Remember back in the day when there was no internet? Or personal computers? No? Ok then.
Yes, actually, I do.
I also remember when "to take advantage of your lower drinking age and get shitfaced on that fine Canuck ale of yours" counted as a valid reason to visit Canada, as far as the border guards cared, that they would even laugh at and wish you a good night.
Funny how times have changed, when visiting Canada from the US (or more accurately, coming back) didn't feel more like crossing between East and West Germany at the height of the cold war, than a day-trip to visit a fun and slightly different culture.
Oh, but our jobs can go to Mexico without the slightest barriers. Progress: The Aristocrats!
I don't mind needing a passport for visiting entirely different countries. After all, escaping to South America is the legendary trick used for 200 years by suspects, whereupon they invoke Nelson's HaHa.
You realize, of course, that you don't need a passport to leave the US - Only to get back in with a minimum of hassle? Which if you never planned to come back, seems like a moot point.
Not to mention that someone fleeing life in prison probably wouldn't get cold feet over mere doc fraud.:)
Maybe Slashdoters are passionate, but we are the minority compared to the population at large.
I agree with you completely, but I think you've missed the bigger social context here...
I would say that Slashdotters feel passionate about the "right" issues, the ones that truly represent an erosion of our basic rights, that the average Joe doesn't even recognize as a problem. But make no mistake, Joe still recognizes his situation as getting worse by the day.
Until the police state will start to really affect everyday basic living, don't expect to see anything changed. Hell, TSA are molesting people in airports and asking for papers on roads and trains and I haven't even heard of any protests against it!
This involves more than the police state... People see their buying power steadily going down year after year, with token 2-3% COL increases compared with healthcare and energy costs going up 10-15% per year. The "core" CPI looks just the same as it ever did, yet bread and milk and beer and Twinkies cost twice as much as they did a decade ago. People in once-decent middle-class careers, even the ones not suddenly on the streets as a "newbie" at 50 years old, can't seem to make ends meet despite following all the rules and having thought themselves financially stable and "set" for retirement. Even on the subject of the police state, as you yourself point out, we can't help but notice Grandma getting felt up at the airport, and now the bus and train stations, in the name of protecting us from "foreigners" who hate our "freedom".
And don't forget the ones most likely to kick this off - We have the largest highly-educated but unemployed population of post-college 20-somethings ever. Lots of angsty kids who haven't yet come to appreciate their own morality and who don't see themselves as having much to lose.
Now - This very FP topic keeps coming up, wherein our new-and-improved Opiate of the Masses(tm) wants to put people in prison for watching the show through the back curtain instead of paying for a ticket.
When you take away the bread, and the circus owners will only put on their shows for the rich, Goodbye Rome.
What will be the new policies? Who will be the new leaders and how will they be different? What will be the new safeguards that will prevent the same issues as the previous ways?
Excellent questions, and to reiterate my opening comment, I agree with almost all of what you've said. But this last point I'd call the keystone issue keeping us in check at this point... As soon as someone comes up with an even halfway passable answer (please not "god" please not "god" please not "god"), I fully expect the revolution - violent or otherwise - to start within hours.
Not quite - More like the entire US government will bend over for the highest bidder. The fact that embassies serve our interests abroad, and the MPAA can bid pretty damned high, counts as merely an incidental fact in this situation.
Ironically enough, as a consequence, we may do better with the personally-richer candidate in any election, because it will cost more for them to take any potential buyer seriously. But at this point, it looks more and more like we have only one of the traditional "boxes" of democracy remaining.
Seriously? We have Hollywood publicly admitting an expectation of quid pro quo for its "campaign contributions" and now this, and the government doesn't give the least bit of a flying fuck. Welcome to the end of the modern experiment. At least we went the "Marie Antoinette", rather than the "thermonuclear global holocaust", route.
That should silence you assholes posting like it's no big deal or something.
Still no big deal - Sticks and stones, "get butch, bitch". And, I'd rather know my enemies than have them quietly work to sabotage our attempts at civil society.
or, more likely, someone messed with an improperly secured router.
I will agree completely that this one point makes the present issue comparable to an act of vandalism. And thanks to a massive overreaction by everyone involved, some 3th-rate digital "tagger" has gotten national media coverage of his stupid little prank. Congrats, he couldn't have dreamed of a more successful outcome.
but you do not have a right to put a sign out on your lawn preaching hate speech
Yes, actually, I do. I don't have the right to put such a sign on your lawn.
