What happened to the genetically engineered square fruits and vegetables we were promised a few years ago? They were going to be easy to stack on store shelves than these round ones we have now.
Larry's a cheap bastard. I just heard this week Oracle just cut its employee stock purchase plan discount from 15% to 5%. And morale at Oracle headquarters is in the toilet.
The cartoon, while humorous, is misleading. The bank, and the shareholders of the bank, are both essentially the same taxed entity.
No. You obviously don't know what a corporation is, or why people create corporations at all. When you incorporate, you protect yourself from risk by creating a separate entity that is decoupled from you. When the bank fails, you as a stockholder are protected from liability with respect to the bank's creditors, etc.
But it isn't a free lunch. If the bank isn't passing passing risk onto you by virtue of being a separate entity, there's no reason why it should be paying all your taxes for you either. Either you and the corporation partially owned by you are the "same entity" or you aren't.
While the cartoon makes it look like it's an old stodgy rich evil banker and shareholder, in reality it's 97% of Americans that own stock and are being taxed twice.
This is a telling sign that you've been reading propaganda, because this "97%" figure is a standard talking-point. (The same people will talk about an average Bush tax cut instead of a median Bush tax cut- it's fooling people with the same sort of mathematical trick.)
While 97% of Americans may own stock, very close to 97% own insignificant portions of that stock and are not affected by taxes on the little dividends that might dribble out of their 60 shares of MSFT or QQQQ. Eliminating the tax on dividends was a gift to an extremely small group of extremely wealthy people who own most of the stocks traded in this country.
It's hitting you and me, not just some rich guy who looks somehow like he "deserves" to be taxed twice.
Looks? What do looks have to do with it? I don't know about your tax situation, AC. But I just did my taxes last week. I filed a 1099-DIV and paid taxes on $24 in ordinary dividends, at a rate of almost 20%... so I paid less than $5. I guess I could have bought a cheeseburger with the taxes on that.
Meanwhile the elimination of "double-taxation" of wealthy stockholders makes the deficit swell by a huge amount. I think it will cause my future taxes to rise by something more than $5.
Yes, indeed money is taxed many times as it changes hands. But as a shareholder in a bank, I am being taxed along with all my fellow shareholders when we take in the money, and then again when we distribute the money, which is double-taxation.
No. The bank "took in the money", not you. YOU ARE NOT THE BANK. If the bank goes under, would you be held personally responsible for its debts? No. Your stock would be worthless, that's all. QED.
Not that this is inherently bad.... if the double-taxation rate were half the regular rate, all would even out...
There is no "double-taxation rate". Stop playing games with language.
The Republican argument was dividend taxes were double taxation, because the company paid taxes on it when the money was made and it was unfair to tax it again when it was paid out as a dividend. The little catch they didn't mention was big corporations exploit so many loopholes in the tax code, and take advantage of so many shelters they often don't pay any taxes in the first iteration.
You don't even need to mention a "catch". This argument was always stupid on its face. This cartoon explains all you need to know about what people mean when they refer to "money being taxed twice".
Money is taxed an indefinite number of times, whenever it moves from one hand to another. The idea that this should not apply when one of the hands belongs to a wealthy individual is quite new.
The answer isn't to throw your hands in the air and say "everybody is biased", as you have done,
I find it highly amusing that the same crowd that decries something called "moral relativism" has foisted a cultural shift on us in just a few short years- where there is no such thing as truth, everyone is "biased", anyone's opinion is just as valid as everyone else's (except for "liberal elites" of course) regardless of whether or not actual facts support one side or the other, and only spin matters.
A few years ago nobody was scared to point fingers and recognize obvious bullshit for what it is. You can't do that anymore- it makes you "biased".
If this wasn't about spam, people on here would be jumping up and down screaming their guts out about how the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
$400k for 92 million screen names? That's less than a half-cent per compromised screen name- what a deal! The year in prison is on top of that but that's probably on the order of magnitude of about $500k (judging from how much you'd have to pay me to go) so we're still at less than a cent per screen name. Ask anyone whose screen name was compromised, with a punishment of less than a cent. This guy got off easy.
For christ's sake, spam is NOT that big of a deal.
Considering that Freon is a wonderfully inert substance at ground level that gets changed into an ozone eating monster at altitude under high UV, one wonders whether hosing the atmosphere with highly charged particles is a good idea.
