Dude, I know we are all experts in everything and would never have done what some random idiot did, so let's not bother with product safety laws, and just point out the injured people just did it wrong and should STFU.
So:
Do you want to classify many products as dangerous, i.e. you can't buy/use them without a license? or... Do you want to have buyers be assumed experts when they buy stuff? Like you should know that brand XYZ milk often has dead rats in it? or... Do you want buyers to be able to assume they are buying product that is safe by current standards?
Part of the reason America sells tons of dangerous stuff to people is that we strike a balance here. We start with cars with plate-glass windshields, decapitate a few early adopters, improve the tech, sell it, then sue the guys still building the old stuff until they get their product in line with current expectations. Hey, I like this modern stuff like hot-tubs what don't suck your insides out if you sit in the wrong place in them.
That makes no sense. All NYC cabs are yellow and charge the same rates - you don't the choice to either hail an honest one or a dishonest one. It's about the most uncompetitive market there is.
Hmm, I've got 10K+ cpus running right now. I 'd bet at least three nodes are actually running Ubuntu: some of our SAs like it, and I'm guessing a few boxes got booted manually and left in some random mode. Me, I don't much care, as long as the node can fork and exec and return the right results.
Trying to pretend this is some giant strategic cat-fight is a waste of time. I can only assume the author of the article is trying to gin up his importance and earn a few thou in consulting fees.
The big companies have already figured out that Linux works just fine in datacenters. Most managers don't know or care if they are running Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse, or a home-roll. They do know that Linux isn't going to vanish just cos some random firm gets bought out.
You capture the absurdity of the singleton pattern well. It's a single instance of something but it's actually not (it's only single by thread, scope, or whatever.)
Every attempt to anoint object X as a singleton has failed. The canonical examples of the CPU, the CRT, the mouse all failed.
Eventually, the programmer will achieve enlightenment and realize he has reinvented LISP's dynamic variables. Or not.
It's common, and yes it can be fixed. But it's just a special case of a large class of attacks: hitting the element with cold/heat/radiation, grabbing leakage of various physical information from the element, etc.
The main goal of this game is to ensure the attack never becomes very cheap relative to the other attacks available. Thus, for example, certain types of big systems keep their bandwidth and compute in full usage at all times just to deter traffic analysis, naturally, this is not reasonable for cell phones, etc. You pays your money and makes your choice, and constantly reevaluate if you are paying your money in the right way to minimize risks.
Sigh. Printing money may either increase or decrease global wealth. If we were on a gold standard, mining more gold might increase or decrease global wealth.
What claim do you want me to justify? Right now, paper money is wealth, so is electronic money: that $100K in my bank account is real in terms of purchasing power. QED.
Gold has a use, sure, but is that use really worth $1200/oz? no. It, like paper money, is a classic commodity: an agreed upon measure of value that is easy to carry, doesn't rot, and is divisible as needed. In the past, people used nails and shells and stone wheels and silver and lots of other things for the same reason.
What do you think a personal cheque is? Its just paper money. You can keep it, cash it, convert it into something you want. Govt paper is the same: if people have faith in it, its better than barter.
Paper USD money is just a commodity. No one makes you own it or use it, but it's useful because most people agree it's got a value (unlike, say, Zimbabwe currency.)
Printing money has as much bearing on wealth as digging up more gold has in a gold-standard economy. From an efficiency point of view, the paper money is better because you can make more or less of it without needing miners.
The great thing about paper money is that you can mostly avoid it if you don't trust it: just exchange it for gold or silver or trees or nails or shares of Intel or whatever you think is better. If the govt goes crazy and inflates to all hell, you were right, and you get rich.
Last time I checked, paper money was wealth. Actually, I just used some "paper money" to buy a bottle of nice scotch and a few beers. Amazing how convenient that stuff is when you want to buy something. I could even use the $300 left to "buy" something like lunch and dinner. Gosh, it really sucks to have 4 billion people agree that an easy-to-carry bit of paper is a commodity that can be exchanged for stuff without the need for weighing scales or barter.
Your second paragraph sounds like my 7 year old when she is told to go to bed: lots of complainty noise, little coherence.
