I quite agree. A healthy society should easily be able to let it successful members become quite wealthy without unduly harming its not-yet successful members.
On the other hand, the economy is not an infinite sum game either. There is some limit to the number of people who can be so wealthy that they no longer work at all.
I'm fine with people being able to become so wealthy they never have to work again. That's great, good for them. I think it's a problem if people can become so wealthy they and their heirs never work again forever, and just keep getting wealthier forever. At some point, it does prevent other peoples ascendency, when the fraction of economic output that supports the idle rich grows faster than the economy itself.
"What I said was that inflation is caused by the creation of new 'money' which is added into the pool of the existing money supply." "As to banks creating money, the only thing they did was create paper promisary notes."
The banks created currency. Now only the Federal reserve does, in the same way. You can call it money or not, I won't argue semantics.
Keep all your money in Gold and Silver if you like! Apparently you think its value won't change then; and in terms of the amount of gold or silver it is worth, you are absolutely right. (glad to hear you like silver as well, William Jennings would be proud.) I, and many others, prefer to reckon our money in terms of what it can buy that we actually use. You ought to find inflation easy to measure- just check out the price of Gold; I don't know why you're messing with stamps. Those of us who prefer to measure value in terms of things most people buy and use instead of shiny metal have a harder time of it.
Investment banks sometimes like Gold because it's fairly difficult to create or (accidentally) destroy, so it's price is stable. But it's not magic; it's just shiny metal.
"So delivering mail has gotten cheaper, but you think the price of stamps should be higher??"
I don't care, I don't send many letters, and my desires are not relevant to this discussion. The point is the price of a stamp is not well related to the cost of delivering mail. During the time period your article discusses the amount of external tax-dollar subsidy artificially supporting the price of first class postage has varied by huge fractions of that price. It's not that stamps under or overstate inflation, it's that they don't say anything meaningful about it at all. Stamp prices are not the result of free market economics, but are about as far from it as possible. Using stamp prices to measure inflation says that they say what the person doing so wants in order to arrive at whatever foregone conclusion they are after. There is simply no other reason to use a measure so uniquely terrible.
The gold standard kept the value of the dollar constant in terms of how much gold it could buy. As gold is not terribly useful compared to food, shelter, or what have you, that says little abut the buying power of a dollar, which fluctuated significantly over the period you describe. ( During much of which, I'll note, the government could not issue un-backed currency, but private banks could, thus adjusting the money supply by the somewhat messier mechanisms of unscrupulously printing money like mad, then failing, screwing over your depositors or creditors in alternation )
The essay you point to decries the inacuracy of the broad based CPI, and so replaces it with the price of a single service?!?! A service whose very nature (in terms of maximum weigth/dimensions and speed of delivery) has changed significantly in the period covered. A service which is provided by an entity that has undergone significant changes in that period from being an outright government department to a semi-autonomous entity expected to support itself.
As someone who formerly worked in an organization doing statistical analysis of Postal Service costs, let me help you aboard the clue train: Mail delivery has gotten far cheaper during the period described thanks to automation, which is why government subsidy of the postal service has declined. The price of a first class stamp has remained relatively constant in relation to the buying power of that money vs other goods only because postal rates are artificially set by a byzantine congressional commision process that forces that to be the case. The cost to deliver a letter has roughly jack squat to do with the price of a stamp.
Postal rates are about the most ass-backward, ultra-stupid inflation measure you could ever come up with.
Measuring inflation is not an easy thing to do. Fundamentaly, you have to decide what is really valuable, and track how much of that you can buy with a doallar. Anyone who tells you masuring inflation realy is easy is a charlatan. If they tell you inflation is a government conspiracy, they are a kooky charlatan. If they tell you it's easy to see this, because you can measure inflation by the price of a stamp, they're an incredible idiot.
Well, we disagree. Of course, by your position, it sounds like I should just shoot you and run things the way I want to. Survival of the fittest, yee-haw! The only problem with muggers is they think small, they should try to run whole crime syndicates!
I'll mention to my friends in Sudan that they should really be happy about the fabulous oportunities they have, and quit blaming others for their problems.
