Here's an easy fill-in-the-blanks template to deduplicate about a third of/. submissions:
"Western [social class] shocked at [tyrannical behaviour] in [undeveloped nation]. Allusions to widespread corruption cause outrage. [fingers|guns|nukes] pointed. [links to U.S. corporate interests] completely ignored. [someone else] should do something."
Yes, the UAE is a shithole run by fascist inbred swine. I think I figured that out by the time I started kindergarten. Perhaps we could figure out a way to extract the bad guys and paradrop them on a secluded island that is subjected to hourly carpet bombings. Or maybe tie them to a desk chair and force them to work for Joel Spolsky, but that seems cruel.
X32 is for running 32-bit apps in a 64-bit native execution environment.
On Windows this practice is called "thunking" or "Windows-on-Windows", where it takes the form of a partially emulated legacy kernel which then backhands its requests to the real kernel.
On Linux, since we usually compile things for the platform as-needed, it's more about efficiency than compatibility. If you don't need 64-bit processing, sometimes it's faster to stick with 32-bit code. If you can live with the 4gb address space, your pointers are half the size, resulting in a smaller memory footprint, which then reduces cache pressure, potentially yielding significant speed improvements for some workloads. Due to the use of 32-bit pointers in this scenario, a 32-bit compatibility layer is required to interface with system libraries. You can't just stick a 32-bit libc and expect it to work, because of its intimate relationship with the kernel.
In what kind of rosy-tinted world do you live, where budgets are allocated for "nice to have" stuff like clean code and proper docs ? To a non-programmer, if the stupid thing works most of the time, it's done. That means you take the little prototype you demoed at last tuesday's meeting, slap the corporate logo on there and bite your tongue because the PHBs aren't going to give you another 3 months to rewrite the whole thing as a cleanly designed, production-ready app. Sure, my own pet projects undergo continual refinement, because I take pride in my work, but when I'm on someone else's dime, all those good intentions fly out the window and the only question coming from management is "when can we invoice the client", not "is everything up to your O.C.D. standards".
Sorry but that's just the reality of capitalism. It's not about doing things right, it's about selling crap to idiots.
Pardon my crystallized forebrain, but what's "point-and-grunt" ? Is that one of those newfangled hipster Fail-on-Rails thingamabobs that goes into the weird rounded USB thing on my tee-vee ?
I knew an admin who'd work on PHP for doing his server maintenance. He hated PHP on web based applications. You kinda remind me of him.
Yep, I do that too. Most of the time, when I need a small bullshit script for something, it's PHP. The DB integration and no-brainer multi-dimensional arrays make it way too easy to do so many things. I even wrote a bunch of MAME tools with it, because it was the easiest language for quickly parsing ROM parent relationships into a tree and running various operations on the archives with the same fine-grained control as C, but the immediacy and simplicity of shell scripts.
Some of us are getting shit done with PHP. To me, that's all that matters. If all these whiners got together, forked PHP into something cleaner and faster and posted THAT to their shitty blogs, I'd be all over it.
Programming isn't about having the prettiest language. It's about accomplishing whatever it is you need accomplished, using whichever tool gets you there in the most efficient manner. These "solutions" provided by PHP haters are the equivalent of saying "I'm scared of big trucks, so here's a purple unicycle driven by an albino puppy who can bark the first 400 digits of Pi in reverse", when the problem was "I gotta move 83 tons of unobtainium from here to there by Tuesday".
Re:Fix? I think you mean, "migrate"
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This.
PHP feels natural for me, as a C guy. The library functions lack consistency, but then neither do 3rd party C libraries. You just learn how to work them and get on with your billable day. I can look at just about any PHP code and figure it out pretty quickly. A lot of it is written by mental midgets, but it is familiar enough that I can jump in and fix whatever needs to be done.
