But you can't become rich only because of your own hard work. You also have to take advantage of the hard work of others, pay them less than the value of their labor so you can skim off a portion of that value for yourself.
I'm shure you know this by your experience in trying to be rich. So, what you say is there is no way a company will pay fair salaries AND be profitable. I don't really know what else to say to you, we don't live on the same universe.
And that person, whether honest or dishonest, gets benefit from the government in proportion to the size of his operations.
As everyone else. Why should A pay, lets say, 20% of their income, and B pay 40%?
Everything relies on public infrastructures that have to be paid for, whether it's a rich dude sitting alone in his mansion on his private estate or a multi-billion dollar technology company
Where did you read otherwise? I could argue that most of those structures aren't really public in many countries, or that you are already paying the structures when you use them (tolls, fuel taxes, environment taxes, utilities, etc). Have you ever seen a cable provider bill by customer income? Of course not - and there are even laws in some countries against it. Everyone pays the same for the same service, why taxation doesn't use the same method? I actually know why - because the top 5% or 10% of "rich people" actually pay >60% of everything "public". The value, of course, varies from country to country, but the result is the same - "the parasites" as you called it are the ones that allow the government to keep the lights on.
Since when is it their work. Reality is, it is always someone else's work, they are just parasites. Their risk, never they just gamble other peoples money. Just plotting, scheming, greed and more greed and yet more greed.
Yes, there is no way someone honest can be rich. Or that someone can become rich because of hard work. Because if you somehow have less, it's never your fault, is it? It's always someone else's. No one forces you to live in capitalism, no one forces you to be a part of what you call "twisted society". But it's funny how you spew your little rant over giant multi-billion technology infrastructure that probably woudn't exist if not for those "parasites" you hate. Hypocrisy much?
The corporation the buys the investment mansion which no one ever wants to rent and tax deducts all running and management costs. The corporation buys the supercars and limos and tax deducts them, perhaps the locate the mansion on a few acres add one horse and those supercars and limos become farm vehicles.
So, it will be pretty much like now since most of the expenses you mention are deductible in some way. And while this company dependency may not be the norm for filthy rich dudes, it is for many many other whealthy people.
I'm all in favor of taxing the companies, but as someone viewing from the outside, US tax law is batshit crazy. And yes, I also believe that individual taxation should be fixed, and not progressive (as it is now in many regions of the world, including my country) - why should someone who earns more pay a bigger cut of their pie? It's their work. And no, I'm not rich, not even remotely close to it.
Personally, I think a 100hz+ IPS display with a 2560x1600 resolutuon would be great... but I'd be surprised it I ever see it.
It's not there yet, but monitors using LM300WQ5-SLA2 (such as NEC PA301W) are an improvement. Unfortunely, usually you only get the 10-bit color depth using professional-line graphic cards and "original" drivers. Oh and they are quite expensive:)
Domain registering has always been about first-come-first-served. You think companies don't pay hefty sums of money for their vaguely-related domain names? They do. And no, DNS doesn't specify the shape of content, but with a more free.TLD scheme you could get something useful such as mcdonald.farms.scotland or mcdonald.restaurant
The hierarchical name system had a dumb reason to exist - specially considering trademark law was already mature - and domain name usage as it is today was unthinkable at the time. Borders and country names aren't that stable, and it seems no one predicted global domain-using companies and communities. It made senser when hardware and conectivity was limited, but if I can get a geographic coordinate for every valid address I can think of (and using services a level up the hierarchy), why can't domain names be truely unrestricted?
You can copy the template of the "non-valid" self-signed certificates that scare the hell out of users (and incidentally, are useful to land more money on Verisign's pocket), but serves no one's interest.
Yeah, because *no one* uses DNS on a local network with custom TLDs. You could register a.suckmyballsificare and most of the software would eat it. Literally.
all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...
Exposing the ripoff that are TLDs and domain naming today. Companies will become less interested in purchasing unused domain names if a ton of TLDs are available. If you could register any domain with a tld upto 32 chars everywhere, do you think companies would fork money for a.xxx? Or a.suckmyballs? Or a.chupamishuevos? Of course not.
Why should you use.com,.net and org? Why use domains at all if often the IPv4 address requires less characters? And how about your local network, what kind of suffixes do you use? Do you use them at all?
The point of DNS is to translate easy to remember MRIs (machine resource identifiers) into actual usable IP addresses. What TLD is used is more of a political choice than a technical one.
