The top 1% of the US earners pay about 21% of the total US income tax.
Do you have some support for this assertion?
Is it fair to force them to pay more?
Yes. First of all, the top one percent of income earners in the US have a MINIMUM gross income of $300,000/year, which is 7.5 times the median income of approximately $40,000/year. I do not subscribe to the proposition of "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs" but the distribution of income in the United States is obscenely skewed and it is getting worse, thanks to the Bush tax cuts. The truth of the matter is that everyone does better when EVERYONE does better.
What they all talk about is a change for the current generation to a way of saving for retirement that could have many advantages over the current system. No one would be denied their social security benefits - it's just another myth some people would like you to believe.
You obviously have zero, or less, understand of the way in which Social Security functions. Giving the "current generation" a "way of saving for retirement that could have many advantages over the current system" would, in fact, strip ALL Social Security recipients of their benefits because currently collected payroll taxes are what pays for those current benefits. Names notwithstanding there is a LONG line of case law, going all the way to the US Supreme Court, that says, in effect:
"the Social Security Trust Fund is not truly a trust and it's administrators in the Social Security Administration owe a fiduciary duty to neither social security tax payors not to recipients. Social Security benefits are to be paid, under the law, out of current payroll tax receipts."
In short, do away with the payroll tax into the current system, do away with your Grandmother's benefits checks. Do you really see that as a desirable outcome? And, do you honestly think that our current Congress would DARE pass up such a huge "revenue enhancement" as adding the payroll tax rates to the income tax rates? After all, you, the wage-earner won't even feel the hit since you're already used to the money not being there.
The other points quoted in the Reg article are similarly self-evident and entirely credible; the security one is probably most tenuous, but does anyone really believe OSS is a silver bullet here? <ahem> shell: <ahem>
It is not a binding precedent, which means that US courts do not HAVE to follow it. I imagine that since it is a DISTRICT court (trial-level court, IIRC) other German courts are not even required to follow it. That being said, the legal reasoning the judge used in deciding the case CAN (and probably will be) be followed as "persuasive authority" in other courts.
Nope, the 30 day response period comes from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and as a previous poster said, it seems the judge isn't taking SCO's complaints about deadlines very seriously.
Deadlines are missed in litigation all the time. It is extremely rare that judges get really hardassed about them unless the offending party begins abusing that fact (*cough* SCO witholding discovery from IBM *cough*).
Remember how often the term "draft dodger" was applied to Clinton and "war hero" was attributed to Bush Sr. by the so-called liberal media?
and the parent:
That's because clinton was a draft dodger, whereas Bush spent some time in the armed forces during the vietnam war.
The grandparent was referring to George H.W. Bush, who was, in fact, a war hero, having been shot down as a dive bomber pilot during the battle of Midway. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was a pilot of obsolete Air National Guard jet fighters during the last years of the Viet Nam conflict who occasionally appeared for drill.
Many of us who were on active duty at the time considered that to be the "moral equivalent" of draft-dodging.
in a university were administered by the faculty and students (E.E. CompE., C.S.) and not by some IT bureaucrats who couldn't pass Programming Languages 101.
It is obvious to me, young sir, that you know nothing on the subject about which you have chosen to raise the noise pollution level.
I am one of those "IT bureaucrats" of which you speak. I administer Unix and Linux systems at a University with approximately 2500 faculty, 2500 staff and 25000 students.
I probably wrote my first computer program before you were born. I can code in assembler for a couple of processors that are no longer even manufactured and I remember when an IBM 24 inch disk pack held a whole 10 megabytes per platter.
It is my experience that faculty and students in the disciplines you named are so focussed on their research projects that they are completely clueless on any other subject and they don't want to invest the time it takes to BUY a clue in learning anything outside their personal research topics.
At the university where I work we DO have some profs and students who maintain their own (n*x) systems. Two to three times a semester one of the three Unix admins have to go do a forensic study on one of these non-maintained systems because the prof, or his student admin, didn't keep his system up to date and his box got rooted. During the three-plus years I have been at the university we have had exactly two professionally-maintained n*x boxes hacked.