Meanwhile, all those other, functional languages venture so far off the beaten path as to make them look like gibberish. They often strike me as the product of overexcited college grads. It's like a little kid who just learned a new swear word and starts using it ten times in every sentence. Closures this, aspects that, ooh look ma I'm using list operators... academic functionality makes for cute sample code, but those of us with actual jobs have more pressing things to do than learn a new language and syntax. At the very least, PHP offers a good online manual with some very handy user-contributed snippets. Sure, some of them are ass and could benefit from some karma/moderation system, but I've often found a little 10-line function in those comments that saved me an hour of poking around, or that I could patch up and post my improved version. That right there beats all those "Look how easy RoR is" screencasts that ignore all the actual things programmers need to know to write secure, production-ready code.
Agreed that PHP needs a major cleanup, but the resultant product probably shouldn't be called PHP 6. While we techies understand that a major version bump can break backward compatibility, explaining that to management types is an exercise in futility. They will state that the I.T. lab must continue using the old, unsupported version and not spend a dime rewriting any deprecated code. These would be the same management types who are still using IE6 because they can't let go of their decade-old million-dollar piece of shit CRM whose developer smartly closed up shop before the maintenance contract kicked in.
Fork it, have a nasty legacy PHP to support the existing codebase, and a separate, cleaned up PHP-derivative for everyone else. I'd use it in a heartbeat, because I actually like PHP for the most part. I use it for all sorts of scripting, not just web stuff, kind of like a more string-friendly Perl.
The problem with "fixing" PHP is it breaks compatibility with existing code. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because it was either written by complete imbeciles who just happened to get lucky, or brilliant coders who worked around PHP's perversions.
I'd like to think I fit in the latter category. I actually really like PHP because it's so dumb and open-ended, it lets me code whatever the hell I want without forcing much functional-programming hipster crap down my throat (I'm staring at you: Python/Ruby/Haskell/Scala/Clojure).
Yes, it's messy, and yes, it could greatly benefit from a concerted cleanup effort, but given it's install base and the mind-numbing amount of public code in use, it's hard to justify the pain in fixing all that stuff. Just think of the tens of millions of sites running some spinoff of PhpBB, the countless MediaWikis, nearly every torrent tracker, and all those pages of horrible code written by the aforementioned imbeciles. That's a lot of pain to satisfy a few pedants. Clearly, PHP works "well enough" for most of us.
That said, nothing's stopping people from forking it, fixing that code, and releasing it as something new. If it's better than PHP and helps me land paying work, or make my own projects easier to develop and maintain, I'll happily use it. Ah, but that would require these people to stop posting inflammatory linkbait on their canned Wordpress blogs and actually practice what they preach...
This is the root of my argument against corporate tax. Governments have proven time and time again that they cannot properly manage our money. My quality of living is worse now than it was 15 years ago, despite my income having doubled as well as my tax burden. I am paying more to have less rights and less services thanks to privatisation, while the rich get richer at my expense.
I went to college, I'm good at what I do and put in the hours. I am a prime example of someone who's not getting their money's worth from the government. You might look at my hourly rate and think I must be doing well, but in reality I'm worse off than when I was a full time employee earning half as much (on paper). I pay more tax, I get nickel-and-dimed with little fees everywhere, and if I should ever have a bad year, they send an auditor to pester me for a week, further crippling my ability to work. To top it all off, if things really go south and I have to shutter the business, I'm not eligible for unemployment benefits. They won't even let me properly write off expenses, so if I need to replace equipment, that year is almost guaranteed to be a net loss.
The whole damned system seems designed to punish little guys and drive us into debt. There is no reason a guy like me, selling information services, should be running at a loss when I'm working 50 hours a week.
Right. That education is paid from income taxes, which is great because, at least in theory, the better your education level, the higher your income potential. It's a win-win.
The corporation, that abstract entity that exists only on paper and in our minds, it didn't go to school. It is merely a logical grouping of everyone working together at Rovio. Why should that money be taxed again ? Wouldn't it be better applied toward creating more high-paying jobs ?
Let's suppose the corporate tax rate is 12%. That's 12% less growth for the company, or if you share my cynicism, 12% more cash diverted to the fascist elite, who already enjoy countless tax breaks to build themselves giant mansions where they host lavish parties to curry favour with the political leadership. A.K.A. corruption. I'd sooner trust SMBs with that money, than the government.
