Does this mean that South Koreans don't have the benefit of GPS navigators?
Not from what I saw. Uber drivers in Seoul certainly use them. My phone (with Google Maps) also worked just fine... way too accurate and smooth to have been using network location, and it worked well outside the city which means it couldn't rely on Wifi location.
Your phone did NOT use GPS location. Instead it used CELL TOWER location.
That's what I meant by "network location". And, yes, it is much less precise and bounces around a lot... which my location in SK did *not* do. I pointed out those characteristics of network/cell tower location to make clear that that's NOT what my phone was doing.
Certain areas, such as the entire country of South Korea, are legally forbidden from using GPS style location determination.
I was in South Korea last month, and played Ingress, used Google Maps, and used Uber, all over Seoul and various areas outside of it (including on a trip up to the DMZ). My phone was definitely using GPS location. Network location is much less precise and your location bounces around a lot. Wifi-based location is quite precise, but only in areas where there are a lot of APs -- which is certainly the case in Seoul, but definitely not the case in outside of it.
So, your statement seems reasonable, but is inconsistent with my firsthand experience.
Nope, the real difference is in the ability and willingness to navigate the military procurement process.
I thought about that, thinking maybe the only Android OEMs who were willing to do that were obscure ones making crappy devices, but then I remembered that Samsung has actually gone to the effort of getting at least one of their devices certified for classified data. If they're doing that, they can certainly navigate the procurement process. And the Samsung flagships are very good devices, clearly competitive with the iPhone.
The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance.
I certainly agree with that. However, I can't really see that it has anything to do with the story. Requests for data about 80K users out of, what, 2B? That's 0.004%, which is a very myopic panopticon. The US rate is a bit higher, 27K users out of, say, 150M (I'm just assuming that half of the US population has a Google account of some sort) is 0.02%, but that actually doesn't seem too excessive for supporting normal civil and criminal legal processes in a world where most people have significant electronic data in the cloud.
I'm not saying there isn't some crazy excessive surveillance going on, in fact I think there is. But the Google-reported numbers don't support it, so if the surveillance state is spying on us through our Google accounts, they're doing it without Google's knowledge.
The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
First, these requests aren't warrantless. The numbers Google reports are a combination of various types of legal process requests, including warrants, subpoenas, court orders, national security letters, wiretaps, pen registers, trap and trace orders and various kinds of requests from foreign countries (often through the US legal system, but sometimes directly). Google generally doesn't provide any information without legal process, though it makes exceptions for certain kinds of emergency requests from law enforcement (see https://www.google.com/transpa...).
Second, given there are a lot of different kinds of requests, they're for a lot of different things. Subpoenas are usually used to gather information to support a lawsuit. Court orders and warrants are usually used in criminal investigations. National security letters are used for terrorism and similar investigations. Wiretaps, pen registers and trap and trace orders are used in criminal and terrorism investigations.
Though we know that the government is doing a lot of spying that many of us (including me) find highly objectionable, it's not the case that all, or probably more than a tiny fraction, of the requests Google receives fall into that category. It's no surprise that the numbers are rising, either. As more of our communications and data storage moves online, more of what attorneys working on civil suits and criminal investigators looking for evidence needed to prosecute a crime is going to be found online. As one of the biggest repositories of that sort of data, Google is an obvious target to be served with lots of legal process papers.
And unfortunately it's really only useful if you factor in the state+local, too, and that data is probably not available. The feds have pushed a lot of responsibility downward, and many local and state taxes have risen rather astronomically.
That's a large claim. If it's true you ought to be able to provide some data to support it, even if only in specific jurisdictions.
I work on Android, so my primary device has been running Android N since December, and I run internal development builds which are more like nightly tip-of-tree builds than the much more heavily-tested previews.
Is running such bleeding edge software on my primary device sometimes painful? Sometimes. All in all it's not really that bad, though. I do keep a backup device around that has Marshmallow on it, just in case, but I've never had to use it.