In the days when faculty and students were the primary adminstrators of computer systems there was no public internet (it was still a closed network), and a major research university might have had fifty computers on campus and all connections to the internet were dial-up. The internet was a friendly collegial environment where it was possible to trust all of the other users because you were personally acquainted with ninety percent of them. The Morris Worm changed all of that.
In contract, the campus where I work has some 300 megabits/second of bandwidth directly to the backbone and the College of Engineering's computer lab has some 200 Windows boxes, approximately 50 Unix workstations and a Beowulf cluster. IIRC, the entire campus has some 8000 administerable computer systems ranging from PCs to Origin 3000s and Sun E10Ks and a couple of multi-hundred-node Beowulfs. Even if they were competent to manage systems of that nature, faculty and students do not have the time to cope with computers at that pervasive a level.
If the rules we are required to enforce "cramp your style" try complaining to the President of the university or the Dean of the college you are connected with. They are the ones who SET the policies.
We need these sites to push the idea of Mozilla to the masses
And just WHY should CNN, or any other news service, "push" one product over another? What possible interest could they have?
What is needed is for people (Slashdotters???) who provide "level one" tech support to family and friends to do what I did on my fiancee's computer about three weeks ago.
Her installed IE would crash while launching and ask if she wanted to send an error report to MS. I ran ad-aware on her box and found about a dozen "browser hijacks" in amongst all the malware cookies, etc. I removed them, removed all the "Shortcuts to IE and Outlook Express from her desktop, installed Firefox and Thunderbird (along with the AdBlock and Things They Left Out extensions and a theme she liked), then made sure they were set as the default browser and mail program. Next I imported her Inbox from Outlook Express into T-bird. Finally, I turned on pop-up blocking and showed her how to use AdBlock to block ad servers.
She's been happy as a clam ever since. To quote, "Getting on the 'net is fun again."
Development of Windows 2000 on Alpha was not discontinued by Microsoft.
The project to port Win2K to the Alpha processor was a joint development effort between Compaq and Microsoft. Shortly before Compaq sold the Alpha processor technology to Intel, Compaq pulled the plug on the joint venture.
Im sure I am in the minority when saying this, but it has just been my experience that even though I have to continuously do Microsoft refreshes, their software works better ouf of box.
Their software, out of the box, runs Sobig, Bagel and Blaster as well as it does IE or Office.
A large part of the cost of administering desktops in a business environment is repairing the damage done by users who have been given excessive system privileges because their applications require them to have them. Linux/Unix apps, as a general rule, don't do that. As a result, it is possible to lock a n*x box down to the point that a user can still do his/her job but he/she cannot wreak havoc on the machine or the network. When the user can only install "goodies in his or her $HOME where they also store their precious data, and pr0n^W other irreplaceable information, they are MUCH more careful about what they click "OK" on. This reduces TCO dramatically.
And as for the comparison of Linux to a DOS prompt... Microsoft seems to think that adding a huge bloated GUI to a server OS is going to improve things.
Moreover, it exposes the degree to which Microsoft is engaging in "Not Invented Here" self-delusion for them to try and compare a DOS prompt (command.com and its standard utilities) to a real shell (bash, tcsh or zsh) and the standard set of utilities (the GNU file utils, find utils and text utils) that ship with most linux distributions.
Personally, I'd reverse the comparison and say the DOS prompt is "almost as good as a Unix shell."
So, in RSA's case, there was prior art but that prior art was kept a secret because of national security concerns.
So you have a problem with RSA getting a patent on something that was discovered earlier and not only not disclosed, but actively hidden by the British government?? I don't...
I have a problem with the fact that RSA got a patent for technology that they developed while conducting cryptographic research under a government contract! Not RSA's fault... they acted rationally... it's the government's fault for not drafting a better contract. However, either way, "We the People" wound up paying twice for the research results we should have owned.
i don't understand the big fear of lack of privacy due to RFID tags.
Well, to start with, there have already been cases of lawyers subpoena-ing "EZ-Tag" records from toll road authorities in divorce cases, and at least ONE case I'm aware of where a criminal defendant was convicted primarily on the basis of toll-road records resulting from the RFID toll payment system (proved the defendant was in the right part of town at the right time, circumstantial evidence was sufficient from that point on).
