You missed my point. Say I have two choices, OS 1 and OS 2. I care about 4 things, I want my OS to be aaab, and OS 1 is aaaa and OS 2 is bbbb. How do I get the maker of OS 1 to realize I care about option 4 when I'm not going to buy anymore product if they do it nor will I buy less product if they don't (3 options out of 4 is still better than one).
You can't vote with your wallet when an issue isn't the deciding factor. You might argue that it should be but OS security is not a deciding factor when OSs are SO different (comparing *nix to M$ not different flavors of *nix to each other). It's the same thing w/ politics, is there anyway to influence a politician to take a stance on something when you're still going to vote for him no matter what (because you like him better than the other options regardless).
I'm not saying security shouldn't be important or my issue, but how do you make a monopoly act if there's no viable alternative for you if they don't act (viable alternative means w/out lots of time/money spent to switchover)
I completely understand what your saying but my question is, how do you demand better security when you can't/wont switch to a different OS? You can't vote with your wallet, and if you're an average user/not a major corporation, how do you get heard and not lost in the noise? The only way I can think of to demand better security is to switch to a more secure OS. Assuming that's not an option, what's a user supposed to do (I agree about the being more careful concept though, but part of that I blame on M$. They have incredibly insecure default settings. They also have a system setup that encourages you to have administrative powers on your normal account - logging into a different user to change one thing and back in is a pain because it closes whatever I have open - as opposed to *nix where I can open a new tty if I don't want to close anything I'm doing.
A comment I often see here on/. is vote with your wallet. Don't buy the product if it sucks. The problem is, what if you want/need the product and there's no viable alternative (and don't even start the linux is a viable alternative to windows argument, for the average person it's not in my experience). Regardless of difficulty to use, my parents want a computer that if something goes wrong, they can easily get help and that their digital camera/printer/sound card/can connect to my dad's office vpn server where he can read his EXCHANGE email will work for w/out any hassle.
Voting with your wallet only works for you when you actually have a market w/ products that easily substitute. For instance coke and pepsi. It has been decided that Microsoft has a monopoly. You cannot vote with your wallet against a Monopoly if you want their product. The only solution I see is for there to be other viable alternatives that are shown to the average person to be viable.
Furthermore, when I was younger and I used to play a lot of computer games (not MMOG's) but things by myself or w/ a friend like NHL 94, or whatever, these games did not/still mainly don't work for any non-Windows OS. So if that's what I use a computer for, I need to run windows (I used to dual-boot w/ Linux but then again, I'm a computer geek and dealt w/ the hassle to get sound/printing working.)
Stop please telling people to vote w/ their wallet when there is no direct substitute. Indie labels are not a substitute for RIAA-music, it's DIFFERENT music. I'm not saying don't buy it or that it isn't better, it's still different. Most people don't want to have to deal w/ the hassles of learning a new OS that everyone else can't help them with.
2 things. 1) is there a justification for sales tax other than we can and we need money? just curious. and 2) there are some nice things about brick-and-mortar stores but it doesn't necessarily get me to buy from them. I love sitting in Barnes & Nobles for hours browsing books and when I do that I inevitably buy at least a couple. However if I want a specific book and know what I want, online is faster and less hassle so I use amazon or bn.com. I'd be really sad if Barnes and Noble stopped having stores but I'm not voting for it with my wallet.
Furthermore as far as the car thing goes, I know tons of people who will not buy a car w/out test driving one first. But I do see people test driving cars at a dealership and then buying it cheaper online/directly from the factory. Brick-and-mortar stores have benefits but unless their prices are competitive, people are going to use them for their benefits and then buy where the prices are cheaper. I think it'd be sad if brick-and-mortar died but then maybe it'd resurface w/ cheaper prices and less of that out-of-the-way stuff that only.1% of the customers even consider purchasing.
I've made this comment before and the response I got was BS, that wouldn't happen.
In Russia, once they instituted a flat tax, they got much more revenue than expected (28% increase) http://www.cse.org/informed/issues_template.php?is sue_id=890
A quick google revealed that, increased because people suddenly declared more income. My comment was if the U.S. instituted a flat tax I bet they'd suddenly find a lot more income declared, and I still stand by it. As is often mentioned in the anti-RIAA comments, people will pay for stuff if they find it worth it and rebel when they think it's overpriced/not worth it (99cents for a song as opposed to $18 for 3 songs and 12 filler tracks). Why should taxes be any different? The only way I see sales taxes working is if the vendor is responsible to collect it (which is how it generally works).
There was a major case against someone who was purchasing stuff via his company so that he could avoid the insane amount of taxes if he bought it and had it shipped to his house (worked in a different state, and talking about pieces of artwork where he would've owed thousands of dollars worth of sales tax had he bought it in state). I'm not saying this isn't tax fraud but I'm saying, people are people and want to keep their money, don't have a system that requires them to be honest about stuff you can't check up on and expect them to be honest. Either have the vendors collect it or don't make them pay taxes on it.
BTW, I've been told this has been a fight for a long time over mail-order stuff (which I believe still exceeds internet purchases) that states wanted to charge sales tax on. It's become a more visible fight since the internet.