I wouldn't worry about running one of the preview releases at all, myself. YMMV, of course:)
Top marginal rates really aren't that informative, because relatively few pay them... and when they were really high almost no one paid them.
For a better comparison, look at the middle quintile (or median, but middle quintile works). Unfortunately the source I found only has data from 1979-2011:
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1980: 18.9%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1985: 18.0%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1990: 17.7%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1995: 17.1%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2000: 16.5%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2005: 13.8%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2010: 11.5%
Of course, that's federal only. I should say that the trend there is the opposite of what I thought it was, since my tax rates have been steadily increasing over that time range, but that's clearly because my income has been steadily increasing.
So I'd have to say the claim that we're being taxed twice as much is blatantly false, at least in terms of federal taxes. And I don't think state taxes have gone up much, but I'll let someone else find that data.
Ah, good, I think it's about time to have a meaningless pissing contest. My work setup is three Dell UP2715K monitors in portrait orientation, giving a total screen resolution of 8640x5120, or 44 megapixels.
If anyone can beat that, I will take you on in a stage-2 match of who has the lowest Slashdot user id.
No, no, no. Screen resolution is stage 2. Stage 1 is computing horsepower. My desktop has 40 cores@2.8 Ghz. Total bogomips: 223515.2. If you can beat that, you've got me on the screen resolution. I have three monitors, but they're low res (e.g. 2560x1600). And the UID... I lurked for a long time before getting an account.
If done properly, one frame per screen. The landscape one split vertically, and the portraits split horizontally. Emacs handles multiple monitors better than any editor I've found, by far; all the same Emacs, just spread across all the screens.
I put one frame with four windows on my 30" screen. The 24" portrait mode screens are mostly for browsers (portrait mode works great for browsers, since web pages are typically narrow and long). Given that all of my e-mail, calendaring, code reviews, bug tracking, music playing and lots, lots, more is all in browser tabs, I need lots of browser space.
Main system: Dual-CPU Xeon E5-2680v2 (10 cores per CPU, so 20 cores total, 40 w/hyperthreading), 128 GiB RAM, 1 TB SSD, 1 TB spinning disk, Quadro K2000 GPU, three monitors (2 24", in portrait mode, 1 30" in landscape), running Ubuntu 14.04 (upgrading to 16.04 soon). Desktop is the AwesomeWM tiling window manager w/10 virtual screens on each monitor.
Why so much horsepower? I work on the Android OS and a clean build takes an hour even on this beast of a machine and with make -j60. Why three monitors? Because I haven't gotten around to adding more. Duh.
And, yes, I'm posting this to brag, and making Tim the Toolman grunts while doing it.:P
Oh, and EMACS is the One True Editor. Nothing else compares.
Except that the "religious right" was beginning to accept the idea of domestic partnership when the activists said that was not good enough.
They said that because it still placed them in a different, and by implication lesser, class. Eliminating government-sanctioned marriage for heterosexuals would have removed that distinction.
They did not want to allow churches the option to define marriage.
What they wanted churches to do or not do wouldn't have mattered at all. Removing government sanction for heterosexual marriage would have left gay marriage activists without any logical basis to demand that government should sanction homosexual marriage. And there's clearly NO way government could intervene to prevent churches from defining marriage however they like for their own religious purposes. Any attempt to do so would have been a blatant violation of the first amendment protections on freedom of religion.
Except of course that before "marriage equality" was imposed by the courts many states were passing domestic partnership laws. Domestic partnership laws solved all of those issues.
Water under the bridge now, but I always thought this was the right solution... as long as it was taken one step further: Establish standard legal structures for domestic partnerships that mirror existing legal structures for marriage but can be used by any pair (or more, for that matter) of competent adults, then classify all existing marriages as domestic partnerships and stop issuing marriage licenses. Just have civil unions/domestic partnerships for everyone.
That approach would have left "marriage" as a purely symbolic and religious act, and left it up to churches to decide how they wanted to define it. Undoubtedly, some churches would refuse to solemnize gay marriage while others would be fine with it... indeed some churches might be established precisely in order to provide that religious service for the LGBT community. No need to make anyone feel like their religious freedom is being trampled, and no need to treat any segment of society differently.
