You're confusing "progressive" with "progressive", sort of like when the mainstream press confuses "hacker" with "hacker." They do that because the terms in question are (at least somewhat) technical terms. They have a specific definition that may differ from the mainstream (ie most popular) definition.
"Progressive" in this case refers to a specific tax structure. As your income goes up, your tax rate goes up. A regressive tax is one in which higher incomes are taxed at a lower rate. A flat tax is one which taxes you at the same rate, regardless of income.
So sales and social security taxes are regressive, income tax is progressive, and I know of no truly flat tax.
Does alcohol cost me money? Yes, because someone drinks is, their intellect shuts off, they drive somewhere, and Social Security and Medicare pay for the quadriplegic who survives the wreck. Calculate the total costs, divide by the bottles of booze sold, add a few % for overhead, and tax accordingly.
Does air/water pollution cost me money? Does tobacco cost me money? Does gambling cost me money? Does the war on drugs cost me money? And on down the line...if the public pays for the results of an activity, the activity should be taxed.
Oh yes, it does. It keeps you, in your ignorance of the law, from telling the FBI things that they can later use against you. Maybe port scanning is illegal in the state the server resides in. Maybe that state has an extradition treaty with your state. Maybe your knowledge dazzles the FBI so much that they decide you MUST be the one. Maybe your statements match the profile of the crime. Maybe they harass you while they investigate you. Maybe you get screwed on the basis of shooting off your own mouth and trusting people whose job it is to spend eight hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year dealing with criminals.
It's kind of like tech support. When all you deal with is broken computers, you start to think that all computers are broken. When all you talk to are stupid people, you start to think that people are stupid. When all you deal with is criminals lying to you, you start to think that accusation = guilt...
You miss the point, my friend, and you forget the 25 years of internet history that pre-date the last five. You put a computer on the internet and enable its services because you WANT the entire world to have access to them.
Your analogy is flawed because Western society has had CENTURIES of property law. Even legally clueless people like you and me know that what you are suggesting is stupid. The internet, on the other hand, had a couple of decades of exactly what you described, followed by a corporate revolution. Your analogy would be closer to correct if we assumed that the "you" mentoned throughout the analogy is an aboriginal individual who was raised with no notion of Western-style property rights, and who therefore has a run-in with the law.
America today has more incarcerated citizens per capita that Stalinist Russia did. (Not counting those executed outright by the state.)
This is incredibly bogus. How many people, per capita, were murdered by the state in the USSR (not Russia) under Stalin? How many were not incarcerated but sent into internal exile? Put down your crack pipe and compare those numbers to the US today.
This may have been true once upon a time, and is probably still true for many older scientists, but consider this:
Would you rather gain prestige with the old crowd (who will be dead in 20-30 years) by killing trees, or with the young crowd (who will still be in their prime 20-30 years from now) by making valuable information available for free with frequent updates? Which is the investment in the future and which to the past?
You are sending mail and surfing while on company time and you whine because your employer wants to see how you are using it's resources.
Bad logic.
When you go to the toilet, you are using your employers property, and are possibly doing this on your employer's time, and may even be engaging in obhjectionable practices. Does your employer therefore have the right to install cameras in the toilet and watch your activities there?
I'm no guru, but aren't there lots of things that you can leave out when you compile the kernel?
And they're not necessarily even running a non-"standard" (whatever that would be) kernel. They may be using ONLY the kernel.
But go ahead and be a gadfly. That's the sort of thing that keeps companies honest. It should cost them next to nothing to say "Yes, we're not violating the GPL, and to prove it, here's the process you can go through to produce the GPL binaries on our system - include these options, exclude those, and use this compiler."
This puts the power in the hands of the parent and removes it from everyone else. Unfortunately, most ISPs' terms of service forbid this, meaning that the most effective solution is denied to parents. I would like to see the two candidates OUTLAW the provision that exists in many ISP's agreements (especially DSL and cable ISPs) that prohibit filtering by the parents. (It is a contract violation for me to have multiple computers attached to my cable modem.)
What I'd like to do is put a Linux box between my kids' computers and all the other computers in the house. The box, the cable modem, and the hub would be under lock and key, and only I and my wife would know the root password (not that she'd know what to do with a root password). Granted, an intelligent kid could hack the whole setup, but frankly, if the kid is old enough and smart enough to do that, and wants to hack past my parental controls, my job as a parent is just about finished, whether I like it or not.
Despite the common misconception that electricity flows at the speed of light, it does not.
