Slashdot Mirror

Thanks for your amazing math skills, Rush.

Sorry, I can't take credit for it. I knew about the source data from the Congressional Budget Office:

http://cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/all_tables.pdf

But, I only recently discovered that someone had plotted the data and posted it on Wikimedia.

One person in the U.S. earns a few trillion dollars a year. Everyone else earns a few thousand. The government taxes anyone earning over a million at %60. Who's paying most of the taxes? That one guy. Oh... but who SHOULD be paying most of the taxes? That one guy.

Compare this graph:

Share of US Pre-Tax Income by Income Level, 1979-2007

To this graph:

Share of Total US Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

Even you should be able to see the difference. I certainly understand your desire for the "wealthy" to pay more, but you can't claim they aren't paying their share.

Yes, the wealthy are paying for the bulk of government operations, but they should, because nobody else can.

No, the wealthy are paying for the bulk of government operations because you don't want to.

Then those that make the most will finally pull their own weight.

Those that make the most are already paying most of the taxes, and the proportion is increasing:

Share of Total Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

If you limit it to income taxes, the proportion is even higher:

Share of Individual Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

Note that the proportion of individual income taxes paid by the lowest quintile is near or at zero through this period, and the second quintile has dropped to zero. The average income tax rates for these groups is effectively negative, due to the effective of various transfer payments like the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Average Individual US Income Tax Rate by Income Level, 1979-2007

Then those that make the most will finally pull their own weight.

Those that make the most are already paying most of the taxes, and the proportion is increasing:

Share of Total Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

If you limit it to income taxes, the proportion is even higher:

Share of Individual Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

Note that the proportion of individual income taxes paid by the lowest quintile is near or at zero through this period, and the second quintile has dropped to zero. The average income tax rates for these groups is effectively negative, due to the effective of various transfer payments like the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Average Individual US Income Tax Rate by Income Level, 1979-2007

Then those that make the most will finally pull their own weight.

Those that make the most are already paying most of the taxes, and the proportion is increasing:

Share of Total Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

If you limit it to income taxes, the proportion is even higher:

Share of Individual Federal Taxes by Income Level, 1979-2007

Note that the proportion of individual income taxes paid by the lowest quintile is near or at zero through this period, and the second quintile has dropped to zero. The average income tax rates for these groups is effectively negative, due to the effective of various transfer payments like the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Average Individual US Income Tax Rate by Income Level, 1979-2007

That's a misquote, what he really said was:

You have -- people spend -- corporations and governments spend massive sums of money, you know, trying to protect their information. And look, this enlisted Army person blew through it all and dumped all that information on the Wiki Wiki Bus. So that's troubling

Hey guise, I found a picture! It runs Debian Linux!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Nokia_N900-1.jpg/788px-Nokia_N900-1.jpg

There are hundreds of reports of UFOs from pilots who flew during WWI and WWII (the so called 'Foo Fighters'). Not to mention all the reports from Naval officers of USOs, UFO reports from astronauts, pilots, and mass sightings of UFOs over major cities. Lets also not forget about the UFOs that were seen over the US Capitol in 1952. President Truman even issued a shoot down order. I guess they were all drunken hillbillies too? Any logical person has to admit that there is something out there.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Foo_fighter

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/1952_Washington_D.C._UFO_incident

There are hundreds of reports of UFOs from pilots who flew during WWI and WWII (the so called 'Foo Fighters'). Not to mention all the reports from Naval officers of USOs, UFO reports from astronauts, pilots, and mass sightings of UFOs over major cities. Lets also not forget about the UFOs that were seen over the US Capitol in 1952. President Truman even issued a shoot down order. I guess they were all drunken hillbillies too? Any logical person has to admit that there is something out there.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Foo_fighter

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/1952_Washington_D.C._UFO_incident

Living nearby a coal ash spill is as bad or worse in terms of possibility to get a cancer. Why isn't it an evacuation area?

Say hello to Error Correcting Code. And yes HDMI has that as well. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/BCH_code I swear slashdotters gets dumber and dumber for each day.

Mark V. Shaney, is that you?

Lucy, in the sky, with priceline-dot-com...

[ WARNING: do NOT listen to the clip from Mr. Tambourine Man if you value your sanity. ]

But they are tasty.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

They do not list ethnicity explicitly, but there certainly are a a number of "Caucasian" last names of hijackers listed.

Will always make me think of this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020

All that claptrap about "the free press" and "guardians of democracy" is a pile of cow dung, as anyone who lived through the last 10 years can easily tell. Read your history books and you will see that it has always been thus.

This is true only if U.S. history begins at World War II. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were labor papers which were mainly subscription supported, with local news, educational articles, and union events. There were many of these, some small, some with a broader reach. For example as late as the 1930s the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which taught people how to read and think critically, had significant influence.

