Erm... would that 'small mistake' be the way that all of your dots are copyright symbols and you bracketed another statement with then Yen and international currency symbols? Or are you just a very clever troll who deliberately mutilated a post to make Microsoft look bad? (Why anyone would feel the need to do that -here-, I dunno, but either your settings are -massively- screwed up, or you did it on purpose.)
The question is entirely irrelevant. It is answered in the First Amendment. It seems that the askee wants special status in the constitution and the right to take time-off for religious "holidays" and perhaps an entry as a victimized religion in a federal hate-crimes bill. Fact is, these "cusp" religions don't play any factor in the role of government -- nor should they.
Actually, I believe that the askee was more concerned about Bush's statement that he doesn't consider witchcraft a religion, and would prefer the military to ban wiccan religious practice. The concern here is not to get -special- rights, but to have the -same- rights as the judeo-christian religions.
--Parity
Well, if you don't have any statistics in front of you, just make up something that fits your argument. 10-15%? Where did you pull that number from?
Memory. That's why I said 10-15%, instead of '11.2%'... I remember roughly what the numbers were, (in a study of pagans/career several years ago) but not precisely.
Also, of course, the statistics I was indicating I didn't have were those on the breakdown of the US population by religion, so you're taking me out of context.
--Parity
I don't have any statistics in front of me, but I do believe that the combined neopagan religions (Wicca, Asatru, etc) plus the combined Buddhist variants, plus the combined eastern polytheistic religions (Hindus and Hari Krishnas, Religious Taoism (diff. from philosophy of Taoism), etc), plus the Voudoun/Santeria/etc religions, all together would add up to more than 1% of the religious people in the United States.
Further, as a praticing Pagan I found the question -extremely- relevant to me, and considering that something on the order of 10-15% of IT workers are pagan, it's pretty relevant to slashdot. (Yes, it's weird, but the IT industry has - or had a few years ago - the highest percentage of neopagans of any career grouping.)
Finally, yes, there -are- vast differences between the judeo-christian monotheistic religions, but that does not change the fact that they are more similar to each other than to the non-monotheistic religions.
Considering that you're promoting yourselves as security experts with a tool to secure Linux distributions, why is your verification on your tarball an MD5 checksum, which is much easier to forge than a PGP/GPG signature?
I think the md5 checksum is a good idea, for those who can't/won't install pgp or gpg, but why not authenticate with one, or both, public-key tools?
Your advice assumes there exists at least one candidate who deserves my support. I've looked at them all, and none of them do. How can I register my preference that they scrap all these losers and start again? We don't have "None of the Above" so best I can do is not vote in the Presidential race.
You still vote - just because you have a ballot doesn't mean you have to pick somebody in every race. Vote on your local questions, vote on your congressional candidates and local offices, and abstain on the presidential race. Do -not- write in None of the Above, as in many areas this will invalidate your ballot; abstaining is the official way of voting 'none of the above', and abstaining means casting a ballot with no choice in a particular race. Not voting is just not voting.
--Parity
So embedded systems don't have OSs? Generally, no. At least, they didn't used to. What the hell does a microwave oven need an operating system for?
Hunh? No, actually, almost all embedded systems have an OS, for exactly the same reason as any other computer having an OS - a centralized resource manager. Granted, in many cases, embedded OSes look more like DOS than *nix, which is to say, a handful of interrupt handlers and some startup/initialization code, but it depends. Remember that the UI for a microwave is only a tiny fraction of the code - there's also code to turn on the fan, optionally turn the rotary tray, modulate power to the microwave heating system, monitor the ambient temperature and/or thermometer for 'autosense' cooking, etc.
It might well be sensible to put a multithreading OS inside a microwave so that your UI is a separate component from your systems controls, and if your UI gets screwed up your systems controls still shut the power off when they detect an erroneous condition and don't microwave the hapless user or burn out the microwave...
Note that embedded operating systems may well look like a single process, or a single process with multiple-threading... if you wanted to get semantical, you could argue that products sold as embedded operating systems are really 'template applications' and not operating systems at all, but then, the embedded world is just backwards that way. A better way of looking at it, is that the simplest embedded operating systems are modified by adding functional code directly to the kernel rather than having a separate application. (More complex embedded OSes have a tendency to look like unix plus or minus some system services... but those are more likely to go into factory control than a microwave... )
--Parity
However, until I sell (I trade rather infrequently. I should probably put much of it in an aggresive growth fund instead.), these gains and losses do not, if memory serves, affect my tax liabilities. Hence, my net assets may, on paper, change rather more significantly in either direction than this fiscal year's tax return may reflect. Until I sell...
This is mostly true, yes; change in the value of your holdings doesn't count as income until you sell. Capital Gains Distributions, Dividends, and Interest, however, do count as income immediately... I -think- even if reinvested, but I'm not sure; my 'real' money right now is only in a savings account, my only 'investments' are sheltered in IRA and 401K accounts, and it's been a while since I've held anything outside of those shelters.
I would imagine, however, that the 'richest 10%' would have widely diversified holdings that would need money moved around as market conditions changed or else suffer losses, not to mention the dividend and interest incomes from stocks and bonds. It's theoretically possible but rather difficult in practice to make a lot of money and not have it be taxable. (Though you could play tricks like selling a stock that has dropped that you don't expect to recover at the same time you sell a stock that has grown, offsetting 'locked-in' loss against gain... that only works to a point though, if you have a net gain). Anyway. I'm no financial analyst, I'm just suggesting that there is some correlation between assets and income.
