Interstingly enough is that it is 'higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases.
Even though the potential for harm for the top 10 is bigger (in terms of murder, etc), unless the person is a terrorist plotting large-scale attacks, the economic damage from a spammer would be much larger. This argument would have been a lot more convincing four years ago.
Still, if it gets rid of all those v!@gr@ ads, I'm all for it.
No you're not. I'm actually a Windows developer. I'm just absolutely sick of Microsoft talking a good game but not backing it up.
Just like a presidential candidate, MS has been promising to take security seriously for about 4 years now and yet, nothing ever seems to get better. Candidates make all kinds of bold promises, knowing full well that when it comes time to deliver, excuses can easily be made. Bugs get fixed reasonably well, but the rate new exploits show up has, if anything, increased. Linux is real competition, but MS's main strategy seems to be FUD and flexing their monopoly (see the USB story today).
I often spend more time trying to get MS software to work than I spend writing my own code from scratch, so if I troll against MS now and again, it's for reasons like that.
Don't forget, new security holes. Given that we've now seen how Windows machines could be compromised with BMPs or JPGs (with suitably old versions), it's just a matter of time until someone figures out how to root a Windows box through an edit control.
Also, you forgot to add, another in Microsoft's long running series of increasingly ugly boot screens. Even since Windows 3.1, each successive version of Windows had an uglier boot graphic.
Oh, yeah, the new desktop theme will make everything looks like chrome balls over checkerboard planes. You know it's coming.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player?
I have no reason to uninstall WMP. It isn't annoying me or signing me up for news updates unless I closely scrutinize the setup options or putting yet another stupid little icon in the little notification area of the taskbar. Oh, yeah, and from my experience in the past 5 years or so, WMP works about 10 times better too.
Maybe you can't uninstall WMP, but I've seen Real Player get to a state where it wouldn't work, wouldn't reinstall and wouldn't uninstall. And several times I've been instructed to update Real Player in order to play a particular file only to get the same message after updating. Their confusing naming scheme has also made it difficult to even know if you're running the latest. RealOne, G2, Gold, Real 10? Pfffft. My laptop I bought a year ago came with Real preinstalled and I still couldn't get some media to play. I gave up and uninstalled it vowing to never use it again (although I've said this before).
Some companies I can forgive, but the combination of gross incompetence and over-the-top sleezy tactics is something I cannot. I also notice that a lot of sites, like NPR for instance are switching away from Real to software that people would actually choose to use. Maybe that's why Air America has only about 3 listeners in the whole country... if they supported something other than Real, I might check them out (at least to see if Al Franken is as pathologically unfunny as I've heard).
Still, I do have to give whatsisname credit for at least acknowledging Real's reputation and not pretending like it doesn't exist. I know it's too much to expect him to apologize for past tactics and/or promise not to do it again (something that could actually change mind on using Real, at least if it ever worked for me), because in public life, it's nearly anathema to admit you were wrong and it is anathema to take repsonsibility for it. Stockholders hate that kind of thing. But again, he deserves credit for actually addressing the issues presented, as did/. for modding up tough, but fair questions.
At the very least, someone could take an engine like CrystalSpace and make a Virtual Springfield, like the non-3D game that came out several years ago. The game was cool, but was too limited, and as a non-3D environment, it used animations to render travelling from point to point rather than doing it on the fly. Using a 3D engine would be far better, like the Simpsons Hit and Run levels on steroids.
Perhaps a collaborative project where people can submit locations on the map which are compiled together in a single environment. I'd do it, but I'm just a grandiose idea guy.;-)
Excuse me. Bush vs Gore was settled in a peaceful way.
It's a shame the Supreme Court judges each ruled in a partisan manner, since the situation, in my mind, was pretty cut-and-dried, but then they are often biased.
However, the system worked despite flawed laws, poorly thought-out procedures and lawyers out the wazoo. In many countries, it would have gone a month and a half without shots being fired.
Just because a bunch of breathless idiots want to generate ill-will towards the president by making outrageous and provably wrong statements doesn't change the fact that the rule of law did, in fact, work.
It's another big piece of the national debt that doesn't get counted in that $7 trillion total. The frustrating part is that if we poor schmucks engaged in this kind of accounting, we'd end up bankrupt or in jail.
Perhaps, but what you receive in benefits does not depend on how the government manages the fund, at least until it runs out.
