The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it.
I think a bigger problem is that SF is currently blessed with so few great writers, compared to the giants that came before. I read alot of SF and fantasy and am consistently disappointed because what passes for 'great' nowadays simply isn't up to what 'great' used to mean.
That doesn't mean that there aren't *any* good writers. But during the '60's and '70's these boys seemed to be popping out of the woodwork, building on an abundance that blossomed in the'50's. Very few people have successfully picked up the torch and run with it since then.
No they aren't. Companies collect taxes for government by charging those taxes to customers. The customer is the taxpayer, the corporation the simplified collection point.
In any event corporations aren't citizens and have no rights. They have only the privileges we allow them to have, by whatever criteria we decide to apply.
If *MY* tax dollars are paying for something I damn well want to be able to use the fruits of that work any way I please - including in ways which are NOT GPL compatible.
Sorta like how humans are hitting puberty much earlier now.)
The average age for the onset of puberty in the U.S. is 12. It's been about 14 for most of the history of homo sapiens. While indeed earlier, this isn't "much earlier".
You are right up to a point. The GPL doesn't discourage every other journeyman coder or college student from contributing. Real engineers with real funding however, have better things to do with their time.
And you would know, being the obvious equal of folks like Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox?
Hmmm...I wonder why Bill particularly mentioned biotech?
"The investment is paying off. Icos is awaiting regulatory approval for Cialis, a drug for male impotence that will most likely encroach on a market dominated by Pfizer's blockbuster Viagra."
Unless a corporation is in the business of printing it's own money, the corporation pays taxes by charging those taxes to it's customers. If it didn't, it would go bankrupt in the first year of operation.
So ultimately, all taxes are payed by individuals, not by corporations. Corporations are just nifty collection points for government skimming. All taxes - every single dime of them - come from citizens.
Corporations have no rights, either as citizens (which they aren't) or taxpayers (which they aren't). They have only privileges, which we may or may not grant them based upon whatever criteria we - the citizens - feel are appropriate.
In this case I agree: government-funded research, all of which comes from tax dollars payed by citizens, should be returned to the citizens. This may be 'public domain' or 'GPL' depending on the circumstances and public will, but corporations aren't entitled to anything other than what we say they're entitled to.
Microsoft, or any other non-GPL developer, would be blocked from taking that code and linking to it.
Exactly how is this a problem? The government's sole responsibility is to it's citizens; corporations are *not* people nor do they deserve to be treated as such.
If a corporation objects to using GPL'd code, it should do the capitalist thing and develop it's own proprietary software. A corporation asking for a government handout is anti-capitalist; almost communist, even....
If you're a Microsoft shareholder, can you barge-in and demand to see the source code for Windows XP?
Microsoft is not a government. The government is not a privately-held corporation. There is a vast difference between 'government' and 'corporation' for those with the critical faculties to distinguish between the two.
Selling closed-source software has worked, for Microsoft as well as many other companies. Consumers have for the most part benefited, PCs are cheaper and better than they've ever been.
The existence of Microsoft and the fact that PCs are cheaper and better have nothing to do with each other. PCs would be better and cheaper regardless of whether or not MS was around and to conflate the two is just propaganda.
In addition, we have no idea what the world would be like if there had been no single monopoly but instead several competing companies. No one does, including you. The only thing we do know is that sans MS the world would *still* have obtained an OS for home computers, probably several of them; MS didn't 'create' a demand here, nor would the demand have evaporated without MS.
Remember the SNAFU principle, which works wonders in any organization. In essence, the farther you go up the food chain the more distorted the information gets as each level of management reinterprets the facts to make these facts (as well as themselves) look better.
Bill Gates is at the top of his own little kingdom, one he personally designed to his own satisfaction. Combined with the fact that the man is insanely rich and not known for his ability to accept opposing viewpoints (to put it mildly), by the time the 'facts' make it to Bill they're probably, at best, a vague approximation of reality. There's little doubt in my mind that they reflect a reality which doesn't actually exist, but instead is one that Bill would *like* to exist since his underlings are highly motivated to present this over anything which the king might find less pleasant.
This is a problem in all organizations, and it gets worse the more levels of 'sifting' you have between the very bottom rung that collects the information and the very top rung that acts on it. The problem is exacerbated if those that sit at the top rung have a great deal of power, and Bill is arguably one of the most powerful men in the world based on his wealth alone. The information he receives has to be some of the worst blather in the industry.
