Actually I'd almost go so far as "A TV displaying MPEG4" is patentable, since it produces visible output. "MPEG4" would not be patentable by itself though, since it is a mathematical operation.
It seems to me that this is kind of a bizarre solution. Why not simply pass the full path to the file to the shell as a single argument? bash "/tmp/-i" would certainly behave as expected.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill
Perhaps going back to the coin-op pricing model would help with a model like this: For $x, you get N lives. Maybe provide "1-up"s in the game for "heroism" (define it computationally?) and at the end a pinball-like random "free play" chance.
The storage locker idea is also intriguing. Diablo 2's stash never seemed to be big enough to make retrieving your corpse and its equipment optional though.
They don't outright state "all your hashes are belong to us" but the things they claim to be doing are more-or-less impossible unless they somehow subvert the hash process.
I suspect that what they really do is look up the "right" hashes from the various hash-checking sites, then have clients that rather than actually calculate the hash from the junk file, simply tell everyone that the junk file hashes to the "right" hash, and nobody would know better until they downloaded it and it failed the local hash check (which would fit their definition of "success": someone wasted time downloading data and had to check afterwards).
I say lets bake the fuckers. Lets set up tents in the hot Arizona sun, lets put up tents, lets make the inmates wear pink uniforms, and lets feed them hotdogs made with green dye. Lets stick black gang members with white supremasists in the same tent.
When you suggest torturing inmates remember that in a year it could be you standing there in those tents. It may be "good enough for our troops in Iraq", but every single person there made the choice to join the army.
You forgot the third option, that she was using a system like bittorrent where her activity in downloading the file was publically broadcast, and could easily be tracked using the tracker (well, what else would you call it?;) without approving or otherwise participating in the transfer, or tapping her wires or anything.
Missed this reply while dealing with the other branch of the conversation.
I am still waiting to read the powers given to Congress to promote the general welfare?
Where in the constitiution does it say the government can buy tanks and bombers for its army? It doesn't. It says it can spend money to promote defense, and expects the government to spend said money in a way that promotes defense. Likewise, it expects the government to spend money in a way that promotes the well-being of the country.
Indeed, they did not even give Congress the power to collect income taxes.
Not exactly right, but not exactly wrong either. Article I Section 9 (which was amended by that amendment) originally reads No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. The amendment modified it to remove the census proportionality requirement, which made the income tax as we now know it to be possible, but a capitation or other direct tax (such as, say, a property tax, which would be pretty well tied to income, especially if they said the money you had was taxable property as well) following those guidelines would have been possible without the amendment.
As for the "well-being" of the country, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Personally, I'm glad that our government sometimes takes the time to step in when the livelihood of its people is threatened. It's nice living in Houston and not having to live in fear of Polio outbreaks because the government decided that every kid in the country should be vaccinated.
Actually, I can see this going sour for the media companies.
Joe Loser buys his brand new release, brings it home, pops it in the drive... and nothing. What is he going to do, blame the drive immediately? Most of the people would try another disc, discover it works, and return the new release, probably two or three times before deciding it must be something else. The guy working the cash register at Wal-Mart (hell, probably nobody at the entire store) will know about the whole key scheme, much less that a particular title revoked this or that player's key. The people who don't figure it out and call tech support? "Hi, this disc won't work" "Did you try a different disc" "No, should I?" "Yes, try a different disc and see if it works" "hm, yeah, my other movies still work" "Then it sounds like your disc is bad. Return it"
Multiply returned discs by the popularity of the revoked player, and you'll see just how stupid the idea is, and who would really be hurt by it.
and not the net population ignoring the traditional mediums and making their own shows. It'll be another decade before that shift happens.
The funny thing is, this shift could probably be faster than you think, especially if "the masses" get involved as soon as possible. After all, who doesn't enjoy someone else's kid clubbing daddy in the balls with a baseball bat or someone setting themselves on fire for a stunt. "The Internet's Funniest Videos" you could call it, and the content will mail itself to you. While that'd probably not stretch to a full 24 hours of programming, it'd be a start. Might also be amusing to get a University with public TV show feeds in on this (with the TV show authors' approval, of course). I'd watch old PBS shows nobody broadcasts anymore just to relive my childhood.
You'd have to be stupid to pull something like this then rush out and use the information you just got.
Wait 8-9 years, then we'll see whose identity information is being misused when this incident is just a distant memory and people are scratching their heads over how their information "got away".
First of all, I never said anything to you about taking unemployment, did I?
Already forgotten this morning and what started it all? Let me refresh your memory:
What a disgusting and truly saddening post to read. It really breaks my heart to see someone become so dependent on the government...I'm sorry, but it really makes me want to vomit, to see how far we've sunk in the last 200 years.