Perhaps this is my inner socialist peeking out the window, but I see no benefit in having a company sit on huge stockpiles of cash. Money is only useful if it's moving around. Create jobs, buy stuff, make it work for someone. Our western governments are widely recognized for being grossly corrupt, funneling money to the existing plutocracy. I don't feel giving more money to a government is going to result in more value for its citizens when it so much more easily diverted back to the fascist elite.
Instead of corporate tax, perhaps we would be better served by strict regulation that forces corporate profits to be spent on actual growth. After all, government exists to help us all lead better lives, not just a handful of the wealthiest residents who already have the means to serve themselves.
My understanding is that corporations are created not for tax benefits, but for liability reasons.
If I operate as a sole proprietorship, screw up royally and get sued, I lose everything. My cash, my property, my personal assets - everything. If I incorporate, the company gains its own little identity which can hold assets, and barring exceptional (criminal) circumstances, liability is limited to whatever the company owns, without spilling over onto me personally. Moreover, if every penny the corporation earns is spent as my salary, or operating expenses, its taxable income is zero. I still pay income tax on my salary so the end result is the same.
Where corporate tax kicks in is for unspent money. It has to file its own tax return, which means any money not written off is now subject to another round of taxation. This corporate entity only exists as an abstract construct. It does not get sick, it does not drive a car, it does not drink the water, and it does not get mugged in the park. Why then, should an abstract construct be paying for infrastructure ?
I get what you're saying, that a government needs tax income to cover cost of services provided. That's not under debate, i'm all for socialized services that benefit all. What I'm arguing is that income should come from the people who can use those government services. If shifting that tax burden back to the citizens means the corporations can keep more jobs inland, that's a win-win.
Pragmatically, the money is already poorly spent, which is the one tenet of the Tea Party that actually carries any merit, but that's a separate issue. Up here in Canada, we've been seeing daily protests going on for four months, initially about tuition hikes, but the scope has expanded to cover a much wider umbrella of corrupt spending. You see, there are some few million of us who feel we're not actually getting 43% worth of our income in services from the government, while the super-rich get rewarded with more tax breaks for their secluded mansions and stockpiles of inert cash. Corporate tax addresses none of the issues and instead creates more avenues for tax avoidance and disincentivizes small business growth.
The plumber draws a salary, and pays income tax on that.
Corporate tax is a tax on the corporation's income. That's why I described it as triple-dipping. More importantly, the government serves no purpose within the context of that transaction, because it exists only on paper. It's really a midpoint between the client's expense, and the employee's paycheque - at least in well-balanced companies. I don't feel a corporation (in the abstract sense) should be paying for infrastructure it cannot even use. Corporate entities don't need health care. They don't need roads. They don't even need government. Where is the logic in taxing an abstract construct ? They already pay for land use through property taxes, they pay utility bills like anyone else using water, electricity and gas, their employees pay income tax to cover human services.
Using your example, if the plumber were incorporated, he'd have to pay two taxes: corporate tax, and personal income tax. The net result is his hourly rates will increase to cover that extra tax. It all stems from this perverse notion that corporations are almost people. The only difference between a corporation and a sole proprietorship is a few extra signatures on the registration form. Why should that clerical distinction entitle the government to charge more money for the same services ?
I'm not knocking infrastructure, but the country is in the middle of a growing crisis concerning rampant corruption. Giving these crooks more money right now would not provide citizens with better services, it would only serve to widen the income gap and enable further heavy-handed borderline-fascist activity.
Canada's governments don't need more money, they already take a huge chunk of it and piss it away. They need to spend existing tax dollars more effectively.
I'm on the fence about corporate tax, because I consider it triple dipping. After all, people buying Rovio's products are spending their post-tax income. Rovio's employees pay income tax. Why should that same money be taxed yet again at the corporate level ? Does the Finnish gov't do anything of value with those taxes ? Mine does not (Canada).