What's that you say? Pay your tolls with cash instead? Aren't you aware that the US Treasury Dept. and the IRS are working diligently to eliminate cash from the economy, the better to track transactions/collect taxes? I probably will be able to function adequately on cash for the rest of my life (I'm 54). The average Slashdotter in the US probably will not.
I might also add the putting RFIDs in garments for inventory control is, IMHO, A Good Thing(TM Martha Stewart Living, Inc.) (loss prevention == cost control == lower prices), however, when the Secret Police can place RFID readers in every door frame in your city and coerce/cajole WallyWorld into providing a list of who bought which shirt, they will probably arrange to shift the burden to you to prove that you were NOT where your shirt was at the time of a "thought crime."
A person may need a college degree out in the job world, but chances are they don't need a college "education".
On the contrary, The "education" part of college counts MUCH more than your specialized major courses. A major in CS, math, engineering, or other technical subject make you qualified to work as an entry-level nerd for a few years. The core requirements for a BS degree give you things outside your technical field that make you able to "flesh out" your technical work in a broader context.
Most college graduates don't work in their major field and many don't even work in jobs that have any use for a degreed person at all.
You make my point for me... in fact, I make my OWN point just by living. I have a BS in Biology and one in Engineering (non-specialized inter-disciplinary program from 25 years ago). I also have a JD... what do I do for a living? Admin UNIX systems for a major University. Why? I like the environment and the people, and I don't have to put up with clients' BS.
Just remember, in almost every survey taken by a major business publication in the last 30 years, the most common undergraduate degree among CEOs of major corporations is a BA in Liberal Arts.
Care to try and tell me again how the "education" part of college has little, if any, value?
Re:Are there any advantages other than licensing?
on
Mandrakelinux Goes X.org
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Two points to consider:
1) I assume XF86 means distros that currently support their software and have not announced an intention to change,
2) I know Conectiva was initially RedHat-based, but then, so was Mandrake. I wonder how many of these distros are also derivatives... hmmm Arch(Debian), Lycoris(Debian), Peanut(appears to be RedHat/Fedora-based), Lycoris(Debian), Slax(could it be Slack-based?), Source and Sorcere (I'd be willing to bet on Gentoo)... they will eventually switch as their parent distros do.
Debian WAS the official maintainer of the non-x86 branches of the XF86 tree, however, I don't believe that will continue because Daniel Stone has stated for the record that they will NOT ship any version of XFree86 under the 1.1 license.
When I purchase a piece of software I'm bound by a licence agreement, a contract on my use of the software that I paid for. With broadcast TV, you have not agreed nor signed to such a contract, therefor, how can DRM be enforceable?
Very simply:
1) Terminate analog broadcasting; 2) Apply DRM signal (broadcast flag) to programming; 3) Handle thousands of customer complaints; 3) Profit??? Who knows?
Of course, all those early adopters who rushed out and spent multi k-bucks for non-DRM'd HDTVs are going to be MIGHTILY pissed... oh well, a good argument can be made that they had more money than brains for rushing into something for which the standards weren't even BEGINNING to solidify. The fact of the matter remains that once HDTV becomes the rule rather than the high-end exception you will accept DRM or do without TV.
Well, doing this sort of thing (real-time visualization) is not, in my rather limited experience) a normal application for clusters anyway. To handle this type of data bandwidth, you need a networking FABRIC (something like SGI's NUMAlink)... Myrinet and Giabit Ethernet just don't cut it.
I have yet to see a "rifle mic" with a sensitive zone less than 10 degrees unless it was backed up by a "big ear" reflector like you see on the sideline at pro (and some college) football games. Hiding the mic is not difficult... but that 3 foot diameter reflector is going to be a b!tch to hide.
Also, my sibling post is correct. I read the article about passive transceiviers that was published in SciAm right after the device was found. It was basically a "whip antenna attached to a cavity resonator with one very thin wall. The vibrations of the thin wall changed the resonance of the cavity thus modulating the retransmitted RF energy... no mics involved.