Or do you not consider every church I pass on my way to work condemning me to an eternity in Hell as "hate speech"? Because I do, oddly enough, and the fact that they belong to an socially acceptable religion doesn't make a damned (no pun intended) bit of difference in that.
Congress is 500+ pandering politicians voting on stuff that (at least TECHNICALLY) are in the interests of their constituency.
Except, most people have the same false assumption about Congress that they do about TV. With TV, we naturally assume, as the viewer, that we act as the customer and the shows serve as the product; in reality, we act as the product and the advertisers count as the real customers.
With Congress, the same idea applies - We assume they work for us, sometimes in ways we don't like, but overall for the purpose of keeping society flowing smoothly to our mutual benefit. In reality, they do act to maintain social stability, but couldn't care less about whether or not we like it - Only whether or not we can make it to work every morning, and to the store on the weekends to give back our pay for a fraction of what we produced during the week. Pump us for labor, then pump us again to get the money back.
Don't like it, and want to try living alone on a small farm in the middle of nowhere? You'll soon discover the joys of property tax, Citizen! In this world, you either belong to the oligarchy in the membership sense, belong to the oligarchy in the serfdom sense, or belong to the oligarchy in the prisoner/slave sense - With the latter the primary motivation for the "middle class" of that lineup.
Yeah, blah blah "Intellectual property" doesn't really exist, it's only copying not stealing, whatever.
Unfortunate that you got modded troll, because you make a good point.
I have to ask, though - At what point do you consider time and/or format shifting as "piracy", for ethical purposes?
If I watch live TV, no piracy, ostensibly because we see the ads that "pay" for it. But I can (and back before TiVo, most people did) use commercials as food/bathroom breaks, or just flip channels during them, so even in the bad-ol'-days, no one really watched them.
If I buy the season on DVD, no piracy, because I've actually directly paid for the content.
If I download the same show from a torrent, most of us would agree that violates the spirit of copyright, even if we don't particularly care and do it anyway.
If I rent the DVD and rip it, I think most would consider that piracy.
And of course, we have the DVR, where I can time and format shift it to watch wherever and whenever I want, which IMO most people have come to accept as not piracy.
But - How does ripping or torrenting differ from the DVR case, either functionally or in terms of compensation? Whether I "rip" a show from broadcast TV or rip it from a DVD, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer. Whether I download it from a torrent or "download" it from my TiVo To Go, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer. Whether I watch it live and promise to completely ignore the commercials, or watch a torrented 4th-hand fansubbed unlocked-PSP version, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer.
Basically, once the producer has "given it away" by broadcasting it to the world, how can any use of that content really fall into the same box as "stealing"?
Anyway, the part of your comment about using alpha state for 8+ hrs. Do you have more info on this?
Oddly enough, I don't - I have no idea whether or not anyone has ever studied that specifically. I have done research (as the "number cruncher" for the psych chair's group at my uni) on attention to a sustained task, and we found that the "pool" model of attention amounts to complete BS; but unfortunately we didn't have the gear to do any brain-wave measuring at the time.
But speaking from personal experience, a good coding session very clearly takes me (and, I expect, most programmers) into a deep alpha state - I lose almost all awareness of my surroundings (even my own body, things like hunger), and enter a world composed of thought and patterns of logic; the monitor provides mere feedback of what I "want" to go there. Any sudden external distractions, such as a visitor or the phone ringing, takes me 15-30 seconds to properly respond and usually makes me somewhat annoyed/irritable at the interruption of my thoughts. And I can stay in that state basically as long as I want - Or until I need to pee.:)
Relating back to your point, I have to wonder if that holds true of any "artist" deep in their work - That would prove quite the twist on the stereotypical alpha=daydreaming, beta=attending model.
Nobody loves real work except those that love the work.
I can't tell if you meant that as agreeing with me or counterpoint, but I agree with you completely - You really have to love any of those things to master them.
I would even argue that "artists" have it even harder, because for programmers, you merely need to love it to make a living at it; for any of the arts, you need to not only love doing it, but either count as a genius at your craft or get very, very lucky.