You are right on the money (pun intended) regarding ICANN. There is no reason for keeping up with the silly 80's scheme of TLDs, other than money. And 20 mil for 200 TLDs is pocket change - the real money will come from trademarked companies that will need ssl certificates. And all this will come at zero cost, since virtually any DNS Server implementation and PKI will work with a valid but unrestricted TLD.
I don't understand why people are flaming Verising for doing what they do best - business. But ICANN, AFAIK shouldn't be profit-oriented (hahahaha).
Shure, let's piss all over the customers that pay for the infrastructure. The "xxx" TLD is the perfect example of what is wrong with the system - a restricted TLD set. If you could register eg. cocacola.xpto, cocacola.abc, cocacola.rma and so forth, do you think the company would waste money on meaningless (but useful) TLDs? No. TLDs as currently implemented are an artificial limitation to the whole WWW thing. People go nuts over "clever" (easy to memorize) domain names like eat.me or bone.me, and some of them achieve astronomical value on the market. There's a whole industry fed by pun-driven domain name reselling. If I can use "local" or "headquarter" as a TLD on my local network, why can't I register them publicly?
Please, pleeease stop with this ridiculous naming schemes, stop protecting the assets of a few domain speculators, and allow for valid but unrestricted TLDs. Not only people already use them on internal networks, but some networks (Windows I'm looking at you) will barf less when clueless administrators decide to use "valid" TLDs as their AD root.
As for your list, you are hilarious. Here are a few hints:
1) If you run a DNS server where blocking this would cause an effect, you have paying customers. Go ahead, piss them off. It's not like you are the only provider on the market.
2) See 1)
3) See 1) again
4) This is 2012. Most of the spam hitting my servers is from compromised servers. So, we're talking about full SPF-passing domains, with valid servers that will retry deliver (greylist won't do a thing), and complex messages written in our native tongue (bayesian filters only go so far). You expect to accomplish exactly what?
I'm not an expert on gaming, and I'm sure the monitor you mention is awesome, but you are eating the marketing buzz. Most TN panels indicate the fastest response time (gray-to-gray), not the slowest, so a 120Hz panel would have a maximum response time of 8.3ms across all colors - that's another problem, since most TN panels use posterizing techniques to display 24-bit color. Also, it is a 3D panel, so you usually get a good 60Hz image, since two superimposing frames are used to create depth.
In case you're wondering, the panel used in the monitor you mentioned is ref. M236H5 (and it does spec 120Hz).
By the way, I wonder how "smart" Portugal's electrical grid is.
I can't really give you any juicy details, because it's not really my area. I do know that there was a lot of subsidized investment - and good investment too, because we had a lot of R&D and know-how in that area. I have some school friends that work in renewable energy, and it seems there is a high demand for portuguese specialists. Unfortunely, the government is shooting itself in the foot and cutting most of energy subsidies, and paired with the decision of "selling" EDP (the major electricity company, that has a renewable source spinoff called EDP Renovaveis - http://www.edprenovaveis.com/) to a chinese company, well... let's say its good news for the oil producers:P
Most of our electrical infrastructure is somewhat recent (in contrast, some countries like the USA have >50 year old grid in some areas), and there is a sort of monopoly on infrastructure (but the state owned part of the company is also being sold - thank you IMF!) by REN (http://www.ren.pt), so not only they must ensure quality levels, but every electricity supplier needs to use them - the cost of transport is probably the same, regardless of the operator.
Not directly related to the energy field, but somewhat interesting, we also have a state-of-the-art telecomunications infrastructure - it is easy when you don't need to retrofit, just build it new. There is broadband available in virtually 100% of the territory, and 1GBps internet connection is available at some places (I have in my office a 120Mbps connection for about 50 euros), 3G covers a good part of the territory, and you also have 4G in main cities. As expected (given cellphone usage statistics), cellphone coverage is also almost 100%, with the addition of some subway tunnels, underground parkings, etc.
Is that the origins of the electricity delivered just to your home or the entire country?
My home, of course. But the country isn't _that_ big. It may vary from region to region (there still exists a coal central in the south), but the variation shouldn't be that relevant.
Also, now that I think about it, there is no nuclear power in Portugal
Yes, you are right. Portugal imports electricity from both Spain and France.
Perhaps your figures are for usage (incuding imports) while the figures I was looking at were for production in Portugal.