Sadly the problem is consumers don't care enough to require companies to put the effort into caring about real security. How many people who buy these products actually know what a brute-force or dictionary attack is? In my comp sci course we, doing a time-space tradeoff problem cracked a subset sum password scheme (iirc, subset-sum is NP-complete so there's currently no known polynomial time algorithm) fairly quickly (it was one that M$ used to use). I bet most people who purchase these products have on knowledge/no interest in what makes a security scheme vulnerable as long as it works for them.
Furthermore, aside from the tinfoil hat crowd, do most people really have a need for their systems to be crack-proof. Granted, I use various randomly generated passwords (but I use them all enough that my fingers remember them even if I forget them) but in all honesty, if someone cracked my computer password, unless they were just an asshole trying to wreak havoc for no reason, there's not much they could grab that would bother me (pr0n is not something I'm embarassed about having on my computer and anything really private, I have encrypted another way - I used to keep a journal on my comp but I never wrote in English in case someone saw it because that was way private).
Companies respond to consumer pressure. If people really wanted these things to be super secure, there'd be a consumer backlash and then Cisco would realize that things should be super secure. Problem is, most people don't seem to care. How many management people have any idea what their IT person is talking about when he mentions public-key or asymetric key versus symmetric key encryption? Furthermore even if they do, do you think they honestly understand what makes certain protocols more secure than others?
The/. crowd cares because we're all computer geeks and we read/., but until mainstream consumers care, there's not much incentive to correct things.
I want to know why if I program in some function that determines how good a board is, and the computer goes and tries all possibilities to a certain depth of moves to determine the best move using either a minimax algorithm or something like that, why is this considered A.I.? The computer isn't doing anything I didn't specifically tell it to do.
Wouldn't real AI be writing a program that plays a whole lot of chess and "learns" what makes a board/move good and that's how it decides how to play?
I just don't get why a computer playing exactly how it's programmed is considered AI and not learning anything on it's own (on its own is loose here, if it was specifically programmed to learn I'd still consider it learning on it's own).
For instance, we wrote a Kalah player in a CS class I was in. You know how my team decided how to rank boards, we wrote a program that cycled through thousands of possibilities for the different weightings of each pit and then compared the results when using those weightings. In my head, that's A.I., the computer just decided for itself what the best evaluation function was (albeit we told it how to decide) as opposed to simply using one we hard-coded in and having it search really deeply (which in my mind is not AI at all, just a computer playing a game).
Let's not forget about the danger of someone who's speeding not being able to stop because the light suddenly switches to yellow and quickly to red when it normally is yellow for much longer.
Or even if it's not normally yellow for much longer, if you know someone is speeding and you want them to stop, make sure you start early enough so that they can stop. But then this will probably cause people ahead of the speeder to get nailed by the light.
The Recording Industry strategy is to invest in a lot of musicians (many of whom fail) and make back their money w/ the successful ones. If people can buy only what they want and none of the crap they don't want, then this strategy will fail unless the stuff they want is overpriced enough to make up for the lack of sales by the unwanted crap. Now people don't like increased prices, so if we increase the price and bundle in some unwanted crap "for free" (by which we mean we just bundle it in and charge you for it), maybe they'll just deal w/ it. It's a common strategy to sell stuff that isn't wanted, use stuff that is. (Examples, NBC playing around w/ whatever is on after friends to get people to watch it by having no commercials right after friends, ESPN being bundled w/ ESPNews, ESPN Classic, ESPN 2, ESPN Fly Fishing, etc.).
A business that sells only what consumers want can't survive if it invests heavily in stuff consumers don't want.
To paraphrase George Carlin, most of us don't want our kids to grow up and kill people yet we let them watch violent stuff all the time. Most of us do want our kids to grow up and have sex (so we have grandchildren to spoil) yet we refuse to let them watch sexual acts.
While we're on the subject, selling is legal, fucking is legal, why isn't selling fucking legal. Why is prostitution illegal? It should be a regulated industry. It'd be safer, not necessarily anymore morally acceptable, but definitely safer. It's not like this woman agreeing to have sex for money is any worse than a woman who marries someone (and has sex w/ them) just for their money (also looked down upon but legal), the first one is just upfront about it and cheaper.
(My bias) when I was younger my parents used to let me watch R rated movies if it was rated R for sexual reasons but not violent reasons because she was afraid the violence would scare me but figured the sex stuff was harmless. I guess we'll never know but I think I turned out ok and she was right .
Stealing requires depriving someone else of something. Making a copy isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement. Huge difference (maybe not morally but legally).
Because then they lose the effective social engineering of the tax code (which encourages donations to charities by offering tax breaks and makes having children more affordable by offering deductions for dependants) and we also lose our beloved progressive tax structure (which tries to make things easier on those who make less income).
I have illegally downloaded music and never once thought it was right. However, I don't feel bad about it because almost all of the time, I download music that I would never pay for. So I don't view it as a lost revenue stream for the RIAA. It doesn't make it right, it's just my justification. I've done the same thing w/ expensive software programs (think Mathematica). I've had assignments that require me to use it and my school only has so many copies of it on public cluster computers, I want to use it from my computer and am not going to pay for it. Granted, I should not have the opportunity to use stuff I don't pay for, but if I would never pay for it, it's clearly not stealing and fails into a moral gray-area for me where I default into doing what's in my best interest.
