I would like to think that this move on the part of the content owners will be a massive failure without any intervention by government. If a typical computer user goes to a content owner's site and sees a message saying that the ISP has not purchased the "ESPN360" package and that the user will not be able to access ESPN360 videos, I expect that the user will just go download it via bittorrent or the like. Or just ignore ESPN360 and go to a competitor's site for the scores and highlights. So ESPN360 loses out on a potential sale (to the individual) either way.
I would understand if users from an ISP which did not pay for the ESPN360 access for its customers get a "give me your credit card info to see this video" page, whereas users from an ISP which did pay for access for its customers get to see the video free of charge. That might actually end up being a viable business model.
Of course, it's entirely possible that I don't know consumer behavior as well as I think I do. The foolish choices made by consumers continually impresses me.
I like this decision actually. Now that Internet radio stations cannot afford to play the big label music, I expect to see a slew of new independent artists and small labels allowing the Internet stations to play their music for free (or very cheap). Thus a whole new crop of musicians (who the world might not have otherwise heard of) will be getting airplay and become popular. Then we have a chance at bringing in that wonderful new era of fresh, creative music that everyone always talks about.
Of course, when these new artists and labels start making money, the big labels will take notice and want a piece of the action. So the big labels will allow Internet stations to play for free or cheap and we'll have all the same mass produced crap that we have today...
Although strong journalistic ethics is always a good thing, does this issue really affect slashdotters? I mean, who here actually reads Windows-centric blogs anyway?
"...and here comes the Libertarian trolls to flame me to death..."
Fixed your typo! I don't agree with every idea of Libertarianism, but I certainly consider myself a Libertarian. I'm very excited by this case and very much hope that she wins against the RIAA. No company has the right to harass individuals in the way that the RIAA has been doing. I don't have the links handy, but I recall the automated ceases and desist notices, as well as some very questionable proof used in past cases. The RIAA is throwing its weight around and it's infringing upon individuals' rights. It's time they got burned for that.
From what I remember of my University days, it was the norm to keep odd hours, and not "report" my contacts with foreigners to anybody in particular. I had many interests outside of my school work and my job. Granted I didn't know many or my fellow students who were consorting with foreign governments, but a lot of the behaviors listed are not out of the norm for college students.
I disagree that stability is a lame excuse for the lack of an SDK because Treo and Blackberry owners have seen firsthand how unstable those platforms can be, particularly with poorly written apps.
No, it's still a lame excuse.
Bob makes a computer for Mike. John writes a program for that computer. Mike loves his computer. As soon as he installs John's program on his computer, it starts crashing. When he removes John's program, it stops crashing.
Why the Christ would Mike blame Bob for his computer crashing?
All Apple has to do is say from the outset, "we can only guarantee the stability of the iPhone with programs that have gone through our quality assurance process." "Stability" problem solved. Why would anyone blame Windows for crashing when you install any third party software? It's not logical, but it still happens. Users blame Microsoft for their troubles, even if the source of the problem is some third party software app. Users don't know the difference. Besides, it's sometimes difficult to tell which of the 10 programs running on a machine actually caused the problem.
My point is that while people like Slashdotters might understand what's happening on the device, a normal corporate iPhone user is going to blame Apple's POS iPhone when it crashes or doesn't work right. That's just the way the world works. So if iPhone owners go around complaining about how often their iPhone crashes, it hurts Apple even though it's not really Apple's fault. I think it's simply a practical business decision rather than a technical decision.
Even a Java VM is still crippleware. Give us Cocoa ffs, Apple. I don't consider a Java VM crippleware. That's like saying that the Blackberry is crippleware because it's based on Java. As long as you can write applications, I don't see that it's really crippleware. It may not be the brilliant Apple SDK that you want, but it's far from crippleware. However, a real Apple SDK would be my preference as well.
Let me know when you release your ssh v2 AJAX app for the iphone. Or a VNC client / RDP client, etc. Or how about an OGG player, Skype, etc. Yes. The lack of a Java VM is very disturbing to me. All of the above would be possible with Java on the iPhone, but I don't think that AJAX will do the job here.
