> Quick searching could allow the CBP agent to notice that the car was stolen and that the drug dealer always carries a gun, so that they could wave them through and avoid conflict.
Exactly! With this fantastic and expensive technology, the new-and-improved BCIS could have sent the 9/11 pilots their approval to go to flight school before they blew up the WTC, rather than six months after the attack, thereby saving them much embarassment.
By government standards, that means it's money well spent.
> This was bought by the Internal Revenue Service in order to improve the auditing of tax returns. They say that the additional revenue brought in will easily pay for the device many times over.
> > If it was for the DHS or NSA you would not have heard about the purchase.
You're both wrong. It's probably just some bureaucrat who happened to have $4.7M to spend before the end of the fiscal year. Half an hour ago he saw a Slashdot article titled "Can Software Kill?", and he said "Hey, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to find out!"
> some of the most amazing tradeshow giveaways was at linuxworld 2000 in San Jose. just before
the dotcrash, vendors were handing out tshirts and trinkets like there was no tomorrow.
Heh, I remember a pitchman throwing $100 bills into the audience as part of his hook to get people to listen to the pitch.
Can't fuckin' tell you the name of the distro to save my life. But man, I'll never forget the memory of a company whose marketing strategy was based on literally throwing money away.
Fond memories, man. I'm with the other guy who says tradeshows are like vacations. Hell, with nobody else to occupy your time, and having to stay for the weekend to get the cheap flight back home, tradeshows are better than vacations.
> I agree with you, but the post implies that in trade shows top down means speakers to audience. Who are the speakers in that context? They are the vendors who are selling stuff. So in that context, maybe it is better to have information flowing customer->vendor too?
Problem is, most of the time, the vendor booth babes/drones are from marketing. They're clueless. Any company that puts enclued people (i.e. developers or other technies) at its booth stands a much better chance of getting my business.
If I want your marketing, I can get it from your web site. If I take time to talk to you in meatspace, you'd goddamn well better have someone in your booth with whom I can have an intelligent conversation.
Even at something like E3 - sure, it's nice to look at all the b00bies, but I'd still rather talk to someone who's... I dunno... actually developing software:)
> Someone mentioned bringing the g/f along -- it was nice when I could bring her, but some (most?) bosses like to put more than one employee to a room.
Hey, I thought we agreed! What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
> Actually, a congressman from Colorado is trying to get a commitee together to determine the fate of the Hubble, so the decision is not solely on the director of NASA. This could mean life for the Hubble.
Why must Hubble die? It's producing too much science, and not consuming enough pork dollars.
End of story. Hubble will die, we'll build a reusable shuttle that still can't go beyond low earth orbit, we'll spend tens of billions turning the existing shuttles into unmanned cargo lifters inferior to present unmanned launch vehicles, and we'll do it all to preserve the ISS.
Vote for me! I promise a chicken in every pot, a subcontractor in every district! And no pesky science to get in the way of your religious beliefs!
> > "It's just as good as getting a hi-colonic (sp?) so keep on drinking those 4 cups a day and keep your colon clean as a whistle! " > > I'll thank you to not use my colon as a whistle!
> Sid Meyer = a Good Sim. >
"Two Guys from Andromeda" = a Good Comedy in Space. >
John Carmack = a Great First Person Shooter. >
Richard Garriot = a Great RPG.
Sony Online Entertainment = Crap.:)
Let's go back in time 20 years.
Front cover:
"Axis Assassin: John Field."
Inside cover:
"Inside John Field.
Six years ago, Jon Field thought an integrated circuit was a social issue. Then, in seventh grade, his school hooked up a computer. John checked it out. He punched in a few simple games. He realized the computer assumed nothing, but was capable of anything. He wanted one.
John went home and punched in a few requests. His parents knew lessa bout computers than he did. But his Dad liked the idea, so he brought one home, in a bunch of little boxes. He handed John the instruction manual and a soldering iron and closed the door.
Six months later, at twelve years old, John Field emerged with a hand-built computer. And he was generating some pretty good adventure games with it. His parents bought him a state-of-the-art Altos. It had over 100K, and best of all, it came assembled. Next, there were two Apples and a Commodore.