It is, frankly, NOT always a personal choice what you want to do with your life.
"I have most definitely expected a reply of this kind: you have gone to Canada and that is where you have succeeded."
You may have expected that reply, but that's not what I said. All of my arguments would still apply presuming you lived in any organized society. You live and work in a society, you should contribute to making it function.
Now that you mention it, a society where the punishment for failure is death might be just another option, but a society where death is frequently the punishment for some thug deciding he likes your stuff is, in my opinion, not as good as Canada. I know people who live in significantly less stable parts of the world than Canada. They are not excited by the fabulous opportunities; they just want to live their lives and not killed by bandits.
"Being rich, and using your wealth strategically, is not a sin."
I don't care if it's a sin or not. I'm concerned with what makes a functional, stable society.
We can try to make society as fair as possible (and argue about what is fair), but whatever wonderfully fair social policies we come up with are stupid if they quickly go away as the society run by them collapses.
"...all of which was done by myself personally without gov't intervention and help of any kind from anyone."
Canada, from what I understand, has a reasonably stable society, with little threat of armed gangs taking your money, or of the government nationalizing your business without compensating you, or corrupt officials making life hard on you, etc. Did you build this society personally, without any help of any kind from anyone? Is it maybe reasonable that the society in which you live expects you to contribute to the maintenance of the conditions that made your success possible?
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you appear to draw between saving money and investing. Return rates from even very low risk savings instruments avaiable to even the smallest investors exceed the rate of inflation by a significant margin.
Nor do I think it's reasonable to describe inflation as a stealth "tax". Nobody takes the value you lose to inflation; it's just gone.
Stuffing money in a mattress has never been a good savings option. I'm not sure what could be done to change this, or why it would be desirable.
"Your childish, take from the rich, give to the poor, sentiments when taken to Liberal policy statement level, boils down to, 'It's not fair that...'"
Did you even read my post? I'm not claiming anything is more or less fair. I'm claiming fairness is less important than a stable society.
Historically, it appears that "theft" from those who acheive success is going to happen no matter what. It can happen slowly though moderate taxation, or it can happen all at once when communist revolutionaries shoot you in the head and take your stuff.
Since I am one of the "rich kids", I'd prefer the moderate taxation route. I'm smart, competent and hard working, I can (and do) manage to stay ahead in our society just fine. Under the fiscal policies I hear proposed by Libertarians, I beleive I could sit on my ass doing nothing, getting steadily richer, until someone poor shot me in the head. No thanks.
Well, I still think they're insane. The playing field is not level, and the one Libertarians seek is less so. The wealthy have a massive advantage when it comes to aquiring more wealth. I don't think I'm painting with a broad brush if I say Libertarians think the government should avoid engaging in downward wealth redistribution. Since I think that is perhaps the single most vital role of government, I think they're insane.
Note I'm not arguing for communism: excessive wealth redistribution also destroys your society, just as surely. What's needed is some middle ground where the competent can improve their staion, but cannot then sit back as wealth becomes ever more concentrated, and the next generation of competent workers and investors are locked out.
Also note that I don't claim the governmnets taking from the rich and giving to the poor is in any way fair. It's not fair; it's just a good idea. Critical even.
Penny Arcade fared perfectly. They did not lose in court; they did not make any attempt to fight in court. Instead they complied with the cease-and-desist letter and then ran a comic portraying American Greetings as Nazi anal rapists, and nobody said boo. The original strip is far more famous than if American Greetings had never done anything, which they've presumably figured out since they're not C&Ding all the places it's easily available now (Wikipedia fer Christs sake).
American Greetings lost that confrontaion big time, and Penny Arcade didn't have to spend a dime on lawyers to make it happen.
"Did your simple minded idiot see their first website in 2000 or 1990?"
If a simple minded idiot saw their first website in 1990, they must have been a simple-minded-particle-physicist-idiot working at CERN, since the web was first publicly accessible in mid 91.