Yeah, I saw the keynote. Simple apps that do simple things are possible / easy with ajax. Good luck doing anything that just won't run in a browser / javascript environment. If we had a full JVM in there, it would be a whole different ballgame. We don't.
Sorry Steve, your "solution" just doesn't cut it. Frankly, your lame excuse that a REAL SDK and openness will de-stabilize the phone / network ALSO doesn't cut it for any of us that has ever had a treo, blackberry, etc. Hey, you claim that you have the power of OSX in there, certainly you give us at least a restricted mini VM to run in without "destabilizing" anything... I disagree that stability is a lame excuse for the lack of an SDK because Treo and Blackberry owners have seen firsthand how unstable those platforms can be, particularly with poorly written apps. But you're right on the money about Java. No SDK *and* no Java is just silly to me.
People will always complain if there's no SDK, but at least give them a Java environment for goodness sake! Walt was absolutely right that VNC, RDP and SSH clients probably can't (or won't) be done under AJAX alone. All the existing web based implementations of these clients that I've seen have used Java.
Maybe Apple will pull their big fruit-shaped head out of the sand on this issue and give us a Java VM!
Glad to hear that someone's already debunking this. Personally, I rather hope that the guy's claims are true because it would usher in a remarkable new era of archaeology, revealing vast amounts of information about the history of humans and animals and maybe evolution by allowing us to more easily find remains that might otherwise elude us for centuries.
However, I too find the claims of the technology to be highly suspect. I might be that such revealing data might be gathered by military satellites, but if such information were available from civilian-use satellites, then I think we would have more about it before now. I just don't believe that governments would want civilians to have access to satellite data which would likely compromise submarine movements and other such secrets.
According to the articles I read about this, they were judged against 22 other possible majors. The education majors, who averaged 961 out of a possible 1600, were not the lowest though! Education majors beat out the home economics majors, "technical & vocational education" majors, and public affairs & services majors.
So teachers are smarter than auto mechanics, professional housewives/husbands, and social workers (I presume that this is part of the "public affairs & services" classification).
The article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette can be found here.
Also from that article:
Frederick Hess, a University of Virginia researcher, noted in a recent study that "teacher-preparation programs neither screen out nor weed out weak candidates."
Even the elite universities, he found, accept more than 50 percent of the applicants for their master's programs in education. But their average acceptance rate for medical schools is about 5 percent; for law schools, about 25 percent.
And this article at www.reformk12.org has the following to say:
Each year, over a million college-bound high school students take the SAT test. And each year, The College Board publishes reports which are gold mines of information for statistics junkies like us.
We decided to have some fun with the 2003 report (pdf), looking specifically at the average scores for groups of students headed towards different college majors.
As you may well know, the SAT test is divided into two halves: Math and Verbal, with the scores reported separately for each. For some unfair comparisions, it is interesting to see how math and science fields do on the Verbal, and how language and humanities fields do on the Math.
The Math SAT: As would be expected, Mathematics majors scored highest of all the majors on the Math portion, with a 626 point average. They soundly trounced the Language and Literature majors, who were 76 points behind. But here's the kicker: Language and Literature scored 67 points higher in Math than Education majors!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but well over half of future teachers will end up either teaching math or a math-heavy field such as science. Meanwhile future linguists, authors, and literature critics might not ever see another equation in their life.
And yet with Euclidian aplomb they fairly kicked Education majors' butts (by 1.75 standard deviations, no less).
Ok, we hear your protests. Not every teacher will teach math, granted. So let's look at the Verbal scores.
The Verbal SAT: Here, Language and Literature majors got their reciprocity, outperforming all other majors with a score of 603. Mathematics majors were forced to lick their wounds 58 points back. But (and you knew this was coming) the Math majors came off as quite cultured in comparison to our soon-to-be public school teachers, beating Education majors by 63 Verbal points!