That said, I don't think that I could ever make an even halfway competent artist, not even if society so valued them as to hire any hack "draper" for a six-figure salary. With years of study, i could possibly manage technical illustration. But art? I just don't think even a lifetime of study would turn me into an Escher, nevermind a Rembrandt.
My take home is 90% of my salary. So an 85% take home is a pay cut for me.
Even married-filing-jointly, that would require you to have an AGI under $16,700.
So either you've figured out the "perfect" tax shelter, or even $72k at a full 28% would represent a huge increase for you, regardless of rate.
(In fairness, I used the marginal rather than actual rate - But that only changes the correct numbers by a few hundred bucks per year, not the difference between 17k and 85k).
But the sub $100,000 from a million would be insufficient. I'd need something supplementing it.
Keep in mind that you'd pay long-term capital gains of only 15% rather than 28%, basically boosting your ($100k) income by $13k/year (and for $200k/year at 33%, add another $5k/$100k/year savings to that).
And I don't know about you, but I could certainly get by on a take-home income of $85k/year - Hell, I make somewhat less than that gross, and live pretty damned well for my area.
To tell you the truth, I honestly don't know if most people could eventually learn to program well. I know that most people can, with time and effort, learn to write very, very simple programs - programs most of us would consider easy homework assignments from CSC101.
But most people hate hate hate everything that makes good programmers good programmers. They hate the tediousness, the methodicalness, the breaking-things-down-into-tiny-steps, the 8+ hours of keeping your brain in an alpha state. What "real" programmers view as fun and almost a form of meditation, the average Joe views as nothing short of self-imposed torture.
So yeah, maybe everyone could learn to program. But I have absolutely no concern that any time in my lifetime, "most" people will want to program even if they could learn to do it.
This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".
No. TPB doesn't host a damned thing (at least, none of the content of interest that we agree counts as "infringing"). They provide a place for 3rd parties to meet, nothing more and nothing less.
This doesn't amount to a "Prove I don't own it this stuff!" argument, but rather, a "What stuff?" one.
More importantly, TPB performs a service substantially similar to Google or Bing, just tailored to finding P2P feeds rather than websites. If the courts spank TPB over this, it comes scarily close for allowing the same logic to apply to Google.
Meanwhile, the salesguy is selling the image of being a rockstar in industry X and how such a rockstar would need this program to achieve that. Whether it will actually accomplish anything like that or not.
THIS.
Sales and marketing does indeed have a "hard", finely-honed skillset - At self-deception. They need to convince themselves that their customer "needs" rockstar vibes, before they can convince the world of it.
A lot of this goes back to the old stereotype of a salesman - Any Marketing 101 class will tell you on day-1 that a good salesman doesn't try to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, because Eskimos don't need refrigerators; then on day-1 of their first post-college job, these poor deluded folks learn that they have a quota for how many refrigerators they need to sell to Eskimos per week to keep their jobs.
I know what I need, I know where to get what I need, I know how to compare similar products to find the one that will best suit my needs. I don't need phone calls, junkmail, spam, product placement, or even sales drones offering to help me once I find it unavoidable that I enter their personal domains of power (just one of many points that makes shopping online far, far less painful than going to a brick and mortar).
You want to help me, as a marketer? Make sure your website has detailed, meaningful specs easily accessible for every product you sell. No, I don't care about your damned sales brochure. I don't want a reiteration of the selling points already listed on the box, or how your choice of palette supposedly appeals to my demographic. I care about Watts, I care about MHz, I care MPG, I care about capacities, I care about durability when gnawed on for a while by a rabid rottweiler. I don't care about "vibes", I don't care about colors, I don't care about how many other people use it (unless more people makes it more useful, such as with something like Facebook - Which I don't use), I don't care that nine out of ten dentists will take your money to admit they tried it once.
You mean the same way you pulled that out of your ass?
Please describe to me the process by which you would prove that a fuel line currently in geostationary orbit 24,000 miles above the surface of the Earth has a dirty rag (specifically - As opposed to a dead mouse or a styrofoam peanut, for example) blocking it, without taking it apart and finding said rag.
FTA: "They didn’t know it at the time, but a fuel line had become clogged. The blockage “was most likely caused by a small piece of cloth inadvertently left in the line during the manufacturing process,” according to the Government Accountability Office." (bolding mine).
