You're missing out on the point: Linking to the article from slashdot improves the pagerank score of said article, making the claim that "147 corporations control the global economy" more truthy for the Mother Jones set.
You're really going to go there? A small number of political action committees that are tightly regulated by the FEC makes us more lied-to and manipulated than, say, North Korea? Really!?!
Dell is the same way with the Streak 5. They have a kernel dump from an old version of Froyo from last year and their build instructions are shitty to the point of uselessness (download the android source from Qualcomm? Good thing there's only ever been one version...).
One of the problems that a flat tax solves is "moral hazard". People who don't feel any pain continually vote themselves larger and larger shares of the treasury with calls to pass the cost on to the "rich" (conveniently defined as someone who makes more than they do*)
As to the regressive nature of such a tax, it's only regressive in the absence of a social safety net. If the social safety net includes food assistance, housing assistance, transportation assistance and medical care then much of what's left over isn't really for necessities.
*You can see this in action whenever the topic of how much money is returned to states out of the amount they pay in federal taxation. All of a sudden people who are normally for progressive taxation get all worked up about not getting back all their federal tax dollars.
You're the pot calling the kettle black. The numbers you cite are _marginal_ rates and were paid by almost no-one (hence the AMT). Check the historical _effective_ rates and you'll see that the percentages paid by the top quintile has been essentially flat regardless of marginal rates.
Don't kid yourself. Oracle wants Solaris, while it would have represented a major competitor for that pile of crap known as AIX. Sure, IBM might have extracted ZFS and Dtrace before throwing the husk into a dumpster, but it would be nothing like the Solaris we enjoy today.
My employer bought a license for a Sun product that was dumped in favor of the Oracle version (Java CAPS). JCAPS is barely on life support @ Oracle -- they're committed to bug fixes and that's it. There will be no additional features, and the really cool stuff, like Fuji, that was promised "real soon now" is gone along with the talent that worked on it. As a result, we've foregone support and saved about $30k/year.
On the other hand, ForgeRock has taken the core of JCAPS (OpenESB) and is working on delivering the stuff that Sun had previously committed to.
Meanwhile, effective tax rates have been essentially flat over the same time period. If you really want to pick nits, effective tax rates for the top quartile are now actually higher than they were 30 years ago.
So if I D/L a bunch of stuff via BT, can I provide some gnuplot graphs that show that (honest!) I was just downloading it in an attempt to determine malware infection rates as a get-out-of-jail-free card?
Actually, it has. Or, at least, portions of it have. The portions that allow adult children to stay on their parent's plan until 26
and (the real killer as far as premiums go), removal of lifetime limits on expenditures.
Sun had two issues: The first was that their main profit center (banking) was undergoing a decline in business.
That would have been survivable had it not been for an ill-timed loan: They borrowed a bunch of expensive money and
then couldn't cover the notes as they came due. Had they borrowed the money earlier or later, or maybe even not borrowed so much,
then they could have stood the losses.
At this point, I think Larry and Sergei are kicking themselves that they didn't shake the $7B out of their couch to buy
Sun. They could have scooped up all that sweet software engineering talent and then spun off the hardware to Fujitsu, IBM, Dell, or even Oracle and made back at least half of the $7B purchase price...
Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release.
I tried, but my 15" Aluminum Powerbook wouldn't accept the installer disk. Something about G4 vs. Intel???
I used this, and it's a bit hinky. It would work, and then require the camera to be unplugged and plugged back in. It was also very picky about which
camera it would work with. I've got a box full of webcams that can be made to work with Linux, but it only liked one or two of them.
The perception that the US manufacturing sector is anemic, in decline, or that it no longer manufactures anything is false.
The United States is the world's largest manufacturer, with a 2007 industrial output of US$2.69 trillion. In 2008, its manufacturing output was greater than that of the manufacturing output of China, India, and Brazil combined, despite manufacturing being a very small portion of the entire US economy as compared to most other countries.
If you still need 1.4 or 1.5, you can get support but it's going to cost you.
I've got an install of JDK 6u11 in parallel with newer versions because of a Swing change that broke
some Sun/NetBeans tooling.
IIRC, 6u17 was another game changer.
You really think used bookstores offer "loss-leader" prices? They're buying these books at $.50 or a $1 and selling them at $3-5.
The only time they mark the prices down to what they paid is when the stuff is clogging up the shelves and not moving (e.g. 50 copies of "It Takes A Hero").