It seemed to me that your opinion on "dependence on the government" was crystal clear.
Well, if you would use actual numbers and not made up ones like $5000
So sorry, $5902 for a married couple with two kids. Less for some situations, more for others. I didn't whip out a calculator and the last census report to find out what exactly would be paid out on average, but I didn't make up the number.
The FairTax shifts a lot of the tax burden to people that currently defraud the system by getting paid under the table and pay no income taxes.
You mean multinational corporations that are headquartered in the Bahamas when its convenient for them for tax purposes, but have all of their offices and assets in the US? Though under fairtax they'd still pay nothing.
The fairtax website is great, but too bad they ran all their numbers based on 100% consumption of income on taxable goods. Thing is, the rich don't get rich by spending their money. If I made $100k, I wouldn't be spending $100k, I'd be spending maybe $40k, with the rest of it in some form of savings. Of the $40k, I wonder how much of that I would spend on used goods. Maybe every 4 or 5 years I'd be buying the latest Lexus or something, if I continued to drive like I do now, it'd be more like 9 or 10 years. Unlike the fairtax's FAQ, rich people do not all buy expensive cars, big houses, and yachts. They buy filet mignon instead of hamburger, fine wine instead of beer, designer dresses and expensive jewelry. Though they do invest already, and will undoubtably invest more under this plan.
I do have to wonder what happens when I import the latest and greatest in british comedy, or any other good not produced in America. The faq simply states It is unlikely that "shopping across the border" in Canada or Mexico will result in any cost savings to the consumer. and doesn't mention whether there'd be a tax on imported goods.
we should encourage the USA company Microsoft to try to take over this market?
USA company? What USA company? Oh, you missed it, the paperwork to transfer the corporation to India was just signed a few minutes ago.
Unlike the laborers who will be fucked hard during this whole thing, the corporations are free to move wherever they want, riding on a large cloud of money.
Man, it must really bug you that the FairTax isn't regressive, since that kind of kills your argument against it. Sorry!
No, I'm just annoyed that you're more than happy to take money when you feel its "yours" but go into paroxyisms when I take money that I feel is "mine" (after all, I paid taxes too, and since unemployment is partially paid at the state level, I've paid a lot of that back through our state sales tax).
As for progressive vs. regressive, sorry, but giving everyone $5000 doesn't make the tax any less regressive. As a fraction of the money they earn, people with less money will generally spend more on goods than people with more money (regardless of where they are relative to the poverty line), which means they will spend more on taxes than rich people percentage-wise, which seems to be the very definition of the word.
All the $5000 does is shift the scale so that people who are really poor end up either making money or having no taxes, but then the scale starts climbing from there.
Section 8 Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
Of course, we're back to pedantry again if we start arguing over the definition of "general Welfare". We could say that instead of the payola version of "welfare" that we use now, it means "well-being". The latter is quite possible, given that the people who wrote this document also shot up a lot of Brits for the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property^WHappiness. In this materialistic society we live in today, its not hard to see that all three/four of the above costs money.
The FairTax is not a flat tax. It is a national, retail sales tax.
only with HOW the money is collected
Exactly. I called it a flat tax because its a flat rate, the only difference is in how the money is collected. Sorry if that confused you.
Everyone gets a prebate based on poverty level spending, so that the poor are not spending tax money on the necessities.
Of course, pushing a system where the government hands out thousands of dollars to everyone really jives with your position. You'd turn down your share, right? I'd hate to see you vomit all over it.
No, it most surely does not say that. It says they created the Constitution to, in part, promote the general welfare.
Ineffective pedantry. If I write a proposal for some project because I want software to do task X, it follows that the proposed project performs task X. Likewise, if I wrote a constitution to "promote the general Welfare", I would expect that the government defined within that constitution would promote the general Welfare, amongst the other purposes cited.
I find your viewpoint especially intriguing based on your pimping of the fairtax.org website.
So lets say I picked myself up off my bootstraps and did something else. Say I started my own company. You would still tell me that you're gagging and vomiting for requesting small business loans from the government in order to obtain funding to hire employees and develop a product.
Of course, you seem to not have such a violent reaction when it comes to the existing companies taking government money hand-over-fist. If you were having such fits over each of these companies and their subsidies, loans, breaks, and contracts, you'd never leave your house... oh wait, its not an Energy Star house, is it?
Back to your support of a flat tax, what is the point of paying our government at all if its not providing services? Especially in the form of one of the most regressive taxes known to man (the sales tax) where it takes the most money from those who would be using those services you have an allergic reaction to.
