> Sounds to me like someone at Wired is heavily into ye olde art rock, and expects people to listen to albums that are really just collections of pop songs as if they were Dark Side of the Moon
Exactly. RIAA artists stopped making albums - one single, one half-decent track, 50 minutes of filler.
DJs started making albums when RIAA artists left off. It's hard to do it at home with CDs, because you'll be shuffling discs every 5 minutes. But if you have a few thousand MP3s to choose from, the art of the mix is a lot of fun.
Who would have thunk that you could put Ice-T's "Body Count's In The House" (rapper) with Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" (80s dance), Front Line Assembly's "Mindphaser" (90s techno-industrial), Ministry's "NWO" (hard guitar-based industrial), and KMFDM's "WW III" (industrial) and ends up with Timbuk 3's "Assholes On Parade" (laid-back, acoustic, funny-serious) Weird Al Yankovic "Christmas at Ground Zero" (happy, funny-haha).
There's an ordered progression from slow rhythm to fast thrash, and a release of tension towards the end, and it tells a story that starts the urban chaos of that fateful dust-choked morning, builds to a climax of rapid-fire mechanistic war, and gives a denouement that pokes gleeful fun at the inevitable end of the world as a result of human stupidity.
No single artist would be likely come up with that (no way to cross genres so radically). No DJ on commercial radio would be able play it, even if a Clear Channel "DJ" had enough twisted humor to invent it in the first place. That kind of warped genius can come only from someone with half an hour of spare time and a lot of MP3s on the hard drive.
Having a large collection of MP3s is like being able to come up with an instant concept album for any mood that strikes you.
A riff from metal band Slayer's Angel of Death appears in industrial band KMFDM's guitar riff in Godlike (subsequently covered by Birmingham 6, and also appeared in rap band Public Enemy's guitar riff in She Watch Channel Zero. Speaking of techno-industrial band Birmingham 6, the ominous repetitive sound sampled Birmingham 6's Birmingham 6 track... started life as the happy teasing laugh of the ditzy chick (after she unzips the singer's pants) about whom hair-band Motley Crue sang She Goes Down.
And that's a mix set in that'll truly fuck with your head. Imagine, if you will:
"Zzzzzzzzzzzip(giggle!)"-Motley Crue, Slayer, Public Enemy, KMFDM, Birmingham 6, the playlist loops back to Track 01, and *kaboom*, the listener's head explodes.
> > go into the theatre with camcorders WITHOUT a tape in it > > What about robbing someone with an unloaded gun?
Fair enough. But I just thought of something better than an empty camcorder (besides, "camcorder" - even without tape - might be illegal, ostensibly on the same grounds that pointing a fake gun at someone in a convenience store is still armed robbery.)
Y'know those little LED blinky buttons? What if you replaced a red LED with an infrared LED and wore one? Hilarity ensues!
> after three decades, the War on (Some) Drugs is a failure in every way. Hard drugs are readily available in any urban area, our prisons are overflowing, our society several times more violent, and our liberties eroding.
"So where's the problem? Tomorrow's always a day away!" - The Coalition of Policemen, Prison Guards, Gauleiters and Bureaucrats for a Drug-Free Tomorrow.
> So, let's follow 9/11's lead everywhere and stamp out these criminals at the cost of our own liberties.
To paraphrase Scott McNealy, your liberties are dead. Get over it. Given that we've already paid the cost, can we at least get something in return, such as the ability to read our email again while reading the occasional reports of once-proud spammers reduced to quivering pulpy messes during prison gladiator battles?
> If you met Alan Ralksy, Scott Richter, Alexey Panov, Anthony M. Banks, Chris Smith, Eddy Marin, Eric Reinersten, Juan Garavaglia or Robert Soloway on the street, you would:
>
# Kick their balls into their shoulder blades. >
# Punch them in the face then kick their balls into their shoulder blades. >
# Punch them in the face, kick their balls into their shoulder blades and spit on them as they writhe on the ground. >
# Call them "motherfscking c0cksucking son of a festering whore", spit in their face, punch them in the face and kick their balls into their shoulder blaes. >
# Flash them the "secret spammer sign" then kick them in the balls because they're competition.
Then again, they all sound like fun. Except for the unwarranted slur against Oedipal fellatio fetishists who happen to be descended from medically-challenged ladies of the evening. I expect you'll be getting your cease-and-desist notice from the MCSOAFWAnti-Defamation League shortly.
