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New Global Plan Would Crack Down On Corporate Tax Avoidance
For the recommendations to actually become binding countries will have to encode them in their domestic laws or amend their bilateral tax treaties. The OECD says that it plans to hold an international conference on amending the network of existing tax treaties. Sol Picciotto, an emeritus professor at Lancaster University in Britain, says the recommendations are at least five to 10 years from becoming law, and that the jury is still out on whether they will accomplish their stated goals. “These are just tweaks,” says Picciotto. “They’re trying to repair an old motorcar, but what they need is a new engine.”
Court Says Child Porn Arrest Violated Posse Comitatus Act
When the search was challenged, the government argued that the search was justified because there are military bases in the greater Seattle area, and it's a crime for military members to distribute child pornography. Those actions, the three-judge panel said, violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that prohibits the U.S. military from taking part in civilian law enforcement activities. The ruling said the search was so sweeping, it shows "a profound lack of regard for the important limitations on the role of the military in our civilian society." It noted "abundant evidence" that the Navy frequently hacks into civilian computers to search for evidence of child pornography and turn it over to the police if the computer owner has no relation to the military. "This is, literally, the militarization of the police," says defense attorney Erik Levin. "They have enough funding that they can go out and stray from the core mission of national security and get into local law enforcement."
Science, Atheism, and Captain Kirk
According to Noë, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Spockians give science a bad name because if you think of science as being in the business of figuring out how atoms spinning noiselessly in the void give rise to the illusion that there are such things as love, humor, sunsets and knuckleballs, then it isn't surprising that people might come to think that the inner life of a scientist would be barren. "The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value. What we need, then, is a Kirkian understanding of science and its place in our lives. The world, for Captain Kirk and his ontological followers, is a field of play, and science is a form of action."
Comcast Threatens to Cut Off Customer Who Use Tor
We respect customer privacy and security and would only investigate the specifics of a customer’s account with a valid court order. And if we’re asked by a court to provide customer information, then we ask for a reasonable amount of time to notify the customer so they can decide if they would like to hire a lawyer and if they do, then we turn the case over to them and they proceed with the judge directly and we step away.
Mars, Ho! Chapter Fifty
Mars!
John and Destiny left the houseboat parked on a space port pad they had rented at the spaceport at the Meridian Bay dome and got in a cab. Destiny said "I don't want to shop on an empty stomach. Taxi, take us to a restaurant that serves eggs and pork sausage this time of day."
"Wow," John said. "That's going to be an expensive place."
"Well, I'm buying. You said you never tried pork sausage, now's your chance, it's my treat. Besides, I've been thinking about pork sausage for half the trip and I don't want to wait any longer!"
Dewey was on his way to Mars when he finished reading Knolls' report. He sipped on the coffee the captain had brought and switched on the news. They were digging the deep hole in Mars again.
Plans were being made to tow the tragic Venus station to drop into the sun. It had been argued that if they dropped it on Venus it would incinerate from the friction with Venus' thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, but some lesser educated people were afraid that the disease might somehow survive Venus' hellish surface.
Charles was back on TV talking about pirates. He was glad it was Charles and not him, Dewey hated TV cameras.
He emailed Kowalski, telling him that when Kelly got back to Earth to have a couple of his best electrical engineers, one who was good with batteries and one that was good with engines, to talk to him and find out how he got a third gravity out of batteries. Nobody else had managed to do that before, and some engineers claimed it was physically impossible.
John and Destiny were really busy on Mars the next few days, mostly shopping. First shopping for a wedding ring, then for real estate; they would buy a house and a bar. The houseboat was big as houseboats go, but was a bit small for someone as wealthy as Destiny who had lived all her life in very large homes, especially since the houseboat was half full of beer. After signing papers for the house they went for breakfast at a nice restaurant, where Destiny bought John another omelette and pork sausage. John wasn't any more impressed with this sausage than at the other restaurant.
Then they visited Tammy in her hotel room. Her face was still a little bruised but she wasn't wearing the sling.
"Hi, come on in, guys. Want some coffee?"
"Sure," Destiny said. "So how are you coming with your research?"
"Well, we haven't had time to do much except move them into the facility and acquaint them with it, but Rilla had really come a long way and Lek was almost cured already, at least from the physical withdrawal symptoms, by the time we got to Mars. She's to the point that withdrawal is still torture to her, but no longer deadly. She's still in mental and physical pain but she's not dropping any more. The physical pain should be gone in a few weeks. Of course, full therapy will probably take years."