This is embarrassing.
It could be worse: In a comparison of 21 college categories (we're eliminating the non-college categories of "Home Economics" and "Technical and Vocational") Education majors come in third-to-last place on the Math portion. Only "Agriculture or Natural Resources" and "Public Affairs and Services" majors scored worse.
In the Verbal portion--which should be a teacher's strong point, or so we thought--Education majors took the silver medal in the race for last place. "Public Affairs and Services" again occupied the basement.
All we can say is, Thank God for government majors.
The study that these articles and others reference is published by The College Board. However, the links which I found in the reformk12.org article lead to a page and a PDF which have been removed or relocated. If someone wants to spend the time to hunt down the articles on The College Board's web site, I'd love to read the original study.
I do not believe that the school system's repeated failure to renew on time is the most important issue here. The disturbing thing is that these educational systems have been forced to generate revenue by leasing portions of the spectrum to corporations. When educational departments are driven to things like this, what message does it send - scream, even - to the people? Right now, I am thinking it is along the lines of:
When you take thirty seconds and look up government expenditures, it is actually plain as day. Here are the figures for defense versus education in 2004:
Defense: totalled $456 billion.
Education: totalled $88 billion.
If that does not anger the average person, I honestly do not know what will. You make a good point, though more money != better education. Since I am originally from Georgia, I'll pick on my own state as an example. Georgia schools have one of the highest per-student education spending ratios in the nation, but the Georgia students are consistently one of the lowest ranked of the nation in educational abilities testing.
I imagine that educating children is a very complicated matter, and quoting one statistic alone does not prove a point. However, throwing more money at a broken system does not fix the broken system, and thus kids are still not well educated.
The teachers' union does not help matters either. They fight against testing of teachers to ensure that the teachers actually understand the subjects that they are teaching. And the teacher certification/testing standards that are currently in place are a joke. Many states use the "Praxis" test to determine teacher eligibility. In the District of Columbia, teachers only have to score above the 20th percentile to pass. Most of the other states that use the Praxis test only require test takers to score above the 33rd percentile.
And the "No Child Left Behind Act" (2002) mandated that all school systems be able to demonstrate by August 2006 that their teachers are "highly qualified" in their primary area of teaching. But in 2006 the Department of Education notified at least 34 states that their teacher testing had major problems and would be subject to mandatory oversight.
After all that NEA bashing, I have to say that most teachers are great people with big hearts who try to make a difference in the lives of the kids that they teach. The teachers themselves aren't the problem. It's their union(s). Although teachers are not the brightest group of Americans (Education majors have lowest SAT scores amongst their college cohorts), they would improve if they were required to do so to maintain their jobs. The unions are keeping the teachers complacent at their well-below-average status. It's unfortunate that the bad apples are bringing down the entire educational system.
While I was perusing the figures, I thought these two were also rather telling:
Also from 2004, cumulative, the amount that our government took in from taxes:
Individual Income Taxes: totalled $809 billion.
Corporate Income Taxes: totalled $189.4 billion.
I would say that there is a bit of a disparity there. I will leave it up to everyone to draw their own conclusions as to why. See my other reply on this story regarding corporate versus individual taxes. It's not as clear cut an issue as it might appear at first glance.
As far as I know, a hike in corporate tax is partly internalized by downsizing workers and eating some of the tax by taking a lower profit margin. They make up for the rest by raising prices. This is a bit simplistic, as taxation is sticky business, but higher inflation and unemployment are not the targets of fiscal policy.
I'd say you're on the right track with this, but it's even simpler. If corporate income taxes are raised, a business will compensate for the potential loss of profits via:
1) Raise prices 2) Lower costs of production (fewer workers, cheaper parts, etc.) 3) Both of the above
The really sad thing about Americans and taxes is that most of us don't realize that an increase in corporate taxes might as well be an increase in individual taxes. The consumers pay for all corporate taxes. It might be in the form of higher prices, or lower quality goods for the same price, lost jobs, or some combination of those three. We just feel better about instituting higher taxes on corporations, because we feel like they're the ones making all the money. Nobody feels good about increasing taxes on individuals.
