My mom is in IT at John Deere and just this year she's having to learn how to support Macs now. As I understand it, it's only being used by some of the employees and not any of the servers. Deere is a pretty big international corporation, and they're taking Macs more seriously.
The private jets are using the public air traffic control towers. All the info that was made public was that Jet 843x or whatever flew from San Francisco to Tahiti. Then if you know that this jet belongs to a certain individual then you can assume who it was.
Perhaps it isn't technically regressive, but it's not fair either. As SleazyRidr pointed out, if the guy making 20k has to spend 16 or 17k just to cover the basics then he doesn't have 5k left to be taxed. Would you lower the flat tax rate for everyone so that he could afford it? Now the rich are paying even less in taxes and have even more disposable income. Your system would further lead to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Why do so many people call the wealthy "hard-working", "productive", or "successful"? I mean seriously. I can sit on my bum all day and make it look like I'm writing fancy business documents all day too, but I choose to be a programmer because that's what I enjoy even if I get paid less and therefore I'm "less successful".
It sounds like a problem in education then. The rich people who make huge salaries are taking that money out of their business instead of investing it in the business. The argument you present might work if we're talking about corporate taxes, but for personal income taxes we need to get the message out that taking out a gigantic salary isn't helping the business prosper.
You really do get the better end of the stick. Between state and federal tax paying 30% income tax isn't uncommon in the US. And as you said, we still have to pay for all those benefits that Europeans get for free. All we get is a bloated war machine and a crummy public education system and a crummy infrastructure. If my calculations are accurate, my parents would have paid something like 20% in federal tax and 6% state tax which comes out to 26% total. And with the remaining 74% they have to buy healthcare, put me through college, etc.
Except it isn't a fair tax. Those with lower incomes spend more of their income as a percentage than those who make more. If I'm spending 30% of my income on gas and groceries, then my effective tax rate is higher than someone who buys the same amount of groceries and gas but makes 2x more money than me.
So now not only is a large portion of my income gone, I get more of what is left taken by taxes. Rich people don't spend the same proportion of their income as poor people.
Flat taxes are purely regressive. 10% of the income of a janitor is much more significant than 10% of the income of a millionaire or billionaire. There needs to be lower tax rates for the poor and higher rates for the wealthy. I'm not going to lose sleep over Bill Gates or Warren Buffet only having $1 billion of disposable income per year as opposed to $5 billion.
I think the tax code can be simplified but going to a flat tax purely for simplification is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
Maybe somebody knows something about computer science that I don't, but you need to have a good idea of the results you expect from an algorithm before you can implement it. You can't just hand a computer a tax code and expect it to output something that fills your vague requirements. A computer is simply a machine that can calculate (or compute) instructions fast. It does not have any more intelligence or insight than the person who programmed it. If there is someone out there smart enough to simplify the tax code, then they can do it by hand. Doing it by hand would probably be more efficient because any program that does it would probably boil down to a series of sed statements. And all the people in the general population who think computers are capable of AI need to learn what a computer is capable of too. If you're building something that is AI then it should be called a brain, not a computer.
I tried this earlier and I noticed the hello.c file in the home dir. I tried compiling it with gcc and plain old cc, but it didn't have either command. Now that I've read your post I notice that tcc works. Shouldn't cc be a symlink to a default compiler though?
The Dutch language is indeed similar to German, but it's also similar to English. To me it looks like a cross between the two. I'm not a linguist however.
Quake Live isn't WebGL. Even if it was, Quake Live wouldn't be affected. This security concern is only about a user visiting a web page that runs a malicious WebGL program, which Quake Live is not.
I don't know about reducing the half life, but there are reactors out there that you put the waste into and can burn up and get energy from, so you have less waste when it's done.
There are reactor designs that currently exist that are more resilient to meltdowns. Most notably, thorium molten salt reactors, but there are only a handful of experimental reactors in existence. There is also the CANDU reactor primarily used and designed in Canada which is a uranium heavy water reactor.