John said "Yes, Lek sure did change during the trip. This is great coffee, Tammy!"
She laughed. "It's robot coffee!"
"No way," John said.
"Yep, and it's one of your company's robots that made it, too!"
"No way in hell!" John exclaimed.
"It's true," she said. "Your company updated all their coffeebots' operating systems and other programs. And it perks a whole pot of coffee in five minutes, and a cup in less than a minute. You have one of their robots, now it can make good coffee. I only found out because they're advertising it all over everywhere. I'm surprised you didn't notice."
John said "I saw the ads, I just didn't believe them."
Destiny laughed. "Dad must have tried a cup of his own robots' nasty coffee, I think he fired his head engineer. He should get here in another week."
John said "Bill lands in two days. I'm still reeling from the trip here. God, but that was a damned nightmare!"
They continued chatting a while before going home. They would be moving into their new home about the time Bill showed up two days later and would have more shopping to do; they would need furniture and appliances.
John and Destiny met him at the spaceport, and they stopped at a bar for the beer he'd promised John. He bought John and Destiny several, in fact. John tried to buy a round and Bill wouldn't let him.
"Excuse me, Bartender, but I want to buy a round," he said. The bartender told John what they cost.
"Wow," he said. "That's pretty high! Is it like that everywhere here?"
The bartender told him the reason was the cost of shipping it to Mars from Earth. He was going to clean up in the tavern business, it seemed, since Destiny would get a huge discount on shipping. He decided that while he was learning business he'd learn how to make beer and open a microbrewery in his tavern, too. He'd have really cheap beer, at least compared to other taverns, that he could sell for a huge profit and still be way cheaper than anyone else's if he could learn to make good beer.
Bill said "Bartender, don't take his money, this is all on me. I have to write a damned report tomorrow, I don't know why" he said, turning to John.
"I had to write one and they really wanted detail," John said. "Maybe they changed policies and everybody has to write reports now."
A few days after that they met Dewey at the spaceport. After Dewey and his daughter hugged she said "Where's Mom?"
Dewey said "Come on, Destiny, you know how your mom is. She's scared to death to even get on an airplane, let alone a space ship. I'm going to wear a camera at the wedding, though, so she'll be there in a way."
He stuck out his hand. "Good seeing you again, John. That was some great work you did on that trip. We're going to be rewriting the book. I wish I could talk you out of retiring."
"Well, thank you, Mister Green..."
"Call me Dewey, John. You're family now."
Google Must Stop Ignoring Customer Support Emails in Germany
This doesn’t mean that every incoming email should now be checked and processed individually by a Google employee, the court said. But the company has to provide the possibility for users to contact it via email, it said. It was left up to Google how to deal with future incoming email. If Google does not change its conduct, it could be fined up to €250,000 (about US$323,000) (PDF in German), the court said.
NSF Fires Researcher For 1980s Activism
Barr’s first background interview was held in November 2013, 3 months after she began working at NSF. During that session, Barr answered “no” when asked if she had ever been a member of an organization “dedicated to the use of violence” to overthrow the U.S. government or to prevent others from exercising their constitutional rights. In a second interview after again being asked if she had been a member of any organization that espoused violence, Barr was grilled for 4.5 hours about her knowledge of all three organizations and several individuals with ties to them, including the persons who tried to rob the Brink’s truck. Four people were found guilty of murder in that attack and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including Kathy Boudin, who was released in 2003 and is now an adjunct assistant professor of social work at Columbia University. “I found out about the Brink’s robbery by hearing it on the news, and just like everybody else I was shocked,” she recalls.
Barr says she is thankful that Union College has welcomed her back with open arms and says she will soon resume her teaching and research activities. In addition, she regards her year at NSF as “a very rewarding experience in many ways.” Even so, she has written to her representatives in Congress and to NSF Director France Córdova asking them to examine what she labels an “Orwellian process” for vetting rotators like herself. “We volunteer to do this,” she wrote Cordova on 29 August. Until a better process is put in place, Barr says, “NSF runs the risk that many highly qualified scientists will not even consider serving as IPAs. That will be a tremendous loss.”
