For phones that PIN numbers specifically, an easier method I've used is programming an Arduino to act as a keyboard. No need to desolder chips or anything. Plug the Arduino mini into the USB, Android sees it as an external keyboard. A very simple Arduino program can be used to try four or five PINs, then wait a few seconds and loop. It'll get the PIN overnight or sooner. Again, I've done this one.
Screen unlock patterns are often visible as long smudges on the screen if you angle the screen in different ways relative to the light. You'll see lots of small smudges and one big smudge that goes across the screen with a couple of turns. The big one is the unlock pattern.
Thanks for taking the time to reply with such a reply response.
> Actually, I wrote chunks of that code, and work with the guys who wrote the rest, so I know *exactly* how the key is generated.
In that case perhaps you can clarify whether I'm misunderstanding or just didn't communicate clearly. My understanding is:
The symmetric AES key is generated ~once, then that key is encrypted based on the password or pattern.
By the time an end-user is using the device, the key has -already- been generated (or may have been).
Therefore the binary will not generate a new key, because it's already there in the footer.
Therefore even if the binary matches the source - it won't generate a key from/dev/urandom because the key is already there.
Therefore even if we knew that the binary matches the source, we don't know how the (pre-existing) key was generated.
In other words, everything about generating the key is conditional on there not already being a key. IF an OEM put a bad key in the footer, it would stay there.
On a somewhat different topic, it's nice to meet someone will similar interests. I don't really remember names on Slashdot, don't remember who said what. I don't know if you've noticed I post a lot on information security since that's what I've been doing for fifteen years. Feel free to shoot me a message sometime if you ever care to - if you're looking for a job in the Dallas, Houston, Denver, or Cardfiff areas, or if you have an open source project that could use an extra hand.
They have published some code which they say is used to generate the initial master key. They are probably telling the truth, but there's no way to know - they master key looks like random bits.
55% of ad revenue is brokered by Google, Facebook and Twitter account for another 30%. That's 85% of all online ads between those three companies. Whichever standards these companies select to make ads less annoying, advertisers will have to deal with it.
This is technically possible IF Apple and Google are lying about how the symmetric key itself is generated and stored.
The passcode is used to secure the "real" key, which is used for data encryption. This symmetric key is supposedly not predictable or retrievable. However, it could in fact be the output of crypt('$1$hfgfydhjd$', imei + masterkey)
That would allow anyone who knows the imei and master key to derive the symmetric key.
> The 200 Million extra spend could easily be eaten up by R&D costs and lost market share. This could be a strategic purchase, not a financial one.
The company I work for was just aquired under just such a scenario. The board had three options:
R&D the needed tech: $40 million Lease license the needed tech: $30 million Buy a company who had the tech: $20 million
That IS a financial decision, I'd say.
Ps - I don't know how many million the actual costs were for the company I work for. I do know that buying the subsidiary made better financial sense than doing the R&D or licensing the tech.
I was talking about actual value of the purchase, not book value.
If adding 0.8B will make it worth $4B, it IS worth approximately $3.2B, in terms of whether or not it's a good deal. That's the value I was speaking of.
Since it's worth 3.2 to company A, if they buy it for 2.2, they got a good deal. When valuing companies with significant growth potential, you do in fact factor that potential into the value, so much so that it's often a much larger factor than book value.
If your business $1B cash, that adds $1B to its value. If your business owns $800 million worth of Sandisk, that adds $800 million to its value.
Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
The value (stock price) increases only if you get a good deal on the purchase, if you buy a company for less than it is worth. So companies make aquisitions when they think they're getting a good deal. Who doesn't like getting a good deal?
That's a great video. The extreme limp-wristing allows us to see what the different parts of the gun do without too much interference from the hand.
Kinetic energy is mass (weight) multiplied by velocity. Here are the mass measurements of different parts of my Glock 19:
Slide 12.3 oz Barrel 3 oz Frame and the rest 6 oz.
So we see that if they were moving at the same speed, the slide would have twice as much energy as the frame.
You can see in the video you linked to (and by the fact that it moves backward relative to the slide) that the velocity of the slide is GREATER than the velocity of the frame. Therefore more than 2/3rds of the energy is in the slide until it stops moving rearward relative to the frame.
This may surprise you. Still, mass times velocity. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Did you reply to the wrong post? I posted about a loop, you posted about a conditional.
Your post contains no loop, and mine doesn't assign twice.
