...said the idiot, ignoring the other part of what I said in which I pointed out that stock prices alter based on the value of the company, not if the company makes 'a profit'. And if the value goes up, by definition, that is because the money wasn't a 'profit', because the money wasn't given out, but instead kept...and hence not taxed.
Those two things are mutually exclusive. Either the company gives out the remaining money as dividends (In which case it is taxed as profit, and the people who earn the dividends pay income tax on it.) or the company keeps/reinvests it (In which case the company does _not_ pay taxes on it, the valuation of the company rises, and hence possibly and stock prices go up, which people can get taxed on when they sell.)
To repeat: Money that is reinvested in the company, making the company valuation go up and thus, in theory, the stock price go up...DOES NOT HAVE CORPORATE INCOME TAX PAID ON IT.
You can perhaps sit there and argue with a straight face that taxing me because I sell stock to you is somehow taxing the corporations that the stock is in. The corporation, and other sane people, will disagree, as they appear to have the same money at the start and end and don't even know I sold the stock, but perhaps you can argue that this 'second tax' happens. But it's kinda moot when the first tax only happened in your imagination.
As you do not understand a word of this and have no idea how corporate taxes work, I'm ending this conversation now.
All this because you thought objecting to someone explaining dividends was clever. (When, in reality, an argument can be made that dividends are double-taxed, which is what the non-stupid people in this argument assumed you were talking about before you started insisting this had nothing to do with dividends.)
Considering the signing is public/private keys, if the BIOS is smart enough to simply overwrite the memory location of the private key before actually starting execution of user code , it should keep malware from accessing it, while keeping the public keys around for verification purposes. (I'm BIOS tend to copy themselves into memory and run from there, so all they have to do is not copy that part. No one can get to their actual ROM.)
However, I'm a little confused at your process. Why would anyone need to do anything before installing?
What needs to happen is that there is a 'Boot unsecured off CD.' key to press during startup. (Or an option to boot off CD, and a prompt if the CD is unsigned.) Then the install happens.
At that point, you have a computer that probably won't boot, and that gives a big error on startup. (I actually suspect that the BIOS is going to let Windows 'start', but then Windows will present the single option to repair the boot sector and reboot. But it might just not work at all.)
Regardless, at that point, you should be able to go into the BIOS and sign the new boot sector. You don't really need a UI, although presenting a CRC would be a good idea so paranoid people can make sure they are signing the right thing.
This must not be any sort of prompted option on the 'Your computer is unsigned' screen, or idiot users will go and sign their malware to stop the prompt. This should be something that people who deliberately change their boot sector should know they have to do (And such software should warn them.), and people who did not do it deliberately and don't know what happened end up with a broken computer. (Although one that is trivially fixable from a recovery CD, or even a Windows prompt if the BIOS still lets Windows 'run' and it's Windows that bitches.)
Broken computers are better than rooted computers. Or, rather, as rooted computers are indeed broken: Broken computers that obviously do not work are better than broken computers that appear to.
Except that that seems to limit you from installing a Linux partition.
What really needs both that, and the BIOS able to sign the first sector. So the steps should be that you startup and press a key to boot, unsigned, off the Linux CD. (You should have to press a key to boot off a CD anyway. A computer shouldn't automatically boot off a CD without flipping some stuff in the BIOS.)
After it's installed, on boot, you should get a big honking warning saying 'The first sector of this disk is unsigned, do you wish to continue?' (And if you try to continue into Windows 8, Windows will probably say 'Uh, fuck no. You have malware, press F3 to rewrite your boot sector and reboot, press enter to turn off your computer, or sit here staring at this screen, cause you ain't getting into Windows.')
But during startup, you should be able to go into the BIOS and sign the current first sector, so now it works without prompts at startup or Windows 8 freaking out. (This shouldn't, however, be explained at the warning. If you've deliberately changed your boot sector, you should know you have to fix it in the BIOS. If you did not, if you're a normal computer user, you should rightly be going 'Uh, what? Wait, what is this? Why doesn't my computer start up correctly anymore? I better ask someone.')
This also works if the computer simply won't boot with an unsigned boot sector, although I suspect MS doesn't want that. (It would be safer, but it's much harder for Windows to fix, or even explain what's wrong.)
This signing by the BIOS, yes, lets people cleverly sabotage their computer by signing malware boot sectors...but if people are randomly messing around in the BIOS, they can pretty easily sabotage their computer anyway.
Of course, at some point, we'll have malware directing people at startup to go into their BIOS to do that. Sometimes I want to release some malware that simply puts up a prompt on the screen 'To continue, please purchase a firearm and fire three shots directly into your forehead' , so we no longer have to deal with such idiots.
It turns out that primary homeowners are exempt from capital gains less than $250,000 when selling their house. And that's the gain, not the total value...if a $500,000 house sells for $700,000, no capital gains tax.
But, and this is interesting, apparently people are taxed normal capital gains for selling non-residential houses.
Of course, you just reminded me of something else...for some reason, we have property taxes on houses, but not stocks.
Money that does not get paid as dividends, that is "reinvested in the company" is money that (since we are talking about this money in this way in the first place) originated as corporate profit. The fact that it's reinvested isn't the reason that it's profit, but the fact that it was considered to be paid as a dividend means that it WAS corporate profit (at least in financially sound corporations). Keeping it in the company means it now has extra money to use.
What the fuck are you yammering about? It doesn't matter where it 'originated'. (He said, pretending that having something originate as profit makes any fucking sense at all. Profit is what is left over that isn't spent.)
What matters is that no tax was paid on it. Money that is reinvested in the company, making the company valuation go up and thus, in theory, the stock price go up...DOES NOT HAVE CORPORATE INCOME TAX PAID ON IT, whether or not you want to define that money as 'profit'.
And hence cannot be 'double taxed', because it's not taxed the first time. (And it's not fucking taxed a 'second time' either.)
When you catch a home run baseball... let's say Barry Bonds' 800th home run... you just gained a lot of wealth, and you are expected to pay taxes on that wealth, whether or not you sell the ball.
You realize this has nothing to do with stock, right? And you also realize that catching a game ball is a financial transaction, right? It's a 'gift'.
