OTOH, you seem to not be able to understand anything about taxes or why the fairtax isn't fair and couldn't work.
the fairtax is supported by two types of people: People who don't understand how the tax system works and people who want to suck up to those people. I'm not saying I am in favor of it but there is no reason it couldnt work, all it is is a high sales tax. We have sales tax on the state level and it works just fine, most people dont really complain about it too much.
Besides the obvious fact that it would be very hard to police (esp. the pr0n) this would lead to more piracy. Only legitimate outlets would be effected. And how is this any different from the fair tax that you advocate in your signature?
I dont think that anyone disputes that taxes are necessary for most of the things you just listed. But 20k out of a 50k paycheck is a hell of a lot. You dont need that kind of money from every working American to provide the kind of services that the government is supposed to provide.
Also, I take issue with your economics. The paycheck your employer writes you is based on what they think your market value is. (ie a combination of what you could get working elsewhere and what it would cost to hire someone similarly qualified for your job) Raising or lowering taxes doesnt change your market value. Lowering taxes doesnt suddenly mean that other people are going to be available at 30k a year and the boss wont have to pay you 50k anymore.
Becuase there are deficits. The only way to pay for them is to increase taxes. Or the government could just not spend so much. I mean really, the government (at all levels state/municipal/federal) wastes a phenomenal amount of money. We shouldnt be giving them more every time they go overbudget.
I keep hearing people say things like "course X used to be in C++ and now its in java and thats bad". What exactly is it that is so great about C++ for learning fundamentals that you dont get in java? The only thing I can think of is understanding pointers and how memory is laid out. But that really falls outside the scope of algorithms and data structures which is what intro level CS is really all about.
No joke! Scanning msn.com right now the headline is 'is she divorced or just single, why it matters'....What gutter demographic are they looking for with this? Guys who date and like to read articles about things that they do. Dont worry, you would never see something along these lines on a website like slashdot.:)
Incidentally, one of the headlines on yahoo right now is "Find inexpensive date ideas" so its not like they are really all that different.
$X worth of MS shares is just as good as $X. If you dont want to hold MS shares you can just sell them the instant you get them, MS shares are highly liquid like most large cap stocks. Really the better question would be "Is yahoo worth $X?". Indicators are that most people who currently hold yahoo stock seem to think thats a good price to sell for, but we will find out for certain if it goes to a proxy battle.
The founders and management of Yahoo dont own the company, it isnt their decision nor should it be. The founders made the decision that they wanted to go public and basically sell the company to others. Sure, they built it from ashes, but they made the decision to sell it. (for quite a bit of money too)
What is becoming apparant now is that they really just wanted all the money they got from selling the company to the general public, they didnt actually want other people to be the real owners of the company. You cant have your cake and eat it too, if you sell controlling shares of your company you have to accept that you cant just do whatever you want to with it, you have an obligation to act in the best interests of the shareholders. (the real owners of the company) If the founder of a company cant accept that he should just keep his company private.
Well yes, if hot shoes came up every half hour and you won 100% of the time when a shoe was hot blackjack would be pretty damn profitable and everyone would be betting 10 thousand dollars a hand.:) But that isnt the case, thats the movie/book fantasyland.
1) A hot shoe isnt some automatic thing that will happen as soon as you get more than halfway through the deck. Its actually pretty unlikely to have the cards distributed in that manner. You will need to play a LOT more than 6 rounds to get to it.
2) You assume that the player will win 100% of the time when betting a thousand dollars with a hot shoe. Thats nuts. More like 50.5%. You have to play thousands of hands with a 1% advantage in order for it to be noticable.
3) In order to play the thousands of hands necessary for point 2 you have to wait through hundreds of hands on point one. Multiply hundreds by thousands you get hundreds of hours. And this is the ideal scenario, in practice it will likely be worse.
That doesnt prove discrimination. It could be (and probably is in my view) the case that richer families are able to do a better job of raising their children and giving them a good education as the grow up. In this case MIT wouldnt be discriminating, they would just be taking the best students available to them. Unless you consider accepting the best qualified students to be discriminatory.