There also seems to be some indication that Bill's reality is warping a bit, also not uncommon amongst the rich and powerful. The longer they spend at the top the stranger they seem to become, this process accelerating dependent on wealth and isolation. Bill is very, very wealthy and also very, very isolated; it's no wonder he's starting to act even weirder than normal.
So it's not a surprise that he seems to be sincere. He probably believes most of what he says now, convinced by his continued existence in OddWorld that what he used to know as propaganda is actually true. Just wait for another ten years to pass and see how bizarre and out of touch the guy is then...like Howard Hughes they'll say he *used* to be great but now he's just insane...err, 'eccentric'.
If I have a tax rate of 5% and it's raised to 10% my taxes are now 200% of what they used to be. Even so, only a moron would claim that this is a huge difference based simply on percentages.
If I had a tax rate of 25% and it was raised to 50% that's also a 200% increase, but it's obviously going to have a much greater impact than the first example.
In the case discussed a 33% tax rate compared to a 20% tax rate represents an increase of 165%, just as you said. But based upon the income of the person who's paying (top 20%, remember) the difference isn't as large as you claim it to be.
Not only do you need to the ability to do "simple fucking math", but also the wit to indulge in some critical thinking. Which, apparently, you lack.
And the majority of us actually like popular music, hence the term 'popular music'. Touting the tired old 'go see a local band' line, or 'support alternative artists duuude!' is really a display of ignorance, or a complete lack of respect for any musical taste but your own.
Apparently you have trouble parsing the sentence "that seems about right to me". Note the word 'about', which in this case obviously means 'pretty close to'. As in '33% of the taxes for the people making 20% of the income is about right'. Not quite right, as I made clear at the end of the line by indicating I thought a 20% tax rate was more than 'about right'.
Actually, I agree with every single thing you said. But as I pointed out earlier, many of the self-proclaimed 'Libertarians' you run into (on the net and real life) have little idea what libertarianism is actually about. They sound more like whacked out college kids spouting the rhetoric of pseudo-anarchy than anything else. I wonder, at times, how many of those 'Libertarians' have actually bothered to read anything beyond the propaganda of their own social circle.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm more libertarian than most of the 'libertarians' I run into. Libertarianism says nothing about doing away with government, but rather doing away with *unnecessary* government where a *free market would otherwise provide*. These kids take this to mean that if the free market doesn't do the trick then it shouldn't be done, and that market forces determine morality. Critical thinking on the issue has completely eluded them; they're just as much unthinking drivel-spouting robots as the socialists are.
So, when someone says "I'm a Libertarian" I'm right if I assume that 90%+ of the posters who make this claim don't have the first bloody clue what they're talking about. It's more an 'aren't I hip and cool' sort of thing than an actual belief. I especially hate it when they misquote Ayn Rand, who had some pretty decent ideas if you ignore the tripe that her current-day followers spout and actually read her works. The 'Libertarians' have done more to discredit Ayn Rand than her opponents could ever have accomplished.
As for what needs to be done...what real libertarianism is about. Slash taxes, eliminate entire government departments, leave the free market to do what it does best (after, of course, you actually implement a free market - something we don't have in the U.S.). But unlike the 'fuck everyone else but me' sort of libertarian I do believe in social services, especially those geared to training the disadvantaged in useful job skills. I do *not* - emphatically so - believe in charting my morality by market forces, and leaving, for example, single mothers with kids to starve on the streets because bad luck has put that mother out of a job at the wrong time.
Now that I think about it, I think that's the most offensive thing about a pseudo-libertarian: they proclaim that luck has no place in life, that random chance isn't a factor, and that everyone deserves what they get. Not only offensive, but indicative of the fact that the speaker is definitely on the left-hand side of the IQ bell curve. This attitude makes them nothing more than recycled 21st century Calvinists, a loser belief if there ever was one.
"Commerce" and "communication" are two separate things. The Federal government has decided that *any* endeavor that crosses a state line is under their bailiwick. This clearly does not comply with the spirit the clause, which was originally intended to prevent states from erecting tariffs against one another (among other things).
It's also illegal to prevent states from seceding from the Union. Note, however, that the restrictions on the powers of the Federal government were challenged in 1860, and the challengers lost. Ever since that time the Federal government has done nothing but expand, raise taxes, and increase it's own powers.
I do not understand this obsession of deeply ideological Libertarians with the capital-M Market.