But all this is utterly unrelated to the issue at hand. You seem to think that the 'money' that is somehow 'in' your stock is the same money that is in 'your company', so when money goes to your company, and is taxed, money that goes to your stock shouldn't be.
But this is nonsense. Money that is 'in' your company is the assets the company holds. Money that is 'in' your stock is simply how much people are willing to purchase it from you for. The later value might be based on the former, but that doesn't make it the same money.
You seem to think it's the same money because the new owner can, in theory, get the money out of the corporation, but that makes very little sense. (And he can't do that anyway.)
Because, and this is a fairly obvious point, the corporation still has the money, whether or not you sell. It's sheer insanity to stand there and argue that something 'got taxed' when the actual holders of the actual money still have as much. It's other people who might, or might not, have less. Clearly it was some other money that was taxed.
I could keep talking about that, but, you know, fuck it. As I pointed out, your original premise was wrong anyway...if you want to consider stock sales as 'taxing the money that corporations used to raise the stock value', you go ahead and do that...because, as I pointed out, that money wasn't taxed the first time.
To repeat: Money that corporations reinvest in themselves (To, you know, raise the stock price) isn't taxed.
This money is the month you are trying to claim that capital gain taxes tax 'twice', but the fact is, as people have tried to point out, it isn't taxed the first time you think it is. Nor is that specific money taxed the 'second' time, that's entirely different money owned by entirely different people, but you can stupidly argue that point. But it's sure as hell not taxed the first time.
All you really need to do is point people to here.
If you took every single asset (Not their yearly income, but every single thing they own.) of the bottom 50% in this country, you'd end up with 2.5% of all assets, aka, 1.4 trillion dollars.
And Jon Stewart doesn't point this out, but the US budget deficit this year? 1.4 trillion dollars.
If we took every single dime owned by the bottom 50% in this country, their house, their car, their food, everything, and sold it and put the money towards the budget, we'd balance the budget for one year.
One. Year.
After that, well, it's not like we could take all their stuff twice, so I don't know what to do. And at the end of that we've got 150 million angry rioters on the streets, so I suspect government costs would go up pretty dramatically.
Admittedly, this is a slump. That 1.4 trillion could have been spread out and balanced the budget from 2003-2007. Assuming that the poor didn't start rioting in 2003 because you stole a fourth of their stuff.
The poor do not have the money to pay for this government. Period.
How much would we have to take from the top to cover $1.4 trillion?
Well, millionaires have $45.9 trillion in wealth. If we took 3% of all assets, we'd cover it. For one year, but obviously you can repeatedly take 3% for quite some time.
Alternately, the top 1% hold about $17 trillion. If we take 8% from them each year, we'd cover it, although obviously that would run out faster.
Of course, all this is silly. We do not fund the government by seizing assets, we fund it by taxing income. But, clearly, if the poor cannot fund something with all the money they own, they certainly can't fund it with their yearly income.
If the rich wish to continue to have a government (As opposed to the poor getting so fed up that they just decide to kill them and steal all their shit.), then the rich need to fucking pay for the government.
Indeed, I'm not a fan of lower taxes on long term capital gain, but, frankly, anything that encourages actually operating companies as profit making centers (Which requires, you know, employees.) instead of pump-and-dump stock scams, I can't be too opposed to.
Sadly, we're going in exactly the wrong direction. we've decided to tax dividends back at the standard income rate, and capital gains less, when it should be the other way around.
Why? Because it's easy to strip-mine a company to bump up the stock price for just long enough for those stock options(1) to pay off. It's a bit harder to strip-mine it to pay dividends. People tend to notice all that cash going out the door and the negative balance sheet. Let's make them be very blatant about what they're doing, let's make them fire workers and then sit down and write dividend checks for million of dollars for their large stockholders.
And dividends, instead of stock price changes, make stock investing safer anyway. Tomorrow, a stock could plummet and investors lose everything...but they can't lose dividends they already have. (Or, more likely, have ended up in other stock.)
As for inflation...it's worth pointing out that inflation is almost nonexistent right now. But, normally, a solution there would be to make a yearly index based on that. In fact, that should be a general rule for all taxes, it's a little idiotic that it works the way it does. (I've never owned a home, being smart enough to not buy when prices were clearly insanely skyrocketing. Do home prices work that way? I mean, during sane times when it's not a bubble anyway? Do people who bought a $30,000 house in 1962 have to pay taxes on the $200,000 'more' it is worth now?)
1) You know, giving executives stock options is the most idiotic idea ever. Of, if the executive does good they make a lot of money, but if they do bad...they merely get to leave with their millions in pay? Let's start paying CEOs 99% in stock. They get $50,000 or whatever, and the rest in real actual stock. Stock they can't sell for five years. If they drive the company into the ground, they should end up staring at a pile of worthless stock.
Fuck, let's pay them 100% in stock they can't cash in for five years. They can borrow money against that stock to live on. Let's see how many people are willing to leave a hollow husk of a company if it leaves them a few hundred thousand in debt.
I never said anything about dividends. How did you come up with the idea that I'm "incorrectly conflating dividends?"
You can't get 'double taxed' unless you get a dividend, you idiot.
Here is how it work, for simpletons out there. Corporations have, at the end of a month, some extra money.
They can give this money to their owners as dividends, which makes it corporate profit, and they pay corporate income taxes on it. Also, the stock owner pays income tax on it, at, I believe, the standard rate.
Alternately, the company can reinvest this money, which raises the value of the company, and, presumably, the stock price. This is not corporate profit. It is not taxed as profit.
The stock owner can then, at some point, sell the stock for money, at which point he sometimes doesn't pay as much taxes on it as he would if he'd spent a shift at McDonalds.
By talking about 'double taxes' and yet asserting that you're not talking about dividends, you make yourself into an idiot. Dividends are corporate profit, and hence are taxed as corporate income. But doing expensive things that raise the stock price do not count as corporate income.
But perhaps more to the point, that's not the same money, so it can't be fucking 'double taxed' anyway. If you own stock, and the stock goes up, and you sell it and make a profit, you pay taxes on a transaction with a completely unrelated third party. That's nothing to do with any corporate money.
