I'm using Crunchbang, a Debian derivative -- my packages come directly from Debian stable 98% of the time. It is, as you say, extremely stable, and updates don't trash the system.
Most of the other popular distros have either replaced SysV init or have newer packages. I promise not to quit my day job to become a comedian.
Linux would survive on servers, the mobile space, high-performance computing, embedded devices, and the desktop. Linux Mint is carrying that last torch pretty well, Fedora has never stopped being a good option, and there's always Gentoo for the masochistic and Debian for the ones that want all the fun of configuring their boot scripts by hand and none of the excitement that comes with recent packages.
But seriously, Ubuntu doesn't actually bring that much to the table. It has almost nothing to do with the success of Linux, even if we limit our scope to desktop environments.
The question we should be asking is, why does Red Hat bring in a billion dollars annually, and Canonical $30 million? (2009) Question two, what percentage of Windows profits come from home users?
For the grand prize, what do most home users say keeps them from switching to linux? Is it [a] games, [b] other applications, [c] what the desktop environment looks like, or [d] how easy it is to get Amazon search results.
Canonical stands out most not for their contributions to Linux, but for their disdain for their users.
You may want to read this before you start talking about how much energy we can use.
We can't just produce an infinite amount of energy here on Earth; all that energy ends up as waste heat. A back-of-the-envelope calculation is hard, but say we actually used all the sunlight we receive. An ideal earth-sized blackbody would be 5.3 degrees C. A body that reflects 30% more light than that (as the Earth does) should theoretically be about -18 degrees. The average surface temperature on Earth is about 14 degrees, so we can chalk up about 33 degrees to the normal atmospheric greenhouse effect. Absorbing all energy from the sun would get rid of that 30% thing and (assuming linear effects) raise the average surface temperature to ~37 degrees.
In the not-so-distant future we're going to have real problems with energy use, purely based on the waste heat. How much we can use of the sun's energy--or any other source--has nothing to do with dollars.
Let it be mandatory to vote, with no punishment for abstaining, but if the voting percentage falls below a certain number -- say a 2/3rds majority -- then the Government is disbanded and a Constitutional Convention called.
Governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. Voting is how we display that consent. Currently, our only option for withdrawing it is revolution -- which is a right we explicitly enjoy; the founding document for this country is not the current Constitution but the Declaration of Independence. The way to get more people to vote is not to bribe them, but to make their votes matter.
A hundred dollar tax rebate for a vote is vile and shameful to those who spent their lives for you to enjoy that right.
I hope so. I could have used those things immediately when I lived abroad. You start contributing to the economy immediately. That sort of thing encourages people to stick around, and not just any people -- it takes some determination, intelligence, and luck to move to a different country.
I've had the shoe on the other foot. You should try it sometime. Things look very different.
Actually the tree-hugging commies I know also support nuclear power too. Would you rather have your radioactive waste in the atmosphere (coal) or in a barrel? Do you harbor some fantasies of solar and wind being able to provide baseline power? Do you think that we'll develop batteries with the required power density, that somehow won't be dangerously explosive on their own?
So go ahead Mr. Critic, what's your solution? Or are your insights limited to pandering and denunciation?
Good on them for going closed source. The Makerbot people have done a lot of work advancing the state of the art in consumer-level 3D printing technology. And they're being copied all over the place: there are kickstarters for near-identical models with shittier manufacturing that undercut their business. This is exactly what patents are made for, to protect innovation!
Protect innovation? Sounds like stifling competition to me. And here I thought that patents were supposed to promote the sciences and useful arts; can you show me where it says innovation in here?
How can you laud competition on the one hand and promote the rights of the first-to-market on the other? Those things stand in clear opposition to each other.
Also send a copy of the relevant hardware, and the source code to every installed package, with history dating to before the problem started happening so you can bisect the error.
Or you could use your psychic powers to flip the appropriate bits in memory when this bug comes up.
Computers are fiendishly complicated. Sometimes there's no simple answer to a problem, and the problem ends up on slashdot as a result. Personally I'm just glad [a] I don't have this problem (debian stable), and [b] it's not my job to fix it.
