It's not a lie. Tax increases don't exist in a vacuum; as you increase tax rates it shrinks the amount of income that you can tax.
After all, millionaires and billionaires don't grab all their money and store it in a big vault that they can swim in on the weekends. It's all invested, all circulating through the economy. You go after that, and there is now less investment, as more of the overall income is pulled into government and out of the private sector. Many states have struggled with this issue over the last year -- even with higher taxes, when people have less you'll just end up pulling in less.
You could make the argument that we should be taxing overall wealth instead of income, but I think that's a dangerous idea -- it would certainly be a radical restructuring of our tax system! But I think at least for the time being it's worth considering simplifying the tax code and closing a good number of the loopholes that are there. I don't think we need to "raise taxes," I think we could do just fine with lowering spending and closing loopholes that prevent us from collecting those taxes in the first place.
Have to disagree; relevance 63.2 if I were a betting man.:)
Oh, I wouldn't be quite that generous! I think a comparison to the airlines would only be accurate if broadband was a free market. It isn't. In most areas it's a duopoly, in others it's a monopoly. I would be all for a "well, it'd be ok to let those providers violate net neutrality; consumers have other choices in broadband access" if consumers actually could vote with their dollars. Hell, if you surveyed all the Comcast customers asking if they were in favor or against Comcast from making some extra dough by charging more for competing services, I bet the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative. But Comcast won't do that, because they know what the reaction would be, and they don't particularly care. They can get away with it because there's no competition. There's no competition because they're the ones who can install lines under the streets. They're the ones granted local monopolies in cable service, just as AT&T is the one who usually gets close to a monopoly on DSL service. I say close because there are a few small areas where other DSL companies buy bandwidth through AT I happen to be extremely fortunate to live in one of those areas with an extremely good ISP. Most people are not that lucky though, and arguments like "well they can move to an area with a better ISP" are disingenuous.
And the one and only reason why I can choose an alternate carrier here? Government order -- AT&T, while kicking and screaming, was forced to open their lines to other DSL ISPs. And that's the way it should be -- bad things happen when the ISP also owns and controls the lines. You get BS like the broadband companies' tiered pricing plans.
So I don't have a problem with the federal government telling Comcast and AT&T that they can't set up a rate limiting for those websites unwilling to play along. The billions those companies have gotten for infrastructure and investment from the government should come with some strings attached after all.
Spending money to help those in need isn't socialism. Retirement money isn't socialism. Medicare isn't socialism. Medicaid isn't socialism.
Yes it is. That's exactly what it is. Donating money to the poor? That isn't socialism. Taxing money, then spending that on programs for the poor, that is socialism. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing (I don't think it is). But I'm quite happy to call it what it is. I'm fine with a small amount of socialism.
It's like how the Republican Party successfully turned "liberal" into a dirty word in the 80s, so now folks call themselves "progressive." "Socialism" has a good portion of the last century to have been tarred and feathered that everyone has a visceral reaction to the name.
While the AC is flat-out wrong about the only free UNIX option in the late 90s being BSD (no, BSD was on very few peoples' radar), non-windows web startups were ALL about Solaris.
Database backend? Solaris, often paired with Oracle. Oracle was overkill for a startup? Doesn't matter, most startups were not wise with how they spent their money and had visions of making it big overnight, so they designed big. Java-based middleware? Solaris. Web front-end? Usually still Solaris, occasionally Linux (it was starting to get the reputation that that was what it could be good at).
Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.
And this is why Sony so often loses -- because it's so scared of competing against itself that over and over again it lets markets slip away to other companies.
I'm starting to come around to the conclusion that it's not Apple or Steve Jobs that wannabe techies really hate.
They really hate it that their role as the interpreter and guide to the tech is being obsoleted. It's a dying priesthood and the writing on the wall doesn't look good for them. Thus the hate.
In this case, it's the tech literate who are most vested in the cathedral and it's priestly trappings, not Apple that's actually managing to bring usable tech access to the masses.
I would say no, no, that's not it.
What the techies really worry about is their dwindling amount of options. I don't really care if people enjoy their iPads. That's their choice and if they're happy with them, that's all right by me. But I wouldn't be happy with one, but I need more options, more control, over my devices and over my programs. But if the iPad is the way things are going, it will begin to crowd out general computing completely, and techies who want that greater freedom will soon find it gone, as everyone else willingly surrenders freedoms they never knew they had or really wanted to companies that act like control-freaks*. That's what the techies fear the most.
* We could certainly argue that they're benevolent control freaks, and that the solitary choice they offer was really the best option anyway, but the point remains.
Time is valuable. Time is precious. Time is best spent on the things you need to do and the things you want to do.
Having to read a 100-page manual on a device that shouldn't need one doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't really even make you a smarter person since all you've learned is how to operate that poorly-made device. But it has wasted your valuable time.