If I own some Transformers from the 1980s, and the new movies made their value rise in price, and I sell them and have to pay taxes because I sold them to someone for more than what I bought them for, I was not fucking 'double taxed' because the damn moviemakers paid taxes. It's not the same money, you idiot.
The whole 'double taxed' thing is nonsense, (All money is infinitely taxed. Everytime money moves it is taxed.) but it's exceptionally stupid nonsense when you conflate it with stock prices going up.
You know, if you are going to claim what 'slashdot' did something, you might to actually check your link.
Because, you see, I did.
A few people seemed to think it was obvious and shouldn't have been allowed to be patented, and others pointed out some prior art, but I'm counting exactly four people, 'mcgrew', 'pandrijeczko', 'tius', and 'erroneus' who seemed to think it was 'useless' or that only 'idiots' would need it.
That's it. That's all.
453 comments, and you have such an confirmation bias that slashdot is anti-MS that you see four people posting a dozen comments between them, and that means that 'slashdot' thinks that.
And every one of those people has multiple comments saying 'Uh, no, you idiot, lots of people have trouble with this. Like old people.'. And a lot of other comments about how MS tends to make fairly good hardware.
Indeed, and often the government will provide something 'for everyone', but in reality it's only some providing a bedrock that only corporations (Owned by the rich) can build on.
Like air travel, for example. How much the government spend on that? The entire FAA, licensing pilots, matching funds for airports, all of that.
Now...who owns airplanes? Rich individuals, corporations owned by rich individuals, and commercial airlines owned by rich individuals, who are so graciously willing to let buy seats on them.
The entire FAA is operated in order to control objects that cost millions of dollars.
Likewise, there's a section of the FBI dedicated to bank robberies. And one for art crimes.
I understand that was a hypothetical, but I think it's worth pointing out that the '2%' premise is _insane_ and not how corporations work.
Prices are set by the market, not individual corporations. Corporations attempt to make as much profit as they can, but usually they can't do that by randomly varying the price of their goods.(1)
Instead, they set the price of their good as high as it can go to start with, (which will be roughly where everyone else is), and hence cannot raise it unless everyone else does.
If a company suffers a 2% reduction in profit, they usually just have to wince and take it. There's no magical thing they can do to get back that 2%, because if there was something they know of that give them 2% more profit, they already did it. (Yes, sometimes the loss of 2% can cause them to do risky things to get it back...but corporations are actually more likely to do risky stuff during good times when they have a buffer.)
The idea that corporations are just sitting around thinking 'Well, yes, we could raise prices and make more money, but we'll refrain from that out of the goodness of our heart...wait, they raised our taxes? Well, damn, I guess we will have to raise the prices...' is just utterly insane.
There a slightly more logical assumption that 'If we raise taxes on corporations this will raise the price of goods across the board', which is probably true to some extent...but that's better than raising taxes on people for two reasons. 1) Market corrections take a long time to happen, and 2) people are much more stupid and panicky with their money than corporations, so more taxes on people has much more a depressive market effect than on corporations. (Likewise, giving people money is a lot more anti-recessive than giving corporations money, precisely because people are idiots and instantly spend it...putting it in the economy.)
There's also the argument that raising prices is, hypothetically, more regressive than progressive income taxes. The fact that it's always Republicans fighting corporate income tax, and always Democrats in favor it, should rather hint that's not true. (But I don't really have time to explain why. Let's just say it causes inflation, which hits people who actually own money, instead of the poor.)
1) If they can do that, it means something is wrong with the market. Quite possibly they have a monopoly.
For a political position that worships the 'free market', the right instantly forget Market 101 when it comes to taxing corporations. People do not price things based on what it costs to make them, you moron. (Except in the sense that they'll stop if they can't make a profit.) They price things based on what the market will pay for them. Taxes can't make a corporation sell things at a higher price, because if they could sell it at a higher price, they already would.
I love the idea that corporations have some 'set amount of profit' they want to make, no more, and no less, and if something like more taxes come along to take some money from their profits, they can, and will, decide to randomly raise their price, which they could have done at any time, but have refrained from because...uh...something. Likewise, if we reduce their taxes, they will nicely reduce their prices for no discernible reason.
Seriously, you guys are so complete and utter idiots it's astonishing. The price of goods and services is set by the market, by supply and demand. It is not a number that individual suppliers can randomly set. (At least, not and stay in business.)
Of course, in the technical sense, you are correct, corporate taxes do get passed on to customers...just like income taxes get passed back to corporations because individuals buy less. Taxes are removing money from the cycle of the market, and hence the entire market feels them in some manner. (Of course, then the government is supposed to spend the money, putting it back.)
Of course, removing money from individuals results in a much more random and economic depressive behavior than removing it from corporations, because individuals are a lot less logical about their situation. And it's much easier to tax corporations, because the government knows where they live.
But here's the $64,000 question: If corporations just pass the costs on, WHY ARE THEY CONSTANTLY TRYING TO REDUCE THEIR TAXES, you fucktard?
The police exist almost solely to keep the poor from taking from the rich. (Usually by paying a lot of attention to crimes against the rich, and little attention to the crimes against the poor, so that criminals prey on the poor, not the rich. In fact, taking expensive things is often treated different _by law_, with specific laws to cover it and specific organizations to handle it...and only the rich have expensive things.)
The military exist almost solely to keep other countries from taking assets belonging to the rich. (You think they'd invade for your house?) Actually, recently, it's started to exist to start taking from other countries.
The civil legal system exists almost solely to settle disputes between the rich, or to settle a dispute between the rich and the poor in favor of the best lawyer, which means the rich.
I could go on, but that's like half the entire government funding right there.
It seems far more reasonable to do away with public schools and make those with children pay for the costs of their education.
I'm very sorry you were not educated in schools. You write very well for someone with no schooling, I would not known if you had not told me. Or were you home schooled?
But I think the system we have now, where we assume we educate everyone in public schools, and then bill everyone who got that benefit (I.e, everyone) later in life, works fine. (I'm a little baffled at the idea we'd charge their parents, or the charge children when they are children, though. No, we wait until they are adults,at which point, if schools have done our job, they pay taxes.)
