I suspect that the disconnect lies in one sentence:
Most people seriously confuse "fair share" with "fair misery" when it comes to wealth and taxation.
What I mean is, when some folks say they want "progressive taxation", or "fair tax", what they really mean is that they want the wealthy to be just as miserable financially as the average person after taxes are paid. It's an emotional rather than a logical demand.
Why should a mom-and-pop internet business be exempt from taxes that the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store has to pay?
Because the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store only has one set of three tax structures which they are beholden to (federal, state, city). The mom-and-pop Internet business would have literal thousands of tax codes to be subject to (that is, the tax laws of every nation, province/state, county, city, federation, etc. on the planet - at least outside of North Korea). That is not, as you declare, a "level playing field" by any means.
Large brick-and-mortar international concerns and large internet international concerns are already level with each other tax-wise aside from sales taxes (which vary by locale).
Step 2 - if you're not a working developer or in DevOps, you really shouldn't be using this thing, so, like, stop there.;)
Okay, just kidding. In all seriousness, Git can have a steep learning curve to the uninitiated. Then again, so can CG compositing/modeling, systems administration on a CLI-only install of any UNIX/Linux flavor you care to name, or even to beginners of Powershell on Windows.
But then, like most things, I've found that after *using* the thing, it goes from impossible to tolerable, then to easy, then drop-simple. If you're a *nix sysadmin, many of the commands should already be familiar (git rm, git add, git mv, etc).
Besides: You can always alias a lot of those commands and save yourself a lot of trouble/time...
We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.
Well, that or put a lot less aircraft and ships at risk by carpet-bombing Japan with atomic weapons. Mind you, we only had 3-4 total, and spent one on testing and two on targets... but the Tojo government didn't know that. All that hot air about how everyone would fight to the last man, woman, and child withered very quickly once the full horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to light... and they realized that each happened from just one bomb, dropped by just one airplane. Morale pretty much evaporated at that point, to where (IIRC) the Emperor stepped in (via intermediates) and told them to surrender once and for all.
It's one thing to die fighting your enemy head-on for honor, glory, etc. - such a thought has driven many doomed men to fight like tigers, in spite of all the certainty of death. It's another thing entirely to be exterminated without a second thought, by an enemy using weapons that you could not hope to hide from, let alone fight back against.
Possibly, but compare the two options from Israel's POV: destroy their nuke capability and risk a conventional war with that country, or let it continue unabated and get wiped out by the same country - incidentally the same country which has officially and loudly vowed to destroy you multiple times.
They're going to get nuclear weapons if there ISN'T a deal.
If Obama would stop warning the Israelis off of bombing the shit out Iranian enrichment plants (and actively denying them airspace travel through Iraq to do it), this whole question would have been settled long ago.
Yes, I keep hearing the comparison of Germany in 1938 to Iran today That leads me to ask a few questions
I might be able to help. Mind you, the comparisons aren't exact, but IMO close enough...
How is it that Iran is comparable to a country that had been a economic leader in Europe for the prior several hundred years?
Iran is and was an economic leader in its own region since 1979 at the very least.
Germany had been a colonial empire, with militarily help colonies across the globe, is there any comparison to Iran's status?
Yes. Iran sponsors and funds numerous terror organizations and activities across the globe at this time.
Germany had just waged a global war a couple of decades prior, and had waged wars against other global superpowers over the prior few hundred years going back to the Ottoman Empire, is there any comparison to the capabilities of Iran?
Globally/superpower-like? No. However, it did endure an 8-year-long war with what was then Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Google for 'Shatt-Al-Arab' (I believe that's the proper spelling). It was pretty big from the POV of the butcher's bill.
That said, consider that once in possession of nuclear weapons, Iran will essentially be a superpower, and has stated numerous times over (even as recently as last week) that their policy is to annihilate a certain other country in the region, and do so by any means possible.