--Parity
The patent is not, actually, if you read it, on '1-click' shopping, but on single-action-to-purchase' shopping.
You could patent button-press shopping (that's what the first half of a click is, a press-event; the second half is a release-event; your OOP library may vary in terminology.;)) , however you'd have to cite the Amazon patent (because it covers in general, any single event to initiate a purchase, including a mouse-button press), and you'd have to license the amazon patent before you could even use your patent.
This also applies to one-word-voice-activated shopping, 'point-and-buy' gesture-recognition-shopping, etc, etc.
Amazon's -PATENT- may be stupid, but their Patent -Attorneys- are not, and they covered the bases.
Not entirely, s/he isn't; those 'accumulated assets' don't just sit there, but are constantly being spent and re-accumulated through investments and so on, aka, 'unearned income.' Anyone who's income, earned or otherwise, isn't roughly proportional to his/her assets is going to steadily become broke, from devaluation of the dollar if nothing else.
This whole topic does need a deeper analysis than statistical quips without citations, though, it's true.
There has to be a government to legislate stuff like drug use (including alcohol and tobacco) becuase a good number of people are 1) too stupid to know any better in the first place, 2) too stupid to "only hurt themselves" when they engage in stupid behavior... killing others while driving drunk,...
You're absolutely right; it's clear to me now that the correct solution here is to completely ban the consumption of alcohol. Everybody knows that alcohol is bad for you and you shouldn't be drinking it anyway, so if we just outlaw it, nobody will drink anymore, and everyone will live longer, crime will go down, and society will be more peaceful.
(Warning: This post may contain irony; knowledge of the prohibition era is recommended before replying.)
--Parity
That's not how the debt is read, though; social security and 'other investments' are not part of the general federal budget. They are - or were - deliberately separate.
The funds borrowed 'by the government from the government' are -still- debt, because, firstly, interest must still be payed on them, and secondly, social security funds are intended to be returned to the public via the social security program.
To treat money borrowed from social security as 'not really debt' is only valid if you think it's okay for the federal-budget side of government to decide to terminate the social security program and not pay that money back to its social security branch.
Don't forget that most of that debt is owed to ourselves (in the form of Treasury notes and other bonds). So what? This mostly means that our savings, held by banks, is in turn, invested into the US, which allows the banks to make a profit because of the interest rate differential, and other various large-financial-institution day-to-day-business. It -still- comes down to, the citizen is paying something like (I haven't checked the percentages in a couple years) half of his taxes to interest on the debt. Which would be better, doubling the federal income (allowing tax breaks of 50% across the board and/or new spending programs) or buffering savings bank interest rates?
Honestly, I suspect that having -some- national debt is a good thing for the economy generally since it -does- provide this stable place to dump excess funds and still earn -some- interest; however, the current debt is ridiculous; I really don't want more than about 10% of my taxes going to pay interest on the debt. I would much, much rather see the entire surplus (okay, lets compromise - half of it?;)) go into debt control than take any of it out now. This will ensure a larger surplus next year, and the next, as long as the policy is kept up. (I would -not- want to see the debt cut in half in a single year or anything like that; I don't want to play with the economy that way.)
Anyway; recalling history, nations with drastic debts go into a spiralling inflationary depression when the economy dips, often destroying their currency altogether so they have to start over. (Witness Germany, England; Mexico had similar but recovered with a controlled, forced-inflation model). I'd really, really rather not see my life savings wiped out permanently because of poor foresight and something that -should- have been a temporary dip in the economy.
a) You shouldn't reply to obvious trolls.
b) Joining an organization such as the ULC (Universal Life Church, at www.ulc.org) or one of the several umbrella pagan organizations that exist just to accredit local pagan groups as members of their religion can make it easier to get your temple/grove/whatever made into a place of worship, though depending on where you are in the country it still won't be easy... but then, starting a branch of the 'universal life church' might slide the paperwork through painlessly (and most ULC chapters -are- Christian oriented, though the church itself has as its only tenet that everyone is free to believe and worship as they choose, so you can easily be a pagan ULC minister... ) Anyway. Blessed be.;)
If anything, atheism is now the official statre religion of the US, since the only legally acceptable religion in public has become no religion. It seems pretty childish to complain of discrimination against your revolt against reason when your form of disbelief is being enshrined as the only acceptable position.
This is simply not right. I will confess that in academia and in the tech industry, atheism is fairly widespread, however, -legally-, the right to practice any religion is as well protected as ever in the history of the U.S., and -socially- christianity is clearly still the primarily accepted religion, evidenced not only by the predominance of churches of christian sects, but, by the way that the candidates in the 'big two' parties manuevered to express their strong christian faith back in the primaries, not to mention that -every- president of the U.S. has been a christian of one sect or another. There is some evidence that the strongly christian leaning of the US government is weakening in that Gore chose Liebermann for a running-mate, but that only goes to show that there is increasing tolerance for other monotheistic faiths besides Christianity.
