Slightly off-topic, but the only way to make sure everyone pays their fair share would be to remove *all* loopholes/deductions/credits, and set a single tax rate (say, 15-20%). For charity's sake, the first $x/year income can be exempt (where x = 120% of poverty rate or similar metric).
Yes, a flat tax. But, it is ultimately fair for a zillionaire to pay in 20% of his income, which would be way larger than 20% of Joe Sixpack's middle-class income. As a beneficial side-effect, people would suddenly get very interested in any congressional action that would change the tax rate, no?
Of course, often when people demand that $group pay their "fair share", what they often mean is "enough to make them suffer - hard!" I trust and am hoping that you're not one of those folks.
--
Now, on topic - as for Russia? They can set whatever rates they want... we have no sovereignty there, so even if they were taxed at 100% of income, the US government would not see a dime of it.
I doubt it - it ties far more closely to the overall Russian drive towards nationalistic solutions and tendencies. Even though Linux (we all know that's what they'll use) is not purely Russian (or even a fraction of same), it does allow them to fork the kernel and make it that way. Sort of like NoKo's 'Red Flag Linux', but without all the governmental spyware and crippling (well, as far as we know...)
I can actually see a good reason for Russia dumping Windows... a Linux-based system gives them internal control over the source code to the OS they use - they can fork it and do whatever they want with it internally.
The taxation thing? That's just governments doing what governments tend to do - extract more money from those who produce wealth, especially from outside the borders where it's more politically palatable (and in some cases highly desirable). Shit, they've been doing this for as long as the word "tariff" has existed, and the "on a computer" aspect doesn't really make it all that much different.
Not sure if the pimped local options (e.g. Yandex) are any better or worse, though - only the Russian public can ultimately decide that.
Mostly our problem is telling people MP3s shouldn't be copied onto the network.
Actually, I saw that at a former employer myself - damned Netapp had to have at least a full shelf of disk devoted to just music. Mind you, it was mostly folks who didn't have a clue about it - they just plugged their ipods/iphones into their workstation, and iTunes happily backed it all up... to their Documents folder, which was mounted from the office-dedicated SAN.
Tried to bring it up with the PHBs multiple times, but they usually dumped my mention of it down the nearest memory hole.
I got one small consolation, I guess: I found a metric ton of cool music that I'd never heard of along the way...
Looking at porn was no different than reading a paper newspaper. Do whatever you want as long as work is not impacted.
Pretty sure the HR department was either clueless or were really out to destroy the company. Now if it were a company that made/sold porn, no problem... but any other company on Earth has an HR (and/or legal) department that lives in absolute fear of shit like this.
Seriously - the first female employee to stumble across it would make enough off the lawsuit to retire, so long as she was never seen to participate.
What would a union do? Strikes don't happen at government-regulated utilities the same way they do at a wholly private company. Don't believe me? Look up PATCO and see what happened. Of course, utilities are quasi-private and under state (not federal control), but it's still quite doable.
Makes sense, but a state still has ultimate control over whether that company can do business within that state, correct? Otherwise, state regulation would be worthless and toothless.
Back in the nasty old 1990's, putting non-HP-branded RAM in some x86-based HP tower server models would often end up scrambling your disk. IIRC that behavior stopped pretty quickly once word got out, and folks began to flock to competing brands.
It's not a question of ownership. It's a question of warranty. He still owns his (now-bricked) phone.
In this case, the dude dropped his phone, gets it repaired at some no-name shop with dodgy parts, then complains when the security loophole the dodgy parts used got closed. If anything, the fault lies with the shop that did the repair.
Hell, Apple told him they'd do out-of-warranty replacement for it (not sure what that costs, but likely still less than full price), and that's because the problems began when he dropped it (which is not covered under warranty anyway, though some 3rd-party sellers do offer such warranty protection for a nominal fee).
Fair warning: If I bought anything from any other OEM and went through the same rigamarole, I'm certain that I'd get the same (or worse) treatment from the OEM... so this isn't just an Apple thing.
