You're free to choose that point, but then go ahead and graph its curve to national prosperity. Higher income tax doesn't prevent prosperity, while lower income tax does not create prosperity.

A flat tax can only work after you have a system in place to ensure that every citizen of working age has a guaranteed minimum access to the essentials necessary for living-- food, home, healthcare, education, utilities, and so forth. If you want to guarantee that every citizen has equal access to the bare minimum of those things, then I'll be 100% behind your desire for a flat tax. Until then, though, flat taxes are inequitably detrimental to the poor.

I'm pretty sure he's arguing that paying someone in shares in lieu of income is a deliberate gaming of the system. You could prove this by raising capital gains taxes to a rate higher than income tax, and watching all those shares disappear and turn into income. It's a deliberate gaming of the system in order to benefit one's self at the expense of the public at large. You can try to justify that as "smart" all you want (because financially, it is), but that doesn't change the nature of what it actually is and what it actually does. It's "smart" driven by pure self-interested greed, and it has a toxic effect on the machinery that allows it to work in the first place. It's destructive policy.

That's perfectly valid-- you're among the 1-5% of the population that the current Tesla isn't an ideal fit for at least several times a year. For everyone else's use case, it's way more than adequate. It may even be adequate for you, depending on how many of those trips you make. If you save enough gas during the rest of your year, the difference may be enough to rent a vehicle for those trips to your mom's house and still leave you break even or profitable relative to driving something else all year long (ignoring whether or not you can afford a Tesla right now in the first place of course).

It's not ideal in every possible situation today, and it likely never will be, but that's not a true negative because neither will any other vehicle be. But it's beneficial when it's ideal or close enough to ideal in enough situations, and for most people, Tesla has already surpassed that point (again, save for the current initial cost of the vehicle). It's already better than all of its most direct competition on most, but not all metrics, and most of its competition on several other metrics, and that was the purpose in making them in the first place-- demonstrating that it can actually be done in the real world.

So there's really very little reason for the auto industry to try to argue an opposing position if that position is already demonstrably false.

Thankfully, things like objective measurements of actual data can differentiate between both ends of this spectrum-- it's not a matter of having to diametrically oppose a thing because it has on it a spectrum with two extreme ends. We can actually measure things and determine objectively whether it's beneficial or detrimental. Your argument is without merit.

Psychopaths aren't really the best at most things though. They should be guided by reason and logic, but they can still implement compassion and empathy in interfacing with people. Many things are much more palatable if they're presented nicely compared to the same things being presented contemptuously with an utter lack of tact or decorum. People are nearly always much more likely to listen or defer to someone who at least makes them feel heard and understood than to someone who makes them feel worthless and unvalued and unheard.

I'd posit that there's lots of them. They don't do anything. You have to look for the people who don't do anything. ;)

Without sentience, they would have no reason to screw it up like we do, and a robot with compassion can just do things where compassion is an asset, and a robot without compassion can do the things where compassion is a detriment. Humans fail at this because we have sentience and free will, so we often choose the things we're not as well-suited to because we WANT to rather than because we can make the best contribution there. Robots wouldn't need to make that mistake.

My guess is he got it from Intel's announcement here: http://newsroom.intel.com/comm...

3D XPoint technology will sample later this year with select customers, and Intel and Micron are developing individual products based on the technology.

This is largely only an issue because so many people do not have a solid grasp on reality and are ill-equipped to deal with that reality in healthy and effective ways and are unwilling or unable to grow beyond that.

So someone did something when they were young that was embarrassing? Big deal, so did most people. It's an inability to see them in their proper context and deal with them appropriately that's the problem-- not the fact that it actually happened.

In the end, this sort of "censorship" of reality is very unhealthy and a highly inappropriate way of dealing with reality, and sets a very bad precedent to others about the way we should face actual facts in life.

In the end, we need to learn to understand and comprehend what reality is in reality's terms, rather than our own clouded and inaccurate terms, because dealing with actual reality will always produce superior results to dealing with imagined reality and fantasy. In the real world, you might think you can fly and jump off a building in order to do it, but in that same real world, you're going to fall to the ground and break your neck and die. Passing a law that says everyone should point to the sky when you jump off and go "wow, look at that guy, he can really fly!" and ignore him going splat on the ground isn't a healthy way to deal with a delusional perspective-- helping people deal with the reality that you can't fly and jumping off a building is going to kill you is the healthy and appropriate way to deal with it.

tldr; Google is right, the "right to be forgotten" is wrong.