Anecdotally, it's easy to come up with examples of how religion is disappearing, but really, in a religiously diverse country, it's easier to keep religion as a quiet and personal matter than provoke arguments by loudly proclaiming the rightness of one's own faith at every opportunity. This is simple politeness, really, as any claim that one's own religion is 'true' implies that others are 'false,' and nobody likes to have their religious beliefs publically attacked. (Polite theological debate in the right setting being another matter.)
So, as evidenced by the fact that the a pro-christian standpoint -improves- the approval ratings of a candidate for the highest office in the United States, and with my suggestion above as an alternative explanation for some -appearances- to the contrary, I think it's safe to say that religion is still alive and well.
Anecdotally, FWIW, I don't currently know any atheists at all; I seem to recall knowing one or two in college. I -do- still know a handful of agnostics, but most people I know are, in about equal numbers, christian, jewish, or neopagan. I'm pretty confident that that's not at all close to the actual population, but it does show, at least, that the country is not overwhelmingly atheist or I'd have trouble meeting such people.
Now, if by 'legally acceptable' you meant the creationism/evolution in schools thing, and related issues, let me just say that science is not (or rather, -should not- be) a religion. It's a set of momentarilly believed 'truths' based on empirical evidence, and is perfectly possible to accept both scientific 'truth' and religious 'truth' at the same time. People do it every day. Now, when someone says 'spiritual religion is bunk because there's no scientific evidence for it', that's treating science like religion, and the proper answer to such persons is 'there's no scientific evidence -against- it either'. (Specifically, there's no scientific evidence that there is no such thing as a soul, a god or gods, an afterlife, etc. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, etc. The devout christian will have to either believe that God created the world with that illusory evidence in place, or that the stories of Genesis and the years that people lived as you follow the genealogies up to historically verifiable events aren't exactly literal.)
The -only- package I've seen this with is the gimp, which was only half-working until I installed gnome-apt; with all those gnome parts installed, suddenly the gimp worked great. D'oh.
However, I was -very- suprised at this behaviour; normally, Debian is very good with this. Well. Caveat there: There are bugs in 'non-free' that are deadly and have lurked for years. Debian focus is on liberated software almost to the exclusion of contrib on non-free.
I -will- admit, as happy a Debian user as I am, that Debian is not 'scaling' well; as it grows in size, it is becoming a bit tangled, some packages are not well debugged (eyeballs are spread thinner, I guess, with so many packages) and the isolation of non-free and contrib does create some technical problems in favor of political correctness. All that said though... even if I have some theoretical complaints about Debian's scaling, a) nobody else is doing as well, and b) this is being addressed with the no-files metapackages that simplify installation of certain complex systems.
Oh, and a final point about Debian-thinking... if you're a Debian user, you're part -of- Debian. It's not 'Debian' as a whole that messed up package X, it's the package maintainer for package X and the users that didn't report the bug. Unlike Redhat, Debian isn't a company, it's just an offshoot of the liberated software process.
While I largely agree with your rant, I would have moderated you down as flamebait for the gratuitously graphic profanity... however... since less sensitive souls have you up here to see...
Have you considered saying 'Oh, yes, I'd -love- to subscribe to your wonderful service' and waiting until you get to the indepent verification and -then- saying, 'No, I don't want to subscribe; I lied, in order to get to the indepent verification; this call was in violation of the law and I'd like to know if you can provide me information about who made it.'
I'm not entirely convinced that the 'independent verification' is so very independent, but somewhere in the play-along process you might get the info needed to shaft them.
--Parity
Re:Has the patent benefited mankind? Does it have
on
One Click Patent News
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· Score: 2
Genes can -not- be patented. 'Discoveries' of natural things can -not- be patented. 'gene patents' is media shorthand for 'have patented the process of extracting or synthesizing the gene sequence'.
Similarly to 'algorithms cannot be patented'; you can't stop people from engaging in public key cryptography if they do it with pencil and paper. (Or maybe you can if you patent 'a process implementing public key cryptography with pencil and paper'... but I doubt it. I think it's 'obvious' even to the patent office that math can be done with a pencil and paper...)
So, software patents are on the -synthetic- process of a program running in memory, and gene patents are on the -synthetic- process of extracting/synthesizing genes. The 'natural' processes of thinking through a math problem or procreating are unpatentable.
The -scary- part of gene patents is the same thing that is scary about -all- medicinal patents. What if you have a deadly disease but have no insurance and cannot afford the inflated prices of the exclusive manufacturer of the treatment? (As happens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with AIDS right now... ). Anyway. Don't dilute important issues just because the media is too lazy to describe things properly. (They do, you know, at least once every few weeks have an 'in-depth' discussion of gene-patents, and the first question is always 'how can you patent a gene?' followed by the explanation I just gave. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by NPR and the BBC... )
The current plan (as I understand it, which is admittedly not well) is pretty much exactly what you're saying: Add TLDs like.shop and.ecom and.biz and.bank... and then give trademark holders of domains first-chance... so, microsoft will immediately buy microsoft.shop, microsoft.ecom, microsoft.biz, microsoft.bank, microsoft.sucks... etc. That's fine for microsoft, but what about 'southwest airlines'? they'd probably buy southwest.everything-except-.bank-and-maybe-that-t oo.