So no, we don't know that a dirty rag caused a two billion dollar satellite to fail. We think a fuel line became clogged, and some government bean-counter pulled the dirty-rag hypothesis straight out of their derriere so they could sign off on this one and go home.
The French do not have a Common Law legal system. The US does. Simple as that.
Ideally, Civil vs Common law really shouldn't matter all that much; In practice, people (such as judges) do not function well as logic-parsing automatons. As a result, instead of seeing similar outcomes between cases with similar sets of facts, you have every French judge left to boil 208 years of law, spread over 40 volumes of steadily increasing length and complexity, into their own personal version of "the truth".
For an analogy to how well that works in the US, ask ten random Americans what it means that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", and you'll likely get ten completely different answers. Fortunately, in the US, we only have a single court that regularly goes back to "first principles", and even they tend to give at least a nod to the application of common law through the tradition of stare decisis.
Now, none of that has anything to do with corruption or stupidity, which we both (and indeed, all) have in abundance in our governments, no argument there.;)
Unless you are a French citizen or live in France you have no right to complain.
Oddly enough, you have made the single most insightful comment in this entire discussion - Albeit unintentionally.
Many people (mostly Americans, I expect) in this conversation have the mistaken impression that France has a legal system more-or-less the same as most of the rest of the civilized world.
That does not describe the reality of the situation.
France has a "legal system" in the same sense that ancient Rome did - Between two citizens of roughly equal stature, it does/did a pretty good job of doling out justice. Throw a foreigner into the mix, though, and he might as well just jump into the lion's mouth and save everyone the trouble.
I honestly don't understand why any modern (non-French) company bothers setting up shop there. In Google's shoes, I'd pull out of the whole damned country and change www.google.fr to one of their cute logo variants consisting entirely of obscene hand gestures.
I know, I know, you could easily mistake the last bastion of Communism for the failed socialist utopia you've tried to create over there (complete with rationing and rolling blackouts), but seriously, Californian law just doesn't apply to China. Or France. Or even to Nevada, for that matter.
Thanks for playing, though, better luck next time.
With the twitter account deal, the moron created an account FOR THE COMPANY, ON COMPANY TIME.
In most of the US (the "at will" states), for salaried employees, the idea of "ON COMPANY TIME" simply doesn't exist in a meaningful way - As the flip side of 60 hour weeks, a company can't dock an exempt employee for not putting in X hours a week. They can fire us on a whim, but they can't tie compensation to actual hours worked (if they could, the entire weak excuse for calling an employee "exempt" in the first place, wouldn't really exist).
Now, making a Twitter account "for" the company gets a bit more fuzzy. He didn't make it at the company's request, as part of his expected job duties - He did it of his own volition to help PhoneDog by circumventing their social networking cluelessness. If not for having used their name in the handle, we wouldn't even stop to consider that one as grey area.
Meaning, he literally stole company property OR defrauded the company by using personal time on company time while using company property. So either he's a fucktard or a criminal.
Wow, shill much? You realize that if I sit around all day at work and do nothing but pick my nose (or read and post on Slashdot - Hi there, fellow "thief"!), I haven't "stolen" or "defrauded" or any other wannabe-legalese offenses such that they can do a goddamned thing beyond firing me for not doing my job?
Holy shit the submitter is a moron.
Funny, that glass house looks like it would make a good mirror...
For everyone normally making fun of the tinfoil hat crowd, we have here nothing short of concrete proof of a vast (global?) intergovernmental conspiracy by the oligarchy to fuck... us... all.
We've discussed the technical merits (or lack thereof) of SOPA here on Slashdot numerous times, and always, the inescapable conclusion came out that we simply had Luddites and idiots for leaders. Now, we have a better, more accurate answer. Our leaders may still count as idiots, but they fully realize just how deliberately-bad a law they've crafted in SOPA.
Can you hear the drums in the distance, getting ever closer, Washington?
Slashdot Mirror
Pleading guilty seems to be pretty clear intent.
So every black man ever tricked into copping a plea, for two instead of ten years, in a mostly-white jurisdiction had "clear intent"?
And make no mistake, I normally call BS on that sort of racial BS, but you've just bluntly stated your support for nothing less.
Remember back in the day when there was no internet? Or personal computers? No? Ok then.
Yes, actually, I do.
I also remember when "to take advantage of your lower drinking age and get shitfaced on that fine Canuck ale of yours" counted as a valid reason to visit Canada, as far as the border guards cared, that they would even laugh at and wish you a good night.