> Because they're paranoid. > I've run XP for over a year and every once in a while, just for kicks, I install AVG and AdAware. >Last time I ran AdAware 6 with the latest definitions, out of 90000+ items scanned, it found ONE
registry key. > And AVG has not once turned up an infection of any kind.
> So I ask the other windows users, what the hell are you doing to require this.
I have similar experiences and similar configurations of Win9x and XP boxen over longer time periods.
We're paranoid. So are "they". The difference is what kind of paranoia we're afflicted with.
You and I appear to be working with the "good paranoia". The IE HTML-rendering engine is terminally buggy and hooked too deep into the OS and other applications - avoid using it. When I first touched XP, I asked "WTF is that listening on ports 445 and 135?" and blocked it (and "WTF is uPNP? I don't have anything that uses this", and shut the offending services down and/or blocked the ports. Etc. etc. etc.
Security is a mindset, not a cookbook. That's "good paranoia".
The people that run six AV scanners (all conflicting with each other:), and think that the seventh (when IE pops up, or an email shows up saying "Security Al3rt! YOUR IP ADDRESS IS EXPOSED! Click YES to insta11 a FR#EE APPL1CATION to PR0TECT your SECUR1TY and PR1VACY!", aren't of the security mindset. They're looking for a magic bullet, and they'll keep buying anything that anyone sells them, as long as they're promised that this one (really, honest) will fix all their problems.
That's "bad paranoia".
By way of analogy.
Good paranoia is spending $100M to reinforce the cockpit doors (or better yet, removing the doors and separating the crew cabin from the passenger cabin entirely) and adding sky marshals to (attempt to) protect the contents of the passenger cabin.
Bad paranoia: Spending $100B for the ability to issue a press release including names, addresses, and favorite sexual positions of all the victims... while the charred bodies are still smoldering in the rubble.
> But the pork and the cronyism comes from Congress, via laws and regulations that, currently, are legal.
Although government agencies (bureaucracies) are accountable to nobody, and as a result, the IRS would never support its own downsizing, you've hit at the real root of the problem.
If the Internal Revenue Code weren't so complex, the IRS would be forced to downsize, no matter how hard it screamed for self-preservation.
The revolving-door "in-house"/"contractor"/"in-house" system you describe is symptomatic of bureaucracy. But that bureaucracy wouldn't exist if Congress didn't invent it.
If every Congressman had to do his or her own taxes, with pencil, paper, and 4-function calculator, and with no assistance from anything but the IRS help line, web site, and published forms, the Internal Revenue Code would be fixed within a month.
Unfortunately, the odds of Congressmen having to face the monster they created are zero. As much as I hate the IRS - they're just the guys running the trains and seeing to it that the gold teeth are accounted for. The real villians in the story of high tax compliance costs are the ones who issue the orders that we get into the fucking boxcars.
Re:Sounds good, but there'd still be loopholes
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No EZ Fix For The IRS
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>..So eliminate the corporate income tax and tax capital gains and dividends at the same rate as income.
In all seriousness - yes, that would work, and would probably be the quickest and easiest way to do it. I wouldn't benefit from such a measure, but for the record, I would support it.
Re:Sounds good, but there'd still be loopholes
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No EZ Fix For The IRS
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· Score: 1
> Corporations sit in a special class as far as taxation of their income. Income from stocks and bonds is earned from things purchased with already taxed money. And so on, and so forth.
I agree with most of your post, but I gotta rant here: As an investor with a 9-to-5 job, whose parents aren't dead yet... Umm, apart from "already taxed money", with what the fuck do you think I purchased the stocks and bonds that make up the income-generating part of my portfolio?:)
Four Patches for the Internal Revenue Code
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No EZ Fix For The IRS
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· Score: 5, Interesting
> How much could be saved by moving to a flat tax and getting rid of all the exemptions and deductions and tax-breaks?