On the other hand, I loathe any modern corporation that amasses vast amounts of wealth and doesn't create jobs to spend it. We see far too much of this happening in North America, with the wealthiest companies playing investment games and showing growth on paper, but never feeding any of that wealth back into the system. That numbers game drives up inflation as stagnant wealth does not serve anyone.
I still don't think corporate tax is the solution. It is clearly a stop-gap measure that has proven ineffective at stimulating societal growth.
At first, I thought 100mbps seemed a bit low, after all it's only 100kbps per user, but pragmatically it's more like 3mbps per classroom. You don't need to be streaming individual content to each kid. As much as I despise the overt brainwashing that is most K-12 education, if those subservient lemmings can come out with a bit more content between the ears, maybe they'll be better equipped to think for themselves and add value to their surroundings, unlike the current sad state of affairs.
Well yeah, that's the thing. Most of us have enough experience that even while pounding out the first skeleton templates, we have a pretty good sense of where IE will stumble. I'd even say that I compensate for IE from the very start of the project, in such a subconscious manner that only a handful of minor fixes are required during debugging. You get used to it and you adapt your practices in a way that minimizes the pain of cross-browser testing. Plus, these days we have a bunch of heavy but useful Javascripts to palliate those shortcomings.
Have you even used IE8 or 9 ? Safari/WebKit is quite nice, though I prefer Firefox, but I really cannot dump on IE like we used to. IE9 tends to work fine with the vast majority of my sites. When I have to add IE-specific fixes, they are for IE7. IE8 is missing some CSS3 stuff, but is usually pretty close.
As a web developer in 2012, I really don't mind any current browser. They have all come a long way, and if I'm not targeting older browsers, I hardly ever need to do any tweaking at all. I can develop with any of those browsers and the result will be near-identical across the board. To hate on any of them is a display of ignorance.
In my experience, tacking IE7 support onto a modern web site adds up to 15% to the total cost. Call me jaded, but I don't expect this Huddlers thing to be all that complex, certainly not enough to justify a $100k premium for IE support. So maybe they pulled a number out of their ass to look important and draw attention, or they're projecting that $100k over several years of development. Either way, it's a load of bullshit.
More importantly, how much business are they losing over that $100k "savings" ? I don't put in extreme effort to support IE, but then again I usually don't need to. It's pretty easy, as long as you're not shooting for 100% pixel accuracy - which is a dumb goal anyway, regardless of browser preference. That 15% figure I mentioned earlier, that's a worst-case scenario, meaning everything's messed up and I need to spit out completely different HTML for IE. Most of the time, all that's needed is a conditional stylesheet and a Javascript shim.
It's the 6 o'clock news; since when do they bother presenting any facts ? Just more thinly-veiled propaganda to distract the docile masses.
This is just the slightly updated version of retagging. A decade ago, petty crooks would keep 4-5 different price guns handy, so they could match the style of price tag used in various shops. Even then, stores were smaller and many cashiers had most of the prices memorized, so they would notice major discrepancies like these Legos. Today, all you need is a Kinko's and free software to generate the barcodes, the cashiers don't even look at the item as it zooms past the scanner, and in some cases they even have self-checkout aisles with only moderate supervision.
It's never been difficult to defraud the system, but only recently has it become so dehumanized that the dumbest of dumb could get away with it.
How is it "math" if it's a trivial observation ? Transit is generally organised in a network of hubs and spokes, with interconnects where necessary/convenient. The same semi-concentrated topology can be seen in large corporate networks where the core switches are much fatter than per-floor and per-office distribution switches.
This doesn't teach us anything about subway design. The average 12 year old gamer could draw an optimal shortest-route network in a matter of minutes. The challeges faced in urban planning are of a political nature, not technical. Can't dig here because of heritage blah blah, can't dig there because it's a wealthy neighbourhood, can't dig anything because the bus drivers' union is suing the city... We already have all the tech we could want, but what we're lacking is people smart enough to step aside and let progress happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an easy fill-in-the-blanks template to deduplicate about a third of /. submissions:
"Western [social class] shocked at [tyrannical behaviour] in [undeveloped nation]. Allusions to widespread corruption cause outrage. [fingers|guns|nukes] pointed. [links to U.S. corporate interests] completely ignored. [someone else] should do something."