Yes, sometimes people are not able to get to school, or moved here from outside the country, or sometimes opt-out, but there is a rather large difference between 'Government services that 99% of the population uses to have the basics required for life, which everyone should pay for in taxes', like public education or roads, and 'Government services that 1% of the population uses to make money', like copyright.
And please note that arguing that I'm some sort of pay-as-you-go libertarian is stupid. I'm probably further to the left than you. But copyright isn't some free public service the government provides for the poor, copyright is specifically restricting the rights of _millions_ of people to make copies for the benefit of a copyright holder. It's a government sanctioned and enforced monopoly, and just like it's reasonable to charge companies for purchasing exclusive rights to parts of the EM spectrum, it's reasonable to charge companies (and people) for exclusive rights to make copies.
Copyright isn't only for profit. It is also for the purpose of control. As for $25, that adds up pretty fast if you are actually producing material. A hobby song writer might write a couple dozen songs a year making it a $600 experiment to find out if they will make money on ANY of them.
Which is why, of course, I proposed a 3 year free copyright period. You can make the song, and _then_ see if it's successful, and _then_ pay for the copyright renewal.
If after 3 years of selling the thing you can't see yourself making $25 off it in the next seven years, you probably shouldn't renew the copyright. If it's not worth $3.57 a year to you, then it seems pretty damn unlikely you'd be willing to pay court filing fees to keep someone from violating the copyright anyway, so there's really no point in keeping the registration around.
I agree completely, except 14 years is much too long. I proposed 3 years above. You get 3 years without registering.
In fact, make it graduated. 3 years free, 7 years for $25, another 7 for $250, another 7 for $2500, etc.
And, also, copyright holders should have to keep contact information up to date. Every copyright statement should have an ID that people can look up online, and find out who owns it. This is frickin 2011, it's entirely possible to get every copyright holder an account at the copyright office and let them update their address and whatnot.
If someone cannot locate a copyright holder, they should be able to pay a small fee and have the copyright office look into the matter, and void the copyright if the holder cannot be located in a year or so. Something like 50% of all _registered_ copyrights are floating around without an locatable owner, there are movies smuldering in vaults without known owners, and it's only gotten worse since we magically made everything ever produced under copyright.
No. Just, no. We cannot locate you, you do not get to have a copyright, period. The government is not going to let you keep a government granted monopoly when no one knows where or even who you are.
There's actually a nice side effect of my system that I didn't think of until rereading my post: It discourages updated-copyrighting.
Right now, there are web pages that have the copyright notice show the current year. Likewise, if someone rereleased a DVD, they will simply update the copyright year.
So it's possible to find something that says 'Copyright 2011', when in actuality it's copyright 1986.
But if each unique ID was different...well, the ID was generated at a certain time, and that's when the copyright starts from. (In fact, the IDs should probably be of the form 20110912-492922533 or whatever, having the day generated in them.)
So that would mean that either they get a new ID for each thing (And hence actually pay for that one, or risk that falling into public domain.) or they use the old ID, so we can see the _actual_ expiration on it. Or they use both together: DVD menu and extras copyright 20110912-492922533, movie copyright 1986-whatever.(And now there's limited risk of the movie falling into the public domain, as they just need to keep track of on ID for it.)
Right now, the law seems a little screwed up. They have to register copyright to sue over them, but no one seems to notice that, when they sue someone over distributing a copy of Back to the Future, that they've registered a copyright as being created in 1986, but the actual DVD claims to be copyright 2006 or whenever.
Of course, this would be more relevant if copyright actually expired.
There is a valid argument for saying 'People should not have to pay to register every single thing.'. But the fact is, at this point in time, there's absolutely no reason why anyone should have to pay just in case.
The government could simply have a website and hand out unique IDs whenever anyone wanted. You produce something you suspect might be worth copyrighting, you get a unique ID for that thing for free and stick it in the copyright notice.
Then you have three years to actually fill out a copyright registration for that ID and pay $25 or whatever, or it's considered abandoned and thus public domain.
That seems to get rid of any of the so-called reasons we started issuing copyrights automatically. It gives people plenty of time to see if the registration is worthwhile, it helps people who might not have thought that specific thing was worthwhile, yet doesn't result in every single damn thing ever written being copyrighted.
Likewise, if someone attempts to contact the person listed, and they can not be reached, they should be able to send a notice to the copyright office, which will then mail an official letter giving them a year to fix their registration, or it's public domain. Any idiot can type in the unique ID and see the copyright status, and where to send the info to. (We could even charge people for questioning the status. You try to contact a copyright holder, you can't, you pay $1 to have the copyright office send an official postage-paid letter that they are require to respond to.)
And we need to go through the older stuff and slowly start requiring that done to them, also. The older stuff actually _does_ have registration, as you pointed out....but we need to put the contact information online, so we can say 'Hey, those people don't exist', and get the copyright office to remove the copyright after a year or so.
As for the newer stuff, that's harder to figure out, but I think giving people ten years or so to locate it and register it would be reasonable.
I don't know what good it says that communism hasn't been tried. A revolt to put people in charge has been tried, and that's how Marx thought you got there.
I agree that what you're saying would make more sense, probably in ways you actually missed, a lot of the problem with the economy is people attempting to make money of stock sales, instead of wanting that company to make money so they get a cut of the profits.
But saying 'That's how communism should work' is silly. That's not how Marx predicted anything.
Yes, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
And the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to pay lower taxes on stock income vs.a paycheck, deduct the use of any business jet, and have the police show up and actually investigate when a $100,000 piece of art is stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
...said the idiot, ignoring the other part of what I said in which I pointed out that stock prices alter based on the value of the company, not if the company makes 'a profit'. And if the value goes up, by definition, that is because the money wasn't a 'profit', because the money wasn't given out, but instead kept...and hence not taxed.
Those two things are mutually exclusive. Either the company gives out the remaining money as dividends (In which case it is taxed as profit, and the people who earn the dividends pay income tax on it.) or the company keeps/reinvests it (In which case the company does _not_ pay taxes on it, the valuation of the company rises, and hence possibly and stock prices go up, which people can get taxed on when they sell.)