Or are you referring to the fact that in order to return at the end, one might have to assign the return value to a variable earlier. That's true. Compare spending 1/1,000,000,000 of a second processing time versus both spending 30 minutes of developer trying to figure out what it's supposed to return time AND increasing the likelihood of a bug affecting customer data. One is clearly better than the other, certainly.
Combine that with another poster's 200-line methods and someone looking at the code has no easy way to know what the code returns - what it DOES . And the person looking at it my be you in two years. Also, such code -lies- about what it does. More on that in a minute.
It is better to return at the bottom of a function, partly so you can FIND the damn return statement. So an improvement over return () in the middle of the function is to break.
Even better, make the loop condition honest. Instead of this:
while(line = readline) {...
if lineempty(line) return;... }
In standard pistols, the breech is unlocked after the slide moves a distance relative to the frame, and the slide continues to move after the breech is unlocked. This movement of slide relative to the frame means that the slide has momentum (recoil energy) that it has not yet transferred to the frame.
Whether that motion unlocks the breech directly, via a tilting barrel, a lever, or a rotary mechanism doesn't effect this fact. So long as the any recoiling part of the weapon is moving faster than the frame, that's recoil energy not yet transferred to the frame. That means it increases the time over which the same energy is transferred and therefore reduces the instantaneous force.
Where this would not occur would be if you had a weapon in which no massive parts of the weapon has recoil motion relative to the frame - mortars and old-fsshioned cannons.
>it modifies the time profile of the impartation of the momentum to the mount or the person holding the weapon.
and the topic of this thread is precisely the time profile. Quoting: >> detonation time, whereas in a railgun the energy is spent continuously during the time the projectile travels the length of the barrel.... (although the recoil is felt longer)
So whether or not the recoil is spread over time is precisely what I was responding to.
It should be noted that all we know is that someone thought about publishing something called efast. We don't know that this person is involved with the Efast Browser malware.
That's not a bad guess, but not really true, for four reasons.
First, there is no "moment of detonation", powder doesn't detonate*, it burns quickly, producing gas. It's a lot of gas in a small space, so it's under pressure and that pressure pushes the bullet out. The powder continues to burn as the bullet moves down the barrel and even -after- the bullet leaves the barrel, producing muzzle flash. In pictures you may have seen the "fire" coming out of the muzzle. That fire is burning powder, meaning it's still burning after the bullet is gone.
To look at it from another perspective, imagine a firecracker on a stick. When the cracker blows, the stick doesn't get shot "backward" toward whoever lit it. The recoil exists because (and while) the bullet and gas is being propelled down the barrel. So the duration of recoil force to the slide is the same as the duration of pushing the bullet down the barrel, equal and opposite at any given instant.
Third, slide -momentum-. The mass of the slide means that the recoil force increases the momentum of the slide, and the hand feels the force as you resist the slide's recoil - meaning the hand or other mount feels the recoil until the slide stops, after the bullet has hit the target.
Lastly, the slide -move- relative to the frame (and hand or other mounts) against a spring. Since the slide is pushing on the spring, and the spring pushing on the frame, it's actually the pressure of the -spring- that pushes on the frame. Therefore the mount experiences only as much recoil as the resitance of the spring at that portion of its travel.
* Some powders contain ingredients that -could- detonate if they were pure, but they are mixed with much slower burning components in order to slow them to a conflagration.
Ps, it's been a couple of months since I looked up the 1% number. It's possible I remembered wrong and it's $33,000 to be in the top 1%, with $22,000 being the top 2% or something. Either way, most people on Slashdot are in the top 1% or very close to it. If you care whether you are in the top 1% or the top 2%, you can of course look it up. Either way you're rich.
If you want to reason from world totals, gross world product is $80-$100 trillion, depending on how you count. Divide by 7.3 billion people, that's $12,300.
The World Fact Book says average is $16,100. So yeah, most people (by far) aren't American technology professionals. If you happen to be American and salaried, you're the rich.
Some black people aren't stupid, amd make decisions based on something other than "he's black like me."
A few months before Obama started his exploratory presidential campaign, one well-known black leader was asked of he should run. The well-known black leader replied:
You know, I am a believer in knowing what you're doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if [Obama] were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, he would essentially have to start -now-, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I'm not one of those people.
That leaders name? Barak Obama. I agree with him, because I don't make decisions based on skin complexion.
