Over in desktop land a similar thing is true, by mid 2007 we had 2.67 GHz C2Qs. Now we have 3. GHz i7 quads and hexes.
There has been improvement in the last 3 years but afaict it's closer to 2x than 4x.
A Core i series CPU is substantially faster at the same clock speed than a Core 2 series CPU.
No, the real free market solution (a.k.a. the ones politicians would never propose) is that you get a whole bunch of power companies competing on the same grid, attempting to be a lower cost than one another, and give consumers a choice of who to pay for their power.
You also get a bunch of companies who have no interest in maintaining (or building new) infrastructure, since that is an investment that takes decades to pay off. Ergo, it is left to fall apart in the face of turning a profit next quarter.
Is there a single example, anywhere, of a deregulated power industry not resulting in higher prices, poorer service, and crumbling infrastructure ?
f microsoft were to produce an ARM version of server2008r2 that was able to provide a full AD DC role, print server role, WSUS or IIS as a single role server on a lighter ARM box they would kill.
No it wouldn't. The cost savings wouldn't even be significant enough to count as a rounding error.
Considering that ANY full size server is going to chew up 250W, and 350W more often than not, [...]
250W ? 350W !? A decent gaming machine won't use that much power, and a mostly-idle server (without a screen or power-hungry video card) wouldn't get close.
A 2U rackmount server with 8 cores @ 2.5Ghz, 48GB RAM and 8x15k RPM pulls under 250W with a light load. Any contemporary, basic "server" (~2Ghz dual-core CPU, 4-8GB RAM, 2-4 hard disks) should rarely, if ever, break 100W in typical usage.
There are many roles that just arent worthy of an entire machine and shouldnt be put in a VM.
Why not ?
A backup server for DPM for instance. Doesnt need much horsepower, just diskspace, server 2008r2, and the DPM software. PERFECT for a small ARM platform like a dual core 1.5-2Ghz.
The power savings over an identical machine with a Core 2 based machine would be insignificant, in the context of an office's annual budget. You'd probably save an order of magnitude more money just by getting rid of the water cooler.
They could have made Windows Vista/7 64bit only. Leave XP on 32 bit only. They could have killed the cruft of backwards compatibility once and for all.
If there was a stupid law about being drunk in public and everyone who walked from a bar into a cab got a ticket during that 5ft walk... I bet the laws would be changed in a hurry. Yet, as it stands, a cop can selectively apply these ridiculous laws to effectively harass anyone they want.
The flipside being, of course, that without a "public intoxication" charge, you have no way of stopping some drunken moron from wandering the streets being a nuisance or yelling abuse at passers-by.
So. You are saying that "No internet provider shall at any time or for any reason discriminate against any particular types of traffic going to their subscribers." Needs some industry insider complexity thrown in for some mystical reason?
Well, there are very good reasons why a provider may need to "discriminate" against "particular types of traffic". Protecting themselves and their customers against a DDoS, for example, or ensuring latency-sensitive protocols like VOIP have precedence.
yes, assange did something good in the world. he also did something wrong.
Did he though ? If there's one thing markedly lacking from this case so far, it's evidence. Further, Assange's behaviour strongly suggests he has no fear of being found guilty of rape (by any definition).
If you take a step back, the whole idea of needing (CPU, $ expensive) external programs like virus checkers and firewalls to protect your OS is ridiculous.
You don't. That software isn't protecting the OS, it's protecting the user. The OS can protect itself just fine, it's just the users insist on bypassing or ignoring that protection.
Microsoft should be deeply ashamed that such a massive industry has grown up around their failure to build a secure OS.
When you can come up with a way to protect an OS against malware, let a few people in Microsoft and Apple know about it. I'm sure they'll be happy to pay you lots of money for the knowledge.
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.
Three things:
First and foremost, if you can't find porn that matches your idea of a "realistic body portrayal", then you're simply not looking. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that every taste within the bounds of legality - is catered for in spades.
Secondly, porn is supposed to be a fantasy setting. As such, you'd generally expect it to have only a tenuous connection with reality, just like no-one creates a car racing game where you trundle around town in a minivan picking up your kids from school and dropping them off at soccer.
Finally, the problems with body image in the world don't come from porn - which despite growing accessibility, it still a niche form of content - it comes from mainstream media. There are few magazines more damaging to women's body image expectations than magazines targeted directly at them. Women in Playboy or even things like Ralph look positively normal compared to the average model posing in Cosmo or the lingerie section of a Macy's catalog.