Huh? How do you figure this? One thought doesn't follow from the other.
UV breaks the stable bonds in Freon, producing chlorine radicals among other things. This is bad because chlorine in that electronic state does not usually exist there and the chlorine catalyzes the breakdown of ozone.
This "HAARP" process sends radio pulses up into the ionosphere to excite the free electrons in the plasma that exist at that height. The exited electrons strike ordinary air molecules. This is nothing that doesn't happen already. Auroras occur every day. The only real difference here is the direction of the incoming radiation. Thunderstorms have a similar atmospheric chemistry.
Not that I support this development at all- while this may have been a technically brilliant experiment, it threatens to spawn a new form of advertising. This is going to become really annoying if it catches on. And the astronomers are going to hate it.
Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.
You left out the next part, where they stopped "innovating" IE once they got their browser monopoly. They left the world to languish with an insecure, broken, and unmaintained product for years. IE is finally losing its market share because it is such an effective conduit for malicious code. Users are fleeing toward Mozilla simply because they're terrified of the numerous security vulnerabilities in IE that have been left unfixed for years.
Yes, I see zero content here also. This is a fanboy's open call for a pointless flamewar. Stories like this are pathetic. And you can really see the resentment for the ideologically-minded fanboy clique around here. An unusual number of derisive AC posts calling michael a communist, etc.
But Michael is no communist. He is just an insecure geek who seeks to bolster his street cred among the other nerds by adopting a faddish software ideology that happens to be in style at the moment. But insisting that all software should be free doesn't really validate your "geek credentials". It could just simply be reflective of the fact that you might be a user and not a producer of software.
Each element emits colors at several discrete frequencies that make a barcode of sorts. The lines don't appear in the same place all the time (this is how you measure c) but they always appear in the same positions relative to each other and to the lines of other elements and can be recognized easily.
You can read the very same argument being made on the American Family Association's site. Murder is illegal, and is also immoral, therefore all immoral things should be illegal.
Actually all bloggers have to update their blog software to use the rel attribute in comment links before the comments become useless for affecting page rank. So this will have a slower effect still and search results will take even longer to improve.
In the long term this is a good idea. But they'll just find another way to annoy us.
And Google is merely announcing that they are no longer going to spider. Spidering of a page usually happens days to weeks after its first appearance, and you usually receive no direct evidence that the page was spidered at all except for the spider's appearance in your logs- but in this case the logs are available to the blogger, not the spammer who submitted the comments. Even if Google no longer spiders them a spammer might easily continue the practice for years. Unless he is smart enough to do QA by Googling for specific comments in his posts, he might not realize his posts aren't being spidered. So spam comments will continue until the spammers who post them finally get a clue.
The most immediate improvement we will all see is better search results from Google in a few weeks as the crap clears out of its system.
I, for one, am against Microsoft because of their business practices {consistent abuse of dominant position to achieve near-monopoly status} and their products {closed-source software}.
You mean, if Microsoft were to lose all its abusive business practices, you'd still be against it just for being an ordinary software company?
No, did you read what I wrote? Technology is bounded by nature. If something falls within the bounds of technology, it is therefore within the bounds of nature. Refrigerators, for example, are not free to violate thermodynamic laws simply because they are man-made. By implementing abiogenesis, we would show that it violates no natural laws. That would have huge implications.
We would also demonstrate that "intelligent creators can create things" which frankly isn't saying much.
There are efforts to construct living creatures (all prokaryotic) de novo from nothing but inert chemicals and information from sequence databases. If these efforts are successful in creating a viable organism from nonliving sources, it should rightly shake our thinking in a number of fundamental ways.
First of all, if we succeed in creating life from non-life (and only non-life), we demonstrate that a process of abiogenesis is physically (i.e. kinematically and thermodynamically) possible. Abiogenesis has never been directly observed, only inferred from our existence.
If we can demonstrate abiogenesis, we also demonstrate a weaker possibility- if it's possible to create life from chemicals, it's possible to create life from matter that is no longer alive (i.e. dead).
We also demonstrate that abiogenesis may have happened before. After all, if we can make a bacterium from scratch, it isn't as farfetched to suggest that bacteria might have arisen from natural processes. Our technology is constrained by nature.
