19% of the direct payments to go to programs for the poor/unemployed. Thus 81% go to everyone else. When you give a rich person a $100K tax break, that's as much cash as unemployment for 20 people for a year (and produces much less economic value).
Yes, the article is pure political spin. WTF is it doing on Slashdot? These periodic political rants are off-topic, and are nearly as destructive to Slashdot as the horrible beta software.
Exactly. When the OP posted "Einstein found a way to get more precision under certain circumstances" they were referring to the circumstance of travelling at nearly the speed of light.:-)
It depends on the store. Some are just cell phone stores, but one in particular where I live has focused on "Makers" and stocks Arduino, Raspberry Pi, chips, connectors, servo's, EL wire, all sorts of fun stuff, and is a great place to shop. Sure, online is a little cheaper, and of course you can find exactly what you want online if you don't mind waiting, but it's great to be able to see what a product is like hands-on, and buy it locally and support a local business. And when I needed a DB25 solderable connector, for example, I had it in a few minutes, and finished the repair instead of waiting days for shipping.
As usual, the Founding Fathers were right. The US shouldn't have a standing army, because having an army creates a need for the army to "do something", and gets you into wars, wasting money and corrupting Democracy. Of course, there should be a structure ready, with equipment, training, etc., so that in an actual time of war we can mobilize the population. But really, when was the last time the US faced a land invasion that required immediate response?:-)
Filing a counter-claim is a one-page form that doesn't cost anything. I can understand why he's using the sleazy DMCA takedown tactic to get some publicity for his films. But I can't understand why he doesn't send a counter-claim to YouTube so his videos stay up. Perhaps he wants to draw things out to generate more debate?
Because the population of the country is going up, nearly every election has more voters than previous elections. But if you look at the percentage of the population voting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections), it's been around 55% since 1920, and in fact the percent of the population voting in the last two elections (over 57% both times) was higher than any election since 1968. The two Bush Jr elections were 51% and 55%.
What's also striking is that elections before 1900 had around 80% voter participation, then it dropped to below 50% (1920, 1924), then has been roughly level since then.
So (1) people aren't voting less now than in previous elections - if anything, voter participation is higher than it's been in decades. And (2) what happened in 1900 that changed voting so dramatically?
As for it being a bad thing if everyone votes, the US is a Democracy based on the legitimacy of the elections representing the will of all of the people. If enough people stop voting, the elections, and thus the country, lose legitimacy. That's why most people think that it's important to encourage voting, by making it easy to register to vote, by having enough polling stations for people to vote, etc., and they tend to regard moves to prevent voting as un-American.
And as for the relative number of (self-identified) Democrats and Republicans, the numbers are well known (e.g. http://www.gallup.com/poll/159...), with Democrats consistently outnumbering Republicans. The only time that Gallup has ever polled Republicans leading Democrats was in 1991, when Bush Sr's popularity was boosted shortly after the Persian Gulf War.
So how does a minoritory part retain power? By manipulating the game. For example, Republicans' gerrymandering managed to give them control of the House despite their getting over a million fewer votes than the Democrats in House elections.
This is wildly incorrect. Everyone pays taxes. You're focused only on income tax, which is only 40% of tax revenue, and pretending that it's 100% of taxes paid.
Keep in mind that income tax is just one tax, which taxes only people with incomes above the median, and which has never been collected from much more than 50% of the population. This is the case because people with no income (e.g. retired, kids, students) and people with very low incomes (e.g. people working full time for minimum wage) constitute about half the population. The percentage paying income tax dropped because of the Republican tax breaks (which they were proud of, and which raised the minimum taxed income) and the Bush recession (which pushed down incomes generally). So Republicans complaining that their policies did exactly what they were intended to do is a little weird.
But remember, everyone pays the 60% of taxes that aren't tied to income, and in fact the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than people making higher incomes, because their money is spent on gas and other taxed purchases, while people who are better off save or invest (which gets massive tax breaks compared to earned income).