I still buy music but not very much. I find CDs not worth my money, part of that reason being that I can download a lot of the music for free. The last CD I bought was the Dave Matthews Central Park concert, a 3-disc set for $18 which included a bonus cd containing 7 random live songs. Even just the third disc would have been worth $18 to me because the performance is so good. Consequently, I find it completely not worth it to pay even $12 for a normal CD that I wont like half as much as that. I buy live concerts from some bands, because I enjoy the live music more than the studio version and some concerts are hard to find. However, with Dave Matthews for example, one can easily find any concert he's ever played at and get an shn version of it (lossless compression) for free, yet I still pay for the CD because I find it useful.
Furthermore, I rarely listen to CDs, I use my computer (sometimes hooked up to my stereo) to play music because I like having access to my entire collection (I have ripped all my cds to mp3's) and I also have a minidisc player that I use instead of a portable cd player. And while I do download a good deal of music, if I could not download this, I know for certain, I probably would not buy more CDs because I just don't consider them worth the price, I'd rather buy a DVD.
I'm currently in a linear programming class and almost any problem is computationally a bitch to by hand. The solution? We have automated tools which will perform the steps but you have to tell them the order and for hw/exams, we might perform one step by hand and just not solve the entire problem. I think that's a good balance.
I personally despise my comp sci classes that have made me program on paper for exams. Yes I use a compiler as a crutch to find errors, but when will I not have a compiler that can tell me that I missed a close quotes or a semicolon? I don't view this the same as a calculator because there are times when one wants to do simple arithmetic without one (i.e., calculating change or what something will cost)
You're right I am a child of privledge and I'm not ashamed of it. As far as the shouldering a heavier tax burden, I know for a fact that my sister could not survive with her current government-employed salary and my parents are subsidizing her. She would have to make I think about double what she currently makes. Not only does she spend more than her salary living a rather simple life (yes she does have luxuries such as cable/internet, and she does go on vacations and buy nice clothes) but she spends almost 1.5 times her after tax income.
However, I don't think the solution is for her to pay less in taxes and have richer people pay more, I think the solution would be to lower taxes overall to a more reasonable level or for her to spend less money if she couldn't live off of my parents. I, in no way shape or form, think poor people pay too little in taxes. However, I also don't find the progressive structure we currently have fair. I don't have enough information to make an intelligent recomendation as to what specifically should be done but in my head it's not fair to "steal from the rich to give to the poor" despite the fact that the poor obviously need it more than the rich do.
I realize I have very controversial opinions because I don't have very much sympathy for people who aren't particularly well off (and more power to those who have no desire to make more money) but it's simply because my limited experiences demonstrate a world in which those who work hard and are capable suceed and then are forced to loss a lot of their income to support those who don't work hard or aren't particularly capable. Obviously these are generalizations and don't cover everyone and the system isn't perfect. But when I see news stories about an inner city woman w/ 9 children who's on welfare, it makes me really angry. Don't have kids if you can't afford them, why should my parents who work hard, have to pay for your 9 kids, who you can't afford? I can never reconcile my feelings that kids shouldn't be punished because of who their parents are and that parents should be able to provide their children w/ advantages throughout their life if they worked hard and are successful.
Sorry to rant a bit, I just have strong opinions about this because I haven't seen a world where the majority of the poor are just "unlucky" and I am around a lot of "privledged" people who pay an insane percentage of their income in taxes to support people who don't work/can't hold down a job (in addition to those who do work but simply can't find a job that pays a lot of money/don't want one - in which case, why should I pay for you if you don't want to work in a job that pays more).
Last comment, a flat tax in russia produced a lot more income than expected because a lot of people declared more of their income once it was a flat x% for everyone as opposed to a progressive tax structure.
If you can write off donations it means you don't pay tax on the dollars you donate. So if I donate 130k, it's really only like donating 100k because at least 30% would've gone to taxes otherwise.
What's complicated is how much money came in? Do you count contracts signed to do something at a future date. Do you count returns on assets? And if my company makes $200k, and I pay myself all of that, why should I have to pay taxes twice, once on my income, and the company on what it earned. It should be a deductable expense (and payroll is) so that I'm not taxed twice. Most of the tax code serves a purpose.
And as for the, the rich people can afford it comment, why should my grandfather, a very successful person who group up poor and worked his way through college/law school, have to pay more to support some screwup, who can't hold down a job just because he can afford to do it? I'm not saying all poor people are misfits, some are simple unlucky but I know a lot of well-off people, and almost all of them came from lower class or lower middle class families and now have a lot more money because they're very capable. A lot of people earn there money, why should they have to pay a higher percentage because they can afford to?
Sorry this is a subject that makes me sore especially when I see how much my friends who just graudated from school have to pay in taxes to support everyone who doesn't have a job. Call me an insensitive prick, but I very much see a world where if you work hard and are capable, you will succeed. I realize some people are jsut unlucky, but I feel like everyone can't be.
My sister works for the government (DA's office) and gets YELLED AT and in trouble for working overtime. They are legally required to pay her and don't have the money to, so if she works overtime that they have to pay consistently, they'll fire her. That's THE problem and the reason companies don't like overtime. Say my employees work overtime so now my payroll costs more than I antipicated and now we don't ahve the money to pay them. This is a huge problem, that's a big reason why it occurs (it's possible that it's simple cost-cutting but I think this case is more common).
