The wealthiest five percent pay more than half the tax bill, because they make far more money. The 40 wealthiest people in America have more wealth than some continents. The wealthiest one percent of Americans earn almost 20% of the taxable income in the US, and they pay about 33% of the tax load.
The idea of progressive taxation is that in both absolute and in relative terms, the wealth of the rich has less utility value than the wealth of the poor. It's obvious that $1000 to Bill Gates means a lot less than $1000 to me. What is also true, but less obvious, is that 20% of my income is much more painful than 20% of Bill Gates. I am spending a far greater percentage of my wealth on essentials than a multimillionaire is.
It's a small tax, that will likely be repealed for wireless providers. In the scale of injustices great and minor, public and private, it's tiny. Far more worrisome to me are the injustices created by the criminal "justice" system, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the protection of intellectual property and other components of the policing/defense function of government: a function that very few libertarians/neo-conservatives really care anything about.
This is very much not entrapment. IANAL, but NAY; entrapment entails actively urging someone who was otherwise not inclined towards criminal activity. This is no more entrapment than an undercover cop trying to catch a rapist, walking alone in the park, is entrapment. If the cops walked up to some guy and said "hey, it looks like that car's unlocked - and maybe you can hotwire it! Probably could get a lot of money for it..." then that would be entrapment.
New York's an exception because New York has done what I recommend: focus on consistent enforcement and police presence, not on draconian sentencing. NYPD actually respond to calls, are out on the streets.
The problem is that deterrence is hard to measure. Punitive justice feels like it is getting results, because you have a guilty sentence and a guy going to prison (even if he didn't do it.) Successfully deterred crime is, by definition, Nothing Happening. Very hard to show that as a success. And when crime is successfully deterred, people start wondering why they are paying so much for the cops: after all, nothing's happening.
Jail time is only a deterrent if would-be crooks consider it likely they will be caught. The problem with the get-tough-on-crime attitude we've seen is that it's all geared to prosecution, not protection or enforcement. Which is what leads to 3-strike laws which put someone in prison for life for shoplifting, a criminal justice system that has been jailing - even sentencing to death - hundreds of innocent people, yet not making the streets any safer. If a crook faced 90% certainty of facing a reasonable sentence, I believe it would be far better deterrent than 10% certainty of facing a draconian one.
I think that the freedom to criticize and research freely outweighs the permission of the originator of the work. If I'm going to be doing a historical retrospective of Kevin Costner's work, I'm sure he may want me to NOT quote from the screenplay for "Waterworld," but that's just too bad. It's part of history, it's part of his output, and it'll be part of the work.
Vital, vital additions.
on
Coding Fair Use
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
* Insofar as almost all artistic production is built on the foundation of past artistic production, and insofar as quoting, sampling and reframing existing artistic works in order to create new artistic works is a natural form of artistic production and a healthy, creative response to one's cultural millieu, such quoting, sampling and reframing shall not entail a copyright infringement when the result is an identifiably distinct artistic production.
* Likewise, quoting, resampling and reframing as part of critical practice and in research shall not entail enfringment.
I don't fully disagree with what you've written, but you've also made a lot of misses. China, Japan, etc. have actually had longstanding educational traditions and institutions that rolled one through another, and with the possible exceptions of the subcontinent and indochina, none of the Asian countries experienced the long term destabilizing colonial presence that Africa did - Korea, Japan, and China all had sophisticated nation-state apparata before the arrival of the Europeans, and never really lagged very far behind the West (except for Japan's catch-up at the Meiji revolution.) With a handful of exceptions - the Timbuktu state, the original Ethiopian civilization - Africa didn't have those (except for North Africa, whose history has been part of European history since antiquity and who were also part of the Islamic civilizations and states - and it's no accident that North Africa's situation is more analogous to Latin America's than to sub-Saharan Africa).