Hmmm...this depends on how you look at it, I guess. Signals propagate along the wire at the speed of light. Apply voltage to a wire and that voltage will propagate at the speed of wire. HOWEVER, individual electrons do not move at the speed of light; I've read that they can be as slow as 1 inch / second (that's 1 cm / second, for you metric types - bonus points if you can figure out why the conversion factors don' matter).
Back when I first started playing Doom, I would go until four in the morning. I would go lie down, and in that odd state between waking and dreaming, I would see walls, columns, rooms...never any antagonists, just the 3-D textured environment moving around in my head.
I dunno . . . I'm not so keen on the idea that the dominant powers-that-be should make standards, and the rest of the world should then follow.
If there is a dominant vendor, whatever they do becomes a de facto standard. I'm not too keen on it either, but that's reality.
What I am keen on, though, is for that dominant vendor to say "Here's our product. It will become standard. Here's the source code. Copy and reimplement to your heart's content."
It was a good trade. Fuck a few hundred people, make tens of millions, and be forced to pay back a few thousand here and there to the annoying gnats which actually stand up to their chicanery.
Welcome to the modus operandi of corporate America.
What the Dell salesperson you spoke to meant to say was this:
The model you were ordering was part of a line that includes Windows. Dell pays a license fee for EVERY laptop from that model line, whether or not they load Windows on it (thank you, consent decree of 1994, for NOTHING). You would need to purchase a model from a Dell product line that does NOT include Windows.
The salesperson didn't offer to sell you a laptop from a non-Windows product line for one of two reasons:
1. Dell doesn't have any non-Windows laptops
2. Dell does have non-Windows laptops, but ordering one would be too much of a hassle for the salesperson, and processing the order would not be worth his time. This would be the case if, for example, in the time it takes him to sell you one laptop without Windows (filling out paperwork, requesting a non-standard software load, etc), he could sell two laptops WITH Windows to two other customers. Since he's working on a commission basis, he'd rather sell you NO laptop and get on to easier customers than make you happy with Dell.
It's possible that the original MB is no longer available, and they'll have to give me one that may accept more CPUs, have a faster IDE controller, better video, etc. This is rare but certainly could happen with the little "screwdriver shops" that use off the shelf parts.
Having worked tech support for three years for a major OEM (think cow spots), I can tell you that this DOES happen and it's NOT rare.
Part of the reason for the extreme skepticism is that thousands of brilliant people have tried to come up with a solution to this problem. Although I agree with you completely, I find your lack of faith...disturbing. If I strip out all references to NP, your post could just as easily apply to the proof of Fermat's theorem. Your statements imply that the guy who proposes the proof today is less smart than the people who went before and has access to exactly the same knowledge. BZZZT! He may be smarter, and he has more mathematical tools to work with. Or are you implying that mathematics does not
advance?
Empirical evidence (namely, failures to prove the conjecture in the past) is completely irrelevant.
Re: Is this problem NP complete?
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
OK, after reading these two posts, I think I have a better idea of P, NP, and NP-complete. But I have one question...
you just have to show that there is an isomorphism between your problem and another NP complete problem So what was the first NP complete problem?
Funny you should say that...I've a cousin who uses organic methods to grow wheat. He saves money and has higher yields than before he switched and he's using the same amount of land.
If washing removes pesticides (which are the size of molecules), I would think it would remove E.coli (which are huger than molecules). Manure is only one of many organic products which can be used as fertilizer.
The French intensive method of gardening uses less space to grow more produce. It doesn't produce any prizewinning vegetables, though; you get many more vegetables butindividual vegetables may be smaller.
But you're probably right about the empirical evidence. How could large corporations survive if it was found that they were poisoning people? How can they permit such evidence to come to light?
It was hard to tell from the article, but it read like they are taking a tax credit, not merely a deduction from their gross income.
Suppose there's a 10% tax rate. Then on $10,000, they'd pay $1,000. A $1,000 deduction would make making taxable income $9000, and they'd pay $900. A $1,000 tax credit would wipe out their taxes completely. The key question, qhich the article FAILS to address, is whether or not it was a tax credit or a tax deduction. In this case, I'd say deductions are fair; credits are not.
Just yesterday I was explaining to someone that I felt that one of my signal qualities was the ability to listen to coworkers half-truths, guesses, misdirections, and outright lies and glean from them a pretty fair approximation of the truth...that's the benefit I see to/. as well...
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing "progressive" with "progressive", sort of like when the mainstream press confuses "hacker" with "hacker." They do that because the terms in question are (at least somewhat) technical terms. They have a specific definition that may differ from the mainstream (ie most popular) definition.