When the fellow mentions the "stability" trade off, that means stability of the API/ABI, libraries, etc... not how often it crashes or not.
Must be a different RedHat from the one I've used in the past. RH has certainly been one of the least stable ditros I've used in the last couple of years. If you're looking for both stability of uptime as well as stability of software changes, check out Debian's stable branch. My personal favorite for long-term relatively unchanging-but-bug-fixes-kept-up-to-date servers.
Imagine getting hit with an income tax bill for $10,000 or so... that's why we have withholding, so people don't wind up in debt to pay their taxes, even if thru lack of foresight.
Actually, the income tax withholding system was introduced during WW2 as a means for the government to get access to our tax dollars more quickly to fund the war efforts. It was promised at the time that the law would be repealed after the war, but that obviously didn't happen.
I suspect that the reason it has never been repealed is because when the taxes are taken gradually from you before you even see your paycheck, the loss does not register in your brain as strongly as when you have to write one big check for a full year's worth of taxes. Thus it is easier for the government to raise taxes without pissing off the public. Any tax increase is spread out over 12 months and taken from you before your paycheck ever reaches you. So it does not *appear* to be a big change for you.
And now when somebody gets a tax refund in April or May, and you ask them how much they paid for taxes for the previous year, they'll tell you that that didn't pay anything... They got a check from the government. We the sheep don't keep track of the amount of money that we pay in taxes every year. It's only the net effect of "Tax Time" in April that people grasp. How wrong that is...
We use Citrix extensively in our enterprise WAN, and for a while we were having the problem you describe of print jobs mysteriously appearing at any one of our 25 sites across 10 counties. Turned out that we had two problems with our setup.
First, we had many users sharing their logins with other users, which meant that there were sometimes up to eight users logged from different workstations under the same username. When they printed, Citrix got confused and sent the print jobs to any one of the potentially eight different default printers of the eight people logged in under that username. Once that problem was corrected, we found our second problem...
We were imaging our workstations for fast and easy rollout, with the Citrix client pre-installed. Unfortunately, the Citrix client stores the Windows workstation's NetBIOS name in an.ini file on the local hard drive, and once the.ini file has been created, the Citrix client app never bothers to check and see if the Windows workstation's name has changed. So we had hundreds of workstations with the same NetBIOS name recorded in the Citrix client's.ini file! What a nightmare... So we started clearing the contents of that file at every logon, and now all of our Citrix printing works really smoothly.
Democracy is mob rule. The majority gets what the majority wants. Wish that I could say I'm glad that I don't live in a democracy, but the U.S. of A. is becoming less of a republic and more of a democracy. Quite a shame I say. What began as a wonderful form of government that was by the people and for the people has degenerated in people for the government and by the government....
So anyway, let's practice that mob-rule/democracy thing and get some soft-core action between Anakin and the queen!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to think that this move on the part of the content owners will be a massive failure without any intervention by government. If a typical computer user goes to a content owner's site and sees a message saying that the ISP has not purchased the "ESPN360" package and that the user will not be able to access ESPN360 videos, I expect that the user will just go download it via bittorrent or the like. Or just ignore ESPN360 and go to a competitor's site for the scores and highlights. So ESPN360 loses out on a potential sale (to the individual) either way.
I would understand if users from an ISP which did not pay for the ESPN360 access for its customers get a "give me your credit card info to see this video" page, whereas users from an ISP which did pay for access for its customers get to see the video free of charge. That might actually end up being a viable business model.
Of course, it's entirely possible that I don't know consumer behavior as well as I think I do. The foolish choices made by consumers continually impresses me.
