I don't get why people don't understand that corporations don't pay taxes. Taxes are just another expense that gets added into the final price of the product. It doesn't matter that they actually write the check, you pay Microsoft's corporate taxes every time you buy one of their products.
Product prices will be the highest the market can bear, regardless of expenses. Software already has massive profit margins, so taxes merely eat into those profits, thus depriving the company from money they can use to buy other companies, run ad campaigns, pay bribes and manipulate market in other ways.
We should eliminate them entirely. Nearly every company in the world would want to be headquartered in the US if we had no corporate taxes, imagine how many jobs that would create.
Corporate headquarters are only considered useful for locals because THEY PAY TAXES. The local employment they provide mostly consists of secretaries and janitors.
Usually SIM card is placed in a socket with metal shield or clip, with circuit board and a keyboard on one side (keyboard mostly consisting of two layers of conductive film) and a battery on the other side (containing metal electrodes and cell casings).
With shielding like that, good luck getting any signal in or out, unless this thing has a separate connector for an antenna outside the card (and good luck getting support for that from phone manufacturers and carriers).
Oh yes it did. Your post-soviet propaganda post notwithstanding, the Soviet Union tried to saturate Star Wars by continuing to build ever more warheads, so a percentage getting through even a mostly effective.
Which was their strategy all along, with or without Star Wars -- it reduced the impact of the first strike that was expected from US. There was no noticeable disparity between the number of warheads in US and USSR, so unless you claim that US tried to defend from unknown ABM weapon program ran by USSR, this is bullshit, created to whitewash Reagan policies.
That is what winning a war looks like.
What US economy and society is now, looks like a massive, unmitigated disaster for anyone but Americans. I know, I live in US, and it's now worse than post-USSR Russia. If I was at the same age as I was when I left Russia, I would get the Hell out of here, except, of course, I would be too dumb and uneducated to do so.
Even if you're Russian (which you are), and think winning a war can look only like establishing your government's laws and taxes over newly conquered territory, amidst piles of broken bodies and smashed cities, smoldering countryside.
I wonder why would Russian think that, considering that it's Americans who spent half a century building a massive empire.
It's primary purpose was bankrupting the Soviet Union in an arms race, which it did,
Which it DID NOT because USSR never bothered to create any response to this obviously idiotic project. It's also impossible to be bankrupted by any military costs when military industry is owned by the government and runs as a giant nonprofit.
The whole thing is a myth created by US propaganda workers to promote Reagan's policies and to whitewash military industrial complex...
at the cost of bankrupting the US,
...because said military-industrial complex runs at massive profits and does not have to show any tangible results or face any meaningful competition.
which the US was able to (kinda) recover from, but the SU could not.
USSR was dissolved as a result of entirely political process, basically by three largest USSR members' leaders (Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich, of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) being fed up with Gorbachev and his government and leaving the Union. It caused no change in ex-USSR countries' economies -- countries continued being run by formerly-provincial governments that usually were even less competent than USSR government in anything related to the economy, so if that event affected the economy, it was more and worse of the same.
We won the Cold War with the Star Wars budget as the atom bomb.
You didn't win shit. Your current economic crisis is deeper than anything USSR or its former members faced at any time after WWII. At this point your economy still can suck on the world's teat until dollar will be displaced as the dominant international currency, however its position is anything but stable now. Less stable than Gorbachev's grip on power in 1991.
And you know this how? By the skewed reports showing the short term, best case costs?
Because if it was cheaper to stay with a vendor, he wouldn't have to waste time, money and effort on locking in his customers.
The only possible question is, how long it would take for the locked-in environment to become more expensive than switching away from it. For Internet Explorer it's immediate because lock-in is already broken. When it's something like Microsoft Office and a single user, the answer is usually in a matter of hours. When it's AutoCAD and a large company it may be decades, as this is probably the single most-entrenched piece of proprietary software with least-developed open source competition and worst-defined standards. However if users benefited from staying with a piece of software, vendors would not go out of their way to make switching away from their products as painful as possible in the short term.
So for a long term saving, it's often cheaper to stay with what you've got (or for a new installation, choose the same as everyone else) and pay a lot of licensefees, than to change to something that's cheaper in licensing and have a shitload of other costs.