"Progressive" in this case refers to a specific tax structure. As your income goes up, your tax rate goes up. A regressive tax is one in which higher incomes are taxed at a lower rate. A flat tax is one which taxes you at the same rate, regardless of income.
So sales and social security taxes are regressive, income tax is progressive, and I know of no truly flat tax.
Spillover costs, baby, spillover costs...
It's simple to determine what "we" don't like.
What costs me money?
Does alcohol cost me money? Yes, because someone drinks is, their intellect shuts off, they drive somewhere, and Social Security and Medicare pay for the quadriplegic who survives the wreck. Calculate the total costs, divide by the bottles of booze sold, add a few % for overhead, and tax accordingly.
Does air/water pollution cost me money? Does tobacco cost me money? Does gambling cost me money? Does the war on drugs cost me money? And on down the line...if the public pays for the results of an activity, the activity should be taxed.
And aim for the head...jackbooted thugs wear body armor.
Oh yes, it does. It keeps you, in your ignorance of the law, from telling the FBI things that they can later use against you. Maybe port scanning is illegal in the state the server resides in. Maybe that state has an extradition treaty with your state. Maybe your knowledge dazzles the FBI so much that they decide you MUST be the one. Maybe your statements match the profile of the crime. Maybe they harass you while they investigate you. Maybe you get screwed on the basis of shooting off your own mouth and trusting people whose job it is to spend eight hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year dealing with criminals.
It's kind of like tech support. When all you deal with is broken computers, you start to think that all computers are broken. When all you talk to are stupid people, you start to think that people are stupid. When all you deal with is criminals lying to you, you start to think that accusation = guilt...
You miss the point, my friend, and you forget the 25 years of internet history that pre-date the last five. You put a computer on the internet and enable its services because you WANT the entire world to have access to them.
Your analogy is flawed because Western society has had CENTURIES of property law. Even legally clueless people like you and me know that what you are suggesting is stupid. The internet, on the other hand, had a couple of decades of exactly what you described, followed by a corporate revolution. Your analogy would be closer to correct if we assumed that the "you" mentoned throughout the analogy is an aboriginal individual who was raised with no notion of Western-style property rights, and who therefore has a run-in with the law.
America today has more incarcerated citizens per capita that Stalinist Russia did. (Not counting those executed outright by the state.)
This is incredibly bogus. How many people, per capita, were murdered by the state in the USSR (not Russia) under Stalin? How many were not incarcerated but sent into internal exile? Put down your crack pipe and compare those numbers to the US today.
This may have been true once upon a time, and is probably still true for many older scientists, but consider this:
Would you rather gain prestige with the old crowd (who will be dead in 20-30 years) by killing trees, or with the young crowd (who will still be in their prime 20-30 years from now) by making valuable information available for free with frequent updates? Which is the investment in the future and which to the past?
BZZT! Wrong answer. In the US, at least, spying on people in the toilet is illegal.
You are sending mail and surfing while on company time and you whine because your employer wants to see how you are using it's resources.
Bad logic.
When you go to the toilet, you are using your employers property, and are possibly doing this on your employer's time, and may even be engaging in obhjectionable practices. Does your employer therefore have the right to install cameras in the toilet and watch your activities there?
Enhancing your time in the pub? I thought that's what the booze was for...
I'm no guru, but aren't there lots of things that you can leave out when you compile the kernel?
And they're not necessarily even running a non-"standard" (whatever that would be) kernel. They may be using ONLY the kernel.
But go ahead and be a gadfly. That's the sort of thing that keeps companies honest. It should cost them next to nothing to say "Yes, we're not violating the GPL, and to prove it, here's the process you can go through to produce the GPL binaries on our system - include these options, exclude those, and use this compiler."
...proxy...server...
This puts the power in the hands of the parent and removes it from everyone else. Unfortunately, most ISPs' terms of service forbid this, meaning that the most effective solution is denied to parents. I would like to see the two candidates OUTLAW the provision that exists in many ISP's agreements (especially DSL and cable ISPs) that prohibit filtering by the parents. (It is a contract violation for me to have multiple computers attached to my cable modem.)
What I'd like to do is put a Linux box between my kids' computers and all the other computers in the house. The box, the cable modem, and the hub would be under lock and key, and only I and my wife would know the root password (not that she'd know what to do with a root password). Granted, an intelligent kid could hack the whole setup, but frankly, if the kid is old enough and smart enough to do that, and wants to hack past my parental controls, my job as a parent is just about finished, whether I like it or not.
Despite the common misconception that electricity flows at the speed of light, it does not.