Right, because every time I go to the used bookstore, there's a bouncer out front with some velvet ropes, and the fire department and/or code enforcement show
up every 20 minutes to make sure that the store isn't violating it's occupancy limit.
There's a local chain of used bookstores here called "Bookmans" that has lounge chairs, a coffee shop, and free WiFi. Somehow, if they're not worried about people lounging,
there's probably no point in you worrying about it.
IME, the only thing that would elevate this guy to "douchebag" is if he's pulling 900 books off the shelf and then leaving them scattered all over the store.
I thought the idea of thrift stores was to dell stuff inexpensively so people with limited means could afford to get them?
That's part of it. Another part of it is to sell stuff to raise money to pay for things that you don't get as donations (e.g. food, diapers, shelter). A third part is to create an environment where people who need job training and/or low-impact employment can get back on their feet (think: trainable mentally handicapped or people reentering the workforce from incarceration). If the employees drop a donated glass, or shoplifts a donated CD, the store isn't out the wholesale value, they're out the pennies that collection cost them.
My standard of living is worse than my Grandfather's. My Grandpa had an eighth grade education, 5 kids, a stay at home wife, middle class home, a car, and had no problem paying the bills. He retired with a great pension and never had to worry about eating, keeping the house, and he still gave out $10,000 a pop to his kids. My Dad supported 3 kids, a house, two cars on one salary. You can't do that anymore.
That American dream is dead, dead, dead.
If we go by averages, your grandfather ate less meat, ate out less, lived in a house that's maybe half the size of the average American house, and stood a fair chance of dying in even a moderate car accident.
Seriously, if you want to eat 1/3rd less red meat than average, hardly ever eat out, live in a 900 square foot house, buy the cheapest cars that Hyundai sells, and get your internet access from the public library, there's no problem with the median US household income.
What's really changed is that we have vastly over-inflated notions of what an appropriate middle-class lifestyle is, we don't have the benefit of a one-time set of circumstances from the end of WW2, and we no longer artificially restrict the pool of employees by sex and race.
For the few dollars they lose in game sales to folks buying a PS3 to build a cluster, they get back 10 or 100 times as much in free publicity about how awesome
the PS3 is. If the XBOX 360 is so XOBX awesome, where's their cluster? (ASCI Red ring of Death?)
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing out on the point: Linking to the article from slashdot improves the pagerank score of said article, making the claim that "147 corporations control the global economy" more truthy for the Mother Jones set.
You're really going to go there? A small number of political action committees that are tightly regulated by the FEC makes us more lied-to and manipulated than, say, North Korea? Really!?!
Dell is the same way with the Streak 5. They have a kernel dump from an old version of Froyo from last year and their build instructions are shitty to the point of uselessness (download the android source from Qualcomm? Good thing there's only ever been one version...).
One of the problems that a flat tax solves is "moral hazard". People who don't feel any pain continually vote themselves larger and larger shares of the treasury with calls to pass the cost on to the "rich" (conveniently defined as someone who makes more than they do*) As to the regressive nature of such a tax, it's only regressive in the absence of a social safety net. If the social safety net includes food assistance, housing assistance, transportation assistance and medical care then much of what's left over isn't really for necessities. *You can see this in action whenever the topic of how much money is returned to states out of the amount they pay in federal taxation. All of a sudden people who are normally for progressive taxation get all worked up about not getting back all their federal tax dollars.
You're the pot calling the kettle black. The numbers you cite are _marginal_ rates and were paid by almost no-one (hence the AMT). Check the historical _effective_ rates and you'll see that the percentages paid by the top quintile has been essentially flat regardless of marginal rates.
What about OpenCV?
http://blog.damiles.com/?p=292
The gods of our legends were there:
Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the magician, the guy who invented Coca Cola. Also, Jane Fonda was there.
Oops -- I thought we were talking about the lost city of Atlanta.
Don't kid yourself. Oracle wants Solaris, while it would have represented a major competitor for that pile of crap known as AIX. Sure, IBM might have extracted ZFS and Dtrace before throwing the husk into a dumpster, but it would be nothing like the Solaris we enjoy today.
My employer bought a license for a Sun product that was dumped in favor of the Oracle version (Java CAPS). JCAPS is barely on life support @ Oracle -- they're committed to bug fixes and that's it. There will be no additional features, and the really cool stuff, like Fuji, that was promised "real soon now" is gone along with the talent that worked on it. As a result, we've foregone support and saved about $30k/year.