This was my position on the issue from the early 90s when it first started to get some traction. I knew from the beginning that there was no way the restriction on homosexual marriage could be justified under the 14th amendment, and that if the religious right wanted to preserve the institution of marriage the way they saw it they needed to get government out of it, but instead they tried to fight it head on, and lost.
I wasn't disagreeing with you, just pointing out that even without SpaceX, et al, the approach to space has changed dramatically, much more than it might appear to someone who doesn't look closely and just says "Oh, well, it's still NASA contracting to private companies".
I don't think that argument works for companies that are multinationals.
It's especially important for multinationals, because they have lots of options to avoid paying taxes. This gives them an artificial advantage over non-transnational corporations who don't have the same escape hatches. If you want to tax them where they build stuff, tax incomes. If you want to tax them where there capital comes from, tax gains. If you want to tax them where they sell stuff, tax sales.
Certainly they want as much profit as they can get, but that's different from saying that if they don't get as much as they want they'll quit doing business.
In a competitive market, they get only as much profit as that expected rate of return, in the long run. Why? Because if they make larger profits, their competitors can undersell them. If they make smaller profits, they can't attract capital and their competitors who can squeeze them out.
Now you may be saying that investors will prefer to invest where they get the maximum return, and that's generally true, but that's a very different statement than a statement about what a company will do, or even what a particular investor will do.
In isolated cases, for a short period of time, sure. Over the entire economy, and in the long run, no.
The important thing is that on a fixed price, the launch provider gets more profit if they reduce launch costs and schedules. On cost-plus, the provider is incentivized to have cost overruns and schedule slips.
I have several good friends who work for ATK, maker of the shuttle boosters among lots of other aerospace components. They say the old and new approaches are radically different... so different that ATK is having a hell of a time making the transition. The old organizational structure was enormous, with tremendous amounts of fat and redundancy at every level, because cost management was not a concern, at all. At best they basically ignored costs, at worst they actively worked to increase costs, because that boosted profits. Learning how to operate like a real business has required a complete restructuring of their world, including massive layoffs not just to cut costs but to remove all of the people with decades of "cost plus" methodology ingrained into their thought processes.
Old space and new space are both largely private, but they're dramatically different, even aside from Musk's ambitions.
The Tax is the amount society pays it's people in Government services and infrastructure.
The less corporations pay in tax deprives the society that supports it.
Sigh.
Corporations. Don't. Pay. Taxes.
Look, this is basic economics. Capital seeks a certain rate of return in given economic conditions and a given economic context. When you raise taxes on corporations, you don't change that sought rate of return, which means that corporate governance adapts to shift the cost of the taxes elsewhere, so they don't come out of profits and returns meet expectations. Corporations that fail to do this lose, and their capital moves to others that do it well.
This means that any taxes you nominally assess to corporations actually land on suppliers, employees or customers. In many cases suppliers and customers are other corporations subject to the same demands of capital, so they just shuffle the costs off further. At the end, it always lands on employees and customers. In the short term profits may take a hit, which drops the cost onto investors, but that's a temporary situation.
The bottom line, then, is that corporate taxes are all ultimately paid by individuals. Actually, this should be utterly obvious even without looking at the detailed mechanisms: corporations aren't real, they're just a mechanism for pooling individual wealth to accomplish larger goals than any individual could... but the products are all ultimately consumed by people, the owners are all ultimately people, and so the taxes all ultimately land on individuals -- voters.
That means that corporate taxation is just a way to impose hidden taxes on voters. Taxes that they pay but don't know they pay, and taxes that are allocated fairly randomly, and likely rather regressively. Corporate taxes are a bad idea and we should abolish them, instead raising capital gains taxes and the top marginal income tax rates.