Funny how times have changed, when visiting Canada from the US (or more accurately, coming back) didn't feel more like crossing between East and West Germany at the height of the cold war, than a day-trip to visit a fun and slightly different culture.
Oh, but our jobs can go to Mexico without the slightest barriers. Progress: The Aristocrats!
Your point?
I don't mind needing a passport for visiting entirely different countries. After all, escaping to South America is the legendary trick used for 200 years by suspects, whereupon they invoke Nelson's HaHa.
:)
You realize, of course, that you don't need a passport to leave the US - Only to get back in with a minimum of hassle? Which if you never planned to come back, seems like a moot point.
Not to mention that someone fleeing life in prison probably wouldn't get cold feet over mere doc fraud.
Maybe Slashdoters are passionate, but we are the minority compared to the population at large.
I agree with you completely, but I think you've missed the bigger social context here...
I would say that Slashdotters feel passionate about the "right" issues, the ones that truly represent an erosion of our basic rights, that the average Joe doesn't even recognize as a problem. But make no mistake, Joe still recognizes his situation as getting worse by the day.
Until the police state will start to really affect everyday basic living, don't expect to see anything changed. Hell, TSA are molesting people in airports and asking for papers on roads and trains and I haven't even heard of any protests against it!
This involves more than the police state... People see their buying power steadily going down year after year, with token 2-3% COL increases compared with healthcare and energy costs going up 10-15% per year. The "core" CPI looks just the same as it ever did, yet bread and milk and beer and Twinkies cost twice as much as they did a decade ago. People in once-decent middle-class careers, even the ones not suddenly on the streets as a "newbie" at 50 years old, can't seem to make ends meet despite following all the rules and having thought themselves financially stable and "set" for retirement. Even on the subject of the police state, as you yourself point out, we can't help but notice Grandma getting felt up at the airport, and now the bus and train stations, in the name of protecting us from "foreigners" who hate our "freedom".
And don't forget the ones most likely to kick this off - We have the largest highly-educated but unemployed population of post-college 20-somethings ever. Lots of angsty kids who haven't yet come to appreciate their own morality and who don't see themselves as having much to lose.
Now - This very FP topic keeps coming up, wherein our new-and-improved Opiate of the Masses(tm) wants to put people in prison for watching the show through the back curtain instead of paying for a ticket.
When you take away the bread, and the circus owners will only put on their shows for the rich, Goodbye Rome.
What will be the new policies? Who will be the new leaders and how will they be different? What will be the new safeguards that will prevent the same issues as the previous ways?
Excellent questions, and to reiterate my opening comment, I agree with almost all of what you've said. But this last point I'd call the keystone issue keeping us in check at this point... As soon as someone comes up with an even halfway passable answer (please not "god" please not "god" please not "god"), I fully expect the revolution - violent or otherwise - to start within hours.
So, american embassies are MPAA's bitches ?
Not quite - More like the entire US government will bend over for the highest bidder. The fact that embassies serve our interests abroad, and the MPAA can bid pretty damned high, counts as merely an incidental fact in this situation.
Ironically enough, as a consequence, we may do better with the personally-richer candidate in any election, because it will cost more for them to take any potential buyer seriously. But at this point, it looks more and more like we have only one of the traditional "boxes" of democracy remaining.
Seriously? We have Hollywood publicly admitting an expectation of quid pro quo for its "campaign contributions" and now this, and the government doesn't give the least bit of a flying fuck. Welcome to the end of the modern experiment. At least we went the "Marie Antoinette", rather than the "thermonuclear global holocaust", route.
That should silence you assholes posting like it's no big deal or something.
Still no big deal - Sticks and stones, "get butch, bitch". And, I'd rather know my enemies than have them quietly work to sabotage our attempts at civil society.
or, more likely, someone messed with an improperly secured router.
I will agree completely that this one point makes the present issue comparable to an act of vandalism. And thanks to a massive overreaction by everyone involved, some 3th-rate digital "tagger" has gotten national media coverage of his stupid little prank. Congrats, he couldn't have dreamed of a more successful outcome.
but you do not have a right to put a sign out on your lawn preaching hate speech
Yes, actually, I do. I don't have the right to put such a sign on your lawn.