That said, I (who may or may not be a simple minded idiot) first saw a website in 93. At that point, support for images was little more than a rumor, and Gopher dwarfed http in deployed base. Yet it was immediately clear to me that the web would be the dominant form of internet content delivery in short order. On the other hand, the idea that everyday un-geeky people would have heard of the web, much less see it as the natural, obvious way to get info from entirely un-tech-oriented organizations only a few years later was certainly not obvious.
"in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up"
You're taxed on income. It's really pretty straight forward...
"an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery"
Oh, we're talking at that level of abstraction... Well, since on a fundsamental level, everything is mine (I called it) your owning property in the first place is a form of armed robbery. Please give my stuff back.
"Not that I enjoy the paying part, but what I really hate is the hassle of the paperwork, and the complexity of the tax code"
That, again, is not a reason to hate the IRS.
"I'd rather pay a flat tax, even if it cost me more money."
If you're not sure, it's going to cost you a *lot* more money; (not to mention that utter- destruction-of-society thing, but that's just my prediction) In any case, wanting a simpler tax code is an often-given, but stupid argument for a flat tax. Flat vs. Progressive is just different numbers in one lookup table. What makes the tax code complex is not the numbers in that table; it's the many exceptions, deductions, credits, etc. You could elimintate any or all of those independently of any changes to the base rate calculation.
If you making a 10K payment, you've had to be paying quarterly estimated taxes, so your total tax bill is more like 40K, so I'm thinking the 100 bucks you're trying to save by paying at the last minute may not be worth the hassle, but I guess that's up to you.
On the other hand, every accountant I've worked with has you get stuff in asap, determines the most advantageous time and method for you to file, and takes care of it.
Unless someone else misses a deadline, I see little reason not to be done with ones taxes in February. In any case, extensions are easily obtained.
Everybody loves to hate the IRS, but what they really hate is paying taxes. As long as you are actually trying to pay your taxes, the IRS is quite accommodating.
If Ubuntu makes it easier for more people to adopt Linux, how much more development might eventually result?
Mind you, I use Linux even though I've never contributed to the kernel, and probably never will. I don't think that makes me a bad person, nor do I see why Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu project should be held to a different standard.
I, and many Vonnegut fans, seem to like Breakfast of Champions much more than he did. I'd call it his third A-Plus, though I wouldn't start with it as it's comparitively more "out there" (which is saying something). Other than that I pretty much agree with his grades. For stuff written after he made that list, I'd add a As for Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Bluebeard, something less than A for Hocus Pocus and Timequake.
I'd start with any of: Cat's Cradle (because I think it's his best) Slaughterhouse Five (because it's his most famous) The Sirens of Titan (because I did, and imediately continued into reading everything else he wrote)
That makes sense. As I mentioned, I was having these conversations about 10 (or 15 now that I think about it) years ago, because my friend was ggetting her hands on FPGAs which were new and cool. So I think she mentioned power consumption as one obvious deal-killer, but there wasn't any suggestion they were ready to launch otherwise.
"For example, when you're playing Unreal Tournament and some guy keeps doing 180's and putting a bullet through your head from across the map... it's a safe bet he's a cheater and you should move on."
And if I'm running the server, I'll ban him. On servers Blizzard runs, I see no problem with their defining what is cheating, and banning who they like.
Suing someone for copyright violation who has not actually copied anything is still incredibly stupid of course.
"I didn't know that looking at copyrighted code in your possession could constitute infringement"
It can't. You cannot infringe on copyright except by copying something. You may not have called the other poster ignorant, but I will. He continues to be wrong about what Phoenix (the BIOS guys) did and why. One of their two teams absolutely opened up the "box", read the source code, etc. Those guys could have then gone and written their own BIOS without directly copying anything, and it would not have been infringement. But it would have been impossible to *prove* they didn't copy the code just by remembering it. So instead they wrote up their own detailed description of what the thing did, and passed that off to an entirely seperate team that wrote the new code.
You are entirely correct. I'm not sure how to elaborate except by mocking the original poster, but I'll give it a try:
The creators of the first non-IBM PC BIOS had one team decompiling/inspecting/reverse engineering the code and writing up documents describing how it worked. Then a toatlly seperate team that never saw the original wrote a functional replacement based on those specs. This was carefully documented so they could prove they weren't copying the code, just duplicating the functionality. Similar procedures have been used in other less famous cases.