There is also a large class of interesting biological questions one might finally answer. For example, your DNA is right-handed and your proteins are levorotary. This is common to all life on earth. Nobody knows if a biochemistry based on left-handed DNA and dextrorotary proteins is viable or not. Some people say things twist the way they do because of chance in the way they evolved; others say things have to be this way because of the weak nuclear force or something. If we can create a "normal" bacterium from dead chemicals off the shelf, we can create a mirror image version, and directly observe how well our mirror-image bacteria digest sugars of either chirality.
Yeah but this way you could visit the Pay and Spray at the start of the mission and get your paint job over with beforehand. Once you're wanted level is up, duck into an alleyway and peel it off. This would really be convenient for some of the harder missions involving police, since the nearest Pay and Spray is often difficult to find when you're in a hurry.
It's similar to visiting a prostitute when preparing for a violent mission. Normally your health is capped at 100, but a special cap (120) applies to your health where prostitutes are concerned. So if you need to take every advantage, visiting a prostitute is one of the things you do. Getting a peelable paint job would become similar and all the walkthroughs would say things like "this one is really tough, you'll need to visit a prostitute and get your peelable paint job from Pay and Spray and save your game first."
New Paint Job & Engine... the cops won't recognize you!
The most striking thing about that cult was how they made their living. They were paying the rent on a large group home in Rancho Santa Fe and wearing Nikes and all they did was slap together crappy HTML templates for local businesses. Consider that Manson et al were forced to live in low rent districts of southern CA like Death Valley, and got all their food from dumpster diving at supermarkets. If you're in a cult and needing a source of cash but not wanting to call attention to yourself, computer work is great. Everyone expects you to be weird. Sure, Nikes, bald head, whatever.
It was very strategic for them to commit mass suicide like that. They bailed out of the web-design market at the right time. And I bet the message a lot of people took from the whole episode at the time was wow, if you go into web design, you can make the rent on a hacienda even if you're crazy!
In all fairness I don't think the cult standard is good for comets. Hale Bopp had the advantage of showing up during a dot com boom.
You haven't cost them anything at all. The money you pay to have your paper delivered goes almost entirely to your paperboy/girl/whatever.
You are oh so full of shit. I used to deliver papers when I was a kid and I had to pay a big bill at the end of each week for them. A week's subscription cost $1.40 and they charged for $1.20 of it- you made 20 cents per customer per week. You depend on the customers that pay you $2 without asking for change.
And when someone quits, good luck getting them to remove the extra copy off your bill. You'd be throwing away an extra newspaper every day for months after someone on your route canceled their subscription.
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What happened to the genetically engineered square fruits and vegetables we were promised a few years ago? They were going to be easy to stack on store shelves than these round ones we have now.
Larry's a cheap bastard. I just heard this week Oracle just cut its employee stock purchase plan discount from 15% to 5%. And morale at Oracle headquarters is in the toilet.
The cartoon, while humorous, is misleading. The bank, and the shareholders of the bank, are both essentially the same taxed entity.
No. You obviously don't know what a corporation is, or why people create corporations at all. When you incorporate, you protect yourself from risk by creating a separate entity that is decoupled from you. When the bank fails, you as a stockholder are protected from liability with respect to the bank's creditors, etc.
But it isn't a free lunch. If the bank isn't passing passing risk onto you by virtue of being a separate entity, there's no reason why it should be paying all your taxes for you either. Either you and the corporation partially owned by you are the "same entity" or you aren't.
While the cartoon makes it look like it's an old stodgy rich evil banker and shareholder, in reality it's 97% of Americans that own stock and are being taxed twice.
This is a telling sign that you've been reading propaganda, because this "97%" figure is a standard talking-point. (The same people will talk about an average Bush tax cut instead of a median Bush tax cut- it's fooling people with the same sort of mathematical trick.)
While 97% of Americans may own stock, very close to 97% own insignificant portions of that stock and are not affected by taxes on the little dividends that might dribble out of their 60 shares of MSFT or QQQQ. Eliminating the tax on dividends was a gift to an extremely small group of extremely wealthy people who own most of the stocks traded in this country.
It's hitting you and me, not just some rich guy who looks somehow like he "deserves" to be taxed twice.
Looks? What do looks have to do with it?
I don't know about your tax situation, AC. But I just did my taxes last week. I filed a 1099-DIV and paid taxes on $24 in ordinary dividends, at a rate of almost 20%... so I paid less than $5. I guess I could have bought a cheeseburger with the taxes on that.
