Do you seriously think that any tax rate such that the cost of paying the tax is higher than the cost of paying the accountant would avoid elaborate tax evasion schemes? Seriously?
These are amoral profit-maximizing entities we are talking about here, they aren't engaging in tax evasion to protest the man, they are doing so to save money. It isn't as though a 15% rate would make them say "Well, golly-shucks, I guess we've finally been asked to pay only our fair share, we'd better do our civic duty!" and stop...
I suspect that that isn't quite correct: members of congress tend to be of substantially above-average wealth; but not nearly so much that they would have personal need for the same accounting tricks used to hide the incomes of major multinationals.
Now, of course, the major multinationals who serve as important campaign donors and likely future employers, funders of think-tanks, etc. for them do have need of the accounting tricks used to hide the incomes of major multinationals, so the effect is largely the same.
E-ink displays could be quite useful, if the module could be made cheap enough, in certain sorts of logistical applications...
Since you only pay a power cost when you change them, and static display costs nothing, things like shelf price tags that last ages on tiny batteries should be quite doable. a desktop/laptop equivalent to the small LCD status displays that servers have(usually switching between hostname/uptime/fault conditions/etc.) would make life easier as well. Having to boot a machine in storage or in transit just to learn its hostname/IP/whatever is a pain in the ass. A teeny little microcontroller module that chats with the motherboard and recharges its ultracapacitor when up, and then is good for a few hundred or thousand cycles through hostname/last IP/MAC/user defined barcode/Asset tag certainly would be handy...
It isn't really confined to science, or even as new (relatively) as science is.
Whenever you make a political decision, it is helpful to have reasons that don't make you look quite as crass and calculating. Certain reasons are as old as the hills(defending Us vs. Them, preventing the decline of Morality, etc.) others change according to the prevailing epistemology of the time. In theistic societies, your political decision is couched as being the one that makes god happy. In technological ones(it's hard to say that the US, or the contemporary west is "scientific", given that magical thinking and sheer nonsense continue to flourish; but nobody denies that knowing the world is among the most powerful ways of changing it), your decision has sound, reasonable, scientific backing. Heck, RAND has probably done a cost-benefit analysis justifying it!
Don't be so dismissive of MBAs... If you stop falling for the illusion that their 'business' is running businesses efficiently, and start viewing them as amoral rational actors feathering their nests at the expense of anybody whose pockets they can reach, you'll see that they are extraordinarily effective a locating targets, infesting them, sucking them dry, and then moving on, somehow not dragged down by their record of failure and occasional malfeasance...
Never make the mistake of underestimating a superb parasite because it is lousy at whatever non-noxious lifeform it is mimicking...
They really ought to experiment with outsourcing the board of directors to a call center somewhere.
It would't necessarily generate better leadership; but 8-12 incomprehensible guys allegedly named "Robert" somewhere in the far east would provide incomprehensible decisions and inconsistent directions for several factors of ten less money...
Let's just mention that whoever is responsible for the atrocity that is the "HP Universal Print Driver" ought to spend an eternity with fire ants exploring their sinuses...
Never have I seen software that is more baroque, or less reliable, at the seemingly simple task of sending PCL or postscript over a network to a printer with an embedded RIP.
Are you suggesting that a kangaroo court where one of the parties gets to hire the judge, there is no jury, no record of the proceedings, and no requirement that the decision be made in line with settled law isn't Fair, Just, and Efficient?
Some people just hate America, I guess, can't reason with 'em...
A DDoS or a petty "doxing" would be boring; but my schadenfreude lobe would be pulsating with happiness if their private signing key(s) were to make their merry way into the world.... Can you imagine the mayhem?
I am neither a lawyer, nor your lawyer; but I suspect that it would shake down to a case of "Your bank/CC company/whatever loaths the idea on principle, because little people aren't supposed to think about the fact that mag-stripe cards are about as hard to produce as business cards; but the available legal banhammers likely cover fraud, theft by deception, impersonation, etc. which using a mag-stripe card bearing your cardholder data to interact with your account wouldn't be."
If you actually printed cardstock to look exactly like their cards, they could probably nail you on copyright grounds; but re-writing their cardstock(if legally obtained, as if they issued it to you), or using generic cards, would be hard to hit with that argument.
I've never heard of any litigation surrounding somebody trying that, though, so I have no court-supported idea...
This is partially the motherboard makers' fault, since they can generally scuttle such features in the BIOS even if enabled on die(laptop makers, in particular, seem to revel in doing this); but Intel's "VT-x", for various values of x, is a pit of confusion, and some of those VT-x's make a significant difference for VM workloads.
It's of interest to me because my next build/config to order is likely to be primarily for VM hosting, with routine desktop/workstation tasks taken care of by the fact that modern CPUs are fast as hell. Unfortunately, a lot of the enthusiast benchmarks generally focus on running Medal Of Warfare fast and cheap, and the virtualization benchmarks generally start from the assumption that you are looking to buy a palletload of 1Us...