Of course, the people Blizard is complaining about certainly aren't copying the code, as they aren't even trying to make a replacement. They are trying to make their code interoperate with Blizzards, which is clearly protected, despite the undesirability of that interoperation to many.
Blizzard is probably trying to enforce some EULA deal where the right to copy the software (by installing and/or running it) is only granted if you "agree" not to reverse-engineer it. I find that legally dubious, and I'm only guessing that's the deal, because that would bring the story into the ballpark where a really flexible-minded lawyer might advance the theory with a straight face. Claiming copyright violation for looking at RAM and not copying anything is not in that ballpark.
You can abuse anything (though I've never heard of anyone even refer to anything as a "memory" variable, much less use "m_" to mean anything but "member").
There are any number of sets of simple conventions, and arguing ones own is obviously superior is kind of silly. Your conventions sound perfectly reasonable, though what do you mean by an "instance" if not a variable?
My own conventions are a bit different, because I like StuffInCamelCase and not stuff_with_underscores_in_it. Since function names don't come up in the same places as class names, I put both in plain CamelCase (which you call ProperCase). Variables and functions do go in similar places, so vars go in mixed case, but start with a single lowercase letter. Yes, the dreaded Hungarian. But I still pick expressive variable mnames, and I never have to retype, because I only indicate "n" for integral types, "f" for any floating point type, "s" for any sort of string. I'm not really in the habit of changing the type of my variables much, but if I change it in a way that means a different prefix under my scheme, it's not the same variable; I'd have to change any properly descriptive variable name. I also use "m_" for private class members, "p" for pointers, and "a" for array like things. I don't see how "array_of_integer_indexes" is better than "anIndexes" and I find it makes code much more readily readable to know the basics of what sort of thing you're talking about without having to look it up.
As a somewhat separate point, I am occasionally compelled to write something in JavaScript. There, variable type is frequently crucial, yet perversely unenforced. I find a very simple hungarian (mostly just "n" vs. "s") absolutely essential in order to get anything done.
People who don't know what they are talking about focus on amendment 16 as establishing the income tax. Amendment 16 is changing the formulation in Article 1 section 2, paragraph 3: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers..." Amendment 16 just says skip "apportionment", which was all about counting slaves as 3/5 persons, and was in conflict in any case with the uniformity requirement of the language which actually grants the power to levy taxes. Namely, Article 1, section 8, paragraph 1:
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States"
Which is certainly broad. Congress can theoretically tax whatever the heck they think it is a good idea to tax. When I said the language you used (tangible/intangible/real/whatever) did not appear in the tax code, I meant those laws which congress has passed that actually do levy taxes. These laws establish various sorts of taxes on income.
"Virtual assets" could be made taxible in the future in the sense that Congress has the power to establish a tax on them, but it seems unlikely that they would, given that there is not now a federal property tax on any sort of asset whatsoever. One could as easily say that breathing "could be taxable".
Income derived from activities in virtual worlds "could be taxible" in the sense that it is currently a legal requirement that one pay taxes on such income, just like any other income. The only area of speculation is whether the IRS will begin attempting specific enforcement in this area.
"The government can only tax 3 things. Tangible things, intangible things, and that which is real."
This is not terminology that appears in the (US) tax code. The tax we are talking about here is income tax. You make income, it is taxable. Simple. The fact there is or is not a computer game involved is completely irrelevant, as is the tangibility of whatever someone may be giving you money for. The question is: You aquired money, yes or no?
"money" is not taxable. Income from interest earned on money in a bank is taxable, even if theat bank is "off-shore". Certain foreign banks (that people tend to call "off-shore") are freindly about not mentioning to the IRS that they paid you interest. This does not make that income untaxable, it just makes it easy to cheat.
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I quite agree. A healthy society should easily be able to let it successful members become quite wealthy without unduly harming its not-yet successful members.
