Amen to that. Payroll tax is essentially a hidden income tax, and one that doesn't have the progressive (ie. relatively fair) qualities of regular income tax.
It's also an active disincentive to people who are thinking of starting their own business or just doing some extra work on the side, because you have to pay them yourself if you're self-employed. This can easily push your marginal tax rate to about half your earnings, even on average incomes.
For the very rich, the U.S. has the best health care in the world. That's why rich people from all over the world come to America for treatment.
For the middle classes, the "privatized" health system in the U.S. actually works in the same way as the "socialist" health system in European countries. This is due to health insurance, which is mostly paid for by employers. The employers in turn get a huge tax break on subsidising health insurance, so in a sense the whole system is actually paid for by the government (which of course means other taxpayers --- or with the current deficit, future taxpayers). The main differences:
1. In addition to doctors, nurses, etc., the U.S. healthcare system also has to support large parts of the insurance and lawsuit industries. This is why Americans pay more for health care than their counterparts in other countries but get about the same level of service.
2. People who don't have a job are completely screwed. The system isn't so bad that poor people are always left to die, but it can force anyone who doesn't have several million dollars to spare into bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Almost all corporations exploit this as a way to retain employees while cutting pay and increasing hours: The threat of losing health insurance means that Americans are terrified of layoffs in a way that Europeans are not.
Communism and capitalism are both about the distribution of physical objects, which by nature are limited: If the stockholders take a larger slice of the pie, the workers get a smaller one, and vice-versa. New technologies ("economic growth") can make the pie larger, but it's still finite. Also, this growth is often either illusory (it comes at the expense of damage to the natural environment, which is also finite) or quickly compensated for by an increase in population.
RMS's philosophy is about the distribution of information. This is not a physical object: You can give it away to as many people as you like, yet still keep it. The pie is infinite, so sharing costs nothing. The "intellectual property" industry tries to obscure this, but the huge number of files on P2P file sharing networks show that most people aren't fooled.
It's not a security mechanism, just an automated way of asking Google not to spider the site. Ignoring the request isn't difficult, but it is unethical and possibly illegal, so most legitimate search engines (including Google) tend to follow these requests. The 'bots that don't are usually email address harvesters used by spammers, who as we all know don't care about ethics, laws, etc.
MS might just disallow Google (not other search engines), so in that case everyone else would be fully within their rights to crawl MS's sites.
I can't think of many people wealthy enough to take on the RIAAA who would also be prepared to risk everything against them. But why not a charity or non-profit?
The community has rallied round to pay the settlements for the 12-year-old girl who shared files and the college student who wrote a search engine, so we could get together and start a fighting fund for whoever does want to take them on. Or is contributing to the EFF already the best way to fight back?
What makes everyone so sure that SCO actually has any technical staff left? The company doesn't really need programmers anymore (or a sales department, for that matter) and McBride doesn't seem like the type to keep them around out of charity.
Yes, people who understand code might be useful when trying to determine whether SCO code really has been copied into Linux, but this is SCO we're talking about, not a sane company. Does the "evidence" shown so far look like it has been run by anyone remotely competent? The geeks have all been fired and replaced by lawyers and investor relations types.
"Scientists" is a more inclusive term than "workers in munitions factories". In a free society, we should expect scientists in munitions factories to have a similar range of ethics to other munitions workers, usually support ("we need these munitions to defend ourselves against the enemy") or indifference ("ethics?").
Scientists in general have the same set of ethics as workers in general. In a totalitarian society, they may have few choices except making weapons ("the military-industrial complex is evil, but I need to feed my family").
There are two issues here. The Supreme Court decision was only about the various Florida recounts, and that was what Gore said he disagrees with but accepts.
Then there's the Electoral College, which ensured that the few hundred disputed votes in Florida were so important, even though everyone accepts that Gore had about a half million more votes than Bush nationwide. This is obviously unfair, but Gore isn't the best person to criticize it. Before the election, some of his supporters were speculating happily about the opposite outcome (Bush winning the popular vote and Gore the presidency). Unfortunately, there's little chance of it being changed, as the constitution was designed specificially to be unfair in this regard. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) The very people who benefit most from the College are those who would have to remove it.
it's effectively impossible to steal a copyright. (at least I can't reckon how one would)
Start by suing IBM. This gets you a lot of publicity. Next, say that Linux contains your valuable intellectual property, but refuse to say what that is. Finally, find some crazy lawyers who will argue that GPL is the same as public domain.