And the comparisons seemed pretty much benchmarked performance based, with a side of price comparison. Fair enough, as these are pitched as 'enthusiast' parts; but left me wondering about one thing:
Of late, intel's somewhat confusing set of model numbers has been distinguished, in addition to differences in speed, by various features being lasered off of certain parts, but not others, mostly virtualization-related stuff. AMD generally left those on at all times and distinguished primarily by speed.
Does anybody have an idea how the price/performance comparisons change(if in fact they do) from the pure-benchmark ones given in TFAs, if the buyer requires that all the relevant virtualization features be enabled?
It won't be a super-soldiers thing as much as a cost-savings thing...
Instead of giving them a discharge and pensioning them out, we can just neural-implant any severely crippled soldiers and retain them as the 'drone operations corps'.
At American military hospital facilities around the world, row after row of shattered bodies, surgically wired into data links from the world's warzones, will mentally pit America's drones against its enemies...
In case that doesn't strike you as sufficiently dystopian, the next step would be to cybernetically equip those whose bodies are intact but whose brains are destroyed to be remote controlled by their comrades who are shattered in body; but still of sound mind...
The fact that we can pull the data necessary to control the robot arm out of the brain, without unacceptable damage, is pretty damn sci-fi...
Robot arms, though, outside of niche applications, are actually pretty clunky. I wonder how far we are from being able to feed the control signals back into the muscles and nerves that are present; but not receiving the signals they require?
I've never been able to understand why these periodic "Stallman says something many people don't like" stories always involve so much strawmanning and apparent confusion. Like him or not, Stallman has been highly consistent for decades in his take on all things software freedom.
Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...
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Would these independent auditors be graduates of the Arthur Andersen school?
Do you seriously think that any tax rate such that the cost of paying the tax is higher than the cost of paying the accountant would avoid elaborate tax evasion schemes? Seriously?
These are amoral profit-maximizing entities we are talking about here, they aren't engaging in tax evasion to protest the man, they are doing so to save money. It isn't as though a 15% rate would make them say "Well, golly-shucks, I guess we've finally been asked to pay only our fair share, we'd better do our civic duty!" and stop...
Have we fallen so far into austerity measures that hatred is now being rationed?
Hate the player, the game, and everybody who uses the phrase "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
I suspect that that isn't quite correct: members of congress tend to be of substantially above-average wealth; but not nearly so much that they would have personal need for the same accounting tricks used to hide the incomes of major multinationals.
Now, of course, the major multinationals who serve as important campaign donors and likely future employers, funders of think-tanks, etc. for them do have need of the accounting tricks used to hide the incomes of major multinationals, so the effect is largely the same.
As long as you've paid for a shiny new Skype Endpoint CAL, we don't care what you are skyping from!
E-ink displays could be quite useful, if the module could be made cheap enough, in certain sorts of logistical applications...
Since you only pay a power cost when you change them, and static display costs nothing, things like shelf price tags that last ages on tiny batteries should be quite doable. a desktop/laptop equivalent to the small LCD status displays that servers have(usually switching between hostname/uptime/fault conditions/etc.) would make life easier as well. Having to boot a machine in storage or in transit just to learn its hostname/IP/whatever is a pain in the ass. A teeny little microcontroller module that chats with the motherboard and recharges its ultracapacitor when up, and then is good for a few hundred or thousand cycles through hostname/last IP/MAC/user defined barcode/Asset tag certainly would be handy...
It isn't really confined to science, or even as new (relatively) as science is.
Whenever you make a political decision, it is helpful to have reasons that don't make you look quite as crass and calculating. Certain reasons are as old as the hills(defending Us vs. Them, preventing the decline of Morality, etc.) others change according to the prevailing epistemology of the time. In theistic societies, your political decision is couched as being the one that makes god happy. In technological ones(it's hard to say that the US, or the contemporary west is "scientific", given that magical thinking and sheer nonsense continue to flourish; but nobody denies that knowing the world is among the most powerful ways of changing it), your decision has sound, reasonable, scientific backing. Heck, RAND has probably done a cost-benefit analysis justifying it!
Remember Smokey the bear, the adorable bear who became the public face of anti-forest-fire programs?
Well, I think we need a new bear, for a new time, to prevent terror by reading lots and lots of facebook accounts: Pedobear, of course!
I naively thought that John "Iran-Contra" Poindexter was just going to fade away after his too-creepy-even-for-congress TIA project was cancelled...
Don't be so dismissive of MBAs... If you stop falling for the illusion that their 'business' is running businesses efficiently, and start viewing them as amoral rational actors feathering their nests at the expense of anybody whose pockets they can reach, you'll see that they are extraordinarily effective a locating targets, infesting them, sucking them dry, and then moving on, somehow not dragged down by their record of failure and occasional malfeasance...