The odd thing here is that most so-called Libertarians on Slashdot spout their own ideology incorrectly, generally embracing an extremist viewpoint which has more to do with college-kid pseudo-anarchy than actual libertarian ideals. Some don't even realize that the U.S. isn't a free market system, nor even close to one.
I've noticed that this is true of many 'libertarians' and their opponents (who're equally unequal to the task of researching what a real libertarian is). A battle of wits where both sides are suffering a critical shortage.
You'll also find this phenomenon amongst Ayn Rand supporters and Ayn Rand opponents. It appears the vast majority have never actual read anything that Ayn Rand has published. Ask them what objectivism is and how it relates to cognitive psychology and watch them draw blanks - despite the fact that objectivism is the root source of much of Rand's observations on economic models and human interaction.
This has got to be a case of fanatics looking for a cause (and someone else to blame), rather than a cause inspiring fanaticism.
Depends on where they are. Some towns are so small that simply running the wire, or even setting up high speed wireless access points, would be uneconomical unless you charged thousands of dollars for the hookup, and a hundred a month for maintenance. And satellite has latency issues.
Exactly why does this make it anyone else's problem except for the people who live in that town? They choose to be there; they can suffer the consequences of that choice.
So what would you do? Increase taxes for the middle class and poor, decrease taxes for the rich, or give people a number of votes based upon their current dollar worth?
I'm not a libertarian - you blokes smoke crack, as far as I'm concerned - so I'm wondering what empirical source you get your 50% number from. By 'empirical' I mean 'not published by a libertarian, and therefore unreliable, source'.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem of Fantasy / Science Fiction at the moment is that people find one writer / style and refuse to read outside it.
I think a bigger problem is that SF is currently blessed with so few great writers, compared to the giants that came before. I read alot of SF and fantasy and am consistently disappointed because what passes for 'great' nowadays simply isn't up to what 'great' used to mean.
That doesn't mean that there aren't *any* good writers. But during the '60's and '70's these boys seemed to be popping out of the woodwork, building on an abundance that blossomed in the'50's. Very few people have successfully picked up the torch and run with it since then.
Max
Companies are taxpayers just like you are
No they aren't. Companies collect taxes for government by charging those taxes to customers. The customer is the taxpayer, the corporation the simplified collection point.
In any event corporations aren't citizens and have no rights. They have only the privileges we allow them to have, by whatever criteria we decide to apply.
Max
If *MY* tax dollars are paying for something I damn well want to be able to use the fruits of that work any way I please - including in ways which are NOT GPL compatible.
Well, then, let's vote on it, shall we?
Max
Sorta like how humans are hitting puberty much earlier now.)
The average age for the onset of puberty in the U.S. is 12. It's been about 14 for most of the history of homo sapiens. While indeed earlier, this isn't "much earlier".
Max
You are right up to a point. The GPL doesn't discourage every other journeyman coder or college student from contributing. Real engineers with real funding however, have better things to do with their time.
And you would know, being the obvious equal of folks like Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox?
Max
Hmmm...I wonder why Bill particularly mentioned biotech?
"The investment is paying off. Icos is awaiting regulatory approval for Cialis, a drug for male impotence that will most likely encroach on a market dominated by Pfizer's blockbuster Viagra."
Maybe his wife suggested it?
Max
this programmer-farmer is now also delivering eggs, meat, and spinach!
The eggs and meat I can see, but all spinach is going to create is ill-will among just about everyone under the age of 10.
Max
Unless a corporation is in the business of printing it's own money, the corporation pays taxes by charging those taxes to it's customers. If it didn't, it would go bankrupt in the first year of operation.
So ultimately, all taxes are payed by individuals, not by corporations. Corporations are just nifty collection points for government skimming. All taxes - every single dime of them - come from citizens.
Corporations have no rights, either as citizens (which they aren't) or taxpayers (which they aren't). They have only privileges, which we may or may not grant them based upon whatever criteria we - the citizens - feel are appropriate.
In this case I agree: government-funded research, all of which comes from tax dollars payed by citizens, should be returned to the citizens. This may be 'public domain' or 'GPL' depending on the circumstances and public will, but corporations aren't entitled to anything other than what we say they're entitled to.
Max
Microsoft, or any other non-GPL developer, would be blocked from taking that code and linking to it.
Exactly how is this a problem? The government's sole responsibility is to it's citizens; corporations are *not* people nor do they deserve to be treated as such.