If enough people buy your latter argument, you will be able to distribute GPL code without adhering to the GPL. If they buy the former argument, you will be able to prevent people from using or copying Linx unless they pay you money. Combined, these are exactly equivalent to stealing the copyright on Linux from the people who actually wrote it.
Alternatively, just be a record company or publisher. That way, you can use your power as part of a cartel to force musicians and authors into restrictive contracts that give you control over their work.
In many countries, you are legally required to carry a drivers' license while driving. In the U.S., you're required to carry it in order to enter a bar (if you look under retirement age), pay by check, travel by plane or complete many other tasks. (A passport will do instead, provided it's from a well-known "friendly" country.) However, you don't need it at all times.
The problem with compulsory ID cards is, as you say, that people would have to carry them even if they just go out for a walk. Under the govt.'s preferred scenario, failure to produce an ID to a policeman on demand would be a criminal offence, or at the very least a cause for a long interrogation while the police find some other means to verify identity.
The other risk is that many businesses would come to rely on the universal ID card, making it easy for either the government or some data-mining corporation to cross-reference information and keep detailed, relatively accurate files on everyone.
Most people I know store their voicemail passwords as a "quick dial" number on their office phones. Sure, it's insecure, but it's an effective workaround! And if someone's rifling through your desk, the possibility that they might pick up a voicemail message is usually not the most serious risk.
Re:64-benchmarks wont be good
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
Intel and AMD say that the Opteron and Itanium aren't competing with each other, but that isn't entirely true. Intel knows that saying the two are competitors would be the kiss of death for Itanium, because it would be an admission that they offer comparable performance. Likewise, AMD has no desire to go after the Itanium market, because right now there isn't a serious Itanium market.
Opteron and Itanium are both aimed at Unix servers, in particular those using 64-bit processors from IBM, HP and (especially) Sun. Indirectly, they are helping both Micrsooft and the open-source community, by pushing the replacement of proprietary Unix with Windows and (even more likely) Linux. Intel is currently doing very well in this segment, but that's with the Xeon, not the Itanium. Although it's only 32-bit, the Xeon's (relatively) low cost and ability to work with cheap commodity components make the tradeoff worthwhile.
The Opteron seems to offer the best of both worlds, but many big customers aren't yet ready to move to AMD. ("No one ever got fired for buying Intel!"). Intel is hoping that by the time they are, the x86 architecture will have run out of steam and Moore's Law will make the Itanium more competitive.
It isn't just the secular ("post-Christian") world that is abandoning all sense of decency. It's religion too, and in particular Christianity. The religious right is constantly complaining about sex, drugs and violent movies, yet condones corporations that do everything in the name of profit. (Yes, I know that fundamentalists don't represent all Christians, but they do have a very powerful influence on U.S. policy.)
At the core of most religions is some variant of the "Do unto others" Golden Rule. There's a reason for this: it's the best strategy for long-term survival in a society composed of intelligent agents. It emerges naturally through evolution, and is probably hard-coded into our DNA. Only in the corporate world is it routinely ignored.
The main "benefit" is that the MPAA and RIAA simply won't make their content available on non-DRM platforms.
It's blackmail, but it'll work. Although I hate DRM, I already own one DRM-crippled device because without one, I won't be able to watch DVDs legally. This makes me a hypocrite, but hardly unique. (All DVDs, DVD players and DVD drives contain DRM, in the form of region encoding, CSS and/or Macrovision.)
You could be right. But the motivation for DRM in hardware is pretty clear: The copyright cartels want to make sure that no-one is running a screen capture or audio recorder utility, or perhaps even make sure they're not connecting non-DRM speakers (the "analog hole").
