I was just in Poznan Poland for a math conference. We had a tour one day. Our first stop the tour guide says : "What is this place?" people answer "a synagogue". He says "Yes, it was a synagogue" but what is it now, nobody knows. He says "It's a swimming pool, so now you can swim where the Jews used to pray." I shit you not.
I'd say this isn't such a bad idea, assuming environmentalists get to sue the EPA next time some rich oil kid runs the White House.
An even better idea is : Replace the presidential veto with jury trials using huge 100-200 people randomly selected juries. Of course, the president sends a lawyer who argues about changes, as does any minority position in the legislature. You'd even give the jury the power to "accept with changes" meaning they may cut pork from legislation.
No, you won't save any money on the MacBook sticker price because (1) that price is set by market research, not costs, and (2) AppleCare is the "product" that forces most Apple warranty payout, not the MacBook itself.
Will you save money on AppleCare? Not much.
A normal hardware vender sells you primarily hardware, usually bundling windows, but not providing excessive software support. You will get laughed off the line if you claim your extended warranty says Dell owes you help for backing up your hard disk. By comparison, you're buying considerable software support when you buy AppleCare, like some guy explaining how you activate time machine. *But* AppleCare buys you far far less hardware warranty coverage.
Why does Apple bundle their extended warranty & software support contract like this? I see many reasons : nobody would buy the support contract otherwise, users don't understand the difference, gives users a more seamless experience, etc.
Console games are the bane of computing! Any innovation that drastically reduces the console game market, moving those people to netbooks and set top boxes is a massive boon for humanity!
I'm not surprised membership alone doesn't disqualify this judge. But they obviously must research all his past writings on copyright and dealings with the organizations, as well as subpoena records of all his recent large financial transactions. If they can show bias now, this will cast doubt upon all members of that organization in future.
English citizens emigrate by the thousands every year sheerly for desire of food & wine that actually have a taste, and maybe the scenery. English ex-pats helped create Europe's budget airlines craze. etc. To answer your question, virtually any modern western country is "more free" than England on the measures you describe. So ask the real questions : Where do you want to live? Where can you get a jobs?
Just remember that Google still tries to not be evil. Facebook quite clearly has no such qualms about the standard sort of "corporate evil". Also Facebook invades your life infinite more than Google.
If you have a "real job" in the U.S. then your health insurance is covered by your employer. So only freelancers need to include that in the comparison. Of course, you need to factor savings into health care after retirement.
U.S. tax rates are also about 30% to 35% for many many people, but they rise to 50% more slowly than Norway's. I think there is almost an inherent equilibrium state on taxes, which are determined more by psychology than economics. You can't really take much more than 30% of income that people need or more than 50% on income people don't need.
So I'd say the VAT is the biggest single difference between European and U.S. taxes.
As an aside, the 60% marginal rate will come to the U.S. courtesy of the flat tax folks and the republicans.:) How you ask? Many right wing Americans want some VAT that *replaces* income tax. It'll never happen that way however, they'll add the VAT and reduce the income tax, but not eliminate it. Then both the VAT rate and the income tax rate will slowly & separately rise over time, eventually settling into the same equilibrium state seen in Europe.
I see, your hiring people who learned how to program while they were kids, not collage graduates. It sounds like you've been lucky thus far, but this hiring strategy doesn't necessarily scale well. I think you need to figure out what you want : cleverness or skill set. You might need cleverness more than you think if you're so happy with your future math major.
You might ask about co-op programs where the students spend 1/2 the year working for you and 1/2 taking classes. I don't know if your business can handle that level of quasi-turnover, but it sounds similar to your existing hiring strategy while somewhat more "scalable", and some portion will hang around after graduation.
I don't think you'll find that many really clever people with these managerial degrees like IS. Worse, I once read an analysis explaining that these management and IS majors are usually risk averse people, meaning they'll strongly prefer larger more stable companies, so you'd only see the dregs.
I'll refine this slightly, good IS majors are also qualified for tricky installations themselves. So your IS guy might be able to download and configure Asterisk, letting people test it out. But your MIS will never be qualified as a programmer.