And no, I didnt go to MIT and I grew up in a family that was in the "poor" 75%. (if you can call under 60k poor, Americans are so wealthy they seem to develop strange ideas about what economic hardship is like)
I agree with 90% of what you just said except for one part:
But, it's a lot more complicated than just counting +1 / -1 and then betting more when the count is good, at least if you want to be GOOD at card counting. On top of just betting more, when you have good information about what cards are left, that also changes the 'right' actions in certain situations. For example, some hands that you always hit if you don't know what's in the chute may become hands you double-down instead. Some surrenders become stands. Some stands become hits. And looking at the table of 'perfect' blackjack strategy, the counts at which the 'right' move changes are different for each box. At a trivial level, instead of memorizing that you hit a 12 against a dealer's 3, you'd instead have to know that you hit a 12 against a dealers 3 when the count is less than (Whatever). You are correct that you can gain a little bit of an advantage by adding a few more rules to basic strategy but I dont think that this makes it substantially harder. Memorizing that you hit a 12 on a dealers 3 when the count is less than X isnt much more difficult than the base case where you arent counting. Even if you are card counting you should never be doing math beyond basic arithmatic at the table. You dont need to understand all the math behind it to use basic strategy. You also dont need to understand all the math behind card counting to follow a slightly larger set of rules while card counting.
That may make things slightly more difficult to detect but not a lot. It is a REALLY well known strategy (most people reading slashdot have heard of it and this isnt even a gambling related website). One big player moving tables a lot and throwing down thousands of dollars a hand will attract a lot of attention. It may not be as obvious but its not easy to grind away for the hundreds of hours it takes to come ahead in blackjack without getting caught at it either. Casinos know to watch for it.
I agree that if done correctly that is possible, but:
1) Peeking at cards can get you thrown in jail, unlike card counting. (there is some legalese I dont totally understand about "actively" versus "passively" attempting to view the card, but with what you are suggesting I am pretty sure its considered actively trying to peek at cards)
2) Trying to cut to a certain card X number of cards in is super hard even with practice (believe me, as a practitioner of lame card tricks I have practiced):) and one other guy at your table hitting/staying at the wrong time can easily throw things off even if you were able to perfectly cut to card number 52 or whatever number. I believe this is one of those things where the theoretical profitability is much higher than the actual profitability due to the difficulty of actually pulling it off.
3) I doubt that any casino these days is going to have the dealers working in such a way that allows anyone to see the bottom card. (of course you did mention this alraedy):)
Card counting is waaayyyyy overhyped in terms of effectiveness and profitibility. You (or your teammate if you are sneaky) have to sit there for a long time losing money waiting for a 'hot' shoe. A hot shoe really isnt all that hot either, think 51% in favor of the player. Then you have to bet huge in order to make up for all the time you sat there losing money. Do the math here for just one second, a 1% player advantage is about 10 dollars a hand winnings on average with a thousand dollar bet. In addition to all that hot shoes wont last for very long either, so dont go thinking "hey 10 bucks a hand for a few hours sounds pretty good to me". You will be doing good just to make up for all the hands your teammates spent losing money while you waited for a hot shoe.
Even these famous teams that everyone talks about werent really all that profitable. Sure, millions of dollars may sound like a lot but thats divided up among dozens of team members over the course of several years. It wasnt 5 guys over a few weekends like in the movie 21. Do the division a few times and it quickly becomes apparant that it really isnt worth it even if you discount the fact that you are risking a large sum of money in the endeavor. If you are going to get a lot of dedicated people together and put lots of money at risk you can do a hell of a lot better than playing blackjack.
It may make for good books, movies, etc. but if card counting was really all that effective vegas would be losing money to a brand new team every week. There is a reason everyone isnt doing it and its not because adding one for a face card and subtracting one for a low card requires 1337 math skills.