Software DRM can't do this, even at the OS level. When Windows includes DRM, it will needs a hardware component (Palladium, LaGrande, TCPA, etc.) to ensure that it isn't running on a VM or emulator within a non-DRM OS.
Discussion about SCO on/. is good, but the editors need to be careful about linking to pro-SCO articles. Large online publishers love a Slashdotting (more page impressions), and many privately gloat that they resort to trolling in an attempt to drive traffic. (This is separate from the well-known problem of clueless journalists who don't know enough to dismiss SCO's claims out-of-hand, and from the even better-known problem of corrupt publishers who censor criticism of that one big company.) Links to SCO FUD ultimately result in more SCO FUD.
The big question is: Did that one company actually instigate this, or is SCO's strategy just evolving. I think the latter is more likely: SCO originally wanted to be bought by IBM, but now it's just spreading FUD in the hope of more "license fees" from that one GPL-hating company.
Pump-and-dump is a part of it too, of course, but the longer McBride and Canopy can keep SCO alive, in the news and with a high stock price, the more stock they can sell and the less likely they are to suffer justice. When it's all over and SCO files Chapter 7, a relatively long lifetime will enable the enriched executives to claim that they did actually have a long-term business plan that just went wrong, and that they weren't deliberately engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
The precedent is that Google will take down links under threat of DMCA, not a legal one. However, that precedent was actually set a long time ago, by the "Church" of Scientology demanding that Google stop linking to Xenu.net. (There may have been evene earlier cases with Google and DCMA, but that's the big one.)
In the CoS/Xenu case, Google didn't stop indexing Scientology altogether; they just replaced the Xenu link with one to the DMCA notice. Following their own precedent, they have to do the same with Kazaa.
He claims to be a devout Mormon, just like he claims to own the IP on all operating systems ever written (except Solaris). I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs, but my guess is that few religions would condone his conduct, and I see no reason to believe anything he says. Fake piety is becoming almost as popular in business as in politics.
Anyway, the point of the article is that SCO are a bunch of crazy fundamentalists who can be be compared to creationists, so pointing out his religious beliefs is fitting (if slightly insulting to Mormons and creationists). The analogy isn't perfect, though: SCO are claiming that Linux evolved from "their" Unix, while sane people are pretty sure that it was created anew.
It's not supernatural, just trial and (lots of) error. IBM was failing spectacularly in the late 1980s, its monopoly lost to Microsoft, but after several attempts it has been able to reinvent itself.
IBM is basically a conglomerate, with each business unit often unaware of what the others are doing. Many employees are so wrapped up in their own departments that they don't know much about Linux, Windows or even computers at all (except for email: IBM has been using it internally for >20 years). This leads to some good (Linux), some evil (CPRM), some sound decisions (exiting the desktop business) and some things that just seem crazy (the apparent obsession with Grid Computing). I guess thats' a deliberate strategy: Do a lot of different things, and some will succeed.
Because caning is cheap. That means it isn't attractive to corporations or unions, both of which lobby for more prisons and ever-tougher laws.Neither would caning mean a large pool of slave labor that corporations can exploit for below minimum wage, or an even larger pool of inactive people who politicians don't want to show up in the unemployment statistics.
Even worse for corrupt politicians and corporations, caning can be over in minutes, giving the convict a chance to get on with his (or, rarely, her) life, hold down a job and maintain social and family relationships. This might actually reduce crime, something that is anethema to both the incarceration industry and to politicians who require an excuse for evermore repressive laws.
Prison, on the other hand, disrupts life to such an extent that released prisoners find it almost impossible to find legitimate employment or reintegrate into society. Many decide to go back to crime, having been forced to spend months or years associating mainly with criminals. Prison ensures a steady supply of reoffenders, increasing both profits for the prison companies and fear among the public.
Because spammers are criminals
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P2P Spam?
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· Score: 1
Even under jurisdictions which haven't outlawed spam itself, hacking into someone else's open relay is often a crime. Spammers do that all the time, and this network is just the same thing on a (much) larger scale.
Pyramid schemes, child pornography and counterfeit prescription drugs are also illegal, whether promoted through spam or not, and my inbox is full of offers for those.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. Payroll tax is essentially a hidden income tax, and one that doesn't have the progressive (ie. relatively fair) qualities of regular income tax.
