You do not neded to do away with capital gains tax.. just income tax. The money needs to go someplace. I guess investment firms could be forced to deduct the tax automatically when you sell stuff, so individual people would not need to fill out taxes unless they actually took possetion of the stock. I suppose you would also need to keep things like inheretance tax.
Maybe, maybe not. These are interesting ideas, and I don't disagree with them, I just don't think they address a truly significant problem. People talk about rich people evading taxes and so on, but really, this is a relatively minor problem. If we simply stopped taxing millionaires altogether, it wouldn't make a significant dent in the budget. There simply don't make that large a contribution to the IRS's yearly take -- there just aren't enough of them for it to really make a difference. Which is not to say I think they should be exempted from taxes, but just applying a national sales tax instead of an income tax and letting them pay their fair share under the same system everyone else uses seems enough. If it turns out they spend a smaller percentage of their income than others on taxes that way, well, so that's what happens. No big deal, no real need to up luxury taxes, capital gains taxes, or anything like that. We can, but it's just not that big an issue...
At the moment gasoline is running about a $1.40/gallon. 41 cents of that is tax. It's a 30% tax already! I drive a 1979 Camaro at 12mpg 500 miles a week. That means that I gave the government $900 in gas taxes last year. What did paying the tax do for me? Less than nothing. I've replaced two shocks, a tie-rod and a tire because of their misuse of the tax.
Err, are you normally this stupid or are you just venting? Yes, you had to repair your car. How much more or less would you have had to repair it if they didn't do what they do to upkeep the roads? If you think your car would have been less damaged driving off-road, then yes, it's true, you received "less than nothing" for your taxes. Somehow, I suspect this isn't the case, though. Did you spend more than you would spend of the roads were kept up better? Maybe, maybe not. Cars suffer wear and tear driving on perfectly good roads. It's unreasonable to simply assume if roads were kept up in perfect condition, you would't have spent any money on repair. Also, if you stop and think about what you're saying, you're making an argument for increasing gas tax. Right now, according to you, we don't do enough upkeep on the roads and it's costing you money because of it.
I vote we just toss all the bums out of office and start over. There's gotta be a more cost effective way of doing it!
Unless you can be more specific about what the more effective way would be, there would be no point in starting over. We'd just rebuilding using the same poor design.
By the way, why is this a reply to my post? You seem to have avoided the issue I was addressing and ranted on about something unrelated. I don't disagree that the government is not spending the money it receives efficiently. That's completely unrelated to what I was suggesting. I wasn't suggesting we give the government any more or less money than we do now. I was suggesting that we distribute the tax burden more fairly. You use the roads way more than I do, should you not in fact pay more for their upkeep than I do? I think that's only fair. Why do you think I should pay for your use of the highway? Do you always look to the government for free handouts?
Recent geologic studies have shown that the temperature of the Earth is normally 8-10 degrees warmer than it is now. We're still coming out of the last ice age! Try http://www.junkscience.c om/news/william-the-conqueror.html or http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/ge olog.htm
You'll forgive me if the informally expressed, vague opinion on the climate of the middle ages (which is not at issue) from half a decade ago, or a reprint from the Wall St. Journal's Letters to the Editor section don't exactly hold much weight for me.
We're not still coming out of the last ice age. The last glacial retreat was 10000 years ago, and although the climate is supposed to continue to warm for some time after that, it should have stopped by now. In fact, we're over the hump, the climate should be getting cooler. (This is not based on computer models, it's based on the historical glacial advance/retreat scedule from the last few hundred thousand years.)
As far as what the Earth "normally" is, that entirely depends on what you call normal. It's true that the Earth was significantly warmer during the Cretaceous period. Tropical climates were found north of the Arctic Circle! The carbion dioxide count in the atmosphere was over ten times higher than it is now, so this is not surprising (except to idiots who think CO2 doesn't affect global temperatures). But it should be noted that there was also far less land area available back then, due to higher sea levels (since there were NO polar ice caps at the time). If your idea of "normal" is to place the majority of the land humanity has lived on during its existence, then might I suggest we do everything in our power to prevent the Earth from returning to "normal". You see, I don't care whether it's natural for the Earth to be warmer or not! That's not the issue here! The issue is we've evolved to live on a planet more like it is today.