Yes, the UAE is a shithole run by fascist inbred swine. I think I figured that out by the time I started kindergarten. Perhaps we could figure out a way to extract the bad guys and paradrop them on a secluded island that is subjected to hourly carpet bombings. Or maybe tie them to a desk chair and force them to work for Joel Spolsky, but that seems cruel.
X32 is for running 32-bit apps in a 64-bit native execution environment.
On Windows this practice is called "thunking" or "Windows-on-Windows", where it takes the form of a partially emulated legacy kernel which then backhands its requests to the real kernel.
On Linux, since we usually compile things for the platform as-needed, it's more about efficiency than compatibility. If you don't need 64-bit processing, sometimes it's faster to stick with 32-bit code. If you can live with the 4gb address space, your pointers are half the size, resulting in a smaller memory footprint, which then reduces cache pressure, potentially yielding significant speed improvements for some workloads. Due to the use of 32-bit pointers in this scenario, a 32-bit compatibility layer is required to interface with system libraries. You can't just stick a 32-bit libc and expect it to work, because of its intimate relationship with the kernel.
In what kind of rosy-tinted world do you live, where budgets are allocated for "nice to have" stuff like clean code and proper docs ? To a non-programmer, if the stupid thing works most of the time, it's done. That means you take the little prototype you demoed at last tuesday's meeting, slap the corporate logo on there and bite your tongue because the PHBs aren't going to give you another 3 months to rewrite the whole thing as a cleanly designed, production-ready app. Sure, my own pet projects undergo continual refinement, because I take pride in my work, but when I'm on someone else's dime, all those good intentions fly out the window and the only question coming from management is "when can we invoice the client", not "is everything up to your O.C.D. standards".
Sorry but that's just the reality of capitalism. It's not about doing things right, it's about selling crap to idiots.
A winner is us. Also, hot grits.
Pardon my crystallized forebrain, but what's "point-and-grunt" ? Is that one of those newfangled hipster Fail-on-Rails thingamabobs that goes into the weird rounded USB thing on my tee-vee ?
I knew an admin who'd work on PHP for doing his server maintenance. He hated PHP on web based applications. You kinda remind me of him.
Yep, I do that too. Most of the time, when I need a small bullshit script for something, it's PHP. The DB integration and no-brainer multi-dimensional arrays make it way too easy to do so many things. I even wrote a bunch of MAME tools with it, because it was the easiest language for quickly parsing ROM parent relationships into a tree and running various operations on the archives with the same fine-grained control as C, but the immediacy and simplicity of shell scripts.
Welcome to the club.
Some of us are getting shit done with PHP. To me, that's all that matters. If all these whiners got together, forked PHP into something cleaner and faster and posted THAT to their shitty blogs, I'd be all over it.
Programming isn't about having the prettiest language. It's about accomplishing whatever it is you need accomplished, using whichever tool gets you there in the most efficient manner. These "solutions" provided by PHP haters are the equivalent of saying "I'm scared of big trucks, so here's a purple unicycle driven by an albino puppy who can bark the first 400 digits of Pi in reverse", when the problem was "I gotta move 83 tons of unobtainium from here to there by Tuesday".
This.
PHP feels natural for me, as a C guy. The library functions lack consistency, but then neither do 3rd party C libraries. You just learn how to work them and get on with your billable day. I can look at just about any PHP code and figure it out pretty quickly. A lot of it is written by mental midgets, but it is familiar enough that I can jump in and fix whatever needs to be done.
Meanwhile, all those other, functional languages venture so far off the beaten path as to make them look like gibberish. They often strike me as the product of overexcited college grads. It's like a little kid who just learned a new swear word and starts using it ten times in every sentence. Closures this, aspects that, ooh look ma I'm using list operators... academic functionality makes for cute sample code, but those of us with actual jobs have more pressing things to do than learn a new language and syntax. At the very least, PHP offers a good online manual with some very handy user-contributed snippets. Sure, some of them are ass and could benefit from some karma/moderation system, but I've often found a little 10-line function in those comments that saved me an hour of poking around, or that I could patch up and post my improved version. That right there beats all those "Look how easy RoR is" screencasts that ignore all the actual things programmers need to know to write secure, production-ready code.