Back in the 80's when it happened, people asked "but what will we do now?"
The difference between then and now is that back then there was an answer. Both auto companies laying off workers and the government stepped in and provided retraining, job search and placement assistance, subsidies for those going to college. There was assistance for those looking for a way to pull themselves out of the rust belt.
Now that its my turn, what am I supposed to do? Nobody has answers, nobody is providing retraining, and the only government assistance I've seen is the unemployment office reminding me that I need to apply to N jobs every week and take the first minimum wage job that accepts me, or they'll cut off my unemployment. College costs are climbing as both federal and state funding for both grants and loans are going downhill. I ended up with a college loan from a private entity since Uncle Sam couldn't afford to let me borrow money from him.
I'm sure America will come through somehow, but this time around it looks like its going to be a very bumpy ride.
The only commonality of Texans and Bostoners is that within two minutes of the start of a conversation they'll let you know where they're from... whether you care or not.
Hey now, I'm from Texas and I take offense at your sterotyping! While being Texan, I certainly do not tell everyone that I'm from Texas at the beginning of every conversation held right here in Texas. In fact, none of my Texan neighbors here in the great state of Texas go around telling the other Texans here in Texas that they're from Texas.
With patents, a little guy can invent something, and then a big guy can come along and copy it. Not having paid for the research into it, they can probably sell it for less too. Result - Little guy goes out of business and big guys keep selling product for $$$.
Because face it, what the hell is a little guy going to do if Microsoft, IBM, or any other company with a well-funded legal team steals their technology? Hire a lawyer on contingency? Do patent lawyers even do pro bono work for doomed causes?
But, for example, how about robots to prepare fast food? It's a straight forward repetative task which a machine can be designed for - non-trivial perhaps, but well within todays technology.
It requires too many points of articulation to build a robot that can not only flip burgers but also to toss the ones that fall on the floor back on the grill.
Re:Quirky service but worth it
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Think outside the product. They've sued people for buying smartcard writers in the past, without any proof that they were being used to make bogus DTV cards (hello, DTV, your units aren't the only thing that uses smartcards!)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'd almost go so far as "A TV displaying MPEG4" is patentable, since it produces visible output. "MPEG4" would not be patentable by itself though, since it is a mathematical operation.
rather than one famous for being stormed by about 1,000 upset Frenchmen.
;)
Good thing I don't need to keep 1000 upset Frenchmen out of my server
It seems to me that this is kind of a bizarre solution. Why not simply pass the full path to the file to the shell as a single argument? bash "/tmp/-i" would certainly behave as expected.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill
Perhaps going back to the coin-op pricing model would help with a model like this: For $x, you get N lives. Maybe provide "1-up"s in the game for "heroism" (define it computationally?) and at the end a pinball-like random "free play" chance.
The storage locker idea is also intriguing. Diablo 2's stash never seemed to be big enough to make retrieving your corpse and its equipment optional though.
They don't outright state "all your hashes are belong to us" but the things they claim to be doing are more-or-less impossible unless they somehow subvert the hash process.
I suspect that what they really do is look up the "right" hashes from the various hash-checking sites, then have clients that rather than actually calculate the hash from the junk file, simply tell everyone that the junk file hashes to the "right" hash, and nobody would know better until they downloaded it and it failed the local hash check (which would fit their definition of "success": someone wasted time downloading data and had to check afterwards).
Heh.
That someone modded you funny for this shows that people are rather ignorant of what goes on in this country.
I say lets bake the fuckers. Lets set up tents in the hot Arizona sun, lets put up tents, lets make the inmates wear pink uniforms, and lets feed them hotdogs made with green dye. Lets stick black gang members with white supremasists in the same tent.
When I see people propose stuff like this, I'm just so glad that we have DNA testing that works every time and we have District Attorneys in charge that are always quick to make sure justice is served.
At least our country still has a few good citizens that still care and want to keep our justice system honest.
When you suggest torturing inmates remember that in a year it could be you standing there in those tents. It may be "good enough for our troops in Iraq", but every single person there made the choice to join the army.
Can you say the same for our justice system?
You forgot the third option, that she was using a system like bittorrent where her activity in downloading the file was publically broadcast, and could easily be tracked using the tracker (well, what else would you call it? ;) without approving or otherwise participating in the transfer, or tapping her wires or anything.
Missed this reply while dealing with the other branch of the conversation.
I am still waiting to read the powers given to Congress to promote the general welfare?
Where in the constitiution does it say the government can buy tanks and bombers for its army? It doesn't. It says it can spend money to promote defense, and expects the government to spend said money in a way that promotes defense. Likewise, it expects the government to spend money in a way that promotes the well-being of the country.