If a corporation objects to using GPL'd code, it should do the capitalist thing and develop it's own proprietary software. A corporation asking for a government handout is anti-capitalist; almost communist, even....
Max
If you're a Microsoft shareholder, can you barge-in and demand to see the source code for Windows XP?
Microsoft is not a government. The government is not a privately-held corporation. There is a vast difference between 'government' and 'corporation' for those with the critical faculties to distinguish between the two.
Max
Selling closed-source software has worked, for Microsoft as well as many other companies. Consumers have for the most part benefited, PCs are cheaper and better than they've ever been.
The existence of Microsoft and the fact that PCs are cheaper and better have nothing to do with each other. PCs would be better and cheaper regardless of whether or not MS was around and to conflate the two is just propaganda.
In addition, we have no idea what the world would be like if there had been no single monopoly but instead several competing companies. No one does, including you. The only thing we do know is that sans MS the world would *still* have obtained an OS for home computers, probably several of them; MS didn't 'create' a demand here, nor would the demand have evaporated without MS.
Max
Remember the SNAFU principle, which works wonders in any organization. In essence, the farther you go up the food chain the more distorted the information gets as each level of management reinterprets the facts to make these facts (as well as themselves) look better.
Bill Gates is at the top of his own little kingdom, one he personally designed to his own satisfaction. Combined with the fact that the man is insanely rich and not known for his ability to accept opposing viewpoints (to put it mildly), by the time the 'facts' make it to Bill they're probably, at best, a vague approximation of reality. There's little doubt in my mind that they reflect a reality which doesn't actually exist, but instead is one that Bill would *like* to exist since his underlings are highly motivated to present this over anything which the king might find less pleasant.
This is a problem in all organizations, and it gets worse the more levels of 'sifting' you have between the very bottom rung that collects the information and the very top rung that acts on it. The problem is exacerbated if those that sit at the top rung have a great deal of power, and Bill is arguably one of the most powerful men in the world based on his wealth alone. The information he receives has to be some of the worst blather in the industry.
There also seems to be some indication that Bill's reality is warping a bit, also not uncommon amongst the rich and powerful. The longer they spend at the top the stranger they seem to become, this process accelerating dependent on wealth and isolation. Bill is very, very wealthy and also very, very isolated; it's no wonder he's starting to act even weirder than normal.
So it's not a surprise that he seems to be sincere. He probably believes most of what he says now, convinced by his continued existence in OddWorld that what he used to know as propaganda is actually true. Just wait for another ten years to pass and see how bizarre and out of touch the guy is then...like Howard Hughes they'll say he *used* to be great but now he's just insane...err, 'eccentric'.
Max
No wonder you post as an anonymous coward.
If I have a tax rate of 5% and it's raised to 10% my taxes are now 200% of what they used to be. Even so, only a moron would claim that this is a huge difference based simply on percentages.
If I had a tax rate of 25% and it was raised to 50% that's also a 200% increase, but it's obviously going to have a much greater impact than the first example.
In the case discussed a 33% tax rate compared to a 20% tax rate represents an increase of 165%, just as you said. But based upon the income of the person who's paying (top 20%, remember) the difference isn't as large as you claim it to be.
Not only do you need to the ability to do "simple fucking math", but also the wit to indulge in some critical thinking. Which, apparently, you lack.
Max
And the majority of us actually like popular music, hence the term 'popular music'. Touting the tired old 'go see a local band' line, or 'support alternative artists duuude!' is really a display of ignorance, or a complete lack of respect for any musical taste but your own.
Max
Apparently you have trouble parsing the sentence "that seems about right to me". Note the word 'about', which in this case obviously means 'pretty close to'. As in '33% of the taxes for the people making 20% of the income is about right'. Not quite right, as I made clear at the end of the line by indicating I thought a 20% tax rate was more than 'about right'.
Max
A 20% upper-end tax rate sounds rather good to me, and certainly preferable to the scheme that's currently in place.
Max
Actually, I agree with every single thing you said. But as I pointed out earlier, many of the self-proclaimed 'Libertarians' you run into (on the net and real life) have little idea what libertarianism is actually about. They sound more like whacked out college kids spouting the rhetoric of pseudo-anarchy than anything else. I wonder, at times, how many of those 'Libertarians' have actually bothered to read anything beyond the propaganda of their own social circle.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm more libertarian than most of the 'libertarians' I run into. Libertarianism says nothing about doing away with government, but rather doing away with *unnecessary* government where a *free market would otherwise provide*. These kids take this to mean that if the free market doesn't do the trick then it shouldn't be done, and that market forces determine morality. Critical thinking on the issue has completely eluded them; they're just as much unthinking drivel-spouting robots as the socialists are.