Sub-saharan Africa's cultural experience is one of the most nightmarish in colonial history. Few genocidal episodes in history have been as horrific as those wrought upon the peoples of the Congo by the Belgian rubber industry, and the rest of the colonial experience was just as nightmarish. I don't need to list how the South American experience is so radically different - how the South American domininat class is still the criollo class, and how institutions have been imported whole-cloth. The jury is still out on just how far down Mexico's economic success will trickle, and that's after over a hundred years of independence (starting with Juarez); Argentina's entire identity is essentially European - it's long excellent educational tradition started with Sarmiento, and despite it's problems now, it still has that foundation.
Your two other Asian success stories are city-states, and I don't think that's an accident; they harvested the economic benefits of the natural advantages of the regions they are in without exposure to the obligations of national management.
But the states of Africa had no pre-colonial history as states. There were no institutions to pick up from. These states are no more than 2 generations old, and the elites of those states are the kleptocratic foreman classes of old. The best way to help Africa is conscientious globalism: trade agreements focus on and with the middle class coupled with an insistence on environmental, human rights, and labor standards. Which is exactly what a good deal for the ISP's in Africa would entail.
Fair enough, the key value would be T/A/P/E (Edition information) + ISDN - but a system that returned T/A/P for ISDN when it's there and vice versa (or null when it isn't) would still be very, very helpful. Reducing data input by the percentage of books in a library that are 20 years old is still a gain.
What if you could scan it, it brings a copy of that record into your local database, prints out a book plate, and the can set up a borrowing schedule for it? That'd be cool. And very helpful for small libraries.
In conjunction with a barcode scanner/CueCat, it could make it a lot easier to start private libraries. I have a couple thousand books, about a hundred of which I lend out at any given time. Be nice to make a catalog, and a freely available cddb-like ISBN-based system would make that a lot easier.
You are comparing one continent with several countries, as noticed elsewhere. All you little "success stories" are from largely single-culture single-language states - China is completely dominated by Han culture, Japan is dominated by the Yamato, etc. Yet you sloppily paint an entire continent with hundreds of language groups, five major language families, hundreds and hundreds of tribal divisions, organized into post-colonial states that were given their independence only in the last 50 years, often divided into national units that only reflected the colonizing nations' needs and histories and have nothing to do with the ethnic natures of the people who lived there; whose ruling classes were, essentially, the "collaborator" classes from those years of colonialism. Just what mechanism is supposed to overcome all that and create a state that can build infrastructure, educate a generation (you might want to note the relationship between a healthy educational infrastructure and all those success stories of yours) and create healthy democratic institutions for an entire continent? As has been noted elsewhere, there are some stable, working countries within Africa, but unfortunately they get painted with the same crude brush you use by geographically-ignorant investors and partners, just as if the US' status as a trade partner was partially determined by the state of Central America.
Most of the references to open-source would-be work-alikes are made by people who never actually used either the tool or the tool it's imitating. Someone on this thread actually suggested xfig as a viable workalike for Visio! (Now I've actually used xfig *and* Visio *and* dia - dia is a viable Visio replacement, but *xfig*? Obviously, someone who hasn't used Visio, and may not have used xfig, made that recommendation.) People have recommended gimp as a workalike replacement for Photoshop - which I think would be OK for many uses *now*, but this was back in the pre-1.0 days - mrproject as a replacement for MS Project (no fucking way), and so on.
It's almost embarassing when I try to load up one of these pre-alpha putative workalikes and try to use it. Not that I hold it against the developers: at the very worst, they are using the project to learn something, very few make premature claims about their pet projects, and sometimes, as in the case of the Gimp, the projects grow up to be impressive, useable applications. But the peanut gallery here has no compunctions about premature recommendations without the benefit of experience.
Macromedia doesn't have a vested interest in SWF anyway: it's already an open format that anyone can build tools for. I can see no reason why it wouldn't put SVG output ability into its future authoring projects.