(...and this boys and girls, is why I buy just-behind-bleeding-edge Android stuff, so a total loss of the phone is only like $200, not $600 or more).
Dude in the Balkans could have his phone repaired at an Apple shop when he got home, right?
Not trying to be a dick or anything, but honestly - using a gray-market security-related part *should* get that result. If my device is stolen, I'd want that to happen - if only to prevent some schmuck from plugging in something with hacked firmware to bypass the fingerprint sensor.
You do realize that the lottery, say Powerball, has 6 numbers, with each number having a far larger set of outcomes, right? The first five numbers can cough up anything from 1 - 69, and the sixth number anything from 1 - 26. *That* is why the odds are much higher with a lottery of that type.
By contrast, six coin tosses (each toss producing one of two outcomes) by contrast only has something like 64 possible combinations, max...
Well, what about efficiencies of scale? The costs of other factors dropping (e.g. transportation viz. lower petroleum prices, currently)? Offshoring manufacturing (which is why a lot of stuff got so crazy cheap in the first place)?
That would get more than a bit expensive, wouldn't you think? I meant for the manufacturer, not the individual consumer (who also gets shafted).
I'll explain - the R&D into making everything fail at once (or enough to brick the device) would never be recouped...
* too much chance of the customer jumping ship to a competing brand that promises that their widget lasts x% longer. * too much chance that the failure wouldn't fail gracefully, causing something lawsuit-worthy * too much chance that the failure would fail gracefully, but do so at the wrong time, again causing lawsuits * too much chance that you mis-time your intentional MTBF, causing your entire customer base to simply stop using that class of device (after all, I don't *need* a smartphone to eat/sleep/shit/whatever, and if the cost is too high to keep replacing them, I'll simply do without.) * too much chance that some group like Greenpeace (or worse) would use that pre-planned failure to whip up animosity towards you and your company....sure there's lots more involved, but think about this: some breakages can be repaired at relatively little cost, such as a cracked screen. Because of this, replacing an entire fairly-new phone (and then blowing all that time configuring/syncing the replacement) because the screen cracked is asinine (doubly so when you consider things like device insurance).
Just at first blush, I don't see this idea working at all... it would require everybody in the industry to do it at the same time, and further require that a struggling company not 'cheat' by making and selling more durable products.
By the by, the above 'code' snippet may well brick a *nix box - use at your own risk. I saw first-hand that doing an rm -rf *.* was perfectly capable of blowing away an entire install (including all mounted devices), no sweat - at least as late as 2006 when a junior admin I once worked with made that rather horrendous typo in his regex...
But overall, why the hell is this news? I mean, every OS has this problem (see also the ancient deltree, or the newer rd/s, or getting stupid with the GUI Disk Utility in Windows or OSX, etc.)
Boys and girls, this is why you don't give ordinary folks admin/root/wheel/whatever privileges, eh?
You want log files? F-U, Apple fanboys don't need no stinkin log files so they don't exist despite Unix being one of the pioneers of this concept. You want an error code? Nope, can't help you there, they don't exist; you're lucky if you're told that a problem occurred at all.
Hate to say it, but even the staid corporate drone-factories are buying more MacBook Pros for their higher-end employees (developers who want/need a *nix platform to work from, marketing/graphics types who want the tools and UI they're already comfortable with, executives and sales-critters who want to rub that glowing little logo into others' faces, etc).
There are fanboys of any platform that are always eager to make fun of competitors to their Chosen Idol.... so what exactly was your point there? Can't be due to any sneering by any top dog... currently it's a near-duopoly in the smartphone OS world, and fortunately neither major participant is run by a monopolistic player of dirty pool.
Microsoft used to have 2-3rd place in North America at best, back before the iPhone and Android came out (#1 was BlackberryOS, #2 was PalmOS). Microsoft *could* have taken advantage of a decent position back then, but they, like Nokia, Palm, and BB, were blindsided by the advent of first the iPhone, then Android.