You're looking at the wrong degree, IS is a managerial degree not a technical degree. Just like a Management degree, IS gives very very little information about the person's actual skill set. A Management degree says "he likes money and people". An IS degree says "he likes money, people and computers".
You must remember, all "people management" degrees are fundamentally about managing unqualified and/or stupid people. So you hire an MIS for say managing the computing needs of an office with very little computing needs, managing the software installation part of an assembly of line for kiosks, or thousands of similar jobs requiring only minimal computer skills. Your MIS guy's resume saying "oracle" means he's used some basic qui query engine in class. Well, obviously that's quite valuable if you want him managing a call center. Not so much if you want him programming.
A qualified programmer will have a degree in science, engineering, mathematics, or occasionally some "interesting" major, and ideally list a slew programming languages. For example, if you see a guy with a degree in Music Theory, Economics, or French that knows C, Java, and Ruby, well I promise you that guy can learn SQL infinitely faster than your MIS.
I mean, business gets all excited about these business oriented degrees we academics sell, but mostly these degrees say `` This person lacked the initiative, confidence, and curiosity to pursue real academic interests. We recommend using them to manage people without collage degrees. ''
It was pointed out up thread that he quit some anti-pedophile working group with the parliament because that working group was run by politicians engaged in human trafficking and child prostitution, see the Sachsen-AffÃre. It sounds like he is a whistle blower being punished. So he moved to a party for young people who read the news. I don't think the Pirate Party would have accepted his membership if they didn't believe his story.
I think the safety issues can be greatly alleviated by adjusting the laws that cover right of way and collisions : A driver who hits a pedestrian is always considered "at fault". I'd say the driver of a significantly heavier vehicle should also always be considered "at fault". I doesn't mean the lighter vehicle driver doesn't get some fine for criminal behavior, like failure to signal or speeding, but the heavier vehicle's driver always gets much worse, and crimes by the lighter vehicles driver are not germane to insurance awards.
We must also institute a lifetime ban from driving for any person involved in an accident with a lighter vehicle. So you never drive again if you hit a pedestrian in this 700lb car, you hit this car in a normal car, you hit a normal car in a heavy SUV, etc. I don't necessarily mean fender benders, but real accidents, but definitely any accidents involving significant damage or injuries, even whiplash. Just don't let the people who cause problems drive, period.
I donno, courts will not view internet access as a privilege today. ResNet itself is a privilege, but internet is not. So it matters if DSL or Cable are options, if first year students are compelled to live in a dormitory, if the labs are convenient and modern, if they have a desktop computer or a laptop, etc. A first year student could sue over this policy in small claims court, with their chances for winning increasing according to those factors.
Two cold hard facts are : (1) a user with a desktop computer needs internet access in their residence, and (2) they have the right to run any operating system they please. So you need some framework for exceptions.
Universities are luckily run by academics who usually have considerably more understanding of such human issues than IT guys.:)
There are always operating systems that don't support your trojans. Do you have an iPhone version? Symbian? BSD? What about simply plugging two machines into the same NATed router? You scanners probably won't detect any machine behind its own firewall either.
I'm guessing you don't know much about academic institutions beyond your little world. Academic misconduct rarely if ever extends to resource misuse cases, especially such minor ones. Imagine a student ran bittorrent seeds for pirated pornography on school servers, well they'd get a warning. If they repeated the infraction, they'd have all access terminated. If they circumvented that, they'd surely be expelled, and maybe face intrusion charges. But even then it's not clear their transcript would read "academic misconduct". In particular, there would be no "F (academic misconduct)" on their transcript because they haven't cheated in any classes.
Sadly, residential networks create a perfect environment for windows worms. But viruses that support Mac & Linux usually do so passively by wrapping their executable within non-executable formates, like office or PDF. So IT should ask Mac & Linux users to scan for viruses as a courtesy to their windows using fellow students, but compelling scans using closed source software will only discourage compliance.
I concur with the other posts that say running Linux will grant you an exception most anyplace. If that doesn't work, then share your roommate's connection using a NATed router.
I replied to the top post explaining that you can have your cake and eat it too :
You want a VAT (sales tax) with a rate determined logarithmically based upon gross corporate income. An "income adjusted VAT" will massively benefit free market competition and discourage monopoly.