I'm sure there are other 'trademarks' that are common words and really only trademarks in a particular sphere of business. 'Disney' and 'Microsoft' and 'Coca-Cola' are obviously universal trademarks. Any-way.
The civil liberties issues are, what if somebody's asleep at the helm and I sneak in and buy microsoft.sucks and put up a parody site. Can Microsoft insist that the domain is under their trademark and have ICANN transfer ownership? Is that a violation of free speech? (Technically 'no' because this is a business transaction not a legal one, but in practice it's a -supression- of speech.) What about etoy/etoys type suppression-by-trademark where a domain just gets deactivated? If my last name is miller and I get miller.per what protections to I really have from miller beer?
An-yway, the solution to all this in -my- mind is to use the geographical system... granted, 'slashdot.holland.mi.us' doesn't sound as spiffy as 'slashdot.org' or 'slashdot.dot' but it neatly sidesteps the whole trademark thing. Unless, of course, the administrator of holland.mi.us happens to be an idiot, but hey, we -know- the people at the top of the.com/.net/.org domains are idiots and the neat thing about the geographical domains is they're inherently unmonopolizable. (no more than 10 domains per administrator, I seem to recall, so if holland.mi.us's administrator were some sort of corporate lackey who refused to cooperate with slashdot, just get slasdot..mi.us or some other 'nearby large city' that isn't unreasonable to put yourself in.
In the real world we all agree on the difference between 'inside' and 'outside' and the difference between 'an open door' and a 'closed door' and the difference between a private residence and a public facility is usually clear at a glance.
In the online-world we have no such agreements. So what I'm saying is, don't make 'trespassing' or 'entering' a crime, only make 'breaking' a crime; at least so long as we -don't- have a society-wide agreement about where the lines are.
No, but I bet you'd be screaming at 911 to get the police to your house if your pervert neighbor was peeping through your window at your wife getting out of the shower.
Actually, no; I'd make sure we kept the curtains drawn (my online journal encrypted); unless you mean he was in the yard right up at the window? Then yell at him to get the hell away (kill the process of the intruder and change the passwords he/she got).
Now, if the peeping time broke into the house and planted a camera and 'fixed' the locks so he could get in any time, then I'd call the police; and in the analogy, damage would have been done to the computer system - software 'damaged' with insertion of backdoors, etc.
In the real world we don't have a law against looking in through somebody's window, though we do have laws against stomping across the yard and climbing into the azalea bushes to peer through the cracks in the curtains...
People behave reasonably in the real world; they -don't- call the cops because someone looks out their bedroom window and into yours, or because somebody walked across the corner of the yard and happened to glance into the living room window (even though you could technically say it's trespassing, maybe... sort of...); people want to make the analagous behaviours in the online world felonies, and people are -not- reasonable about it. There are people out there who would (And even try to with current laws!) try to take someone to court for ftping to their machine. (Kinda like insisting the police arrest someone for 'trespassing' when they pulled into your driveway by accident mistaking it for their friend Bill's house... )
Anyway; if ten years from now, we see that certain loopholes have been left in the legislation, we can close them, but remember - tampering with logs to hide your presence would count as damaging the machine, adding accounts and backdoors makes the machine less secure and is damaging the machine... just about any conceivable 'cracking' attack will at some point 'damage' the machine... a portscan or an attempt to ftp in or whatever are harmless and shouldn't be criminalized, -that's- what I'm saying. (And if someone cracks your machine without fixing the logs you can just block their host forevermore since you know exactly who they are!)
Anyway. It's much easier to -add- legislation to solve a problem and it's much -harder- to undo draconian legislation, so it's much, much better to add laws for 'digital crimes' slowly and carefully and without any sweeping gestures that might outlaw lots of legitimate activity.
For the record, the Linux Kernel Compilation Benchmark being 'the only test that matters' was a tongue in cheek remark. Next time I'll remember the smiley for the humor impaired; as for the rest of your 'argument':
You invoked a fascist reference; you automatically lose. Go away Troll.
In my case, I go to http://www.state.ma.us/ and click on 'elections' and try to figure out which document will describe the electoral college process; if your state does not have good online archives, try writing to the office of the Secretary in your state's capital; at least, in Massachusetts, the election information seems to be published by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. (Obviously you'd have a State Secretary or a Secretary of -the- State in a state that didn't call itself a commonwealth!)
And, of course, if none of this works out, you can go to the public library; especially in the fall they tend to have government leaflets/handbooks/manuals to hand out.
So, if I read this rightly, NT has been C2 certified with service pack 6a and special c2 updates, for less than a year (though MS has been claiming certification forever...) and while you're allowed to have a network card, your network configuration is TCP/IP only, no appletalk, netbeui, or IPX, and no network services of any kind. (That is, I believe the list of 'specifically excluded' services is a superset of the standard install services.)
Also, what data you transmit over the net is not evaluated. They're just saying you can have a network card, and if no ports are open you're still safe.
Which I guess is better than the (supposed) no-network configuration of NT3.51. If that's true.
I think I'm going to print this out and take it home. THanks.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Erm... would that 'small mistake' be the way that all of your dots are copyright symbols and you bracketed another statement with then Yen and international currency symbols? Or are you just a very clever troll who deliberately mutilated a post to make Microsoft look bad? (Why anyone would feel the need to do that -here-, I dunno, but either your settings are -massively- screwed up, or you did it on purpose.)