On the other hand, the economy is not an infinite sum game either. There is some limit to the number of people who can be so wealthy that they no longer work at all.
I'm fine with people being able to become so wealthy they never have to work again. That's great, good for them. I think it's a problem if people can become so wealthy they and their heirs never work again forever, and just keep getting wealthier forever. At some point, it does prevent other peoples ascendency, when the fraction of economic output that supports the idle rich grows faster than the economy itself.
"What I said was that inflation is caused by the creation of new 'money' which is added into the pool of the existing money supply."
"As to banks creating money, the only thing they did was create paper promisary notes."
The banks created currency. Now only the Federal reserve does, in the same way. You can call it money or not, I won't argue semantics.
Keep all your money in Gold and Silver if you like! Apparently you think its value won't change then; and in terms of the amount of gold or silver it is worth, you are absolutely right. (glad to hear you like silver as well, William Jennings would be proud.) I, and many others, prefer to reckon our money in terms of what it can buy that we actually use. You ought to find inflation easy to measure- just check out the price of Gold; I don't know why you're messing with stamps. Those of us who prefer to measure value in terms of things most people buy and use instead of shiny metal have a harder time of it.
Investment banks sometimes like Gold because it's fairly difficult to create or (accidentally) destroy, so it's price is stable. But it's not magic; it's just shiny metal.
"So delivering mail has gotten cheaper, but you think the price of stamps should be higher??"
I don't care, I don't send many letters, and my desires are not relevant to this discussion. The point is the price of a stamp is not well related to the cost of delivering mail. During the time period your article discusses the amount of external tax-dollar subsidy artificially supporting the price of first class postage has varied by huge fractions of that price. It's not that stamps under or overstate inflation, it's that they don't say anything meaningful about it at all. Stamp prices are not the result of free market economics, but are about as far from it as possible. Using stamp prices to measure inflation says that they say what the person doing so wants in order to arrive at whatever foregone conclusion they are after. There is simply no other reason to use a measure so uniquely terrible.
The gold standard kept the value of the dollar constant in terms of how much gold it could buy. As gold is not terribly useful compared to food, shelter, or what have you, that says little abut the buying power of a dollar, which fluctuated significantly over the period you describe. ( During much of which, I'll note, the government could not issue un-backed currency, but private banks could, thus adjusting the money supply by the somewhat messier mechanisms of unscrupulously printing money like mad, then failing, screwing over your depositors or creditors in alternation )
The essay you point to decries the inacuracy of the broad based CPI, and so replaces it with the price of a single service?!?! A service whose very nature (in terms of maximum weigth/dimensions and speed of delivery) has changed significantly in the period covered. A service which is provided by an entity that has undergone significant changes in that period from being an outright government department to a semi-autonomous entity expected to support itself.
As someone who formerly worked in an organization doing statistical analysis of Postal Service costs, let me help you aboard the clue train: Mail delivery has gotten far cheaper during the period described thanks to automation, which is why government subsidy of the postal service has declined. The price of a first class stamp has remained relatively constant in relation to the buying power of that money vs other goods only because postal rates are artificially set by a byzantine congressional commision process that forces that to be the case. The cost to deliver a letter has roughly jack squat to do with the price of a stamp.
Postal rates are about the most ass-backward, ultra-stupid inflation measure you could ever come up with.
Measuring inflation is not an easy thing to do. Fundamentaly, you have to decide what is really valuable, and track how much of that you can buy with a doallar. Anyone who tells you masuring inflation realy is easy is a charlatan. If they tell you inflation is a government conspiracy, they are a kooky charlatan. If they tell you it's easy to see this, because you can measure inflation by the price of a stamp, they're an incredible idiot.
Well, we disagree. Of course, by your position, it sounds like I should just shoot you and run things the way I want to. Survival of the fittest, yee-haw! The only problem with muggers is they think small, they should try to run whole crime syndicates!
I'll mention to my friends in Sudan that they should really be happy about the fabulous oportunities they have, and quit blaming others for their problems.
It is, frankly, NOT always a personal choice what you want to do with your life.
"I have most definitely expected a reply of this kind: you have gone to Canada and that is where you have succeeded."