The question is "how do you define income" -- at which point we're back to square one. Capital gains? Dividends? Revenue from your business? Or profits? If profits -- how do you handle the deduction of your legitimate business expenses? What expenses are legitimate and what expenses aren't? That yacht you bought to entertain your guests? The hamburger you bought when you were interviewing your first employee?
I believe that taxing consumption, not income, allows for a less complex system.
If I had to "patch" the US Internal Revenue Code, I'd:
1. Abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax. One tax code is enough.
2. Eliminate holding periods such as the one-year holding period to differentiate a "short-term" capital gain versus a "long-term" capital gain, and the "30 days, not necessarily consecutive, during the 60 days surrounding the ex-dividend date" used to determine whether dividends are "qualified" or "unqualified" dividends, and the 2-year rule on principal residences. Eliminating these arbitrary time periods and the differential tax rates they cause throughout dozens of forms would eliminate *hundreds* of lines of calculations that deal with the intersection of these arbitrary time periods, Section 1250 contracts, and the myriads of "wash sale", "straddle" and "constructive sale" rules, etc etc etc.
3. Eliminate phaseouts. There's nothing dumber than going through the entire year assuming you get a $5000 deduction, only to find out that the $5000 deduction is "phased out" by $0.25 for every dollar over $32,767 that you made, until $49,152. (Unless you're an Albino Sheep, in which case you have the Albino Sheep Allowance of $6000, phased out by $0.52 for every dollar over $39,152 to $42,767.) If you must have progressivity or social engineering measures in the tax code, make 'em all-or-nothing.
4. Tax employment income, interest income, dividend income, and capital gains income at the same flat rate. (Double taxation on dividends could be prevented under such a scheme by providing full deductibility for corporations that issue dividends. My personal opinion is that because investments are purchased with after-tax dollars, the only morally-justifiable tax rate on investment income - interest, dividends, or capital gains - is zero. But in this post, I'm talking about how I'd patch the existing Internal Revenue Code so as not to be so fucking confusing, not to make it "right".)
5. Scrap the motherfucker. And replace it with a consumption-based tax. But since #5 isn't gonna happen - ever - I'll vote for any ruler who includes any of #1 through #4 in his platform.
> If this project was my responsibility, as CTO I believe I would have canned the whole project and started anew as from the sounds of it, there is too much baggage with which to continue. So, here we go: Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project so that nobody gets paid unless key points in the strategy are reached.
You work in the private sector -- where a CTO's responsibility is to implement the new technology and deliver results.
I can guarantee you that actually completing a project is not the goal of any government CTO.
In the public sector, the longer a project takes, the more favorable contracts can be handed out to friends and people from whom political favors can be extracted in the future. The more favors you're owed, the more power you have. The more power you have, the more people you can hire, the bigger your budget, and the more people who owe you favors.
If your goal is to decrease cost and increase customer service because there's competition that's ready, willing, and able to take customer dollars out of your pockets, those are bugs, not features.
If your goal is to increase cost and decrease customer service because there is no competition -- and the only way to get more dollars into your pocket is to increase your power, these are features, not bugs.
In brief: Government - working according to the parameters listed in its functional specification.
> Erm... am I missing something? The only instance I am aware of where the NSA gave some advice to "strengthen" a cryptographic algorithm did actually strengthen it, when an attack was found for the algorithm a decade or so later. > > Anyone remember what algorithm it was? I think it might have been RSA.
It was DES. NSA suggested that IBM make some modifications to the S-boxes that made DES more resistant to differential cryptanalysis.
At the time, nobody (but NSA) knew about differential cryptanalysis. NSA basically told IBM to make the changes, and that it couldn't tell IBM why the changes were required.
At the time (1980s), "informed speculation" in the crypto community was that NSA had weakened DES. When differential cryptanalysis was "discovered" publicly, a lot of smart people with a lot of math degrees under their belts... wound up looking like they had a fair bit of tinfoil on their heads:)
> > Would the NSA investigate if PGP or similar encryption was used? > > Surely the guys from the NSA reading this now can answer that for us...
