Sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning poor people pay more than rich people
What? Run that by me again? Poor people, who by definition have very little money to spend and hardly ever buy anything, pay MORE sales tax than rich people, who are spending money all the time? Wait, did you work at Enron or a dot-com?
Not only that, but it will make other businesses think twice about Texas, too.
There's a law about taxation: the more you try to get, the less you actually get. Bankrupt and irresponsible countries, states and municipalities should correct their spending binges instead of looking for creative taxation.
Think all I have to do is provide a signed charge slip to get my money back? Then you probably have never experienced the joys of attempting to do battle with a credit card company.
So why do you do business with credit card companies? Of course THEY don't want to pay for it, so they will screw the little(r) guy, ie you. And if that doesn't work, they will screw the customer and refuse the charge-back. I've had it happen to me with airline tickets which I was charged for and never received. Funnily enough I was not able to get that $900 removed from my credit card bill, despite arguing with the credit card company AND the airline. Nor did I ever get the tickets. So I got screwed out of $900. Your chargeback scenario is a very rare one indeed.
Which is exactly where it belongs. I need to make sure no one steals my credit card, and report it immediately if it gets stolen. I don't have to use a credit card, either. The only time the bank is responsible is if someone forges their cards or otherwise breaks their system.
However we live in a world of free-loaders who want all the credit in the world, and none of the responsibility. The merchant must only ensure that the card is a real card, just like he must ensure that those $20 bills are real $20 bills. The card owner must ensure that his card hasn't expired and that he hasn't lent it out to anyone or better yet, stored the number in his browser on his computer. And that's that.
The credit card company is assuming the risk, not you. Since when did Master Card have the power to deputize you and turn you into a mini police detective? They set up a system, it's their responsibility to ensure that their business model works. For that they earn billions of dollars, and you don't.
Bullshit. If my credit card company wants to talk to me and ask me security questions, they can ask the merchant to put me on the phone. The merchant is neither law enforcement nor my legal counsel. They have their arrangement with the credit card company. I have my own, separate arrangement with the credit card company. And never the twain shall meet. And if the risk of doing business is too great for that 3% or 5% or whatever they earn on every single transaction before even thinking about interest, then the credit card company should close its doors.
No, stupid is paying $300 for an MP3 player, $300 for a phone, $700 for a crippled tablet/reader, and $2000 for a laptop. But they are sleek and shiny and come with stickers, so I guess that makes them irresistible for those so called right brain types. Fool, money, soon parted. Funny though that all the Mac owners I've met haven't been creative at all. They've just been snobby little assholes very interested in telling people how to go about their business while their own lives were complete disasters. Or people who just dismiss others as stupid offhand. But I guess that's just sample error.
Apple is not about enterprise. It's about selling expensive trinkets to teenagers, nouveau riche, and "me too"ers. Apple buying Sun makes about as much sense as McDonald's opening a luxury car dealership.
Once you find out that's what's in play, do you not see value in being able to direct the carrier to shut down the tower they're using?
By the time you figure that out, they've already done what they set out to do. The attacks only lasted about an hour before they barricaded themselves. I don't see how not having cell phones would have saved lives and frustrated this carefully planned assault. Their plan was to kill as many people as they could, not hold a teleconference.
See the thing is the bad guy always, always has the advantage. The only time you can really prevent something is through careful surveillance BEFORE it happens. When the ball start rolling, there's not much you can do. Sure, cut off the phones. Paramedics and other first responders also use the phone system. Victims also use the phone system. So are you actually helping or making things worse?
And as for the surveillance issue - perhaps soon it will be possible to eavesdrop and keep records and mine every single data source. Now how do you stop someone from saying "hey, since we have all this data anyway, let's go after other people too"? None of us are perfect. All of us have broken some law or other. We cannot live in a world that never forgives or forgets. And it becomes even worse when some elites have the ability to modify their records and the common man doesn't. And they will - after all that's what power IS.
As for the internet - they killed the internet in Egypt. Did the problem go away? I am against nonsensical laws, and a kill switch makes no sense and it's proven NOT to work.
You realize that, in a democracy, a politician with your opinion could not be elected?