In the long term it's NEVER cheaper to follow a vendor's lock-in.
That said, I LOVE linux, open source and free software. But for commercial use, it just isn't always optimal.
Lots of people have spouted the conventional wisdom that Microsoft never innovates, and it's true for every case but one: DirectX. The DirectX libraries were internally developed, they are tight, high performance code, and they were THE innovation that prevented Windows from fading.
Writing trivial interfaces for hardware that already exists, and establishing "infrastructure" that is only accepted because you are pushing it, is not innovation. It's the most trivial part of software development combined with crappy business practices.
If you argued against the claim that Microsoft code is inefficient and buggy EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE THAT IT WAS WRITTEN, you would have a point, however that's a pretty low bar considering that Microsoft is known for mind-numbingly bad ideas and infrastructure behind their products.
I'm pretty sure there is a strong fundamental need to establish dominance.
You, sir, are an idiot.
People (and animals) have a drive to achieve dominance, however evolution developed it to be just strong enough to make sure that positions of power are not occupied by individuals vastly inferior to the rest of the group. Make it slightly higher, and the amount of infighting will destroy the group from the inside before environment and enemies will get to it. Make is slightly lower, and packs/tribes/... will be led by leaders incapable of making reasonable decisions, communicating with the rest of the group and organizing common activities.
The culture of modern American society already elevated this competitiveness to dangerous levels, and this is why you are being led by sociopaths. Telling people that they "need" to dominate others, plays exactly into the hands of those sick leaders -- it imposes pathological behavior onto the rest of society, and makes it impossible to recognize the disease in those who have it.
Open source means the source code is distributed with the product or is optionally available for a modest fee. It doesn't do anything by itself. It doesn't imply anything else. It doesn't get you from point A to "awesome design". Cmon F/OSS cheerleaders, get your propaganda straight. A child and see through this.
In a different universe it would be possible to have a community of open source developers that promotes bad engineering practices. In this one, most of developers who work on all noticeable open source projects, happen to do something that is WORTH sharing with others.
Oh, btw - the cache has to be SRAM so that if the power goes out, it can write the files when it comes back on. SSDs absolutely must have a RAM cache so that they can efficiently locate places to write files, or they will stall while the controller tries to locate one. That's why the low end controllers perform so horribly in random write.
This is only true when educating people in the matter of law is impossible because not even lawyers can guarantee that laws mean anything in particular. In this situation public law awareness programs would be "practicing law without a license", so even laws that are clear enough to be understood, can not be explained or clarified to the public.
How exactly has Microsoft set back free software "decades"?
By contaminating minds of people who write software with Windows design. To write anything for Windows, one has to internalize Microsoft design principles, so programmers exposed to it produce more stupidly designed software and become incapable of understanding non-Windows-based software.
The whole thing IS a war of ideologies. Microsoft uses specific interfaces for everything, generalizations are based on random choices of abstraction, interfaces are never generalized or inherited between technologies, except when such interface imposes completely inappropriate specific abstraction on a more general concept. It's great for giving work for large number of mediocre employees, so they are kept mediocre. It creates unnecessary complexity and confusion, so security suffers most and performance next. Ex: Win32, Windows events handling and I/O, OLE/DDE -< COM/DCOM -< ActiveX/SOAP saga, the whole evolution of VB.
Unix and later open source does the opposite -- generalized interfaces are designed to be useful for multiple unrelated applications as an underlying mechanism, so specific applications can have their own infrastructure based on the same foundation. Ex: Unix filesystem, file descriptors, IPC, TCP/IP, virtual memory, security and process model, Berkeley sockets, libc.
In my experience, a person exposed to one of those sides can't effectively work with the other, so people indoctrinated with inferior engineering ideology are only capable of producing more compromised technology, making any real progress more difficult.
Would being a lawyer who becomes a politician that writes laws be considered a conflict of interest?
No, it's merely a situation conducive for abuse of power. Many believe that any kind of abuse of power can be prevented by splitting things between multiple people so they won't have "conflict of interest" -- and then it wouldn't matter if those people are total sociopaths. In reality it only replaces abuse of power with corruption and creates more hidden dependencies and relationships in power structures.
Same, unfortunately, now applies to "separation of power".