The guys from the FBI probably could answer that, and might answer it without even knowing they'd done so. The guys from CIA could, but probably wouldn't, answer it. The guys from NSA definitely can answer that, but are smart enough not to.:)
Clue hierarchy is as follows: NSA > CIA > FBI. Not sure where the UK and Russian Federation intelligence agencies fit in here - probably somewhere between NSA and CIA.
I have no problem with NSA or CIA logging every packet I send or receive. Because I have nothing to hide that's worth hiding (in the sense that it can be used to "turn"/blackmail me into a threat to national security), I have nothing to fear.
The FeeBs, on the other hand, would see me posting snarky comments (like this one!) about them on Slashdot, a recent wisecrack I made about Bukkake and Krispy Kreme in the "Ashcroft Declars War On Pr0n" thread, take a look at the electric bill for running an overclocked Athlon 64 and a Prescott in the same house, and immediately conclude that I'm... well, concluding I was a pornographer would be wrong but still make too much sense, so they'll just bust my door down while I'm at work and claim my cat was growing drugs. Or something equally off-the-wall wrong.
A secret police force with a complete picture of my activities would file me correctly as "Cynical, harmless, weird sense of humor, might be useful if we get really desperate for propaganda writers someday."
The only thing that frightens me about the future of America is that the FBI, reporting to General Ashcroft, is not - and so long as a whackjob like Ashcroft has the post of Attorney General - can never be that secret police force.
Inter-service rivalry that gets in the way of military operations costs lives, and the.mil folks have made great strides in reducing it. It's just as bad for the domestic intelligence game. Is it too much to ask that the.gov folks do likewise?
> Thats a Uk cash Sterling Pound to a genuine pinch of shit (poo, crap, jobbies, turd).
I'd always wondered whether that expression referred to relative masses of material or to money. Thanks for clearing it up.
(Next question, did it originally mean 16 ounces of Her Majesty's.999 sterling?:)
Re:That bowling ball! It's my wife
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Hack Your Ride
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· Score: 4, Interesting
> He started out just fixing his own...then friends of his with Ferraris would ask him to tinker with theirs...one thing lead to another.
Ironic. My first "electronics" project as a child was abusing my dad's 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder by opening it up twisting the belt around to force it to run backwards. I recorded the "strange foreign language" in J. Geils' No Anchovies Please, unhacked the tape recorder, and played the message backwards to discover the shocking secret:
"It doesn't take a genuis to tell the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad."
I've waited most of my life to use that line in context. I am complete! w00t!
> > No. They wanted to see Americans die, and their social agenda (a worldwide islamic state) furthered. > >
And this is different from wanting to see Muslims die, and the world-wide furtherment of a World American State, how exactly?
Well, someone else has pointed out that militant Islam is - by any objective measure - immeasurably more cruel than anything we've done to ourselves. Hack off your daughter's clit? No problem! Murder your wife because she got raped? Well, the bitch shouldn't have been showin' it off! Hey, it's their culture, and all cultures are equivalent, right? That's what your moral relativism implies -- fine by me. For one post, I'll accept your premise (even though I vehemently disagree with it) and argue from the basis of moral relativism.
If someone says their life's goal is my extermination, I have no ethical qualms about using everything in my arsenal against them. It's not a pleasant task, but it is a necessary one.
To the moral relativists who say that I'm no different than the enemy -- "so what?" If all moral systems are equivalent, please accept my arbitrary choice of the one that allows me to live as I choose (Evil Kapitalist Western Imperialism) over the one that requires me to submit or die (militant Islam).
And assuming you live in the industrialized West, why on earth would you choose to defend militant Islam? The religion is itself a political movement (as defined in its own holy writings), and moral relativists tend not to live very long in Islamic theocracies. If you're suicidal, fine - either seek professional help or just kill yourself - please, in the name of the very moral relativism you preach, keep your self-destructive tendencies from negatively impacting on the other 6 billion of us.
> No military weapons were involved when some islamic terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Centers and Pentagon killing 3000 people.
In fact, they didn't even use guns, but "box cutters".
They used another weapon -- the assumption on the part of "peaceful" civilians that civilians weren't targets, and were unlikely to be harmed if they "cooperated" with the enemy.
Anybody who clings to the historically untrue - and
thoroughly immoral - doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedom."