Normally that's what happens in the US as well. Every place I've ever signed up for video rentals required me to give them a credit card and authorize them to charge me replacement costs plus a penalty specified in the contract. So typically she'd have been charged for the tape a few months after failing to return it. The idea of going to jail for losing a videotape rental is insane. I can't believe the video rental store would waste the money filing the charges over a single tape. Perhaps that sort of decision-making helped put them under?
At some point the issue of what's reasonable has to kick in. If she lost a VHS tape 9 years ago, and the store went under since then, (1) there's no victim, and (2) the replacement cost for the videotape is probably only a few dollars (check on eBay).
I'm just amazed that the magistrate that has to hear all such issues before they can book people didn't throw it out, since the issue is so flimsy. Perhaps they had to wait until the morning?
Now, if a magistrate signed off on throwing her in jail for not returning a videotape 9 years ago, then there's something very wrong - the magistrates are there to filter out exactly this sort of BS from wasting the court's time.
Off, I think that SOX is actually a rather elegant law. It's actually very simple, in that it doesn't tell companies how they do business, just that if they lie/provide incorrect information to investors, the officers of the company are personally liable. All of the complexity that I've seem related to SOX is because companies sometimes invent complex control mechanisms to try to prevent errors. But the SOX law is nice and simple establishment of responsibility.
Based on polls, Republicans are almost always the minority party, because they advocate positions that benefit the minority and harm the majority. Their electoral victories come from discouraging voting by the majority so that the committed minority can win.
Of course, because they've painted themselves into a corner and cannot imagine that their policies are the reason for their failures, they have to keep trying various tactics to "win" despite public opposition. But until they believe that they need to change, they can't change, and will keep losing.
Though if tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression continue to be allowed to succeed, then they'll never change.
Good point. Look at how when SOX made the officers of a company personally liable for incorrect financial statements that suddenly companies put financial controls in place. Personal liability is clearly a much better motivator than ethics or responsibility to shareholders.
If they defrauded the government of $25m, how is $2m a punishment that discourages fraud, since it leaves them $23m ahead? Shouldn't the penalty be, say, 3x the amount of the fraud, so that the cost of defrauding the government is far more than the benefit of committing fraud, enough more that the risk of getting caught and paying the penalty is far more than the benefit, and companies don't commit fraud because it's a bad risk?
"The government is doing this in secret, without your permission with no opt-in or opt-out, with nothing akin to a privacy policy, and by their own admission they cannot secure the data"
Not even remotely true. Read the article. The government is buying exactly the same data from the credit companies that they'll sell anyone willing to pay. You agreed to let the banks and credit card companies sell your data to anyone they like, by using bank accounts and credit cards. The government isn't doing anything in secret - they disclosed that they planned to buy the data before they did so. Note that the tend of thousands of companies buying the same data and using it to do direct marketing, credit scoring, etc., don't disclose that, while the government did.
The issue wasn't that the person wasn't guilty of the offense, the issue was grouping trivial offenses with horrifying ones under the label of "sex offender". This is over-punishing the person who commits a minor infraction by treating them as if they'd done something truly deserving of a lifetime of being labeled a "sex offender".
The CFPB is buying exactly the same data, exactly the same way, as anyone else can. If you don't like the idea that the government can get this data, you should be horrified that anyone else can do the same, and without any oversight.
While it's creepy, in the US your credit card transaction is not private - it's collected by credit card companies and massively data mined (and has been for decades) for direct marketing, credit scoring, etc., used by companies to sell products to consumers and to drive them as deeply as possible into debt.
The only "news" here is that the government is data mining to benefit consumers rather than to exploit them. That's clearly crossing the line.
What conclusion should we draw from the complete lack of an evidence that there are companies with "a vested interested in climate change" that are funding biased research? Do you think that Greenpeace and the solar panel companies have much better funding and security than the oil and oil-powered car industries?