From a strictly Gaian perspective, global warming is irrelevant. The Earth has been much warmer in the past, and it gotby just fine (perhaps better if you consider the total amount of living biomass on the planet as a guage of how well Gaia is doing). But if you care at all about humanity, it IS an issue. Nature will get by just fine, it's humanity that will suffer if we can't keep the climate under control.
I'm a registered Republican, but I'd rather see McCain or Bradley win than any of the other candidates
Agreed. I'm a Democrat, but I'd rather see either Bradley or McCain than Gore (or, obviously, Bush).
But then, what do I know -- last election I voted in, I voted for an ex-professional wrestler rather than the idiot my party nominated (I *never* liked Skip -- when he ran for Senate, I voted for the Republican running against him (Dave Durenberger, IIRC)).
A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle). On the other hand, I think that, even though it's not a perfect solution, it's better than the current one. I see several advantages to a national sales tax in lieu of income tax:
(1) It's much harder to evade. (2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people. (3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes. I think we ought to eliminate drivers license fees and license plate tab fees, etc, and bump up the gasoline tax instead. Many of us would pay less this way, although gas guzzlers would of course pay more.
Ultimately, all taxes suck, but this seems to suck less than any of the alternatives.
So then make a VCD of it, or just put it on your hard drive or your ftp server or something. Who cares about writing it back to DVD once you've gotten the unencrypted data off of the DVD disk?
Umm, storing it on standard hard drives is even more expensive than storing it on writable DVDs. As for making VCDs, that results in quality loss. If you're going to do that, just connect the video in on your VCR to the video out on your DVD and tape away!
But the networks can't count those netcasts when they figure in how many people are watching the show and the ads, so they can't charge more to the advertisers.
Actually, it's a lot easier to count Internet viewers than broadcast viewers.
Seriously though, Canada is pretty messed in a few ways. We've crippled our public broadcasting by cutting all of its funding, then we make regulations that it can't have nearly as many ads (nice double way to make sure it goes belly up), then we mismanage 3 billion dollars in government human resources programs. And yet out of all of these things people are most offended by the fact that out government is thinking of giving hockey teams 3 million each. Ohhhh nooo. Not $3 Million. That'll be what busts the bank. Not the 108 senetors for 27 million people, each of whom (the senetors) has to be a rubber stamp, work a MINIMUM of 7 days a year (this is actually flexible) and make upwards of $100,000 a year.
Heh! If this is the worst you can come up with, I'd have to say the Canadian government is doing pretty well. Look across your southern border for some really screwed up government...
What about cyclists? Although banned from some roads for safety reasons, they need no licenses elsewhere.
What about CB radio operators? Although banned from some frequencies, they need no licenses elsewhere.
Besides, licensing for the roads is about safety and ensuring that others don't get hurt.
Licensing for the public airwares is to ensure two stations don't broadcast too close to one another or otherwise interfere with other broadcaster's rights.
Ok, I'm sorry, I'm just taking this discussion further into irrelevance.
Actually, no, these are valid questions that deserve answers. And the issue at hand is quite relevant. As another poster pointed out, too many people want you to forget that YOU, the public, own the airwaves, not them.
there's no real way for the content producers and distributors to tell how many people are watching their shows on icravetv, and adjust their rates accordingly.
There's no real way to do this for broadcast television, either. This changes nothing...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these airwaves are auctioned off and PAID FOR by the networks
You're wrong. The airwaves aren't paid for by the television stations, TV stations pay for licenses to broadcast on them. This is much like how you pay for licenses to drive on public roads. The roads remain public, despite the fact that you're paying for the license.
You could say that I own a percentage of the public roads because I pay taxes for them. They're public in the sense that anybody can use them, but in reality that's because we all jointly own them. The airwaves are not owned by anybody otherwise I would have the right to broadcast what I want (if I did this in the US, the FCC would be after me)
Not anyone can get onto the public roads and drive on them, only licensed drivers may do that; anyone else will have the highway patrol on their asses. Likewise, not anyone can get onto the public airwaves and broadcast on them, only licensed broadcasters can do that; anyone else will have the FCC on their asses. These cases are in fact identical, the only difference being that due to bandwidth limitations, we grant far fewer broadcast licenses than drivers licenses. But your rights to both are roughly the same, and they are both examples of public property. (Incidently, the fact that you pay taxes for them has nothing to do with it.)