To repeat: Money that is reinvested in the company, making the company valuation go up and thus, in theory, the stock price go up...DOES NOT HAVE CORPORATE INCOME TAX PAID ON IT.
You can perhaps sit there and argue with a straight face that taxing me because I sell stock to you is somehow taxing the corporations that the stock is in. The corporation, and other sane people, will disagree, as they appear to have the same money at the start and end and don't even know I sold the stock, but perhaps you can argue that this 'second tax' happens. But it's kinda moot when the first tax only happened in your imagination.
As you do not understand a word of this and have no idea how corporate taxes work, I'm ending this conversation now.
All this because you thought objecting to someone explaining dividends was clever. (When, in reality, an argument can be made that dividends are double-taxed, which is what the non-stupid people in this argument assumed you were talking about before you started insisting this had nothing to do with dividends.)
Considering the signing is public/private keys, if the BIOS is smart enough to simply overwrite the memory location of the private key before actually starting execution of user code , it should keep malware from accessing it, while keeping the public keys around for verification purposes. (I'm BIOS tend to copy themselves into memory and run from there, so all they have to do is not copy that part. No one can get to their actual ROM.)
However, I'm a little confused at your process. Why would anyone need to do anything before installing?
What needs to happen is that there is a 'Boot unsecured off CD.' key to press during startup. (Or an option to boot off CD, and a prompt if the CD is unsigned.) Then the install happens.
At that point, you have a computer that probably won't boot, and that gives a big error on startup. (I actually suspect that the BIOS is going to let Windows 'start', but then Windows will present the single option to repair the boot sector and reboot. But it might just not work at all.)
Regardless, at that point, you should be able to go into the BIOS and sign the new boot sector. You don't really need a UI, although presenting a CRC would be a good idea so paranoid people can make sure they are signing the right thing.
This must not be any sort of prompted option on the 'Your computer is unsigned' screen, or idiot users will go and sign their malware to stop the prompt. This should be something that people who deliberately change their boot sector should know they have to do (And such software should warn them.), and people who did not do it deliberately and don't know what happened end up with a broken computer. (Although one that is trivially fixable from a recovery CD, or even a Windows prompt if the BIOS still lets Windows 'run' and it's Windows that bitches.)
Broken computers are better than rooted computers. Or, rather, as rooted computers are indeed broken: Broken computers that obviously do not work are better than broken computers that appear to.
Except that that seems to limit you from installing a Linux partition.
What really needs both that, and the BIOS able to sign the first sector. So the steps should be that you startup and press a key to boot, unsigned, off the Linux CD. (You should have to press a key to boot off a CD anyway. A computer shouldn't automatically boot off a CD without flipping some stuff in the BIOS.)
After it's installed, on boot, you should get a big honking warning saying 'The first sector of this disk is unsigned, do you wish to continue?' (And if you try to continue into Windows 8, Windows will probably say 'Uh, fuck no. You have malware, press F3 to rewrite your boot sector and reboot, press enter to turn off your computer, or sit here staring at this screen, cause you ain't getting into Windows.')
But during startup, you should be able to go into the BIOS and sign the current first sector, so now it works without prompts at startup or Windows 8 freaking out. (This shouldn't, however, be explained at the warning. If you've deliberately changed your boot sector, you should know you have to fix it in the BIOS. If you did not, if you're a normal computer user, you should rightly be going 'Uh, what? Wait, what is this? Why doesn't my computer start up correctly anymore? I better ask someone.')
This also works if the computer simply won't boot with an unsigned boot sector, although I suspect MS doesn't want that. (It would be safer, but it's much harder for Windows to fix, or even explain what's wrong.)
This signing by the BIOS, yes, lets people cleverly sabotage their computer by signing malware boot sectors...but if people are randomly messing around in the BIOS, they can pretty easily sabotage their computer anyway.
Of course, at some point, we'll have malware directing people at startup to go into their BIOS to do that. Sometimes I want to release some malware that simply puts up a prompt on the screen 'To continue, please purchase a firearm and fire three shots directly into your forehead' , so we no longer have to deal with such idiots.
It turns out that primary homeowners are exempt from capital gains less than $250,000 when selling their house. And that's the gain, not the total value...if a $500,000 house sells for $700,000, no capital gains tax.
But, and this is interesting, apparently people are taxed normal capital gains for selling non-residential houses.
Of course, you just reminded me of something else...for some reason, we have property taxes on houses, but not stocks.
Money that does not get paid as dividends, that is "reinvested in the company" is money that (since we are talking about this money in this way in the first place) originated as corporate profit. The fact that it's reinvested isn't the reason that it's profit, but the fact that it was considered to be paid as a dividend means that it WAS corporate profit (at least in financially sound corporations). Keeping it in the company means it now has extra money to use.
What the fuck are you yammering about? It doesn't matter where it 'originated'. (He said, pretending that having something originate as profit makes any fucking sense at all. Profit is what is left over that isn't spent.)
What matters is that no tax was paid on it. Money that is reinvested in the company, making the company valuation go up and thus, in theory, the stock price go up...DOES NOT HAVE CORPORATE INCOME TAX PAID ON IT, whether or not you want to define that money as 'profit'.
And hence cannot be 'double taxed', because it's not taxed the first time. (And it's not fucking taxed a 'second time' either.)
When you catch a home run baseball... let's say Barry Bonds' 800th home run... you just gained a lot of wealth, and you are expected to pay taxes on that wealth, whether or not you sell the ball.
You realize this has nothing to do with stock, right? And you also realize that catching a game ball is a financial transaction, right? It's a 'gift'.
But all this is utterly unrelated to the issue at hand. You seem to think that the 'money' that is somehow 'in' your stock is the same money that is in 'your company', so when money goes to your company, and is taxed, money that goes to your stock shouldn't be.
But this is nonsense. Money that is 'in' your company is the assets the company holds. Money that is 'in' your stock is simply how much people are willing to purchase it from you for. The later value might be based on the former, but that doesn't make it the same money.
You seem to think it's the same money because the new owner can, in theory, get the money out of the corporation, but that makes very little sense. (And he can't do that anyway.)
