falsifiable they have to make predictions.
Also, it's true that God cannot be completely comprehended, but the fact that an ordered, non-capricious God created the universe, and He called it good - that fact tells us that the universe should be expected to be ordered and possible to be studied.
But we don't know that God has those properties, or more to the point that he exists at all. Even if ID was correct (which it isn't, of course) the most we'd know about the nature of God is that he was sufficiently powerful to create the universe. That doesn't imply that he's good, kind, nice, etc.
The fact that we are here as a result of an intelligent designer makes scientific study a possibility. If everything was random chance, no ideas would have structure or meaning!
That just doesn't make any sense. What makes scientific study possible is that some phenomena seem to be rule-governed (e.g. the motion of the planets). The fact that some phenomena have this property doesn't mean that there's a designer. If rule-governed phenomena could only come about through the work of a designer, then God himself would require a designer (and God's designer would also require a designer, and so on).
Creationism is another theory based on philosophy and the same physical evidence.
Creationism isn' based on any physical evidence, because it doens't make predictions about the physical world (as I've already pointed out). You can use physical evidence to create problems for evolution, but even if evolution turned out to be wrong that wouldn't justify creationism.
Gould contended that scientists have an 'a priori commitment to naturalism' which in my view prevents scientists from considering whether something supernatural might be the primary cause.
Actually, the difference between the "natural" and "supernatural" doesn't exist a prioi -- we just consider anything which has a scientific explanation to be "natural". So before Newton came up with overwhelming evidence for gravity, the idea of action at a distance (i.e. forces, etc.) was considered to be supernatural (Newton himself was troubled by the need to make use of "occult forces" in his explanations).
The trouble with creationism, then, isn't that it relies on supernatural explanations (whatever they are exactly), but that it doesn't make any predictions. Let's assume that God created life on Earth. What does that tell you about life on Earth? Nothing, since God is inscrutable and he could have made life in whatever form he wanted to. Evolution, on the other hand, does make predictions. For example you predict that organisms will be highly modular and structured, that organisms will show clear similarities owing to their having a common ancestor, etc.
But what is the big difference between the situation in colonial America and the situation in France? There are lots and lots of differences of course, but I don't see a relavent difference. In both cases, people are dissatisfied with the treatment they have been receiving from the governmen/police/armed forces for various reasons. If dissatisfaction with the government can justify rioting/rebelling, it can do so in France as well as in America. Sure, you might argue that the colonists in America were suffering more repression (though that's not necessarily true), but then again the American colonists had a full on rebellion, whereas these guys are just burning a few cars. You really seem to have your patented American patriot blinders on.
(in most cases, choosing not to vote, not to learn the local language, etc)
Any evidence that this is the case in the French situation? I thought that most of these people were 2nd/3rd generation immigrants who speak French as a first language.
On one hand you've got colonists living, working, and risking it all to set up shop under circumstances that are being continually (and sometimes brutally) altered by the parent country. On the other hand you've got people who leave their own country and travel to another country to live in a place where the social structure, economy, laws and current events are plainly known.
LOL. Wait a minute, didn't those colonists also choose to leave their own country and travel to another country? That's why they're called colonists, non? Sure, many of the colonists were born in America, but many of these rioters were born in France. Hence, your injunctions against immigrants to France (i.e. don't bitch about the situation since you chose to go there) apply just as much to the American colonists. Nice touch to round off your rant with some generic blathering about the "work ethic".
Oh well, this is the sort of level of argument you expect on Slashdot I guess.
So, in your own words, these people have no choice. They are told where to live. Those who have a choice, live elsewhere.
Really? If the government provides low-cost housing, it is "forcing" people to live there? What rubbish. In your original post you said "they live where they are told", which is clearly not true, and is what the grandparent was responding to. But it seems you have no respect for the facts.
new 3-month detention without process, etc etc.
Actually, that was defeated in Parliament today (though unfortunately they still managed to extend it to 28 days).
That may be all they can get away with now, but what makes you think they would stop there if they could exert influence over the name system in other countries?
Becuase censorship can't be effected via DNS, you twit.
Science is the natural explanation of phenomena. ID is a supernatural explanation of phenomena.
Of course I agree that ID/creationism is bullshit and shouldn't be taught in schools, but this is a rather spurious distinction. Newton's laws of motion were initially criticised for positing supernatural or "occult" forces since they relied on action at a distance (gravity), but these days they're thought to be the paradigm case of successful scientific explanation. The distinction between natural and supernatural doesn't come a priori: what's natural is merely whatever we can explain scientifically with our current level of understanding. For this reason, the definition of science as "the natural explanation of phenomena" is actually circular.
