I thought that maybe someone set up a Vegas sim in SecondLife, and built a simple API to SecondLife's Real Life APIs (that program SecondLife world functions from real world computers) that avatars (not their human players) could program easily in-game. Maybe by sitting at animated PC in the game, or just by waving around some "magic" items and saying some "magic spells" (or picking up a phone and talking to "Central Services").
A virtual machine that avatars could program, which converts or interprets the avatars' "programming" actions into "real" code that runs in SecondLife's real datacenters.
I think such a service could crank out quite a few LindenDollars.
Where I put it? I put it in reply to a story about Canadians protecting their own data (and jobs, according to my argument) by not leaving it in a foreign country, the United States. I put a comment about Americans putting their data in a foreign country.
Now, what you're describing (a valid comment in the wrong place) is known as "Offtopic", not "Overrated". But my comment was on-topic, but from the reverse perspective.
How is that "trollish"? What were the "predictable comments" which would be the sole purpose for which my comment was designed, which is the meaning of a troll?
I didn't say anything "pro-American" that in any way is "anti-Canada", except I suppose in that Canada is part of the world that is not the United States. And even at that, the exact same argument could be made for any country protecting its jobs & data - there's nothing uniquely US about what I described. But as an American, I'm going to talk about my own country. Just as it was perfectly reasonable for this story submitter to talk about Canada, when of course most countries have exactly the same concerns about their own data (and, I'd say, jobs) going abroad.
Or is it just OK for non-Americans to single out the US as a "dangerous foreign data haven", but not for Americans to discuss our identical concerns (which therefore have to be in other countries), even if we don't single out any other countries (though there are many, including Canada) about which the argument can apply?
TrollMods think Americans' job security and national security are "overrated", so they don't even want to talk about it. Because talking about it in public could protect it.
search engines which primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the US
What about search engines that only secondarily index such (possibly - how is the index to determine the copyright compliance without having the content itself?) content? If the engine indexes a lot of other stuff that no one says is coypright infringing, like the rest of the Web, is that OK? IOW, could Google also point to this contentious content, along with its other content?
That is exactly the dance that other controversial media has forced outlets to dance when the crackdown comes down. Like in NYC under Giuliani, when he started shutting down porno video stores in neighborhoods he wanted to force to sell out to real estate speculators. The stores would reopen if their "primary" content was non-porno movies, which was just window dressing since "despite their primary stock", their customers mostly still just bought the porno out of the (now legit, by being ghettoized) back corner with the "Adults Only" signs flashing all over it.
This distinction is an essential point in this whole conflict. If Google's regular "Web" search results (not a separate section like for "News" or "Shopping", etc) also returned results that point at material that the RIAA says violates copyright, is Google safe, because those indexed items are not its primariy function? How does Google know that the content it points to is copyright-legit? How is anyone without a $billion to spend on compliance to set up an Internet search engine? And how does the Constitutional copyright exception to free speech/press justify impeding the entire Internet's navigation just for the already dubious (probably unjustified already) claims that current copyright controls "promote progress in science and the useful arts", its only legal basis, rather than sharply harm that progress?
If Google is safe legally, because of its primary function indexing other content (and not making its primary function paying a lot of lawyers and content examiners), then what about a competitor to Google that also spiders the Web, indexes all content, but doesn't exclude content on the basis of possible copyright infringement? Would such an inclusive search engine be legally OK, free to grow to a huge size, competing with Google by including all the content "too hot for Google to handle"? Would that legit competition in turn push Google into indexing that same content, too?
Especially while American workers and domestic operated industries are hurting and threatened with even more hurt, the American people's security, both economic security and the resulting national security, would benefit by the American people investing more in American workers. American legal jurisdiction and yes, even patriotism, also make domestic operations even more securable than those outsourced to foreign corporations whose security integrity can be bought, perhaps as cheaply as Americans bought their basic IT operations.
The US government should always weight IT procurement decisions, in fact any expenditures, in favor of American vendors. The more 100% American the operations, and therefore the staff and the nearby economic circulation of the fees spent on them, the more favored they should be against foreign competitors for the American government contracts. And in fact, some essential operations should never be outsourced to foreigners, and probably not even outsourced at all outside the government itself, and its longterm civil servants.