Actually, if you have a more disagreement with copyrights, you shouldn't waste your time GPLing anything.... Because if you don't agree that copyrights should exist, you don't believe in the copyright protection that the GPL provides.
This is wildly bad logic. That's like saying that because I don't believe wild tigers should be allowed to roam the streets of downtown Minneapolis, if I happen to run into one, I should just go about my business as if it isn't there. This is likely to get me eaten. Just because someone doesn't believe copyrights should exists does not mean they should act as if they don't.
As for what that has to do with the GPL, I'm not sure, since the whole point of the GPL is to make sure your code is only used in the way you approve of, which is also the whole point of copyrights. No one who uses the GPL thinks copyrights are a bad idea. I think you're getting the GPL and BSD licenses confused...
I say scrap the over-regulated Canadian 'cultural protectionist' bull regulation and re-establish property rights properly!
I find it humorous that you're calling the Canadian system over-regulated while arguing that it is in fact under-regulated, and needs additional regulation. (You're saying Canadian broadcasters are currently allowed to do something they shouldn't be able to do and recommending they be denied to ability to do this. By definition, that's an increase in regulation, not a decrease.)
By your naive argument, cable operators should be able to rebroadcast anything from the airwaves that we normally get on "free" tv.
Umm, yes. That's absolutely true. Cable operators should be able to rebroadcast anything from the airwaves. Whether that can or not in your country does not alter the fact that they should be able to. If they can't, that's a bug in your laws.
This is of course absurd.
In what way?
Cable operators have to negotiate fees with broadcast operators to redistribute their content. Why should internet operators be held to a different standard?
They shouldn't be held to different standards. Neither cable operators nor internet operators should need permission to stream out what's currently available on the public airwaves, which belong to the people, and we only license to TV stations to make use of our air.
If it weren't something out in public, I would agree with you, but the public airwaves are, after all, public. If a singer decides to sing a song in the Capitol Mall or some other public park, anyone ought to be able to point a camera at them and broadcast it for free. It's occuring in a public area, on public property. Same should apply to the publicly owned airwaves. Whether it does or not is a matter of local law, so depends on what country you're in, but regardless of where you are, I maintain that it should apply.
Isn't this data that's broadcast in the VBI (Vertical Blanking Interval - the time it takes for the beam to zip back up to the top of the screen)?
I don't think so. It might contain an identifier that allows you to pull this information out of a database, but the information itself isn't in the VBI.
Can you really broadcast something over the public airwaves, and then prevent other people from monitoring & displaying it?
Actually, with the way the Patent Office has been issuing patents, it wouldn't surprise me. I'm just waiting for my patent on the wheel to be approved before I begin using Microsoft over sticking them in mice without my permission...
Just turn the toolbar off. On any decent browser, all that functionality is available by pressing the right mouse button. (On more idiotic browsers, one has to press and release the right mouse button before anything happen.) The icons both waste space and time (you have to mouse over to them). If you do a lot of web browsing, those buttons are a big pain, might as well just remove them entirely.
Even Microsoft doesn't really follow the year scheme very well. Win95 came in a few flavors, the more recent of which (I forget the designation, something like OEM 2.0) used a new filesystem.
Windows 95B, also known as OSR 2.0, included FAT32 support, as well as other things. The most recent version, Windows 95C, also know as OSR 2.5, included Active Desktop, among other things (it's the most visible feature, though -- your taskbar looks exactly like it does in Windows 98 and unlike what it looked like in previous versions of Windows 95 -- in fact, the differences between Windows 98 and Windows 95C are smaller than the differences between Windows 95C and Windows 95B as far as I can tell).
Incidently, I still run Windows 95C. It's the last version of Windows I own a legal copy of. (In Minnesota, we consider a preposition to be a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with. Apparently, this makes sense if you're Norwegian.)
First of all, there are a *lot* of differences between Mandrake 6.1 and 7.0, a heck of a lot more than there were between 5.3 and 6.0. It's *not* just a new installer.
And secondly, who gives a fuck? People who obsess about version numbers need to get a life. There is one and only one requirement a good version numbering scheme needs, and that would be that the newer version numbers are greater than the older version numbers. Anything beyond that is unnecessary and not worth loosing any sleep over...