The media consists almost entirely of hired shills, whose job it is to influence your opinion in exchange for money.

While this is generally true of US corporate news, here are four exceptions: Amnesty International, Christian Science Monitor, DemocracyNow, and Z Magazine.

It's the ad-supported news that increasingly becomes business-supporting news; particularly when the news media organization is owned by big business.

The 13 limit has to do with COPPA, so even if Facebook wanted to allow under 13s it can't legally without the guardian's permission.

Other websites manage, it's up to Facebook to do the right thing.

The 13 limit has to do with COPPA, so even if Facebook wanted to allow under 13s it can't legally without the guardian's permission.

HEY! Not getting out of bed is not an american tradition. It's a Russian tradition, centuries old.

I'm Swedish and this is 100% accurate, +100 Insightful. The Swedish justice system is a huge embarrassment and completely broken. Hopefully this case will shed some light on it so it can be fixed.

You also forgot to mention two other interesting facts of Claes Borgström, both of which you can find in his Wikipedia article. First of all he was the attorney of Thomas Quick, a case that is one of the biggest scandals in Swedish justice history. Basically Quick was mental and admitted to a whole bunch of murders he never committed and was sentenced guilty without a shred of evidence. Secondly Claes Borgström is an extreme left wing feminist nutjob that thinks men has a "collective guilt" against women and should pay a special tax for being men.

That said, we need to figure out a better solution for the used fuel

Personally, I think that the fourth generation nuclear plants is a big step towards a solution to that problem. Of course, further research into safety and security is always a good idea, regardless of the quality of the options.

Bradley E. Manning should get this price, he is the real hero. He put his life on the line to release this information, what did Assange risk?
Manning was held naked in a prison cell without windows for 23 hours a day, Assange won't even go to Sweden to face the charges for sex-crimes (not even after being assured he will not be sent to any other country without britains concent).

The jet engine is correct, but it burns natural gas with diesel as a backup. Jet engine gas turbine. But you're correct, they only run them when the solar wind farms and coal plants (the "cheap" energy) are already maxed out.

Well there is already work on a optionally manned helicopter for a similar reason.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kaman_K-MAX

1. it looks like the love child between a predator drone and the OV-10 bronco: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/North_American_Rockwell_OV-10_Bronco

2. any chance there will be a civilian version?

Personally I think H2 is too difficult to handle. I think after a few cars blowup, the consumers will flee. -or- If the manufacturers do manage to make safe, impervious hydrogen cars, the pricetag will be so high (~$100,000) that nobody will be able to afford it. The same flaw that plagues pure EVs.

Because conventional gas tanks never explode, gas engines never catch fire, and we're paying a fair price for perfectly safe gasoline storage and transport?

Never mind the studies showing that hydrogen is safer than gasoline in real-world situations. It's not the safety mechanisms that make the present technology cost $100,000 per car, it's the fuel cells themselves, and the cost will only come down over time because of mass-production and technology advances.

Actually, older than that... The Plato IV terminal had a touch screen in 1964... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Plato_computer#Innovation

You're overestimating the music industry; while I'm sure that no one wants a long, drawn out lawsuit, Google sees about twice as much revenue than the entire recording industry*.

I think you're missing the forest for the (tallest) trees... Sure, Google is larger than the music labels, but according to wikipedia the Music/Recording Industry is comprised of the following:

By the middle of the century records had supplanted sheet music as the largest player in the music business: in the commercial world people began speaking of "the recording industry" as a loose synonym of "the music industry". Since 2000, sales of recorded music have dropped off substantially,[1] while live music has increased in importance.[2] Four "major corporate labels" dominate recorded music — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment,[3] Warner Music Group and EMI — each of which consists of many smaller companies and labels serving different regions and markets. The live music industry is dominated by Live Nation, the largest promoter and music venue owner. Live Nation is a former subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, which is the largest owner of radio stations in the United States. Other important music industry companies include Creative Artists Agency (a management and booking company) and Apple Inc. (which runs the world's largest music store, the iTunes Store).[4]

Now let's leave Apple aside (although Apple actually has a strong interest in blocking Google here, and they make pull over 2x more money than Google). You still have to add ClearChannel and Live Nation to the list, as well as all the radio stations... I'm sure I'm leaving off some other interested players.

Furthermore, any precedent set here will highly impact the movie industry as well as television industries... which is a bigger juggernaut than music... which is why they're often called the "content companies". The content companies combined are far greater than Google or even Google + Amazon, and have consolidated their political power over the more than the past century.

There's no correlation. The sun has been getting weaker since the 1980's, while global temperature has gone up.