Big businesses do pay their share. And who do you think pays the taxes that corporations do? The consumers do by buying the product. Businesses have massive amounts of taxes they have to pay, and the consumers pay for this. And the loopholes and "tax breaks" are as was mentioned in a previous post, a social engineering thing. Why are charitable donations tax deductible, so that people are encouraged to give money to charity.
Most of the tax code has to deal w/ how to determine the value of something. Say I'm in a business and I buy a machine that costs x dollars, that machine has value that needs to be part of my assets. What's it's value now, 3 years from now, etc.? That's more of a general accounting thing but say I sign 10 contracts for someone to buy widgets. Are these contracts worth the money I will get in the future? What interest rate do you use to determine the present value of what I will be paid (money received 1 year from now is worth less than money received now because money received now could be invested/put in a bank and then 1 year from now i'd have more)? How do I get to decide how many people will bail on those contracts and pay whatever the price is? These are just dumb examples, but it's very complicated to determine a businesses revenue/profit/income, much more so than a person's. Also what can be deducted as an expense? How are stock options deducted (or should we deduct them at all since it's only opportunity cost lost)?
You yell about the little-guy getting screwed, and I hate to say it but I think the little guy is always going to get screwed. We don't live in a socialist society, some people will be better off than others. We already have a progressive tax (which I personally find unfair but then again, I'm not impoverished and if I was I'm sure I'd find anything that helped me out fair), while a flat-tax rate would be simpler, it's technically considered more unfair for the poor because it cuts more into their "necessities" while for a richer person it cuts mainly into their luxuries.
As much of a nightmare our current tax system is it serves several purposes. come up with a simpler system that serves the same purposes. I personally support a flat-tax but that's not progressive and a lot of people would have problems with that (specifically those who would have to pay more). And if you remove deductions, what happens to charities?
Comments like this scare the hell out of me. My family makes nowhere near 1million dollars a year but I know a lot of people who do. I don't know of ANYONE who makes over a million dollars a year who doesn't pay 1% income tax, in fact most pay exactly what they should pay aside from using "loopholes" such as charitable contributions/mortgage payments to cut what they pay taxes on. Donating money to a campaign does not make that money tax deductible.
And they're not after people who transpose two numbers. But if you declare all your income as coming from work at McDonald's and drive a Mercedes, odds are you are making income that you're not declaring or have other money somehow. That's not picking on the little guy, that's picking on the person who's living a lifestyle well above what their declared income is which means 1) they have their own family money which is probably earning interest somewhere that should be declared or 2) they have a source of income they're not declaring.
Just because someone makes a lot of money, doesn't mean they're cheating the system or that the government is only out to protect them. What scares me the most is the general "hatred" I see for people who make a lot of money and the assumption that the government is out to protect them and fuck everyone else. Have a serious talk with someone who makes a lot of money and see how much of it they actually get to keep. We have a progressive tax system in the U.S. and it does a very good job of taxing the rich (despite what you might think).
From what I've heard from my dad who does some tax work (he has a CPA but is actualy a lawyer) most tax cheats that he's heard of people doing are either people not declaring their income (in the case of cash businesses) or people using "tax loopholes" such as ordering a product to somewhere out of state to avoid paying sales tax when they actually are using it in state. And I'm not talking about your $50 sweater, I'm talking about pieces of artwork that cost thousands of dollars or major purchases.
One issue w/ this is charitable contributions. Charities get most of their money from large contributions from people who contribute partially because it means not paying taxes on the money. That's another reason they don't want to repeal the estate tax. Charities get a lot of money from rich people who would otherwise pay exhorbitant amounts of taxes. If we made only a national sales tax, there'd be no incentive to give to charity and consequently these non-profit organizations that work for the common good (i.e., aids/cancer research) would suffer.
"Once the dude is in the country, and has committed the offence, this sort of system is absolutely worthless"
Most of the justice/legal system is not preventative, it's punitive. It's designed to punish those who commit crimes (and arguably rehabilitate in some cases) in an effort to deter more crime. Laws like these are to help the police figure out who commited a crime if one happens, and to scare the criminals into thinking they'll easily get caught. The system bases itself on the premise that if we scare the criminals by making it seem like they'll definitely get caught, they wont commit the crime. It's not about not letting the crime happen in the first place. It's about making it extremely difficult to commit a crime and not get caught/punished.
I, for one, would love to hear any other effective systems for crime prevention that don't encroach on civil liberties (ours definitely does but you need to trade some freedoms for safety, ben franklin be damned).
i believe it was ben franklin who said "those who are willing to give up their liberties for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" or something along those lines.
Best Prank I've yet to see. I know a lot of people in an intro electrical engineering course that was basically programming for palm pilots. The prof, a week before april fool's told them that they were going to get their final assignment on april 1st (used the day not the date) and it was to implement a basic operating system for the palm pilot. He gave them a list of all the things they had to deal with (including threading/process management/IO/etc.) and some source files to use as a start. the source files all said April Fools but most of the class just panicked and emailed the teaching assistants for help.
"Alternatively, if someone on my street were arrested for possessing child pornography, I darn well want to know about it. S?he may eventually be found innocent, but in the mean time, I don't want my kids playing near their house."
You're assuming the person is guilty because they were arrested. This is how false accusations ruin people's lives especially related to sexual misconduct (rape accusations/kiddie porn/etc.).
Granted you add the s/he may eventually be found innocent but you then state that until then you're assuming the person is guilty which goes contrary to our justice system.