No, it'll never be 100%, because (for one thing) you actually get the work and service you requested as part of the transaction. For another, every time that dollar changes hands, it provides more goods and services, although less and less as it works its way downstream.
Right, you get stuff, pay the provider, and pay some tax.
But, you claim we must also include the tax the plumber pays as part of your effective tax rate. What is your reason for claiming that? The plumber is a tax-free entity? The plumber is the final consumer of dollars? Dollars are backed by plumbing supplies? Plumbers are tax-exempt?
Your argument makes very little sense, unless:
No. I earned $133; I was enabled to apply $75 to engage services or purchase goods; the government got $58 with which it then generally spends servicing a huge debt it should never, ever have gotten into, with the remainder mostly paying for services I do not consider useful, much less necessary, notable exceptions being roads, education, and the like.
Ah, the "I was born, raised, and educated in the USA, now I'm paying taxes, I have the moral right to decide what I should be paying for. Oh, and I repudiate the national debt: sure it helped pay for my education, provided roads, sanitation, a safe place to grow up in, but I didn't vote for it, so no obligation here."
*note: The amount of your money that goes to taxes is the amount you actually pay directly, plus the amount paid by any first-party you do business with. For instance, if you pay a plumber $100 to fix your pipes, and the plumber is paying a 25% tax rate, then $25 of the $100 you gave the plumber goes directly to the same tax well that your direct taxes do. Here's the math. Let's say you and the plumber are both paying 25%. Then, you initially earned $133; the government taxed you 25%, which is $33.33, and now you have $100 left. Now you give that $100 to the plumber, who in turn has to give $25 of that income (25%) to the government. $75 of your $133 has arrived in the plumber's hands, actually paying for the plumbing work. Your actual tax rate here is 75/133 which is about 56% - not the 25% that it initially appears to be.
Ok, let us carry your argument to its logical conclusion: your original dollar passes through your hands, your plumber's hands, the local hardware store's hands, etc, getting taxed at 25% at each point. Eventually, all the money goes back to the government in taxes. Wow, we have a 100% tax rate!
Maybe you want to reexamine your model?
The horror! Obviously, the economy is broken. Oh, except you got your pipes fixed, the plumber made a profit and bought more stuff, the hardware store owner got to buy food for dinner, etc. And somehow, the government wound up with $1 to spend on fixing the roads, hiring a policeman, or whatever.
Re:Was it a cause of his legal trouble?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm pretty left wing, but I lived through that insanity:
1. The IBM PC had just become a viable business computer 2. Firms had an incredible need for decent programmers 3. Decent programmers commanded pay 2-3 times what was then considered reasonable salary for a recent college grad (i.e. way outside corporate pay scales) 4. Firms had a hard time telling good vs bad programmers apart
so...
5. Firms hire programmers as consultants, pay them market wage, but have the ability to easily fire them by not renewing contracts 6. Programmers self incorporate because that is the only way firms are equipped to pay them 7. Programmers quickly realize that they can write off giant amounts of income as business expenses (travel, meals, home computers, video games, home office space, etc.)
then...
8. Law is passed to prevent this if basically:
a. You claim to be a sole proprietor, and b. All your billing is coming from a single corporation (i.e. you are really an employee, not a consultant.)
IIRC, I avoided the law by forming a two person corporation with multiple billing streams.
Damn straight. I don't really know what goes on in the back of the plane (I assume those guys are there for ballast or something) but please STFU and board in an efficient fashion.
There were times when I left the lounge early, took my seat, and then had to deal with hordes of ugly people passing through our cabin to get to their seats.
Protip: do not get in the way of the stewardess bringing me my drink. Also, don't jiggle your tits in my face - just drop off your business card and we will hook up at the destination: that mile high club crap was old in the 80s.
When you're making $10mn a year (or even $1mn) and already have several million in the bank, why on earth would you need another $Xmn in severance and bonuses on your walk out the door? Greed is the only answer that seems to make any sense.
Wrong as it seems, that's just the cost a firm has to pay to get or keep a key employee.