1. Security. 2. Security. 3. A saner driver model. 4. Support for newer hardware. Vanilla XP needs drivers slipstreamed into the installer to deal with SATA drives. 5. Support for more standards-compliant versions of IE. Only Microsoft thinks that tying improvements like that to major OS releases is a good idea.
More minor things include an updated sound system (per-app volume levels), better graphics composition, improved boot times (varies), more efficient use of hardware (e.g. SuperFetch/Readyboost), and probably half a dozen other things I've forgotten.
I don't like buying things from Microsoft either. I switched from XP to linux and haven't looked back. However, I don't ignore that they have made a number of improvements since the days of XP. People seem to really like Win7, for what it's worth. Personally, the only way that I would use XP at this point would be from read-only media; Windows before the introduction of UAC was basically without a security model.
A government is an entity which has a local monopoly on the use of force. The "competitive market" for governments is called warfare. In reducing government, you are both eliminating economies of scale, and creating a power vacuum: If you do not grant a government the right to use force against business entities, you are de facto granting those business entities that right. If you want to know what this looks like, there is a plenitude of historical examples: any time a first-world business interest encounters a third-world resource the pattern repeats. The British East India Company (India), the Dole Fruit Company (Hawai'i), the United Fruit Company (Central America) all enjoyed that libertarian ideal of being more powerful than local governments.
It has been a recognized principle that governments derive their right to use force from the consent of the governed. This is not a business transaction, nor should it be. The market is not a solution for everything -- it fails spectacularly in the case of natural monopolies. It should be perfectly obvious that government is a natural monopoly. If you want to open that market to competition, then you're frankly insane, but I will promise you that I will make every effort to out-compete you.
Individual rights are not worthless, nor is it wrong to champion them. Governments exist in balance with liberty; they should be resisted at every step, but to dispute their necessity is to eradicate the basis of democracy. Ultimately libertarianism dictates that man is only answerable to himself, and for himself. It would certainly be a better world if men were islands of virtuous selfdom. However, the strongest basis for virtue is that which perpetuates the species; unless you're willing to tell that to go hang, you must acknowledge that at some level the rights of society trump the rights of the individual. From there we differ only in degrees as to what other rights have preeminence.
If you have determined that your rights outweigh the rest of society or the species, one hopes that you will exempt yourself from the demands of society in whichever way is least detrimental to others -- I may recommend suicide -- and do be so good as to not reproduce while you're at it.
So what other part of my medical records do you feel you have a right to? My kidney function? Racial descent?
If you're worried about pilot performance, why not test that?
In my view, drug testing is an invasion of privacy and person, justifiable for nothing short of felonious acts. Even then I would prefer a court order, particularly describing the place to be searched.
Whatever Carter's faults, he paved the way for the revival of the American brewing industry. Here's a joke you haven't heard for decades:
Why is American beer like having sex in a canoe? They're both fucking close to water.
Imagine a world where the only options are Budweiser, Coors, or Miller. Terrible! Yet it existed. Carter legalized home brewing, which led to the resurgence of microbreweries that we tipplers currently enjoy. So if you'll excuse me, I will raise a glass to the continued health of Mr. Carter and the American beer industry!
No, his analogy holds up. You want a plant? Buy one. You want to grow a plant? Now that's a little more complicated, but at its simplest it's just dirt and water, right?
However, you probably want to germinate the seeds in a paper towel before planting them. Potting soil is the best if you don't care too much about the process. Otherwise, you may want to pick up some perlite as well, and mix that with the lower layers in order to ensure good drainage. At some point you're going to end up asking "Why are the leaves turning yellow?" so a small book on nutrient deficiencies is probably a good idea, and a ph tester. If you're really serious about growing things well, though, you should probably look into hydroponics...
You can buy hydroponics kits from the same box stores that you can get your plants from.
The only part where this analogy fails is that you don't get the plant- and kit-buyers screaming about how everything should be that way, and gardeners should make things easier for someone with only a casual interest. You don't seem to understand that what you're after isn't really gardening. Now, there's a walled garden over that way where you can arrange the flowers how you like...maybe that's more your speed?
Absolutely. We just need One True Linux to handle the desktop. Oh, and the server. So we just need Two True Linuxes to handle the server and the desktop. Oh, and embedded devices. We just need Three True Linuxes...