Microsoft compounded its error in judgement by dumping time and money into 'Pink', thinking that a Sidekick inspired hardwired-keyboard phone style was eventually going to win out over the rapidly growing Apple/Android phones, who in turn were moving in the opposite direction (that is, Microsoft's competitors were busy as hell trying to cut down the number of hardware buttons, while Microsoft was busy adding more). In the end, the long-delayed Kin phone had no chance.
To try and make up for the fuckups, They send ol' Elop over to take over a now-ailing Nokia, then slowly drag Nokia into Microsoft's fold. Problem is, they did it about 5 years too late, long after Nokia fell into massive decline. They should have taken over that platform before it caught fire, to borrow Elop's analogy.
When Microsoft finally got its shit together, it was too little, too late. With a near-deserted app store, a widely-panned mobile UI, and a near-saturated market, Microsoft is in no position to do jack shit in this market... and I think the sooner Nadella gets the memo and pulls out of that mess, the better.
IMHO, the whole Windows Phone fiasco is prima facie evidence that Microsoft overextended itself. Excepting the still-no-ROI-yet XBox line, they have been patently unable to do anything profitable, let alone successful outside of their existing core competencies: OS, Exchange, Office, Active Directory, and rebranding Logitech peripherals....maybe it's time for Microsoft to get back to basics, keep the stuff that actually makes money, dump the rest, then sit down and take a long, hard, vision-related look at where they really need to go in order to thrive (and not decline or remain stale-steady-state) a couple of decades from now?
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Slightly off-topic, but the only way to make sure everyone pays their fair share would be to remove *all* loopholes/deductions/credits, and set a single tax rate (say, 15-20%). For charity's sake, the first $x/year income can be exempt (where x = 120% of poverty rate or similar metric).
Yes, a flat tax. But, it is ultimately fair for a zillionaire to pay in 20% of his income, which would be way larger than 20% of Joe Sixpack's middle-class income. As a beneficial side-effect, people would suddenly get very interested in any congressional action that would change the tax rate, no?
Of course, often when people demand that $group pay their "fair share", what they often mean is "enough to make them suffer - hard!" I trust and am hoping that you're not one of those folks.
--
Now, on topic - as for Russia? They can set whatever rates they want... we have no sovereignty there, so even if they were taxed at 100% of income, the US government would not see a dime of it.
I doubt it - it ties far more closely to the overall Russian drive towards nationalistic solutions and tendencies. Even though Linux (we all know that's what they'll use) is not purely Russian (or even a fraction of same), it does allow them to fork the kernel and make it that way. Sort of like NoKo's 'Red Flag Linux', but without all the governmental spyware and crippling (well, as far as we know...)
I can actually see a good reason for Russia dumping Windows... a Linux-based system gives them internal control over the source code to the OS they use - they can fork it and do whatever they want with it internally.
The taxation thing? That's just governments doing what governments tend to do - extract more money from those who produce wealth, especially from outside the borders where it's more politically palatable (and in some cases highly desirable). Shit, they've been doing this for as long as the word "tariff" has existed, and the "on a computer" aspect doesn't really make it all that much different.
Not sure if the pimped local options (e.g. Yandex) are any better or worse, though - only the Russian public can ultimately decide that.
Mostly our problem is telling people MP3s shouldn't be copied onto the network.
Actually, I saw that at a former employer myself - damned Netapp had to have at least a full shelf of disk devoted to just music. Mind you, it was mostly folks who didn't have a clue about it - they just plugged their ipods/iphones into their workstation, and iTunes happily backed it all up... to their Documents folder, which was mounted from the office-dedicated SAN.
Tried to bring it up with the PHBs multiple times, but they usually dumped my mention of it down the nearest memory hole.
I got one small consolation, I guess: I found a metric ton of cool music that I'd never heard of along the way...
Looking at porn was no different than reading a paper newspaper. Do whatever you want as long as work is not impacted.
Pretty sure the HR department was either clueless or were really out to destroy the company. Now if it were a company that made/sold porn, no problem... but any other company on Earth has an HR (and/or legal) department that lives in absolute fear of shit like this.