If saving money were more important than protecting Americans, we wouldn't spend any of the $TRILLIONS we spend on security and defense. I'd love to see the millions of Americans so up in arms about immigration set their priority as defending our government operations from "foreign occupation", which would actually defend the country and even find a lot more solidarity among their fellow Americans.
And of course MacOS isn't the only other consumer PC OS sold around the world: Linux servers are already half of the amount of Windows servers sold. Plus all the Linux machines, probably the majority, that are not sold as Linux machines, which is probably still the majority of "consumer" machines, which much more rarely pay for support when they can just download the OS for free. And which probably usually wipe away a preinstalled, bundled Windows OS that might have been sold, but is not used.
Revising those crude raw numbers according to what we can easily guess about Vista alternatives shows that there's surely a lot more than "0%" of consumer PCs sold without Vista, or without Vista lasting long after it's sold as a forced bundle.
Which, apart from the gratuitous profit Microsoft continues to lock in, is what counts to the industry: the installed base is what counts to app developers and service deliverers, which is what most of the industry consists of.
If Microsoft could be kept from their ongoing illegal bundling (despite the failure of the monopoly abuse verdict to stop their monopoly abuses since Bush took over the remedy phase), Vista penetration would be on its own merit, and shrink even more from its anemic oozing into a disappointed marketplace. Though there's probably nothing that can keep Ballmer from lying at the top of his lungs about Vista's unrivalled dominance.
OK, just a note to dignify your tangential paranoid ravings. Your imaginary beliefs evidently include your foreknowledge of this new proposed reporting system, because you deny that it's news.
Somehow your disappointment that people aren't more informed is the reason that you complain when some news tries to inform them of something new coming around that neither you nor they will probably like.
Oh, and the Constitution grants the government the power to collect taxes, which includes income taxes when Congress passes the laws. Which, despite what paranoids like you are fond of imagining, Congress has done many times. The 1986 tax law was the single largest law ever passed, and you people would like to pretend that it's not a law at all. And there have of course been several revisions since then. But of course the only law that applies to you is the bare Constitution, not any of the laws that the Constitution creates the Congress to write and the Executive to apply.
Overall, in your perfect self-contradiction, delusional attack on the basic operations of government - especially to collect taxes - and your weird tangents justifying dismissal of news you don't like, you are stratospherically Bushlike.
Overall I'd tend to agree with your calm assesment. But in my personal experience I've seen many many kids prescribed Ritalin or other drugs when what they needed was more time chasing each other around outside, less time playing videogames or just watching TV. And not just kids, but loads of adults on Prozac-type drugs, Xanax, and other stuff that's supposed to be prescribed by a doctor to give them a moment of clarity and a chance to work through their problems, but instead are just dosed into limbo. Psychiatrists who meet with patients just to represcribe them drugs, and never offer any actual therapy at all.
So I expect that there are lots of people out there who aren't "understimulated" in any psychopharmacological sense requiring correction, but are rather just pawns of lazy parents, teachers and medical personnel, whose endocrinology and neurotransmitter balances have a synthetic wedge driven into their cycles. Who then spend adolescence and beyond with their heads ringing from growing up dosed. There's quite a lot of people like that around now, and more all the time.
Figuring out a good system to move to is different than what it takes to get there. One part of what it takes is figuring out a good system, which we haven't yet.
But the fact that the #2 and #3 finishers in the Republican presidential primaries each proposed sales tax and IRS abolishment means that in fact the notion has plenty of traction among the people, even if not yet in the corporate mass media. That media doesn't get to say whether we continue the discussion among ourselves, in interactive distributed media like this website. And since you and I come from different directions, and are discussing it on a tech blog, but already are somewhat sync'ed, I'd say that things are moving along at a fairly encouraging pace. Republican presidential candidates don't do innovation: they just latch on to what is already popular among a desired constituency, and try to pitch it to a larger audience, and take credit for it. That's how all economics, no matter which route through which party, is turned into policy.
Oh, so since we have massive problems, we can't afford a massive change. And it's not a change in how "economics fundamentally work", it's a change in how we fund the government. Fixing it, which by definition requires changing it.
Not only isn't encouraging everyone to save "necessarily bad", it's almost necessarily always good. Especially since America's savings rate has finally fallen to negative savings, on average, across 300 million people. That's a catastrophe, and fixing that would be a top priority, even if it didn't also fix our government funding catastrophe.