The One Thing we can be sure of is that you know nothing about what Linux does or why people use it. Hell, I'm not even going to qualify that: you know nothing about Linux.
If in my employ there is a performance issue, or better yet an indication of malfeasance, you might have a sufficient right to violate my privacy and my physical person to determine whether I have a problem with substance abuse. The argument for this is thin.
Generally, you have as much right to know what drugs I take as you would any of my medical records: none whatsoever. Forcing someone to undergo medical testing of any kind is abhorrent.
I've yet to see the article that was so badly written that Google was no avail. You seem to be complaining about having to educate yourself. Executive summaries are for the PHBs, technical staff are in fact paid to know these things, and if they don't know, to find out.
I might ask what your profession is and how often you read/.
Wikipedia tells me that the human gamete contains ~800 megabytes of information in 23 chromosomes. Multiply by the median 250 million sperm == 200 petabytes. Over the theoretical max of 10 Gigabits per second of Thunderbolt, that sort of data transfer would take 1.6 x 10^8 seconds, or about five years. Humans having neither the largest genome nor sperm totals, it gives you a bit of respect for the sheer amount of information transferable by sex acts.
The Intercourse is a series of tubes. Hey baby, want to see my fat pipe?
"[conservatives] love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. Thatâ(TM)s why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good.â - Al Franken"
Corruption comes in several flavors. Countries like China and certain Latin American nations have a kind of pervasive corruption, where it is somewhat expected that bureaucrats will ignore the law when convenient. It's likely that this arises from income disparity; if a land developer with millions to spend wishes to compete for loyalty with your employer and your $2 an hour salary, are you going to hold out for your ideals?
In the USA the standard of living is higher so e.g. the people going into the DMV aren't going to have a massive income disparity, and people value their integrity a bit more. However, if you don't think that the higher echelons of US politics are corrupt, then you are deaf, blind, and stupid. I am not aware of any national legislation that is not in some measure corrupt.
The assertion that the US is the 'best country out there' is false pretty much no matter how you look at it. The US is not the happiest or healthiest country in the world, nor do its citizens enjoy the highest standard of living (HDI), we're also not the richest (per capita GDP), the most conservative or liberal, etc. We are the most militarized country (cf corruption & m-i complex) in absolute terms, but not in % of GDP (Saudi Arabia). It's been a long time since the US was recognized as a moral leader on the world stage too. Our politicians might be the biggest assholes in the world, that should count for something.
Now, you can say that these are all statistics and don't mean anything, in which case I will say that unless you've lived in another country you have no basis for comparison. As for myself, my long-term goals include staying in the States and trying to fix some of these issues instead of pretending that everything here is perfect.
P.S. Do all countries have these 'love it or leave it' morons?
Hacker is one of those terms which is not credible if self-applied. You become a hacker when other hackers call you one. Even then, it is recognized that Master is a subclass of Student.
Two computer programmers are lost in the desert. The first man, being a fool, sees the mirage and devises plans to bring it to himself. He breaks the complex problem into steps and devises a plan. The second man has deep knowledge, and has learned how to avoid sweating.
Creative works have a long tail distribution, both on the individual level and the macro scale. This proposal axes that tail, and hand it to the tax-collecting entity. You also have failed to comprehend the meaning of the following words: regressive, tax.
"Success" should not affect one's rights. The rest of my points stand.
P.S. Nice strawman with "natural" rights.
Re:Another admission of JavaScript's failings
on
Opa 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Please post your identity and company publicly so we can all be warned against applying.
Start here. Further reading. There's a hell of a lot more to this issue than your prejudices. Anyone that claims either way is objectively better is a fool. The good programmer uses the tool that's suitable for the job.
Copyright is already commercial. There are many forms of taxation but I'm amazed that anyone would seriously promote an exponential one. Do you really think the government needs that money? The artist already pays income tax. Why should your rights to creative works depend on how much money you have in the bank? Not to mention that as a tax, this one is extremely regressive, favoring the large studios which produce few works.
This idea is profound -- it is bottomlessly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Iran is as the US has made it.
There must have been a missing element there.
I'm using Crunchbang, a Debian derivative -- my packages come directly from Debian stable 98% of the time. It is, as you say, extremely stable, and updates don't trash the system.