Seriously - the first female employee to stumble across it would make enough off the lawsuit to retire, so long as she was never seen to participate.
"Windows Dynamic Linked Library" in this case... not seeing a single mention of Linux or OSX in there.
(Yes, there are equivalents in Linux and OSX, but no indication of the vuln in shared libs, dylibs, or dynamic shared libs, so...)
What would a union do? Strikes don't happen at government-regulated utilities the same way they do at a wholly private company. Don't believe me? Look up PATCO and see what happened. Of course, utilities are quasi-private and under state (not federal control), but it's still quite doable.
Makes sense, but a state still has ultimate control over whether that company can do business within that state, correct? Otherwise, state regulation would be worthless and toothless.
No, but for awhile HP did...
Back in the nasty old 1990's, putting non-HP-branded RAM in some x86-based HP tower server models would often end up scrambling your disk. IIRC that behavior stopped pretty quickly once word got out, and folks began to flock to competing brands.
False analogy: Lotus didn't exploit security vulns to run. The dodgy fingerprint sensor did.
It's not a question of ownership. It's a question of warranty. He still owns his (now-bricked) phone.
In this case, the dude dropped his phone, gets it repaired at some no-name shop with dodgy parts, then complains when the security loophole the dodgy parts used got closed. If anything, the fault lies with the shop that did the repair.
Hell, Apple told him they'd do out-of-warranty replacement for it (not sure what that costs, but likely still less than full price), and that's because the problems began when he dropped it (which is not covered under warranty anyway, though some 3rd-party sellers do offer such warranty protection for a nominal fee).
Fair warning: If I bought anything from any other OEM and went through the same rigamarole, I'm certain that I'd get the same (or worse) treatment from the OEM... so this isn't just an Apple thing.
(...and this boys and girls, is why I buy just-behind-bleeding-edge Android stuff, so a total loss of the phone is only like $200, not $600 or more).
Dude in the Balkans could have his phone repaired at an Apple shop when he got home, right?
Not trying to be a dick or anything, but honestly - using a gray-market security-related part *should* get that result. If my device is stolen, I'd want that to happen - if only to prevent some schmuck from plugging in something with hacked firmware to bypass the fingerprint sensor.
^^This, a million fucking times this!
Corporatism knows no party, and cares for none but one driving ideology: profit.
The sooner you partisan asshats get that through your skulls, the better off we'll all be.
The lottery has MUCH higher odds.
You do realize that the lottery, say Powerball, has 6 numbers, with each number having a far larger set of outcomes, right? The first five numbers can cough up anything from 1 - 69, and the sixth number anything from 1 - 26. *That* is why the odds are much higher with a lottery of that type.
By contrast, six coin tosses (each toss producing one of two outcomes) by contrast only has something like 64 possible combinations, max...
Well, what about efficiencies of scale? The costs of other factors dropping (e.g. transportation viz. lower petroleum prices, currently)? Offshoring manufacturing (which is why a lot of stuff got so crazy cheap in the first place)?
Lots of factors besides the two you mentioned...
Do you want small, efficient devices that can't be serviced or big, inefficient devices that are modular?
These are not always mutually exclusive. ;)
That would get more than a bit expensive, wouldn't you think? I meant for the manufacturer, not the individual consumer (who also gets shafted).
I'll explain - the R&D into making everything fail at once (or enough to brick the device) would never be recouped...
* too much chance of the customer jumping ship to a competing brand that promises that their widget lasts x% longer. ...sure there's lots more involved, but think about this: some breakages can be repaired at relatively little cost, such as a cracked screen. Because of this, replacing an entire fairly-new phone (and then blowing all that time configuring/syncing the replacement) because the screen cracked is asinine (doubly so when you consider things like device insurance).
* too much chance that the failure wouldn't fail gracefully, causing something lawsuit-worthy
* too much chance that the failure would fail gracefully, but do so at the wrong time, again causing lawsuits
* too much chance that you mis-time your intentional MTBF, causing your entire customer base to simply stop using that class of device (after all, I don't *need* a smartphone to eat/sleep/shit/whatever, and if the cost is too high to keep replacing them, I'll simply do without.)