He will not, however, have the means to start a war without provocation
As commander in chief? Yes, he would. I'm not saying he'd actually do it, but he'd certainly be in a position to... and it's not impossible that he would do it.
nor will he actually be able to round up people already residing in the US of a certain race or religious creed
He could probably get away with a fair amount of it in the short term, though the courts would step in pretty quickly (although that doesn't necessarily mean that much, remember Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears). But he could do a tremendous amount to inflame all sorts of deep resentments and spark a great deal of violence... and his potential reaction to that violence is terrifying to think about. Yeah, yeah, posse comitatus, but it seems entirely possible that he'd be willing to ignore the law, and I'm not really certain that anyone would be in a position to tell him no, in the short term.
That would take more than the powers granted to the office of the presidency
You vastly underestimate the powers actually possessed by the president, particularly after the massive expansion those powers have seen over the last four presidential terms.
I guess it's far more satisfying -- and far less convincing -- to paint him as an evil tyrant.
"Evil tyrant" is giving him too much credit. I'd go with "dangerously egotistical and short-sighted buffoon", myself.
What Trump says and what will actually happen are obviously two different things.
"What he says he'll do is so insane he can't actually do it", is a frighteningly bad argument for supporting a candidate for the most powerful office in the world.
They're both clearly unfit for the job, but Trump entertains me while Clinton makes my blood run cold for multiple reasons.
Clinton will be another four years of the status quo, basically, but Trump's brand of insanity could well start WWIII.
If both his blog and his e-mail have stopped working, it sounds to me like his entire account has been shut down. AFAIK, that's only done in cases of pretty egregious abuse... kiddie porn and the like. It's possible he didn't do the abuse, though, so he should contact Google to go through the account recovery process. This seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that South Koreans don't have the benefit of GPS navigators?
Not from what I saw. Uber drivers in Seoul certainly use them. My phone (with Google Maps) also worked just fine... way too accurate and smooth to have been using network location, and it worked well outside the city which means it couldn't rely on Wifi location.
Your phone did NOT use GPS location. Instead it used CELL TOWER location.
That's what I meant by "network location". And, yes, it is much less precise and bounces around a lot... which my location in SK did *not* do. I pointed out those characteristics of network/cell tower location to make clear that that's NOT what my phone was doing.
Certain areas, such as the entire country of South Korea, are legally forbidden from using GPS style location determination.
I was in South Korea last month, and played Ingress, used Google Maps, and used Uber, all over Seoul and various areas outside of it (including on a trip up to the DMZ). My phone was definitely using GPS location. Network location is much less precise and your location bounces around a lot. Wifi-based location is quite precise, but only in areas where there are a lot of APs -- which is certainly the case in Seoul, but definitely not the case in outside of it.
So, your statement seems reasonable, but is inconsistent with my firsthand experience.
The real difference is in the software.
Nope, the real difference is in the ability and willingness to navigate the military procurement process.
I thought about that, thinking maybe the only Android OEMs who were willing to do that were obscure ones making crappy devices, but then I remembered that Samsung has actually gone to the effort of getting at least one of their devices certified for classified data. If they're doing that, they can certainly navigate the procurement process. And the Samsung flagships are very good devices, clearly competitive with the iPhone.
The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance.
I certainly agree with that. However, I can't really see that it has anything to do with the story. Requests for data about 80K users out of, what, 2B? That's 0.004%, which is a very myopic panopticon. The US rate is a bit higher, 27K users out of, say, 150M (I'm just assuming that half of the US population has a Google account of some sort) is 0.02%, but that actually doesn't seem too excessive for supporting normal civil and criminal legal processes in a world where most people have significant electronic data in the cloud.
I'm not saying there isn't some crazy excessive surveillance going on, in fact I think there is. But the Google-reported numbers don't support it, so if the surveillance state is spying on us through our Google accounts, they're doing it without Google's knowledge.