The businesses that go broke when markets for products that people buy because they can put off paying their taxes, at higher rates (to compensate for the corporations that usually pay no taxes) are the businesses that make our economy less efficient. I'm not going to miss subsidizing them. That's business: winners and losers. Except when they're propped up by a broken system, which makes everyone a loser at the expense of bad business.
Of course there will still be tax evasion, real theft and some fraud. But since the points of collection are both much fewer and already include accounting as a core competency, there will be much less. But I suppose that "better" isn't good enough. We should just stay broken until the magic perfection comes down, and then everyone will get a pony.
If America can't support its expenses on taxing domestic purchases because there's too much foreign purchasing without taxes, then of course we should tariff it. The restraint on free trade from tariffs comes from disadvantaging imports vs domestic goods. If the domestic goods are all burdened, but foreign ones aren't, then the unfair trade is working in reverse, and tariffs are necessary even without the benefit of stopping tax evasion, just to level the playing field.
Besides, if you knew anything about current economics, you'd know that the US dollar is becoming worthless for buying imports, with no letup in sight.
But then, if you knew anything about economics, you'd know that replacing the income tax with a sales tax wasn't invented by Ron Paul. And you wouldn't have said any of those other ignorant things about economics or government finance, especially not in a tone like you know everything, when everything you said was dead wrong. Anonymous squanderer Coward.
What happens to your cognition once you stop taking it, after you've gotten used to taking it? Do you get a tolerance, so you not only need higher doses for a smarts boost, but you also just return to your base performance after getting used to it?
What's the withdrawal like?
I suspect that maybe the many kids given Ritalin while growing up learn to depend on it for their baseline. When they outgrow their "hyperactivity" (AKA "childhood"), they quit the drugs, and sink into an unfamiliar dullness in which they can't think at their previous baseline without the artificial stimulation. And how much do they just get burned out from the steady drugging?
The IRS and its inevitable escalation of privacy invasions is one good reason why we should discard the income tax entirely, in favor of a sales tax. At about 25% (instead of income tax that's 20-35%), our $15 TRILLION economy would produce something over $3T, which (if we stopped pouring money into the Iraq War) would completely pay for even modern bloated budgets, without deficits (and probably with substantial debt paydowns).
Everything sold retail, with exceptions for a few "necessities", would be charged the 25% sales tax. The necessities would be raw cloth (not finished clothing, unless used and bought from a nonprofit collecting it from donations), raw food (groceries, not restaurants), health insurance, education, telecom (phone, basic cable, basic broadband), local average mass transit expenses, and home expenses on those primary homes costing (rent, mortgage, etc) in the bottom 20% of their Congressional District. Those homes would also have their median power/heat/light utilities exempted. The vendors would be the ones audited by the government, and responsible for ongoing tax collection, not the consumers, so the cost of the tax system would be part of the existing business accounting infrastructure. And violations would cause liens and seizures on the much more easily grabbed businesses.
Wholesale taxes for registered wholesalers would be a fraction of that 25%, probably closer to 1-5%. Equity sales not resulting in majority ownership transfer would be taxed at a rate of something like 0.01-0.001%, to encourage liquidity.
Congress could grant extra exemptions for subsidizing commerce it says the US is investing in, like home sales during housing busts or prescription drugs for seniors whose hardship is monitored by the government. But those arbitrary economics engineering projects would be easily pointed out for balancing against new debt when the government proposed deficit spending, rather than charge exempt people their fair share.
This system would put US taxation on a fair and supportable basis for the first time. Those benefiting most from the system that protects their ability to spend money on what they want would pay the most to keep that system working. Everyone would be encouraged to save, as income and savings aren't taxed. The poorest would have their prices on necessities lowered, but so would everyone else, without the government deciding how to redistribute that money among different people. And the simplicity, fairness and much smaller population (vendors) from whom taxes are actually collected would increase compliance and reduce tax evasion: the vendor won't sell you the goods if you don't pay, and they'll lose their business if their records don't add up.
But their records will be aggregated, not individual. The government tax authorities won't know a goddamn thing about individuals' private transactions, because they won't need to, and they won't have the raw data.