You'd also move anti-trust law into tax courts, giving judges the power to penalize companies by increasing their VAT rate for future years or charging backed taxes for past periods of violations. So if your company get fines 5% for 10 years because you spent 10 years destroying your competitors, well that's some hefty fine.
Employes don't pay taxes either. They pass that on to their employers.:)
Tax has two purposes : funding the government & redistributing wealth. We all know the government can be funded solely by any one of sales tax, individual income tax, corporate income tax, or some mixture. All that matters is : How do you want to redistribute wealth?
A priori, sales tax doesn't really redistribute wealth beneficially. You can definitely give it this role, as I'll propose below, but that'll make it indistinguishable from corporate income tax. So lets ignore that one for now.
Individual income tax take more money from rich people. Yes, this is fine & fair, but the ultimate utility is questionable. Inheritance tax otoh has a massively beneficial effect upon society, so you should always keep that one, even if you eliminate individual income tax
Corporate income tax theoretically takes more money from larger more powerful corporations. A priori, corporate income tax is the best tax framework since you encourage cleaner free-market competition and discourage monopoly.
I favor confining federal taxes to a VAT (sales tax) whose rate scales logarithmically in corporate gross income, i.e. a hybrid VAT and corporate income tax. Individuals will still pay taxes on the corporate scale after the first few million per year, you'd likely implement inheritance tax similarly. All this creates fairly steep costs for monopolies.
Anti-monopoly law itself would also become a subset of tax law, i.e. courts could penalize companies for dominating a market by increasing their tax burden. If M$ spent 10 years stealing key employees from competitors, the courts might penalize them by increasing their VAT by 5% for the next 10 years.
p.s. Corporations should not be taxed on world wide earnings. Foreign companies pay this adjusted VAT too, based upon their market share. I guess this make some extra work for importers, but no worse than the existing paperwork.
p.s. Your logarithmic tax function can obviously grow without bound, so you likely want to cap VAT at 50%, i.e. the largest company pays 50%, a company with only 1/2 their income pays 50%-r, etc. But realistically your largest company will always be under some anti-monopoly action, so they'll pay more than 50% effectively. A nice perk here is politicians can't easily increase the tax income, but they can break up the largest companies, thus readjusting the parameters to mean more companies pay near 50%.
It's not true, the news media isn't vulnerable to piracy. Well, obviously their product is ad supported, but only some small minority of "pirates" blocks the ads. An easy solution is : (1) change internet radio consist of separate mixing instructions and content, so the original song is immediately available to users, but (2) include banner as in the ogg/mp3 comments and get player to attempt to induce purchases. But there are numerous other frameworks where users "usually pay".
Commercial music is designed for easy marketability, like most other consumer products. Examples :
(1) Apples exist in numerous different varieties all over the wold. We don't eat the best tasting ones, not by far, we eat the ones that still look red after being shipped.
(2) Potato chip companies made chips without added sugar for years because taste tests shows people preferred potato chips without sugar. But then some clever bastard noticed that people eat more chips if they add sugar. So now they ignore the taste tests, make bad tasting chips, and trust the people to buy 2x more chips.
Why should commercial music be any different? I mean, they just only care if you buy it, so they make what successfully gets people to buy it.
Dirty bombs are a joke. All the radiation goes away after some basic clean up. I suspect the dirty bomb was invented by the CIA to trick the jihadis.
A better plan is just get untrained jihadis to hide the shit all over NYC, like the chairs in cinemas, stoves of fancy restaurants, the cart of some guy selling pizza on the street, shove it down the pipes in hotels, stick it up the ass of a police horse, etc. You then wait 6 months and call the press. A few people have actually been mildly irritated by then. Instant panic.
Italy & Spain allow only a few plants per person, which seems to suffice for individual smokers needs, although it seems to force them to use only in moderation. I think selling is illegal in both countries, so all smokers who want to smoke legally must grow a green thumb and smoke in moderation.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't Bohmian Mechanics a perfectly solid hidden variable theory that handles this?