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You missed my point. Say I have two choices, OS 1 and OS 2. I care about 4 things, I want my OS to be aaab, and OS 1 is aaaa and OS 2 is bbbb. How do I get the maker of OS 1 to realize I care about option 4 when I'm not going to buy anymore product if they do it nor will I buy less product if they don't (3 options out of 4 is still better than one).
You can't vote with your wallet when an issue isn't the deciding factor. You might argue that it should be but OS security is not a deciding factor when OSs are SO different (comparing *nix to M$ not different flavors of *nix to each other). It's the same thing w/ politics, is there anyway to influence a politician to take a stance on something when you're still going to vote for him no matter what (because you like him better than the other options regardless).
I'm not saying security shouldn't be important or my issue, but how do you make a monopoly act if there's no viable alternative for you if they don't act (viable alternative means w/out lots of time/money spent to switchover)
I completely understand what your saying but my question is, how do you demand better security when you can't/wont switch to a different OS? You can't vote with your wallet, and if you're an average user/not a major corporation, how do you get heard and not lost in the noise? The only way I can think of to demand better security is to switch to a more secure OS. Assuming that's not an option, what's a user supposed to do (I agree about the being more careful concept though, but part of that I blame on M$. They have incredibly insecure default settings. They also have a system setup that encourages you to have administrative powers on your normal account - logging into a different user to change one thing and back in is a pain because it closes whatever I have open - as opposed to *nix where I can open a new tty if I don't want to close anything I'm doing.
A comment I often see here on /. is vote with your wallet. Don't buy the product if it sucks. The problem is, what if you want/need the product and there's no viable alternative (and don't even start the linux is a viable alternative to windows argument, for the average person it's not in my experience). Regardless of difficulty to use, my parents want a computer that if something goes wrong, they can easily get help and that their digital camera/printer/sound card/can connect to my dad's office vpn server where he can read his EXCHANGE email will work for w/out any hassle.
Voting with your wallet only works for you when you actually have a market w/ products that easily substitute. For instance coke and pepsi. It has been decided that Microsoft has a monopoly. You cannot vote with your wallet against a Monopoly if you want their product. The only solution I see is for there to be other viable alternatives that are shown to the average person to be viable.
Furthermore, when I was younger and I used to play a lot of computer games (not MMOG's) but things by myself or w/ a friend like NHL 94, or whatever, these games did not/still mainly don't work for any non-Windows OS. So if that's what I use a computer for, I need to run windows (I used to dual-boot w/ Linux but then again, I'm a computer geek and dealt w/ the hassle to get sound/printing working.)
Stop please telling people to vote w/ their wallet when there is no direct substitute. Indie labels are not a substitute for RIAA-music, it's DIFFERENT music. I'm not saying don't buy it or that it isn't better, it's still different. Most people don't want to have to deal w/ the hassles of learning a new OS that everyone else can't help them with.
2 things. 1) is there a justification for sales tax other than we can and we need money? just curious. and 2) there are some nice things about brick-and-mortar stores but it doesn't necessarily get me to buy from them. I love sitting in Barnes & Nobles for hours browsing books and when I do that I inevitably buy at least a couple. However if I want a specific book and know what I want, online is faster and less hassle so I use amazon or bn.com. I'd be really sad if Barnes and Noble stopped having stores but I'm not voting for it with my wallet.
.1% of the customers even consider purchasing.
Furthermore as far as the car thing goes, I know tons of people who will not buy a car w/out test driving one first. But I do see people test driving cars at a dealership and then buying it cheaper online/directly from the factory. Brick-and-mortar stores have benefits but unless their prices are competitive, people are going to use them for their benefits and then buy where the prices are cheaper. I think it'd be sad if brick-and-mortar died but then maybe it'd resurface w/ cheaper prices and less of that out-of-the-way stuff that only
I've made this comment before and the response I got was BS, that wouldn't happen.
s sue_id=890
In Russia, once they instituted a flat tax, they got much more revenue than expected (28% increase) http://www.cse.org/informed/issues_template.php?i
A quick google revealed that, increased because people suddenly declared more income. My comment was if the U.S. instituted a flat tax I bet they'd suddenly find a lot more income declared, and I still stand by it. As is often mentioned in the anti-RIAA comments, people will pay for stuff if they find it worth it and rebel when they think it's overpriced/not worth it (99cents for a song as opposed to $18 for 3 songs and 12 filler tracks). Why should taxes be any different? The only way I see sales taxes working is if the vendor is responsible to collect it (which is how it generally works).
There was a major case against someone who was purchasing stuff via his company so that he could avoid the insane amount of taxes if he bought it and had it shipped to his house (worked in a different state, and talking about pieces of artwork where he would've owed thousands of dollars worth of sales tax had he bought it in state). I'm not saying this isn't tax fraud but I'm saying, people are people and want to keep their money, don't have a system that requires them to be honest about stuff you can't check up on and expect them to be honest. Either have the vendors collect it or don't make them pay taxes on it.
BTW, I've been told this has been a fight for a long time over mail-order stuff (which I believe still exceeds internet purchases) that states wanted to charge sales tax on. It's become a more visible fight since the internet.