The IRS and the income tax will just keep getting worse. Even as it increasingly fails to either manage the economy by "exemption engineering", as we can see from its sketchy results (which usually just covers up subsidies to huge multinational corps), or to even pay the bills, as the ever-booming (especially lately) National Debt proves with more data than any other human endeavor ever measured. Sales tax will do what we want, without doing what we don't want. Let's have it already.
Who said it's a surprise? It's "New Reporting", which is why it's "news". New things that are important are news (you can tell by the spelling).
What is this bizarre dismissal of important stories just because they are new developments that meet low expectations? Do you have something against people being informed that our worst expectations are being realized? Or are you Bushlike in equating your purely imaginary prior beliefs with their actual materialization?
Stewart never said anything about "two scenarios", you did. He said that antivirus money is "completely wasted" if it allows any infections:
"If patching and antivirus is where I spend my money, and I'm still getting infected and I still have to clean up computers and I still need to reload them and still have to recover the user's data and I still have to reinstall it, the entire cost equation of that is a waste.
"It's completely wasted money," Stewart told delegates.
"The entire cost equation" isn't a waste. Not if it's compared to the entire cost equation of not spending on antivirus, which would be a lot worse.
Sure the current antivirus industry isn't protecting us 100% (or even close) from viruses. But if there were no antivirus industry, that protection level would be a lot closer to 0% than to 100%. And the risks and losses would be much greater. Probably the global Windows installed base would be a botnet, making the Internet an impossible, not just an inconvenient, platform.
I don't think that Cisco's CSO is a total waste of money. But if he's going to equate "inadequate" to "nothing", Cisco needs to upgrade him and get its money's worth.
Point out that Republicans based their government monopoly on Jack Abramoff's corruption ring, and their TrollMods try to shut you down like an Indian Affairs server.
A Labrador retriever, that is. They all look more or less exactly the same, and have exactly the same friendly personality.
Or just brave the wilds of adopting a new random dog. There's already way too many of them for anyone's good, without cloning up more in the world.
These cloning fees should include a $1000 donation to a programme that neuters 20 other dogs. If we're going to clone biodiversity out of the gene pool, we might as well get aggressive. After all, it's a dog eat dog world.
The Interior Dept's servers were ordered disconnected from the Internet after several years in which the Department's computers were repeatedly broken into, the Department never even seriously attempted to secure those servers, lots of important data was compromised, especially data in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Interior Department was exposing Indian Affairs to huge risks, because Indian Affairs is an extremely low priority for the US government, as it always has been.
And now this judge has admitted that he's not qualified to judge security, so therefore he's qualified to order insecure servers back onto the Internet. Because obviously the Bush administration doesn't care about Indians. Especially not since Jack Abramoff, who based much of his corrupt Republican lobbying empire on ripping off Indian tribes, is rotting in jail instead of keeping that Republican machine working.
This judge should have to learn about IT security by having all his personal and professional data stored on these Interior Department servers.
Just because you wouldn't use that site doesn't mean that it's without value.
I agree. I didn't say it doesn't have value. But there are also other measures of value, especially to me, than whether a lot of other people use a site that I wouldn't.
Meanwhile, your.sig says
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the editors didn't read.
I'm not going to ask you anything about your basis of value, because you don't have a comprehensible one.
You might "realize" that, but all I did was suggest a way to avoid the liability problems while getting the moderation that some people prefer. I didn't say 2channel was badly designed, I just proposed an alternate method that would do something it didn't.
This supernova event's description includes a mention of how stars make only the elements no heavier than iron:
After a few million years of generating energy by fusing light elements into heavier ones (hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and so on), the core runs out of fuel. Iron builds up in the very center of the star, and no star in the Universe has what it takes to fuse iron.
Heavier elements (like uranium) are actually created in the supernova event itself:
Along with all elements having atomic weights higher than that of iron, it is only naturally formed in supernova explosions.
So this observation is actually recording the actual origin of all the elements heavier than iron. All the jewelry and aerospace materials you've ever seen, all the copper you use in wiring and plumbing, all elements with atomic numbers from 27 (cobalt) through 94 (plutonium) were made in crucibles like the one we just took home movies of.
I didn't miss the point. Just because a site is popular doesn't mean it's good. I wouldn't want to use that site. The measure of a site's success or value, especially to its users, is not merely how much money it makes in a year.