> My laptop is in need of renewal - its a 1Ghz Dell. The replacement will be a 3Ghz-ish of similar style - with more HD, more RAM etc... > >I can bet you a pound to a pinch of shit that within a couple of weeks it'll be pissing me off as much as this piece of crap I'm typing on.
So if you're happy with the laptop, I give you a pinch of shit, and if you're unhappy with the laptop, you give me a pound of shit? Nice odds, but I don't have much use for a pound of shit.
On the other hand, one small grape-sized turdlet (about 5 pinches, by my fingers) against your 1 GHz Dell (about 5 pounds, according to dell.com) sounds pretty good. Quintuple or nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. RIAA artists stopped making albums - one single, one half-decent track, 50 minutes of filler.
DJs started making albums when RIAA artists left off. It's hard to do it at home with CDs, because you'll be shuffling discs every 5 minutes. But if you have a few thousand MP3s to choose from, the art of the mix is a lot of fun.
Who would have thunk that you could put Ice-T's "Body Count's In The House" (rapper) with Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" (80s dance), Front Line Assembly's "Mindphaser" (90s techno-industrial), Ministry's "NWO" (hard guitar-based industrial), and KMFDM's "WW III" (industrial) and ends up with Timbuk 3's "Assholes On Parade" (laid-back, acoustic, funny-serious) Weird Al Yankovic "Christmas at Ground Zero" (happy, funny-haha).
There's an ordered progression from slow rhythm to fast thrash, and a release of tension towards the end, and it tells a story that starts the urban chaos of that fateful dust-choked morning, builds to a climax of rapid-fire mechanistic war, and gives a denouement that pokes gleeful fun at the inevitable end of the world as a result of human stupidity.
No single artist would be likely come up with that (no way to cross genres so radically). No DJ on commercial radio would be able play it, even if a Clear Channel "DJ" had enough twisted humor to invent it in the first place. That kind of warped genius can come only from someone with half an hour of spare time and a lot of MP3s on the hard drive.
Having a large collection of MP3s is like being able to come up with an instant concept album for any mood that strikes you.
Random Play is a tool you can use to find juxtapositions of style that you'd never have otherwise guessed. You can also use it to discover sampling sources you'd have never pieced together in a million years.
A riff from metal band Slayer's Angel of Death appears in industrial band KMFDM's guitar riff in Godlike (subsequently covered by Birmingham 6, and also appeared in rap band Public Enemy's guitar riff in She Watch Channel Zero. Speaking of techno-industrial band Birmingham 6, the ominous repetitive sound sampled Birmingham 6's Birmingham 6 track... started life as the happy teasing laugh of the ditzy chick (after she unzips the singer's pants) about whom hair-band Motley Crue sang She Goes Down.
And that's a mix set in that'll truly fuck with your head. Imagine, if you will: "Zzzzzzzzzzzip(giggle!)"-Motley Crue, Slayer, Public Enemy, KMFDM, Birmingham 6, the playlist loops back to Track 01, and *kaboom*, the listener's head explodes.
>
> Electrostatic motors?
Electroweak motors? (OK, not terribly efficient, but plenty of fast-moving parts.)
>
> What about robbing someone with an unloaded gun?
Fair enough. But I just thought of something better than an empty camcorder (besides, "camcorder" - even without tape - might be illegal, ostensibly on the same grounds that pointing a fake gun at someone in a convenience store is still armed robbery.)
Y'know those little LED blinky buttons? What if you replaced a red LED with an infrared LED and wore one? Hilarity ensues!
"So where's the problem? Tomorrow's always a day away!"
- The Coalition of Policemen, Prison Guards, Gauleiters and Bureaucrats for a Drug-Free Tomorrow.
To paraphrase Scott McNealy, your liberties are dead. Get over it. Given that we've already paid the cost, can we at least get something in return, such as the ability to read our email again while reading the occasional reports of once-proud spammers reduced to quivering pulpy messes during prison gladiator battles?
> # Kick their balls into their shoulder blades.
> # Punch them in the face then kick their balls into their shoulder blades.
> # Punch them in the face, kick their balls into their shoulder blades and spit on them as they writhe on the ground.