Meanwhile the elimination of "double-taxation" of wealthy stockholders makes the deficit swell by a huge amount. I think it will cause my future taxes to rise by something more than $5.
Yes, indeed money is taxed many times as it changes hands. But as a shareholder in a bank, I am being taxed along with all my fellow shareholders when we take in the money, and then again when we distribute the money, which is double-taxation.
No. The bank "took in the money", not you. YOU ARE NOT THE BANK. If the bank goes under, would you be held personally responsible for its debts? No. Your stock would be worthless, that's all. QED.
Not that this is inherently bad.... if the double-taxation rate were half the regular rate, all would even out...
There is no "double-taxation rate". Stop playing games with language.
The Republican argument was dividend taxes were double taxation, because the company paid taxes on it when the money was made and it was unfair to tax it again when it was paid out as a dividend. The little catch they didn't mention was big corporations exploit so many loopholes in the tax code, and take advantage of so many shelters they often don't pay any taxes in the first iteration.
You don't even need to mention a "catch". This argument was always stupid on its face. This cartoon explains all you need to know about what people mean when they refer to "money being taxed twice".
Money is taxed an indefinite number of times, whenever it moves from one hand to another. The idea that this should not apply when one of the hands belongs to a wealthy individual is quite new.
The answer isn't to throw your hands in the air and say "everybody is biased", as you have done,
I find it highly amusing that the same crowd that decries something called "moral relativism" has foisted a cultural shift on us in just a few short years- where there is no such thing as truth, everyone is "biased", anyone's opinion is just as valid as everyone else's (except for "liberal elites" of course) regardless of whether or not actual facts support one side or the other, and only spin matters.
A few years ago nobody was scared to point fingers and recognize obvious bullshit for what it is. You can't do that anymore- it makes you "biased".
Our species survived just fine before the environmental movement.
Wow, you must be a teenager. How long do you think "our species" has been industrialized? Forever?
Some reading for you, since you obviously haven't exposed yourself to much history.
I'm all with you on the "both parties are assholes" thing,
"Both parties are assholes" is the chant of good men who do nothing. I stopped reading the rest of your post.
If this wasn't about spam, people on here would be jumping up and down screaming their guts out about how the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
$400k for 92 million screen names? That's less than a half-cent per compromised screen name- what a deal! The year in prison is on top of that but that's probably on the order of magnitude of about $500k (judging from how much you'd have to pay me to go) so we're still at less than a cent per screen name. Ask anyone whose screen name was compromised, with a punishment of less than a cent. This guy got off easy.
For christ's sake, spam is NOT that big of a deal.
Yes it is.
Considering that Freon is a wonderfully inert substance at ground level that gets changed into an ozone eating monster at altitude under high UV, one wonders whether hosing the atmosphere with highly charged particles is a good idea.
Huh? How do you figure this? One thought doesn't follow from the other.
UV breaks the stable bonds in Freon, producing chlorine radicals among other things. This is bad because chlorine in that electronic state does not usually exist there and the chlorine catalyzes the breakdown of ozone.
This "HAARP" process sends radio pulses up into the ionosphere to excite the free electrons in the plasma that exist at that height. The exited electrons strike ordinary air molecules. This is nothing that doesn't happen already. Auroras occur every day. The only real difference here is the direction of the incoming radiation. Thunderstorms have a similar atmospheric chemistry.
Not that I support this development at all- while this may have been a technically brilliant experiment, it threatens to spawn a new form of advertising. This is going to become really annoying if it catches on. And the astronomers are going to hate it.
Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.
You left out the next part, where they stopped "innovating" IE once they got their browser monopoly. They left the world to languish with an insecure, broken, and unmaintained product for years. IE is finally losing its market share because it is such an effective conduit for malicious code. Users are fleeing toward Mozilla simply because they're terrified of the numerous security vulnerabilities in IE that have been left unfixed for years.
Yes, I see zero content here also. This is a fanboy's open call for a pointless flamewar. Stories like this are pathetic. And you can really see the resentment for the ideologically-minded fanboy clique around here. An unusual number of derisive AC posts calling michael a communist, etc.
But Michael is no communist. He is just an insecure geek who seeks to bolster his street cred among the other nerds by adopting a faddish software ideology that happens to be in style at the moment. But insisting that all software should be free doesn't really validate your "geek credentials". It could just simply be reflective of the fact that you might be a user and not a producer of software.