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe.
Define "safe". The vast majority of data loss scenarios involve theft, hardware failure, and/or user error. For individuals especially, "the cloud" can trivially and transparently protect against these, far more efficiently than any "local" device can.
That's before even getting into the whole "access from anywhere" aspect, which most people consider to be the single biggest feature of "the cloud".
Did we really used to put up with that kind of shitty frame rate back then, or has, despite having not been touched for about 15 years, this system mysteriously slowed down?
Quake was one of, if not the, first game to require a decent FPU, something the 486 (even DXs) lacked.
DOOM should have been "great" on a machine like that, however (ie: as good as it's going to get). When it came out in 1993, a 486DX2/66 was pretty much the fastest machine normal people could buy.
I disagree. It would be very easy for a government agency to approach a big company and say: "We'd like a backdoor in your software. If you don't add one, or if you tell anyone we asked you to do this, you can say goodbye to any juicy government contracts you may have, as well as any hope of getting said contracts in the future." Somehow, I don't think the company is going to fight it.
And it would be even easier for any one of the dozens of people that would need to be involved to pass this on to various forms of media.
Or the code is there, for you to look at, if you want. There's no guarantee someone else has or that it's quality code.
Yet we are frequently and loudly told by Open Source evangelists that the fact lots of people CAN look at the code *implicitly* means lots of people WILL be looking at the code.
This is, as the GP said, supposed to be one of the biggest selling points of Open Source.
When what he wants in a woman is a chick from a country in turmoil, the guy deserves some criticism. What kind of sick fuck has that at or near the top of their list of desirable qualities.
Someone interested in women that are likely to be resourceful, independent and mature ?
Yes more so than a credit card. Credit cards are way too expensive for small amounts. I know of no shop that even accepts credit cards for small amounts.
What country ? One of the few things the USA's banking system has over many (most?) others is that credit card transactions (generally) don't have additional fees just because they're a credit card. Most places [that take cards at all] are also happy for you to use credit cards for transactions as small as a couple of dollars (and probably less, but that's the least I've used them for).
Only when I go through my bank's internet banking site. Well, you can authorize someone to take money from your account, and that can be faked, but it's every bit as easy to reverse as with credit cards.
This is something else that seems to be most prevalent in the US, presumably because their absurd credit rating system makes getting real credit cards relatively difficult. It's handled through the Visa network - nearly every debit card I've ever seen has a Visa logo on it and can function like a credit card on online sites. I believe Mastercard/Maestro do a similar thing in Europe (since Visa isn't as big over there).
$500 a year? Good lord! I pay EUR 25 for mine. And I find even that unreasonably expensive.
It's not when you're saving a grand or two a year from the perks.
I understand not everyone will be able to do this, but even relatively basic card rewards schemes should more than pay for themselves if you're funnelling nearly all your expenses through them. Of course, if you're only putting a few thousand a year through the card then it's unlikely to be convertible into a net profit.
I honestly think we need a better, cheaper, more modern and more interoperable system than the current credit card system.
Credit cards are only expensive if your banks are screwing you. If the USA's archaic and ridiculous banking systems allow me to use a credit card for everything from a bottle of coke to a new car, with no additional fees just because it's a credit card, then there's no reason every other country's shouldn't be able to as well.
Of course cash is inconvenient for large purchases, but it's incredibly convenient for small ones.
No more so than a credit card for the vast, vast majority of purchases. Plus there's the problem having to carry it around.
And it's the credit card that's at best equally convenient to a debit card. Where I live, debit cards are accepted absolutely everywhere (except in places where they only accept cash), whereas credit cards are much more limited. Credit card transactions also cost more.
I can't even remember the last place I saw that could have processed a debit card transaction but not a credit card.
But your credit card doesn't even need to be stolen for someone else to be able to use your money. You might not notice, and if you don't check your payments carefully, you might not realise you need to get a payment reversed. This risk is much smaller with debit cards that require a PIN in order to pay.
Many (most?) debit cards these days can be used without a PIN for online purchases. They work like a credit card but the money comes straight out of your account.
Does the credit card company provide those things? If so, you're probably still paying for it through higher credit card costs. Credit cards aren't cheap.