All I know is that the people who are contributing to the system are the ones getting screwed. Not only do they not get what they could because of investments, but neither does anyone else. It's a significant chunk of our economy being sucked away to feed more government rather than grow the economy. It's taking economic growth which is not a zero-sum game, and making it into a zero-sum (or near-zero-sum) game.
Social Security is not a personal retirement account.
But that's what it's been sold as, at least these days. Otherwise it's just another tax and more income redistribution. If they call it that, then I think people will look at it a lot differently, especially since there will be no difference between the hard-working person who couldn't save enough to retire despite good planning and best efforts and the stupid person who didn't plan for the future and squandered his money, from the system's point of view. And we all know proving a negative ("I can't be successful.") is infinitely harder than proving a positive ("I have been successful."), where success here means being able to take care of yourself.
I'm not disagreeing with your categorization of what it should be. The problem with all these "Christian charity" type Government programs is a.) they are coerced, and b.) that far too many people will do everything they can to unfairly take advantage of them.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a safety net, there absolutely should be. But I am extremely leary when the government implements one, because every time it has done it in the past, it has failed. Not in the fact that it didn't provide the safety net, although that happens, but the fact that such programs attract abuse and result in dependency, whether real or perceived.
It is truly Christian to administer "tough love" (although obviously not to the point of people starving to death). The problem is that there are people who cannot help themselves, temporarily or permanently, and people who will not help themselves, because of lack of education, motivation or need (i.e., the system lets them float along just fine). I think the former, while very real and in genuine need of our help as citizens and as a society, are greatly outnumbered by the latter. The problem is that "The Government provides a safety net." is perceived by many as "The Government owes me a living."
The pact of the New Deal is that if you do your part, the government will cover your butt if something really bad happens, and that's good. The problem is with the "you do part" part of it. Just like with Communism, the "give what you have and take what you need" won't work when people fail to acknowledge the proper definitions of "have" and "need".
The problem with this, and it is a very big problem is that there is little risk to a healthy chashflow scam and investments are by definition risky. The other problem is that the money would not be 100% under government control and congress could not use the money when other sources of revenues dry up as it uses Social Security today.
You're right. But at this point, I'd rather take the investment risk than the certainty of a cashflow system that will fail. The second reason you describe obviates the first... one of the reasons, besides basic mathemetics, is that the so-called Social Security Fund is really just more government debt.
From what I've heard, in the best of time Social Security ended up rendering about 2% interest in terms of average payouts. There is no 40-year period in the last 100 years where investments in the stock market wouldn't have beat that by a huge margin. The key is the length of time: 40 years. Certain the period from 1928 to 193x was awful, as were other times like 1987, 1990-1991, and the beginning of this decade, but over 40 years, these drops were more than offset by the subsequent economic growth.
If the government could unleash the economy with true tax reform (a la Dennis Hastert, Jerry Brown and many others), combined with a program of retirement investment becoming personal rather than just another Congressional feedbag and Ponzi scheme, I think the problem can be solved. However, these are drastic measures, and it seems like it would take someone as crazy as Ross Perot to be bold enough to actually propose them (rather than just hint around). That's one thing I really respected about him, by the way. I was really hoping President Bush would drop a huge tax reform bomb at the RNC convention, and I think it could have clinched his run for re-election. Like a friend of mine used to say: The flat tax (or whatever scheme you are talking about, like VAT, etc) won't work perfectly either, but it makes a whole lot of sense to start from there and fix that rather than add to the 20,000 pages of tax code that alreadyt exist. An additional plus is that there's a whole industry of people who could get jobs that actually produce something rather than just waste productivity dealing with an incomprehensible tax code.
True tax reform and Social Security are just like the weather, everyone talks about them but no one does anything.
But not my criterion. It was a cheesy horror movie posing as a science fiction movie.
The premise was cool, which is why I saw it in the first place, but the execution was awful. After a while, I was just thinking "Would you all die already!?"
A lot of people are calling for significant increases in the minimum wage. This is where the real problems would occur.
Regardless, I don't understand why the market can't solve this problem. Minimum wage laws are another way for people to get paid more than they're worth. That's the sad part, but if our education system was brought into the 20th century (leave alone the 21st) it wouldn't be an issue because people with better educations would be worth more as employees.