--Parity
The question is entirely irrelevant. It is answered in the First Amendment. It seems that the askee wants special status in the constitution and the right to take time-off for religious "holidays" and perhaps an entry as a victimized religion in a federal hate-crimes bill. Fact is, these "cusp" religions don't play any factor in the role of government -- nor should they.
Actually, I believe that the askee was more concerned about Bush's statement that he doesn't consider witchcraft a religion, and would prefer the military to ban wiccan religious practice. The concern here is not to get -special- rights, but to have the -same- rights as the judeo-christian religions.
--Parity
Well, if you don't have any statistics in front of you, just make up something that fits your argument. 10-15%? Where did you pull that number from? ... I remember roughly what the numbers were, (in a study of pagans/career several years ago) but not precisely.
Memory. That's why I said 10-15%, instead of '11.2%'
Also, of course, the statistics I was indicating I didn't have were those on the breakdown of the US population by religion, so you're taking me out of context.
--Parity
I don't have any statistics in front of me, but I do believe that the combined neopagan religions (Wicca, Asatru, etc) plus the combined Buddhist variants, plus the combined eastern polytheistic religions (Hindus and Hari Krishnas, Religious Taoism (diff. from philosophy of Taoism), etc), plus the Voudoun/Santeria/etc religions, all together would add up to more than 1% of the religious people in the United States.
Further, as a praticing Pagan I found the question -extremely- relevant to me, and considering that something on the order of 10-15% of IT workers are pagan, it's pretty relevant to slashdot. (Yes, it's weird, but the IT industry has - or had a few years ago - the highest percentage of neopagans of any career grouping.)
Finally, yes, there -are- vast differences between the judeo-christian monotheistic religions, but that does not change the fact that they are more similar to each other than to the non-monotheistic religions.
--Parity
Considering that you're promoting yourselves as security experts with a tool to secure Linux distributions, why is your verification on your tarball an MD5 checksum, which is much easier to forge than a PGP/GPG signature?
I think the md5 checksum is a good idea, for those who can't/won't install pgp or gpg, but why not authenticate with one, or both, public-key tools?
--Parity
Your advice assumes there exists at least one candidate who deserves my support. I've looked at them all, and none of them do. How can I register my preference that they scrap all these losers and start again? We don't have "None of the Above" so best I can do is not vote in the Presidential race.
You still vote - just because you have a ballot doesn't mean you have to pick somebody in every race. Vote on your local questions, vote on your congressional candidates and local offices, and abstain on the presidential race. Do -not- write in None of the Above, as in many areas this will invalidate your ballot; abstaining is the official way of voting 'none of the above', and abstaining means casting a ballot with no choice in a particular race. Not voting is just not voting.
--Parity
So embedded systems don't have OSs?
Generally, no. At least, they didn't used to. What the hell does a microwave oven need an operating system for?
Hunh? No, actually, almost all embedded systems have an OS, for exactly the same reason as any other computer having an OS - a centralized resource manager. Granted, in many cases, embedded OSes look more like DOS than *nix, which is to say, a handful of interrupt handlers and some startup/initialization code, but it depends. Remember that the UI for a microwave is only a tiny fraction of the code - there's also code to turn on the fan, optionally turn the rotary tray, modulate power to the microwave heating system, monitor the ambient temperature and/or thermometer for 'autosense' cooking, etc. It might well be sensible to put a multithreading OS inside a microwave so that your UI is a separate component from your systems controls, and if your UI gets screwed up your systems controls still shut the power off when they detect an erroneous condition and don't microwave the hapless user or burn out the microwave...
Note that embedded operating systems may well look like a single process, or a single process with multiple-threading... if you wanted to get semantical, you could argue that products sold as embedded operating systems are really 'template applications' and not operating systems at all, but then, the embedded world is just backwards that way. A better way of looking at it, is that the simplest embedded operating systems are modified by adding functional code directly to the kernel rather than having a separate application. (More complex embedded OSes have a tendency to look like unix plus or minus some system services... but those are more likely to go into factory control than a microwave... )
--Parity
However, until I sell (I trade rather infrequently. I should probably put much of it in an aggresive growth fund instead.), these gains and losses do not, if memory serves, affect my tax liabilities. Hence, my net assets may, on paper, change rather more significantly in either direction than this fiscal year's tax return may reflect. Until I sell...
This is mostly true, yes; change in the value of your holdings doesn't count as income until you sell. Capital Gains Distributions, Dividends, and Interest, however, do count as income immediately... I -think- even if reinvested, but I'm not sure; my 'real' money right now is only in a savings account, my only 'investments' are sheltered in IRA and 401K accounts, and it's been a while since I've held anything outside of those shelters.
I would imagine, however, that the 'richest 10%' would have widely diversified holdings that would need money moved around as market conditions changed or else suffer losses, not to mention the dividend and interest incomes from stocks and bonds. It's theoretically possible but rather difficult in practice to make a lot of money and not have it be taxable. (Though you could play tricks like selling a stock that has dropped that you don't expect to recover at the same time you sell a stock that has grown, offsetting 'locked-in' loss against gain... that only works to a point though, if you have a net gain). Anyway. I'm no financial analyst, I'm just suggesting that there is some correlation between assets and income.