Furthermore, consider that while North Korea is kept in check by China (without whom NoKo would essentially collapse from within economically), Iran has no tempering authority over its planning and actions. Further still, consider that Iran can essentially control the Straits of Hormuz, through which the vast majority of Mideast oil is transported.
So - we have a hysteric pack of nutcases running the country who wants the ultimate weapon in order to achieve their goals of domination and the eradication of the country that Mr. Netanyahu happens to represent.
This can get very ugly, very fast... and this time, we get to add the potential for nuclear weapons to the aggressor's side of the balance sheet, perched atop missiles that they're desperately trying to make capable of reaching any point on the globe... including your home city.
I totally get that POV. I even somewhat agree with it. Sometimes, it's better to just have a character die (or at most become so minor later on that his appearance is little more than a cameo, or a wink/nod to fans.)
It would have been way, way better if Daneel was reduced to some glorified scribe who wrote down history or something minor, and not this 'power-behind-the-throne' thing.
That said, I don't really detest the series that much... Asimov did manage to pull it off IMHO (barely, but still).
Posting them non-stop while you dredge every corner of sci-fi? It's like being rick-rolled, geek-style (shit... now/. is going to post one of those, I just know it...)
Wait, no... wrong details, and it's not a good parallel to use.
The dude in question was the lead network engineer for the City of San Francisco. Long story short, he had no standing policy to do what he did: he changed the supe passwords on all the city's core routers, locked everyone else out of the the things, then refused to tell anyone what the new password was.
I agree that he shouldn't have gone to jail over it, but TBH it was a dick move on his part.
So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?
Being relevant in consumer products?
This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.
More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now (mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.
Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.
Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple of years off at best, and after that, I have no idea what kind of profit margin it would have.
My best guess is that Microsoft wanted to (and is still desperately trying to) make the XBox into a home media center, to the exclusion of everything else (DVRs, dedicated DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc). They may still latch on a cablecard/sat receiver, and maybe some tie-in to "The Internet of Things" (or whatever buzzphrase is being used nowadays), so that it becomes the brain of the "smart home"(ditto), so as to lock-in a potential market. But then, people being what they are, they stubbornly go out and buy tablets, 3rd-party home alarm/HVAC controllers, decide to use Dish instead of DirecTV or Comcast, run out and buy a Sling/AppleTV/Roku box, etc. I think it's that diversity (and the entrenchment of the players in it) which has kept them from making that final drive. This in the end may well turn the whole XBox thing into a permanent anchor on Microsoft's profit margins unless costs are cut somewhere... which makes me wonder why the shareholders haven't demanded that the console be made profitable or else.
As an example, meander on down to the PuppetForge and look at the common modules used to do boring stuff.
For example, installing and maintaining PHP on a box via Puppet should be drop-simple, with little-to-no work... I designed and wrote a simple module for it in like 30 minutes, spending 15 minutes of that having a cigarette, no sweat. But one look at some of these, and you'd think they were writing Turing-capable climate modeling software. Okay, I exaggerate (a little), but the point is, these guys spend untold hours trying to turn a set of car tires into jet engines.
Here's where it gets ugly: Most DevOps folks liberally download these beasts and implement them, never realizing (until it's way too late) that the vast majority of these modules are written either to be cute, to be clever-by-too-far, or to bolster someone's resume ('look, I'm a coding deity!' type crap***). They then spend hours on end busting their ass trying to get these damned things to work in their environment, and end up with something that quite frankly eats more CPU cycles and disk space then it really should... by orders of magnitude.
TL;DR? The greatest wasting of time I've seen in development and beyond is when people try to get too cute or too clever with code.
*** if someone showed me some of these ugly-assed bloat-factories as part of the interview process, they would face some damned hard questions from me about design before I'd even think of recommending them to be hired.
I dunno, I usually like going to conventions so people can try to sell me things.
Thing is, these 'booth babes' acting as total sex objects *do* sell things...