I'm not, because I pay my credit card off in time. People who incur interest charges or don't use the services are the ones paying for it. My credit cards probably cost me $500 per year, but I *easily* get more than that back in value from the services they provide.
No they're not. At best a debit card is equally so, but cash is decidedly *inconvenient* since I need to plan ahead to have it on me, have to carry it around, and for large purchases may have to go into a branch to be able to withdraw enough.
Not to mention emergencies are much more manageable with a credit card on hand than with the amount of cash you're likely to be carrying.
[...] and less in need of fraud protection (the entire reason credit cards need that is that fraud is ridiculously easy with them; and the protection is why they cost so much).
It's *substantially* easier to get credit card charges reversed should a card be stolen, than it is to get money put back into your checking account if a debit card goes astray. Losing a wallet full of cash - or having it stolen - is, of course, pretty much guaranteed to be a total loss.
Cash gives me a better feel for how fast I'm spending, whereas my checking account gives me better record keeping. I couldn't care less about point/reward schemes, and I've never heard of my credit card having anything like that anyway. I've never heard of extended warranties merely for using a different payment method either.
Decent credit cards will often include things like an additional year of warranty for goods purchased with them, complimentary travel insurance for trips booked with them, points/rewards schemes (though x% "cash back" seems to be more common in the US), airport lounge access and various other perks and bonuses.
Of course, you don't get that on the cheapest cards, but it's not difficult to get much more value out of a higher-end card than it costs you to have it. This is particularly true if you're in the position where you can funnel a lot of (reimbursable) work expenses through it.
The only thing that credit cards make more convenient, is international payment. Especially online.
With only a modicum of care, a credit card is *by far* the best way to manage expenses. When you're going to be spending the money anyway, why wouldn't you be trying to get frequent flyer miles, cash back, or something else out of it as well ? Why would you be carrying around a lot of cash and risking loss or theft of same ? Why wouldn't you want to be using the bank's money for a month or two while yours is earning interest or otherwise being useful ?
Yes, but, well... homosexuality *is* wrong. Homosexual homosapiens are physically unable to reproduce. That is the most damning evidence to support this position.
On the contrary, the poor DO pay taxes, and lots of them. Anyone earning more than $5.00/yr pays US Income taxes [irs.gov]. Granted, they don't pay much, but they do pay. Someone working 40 hours a week making the minimum wage of $8.50/hr earns $17,680 per year (that's only 340 dollars per week!) pays $2,136 in Federal income tax.
However, they get tax rebates and various other payments that more than exceed the amount of income tax they pay.
Then there are all the myriad other taxes. State income taxes, State, county, and city sales taxes, Excise taxes on gasoline, tobacco, alcohol. The poor rent, so they don't get a mortgage deduction -- their landlords do. But they pay property taxes as part of their rent*.
None of these are income taxes. Means-testing such taxes (which you must do if you want to add exceptions for the poor) will a) complicate tax laws and b) require normal people to become tax experts.
The fairest tax is a graduated income tax with no deductions.
But then you don't tax wealth, which is where the rich "hide" the majority of their worth. An income tax on someone who only "earns" a few hundred grand a year but has a dozen homes all over the world is not "fair".
Get rid of the Capital Gains tax and tax capital gains as income, and you raise more revenue for government while making the system more fair.
How well do you think taxing capital gains is going to work out for that elderly couple when their house goes from being worth $200k to $600k during a real estate boom and they're suddenly taxed on $400k of "income" ? If they have a retirement fund making barely enough to cover inflation, why should that increase in value be taxed as income, effectively causing them to lose money in real terms ?
Why should a roofing contractor who earns $100k/yr pay twice the taxes as someone who "earns" his money gambling the stock market?
The gambler will still pay income tax when he converts his stocks (which are worthless in and of themselves) into cash (which is actually useful).
I'm all for punishingly high taxes on the very rich, but it's not as simple as you want to make out.
Slashdot Mirror
The government has no incentive to ensure passenger safety.
Just like they have no incentive to provide Police ?
An airline with a reputation for carelessness will be destroyed by market forces.
Not until something goes wrong, if it goes wrong at all. Even then, if it's cheaper, people will still prefer it.
Over in desktop land a similar thing is true, by mid 2007 we had 2.67 GHz C2Qs. Now we have 3. GHz i7 quads and hexes.
There has been improvement in the last 3 years but afaict it's closer to 2x than 4x.
A Core i series CPU is substantially faster at the same clock speed than a Core 2 series CPU.