--Parity
The patent is not, actually, if you read it, on '1-click' shopping, but on single-action-to-purchase' shopping. ;)) , however you'd have to cite the Amazon patent (because it covers in general, any single event to initiate a purchase, including a mouse-button press), and you'd have to license the amazon patent before you could even use your patent.
You could patent button-press shopping (that's what the first half of a click is, a press-event; the second half is a release-event; your OOP library may vary in terminology.
This also applies to one-word-voice-activated shopping, 'point-and-buy' gesture-recognition-shopping, etc, etc.
Amazon's -PATENT- may be stupid, but their Patent -Attorneys- are not, and they covered the bases.
--Parity
Not entirely, s/he isn't; those 'accumulated assets' don't just sit there, but are constantly being spent and re-accumulated through investments and so on, aka, 'unearned income.' Anyone who's income, earned or otherwise, isn't roughly proportional to his/her assets is going to steadily become broke, from devaluation of the dollar if nothing else.
This whole topic does need a deeper analysis than statistical quips without citations, though, it's true.
--Parity
There has to be a government to legislate stuff like drug use (including alcohol and tobacco) becuase a good number of people are 1) too stupid to know any better in the first place, 2) too stupid to "only hurt themselves" when they engage in stupid behavior... killing others while driving drunk, ...
You're absolutely right; it's clear to me now that the correct solution here is to completely ban the consumption of alcohol. Everybody knows that alcohol is bad for you and you shouldn't be drinking it anyway, so if we just outlaw it, nobody will drink anymore, and everyone will live longer, crime will go down, and society will be more peaceful.
(Warning: This post may contain irony; knowledge of the prohibition era is recommended before replying.)
--Parity
That's not how the debt is read, though; social security and 'other investments' are not part of the general federal budget. They are - or were - deliberately separate.
The funds borrowed 'by the government from the government' are -still- debt, because, firstly, interest must still be payed on them, and secondly, social security funds are intended to be returned to the public via the social security program.
To treat money borrowed from social security as 'not really debt' is only valid if you think it's okay for the federal-budget side of government to decide to terminate the social security program and not pay that money back to its social security branch.
--Parity
Don't forget that most of that debt is owed to ourselves (in the form of Treasury notes and other bonds).
;)) go into debt control than take any of it out now. This will ensure a larger surplus next year, and the next, as long as the policy is kept up. (I would -not- want to see the debt cut in half in a single year or anything like that; I don't want to play with the economy that way.)
So what? This mostly means that our savings, held by banks, is in turn, invested into the US, which allows the banks to make a profit because of the interest rate differential, and other various large-financial-institution day-to-day-business. It -still- comes down to, the citizen is paying something like (I haven't checked the percentages in a couple years) half of his taxes to interest on the debt. Which would be better, doubling the federal income (allowing tax breaks of 50% across the board and/or new spending programs) or buffering savings bank interest rates?
Honestly, I suspect that having -some- national debt is a good thing for the economy generally since it -does- provide this stable place to dump excess funds and still earn -some- interest; however, the current debt is ridiculous; I really don't want more than about 10% of my taxes going to pay interest on the debt. I would much, much rather see the entire surplus (okay, lets compromise - half of it?
Anyway; recalling history, nations with drastic debts go into a spiralling inflationary depression when the economy dips, often destroying their currency altogether so they have to start over. (Witness Germany, England; Mexico had similar but recovered with a controlled, forced-inflation model). I'd really, really rather not see my life savings wiped out permanently because of poor foresight and something that -should- have been a temporary dip in the economy.
--Parity
a) You shouldn't reply to obvious trolls. ;)
b) Joining an organization such as the ULC (Universal Life Church, at www.ulc.org) or one of the several umbrella pagan organizations that exist just to accredit local pagan groups as members of their religion can make it easier to get your temple/grove/whatever made into a place of worship, though depending on where you are in the country it still won't be easy... but then, starting a branch of the 'universal life church' might slide the paperwork through painlessly (and most ULC chapters -are- Christian oriented, though the church itself has as its only tenet that everyone is free to believe and worship as they choose, so you can easily be a pagan ULC minister... ) Anyway. Blessed be.
--Parity
If anything, atheism is now the official statre religion of the US, since the only legally acceptable religion in public has become no religion. It seems pretty childish to complain of discrimination against your revolt against reason when your form of disbelief is being enshrined as the only acceptable position.
This is simply not right. I will confess that in academia and in the tech industry, atheism is fairly widespread, however, -legally-, the right to practice any religion is as well protected as ever in the history of the U.S., and -socially- christianity is clearly still the primarily accepted religion, evidenced not only by the predominance of churches of christian sects, but, by the way that the candidates in the 'big two' parties manuevered to express their strong christian faith back in the primaries, not to mention that -every- president of the U.S. has been a christian of one sect or another. There is some evidence that the strongly christian leaning of the US government is weakening in that Gore chose Liebermann for a running-mate, but that only goes to show that there is increasing tolerance for other monotheistic faiths besides Christianity.