> # Call them "motherfscking c0cksucking son of a festering whore", spit in their face, punch them in the face and kick their balls into their shoulder blaes.
> # Flash them the "secret spammer sign" then kick them in the balls because they're competition.
ObQuirk: I call Quirk Objection, five times over.
Then again, they all sound like fun. Except for the unwarranted slur against Oedipal fellatio fetishists who happen to be descended from medically-challenged ladies of the evening. I expect you'll be getting your cease-and-desist notice from the MCSOAFWAnti-Defamation League shortly.
> >
>
>-bash:
Be thankful you have a terminal emulator that'll let you echo > ./ed and write it yourself.
What do you expect for $10/month? ed? vi? EMACS?
(There's a "Priceless" joke in here somewhere, Bobdammit.)
> I've run XP for over a year and every once in a while, just for kicks, I install AVG and AdAware.
>Last time I ran AdAware 6 with the latest definitions, out of 90000+ items scanned, it found ONE registry key.
> And AVG has not once turned up an infection of any kind.
> So I ask the other windows users, what the hell are you doing to require this.
I have similar experiences and similar configurations of Win9x and XP boxen over longer time periods.
We're paranoid. So are "they". The difference is what kind of paranoia we're afflicted with.
You and I appear to be working with the "good paranoia". The IE HTML-rendering engine is terminally buggy and hooked too deep into the OS and other applications - avoid using it. When I first touched XP, I asked "WTF is that listening on ports 445 and 135?" and blocked it (and "WTF is uPNP? I don't have anything that uses this", and shut the offending services down and/or blocked the ports. Etc. etc. etc.
Security is a mindset, not a cookbook. That's "good paranoia".
The people that run six AV scanners (all conflicting with each other :), and think that the seventh (when IE pops up, or an email shows up saying "Security Al3rt! YOUR IP ADDRESS IS EXPOSED! Click YES to insta11 a FR#EE APPL1CATION to PR0TECT your SECUR1TY and PR1VACY!", aren't of the security mindset. They're looking for a magic bullet, and they'll keep buying anything that anyone sells them, as long as they're promised that this one (really, honest) will fix all their problems.
That's "bad paranoia".
By way of analogy.
Good paranoia is spending $100M to reinforce the cockpit doors (or better yet, removing the doors and separating the crew cabin from the passenger cabin entirely) and adding sky marshals to (attempt to) protect the contents of the passenger cabin.
Bad paranoia: Spending $100B for the ability to issue a press release including names, addresses, and favorite sexual positions of all the victims... while the charred bodies are still smoldering in the rubble.
Although government agencies (bureaucracies) are accountable to nobody, and as a result, the IRS would never support its own downsizing, you've hit at the real root of the problem.
If the Internal Revenue Code weren't so complex, the IRS would be forced to downsize, no matter how hard it screamed for self-preservation.
The revolving-door "in-house"/"contractor"/"in-house" system you describe is symptomatic of bureaucracy. But that bureaucracy wouldn't exist if Congress didn't invent it.
If every Congressman had to do his or her own taxes, with pencil, paper, and 4-function calculator, and with no assistance from anything but the IRS help line, web site, and published forms, the Internal Revenue Code would be fixed within a month.
Unfortunately, the odds of Congressmen having to face the monster they created are zero. As much as I hate the IRS - they're just the guys running the trains and seeing to it that the gold teeth are accounted for. The real villians in the story of high tax compliance costs are the ones who issue the orders that we get into the fucking boxcars.
In all seriousness - yes, that would work, and would probably be the quickest and easiest way to do it. I wouldn't benefit from such a measure, but for the record, I would support it.
I agree with most of your post, but I gotta rant here: As an investor with a 9-to-5 job, whose parents aren't dead yet... Umm, apart from "already taxed money", with what the fuck do you think I purchased the stocks and bonds that make up the income-generating part of my portfolio? :)
At least $200 billion per year.
5.8 billion person-hours in 2002 - the equivalent to the entire labor of a city of 2.7 million people.
> Income: xxxxxx
> x 0.20
> Tax owed: xxx
The question is "how do you define income" -- at which point we're back to square one. Capital gains? Dividends? Revenue from your business? Or profits? If profits -- how do you handle the deduction of your legitimate business expenses? What expenses are legitimate and what expenses aren't? That yacht you bought to entertain your guests? The hamburger you bought when you were interviewing your first employee?