The reason that ID isn't science is that it doesn't make testable predictions. The idea that it's bad because it posits supernatural forces is a red herring.
Most government-driven industrial failures do not involve design but execution, e.g. Yugoslav and Soviet peacetime designs were good enough, it was the execution that was shoddy, as was the lack of finish (somewhat like the Gnome/KDE desktops, really...). It is execution that improves dramatically at gunpoint (pun intended).
I find this argument hard to follow. Clearly, if it is possible for a government organisation to come up with a good design, it is possible for them to execute it well. Your distinction between design and execution is utterly spurious in this case, based on apparently no evidence whatsoever. I've already given you some examples of successful government programs in nontotalitarian societies, but you're going to ignore them because they cause you problems. Here's one more example: the NHS. It had a dramatic effect in increasing the overall health of postwar Britian, and despite it's problems (which I don't deny) 60% of the population find it satisfactorary (compared to 49% of Americans for their health system).
So the BBN and Berkeley guys who worked on TCP/IP were government employees. Wow. Thank you for completely misunderstanding the nature of research grants.
Those guys wouldn't have been able to do their research if the government hadn't payed for it. So I repeat, except in a technical legal sense, they're government employees. The government gave them a lot of freedom to pursue their own interests, but that just goes to show that the government can foster innovation as well as creating beurocracy and waste.
I am English, but I don't see what you're getting at. You seemed to be making out that a shortage of dentists for little old ladies in Wales was the result of having a national health service, or at least was an example of some endemic problem (which I can refute through my personal experience and that of people I know). The shortage of dentists in Wales is no doubt a problem for the NHS in that area, and one which needs to be fixed. I expect if I did the research I could find some corners of the US which don't have enough dentists either, and blame it on your absurdly inefficient health insurance system. But I'm not quite so inclined to cheap propaganda as you are.
Stop changing the argument. The legal system has NOTHING to do with setting up a putative Federal Software Development Authority. You are just arguing for the heck of it.
Erm, you said the free software movement could do without government help. I showed why that was a silly thing to say. No need to be bitter ;)
but *I* expect everyone to obey the laws of economics
Fatal mistake. The "laws of economics" are based on assumptions which rarely hold in the real world. As I've repeatedly said, the empricial evidence (as for example provided in the PDF linked to by an earlier poster) shows that the private US health system isn't any better than the NHS in terms of cost and outcomes (in some ways better, in some ways worse). So time to come up with some new laws of economics which actually make the right predictions! And the fact remains, though you continue to ignore it, that everyone in this country has guaranteed access to basic healthcare [*], whereas 15.7% of your population do not (or at least, have access only because hospitals agree to treat people without insurance in some cases). Does that follow from your laws of economics which we're all supposed to obey? [*] With the exception of dentistry in Wales, natch.
I have to pay into the public school system. If I send my child to private school, I pay twice, the coerced government education through taxes, and the voluntary private education I pay for myself.
That's not a monopoly, use a dictionary.
And really, enough of the cliched libertarian moaning about having to pay taxes to support a civilized society. Some of us like having a basic social safety net to improve public health, reduce crime and prevent businesses exploiting people who'd otherwise work for any money whatsoever rather than starve. Paying to support that is part of the social contract you agree to by living in the US (or any other country with similar systems). When the terms of this contract are drawn up democratically, its perfectly legitimate. The only way you can challenge the legitimacy of such a contract is if you regard property as an absolute individual right, but that's absurd, since property is a right defined and protected by the government. If there was no government, you'd have only as much property as you could defend by your own means (i.e., not very much, unless you want to employ your own private army).
By the way, I don't think you can actually go to jail for not paying taxes. At least, in the US you can't really go to jail for owing people money. A court would eventually issue an order to your bank to dock the money from your account, so you wouldn't go to jail. But hey, who needs facts when you've got overblown rhetoric?
just look at other state programs: government education, government retirement (social security), government charity (welfare), government transportation. Whenever the government gets involved in franchises, subsidies, etc. the end result is a government-created monopoly.
Wtf are you on about? Since when has the US government had a monopoly on education, pensions or charity? You can go to a private school, get a private pension plan and donate to a private (as in non-government-affiliated) charity. Use your head, man!
So the best examples you can come up with are totalitarian societies where you either performed 100% or were ostracized or worse?
You can't have it both ways. Either government is inherently inefficient at doing stuff or it isn't. I've shown it isn't. I don't see that the totalitarian nature of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had much to do with the success of the projects I mentioned -- you can't force people to come up with brilliant designs at gunpoint. Many government programs run by the allies in WW1/2 were successful, anyway (e.g. the SE5A fighter in WW1).