I was just in Poznan Poland for a math conference. We had a tour one day. Our first stop the tour guide says : "What is this place?" people answer "a synagogue". He says "Yes, it was a synagogue" but what is it now, nobody knows. He says "It's a swimming pool, so now you can swim where the Jews used to pray." I shit you not.
I'd say this isn't such a bad idea, assuming environmentalists get to sue the EPA next time some rich oil kid runs the White House.
An even better idea is : Replace the presidential veto with jury trials using huge 100-200 people randomly selected juries. Of course, the president sends a lawyer who argues about changes, as does any minority position in the legislature. You'd even give the jury the power to "accept with changes" meaning they may cut pork from legislation.
No, you won't save any money on the MacBook sticker price because (1) that price is set by market research, not costs, and (2) AppleCare is the "product" that forces most Apple warranty payout, not the MacBook itself.
Will you save money on AppleCare? Not much.
A normal hardware vender sells you primarily hardware, usually bundling windows, but not providing excessive software support. You will get laughed off the line if you claim your extended warranty says Dell owes you help for backing up your hard disk. By comparison, you're buying considerable software support when you buy AppleCare, like some guy explaining how you activate time machine. *But* AppleCare buys you far far less hardware warranty coverage.
Why does Apple bundle their extended warranty & software support contract like this? I see many reasons : nobody would buy the support contract otherwise, users don't understand the difference, gives users a more seamless experience, etc.
Who is teh guy who made a name for himself designing tests for sociopathy to be administered to potential police officers?
Console games are the bane of computing! Any innovation that drastically reduces the console game market, moving those people to netbooks and set top boxes is a massive boon for humanity!
I'm not surprised membership alone doesn't disqualify this judge. But they obviously must research all his past writings on copyright and dealings with the organizations, as well as subpoena records of all his recent large financial transactions. If they can show bias now, this will cast doubt upon all members of that organization in future.
English citizens emigrate by the thousands every year sheerly for desire of food & wine that actually have a taste, and maybe the scenery. English ex-pats helped create Europe's budget airlines craze. etc. To answer your question, virtually any modern western country is "more free" than England on the measures you describe. So ask the real questions : Where do you want to live? Where can you get a jobs?
Just remember that Google still tries to not be evil. Facebook quite clearly has no such qualms about the standard sort of "corporate evil". Also Facebook invades your life infinite more than Google.
If you have a "real job" in the U.S. then your health insurance is covered by your employer. So only freelancers need to include that in the comparison. Of course, you need to factor savings into health care after retirement.
U.S. tax rates are also about 30% to 35% for many many people, but they rise to 50% more slowly than Norway's. I think there is almost an inherent equilibrium state on taxes, which are determined more by psychology than economics. You can't really take much more than 30% of income that people need or more than 50% on income people don't need.
So I'd say the VAT is the biggest single difference between European and U.S. taxes.
As an aside, the 60% marginal rate will come to the U.S. courtesy of the flat tax folks and the republicans. :) How you ask? Many right wing Americans want some VAT that *replaces* income tax. It'll never happen that way however, they'll add the VAT and reduce the income tax, but not eliminate it. Then both the VAT rate and the income tax rate will slowly & separately rise over time, eventually settling into the same equilibrium state seen in Europe.
I see, your hiring people who learned how to program while they were kids, not collage graduates. It sounds like you've been lucky thus far, but this hiring strategy doesn't necessarily scale well. I think you need to figure out what you want : cleverness or skill set. You might need cleverness more than you think if you're so happy with your future math major.
You might ask about co-op programs where the students spend 1/2 the year working for you and 1/2 taking classes. I don't know if your business can handle that level of quasi-turnover, but it sounds similar to your existing hiring strategy while somewhat more "scalable", and some portion will hang around after graduation.
I don't think you'll find that many really clever people with these managerial degrees like IS. Worse, I once read an analysis explaining that these management and IS majors are usually risk averse people, meaning they'll strongly prefer larger more stable companies, so you'd only see the dregs.
I'll refine this slightly, good IS majors are also qualified for tricky installations themselves. So your IS guy might be able to download and configure Asterisk, letting people test it out. But your MIS will never be qualified as a programmer.