What I proposed might be used to take all the 2channel content and present it with useful moderation, but without the liability that its unmoderated version also avoids.
Slashdot Mirror
Some things never change.
They say they photographed it in action. Where's the video?
I thought that maybe someone set up a Vegas sim in SecondLife, and built a simple API to SecondLife's Real Life APIs (that program SecondLife world functions from real world computers) that avatars (not their human players) could program easily in-game. Maybe by sitting at animated PC in the game, or just by waving around some "magic" items and saying some "magic spells" (or picking up a phone and talking to "Central Services").
A virtual machine that avatars could program, which converts or interprets the avatars' "programming" actions into "real" code that runs in SecondLife's real datacenters.
I think such a service could crank out quite a few LindenDollars.
Where I put it? I put it in reply to a story about Canadians protecting their own data (and jobs, according to my argument) by not leaving it in a foreign country, the United States. I put a comment about Americans putting their data in a foreign country.
Now, what you're describing (a valid comment in the wrong place) is known as "Offtopic", not "Overrated". But my comment was on-topic, but from the reverse perspective.
How is that "trollish"? What were the "predictable comments" which would be the sole purpose for which my comment was designed, which is the meaning of a troll?
I didn't say anything "pro-American" that in any way is "anti-Canada", except I suppose in that Canada is part of the world that is not the United States. And even at that, the exact same argument could be made for any country protecting its jobs & data - there's nothing uniquely US about what I described. But as an American, I'm going to talk about my own country. Just as it was perfectly reasonable for this story submitter to talk about Canada, when of course most countries have exactly the same concerns about their own data (and, I'd say, jobs) going abroad.
Or is it just OK for non-Americans to single out the US as a "dangerous foreign data haven", but not for Americans to discuss our identical concerns (which therefore have to be in other countries), even if we don't single out any other countries (though there are many, including Canada) about which the argument can apply?
Moderation 0
50% Insightful
50% Overrated
TrollMods think Americans' job security and national security are "overrated", so they don't even want to talk about it. Because talking about it in public could protect it.
What about search engines that only secondarily index such (possibly - how is the index to determine the copyright compliance without having the content itself?) content? If the engine indexes a lot of other stuff that no one says is coypright infringing, like the rest of the Web, is that OK? IOW, could Google also point to this contentious content, along with its other content?
That is exactly the dance that other controversial media has forced outlets to dance when the crackdown comes down. Like in NYC under Giuliani, when he started shutting down porno video stores in neighborhoods he wanted to force to sell out to real estate speculators. The stores would reopen if their "primary" content was non-porno movies, which was just window dressing since "despite their primary stock", their customers mostly still just bought the porno out of the (now legit, by being ghettoized) back corner with the "Adults Only" signs flashing all over it.
This distinction is an essential point in this whole conflict. If Google's regular "Web" search results (not a separate section like for "News" or "Shopping", etc) also returned results that point at material that the RIAA says violates copyright, is Google safe, because those indexed items are not its primariy function? How does Google know that the content it points to is copyright-legit? How is anyone without a $billion to spend on compliance to set up an Internet search engine? And how does the Constitutional copyright exception to free speech/press justify impeding the entire Internet's navigation just for the already dubious (probably unjustified already) claims that current copyright controls "promote progress in science and the useful arts", its only legal basis, rather than sharply harm that progress?
If Google is safe legally, because of its primary function indexing other content (and not making its primary function paying a lot of lawyers and content examiners), then what about a competitor to Google that also spiders the Web, indexes all content, but doesn't exclude content on the basis of possible copyright infringement? Would such an inclusive search engine be legally OK, free to grow to a huge size, competing with Google by including all the content "too hot for Google to handle"? Would that legit competition in turn push Google into indexing that same content, too?
Especially while American workers and domestic operated industries are hurting and threatened with even more hurt, the American people's security, both economic security and the resulting national security, would benefit by the American people investing more in American workers. American legal jurisdiction and yes, even patriotism, also make domestic operations even more securable than those outsourced to foreign corporations whose security integrity can be bought, perhaps as cheaply as Americans bought their basic IT operations.