Indeed, they did not even give Congress the power to collect income taxes.
Not exactly right, but not exactly wrong either. Article I Section 9 (which was amended by that amendment) originally reads No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. The amendment modified it to remove the census proportionality requirement, which made the income tax as we now know it to be possible, but a capitation or other direct tax (such as, say, a property tax, which would be pretty well tied to income, especially if they said the money you had was taxable property as well) following those guidelines would have been possible without the amendment.
As for the "well-being" of the country, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Personally, I'm glad that our government sometimes takes the time to step in when the livelihood of its people is threatened. It's nice living in Houston and not having to live in fear of Polio outbreaks because the government decided that every kid in the country should be vaccinated.
Actually, I can see this going sour for the media companies.
Joe Loser buys his brand new release, brings it home, pops it in the drive... and nothing. What is he going to do, blame the drive immediately? Most of the people would try another disc, discover it works, and return the new release, probably two or three times before deciding it must be something else. The guy working the cash register at Wal-Mart (hell, probably nobody at the entire store) will know about the whole key scheme, much less that a particular title revoked this or that player's key. The people who don't figure it out and call tech support? "Hi, this disc won't work" "Did you try a different disc" "No, should I?" "Yes, try a different disc and see if it works" "hm, yeah, my other movies still work" "Then it sounds like your disc is bad. Return it"
Multiply returned discs by the popularity of the revoked player, and you'll see just how stupid the idea is, and who would really be hurt by it.
and not the net population ignoring the traditional mediums and making their own shows. It'll be another decade before that shift happens.
The funny thing is, this shift could probably be faster than you think, especially if "the masses" get involved as soon as possible. After all, who doesn't enjoy someone else's kid clubbing daddy in the balls with a baseball bat or someone setting themselves on fire for a stunt. "The Internet's Funniest Videos" you could call it, and the content will mail itself to you. While that'd probably not stretch to a full 24 hours of programming, it'd be a start. Might also be amusing to get a University with public TV show feeds in on this (with the TV show authors' approval, of course). I'd watch old PBS shows nobody broadcasts anymore just to relive my childhood.
No, you're now doomed to be tech support for the CEO who just came up with that stunning and brilliant idea.
But it did make a great video game when the mitochondria takes over the world! ;)
You'd have to be stupid to pull something like this then rush out and use the information you just got.
Wait 8-9 years, then we'll see whose identity information is being misused when this incident is just a distant memory and people are scratching their heads over how their information "got away".
Already forgotten this morning and what started it all? Let me refresh your memory:It seemed to me that your opinion on "dependence on the government" was crystal clear.
Well, if you would use actual numbers and not made up ones like $5000
So sorry, $5902 for a married couple with two kids. Less for some situations, more for others. I didn't whip out a calculator and the last census report to find out what exactly would be paid out on average, but I didn't make up the number.
The FairTax shifts a lot of the tax burden to people that currently defraud the system by getting paid under the table and pay no income taxes.
You mean multinational corporations that are headquartered in the Bahamas when its convenient for them for tax purposes, but have all of their offices and assets in the US? Though under fairtax they'd still pay nothing.
The fairtax website is great, but too bad they ran all their numbers based on 100% consumption of income on taxable goods. Thing is, the rich don't get rich by spending their money. If I made $100k, I wouldn't be spending $100k, I'd be spending maybe $40k, with the rest of it in some form of savings. Of the $40k, I wonder how much of that I would spend on used goods. Maybe every 4 or 5 years I'd be buying the latest Lexus or something, if I continued to drive like I do now, it'd be more like 9 or 10 years. Unlike the fairtax's FAQ, rich people do not all buy expensive cars, big houses, and yachts. They buy filet mignon instead of hamburger, fine wine instead of beer, designer dresses and expensive jewelry. Though they do invest already, and will undoubtably invest more under this plan.
I do have to wonder what happens when I import the latest and greatest in british comedy, or any other good not produced in America. The faq simply states It is unlikely that "shopping across the border" in Canada or Mexico will result in any cost savings to the consumer. and doesn't mention whether there'd be a tax on imported goods.
we should encourage the USA company Microsoft to try to take over this market?
USA company? What USA company? Oh, you missed it, the paperwork to transfer the corporation to India was just signed a few minutes ago.
Unlike the laborers who will be fucked hard during this whole thing, the corporations are free to move wherever they want, riding on a large cloud of money.
Man, it must really bug you that the FairTax isn't regressive, since that kind of kills your argument against it. Sorry!