Sadly the problem is consumers don't care enough to require companies to put the effort into caring about real security. How many people who buy these products actually know what a brute-force or dictionary attack is? In my comp sci course we, doing a time-space tradeoff problem cracked a subset sum password scheme (iirc, subset-sum is NP-complete so there's currently no known polynomial time algorithm) fairly quickly (it was one that M$ used to use). I bet most people who purchase these products have on knowledge/no interest in what makes a security scheme vulnerable as long as it works for them.
/. crowd cares because we're all computer geeks and we read /., but until mainstream consumers care, there's not much incentive to correct things.
Furthermore, aside from the tinfoil hat crowd, do most people really have a need for their systems to be crack-proof. Granted, I use various randomly generated passwords (but I use them all enough that my fingers remember them even if I forget them) but in all honesty, if someone cracked my computer password, unless they were just an asshole trying to wreak havoc for no reason, there's not much they could grab that would bother me (pr0n is not something I'm embarassed about having on my computer and anything really private, I have encrypted another way - I used to keep a journal on my comp but I never wrote in English in case someone saw it because that was way private).
Companies respond to consumer pressure. If people really wanted these things to be super secure, there'd be a consumer backlash and then Cisco would realize that things should be super secure. Problem is, most people don't seem to care. How many management people have any idea what their IT person is talking about when he mentions public-key or asymetric key versus symmetric key encryption? Furthermore even if they do, do you think they honestly understand what makes certain protocols more secure than others?
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I want to know why if I program in some function that determines how good a board is, and the computer goes and tries all possibilities to a certain depth of moves to determine the best move using either a minimax algorithm or something like that, why is this considered A.I.? The computer isn't doing anything I didn't specifically tell it to do.
Wouldn't real AI be writing a program that plays a whole lot of chess and "learns" what makes a board/move good and that's how it decides how to play?
I just don't get why a computer playing exactly how it's programmed is considered AI and not learning anything on it's own (on its own is loose here, if it was specifically programmed to learn I'd still consider it learning on it's own).
For instance, we wrote a Kalah player in a CS class I was in. You know how my team decided how to rank boards, we wrote a program that cycled through thousands of possibilities for the different weightings of each pit and then compared the results when using those weightings. In my head, that's A.I., the computer just decided for itself what the best evaluation function was (albeit we told it how to decide) as opposed to simply using one we hard-coded in and having it search really deeply (which in my mind is not AI at all, just a computer playing a game).
Let's not forget about the danger of someone who's speeding not being able to stop because the light suddenly switches to yellow and quickly to red when it normally is yellow for much longer.
Or even if it's not normally yellow for much longer, if you know someone is speeding and you want them to stop, make sure you start early enough so that they can stop. But then this will probably cause people ahead of the speeder to get nailed by the light.
The Recording Industry strategy is to invest in a lot of musicians (many of whom fail) and make back their money w/ the successful ones. If people can buy only what they want and none of the crap they don't want, then this strategy will fail unless the stuff they want is overpriced enough to make up for the lack of sales by the unwanted crap. Now people don't like increased prices, so if we increase the price and bundle in some unwanted crap "for free" (by which we mean we just bundle it in and charge you for it), maybe they'll just deal w/ it. It's a common strategy to sell stuff that isn't wanted, use stuff that is. (Examples, NBC playing around w/ whatever is on after friends to get people to watch it by having no commercials right after friends, ESPN being bundled w/ ESPNews, ESPN Classic, ESPN 2, ESPN Fly Fishing, etc.).
A business that sells only what consumers want can't survive if it invests heavily in stuff consumers don't want.
To paraphrase George Carlin, most of us don't want our kids to grow up and kill people yet we let them watch violent stuff all the time. Most of us do want our kids to grow up and have sex (so we have grandchildren to spoil) yet we refuse to let them watch sexual acts.
While we're on the subject, selling is legal, fucking is legal, why isn't selling fucking legal. Why is prostitution illegal? It should be a regulated industry. It'd be safer, not necessarily anymore morally acceptable, but definitely safer. It's not like this woman agreeing to have sex for money is any worse than a woman who marries someone (and has sex w/ them) just for their money (also looked down upon but legal), the first one is just upfront about it and cheaper.
(My bias) when I was younger my parents used to let me watch R rated movies if it was rated R for sexual reasons but not violent reasons because she was afraid the violence would scare me but figured the sex stuff was harmless. I guess we'll never know but I think I turned out ok and she was right .
Stealing requires depriving someone else of something. Making a copy isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement. Huge difference (maybe not morally but legally).
Because then they lose the effective social engineering of the tax code (which encourages donations to charities by offering tax breaks and makes having children more affordable by offering deductions for dependants) and we also lose our beloved progressive tax structure (which tries to make things easier on those who make less income).
I have illegally downloaded music and never once thought it was right. However, I don't feel bad about it because almost all of the time, I download music that I would never pay for. So I don't view it as a lost revenue stream for the RIAA. It doesn't make it right, it's just my justification. I've done the same thing w/ expensive software programs (think Mathematica). I've had assignments that require me to use it and my school only has so many copies of it on public cluster computers, I want to use it from my computer and am not going to pay for it. Granted, I should not have the opportunity to use stuff I don't pay for, but if I would never pay for it, it's clearly not stealing and fails into a moral gray-area for me where I default into doing what's in my best interest.