How can you parrot truisms without even realising what you're saying? Government development? Yeah, if you define 'government development' as a DOD-run incubation fudn that funded corporations and academia who worked on (the then revolutionary technology of) packet switching and TCP/IP.
Sure sounds like a government development to me. If you're funded by the government you're essentially (except for legal technicalities) a government employee. Naturally the government is going to employ academics to do certain kinds of research. So what? One things for sure, as soon as something goes wrong with anything that's got the remotest connection with the government, people like you love to blame it on "government beurocracy" or some other canard. Do try to be consistent.
OSS can make it on its own without government assistance
Really? Could it do without the legal system to enforce the GPL?
NHS? reasonably well? *blinks*
Erm, you seem to be assuming that the US healthcare system works better than "reasonably well". If you'd care to aquaint yourself with the facts, you'd see that it doesn't.
even if a little old lady in Wales has to cross three counties to see a dentist, hey she has *access* free at point of use
My dentist lives 15 minutes walk from me, and I live in a medium-sized town. You're bullshiting again, you don't have a clue how easy or difficult it is to get particular forms of treatment in the UK or in any other European country.
but dramatically reduces expectations and brings in a culture of 'good enough'.
Hey, I have higher expectations than you do in the US. I expect that everyone will have access to healthcare, no matter what their circumstances, and pretty good quality healthcare at that. That's more than anyone in the US has any right to expect, so you're talking crap again.
Heck, the Soviets, Yugoslavs and Indians tried their hand at cars built by government-built entities. They sucked. Wonder why...
Yeah the Germans tried that with the Vaulkswagen. Oh wait, that one didn't suck... Did you ever think that maybe there isn't any metaphysical inevitability about the failure of government-run/sponsored programs? To take some more examples, the Soviet Union built some extremely good tanks and planes during WW2 which were at the very least competetive with those built by private American/British companies. As other posters have pointed out, the internet was a government development and it worked out pretty well. FWIW, I could point to a whole load of products produced by private companies which suck, but would that show that private enterprise always fails?
Oh and socialized healthcare? Go and actually look at Europe's state-run healthcare systems sometime, they're tottering and will not last a generation for the countries with declining populations.
*Shrugs* I live in the UK and our socialised healthcare system works reasonably well. At least, we don't have 15.7% of our population without health insurance like you do in the US (census) -- and in the US that figure stands despite considerable government aid to encourage people to get insured. Someone has to pay the additional costs created by shifiting demographics: they don't go away just because the system is privatised! I see no reason why a national health system which was affordable after the economic devastation caused by WW2 should suddely become unaffordable now, just becuase people are living a bit longer and having fewer children. Do you have any actual evidence to back these claims up or are you just bullshitting? Most studies which have looked at healthcare without ideological blinders have shown that national health care is generally more efficient at providing good outcomes to ordinary people (i.e. not necessarily people who can afford to spend $1000s on private care) than a private healthcare system, which is not surprising when you consider the enormous amount of beurocracy created by the health insurance industry. Generally, it is cheaper to nationalise healthcare than to privatise it.
Yeah, that's a lot more readable.
Well yeah, actually, it is. Take a look at the kind of domain specific mini-languages that have been developed on top of Haskell and more recently C++. For example, the Spirit parser library for C++ which is part of Boost. Once you start composing complex expressions, infix operators are virtually required to make the end result anything close to readable. Haskell is a big win over C++ in this respect because (apart from all the advantages it has as a functional language) you can define new operators very easily.
Of course, if you're a Java hack[*] who likes to write programs in plodding imperative style (i.e. a sequence of simple statements), the benefits of being able to express complex structures simply will be lost on you. Pity.
[*]Not "hack" as in "hacker", you understand.
Haskell allows you to define new operators. It works very smoothly and makes it easy to implement concise domain specific languages. As another poster points out, Lisp also (sort of) has this feature, although this is more because it doesn't have infix operators at all. (Note to pedantic Lispkinks: yes, you could extend Lisp using reader macros etc. to add infix operators, but you really wouldn't want to, would you?)
At no time in our history has it ever been in the interests of the United States to nuke anyone, much less China
It was a hypothetical, you twit. If it was in the (supposed) interests of the US to nuke the whole of China, would that make it OK? Or would the fact that (yes!) killing innocent people is wrong perhaps prevent it from being OK?