I believe that taxing consumption, not income, allows for a less complex system.
If I had to "patch" the US Internal Revenue Code, I'd:
1. Abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax. One tax code is enough.
2. Eliminate holding periods such as the one-year holding period to differentiate a "short-term" capital gain versus a "long-term" capital gain, and the "30 days, not necessarily consecutive, during the 60 days surrounding the ex-dividend date" used to determine whether dividends are "qualified" or "unqualified" dividends, and the 2-year rule on principal residences. Eliminating these arbitrary time periods and the differential tax rates they cause throughout dozens of forms would eliminate *hundreds* of lines of calculations that deal with the intersection of these arbitrary time periods, Section 1250 contracts, and the myriads of "wash sale", "straddle" and "constructive sale" rules, etc etc etc.
3. Eliminate phaseouts. There's nothing dumber than going through the entire year assuming you get a $5000 deduction, only to find out that the $5000 deduction is "phased out" by $0.25 for every dollar over $32,767 that you made, until $49,152. (Unless you're an Albino Sheep, in which case you have the Albino Sheep Allowance of $6000, phased out by $0.52 for every dollar over $39,152 to $42,767.) If you must have progressivity or social engineering measures in the tax code, make 'em all-or-nothing.
4. Tax employment income, interest income, dividend income, and capital gains income at the same flat rate. (Double taxation on dividends could be prevented under such a scheme by providing full deductibility for corporations that issue dividends. My personal opinion is that because investments are purchased with after-tax dollars, the only morally-justifiable tax rate on investment income - interest, dividends, or capital gains - is zero. But in this post, I'm talking about how I'd patch the existing Internal Revenue Code so as not to be so fucking confusing, not to make it "right".)
5. Scrap the motherfucker. And replace it with a consumption-based tax. But since #5 isn't gonna happen - ever - I'll vote for any ruler who includes any of #1 through #4 in his platform.
You work in the private sector -- where a CTO's responsibility is to implement the new technology and deliver results.
I can guarantee you that actually completing a project is not the goal of any government CTO.
In the public sector, the longer a project takes, the more favorable contracts can be handed out to friends and people from whom political favors can be extracted in the future. The more favors you're owed, the more power you have. The more power you have, the more people you can hire, the bigger your budget, and the more people who owe you favors.
If your goal is to decrease cost and increase customer service because there's competition that's ready, willing, and able to take customer dollars out of your pockets, those are bugs, not features.
If your goal is to increase cost and decrease customer service because there is no competition -- and the only way to get more dollars into your pocket is to increase your power, these are features, not bugs.
In brief: Government - working according to the parameters listed in its functional specification.
> http://www.belshaw.com/glazers/centuryglazers.htm
> figured i'd try to help, is this what you were talking about?
It is indeed.
>
> Anyone remember what algorithm it was? I think it might have been RSA.
It was DES. NSA suggested that IBM make some modifications to the S-boxes that made DES more resistant to differential cryptanalysis.
At the time, nobody (but NSA) knew about differential cryptanalysis. NSA basically told IBM to make the changes, and that it couldn't tell IBM why the changes were required.
At the time (1980s), "informed speculation" in the crypto community was that NSA had weakened DES. When differential cryptanalysis was "discovered" publicly, a lot of smart people with a lot of math degrees under their belts... wound up looking like they had a fair bit of tinfoil on their heads :)
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> Surely the guys from the NSA reading this now can answer that for us...
The guys from the FBI probably could answer that, and might answer it without even knowing they'd done so. The guys from CIA could, but probably wouldn't, answer it. The guys from NSA definitely can answer that, but are smart enough not to. :)
Clue hierarchy is as follows: NSA > CIA > FBI. Not sure where the UK and Russian Federation intelligence agencies fit in here - probably somewhere between NSA and CIA.
I have no problem with NSA or CIA logging every packet I send or receive. Because I have nothing to hide that's worth hiding (in the sense that it can be used to "turn"/blackmail me into a threat to national security), I have nothing to fear.