How is it relevant what "any person who isn't an idiot" would do? This guy fell for the Obama to the extent that he devoted his life to raising money for the idiot. Ergo, he is also an idiot.
I mean, he not only sent his money to "Nigerian prince", he spent years going around convincing other people to send their money because not only would the Nigerian prince make them rich, he'd save the whole country! Of course in this particular scam the "prince" claimed to be of Kenyan descent rather than Nigerian, but the scam is juat as transparent.
Your nicely nicely summarized your point when you said "cost of living isn't guaranteed to be fair."
True, it's not always exactly fair, but it does tend to fairness. This is both caused and evidenced by the fact that in general, populations can and do move over time. People came (in droves) from Mexico to the United States, despite family connections, despite the fact that it's illegal the way many of them did so, etc.
People in Manhattan (high cost of living) CAN move to Detroit (low cost of living) but they choose not to because Manhattan is a better place to live. They pay more for Manhattan because they get something of value for the extra money, they are choosing to "buy" Manhattan rather than Detroit (specifically, they choose to buy a condo in Manhattan rather than one in Detroit).
You -could- move to Nuevo Laredo, and be rich compared to your neighbors. But you choose not to because Nuevo Laredo is a poor place to live - having a bad city around you makes you less rich just as much as having a bad car makes you less rich.
You are absolutely right that wealth is not income, and income is not wealth. (Though properly managing a sufficient income is the primary cause of wealth.)
The thing is, in the US we've done a TERRIBLE job of educating young people about what wealth is. Most people know what their income is, but they don't know what their wealth is. People know whether or not their income if higher than $22K or $34K, so they can easily see that their income is higher than 99% of people. It makes it simple, and in some ways it's a more important number for people who want to talk about external causes for their condition.
Consider these two people Bob earns $150,000, spends $60K on housing, groceries, etc, then blows the other $90K on fun.
Fred earns $150,000, saves $80K, spends $60K on housing, groceries, etc, then blows the other $10K on fun.
Obviously Fred is going to very quickly accumulate a lot more wealth. But just as obviously, Bob can't complain about Fred getting wealthier and wealthier while they have the same income and Bob chooses to spend his with Fred saves.
Being "rich" is of course harder to figure than just net worth in terms of assets minus liabilities. A person living in California, with instant access to safe and nutritious food and water is in a very real way "richer" than someone living 4,000 miles south who doesn't have access to clean water or safe food. So that's a much more involved comparison, while it's much simpler to compare income - AND someone with a much higher income can afford to arrange for safe food and water, so it captures elements of being "rich" that net worth doesn't capture.
"I'm not rich since most of the other people in my country are rich too". "I'm downtrodden because I'm not richer than 99% of rich people - I'm not in the top 1% of the top 1%". That's a silly argument.
If you were born into the middle class of a rich country - if you're "only" moderately rich, you're extremely fortunate and I'm tired of hearing such people whine. If you immigrated to a rich country and worked your way into the middle of the rich, you're doing quite well also (and probably aren't one of the complainers.)
> And even so, I don't think he'd have to exclude himself because he's not the top 1% of Orange County
Not "has to", but "gets to". I'm talking to people who -want- to pretend they aren't the rich people. If you're posting on Slashdot, you probably work in the tech industry. (if you're posting on Slashdot during business hours, "work" means "post on Slashdot"). So you probably make more money than 99% of people. BUT you won't to complain about rich people. Which means you want to pretend you're not "rich people".
You're richer (by income) than 99% of your fellow man. You have multiple cars, and have the luxury of choosing car that costs two or three times as much as another, as a status symbol. So how do you pretend to be the downtrodden poor? You must set the parameters to ignore the people who aren't doing as well you, the vast majority of people.
He says he's not well paid because while he's paid better than 99% of people, it's not better than 99% of the other rich people. What kind of argument is that? "I'm not rich because most people in my country are rich too." It's PRECISELY the same argument as "I'm not rich because my neighbors in Beverly Hills are rich too."
Okay, to if you don't interact with people worse off than you, you get to pretend they don't exist, and then complain about how you can only have TWO giant screen TVs. Got it.
Slashdot Mirror
For phones that PIN numbers specifically, an easier method I've used is programming an Arduino to act as a keyboard. No need to desolder chips or anything. Plug the Arduino mini into the USB, Android sees it as an external keyboard. A very simple Arduino program can be used to try four or five PINs, then wait a few seconds and loop. It'll get the PIN overnight or sooner. Again, I've done this one.