Most of the other popular distros have either replaced SysV init or have newer packages. I promise not to quit my day job to become a comedian.
Linux would survive on servers, the mobile space, high-performance computing, embedded devices, and the desktop. Linux Mint is carrying that last torch pretty well, Fedora has never stopped being a good option, and there's always Gentoo for the masochistic and Debian for the ones that want all the fun of configuring their boot scripts by hand and none of the excitement that comes with recent packages.
But seriously, Ubuntu doesn't actually bring that much to the table. It has almost nothing to do with the success of Linux, even if we limit our scope to desktop environments.
The question we should be asking is, why does Red Hat bring in a billion dollars annually, and Canonical $30 million? (2009) Question two, what percentage of Windows profits come from home users?
For the grand prize, what do most home users say keeps them from switching to linux? Is it [a] games, [b] other applications, [c] what the desktop environment looks like, or [d] how easy it is to get Amazon search results.
Canonical stands out most not for their contributions to Linux, but for their disdain for their users.
You may want to read this before you start talking about how much energy we can use.
We can't just produce an infinite amount of energy here on Earth; all that energy ends up as waste heat. A back-of-the-envelope calculation is hard, but say we actually used all the sunlight we receive. An ideal earth-sized blackbody would be 5.3 degrees C. A body that reflects 30% more light than that (as the Earth does) should theoretically be about -18 degrees. The average surface temperature on Earth is about 14 degrees, so we can chalk up about 33 degrees to the normal atmospheric greenhouse effect. Absorbing all energy from the sun would get rid of that 30% thing and (assuming linear effects) raise the average surface temperature to ~37 degrees.
In the not-so-distant future we're going to have real problems with energy use, purely based on the waste heat. How much we can use of the sun's energy--or any other source--has nothing to do with dollars.
Sorry, why is this a financial transaction?
Let it be mandatory to vote, with no punishment for abstaining, but if the voting percentage falls below a certain number -- say a 2/3rds majority -- then the Government is disbanded and a Constitutional Convention called.
Governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. Voting is how we display that consent. Currently, our only option for withdrawing it is revolution -- which is a right we explicitly enjoy; the founding document for this country is not the current Constitution but the Declaration of Independence. The way to get more people to vote is not to bribe them, but to make their votes matter.
A hundred dollar tax rebate for a vote is vile and shameful to those who spent their lives for you to enjoy that right.
I hope so. I could have used those things immediately when I lived abroad. You start contributing to the economy immediately. That sort of thing encourages people to stick around, and not just any people -- it takes some determination, intelligence, and luck to move to a different country.
I've had the shoe on the other foot. You should try it sometime. Things look very different.
Actually the tree-hugging commies I know also support nuclear power too. Would you rather have your radioactive waste in the atmosphere (coal) or in a barrel? Do you harbor some fantasies of solar and wind being able to provide baseline power? Do you think that we'll develop batteries with the required power density, that somehow won't be dangerously explosive on their own?
So go ahead Mr. Critic, what's your solution? Or are your insights limited to pandering and denunciation?
Good on them for going closed source. The Makerbot people have done a lot of work advancing the state of the art in consumer-level 3D printing technology. And they're being copied all over the place: there are kickstarters for near-identical models with shittier manufacturing that undercut their business. This is exactly what patents are made for, to protect innovation!
Protect innovation? Sounds like stifling competition to me. And here I thought that patents were supposed to promote the sciences and useful arts; can you show me where it says innovation in here?
How can you laud competition on the one hand and promote the rights of the first-to-market on the other? Those things stand in clear opposition to each other.
Also send a copy of the relevant hardware, and the source code to every installed package, with history dating to before the problem started happening so you can bisect the error.
Or you could use your psychic powers to flip the appropriate bits in memory when this bug comes up.
Computers are fiendishly complicated. Sometimes there's no simple answer to a problem, and the problem ends up on slashdot as a result. Personally I'm just glad [a] I don't have this problem (debian stable), and [b] it's not my job to fix it.