I guess the values are consumption totals, not production totals. Production itself isn't that relevant, only in context of electricity consumed. Last year (2011) was the first year Portugal had a positive balance in electricity production (exported more than imported). But think of this - imagine the country has only 2 wind farms, and import everything else - all electricity produced is 100% clean, but it really isn't, right? What really matters is what you see on page 7 of the document you mentioned - the percentage of the electricity spent that is from renewable sources (and of course, assuming that most of the energy is produced locally).
Since in Portugal domestic electricity invoices are mandated to discriminate the origins of the electricity, the gritty details for May of 2011 are:
Natural Gas - 11%
Coal - 11%
Hydro - 15.3%
Nuclear - 2.6%
Wind - 27.1%
Cogen./Microproduction - 17.8%
Other - 7.6%
So, as you can see, Hydro is a small fraction, and nowhere near the 57% value you mention.
Which is nice and all, and it was only possible because wind, solar, geothermal and microproduction was heavily subsidized by the government (and the consumers). That has ended this year (new government, IMF, so all energy subsidies were cancelled. We also have a pretty good electric car powering grid, but I don't recall to ever have seen one in the street (or charging) - the government also cut most incentives to buy electric cars and the expansion of their powering stations. And yes, most of the remaining 48% percent were directly or indirectly imported. So, check the page again in one year or two, and see if the value holds.
Not to mention advances in food storage. Proper storage provided by cooling, chemical additions(preservatives, etc) or environment monitoring (such as done in cereal silos) allows everyone to stop being dependand of local production for all your food, and allows the producers to increase their profit by having less wastes products per lot.
Usually the dependency isn't related directly to the core product, but to the programming libraries and supporting tools. The new SQL Server seems to have a deeper dependency on.NET, but it's unlikely the core applications/services are running managed code (yeah, I'm too lazy to go check the binaries).
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But you can't become rich only because of your own hard work. You also have to take advantage of the hard work of others, pay them less than the value of their labor so you can skim off a portion of that value for yourself.
I'm shure you know this by your experience in trying to be rich. So, what you say is there is no way a company will pay fair salaries AND be profitable. I don't really know what else to say to you, we don't live on the same universe.
And that person, whether honest or dishonest, gets benefit from the government in proportion to the size of his operations.
As everyone else. Why should A pay, lets say, 20% of their income, and B pay 40%?
Everything relies on public infrastructures that have to be paid for, whether it's a rich dude sitting alone in his mansion on his private estate or a multi-billion dollar technology company
Where did you read otherwise? I could argue that most of those structures aren't really public in many countries, or that you are already paying the structures when you use them (tolls, fuel taxes, environment taxes, utilities, etc). Have you ever seen a cable provider bill by customer income? Of course not - and there are even laws in some countries against it. Everyone pays the same for the same service, why taxation doesn't use the same method? I actually know why - because the top 5% or 10% of "rich people" actually pay >60% of everything "public". The value, of course, varies from country to country, but the result is the same - "the parasites" as you called it are the ones that allow the government to keep the lights on.
Since when is it their work. Reality is, it is always someone else's work, they are just parasites. Their risk, never they just gamble other peoples money. Just plotting, scheming, greed and more greed and yet more greed.
Yes, there is no way someone honest can be rich. Or that someone can become rich because of hard work. Because if you somehow have less, it's never your fault, is it? It's always someone else's. No one forces you to live in capitalism, no one forces you to be a part of what you call "twisted society". But it's funny how you spew your little rant over giant multi-billion technology infrastructure that probably woudn't exist if not for those "parasites" you hate. Hypocrisy much?
The corporation the buys the investment mansion which no one ever wants to rent and tax deducts all running and management costs. The corporation buys the supercars and limos and tax deducts them, perhaps the locate the mansion on a few acres add one horse and those supercars and limos become farm vehicles.
So, it will be pretty much like now since most of the expenses you mention are deductible in some way. And while this company dependency may not be the norm for filthy rich dudes, it is for many many other whealthy people.
I'm all in favor of taxing the companies, but as someone viewing from the outside, US tax law is batshit crazy. And yes, I also believe that individual taxation should be fixed, and not progressive (as it is now in many regions of the world, including my country) - why should someone who earns more pay a bigger cut of their pie? It's their work. And no, I'm not rich, not even remotely close to it.
Personally, I think a 100hz+ IPS display with a 2560x1600 resolutuon would be great... but I'd be surprised it I ever see it.