You may have expected that reply, but that's not what I said. All of my arguments would still apply presuming you lived in any organized society. You live and work in a society, you should contribute to making it function.
Now that you mention it, a society where the punishment for failure is death might be just another option, but a society where death is frequently the punishment for some thug deciding he likes your stuff is, in my opinion, not as good as Canada. I know people who live in significantly less stable parts of the world than Canada. They are not excited by the fabulous opportunities; they just want to live their lives and not killed by bandits.
"Being rich, and using your wealth strategically, is not a sin."
I don't care if it's a sin or not. I'm concerned with what makes a functional, stable society.
We can try to make society as fair as possible (and argue about what is fair), but whatever wonderfully fair social policies we come up with are stupid if they quickly go away as the society run by them collapses.
"...all of which was done by myself personally without gov't intervention and help of any kind from anyone."
Canada, from what I understand, has a reasonably stable society, with little threat of armed gangs taking your money, or of the government nationalizing your business without compensating you, or corrupt officials making life hard on you, etc. Did you build this society personally, without any help of any kind from anyone? Is it maybe reasonable that the society in which you live expects you to contribute to the maintenance of the conditions that made your success possible?
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you appear to draw between saving money and investing. Return rates from even very low risk savings instruments avaiable to even the smallest investors exceed the rate of inflation by a significant margin.
Nor do I think it's reasonable to describe inflation as a stealth "tax". Nobody takes the value you lose to inflation; it's just gone.
Stuffing money in a mattress has never been a good savings option. I'm not sure what could be done to change this, or why it would be desirable.
"Your childish, take from the rich, give to the poor, sentiments when taken to Liberal policy statement level, boils down to, 'It's not fair that...'"
Did you even read my post? I'm not claiming anything is more or less fair. I'm claiming fairness is less important than a stable society.
Historically, it appears that "theft" from those who acheive success is going to happen no matter what. It can happen slowly though moderate taxation, or it can happen all at once when communist revolutionaries shoot you in the head and take your stuff.
Since I am one of the "rich kids", I'd prefer the moderate taxation route. I'm smart, competent and hard working, I can (and do) manage to stay ahead in our society just fine. Under the fiscal policies I hear proposed by Libertarians, I beleive I could sit on my ass doing nothing, getting steadily richer, until someone poor shot me in the head. No thanks.
Well, I still think they're insane. The playing field is not level, and the one Libertarians seek is less so. The wealthy have a massive advantage when it comes to aquiring more wealth. I don't think I'm painting with a broad brush if I say Libertarians think the government should avoid engaging in downward wealth redistribution. Since I think that is perhaps the single most vital role of government, I think they're insane.
Note I'm not arguing for communism: excessive wealth redistribution also destroys your society, just as surely. What's needed is some middle ground where the competent can improve their staion, but cannot then sit back as wealth becomes ever more concentrated, and the next generation of competent workers and investors are locked out.
Also note that I don't claim the governmnets taking from the rich and giving to the poor is in any way fair. It's not fair; it's just a good idea. Critical even.
Penny Arcade fared perfectly. They did not lose in court; they did not make any attempt to fight in court. Instead they complied with the cease-and-desist letter and then ran a comic portraying American Greetings as Nazi anal rapists, and nobody said boo. The original strip is far more famous than if American Greetings had never done anything, which they've presumably figured out since they're not C&Ding all the places it's easily available now (Wikipedia fer Christs sake).
American Greetings lost that confrontaion big time, and Penny Arcade didn't have to spend a dime on lawyers to make it happen.
"Did your simple minded idiot see their first website in 2000 or 1990?"
If a simple minded idiot saw their first website in 1990, they must have been a simple-minded-particle-physicist-idiot working at CERN, since the web was first publicly accessible in mid 91.
That said, I (who may or may not be a simple minded idiot) first saw a website in 93. At that point, support for images was little more than a rumor, and Gopher dwarfed http in deployed base. Yet it was immediately clear to me that the web would be the dominant form of internet content delivery in short order. On the other hand, the idea that everyday un-geeky people would have heard of the web, much less see it as the natural, obvious way to get info from entirely un-tech-oriented organizations only a few years later was certainly not obvious.