If they are complicated enough, you could make money interpreting them once you stop being a politician.
Hell with money -- the problem is, a person can't determine what is and isn't legal even after he pays a lawyer, because there might be another lawyer who disagrees. It often takes a lawsuit (and likely wasted months or years, millions of dollars, ruined lives, tied up massive resources) to get an answer that actually carries some weight. SCO anyone?
By the same token, shouldn't laws be written so that at least 90 percent of the people affected by them can understand them without the aid of a lawyer? This could be done by either lowering the readability level of the laws OR increasing the education level of those affected.
That's what would happen if the goal was to have people actually obey the laws. Unfortunately it seems to be that the goal is now to frighten the Hell out of everyone, feed the lawyers, and enforce things randomly at whims. As I said, new aristocracy.
It was "inherited" by Russia, however considering what a disaster Russian economy was in 90's, it was a bad time for science, engineering and military. Things improved since then.
For this right-wing wacko view of US Constitution, so is IRS.
and even if it wasn't, the WORST thing we could do is entrust our education system to the Federal government.
Except all other countries with better-educated population have just that.
The Federal government has no enumerated power to interfere in the educational system, so we would need a Constituional Amendment to get education "out of the state's hands" Thank $deity that's never going to happen.
USSR started using the US method of uranium isotope separation namely gaseous diffusion after they learned of the US success with this method.
In 1940, when it was proposed in USSR?
The use of plutonium as a fission weapon was also gained from spying.
If you count measuring radiation from nuclear weapons use as "spying".
They received the blueprints for the original Bomb there is no telling how many setbacks that eliminated.
Here is the blueprint:
(0)<E
It's basically the same as "Sloika" design already used in USSR, and everything indicates that no one actually seen it.
I'm not saying Russia wouldn't have gotten the bomb but they were more then 5 years behind the US
USSR was 4 years behind because they spent 4 years fighting a war on their own territory, and had other priorities. Active development work on anything nuclear-related started only in 1943-44.
and once the US started tightening up their controls there advancements started retarding.
And this is apparently a new US propaganda formula, because it's neither not the old one, nor it has anything to do with reality. Fusion bomb development went in parallel, with almost simultaneous first tests by US and USSR, then USSR demonstrated Tsar-Bomba (granted, not very useful) everything after that remained evenly matched. Weapon-related development shifted to delivery (ICBMs), smaller bombs and other less "spying-worthy" areas, other nuclear research continued after that with less secrecy on both sides.
Lawyers' associations wouldn't be worth squat if they didn't pass the laws prohibiting law practice by everyone else, thus effectively banning law education of the general population. Considering that politicians are usually lawyers (who left it to themselves to generate laws that can't be interpreted by a non-lawyer), this is more like a modern form of aristocracy than actual professional association.
US public schools still have no common/minimal national curriculum. Before you, idiots, will start developing your "educational technologies" you will have to wrestle public school curriculum out of your States' hands.
The published work of the USSR was mostly rehashing of original work previously done in the West.
[citation needed] -- for example, about everything related to fusion.
It is difficult to conduct real research in a society in which the government viciously controls information flow.
Again, FOR FUCK SAKE -- we are talking about nuclear program, of all things. At the time all countries that had it, surrounded it with layers and layers of secrecy.
In reality, USSR government only cared about access to two kinds of things -- state secrets (nuclear program, aerospace, weapons design, current military/spying/state-security activity) and whatever they deemed to be anti-government propaganda (that had artistic but no scientific value). If you were a scientist or engineer, no one would ever bother preventing you from exchanging anything with colleagues that work in the same area, though they may limit what you can publish if you are in any military-related program.
...And lot of good a cheap FPGA board will do for a "Java programmer" who does not understand the concepts necessary to understand the concepts necessary to understand the concepts necessary for any FPGA-related work. </sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get why people don't understand that corporations don't pay taxes. Taxes are just another expense that gets added into the final price of the product. It doesn't matter that they actually write the check, you pay Microsoft's corporate taxes every time you buy one of their products.
Product prices will be the highest the market can bear, regardless of expenses. Software already has massive profit margins, so taxes merely eat into those profits, thus depriving the company from money they can use to buy other companies, run ad campaigns, pay bribes and manipulate market in other ways.