Compare black line here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Sunspot_Numbers.png/800px-Sunspot_Numbers.png

With this: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/dTs_60+132mons.gif

It is difficult to track users, but one indicator would be to look at the web logs of one of the most popular websites, Wikipedia. In March of 2011, 0.72% of web traffic to Wikipedia came from machines running Ubuntu. Wikipedia received roughly 30 million hits from machines running Ubuntu in March. In contrast, Wikipedia received about 3.4 billion hits from Windows machines in March, 325 million from Macs, 42 million from Androids and so on. Alexa says Wikipedia is the 8th most trafficked site in the world, and other Alexa-like sites put Wikipedia as a top site. It's one of the few (the only?) top sites to open its log analysis statistics like this.

Each and every one of those 50 cables will have to have its own hole dug

That's not the way I read it. The grandparent said "50 incoming optical lines (1 cm thick bundle)", which I took to mean that the 50 optical cables contained in a single cover. So there is only one hole needed. I've been told that the major cost is not the cable, but the digging, so I say cram as many cables as you can while you're there. Sure there will still be some shared infrastructure where those cables terminate, but it's still the best option we're looking at.

I just don't understand the pessimism towards FTH. We implemented a phone network over 60 years ago and look what it did for us. My imagination runs wild thinking of what could be done with synchronous multi-Gbps fiber connections as ubiquitous as POTS. Having fast, reliable, affordable Internet access would open the door for companies to offer services over this medium. The obvious ones are phone and TV, which would benefit from REAL competition. Businesses and individuals alike could make large datasets geographically redundant in real-time as the data rates would be similar to SATA (1.5, 3 GBPS) speeds (yea, there's still latency). High quality video streams and conferences would be the norm instead of the exception they are now (my upstream rate is 2 Mbps on a good day). Consider what happened from dial-up (56K) to what we're at now (~10Mbps/~1Mbps). Now think about the jump to 10Gbps/10Gbps or even 1Gbps/1Gbps. It's a similar sized leap and I think we can expect similar sized advances as a result. Either way, we should wire up our buildings with fiber and while we're digging throw in some extra fiber to grow.

Huh? Aren't they the second richest country in the world?

No. The EU, the US and China all have a higher GDP than Japan, according to all the commonly used sources. You can start with a list of countries by GDP or the same list using PPP GDP if you prefer.

GDP is misleading on its own, you need to use the average product per person to see how well off people actually are in that country overall. China might have a higher GDP, but it's got a lot more people than Japan.

Huh? Aren't they the second richest country in the world?

No. The EU, the US and China all have a higher GDP than Japan, according to all the commonly used sources. You can start with a list of countries by GDP or the same list using PPP GDP if you prefer.

GDP is misleading on its own, you need to use the average product per person to see how well off people actually are in that country overall. China might have a higher GDP, but it's got a lot more people than Japan.

Shall we standardize our electrical plug shapes, too? If it's schuko I'll consider it.

Just as a curiosity, why _wouldn't_ you count individual EU states separately? EU states are actual countries, you know?

That's certainly true but AFAICT the EU itself is also in the process of slowly becoming a country (arguably it already is, since December 1, 2009 when it acquired international legal personality independent of its member states). The power within it has been for decades constantly moved from inter-government negotiations between the individual members to EU-wide shared institutions (e.g. the European Commission and the Parliament).

Huh? Aren't they the second richest country in the world?

No. The EU, the US and China all have a higher GDP than Japan, according to all the commonly used sources. You can start with a list of countries by GDP or the same list using PPP GDP if you prefer.

Huh? Aren't they the second richest country in the world?

No. The EU, the US and China all have a higher GDP than Japan, according to all the commonly used sources. You can start with a list of countries by GDP or the same list using PPP GDP if you prefer.

The operative word in your statement is "yet". Before 9/11, no one had committed large scale murder with airplanes. There's always a first time for everything and when a lot of the people looking at this immediately conclude "assassination tool" you bet there will be others that actually will use it like that.

Bruce Schneier holds an annual contest for best movie plot threat. You should submit your entry.

I think fire would leave carbon on the instruments. Boiling at atmospheric pressure is insufficient (100 C is insufficient for sterilization).

From Wikipedia: "To achieve sterility, a holding time of at least 15 minutes at 121 C (250 F) or 3 minutes at 134 C (273 F) is required."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sterilization_(microbiology)

The numbers vary by method, but I think the principle remains. Many pathogens have spore forms which are incredibly heat resistant.

Or the interactive fiction game A Mind Forever Voyaging

They'll do https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kaizen

I didnt see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Another_World_(video_game) which is one of the few games that really stunned me growing up (on amiga). I still remember the alien voices, animations and ambiance were fantastic.
Gameplay was pretty harsh.
I dont think anything came close until half life, atleast considering overall art direction.

Who is going to play that? Shit, I always balk a bit at $60 for a game, but, that's at least somewhat reasonable. I don't have 100 million burning a hole in my pocket though, good luck to anyone who picks up that title. Not going to be massively multiplayer with a cost like that!