I've installed and used every version of Mandrake since 5.2. The first thing I do when I get it is recompile the kernel, since it never comes properly configured for my system. I've never had any problems, except once after a new Cooker install (Cooker is Mandrake's experimental distro, like RedHat Rawhide or Debian unstable), and the kernel RPMs from a few days later fixed it.
Actually, when Mandrake first came out they publically stated that their version numbers were the same as the version of RedHat that it was based on.
This was the case when Mandrake was simply RedHat with some additional packages added, but it hasn't been true for a while. Mandrake X.Y has not simply been RedHat X.Y with some added stuff since X == 5, and even that started to break down towards the end (witness the Mandrake 5.3 release while RedHat never had a 5.3). Mandrake 6.1 was released before RedHat 6.1, so certainly wasn't based on it (it was the second version of their update to 6.0 really).
Nowadays, with 7.0, I'm not sure you can say Mandrake is based on RedHat any more than Caldera, SuSE, or any of the other RPM-based distributions are, except perhaps as a matter of historical trivia. Well, and also they stick with RedHat's directory structure and incorporate any updates from RedHat that they need in order to make sure any RPM that claims to be for RedHat also happens to work with Mandrake. Essentially, Mandrake has forked, and now maintains compatibility not by simply enhancing the latest RedHat but instead by tracking their changes and making sure they stay compatible. With this new methodology, the old version numbering scheme no longer makes sense.
I read this too, but not until I'd successfully installed and run Mandrake 6.0 on my old 486/66. I have had only one problem so far where I didn't know what the cause was, but it seems to run just fine otherwise.
I think that a lot of stuff (but not necessarily all stuff) compiled with i586 optimizations will still run on a 486, but not as fast as it would have if it was compiled for the 486 instead.
cross platform compatability is a non-issue as long as the libraries are there. QA, bugs, etc. should be the same in both versions as long as the libraries work.
In an ideal world, this would be true.
Loki, however, exists and must do business in this world...
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Maybe, maybe not. These are interesting ideas, and I don't disagree with them, I just don't think they address a truly significant problem. People talk about rich people evading taxes and so on, but really, this is a relatively minor problem. If we simply stopped taxing millionaires altogether, it wouldn't make a significant dent in the budget. There simply don't make that large a contribution to the IRS's yearly take -- there just aren't enough of them for it to really make a difference. Which is not to say I think they should be exempted from taxes, but just applying a national sales tax instead of an income tax and letting them pay their fair share under the same system everyone else uses seems enough. If it turns out they spend a smaller percentage of their income than others on taxes that way, well, so that's what happens. No big deal, no real need to up luxury taxes, capital gains taxes, or anything like that. We can, but it's just not that big an issue...
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Err, are you normally this stupid or are you just venting? Yes, you had to repair your car. How much more or less would you have had to repair it if they didn't do what they do to upkeep the roads? If you think your car would have been less damaged driving off-road, then yes, it's true, you received "less than nothing" for your taxes. Somehow, I suspect this isn't the case, though. Did you spend more than you would spend of the roads were kept up better? Maybe, maybe not. Cars suffer wear and tear driving on perfectly good roads. It's unreasonable to simply assume if roads were kept up in perfect condition, you would't have spent any money on repair. Also, if you stop and think about what you're saying, you're making an argument for increasing gas tax. Right now, according to you, we don't do enough upkeep on the roads and it's costing you money because of it.
I vote we just toss all the bums out of office and start over. There's gotta be a more cost effective way of doing it!
Unless you can be more specific about what the more effective way would be, there would be no point in starting over. We'd just rebuilding using the same poor design.
By the way, why is this a reply to my post? You seem to have avoided the issue I was addressing and ranted on about something unrelated. I don't disagree that the government is not spending the money it receives efficiently. That's completely unrelated to what I was suggesting. I wasn't suggesting we give the government any more or less money than we do now. I was suggesting that we distribute the tax burden more fairly. You use the roads way more than I do, should you not in fact pay more for their upkeep than I do? I think that's only fair. Why do you think I should pay for your use of the highway? Do you always look to the government for free handouts?
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You'll forgive me if the informally expressed, vague opinion on the climate of the middle ages (which is not at issue) from half a decade ago, or a reprint from the Wall St. Journal's Letters to the Editor section don't exactly hold much weight for me.