The unique sonic signature of keys within a particular membrane keyboard is a natural consequence of manufacturing tolerances. Spatial variations in the thickness of the membrane vary its stiffness. Variations in the spacing of the support pins (even with injection molded keyboards from a single mold) will also effect the harmonic structure of the sound.
Yes, it was obvious before I read the article and would be to anyone who has played percussion.
Other things that will effect the harmonic structure of the sound is the placement of sound-absorbent (e.g. papers on a desktop) vs. reflective (e.g. my stainless-steel travel mug)materials around the keyboard. The more material that eats up the high overtones the more difficult this technique becomes.
As to background noise... I spend a LOT of time trying to remove noise (usually voices) from recordings. It is NOT as easy as just using a 32 band eq. Keep in mind, we are talking about spectrum analysis to ID a key... filtering out background noise also removes part of the desired signal's spectrum.
In short, this might work in an anechoic chamber... I DOUBT it would work in my home office where my PC has 4 fans running.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have some support for this assertion?
Yes. First of all, the top one percent of income earners in the US have a MINIMUM gross income of $300,000/year, which is 7.5 times the median income of approximately $40,000/year. I do not subscribe to the proposition of "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs" but the distribution of income in the United States is obscenely skewed and it is getting worse, thanks to the Bush tax cuts. The truth of the matter is that everyone does better when EVERYONE does better.
Actually, the number is 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896. He missed a couple of possibilities and had to update the page.
You obviously have zero, or less, understand of the way in which Social Security functions. Giving the "current generation" a "way of saving for retirement that could have many advantages over the current system" would, in fact, strip ALL Social Security recipients of their benefits because currently collected payroll taxes are what pays for those current benefits. Names notwithstanding there is a LONG line of case law, going all the way to the US Supreme Court, that says, in effect:
In short, do away with the payroll tax into the current system, do away with your Grandmother's benefits checks. Do you really see that as a desirable outcome? And, do you honestly think that our current Congress would DARE pass up such a huge "revenue enhancement" as adding the payroll tax rates to the income tax rates? After all, you, the wage-earner won't even feel the hit since you're already used to the money not being there.
Peace,
You obviously click "agree" on the licensing dialogue box without reading the EULA for your newest Microsoft product!
<AHEM>
It is not a binding precedent, which means that US courts do not HAVE to follow it. I imagine that since it is a DISTRICT court (trial-level court, IIRC) other German courts are not even required to follow it. That being said, the legal reasoning the judge used in deciding the case CAN (and probably will be) be followed as "persuasive authority" in other courts.
Nope, the 30 day response period comes from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and as a previous poster said, it seems the judge isn't taking SCO's complaints about deadlines very seriously.
Deadlines are missed in litigation all the time. It is extremely rare that judges get really hardassed about them unless the offending party begins abusing that fact (*cough* SCO witholding discovery from IBM *cough*).
and the parent:
The grandparent was referring to George H.W. Bush, who was, in fact, a war hero, having been shot down as a dive bomber pilot during the battle of Midway. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was a pilot of obsolete Air National Guard jet fighters during the last years of the Viet Nam conflict who occasionally appeared for drill.
Many of us who were on active duty at the time considered that to be the "moral equivalent" of draft-dodging.
Longer term, no trend
It is obvious to me, young sir, that you know nothing on the subject about which you have chosen to raise the noise pollution level.
I am one of those "IT bureaucrats" of which you speak. I administer Unix and Linux systems at a University with approximately 2500 faculty, 2500 staff and 25000 students.
I probably wrote my first computer program before you were born. I can code in assembler for a couple of processors that are no longer even manufactured and I remember when an IBM 24 inch disk pack held a whole 10 megabytes per platter.
It is my experience that faculty and students in the disciplines you named are so focussed on their research projects that they are completely clueless on any other subject and they don't want to invest the time it takes to BUY a clue in learning anything outside their personal research topics.