I'll explain in detail for those who disagree: the ladies grab the typical convention-goer's attention long enough for the sales-critters to suck the guy in and start making the pitch. Our victim is now too damned busy trying to steal glances so that he can lick every inch of her body with his eyeballs. This in turn means that his attention and concentration are now shitty enough to keep cynicism at bay, but still present enough to suck in any buzzword and pretty chart that gets shoved in front of him.
It's a salesman's dream: a horny distracted dimwit with access to purchase order numbers.
Now let's remove the barely-dressed ladies, and what do you get? People that *pay attention* to your sales pitch. People that will start asking hard questions. People who will have their cynic shields on full-power. People that take way more time to work on. Fewer prospects that even bother paying attention to your booth in the first place.
I suspect that after a year or two of "empowerment" (or whatever they want to call it), it won't be attendance that drops, but vendor participation. When vendors see lower sales numbers off the convention, they can no longer credibly justify the expense and time of going.
Me, I couldn't care either way - I usually bring my wife along (at personal expense), so that we can spend off-hours playing tourist and eating at nice places (and she goes off to museums and such during the day). On the other hand, I know exactly what a younger version of me would want... and the evil salesman I keep locked up in my brain knows just how effective sex is to get what he wants by using it.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that the disconnect lies in one sentence:
Most people seriously confuse "fair share" with "fair misery" when it comes to wealth and taxation.
What I mean is, when some folks say they want "progressive taxation", or "fair tax", what they really mean is that they want the wealthy to be just as miserable financially as the average person after taxes are paid. It's an emotional rather than a logical demand.
Why should a mom-and-pop internet business be exempt from taxes that the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store has to pay?
Because the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar store only has one set of three tax structures which they are beholden to (federal, state, city). The mom-and-pop Internet business would have literal thousands of tax codes to be subject to (that is, the tax laws of every nation, province/state, county, city, federation, etc. on the planet - at least outside of North Korea). That is not, as you declare, a "level playing field" by any means.
Large brick-and-mortar international concerns and large internet international concerns are already level with each other tax-wise aside from sales taxes (which vary by locale).
Git is a crap SCM.
Git is fantastic for integrating changes from everywhere like Linus does.
True - we use the hell out of it for DevOps (and for the same damn reason).
Otherwise, truth be told, *all* SCM packages suck. Badly. Git just sucks less.
Step 2 - if you're not a working developer or in DevOps, you really shouldn't be using this thing, so, like, stop there. ;)
Okay, just kidding. In all seriousness, Git can have a steep learning curve to the uninitiated. Then again, so can CG compositing/modeling, systems administration on a CLI-only install of any UNIX/Linux flavor you care to name, or even to beginners of Powershell on Windows.
But then, like most things, I've found that after *using* the thing, it goes from impossible to tolerable, then to easy, then drop-simple. If you're a *nix sysadmin, many of the commands should already be familiar (git rm, git add, git mv, etc).
Besides: You can always alias a lot of those commands and save yourself a lot of trouble/time...
We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.
Well, that or put a lot less aircraft and ships at risk by carpet-bombing Japan with atomic weapons. Mind you, we only had 3-4 total, and spent one on testing and two on targets... but the Tojo government didn't know that. All that hot air about how everyone would fight to the last man, woman, and child withered very quickly once the full horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to light... and they realized that each happened from just one bomb, dropped by just one airplane. Morale pretty much evaporated at that point, to where (IIRC) the Emperor stepped in (via intermediates) and told them to surrender once and for all.
It's one thing to die fighting your enemy head-on for honor, glory, etc. - such a thought has driven many doomed men to fight like tigers, in spite of all the certainty of death. It's another thing entirely to be exterminated without a second thought, by an enemy using weapons that you could not hope to hide from, let alone fight back against.
Possibly, but compare the two options from Israel's POV: destroy their nuke capability and risk a conventional war with that country, or let it continue unabated and get wiped out by the same country - incidentally the same country which has officially and loudly vowed to destroy you multiple times.