And, yes, most people are lazy. But most people learnt to read.
If you could not learn to read until you were were 30 or 40, I wonder what the literacy rate of the over-30 or over-40 crowd would be. My guess is not very high. Kids learn to read when they're developmentally suited for it.
That's all very interesting, and I'm glad that you take 2 years of steep AAPL increase as indicative of the last 30 years, but it's not addressing my point: I stated that Apple produces consumer shiny, and does not innovate useful tools for producers.
The problem is you're not really defining what "producer" means. What is your definition? The literal definition could mean movie producer, in which case Apple's done pretty well for them.
Even the science shows on PBS seem to be dumbing down - I mean, Come on Nova! WTF?!?
Nova is very hit and miss -- there seem to be a lot of different production companies aimed at much different audiences, all under the banner of "Nova."
I can't help but notice how all channels are pretty much the same nowadays
Because of the burning, unquenchable desire on the part of the channel executives for higher ratings and more ad revenue. So when some network finds something that draws in other viewers, the others look at it and say "we must do that too!" This happens over and over again until the History Channel has shows like "Ice Road Truckers" and "Ax Men," SyFy shows "World Wrestling Entertainment," MTV and VH1 with all their non-music-related nonsense, etc.
It's like Vegas casinos. Several years ago, the owners of the major Vegas casinos (almost all of which are owned by two groups) got together and decided that themed casinos just weren't a good idea, and they've been stripping once-entertaining buildings of everything that makes them unique.
Assuming that "being rather confused due to advice and grossly bad spelling from someone evidently unfamiliar with the subject" counts as doing the GP a favor, given it's "RiffTrax". There's no rifts involved.
There sort of is, given the rift that existed between, say, Joel Hodgsen and Mike Nelson. They claim things are pretty ok between the two groups now, and Joel's Cinematic Titanic and Mike's RiffTrax have two different aims.
This sounds like a horrible idea for gamers like me.
I never, never sit and play a game to the exclusion of anything else. Always at the same time open is at least one of the following:
1) Instant messengers to chat with friends (and sometimes that will take priority over the single-player game). 2) Ventrilo to talk with my guildmates, especially on MMO or even regular multiplayer online games like Diablo 2. 3) A web browser (good for GameFAQs, stats sites, other tools).
I want you guys to think about something. The above person is among us. He's probably one of your co-workers. He lives his life believing that civil engineers are deserving...uh, whatever being "sent to Hell" means.
I doubt it. He's probably just trolling (I've seen a lot of them lately) and doesn't really believe whatever he's saying. It's just to get a reaction.
You bonehead, three decades ago, a whole lot of private sector workers got pensions just like that.
Yup, and then a number of those companies went out of business and the rest discovered that they were way too expensive. It's easy to promise someone now that you'll pay them in 30 years. Far harder to actually do it.
The pension system is just a -bad model-. It doesn't work.
I'm not saying there should be no retirement system and no retirement savings, but pensions seem to be the riskiest move, but easiest to set because you have to pay for them in the future, not now. Except the future is now, and now we're collapsing under the weight of past promises.
Around where I live, during the housing boom the landlords increased the rent by 50% and then during the bust the rents went down by 10-15%. That's not exactly balance, and the unions taking a small cut after getting huge increases in their pensions won't fix the problem either. What the unions have agreed to is tiny compared to the horrific pension system hemorrhaging money. I don't believe in destroying collective bargaining, but I don't think the unions have given enough concessions either.
The access was restored after 30 minutes or so. It says so in the article. It also says this was a new website. The system there is set to block all new websites until they are checked out. It doesn't matter what the web site is.
That sounds like a network connection that's useless for doing any sort of research not found on CNN or Wikipedia.
If you aren't able to get a proper reverse DNS entry for your public outbound mail server then you probably shouldn't be running one. If you have a real static IP (as opposed to "my IP doesn't seem to change") - then it shouldn't be a problem getting the DNS setup correctly.
But whether the DNS is set up correctly or not isn't going to make a lot of difference if the entire IP range that your connection falls into is banned.
If you have good enough lawyers, illegal activities rarely results in a conviction. Just look at United States v. Microsoft (the anti-trust case). Even though Microsoft was convicted, their punishment was essentially a slap on the wrist.
They had the benefit of a change in the Justice Department before the punishment was decided. If the punishment phase was crafted with the Clinton Justice Department in charge, I wonder what would have happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. Sorry, that is a flat out lie.
It's not a lie. Tax increases don't exist in a vacuum; as you increase tax rates it shrinks the amount of income that you can tax.
After all, millionaires and billionaires don't grab all their money and store it in a big vault that they can swim in on the weekends. It's all invested, all circulating through the economy. You go after that, and there is now less investment, as more of the overall income is pulled into government and out of the private sector. Many states have struggled with this issue over the last year -- even with higher taxes, when people have less you'll just end up pulling in less.