MS Pays NFL $400M To Use Surface, Announcers Call Them iPads
Mars, Ho! Chapter Forty Nine
Landing
The alarm woke me up. Still asleep I thought "damned whores" out of habit, thinking we were having an emergency before I remembered that we were due to enter orbit and I'd set the alarm myself the night before. We had been on approach since late yesterday afternoon and would be in orbit and docking with the maintenance facility at nine this morning. The landing boats would already be docked there and we would be on Mars' surface by late this afternoon.
The alarm woke Destiny up, too, and she got up as I was making coffee. Destiny told the computer to make steak and scrambled eggs with toast, and we took a shower together.
Wow! We were finally entering orbit around Mars and would be docking at nine and we hadn't died! Not yet, at least. The way this trip had gone we'd probably crash land on Mars, or get assassinated at the spaceport. I did have a price on my head, after all. Of course, they most likely didn't know my name or what I looked like, but the boat's new captain would probably be in danger.
We put on the news and started eating breakfast and the doorbell rang. It was Tammy.
"Hi, Tammy," Destiny said. "Want some breakfast?"
"No, thanks," she said, "I already ate, but I'll take a cup of coffee if it isn't made by a robot. So, who's going to be your bridesmaid?"
"Well, who do you think, silly," Destiny said. "You, of course. Who's going to be your best man, John?"
"Bill, of course, but he won't be here for a week or more, he's on batteries."
They started talking about clothes and I just kind of zoned out and nodded once in a while.
At five 'til eight I went in the pilot room to finish getting us in orbit, and by eight thirty we were weightless and would be docking in a few minutes. I floated to my quarters.
At quarter to nine the three of us started floating towards the docking bay that still worked without tearing up somebody else's docking bay and didn't have my boat attached, so we could meet the landing crafts' captains who would escort passenger and cargo to Mars. Then we'd take off in the houseboat and Tammy would go down with the droppers.
I got on the PA. "Attention, ladies. Please assemble in docking bay one for landing."
The boat docked a few minutes later as the droppers started showing up, and I greeted two of the three landing pilots, Tom Farley and Jim Woolsley. I'd known both of them for a few years, so we talked about old times as Destiny and Tammy said their goodbyes and cargo streamed in.
They and Tammy started escorting the droppers to the landing boats while me and Destiny went to my houseboat to land on Mars. Lek walked by and said "Thank you, Captain."
We undocked from the ship and flew down to Meridian spaceport together. Now if you guys will excuse me I need to buy a wedding ring.
See you.
Next: Mars!
Hello robots :P
A rigid notion of determinism turns it into a mechanical folly and inverts the importance away from higher functions and towards the lowest detectable causal events, it creates a world in which ultimately the smallest and most remote causal interactions are given disproportionate amounts of importance even though such interactions are constantly changing at speeds far faster than the results they are supposed to have deterministically forced into being. With such an outlook it wouldn't be “turtles all the way down” but instead “turtles all the way up”.
By analogy of a computer program the importance according to such determinism is given to the bits flipping between zero and one rather than the higher structures ruling their behavior.
Such determinism remains technically true but becomes devoid of meaning, comprehension, and value[¹], and thus also without importance.
Instead for any given end result determinism acts as a negative feedback loop in relation to its own importance when given enough complexity: a robot operating its algorithms on the basis of what might as well be an infinite number of ever-changing, causal, and mutually connected variables cannot remain a robot, it is forced into random output and/or the beginnings of intelligence where it chooses which output to give and later also chooses the reason why it is supposed to be the correct output or why a different output is more correct.
Hmm, googly eyes or Einstein afro? It makes sense to me…
(Also ¹ looks like a nice explanation of why “pop” determinism and nihilism so often end up as best friends.)
(And another tangential: if it was possible I wonder what an inverse square type of law would look like for each causal step in determinism, the fact that it rained yesterday has no discernible impact on me writing this journal entry (but now it has and thus two points were made rather than one: one about determinism and one about indirect Wittgensteinian word games).)
The focus of this post was really meant to be the part at the end that I made bold.
To me it makes one or two connections in a way that I haven't seen before (and I know about system complexity and emergence and such). In some way it feels a bit more direct and explanatory tying in a correct understanding/evaluation of determinism as well as (possibly the most basic) evolutionary pressure/fitness challenge. In this way it gets very hands on and mucky (conceptually, and also conceptually reducing the challenge of creating intelligence to that of triggering such a first move and then escalating it). Has anyone seen anything similar elsewhere?
P.S. Yet another tangential: a different kind of amusing folly, more entertaining than determinism but maybe not all that different after all?