Because, and this is a fairly obvious point, the corporation still has the money, whether or not you sell. It's sheer insanity to stand there and argue that something 'got taxed' when the actual holders of the actual money still have as much. It's other people who might, or might not, have less. Clearly it was some other money that was taxed.
I could keep talking about that, but, you know, fuck it. As I pointed out, your original premise was wrong anyway...if you want to consider stock sales as 'taxing the money that corporations used to raise the stock value', you go ahead and do that...because, as I pointed out, that money wasn't taxed the first time.
To repeat: Money that corporations reinvest in themselves (To, you know, raise the stock price) isn't taxed.
This money is the month you are trying to claim that capital gain taxes tax 'twice', but the fact is, as people have tried to point out, it isn't taxed the first time you think it is. Nor is that specific money taxed the 'second' time, that's entirely different money owned by entirely different people, but you can stupidly argue that point. But it's sure as hell not taxed the first time.
All you really need to do is point people to here.
If you took every single asset (Not their yearly income, but every single thing they own.) of the bottom 50% in this country, you'd end up with 2.5% of all assets, aka, 1.4 trillion dollars.
And Jon Stewart doesn't point this out, but the US budget deficit this year? 1.4 trillion dollars.
If we took every single dime owned by the bottom 50% in this country, their house, their car, their food, everything, and sold it and put the money towards the budget, we'd balance the budget for one year.
One. Year.
After that, well, it's not like we could take all their stuff twice, so I don't know what to do. And at the end of that we've got 150 million angry rioters on the streets, so I suspect government costs would go up pretty dramatically.
Admittedly, this is a slump. That 1.4 trillion could have been spread out and balanced the budget from 2003-2007. Assuming that the poor didn't start rioting in 2003 because you stole a fourth of their stuff.
The poor do not have the money to pay for this government. Period.
How much would we have to take from the top to cover $1.4 trillion?
Well, millionaires have $45.9 trillion in wealth. If we took 3% of all assets, we'd cover it. For one year, but obviously you can repeatedly take 3% for quite some time.
Alternately, the top 1% hold about $17 trillion. If we take 8% from them each year, we'd cover it, although obviously that would run out faster.
Of course, all this is silly. We do not fund the government by seizing assets, we fund it by taxing income. But, clearly, if the poor cannot fund something with all the money they own, they certainly can't fund it with their yearly income.
If the rich wish to continue to have a government (As opposed to the poor getting so fed up that they just decide to kill them and steal all their shit.), then the rich need to fucking pay for the government.
Indeed, I'm not a fan of lower taxes on long term capital gain, but, frankly, anything that encourages actually operating companies as profit making centers (Which requires, you know, employees.) instead of pump-and-dump stock scams, I can't be too opposed to.
Sadly, we're going in exactly the wrong direction. we've decided to tax dividends back at the standard income rate, and capital gains less, when it should be the other way around.
Why? Because it's easy to strip-mine a company to bump up the stock price for just long enough for those stock options(1) to pay off. It's a bit harder to strip-mine it to pay dividends. People tend to notice all that cash going out the door and the negative balance sheet. Let's make them be very blatant about what they're doing, let's make them fire workers and then sit down and write dividend checks for million of dollars for their large stockholders.
And dividends, instead of stock price changes, make stock investing safer anyway. Tomorrow, a stock could plummet and investors lose everything...but they can't lose dividends they already have. (Or, more likely, have ended up in other stock.)
As for inflation...it's worth pointing out that inflation is almost nonexistent right now. But, normally, a solution there would be to make a yearly index based on that. In fact, that should be a general rule for all taxes, it's a little idiotic that it works the way it does. (I've never owned a home, being smart enough to not buy when prices were clearly insanely skyrocketing. Do home prices work that way? I mean, during sane times when it's not a bubble anyway? Do people who bought a $30,000 house in 1962 have to pay taxes on the $200,000 'more' it is worth now?)
1) You know, giving executives stock options is the most idiotic idea ever. Of, if the executive does good they make a lot of money, but if they do bad...they merely get to leave with their millions in pay? Let's start paying CEOs 99% in stock. They get $50,000 or whatever, and the rest in real actual stock. Stock they can't sell for five years. If they drive the company into the ground, they should end up staring at a pile of worthless stock.
Fuck, let's pay them 100% in stock they can't cash in for five years. They can borrow money against that stock to live on. Let's see how many people are willing to leave a hollow husk of a company if it leaves them a few hundred thousand in debt.
I never said anything about dividends. How did you come up with the idea that I'm "incorrectly conflating dividends?"
You can't get 'double taxed' unless you get a dividend, you idiot.
Here is how it work, for simpletons out there. Corporations have, at the end of a month, some extra money.
They can give this money to their owners as dividends, which makes it corporate profit, and they pay corporate income taxes on it. Also, the stock owner pays income tax on it, at, I believe, the standard rate.
Alternately, the company can reinvest this money, which raises the value of the company, and, presumably, the stock price. This is not corporate profit. It is not taxed as profit.
The stock owner can then, at some point, sell the stock for money, at which point he sometimes doesn't pay as much taxes on it as he would if he'd spent a shift at McDonalds.
By talking about 'double taxes' and yet asserting that you're not talking about dividends, you make yourself into an idiot. Dividends are corporate profit, and hence are taxed as corporate income. But doing expensive things that raise the stock price do not count as corporate income.
But perhaps more to the point, that's not the same money, so it can't be fucking 'double taxed' anyway. If you own stock, and the stock goes up, and you sell it and make a profit, you pay taxes on a transaction with a completely unrelated third party. That's nothing to do with any corporate money.
If I own some Transformers from the 1980s, and the new movies made their value rise in price, and I sell them and have to pay taxes because I sold them to someone for more than what I bought them for, I was not fucking 'double taxed' because the damn moviemakers paid taxes. It's not the same money, you idiot.
The whole 'double taxed' thing is nonsense, (All money is infinitely taxed. Everytime money moves it is taxed.) but it's exceptionally stupid nonsense when you conflate it with stock prices going up.
The nice thing about USB plug standards is there are so many to choose from.
I want someone to build the equivalent of a wireless USB dongle that also does induction charging.