How often have slashdotters screamed about how IE renders html that doesnt conform to standards? (I do understand the argument here, it creates a situation where broken html will render on IE but not on other browsers thus making it difficult for other browsers to compete) And now they are upset because it doesnt handle this situation when it doesnt conform correctly? Either they are breaking standards or they have crappy software that doesnt "fail gracefully", you cant have it both ways.
You will have to forgive me if I am looking for a better source than "anonymous guy on slashdot who would never make up untrue stuff about the BSA". Dont you think that if it were actually true there would be a credibal source out there? And if something that outragous were actually true dont you think that a reputable news organization of some kind would have brought it up?
Do you have a source for that claim? Their website says they only want to see a valid license. There are a million reasons you could have a valid license that you got for free. Everyone keeps saying that and modding me down, but I really dont think its true.
If you're accused you must be guilty. Yeah, that's a safe assumption. I am not saying "guilty until proven innocent" or anything like that.
My point is that if someone is tipping off the BSA then SOMEONE at your company realises that you are not in compliance. If that is the case then it is very highly probable that you are deliberately violating the license. ie its not a case of bad bookkeeping. If it was an innocent error and noone realised that licenses were being violated then noone would have been tipping off the BSA.
OK, I will give you the benefit of the doubt since everyone here is agreeing with you and modding me down. Do you have a source for this? The BSA's website claims all they want is licenses. Do you have a source showing that they expect to see receipts for every software product you use?
I will apologize if I am wrong, but I really doubt that I am. Everything I have ever heard in the past and everything I could find from looking around just now indicated that they have no bizarre "save your receipts" requirement. They just want to see licenses.
Everyone here is claiming this and modding me down, but I cannot find any source that indicates that this is the case. The BSA's website pretty explicitly states that they just want licenses. Do you have a source that indicates that they want purchase orders/receipts/whatever from X number of years ago?
OK, I went through all the "resources for IT managers" and "resources for employers" that they had on their website and I couldnt find anything about needing to save receipts. I must say that I really truly doubt that a receipt is needed. There are a million legitimate reasons you could obtain a license for free. They provide several checklists to make sure you are compliant and nowhere on there does it say you must retain all receipts indefinintly.
Everyone here is telling me I am wrong and modding me down, but I just dont see where this is a requirement. I do agree that IF it is a requirement then yes, it is ridiculous.
If I am wrong, I will be happy to apologize here, but everything that I can find seems to indicate that saving receipts is not actually a requirement. (and I spent way more time looking thant I really should have on this):)
Of course I realise that anonymous means they arent disclosing it. My point is that you are just speculating, I doubt that there is any more of a problem here than there is in any other area where people are anonymously pointing fingers. By the same token I could phone in an anonymous tip to the FBI that my neighbor is growing drugs, does the fact that someone could theoretically make a false accusation mean that this is a bad idea?
You have got to be kidding. Do you really think that the BSA is cross referencing every receipt with every software retailer? Especially when they give out unique keys that are extremely easy to check?
Slashdot Mirror
the fairtax is supported by two types of people:
People who don't understand how the tax system works and people who want to suck up to those people. I'm not saying I am in favor of it but there is no reason it couldnt work, all it is is a high sales tax. We have sales tax on the state level and it works just fine, most people dont really complain about it too much.
I dont think that anyone disputes that taxes are necessary for most of the things you just listed. But 20k out of a 50k paycheck is a hell of a lot. You dont need that kind of money from every working American to provide the kind of services that the government is supposed to provide.
Also, I take issue with your economics. The paycheck your employer writes you is based on what they think your market value is. (ie a combination of what you could get working elsewhere and what it would cost to hire someone similarly qualified for your job) Raising or lowering taxes doesnt change your market value. Lowering taxes doesnt suddenly mean that other people are going to be available at 30k a year and the boss wont have to pay you 50k anymore.
I keep hearing people say things like "course X used to be in C++ and now its in java and thats bad". What exactly is it that is so great about C++ for learning fundamentals that you dont get in java? The only thing I can think of is understanding pointers and how memory is laid out. But that really falls outside the scope of algorithms and data structures which is what intro level CS is really all about.
Incidentally, one of the headlines on yahoo right now is "Find inexpensive date ideas" so its not like they are really all that different.