You are assuming that the goal of the interface is an application that manipulates documents. Flash is a poor choice for that sort of application. If, however, the idea is to create a unified interactive multimedia presentation that can organize its interface using visual cues in order to communicate its point, that can smoothly script the interactions of a variety of media, then Flash is an excellent choice. The trouble is, most geeks think all learning is the adoption of propositions and the assignation of truth values to them, so they have no sense of how other modalities are used to communicate.
And HTML is not compatible with people who live in places without electricity or telephones, which is a substantially higher figure both in relative and absolute terms. Anyway, when you have a specific audience in mind, Flash is fine. And it is almost impossible to do what can be done in Flash in DHTML or its equivalents, with any kind of ease. Unless you want to actually link to a working alternative for that kind of interactive, dynamic multimedia format.
The problem is the fact that the purveyors of intellectual property want to get paid for our experiences, and are trying to stuff what should be a service model (the time/energy it takes to write a book/play a song/etc) into a unit-sales model (x bucks per consumer). And sadly, they, via the RIAA and the MPAA, have enough political clout to keep trying to stuff that broken model into our legislative craw. IMO, we have to communicate to our lawmakers, not merely the practical problems involved, but the very core philosophical fallacy in which the problems are based.
I don't know where to start - with your obvious confusion over the fact that it is the very illegality of drugs that creates a crime-infested black market, with your conflation of the economy of the illegal drug market with the right of every individual to do what he wants with his own body, with the mix-up between what people do to support habits good, bad and indifferent and their relative rights to have those habits to begin with - your entire post is an exercise in irrelevance and confusion. Please try again.
Frankly, I don't have strong feelings about the 2nd amendment one way or another. But ninety percent of the arguments made by the pro-gunners seem so strained, ridiculous and hysterical, that it actually weakens my respect for their stance. (Versus only about 20 percent of the anti-gun arguments.)
As far as I'm concerned, all countries are equally unfree as long as the core, essential freedom of being able to do with your own body want you want is universally infringed. I say this as a teetotalling drug-abstainer: that the criminalization of drugs, especially pretty harmless ones, is a far greater civil liberties issue than the 2nd amendment. But you don't see the would-be warriors of freedom doing much about it.
Next on "let's bring the Slashdot Effect down on the kind, poor and hapless," the readers of Slashdot bring down the servers of three orphanages, a school for the blind, two hunger project centers, and a sweet little old lady's home-based DSl-linked web server that she uses to organize day trips for the terminally ill.
The biggest thing that it fails to model is that *virtually each and every one of those red dots that has been arrested is the son, daughter, parent, friend, brother, or sister* of some of those blue dots. There's a lot of complicated things that happen when a family member gets caught in the legal system, but often one of the things that happens is *not* increased law-abiding activity.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of progressive taxation is that in both absolute and in relative terms, the wealth of the rich has less utility value than the wealth of the poor. It's obvious that $1000 to Bill Gates means a lot less than $1000 to me. What is also true, but less obvious, is that 20% of my income is much more painful than 20% of Bill Gates. I am spending a far greater percentage of my wealth on essentials than a multimillionaire is.
It's a small tax, that will likely be repealed for wireless providers. In the scale of injustices great and minor, public and private, it's tiny. Far more worrisome to me are the injustices created by the criminal "justice" system, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the protection of intellectual property and other components of the policing/defense function of government: a function that very few libertarians/neo-conservatives really care anything about.
Scott McNealy has offered to do some time in the dunking booth, though. In drag, even!
This is very much not entrapment. IANAL, but NAY; entrapment entails actively urging someone who was otherwise not inclined towards criminal activity. This is no more entrapment than an undercover cop trying to catch a rapist, walking alone in the park, is entrapment. If the cops walked up to some guy and said "hey, it looks like that car's unlocked - and maybe you can hotwire it! Probably could get a lot of money for it..." then that would be entrapment.