Take trying to hire someone who has been at firm X for 10 years and built some cool business. You want her to build something similar, but cooler and bigger, at your firm. If she comes: she loses her X firm options, she loses a lot of business relationships, she risks getting screwed in a new political environment, etc. If you want to retain the right to fire her, the sign-up contract is going to have terms that mitigate the risks she is taking: up-front buyout or bonus, defined compensation for two years, defined upside, decaying severance. The specific types of terms vary by industry, but the idea is the same.
I've seen cases even for midlevel hires where HR comes up with some stupid proposed package based on "industry standards," and the guy with the headcount tells them to STFU and increase all the numbers by 50%: it's a bet the person is who he needs, if right, the payoff is big, if wrong, the cost is only 150% of a small number.
None, of course, because they are not really organized like that.
Entertainment firms, law firms, and finance firms tend to be loosely coupled profit centers with a shared infrastructure. They fight over cost allocations, but are not usually competitive with each other.
The concept is simple, and the right to not be offended does not enter into it: you don't hit other people and you don't say stupid shit, end of story.
Oh, and "stupid shit" is pretty easy to define (all large corporation do it.) If it's ad hominem, it's stupid shit.
Yes, and we stop that shit in the bud. Half the reason the USA kicked ass in the 1990s was that we started trying to treat everyone decently: we get the Indians, Chinese, English, Sengalese, French, and everyone else who wants to try to make it. Just fire the stupids who think "he's black" is actually a joke and replace the guy with someone intelligent.
I love this political correctness stuff: shun the retards and replace them with intelligent people. Life just gets better when "X is ugly" is not considered a funny joke.
It's easy: no insults about looks, sexually orientation, race, etc; no physical violence. All people in a position of power are obligated to intervene immediately.
Works for us, if the situation was more than a simple misunderstanding, we fire the bully, and give the victim $1M.
Yep, you can fix the bullying problem in a week by ending the "blaming the victim" mentality inherent in the people in charge.
The rule is really damn simple: you don't bully anyone. If you do, you get punished.
Good elementary school administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good high-school administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good college administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good bosses at firms do not tolerate bullying.
If you want to suck as an administrator, go right ahead: you make the law, but pleased don't get too upset when we slash your tires and put sugar in your gas tank. You are making the rules and judging, we vote in the only ways we can vote in this situation.
The extent of this attack was unclear, but figure every major US corporate/government net was at risk. Figure any intranet relying exclusively on firewall rules was penetrated (1 man on the inside with a USB rootkit and you are compromised.) Compare the cost of one M1A1 tank to an intern at a US company.
If this was a government sponsored attack, figure half the major US intranets are now compromised to some degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I know we are all experts in everything and would never have done what some random idiot did, so let's not bother with product safety laws, and just point out the injured people just did it wrong and should STFU.
So:
Do you want to classify many products as dangerous, i.e. you can't buy/use them without a license? or...
Do you want to have buyers be assumed experts when they buy stuff? Like you should know that brand XYZ milk often has dead rats in it? or...
Do you want buyers to be able to assume they are buying product that is safe by current standards?
Part of the reason America sells tons of dangerous stuff to people is that we strike a balance here. We start with cars with plate-glass windshields, decapitate a few early adopters, improve the tech, sell it, then sue the guys still building the old stuff until they get their product in line with current expectations. Hey, I like this modern stuff like hot-tubs what don't suck your insides out if you sit in the wrong place in them.
That makes no sense. All NYC cabs are yellow and charge the same rates - you don't the choice to either hail an honest one or a dishonest one. It's about the most uncompetitive market there is.
Hmm, I've got 10K+ cpus running right now. I 'd bet at least three nodes are actually running Ubuntu: some of our SAs like it, and I'm guessing a few boxes got booted manually and left in some random mode. Me, I don't much care, as long as the node can fork and exec and return the right results.
Trying to pretend this is some giant strategic cat-fight is a waste of time. I can only assume the author of the article is trying to gin up his importance and earn a few thou in consulting fees.
The big companies have already figured out that Linux works just fine in datacenters. Most managers don't know or care if they are running Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse, or a home-roll. They do know that Linux isn't going to vanish just cos some random firm gets bought out.