Or do you not consider every church I pass on my way to work condemning me to an eternity in Hell as "hate speech"? Because I do, oddly enough, and the fact that they belong to an socially acceptable religion doesn't make a damned (no pun intended) bit of difference in that.
Congress is 500+ pandering politicians voting on stuff that (at least TECHNICALLY) are in the interests of their constituency.
Except, most people have the same false assumption about Congress that they do about TV. With TV, we naturally assume, as the viewer, that we act as the customer and the shows serve as the product; in reality, we act as the product and the advertisers count as the real customers.
With Congress, the same idea applies - We assume they work for us, sometimes in ways we don't like, but overall for the purpose of keeping society flowing smoothly to our mutual benefit. In reality, they do act to maintain social stability, but couldn't care less about whether or not we like it - Only whether or not we can make it to work every morning, and to the store on the weekends to give back our pay for a fraction of what we produced during the week. Pump us for labor, then pump us again to get the money back.
Don't like it, and want to try living alone on a small farm in the middle of nowhere? You'll soon discover the joys of property tax, Citizen! In this world, you either belong to the oligarchy in the membership sense, belong to the oligarchy in the serfdom sense, or belong to the oligarchy in the prisoner/slave sense - With the latter the primary motivation for the "middle class" of that lineup.
apparently, that one just remained a dream ...
Don't worry, they had the speech digitally remastered to replace that line with something about a walkie-talkie.
Yeah, blah blah "Intellectual property" doesn't really exist, it's only copying not stealing, whatever.
Unfortunate that you got modded troll, because you make a good point.
I have to ask, though - At what point do you consider time and/or format shifting as "piracy", for ethical purposes?
If I watch live TV, no piracy, ostensibly because we see the ads that "pay" for it. But I can (and back before TiVo, most people did) use commercials as food/bathroom breaks, or just flip channels during them, so even in the bad-ol'-days, no one really watched them.
If I buy the season on DVD, no piracy, because I've actually directly paid for the content.
If I download the same show from a torrent, most of us would agree that violates the spirit of copyright, even if we don't particularly care and do it anyway.
If I rent the DVD and rip it, I think most would consider that piracy.
And of course, we have the DVR, where I can time and format shift it to watch wherever and whenever I want, which IMO most people have come to accept as not piracy.
But - How does ripping or torrenting differ from the DVR case, either functionally or in terms of compensation? Whether I "rip" a show from broadcast TV or rip it from a DVD, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer. Whether I download it from a torrent or "download" it from my TiVo To Go, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer. Whether I watch it live and promise to completely ignore the commercials, or watch a torrented 4th-hand fansubbed unlocked-PSP version, it makes absolutely no difference to the producer.
Basically, once the producer has "given it away" by broadcasting it to the world, how can any use of that content really fall into the same box as "stealing"?
Anyway, the part of your comment about using alpha state for 8+ hrs. Do you have more info on this?
:)
Oddly enough, I don't - I have no idea whether or not anyone has ever studied that specifically. I have done research (as the "number cruncher" for the psych chair's group at my uni) on attention to a sustained task, and we found that the "pool" model of attention amounts to complete BS; but unfortunately we didn't have the gear to do any brain-wave measuring at the time.
But speaking from personal experience, a good coding session very clearly takes me (and, I expect, most programmers) into a deep alpha state - I lose almost all awareness of my surroundings (even my own body, things like hunger), and enter a world composed of thought and patterns of logic; the monitor provides mere feedback of what I "want" to go there. Any sudden external distractions, such as a visitor or the phone ringing, takes me 15-30 seconds to properly respond and usually makes me somewhat annoyed/irritable at the interruption of my thoughts. And I can stay in that state basically as long as I want - Or until I need to pee.
Relating back to your point, I have to wonder if that holds true of any "artist" deep in their work - That would prove quite the twist on the stereotypical alpha=daydreaming, beta=attending model.
Nobody loves real work except those that love the work.
I can't tell if you meant that as agreeing with me or counterpoint, but I agree with you completely - You really have to love any of those things to master them.
I would even argue that "artists" have it even harder, because for programmers, you merely need to love it to make a living at it; for any of the arts, you need to not only love doing it, but either count as a genius at your craft or get very, very lucky.