The minimum wage has risen very gradually, at best keeping up with inflation. A lot of Democrat-types would have it be doubled. THAT would have a big effect.
No, he's not running on his record, he's running on an anti-Kerry record. His record over the past four years is not something he wants to discuss.
You must have heard different convention speeches than I did. Aside from a few barbs by McCain and Cheney, the Democrats were hardly even mentioned, except by one of their own, and not at all by the President.
I also have a high opinion of McCain, but I really have to question his judgement with respect to the Campaign Reform law he co-sponsored... he (and everyone who voted for and the guy who signed the law) seemed to think that you could just wish away the influence of all this money in campaigning and it would not show up in a different way.
President Bush found out the hard way when George Soros financed AdHominem.org and threw poo at him for a year. Likewise, the Swift Boat guys are doing the same to Kerry (although it's amusing how much Kerry has backpedaled on some of his Vietnam claims). The thing is, they're 527's. Who's behind them? Who's writing the checks? We'll never know, and so we sit around hearing charges that the Bush Campaign is pumping money into SBVfT, but no one can prove it, because it can all be paid for secretly.
I can't think of one reason why things are better now than they were before this stupid law and many reasons why they are worse.
The Internet will do more to reform campaigning than laws ever could, because it's the one medium where Free Speech is far less hampered by lack of money. It's one of the reasons why news outlets like the New York Times are in credibility free-fall (of course the fact that they make The Washington Post look unbiased is the main reason the NYT is on the outs).
Slashdot Mirror
And layabouts soaking up welfare who always vote Democratic. ;-)
Interstingly enough is that it is 'higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases.
Even though the potential for harm for the top 10 is bigger (in terms of murder, etc), unless the person is a terrorist plotting large-scale attacks, the economic damage from a spammer would be much larger. This argument would have been a lot more convincing four years ago.
Still, if it gets rid of all those v!@gr@ ads, I'm all for it.
No you're not. I'm actually a Windows developer. I'm just absolutely sick of Microsoft talking a good game but not backing it up.
Just like a presidential candidate, MS has been promising to take security seriously for about 4 years now and yet, nothing ever seems to get better. Candidates make all kinds of bold promises, knowing full well that when it comes time to deliver, excuses can easily be made. Bugs get fixed reasonably well, but the rate new exploits show up has, if anything, increased. Linux is real competition, but MS's main strategy seems to be FUD and flexing their monopoly (see the USB story today).
I often spend more time trying to get MS software to work than I spend writing my own code from scratch, so if I troll against MS now and again, it's for reasons like that.
Don't forget, new security holes. Given that we've now seen how Windows machines could be compromised with BMPs or JPGs (with suitably old versions), it's just a matter of time until someone figures out how to root a Windows box through an edit control.
Also, you forgot to add, another in Microsoft's long running series of increasingly ugly boot screens. Even since Windows 3.1, each successive version of Windows had an uglier boot graphic.
Oh, yeah, the new desktop theme will make everything looks like chrome balls over checkerboard planes. You know it's coming.
Yeah, but going to jail for shooting an intruder helps the next little miscreant. And it happens too.
Yeah, I should, but it's also a much easier way to identify posters.
I know it's OT, but this bugs me every time is see it:
Support the First Amendment: Read at -1.
If I'm not the government, this doesn't make any sense.
And like his namesake on the SciFi channel, he channels dead people too!
Only Microsoft would make a picture a vector for a computer virus. Next thing you know the BSOD will expose a security hole.
Can you imagine a car company saying those customers that pay extra will get early recall notices?
Not any more than I can imagine the work of a single teenage miscreant causing half the cars in the country to stall on the highway.
One thing he said that annoyed me was:
/. for modding up tough, but fair questions.
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player?
I have no reason to uninstall WMP. It isn't annoying me or signing me up for news updates unless I closely scrutinize the setup options or putting yet another stupid little icon in the little notification area of the taskbar. Oh, yeah, and from my experience in the past 5 years or so, WMP works about 10 times better too.
Maybe you can't uninstall WMP, but I've seen Real Player get to a state where it wouldn't work, wouldn't reinstall and wouldn't uninstall. And several times I've been instructed to update Real Player in order to play a particular file only to get the same message after updating. Their confusing naming scheme has also made it difficult to even know if you're running the latest. RealOne, G2, Gold, Real 10? Pfffft. My laptop I bought a year ago came with Real preinstalled and I still couldn't get some media to play. I gave up and uninstalled it vowing to never use it again (although I've said this before).