It's also an active disincentive to people who are thinking of starting their own business or just doing some extra work on the side, because you have to pay them yourself if you're self-employed. This can easily push your marginal tax rate to about half your earnings, even on average incomes.
For the very rich, the U.S. has the best health care in the world. That's why rich people from all over the world come to America for treatment.
For the middle classes, the "privatized" health system in the U.S. actually works in the same way as the "socialist" health system in European countries. This is due to health insurance, which is mostly paid for by employers. The employers in turn get a huge tax break on subsidising health insurance, so in a sense the whole system is actually paid for by the government (which of course means other taxpayers --- or with the current deficit, future taxpayers). The main differences:
1. In addition to doctors, nurses, etc., the U.S. healthcare system also has to support large parts of the insurance and lawsuit industries. This is why Americans pay more for health care than their counterparts in other countries but get about the same level of service.
2. People who don't have a job are completely screwed. The system isn't so bad that poor people are always left to die, but it can force anyone who doesn't have several million dollars to spare into bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Almost all corporations exploit this as a way to retain employees while cutting pay and increasing hours: The threat of losing health insurance means that Americans are terrified of layoffs in a way that Europeans are not.
Communism and capitalism are both about the distribution of physical objects, which by nature are limited: If the stockholders take a larger slice of the pie, the workers get a smaller one, and vice-versa. New technologies ("economic growth") can make the pie larger, but it's still finite. Also, this growth is often either illusory (it comes at the expense of damage to the natural environment, which is also finite) or quickly compensated for by an increase in population.
RMS's philosophy is about the distribution of information. This is not a physical object: You can give it away to as many people as you like, yet still keep it. The pie is infinite, so sharing costs nothing. The "intellectual property" industry tries to obscure this, but the huge number of files on P2P file sharing networks show that most people aren't fooled.
It's not a security mechanism, just an automated way of asking Google not to spider the site. Ignoring the request isn't difficult, but it is unethical and possibly illegal, so most legitimate search engines (including Google) tend to follow these requests. The 'bots that don't are usually email address harvesters used by spammers, who as we all know don't care about ethics, laws, etc.
MS might just disallow Google (not other search engines), so in that case everyone else would be fully within their rights to crawl MS's sites.
I can't think of many people wealthy enough to take on the RIAAA who would also be prepared to risk everything against them. But why not a charity or non-profit?
The community has rallied round to pay the settlements for the 12-year-old girl who shared files and the college student who wrote a search engine, so we could get together and start a fighting fund for whoever does want to take them on. Or is contributing to the EFF already the best way to fight back?
What makes everyone so sure that SCO actually has any technical staff left? The company doesn't really need programmers anymore (or a sales department, for that matter) and McBride doesn't seem like the type to keep them around out of charity.
Yes, people who understand code might be useful when trying to determine whether SCO code really has been copied into Linux, but this is SCO we're talking about, not a sane company. Does the "evidence" shown so far look like it has been run by anyone remotely competent? The geeks have all been fired and replaced by lawyers and investor relations types.
"Scientists" is a more inclusive term than "workers in munitions factories". In a free society, we should expect scientists in munitions factories to have a similar range of ethics to other munitions workers, usually support ("we need these munitions to defend ourselves against the enemy") or indifference ("ethics?").
Scientists in general have the same set of ethics as workers in general. In a totalitarian society, they may have few choices except making weapons ("the military-industrial complex is evil, but I need to feed my family").
There are two issues here. The Supreme Court decision was only about the various Florida recounts, and that was what Gore said he disagrees with but accepts.
Then there's the Electoral College, which ensured that the few hundred disputed votes in Florida were so important, even though everyone accepts that Gore had about a half million more votes than Bush nationwide. This is obviously unfair, but Gore isn't the best person to criticize it. Before the election, some of his supporters were speculating happily about the opposite outcome (Bush winning the popular vote and Gore the presidency). Unfortunately, there's little chance of it being changed, as the constitution was designed specificially to be unfair in this regard. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) The very people who benefit most from the College are those who would have to remove it.