Anecdotally, it's easy to come up with examples of how religion is disappearing, but really, in a religiously diverse country, it's easier to keep religion as a quiet and personal matter than provoke arguments by loudly proclaiming the rightness of one's own faith at every opportunity. This is simple politeness, really, as any claim that one's own religion is 'true' implies that others are 'false,' and nobody likes to have their religious beliefs publically attacked. (Polite theological debate in the right setting being another matter.)
So, as evidenced by the fact that the a pro-christian standpoint -improves- the approval ratings of a candidate for the highest office in the United States, and with my suggestion above as an alternative explanation for some -appearances- to the contrary, I think it's safe to say that religion is still alive and well.
Anecdotally, FWIW, I don't currently know any atheists at all; I seem to recall knowing one or two in college. I -do- still know a handful of agnostics, but most people I know are, in about equal numbers, christian, jewish, or neopagan. I'm pretty confident that that's not at all close to the actual population, but it does show, at least, that the country is not overwhelmingly atheist or I'd have trouble meeting such people.
Now, if by 'legally acceptable' you meant the creationism/evolution in schools thing, and related issues, let me just say that science is not (or rather, -should not- be) a religion. It's a set of momentarilly believed 'truths' based on empirical evidence, and is perfectly possible to accept both scientific 'truth' and religious 'truth' at the same time. People do it every day. Now, when someone says 'spiritual religion is bunk because there's no scientific evidence for it', that's treating science like religion, and the proper answer to such persons is 'there's no scientific evidence -against- it either'. (Specifically, there's no scientific evidence that there is no such thing as a soul, a god or gods, an afterlife, etc. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, etc. The devout christian will have to either believe that God created the world with that illusory evidence in place, or that the stories of Genesis and the years that people lived as you follow the genealogies up to historically verifiable events aren't exactly literal.)
--Parity
The -only- package I've seen this with is the gimp, which was only half-working until I installed gnome-apt; with all those gnome parts installed, suddenly the gimp worked great. D'oh.
However, I was -very- suprised at this behaviour; normally, Debian is very good with this. Well. Caveat there: There are bugs in 'non-free' that are deadly and have lurked for years. Debian focus is on liberated software almost to the exclusion of contrib on non-free.
I -will- admit, as happy a Debian user as I am, that Debian is not 'scaling' well; as it grows in size, it is becoming a bit tangled, some packages are not well debugged (eyeballs are spread thinner, I guess, with so many packages) and the isolation of non-free and contrib does create some technical problems in favor of political correctness. All that said though... even if I have some theoretical complaints about Debian's scaling, a) nobody else is doing as well, and b) this is being addressed with the no-files metapackages that simplify installation of certain complex systems.
Oh, and a final point about Debian-thinking... if you're a Debian user, you're part -of- Debian. It's not 'Debian' as a whole that messed up package X, it's the package maintainer for package X and the users that didn't report the bug. Unlike Redhat, Debian isn't a company, it's just an offshoot of the liberated software process.
--Parity
I don't think that you can use press articles as evidence that way. If you could, Hunter S. Thompson would've been jailed after his first article...
Besides, they don't actually say 'windows' they say 'an operating system'; we know what they're implying, but implying isn't stating.
--Parity
While I largely agree with your rant, I would have moderated you down as flamebait for the gratuitously graphic profanity... however... since less sensitive souls have you up here to see...
Have you considered saying 'Oh, yes, I'd -love- to subscribe to your wonderful service' and waiting until you get to the indepent verification and -then- saying, 'No, I don't want to subscribe; I lied, in order to get to the indepent verification; this call was in violation of the law and I'd like to know if you can provide me information about who made it.'
I'm not entirely convinced that the 'independent verification' is so very independent, but somewhere in the play-along process you might get the info needed to shaft them.
--Parity
Genes can -not- be patented. 'Discoveries' of natural things can -not- be patented. 'gene patents' is media shorthand for 'have patented the process of extracting or synthesizing the gene sequence'.
... but I doubt it. I think it's 'obvious' even to the patent office that math can be done with a pencil and paper...)
Similarly to 'algorithms cannot be patented'; you can't stop people from engaging in public key cryptography if they do it with pencil and paper. (Or maybe you can if you patent 'a process implementing public key cryptography with pencil and paper'
So, software patents are on the -synthetic- process of a program running in memory, and gene patents are on the -synthetic- process of extracting/synthesizing genes. The 'natural' processes of thinking through a math problem or procreating are unpatentable.
The -scary- part of gene patents is the same thing that is scary about -all- medicinal patents. What if you have a deadly disease but have no insurance and cannot afford the inflated prices of the exclusive manufacturer of the treatment? (As happens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with AIDS right now... ). Anyway. Don't dilute important issues just because the media is too lazy to describe things properly. (They do, you know, at least once every few weeks have an 'in-depth' discussion of gene-patents, and the first question is always 'how can you patent a gene?' followed by the explanation I just gave. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by NPR and the BBC... )
--Parity
The current plan (as I understand it, which is admittedly not well) is pretty much exactly what you're saying: Add TLDs like .shop and .ecom and .biz and .bank... and then give trademark holders of domains first-chance... so, microsoft will immediately buy microsoft.shop, microsoft.ecom, microsoft.biz, microsoft.bank, microsoft.sucks... etc. That's fine for microsoft, but what about 'southwest airlines'? they'd probably buy southwest.everything-except-.bank-and-maybe-that-t oo.