They have inside news that the US dollar is going to go like this. You will see 100 million dollars as good value.

You should try reading the conversation before you get all indignant like I insulted your mom.

Classy start.

The assertion made was that "open platforms" attract more developers because developers want to work on platforms they can tinker with. Axiomatic to this is the notion that, where an "open platform" exists, it will attract developers away because those devs will eschew closed platforms where they cannot tinker.

You need to understand the difference between an axiom and a corollary.

In either case, the only way that FOSS development could draw resources away from other places is if developers were not capable of working on multiple platforms, which is demonstrably not the case, especially with FOSS, whose open source makes porting to other platforms easier.

Which was my fucking point, as you'll recall.

Do you really mean to suggest that all the developers in the FOSS world are so tied up with Expose (^H^H sorry, Compiz), "The Web," and NoSQL db's that there has literally been no manpower available to produce games, desktop software, mobile apps, and a host of other things which Linux lacks?

No, that's your own straw man. I prefer my straw men to look more like this:

"Your inability to make a logically coherent argument renders any attempt at disputation and persuasion ineffective and pointless. May I instead suggest you eat donkey poo?"

See, mine also refuses to engage honestly with the interlocutor, but at least it has some style.

In any case, my suggestion was that revolutionary progress in three major areas of technological development kind of negates your claim that 'Linux software' is derivative and, by implication, second-rate.

Have some donkey poo.

And if so, and if the "openness" argument put forth by the GGP is correct, how come all of those things exist on closed platforms in far greater numbers than they do on open platforms?

Because of -gasp- horses for courses. Some things are easier to build and maintain using FOSS approaches, some just haven't seized anyone's attention yet, and some are genuinely easier to build and maintain in a proprietary setting.

If history is any guide, these last are in the minority. Commodification is a powerful force in software, and commodification usually implies FOSS - or at least an open environment.

I remember IEF, later Cool:Gen, that took flowcharts and generated the most hideous and confusing COBOL code I've ever seen. And considering how many godawful COBOL systems I've worked on I was impressed and horrified at the same time.

Just thought I would chime in with the term you seem to be searching for wrt. these flexibility discussions: tax incidence

Perhaps you were already familiar, but many are not and I believe it is a missing, yet salient aspect to many of these discussions. Supply flexibility and demand flexibility are the key factors in determining who pays any given tax.

You're missing the joke: Matt Welsh is a Linux guy. The quote was presumably said ironically.

The theory goes that in the very early universe, temperatures and pressures were so high that even small fluctuations in the density of matter would have resulted in local regions becoming dense enough to collapse into black holes. The time period considered here is long before any nucleosynthesis occurred: in fact temperatures and pressures were so high in this period that the strong nuclear force is not yet able to confine quarks into hadrons.

These tiny primordial black holes would not, contrary to popular conception, simply suck in everything around them. A typical black hole of this type would have a mass of about a billion tons (about the mass of a mid-sized asteroid), and have an event horizon smaller than the diameter of a proton. With mass that low its gravity would be correspondingly low and its interaction with normal matter very feeble. They should, however, be emitting large amounts of gamma rays if the theory of Hawking radiation is correct, and that might be one way that they'd be detected.

The hands-down best firewall for OS X (and other BSDs) is ipfw.

Nonsense, the best firewall for other BSDs is pf. Apparently it's also going to be the best firewall in OS X 10.7.

Article II - The Executive Branch

Section 1 - The President

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;"

Have there been any court rulings on the definition of "natural born Citizen"? Is "Chris Johnson" is a "natural born" child of American citizens - is not Chris a Citizen of the United States regardless of the location of their birth? If your child is unexpectedly born while you are vacationing abroad does that or does that not limit their ability to become president?

(Actually, when parsing the above clause, it seems as though only people who were alive "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" would be eligible - which sort of messes up everyone alive today. Is that comma after "States" correct?)

Anyhow, to answer some of my own questions, Wikipedia seems to have a bit of information on it, but it is not conclusive. Most of the discussion seem to be trying to decide the status of people born in the USA: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Natural_Born_Citizen_Clause

There is this bit:

The requirements for citizenship, and its definition in American statute law, have changed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Congress first recognized the citizenship of children born to U.S. parents overseas on March 26, 1790, stating that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."[21]

Interestingly, it seems that McCain's citizenship status derives from his parentage rather than the location of his birth (on a US military base) since according to the Wikipedia article above:

Regarding people born at U.S. military bases in foreign countries, current U.S. State Department policy, as codified in the department's Foreign Affairs Manual, reads:

        Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.[29]

So it seems that if McCain is eligible, so is "Chris". And even if Obama was born outside of the US, as the child of a US mother, he would seem to be as eligible as McCain - unless it is the father that is important. Has McCain had a paternity test? The political difference between two situations couldn't have anything to do with their visible skin colour, could it?