The problem is that deterrence is hard to measure. Punitive justice feels like it is getting results, because you have a guilty sentence and a guy going to prison (even if he didn't do it.) Successfully deterred crime is, by definition, Nothing Happening. Very hard to show that as a success. And when crime is successfully deterred, people start wondering why they are paying so much for the cops: after all, nothing's happening.
Jail time is only a deterrent if would-be crooks consider it likely they will be caught. The problem with the get-tough-on-crime attitude we've seen is that it's all geared to prosecution, not protection or enforcement. Which is what leads to 3-strike laws which put someone in prison for life for shoplifting, a criminal justice system that has been jailing - even sentencing to death - hundreds of innocent people, yet not making the streets any safer. If a crook faced 90% certainty of facing a reasonable sentence, I believe it would be far better deterrent than 10% certainty of facing a draconian one.
I think that the freedom to criticize and research freely outweighs the permission of the originator of the work. If I'm going to be doing a historical retrospective of Kevin Costner's work, I'm sure he may want me to NOT quote from the screenplay for "Waterworld," but that's just too bad. It's part of history, it's part of his output, and it'll be part of the work.
* Insofar as almost all artistic production is built on the foundation of past artistic production, and insofar as quoting, sampling and reframing existing artistic works in order to create new artistic works is a natural form of artistic production and a healthy, creative response to one's cultural millieu, such quoting, sampling and reframing shall not entail a copyright infringement when the result is an identifiably distinct artistic production.
* Likewise, quoting, resampling and reframing as part of critical practice and in research shall not entail enfringment.
Sub-saharan Africa's cultural experience is one of the most nightmarish in colonial history. Few genocidal episodes in history have been as horrific as those wrought upon the peoples of the Congo by the Belgian rubber industry, and the rest of the colonial experience was just as nightmarish. I don't need to list how the South American experience is so radically different - how the South American domininat class is still the criollo class, and how institutions have been imported whole-cloth. The jury is still out on just how far down Mexico's economic success will trickle, and that's after over a hundred years of independence (starting with Juarez); Argentina's entire identity is essentially European - it's long excellent educational tradition started with Sarmiento, and despite it's problems now, it still has that foundation.
Your two other Asian success stories are city-states, and I don't think that's an accident; they harvested the economic benefits of the natural advantages of the regions they are in without exposure to the obligations of national management.
But the states of Africa had no pre-colonial history as states. There were no institutions to pick up from. These states are no more than 2 generations old, and the elites of those states are the kleptocratic foreman classes of old. The best way to help Africa is conscientious globalism: trade agreements focus on and with the middle class coupled with an insistence on environmental, human rights, and labor standards. Which is exactly what a good deal for the ISP's in Africa would entail.
Fair enough, the key value would be T/A/P/E (Edition information) + ISDN - but a system that returned T/A/P for ISDN when it's there and vice versa (or null when it isn't) would still be very, very helpful. Reducing data input by the percentage of books in a library that are 20 years old is still a gain.
Where do you get all this fascinating data from?
What if you could scan it, it brings a copy of that record into your local database, prints out a book plate, and the can set up a borrowing schedule for it? That'd be cool. And very helpful for small libraries.
In conjunction with a barcode scanner/CueCat, it could make it a lot easier to start private libraries. I have a couple thousand books, about a hundred of which I lend out at any given time. Be nice to make a catalog, and a freely available cddb-like ISBN-based system would make that a lot easier.
You are comparing one continent with several countries, as noticed elsewhere. All you little "success stories" are from largely single-culture single-language states - China is completely dominated by Han culture, Japan is dominated by the Yamato, etc. Yet you sloppily paint an entire continent with hundreds of language groups, five major language families, hundreds and hundreds of tribal divisions, organized into post-colonial states that were given their independence only in the last 50 years, often divided into national units that only reflected the colonizing nations' needs and histories and have nothing to do with the ethnic natures of the people who lived there; whose ruling classes were, essentially, the "collaborator" classes from those years of colonialism. Just what mechanism is supposed to overcome all that and create a state that can build infrastructure, educate a generation (you might want to note the relationship between a healthy educational infrastructure and all those success stories of yours) and create healthy democratic institutions for an entire continent? As has been noted elsewhere, there are some stable, working countries within Africa, but unfortunately they get painted with the same crude brush you use by geographically-ignorant investors and partners, just as if the US' status as a trade partner was partially determined by the state of Central America.