The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
First, these requests aren't warrantless. The numbers Google reports are a combination of various types of legal process requests, including warrants, subpoenas, court orders, national security letters, wiretaps, pen registers, trap and trace orders and various kinds of requests from foreign countries (often through the US legal system, but sometimes directly). Google generally doesn't provide any information without legal process, though it makes exceptions for certain kinds of emergency requests from law enforcement (see https://www.google.com/transpa...).
Second, given there are a lot of different kinds of requests, they're for a lot of different things. Subpoenas are usually used to gather information to support a lawsuit. Court orders and warrants are usually used in criminal investigations. National security letters are used for terrorism and similar investigations. Wiretaps, pen registers and trap and trace orders are used in criminal and terrorism investigations.
Though we know that the government is doing a lot of spying that many of us (including me) find highly objectionable, it's not the case that all, or probably more than a tiny fraction, of the requests Google receives fall into that category. It's no surprise that the numbers are rising, either. As more of our communications and data storage moves online, more of what attorneys working on civil suits and criminal investigators looking for evidence needed to prosecute a crime is going to be found online. As one of the biggest repositories of that sort of data, Google is an obvious target to be served with lots of legal process papers.
And unfortunately it's really only useful if you factor in the state+local, too, and that data is probably not available. The feds have pushed a lot of responsibility downward, and many local and state taxes have risen rather astronomically.
That's a large claim. If it's true you ought to be able to provide some data to support it, even if only in specific jurisdictions.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I work on Android, so my primary device has been running Android N since December, and I run internal development builds which are more like nightly tip-of-tree builds than the much more heavily-tested previews.
Is running such bleeding edge software on my primary device sometimes painful? Sometimes. All in all it's not really that bad, though. I do keep a backup device around that has Marshmallow on it, just in case, but I've never had to use it.
I wouldn't worry about running one of the preview releases at all, myself. YMMV, of course :)
Top Marginal Income Tax Rate...
Top marginal rates really aren't that informative, because relatively few pay them... and when they were really high almost no one paid them.
For a better comparison, look at the middle quintile (or median, but middle quintile works). Unfortunately the source I found only has data from 1979-2011:
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1980: 18.9%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1985: 18.0%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1990: 17.7%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 1995: 17.1%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2000: 16.5%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2005: 13.8%
Middle quintile total average federal tax rate, 2010: 11.5%
Of course, that's federal only. I should say that the trend there is the opposite of what I thought it was, since my tax rates have been steadily increasing over that time range, but that's clearly because my income has been steadily increasing.
The trend of all quintiles is pretty steadily downward. Here's a chart I threw together: https://docs.google.com/spread...
So I'd have to say the claim that we're being taxed twice as much is blatantly false, at least in terms of federal taxes. And I don't think state taxes have gone up much, but I'll let someone else find that data.
Ah, good, I think it's about time to have a meaningless pissing contest. My work setup is three Dell UP2715K monitors in portrait orientation, giving a total screen resolution of 8640x5120, or 44 megapixels. If anyone can beat that, I will take you on in a stage-2 match of who has the lowest Slashdot user id.
No, no, no. Screen resolution is stage 2. Stage 1 is computing horsepower. My desktop has 40 cores@2.8 Ghz. Total bogomips: 223515.2. If you can beat that, you've got me on the screen resolution. I have three monitors, but they're low res (e.g. 2560x1600). And the UID... I lurked for a long time before getting an account.
If done properly, one frame per screen. The landscape one split vertically, and the portraits split horizontally. Emacs handles multiple monitors better than any editor I've found, by far; all the same Emacs, just spread across all the screens.
I put one frame with four windows on my 30" screen. The 24" portrait mode screens are mostly for browsers (portrait mode works great for browsers, since web pages are typically narrow and long). Given that all of my e-mail, calendaring, code reviews, bug tracking, music playing and lots, lots, more is all in browser tabs, I need lots of browser space.
Main system: Dual-CPU Xeon E5-2680v2 (10 cores per CPU, so 20 cores total, 40 w/hyperthreading), 128 GiB RAM, 1 TB SSD, 1 TB spinning disk, Quadro K2000 GPU, three monitors (2 24", in portrait mode, 1 30" in landscape), running Ubuntu 14.04 (upgrading to 16.04 soon). Desktop is the AwesomeWM tiling window manager w/10 virtual screens on each monitor.