Some companies I can forgive, but the combination of gross incompetence and over-the-top sleezy tactics is something I cannot. I also notice that a lot of sites, like NPR for instance are switching away from Real to software that people would actually choose to use. Maybe that's why Air America has only about 3 listeners in the whole country... if they supported something other than Real, I might check them out (at least to see if Al Franken is as pathologically unfunny as I've heard).
Still, I do have to give whatsisname credit for at least acknowledging Real's reputation and not pretending like it doesn't exist. I know it's too much to expect him to apologize for past tactics and/or promise not to do it again (something that could actually change mind on using Real, at least if it ever worked for me), because in public life, it's nearly anathema to admit you were wrong and it is anathema to take repsonsibility for it. Stockholders hate that kind of thing. But again, he deserves credit for actually addressing the issues presented, as did
At the very least, someone could take an engine like CrystalSpace and make a Virtual Springfield, like the non-3D game that came out several years ago. The game was cool, but was too limited, and as a non-3D environment, it used animations to render travelling from point to point rather than doing it on the fly. Using a 3D engine would be far better, like the Simpsons Hit and Run levels on steroids.
;-)
Perhaps a collaborative project where people can submit locations on the map which are compiled together in a single environment. I'd do it, but I'm just a grandiose idea guy.
How is this OffTopic?! DaneelGiskard made a joke reply to an on-topic comment.
Just another instance of...
(bom,bom,bawwwwwwwwm)
MODS ON CRACK
Or Bush v. Gore.
Excuse me. Bush vs Gore was settled in a peaceful way.
It's a shame the Supreme Court judges each ruled in a partisan manner, since the situation, in my mind, was pretty cut-and-dried, but then they are often biased.
However, the system worked despite flawed laws, poorly thought-out procedures and lawyers out the wazoo. In many countries, it would have gone a month and a half without shots being fired.
Just because a bunch of breathless idiots want to generate ill-will towards the president by making outrageous and provably wrong statements doesn't change the fact that the rule of law did, in fact, work.
and far more is needed to prevent a crisis.
It's another big piece of the national debt that doesn't get counted in that $7 trillion total. The frustrating part is that if we poor schmucks engaged in this kind of accounting, we'd end up bankrupt or in jail.
Perhaps, but what you receive in benefits does not depend on how the government manages the fund, at least until it runs out.
All I know is that the people who are contributing to the system are the ones getting screwed. Not only do they not get what they could because of investments, but neither does anyone else. It's a significant chunk of our economy being sucked away to feed more government rather than grow the economy. It's taking economic growth which is not a zero-sum game, and making it into a zero-sum (or near-zero-sum) game.
Social Security is not a personal retirement account.
But that's what it's been sold as, at least these days. Otherwise it's just another tax and more income redistribution. If they call it that, then I think people will look at it a lot differently, especially since there will be no difference between the hard-working person who couldn't save enough to retire despite good planning and best efforts and the stupid person who didn't plan for the future and squandered his money, from the system's point of view. And we all know proving a negative ("I can't be successful.") is infinitely harder than proving a positive ("I have been successful."), where success here means being able to take care of yourself.
I'm not disagreeing with your categorization of what it should be. The problem with all these "Christian charity" type Government programs is a.) they are coerced, and b.) that far too many people will do everything they can to unfairly take advantage of them.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a safety net, there absolutely should be. But I am extremely leary when the government implements one, because every time it has done it in the past, it has failed. Not in the fact that it didn't provide the safety net, although that happens, but the fact that such programs attract abuse and result in dependency, whether real or perceived.
It is truly Christian to administer "tough love" (although obviously not to the point of people starving to death). The problem is that there are people who cannot help themselves, temporarily or permanently, and people who will not help themselves, because of lack of education, motivation or need (i.e., the system lets them float along just fine). I think the former, while very real and in genuine need of our help as citizens and as a society, are greatly outnumbered by the latter. The problem is that "The Government provides a safety net." is perceived by many as "The Government owes me a living."
The pact of the New Deal is that if you do your part, the government will cover your butt if something really bad happens, and that's good. The problem is with the "you do part" part of it. Just like with Communism, the "give what you have and take what you need" won't work when people fail to acknowledge the proper definitions of "have" and "need".