Screen unlock patterns are often visible as long smudges on the screen if you angle the screen in different ways relative to the light. You'll see lots of small smudges and one big smudge that goes across the screen with a couple of turns. The big one is the unlock pattern.
Thanks for taking the time to reply with such a reply response.
> Actually, I wrote chunks of that code, and work with the guys who wrote the rest, so I know *exactly* how the key is generated.
In that case perhaps you can clarify whether I'm misunderstanding or just didn't communicate clearly. My understanding is:
The symmetric AES key is generated ~once, then that key is encrypted based on the password or pattern.
By the time an end-user is using the device, the key has -already- been generated (or may have been).
Therefore the binary will not generate a new key, because it's already there in the footer.
Therefore even if the binary matches the source - it won't generate a key from /dev/urandom because the key is already there.
Therefore even if we knew that the binary matches the source, we don't know how the (pre-existing) key was generated.
In other words, everything about generating the key is conditional on there not already being a key. IF an OEM put a bad key in the footer, it would stay there.
On a somewhat different topic, it's nice to meet someone will similar interests. I don't really remember names on Slashdot, don't remember who said what. I don't know if you've noticed I post a lot on information security since that's what I've been doing for fifteen years. Feel free to shoot me a message sometime if you ever care to - if you're looking for a job in the Dallas, Houston, Denver, or Cardfiff areas, or if you have an open source project that could use an extra hand.
They have published some code which they say is used to generate the initial master key. They are probably telling the truth, but there's no way to know - they master key looks like random bits.
55% of ad revenue is brokered by Google, Facebook and Twitter account for another 30%. That's 85% of all online ads between those three companies. Whichever standards these companies select to make ads less annoying, advertisers will have to deal with it.
This is technically possible IF Apple and Google are lying about how the symmetric key itself is generated and stored.
The passcode is used to secure the "real" key, which is used for data encryption. This symmetric key is supposedly not predictable or retrievable. However, it could in fact be the output of crypt('$1$hfgfydhjd$', imei + masterkey)
That would allow anyone who knows the imei and master key to derive the symmetric key.
> The 200 Million extra spend could easily be eaten up by R&D costs and lost market share. This could be a strategic purchase, not a financial one.
The company I work for was just aquired under just such a scenario. The board had three options:
R&D the needed tech: $40 million
Lease license the needed tech: $30 million
Buy a company who had the tech: $20 million
That IS a financial decision, I'd say.
Ps - I don't know how many million the actual costs were for the company I work for. I do know that buying the subsidiary made better financial sense than doing the R&D or licensing the tech.
I was talking about actual value of the purchase, not book value.
If adding 0.8B will make it worth $4B, it IS worth approximately $3.2B, in terms of whether or not it's a good deal. That's the value I was speaking of.
Since it's worth 3.2 to company A, if they buy it for 2.2, they got a good deal. When valuing companies with significant growth potential, you do in fact factor that potential into the value, so much so that it's often a much larger factor than book value.
If your business $1B cash, that adds $1B to its value.
If your business owns $800 million worth of Sandisk, that adds $800 million to its value.
Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
The value (stock price) increases only if you get a good deal on the purchase, if you buy a company for less than it is worth. So companies make aquisitions when they think they're getting a good deal. Who doesn't like getting a good deal?
That's a great video. The extreme limp-wristing allows us to see what the different parts of the gun do without too much interference from the hand.
Kinetic energy is mass (weight) multiplied by velocity.
Here are the mass measurements of different parts of my Glock 19:
Slide 12.3 oz
Barrel 3 oz
Frame and the rest 6 oz.
So we see that if they were moving at the same speed, the slide would have twice as much energy as the frame.
You can see in the video you linked to (and by the fact that it moves backward relative to the slide) that the velocity of the slide is GREATER than the velocity of the frame. Therefore more than 2/3rds of the energy is in the slide until it stops moving rearward relative to the frame.
This may surprise you. Still, mass times velocity. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Did you reply to the wrong post? I posted about a loop, you posted about a conditional.
Your post contains no loop, and mine doesn't assign twice.
Or are you referring to the fact that in order to return at the end, one might have to assign the return value to a variable earlier. That's true. Compare spending 1/1,000,000,000 of a second processing time versus both spending 30 minutes of developer trying to figure out what it's supposed to return time AND increasing the likelihood of a bug affecting customer data. One is clearly better than the other, certainly.