Umm, no.
reason #1
reason #2
reason #3
reason #4 (which obviously wasn't a translation error)
You know how I know you don't know any Iranians?
Know how I know that you cannot respond with facts but instead respond with angry little hysteria?
This is how... and then there's this... ...this... ...and of course this (you may need Google Translate for that last one.)
Mind you, the people quoted are, I suspect, quite Iranian.
But you know, maybe you just forgot to check "Post Anonymously"? ;)
FYI: Israel was never a signatory to the NPT.
Dunno what moron upmodded your post, but FYI, there are Christians in Iran. They're frequently persecuted, but they do exist, and are growing rapidly in numbers
MAD only worked because both sides of the conflict were rational and relatively sane. Iran has no such encumbrance.
They're going to get nuclear weapons if there ISN'T a deal.
If Obama would stop warning the Israelis off of bombing the shit out Iranian enrichment plants (and actively denying them airspace travel through Iraq to do it), this whole question would have been settled long ago.
Yes, I keep hearing the comparison of Germany in 1938 to Iran today
That leads me to ask a few questions
I might be able to help. Mind you, the comparisons aren't exact, but IMO close enough...
How is it that Iran is comparable to a country that had been a economic leader in Europe for the prior several hundred years?
Iran is and was an economic leader in its own region since 1979 at the very least.
Germany had been a colonial empire, with militarily help colonies across the globe, is there any comparison to Iran's status?
Yes. Iran sponsors and funds numerous terror organizations and activities across the globe at this time.
Germany had just waged a global war a couple of decades prior, and had waged wars against other global superpowers over the prior few hundred years going back to the Ottoman Empire, is there any comparison to the capabilities of Iran?
Globally/superpower-like? No. However, it did endure an 8-year-long war with what was then Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Google for 'Shatt-Al-Arab' (I believe that's the proper spelling). It was pretty big from the POV of the butcher's bill.
That said, consider that once in possession of nuclear weapons, Iran will essentially be a superpower, and has stated numerous times over (even as recently as last week) that their policy is to annihilate a certain other country in the region, and do so by any means possible.
Furthermore, consider that while North Korea is kept in check by China (without whom NoKo would essentially collapse from within economically), Iran has no tempering authority over its planning and actions. Further still, consider that Iran can essentially control the Straits of Hormuz, through which the vast majority of Mideast oil is transported.
So - we have a hysteric pack of nutcases running the country who wants the ultimate weapon in order to achieve their goals of domination and the eradication of the country that Mr. Netanyahu happens to represent.
This can get very ugly, very fast... and this time, we get to add the potential for nuclear weapons to the aggressor's side of the balance sheet, perched atop missiles that they're desperately trying to make capable of reaching any point on the globe... including your home city.
I totally get that POV. I even somewhat agree with it. Sometimes, it's better to just have a character die (or at most become so minor later on that his appearance is little more than a cameo, or a wink/nod to fans.)
It would have been way, way better if Daneel was reduced to some glorified scribe who wrote down history or something minor, and not this 'power-behind-the-throne' thing.
That said, I don't really detest the series that much... Asimov did manage to pull it off IMHO (barely, but still).
A couple of them? Cool, funny, etc.
Posting them non-stop while you dredge every corner of sci-fi? It's like being rick-rolled, geek-style (shit... now /. is going to post one of those, I just know it...)
Seriously guys, this is becoming irritating.
Wait, no... wrong details, and it's not a good parallel to use.
The dude in question was the lead network engineer for the City of San Francisco. Long story short, he had no standing policy to do what he did: he changed the supe passwords on all the city's core routers, locked everyone else out of the the things, then refused to tell anyone what the new password was.
I agree that he shouldn't have gone to jail over it, but TBH it was a dick move on his part.
Damnit! You weren't supposed to tell anyone about the second one yet!