I will agree with you that the ancient nuclear technology most reactors use today is not that safe, but more modern reactors have solved that issue. The only problem has been rolling out thorium and CANDU reactors.
And WRT your comment on terrorism, there's a video on Youtube I've seen that debunks the whole "flying a plane into a reactor" myth. Nuclear plants have concrete walls that are like 10 feet thick and the plane collapses on it self and does nothing to the wall.
There's no need to further tax the middle class though when the rich and wealthy have plenty of money we can tax. Same with the oil companies like Exxon who pays $0 to the US but pays taxes in every other country they operate in.
Just tax the rich because I'm not rich and probably never will be, so yeah screw them. Maybe the government can give me some of that money so I can do things like go to the doctor. I know, radical right?
Alternatively, a "smart" person could be wiped out by a drought or food shortage through no fault of their own and their "smart" genes die out. Natural Selection isn't as clear cut as you make it out to be. With today's technology, if there's a drought in one area we can transport food from another area so the genetically superior people in your opinion don't starve to death. In a lot of cases, it's not "survival of the fittest", it's "survival of the luckiest".
This is absolutely correct. 9/11 would have never happened it if weren't for America's crummy foreign policy. It's like we're a 13 year old poking a fat kid and making fun of him, and then we get upset when he finally punches us in the face. Most of the problems in the Middle East can be traced back to US and UK involvement since they drew the political boundaries. Take Iraq for instance, there are 3 ethnic groups there that all hate each other. It wasn't the people of Iraq who created the borders, it was the western nations. And then there's the obvious one of kicking the Palestinians out of Israel.
Gee, I can't imagine why some people in the Middle East don't not like us.
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Alpha is the most harmful? I thought that was Gamma. Alpha particles can't even penetrate your skin but gamma will go straight through you.
My mom is in IT at John Deere and just this year she's having to learn how to support Macs now. As I understand it, it's only being used by some of the employees and not any of the servers. Deere is a pretty big international corporation, and they're taking Macs more seriously.
The private jets are using the public air traffic control towers. All the info that was made public was that Jet 843x or whatever flew from San Francisco to Tahiti. Then if you know that this jet belongs to a certain individual then you can assume who it was.
Quoting Linus Torvalds:
"So every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever."
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/08/13744-supplied.html
Perhaps it isn't technically regressive, but it's not fair either. As SleazyRidr pointed out, if the guy making 20k has to spend 16 or 17k just to cover the basics then he doesn't have 5k left to be taxed. Would you lower the flat tax rate for everyone so that he could afford it? Now the rich are paying even less in taxes and have even more disposable income. Your system would further lead to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Why do so many people call the wealthy "hard-working", "productive", or "successful"?
I mean seriously. I can sit on my bum all day and make it look like I'm writing fancy business documents all day too, but I choose to be a programmer because that's what I enjoy even if I get paid less and therefore I'm "less successful".
It sounds like a problem in education then. The rich people who make huge salaries are taking that money out of their business instead of investing it in the business. The argument you present might work if we're talking about corporate taxes, but for personal income taxes we need to get the message out that taking out a gigantic salary isn't helping the business prosper.
Isn't that what they said about IPv4? 4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody.
You really do get the better end of the stick. Between state and federal tax paying 30% income tax isn't uncommon in the US. And as you said, we still have to pay for all those benefits that Europeans get for free. All we get is a bloated war machine and a crummy public education system and a crummy infrastructure. If my calculations are accurate, my parents would have paid something like 20% in federal tax and 6% state tax which comes out to 26% total. And with the remaining 74% they have to buy healthcare, put me through college, etc.
Except it isn't a fair tax. Those with lower incomes spend more of their income as a percentage than those who make more. If I'm spending 30% of my income on gas and groceries, then my effective tax rate is higher than someone who buys the same amount of groceries and gas but makes 2x more money than me.
So now not only is a large portion of my income gone, I get more of what is left taken by taxes. Rich people don't spend the same proportion of their income as poor people.