You're looking at the wrong degree, IS is a managerial degree not a technical degree. Just like a Management degree, IS gives very very little information about the person's actual skill set. A Management degree says "he likes money and people". An IS degree says "he likes money, people and computers".
You must remember, all "people management" degrees are fundamentally about managing unqualified and/or stupid people. So you hire an MIS for say managing the computing needs of an office with very little computing needs, managing the software installation part of an assembly of line for kiosks, or thousands of similar jobs requiring only minimal computer skills. Your MIS guy's resume saying "oracle" means he's used some basic qui query engine in class. Well, obviously that's quite valuable if you want him managing a call center. Not so much if you want him programming.
A qualified programmer will have a degree in science, engineering, mathematics, or occasionally some "interesting" major, and ideally list a slew programming languages. For example, if you see a guy with a degree in Music Theory, Economics, or French that knows C, Java, and Ruby, well I promise you that guy can learn SQL infinitely faster than your MIS.
I mean, business gets all excited about these business oriented degrees we academics sell, but mostly these degrees say `` This person lacked the initiative, confidence, and curiosity to pursue real academic interests. We recommend using them to manage people without collage degrees. ''
It was pointed out up thread that he quit some anti-pedophile working group with the parliament because that working group was run by politicians engaged in human trafficking and child prostitution, see the Sachsen-AffÃre. It sounds like he is a whistle blower being punished. So he moved to a party for young people who read the news. I don't think the Pirate Party would have accepted his membership if they didn't believe his story.
I think the safety issues can be greatly alleviated by adjusting the laws that cover right of way and collisions : A driver who hits a pedestrian is always considered "at fault". I'd say the driver of a significantly heavier vehicle should also always be considered "at fault". I doesn't mean the lighter vehicle driver doesn't get some fine for criminal behavior, like failure to signal or speeding, but the heavier vehicle's driver always gets much worse, and crimes by the lighter vehicles driver are not germane to insurance awards.
We must also institute a lifetime ban from driving for any person involved in an accident with a lighter vehicle. So you never drive again if you hit a pedestrian in this 700lb car, you hit this car in a normal car, you hit a normal car in a heavy SUV, etc. I don't necessarily mean fender benders, but real accidents, but definitely any accidents involving significant damage or injuries, even whiplash. Just don't let the people who cause problems drive, period.
I donno, courts will not view internet access as a privilege today. ResNet itself is a privilege, but internet is not. So it matters if DSL or Cable are options, if first year students are compelled to live in a dormitory, if the labs are convenient and modern, if they have a desktop computer or a laptop, etc. A first year student could sue over this policy in small claims court, with their chances for winning increasing according to those factors.
Two cold hard facts are : (1) a user with a desktop computer needs internet access in their residence, and (2) they have the right to run any operating system they please. So you need some framework for exceptions.
Universities are luckily run by academics who usually have considerably more understanding of such human issues than IT guys. :)
There are always operating systems that don't support your trojans. Do you have an iPhone version? Symbian? BSD? What about simply plugging two machines into the same NATed router? You scanners probably won't detect any machine behind its own firewall either.
I'm guessing you don't know much about academic institutions beyond your little world. Academic misconduct rarely if ever extends to resource misuse cases, especially such minor ones. Imagine a student ran bittorrent seeds for pirated pornography on school servers, well they'd get a warning. If they repeated the infraction, they'd have all access terminated. If they circumvented that, they'd surely be expelled, and maybe face intrusion charges. But even then it's not clear their transcript would read "academic misconduct". In particular, there would be no "F (academic misconduct)" on their transcript because they haven't cheated in any classes.
Sadly, residential networks create a perfect environment for windows worms. But viruses that support Mac & Linux usually do so passively by wrapping their executable within non-executable formates, like office or PDF. So IT should ask Mac & Linux users to scan for viruses as a courtesy to their windows using fellow students, but compelling scans using closed source software will only discourage compliance.
I concur with the other posts that say running Linux will grant you an exception most anyplace. If that doesn't work, then share your roommate's connection using a NATed router.
I replied to the top post explaining that you can have your cake and eat it too :
You want a VAT (sales tax) with a rate determined logarithmically based upon gross corporate income. An "income adjusted VAT" will massively benefit free market competition and discourage monopoly.