Never make the mistake of underestimating a superb parasite because it is lousy at whatever non-noxious lifeform it is mimicking...
Peons are capable only of timid, limited, tactical failure. It takes a Visionary Leader to achieve Strategic failure on an grand scale.
They really ought to experiment with outsourcing the board of directors to a call center somewhere.
It would't necessarily generate better leadership; but 8-12 incomprehensible guys allegedly named "Robert" somewhere in the far east would provide incomprehensible decisions and inconsistent directions for several factors of ten less money...
Let's just mention that whoever is responsible for the atrocity that is the "HP Universal Print Driver" ought to spend an eternity with fire ants exploring their sinuses...
Never have I seen software that is more baroque, or less reliable, at the seemingly simple task of sending PCL or postscript over a network to a printer with an embedded RIP.
Are you suggesting that a kangaroo court where one of the parties gets to hire the judge, there is no jury, no record of the proceedings, and no requirement that the decision be made in line with settled law isn't Fair, Just, and Efficient?
Some people just hate America, I guess, can't reason with 'em...
$1k/year? Can I get your Verisign rep's number?
A DDoS or a petty "doxing" would be boring; but my schadenfreude lobe would be pulsating with happiness if their private signing key(s) were to make their merry way into the world.... Can you imagine the mayhem?
That should provide robust protections for, oh, anybody who can afford a protracted legal battle... Shouldn't be a problem.
I'm sure their solid record of "cooperation" will prove a valuable asset when the next round of selecting-the-guys-to-run-the-.com-TLD comes around...
I am neither a lawyer, nor your lawyer; but I suspect that it would shake down to a case of "Your bank/CC company/whatever loaths the idea on principle, because little people aren't supposed to think about the fact that mag-stripe cards are about as hard to produce as business cards; but the available legal banhammers likely cover fraud, theft by deception, impersonation, etc. which using a mag-stripe card bearing your cardholder data to interact with your account wouldn't be."
If you actually printed cardstock to look exactly like their cards, they could probably nail you on copyright grounds; but re-writing their cardstock(if legally obtained, as if they issued it to you), or using generic cards, would be hard to hit with that argument.
I've never heard of any litigation surrounding somebody trying that, though, so I have no court-supported idea...
This is partially the motherboard makers' fault, since they can generally scuttle such features in the BIOS even if enabled on die(laptop makers, in particular, seem to revel in doing this); but Intel's "VT-x", for various values of x, is a pit of confusion, and some of those VT-x's make a significant difference for VM workloads.
It's of interest to me because my next build/config to order is likely to be primarily for VM hosting, with routine desktop/workstation tasks taken care of by the fact that modern CPUs are fast as hell. Unfortunately, a lot of the enthusiast benchmarks generally focus on running Medal Of Warfare fast and cheap, and the virtualization benchmarks generally start from the assumption that you are looking to buy a palletload of 1Us...
You might want to buy some sort of AMD processor, if only to decorate the shelf, even if you prefer Intel... Consider it an investment.
The...optimism... of Intel's pricing guys can get a touch out of hand when their competitors get weak.
And the comparisons seemed pretty much benchmarked performance based, with a side of price comparison. Fair enough, as these are pitched as 'enthusiast' parts; but left me wondering about one thing:
Of late, intel's somewhat confusing set of model numbers has been distinguished, in addition to differences in speed, by various features being lasered off of certain parts, but not others, mostly virtualization-related stuff. AMD generally left those on at all times and distinguished primarily by speed.
Does anybody have an idea how the price/performance comparisons change(if in fact they do) from the pure-benchmark ones given in TFAs, if the buyer requires that all the relevant virtualization features be enabled?
It won't be a super-soldiers thing as much as a cost-savings thing...
Instead of giving them a discharge and pensioning them out, we can just neural-implant any severely crippled soldiers and retain them as the 'drone operations corps'.
At American military hospital facilities around the world, row after row of shattered bodies, surgically wired into data links from the world's warzones, will mentally pit America's drones against its enemies...
In case that doesn't strike you as sufficiently dystopian, the next step would be to cybernetically equip those whose bodies are intact but whose brains are destroyed to be remote controlled by their comrades who are shattered in body; but still of sound mind...
The fact that we can pull the data necessary to control the robot arm out of the brain, without unacceptable damage, is pretty damn sci-fi...
Robot arms, though, outside of niche applications, are actually pretty clunky. I wonder how far we are from being able to feed the control signals back into the muscles and nerves that are present; but not receiving the signals they require?
I've never been able to understand why these periodic "Stallman says something many people don't like" stories always involve so much strawmanning and apparent confusion. Like him or not, Stallman has been highly consistent for decades in his take on all things software freedom.
Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...