So, when someone says "I'm a Libertarian" I'm right if I assume that 90%+ of the posters who make this claim don't have the first bloody clue what they're talking about. It's more an 'aren't I hip and cool' sort of thing than an actual belief. I especially hate it when they misquote Ayn Rand, who had some pretty decent ideas if you ignore the tripe that her current-day followers spout and actually read her works. The 'Libertarians' have done more to discredit Ayn Rand than her opponents could ever have accomplished.
As for what needs to be done...what real libertarianism is about. Slash taxes, eliminate entire government departments, leave the free market to do what it does best (after, of course, you actually implement a free market - something we don't have in the U.S.). But unlike the 'fuck everyone else but me' sort of libertarian I do believe in social services, especially those geared to training the disadvantaged in useful job skills. I do *not* - emphatically so - believe in charting my morality by market forces, and leaving, for example, single mothers with kids to starve on the streets because bad luck has put that mother out of a job at the wrong time.
Now that I think about it, I think that's the most offensive thing about a pseudo-libertarian: they proclaim that luck has no place in life, that random chance isn't a factor, and that everyone deserves what they get. Not only offensive, but indicative of the fact that the speaker is definitely on the left-hand side of the IQ bell curve. This attitude makes them nothing more than recycled 21st century Calvinists, a loser belief if there ever was one.
Rant, rant. Enough. There's your answer.
Max
The wealthiest one percent of Americans earn almost 20% of the taxable income in the US, and they pay about 33% of the tax load.
This seems about right to me. If you earn 20% of the nation's taxable income you should be paying 20% of the nation's taxes. Where's the problem?
Max
"Commerce" and "communication" are two separate things. The Federal government has decided that *any* endeavor that crosses a state line is under their bailiwick. This clearly does not comply with the spirit the clause, which was originally intended to prevent states from erecting tariffs against one another (among other things).
Max
It's also illegal to prevent states from seceding from the Union. Note, however, that the restrictions on the powers of the Federal government were challenged in 1860, and the challengers lost. Ever since that time the Federal government has done nothing but expand, raise taxes, and increase it's own powers.
Max
I do not understand this obsession of deeply ideological Libertarians with the capital-M Market.
The odd thing here is that most so-called Libertarians on Slashdot spout their own ideology incorrectly, generally embracing an extremist viewpoint which has more to do with college-kid pseudo-anarchy than actual libertarian ideals. Some don't even realize that the U.S. isn't a free market system, nor even close to one.
I've noticed that this is true of many 'libertarians' and their opponents (who're equally unequal to the task of researching what a real libertarian is). A battle of wits where both sides are suffering a critical shortage.
You'll also find this phenomenon amongst Ayn Rand supporters and Ayn Rand opponents. It appears the vast majority have never actual read anything that Ayn Rand has published. Ask them what objectivism is and how it relates to cognitive psychology and watch them draw blanks - despite the fact that objectivism is the root source of much of Rand's observations on economic models and human interaction.
This has got to be a case of fanatics looking for a cause (and someone else to blame), rather than a cause inspiring fanaticism.
Max
Depends on where they are. Some towns are so small that simply running the wire, or even setting up high speed wireless access points, would be uneconomical unless you charged thousands of dollars for the hookup, and a hundred a month for maintenance. And satellite has latency issues.
Exactly why does this make it anyone else's problem except for the people who live in that town? They choose to be there; they can suffer the consequences of that choice.
Max
So what would you do? Increase taxes for the middle class and poor, decrease taxes for the rich, or give people a number of votes based upon their current dollar worth?
I'm not a libertarian - you blokes smoke crack, as far as I'm concerned - so I'm wondering what empirical source you get your 50% number from. By 'empirical' I mean 'not published by a libertarian, and therefore unreliable, source'.
Max
Finding Jesus is the only way out of the cycle of poverty and he ain't reachable by cell phone.
Given that he's verifiably dead I'd hazard there's a good reason you can't reach him by cell.
Max
Wow. The things you see when you read all the trash.
You're majorly fucked up, you know that boy? Meds are what you need, and lots of them. I'm surprised aren't already in a locked-down facility.
Max