As a home user,
1. Security.
2. Security.
3. A saner driver model.
4. Support for newer hardware. Vanilla XP needs drivers slipstreamed into the installer to deal with SATA drives.
5. Support for more standards-compliant versions of IE. Only Microsoft thinks that tying improvements like that to major OS releases is a good idea.
More minor things include an updated sound system (per-app volume levels), better graphics composition, improved boot times (varies), more efficient use of hardware (e.g. SuperFetch/Readyboost), and probably half a dozen other things I've forgotten.
I don't like buying things from Microsoft either. I switched from XP to linux and haven't looked back. However, I don't ignore that they have made a number of improvements since the days of XP. People seem to really like Win7, for what it's worth. Personally, the only way that I would use XP at this point would be from read-only media; Windows before the introduction of UAC was basically without a security model.
A government is an entity which has a local monopoly on the use of force. The "competitive market" for governments is called warfare. In reducing government, you are both eliminating economies of scale, and creating a power vacuum: If you do not grant a government the right to use force against business entities, you are de facto granting those business entities that right. If you want to know what this looks like, there is a plenitude of historical examples: any time a first-world business interest encounters a third-world resource the pattern repeats. The British East India Company (India), the Dole Fruit Company (Hawai'i), the United Fruit Company (Central America) all enjoyed that libertarian ideal of being more powerful than local governments.
It has been a recognized principle that governments derive their right to use force from the consent of the governed. This is not a business transaction, nor should it be. The market is not a solution for everything -- it fails spectacularly in the case of natural monopolies. It should be perfectly obvious that government is a natural monopoly. If you want to open that market to competition, then you're frankly insane, but I will promise you that I will make every effort to out-compete you.
Individual rights are not worthless, nor is it wrong to champion them. Governments exist in balance with liberty; they should be resisted at every step, but to dispute their necessity is to eradicate the basis of democracy. Ultimately libertarianism dictates that man is only answerable to himself, and for himself. It would certainly be a better world if men were islands of virtuous selfdom. However, the strongest basis for virtue is that which perpetuates the species; unless you're willing to tell that to go hang, you must acknowledge that at some level the rights of society trump the rights of the individual. From there we differ only in degrees as to what other rights have preeminence.
If you have determined that your rights outweigh the rest of society or the species, one hopes that you will exempt yourself from the demands of society in whichever way is least detrimental to others -- I may recommend suicide -- and do be so good as to not reproduce while you're at it.
So what other part of my medical records do you feel you have a right to? My kidney function? Racial descent?
If you're worried about pilot performance, why not test that?
In my view, drug testing is an invasion of privacy and person, justifiable for nothing short of felonious acts. Even then I would prefer a court order, particularly describing the place to be searched.
Whatever Carter's faults, he paved the way for the revival of the American brewing industry. Here's a joke you haven't heard for decades:
Why is American beer like having sex in a canoe?
They're both fucking close to water.
Imagine a world where the only options are Budweiser, Coors, or Miller. Terrible! Yet it existed. Carter legalized home brewing, which led to the resurgence of microbreweries that we tipplers currently enjoy. So if you'll excuse me, I will raise a glass to the continued health of Mr. Carter and the American beer industry!
No, his analogy holds up. You want a plant? Buy one. You want to grow a plant? Now that's a little more complicated, but at its simplest it's just dirt and water, right?
However, you probably want to germinate the seeds in a paper towel before planting them. Potting soil is the best if you don't care too much about the process. Otherwise, you may want to pick up some perlite as well, and mix that with the lower layers in order to ensure good drainage. At some point you're going to end up asking "Why are the leaves turning yellow?" so a small book on nutrient deficiencies is probably a good idea, and a ph tester. If you're really serious about growing things well, though, you should probably look into hydroponics...
You can buy hydroponics kits from the same box stores that you can get your plants from.
The only part where this analogy fails is that you don't get the plant- and kit-buyers screaming about how everything should be that way, and gardeners should make things easier for someone with only a casual interest. You don't seem to understand that what you're after isn't really gardening. Now, there's a walled garden over that way where you can arrange the flowers how you like...maybe that's more your speed?
Absolutely. We just need One True Linux to handle the desktop. Oh, and the server. So we just need Two True Linuxes to handle the server and the desktop. Oh, and embedded devices. We just need Three True Linuxes...