Flat taxes are purely regressive. 10% of the income of a janitor is much more significant than 10% of the income of a millionaire or billionaire. There needs to be lower tax rates for the poor and higher rates for the wealthy. I'm not going to lose sleep over Bill Gates or Warren Buffet only having $1 billion of disposable income per year as opposed to $5 billion.
I think the tax code can be simplified but going to a flat tax purely for simplification is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
Maybe somebody knows something about computer science that I don't, but you need to have a good idea of the results you expect from an algorithm before you can implement it. You can't just hand a computer a tax code and expect it to output something that fills your vague requirements. A computer is simply a machine that can calculate (or compute) instructions fast. It does not have any more intelligence or insight than the person who programmed it. If there is someone out there smart enough to simplify the tax code, then they can do it by hand. Doing it by hand would probably be more efficient because any program that does it would probably boil down to a series of sed statements. And all the people in the general population who think computers are capable of AI need to learn what a computer is capable of too. If you're building something that is AI then it should be called a brain, not a computer.
I tried this earlier and I noticed the hello.c file in the home dir. I tried compiling it with gcc and plain old cc, but it didn't have either command. Now that I've read your post I notice that tcc works. Shouldn't cc be a symlink to a default compiler though?
The Dutch language is indeed similar to German, but it's also similar to English. To me it looks like a cross between the two. I'm not a linguist however.
Quake Live isn't WebGL. Even if it was, Quake Live wouldn't be affected. This security concern is only about a user visiting a web page that runs a malicious WebGL program, which Quake Live is not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM
Take it for what you will.
I bet PBS gets more traffic from /. today than from Drudge Report.
Or perhaps not, since nobody will read TFA (which is only a graph).
I don't know about reducing the half life, but there are reactors out there that you put the waste into and can burn up and get energy from, so you have less waste when it's done.
There are reactor designs that currently exist that are more resilient to meltdowns. Most notably, thorium molten salt reactors, but there are only a handful of experimental reactors in existence. There is also the CANDU reactor primarily used and designed in Canada which is a uranium heavy water reactor.
I will agree with you that the ancient nuclear technology most reactors use today is not that safe, but more modern reactors have solved that issue. The only problem has been rolling out thorium and CANDU reactors.
And WRT your comment on terrorism, there's a video on Youtube I've seen that debunks the whole "flying a plane into a reactor" myth. Nuclear plants have concrete walls that are like 10 feet thick and the plane collapses on it self and does nothing to the wall.
Shouldn't you have posted this as AC? Now /. knows who you are.
"Trying to push any particular license as "the ethical choice" just makes me mad. Really."
You dun made Linus mad.
There's no need to further tax the middle class though when the rich and wealthy have plenty of money we can tax. Same with the oil companies like Exxon who pays $0 to the US but pays taxes in every other country they operate in.
Just tax the rich because I'm not rich and probably never will be, so yeah screw them. Maybe the government can give me some of that money so I can do things like go to the doctor. I know, radical right?
Alternatively, a "smart" person could be wiped out by a drought or food shortage through no fault of their own and their "smart" genes die out.
Natural Selection isn't as clear cut as you make it out to be. With today's technology, if there's a drought in one area we can transport food from another area so the genetically superior people in your opinion don't starve to death. In a lot of cases, it's not "survival of the fittest", it's "survival of the luckiest".
I really didn't like how Obama called killing him "bringing him to justice". Am I the only one that knows the distinction between justice and revenge?
This is absolutely correct. 9/11 would have never happened it if weren't for America's crummy foreign policy. It's like we're a 13 year old poking a fat kid and making fun of him, and then we get upset when he finally punches us in the face. Most of the problems in the Middle East can be traced back to US and UK involvement since they drew the political boundaries. Take Iraq for instance, there are 3 ethnic groups there that all hate each other. It wasn't the people of Iraq who created the borders, it was the western nations. And then there's the obvious one of kicking the Palestinians out of Israel.
Gee, I can't imagine why some people in the Middle East don't not like us.