You could make the argument that we should be taxing overall wealth instead of income, but I think that's a dangerous idea -- it would certainly be a radical restructuring of our tax system! But I think at least for the time being it's worth considering simplifying the tax code and closing a good number of the loopholes that are there. I don't think we need to "raise taxes," I think we could do just fine with lowering spending and closing loopholes that prevent us from collecting those taxes in the first place.
Wow, I just may be born again!
Have to disagree; relevance 63.2 if I were a betting man. :)
Oh, I wouldn't be quite that generous! I think a comparison to the airlines would only be accurate if broadband was a free market. It isn't. In most areas it's a duopoly, in others it's a monopoly. I would be all for a "well, it'd be ok to let those providers violate net neutrality; consumers have other choices in broadband access" if consumers actually could vote with their dollars. Hell, if you surveyed all the Comcast customers asking if they were in favor or against Comcast from making some extra dough by charging more for competing services, I bet the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative. But Comcast won't do that, because they know what the reaction would be, and they don't particularly care. They can get away with it because there's no competition. There's no competition because they're the ones who can install lines under the streets. They're the ones granted local monopolies in cable service, just as AT&T is the one who usually gets close to a monopoly on DSL service. I say close because there are a few small areas where other DSL companies buy bandwidth through AT I happen to be extremely fortunate to live in one of those areas with an extremely good ISP. Most people are not that lucky though, and arguments like "well they can move to an area with a better ISP" are disingenuous.
And the one and only reason why I can choose an alternate carrier here? Government order -- AT&T, while kicking and screaming, was forced to open their lines to other DSL ISPs. And that's the way it should be -- bad things happen when the ISP also owns and controls the lines. You get BS like the broadband companies' tiered pricing plans.
So I don't have a problem with the federal government telling Comcast and AT&T that they can't set up a rate limiting for those websites unwilling to play along. The billions those companies have gotten for infrastructure and investment from the government should come with some strings attached after all.
Spending money to help those in need isn't socialism. Retirement money isn't socialism. Medicare isn't socialism. Medicaid isn't socialism.
Yes it is. That's exactly what it is. Donating money to the poor? That isn't socialism. Taxing money, then spending that on programs for the poor, that is socialism. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing (I don't think it is). But I'm quite happy to call it what it is. I'm fine with a small amount of socialism.
It's like how the Republican Party successfully turned "liberal" into a dirty word in the 80s, so now folks call themselves "progressive." "Socialism" has a good portion of the last century to have been tarred and feathered that everyone has a visceral reaction to the name.
While the AC is flat-out wrong about the only free UNIX option in the late 90s being BSD (no, BSD was on very few peoples' radar), non-windows web startups were ALL about Solaris.
Database backend? Solaris, often paired with Oracle. Oracle was overkill for a startup? Doesn't matter, most startups were not wise with how they spent their money and had visions of making it big overnight, so they designed big.
Java-based middleware? Solaris.
Web front-end? Usually still Solaris, occasionally Linux (it was starting to get the reputation that that was what it could be good at).
Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.
And this is why Sony so often loses -- because it's so scared of competing against itself that over and over again it lets markets slip away to other companies.
If you want to push an app onto the store though,
Not interested, though that's always nice to have.
or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval),
Yup, that's what I'd be looking for..
then it is $99 per year.
Geez, just $99? How fucking generous of them.
That doesn't strike you as even a little bit outrageous?
I'm starting to come around to the conclusion that it's not Apple or Steve Jobs that wannabe techies really hate.
They really hate it that their role as the interpreter and guide to the tech is being obsoleted. It's a dying priesthood and the writing on the wall doesn't look good for them. Thus the hate.
In this case, it's the tech literate who are most vested in the cathedral and it's priestly trappings, not Apple that's actually managing to bring usable tech access to the masses.
I would say no, no, that's not it.
What the techies really worry about is their dwindling amount of options. I don't really care if people enjoy their iPads. That's their choice and if they're happy with them, that's all right by me. But I wouldn't be happy with one, but I need more options, more control, over my devices and over my programs. But if the iPad is the way things are going, it will begin to crowd out general computing completely, and techies who want that greater freedom will soon find it gone, as everyone else willingly surrenders freedoms they never knew they had or really wanted to companies that act like control-freaks*. That's what the techies fear the most.
* We could certainly argue that they're benevolent control freaks, and that the solitary choice they offer was really the best option anyway, but the point remains.
Time is valuable. Time is precious. Time is best spent on the things you need to do and the things you want to do.
Having to read a 100-page manual on a device that shouldn't need one doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't really even make you a smarter person since all you've learned is how to operate that poorly-made device. But it has wasted your valuable time.
And, yes, most people are lazy. But most people learnt to read.