Combine that with another poster's 200-line methods and someone looking at the code has no easy way to know what the code returns - what it DOES . And the person looking at it my be you in two years. Also, such code -lies- about what it does. More on that in a minute.
It is better to return at the bottom of a function, partly so you can FIND the damn return statement. So an improvement over return () in the middle of the function is to break.
Even better, make the loop condition honest. Instead of this:
while(line = readline) { ... ...
if lineempty(line) return;
}
Do this:
while( (line = readline) && line_not_empty(line) ) { ...
}
Now your while() condition is honest, it truly reflects how long the loop loops.
In standard pistols, the breech is unlocked after the slide moves a distance relative to the frame, and the slide continues to move after the breech is unlocked. This movement of slide relative to the frame means that the slide has momentum (recoil energy) that it has not yet transferred to the frame.
Whether that motion unlocks the breech directly, via a tilting barrel, a lever, or a rotary mechanism doesn't effect this fact. So long as the any recoiling part of the weapon is moving faster than the frame, that's recoil energy not yet transferred to the frame. That means it increases the time over which the same energy is transferred and therefore reduces the instantaneous force.
Where this would not occur would be if you had a weapon in which no massive parts of the weapon has recoil motion relative to the frame - mortars and old-fsshioned cannons.
>it modifies the time profile of the impartation of the momentum to the mount or the person holding the weapon.
and the topic of this thread is precisely the time profile. Quoting: ... (although the recoil is felt longer)
>> detonation time, whereas in a railgun the energy is spent continuously during the time the projectile travels the length of the barrel.
So whether or not the recoil is spread over time is precisely what I was responding to.
It should be noted that all we know is that someone thought about publishing something called efast. We don't know that this person is involved with the Efast Browser malware.
That's not a bad guess, but not really true, for four reasons.
First, there is no "moment of detonation", powder doesn't detonate*, it burns quickly, producing gas. It's a lot of gas in a small space, so it's under pressure and that pressure pushes the bullet out. The powder continues to burn as the bullet moves down the barrel and even -after- the bullet leaves the barrel, producing muzzle flash. In pictures you may have seen the "fire" coming out of the muzzle. That fire is burning powder, meaning it's still burning after the bullet is gone.
To look at it from another perspective, imagine a firecracker on a stick. When the cracker blows, the stick doesn't get shot "backward" toward whoever lit it. The recoil exists because (and while) the bullet and gas is being propelled down the barrel. So the duration of recoil force to the slide is the same as the duration of pushing the bullet down the barrel, equal and opposite at any given instant.
Third, slide -momentum-. The mass of the slide means that the recoil force increases the momentum of the slide, and the hand feels the force as you resist the slide's recoil - meaning the hand or other mount feels the recoil until the slide stops, after the bullet has hit the target.
Lastly, the slide -move- relative to the frame (and hand or other mounts) against a spring. Since the slide is pushing on the spring, and the spring pushing on the frame, it's actually the pressure of the -spring- that pushes on the frame. Therefore the mount experiences only as much recoil as the resitance of the spring at that portion of its travel.
* Some powders contain ingredients that -could- detonate if they were pure, but they are mixed with much slower burning components in order to slow them to a conflagration.
Not that I disagree with you, but ...
> They've tried it for 15+ years and it's been obvious that the technique didn't work so we need to come up with something new.
If the measure of it working is that people click the link to RTFA ...
Ps, it's been a couple of months since I looked up the 1% number. It's possible I remembered wrong and it's $33,000 to be in the top 1%, with $22,000 being the top 2% or something. Either way, most people on Slashdot are in the top 1% or very close to it. If you care whether you are in the top 1% or the top 2%, you can of course look it up. Either way you're rich.
If you want to reason from world totals, gross world product is $80-$100 trillion, depending on how you count. Divide by 7.3 billion people, that's $12,300.
The World Fact Book says average is $16,100. So yeah, most people (by far) aren't American technology professionals. If you happen to be American and salaried, you're the rich.
Some black people aren't stupid, amd make decisions based on something other than "he's black like me."
A few months before Obama started his exploratory presidential campaign, one well-known black leader was asked of he should run. The well-known black leader replied:
You know, I am a believer in knowing what you're doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if [Obama] were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, he would essentially have to start -now-, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I'm not one of those people.
That leaders name? Barak Obama. I agree with him, because I don't make decisions based on skin complexion.