On the other hand, ForgeRock has taken the core of JCAPS (OpenESB) and is working on delivering the stuff that Sun had previously committed to.
Meanwhile, effective tax rates have been essentially flat over the same time period. If you really want to pick nits, effective tax rates for the top quartile are now actually higher than they were 30 years ago.
So if I D/L a bunch of stuff via BT, can I provide some gnuplot graphs that show that (honest!) I was just downloading it in an attempt to determine malware infection rates as a get-out-of-jail-free card?
Actually, it has. Or, at least, portions of it have. The portions that allow adult children to stay on their parent's plan until 26 and (the real killer as far as premiums go), removal of lifetime limits on expenditures.
They've already laid out their cards on MySQL: The cost of support for MySQL just doubled this week.
You're going outside the narrative, which is supposed to be "The Texas governor holds almost no power compared to the Lt. Governor."
Sun had two issues: The first was that their main profit center (banking) was undergoing a decline in business. That would have been survivable had it not been for an ill-timed loan: They borrowed a bunch of expensive money and then couldn't cover the notes as they came due. Had they borrowed the money earlier or later, or maybe even not borrowed so much, then they could have stood the losses. At this point, I think Larry and Sergei are kicking themselves that they didn't shake the $7B out of their couch to buy Sun. They could have scooped up all that sweet software engineering talent and then spun off the hardware to Fujitsu, IBM, Dell, or even Oracle and made back at least half of the $7B purchase price...
Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release. I tried, but my 15" Aluminum Powerbook wouldn't accept the installer disk. Something about G4 vs. Intel???
I used this, and it's a bit hinky. It would work, and then require the camera to be unplugged and plugged back in. It was also very picky about which camera it would work with. I've got a box full of webcams that can be made to work with Linux, but it only liked one or two of them.
The perception that the US manufacturing sector is anemic, in decline, or that it no longer manufactures anything is false.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104319/g20-manufacturing-output-capita
If you still need 1.4 or 1.5, you can get support but it's going to cost you. I've got an install of JDK 6u11 in parallel with newer versions because of a Swing change that broke some Sun/NetBeans tooling. IIRC, 6u17 was another game changer.
You really think used bookstores offer "loss-leader" prices? They're buying these books at $.50 or a $1 and selling them at $3-5. The only time they mark the prices down to what they paid is when the stuff is clogging up the shelves and not moving (e.g. 50 copies of "It Takes A Hero").
Right, because every time I go to the used bookstore, there's a bouncer out front with some velvet ropes, and the fire department and/or code enforcement show up every 20 minutes to make sure that the store isn't violating it's occupancy limit. There's a local chain of used bookstores here called "Bookmans" that has lounge chairs, a coffee shop, and free WiFi. Somehow, if they're not worried about people lounging, there's probably no point in you worrying about it. IME, the only thing that would elevate this guy to "douchebag" is if he's pulling 900 books off the shelf and then leaving them scattered all over the store.
I thought the idea of thrift stores was to dell stuff inexpensively so people with limited means could afford to get them?
That's part of it. Another part of it is to sell stuff to raise money to pay for things that you don't get as donations (e.g. food, diapers, shelter). A third part is to create
an environment where people who need job training and/or low-impact employment can get back on their feet (think: trainable mentally handicapped or people reentering the workforce from incarceration). If the employees drop a donated glass, or shoplifts a donated CD, the store isn't out the wholesale value, they're out the pennies that collection cost them.
If we go by averages, your grandfather ate less meat, ate out less, lived in a house that's maybe half the size of the average American house, and stood a fair chance of dying in even a moderate car accident. Seriously, if you want to eat 1/3rd less red meat than average, hardly ever eat out, live in a 900 square foot house, buy the cheapest cars that Hyundai sells, and get your internet access from the public library, there's no problem with the median US household income. What's really changed is that we have vastly over-inflated notions of what an appropriate middle-class lifestyle is, we don't have the benefit of a one-time set of circumstances from the end of WW2, and we no longer artificially restrict the pool of employees by sex and race.
If Larry wanted to buy NetApp, he'd ratchet up the lawsuit rhetoric in an attempt to drive down NetApp's stock price.
For the few dollars they lose in game sales to folks buying a PS3 to build a cluster, they get back 10 or 100 times as much in free publicity about how awesome the PS3 is. If the XBOX 360 is so XOBX awesome, where's their cluster? (ASCI Red ring of Death?)