That said, I don't think that I could ever make an even halfway competent artist, not even if society so valued them as to hire any hack "draper" for a six-figure salary. With years of study, i could possibly manage technical illustration. But art? I just don't think even a lifetime of study would turn me into an Escher, nevermind a Rembrandt.
My take home is 90% of my salary. So an 85% take home is a pay cut for me.
Even married-filing-jointly, that would require you to have an AGI under $16,700.
So either you've figured out the "perfect" tax shelter, or even $72k at a full 28% would represent a huge increase for you, regardless of rate.
(In fairness, I used the marginal rather than actual rate - But that only changes the correct numbers by a few hundred bucks per year, not the difference between 17k and 85k).
But the sub $100,000 from a million would be insufficient. I'd need something supplementing it.
Keep in mind that you'd pay long-term capital gains of only 15% rather than 28%, basically boosting your ($100k) income by $13k/year (and for $200k/year at 33%, add another $5k/$100k/year savings to that).
And I don't know about you, but I could certainly get by on a take-home income of $85k/year - Hell, I make somewhat less than that gross, and live pretty damned well for my area.
But *most* people can program.
Aahahahahahahaahaha...
Heh. Ahem, sorry.
<snrrrrrrrk>
To tell you the truth, I honestly don't know if most people could eventually learn to program well. I know that most people can, with time and effort, learn to write very, very simple programs - programs most of us would consider easy homework assignments from CSC101.
But most people hate hate hate everything that makes good programmers good programmers. They hate the tediousness, the methodicalness, the breaking-things-down-into-tiny-steps, the 8+ hours of keeping your brain in an alpha state. What "real" programmers view as fun and almost a form of meditation, the average Joe views as nothing short of self-imposed torture.
So yeah, maybe everyone could learn to program. But I have absolutely no concern that any time in my lifetime, "most" people will want to program even if they could learn to do it.
This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".
No. TPB doesn't host a damned thing (at least, none of the content of interest that we agree counts as "infringing"). They provide a place for 3rd parties to meet, nothing more and nothing less.
This doesn't amount to a "Prove I don't own it this stuff!" argument, but rather, a "What stuff?" one.
More importantly, TPB performs a service substantially similar to Google or Bing, just tailored to finding P2P feeds rather than websites. If the courts spank TPB over this, it comes scarily close for allowing the same logic to apply to Google.
Friends don't let friends use IE 6^W^WFF 11.
Out of curiosity, on what bizarre system do you have ETB mapped to the BS/DEL-like action?
Meanwhile, the salesguy is selling the image of being a rockstar in industry X and how such a rockstar would need this program to achieve that. Whether it will actually accomplish anything like that or not.
THIS.
Sales and marketing does indeed have a "hard", finely-honed skillset - At self-deception. They need to convince themselves that their customer "needs" rockstar vibes, before they can convince the world of it.
A lot of this goes back to the old stereotype of a salesman - Any Marketing 101 class will tell you on day-1 that a good salesman doesn't try to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, because Eskimos don't need refrigerators; then on day-1 of their first post-college job, these poor deluded folks learn that they have a quota for how many refrigerators they need to sell to Eskimos per week to keep their jobs.
I know what I need, I know where to get what I need, I know how to compare similar products to find the one that will best suit my needs. I don't need phone calls, junkmail, spam, product placement, or even sales drones offering to help me once I find it unavoidable that I enter their personal domains of power (just one of many points that makes shopping online far, far less painful than going to a brick and mortar).
You want to help me, as a marketer? Make sure your website has detailed, meaningful specs easily accessible for every product you sell. No, I don't care about your damned sales brochure. I don't want a reiteration of the selling points already listed on the box, or how your choice of palette supposedly appeals to my demographic. I care about Watts, I care about MHz, I care MPG, I care about capacities, I care about durability when gnawed on for a while by a rabid rottweiler. I don't care about "vibes", I don't care about colors, I don't care about how many other people use it (unless more people makes it more useful, such as with something like Facebook - Which I don't use), I don't care that nine out of ten dentists will take your money to admit they tried it once.
Bah... You whipper-snappers and your "Advanced" D&D. All the cool kids still play the original unmodified D&D rules.
;)
Well... No. The cool kids play Football. And they can have it.
You mean the same way you pulled that out of your ass?
Please describe to me the process by which you would prove that a fuel line currently in geostationary orbit 24,000 miles above the surface of the Earth has a dirty rag (specifically - As opposed to a dead mouse or a styrofoam peanut, for example) blocking it, without taking it apart and finding said rag.