Leave it plugged into your phone, set your phone on the charging platform, and it would start charging and USB-connect to the computer.
I have no idea what any engineering problems with that would be, though.
Oh, and FYI, the word 'retard' doesn't even appear in a post. That word is once in an unrelated sig, but not a post.
The word 'useless' shows up twice, but neither time is it referring to the invention.
You know, if you are going to claim what 'slashdot' did something, you might to actually check your link.
Because, you see, I did.
A few people seemed to think it was obvious and shouldn't have been allowed to be patented, and others pointed out some prior art, but I'm counting exactly four people, 'mcgrew', 'pandrijeczko', 'tius', and 'erroneus' who seemed to think it was 'useless' or that only 'idiots' would need it.
That's it. That's all.
453 comments, and you have such an confirmation bias that slashdot is anti-MS that you see four people posting a dozen comments between them, and that means that 'slashdot' thinks that.
And every one of those people has multiple comments saying 'Uh, no, you idiot, lots of people have trouble with this. Like old people.'. And a lot of other comments about how MS tends to make fairly good hardware.
Indeed, and often the government will provide something 'for everyone', but in reality it's only some providing a bedrock that only corporations (Owned by the rich) can build on.
Like air travel, for example. How much the government spend on that? The entire FAA, licensing pilots, matching funds for airports, all of that.
Now...who owns airplanes? Rich individuals, corporations owned by rich individuals, and commercial airlines owned by rich individuals, who are so graciously willing to let buy seats on them.
The entire FAA is operated in order to control objects that cost millions of dollars.
Likewise, there's a section of the FBI dedicated to bank robberies. And one for art crimes.
I understand that was a hypothetical, but I think it's worth pointing out that the '2%' premise is _insane_ and not how corporations work.
Prices are set by the market, not individual corporations. Corporations attempt to make as much profit as they can, but usually they can't do that by randomly varying the price of their goods.(1)
Instead, they set the price of their good as high as it can go to start with, (which will be roughly where everyone else is), and hence cannot raise it unless everyone else does.
If a company suffers a 2% reduction in profit, they usually just have to wince and take it. There's no magical thing they can do to get back that 2%, because if there was something they know of that give them 2% more profit, they already did it. (Yes, sometimes the loss of 2% can cause them to do risky things to get it back...but corporations are actually more likely to do risky stuff during good times when they have a buffer.)
The idea that corporations are just sitting around thinking 'Well, yes, we could raise prices and make more money, but we'll refrain from that out of the goodness of our heart...wait, they raised our taxes? Well, damn, I guess we will have to raise the prices...' is just utterly insane.
There a slightly more logical assumption that 'If we raise taxes on corporations this will raise the price of goods across the board', which is probably true to some extent...but that's better than raising taxes on people for two reasons. 1) Market corrections take a long time to happen, and 2) people are much more stupid and panicky with their money than corporations, so more taxes on people has much more a depressive market effect than on corporations. (Likewise, giving people money is a lot more anti-recessive than giving corporations money, precisely because people are idiots and instantly spend it...putting it in the economy.)
There's also the argument that raising prices is, hypothetically, more regressive than progressive income taxes. The fact that it's always Republicans fighting corporate income tax, and always Democrats in favor it, should rather hint that's not true. (But I don't really have time to explain why. Let's just say it causes inflation, which hits people who actually own money, instead of the poor.)
1) If they can do that, it means something is wrong with the market. Quite possibly they have a monopoly.
For a political position that worships the 'free market', the right instantly forget Market 101 when it comes to taxing corporations. People do not price things based on what it costs to make them, you moron. (Except in the sense that they'll stop if they can't make a profit.) They price things based on what the market will pay for them. Taxes can't make a corporation sell things at a higher price, because if they could sell it at a higher price, they already would.
I love the idea that corporations have some 'set amount of profit' they want to make, no more, and no less, and if something like more taxes come along to take some money from their profits, they can, and will, decide to randomly raise their price, which they could have done at any time, but have refrained from because...uh...something. Likewise, if we reduce their taxes, they will nicely reduce their prices for no discernible reason.
Seriously, you guys are so complete and utter idiots it's astonishing. The price of goods and services is set by the market, by supply and demand. It is not a number that individual suppliers can randomly set. (At least, not and stay in business.)
Of course, in the technical sense, you are correct, corporate taxes do get passed on to customers...just like income taxes get passed back to corporations because individuals buy less. Taxes are removing money from the cycle of the market, and hence the entire market feels them in some manner. (Of course, then the government is supposed to spend the money, putting it back.)
Of course, removing money from individuals results in a much more random and economic depressive behavior than removing it from corporations, because individuals are a lot less logical about their situation. And it's much easier to tax corporations, because the government knows where they live.
But here's the $64,000 question: If corporations just pass the costs on, WHY ARE THEY CONSTANTLY TRYING TO REDUCE THEIR TAXES, you fucktard?
The police exist almost solely to keep the poor from taking from the rich. (Usually by paying a lot of attention to crimes against the rich, and little attention to the crimes against the poor, so that criminals prey on the poor, not the rich. In fact, taking expensive things is often treated different _by law_, with specific laws to cover it and specific organizations to handle it...and only the rich have expensive things.)
The military exist almost solely to keep other countries from taking assets belonging to the rich. (You think they'd invade for your house?) Actually, recently, it's started to exist to start taking from other countries.
The civil legal system exists almost solely to settle disputes between the rich, or to settle a dispute between the rich and the poor in favor of the best lawyer, which means the rich.
I could go on, but that's like half the entire government funding right there.
With our current tiered system, they pay a higher percentage than us.
It seems far more reasonable to do away with public schools and make those with children pay for the costs of their education.
I'm very sorry you were not educated in schools. You write very well for someone with no schooling, I would not known if you had not told me. Or were you home schooled?
But I think the system we have now, where we assume we educate everyone in public schools, and then bill everyone who got that benefit (I.e, everyone) later in life, works fine. (I'm a little baffled at the idea we'd charge their parents, or the charge children when they are children, though. No, we wait until they are adults,at which point, if schools have done our job, they pay taxes.)