Of course not, because I am an honest man. So called democracies only elect crooks.
Since your position is untenable in a democracy, why stick to it?
Non sequitur. What does my opinion have to do with the form of government? Does government dictate opinions now? I am not allowed to think the way I do?
No, I will stick to my position because it's my position. We don't have to agree. I don't even have to be right. But government be damned, and the bovine group-think be damned too.
preaching against security in the face of terrorism isn't going to win the day.
Terrorism is nothing new. Lock the damned cockpit doors of your planes with a serious lock, and you will never get 9/11 again. But no, the terrorism excuse can be used to fish around in your bank account, eavesdrop on your phone/internet sessions, seize or freeze your assets even when you have done nothing wrong. Because just the "suspicion" is enough. Why on earth would a government want to give up these powers? They are more addicting than crack.
But tell me something, is the "war on terror" being lost, that these measures have to be considered? What happened to the "taking the fight to the enemy" excuse for invading Afghanistan (and later Iraq and now Pakistan)? After 10 years (almost twice as long as the second world war) you would think that some progress has been made and the "threat" of terrorism has decreased. Why do you feel you need more "security"? Or is it all just a bloody sham?
I know. And of course this is a completely useless political idea, like all other useless ideas that come from government. As if revolutions never happened in the pre internet or even pre-telephone era. Can't seem to remember Lenin twittering his followers, or Robespierre approving guillotinings by email, or Cromwell governing by Blackberry...
Say we get hard intel that sometime later that day, someone will be using Twitter or Gmail to issue timing commands to a bunch of people ready to drop off backpack bombs on metro trains in half a dozen large cities around the country.
Or they might do it via cell phone, so you should shut down all cell phones too. Or they might do it by short wave radio, so lock that up. Or they might do it by mail, so get rid of the mail. Or they might even do it by voice, so let's get rid of all that sound-carrying air. Where, exactly, do you plan to stop? You can strip a nation of every single right it has, in the name of terrorism, and you still won't prevent it. However at some point YOU start being the bad guy. It's a big bad world out there. Take your lumps, get used to it, and get the hell out of my face.
If you encrypted properly with, say, a one time pad, then no amount of brute forcing will ever help them. It cannot be broken. Of course you would have to keep your several megabyte/gigabyte key somewhere safe if you every want to see your data again.
Oh, wait, you were talking about wind (where every one of the costs you describe are orders of magnitude lower than for a nuke plant)...
I'm not so sure. I mean none of us are sitting with the actual numbers in front of us, but anchoring a wind turbine to the sea floor can't be cheap at all. If bridges across rivers cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it gives us an idea that the cost is not negligible. Now you said that your wanted how many windmills in your wind farm, again?
The main reason being Chinese contracts just seem like Chinese lanterns, so ephemeral.
I know exactly what you mean. But there's a way to deal with risk. Make small investments and don't be greedy. Worst that can happen is you lose your investment - but if it wasn't that much to begin with, who cares. If you go all in though, you are a fool and deserve to be parted from your money.
Nope. Especially if you you use a one time pad, the government will never, ever be able to decrypt your data. What they can do, however, is seize your computer equipment and get the key from there, since I doubt anyone is going to be carrying around a multi-megabyte sequence of numbers in their heads.
Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC.
I don't agree. In my 30+ years of computer gaming, I have noticed that software never, ever falls behind. What does happen is that it moves in cycles or waves of innovation where some startup comes out with a completely new way of doing things and then all the big players either copy them, or in the case of EA - buy them out. Then we have an incremental increase in the quality of all new games, where all the majors are including "new feature X" in their sequels. This results in a stagnation period, with endless identical games being released, like we are seeing right now.
However take heart. It just means we are that much closer to the next big thing in gaming.
As a side note, graphics card manufacturers need to start seriously addressing the heat issues with their cards. I have 2 Geforce 470's side by side in a SLI set up, and the fans on the cards are noisy as shit under load, while keeping the cards at a "cool" 98 degrees C. Plus I don't appreciate these heavy, double-width cards covering up all my remaining PCI slots leaving no physical room in my case.