$X worth of MS shares is just as good as $X. If you dont want to hold MS shares you can just sell them the instant you get them, MS shares are highly liquid like most large cap stocks. Really the better question would be "Is yahoo worth $X?". Indicators are that most people who currently hold yahoo stock seem to think thats a good price to sell for, but we will find out for certain if it goes to a proxy battle.
The founders and management of Yahoo dont own the company, it isnt their decision nor should it be. The founders made the decision that they wanted to go public and basically sell the company to others. Sure, they built it from ashes, but they made the decision to sell it. (for quite a bit of money too)
What is becoming apparant now is that they really just wanted all the money they got from selling the company to the general public, they didnt actually want other people to be the real owners of the company. You cant have your cake and eat it too, if you sell controlling shares of your company you have to accept that you cant just do whatever you want to with it, you have an obligation to act in the best interests of the shareholders. (the real owners of the company) If the founder of a company cant accept that he should just keep his company private.
Well yes, if hot shoes came up every half hour and you won 100% of the time when a shoe was hot blackjack would be pretty damn profitable and everyone would be betting 10 thousand dollars a hand. :) But that isnt the case, thats the movie/book fantasyland.
1) A hot shoe isnt some automatic thing that will happen as soon as you get more than halfway through the deck. Its actually pretty unlikely to have the cards distributed in that manner. You will need to play a LOT more than 6 rounds to get to it.
2) You assume that the player will win 100% of the time when betting a thousand dollars with a hot shoe. Thats nuts. More like 50.5%. You have to play thousands of hands with a 1% advantage in order for it to be noticable.
3) In order to play the thousands of hands necessary for point 2 you have to wait through hundreds of hands on point one. Multiply hundreds by thousands you get hundreds of hours. And this is the ideal scenario, in practice it will likely be worse.
Considering most of the movie is shot inside of Vegas casinos, I would say that its a safe bet they are loving the publicity.
That doesnt prove discrimination. It could be (and probably is in my view) the case that richer families are able to do a better job of raising their children and giving them a good education as the grow up. In this case MIT wouldnt be discriminating, they would just be taking the best students available to them. Unless you consider accepting the best qualified students to be discriminatory.
And no, I didnt go to MIT and I grew up in a family that was in the "poor" 75%. (if you can call under 60k poor, Americans are so wealthy they seem to develop strange ideas about what economic hardship is like)
That may make things slightly more difficult to detect but not a lot. It is a REALLY well known strategy (most people reading slashdot have heard of it and this isnt even a gambling related website). One big player moving tables a lot and throwing down thousands of dollars a hand will attract a lot of attention. It may not be as obvious but its not easy to grind away for the hundreds of hours it takes to come ahead in blackjack without getting caught at it either. Casinos know to watch for it.
I agree that if done correctly that is possible, but:
:) and one other guy at your table hitting/staying at the wrong time can easily throw things off even if you were able to perfectly cut to card number 52 or whatever number. I believe this is one of those things where the theoretical profitability is much higher than the actual profitability due to the difficulty of actually pulling it off.
:)
1) Peeking at cards can get you thrown in jail, unlike card counting. (there is some legalese I dont totally understand about "actively" versus "passively" attempting to view the card, but with what you are suggesting I am pretty sure its considered actively trying to peek at cards)
2) Trying to cut to a certain card X number of cards in is super hard even with practice (believe me, as a practitioner of lame card tricks I have practiced)
3) I doubt that any casino these days is going to have the dealers working in such a way that allows anyone to see the bottom card. (of course you did mention this alraedy)
Card counting is waaayyyyy overhyped in terms of effectiveness and profitibility. You (or your teammate if you are sneaky) have to sit there for a long time losing money waiting for a 'hot' shoe. A hot shoe really isnt all that hot either, think 51% in favor of the player. Then you have to bet huge in order to make up for all the time you sat there losing money. Do the math here for just one second, a 1% player advantage is about 10 dollars a hand winnings on average with a thousand dollar bet. In addition to all that hot shoes wont last for very long either, so dont go thinking "hey 10 bucks a hand for a few hours sounds pretty good to me". You will be doing good just to make up for all the hands your teammates spent losing money while you waited for a hot shoe.