Now, an IBM has been added. Everywhere you look in the Field home, you'll find monitors, modules and disks. Except in the parents' bedroom. Nothing there but John's Mom and Dad, listening through the door and wondering what they unleashed."
Back Cover:
"About Our Company: We're an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That's a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm we think there's a good chance for success. Our products, like this game, are evidence of our intent. If you'd like to get involved, please write us at: Electronic Arts, 2755 Campus Drive, San Mateo, CA 94403."
-- Actual packaging for Axis Assassin, 1983, as published by Electronic Arts.
Similar packaging and developer recognition came with every other EA game of the era.
My, how the mighty have fallen. "EA:Brandslap 2004 : What, you mean actual developers work on this stuff?!?"
> I have doubts that a medium-sized rock coming directly from the moon would be picked up until it was too late, unless everyone started actively pinging circumlunar space 24/7.
And there's no need to do so unless you know there's a lunar weapons base. Lunar weapons bases are pretty hard to hide. If nothing else, the infrared signature of any lunar complex large enough to house a mass driver capable of hurling big hunks of metal towards Earth would be pretty unmistakable, even from the ground.
Too bad, really. I'd love to see a brand-new boxcar-sized meteorite land - with total plausible deniability - on top of an football-sized meteorite in a certain location in the Middle East.
> ever wanted to program in an object oriented
assembly language?"
Y'know, that couldn't be ANY MORE WRONG than an HTML rendering of a.GIF of a psychotic nun in a bondage outfit clubbing a baby seal to death with an Al Gore doll.
(With apologies to the denizen of the Monastery, from whom I stole the idea.)
> Why would you publicly show a picture that told everyone that you could see 30 metres underground durring the Cold War?
Because digging to 45 meters costs your adversary a small fortune. And because maybe you can see to 60 meters.
And because publishing a picture that proves you can see at 30m means that anything new you see next year at 60m depth and not at 30m depth must be pretty important:)
> Now if the ECU doesn't have any protection from something like this. Little Billy the cripple
starts to hit himself in the face.
> > Bully: "Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself! Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself! Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself!" > > Billy: *DUNK* *Sniffle* *THUD* *Blood Spitting* *DUNK*
Geek: *hacks into unit, points Pringles can at Billy the cripple*
Billy: *WHAM*, huh WTF? Sorry bully!
Bully: AAAaah! It hurts! Stop!
Geek: Yeah! Stop hitting the bully! *clickity-click-WHAM!*
Bully: UUnnngh! *blood spurts*
Billy: *CHOP/HACK/SLASH* I... I can't control it! What's happening to me?
Geek: I don't know! *pushes button* Honest! Must be one of them computer viruses! Are you sure you're patched and up to date Billy?
Billy: *SLAM* Yeah, I'm up to date. Sorry bully, that's gonna leave a mark, damn computer viruses again!
> Of course, there's nothing like curing muscle defficiency like getting chased by goons on bikes.
Of course, there's nothing like curing goons chasing you on bikes... by using your powered exoskeletal legs and arms to rip their ugly pink fleshsticks from their sockets.
> If a 100 Slashdoters were told that they could get into an Officemax/Best Buy/Circuit City and fill up a cart with whatever they want, and just walk out -with the chance of ever getting caught being 0.0001% - How many would resist the temptation
"And at the instant that you walk out of the store with your cart, every item in your cart (including the cart!) is magically duplicated back in its original positions on the store shelves for the next Slashdotter!"
Life is not a MMORPG. Bugs in the system that allow item duping are fine with me.
> The mindset of this sort of individual will be to bleed whatever is most conveniently at hand to bleed. Including the corporate body in which they are imbedded.
> >
Eventually this sort of behavior will get its comeuppance, but an awful lot of blood winds up on the floor before it happens. Unfortunately.
> >
Controlling this kind of thing is what's driven political change since the days of bearskins and flint axes. Needless to say, NOBODY has come up with an effective solution to the problem in all that time. Expect no magic bullets any time soon. Or ever.
I think you made a typo. You came to the correct conclusion ("expect no solution to 'this kind of thing' soon, or ever"), but your conclusion does not follow from your premises.
Allow me to provide a correction.