The FeeBs, on the other hand, would see me posting snarky comments (like this one!) about them on Slashdot, a recent wisecrack I made about Bukkake and Krispy Kreme in the "Ashcroft Declars War On Pr0n" thread, take a look at the electric bill for running an overclocked Athlon 64 and a Prescott in the same house, and immediately conclude that I'm... well, concluding I was a pornographer would be wrong but still make too much sense, so they'll just bust my door down while I'm at work and claim my cat was growing drugs. Or something equally off-the-wall wrong.
A secret police force with a complete picture of my activities would file me correctly as "Cynical, harmless, weird sense of humor, might be useful if we get really desperate for propaganda writers someday."
The only thing that frightens me about the future of America is that the FBI, reporting to General Ashcroft, is not - and so long as a whackjob like Ashcroft has the post of Attorney General - can never be that secret police force.
Inter-service rivalry that gets in the way of military operations costs lives, and the .mil folks have made great strides in reducing it. It's just as bad for the domestic intelligence game. Is it too much to ask that the .gov folks do likewise?
McBride! McBride!
(Apologies to any snakes in the audience.)
To hell with thousand-island dressing. America has the machine that glazes Krispy Kreme donuts.
I'll never look at a dozen of classic glazed the same way again. And now, neither will you.
I'd always wondered whether that expression referred to relative masses of material or to money. Thanks for clearing it up.
(Next question, did it originally mean 16 ounces of Her Majesty's .999 sterling? :)
Ironic. My first "electronics" project as a child was abusing my dad's 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder by opening it up twisting the belt around to force it to run backwards. I recorded the "strange foreign language" in J. Geils' No Anchovies Please, unhacked the tape recorder, and played the message backwards to discover the shocking secret:
"It doesn't take a genuis to tell the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad."
I've waited most of my life to use that line in context. I am complete! w00t!
That's no subwoofer... it's a bong!
Inspired by Dennis "Marijuana doesn't lead to other drugs, it leads to fuckin' CARPENTRY!" Leary's rant
I wonder what speakers playing either a 29Hz or 31Hz tone in a fluorescent-lit room would look like :)
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> And this is different from wanting to see Muslims die, and the world-wide furtherment of a World American State, how exactly?
Well, someone else has pointed out that militant Islam is - by any objective measure - immeasurably more cruel than anything we've done to ourselves. Hack off your daughter's clit? No problem! Murder your wife because she got raped? Well, the bitch shouldn't have been showin' it off! Hey, it's their culture, and all cultures are equivalent, right? That's what your moral relativism implies -- fine by me. For one post, I'll accept your premise (even though I vehemently disagree with it) and argue from the basis of moral relativism.
If someone says their life's goal is my extermination, I have no ethical qualms about using everything in my arsenal against them. It's not a pleasant task, but it is a necessary one.
To the moral relativists who say that I'm no different than the enemy -- "so what?" If all moral systems are equivalent, please accept my arbitrary choice of the one that allows me to live as I choose (Evil Kapitalist Western Imperialism) over the one that requires me to submit or die (militant Islam).
And assuming you live in the industrialized West, why on earth would you choose to defend militant Islam? The religion is itself a political movement (as defined in its own holy writings), and moral relativists tend not to live very long in Islamic theocracies. If you're suicidal, fine - either seek professional help or just kill yourself - please, in the name of the very moral relativism you preach, keep your self-destructive tendencies from negatively impacting on the other 6 billion of us.
In fact, they didn't even use guns, but "box cutters".
They used another weapon -- the assumption on the part of "peaceful" civilians that civilians weren't targets, and were unlikely to be harmed if they "cooperated" with the enemy.
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>I can bet you a pound to a pinch of shit that within a couple of weeks it'll be pissing me off as much as this piece of crap I'm typing on.
So if you're happy with the laptop, I give you a pinch of shit, and if you're unhappy with the laptop, you give me a pound of shit? Nice odds, but I don't have much use for a pound of shit.
On the other hand, one small grape-sized turdlet (about 5 pinches, by my fingers) against your 1 GHz Dell (about 5 pounds, according to dell.com) sounds pretty good. Quintuple or nothing?