If you could not learn to read until you were were 30 or 40, I wonder what the literacy rate of the over-30 or over-40 crowd would be. My guess is not very high. Kids learn to read when they're developmentally suited for it.
That's all very interesting, and I'm glad that you take 2 years of steep AAPL increase as indicative of the last 30 years, but it's not addressing my point: I stated that Apple produces consumer shiny, and does not innovate useful tools for producers.
The problem is you're not really defining what "producer" means. What is your definition? The literal definition could mean movie producer, in which case Apple's done pretty well for them.
I thought TLC stood for "Tender Loving Care," generic enough to be a channel that could have anything!
Even the science shows on PBS seem to be dumbing down - I mean, Come on Nova! WTF?!?
Nova is very hit and miss -- there seem to be a lot of different production companies aimed at much different audiences, all under the banner of "Nova."
I can't help but notice how all channels are pretty much the same nowadays
Because of the burning, unquenchable desire on the part of the channel executives for higher ratings and more ad revenue. So when some network finds something that draws in other viewers, the others look at it and say "we must do that too!" This happens over and over again until the History Channel has shows like "Ice Road Truckers" and "Ax Men," SyFy shows "World Wrestling Entertainment," MTV and VH1 with all their non-music-related nonsense, etc.
It's like Vegas casinos. Several years ago, the owners of the major Vegas casinos (almost all of which are owned by two groups) got together and decided that themed casinos just weren't a good idea, and they've been stripping once-entertaining buildings of everything that makes them unique.
Do your self a favor and look up Rift Tracks.
Assuming that "being rather confused due to advice and grossly bad spelling from someone evidently unfamiliar with the subject" counts as doing the GP a favor, given it's "RiffTrax". There's no rifts involved.
There sort of is, given the rift that existed between, say, Joel Hodgsen and Mike Nelson. They claim things are pretty ok between the two groups now, and Joel's Cinematic Titanic and Mike's RiffTrax have two different aims.
South Park had it right -- WFF-style wrestling is theater, it's soap opera, with more trappings of physical violence.
This sounds like a horrible idea for gamers like me.
I never, never sit and play a game to the exclusion of anything else. Always at the same time open is at least one of the following:
1) Instant messengers to chat with friends (and sometimes that will take priority over the single-player game).
2) Ventrilo to talk with my guildmates, especially on MMO or even regular multiplayer online games like Diablo 2.
3) A web browser (good for GameFAQs, stats sites, other tools).
The future you predict is horrific, but I think you're right.
It will take a lot longer than a decade, though.
pushing the islamo-homosexual agenda
I think my brain just exploded like that guy in "Scanners."
Don't give that phrase to the Westboro Baptist Church, because they'll run with it.
I want you guys to think about something. The above person is among us. He's probably one of your co-workers. He lives his life believing that civil engineers are deserving...uh, whatever being "sent to Hell" means.
I doubt it. He's probably just trolling (I've seen a lot of them lately) and doesn't really believe whatever he's saying. It's just to get a reaction.
You bonehead, three decades ago, a whole lot of private sector workers got pensions just like that.
Yup, and then a number of those companies went out of business and the rest discovered that they were way too expensive. It's easy to promise someone now that you'll pay them in 30 years. Far harder to actually do it.
The pension system is just a -bad model-. It doesn't work.
I'm not saying there should be no retirement system and no retirement savings, but pensions seem to be the riskiest move, but easiest to set because you have to pay for them in the future, not now.
Except the future is now, and now we're collapsing under the weight of past promises.
Around where I live, during the housing boom the landlords increased the rent by 50% and then during the bust the rents went down by 10-15%. That's not exactly balance, and the unions taking a small cut after getting huge increases in their pensions won't fix the problem either. What the unions have agreed to is tiny compared to the horrific pension system hemorrhaging money. I don't believe in destroying collective bargaining, but I don't think the unions have given enough concessions either.
The access was restored after 30 minutes or so. It says so in the article. It also says this was a new website. The system there is set to block all new websites until they are checked out. It doesn't matter what the web site is.
That sounds like a network connection that's useless for doing any sort of research not found on CNN or Wikipedia.
If you aren't able to get a proper reverse DNS entry for your public outbound mail server then you probably shouldn't be running one. If you have a real static IP (as opposed to "my IP doesn't seem to change") - then it shouldn't be a problem getting the DNS setup correctly.
But whether the DNS is set up correctly or not isn't going to make a lot of difference if the entire IP range that your connection falls into is banned.
If you have good enough lawyers, illegal activities rarely results in a conviction. Just look at United States v. Microsoft (the anti-trust case). Even though Microsoft was convicted, their punishment was essentially a slap on the wrist.
They had the benefit of a change in the Justice Department before the punishment was decided. If the punishment phase was crafted with the Clinton Justice Department in charge, I wonder what would have happened.