We're not still coming out of the last ice age. The last glacial retreat was 10000 years ago, and although the climate is supposed to continue to warm for some time after that, it should have stopped by now. In fact, we're over the hump, the climate should be getting cooler. (This is not based on computer models, it's based on the historical glacial advance/retreat scedule from the last few hundred thousand years.)
As far as what the Earth "normally" is, that entirely depends on what you call normal. It's true that the Earth was significantly warmer during the Cretaceous period. Tropical climates were found north of the Arctic Circle! The carbion dioxide count in the atmosphere was over ten times higher than it is now, so this is not surprising (except to idiots who think CO2 doesn't affect global temperatures). But it should be noted that there was also far less land area available back then, due to higher sea levels (since there were NO polar ice caps at the time). If your idea of "normal" is to place the majority of the land humanity has lived on during its existence, then might I suggest we do everything in our power to prevent the Earth from returning to "normal". You see, I don't care whether it's natural for the Earth to be warmer or not! That's not the issue here! The issue is we've evolved to live on a planet more like it is today.
From a strictly Gaian perspective, global warming is irrelevant. The Earth has been much warmer in the past, and it gotby just fine (perhaps better if you consider the total amount of living biomass on the planet as a guage of how well Gaia is doing). But if you care at all about humanity, it IS an issue. Nature will get by just fine, it's humanity that will suffer if we can't keep the climate under control.
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Agreed. I'm a Democrat, but I'd rather see either Bradley or McCain than Gore (or, obviously, Bush).
But then, what do I know -- last election I voted in, I voted for an ex-professional wrestler rather than the idiot my party nominated (I *never* liked Skip -- when he ran for Senate, I voted for the Republican running against him (Dave Durenberger, IIRC)).
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This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle). On the other hand, I think that, even though it's not a perfect solution, it's better than the current one. I see several advantages to a national sales tax in lieu of income tax:
(1) It's much harder to evade.
(2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people.
(3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes. I think we ought to eliminate drivers license fees and license plate tab fees, etc, and bump up the gasoline tax instead. Many of us would pay less this way, although gas guzzlers would of course pay more.
Ultimately, all taxes suck, but this seems to suck less than any of the alternatives.
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Umm, storing it on standard hard drives is even more expensive than storing it on writable DVDs. As for making VCDs, that results in quality loss. If you're going to do that, just connect the video in on your VCR to the video out on your DVD and tape away!
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Actually, it's a lot easier to count Internet viewers than broadcast viewers.
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Exactly. Like I said, no real way to count viewers...
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Heh! If this is the worst you can come up with, I'd have to say the Canadian government is doing pretty well. Look across your southern border for some really screwed up government...
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What about CB radio operators? Although banned from some frequencies, they need no licenses elsewhere.
Besides, licensing for the roads is about safety and ensuring that others don't get hurt.
Licensing for the public airwares is to ensure two stations don't broadcast too close to one another or otherwise interfere with other broadcaster's rights.
Ok, I'm sorry, I'm just taking this discussion further into irrelevance.
Actually, no, these are valid questions that deserve answers. And the issue at hand is quite relevant. As another poster pointed out, too many people want you to forget that YOU, the public, own the airwaves, not them.
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There's no real way to do this for broadcast television, either. This changes nothing...
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You're wrong. The airwaves aren't paid for by the television stations, TV stations pay for licenses to broadcast on them. This is much like how you pay for licenses to drive on public roads. The roads remain public, despite the fact that you're paying for the license.
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Not anyone can get onto the public roads and drive on them, only licensed drivers may do that; anyone else will have the highway patrol on their asses. Likewise, not anyone can get onto the public airwaves and broadcast on them, only licensed broadcasters can do that; anyone else will have the FCC on their asses. These cases are in fact identical, the only difference being that due to bandwidth limitations, we grant far fewer broadcast licenses than drivers licenses. But your rights to both are roughly the same, and they are both examples of public property. (Incidently, the fact that you pay taxes for them has nothing to do with it.)
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This is wildly bad logic. That's like saying that because I don't believe wild tigers should be allowed to roam the streets of downtown Minneapolis, if I happen to run into one, I should just go about my business as if it isn't there. This is likely to get me eaten. Just because someone doesn't believe copyrights should exists does not mean they should act as if they don't.