Yeah, thought so, "dipshit".
FTA: "They didn’t know it at the time, but a fuel line had become clogged. The blockage “was most likely caused by a small piece of cloth inadvertently left in the line during the manufacturing process,” according to the Government Accountability Office." (bolding mine).
So no, we don't know that a dirty rag caused a two billion dollar satellite to fail. We think a fuel line became clogged, and some government bean-counter pulled the dirty-rag hypothesis straight out of their derriere so they could sign off on this one and go home.
I would bother asking for cite
;)
The French do not have a Common Law legal system. The US does. Simple as that.
Ideally, Civil vs Common law really shouldn't matter all that much; In practice, people (such as judges) do not function well as logic-parsing automatons. As a result, instead of seeing similar outcomes between cases with similar sets of facts, you have every French judge left to boil 208 years of law, spread over 40 volumes of steadily increasing length and complexity, into their own personal version of "the truth".
For an analogy to how well that works in the US, ask ten random Americans what it means that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", and you'll likely get ten completely different answers. Fortunately, in the US, we only have a single court that regularly goes back to "first principles", and even they tend to give at least a nod to the application of common law through the tradition of stare decisis.
Now, none of that has anything to do with corruption or stupidity, which we both (and indeed, all) have in abundance in our governments, no argument there.
Unless you are a French citizen or live in France you have no right to complain.
Oddly enough, you have made the single most insightful comment in this entire discussion - Albeit unintentionally.
Many people (mostly Americans, I expect) in this conversation have the mistaken impression that France has a legal system more-or-less the same as most of the rest of the civilized world.
That does not describe the reality of the situation.
France has a "legal system" in the same sense that ancient Rome did - Between two citizens of roughly equal stature, it does/did a pretty good job of doling out justice. Throw a foreigner into the mix, though, and he might as well just jump into the lion's mouth and save everyone the trouble.
I honestly don't understand why any modern (non-French) company bothers setting up shop there. In Google's shoes, I'd pull out of the whole damned country and change www.google.fr to one of their cute logo variants consisting entirely of obscene hand gestures.
China != California.
I know, I know, you could easily mistake the last bastion of Communism for the failed socialist utopia you've tried to create over there (complete with rationing and rolling blackouts), but seriously, Californian law just doesn't apply to China. Or France. Or even to Nevada, for that matter.
Thanks for playing, though, better luck next time.
With the twitter account deal, the moron created an account FOR THE COMPANY, ON COMPANY TIME.
In most of the US (the "at will" states), for salaried employees, the idea of "ON COMPANY TIME" simply doesn't exist in a meaningful way - As the flip side of 60 hour weeks, a company can't dock an exempt employee for not putting in X hours a week. They can fire us on a whim, but they can't tie compensation to actual hours worked (if they could, the entire weak excuse for calling an employee "exempt" in the first place, wouldn't really exist).
Now, making a Twitter account "for" the company gets a bit more fuzzy. He didn't make it at the company's request, as part of his expected job duties - He did it of his own volition to help PhoneDog by circumventing their social networking cluelessness. If not for having used their name in the handle, we wouldn't even stop to consider that one as grey area.
Meaning, he literally stole company property OR defrauded the company by using personal time on company time while using company property. So either he's a fucktard or a criminal.
Wow, shill much? You realize that if I sit around all day at work and do nothing but pick my nose (or read and post on Slashdot - Hi there, fellow "thief"!), I haven't "stolen" or "defrauded" or any other wannabe-legalese offenses such that they can do a goddamned thing beyond firing me for not doing my job?
Holy shit the submitter is a moron.
Funny, that glass house looks like it would make a good mirror...
For everyone normally making fun of the tinfoil hat crowd, we have here nothing short of concrete proof of a vast (global?) intergovernmental conspiracy by the oligarchy to fuck... us... all.
We've discussed the technical merits (or lack thereof) of SOPA here on Slashdot numerous times, and always, the inescapable conclusion came out that we simply had Luddites and idiots for leaders. Now, we have a better, more accurate answer. Our leaders may still count as idiots, but they fully realize just how deliberately-bad a law they've crafted in SOPA.
Can you hear the drums in the distance, getting ever closer, Washington?