Agreed that PHP needs a major cleanup, but the resultant product probably shouldn't be called PHP 6. While we techies understand that a major version bump can break backward compatibility, explaining that to management types is an exercise in futility. They will state that the I.T. lab must continue using the old, unsupported version and not spend a dime rewriting any deprecated code. These would be the same management types who are still using IE6 because they can't let go of their decade-old million-dollar piece of shit CRM whose developer smartly closed up shop before the maintenance contract kicked in.
Fork it, have a nasty legacy PHP to support the existing codebase, and a separate, cleaned up PHP-derivative for everyone else. I'd use it in a heartbeat, because I actually like PHP for the most part. I use it for all sorts of scripting, not just web stuff, kind of like a more string-friendly Perl.
The problem with "fixing" PHP is it breaks compatibility with existing code. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because it was either written by complete imbeciles who just happened to get lucky, or brilliant coders who worked around PHP's perversions.
I'd like to think I fit in the latter category. I actually really like PHP because it's so dumb and open-ended, it lets me code whatever the hell I want without forcing much functional-programming hipster crap down my throat (I'm staring at you: Python/Ruby/Haskell/Scala/Clojure).
Yes, it's messy, and yes, it could greatly benefit from a concerted cleanup effort, but given it's install base and the mind-numbing amount of public code in use, it's hard to justify the pain in fixing all that stuff. Just think of the tens of millions of sites running some spinoff of PhpBB, the countless MediaWikis, nearly every torrent tracker, and all those pages of horrible code written by the aforementioned imbeciles. That's a lot of pain to satisfy a few pedants. Clearly, PHP works "well enough" for most of us.
That said, nothing's stopping people from forking it, fixing that code, and releasing it as something new. If it's better than PHP and helps me land paying work, or make my own projects easier to develop and maintain, I'll happily use it. Ah, but that would require these people to stop posting inflammatory linkbait on their canned Wordpress blogs and actually practice what they preach...
This.
This is the root of my argument against corporate tax. Governments have proven time and time again that they cannot properly manage our money. My quality of living is worse now than it was 15 years ago, despite my income having doubled as well as my tax burden. I am paying more to have less rights and less services thanks to privatisation, while the rich get richer at my expense.
I went to college, I'm good at what I do and put in the hours. I am a prime example of someone who's not getting their money's worth from the government. You might look at my hourly rate and think I must be doing well, but in reality I'm worse off than when I was a full time employee earning half as much (on paper). I pay more tax, I get nickel-and-dimed with little fees everywhere, and if I should ever have a bad year, they send an auditor to pester me for a week, further crippling my ability to work. To top it all off, if things really go south and I have to shutter the business, I'm not eligible for unemployment benefits. They won't even let me properly write off expenses, so if I need to replace equipment, that year is almost guaranteed to be a net loss.
The whole damned system seems designed to punish little guys and drive us into debt. There is no reason a guy like me, selling information services, should be running at a loss when I'm working 50 hours a week.
Right. That education is paid from income taxes, which is great because, at least in theory, the better your education level, the higher your income potential. It's a win-win.
The corporation, that abstract entity that exists only on paper and in our minds, it didn't go to school. It is merely a logical grouping of everyone working together at Rovio. Why should that money be taxed again ? Wouldn't it be better applied toward creating more high-paying jobs ?
Let's suppose the corporate tax rate is 12%. That's 12% less growth for the company, or if you share my cynicism, 12% more cash diverted to the fascist elite, who already enjoy countless tax breaks to build themselves giant mansions where they host lavish parties to curry favour with the political leadership. A.K.A. corruption. I'd sooner trust SMBs with that money, than the government.