"in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up"
You're taxed on income. It's really pretty straight forward...
"an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery"
Oh, we're talking at that level of abstraction... Well, since on a fundsamental level, everything is mine (I called it) your owning property in the first place is a form of armed robbery. Please give my stuff back.
"Not that I enjoy the paying part, but what I really hate is the hassle of the paperwork, and the complexity of the tax code"
That, again, is not a reason to hate the IRS.
"I'd rather pay a flat tax, even if it cost me more money."
If you're not sure, it's going to cost you a *lot* more money; (not to mention that utter- destruction-of-society thing, but that's just my prediction) In any case, wanting a simpler tax code is an often-given, but stupid argument for a flat tax. Flat vs. Progressive is just different numbers in one lookup table. What makes the tax code complex is not the numbers in that table; it's the many exceptions, deductions, credits, etc. You could elimintate any or all of those independently of any changes to the base rate calculation.
If you making a 10K payment, you've had to be paying quarterly estimated taxes, so your total tax bill is more like 40K, so I'm thinking the 100 bucks you're trying to save by paying at the last minute may not be worth the hassle, but I guess that's up to you.
On the other hand, every accountant I've worked with has you get stuff in asap, determines the most advantageous time and method for you to file, and takes care of it.
Unless someone else misses a deadline, I see little reason not to be done with ones taxes in February. In any case, extensions are easily obtained.
Everybody loves to hate the IRS, but what they really hate is paying taxes. As long as you are actually trying to pay your taxes, the IRS is quite accommodating.
If Ubuntu makes it easier for more people to adopt Linux, how much more development might eventually result?
Mind you, I use Linux even though I've never contributed to the kernel, and probably never will. I don't think that makes me a bad person, nor do I see why Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu project should be held to a different standard.
I, and many Vonnegut fans, seem to like Breakfast of Champions much more than he did. I'd call it his third A-Plus, though I wouldn't start with it as it's comparitively more "out there" (which is saying something). Other than that I pretty much agree with his grades. For stuff written after he made that list, I'd add a As for Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Bluebeard, something less than A for Hocus Pocus and Timequake.
I'd start with any of:
Cat's Cradle (because I think it's his best)
Slaughterhouse Five (because it's his most famous)
The Sirens of Titan (because I did, and imediately continued into reading everything else he wrote)
That makes sense. As I mentioned, I was having these conversations about 10 (or 15 now that I think about it) years ago, because my friend was ggetting her hands on FPGAs which were new and cool. So I think she mentioned power consumption as one obvious deal-killer, but there wasn't any suggestion they were ready to launch otherwise.
I have a friend who used to do chip design at NASA.
Based on my half remembered conversations from 10 years ago, FPGAs are great for prototyping, but not for flight systems, because they are power hogs.
When you measure your power consumption in surface area of solar panel and weight of battery that need to be put on orbit...
"For example, when you're playing Unreal Tournament and some guy keeps doing 180's and putting a bullet through your head from across the map... it's a safe bet he's a cheater and you should move on."
And if I'm running the server, I'll ban him. On servers Blizzard runs, I see no problem with their defining what is cheating, and banning who they like.
Suing someone for copyright violation who has not actually copied anything is still incredibly stupid of course.
"I didn't know that looking at copyrighted code in your possession could constitute infringement"
It can't. You cannot infringe on copyright except by copying something. You may not have called the other poster ignorant, but I will. He continues to be wrong about what Phoenix (the BIOS guys) did and why. One of their two teams absolutely opened up the "box", read the source code, etc. Those guys could have then gone and written their own BIOS without directly copying anything, and it would not have been infringement. But it would have been impossible to *prove* they didn't copy the code just by remembering it. So instead they wrote up their own detailed description of what the thing did, and passed that off to an entirely seperate team that wrote the new code.