As for what that has to do with the GPL, I'm not sure, since the whole point of the GPL is to make sure your code is only used in the way you approve of, which is also the whole point of copyrights. No one who uses the GPL thinks copyrights are a bad idea. I think you're getting the GPL and BSD licenses confused...
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I find it humorous that you're calling the Canadian system over-regulated while arguing that it is in fact under-regulated, and needs additional regulation. (You're saying Canadian broadcasters are currently allowed to do something they shouldn't be able to do and recommending they be denied to ability to do this. By definition, that's an increase in regulation, not a decrease.)
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Umm, yes. That's absolutely true. Cable operators should be able to rebroadcast anything from the airwaves. Whether that can or not in your country does not alter the fact that they should be able to. If they can't, that's a bug in your laws.
This is of course absurd.
In what way?
Cable operators have to negotiate fees with broadcast operators to redistribute their content. Why should internet operators be held to a different standard?
They shouldn't be held to different standards. Neither cable operators nor internet operators should need permission to stream out what's currently available on the public airwaves, which belong to the people, and we only license to TV stations to make use of our air.
If it weren't something out in public, I would agree with you, but the public airwaves are, after all, public. If a singer decides to sing a song in the Capitol Mall or some other public park, anyone ought to be able to point a camera at them and broadcast it for free. It's occuring in a public area, on public property. Same should apply to the publicly owned airwaves. Whether it does or not is a matter of local law, so depends on what country you're in, but regardless of where you are, I maintain that it should apply.
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I don't think so. It might contain an identifier that allows you to pull this information out of a database, but the information itself isn't in the VBI.
Can you really broadcast something over the public airwaves, and then prevent other people from monitoring & displaying it?
Actually, with the way the Patent Office has been issuing patents, it wouldn't surprise me. I'm just waiting for my patent on the wheel to be approved before I begin using Microsoft over sticking them in mice without my permission...
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Windows 95B, also known as OSR 2.0, included FAT32 support, as well as other things. The most recent version, Windows 95C, also know as OSR 2.5, included Active Desktop, among other things (it's the most visible feature, though -- your taskbar looks exactly like it does in Windows 98 and unlike what it looked like in previous versions of Windows 95 -- in fact, the differences between Windows 98 and Windows 95C are smaller than the differences between Windows 95C and Windows 95B as far as I can tell).
Incidently, I still run Windows 95C. It's the last version of Windows I own a legal copy of. (In Minnesota, we consider a preposition to be a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with. Apparently, this makes sense if you're Norwegian.)
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First of all, there are a *lot* of differences between Mandrake 6.1 and 7.0, a heck of a lot more than there were between 5.3 and 6.0. It's *not* just a new installer.
And secondly, who gives a fuck? People who obsess about version numbers need to get a life. There is one and only one requirement a good version numbering scheme needs, and that would be that the newer version numbers are greater than the older version numbers. Anything beyond that is unnecessary and not worth loosing any sleep over...
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This was the case when Mandrake was simply RedHat with some additional packages added, but it hasn't been true for a while. Mandrake X.Y has not simply been RedHat X.Y with some added stuff since X == 5, and even that started to break down towards the end (witness the Mandrake 5.3 release while RedHat never had a 5.3). Mandrake 6.1 was released before RedHat 6.1, so certainly wasn't based on it (it was the second version of their update to 6.0 really).
Nowadays, with 7.0, I'm not sure you can say Mandrake is based on RedHat any more than Caldera, SuSE, or any of the other RPM-based distributions are, except perhaps as a matter of historical trivia. Well, and also they stick with RedHat's directory structure and incorporate any updates from RedHat that they need in order to make sure any RPM that claims to be for RedHat also happens to work with Mandrake. Essentially, Mandrake has forked, and now maintains compatibility not by simply enhancing the latest RedHat but instead by tracking their changes and making sure they stay compatible. With this new methodology, the old version numbering scheme no longer makes sense.
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I think that a lot of stuff (but not necessarily all stuff) compiled with i586 optimizations will still run on a 486, but not as fast as it would have if it was compiled for the 486 instead.
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In an ideal world, this would be true.
Loki, however, exists and must do business in this world...
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