The One Thing we can be sure of is that you know nothing about what Linux does or why people use it. Hell, I'm not even going to qualify that: you know nothing about Linux.
If in my employ there is a performance issue, or better yet an indication of malfeasance, you might have a sufficient right to violate my privacy and my physical person to determine whether I have a problem with substance abuse. The argument for this is thin.
Generally, you have as much right to know what drugs I take as you would any of my medical records: none whatsoever. Forcing someone to undergo medical testing of any kind is abhorrent.
I've yet to see the article that was so badly written that Google was no avail. You seem to be complaining about having to educate yourself. Executive summaries are for the PHBs, technical staff are in fact paid to know these things, and if they don't know, to find out.
I might ask what your profession is and how often you read /.
I would love to take all the Socialists, Marxists, Communists and simply put them together on the other side of the planet from myself,
You and what army?
This to me sums up the essential differences between the two parties. Democrats are liars, and Republicans are bad liars.
Wikipedia tells me that the human gamete contains ~800 megabytes of information in 23 chromosomes. Multiply by the median 250 million sperm == 200 petabytes. Over the theoretical max of 10 Gigabits per second of Thunderbolt, that sort of data transfer would take 1.6 x 10^8 seconds, or about five years. Humans having neither the largest genome nor sperm totals, it gives you a bit of respect for the sheer amount of information transferable by sex acts.
The Intercourse is a series of tubes. Hey baby, want to see my fat pipe?
"[conservatives] love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. Thatâ(TM)s why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good.â
- Al Franken"
Corruption comes in several flavors. Countries like China and certain Latin American nations have a kind of pervasive corruption, where it is somewhat expected that bureaucrats will ignore the law when convenient. It's likely that this arises from income disparity; if a land developer with millions to spend wishes to compete for loyalty with your employer and your $2 an hour salary, are you going to hold out for your ideals?
In the USA the standard of living is higher so e.g. the people going into the DMV aren't going to have a massive income disparity, and people value their integrity a bit more. However, if you don't think that the higher echelons of US politics are corrupt, then you are deaf, blind, and stupid. I am not aware of any national legislation that is not in some measure corrupt.
The assertion that the US is the 'best country out there' is false pretty much no matter how you look at it. The US is not the happiest or healthiest country in the world, nor do its citizens enjoy the highest standard of living (HDI), we're also not the richest (per capita GDP), the most conservative or liberal, etc. We are the most militarized country (cf corruption & m-i complex) in absolute terms, but not in % of GDP (Saudi Arabia). It's been a long time since the US was recognized as a moral leader on the world stage too. Our politicians might be the biggest assholes in the world, that should count for something.
Now, you can say that these are all statistics and don't mean anything, in which case I will say that unless you've lived in another country you have no basis for comparison. As for myself, my long-term goals include staying in the States and trying to fix some of these issues instead of pretending that everything here is perfect.
P.S. Do all countries have these 'love it or leave it' morons?
Hacker is one of those terms which is not credible if self-applied. You become a hacker when other hackers call you one. Even then, it is recognized that Master is a subclass of Student.
Two computer programmers are lost in the desert. The first man, being a fool, sees the mirage and devises plans to bring it to himself. He breaks the complex problem into steps and devises a plan. The second man has deep knowledge, and has learned how to avoid sweating.
Creative works have a long tail distribution, both on the individual level and the macro scale. This proposal axes that tail, and hand it to the tax-collecting entity. You also have failed to comprehend the meaning of the following words: regressive, tax.
"Success" should not affect one's rights. The rest of my points stand.
P.S. Nice strawman with "natural" rights.
Please post your identity and company publicly so we can all be warned against applying.
Start here.
Further reading.
There's a hell of a lot more to this issue than your prejudices. Anyone that claims either way is objectively better is a fool. The good programmer uses the tool that's suitable for the job.
Copyright is already commercial. There are many forms of taxation but I'm amazed that anyone would seriously promote an exponential one. Do you really think the government needs that money? The artist already pays income tax. Why should your rights to creative works depend on how much money you have in the bank? Not to mention that as a tax, this one is extremely regressive, favoring the large studios which produce few works.
This idea is profound -- it is bottomlessly stupid.