No, the real free market solution (a.k.a. the ones politicians would never propose) is that you get a whole bunch of power companies competing on the same grid, attempting to be a lower cost than one another, and give consumers a choice of who to pay for their power.
You also get a bunch of companies who have no interest in maintaining (or building new) infrastructure, since that is an investment that takes decades to pay off. Ergo, it is left to fall apart in the face of turning a profit next quarter.
Is there a single example, anywhere, of a deregulated power industry not resulting in higher prices, poorer service, and crumbling infrastructure ?
f microsoft were to produce an ARM version of server2008r2 that was able to provide a full AD DC role, print server role, WSUS or IIS as a single role server on a lighter ARM box they would kill.
No it wouldn't. The cost savings wouldn't even be significant enough to count as a rounding error.
Considering that ANY full size server is going to chew up 250W, and 350W more often than not, [...]
250W ? 350W !? A decent gaming machine won't use that much power, and a mostly-idle server (without a screen or power-hungry video card) wouldn't get close.
A 2U rackmount server with 8 cores @ 2.5Ghz, 48GB RAM and 8x15k RPM pulls under 250W with a light load. Any contemporary, basic "server" (~2Ghz dual-core CPU, 4-8GB RAM, 2-4 hard disks) should rarely, if ever, break 100W in typical usage.
There are many roles that just arent worthy of an entire machine and shouldnt be put in a VM.
Why not ?
A backup server for DPM for instance. Doesnt need much horsepower, just diskspace, server 2008r2, and the DPM software. PERFECT for a small ARM platform like a dual core 1.5-2Ghz.
The power savings over an identical machine with a Core 2 based machine would be insignificant, in the context of an office's annual budget. You'd probably save an order of magnitude more money just by getting rid of the water cooler.
They could have made Windows Vista/7 64bit only. Leave XP on 32 bit only. They could have killed the cruft of backwards compatibility once and for all.
How ?
If there was a stupid law about being drunk in public and everyone who walked from a bar into a cab got a ticket during that 5ft walk... I bet the laws would be changed in a hurry. Yet, as it stands, a cop can selectively apply these ridiculous laws to effectively harass anyone they want.
The flipside being, of course, that without a "public intoxication" charge, you have no way of stopping some drunken moron from wandering the streets being a nuisance or yelling abuse at passers-by.
So. You are saying that "No internet provider shall at any time or for any reason discriminate against any particular types of traffic going to their subscribers." Needs some industry insider complexity thrown in for some mystical reason?
Well, there are very good reasons why a provider may need to "discriminate" against "particular types of traffic". Protecting themselves and their customers against a DDoS, for example, or ensuring latency-sensitive protocols like VOIP have precedence.
yes, assange did something good in the world. he also did something wrong.
Did he though ? If there's one thing markedly lacking from this case so far, it's evidence. Further, Assange's behaviour strongly suggests he has no fear of being found guilty of rape (by any definition).
And what gives one person, Assange, greater credibility than two other people?
A consistent story and willingness to co-operate with authorities ?
If you take a step back, the whole idea of needing (CPU, $ expensive) external programs like virus checkers and firewalls to protect your OS is ridiculous.
You don't. That software isn't protecting the OS, it's protecting the user. The OS can protect itself just fine, it's just the users insist on bypassing or ignoring that protection.
Microsoft should be deeply ashamed that such a massive industry has grown up around their failure to build a secure OS.
When you can come up with a way to protect an OS against malware, let a few people in Microsoft and Apple know about it. I'm sure they'll be happy to pay you lots of money for the knowledge.
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
To have realistic body portrayals - perhaps not the morbidly obese, unless you're someone with a fetish for that, but not "Olive Oyl and Brutus" caricature-bodies either - regain the mainstream spotlight might not be such a bad thing.
Three things:
First and foremost, if you can't find porn that matches your idea of a "realistic body portrayal", then you're simply not looking. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that every taste within the bounds of legality - is catered for in spades.
Secondly, porn is supposed to be a fantasy setting. As such, you'd generally expect it to have only a tenuous connection with reality, just like no-one creates a car racing game where you trundle around town in a minivan picking up your kids from school and dropping them off at soccer.