Not really. The right to be forgotten applies to more than search engines. It's more accurately described as delete my tracks and every map anyone has made documenting my tracks.

I abandoned Firefox ages ago and switched to Chrome, despite some of my most beloved extensions not being available, or being less functional on Chrome, because I got sick of the direction they were going.

One of the things that ticked me off from a user perspective was constantly having my extensions disabled due to forced updates that broke them at a pace so rapid that the (mostly) volunteers who made those extensions in their spare time while holding down regular jobs were unable or unwilling to keep up with. It's asking quite a lot of a lot of free or hobbyist developers to create and update the extensions that make the browser usable for so many different people and use cases to deal with a constant influx of changes that break their work every few weeks. I was sick of that.

The other thing that ticked me off was a change they made to their download manager. It used to be there was an option you could check that would automatically delete downloads from the download manager's list when closing the browser, so you'd start out with a clean downloads list every time you started the browser, but for some idiotic reason, they decided that was not a useful feature and should be removed-- so they took the option and its functionality out entirely, so even setting the option in about:config didn't do anything.

The reasoning behind that choice made sense, from a default config point of view-- it could lead a user to believe that deleting the download from their downloads list meant that the download wouldn't show up in their browsing history when in fact the download still existed in the download history, so they thought removing that option made more sense from a user privacy/security expectation point of view. That's probably correct, although such a user would likely also delete their history on exit as well, and that option already existed and still exists today, so it's still an illogical position.

Even more illogical was the decision to remove the option to clear the downloads history on exit entirely, because the functionality still exists in the browser if you're willing to go through half a dozen clicks and an extra window before closing the browser-- clicking to open the download manager, then clicking the "clear" button will do exactly what the former option did, removing the downloads from the downloads list, but not from the browser history-- but there is no functionality to automate this behavior anymore.

What put the final nail in the coffin for me, though, was the response I and many other users got when we reported the issue and put in a feature request to bring the old functionality back at least as a configurable option. Despite our presenting several valid use cases in which the option would solve problems for users as was requested by the developer(s) reading the issue-- we were told that those reasons didn't matter, didn't make sense, and would be ignored, and that if we really wanted it back, we could just use an extension to get it back (an extension which doesn't exist, and obviously none of the users who have the issue are able to create ourselves or we would have, although no guarantee we'd be able to keep up with the seemingly bi-weekly API breaks to keep it compatible /snark) or live without it.

But that attitude seems to have become almost pervasive in the Mozilla/Firefox development world, and since I can't abide that kind of blind commitment to an unreasonable ideological position and that kind of dismissive attitude of my quite legitimate needs (from my point of view), I abandoned ship and haven't looked back.

At this point, I couldn't care less what Mozilla/Firefox thinks about anything-- they have utterly lost their way and become basically what Microsoft of old was. I have better things to spend my days in this life with than that. I mourn the loss of what was once a fantastic product and community, but there's no point keeping the corpse lying around and posing it to make it seem like it's still alive. You were great once, Firefox, but now you're dead. Get back in your casket.

In addition the shooter had no way to know with any reasonable degree of certainty that the 'drone' was unarmed. It could have been carrying an explosive device - and not just a gun as was recently seen, but actual c4 explosive.

Are you kidding? You can't possibly be serious with this. Either that or you don't live in the United States.

I can de facto be at least "reasonably certain" that a drone hovering over my yard is not armed and not carrying actual C4 explosive. I can do so because there are exactly zero incidences in all of human history of an armed drone-- particularly armed with C4 explosive-- hovering over someone's yard watching their 16 year old daughter in her bathing suit. To suggest that he couldn't know with any reasonable certainty is, frankly, insane. Of course he could know that with reasonable certainty. The likelihood that he'd be wrong is about as close to zero as you can get-- well beyond five nines of confidence.

I get that there's a strong Libertarian contingent on Slashdot, but you guys really need to join reality once in a while. You can do that without selling out on any Libertarian values. In fact, it'd probably benefit the Libertarian movement immensely if people would do that. Reality can actually be observed and measured and verified and validated, so there's no need to deal in delusion or fantasy in support of liberty.

Voters quit allowing governments to get the revenues they need to do their jobs properly, so they've taken to using whatever shady means at their disposal to be able to keep doing what voters insist they do better but refuse to give them the funding for.

Please immigrate to the U.S. We need people like you here to spread genes that can think.