Relevant reviews from TheTechStop.net:
http://www.thetechstop.net/?page_id=109
http://www.thetechstop.net/?page_id=501
I like this decision actually. Now that Internet radio stations cannot afford to play the big label music, I expect to see a slew of new independent artists and small labels allowing the Internet stations to play their music for free (or very cheap). Thus a whole new crop of musicians (who the world might not have otherwise heard of) will be getting airplay and become popular. Then we have a chance at bringing in that wonderful new era of fresh, creative music that everyone always talks about.
Of course, when these new artists and labels start making money, the big labels will take notice and want a piece of the action. So the big labels will allow Internet stations to play for free or cheap and we'll have all the same mass produced crap that we have today...
Although strong journalistic ethics is always a good thing, does this issue really affect slashdotters? I mean, who here actually reads Windows-centric blogs anyway?
Fixed your typo! I don't agree with every idea of Libertarianism, but I certainly consider myself a Libertarian. I'm very excited by this case and very much hope that she wins against the RIAA. No company has the right to harass individuals in the way that the RIAA has been doing. I don't have the links handy, but I recall the automated ceases and desist notices, as well as some very questionable proof used in past cases. The RIAA is throwing its weight around and it's infringing upon individuals' rights. It's time they got burned for that.
From what I remember of my University days, it was the norm to keep odd hours, and not "report" my contacts with foreigners to anybody in particular. I had many interests outside of my school work and my job. Granted I didn't know many or my fellow students who were consorting with foreign governments, but a lot of the behaviors listed are not out of the norm for college students.
No, it's still a lame excuse.
Bob makes a computer for Mike.
John writes a program for that computer.
Mike loves his computer. As soon as he installs John's program on his computer, it starts crashing.
When he removes John's program, it stops crashing.
Why the Christ would Mike blame Bob for his computer crashing?
All Apple has to do is say from the outset, "we can only guarantee the stability of the iPhone with programs that have gone through our quality assurance process." "Stability" problem solved. Why would anyone blame Windows for crashing when you install any third party software? It's not logical, but it still happens. Users blame Microsoft for their troubles, even if the source of the problem is some third party software app. Users don't know the difference. Besides, it's sometimes difficult to tell which of the 10 programs running on a machine actually caused the problem.
My point is that while people like Slashdotters might understand what's happening on the device, a normal corporate iPhone user is going to blame Apple's POS iPhone when it crashes or doesn't work right. That's just the way the world works. So if iPhone owners go around complaining about how often their iPhone crashes, it hurts Apple even though it's not really Apple's fault. I think it's simply a practical business decision rather than a technical decision. Even a Java VM is still crippleware. Give us Cocoa ffs, Apple. I don't consider a Java VM crippleware. That's like saying that the Blackberry is crippleware because it's based on Java. As long as you can write applications, I don't see that it's really crippleware. It may not be the brilliant Apple SDK that you want, but it's far from crippleware. However, a real Apple SDK would be my preference as well.
Sorry Steve, your "solution" just doesn't cut it. Frankly, your lame excuse that a REAL SDK and openness will de-stabilize the phone / network ALSO doesn't cut it for any of us that has ever had a treo, blackberry, etc. Hey, you claim that you have the power of OSX in there, certainly you give us at least a restricted mini VM to run in without "destabilizing" anything... I disagree that stability is a lame excuse for the lack of an SDK because Treo and Blackberry owners have seen firsthand how unstable those platforms can be, particularly with poorly written apps. But you're right on the money about Java. No SDK *and* no Java is just silly to me.
People will always complain if there's no SDK, but at least give them a Java environment for goodness sake! Walt was absolutely right that VNC, RDP and SSH clients probably can't (or won't) be done under AJAX alone. All the existing web based implementations of these clients that I've seen have used Java.
Maybe Apple will pull their big fruit-shaped head out of the sand on this issue and give us a Java VM!
Glad to hear that someone's already debunking this. Personally, I rather hope that the guy's claims are true because it would usher in a remarkable new era of archaeology, revealing vast amounts of information about the history of humans and animals and maybe evolution by allowing us to more easily find remains that might otherwise elude us for centuries.