You'd also move anti-trust law into tax courts, giving judges the power to penalize companies by increasing their VAT rate for future years or charging backed taxes for past periods of violations. So if your company get fines 5% for 10 years because you spent 10 years destroying your competitors, well that's some hefty fine.
Employes don't pay taxes either. They pass that on to their employers. :)
Tax has two purposes : funding the government & redistributing wealth. We all know the government can be funded solely by any one of sales tax, individual income tax, corporate income tax, or some mixture. All that matters is : How do you want to redistribute wealth?
A priori, sales tax doesn't really redistribute wealth beneficially. You can definitely give it this role, as I'll propose below, but that'll make it indistinguishable from corporate income tax. So lets ignore that one for now.
Individual income tax take more money from rich people. Yes, this is fine & fair, but the ultimate utility is questionable. Inheritance tax otoh has a massively beneficial effect upon society, so you should always keep that one, even if you eliminate individual income tax
Corporate income tax theoretically takes more money from larger more powerful corporations. A priori, corporate income tax is the best tax framework since you encourage cleaner free-market competition and discourage monopoly.
I favor confining federal taxes to a VAT (sales tax) whose rate scales logarithmically in corporate gross income, i.e. a hybrid VAT and corporate income tax. Individuals will still pay taxes on the corporate scale after the first few million per year, you'd likely implement inheritance tax similarly. All this creates fairly steep costs for monopolies.
Anti-monopoly law itself would also become a subset of tax law, i.e. courts could penalize companies for dominating a market by increasing their tax burden. If M$ spent 10 years stealing key employees from competitors, the courts might penalize them by increasing their VAT by 5% for the next 10 years.
p.s. Corporations should not be taxed on world wide earnings. Foreign companies pay this adjusted VAT too, based upon their market share. I guess this make some extra work for importers, but no worse than the existing paperwork.
p.s. Your logarithmic tax function can obviously grow without bound, so you likely want to cap VAT at 50%, i.e. the largest company pays 50%, a company with only 1/2 their income pays 50%-r, etc. But realistically your largest company will always be under some anti-monopoly action, so they'll pay more than 50% effectively. A nice perk here is politicians can't easily increase the tax income, but they can break up the largest companies, thus readjusting the parameters to mean more companies pay near 50%.
It's not true, the news media isn't vulnerable to piracy. Well, obviously their product is ad supported, but only some small minority of "pirates" blocks the ads. An easy solution is : (1) change internet radio consist of separate mixing instructions and content, so the original song is immediately available to users, but (2) include banner as in the ogg/mp3 comments and get player to attempt to induce purchases. But there are numerous other frameworks where users "usually pay".
Commercial music is designed for easy marketability, like most other consumer products. Examples :
(1) Apples exist in numerous different varieties all over the wold. We don't eat the best tasting ones, not by far, we eat the ones that still look red after being shipped.
(2) Potato chip companies made chips without added sugar for years because taste tests shows people preferred potato chips without sugar. But then some clever bastard noticed that people eat more chips if they add sugar. So now they ignore the taste tests, make bad tasting chips, and trust the people to buy 2x more chips.
Why should commercial music be any different? I mean, they just only care if you buy it, so they make what successfully gets people to buy it.
Why ask about only two? Why ask only the squatter that interests you?
It'll hurt their moral if they see more inquiries without sales.
Dirty bombs are a joke. All the radiation goes away after some basic clean up. I suspect the dirty bomb was invented by the CIA to trick the jihadis.
A better plan is just get untrained jihadis to hide the shit all over NYC, like the chairs in cinemas, stoves of fancy restaurants, the cart of some guy selling pizza on the street, shove it down the pipes in hotels, stick it up the ass of a police horse, etc. You then wait 6 months and call the press. A few people have actually been mildly irritated by then. Instant panic.
Outlaw non-competes & these deals! It'll ultimately raise all tech workers salaries.
Italy & Spain allow only a few plants per person, which seems to suffice for individual smokers needs, although it seems to force them to use only in moderation. I think selling is illegal in both countries, so all smokers who want to smoke legally must grow a green thumb and smoke in moderation.