This is the same argument that Microsoft is using against Linux: If you pay money for your software, you won't be sued by SCO.
it's effectively impossible to steal a copyright. (at least I can't reckon how one would)
Start by suing IBM. This gets you a lot of publicity. Next, say that Linux contains your valuable intellectual property, but refuse to say what that is. Finally, find some crazy lawyers who will argue that GPL is the same as public domain.
If enough people buy your latter argument, you will be able to distribute GPL code without adhering to the GPL. If they buy the former argument, you will be able to prevent people from using or copying Linx unless they pay you money. Combined, these are exactly equivalent to stealing the copyright on Linux from the people who actually wrote it.
Alternatively, just be a record company or publisher. That way, you can use your power as part of a cartel to force musicians and authors into restrictive contracts that give you control over their work.
In many countries, you are legally required to carry a drivers' license while driving. In the U.S., you're required to carry it in order to enter a bar (if you look under retirement age), pay by check, travel by plane or complete many other tasks. (A passport will do instead, provided it's from a well-known "friendly" country.) However, you don't need it at all times.
The problem with compulsory ID cards is, as you say, that people would have to carry them even if they just go out for a walk. Under the govt.'s preferred scenario, failure to produce an ID to a policeman on demand would be a criminal offence, or at the very least a cause for a long interrogation while the police find some other means to verify identity.
The other risk is that many businesses would come to rely on the universal ID card, making it easy for either the government or some data-mining corporation to cross-reference information and keep detailed, relatively accurate files on everyone.
Most people I know store their voicemail passwords as a "quick dial" number on their office phones. Sure, it's insecure, but it's an effective workaround! And if someone's rifling through your desk, the possibility that they might pick up a voicemail message is usually not the most serious risk.
Intel and AMD say that the Opteron and Itanium aren't competing with each other, but that isn't entirely true. Intel knows that saying the two are competitors would be the kiss of death for Itanium, because it would be an admission that they offer comparable performance. Likewise, AMD has no desire to go after the Itanium market, because right now there isn't a serious Itanium market.
Opteron and Itanium are both aimed at Unix servers, in particular those using 64-bit processors from IBM, HP and (especially) Sun. Indirectly, they are helping both Micrsooft and the open-source community, by pushing the replacement of proprietary Unix with Windows and (even more likely) Linux. Intel is currently doing very well in this segment, but that's with the Xeon, not the Itanium. Although it's only 32-bit, the Xeon's (relatively) low cost and ability to work with cheap commodity components make the tradeoff worthwhile.
The Opteron seems to offer the best of both worlds, but many big customers aren't yet ready to move to AMD. ("No one ever got fired for buying Intel!"). Intel is hoping that by the time they are, the x86 architecture will have run out of steam and Moore's Law will make the Itanium more competitive.
It isn't just the secular ("post-Christian") world that is abandoning all sense of decency. It's religion too, and in particular Christianity. The religious right is constantly complaining about sex, drugs and violent movies, yet condones corporations that do everything in the name of profit. (Yes, I know that fundamentalists don't represent all Christians, but they do have a very powerful influence on U.S. policy.)
At the core of most religions is some variant of the "Do unto others" Golden Rule. There's a reason for this: it's the best strategy for long-term survival in a society composed of intelligent agents. It emerges naturally through evolution, and is probably hard-coded into our DNA. Only in the corporate world is it routinely ignored.
I find it hard to associate Avery Brooks with IBM. He should have been in a commercial for that big router company.
IBM's theory was that the original hippies are now middle-aged senior managers in large corporations.
They won't repeat it, though. The Peace sign is now seen as too political.
The main "benefit" is that the MPAA and RIAA simply won't make their content available on non-DRM platforms.
It's blackmail, but it'll work. Although I hate DRM, I already own one DRM-crippled device because without one, I won't be able to watch DVDs legally. This makes me a hypocrite, but hardly unique. (All DVDs, DVD players and DVD drives contain DRM, in the form of region encoding, CSS and/or Macrovision.)