The US government should always weight IT procurement decisions, in fact any expenditures, in favor of American vendors. The more 100% American the operations, and therefore the staff and the nearby economic circulation of the fees spent on them, the more favored they should be against foreign competitors for the American government contracts. And in fact, some essential operations should never be outsourced to foreigners, and probably not even outsourced at all outside the government itself, and its longterm civil servants.
If saving money were more important than protecting Americans, we wouldn't spend any of the $TRILLIONS we spend on security and defense. I'd love to see the millions of Americans so up in arms about immigration set their priority as defending our government operations from "foreign occupation", which would actually defend the country and even find a lot more solidarity among their fellow Americans.
Somehow, that "100%" doesn't include the 60% of all "high end PCs" sold that are Macs . Or maybe Ballmer's lies are that Macs are Vista. Or something.
And of course MacOS isn't the only other consumer PC OS sold around the world: Linux servers are already half of the amount of Windows servers sold. Plus all the Linux machines, probably the majority, that are not sold as Linux machines, which is probably still the majority of "consumer" machines, which much more rarely pay for support when they can just download the OS for free. And which probably usually wipe away a preinstalled, bundled Windows OS that might have been sold, but is not used.
Revising those crude raw numbers according to what we can easily guess about Vista alternatives shows that there's surely a lot more than "0%" of consumer PCs sold without Vista, or without Vista lasting long after it's sold as a forced bundle.
Which, apart from the gratuitous profit Microsoft continues to lock in, is what counts to the industry: the installed base is what counts to app developers and service deliverers, which is what most of the industry consists of.
If Microsoft could be kept from their ongoing illegal bundling (despite the failure of the monopoly abuse verdict to stop their monopoly abuses since Bush took over the remedy phase), Vista penetration would be on its own merit, and shrink even more from its anemic oozing into a disappointed marketplace. Though there's probably nothing that can keep Ballmer from lying at the top of his lungs about Vista's unrivalled dominance.
OK, just a note to dignify your tangential paranoid ravings. Your imaginary beliefs evidently include your foreknowledge of this new proposed reporting system, because you deny that it's news.
Somehow your disappointment that people aren't more informed is the reason that you complain when some news tries to inform them of something new coming around that neither you nor they will probably like.
Oh, and the Constitution grants the government the power to collect taxes, which includes income taxes when Congress passes the laws. Which, despite what paranoids like you are fond of imagining, Congress has done many times. The 1986 tax law was the single largest law ever passed, and you people would like to pretend that it's not a law at all. And there have of course been several revisions since then. But of course the only law that applies to you is the bare Constitution, not any of the laws that the Constitution creates the Congress to write and the Executive to apply.
Overall, in your perfect self-contradiction, delusional attack on the basic operations of government - especially to collect taxes - and your weird tangents justifying dismissal of news you don't like, you are stratospherically Bushlike.
Overall I'd tend to agree with your calm assesment. But in my personal experience I've seen many many kids prescribed Ritalin or other drugs when what they needed was more time chasing each other around outside, less time playing videogames or just watching TV. And not just kids, but loads of adults on Prozac-type drugs, Xanax, and other stuff that's supposed to be prescribed by a doctor to give them a moment of clarity and a chance to work through their problems, but instead are just dosed into limbo. Psychiatrists who meet with patients just to represcribe them drugs, and never offer any actual therapy at all.
So I expect that there are lots of people out there who aren't "understimulated" in any psychopharmacological sense requiring correction, but are rather just pawns of lazy parents, teachers and medical personnel, whose endocrinology and neurotransmitter balances have a synthetic wedge driven into their cycles. Who then spend adolescence and beyond with their heads ringing from growing up dosed. There's quite a lot of people like that around now, and more all the time.
Figuring out a good system to move to is different than what it takes to get there. One part of what it takes is figuring out a good system, which we haven't yet.
But the fact that the #2 and #3 finishers in the Republican presidential primaries each proposed sales tax and IRS abolishment means that in fact the notion has plenty of traction among the people, even if not yet in the corporate mass media. That media doesn't get to say whether we continue the discussion among ourselves, in interactive distributed media like this website. And since you and I come from different directions, and are discussing it on a tech blog, but already are somewhat sync'ed, I'd say that things are moving along at a fairly encouraging pace. Republican presidential candidates don't do innovation: they just latch on to what is already popular among a desired constituency, and try to pitch it to a larger audience, and take credit for it. That's how all economics, no matter which route through which party, is turned into policy.