Specifically, the "whistleblower' laws that people keep talking about specifically do not protect anyone revealing illegal government activity if it's in any way related to national security, the military, etc. So if we had a whistleblower revealing corrupt Department of Agriculture activity, perhaps they'd be protected. But Snowden's situation was very carefully NOT protected by the new "stronger" whistleblower laws.
If you use PLA, which the large majority of 3D printers do, it's not try. PLA is made from corn and is completely recyclable, either by re-grinding the plastic and re-extruding it, or by throwing it into a composting system where it decomposes.
In the video interview, they say that it's standard ABS and PLA filament. So while it's in cartridges that might be OK, as long as they don't try to lock people in. That is, if you can buy your own supplies from competing vendors and use them, that's what matters. At $28 per 600g, that's pretty expensive - it works out to $47/kg, which is quite high.
So overall I'd say that if they really can sell a reliable printer that size for $500 that's an awesome deal. And the fact that they're also doing a lame copy of Makerbot's strategy (e.g. http://us.gallery.xyzprinting.... is really bad version of Thingiverse) is OK, because their software can read STL files, so you can get files (or design your own stuff) so it doesn't matter that they also have a proprietary file format.
HP claims that the HP-85 in 1980 was their entry into the "personal computer" market. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/about... . That's two years after the launch of the Macintosh project inside Apple, though four years before the Mac shipped (January 1984). And that "personal computer" was so obscure nobody remembers it other than whoever made that page for HP. HP didn't introduce a personal computer that sold decently well until many years after the Mac shipped.
Remember, Apple's founders left HP because HP didn't want to make personal computers. So I'm pretty sure Apple hasn't forgotten that HP existed - they also remember that HP dropped the ball on personal computers, and didn't enter the market until after they started working on the Mac.
That being said, I think Schiller is referring to the market consolidation (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/10/10/pc-market-consolidating-around-top-3-vendors/) where there aren't any of the old school PC companies.
Slashdot Mirror
19% of the direct payments to go to programs for the poor/unemployed. Thus 81% go to everyone else. When you give a rich person a $100K tax break, that's as much cash as unemployment for 20 people for a year (and produces much less economic value).
Yes, the article is pure political spin. WTF is it doing on Slashdot? These periodic political rants are off-topic, and are nearly as destructive to Slashdot as the horrible beta software.
Exactly. When the OP posted "Einstein found a way to get more precision under certain circumstances" they were referring to the circumstance of travelling at nearly the speed of light. :-)
It depends on the store. Some are just cell phone stores, but one in particular where I live has focused on "Makers" and stocks Arduino, Raspberry Pi, chips, connectors, servo's, EL wire, all sorts of fun stuff, and is a great place to shop. Sure, online is a little cheaper, and of course you can find exactly what you want online if you don't mind waiting, but it's great to be able to see what a product is like hands-on, and buy it locally and support a local business. And when I needed a DB25 solderable connector, for example, I had it in a few minutes, and finished the repair instead of waiting days for shipping.
As usual, the Founding Fathers were right. The US shouldn't have a standing army, because having an army creates a need for the army to "do something", and gets you into wars, wasting money and corrupting Democracy. Of course, there should be a structure ready, with equipment, training, etc., so that in an actual time of war we can mobilize the population. But really, when was the last time the US faced a land invasion that required immediate response? :-)
Filing a counter-claim is a one-page form that doesn't cost anything. I can understand why he's using the sleazy DMCA takedown tactic to get some publicity for his films. But I can't understand why he doesn't send a counter-claim to YouTube so his videos stay up. Perhaps he wants to draw things out to generate more debate?
Because the population of the country is going up, nearly every election has more voters than previous elections. But if you look at the percentage of the population voting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections), it's been around 55% since 1920, and in fact the percent of the population voting in the last two elections (over 57% both times) was higher than any election since 1968. The two Bush Jr elections were 51% and 55%.
What's also striking is that elections before 1900 had around 80% voter participation, then it dropped to below 50% (1920, 1924), then has been roughly level since then.