We should eliminate them entirely. Nearly every company in the world would want to be headquartered in the US if we had no corporate taxes, imagine how many jobs that would create.
Corporate headquarters are only considered useful for locals because THEY PAY TAXES. The local employment they provide mostly consists of secretaries and janitors.
Usually SIM card is placed in a socket with metal shield or clip, with circuit board and a keyboard on one side (keyboard mostly consisting of two layers of conductive film) and a battery on the other side (containing metal electrodes and cell casings).
With shielding like that, good luck getting any signal in or out, unless this thing has a separate connector for an antenna outside the card (and good luck getting support for that from phone manufacturers and carriers).
Oh yes it did. Your post-soviet propaganda post notwithstanding, the Soviet Union tried to saturate Star Wars by continuing to build ever more warheads, so a percentage getting through even a mostly effective.
Which was their strategy all along, with or without Star Wars -- it reduced the impact of the first strike that was expected from US. There was no noticeable disparity between the number of warheads in US and USSR, so unless you claim that US tried to defend from unknown ABM weapon program ran by USSR, this is bullshit, created to whitewash Reagan policies.
That is what winning a war looks like.
What US economy and society is now, looks like a massive, unmitigated disaster for anyone but Americans. I know, I live in US, and it's now worse than post-USSR Russia. If I was at the same age as I was when I left Russia, I would get the Hell out of here, except, of course, I would be too dumb and uneducated to do so.
Even if you're Russian (which you are), and think winning a war can look only like establishing your government's laws and taxes over newly conquered territory, amidst piles of broken bodies and smashed cities, smoldering countryside.
I wonder why would Russian think that, considering that it's Americans who spent half a century building a massive empire.
It's primary purpose was bankrupting the Soviet Union in an arms race, which it did,
Which it DID NOT because USSR never bothered to create any response to this obviously idiotic project. It's also impossible to be bankrupted by any military costs when military industry is owned by the government and runs as a giant nonprofit.
The whole thing is a myth created by US propaganda workers to promote Reagan's policies and to whitewash military industrial complex...
at the cost of bankrupting the US,
...because said military-industrial complex runs at massive profits and does not have to show any tangible results or face any meaningful competition.
which the US was able to (kinda) recover from, but the SU could not.
USSR was dissolved as a result of entirely political process, basically by three largest USSR members' leaders (Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich, of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) being fed up with Gorbachev and his government and leaving the Union. It caused no change in ex-USSR countries' economies -- countries continued being run by formerly-provincial governments that usually were even less competent than USSR government in anything related to the economy, so if that event affected the economy, it was more and worse of the same.
We won the Cold War with the Star Wars budget as the atom bomb.
You didn't win shit. Your current economic crisis is deeper than anything USSR or its former members faced at any time after WWII. At this point your economy still can suck on the world's teat until dollar will be displaced as the dominant international currency, however its position is anything but stable now. Less stable than Gorbachev's grip on power in 1991.
In the long term -- always. The only question may be how long it should be, but this is the very nature of engineering and development of knowledge.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1545496&cid=31111062
And you know this how? By the skewed reports showing the short term, best case costs?
Because if it was cheaper to stay with a vendor, he wouldn't have to waste time, money and effort on locking in his customers.
The only possible question is, how long it would take for the locked-in environment to become more expensive than switching away from it. For Internet Explorer it's immediate because lock-in is already broken. When it's something like Microsoft Office and a single user, the answer is usually in a matter of hours. When it's AutoCAD and a large company it may be decades, as this is probably the single most-entrenched piece of proprietary software with least-developed open source competition and worst-defined standards. However if users benefited from staying with a piece of software, vendors would not go out of their way to make switching away from their products as painful as possible in the short term.
So for a long term saving, it's often cheaper to stay with what you've got (or for a new installation, choose the same as everyone else) and pay a lot of licensefees, than to change to something that's cheaper in licensing and have a shitload of other costs.
In the long term it's NEVER cheaper to follow a vendor's lock-in.
That said, I LOVE linux, open source and free software. But for commercial use, it just isn't always optimal.
Oh, the hallmark of Microsoft astroturfers.