Oh, so since we have massive problems, we can't afford a massive change. And it's not a change in how "economics fundamentally work", it's a change in how we fund the government. Fixing it, which by definition requires changing it.
Not only isn't encouraging everyone to save "necessarily bad", it's almost necessarily always good. Especially since America's savings rate has finally fallen to negative savings, on average, across 300 million people. That's a catastrophe, and fixing that would be a top priority, even if it didn't also fix our government funding catastrophe.
The businesses that go broke when markets for products that people buy because they can put off paying their taxes, at higher rates (to compensate for the corporations that usually pay no taxes) are the businesses that make our economy less efficient. I'm not going to miss subsidizing them. That's business: winners and losers. Except when they're propped up by a broken system, which makes everyone a loser at the expense of bad business.
Of course there will still be tax evasion, real theft and some fraud. But since the points of collection are both much fewer and already include accounting as a core competency, there will be much less. But I suppose that "better" isn't good enough. We should just stay broken until the magic perfection comes down, and then everyone will get a pony.
If America can't support its expenses on taxing domestic purchases because there's too much foreign purchasing without taxes, then of course we should tariff it. The restraint on free trade from tariffs comes from disadvantaging imports vs domestic goods. If the domestic goods are all burdened, but foreign ones aren't, then the unfair trade is working in reverse, and tariffs are necessary even without the benefit of stopping tax evasion, just to level the playing field.
Besides, if you knew anything about current economics, you'd know that the US dollar is becoming worthless for buying imports, with no letup in sight.
But then, if you knew anything about economics, you'd know that replacing the income tax with a sales tax wasn't invented by Ron Paul. And you wouldn't have said any of those other ignorant things about economics or government finance, especially not in a tone like you know everything, when everything you said was dead wrong. Anonymous squanderer Coward.
What happens to your cognition once you stop taking it, after you've gotten used to taking it? Do you get a tolerance, so you not only need higher doses for a smarts boost, but you also just return to your base performance after getting used to it?
What's the withdrawal like?
I suspect that maybe the many kids given Ritalin while growing up learn to depend on it for their baseline. When they outgrow their "hyperactivity" (AKA "childhood"), they quit the drugs, and sink into an unfamiliar dullness in which they can't think at their previous baseline without the artificial stimulation. And how much do they just get burned out from the steady drugging?
Something's got to explain the evident steady decay in average intellect as the years wear on, despite these synthetic boosts.
The IRS and its inevitable escalation of privacy invasions is one good reason why we should discard the income tax entirely, in favor of a sales tax. At about 25% (instead of income tax that's 20-35%), our $15 TRILLION economy would produce something over $3T, which (if we stopped pouring money into the Iraq War) would completely pay for even modern bloated budgets, without deficits (and probably with substantial debt paydowns).
Everything sold retail, with exceptions for a few "necessities", would be charged the 25% sales tax. The necessities would be raw cloth (not finished clothing, unless used and bought from a nonprofit collecting it from donations), raw food (groceries, not restaurants), health insurance, education, telecom (phone, basic cable, basic broadband), local average mass transit expenses, and home expenses on those primary homes costing (rent, mortgage, etc) in the bottom 20% of their Congressional District. Those homes would also have their median power/heat/light utilities exempted. The vendors would be the ones audited by the government, and responsible for ongoing tax collection, not the consumers, so the cost of the tax system would be part of the existing business accounting infrastructure. And violations would cause liens and seizures on the much more easily grabbed businesses.
Wholesale taxes for registered wholesalers would be a fraction of that 25%, probably closer to 1-5%. Equity sales not resulting in majority ownership transfer would be taxed at a rate of something like 0.01-0.001%, to encourage liquidity.
Congress could grant extra exemptions for subsidizing commerce it says the US is investing in, like home sales during housing busts or prescription drugs for seniors whose hardship is monitored by the government. But those arbitrary economics engineering projects would be easily pointed out for balancing against new debt when the government proposed deficit spending, rather than charge exempt people their fair share.