Even these famous teams that everyone talks about werent really all that profitable. Sure, millions of dollars may sound like a lot but thats divided up among dozens of team members over the course of several years. It wasnt 5 guys over a few weekends like in the movie 21. Do the division a few times and it quickly becomes apparant that it really isnt worth it even if you discount the fact that you are risking a large sum of money in the endeavor. If you are going to get a lot of dedicated people together and put lots of money at risk you can do a hell of a lot better than playing blackjack.
It may make for good books, movies, etc. but if card counting was really all that effective vegas would be losing money to a brand new team every week. There is a reason everyone isnt doing it and its not because adding one for a face card and subtracting one for a low card requires 1337 math skills.
How often have slashdotters screamed about how IE renders html that doesnt conform to standards? (I do understand the argument here, it creates a situation where broken html will render on IE but not on other browsers thus making it difficult for other browsers to compete) And now they are upset because it doesnt handle this situation when it doesnt conform correctly? Either they are breaking standards or they have crappy software that doesnt "fail gracefully", you cant have it both ways.
You will have to forgive me if I am looking for a better source than "anonymous guy on slashdot who would never make up untrue stuff about the BSA". Dont you think that if it were actually true there would be a credibal source out there? And if something that outragous were actually true dont you think that a reputable news organization of some kind would have brought it up?
Do you have a source for that claim? Their website says they only want to see a valid license. There are a million reasons you could have a valid license that you got for free. Everyone keeps saying that and modding me down, but I really dont think its true.
My point is that if someone is tipping off the BSA then SOMEONE at your company realises that you are not in compliance. If that is the case then it is very highly probable that you are deliberately violating the license. ie its not a case of bad bookkeeping. If it was an innocent error and noone realised that licenses were being violated then noone would have been tipping off the BSA.
OK, I will give you the benefit of the doubt since everyone here is agreeing with you and modding me down. Do you have a source for this? The BSA's website claims all they want is licenses. Do you have a source showing that they expect to see receipts for every software product you use?
I will apologize if I am wrong, but I really doubt that I am. Everything I have ever heard in the past and everything I could find from looking around just now indicated that they have no bizarre "save your receipts" requirement. They just want to see licenses.
Everyone here is claiming this and modding me down, but I cannot find any source that indicates that this is the case. The BSA's website pretty explicitly states that they just want licenses. Do you have a source that indicates that they want purchase orders/receipts/whatever from X number of years ago?
OK, I went through all the "resources for IT managers" and "resources for employers" that they had on their website and I couldnt find anything about needing to save receipts. I must say that I really truly doubt that a receipt is needed. There are a million legitimate reasons you could obtain a license for free. They provide several checklists to make sure you are compliant and nowhere on there does it say you must retain all receipts indefinintly.
:)
Everyone here is telling me I am wrong and modding me down, but I just dont see where this is a requirement. I do agree that IF it is a requirement then yes, it is ridiculous.
The BSA's website seems to indicate that they are looking only for licenses. (ie unique product keys) http://www.bsa.org/country/Tools%20and%20Resources/For%20IT%20Managers.aspx
If I am wrong, I will be happy to apologize here, but everything that I can find seems to indicate that saving receipts is not actually a requirement. (and I spent way more time looking thant I really should have on this)
Of course I realise that anonymous means they arent disclosing it. My point is that you are just speculating, I doubt that there is any more of a problem here than there is in any other area where people are anonymously pointing fingers. By the same token I could phone in an anonymous tip to the FBI that my neighbor is growing drugs, does the fact that someone could theoretically make a false accusation mean that this is a bad idea?
Can you point to a single instance where someone collected a bounty for pointing the finger at people who they didnt know were infringing?
You have got to be kidding. Do you really think that the BSA is cross referencing every receipt with every software retailer? Especially when they give out unique keys that are extremely easy to check?