You can hear it direct from the prophet's mouth:
https://youtu.be/ftbN4UmAK3o
You're so right. For the same reason, we need a federal licensing regime for owning binoculars. And cameras. And eyes.
Come to think of it, we've already HAVE privacy laws. Because we already have eyes.
How is it relevant what "any person who isn't an idiot" would do? This guy fell for the Obama to the extent that he devoted his life to raising money for the idiot. Ergo, he is also an idiot.
I mean, he not only sent his money to "Nigerian prince", he spent years going around convincing other people to send their money because not only would the Nigerian prince make them rich, he'd save the whole country! Of course in this particular scam the "prince" claimed to be of Kenyan descent rather than Nigerian, but the scam is juat as transparent.
Your nicely nicely summarized your point when you said "cost of living isn't guaranteed to be fair."
True, it's not always exactly fair, but it does tend to fairness. This is both caused and evidenced by the fact that in general, populations can and do move over time. People came (in droves) from Mexico to the United States, despite family connections, despite the fact that it's illegal the way many of them did so, etc.
People in Manhattan (high cost of living) CAN move to Detroit (low cost of living) but they choose not to because Manhattan is a better place to live. They pay more for Manhattan because they get something of value for the extra money, they are choosing to "buy" Manhattan rather than Detroit (specifically, they choose to buy a condo in Manhattan rather than one in Detroit).
You -could- move to Nuevo Laredo, and be rich compared to your neighbors. But you choose not to because Nuevo Laredo is a poor place to live - having a bad city around you makes you less rich just as much as having a bad car makes you less rich.
You are absolutely right that wealth is not income, and income is not wealth. (Though properly managing a sufficient income is the primary cause of wealth.)
The thing is, in the US we've done a TERRIBLE job of educating young people about what wealth is. Most people know what their income is, but they don't know what their wealth is. People know whether or not their income if higher than $22K or $34K, so they can easily see that their income is higher than 99% of people. It makes it simple, and in some ways it's a more important number for people who want to talk about external causes for their condition.
Consider these two people
Bob earns $150,000, spends $60K on housing, groceries, etc, then blows the other $90K on fun.
Fred earns $150,000, saves $80K, spends $60K on housing, groceries, etc, then blows the other $10K on fun.
Obviously Fred is going to very quickly accumulate a lot more wealth. But just as obviously, Bob can't complain about Fred getting wealthier and wealthier while they have the same income and Bob chooses to spend his with Fred saves.
Being "rich" is of course harder to figure than just net worth in terms of assets minus liabilities. A person living in California, with instant access to safe and nutritious food and water is in a very real way "richer" than someone living 4,000 miles south who doesn't have access to clean water or safe food. So that's a much more involved comparison, while it's much simpler to compare income - AND someone with a much higher income can afford to arrange for safe food and water, so it captures elements of being "rich" that net worth doesn't capture.
"I'm not rich since most of the other people in my country are rich too". "I'm downtrodden because I'm not richer than 99% of rich people - I'm not in the top 1% of the top 1%". That's a silly argument.
If you were born into the middle class of a rich country - if you're "only" moderately rich, you're extremely fortunate and I'm tired of hearing such people whine. If you immigrated to a rich country and worked your way into the middle of the rich, you're doing quite well also (and probably aren't one of the complainers.)
> And even so, I don't think he'd have to exclude himself because he's not the top 1% of Orange County
Not "has to", but "gets to". I'm talking to people who -want- to pretend they aren't the rich people. If you're posting on Slashdot, you probably work in the tech industry. (if you're posting on Slashdot during business hours, "work" means "post on Slashdot"). So you probably make more money than 99% of people. BUT you won't to complain about rich people. Which means you want to pretend you're not "rich people".
You're richer (by income) than 99% of your fellow man. You have multiple cars, and have the luxury of choosing car that costs two or three times as much as another, as a status symbol. So how do you pretend to be the downtrodden poor? You must set the parameters to ignore the people who aren't doing as well you, the vast majority of people.
He says he's not well paid because while he's paid better than 99% of people, it's not better than 99% of the other rich people. What kind of argument is that? "I'm not rich because most people in my country are rich too." It's PRECISELY the same argument as "I'm not rich because my neighbors in Beverly Hills are rich too."
Okay, to if you don't interact with people worse off than you, you get to pretend they don't exist, and then complain about how you can only have TWO giant screen TVs. Got it.