This system would put US taxation on a fair and supportable basis for the first time. Those benefiting most from the system that protects their ability to spend money on what they want would pay the most to keep that system working. Everyone would be encouraged to save, as income and savings aren't taxed. The poorest would have their prices on necessities lowered, but so would everyone else, without the government deciding how to redistribute that money among different people. And the simplicity, fairness and much smaller population (vendors) from whom taxes are actually collected would increase compliance and reduce tax evasion: the vendor won't sell you the goods if you don't pay, and they'll lose their business if their records don't add up.
But their records will be aggregated, not individual. The government tax authorities won't know a goddamn thing about individuals' private transactions, because they won't need to, and they won't have the raw data.
The IRS and the income tax will just keep getting worse. Even as it increasingly fails to either manage the economy by "exemption engineering", as we can see from its sketchy results (which usually just covers up subsidies to huge multinational corps), or to even pay the bills, as the ever-booming (especially lately) National Debt proves with more data than any other human endeavor ever measured. Sales tax will do what we want, without doing what we don't want. Let's have it already.
Who said it's a surprise? It's "New Reporting", which is why it's "news". New things that are important are news (you can tell by the spelling).
What is this bizarre dismissal of important stories just because they are new developments that meet low expectations? Do you have something against people being informed that our worst expectations are being realized? Or are you Bushlike in equating your purely imaginary prior beliefs with their actual materialization?
"The entire cost equation" isn't a waste. Not if it's compared to the entire cost equation of not spending on antivirus, which would be a lot worse.
Which is exactly what I said in my post.
Sure the current antivirus industry isn't protecting us 100% (or even close) from viruses. But if there were no antivirus industry, that protection level would be a lot closer to 0% than to 100%. And the risks and losses would be much greater. Probably the global Windows installed base would be a botnet, making the Internet an impossible, not just an inconvenient, platform.
I don't think that Cisco's CSO is a total waste of money. But if he's going to equate "inadequate" to "nothing", Cisco needs to upgrade him and get its money's worth.
Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Informative
Point out that Republicans based their government monopoly on Jack Abramoff's corruption ring, and their TrollMods try to shut you down like an Indian Affairs server.
A Labrador retriever, that is. They all look more or less exactly the same, and have exactly the same friendly personality.
Or just brave the wilds of adopting a new random dog. There's already way too many of them for anyone's good, without cloning up more in the world.
These cloning fees should include a $1000 donation to a programme that neuters 20 other dogs. If we're going to clone biodiversity out of the gene pool, we might as well get aggressive. After all, it's a dog eat dog world.
The Interior Dept's servers were ordered disconnected from the Internet after several years in which the Department's computers were repeatedly broken into, the Department never even seriously attempted to secure those servers, lots of important data was compromised, especially data in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Interior Department was exposing Indian Affairs to huge risks, because Indian Affairs is an extremely low priority for the US government, as it always has been.
And now this judge has admitted that he's not qualified to judge security, so therefore he's qualified to order insecure servers back onto the Internet. Because obviously the Bush administration doesn't care about Indians. Especially not since Jack Abramoff, who based much of his corrupt Republican lobbying empire on ripping off Indian tribes, is rotting in jail instead of keeping that Republican machine working.
This judge should have to learn about IT security by having all his personal and professional data stored on these Interior Department servers.
I agree. I didn't say it doesn't have value. But there are also other measures of value, especially to me, than whether a lot of other people use a site that I wouldn't.
Meanwhile, your
I'm not going to ask you anything about your basis of value, because you don't have a comprehensible one.
You might "realize" that, but all I did was suggest a way to avoid the liability problems while getting the moderation that some people prefer. I didn't say 2channel was badly designed, I just proposed an alternate method that would do something it didn't.
You do realize what "hacking" is, don't you?
You're welcome. In return, would you care to explain how the "energy per nuclide curve" works?
Heavier elements (like uranium) are actually created in the supernova event itself:
So this observation is actually recording the actual origin of all the elements heavier than iron. All the jewelry and aerospace materials you've ever seen, all the copper you use in wiring and plumbing, all elements with atomic numbers from 27 (cobalt) through 94 (plutonium) were made in crucibles like the one we just took home movies of.
I didn't miss the point. Just because a site is popular doesn't mean it's good. I wouldn't want to use that site. The measure of a site's success or value, especially to its users, is not merely how much money it makes in a year.
What I proposed might be used to take all the 2channel content and present it with useful moderation, but without the liability that its unmoderated version also avoids.