It's almost embarassing when I try to load up one of these pre-alpha putative workalikes and try to use it. Not that I hold it against the developers: at the very worst, they are using the project to learn something, very few make premature claims about their pet projects, and sometimes, as in the case of the Gimp, the projects grow up to be impressive, useable applications. But the peanut gallery here has no compunctions about premature recommendations without the benefit of experience.
Macromedia doesn't have a vested interest in SWF anyway: it's already an open format that anyone can build tools for. I can see no reason why it wouldn't put SVG output ability into its future authoring projects.
You are assuming that the goal of the interface is an application that manipulates documents. Flash is a poor choice for that sort of application. If, however, the idea is to create a unified interactive multimedia presentation that can organize its interface using visual cues in order to communicate its point, that can smoothly script the interactions of a variety of media, then Flash is an excellent choice. The trouble is, most geeks think all learning is the adoption of propositions and the assignation of truth values to them, so they have no sense of how other modalities are used to communicate.
And HTML is not compatible with people who live in places without electricity or telephones, which is a substantially higher figure both in relative and absolute terms. Anyway, when you have a specific audience in mind, Flash is fine. And it is almost impossible to do what can be done in Flash in DHTML or its equivalents, with any kind of ease. Unless you want to actually link to a working alternative for that kind of interactive, dynamic multimedia format.
The problem is the fact that the purveyors of intellectual property want to get paid for our experiences, and are trying to stuff what should be a service model (the time/energy it takes to write a book/play a song/etc) into a unit-sales model (x bucks per consumer). And sadly, they, via the RIAA and the MPAA, have enough political clout to keep trying to stuff that broken model into our legislative craw. IMO, we have to communicate to our lawmakers, not merely the practical problems involved, but the very core philosophical fallacy in which the problems are based.
I don't know where to start - with your obvious confusion over the fact that it is the very illegality of drugs that creates a crime-infested black market, with your conflation of the economy of the illegal drug market with the right of every individual to do what he wants with his own body, with the mix-up between what people do to support habits good, bad and indifferent and their relative rights to have those habits to begin with - your entire post is an exercise in irrelevance and confusion. Please try again.
Because god knows, cigarettes got a bum rap.
Frankly, I don't have strong feelings about the 2nd amendment one way or another. But ninety percent of the arguments made by the pro-gunners seem so strained, ridiculous and hysterical, that it actually weakens my respect for their stance. (Versus only about 20 percent of the anti-gun arguments.)
As far as I'm concerned, all countries are equally unfree as long as the core, essential freedom of being able to do with your own body want you want is universally infringed. I say this as a teetotalling drug-abstainer: that the criminalization of drugs, especially pretty harmless ones, is a far greater civil liberties issue than the 2nd amendment. But you don't see the would-be warriors of freedom doing much about it.
I would far, far rather have my movements on public streets monitored, than my conversations anywhere.
Next on "let's bring the Slashdot Effect down on the kind, poor and hapless," the readers of Slashdot bring down the servers of three orphanages, a school for the blind, two hunger project centers, and a sweet little old lady's home-based DSl-linked web server that she uses to organize day trips for the terminally ill.
The biggest thing that it fails to model is that *virtually each and every one of those red dots that has been arrested is the son, daughter, parent, friend, brother, or sister* of some of those blue dots. There's a lot of complicated things that happen when a family member gets caught in the legal system, but often one of the things that happens is *not* increased law-abiding activity.