It's not there yet, but monitors using LM300WQ5-SLA2 (such as NEC PA301W) are an improvement. Unfortunely, usually you only get the 10-bit color depth using professional-line graphic cards and "original" drivers. Oh and they are quite expensive :)
Domain registering has always been about first-come-first-served. You think companies don't pay hefty sums of money for their vaguely-related domain names? They do. And no, DNS doesn't specify the shape of content, but with a more free .TLD scheme you could get something useful such as mcdonald.farms.scotland or mcdonald.restaurant
The hierarchical name system had a dumb reason to exist - specially considering trademark law was already mature - and domain name usage as it is today was unthinkable at the time. Borders and country names aren't that stable, and it seems no one predicted global domain-using companies and communities. It made senser when hardware and conectivity was limited, but if I can get a geographic coordinate for every valid address I can think of (and using services a level up the hierarchy), why can't domain names be truely unrestricted?
You can copy the template of the "non-valid" self-signed certificates that scare the hell out of users (and incidentally, are useful to land more money on Verisign's pocket), but serves no one's interest.
You didn't specify which other search engines landed you on porn sites for unintended queries, could you be more specific? :D
Yeah, because *no one* uses DNS on a local network with custom TLDs. You could register a .suckmyballsificare and most of the software would eat it. Literally.
Or some big company (like google) will realize they can roll their own DNS scheming without needing ICANN. And you can bet that everyone will follow.
You can already register the holish.it and givash.it
all these new TLD's it will solve the problem of...
Exposing the ripoff that are TLDs and domain naming today. Companies will become less interested in purchasing unused domain names if a ton of TLDs are available. If you could register any domain with a tld upto 32 chars everywhere, do you think companies would fork money for a .xxx? Or a .suckmyballs? Or a .chupamishuevos? Of course not.
Why should you use .com, .net and org? Why use domains at all if often the IPv4 address requires less characters? And how about your local network, what kind of suffixes do you use? Do you use them at all?
The point of DNS is to translate easy to remember MRIs (machine resource identifiers) into actual usable IP addresses. What TLD is used is more of a political choice than a technical one.
And IE will prompt you the results of the predefined search engine. Domain names are increasingly irrelevant.
You are right on the money (pun intended) regarding ICANN. There is no reason for keeping up with the silly 80's scheme of TLDs, other than money. And 20 mil for 200 TLDs is pocket change - the real money will come from trademarked companies that will need ssl certificates. And all this will come at zero cost, since virtually any DNS Server implementation and PKI will work with a valid but unrestricted TLD.
I don't understand why people are flaming Verising for doing what they do best - business. But ICANN, AFAIK shouldn't be profit-oriented (hahahaha).
Shure, let's piss all over the customers that pay for the infrastructure. The "xxx" TLD is the perfect example of what is wrong with the system - a restricted TLD set. If you could register eg. cocacola.xpto, cocacola.abc, cocacola.rma and so forth, do you think the company would waste money on meaningless (but useful) TLDs? No. TLDs as currently implemented are an artificial limitation to the whole WWW thing. People go nuts over "clever" (easy to memorize) domain names like eat.me or bone.me, and some of them achieve astronomical value on the market. There's a whole industry fed by pun-driven domain name reselling. If I can use "local" or "headquarter" as a TLD on my local network, why can't I register them publicly?
Please, pleeease stop with this ridiculous naming schemes, stop protecting the assets of a few domain speculators, and allow for valid but unrestricted TLDs. Not only people already use them on internal networks, but some networks (Windows I'm looking at you) will barf less when clueless administrators decide to use "valid" TLDs as their AD root.
As for your list, you are hilarious. Here are a few hints:
1) If you run a DNS server where blocking this would cause an effect, you have paying customers. Go ahead, piss them off. It's not like you are the only provider on the market.
2) See 1) 3) See 1) again 4) This is 2012. Most of the spam hitting my servers is from compromised servers. So, we're talking about full SPF-passing domains, with valid servers that will retry deliver (greylist won't do a thing), and complex messages written in our native tongue (bayesian filters only go so far). You expect to accomplish exactly what?
No, they use a single paper sheet and are already writing on the margins. Or that's IPv4, sometimes I get confused.
So basically it's just like U.S. video (30fps) but slightly slower.
But with better resolution (625 lines).