Finally, the problems with body image in the world don't come from porn - which despite growing accessibility, it still a niche form of content - it comes from mainstream media. There are few magazines more damaging to women's body image expectations than magazines targeted directly at them. Women in Playboy or even things like Ralph look positively normal compared to the average model posing in Cosmo or the lingerie section of a Macy's catalog.
watching a bunch of out of shape people go at it, isn't something I enjoy watching... Not that I would every watch such a thing...
Plenty of homemade porn involves people who are very much NOT "out of shape".
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe.
Define "safe". The vast majority of data loss scenarios involve theft, hardware failure, and/or user error. For individuals especially, "the cloud" can trivially and transparently protect against these, far more efficiently than any "local" device can.
That's before even getting into the whole "access from anywhere" aspect, which most people consider to be the single biggest feature of "the cloud".
Did we really used to put up with that kind of shitty frame rate back then, or has, despite having not been touched for about 15 years, this system mysteriously slowed down?
Quake was one of, if not the, first game to require a decent FPU, something the 486 (even DXs) lacked.
DOOM should have been "great" on a machine like that, however (ie: as good as it's going to get). When it came out in 1993, a 486DX2/66 was pretty much the fastest machine normal people could buy.
I disagree. It would be very easy for a government agency to approach a big company and say: "We'd like a backdoor in your software. If you don't add one, or if you tell anyone we asked you to do this, you can say goodbye to any juicy government contracts you may have, as well as any hope of getting said contracts in the future." Somehow, I don't think the company is going to fight it.
And it would be even easier for any one of the dozens of people that would need to be involved to pass this on to various forms of media.
No, more likely just damaged, full of self-loathing and hates herself and the world enough to comply with his twisted sexual requests.
No need for a country in turmoil to produce that, you just need the average woman who grew up reading Cosmo and watching shows like "Bridalplasty".
Or the code is there, for you to look at, if you want. There's no guarantee someone else has or that it's quality code.
Yet we are frequently and loudly told by Open Source evangelists that the fact lots of people CAN look at the code *implicitly* means lots of people WILL be looking at the code.
This is, as the GP said, supposed to be one of the biggest selling points of Open Source.
When what he wants in a woman is a chick from a country in turmoil, the guy deserves some criticism. What kind of sick fuck has that at or near the top of their list of desirable qualities.
Someone interested in women that are likely to be resourceful, independent and mature ?
Yes more so than a credit card. Credit cards are way too expensive for small amounts. I know of no shop that even accepts credit cards for small amounts.
What country ? One of the few things the USA's banking system has over many (most?) others is that credit card transactions (generally) don't have additional fees just because they're a credit card. Most places [that take cards at all] are also happy for you to use credit cards for transactions as small as a couple of dollars (and probably less, but that's the least I've used them for).
Only when I go through my bank's internet banking site. Well, you can authorize someone to take money from your account, and that can be faked, but it's every bit as easy to reverse as with credit cards.
This is something else that seems to be most prevalent in the US, presumably because their absurd credit rating system makes getting real credit cards relatively difficult. It's handled through the Visa network - nearly every debit card I've ever seen has a Visa logo on it and can function like a credit card on online sites. I believe Mastercard/Maestro do a similar thing in Europe (since Visa isn't as big over there).
$500 a year? Good lord! I pay EUR 25 for mine. And I find even that unreasonably expensive.
It's not when you're saving a grand or two a year from the perks.
I understand not everyone will be able to do this, but even relatively basic card rewards schemes should more than pay for themselves if you're funnelling nearly all your expenses through them. Of course, if you're only putting a few thousand a year through the card then it's unlikely to be convertible into a net profit.
I honestly think we need a better, cheaper, more modern and more interoperable system than the current credit card system.
Credit cards are only expensive if your banks are screwing you. If the USA's archaic and ridiculous banking systems allow me to use a credit card for everything from a bottle of coke to a new car, with no additional fees just because it's a credit card, then there's no reason every other country's shouldn't be able to as well.
Of course cash is inconvenient for large purchases, but it's incredibly convenient for small ones.
No more so than a credit card for the vast, vast majority of purchases. Plus there's the problem having to carry it around.
And it's the credit card that's at best equally convenient to a debit card. Where I live, debit cards are accepted absolutely everywhere (except in places where they only accept cash), whereas credit cards are much more limited. Credit card transactions also cost more.
I can't even remember the last place I saw that could have processed a debit card transaction but not a credit card.