Yeah right. The evidence for global warming is just SO overwhelming right? What was it? A 0.6 degree rise or something?
Just how many degrees do you think you might have to warm ice before it melts?
Each element emits colors at several discrete frequencies that make a barcode of sorts. The lines don't appear in the same place all the time (this is how you measure c) but they always appear in the same positions relative to each other and to the lines of other elements and can be recognized easily.
You can read the very same argument being made on the American Family Association's site. Murder is illegal, and is also immoral, therefore all immoral things should be illegal.
... amazing... I seem to have made a freak out of you with only 1 post... That's a new record (sort of).
Nothing personal, but I just put you on my foes list because of the freeminimacs.com link in your sig.
Actually all bloggers have to update their blog software to use the rel attribute in comment links before the comments become useless for affecting page rank. So this will have a slower effect still and search results will take even longer to improve.
In the long term this is a good idea. But they'll just find another way to annoy us.
And Google is merely announcing that they are no longer going to spider. Spidering of a page usually happens days to weeks after its first appearance, and you usually receive no direct evidence that the page was spidered at all except for the spider's appearance in your logs- but in this case the logs are available to the blogger, not the spammer who submitted the comments. Even if Google no longer spiders them a spammer might easily continue the practice for years. Unless he is smart enough to do QA by Googling for specific comments in his posts, he might not realize his posts aren't being spidered. So spam comments will continue until the spammers who post them finally get a clue.
The most immediate improvement we will all see is better search results from Google in a few weeks as the crap clears out of its system.
I, for one, am against Microsoft because of their business practices {consistent abuse of dominant position to achieve near-monopoly status} and their products {closed-source software}.
You mean, if Microsoft were to lose all its abusive business practices, you'd still be against it just for being an ordinary software company?
... is that the EA employees working on this lame TV project are probably putting in 80 hour weeks.
No, did you read what I wrote? Technology is bounded by nature. If something falls within the bounds of technology, it is therefore within the bounds of nature. Refrigerators, for example, are not free to violate thermodynamic laws simply because they are man-made. By implementing abiogenesis, we would show that it violates no natural laws. That would have huge implications.
We would also demonstrate that "intelligent creators can create things" which frankly isn't saying much.
Enter your ISPs name into the search, find it on the list, and check the browser and OS stats.
That's a good idea. I bet it's already been patented.
Yeah but this way you could visit the Pay and Spray at the start of the mission and get your paint job over with beforehand. Once you're wanted level is up, duck into an alleyway and peel it off. This would really be convenient for some of the harder missions involving police, since the nearest Pay and Spray is often difficult to find when you're in a hurry.
It's similar to visiting a prostitute when preparing for a violent mission. Normally your health is capped at 100, but a special cap (120) applies to your health where prostitutes are concerned. So if you need to take every advantage, visiting a prostitute is one of the things you do. Getting a peelable paint job would become similar and all the walkthroughs would say things like "this one is really tough, you'll need to visit a prostitute and get your peelable paint job from Pay and Spray and save your game first."
New Paint Job & Engine... the cops won't recognize you!
The most striking thing about that cult was how they made their living. They were paying the rent on a large group home in Rancho Santa Fe and wearing Nikes and all they did was slap together crappy HTML templates for local businesses. Consider that Manson et al were forced to live in low rent districts of southern CA like Death Valley, and got all their food from dumpster diving at supermarkets. If you're in a cult and needing a source of cash but not wanting to call attention to yourself, computer work is great. Everyone expects you to be weird. Sure, Nikes, bald head, whatever.
It was very strategic for them to commit mass suicide like that. They bailed out of the web-design market at the right time. And I bet the message a lot of people took from the whole episode at the time was wow, if you go into web design, you can make the rent on a hacienda even if you're crazy!
In all fairness I don't think the cult standard is good for comets. Hale Bopp had the advantage of showing up during a dot com boom.
You haven't cost them anything at all. The money you pay to have your paper delivered goes almost entirely to your paperboy/girl/whatever.
You are oh so full of shit. I used to deliver papers when I was a kid and I had to pay a big bill at the end of each week for them. A week's subscription cost $1.40 and they charged for $1.20 of it- you made 20 cents per customer per week. You depend on the customers that pay you $2 without asking for change.
And when someone quits, good luck getting them to remove the extra copy off your bill. You'd be throwing away an extra newspaper every day for months after someone on your route canceled their subscription.