Why so much horsepower? I work on the Android OS and a clean build takes an hour even on this beast of a machine and with make -j60. Why three monitors? Because I haven't gotten around to adding more. Duh.
And, yes, I'm posting this to brag, and making Tim the Toolman grunts while doing it. :P
Oh, and EMACS is the One True Editor. Nothing else compares.
Except that the "religious right" was beginning to accept the idea of domestic partnership when the activists said that was not good enough.
They said that because it still placed them in a different, and by implication lesser, class. Eliminating government-sanctioned marriage for heterosexuals would have removed that distinction.
They did not want to allow churches the option to define marriage.
What they wanted churches to do or not do wouldn't have mattered at all. Removing government sanction for heterosexual marriage would have left gay marriage activists without any logical basis to demand that government should sanction homosexual marriage. And there's clearly NO way government could intervene to prevent churches from defining marriage however they like for their own religious purposes. Any attempt to do so would have been a blatant violation of the first amendment protections on freedom of religion.
Except of course that before "marriage equality" was imposed by the courts many states were passing domestic partnership laws. Domestic partnership laws solved all of those issues.
Water under the bridge now, but I always thought this was the right solution... as long as it was taken one step further: Establish standard legal structures for domestic partnerships that mirror existing legal structures for marriage but can be used by any pair (or more, for that matter) of competent adults, then classify all existing marriages as domestic partnerships and stop issuing marriage licenses. Just have civil unions/domestic partnerships for everyone.
That approach would have left "marriage" as a purely symbolic and religious act, and left it up to churches to decide how they wanted to define it. Undoubtedly, some churches would refuse to solemnize gay marriage while others would be fine with it... indeed some churches might be established precisely in order to provide that religious service for the LGBT community. No need to make anyone feel like their religious freedom is being trampled, and no need to treat any segment of society differently.
This was my position on the issue from the early 90s when it first started to get some traction. I knew from the beginning that there was no way the restriction on homosexual marriage could be justified under the 14th amendment, and that if the religious right wanted to preserve the institution of marriage the way they saw it they needed to get government out of it, but instead they tried to fight it head on, and lost.
This is a fairly strong statement to make about the universe. First of all, (-1,1) has essentially all the properties of (-inf, inf).
Only if distances can be infinitely subdivided. Which the Planck length strongly suggests isn't true.
You're not an accountant or economist by any stretch of the imagination.
The cost of doing business is a tax write off.
re-run that through your statement above and see how well that fits.
That makes absolutely no difference to any of what I wrote. Perhaps you should re-read it.
I wasn't disagreeing with you, just pointing out that even without SpaceX, et al, the approach to space has changed dramatically, much more than it might appear to someone who doesn't look closely and just says "Oh, well, it's still NASA contracting to private companies".
I don't think that argument works for companies that are multinationals.
It's especially important for multinationals, because they have lots of options to avoid paying taxes. This gives them an artificial advantage over non-transnational corporations who don't have the same escape hatches. If you want to tax them where they build stuff, tax incomes. If you want to tax them where there capital comes from, tax gains. If you want to tax them where they sell stuff, tax sales.
Certainly they want as much profit as they can get, but that's different from saying that if they don't get as much as they want they'll quit doing business.
In a competitive market, they get only as much profit as that expected rate of return, in the long run. Why? Because if they make larger profits, their competitors can undersell them. If they make smaller profits, they can't attract capital and their competitors who can squeeze them out.
Now you may be saying that investors will prefer to invest where they get the maximum return, and that's generally true, but that's a very different statement than a statement about what a company will do, or even what a particular investor will do.
In isolated cases, for a short period of time, sure. Over the entire economy, and in the long run, no.