.com/.net/.org domains are idiots and the neat thing about the geographical domains is they're inherently unmonopolizable. (no more than 10 domains per administrator, I seem to recall, so if holland.mi.us's administrator were some sort of corporate lackey who refused to cooperate with slashdot, just get slasdot..mi.us or some other 'nearby large city' that isn't unreasonable to put yourself in.
I'm sure there are other 'trademarks' that are common words and really only trademarks in a particular sphere of business. 'Disney' and 'Microsoft' and 'Coca-Cola' are obviously universal trademarks. Any-way.
The civil liberties issues are, what if somebody's asleep at the helm and I sneak in and buy microsoft.sucks and put up a parody site. Can Microsoft insist that the domain is under their trademark and have ICANN transfer ownership? Is that a violation of free speech? (Technically 'no' because this is a business transaction not a legal one, but in practice it's a -supression- of speech.) What about etoy/etoys type suppression-by-trademark where a domain just gets deactivated? If my last name is miller and I get miller.per what protections to I really have from miller beer?
An-yway, the solution to all this in -my- mind is to use the geographical system... granted, 'slashdot.holland.mi.us' doesn't sound as spiffy as 'slashdot.org' or 'slashdot.dot' but it neatly sidesteps the whole trademark thing. Unless, of course, the administrator of holland.mi.us happens to be an idiot, but hey, we -know- the people at the top of the
--Parity
In the real world we all agree on the difference between 'inside' and 'outside' and the difference between 'an open door' and a 'closed door' and the difference between a private residence and a public facility is usually clear at a glance.
In the online-world we have no such agreements. So what I'm saying is, don't make 'trespassing' or 'entering' a crime, only make 'breaking' a crime; at least so long as we -don't- have a society-wide agreement about where the lines are.
--Parity
No, but I bet you'd be screaming at 911 to get the police to your house if your pervert neighbor was peeping through your window at your wife getting out of the shower.
Actually, no; I'd make sure we kept the curtains drawn (my online journal encrypted); unless you mean he was in the yard right up at the window? Then yell at him to get the hell away (kill the process of the intruder and change the passwords he/she got).
Now, if the peeping time broke into the house and planted a camera and 'fixed' the locks so he could get in any time, then I'd call the police; and in the analogy, damage would have been done to the computer system - software 'damaged' with insertion of backdoors, etc.
In the real world we don't have a law against looking in through somebody's window, though we do have laws against stomping across the yard and climbing into the azalea bushes to peer through the cracks in the curtains...
People behave reasonably in the real world; they -don't- call the cops because someone looks out their bedroom window and into yours, or because somebody walked across the corner of the yard and happened to glance into the living room window (even though you could technically say it's trespassing, maybe... sort of...); people want to make the analagous behaviours in the online world felonies, and people are -not- reasonable about it. There are people out there who would (And even try to with current laws!) try to take someone to court for ftping to their machine. (Kinda like insisting the police arrest someone for 'trespassing' when they pulled into your driveway by accident mistaking it for their friend Bill's house... )
Anyway; if ten years from now, we see that certain loopholes have been left in the legislation, we can close them, but remember - tampering with logs to hide your presence would count as damaging the machine, adding accounts and backdoors makes the machine less secure and is damaging the machine... just about any conceivable 'cracking' attack will at some point 'damage' the machine... a portscan or an attempt to ftp in or whatever are harmless and shouldn't be criminalized, -that's- what I'm saying. (And if someone cracks your machine without fixing the logs you can just block their host forevermore since you know exactly who they are!)
Anyway. It's much easier to -add- legislation to solve a problem and it's much -harder- to undo draconian legislation, so it's much, much better to add laws for 'digital crimes' slowly and carefully and without any sweeping gestures that might outlaw lots of legitimate activity.
--Parity
For the record, the Linux Kernel Compilation Benchmark being 'the only test that matters' was a tongue in cheek remark. Next time I'll remember the smiley for the humor impaired; as for the rest of your 'argument':
You invoked a fascist reference; you automatically lose. Go away Troll.
--Parity
In my case, I go to http://www.state.ma.us/ and click on 'elections' and try to figure out which document will describe the electoral college process; if your state does not have good online archives, try writing to the office of the Secretary in your state's capital; at least, in Massachusetts, the election information seems to be published by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. (Obviously you'd have a State Secretary or a Secretary of -the- State in a state that didn't call itself a commonwealth!)
And, of course, if none of this works out, you can go to the public library; especially in the fall they tend to have government leaflets/handbooks/manuals to hand out.
You can email me at parity@angelfire.com.
--Parity
So, if I read this rightly, NT has been C2 certified with service pack 6a and special c2 updates, for less than a year (though MS has been claiming certification forever...) and while you're allowed to have a network card, your network configuration is TCP/IP only, no appletalk, netbeui, or IPX, and no network services of any kind. (That is, I believe the list of 'specifically excluded' services is a superset of the standard install services.) ;)
Also, what data you transmit over the net is not evaluated. They're just saying you can have a network card, and if no ports are open you're still safe.
Which I guess is better than the (supposed) no-network configuration of NT3.51. If that's true.
I think I'm going to print this out and take it home. THanks.
--Parity