I'm not an expert on gaming, and I'm sure the monitor you mention is awesome, but you are eating the marketing buzz. Most TN panels indicate the fastest response time (gray-to-gray), not the slowest, so a 120Hz panel would have a maximum response time of 8.3ms across all colors - that's another problem, since most TN panels use posterizing techniques to display 24-bit color. Also, it is a 3D panel, so you usually get a good 60Hz image, since two superimposing frames are used to create depth.
In case you're wondering, the panel used in the monitor you mentioned is ref. M236H5 (and it does spec 120Hz).
By the way, I wonder how "smart" Portugal's electrical grid is.
I can't really give you any juicy details, because it's not really my area. I do know that there was a lot of subsidized investment - and good investment too, because we had a lot of R&D and know-how in that area. I have some school friends that work in renewable energy, and it seems there is a high demand for portuguese specialists. Unfortunely, the government is shooting itself in the foot and cutting most of energy subsidies, and paired with the decision of "selling" EDP (the major electricity company, that has a renewable source spinoff called EDP Renovaveis - http://www.edprenovaveis.com/) to a chinese company, well... let's say its good news for the oil producers :P
Most of our electrical infrastructure is somewhat recent (in contrast, some countries like the USA have >50 year old grid in some areas), and there is a sort of monopoly on infrastructure (but the state owned part of the company is also being sold - thank you IMF!) by REN (http://www.ren.pt), so not only they must ensure quality levels, but every electricity supplier needs to use them - the cost of transport is probably the same, regardless of the operator.
Not directly related to the energy field, but somewhat interesting, we also have a state-of-the-art telecomunications infrastructure - it is easy when you don't need to retrofit, just build it new. There is broadband available in virtually 100% of the territory, and 1GBps internet connection is available at some places (I have in my office a 120Mbps connection for about 50 euros), 3G covers a good part of the territory, and you also have 4G in main cities. As expected (given cellphone usage statistics), cellphone coverage is also almost 100%, with the addition of some subway tunnels, underground parkings, etc.
Is that the origins of the electricity delivered just to your home or the entire country?
My home, of course. But the country isn't _that_ big. It may vary from region to region (there still exists a coal central in the south), but the variation shouldn't be that relevant.
Also, now that I think about it, there is no nuclear power in Portugal
Yes, you are right. Portugal imports electricity from both Spain and France.
Perhaps your figures are for usage (incuding imports) while the figures I was looking at were for production in Portugal.
I guess the values are consumption totals, not production totals. Production itself isn't that relevant, only in context of electricity consumed. Last year (2011) was the first year Portugal had a positive balance in electricity production (exported more than imported). But think of this - imagine the country has only 2 wind farms, and import everything else - all electricity produced is 100% clean, but it really isn't, right? What really matters is what you see on page 7 of the document you mentioned - the percentage of the electricity spent that is from renewable sources (and of course, assuming that most of the energy is produced locally).
What was your source?
My EDP invoice.
I'm going to guess that they put their many small hydro plants under "Microproduction" in your source.
Hydro microproduction is also indicated (value I already added to hydro): 4.3%
Since in Portugal domestic electricity invoices are mandated to discriminate the origins of the electricity, the gritty details for May of 2011 are:
Natural Gas - 11%
Coal - 11%
Hydro - 15.3%
Nuclear - 2.6%
Wind - 27.1%
Cogen./Microproduction - 17.8%
Other - 7.6%
So, as you can see, Hydro is a small fraction, and nowhere near the 57% value you mention.
Which is nice and all, and it was only possible because wind, solar, geothermal and microproduction was heavily subsidized by the government (and the consumers). That has ended this year (new government, IMF, so all energy subsidies were cancelled. We also have a pretty good electric car powering grid, but I don't recall to ever have seen one in the street (or charging) - the government also cut most incentives to buy electric cars and the expansion of their powering stations. And yes, most of the remaining 48% percent were directly or indirectly imported. So, check the page again in one year or two, and see if the value holds.
Not to mention advances in food storage. Proper storage provided by cooling, chemical additions(preservatives, etc) or environment monitoring (such as done in cereal silos) allows everyone to stop being dependand of local production for all your food, and allows the producers to increase their profit by having less wastes products per lot.
Usually the dependency isn't related directly to the core product, but to the programming libraries and supporting tools. The new SQL Server seems to have a deeper dependency on .NET, but it's unlikely the core applications/services are running managed code (yeah, I'm too lazy to go check the binaries).