You could be right. But the motivation for DRM in hardware is pretty clear: The copyright cartels want to make sure that no-one is running a screen capture or audio recorder utility, or perhaps even make sure they're not connecting non-DRM speakers (the "analog hole").
Software DRM can't do this, even at the OS level. When Windows includes DRM, it will needs a hardware component (Palladium, LaGrande, TCPA, etc.) to ensure that it isn't running on a VM or emulator within a non-DRM OS.
Discussion about SCO on /. is good, but the editors need to be careful about linking to pro-SCO articles. Large online publishers love a Slashdotting (more page impressions), and many privately gloat that they resort to trolling in an attempt to drive traffic. (This is separate from the well-known problem of clueless journalists who don't know enough to dismiss SCO's claims out-of-hand, and from the even better-known problem of corrupt publishers who censor criticism of that one big company.) Links to SCO FUD ultimately result in more SCO FUD.
The big question is: Did that one company actually instigate this, or is SCO's strategy just evolving. I think the latter is more likely: SCO originally wanted to be bought by IBM, but now it's just spreading FUD in the hope of more "license fees" from that one GPL-hating company.
Pump-and-dump is a part of it too, of course, but the longer McBride and Canopy can keep SCO alive, in the news and with a high stock price, the more stock they can sell and the less likely they are to suffer justice. When it's all over and SCO files Chapter 7, a relatively long lifetime will enable the enriched executives to claim that they did actually have a long-term business plan that just went wrong, and that they weren't deliberately engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
The precedent is that Google will take down links under threat of DMCA, not a legal one. However, that precedent was actually set a long time ago, by the "Church" of Scientology demanding that Google stop linking to Xenu.net. (There may have been evene earlier cases with Google and DCMA, but that's the big one.)
In the CoS/Xenu case, Google didn't stop indexing Scientology altogether; they just replaced the Xenu link with one to the DMCA notice. Following their own precedent, they have to do the same with Kazaa.
He claims to be a devout Mormon, just like he claims to own the IP on all operating systems ever written (except Solaris). I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs, but my guess is that few religions would condone his conduct, and I see no reason to believe anything he says. Fake piety is becoming almost as popular in business as in politics.
Anyway, the point of the article is that SCO are a bunch of crazy fundamentalists who can be be compared to creationists, so pointing out his religious beliefs is fitting (if slightly insulting to Mormons and creationists). The analogy isn't perfect, though: SCO are claiming that Linux evolved from "their" Unix, while sane people are pretty sure that it was created anew.
It's not supernatural, just trial and (lots of) error. IBM was failing spectacularly in the late 1980s, its monopoly lost to Microsoft, but after several attempts it has been able to reinvent itself.
IBM is basically a conglomerate, with each business unit often unaware of what the others are doing. Many employees are so wrapped up in their own departments that they don't know much about Linux, Windows or even computers at all (except for email: IBM has been using it internally for >20 years). This leads to some good (Linux), some evil (CPRM), some sound decisions (exiting the desktop business) and some things that just seem crazy (the apparent obsession with Grid Computing). I guess thats' a deliberate strategy: Do a lot of different things, and some will succeed.
Because caning is cheap. That means it isn't attractive to corporations or unions, both of which lobby for more prisons and ever-tougher laws.Neither would caning mean a large pool of slave labor that corporations can exploit for below minimum wage, or an even larger pool of inactive people who politicians don't want to show up in the unemployment statistics.
Even worse for corrupt politicians and corporations, caning can be over in minutes, giving the convict a chance to get on with his (or, rarely, her) life, hold down a job and maintain social and family relationships. This might actually reduce crime, something that is anethema to both the incarceration industry and to politicians who require an excuse for evermore repressive laws.
Prison, on the other hand, disrupts life to such an extent that released prisoners find it almost impossible to find legitimate employment or reintegrate into society. Many decide to go back to crime, having been forced to spend months or years associating mainly with criminals. Prison ensures a steady supply of reoffenders, increasing both profits for the prison companies and fear among the public.
Pyramid schemes, child pornography and counterfeit prescription drugs are also illegal, whether promoted through spam or not, and my inbox is full of offers for those.