The problem with this, and it is a very big problem is that there is little risk to a healthy chashflow scam and investments are by definition risky. The other problem is that the money would not be 100% under government control and congress could not use the money when other sources of revenues dry up as it uses Social Security today.
You're right. But at this point, I'd rather take the investment risk than the certainty of a cashflow system that will fail. The second reason you describe obviates the first... one of the reasons, besides basic mathemetics, is that the so-called Social Security Fund is really just more government debt.
From what I've heard, in the best of time Social Security ended up rendering about 2% interest in terms of average payouts. There is no 40-year period in the last 100 years where investments in the stock market wouldn't have beat that by a huge margin. The key is the length of time: 40 years. Certain the period from 1928 to 193x was awful, as were other times like 1987, 1990-1991, and the beginning of this decade, but over 40 years, these drops were more than offset by the subsequent economic growth.
If the government could unleash the economy with true tax reform (a la Dennis Hastert, Jerry Brown and many others), combined with a program of retirement investment becoming personal rather than just another Congressional feedbag and Ponzi scheme, I think the problem can be solved. However, these are drastic measures, and it seems like it would take someone as crazy as Ross Perot to be bold enough to actually propose them (rather than just hint around). That's one thing I really respected about him, by the way. I was really hoping President Bush would drop a huge tax reform bomb at the RNC convention, and I think it could have clinched his run for re-election. Like a friend of mine used to say: The flat tax (or whatever scheme you are talking about, like VAT, etc) won't work perfectly either, but it makes a whole lot of sense to start from there and fix that rather than add to the 20,000 pages of tax code that alreadyt exist. An additional plus is that there's a whole industry of people who could get jobs that actually produce something rather than just waste productivity dealing with an incomprehensible tax code.
True tax reform and Social Security are just like the weather, everyone talks about them but no one does anything.
he very firmly stated "no more Star Wars movies"
Yeah, "American Graffiti: Episode 1 - Opie Goes Cruising for Chicks"
But not my criterion. It was a cheesy horror movie posing as a science fiction movie.
The premise was cool, which is why I saw it in the first place, but the execution was awful. After a while, I was just thinking "Would you all die already!?"
Better yet, it's not an action movie or a horror wrapped in a thin veneer of science fiction. That's even rarer.
Well, there are more than one dimension to this.
A lot of people are calling for significant increases in the minimum wage. This is where the real problems would occur.
Regardless, I don't understand why the market can't solve this problem. Minimum wage laws are another way for people to get paid more than they're worth. That's the sad part, but if our education system was brought into the 20th century (leave alone the 21st) it wouldn't be an issue because people with better educations would be worth more as employees.
I tried that too in 9th grade. I did find a method to trisect a right angle. :-)
The minimum wage has risen very gradually, at best keeping up with inflation. A lot of Democrat-types would have it be doubled. THAT would have a big effect.
It's a rare boss who can take constructive criticism, and it gets worse the higher up you go.
Good luck rattling the cages.
No, he's not running on his record, he's running on an anti-Kerry record. His record over the past four years is not something he wants to discuss.
You must have heard different convention speeches than I did. Aside from a few barbs by McCain and Cheney, the Democrats were hardly even mentioned, except by one of their own, and not at all by the President.
I also have a high opinion of McCain, but I really have to question his judgement with respect to the Campaign Reform law he co-sponsored... he (and everyone who voted for and the guy who signed the law) seemed to think that you could just wish away the influence of all this money in campaigning and it would not show up in a different way.
President Bush found out the hard way when George Soros financed AdHominem.org and threw poo at him for a year. Likewise, the Swift Boat guys are doing the same to Kerry (although it's amusing how much Kerry has backpedaled on some of his Vietnam claims). The thing is, they're 527's. Who's behind them? Who's writing the checks? We'll never know, and so we sit around hearing charges that the Bush Campaign is pumping money into SBVfT, but no one can prove it, because it can all be paid for secretly.
I can't think of one reason why things are better now than they were before this stupid law and many reasons why they are worse.
The Internet will do more to reform campaigning than laws ever could, because it's the one medium where Free Speech is far less hampered by lack of money. It's one of the reasons why news outlets like the New York Times are in credibility free-fall (of course the fact that they make The Washington Post look unbiased is the main reason the NYT is on the outs).