(Just great... now we gotta build a third one so that no one... shit! Okay, a four- dammit!)
heh
Yep...
Besides, don't those idiots know that you can skip the middleman and just ask Daneel?
(just keep an eye on that ugly big-headed freshman over there...)
Value of brand recognition?
So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?
Being relevant in consumer products?
This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.
More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.
Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.
Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple of years off at best, and after that, I have no idea what kind of profit margin it would have.
My best guess is that Microsoft wanted to (and is still desperately trying to) make the XBox into a home media center, to the exclusion of everything else (DVRs, dedicated DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc). They may still latch on a cablecard/sat receiver, and maybe some tie-in to "The Internet of Things" (or whatever buzzphrase is being used nowadays), so that it becomes the brain of the "smart home"(ditto), so as to lock-in a potential market. But then, people being what they are, they stubbornly go out and buy tablets, 3rd-party home alarm/HVAC controllers, decide to use Dish instead of DirecTV or Comcast, run out and buy a Sling/AppleTV/Roku box, etc. I think it's that diversity (and the entrenchment of the players in it) which has kept them from making that final drive. This in the end may well turn the whole XBox thing into a permanent anchor on Microsoft's profit margins unless costs are cut somewhere... which makes me wonder why the shareholders haven't demanded that the console be made profitable or else.
This problem isn't just in pure developer-land.
As an example, meander on down to the PuppetForge and look at the common modules used to do boring stuff.
For example, installing and maintaining PHP on a box via Puppet should be drop-simple, with little-to-no work... I designed and wrote a simple module for it in like 30 minutes, spending 15 minutes of that having a cigarette, no sweat. But one look at some of these, and you'd think they were writing Turing-capable climate modeling software. Okay, I exaggerate (a little), but the point is, these guys spend untold hours trying to turn a set of car tires into jet engines.
Here's where it gets ugly: Most DevOps folks liberally download these beasts and implement them, never realizing (until it's way too late) that the vast majority of these modules are written either to be cute, to be clever-by-too-far, or to bolster someone's resume ('look, I'm a coding deity!' type crap***). They then spend hours on end busting their ass trying to get these damned things to work in their environment, and end up with something that quite frankly eats more CPU cycles and disk space then it really should... by orders of magnitude.
TL;DR? The greatest wasting of time I've seen in development and beyond is when people try to get too cute or too clever with code.
*** if someone showed me some of these ugly-assed bloat-factories as part of the interview process, they would face some damned hard questions from me about design before I'd even think of recommending them to be hired.
I dunno, I usually like going to conventions so people can try to sell me things.
Thing is, these 'booth babes' acting as total sex objects *do* sell things...
I'll explain in detail for those who disagree: the ladies grab the typical convention-goer's attention long enough for the sales-critters to suck the guy in and start making the pitch. Our victim is now too damned busy trying to steal glances so that he can lick every inch of her body with his eyeballs. This in turn means that his attention and concentration are now shitty enough to keep cynicism at bay, but still present enough to suck in any buzzword and pretty chart that gets shoved in front of him.
It's a salesman's dream: a horny distracted dimwit with access to purchase order numbers.
Now let's remove the barely-dressed ladies, and what do you get? People that *pay attention* to your sales pitch. People that will start asking hard questions. People who will have their cynic shields on full-power. People that take way more time to work on. Fewer prospects that even bother paying attention to your booth in the first place.
I suspect that after a year or two of "empowerment" (or whatever they want to call it), it won't be attendance that drops, but vendor participation. When vendors see lower sales numbers off the convention, they can no longer credibly justify the expense and time of going.
Me, I couldn't care either way - I usually bring my wife along (at personal expense), so that we can spend off-hours playing tourist and eating at nice places (and she goes off to museums and such during the day). On the other hand, I know exactly what a younger version of me would want... and the evil salesman I keep locked up in my brain knows just how effective sex is to get what he wants by using it.
Great! Now I have to change the password on my luggage!