You capture the absurdity of the singleton pattern well. It's a single instance of something but it's actually not (it's only single by thread, scope, or whatever.)
Every attempt to anoint object X as a singleton has failed. The canonical examples of the CPU, the CRT, the mouse all failed.
Eventually, the programmer will achieve enlightenment and realize he has reinvented LISP's dynamic variables. Or not.
It's common, and yes it can be fixed. But it's just a special case of a large class of attacks: hitting the element with cold/heat/radiation, grabbing leakage of various physical information from the element, etc.
The main goal of this game is to ensure the attack never becomes very cheap relative to the other attacks available. Thus, for example, certain types of big systems keep their bandwidth and compute in full usage at all times just to deter traffic analysis, naturally, this is not reasonable for cell phones, etc. You pays your money and makes your choice, and constantly reevaluate if you are paying your money in the right way to minimize risks.
Sigh. Printing money may either increase or decrease global wealth. If we were on a gold standard, mining more gold might increase or decrease global wealth.
Happy now?
What claim do you want me to justify? Right now, paper money is wealth, so is electronic money: that $100K in my bank account is real in terms of purchasing power. QED.
Gold has a use, sure, but is that use really worth $1200/oz? no. It, like paper money, is a classic commodity: an agreed upon measure of value that is easy to carry, doesn't rot, and is divisible as needed. In the past, people used nails and shells and stone wheels and silver and lots of other things for the same reason.
What do you think a personal cheque is? Its just paper money. You can keep it, cash it, convert it into something you want. Govt paper is the same: if people have faith in it, its better than barter.
Paper USD money is just a commodity. No one makes you own it or use it, but it's useful because most people agree it's got a value (unlike, say, Zimbabwe currency.)
Printing money has as much bearing on wealth as digging up more gold has in a gold-standard economy. From an efficiency point of view, the paper money is better because you can make more or less of it without needing miners.
The great thing about paper money is that you can mostly avoid it if you don't trust it: just exchange it for gold or silver or trees or nails or shares of Intel or whatever you think is better. If the govt goes crazy and inflates to all hell, you were right, and you get rich.
Last time I checked, paper money was wealth. Actually, I just used some "paper money" to buy a bottle of nice scotch and a few beers. Amazing how convenient that stuff is when you want to buy something. I could even use the $300 left to "buy" something like lunch and dinner. Gosh, it really sucks to have 4 billion people agree that an easy-to-carry bit of paper is a commodity that can be exchanged for stuff without the need for weighing scales or barter.
Your second paragraph sounds like my 7 year old when she is told to go to bed: lots of complainty noise, little coherence.
Right, you get stuff, pay the provider, and pay some tax.
But, you claim we must also include the tax the plumber pays as part of your effective tax rate. What is your reason for claiming that? The plumber is a tax-free entity? The plumber is the final consumer of dollars? Dollars are backed by plumbing supplies? Plumbers are tax-exempt?
Your argument makes very little sense, unless:
Ah, the "I was born, raised, and educated in the USA, now I'm paying taxes, I have the moral right to decide what I should be paying for. Oh, and I repudiate the national debt: sure it helped pay for my education, provided roads, sanitation, a safe place to grow up in, but I didn't vote for it, so no obligation here."
Ok, let us carry your argument to its logical conclusion: your original dollar passes through your hands, your plumber's hands, the local hardware store's hands, etc, getting taxed at 25% at each point. Eventually, all the money goes back to the government in taxes. Wow, we have a 100% tax rate!
Maybe you want to reexamine your model?
The horror! Obviously, the economy is broken. Oh, except you got your pipes fixed, the plumber made a profit and bought more stuff, the hardware store owner got to buy food for dinner, etc. And somehow, the government wound up with $1 to spend on fixing the roads, hiring a policeman, or whatever.
I'm pretty left wing, but I lived through that insanity:
1. The IBM PC had just become a viable business computer
2. Firms had an incredible need for decent programmers
3. Decent programmers commanded pay 2-3 times what was then considered reasonable salary for a recent college grad (i.e. way outside corporate pay scales)
4. Firms had a hard time telling good vs bad programmers apart
so...