You are entirely correct. I'm not sure how to elaborate except by mocking the original poster, but I'll give it a try:
The creators of the first non-IBM PC BIOS had one team decompiling/inspecting/reverse engineering the code and writing up documents describing how it worked. Then a toatlly seperate team that never saw the original wrote a functional replacement based on those specs. This was carefully documented so they could prove they weren't copying the code, just duplicating the functionality. Similar procedures have been used in other less famous cases.
Of course, the people Blizard is complaining about certainly aren't copying the code, as they aren't even trying to make a replacement. They are trying to make their code interoperate with Blizzards, which is clearly protected, despite the undesirability of that interoperation to many.
Blizzard is probably trying to enforce some EULA deal where the right to copy the software (by installing and/or running it) is only granted if you "agree" not to reverse-engineer it. I find that legally dubious, and I'm only guessing that's the deal, because that would bring the story into the ballpark where a really flexible-minded lawyer might advance the theory with a straight face. Claiming copyright violation for looking at RAM and not copying anything is not in that ballpark.
You can abuse anything (though I've never heard of anyone even refer to anything as a "memory" variable, much less use "m_" to mean anything but "member").
There are any number of sets of simple conventions, and arguing ones own is obviously superior is kind of silly. Your conventions sound perfectly reasonable, though what do you mean by an "instance" if not a variable?
My own conventions are a bit different, because I like StuffInCamelCase and not stuff_with_underscores_in_it. Since function names don't come up in the same places as class names, I put both in plain CamelCase (which you call ProperCase). Variables and functions do go in similar places, so vars go in mixed case, but start with a single lowercase letter. Yes, the dreaded Hungarian. But I still pick expressive variable mnames, and I never have to retype, because I only indicate "n" for integral types, "f" for any floating point type, "s" for any sort of string. I'm not really in the habit of changing the type of my variables much, but if I change it in a way that means a different prefix under my scheme, it's not the same variable; I'd have to change any properly descriptive variable name. I also use "m_" for private class members, "p" for pointers, and "a" for array like things. I don't see how "array_of_integer_indexes" is better than "anIndexes" and I find it makes code much more readily readable to know the basics of what sort of thing you're talking about without having to look it up.
As a somewhat separate point, I am occasionally compelled to write something in JavaScript. There, variable type is frequently crucial, yet perversely unenforced. I find a very simple hungarian (mostly just "n" vs. "s") absolutely essential in order to get anything done.
I find it makes code more readable to
People who don't know what they are talking about focus on amendment 16 as establishing the income tax. Amendment 16 is changing the formulation in Article 1 section 2, paragraph 3: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers..." Amendment 16 just says skip "apportionment", which was all about counting slaves as 3/5 persons, and was in conflict in any case with the uniformity requirement of the language which actually grants the power to levy taxes. Namely, Article 1, section 8, paragraph 1:
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States"
Which is certainly broad. Congress can theoretically tax whatever the heck they think it is a good idea to tax. When I said the language you used (tangible/intangible/real/whatever) did not appear in the tax code, I meant those laws which congress has passed that actually do levy taxes. These laws establish various sorts of taxes on income.
"Virtual assets" could be made taxible in the future in the sense that Congress has the power to establish a tax on them, but it seems unlikely that they would, given that there is not now a federal property tax on any sort of asset whatsoever. One could as easily say that breathing "could be taxable".
Income derived from activities in virtual worlds "could be taxible" in the sense that it is currently a legal requirement that one pay taxes on such income, just like any other income. The only area of speculation is whether the IRS will begin attempting specific enforcement in this area.
P.S. It's spelled "taxable".
"The government can only tax 3 things. Tangible things, intangible things, and that which is real."
This is not terminology that appears in the (US) tax code. The tax we are talking about here is income tax. You make income, it is taxable. Simple. The fact there is or is not a computer game involved is completely irrelevant, as is the tangibility of whatever someone may be giving you money for. The question is: You aquired money, yes or no?
"money" is not taxable. Income from interest earned on money in a bank is taxable, even if theat bank is "off-shore". Certain foreign banks (that people tend to call "off-shore") are freindly about not mentioning to the IRS that they paid you interest. This does not make that income untaxable, it just makes it easy to cheat.