Hmmm...this depends on how you look at it, I guess. Signals propagate along the wire at the speed of light. Apply voltage to a wire and that voltage will propagate at the speed of wire. HOWEVER, individual electrons do not move at the speed of light; I've read that they can be as slow as 1 inch / second (that's 1 cm / second, for you metric types - bonus points if you can figure out why the conversion factors don' matter).
Back when I first started playing Doom, I would go until four in the morning. I would go lie down, and in that odd state between waking and dreaming, I would see walls, columns, rooms...never any antagonists, just the 3-D textured environment moving around in my head.
Actually, since the OEM did the replacing, it is the same computer, at least as far as licensing goes.
I think the direction it will go in is not "installing software on one computer" but "installing software on one mass storage device" (aka hard drive)
I dunno . . . I'm not so keen on the idea that the dominant powers-that-be should make standards, and the rest of the world should then follow.
If there is a dominant vendor, whatever they do becomes a de facto standard. I'm not too keen on it either, but that's reality.
What I am keen on, though, is for that dominant vendor to say "Here's our product. It will become standard. Here's the source code. Copy and reimplement to your heart's content."
It was a good trade. Fuck a few hundred people, make tens of millions, and be forced to pay back a few thousand here and there to the annoying gnats which actually stand up to their chicanery.
Welcome to the modus operandi of corporate America.
What the Dell salesperson you spoke to meant to say was this:
The model you were ordering was part of a line that includes Windows. Dell pays a license fee for EVERY laptop from that model line, whether or not they load Windows on it (thank you, consent decree of 1994, for NOTHING). You would need to purchase a model from a Dell product line that does NOT include Windows.
The salesperson didn't offer to sell you a laptop from a non-Windows product line for one of two reasons:
1. Dell doesn't have any non-Windows laptops
2. Dell does have non-Windows laptops, but ordering one would be too much of a hassle for the salesperson, and processing the order would not be worth his time. This would be the case if, for example, in the time it takes him to sell you one laptop without Windows (filling out paperwork, requesting a non-standard software load, etc), he could sell two laptops WITH Windows to two other customers. Since he's working on a commission basis, he'd rather sell you NO laptop and get on to easier customers than make you happy with Dell.
It's possible that the original MB is no longer available, and they'll have to give me one that may accept more CPUs, have a faster IDE controller, better video, etc. This is rare but certainly could happen with the little "screwdriver shops" that use off the shelf parts.
Having worked tech support for three years for a major OEM (think cow spots), I can tell you that this DOES happen and it's NOT rare.
ROTFLMAO!
Part of the reason for the extreme skepticism is that thousands of brilliant people have tried to come up with a solution to this problem.
Although I agree with you completely, I find your lack of faith...disturbing. If I strip out all references to NP, your post could just as easily apply to the proof of Fermat's theorem. Your statements imply that the guy who proposes the proof today is less smart than the people who went before and has access to exactly the same knowledge. BZZZT! He may be smarter, and he has more mathematical tools to work with. Or are you implying that mathematics does not
advance?
Empirical evidence (namely, failures to prove the conjecture in the past) is completely irrelevant.
OK, after reading these two posts, I think I have a better idea of P, NP, and NP-complete. But I have one question...
you just have to show that there is an isomorphism between your problem and another NP complete problem
So what was the first NP complete problem?
Funny you should say that...I've a cousin who uses organic methods to grow wheat. He saves money and has higher yields than before he switched and he's using the same amount of land.
If washing removes pesticides (which are the size of molecules), I would think it would remove E.coli (which are huger than molecules). Manure is only one of many organic products which can be used as fertilizer.
The French intensive method of gardening uses less space to grow more produce. It doesn't produce any prizewinning vegetables, though; you get many more vegetables butindividual vegetables may be smaller.
But you're probably right about the empirical evidence. How could large corporations survive if it was found that they were poisoning people? How can they permit such evidence to come to light?
It was hard to tell from the article, but it read like they are taking a tax credit, not merely a deduction from their gross income.
Suppose there's a 10% tax rate. Then on $10,000, they'd pay $1,000. A $1,000 deduction would make making taxable income $9000, and they'd pay $900. A $1,000 tax credit would wipe out their taxes completely. The key question, qhich the article FAILS to address, is whether or not it was a tax credit or a tax deduction. In this case, I'd say deductions are fair; credits are not.
Just yesterday I was explaining to someone that I felt that one of my signal qualities was the ability to listen to coworkers half-truths, guesses, misdirections, and outright lies and glean from them a pretty fair approximation of the truth...that's the benefit I see to /. as well...