And then something like this happens that shatters our illusions, and tells us that British people can be just as dumb as anyone else.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The important thing is that on a fixed price, the launch provider gets more profit if they reduce launch costs and schedules. On cost-plus, the provider is incentivized to have cost overruns and schedule slips.
I have several good friends who work for ATK, maker of the shuttle boosters among lots of other aerospace components. They say the old and new approaches are radically different... so different that ATK is having a hell of a time making the transition. The old organizational structure was enormous, with tremendous amounts of fat and redundancy at every level, because cost management was not a concern, at all. At best they basically ignored costs, at worst they actively worked to increase costs, because that boosted profits. Learning how to operate like a real business has required a complete restructuring of their world, including massive layoffs not just to cut costs but to remove all of the people with decades of "cost plus" methodology ingrained into their thought processes.
Old space and new space are both largely private, but they're dramatically different, even aside from Musk's ambitions.
The Tax is the amount society pays it's people in Government services and infrastructure.
The less corporations pay in tax deprives the society that supports it.
Sigh.
Corporations. Don't. Pay. Taxes.
Look, this is basic economics. Capital seeks a certain rate of return in given economic conditions and a given economic context. When you raise taxes on corporations, you don't change that sought rate of return, which means that corporate governance adapts to shift the cost of the taxes elsewhere, so they don't come out of profits and returns meet expectations. Corporations that fail to do this lose, and their capital moves to others that do it well.
This means that any taxes you nominally assess to corporations actually land on suppliers, employees or customers. In many cases suppliers and customers are other corporations subject to the same demands of capital, so they just shuffle the costs off further. At the end, it always lands on employees and customers. In the short term profits may take a hit, which drops the cost onto investors, but that's a temporary situation.
The bottom line, then, is that corporate taxes are all ultimately paid by individuals. Actually, this should be utterly obvious even without looking at the detailed mechanisms: corporations aren't real, they're just a mechanism for pooling individual wealth to accomplish larger goals than any individual could... but the products are all ultimately consumed by people, the owners are all ultimately people, and so the taxes all ultimately land on individuals -- voters.
That means that corporate taxation is just a way to impose hidden taxes on voters. Taxes that they pay but don't know they pay, and taxes that are allocated fairly randomly, and likely rather regressively. Corporate taxes are a bad idea and we should abolish them, instead raising capital gains taxes and the top marginal income tax rates.
He will not, however, have the means to start a war without provocation
As commander in chief? Yes, he would. I'm not saying he'd actually do it, but he'd certainly be in a position to... and it's not impossible that he would do it.
nor will he actually be able to round up people already residing in the US of a certain race or religious creed
He could probably get away with a fair amount of it in the short term, though the courts would step in pretty quickly (although that doesn't necessarily mean that much, remember Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears). But he could do a tremendous amount to inflame all sorts of deep resentments and spark a great deal of violence... and his potential reaction to that violence is terrifying to think about. Yeah, yeah, posse comitatus, but it seems entirely possible that he'd be willing to ignore the law, and I'm not really certain that anyone would be in a position to tell him no, in the short term.
That would take more than the powers granted to the office of the presidency
You vastly underestimate the powers actually possessed by the president, particularly after the massive expansion those powers have seen over the last four presidential terms.
I guess it's far more satisfying -- and far less convincing -- to paint him as an evil tyrant.
"Evil tyrant" is giving him too much credit. I'd go with "dangerously egotistical and short-sighted buffoon", myself.
What Trump says and what will actually happen are obviously two different things.
"What he says he'll do is so insane he can't actually do it", is a frighteningly bad argument for supporting a candidate for the most powerful office in the world.
They're both clearly unfit for the job, but Trump entertains me while Clinton makes my blood run cold for multiple reasons.
Clinton will be another four years of the status quo, basically, but Trump's brand of insanity could well start WWIII.
If both his blog and his e-mail have stopped working, it sounds to me like his entire account has been shut down. AFAIK, that's only done in cases of pretty egregious abuse... kiddie porn and the like. It's possible he didn't do the abuse, though, so he should contact Google to go through the account recovery process. This seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".