I'll gladly shell out for a Mac Pro with 3Ghz on 12 cores, 2 workhorse graphics cards to power six 27" inch displays, 32GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.
Sure, shell out 5k for that....
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What? Run that by me again? Poor people, who by definition have very little money to spend and hardly ever buy anything, pay MORE sales tax than rich people, who are spending money all the time? Wait, did you work at Enron or a dot-com?
Not only that, but it will make other businesses think twice about Texas, too. There's a law about taxation: the more you try to get, the less you actually get. Bankrupt and irresponsible countries, states and municipalities should correct their spending binges instead of looking for creative taxation.
So why do you do business with credit card companies? Of course THEY don't want to pay for it, so they will screw the little(r) guy, ie you. And if that doesn't work, they will screw the customer and refuse the charge-back. I've had it happen to me with airline tickets which I was charged for and never received. Funnily enough I was not able to get that $900 removed from my credit card bill, despite arguing with the credit card company AND the airline. Nor did I ever get the tickets. So I got screwed out of $900. Your chargeback scenario is a very rare one indeed.
Which is exactly where it belongs. I need to make sure no one steals my credit card, and report it immediately if it gets stolen. I don't have to use a credit card, either. The only time the bank is responsible is if someone forges their cards or otherwise breaks their system. However we live in a world of free-loaders who want all the credit in the world, and none of the responsibility. The merchant must only ensure that the card is a real card, just like he must ensure that those $20 bills are real $20 bills. The card owner must ensure that his card hasn't expired and that he hasn't lent it out to anyone or better yet, stored the number in his browser on his computer. And that's that.
The credit card company is assuming the risk, not you. Since when did Master Card have the power to deputize you and turn you into a mini police detective? They set up a system, it's their responsibility to ensure that their business model works. For that they earn billions of dollars, and you don't.
Bullshit. If my credit card company wants to talk to me and ask me security questions, they can ask the merchant to put me on the phone. The merchant is neither law enforcement nor my legal counsel. They have their arrangement with the credit card company. I have my own, separate arrangement with the credit card company. And never the twain shall meet. And if the risk of doing business is too great for that 3% or 5% or whatever they earn on every single transaction before even thinking about interest, then the credit card company should close its doors.
No, stupid is paying $300 for an MP3 player, $300 for a phone, $700 for a crippled tablet/reader, and $2000 for a laptop. But they are sleek and shiny and come with stickers, so I guess that makes them irresistible for those so called right brain types. Fool, money, soon parted. Funny though that all the Mac owners I've met haven't been creative at all. They've just been snobby little assholes very interested in telling people how to go about their business while their own lives were complete disasters. Or people who just dismiss others as stupid offhand. But I guess that's just sample error.
Apple is not about enterprise. It's about selling expensive trinkets to teenagers, nouveau riche, and "me too"ers. Apple buying Sun makes about as much sense as McDonald's opening a luxury car dealership.
But only after we nail him to a tree.
What was this about Apple products being un-hackable again?
By the time you figure that out, they've already done what they set out to do. The attacks only lasted about an hour before they barricaded themselves. I don't see how not having cell phones would have saved lives and frustrated this carefully planned assault. Their plan was to kill as many people as they could, not hold a teleconference.
See the thing is the bad guy always, always has the advantage. The only time you can really prevent something is through careful surveillance BEFORE it happens. When the ball start rolling, there's not much you can do. Sure, cut off the phones. Paramedics and other first responders also use the phone system. Victims also use the phone system. So are you actually helping or making things worse?
And as for the surveillance issue - perhaps soon it will be possible to eavesdrop and keep records and mine every single data source. Now how do you stop someone from saying "hey, since we have all this data anyway, let's go after other people too"? None of us are perfect. All of us have broken some law or other. We cannot live in a world that never forgives or forgets. And it becomes even worse when some elites have the ability to modify their records and the common man doesn't. And they will - after all that's what power IS.
As for the internet - they killed the internet in Egypt. Did the problem go away? I am against nonsensical laws, and a kill switch makes no sense and it's proven NOT to work.
Of course not, because I am an honest man. So called democracies only elect crooks.