You're talking as if there's some sort of Ultimate Arbiter who recognizes this right and doesn't recognize that right
In a sense there is: a combination of rival states and public opinion. In any case you don't need an "ultimate arbiter" to establish a precedent. The point is that no-one sane thinks (or has thought) that states ought to be able to do just whatever they please. Since states are, at a certain remove, agents of their populations, they cannot legitimately claim any rights which are not recognised by the majority of their people.
History is written by the winners.
That's not really true, it's just that ignorant folk such as yourself tend to ignore alternative accounts of history.
The only people guilty of "war crimes" are losers - by definition.
Really? Can you cite a definition of war crimes which says so?
Basically, you're very very confused about the nature of morality. Morality is concerned with what people should do. The fact that a state (or any other entity) can do something doesn't mean that they should. You can masturbate over the US power all you like, but you can never justify its application in that way. There is nothing hard-nosed and clever about your pastiche of Real Politik, it's just absurd, insane and abhorant.
to put the interests of the citizens of other countries ahead of the citizens who elected and pay for the government would in fact be an act of treason
So if the interests of America were served by nuking the whole of China (which they might be, in the long run), it would be treason for the US government not to do this? No. That's an utterly bizzare definition of treason which is supported neither by basic morality (i.e., life in China is just as valuable as life in the US) nor historical precedent, which has never recognized the absolute right of governments to follow their national interests with absolute disregard for the human rights of other peoples. Virtually every war crime in history could be justified using your dumb definition of treason, a fact which apparently delights you.
That's the price they pay for aid. They can have the aid and the strings, or freedom and no aid.
Then it isn't "aid", it's a bribe, and a pretty despicable one at that.
Sure, but if you just go by acceptable pairs of words you'll get gibberish like "I sat down the hole", where each pair of adjacent words is perfectly OK. And your system wouldn't get verb/noun agreement in many cases, e.g. "pictures of John were on display" would be marked incorrect because "John" doesn't agree with "were".
Take a huge corpus of grammatically correct text, use it to generate tables of what words follow each other. Then check the user's text against the tables. If your text isn't in there, then warn user that it may not be gramatical.
Finite state models of language just don't work because the grammars of natural languages aren't regular expressions (this has been known at least since Chomsky's early work). Moreover, even if natural language grammars were regular expressions, there'd still be an infinite number of grammatical sentences. "Octopuses eat toast on Ramadan" is a perfectly grammatical sentence but you won't find those sequences of words in any corpus.
Now as to the comment that the Bush administration is the most anti-democratic administration in recent history, in what context? Do town, local, state and Federal elections go on in the US? Yes. In many states in 2004 there were a record number of voter driven referendums, so where do you come up with that statement?
Elections != democracy. The Bush administration works in the interests of the people who fund it, not the people who voted for it. The US is still more democratic than a lot of countries, but it's gradually sliding into Fascism.
Regarding the censorship of the IRA you mention, I didn't realise you referring to censorship in the past. The other poster has eloquently explained why this didn't really make much difference (though I still wouldn't try to justify the censorship). The US is equally bad in this regard anyway (e.g. its censorship of Al-Jazeera by bombing its newsrooms), though admitedly the constitution forces it to pay more lip service to freedom of speech at home. There is also more de facto censorship in the US media since it's even more corporate-controlled than in the UK.
Note I'm not trying to justify any act of censorship either in the US or Britain. But levels of censorship in the US and Britian are pretty comparable over all.
The UK's stance on speech with it's continous censorship of the Northern Ireland situation in the media
There is no government censorship of the media regarding the Northern Ireland situation. If you don't like the stance taken by the BBC (whose editorial line is not government controlled) or other national news channels, that's probably because you're an ignorant American who wants British troops "out of Dublin" and thinks the IRA is funded through cake sales (I exaggerate only slightly). As someone living in Britian, I can tell you quite categorically that we do not care which country the 5 square meters of disputed land belongs to. In fact, most of us would gladly be rid of the Ulster Unionists. However, the majority of people in NI currently want to remain part of the UK (though this will probably change as the demographics shift), so it's difficult to change the situation without pissing off even more people than are already pissed off (just imagine that!). Both sides in the conflict have shown an equal ability to commit acts of unjustifiable violence against civilians, and it's fruitless and misguided to try and make out that one side is significantly more responsible for this than the other. Historically, Britian is certainly responsible for creating the whole mess, but trying to correct centuries-old injustices often does more harm than good.
Regarding the comment by the "British minister in France", take a look at your own administration. Better? No. Probably the most anti-democratic administration in recent Eurpoean and US history.
You have official censors in the US too, you know. If anything there tends to be less censorship in the UK with regard to sex and violence on TV, and roughly the same amount for films as in the US.