Perhaps this is my inner socialist peeking out the window, but I see no benefit in having a company sit on huge stockpiles of cash. Money is only useful if it's moving around. Create jobs, buy stuff, make it work for someone. Our western governments are widely recognized for being grossly corrupt, funneling money to the existing plutocracy. I don't feel giving more money to a government is going to result in more value for its citizens when it so much more easily diverted back to the fascist elite.
Instead of corporate tax, perhaps we would be better served by strict regulation that forces corporate profits to be spent on actual growth. After all, government exists to help us all lead better lives, not just a handful of the wealthiest residents who already have the means to serve themselves.
To people, all those services is highly valuable.
To a corporation, which is an imaginary concept, they are worthless. Ideas don't get sick. Ideas don't catch fire. Ideas don't get bombed for oil.
My understanding is that corporations are created not for tax benefits, but for liability reasons.
If I operate as a sole proprietorship, screw up royally and get sued, I lose everything. My cash, my property, my personal assets - everything. If I incorporate, the company gains its own little identity which can hold assets, and barring exceptional (criminal) circumstances, liability is limited to whatever the company owns, without spilling over onto me personally. Moreover, if every penny the corporation earns is spent as my salary, or operating expenses, its taxable income is zero. I still pay income tax on my salary so the end result is the same.
Where corporate tax kicks in is for unspent money. It has to file its own tax return, which means any money not written off is now subject to another round of taxation. This corporate entity only exists as an abstract construct. It does not get sick, it does not drive a car, it does not drink the water, and it does not get mugged in the park. Why then, should an abstract construct be paying for infrastructure ?
I get what you're saying, that a government needs tax income to cover cost of services provided. That's not under debate, i'm all for socialized services that benefit all. What I'm arguing is that income should come from the people who can use those government services. If shifting that tax burden back to the citizens means the corporations can keep more jobs inland, that's a win-win.
Pragmatically, the money is already poorly spent, which is the one tenet of the Tea Party that actually carries any merit, but that's a separate issue. Up here in Canada, we've been seeing daily protests going on for four months, initially about tuition hikes, but the scope has expanded to cover a much wider umbrella of corrupt spending. You see, there are some few million of us who feel we're not actually getting 43% worth of our income in services from the government, while the super-rich get rewarded with more tax breaks for their secluded mansions and stockpiles of inert cash. Corporate tax addresses none of the issues and instead creates more avenues for tax avoidance and disincentivizes small business growth.
The plumber draws a salary, and pays income tax on that.
Corporate tax is a tax on the corporation's income. That's why I described it as triple-dipping. More importantly, the government serves no purpose within the context of that transaction, because it exists only on paper. It's really a midpoint between the client's expense, and the employee's paycheque - at least in well-balanced companies. I don't feel a corporation (in the abstract sense) should be paying for infrastructure it cannot even use. Corporate entities don't need health care. They don't need roads. They don't even need government. Where is the logic in taxing an abstract construct ? They already pay for land use through property taxes, they pay utility bills like anyone else using water, electricity and gas, their employees pay income tax to cover human services.
Using your example, if the plumber were incorporated, he'd have to pay two taxes: corporate tax, and personal income tax. The net result is his hourly rates will increase to cover that extra tax. It all stems from this perverse notion that corporations are almost people. The only difference between a corporation and a sole proprietorship is a few extra signatures on the registration form. Why should that clerical distinction entitle the government to charge more money for the same services ?
I'm not knocking infrastructure, but the country is in the middle of a growing crisis concerning rampant corruption. Giving these crooks more money right now would not provide citizens with better services, it would only serve to widen the income gap and enable further heavy-handed borderline-fascist activity.
Canada's governments don't need more money, they already take a huge chunk of it and piss it away. They need to spend existing tax dollars more effectively.
I'm on the fence about corporate tax, because I consider it triple dipping. After all, people buying Rovio's products are spending their post-tax income. Rovio's employees pay income tax. Why should that same money be taxed yet again at the corporate level ? Does the Finnish gov't do anything of value with those taxes ? Mine does not (Canada).
