The problem with the answer to #1 is that there was no answer to: "Is it a threat or an opportunity?". A direct answer would seem to have to be one of: threat, opportunity, none of the above, all of the above.
Not them, but MS has software that will do this for all software not designed to defeat it, which since I presume yours was not, probably will work for your program.
I'm pretty sure the software I've written for airplanes can kill at least 300 people at a throw, more if the plane hits something interesting on the way down.
I think it's also a lousy comparison. How about we compare the number of times my house has gotten a smudge on the wall to the number of software crashes? Because a wall collapsing is a much more catastrophic event than a software crash. Maybe even compare the number of times a wall has developed a crack to the number of software crashes. Those are probably about the same for me.
What about the people who were laid off from the mega-yacht company?
They should have been working in food production, distribution, or education all along. We shouldn't be building mega-yachts while people are starving. It's just pure evil.
Thank you for posting this. I always find myself going crazy trying to explain the problems to pythoners, but I think you really put it together succinctly in this post.
No, sadly, they aren't fixing any of the key problems with the language, they're just not maintaining compatibility. Should be pretty much the death knell for python. I guess ruby wins.
You can obviously set up various exemptions, and you would obviously want this to be a progressive tax. So exempt the first 500k of retirement accounts, and then start at 1 or 2% and climb up to a rate of say 10-12% at the 10-million dollar and beyond level.
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income, so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
Wait, what? If they tax wealth rather than income, you're going to piss away all of your income so you don't have any wealth left to tax. You're not going to buy a house because then you'll have to pay tax on it. You're not going to invest because then you have wealth that can be taxed. At best you'll bury it in your back yard.
They already tax you based on the value of your property in most states. Do people not buy houses? You invest because you want to get ahead. It just means you have to take riskier investments to get as far ahead. Burying your wealth in the yard is a sure loser against inflation, and since you have a yard, you'll be gradually leaking money in tax on your property.
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
Sounds like a pretty high tax to me. If you tax wealth no one is going to want to build and keep wealth. Thus everybody is going to be poor.
I think everyone will want to have wealth just as much as they did before, it's just that the government which protects it will be taxing it more fairly, and you won't just be able to sit on your wealth, you'll have to take risks to keep it growing ahead of the tax. It won't mean everyone is poor, but hopefully it won't mean that we have billionaires building mega yachts while others don't have enough money to eat or get educated.
so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
Really? How? Presumably stocks, bonds, CDs, savings accounts, etc. would still count as "wealth". In two ways, really, first, you put your money into something, in the short term, that's typically worth less than what you put in.
Second, you need to invest to beat the constant drain (which is really what I meant tax defeat rather than tax avoidance).
As to what the government needs to know... i'd say they already know most of it. They know what stocks you own, etc, that's how they tax you on your stock profits. They know the value of your house, your car, bank accounts etc. We could limit it to the stuff they already know about.
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income, so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance. It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
OT: Your link to make ns/cs default in firefox is a nice idea, but I can't imagine them going along with it. For inexperienced users, that would essentially mean such a firefox version wouldn't work on most sites on the internet. Firefox would lose users in drove.
"The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy.
That would be ideal, but since all of the government was elected by a minority of the people which doesn't include me, it can't really claim to be 'the people'. If you want real democracy you have to at least have a majority requirement before you allow it to enact any laws. Otherwise the presumption should be that the people don't want any more government, and everything should be left status quo until they do.
My point was only that metered bandwidth is exactly intended for p2p users. Even the heaviest web page viewers won't come close to exceeding the 'free' base level. Only p2p will reach into the metered range, and in those cases, all of the bandwidth is legitimate.
Static web pages and images are a relatively tiny part of the bandwidth problem being discussed. How do you proxy bittorrent (or other p2p) streams (which make up something like 50+% of internet traffic).
"Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment."
But then you don't have a 'wireless provider', you have a wireless mesh. Each node becomes a provider, and now in addition to still having the limited bandwidth between nodes, you have to deal with routing (chokes, failure, tampering, unreachability), security/privacy, etc. This is a bad idea in many many dimensions, which is why it hasn't caught on in spite of widespread availability.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the answer to #1 is that there was no answer to: "Is it a threat or an opportunity?".
A direct answer would seem to have to be one of: threat, opportunity, none of the above, all of the above.
Not them, but MS has software that will do this for all software not designed to defeat it, which since I presume yours was not, probably will work for your program.