No, I'm just annoyed that you're more than happy to take money when you feel its "yours" but go into paroxyisms when I take money that I feel is "mine" (after all, I paid taxes too, and since unemployment is partially paid at the state level, I've paid a lot of that back through our state sales tax).
As for progressive vs. regressive, sorry, but giving everyone $5000 doesn't make the tax any less regressive. As a fraction of the money they earn, people with less money will generally spend more on goods than people with more money (regardless of where they are relative to the poverty line), which means they will spend more on taxes than rich people percentage-wise, which seems to be the very definition of the word.
All the $5000 does is shift the scale so that people who are really poor end up either making money or having no taxes, but then the scale starts climbing from there.
Read the Constitution harder.
Section 8 Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
Of course, we're back to pedantry again if we start arguing over the definition of "general Welfare". We could say that instead of the payola version of "welfare" that we use now, it means "well-being". The latter is quite possible, given that the people who wrote this document also shot up a lot of Brits for the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property^WHappiness. In this materialistic society we live in today, its not hard to see that all three/four of the above costs money.
The FairTax is not a flat tax. It is a national, retail sales tax.
only with HOW the money is collected
Exactly. I called it a flat tax because its a flat rate, the only difference is in how the money is collected. Sorry if that confused you.
Everyone gets a prebate based on poverty level spending, so that the poor are not spending tax money on the necessities.
Of course, pushing a system where the government hands out thousands of dollars to everyone really jives with your position. You'd turn down your share, right? I'd hate to see you vomit all over it.
No, it most surely does not say that. It says they created the Constitution to, in part, promote the general welfare.
Ineffective pedantry. If I write a proposal for some project because I want software to do task X, it follows that the proposed project performs task X. Likewise, if I wrote a constitution to "promote the general Welfare", I would expect that the government defined within that constitution would promote the general Welfare, amongst the other purposes cited.
I find your viewpoint especially intriguing based on your pimping of the fairtax.org website.
So lets say I picked myself up off my bootstraps and did something else. Say I started my own company. You would still tell me that you're gagging and vomiting for requesting small business loans from the government in order to obtain funding to hire employees and develop a product.
Of course, you seem to not have such a violent reaction when it comes to the existing companies taking government money hand-over-fist. If you were having such fits over each of these companies and their subsidies, loans, breaks, and contracts, you'd never leave your house... oh wait, its not an Energy Star house, is it?
Back to your support of a flat tax, what is the point of paying our government at all if its not providing services? Especially in the form of one of the most regressive taxes known to man (the sales tax) where it takes the most money from those who would be using those services you have an allergic reaction to.
Back in the 80's when it happened, people asked "but what will we do now?"
The difference between then and now is that back then there was an answer. Both auto companies laying off workers and the government stepped in and provided retraining, job search and placement assistance, subsidies for those going to college. There was assistance for those looking for a way to pull themselves out of the rust belt.
Now that its my turn, what am I supposed to do? Nobody has answers, nobody is providing retraining, and the only government assistance I've seen is the unemployment office reminding me that I need to apply to N jobs every week and take the first minimum wage job that accepts me, or they'll cut off my unemployment. College costs are climbing as both federal and state funding for both grants and loans are going downhill. I ended up with a college loan from a private entity since Uncle Sam couldn't afford to let me borrow money from him.
I'm sure America will come through somehow, but this time around it looks like its going to be a very bumpy ride.
The only commonality of Texans and Bostoners is that within two minutes of the start of a conversation they'll let you know where they're from... whether you care or not.
Hey now, I'm from Texas and I take offense at your sterotyping! While being Texan, I certainly do not tell everyone that I'm from Texas at the beginning of every conversation held right here in Texas. In fact, none of my Texan neighbors here in the great state of Texas go around telling the other Texans here in Texas that they're from Texas.
You mean:
With patents, a little guy can invent something, and then a big guy can come along and copy it. Not having paid for the research into it, they can probably sell it for less too. Result - Little guy goes out of business and big guys keep selling product for $$$.
Because face it, what the hell is a little guy going to do if Microsoft, IBM, or any other company with a well-funded legal team steals their technology? Hire a lawyer on contingency? Do patent lawyers even do pro bono work for doomed causes?
But, for example, how about robots to prepare fast food? It's a straight forward repetative task which a machine can be designed for - non-trivial perhaps, but well within todays technology.
It requires too many points of articulation to build a robot that can not only flip burgers but also to toss the ones that fall on the floor back on the grill.
Think outside the product. They've sued people for buying smartcard writers in the past, without any proof that they were being used to make bogus DTV cards (hello, DTV, your units aren't the only thing that uses smartcards!)