I still buy music but not very much. I find CDs not worth my money, part of that reason being that I can download a lot of the music for free. The last CD I bought was the Dave Matthews Central Park concert, a 3-disc set for $18 which included a bonus cd containing 7 random live songs. Even just the third disc would have been worth $18 to me because the performance is so good. Consequently, I find it completely not worth it to pay even $12 for a normal CD that I wont like half as much as that. I buy live concerts from some bands, because I enjoy the live music more than the studio version and some concerts are hard to find. However, with Dave Matthews for example, one can easily find any concert he's ever played at and get an shn version of it (lossless compression) for free, yet I still pay for the CD because I find it useful.
Furthermore, I rarely listen to CDs, I use my computer (sometimes hooked up to my stereo) to play music because I like having access to my entire collection (I have ripped all my cds to mp3's) and I also have a minidisc player that I use instead of a portable cd player. And while I do download a good deal of music, if I could not download this, I know for certain, I probably would not buy more CDs because I just don't consider them worth the price, I'd rather buy a DVD.
I'm currently in a linear programming class and almost any problem is computationally a bitch to by hand. The solution? We have automated tools which will perform the steps but you have to tell them the order and for hw/exams, we might perform one step by hand and just not solve the entire problem. I think that's a good balance.
I personally despise my comp sci classes that have made me program on paper for exams. Yes I use a compiler as a crutch to find errors, but when will I not have a compiler that can tell me that I missed a close quotes or a semicolon? I don't view this the same as a calculator because there are times when one wants to do simple arithmetic without one (i.e., calculating change or what something will cost)
You're right I am a child of privledge and I'm not ashamed of it. As far as the shouldering a heavier tax burden, I know for a fact that my sister could not survive with her current government-employed salary and my parents are subsidizing her. She would have to make I think about double what she currently makes. Not only does she spend more than her salary living a rather simple life (yes she does have luxuries such as cable/internet, and she does go on vacations and buy nice clothes) but she spends almost 1.5 times her after tax income.
However, I don't think the solution is for her to pay less in taxes and have richer people pay more, I think the solution would be to lower taxes overall to a more reasonable level or for her to spend less money if she couldn't live off of my parents. I, in no way shape or form, think poor people pay too little in taxes. However, I also don't find the progressive structure we currently have fair. I don't have enough information to make an intelligent recomendation as to what specifically should be done but in my head it's not fair to "steal from the rich to give to the poor" despite the fact that the poor obviously need it more than the rich do.
I realize I have very controversial opinions because I don't have very much sympathy for people who aren't particularly well off (and more power to those who have no desire to make more money) but it's simply because my limited experiences demonstrate a world in which those who work hard and are capable suceed and then are forced to loss a lot of their income to support those who don't work hard or aren't particularly capable. Obviously these are generalizations and don't cover everyone and the system isn't perfect. But when I see news stories about an inner city woman w/ 9 children who's on welfare, it makes me really angry. Don't have kids if you can't afford them, why should my parents who work hard, have to pay for your 9 kids, who you can't afford? I can never reconcile my feelings that kids shouldn't be punished because of who their parents are and that parents should be able to provide their children w/ advantages throughout their life if they worked hard and are successful.
Sorry to rant a bit, I just have strong opinions about this because I haven't seen a world where the majority of the poor are just "unlucky" and I am around a lot of "privledged" people who pay an insane percentage of their income in taxes to support people who don't work/can't hold down a job (in addition to those who do work but simply can't find a job that pays a lot of money/don't want one - in which case, why should I pay for you if you don't want to work in a job that pays more).
Last comment, a flat tax in russia produced a lot more income than expected because a lot of people declared more of their income once it was a flat x% for everyone as opposed to a progressive tax structure.
If you can write off donations it means you don't pay tax on the dollars you donate. So if I donate 130k, it's really only like donating 100k because at least 30% would've gone to taxes otherwise.
What's complicated is how much money came in? Do you count contracts signed to do something at a future date. Do you count returns on assets? And if my company makes $200k, and I pay myself all of that, why should I have to pay taxes twice, once on my income, and the company on what it earned. It should be a deductable expense (and payroll is) so that I'm not taxed twice. Most of the tax code serves a purpose.
And as for the, the rich people can afford it comment, why should my grandfather, a very successful person who group up poor and worked his way through college/law school, have to pay more to support some screwup, who can't hold down a job just because he can afford to do it? I'm not saying all poor people are misfits, some are simple unlucky but I know a lot of well-off people, and almost all of them came from lower class or lower middle class families and now have a lot more money because they're very capable. A lot of people earn there money, why should they have to pay a higher percentage because they can afford to?
Sorry this is a subject that makes me sore especially when I see how much my friends who just graudated from school have to pay in taxes to support everyone who doesn't have a job. Call me an insensitive prick, but I very much see a world where if you work hard and are capable, you will succeed. I realize some people are jsut unlucky, but I feel like everyone can't be.
My sister works for the government (DA's office) and gets YELLED AT and in trouble for working overtime. They are legally required to pay her and don't have the money to, so if she works overtime that they have to pay consistently, they'll fire her. That's THE problem and the reason companies don't like overtime. Say my employees work overtime so now my payroll costs more than I antipicated and now we don't ahve the money to pay them. This is a huge problem, that's a big reason why it occurs (it's possible that it's simple cost-cutting but I think this case is more common).