However, I too find the claims of the technology to be highly suspect. I might be that such revealing data might be gathered by military satellites, but if such information were available from civilian-use satellites, then I think we would have more about it before now. I just don't believe that governments would want civilians to have access to satellite data which would likely compromise submarine movements and other such secrets.
So teachers are smarter than auto mechanics, professional housewives/husbands, and social workers (I presume that this is part of the "public affairs & services" classification).
The article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette can be found here.
Also from that article: Frederick Hess, a University of Virginia researcher, noted in a recent study that "teacher-preparation programs neither screen out nor weed out weak candidates."
Even the elite universities, he found, accept more than 50 percent of the applicants for their master's programs in education. But their average acceptance rate for medical schools is about 5 percent; for law schools, about 25 percent.
Each year, over a million college-bound high school students take the SAT test. And each year, The College Board publishes reports which are gold mines of information for statistics junkies like us.And this article at www.reformk12.org has the following to say:
We decided to have some fun with the 2003 report (pdf), looking specifically at the average scores for groups of students headed towards different college majors.
As you may well know, the SAT test is divided into two halves: Math and Verbal, with the scores reported separately for each. For some unfair comparisions, it is interesting to see how math and science fields do on the Verbal, and how language and humanities fields do on the Math.
The Math SAT: As would be expected, Mathematics majors scored highest of all the majors on the Math portion, with a 626 point average. They soundly trounced the Language and Literature majors, who were 76 points behind. But here's the kicker: Language and Literature scored 67 points higher in Math than Education majors!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but well over half of future teachers will end up either teaching math or a math-heavy field such as science. Meanwhile future linguists, authors, and literature critics might not ever see another equation in their life.
And yet with Euclidian aplomb they fairly kicked Education majors' butts (by 1.75 standard deviations, no less).
Ok, we hear your protests. Not every teacher will teach math, granted. So let's look at the Verbal scores.
The Verbal SAT: Here, Language and Literature majors got their reciprocity, outperforming all other majors with a score of 603. Mathematics majors were forced to lick their wounds 58 points back. But (and you knew this was coming) the Math majors came off as quite cultured in comparison to our soon-to-be public school teachers, beating Education majors by 63 Verbal points!
This is embarrassing.
It could be worse: In a comparison of 21 college categories (we're eliminating the non-college categories of "Home Economics" and "Technical and Vocational") Education majors come in third-to-last place on the Math portion. Only "Agriculture or Natural Resources" and "Public Affairs and Services" majors scored worse.
In the Verbal portion--which should be a teacher's strong point, or so we thought--Education majors took the silver medal in the race for last place. "Public Affairs and Services" again occupied the basement.
All we can say is, Thank God for government majors.
The study that these articles and others reference is published by The College Board. However, the links which I found in the reformk12.org article lead to a page and a PDF which have been removed or relocated. If someone wants to spend the time to hunt down the articles on The College Board's web site, I'd love to read the original study.
When you take thirty seconds and look up government expenditures, it is actually plain as day. Here are the figures for defense versus education in 2004:
Defense: totalled $456 billion.
Education: totalled $88 billion.
If that does not anger the average person, I honestly do not know what will. You make a good point, though more money != better education. Since I am originally from Georgia, I'll pick on my own state as an example. Georgia schools have one of the highest per-student education spending ratios in the nation, but the Georgia students are consistently one of the lowest ranked of the nation in educational abilities testing.
I imagine that educating children is a very complicated matter, and quoting one statistic alone does not prove a point. However, throwing more money at a broken system does not fix the broken system, and thus kids are still not well educated.
The teachers' union does not help matters either. They fight against testing of teachers to ensure that the teachers actually understand the subjects that they are teaching. And the teacher certification/testing standards that are currently in place are a joke. Many states use the "Praxis" test to determine teacher eligibility. In the District of Columbia, teachers only have to score above the 20th percentile to pass. Most of the other states that use the Praxis test only require test takers to score above the 33rd percentile.