At the university where I work we DO have some profs and students who maintain their own (n*x) systems. Two to three times a semester one of the three Unix admins have to go do a forensic study on one of these non-maintained systems because the prof, or his student admin, didn't keep his system up to date and his box got rooted. During the three-plus years I have been at the university we have had exactly two professionally-maintained n*x boxes hacked.
In the days when faculty and students were the primary adminstrators of computer systems there was no public internet (it was still a closed network), and a major research university might have had fifty computers on campus and all connections to the internet were dial-up. The internet was a friendly collegial environment where it was possible to trust all of the other users because you were personally acquainted with ninety percent of them. The Morris Worm changed all of that.
In contract, the campus where I work has some 300 megabits/second of bandwidth directly to the backbone and the College of Engineering's computer lab has some 200 Windows boxes, approximately 50 Unix workstations and a Beowulf cluster. IIRC, the entire campus has some 8000 administerable computer systems ranging from PCs to Origin 3000s and Sun E10Ks and a couple of multi-hundred-node Beowulfs. Even if they were competent to manage systems of that nature, faculty and students do not have the time to cope with computers at that pervasive a level.
If the rules we are required to enforce "cramp your style" try complaining to the President of the university or the Dean of the college you are connected with. They are the ones who SET the policies.
Okay, here you go
"This is my work computer and the company requires me to use Windows."
N.B.: That reason doesn't apply to me (my work computer is a Sun box), so I don't, but it IS a justifiable reason.
And just WHY should CNN, or any other news service, "push" one product over another? What possible interest could they have?
What is needed is for people (Slashdotters???) who provide "level one" tech support to family and friends to do what I did on my fiancee's computer about three weeks ago.
Her installed IE would crash while launching and ask if she wanted to send an error report to MS. I ran ad-aware on her box and found about a dozen "browser hijacks" in amongst all the malware cookies, etc. I removed them, removed all the "Shortcuts to IE and Outlook Express from her desktop, installed Firefox and Thunderbird (along with the AdBlock and Things They Left Out extensions and a theme she liked), then made sure they were set as the default browser and mail program. Next I imported her Inbox from Outlook Express into T-bird. Finally, I turned on pop-up blocking and showed her how to use AdBlock to block ad servers.
She's been happy as a clam ever since. To quote, "Getting on the 'net is fun again."
Don't ask the media to do our job for us.
Development of Windows 2000 on Alpha was not discontinued by Microsoft.
The project to port Win2K to the Alpha processor was a joint development effort between Compaq and Microsoft. Shortly before Compaq sold the Alpha processor technology to Intel, Compaq pulled the plug on the joint venture.
Their software, out of the box, runs Sobig, Bagel and Blaster as well as it does IE or Office.
A large part of the cost of administering desktops in a business environment is repairing the damage done by users who have been given excessive system privileges because their applications require them to have them. Linux/Unix apps, as a general rule, don't do that. As a result, it is possible to lock a n*x box down to the point that a user can still do his/her job but he/she cannot wreak havoc on the machine or the network. When the user can only install "goodies in his or her $HOME where they also store their precious data, and pr0n^W other irreplaceable information, they are MUCH more careful about what they click "OK" on. This reduces TCO dramatically.
Just my USD0.02
Moreover, it exposes the degree to which Microsoft is engaging in "Not Invented Here" self-delusion for them to try and compare a DOS prompt (command.com and its standard utilities) to a real shell (bash, tcsh or zsh) and the standard set of utilities (the GNU file utils, find utils and text utils) that ship with most linux distributions.
Personally, I'd reverse the comparison and say the DOS prompt is "almost as good as a Unix shell."
So you have a problem with RSA getting a patent on something that was discovered earlier and not only not disclosed, but actively hidden by the British government?? I don't
I have a problem with the fact that RSA got a patent for technology that they developed while conducting cryptographic research under a government contract! Not RSA's fault
Well, to start with, there have already been cases of lawyers subpoena-ing "EZ-Tag" records from toll road authorities in divorce cases, and at least ONE case I'm aware of where a criminal defendant was convicted primarily on the basis of toll-road records resulting from the RFID toll payment system (proved the defendant was in the right part of town at the right time, circumstantial evidence was sufficient from that point on).