Gaining control of "this kind of thing" to your own advantage promising to control "this kind of thing" to protect others is what's driven political change since the days of bearskins and flint axes.
You're welcome.
Now, if you'll kindly send me 1% of your harvest, and let me feed this plant to your daughter while she spends the night in my grass hut, I'll make sure the Gods send rain this season and protect us from the tribe over the next hill. Being a Shaman is hard work, but it's a sacrifice I'm glad to make for my fellow tribsemen.
For 38.6% of your harvest (and a blowjob or two), I'll not only protect you, I'll even feel your pain!
For 33% of your harvest, I'll lay off your daughters. I'll even install cameras in your house and monitor everything everyone says, does, or thinks, just to make sure they're safe. How do I do it for less cost than the guy before me? It's all on the convenient layaway plan!
For 62% of your harvest, I'll undo everything the last guy did, because I'd rather sue your daughters in order to better ensure Jobs for Working Class Families in Your Neighborhood. Or something like that. Whatever it takes to get your vote, man.
> > what fun is the money if you never get a chance to spend it? > > Outsource the spending part. That gives you more time to earn money. And purely concidental, I happen to be an excellent spender, so I'll be your outsourcing company for very reasonable fee.
Tinfoil hats rejoice! Proof positive that the Government does read Slashdot!
> Not at all. The real question is whether or not the e-voting system will be a vehicle for widespread massive one-stop-shopping and completely untraceable fraud as opposed to the small-scale fraud that you seem to feel they will prevent.
Furthermore, small-scale fraud is pretty much guaranteed to cancel itself out. A corrupt Republican stuffs 20 dead peoples' ballots in one precinct, and a corrupt Democrat gets another 20 corpses to vote in the next precinct. Net effect: ZERO.
Electronic voting practically guarantees that the corrupt side with the best crackers to win. The only proof of electoral fraud in an electronic system is likely to come in the form "A team of hackers for Our Guy knows it stuffed 100,000,000 ballots. We hired them and watched it happen, but the popular vote came out 101,000,000 to 99,000,000 in favor of Their Guy. Obviously, Their Guy also hired crackers to rig the election! We want a do-over!"
Personally, I'm OK with a society in which the Side That Gains The Political Allegiance Of The Best Hackers gets to rule the world. I think a society in which the Democratic candidate campaigns on a platform "We'll execute all RIAA members in exchange for your help in rigging the vote", only to be countered with a Republican candidate running on "We'll execute all RIAA members, and because we're also pro-gun, we'll let you pull the trigger on them in exchange for your help in rigging the vote!" would be pretty fucking cool.
Would it be a free society? Given the influence the techno-elite would have, it might be even more free than our present one. But I'd never pretend to call it a democratic one. I'm OK with that, because I happen to believe that democracy is overrated. The Constitution in its current form differs with me on that point. The one that governs the country in which I live says the society is supposed to be a representative republic in which the votes cast by the people for their representatives count.
Because I also believe in the rule of law , and because that Constitution is the law, however cool a society ruled by h4x0rz might be, I must therefore oppose electronic voting. Pisses me off to be consistent in my beliefs sometimes, but there you go.
> It was fun for about 10 minutes. It was: I'm going out
and slaughtering people by the millions and why? There was no motivation for the player. It was just
wanton killing. I strongly believe in putting the player into a scenario where there's a reason you're doing
things. You have a cause and you're not just out there creating mayhem. That's, I guess, my objection to "Grand Theft Auto." I really don't like the amoralistic games where you're out there doing bad stuff just for fun. It's kind of like video vandalism, you know? Maybe you could argue that it's better to have the guy break windows on the video screen than down the street [laughs]. I really don't know. To me, it is a little troubling -- maybe I'm just kind of old-fashioned -- to have the player take on an amoral role in a game. I feel strongly that the player should have a cause and be acting for the just.
Right! For a brand new 1999 Roadster, a BRAND NEW TOASTER, and a Year's Supply of MEAT!. BIG MONEY! BIG PRIZES! I LOVE IT!