On the other hand, I loathe any modern corporation that amasses vast amounts of wealth and doesn't create jobs to spend it. We see far too much of this happening in North America, with the wealthiest companies playing investment games and showing growth on paper, but never feeding any of that wealth back into the system. That numbers game drives up inflation as stagnant wealth does not serve anyone.
I still don't think corporate tax is the solution. It is clearly a stop-gap measure that has proven ineffective at stimulating societal growth.
At first, I thought 100mbps seemed a bit low, after all it's only 100kbps per user, but pragmatically it's more like 3mbps per classroom. You don't need to be streaming individual content to each kid. As much as I despise the overt brainwashing that is most K-12 education, if those subservient lemmings can come out with a bit more content between the ears, maybe they'll be better equipped to think for themselves and add value to their surroundings, unlike the current sad state of affairs.
Well yeah, that's the thing. Most of us have enough experience that even while pounding out the first skeleton templates, we have a pretty good sense of where IE will stumble. I'd even say that I compensate for IE from the very start of the project, in such a subconscious manner that only a handful of minor fixes are required during debugging. You get used to it and you adapt your practices in a way that minimizes the pain of cross-browser testing. Plus, these days we have a bunch of heavy but useful Javascripts to palliate those shortcomings.
Have you even used IE8 or 9 ? Safari/WebKit is quite nice, though I prefer Firefox, but I really cannot dump on IE like we used to. IE9 tends to work fine with the vast majority of my sites. When I have to add IE-specific fixes, they are for IE7. IE8 is missing some CSS3 stuff, but is usually pretty close.
As a web developer in 2012, I really don't mind any current browser. They have all come a long way, and if I'm not targeting older browsers, I hardly ever need to do any tweaking at all. I can develop with any of those browsers and the result will be near-identical across the board. To hate on any of them is a display of ignorance.
In my experience, tacking IE7 support onto a modern web site adds up to 15% to the total cost. Call me jaded, but I don't expect this Huddlers thing to be all that complex, certainly not enough to justify a $100k premium for IE support. So maybe they pulled a number out of their ass to look important and draw attention, or they're projecting that $100k over several years of development. Either way, it's a load of bullshit.
More importantly, how much business are they losing over that $100k "savings" ? I don't put in extreme effort to support IE, but then again I usually don't need to. It's pretty easy, as long as you're not shooting for 100% pixel accuracy - which is a dumb goal anyway, regardless of browser preference. That 15% figure I mentioned earlier, that's a worst-case scenario, meaning everything's messed up and I need to spit out completely different HTML for IE. Most of the time, all that's needed is a conditional stylesheet and a Javascript shim.
It's the 6 o'clock news; since when do they bother presenting any facts ? Just more thinly-veiled propaganda to distract the docile masses.
This is just the slightly updated version of retagging. A decade ago, petty crooks would keep 4-5 different price guns handy, so they could match the style of price tag used in various shops. Even then, stores were smaller and many cashiers had most of the prices memorized, so they would notice major discrepancies like these Legos. Today, all you need is a Kinko's and free software to generate the barcodes, the cashiers don't even look at the item as it zooms past the scanner, and in some cases they even have self-checkout aisles with only moderate supervision.
It's never been difficult to defraud the system, but only recently has it become so dehumanized that the dumbest of dumb could get away with it.
How is it "math" if it's a trivial observation ? Transit is generally organised in a network of hubs and spokes, with interconnects where necessary/convenient. The same semi-concentrated topology can be seen in large corporate networks where the core switches are much fatter than per-floor and per-office distribution switches.
This doesn't teach us anything about subway design. The average 12 year old gamer could draw an optimal shortest-route network in a matter of minutes. The challeges faced in urban planning are of a political nature, not technical. Can't dig here because of heritage blah blah, can't dig there because it's a wealthy neighbourhood, can't dig anything because the bus drivers' union is suing the city... We already have all the tech we could want, but what we're lacking is people smart enough to step aside and let progress happen.
Works fine if I go through the Netherlands, but locally from Canada I get the timeout.
I'd say it's either a routing error, some of their servers down, or censorship. Pick whichever you prefer.