What's that you say? Pay your tolls with cash instead? Aren't you aware that the US Treasury Dept. and the IRS are working diligently to eliminate cash from the economy, the better to track transactions/collect taxes? I probably will be able to function adequately on cash for the rest of my life (I'm 54). The average Slashdotter in the US probably will not.
I might also add the putting RFIDs in garments for inventory control is, IMHO, A Good Thing(TM Martha Stewart Living, Inc.) (loss prevention == cost control == lower prices), however, when the Secret Police can place RFID readers in every door frame in your city and coerce/cajole WallyWorld into providing a list of who bought which shirt, they will probably arrange to shift the burden to you to prove that you were NOT where your shirt was at the time of a "thought crime."
Haven't you ever read 1984?
On the contrary, The "education" part of college counts MUCH more than your specialized major courses. A major in CS, math, engineering, or other technical subject make you qualified to work as an entry-level nerd for a few years. The core requirements for a BS degree give you things outside your technical field that make you able to "flesh out" your technical work in a broader context.
You make my point for me
Just remember, in almost every survey taken by a major business publication in the last 30 years, the most common undergraduate degree among CEOs of major corporations is a BA in Liberal Arts.
Care to try and tell me again how the "education" part of college has little, if any, value?
Two points to consider:
... hmmm Arch(Debian), Lycoris(Debian), Peanut(appears to be RedHat/Fedora-based), Lycoris(Debian), Slax(could it be Slack-based?), Source and Sorcere (I'd be willing to bet on Gentoo) ... they will eventually switch as their parent distros do.
1) I assume XF86 means distros that currently support their software and have not announced an intention to change,
2) I know Conectiva was initially RedHat-based, but then, so was Mandrake. I wonder how many of these distros are also derivatives
Debian WAS the official maintainer of the non-x86 branches of the XF86 tree, however, I don't believe that will continue because Daniel Stone has stated for the record that they will NOT ship any version of XFree86 under the 1.1 license.
Very simply:
1) Terminate analog broadcasting;
2) Apply DRM signal (broadcast flag) to programming;
3) Handle thousands of customer complaints;
3) Profit??? Who knows?
Of course, all those early adopters who rushed out and spent multi k-bucks for non-DRM'd HDTVs are going to be MIGHTILY pissed
Peace,
ninewands
Hmmmm
Ah, the power of innovation!
Well, doing this sort of thing (real-time visualization) is not, in my rather limited experience) a normal application for clusters anyway. To handle this type of data bandwidth, you need a networking FABRIC (something like SGI's NUMAlink) ... Myrinet and Giabit Ethernet just don't cut it.
I have yet to see a "rifle mic" with a sensitive zone less than 10 degrees unless it was backed up by a "big ear" reflector like you see on the sideline at pro (and some college) football games. Hiding the mic is not difficult ... but that 3 foot diameter reflector is going to be a b!tch to hide.
... no mics involved.
Also, my sibling post is correct. I read the article about passive transceiviers that was published in SciAm right after the device was found. It was basically a "whip antenna attached to a cavity resonator with one very thin wall. The vibrations of the thin wall changed the resonance of the cavity thus modulating the retransmitted RF energy
The unique sonic signature of keys within a particular membrane keyboard is a natural consequence of manufacturing tolerances. Spatial variations in the thickness of the membrane vary its stiffness. Variations in the spacing of the support pins (even with injection molded keyboards from a single mold) will also effect the harmonic structure of the sound.
... I spend a LOT of time trying to remove noise (usually voices) from recordings. It is NOT as easy as just using a 32 band eq. Keep in mind, we are talking about spectrum analysis to ID a key ... filtering out background noise also removes part of the desired signal's spectrum.
... I DOUBT it would work in my home office where my PC has 4 fans running.
Yes, it was obvious before I read the article and would be to anyone who has played percussion.
Other things that will effect the harmonic structure of the sound is the placement of sound-absorbent (e.g. papers on a desktop) vs. reflective (e.g. my stainless-steel travel mug)materials around the keyboard. The more material that eats up the high overtones the more difficult this technique becomes.
As to background noise
In short, this might work in an anechoic chamber