Yes, sometimes people are not able to get to school, or moved here from outside the country, or sometimes opt-out, but there is a rather large difference between 'Government services that 99% of the population uses to have the basics required for life, which everyone should pay for in taxes', like public education or roads, and 'Government services that 1% of the population uses to make money', like copyright.
And please note that arguing that I'm some sort of pay-as-you-go libertarian is stupid. I'm probably further to the left than you. But copyright isn't some free public service the government provides for the poor, copyright is specifically restricting the rights of _millions_ of people to make copies for the benefit of a copyright holder. It's a government sanctioned and enforced monopoly, and just like it's reasonable to charge companies for purchasing exclusive rights to parts of the EM spectrum, it's reasonable to charge companies (and people) for exclusive rights to make copies.
Copyright isn't only for profit. It is also for the purpose of control. As for $25, that adds up pretty fast if you are actually producing material. A hobby song writer might write a couple dozen songs a year making it a $600 experiment to find out if they will make money on ANY of them.
Which is why, of course, I proposed a 3 year free copyright period. You can make the song, and _then_ see if it's successful, and _then_ pay for the copyright renewal.
If after 3 years of selling the thing you can't see yourself making $25 off it in the next seven years, you probably shouldn't renew the copyright. If it's not worth $3.57 a year to you, then it seems pretty damn unlikely you'd be willing to pay court filing fees to keep someone from violating the copyright anyway, so there's really no point in keeping the registration around.
I agree completely, except 14 years is much too long. I proposed 3 years above. You get 3 years without registering.
In fact, make it graduated. 3 years free, 7 years for $25, another 7 for $250, another 7 for $2500, etc.
And, also, copyright holders should have to keep contact information up to date. Every copyright statement should have an ID that people can look up online, and find out who owns it. This is frickin 2011, it's entirely possible to get every copyright holder an account at the copyright office and let them update their address and whatnot.
If someone cannot locate a copyright holder, they should be able to pay a small fee and have the copyright office look into the matter, and void the copyright if the holder cannot be located in a year or so. Something like 50% of all _registered_ copyrights are floating around without an locatable owner, there are movies smuldering in vaults without known owners, and it's only gotten worse since we magically made everything ever produced under copyright.
No. Just, no. We cannot locate you, you do not get to have a copyright, period. The government is not going to let you keep a government granted monopoly when no one knows where or even who you are.
There's actually a nice side effect of my system that I didn't think of until rereading my post: It discourages updated-copyrighting.
Right now, there are web pages that have the copyright notice show the current year. Likewise, if someone rereleased a DVD, they will simply update the copyright year.
So it's possible to find something that says 'Copyright 2011', when in actuality it's copyright 1986.
But if each unique ID was different...well, the ID was generated at a certain time, and that's when the copyright starts from. (In fact, the IDs should probably be of the form 20110912-492922533 or whatever, having the day generated in them.)
So that would mean that either they get a new ID for each thing (And hence actually pay for that one, or risk that falling into public domain.) or they use the old ID, so we can see the _actual_ expiration on it. Or they use both together: DVD menu and extras copyright 20110912-492922533, movie copyright 1986-whatever.(And now there's limited risk of the movie falling into the public domain, as they just need to keep track of on ID for it.)
Right now, the law seems a little screwed up. They have to register copyright to sue over them, but no one seems to notice that, when they sue someone over distributing a copy of Back to the Future, that they've registered a copyright as being created in 1986, but the actual DVD claims to be copyright 2006 or whenever.
Of course, this would be more relevant if copyright actually expired.
Copyright is asking for a government enforced monopoly on something. It's entirely reasonable to ask for a fee for the privilege of that monopoly.
And putting the burden of paying for copyrights on the people with copyrights seems, uh, a hell of a lot more fair than spreading it out to everyone.
And if you can't make $25 on something in three years, I have no idea what the heck you'd want it copyrighted for.
This.
There is a valid argument for saying 'People should not have to pay to register every single thing.'. But the fact is, at this point in time, there's absolutely no reason why anyone should have to pay just in case.
The government could simply have a website and hand out unique IDs whenever anyone wanted. You produce something you suspect might be worth copyrighting, you get a unique ID for that thing for free and stick it in the copyright notice.
Then you have three years to actually fill out a copyright registration for that ID and pay $25 or whatever, or it's considered abandoned and thus public domain.
That seems to get rid of any of the so-called reasons we started issuing copyrights automatically. It gives people plenty of time to see if the registration is worthwhile, it helps people who might not have thought that specific thing was worthwhile, yet doesn't result in every single damn thing ever written being copyrighted.
Likewise, if someone attempts to contact the person listed, and they can not be reached, they should be able to send a notice to the copyright office, which will then mail an official letter giving them a year to fix their registration, or it's public domain. Any idiot can type in the unique ID and see the copyright status, and where to send the info to. (We could even charge people for questioning the status. You try to contact a copyright holder, you can't, you pay $1 to have the copyright office send an official postage-paid letter that they are require to respond to.)
And we need to go through the older stuff and slowly start requiring that done to them, also. The older stuff actually _does_ have registration, as you pointed out....but we need to put the contact information online, so we can say 'Hey, those people don't exist', and get the copyright office to remove the copyright after a year or so.
As for the newer stuff, that's harder to figure out, but I think giving people ten years or so to locate it and register it would be reasonable.
I don't know what good it says that communism hasn't been tried. A revolt to put people in charge has been tried, and that's how Marx thought you got there.
I agree that what you're saying would make more sense, probably in ways you actually missed, a lot of the problem with the economy is people attempting to make money of stock sales, instead of wanting that company to make money so they get a cut of the profits.
But saying 'That's how communism should work' is silly. That's not how Marx predicted anything.
I love how goddamn idiots are still trying to insist what is wrong with this country is because of the government interfering too much.
Yeah, I sure they how they built that giant house of cards out of selling bogus mortgages and then blew up the economy.
Oh, wait, that was the banks.
Yes, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
And the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to pay lower taxes on stock income vs.a paycheck, deduct the use of any business jet, and have the police show up and actually investigate when a $100,000 piece of art is stolen.
We are all equal under the law.