But your credit card doesn't even need to be stolen for someone else to be able to use your money. You might not notice, and if you don't check your payments carefully, you might not realise you need to get a payment reversed. This risk is much smaller with debit cards that require a PIN in order to pay.
Many (most?) debit cards these days can be used without a PIN for online purchases. They work like a credit card but the money comes straight out of your account.
Does the credit card company provide those things? If so, you're probably still paying for it through higher credit card costs. Credit cards aren't cheap.
I'm not, because I pay my credit card off in time. People who incur interest charges or don't use the services are the ones paying for it. My credit cards probably cost me $500 per year, but I *easily* get more than that back in value from the services they provide.
They're both more convenient, [...]
No they're not. At best a debit card is equally so, but cash is decidedly *inconvenient* since I need to plan ahead to have it on me, have to carry it around, and for large purchases may have to go into a branch to be able to withdraw enough.
Not to mention emergencies are much more manageable with a credit card on hand than with the amount of cash you're likely to be carrying.
[...] and less in need of fraud protection (the entire reason credit cards need that is that fraud is ridiculously easy with them; and the protection is why they cost so much).
It's *substantially* easier to get credit card charges reversed should a card be stolen, than it is to get money put back into your checking account if a debit card goes astray. Losing a wallet full of cash - or having it stolen - is, of course, pretty much guaranteed to be a total loss.
Cash gives me a better feel for how fast I'm spending, whereas my checking account gives me better record keeping. I couldn't care less about point/reward schemes, and I've never heard of my credit card having anything like that anyway. I've never heard of extended warranties merely for using a different payment method either.
Decent credit cards will often include things like an additional year of warranty for goods purchased with them, complimentary travel insurance for trips booked with them, points/rewards schemes (though x% "cash back" seems to be more common in the US), airport lounge access and various other perks and bonuses.
Of course, you don't get that on the cheapest cards, but it's not difficult to get much more value out of a higher-end card than it costs you to have it. This is particularly true if you're in the position where you can funnel a lot of (reimbursable) work expenses through it.
The only thing that credit cards make more convenient, is international payment. Especially online.
With only a modicum of care, a credit card is *by far* the best way to manage expenses. When you're going to be spending the money anyway, why wouldn't you be trying to get frequent flyer miles, cash back, or something else out of it as well ? Why would you be carrying around a lot of cash and risking loss or theft of same ? Why wouldn't you want to be using the bank's money for a month or two while yours is earning interest or otherwise being useful ?
Yes, but, well... homosexuality *is* wrong. Homosexual homosapiens are physically unable to reproduce. That is the most damning evidence to support this position.
So no blowjobs either ?
Neither of which provide most, if any, the additional benefits listed that a credit card does.
On the contrary, the poor DO pay taxes, and lots of them. Anyone earning more than $5.00/yr pays US Income taxes [irs.gov]. Granted, they don't pay much, but they do pay. Someone working 40 hours a week making the minimum wage of $8.50/hr earns $17,680 per year (that's only 340 dollars per week!) pays $2,136 in Federal income tax.
However, they get tax rebates and various other payments that more than exceed the amount of income tax they pay.
Then there are all the myriad other taxes. State income taxes, State, county, and city sales taxes, Excise taxes on gasoline, tobacco, alcohol. The poor rent, so they don't get a mortgage deduction -- their landlords do. But they pay property taxes as part of their rent*.
None of these are income taxes. Means-testing such taxes (which you must do if you want to add exceptions for the poor) will a) complicate tax laws and b) require normal people to become tax experts.
The fairest tax is a graduated income tax with no deductions.
But then you don't tax wealth, which is where the rich "hide" the majority of their worth. An income tax on someone who only "earns" a few hundred grand a year but has a dozen homes all over the world is not "fair".
Get rid of the Capital Gains tax and tax capital gains as income, and you raise more revenue for government while making the system more fair.
How well do you think taxing capital gains is going to work out for that elderly couple when their house goes from being worth $200k to $600k during a real estate boom and they're suddenly taxed on $400k of "income" ? If they have a retirement fund making barely enough to cover inflation, why should that increase in value be taxed as income, effectively causing them to lose money in real terms ?
Why should a roofing contractor who earns $100k/yr pay twice the taxes as someone who "earns" his money gambling the stock market?
The gambler will still pay income tax when he converts his stocks (which are worthless in and of themselves) into cash (which is actually useful).
I'm all for punishingly high taxes on the very rich, but it's not as simple as you want to make out.