I'm pretty sure the software I've written for airplanes can kill at least 300 people at a throw, more if the plane hits something interesting on the way down.
I live in NO, where we have a much higher rate of wall failure than software failure.
I think it's also a lousy comparison. How about we compare the number of times my house has gotten a smudge on the wall to the number of software crashes? Because a wall collapsing is a much more catastrophic event than a software crash. Maybe even compare the number of times a wall has developed a crack to the number of software crashes. Those are probably about the same for me.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is. Walls in houses fall down a lot.
What about the people who were laid off from the mega-yacht company?
They should have been working in food production, distribution, or education all along. We shouldn't be building mega-yachts while people are starving. It's just pure evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
Includes a nice picture, and description of each layer.
Here's the picture link directly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Submarine_cable_cross-section_3D_plain.svg
Thank you for posting this. I always find myself going crazy trying to explain the problems to pythoners, but I think you really put it together succinctly in this post.
No, sadly, they aren't fixing any of the key problems with the language, they're just not maintaining compatibility. Should be pretty much the death knell for python. I guess ruby wins.
Ah, so the advantage would be that those of us who do use it don't have to install it? And I guess we'd have more opportunity to train other users?
You can obviously set up various exemptions, and you would obviously want this to be a progressive tax. So exempt the first 500k of retirement accounts, and then start at 1 or 2% and climb up to a rate of say 10-12% at the 10-million dollar and beyond level.
Wait, what? If they tax wealth rather than income, you're going to piss away all of your income so you don't have any wealth left to tax. You're not going to buy a house because then you'll have to pay tax on it. You're not going to invest because then you have wealth that can be taxed. At best you'll bury it in your back yard.
They already tax you based on the value of your property in most states. Do people not buy houses? You invest because you want to get ahead. It just means you have to take riskier investments to get as far ahead. Burying your wealth in the yard is a sure loser against inflation, and since you have a yard, you'll be gradually leaking money in tax on your property. It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.Sounds like a pretty high tax to me. If you tax wealth no one is going to want to build and keep wealth. Thus everybody is going to be poor.
I think everyone will want to have wealth just as much as they did before, it's just that the government which protects it will be taxing it more fairly, and you won't just be able to sit on your wealth, you'll have to take risks to keep it growing ahead of the tax. It won't mean everyone is poor, but hopefully it won't mean that we have billionaires building mega yachts while others don't have enough money to eat or get educated.I have no idea what portion of my statement would lead you to believe that I think economics is a zero-sum game.
Really? How? Presumably stocks, bonds, CDs, savings accounts, etc. would still count as "wealth". In two ways, really, first, you put your money into something, in the short term, that's typically worth less than what you put in.
Second, you need to invest to beat the constant drain (which is really what I meant tax defeat rather than tax avoidance).
As to what the government needs to know
Only if you stock enough bullets to stop all the poor. :-)
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income, so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
OT: Your link to make ns/cs default in firefox is a nice idea, but I can't imagine them going along with it. For inexperienced users, that would essentially mean such a firefox version wouldn't work on most sites on the internet. Firefox would lose users in drove.
Well in that case it would probably be best if the police just went ahead and shot them to put them out of their misery.
"The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy.
That would be ideal, but since all of the government was elected by a minority of the people which doesn't include me, it can't really claim to be 'the people'. If you want real democracy you have to at least have a majority requirement before you allow it to enact any laws. Otherwise the presumption should be that the people don't want any more government, and everything should be left status quo until they do.
My point was only that metered bandwidth is exactly intended for p2p users. Even the heaviest web page viewers won't come close to exceeding the 'free' base level. Only p2p will reach into the metered range, and in those cases, all of the bandwidth is legitimate.
Static web pages and images are a relatively tiny part of the bandwidth problem being discussed. How do you proxy bittorrent (or other p2p) streams (which make up something like 50+% of internet traffic).
"Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment."
But then you don't have a 'wireless provider', you have a wireless mesh. Each node becomes a provider, and now in addition to still having the limited bandwidth between nodes, you have to deal with routing (chokes, failure, tampering, unreachability), security/privacy, etc. This is a bad idea in many many dimensions, which is why it hasn't caught on in spite of widespread availability.
Mod parent up past the max. This is the only response such a stupid article deserves. Bandwidth doesn't magically exist free for wireless providers.
I think you misunderstood the reference. I actually voted for Gore/Kerry.