Non sequitur. What does my opinion have to do with the form of government? Does government dictate opinions now? I am not allowed to think the way I do? No, I will stick to my position because it's my position. We don't have to agree. I don't even have to be right. But government be damned, and the bovine group-think be damned too.
Terrorism is nothing new. Lock the damned cockpit doors of your planes with a serious lock, and you will never get 9/11 again. But no, the terrorism excuse can be used to fish around in your bank account, eavesdrop on your phone/internet sessions, seize or freeze your assets even when you have done nothing wrong. Because just the "suspicion" is enough. Why on earth would a government want to give up these powers? They are more addicting than crack. But tell me something, is the "war on terror" being lost, that these measures have to be considered? What happened to the "taking the fight to the enemy" excuse for invading Afghanistan (and later Iraq and now Pakistan)? After 10 years (almost twice as long as the second world war) you would think that some progress has been made and the "threat" of terrorism has decreased. Why do you feel you need more "security"? Or is it all just a bloody sham?
I know. And of course this is a completely useless political idea, like all other useless ideas that come from government. As if revolutions never happened in the pre internet or even pre-telephone era. Can't seem to remember Lenin twittering his followers, or Robespierre approving guillotinings by email, or Cromwell governing by Blackberry...
"Nowhere is liberty spoken of more than in the place where it has ceased to exist. " -- the French Revolution.
Or they might do it via cell phone, so you should shut down all cell phones too. Or they might do it by short wave radio, so lock that up. Or they might do it by mail, so get rid of the mail. Or they might even do it by voice, so let's get rid of all that sound-carrying air. Where, exactly, do you plan to stop? You can strip a nation of every single right it has, in the name of terrorism, and you still won't prevent it. However at some point YOU start being the bad guy. It's a big bad world out there. Take your lumps, get used to it, and get the hell out of my face.
But in a way, his battleship was most certainly sunk...
If you encrypted properly with, say, a one time pad, then no amount of brute forcing will ever help them. It cannot be broken. Of course you would have to keep your several megabyte/gigabyte key somewhere safe if you every want to see your data again.
I'm not so sure. I mean none of us are sitting with the actual numbers in front of us, but anchoring a wind turbine to the sea floor can't be cheap at all. If bridges across rivers cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it gives us an idea that the cost is not negligible. Now you said that your wanted how many windmills in your wind farm, again?
Kinda like oil companies do in the US when people start being concerned about the seals and polar bears in the Gulf of Mexico, huh.
I know exactly what you mean. But there's a way to deal with risk. Make small investments and don't be greedy. Worst that can happen is you lose your investment - but if it wasn't that much to begin with, who cares. If you go all in though, you are a fool and deserve to be parted from your money.
Nope. Especially if you you use a one time pad, the government will never, ever be able to decrypt your data. What they can do, however, is seize your computer equipment and get the key from there, since I doubt anyone is going to be carrying around a multi-megabyte sequence of numbers in their heads.
Not if he encrypts the data before sending it to them. Then they don't have the key. They just have a random series of bytes.
I don't agree. In my 30+ years of computer gaming, I have noticed that software never, ever falls behind. What does happen is that it moves in cycles or waves of innovation where some startup comes out with a completely new way of doing things and then all the big players either copy them, or in the case of EA - buy them out. Then we have an incremental increase in the quality of all new games, where all the majors are including "new feature X" in their sequels. This results in a stagnation period, with endless identical games being released, like we are seeing right now.
However take heart. It just means we are that much closer to the next big thing in gaming.
As a side note, graphics card manufacturers need to start seriously addressing the heat issues with their cards. I have 2 Geforce 470's side by side in a SLI set up, and the fans on the cards are noisy as shit under load, while keeping the cards at a "cool" 98 degrees C. Plus I don't appreciate these heavy, double-width cards covering up all my remaining PCI slots leaving no physical room in my case.
I'll gladly shell out for a Mac Pro with 3Ghz on 12 cores, 2 workhorse graphics cards to power six 27" inch displays, 32GB of RAM and 8TB of storage. Sure, shell out 5k for that....
Early versions of MS-DOS came with MASM.