Big businesses do pay their share. And who do you think pays the taxes that corporations do? The consumers do by buying the product. Businesses have massive amounts of taxes they have to pay, and the consumers pay for this. And the loopholes and "tax breaks" are as was mentioned in a previous post, a social engineering thing. Why are charitable donations tax deductible, so that people are encouraged to give money to charity.
Most of the tax code has to deal w/ how to determine the value of something. Say I'm in a business and I buy a machine that costs x dollars, that machine has value that needs to be part of my assets. What's it's value now, 3 years from now, etc.? That's more of a general accounting thing but say I sign 10 contracts for someone to buy widgets. Are these contracts worth the money I will get in the future? What interest rate do you use to determine the present value of what I will be paid (money received 1 year from now is worth less than money received now because money received now could be invested/put in a bank and then 1 year from now i'd have more)? How do I get to decide how many people will bail on those contracts and pay whatever the price is? These are just dumb examples, but it's very complicated to determine a businesses revenue/profit/income, much more so than a person's. Also what can be deducted as an expense? How are stock options deducted (or should we deduct them at all since it's only opportunity cost lost)?
You yell about the little-guy getting screwed, and I hate to say it but I think the little guy is always going to get screwed. We don't live in a socialist society, some people will be better off than others. We already have a progressive tax (which I personally find unfair but then again, I'm not impoverished and if I was I'm sure I'd find anything that helped me out fair), while a flat-tax rate would be simpler, it's technically considered more unfair for the poor because it cuts more into their "necessities" while for a richer person it cuts mainly into their luxuries.
As much of a nightmare our current tax system is it serves several purposes. come up with a simpler system that serves the same purposes. I personally support a flat-tax but that's not progressive and a lot of people would have problems with that (specifically those who would have to pay more). And if you remove deductions, what happens to charities?
Comments like this scare the hell out of me. My family makes nowhere near 1million dollars a year but I know a lot of people who do. I don't know of ANYONE who makes over a million dollars a year who doesn't pay 1% income tax, in fact most pay exactly what they should pay aside from using "loopholes" such as charitable contributions/mortgage payments to cut what they pay taxes on. Donating money to a campaign does not make that money tax deductible.
And they're not after people who transpose two numbers. But if you declare all your income as coming from work at McDonald's and drive a Mercedes, odds are you are making income that you're not declaring or have other money somehow. That's not picking on the little guy, that's picking on the person who's living a lifestyle well above what their declared income is which means 1) they have their own family money which is probably earning interest somewhere that should be declared or 2) they have a source of income they're not declaring.
Just because someone makes a lot of money, doesn't mean they're cheating the system or that the government is only out to protect them. What scares me the most is the general "hatred" I see for people who make a lot of money and the assumption that the government is out to protect them and fuck everyone else. Have a serious talk with someone who makes a lot of money and see how much of it they actually get to keep. We have a progressive tax system in the U.S. and it does a very good job of taxing the rich (despite what you might think).
From what I've heard from my dad who does some tax work (he has a CPA but is actualy a lawyer) most tax cheats that he's heard of people doing are either people not declaring their income (in the case of cash businesses) or people using "tax loopholes" such as ordering a product to somewhere out of state to avoid paying sales tax when they actually are using it in state. And I'm not talking about your $50 sweater, I'm talking about pieces of artwork that cost thousands of dollars or major purchases.
One issue w/ this is charitable contributions. Charities get most of their money from large contributions from people who contribute partially because it means not paying taxes on the money. That's another reason they don't want to repeal the estate tax. Charities get a lot of money from rich people who would otherwise pay exhorbitant amounts of taxes. If we made only a national sales tax, there'd be no incentive to give to charity and consequently these non-profit organizations that work for the common good (i.e., aids/cancer research) would suffer.
"Once the dude is in the country, and has committed the offence, this sort of system is absolutely worthless"
Most of the justice/legal system is not preventative, it's punitive. It's designed to punish those who commit crimes (and arguably rehabilitate in some cases) in an effort to deter more crime. Laws like these are to help the police figure out who commited a crime if one happens, and to scare the criminals into thinking they'll easily get caught. The system bases itself on the premise that if we scare the criminals by making it seem like they'll definitely get caught, they wont commit the crime. It's not about not letting the crime happen in the first place. It's about making it extremely difficult to commit a crime and not get caught/punished.
I, for one, would love to hear any other effective systems for crime prevention that don't encroach on civil liberties (ours definitely does but you need to trade some freedoms for safety, ben franklin be damned).
i believe it was ben franklin who said "those who are willing to give up their liberties for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" or something along those lines.
Best Prank I've yet to see. I know a lot of people in an intro electrical engineering course that was basically programming for palm pilots. The prof, a week before april fool's told them that they were going to get their final assignment on april 1st (used the day not the date) and it was to implement a basic operating system for the palm pilot. He gave them a list of all the things they had to deal with (including threading/process management/IO/etc.) and some source files to use as a start. the source files all said April Fools but most of the class just panicked and emailed the teaching assistants for help.
My one issue with your comment.
"Alternatively, if someone on my street were arrested for possessing child pornography, I darn well want to know about it. S?he may eventually be found innocent, but in the mean time, I don't want my kids playing near their house."
You're assuming the person is guilty because they were arrested. This is how false accusations ruin people's lives especially related to sexual misconduct (rape accusations/kiddie porn/etc.).
Granted you add the s/he may eventually be found innocent but you then state that until then you're assuming the person is guilty which goes contrary to our justice system.