5. Firms hire programmers as consultants, pay them market wage, but have the ability to easily fire them by not renewing contracts
6. Programmers self incorporate because that is the only way firms are equipped to pay them
7. Programmers quickly realize that they can write off giant amounts of income as business expenses (travel, meals, home computers, video games, home office space, etc.)
then...
8. Law is passed to prevent this if basically:
a. You claim to be a sole proprietor, and
b. All your billing is coming from a single corporation (i.e. you are really an employee, not a consultant.)
IIRC, I avoided the law by forming a two person corporation with multiple billing streams.
Damn straight. I don't really know what goes on in the back of the plane (I assume those guys are there for ballast or something) but please STFU and board in an efficient fashion.
There were times when I left the lounge early, took my seat, and then had to deal with hordes of ugly people passing through our cabin to get to their seats.
Protip: do not get in the way of the stewardess bringing me my drink. Also, don't jiggle your tits in my face - just drop off your business card and we will hook up at the destination: that mile high club crap was old in the 80s.
Wrong as it seems, that's just the cost a firm has to pay to get or keep a key employee.
Take trying to hire someone who has been at firm X for 10 years and built some cool business. You want her to build something similar, but cooler and bigger, at your firm. If she comes: she loses her X firm options, she loses a lot of business relationships, she risks getting screwed in a new political environment, etc. If you want to retain the right to fire her, the sign-up contract is going to have terms that mitigate the risks she is taking: up-front buyout or bonus, defined compensation for two years, defined upside, decaying severance. The specific types of terms vary by industry, but the idea is the same.
I've seen cases even for midlevel hires where HR comes up with some stupid proposed package based on "industry standards," and the guy with the headcount tells them to STFU and increase all the numbers by 50%: it's a bet the person is who he needs, if right, the payoff is big, if wrong, the cost is only 150% of a small number.
None, of course, because they are not really organized like that.
Entertainment firms, law firms, and finance firms tend to be loosely coupled profit centers with a shared infrastructure. They fight over cost allocations, but are not usually competitive with each other.
The concept is simple, and the right to not be offended does not enter into it: you don't hit other people and you don't say stupid shit, end of story.
Oh, and "stupid shit" is pretty easy to define (all large corporation do it.) If it's ad hominem, it's stupid shit.
Yes, and we stop that shit in the bud. Half the reason the USA kicked ass in the 1990s was that we started trying to treat everyone decently: we get the Indians, Chinese, English, Sengalese, French, and everyone else who wants to try to make it. Just fire the stupids who think "he's black" is actually a joke and replace the guy with someone intelligent.
I love this political correctness stuff: shun the retards and replace them with intelligent people. Life just gets better when "X is ugly" is not considered a funny joke.
It's easy: no insults about looks, sexually orientation, race, etc; no physical violence. All people in a position of power are obligated to intervene immediately.
Works for us, if the situation was more than a simple misunderstanding, we fire the bully, and give the victim $1M.
Yep, you can fix the bullying problem in a week by ending the "blaming the victim" mentality inherent in the people in charge.
The rule is really damn simple: you don't bully anyone. If you do, you get punished.
Good elementary school administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good high-school administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good college administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good bosses at firms do not tolerate bullying.
If you want to suck as an administrator, go right ahead: you make the law, but pleased don't get too upset when we slash your tires and put sugar in your gas tank. You are making the rules and judging, we vote in the only ways we can vote in this situation.
The extent of this attack was unclear, but figure every major US corporate/government net was at risk. Figure any intranet relying exclusively on firewall rules was penetrated (1 man on the inside with a USB rootkit and you are compromised.) Compare the cost of one M1A1 tank to an intern at a US company.
If this was a government sponsored attack, figure half the major US intranets are now compromised to some degree.
Haiti is Spanish-speaking? You might want to do a little more research on this topic.
Darl McBride, ex-CEO of SCO.
You are confusing ease of filing for the taxpayer with ease of fraud detection for the IRS.
Opps, miscomputed that, it was only 4E-5 percent.