Lots of people have spouted the conventional wisdom that Microsoft never innovates, and it's true for every case but one: DirectX. The DirectX libraries were internally developed, they are tight, high performance code, and they were THE innovation that prevented Windows from fading.
Writing trivial interfaces for hardware that already exists, and establishing "infrastructure" that is only accepted because you are pushing it, is not innovation. It's the most trivial part of software development combined with crappy business practices.
If you argued against the claim that Microsoft code is inefficient and buggy EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE THAT IT WAS WRITTEN, you would have a point, however that's a pretty low bar considering that Microsoft is known for mind-numbingly bad ideas and infrastructure behind their products.
I'm pretty sure there is a strong fundamental need to establish dominance.
You, sir, are an idiot.
People (and animals) have a drive to achieve dominance, however evolution developed it to be just strong enough to make sure that positions of power are not occupied by individuals vastly inferior to the rest of the group. Make it slightly higher, and the amount of infighting will destroy the group from the inside before environment and enemies will get to it. Make is slightly lower, and packs/tribes/... will be led by leaders incapable of making reasonable decisions, communicating with the rest of the group and organizing common activities.
The culture of modern American society already elevated this competitiveness to dangerous levels, and this is why you are being led by sociopaths. Telling people that they "need" to dominate others, plays exactly into the hands of those sick leaders -- it imposes pathological behavior onto the rest of society, and makes it impossible to recognize the disease in those who have it.
Maybe 4Chan should get involved...
The problem with this is, no one would be able to recognize those statements as anything political.
Another long discussion about "freedom", and white man's burden.
The elephant in the room is that those attacks are as much "Chinese" as 2009 H1N1 flu is "swine".
Opinion. Irrelevant.
Because all opinions are equal, amirite?
Troll + Opinion, irrelevant.
No, actually it's the reality.
Open source means the source code is distributed with the product or is optionally available for a modest fee. It doesn't do anything by itself. It doesn't imply anything else. It doesn't get you from point A to "awesome design". Cmon F/OSS cheerleaders, get your propaganda straight. A child and see through this.
In a different universe it would be possible to have a community of open source developers that promotes bad engineering practices. In this one, most of developers who work on all noticeable open source projects, happen to do something that is WORTH sharing with others.
Oh, btw - the cache has to be SRAM so that if the power goes out, it can write the files when it comes back on. SSDs absolutely must have a RAM cache so that they can efficiently locate places to write files, or they will stall while the controller tries to locate one. That's why the low end controllers perform so horribly in random write.
lol wut.
This is only true when educating people in the matter of law is impossible because not even lawyers can guarantee that laws mean anything in particular. In this situation public law awareness programs would be "practicing law without a license", so even laws that are clear enough to be understood, can not be explained or clarified to the public.
How exactly has Microsoft set back free software "decades"?
By contaminating minds of people who write software with Windows design. To write anything for Windows, one has to internalize Microsoft design principles, so programmers exposed to it produce more stupidly designed software and become incapable of understanding non-Windows-based software.
The whole thing IS a war of ideologies. Microsoft uses specific interfaces for everything, generalizations are based on random choices of abstraction, interfaces are never generalized or inherited between technologies, except when such interface imposes completely inappropriate specific abstraction on a more general concept. It's great for giving work for large number of mediocre employees, so they are kept mediocre. It creates unnecessary complexity and confusion, so security suffers most and performance next. Ex: Win32, Windows events handling and I/O, OLE/DDE -< COM/DCOM -< ActiveX/SOAP saga, the whole evolution of VB.
Unix and later open source does the opposite -- generalized interfaces are designed to be useful for multiple unrelated applications as an underlying mechanism, so specific applications can have their own infrastructure based on the same foundation. Ex: Unix filesystem, file descriptors, IPC, TCP/IP, virtual memory, security and process model, Berkeley sockets, libc.
In my experience, a person exposed to one of those sides can't effectively work with the other, so people indoctrinated with inferior engineering ideology are only capable of producing more compromised technology, making any real progress more difficult.
Would being a lawyer who becomes a politician that writes laws be considered a conflict of interest?