* too much chance that some group like Greenpeace (or worse) would use that pre-planned failure to whip up animosity towards you and your company.
Just at first blush, I don't see this idea working at all... it would require everybody in the industry to do it at the same time, and further require that a struggling company not 'cheat' by making and selling more durable products.
The *.* catches the '..' , causing the rm command to jump up a directory (eventually to / ).
For what it;'s worth, at time of writing the map appears to load, but no data is being presented on it.
(mind, some of this may be the corp proxy cache filling in blanks...)
Oh... now I get it - wipes the UEFI too... neat-o!
first
rm -rf /first/*.*
By the by, the above 'code' snippet may well brick a *nix box - use at your own risk. I saw first-hand that doing an rm -rf *.* was perfectly capable of blowing away an entire install (including all mounted devices), no sweat - at least as late as 2006 when a junior admin I once worked with made that rather horrendous typo in his regex...
But overall, why the hell is this news? I mean, every OS has this problem (see also the ancient deltree, or the newer rd /s, or getting stupid with the GUI Disk Utility in Windows or OSX, etc.)
Boys and girls, this is why you don't give ordinary folks admin/root/wheel/whatever privileges, eh?
No, you don't - Xcode is free for the download.
You want log files? F-U, Apple fanboys don't need no stinkin log files so they don't exist despite Unix being one of the pioneers of this concept. You want an error code? Nope, can't help you there, they don't exist; you're lucky if you're told that a problem occurred at all.
Huh? What are you talking about?
Tiny hipster infested start-ups don't count...
Hate to say it, but even the staid corporate drone-factories are buying more MacBook Pros for their higher-end employees (developers who want/need a *nix platform to work from, marketing/graphics types who want the tools and UI they're already comfortable with, executives and sales-critters who want to rub that glowing little logo into others' faces, etc).
There are fanboys of any platform that are always eager to make fun of competitors to their Chosen Idol.... so what exactly was your point there? Can't be due to any sneering by any top dog... currently it's a near-duopoly in the smartphone OS world, and fortunately neither major participant is run by a monopolistic player of dirty pool.
Microsoft used to have 2-3rd place in North America at best, back before the iPhone and Android came out (#1 was BlackberryOS, #2 was PalmOS). Microsoft *could* have taken advantage of a decent position back then, but they, like Nokia, Palm, and BB, were blindsided by the advent of first the iPhone, then Android.
Microsoft compounded its error in judgement by dumping time and money into 'Pink', thinking that a Sidekick inspired hardwired-keyboard phone style was eventually going to win out over the rapidly growing Apple/Android phones, who in turn were moving in the opposite direction (that is, Microsoft's competitors were busy as hell trying to cut down the number of hardware buttons, while Microsoft was busy adding more). In the end, the long-delayed Kin phone had no chance.
To try and make up for the fuckups, They send ol' Elop over to take over a now-ailing Nokia, then slowly drag Nokia into Microsoft's fold. Problem is, they did it about 5 years too late, long after Nokia fell into massive decline. They should have taken over that platform before it caught fire, to borrow Elop's analogy.
When Microsoft finally got its shit together, it was too little, too late. With a near-deserted app store, a widely-panned mobile UI, and a near-saturated market, Microsoft is in no position to do jack shit in this market... and I think the sooner Nadella gets the memo and pulls out of that mess, the better.
IMHO, the whole Windows Phone fiasco is prima facie evidence that Microsoft overextended itself. Excepting the still-no-ROI-yet XBox line, they have been patently unable to do anything profitable, let alone successful outside of their existing core competencies: OS, Exchange, Office, Active Directory, and rebranding Logitech peripherals. ...maybe it's time for Microsoft to get back to basics, keep the stuff that actually makes money, dump the rest, then sit down and take a long, hard, vision-related look at where they really need to go in order to thrive (and not decline or remain stale-steady-state) a couple of decades from now?