So (1) people aren't voting less now than in previous elections - if anything, voter participation is higher than it's been in decades. And (2) what happened in 1900 that changed voting so dramatically?
As for it being a bad thing if everyone votes, the US is a Democracy based on the legitimacy of the elections representing the will of all of the people. If enough people stop voting, the elections, and thus the country, lose legitimacy. That's why most people think that it's important to encourage voting, by making it easy to register to vote, by having enough polling stations for people to vote, etc., and they tend to regard moves to prevent voting as un-American.
And as for the relative number of (self-identified) Democrats and Republicans, the numbers are well known (e.g. http://www.gallup.com/poll/159...), with Democrats consistently outnumbering Republicans. The only time that Gallup has ever polled Republicans leading Democrats was in 1991, when Bush Sr's popularity was boosted shortly after the Persian Gulf War.
So how does a minoritory part retain power? By manipulating the game. For example, Republicans' gerrymandering managed to give them control of the House despite their getting over a million fewer votes than the Democrats in House elections.
"Now that a minority of adults pay taxes"
This is wildly incorrect. Everyone pays taxes. You're focused only on income tax, which is only 40% of tax revenue, and pretending that it's 100% of taxes paid.
Keep in mind that income tax is just one tax, which taxes only people with incomes above the median, and which has never been collected from much more than 50% of the population. This is the case because people with no income (e.g. retired, kids, students) and people with very low incomes (e.g. people working full time for minimum wage) constitute about half the population. The percentage paying income tax dropped because of the Republican tax breaks (which they were proud of, and which raised the minimum taxed income) and the Bush recession (which pushed down incomes generally). So Republicans complaining that their policies did exactly what they were intended to do is a little weird.
But remember, everyone pays the 60% of taxes that aren't tied to income, and in fact the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than people making higher incomes, because their money is spent on gas and other taxed purchases, while people who are better off save or invest (which gets massive tax breaks compared to earned income).
Normally that's what happens in the US as well. Every place I've ever signed up for video rentals required me to give them a credit card and authorize them to charge me replacement costs plus a penalty specified in the contract. So typically she'd have been charged for the tape a few months after failing to return it. The idea of going to jail for losing a videotape rental is insane. I can't believe the video rental store would waste the money filing the charges over a single tape. Perhaps that sort of decision-making helped put them under?
At some point the issue of what's reasonable has to kick in. If she lost a VHS tape 9 years ago, and the store went under since then, (1) there's no victim, and (2) the replacement cost for the videotape is probably only a few dollars (check on eBay).
I'm just amazed that the magistrate that has to hear all such issues before they can book people didn't throw it out, since the issue is so flimsy. Perhaps they had to wait until the morning?
Now, if a magistrate signed off on throwing her in jail for not returning a videotape 9 years ago, then there's something very wrong - the magistrates are there to filter out exactly this sort of BS from wasting the court's time.
Off, I think that SOX is actually a rather elegant law. It's actually very simple, in that it doesn't tell companies how they do business, just that if they lie/provide incorrect information to investors, the officers of the company are personally liable. All of the complexity that I've seem related to SOX is because companies sometimes invent complex control mechanisms to try to prevent errors. But the SOX law is nice and simple establishment of responsibility.
Based on polls, Republicans are almost always the minority party, because they advocate positions that benefit the minority and harm the majority. Their electoral victories come from discouraging voting by the majority so that the committed minority can win.
Of course, because they've painted themselves into a corner and cannot imagine that their policies are the reason for their failures, they have to keep trying various tactics to "win" despite public opposition. But until they believe that they need to change, they can't change, and will keep losing.
Though if tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression continue to be allowed to succeed, then they'll never change.
Good point. Look at how when SOX made the officers of a company personally liable for incorrect financial statements that suddenly companies put financial controls in place. Personal liability is clearly a much better motivator than ethics or responsibility to shareholders.