No, it's merely a situation conducive for abuse of power. Many believe that any kind of abuse of power can be prevented by splitting things between multiple people so they won't have "conflict of interest" -- and then it wouldn't matter if those people are total sociopaths. In reality it only replaces abuse of power with corruption and creates more hidden dependencies and relationships in power structures.
Same, unfortunately, now applies to "separation of power".
If they are complicated enough, you could make money interpreting them once you stop being a politician.
Hell with money -- the problem is, a person can't determine what is and isn't legal even after he pays a lawyer, because there might be another lawyer who disagrees. It often takes a lawsuit (and likely wasted months or years, millions of dollars, ruined lives, tied up massive resources) to get an answer that actually carries some weight. SCO anyone?
By the same token, shouldn't laws be written so that at least 90 percent of the people affected by them can understand them without the aid of a lawyer? This could be done by either lowering the readability level of the laws OR increasing the education level of those affected.
That's what would happen if the goal was to have people actually obey the laws. Unfortunately it seems to be that the goal is now to frighten the Hell out of everyone, feed the lawyers, and enforce things randomly at whims. As I said, new aristocracy.
It was "inherited" by Russia, however considering what a disaster Russian economy was in 90's, it was a bad time for science, engineering and military. Things improved since then.
Correction: s/"Sloika"//
"Sloika" was a similar later version, used for fusion.
That would be un-Constitutional,
For this right-wing wacko view of US Constitution, so is IRS.
and even if it wasn't, the WORST thing we could do is entrust our education system to the Federal government.
Except all other countries with better-educated population have just that.
The Federal government has no enumerated power to interfere in the educational system, so we would need a Constituional Amendment to get education "out of the state's hands" Thank $deity that's never going to happen.
Enjoy your fail, then.
USSR started using the US method of uranium isotope separation namely gaseous diffusion after they learned of the US success with this method.
In 1940, when it was proposed in USSR?
The use of plutonium as a fission weapon was also gained from spying.
If you count measuring radiation from nuclear weapons use as "spying".
They received the blueprints for the original Bomb there is no telling how many setbacks that eliminated.
Here is the blueprint:
(0)<E
It's basically the same as "Sloika" design already used in USSR, and everything indicates that no one actually seen it.
I'm not saying Russia wouldn't have gotten the bomb but they were more then 5 years behind the US
USSR was 4 years behind because they spent 4 years fighting a war on their own territory, and had other priorities. Active development work on anything nuclear-related started only in 1943-44.
and once the US started tightening up their controls there advancements started retarding.
And this is apparently a new US propaganda formula, because it's neither not the old one, nor it has anything to do with reality. Fusion bomb development went in parallel, with almost simultaneous first tests by US and USSR, then USSR demonstrated Tsar-Bomba (granted, not very useful) everything after that remained evenly matched. Weapon-related development shifted to delivery (ICBMs), smaller bombs and other less "spying-worthy" areas, other nuclear research continued after that with less secrecy on both sides.
Lawyers' associations wouldn't be worth squat if they didn't pass the laws prohibiting law practice by everyone else, thus effectively banning law education of the general population. Considering that politicians are usually lawyers (who left it to themselves to generate laws that can't be interpreted by a non-lawyer), this is more like a modern form of aristocracy than actual professional association.
US public schools still have no common/minimal national curriculum. Before you, idiots, will start developing your "educational technologies" you will have to wrestle public school curriculum out of your States' hands.
The published work of the USSR was mostly rehashing of original work previously done in the West.
[citation needed] -- for example, about everything related to fusion.
It is difficult to conduct real research in a society in which the government viciously controls information flow.
Again, FOR FUCK SAKE -- we are talking about nuclear program, of all things. At the time all countries that had it, surrounded it with layers and layers of secrecy.
In reality, USSR government only cared about access to two kinds of things -- state secrets (nuclear program, aerospace, weapons design, current military/spying/state-security activity) and whatever they deemed to be anti-government propaganda (that had artistic but no scientific value). If you were a scientist or engineer, no one would ever bother preventing you from exchanging anything with colleagues that work in the same area, though they may limit what you can publish if you are in any military-related program.
...And lot of good a cheap FPGA board will do for a "Java programmer" who does not understand the concepts necessary to understand the concepts necessary to understand the concepts necessary for any FPGA-related work. </sarcasm>