And the "No Child Left Behind Act" (2002) mandated that all school systems be able to demonstrate by August 2006 that their teachers are "highly qualified" in their primary area of teaching. But in 2006 the Department of Education notified at least 34 states that their teacher testing had major problems and would be subject to mandatory oversight.
After all that NEA bashing, I have to say that most teachers are great people with big hearts who try to make a difference in the lives of the kids that they teach. The teachers themselves aren't the problem. It's their union(s). Although teachers are not the brightest group of Americans (Education majors have lowest SAT scores amongst their college cohorts), they would improve if they were required to do so to maintain their jobs. The unions are keeping the teachers complacent at their well-below-average status. It's unfortunate that the bad apples are bringing down the entire educational system. While I was perusing the figures, I thought these two were also rather telling:
Also from 2004, cumulative, the amount that our government took in from taxes:
Individual Income Taxes: totalled $809 billion.
Corporate Income Taxes: totalled $189.4 billion.
I would say that there is a bit of a disparity there. I will leave it up to everyone to draw their own conclusions as to why. See my other reply on this story regarding corporate versus individual taxes. It's not as clear cut an issue as it might appear at first glance.
I'd say you're on the right track with this, but it's even simpler. If corporate income taxes are raised, a business will compensate for the potential loss of profits via:
1) Raise prices
2) Lower costs of production (fewer workers, cheaper parts, etc.)
3) Both of the above
The really sad thing about Americans and taxes is that most of us don't realize that an increase in corporate taxes might as well be an increase in individual taxes. The consumers pay for all corporate taxes. It might be in the form of higher prices, or lower quality goods for the same price, lost jobs, or some combination of those three. We just feel better about instituting higher taxes on corporations, because we feel like they're the ones making all the money. Nobody feels good about increasing taxes on individuals.
When the fellow mentions the "stability" trade off, that means stability of the API/ABI, libraries, etc... not how often it crashes or not.
Must be a different RedHat from the one I've used in the past. RH has certainly been one of the least stable ditros I've used in the last couple of years. If you're looking for both stability of uptime as well as stability of software changes, check out Debian's stable branch. My personal favorite for long-term relatively unchanging-but-bug-fixes-kept-up-to-date servers.
Imagine getting hit with an income tax bill for $10,000 or so... that's why we have withholding, so people don't wind up in debt to pay their taxes, even if thru lack of foresight.
Actually, the income tax withholding system was introduced during WW2 as a means for the government to get access to our tax dollars more quickly to fund the war efforts. It was promised at the time that the law would be repealed after the war, but that obviously didn't happen.
I suspect that the reason it has never been repealed is because when the taxes are taken gradually from you before you even see your paycheck, the loss does not register in your brain as strongly as when you have to write one big check for a full year's worth of taxes. Thus it is easier for the government to raise taxes without pissing off the public. Any tax increase is spread out over 12 months and taken from you before your paycheck ever reaches you. So it does not *appear* to be a big change for you.
And now when somebody gets a tax refund in April or May, and you ask them how much they paid for taxes for the previous year, they'll tell you that that didn't pay anything... They got a check from the government. We the sheep don't keep track of the amount of money that we pay in taxes every year. It's only the net effect of "Tax Time" in April that people grasp. How wrong that is...
--
The doctor is in
We use Citrix extensively in our enterprise WAN, and for a while we were having the problem you describe of print jobs mysteriously appearing at any one of our 25 sites across 10 counties. Turned out that we had two problems with our setup.
Wrong day guys. This is NOT April 1st... Look at the date before you post the stories please?
Democracy is mob rule. The majority gets what the majority wants. Wish that I could say I'm glad that I don't live in a democracy, but the U.S. of A. is becoming less of a republic and more of a democracy. Quite a shame I say. What began as a wonderful form of government that was by the people and for the people has degenerated in people for the government and by the government....
So anyway, let's practice that mob-rule/democracy thing and get some soft-core action between Anakin and the queen!!!