If they defrauded the government of $25m, how is $2m a punishment that discourages fraud, since it leaves them $23m ahead? Shouldn't the penalty be, say, 3x the amount of the fraud, so that the cost of defrauding the government is far more than the benefit of committing fraud, enough more that the risk of getting caught and paying the penalty is far more than the benefit, and companies don't commit fraud because it's a bad risk?
The CFPB isn't getting line transaction data, just the essentially public credit limit and outstanding debt. Same as anyone who can buy the same data.
"The government is doing this in secret, without your permission with no opt-in or opt-out, with nothing akin to a privacy policy, and by their own admission they cannot secure the data"
Not even remotely true. Read the article. The government is buying exactly the same data from the credit companies that they'll sell anyone willing to pay. You agreed to let the banks and credit card companies sell your data to anyone they like, by using bank accounts and credit cards. The government isn't doing anything in secret - they disclosed that they planned to buy the data before they did so. Note that the tend of thousands of companies buying the same data and using it to do direct marketing, credit scoring, etc., don't disclose that, while the government did.
The issue wasn't that the person wasn't guilty of the offense, the issue was grouping trivial offenses with horrifying ones under the label of "sex offender". This is over-punishing the person who commits a minor infraction by treating them as if they'd done something truly deserving of a lifetime of being labeled a "sex offender".
The CFPB is buying exactly the same data, exactly the same way, as anyone else can. If you don't like the idea that the government can get this data, you should be horrified that anyone else can do the same, and without any oversight.
While it's creepy, in the US your credit card transaction is not private - it's collected by credit card companies and massively data mined (and has been for decades) for direct marketing, credit scoring, etc., used by companies to sell products to consumers and to drive them as deeply as possible into debt.
The only "news" here is that the government is data mining to benefit consumers rather than to exploit them. That's clearly crossing the line.
What conclusion should we draw from the complete lack of an evidence that there are companies with "a vested interested in climate change" that are funding biased research? Do you think that Greenpeace and the solar panel companies have much better funding and security than the oil and oil-powered car industries?
Specifically, the "whistleblower' laws that people keep talking about specifically do not protect anyone revealing illegal government activity if it's in any way related to national security, the military, etc. So if we had a whistleblower revealing corrupt Department of Agriculture activity, perhaps they'd be protected. But Snowden's situation was very carefully NOT protected by the new "stronger" whistleblower laws.
True, for ABS.
If you use PLA, which the large majority of 3D printers do, it's not try. PLA is made from corn and is completely recyclable, either by re-grinding the plastic and re-extruding it, or by throwing it into a composting system where it decomposes.
In the video interview, they say that it's standard ABS and PLA filament. So while it's in cartridges that might be OK, as long as they don't try to lock people in. That is, if you can buy your own supplies from competing vendors and use them, that's what matters. At $28 per 600g, that's pretty expensive - it works out to $47/kg, which is quite high.
So overall I'd say that if they really can sell a reliable printer that size for $500 that's an awesome deal. And the fact that they're also doing a lame copy of Makerbot's strategy (e.g. http://us.gallery.xyzprinting.... is really bad version of Thingiverse) is OK, because their software can read STL files, so you can get files (or design your own stuff) so it doesn't matter that they also have a proprietary file format.
Schiller said when they started the Macintosh, which was 1978.
HP claims that the HP-85 in 1980 was their entry into the "personal computer" market. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/about... . That's two years after the launch of the Macintosh project inside Apple, though four years before the Mac shipped (January 1984). And that "personal computer" was so obscure nobody remembers it other than whoever made that page for HP. HP didn't introduce a personal computer that sold decently well until many years after the Mac shipped.
Remember, Apple's founders left HP because HP didn't want to make personal computers. So I'm pretty sure Apple hasn't forgotten that HP existed - they also remember that HP dropped the ball on personal computers, and didn't enter the market until after they started working on the Mac.
That being said, I think Schiller is referring to the market consolidation (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/10/10/pc-market-consolidating-around-top-3-vendors/) where there aren't any of the old school PC companies.