Seriously, Eugene, thanks. From Defender, to Robotron, to Blaster, to NARC, to Smash TV, to Total Carnage (how could they forget the "Baby Milk Factory!")... if Target: Terror is even half as intense, immersive, and just plain fun as your prior work, I'm not just gonna go to the arcade and buy that for a dollar, I'll wait a few months and get a full-size machine for myself.
> Let's see, people can either live with a system where you "only" have to save $750,000 over your lifetime to have any chance of actually becoming a capitalist and benefiting from "free trade", or they can try for a system that benefits people beyond the tiny ownership class.
And that system would be... what?
Altria creates wealth. It harvests tobacco out of the ground for a fraction of a cent per gram, and sells it to nicotine addicts for dollars a gram.
If you've a moral problem with the fact that their product kills people, invest in something like a chipmaker, an outsourcing firm (!), a mining company, a shipping company, a tractor-trailer maker, an environmental reclamation firm, a rocket fuel maker, an electric utility, a company that sells health insurance, whatever. There are plenty of companies out there that have figured out how to turn capital ("We buy stuff and hire workers") into wealth ("We sell products and services that workers make, and we do so at a profit").
Whether you get that profit in the form of dividends ("We can't use the capital to grow bigger, so we give it back to the shareholders") or capital gains ("We stick it in the bank until we want to buy a more efficient plant, or build a 90mm fab") doesn't matter.
Wealth doesn't grow on trees. (A government can print dollars, but it'll merely debase the value of those dollars through inflation. Dollars may grow on trees, but unless you're in the forestry sector, wealth doesn't.)
So if the economy grows at around 3% per year, you're going to need about $1M in invested wealth to generate $30,000 a year.
I advocate a system in which you own the wealth, and earn your $30,000 a year.
What system do you advocate? How do you generate $30,000 a year? Whose $1M capital do you invest? On what? And where do you get that capital, since you obviously don't intend that the $30,000 in added value goes to the original owner of that capital?
How does your system differ from "Convince a bunch of thugs to steal your retirement for you -- whether by seizing $1M in assets outright, or by taxing at 50% the income generated by $2M -- from people who earned it, in order to give it away to those who did not?"
If you cannot come up with a good answer to that one, you are worse than a beggar -- you are a thief.
> Sythesis: By strapping buttered bread on the backs of millions of cats and dropping them, all cat-bread entities will stop short of landing on the ground and hover over the ground while spinning.
"After about 10 floors, it doesn't matter what side of the cat you staple the bread to, nor does it matter if anyone's there to observe it or not."
- Schrodinger's Dog.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! With this fantastic and expensive technology, the new-and-improved BCIS could have sent the 9/11 pilots their approval to go to flight school before they blew up the WTC, rather than six months after the attack, thereby saving them much embarassment.
By government standards, that means it's money well spent.
Especially if you're only caching the indexes to the key fields in RAM.
>
> If it was for the DHS or NSA you would not have heard about the purchase.
You're both wrong. It's probably just some bureaucrat who happened to have $4.7M to spend before the end of the fiscal year. Half an hour ago he saw a Slashdot article titled "Can Software Kill?", and he said "Hey, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to find out!"
Heh, I remember a pitchman throwing $100 bills into the audience as part of his hook to get people to listen to the pitch.
Can't fuckin' tell you the name of the distro to save my life. But man, I'll never forget the memory of a company whose marketing strategy was based on literally throwing money away.
Fond memories, man. I'm with the other guy who says tradeshows are like vacations. Hell, with nobody else to occupy your time, and having to stay for the weekend to get the cheap flight back home, tradeshows are better than vacations.
Problem is, most of the time, the vendor booth babes/drones are from marketing. They're clueless. Any company that puts enclued people (i.e. developers or other technies) at its booth stands a much better chance of getting my business.
If I want your marketing, I can get it from your web site. If I take time to talk to you in meatspace, you'd goddamn well better have someone in your booth with whom I can have an intelligent conversation.
Even at something like E3 - sure, it's nice to look at all the b00bies, but I'd still rather talk to someone who's... I dunno... actually developing software :)
Hey, I thought we agreed! What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Why must Hubble die? It's producing too much science, and not consuming enough pork dollars.
End of story. Hubble will die, we'll build a reusable shuttle that still can't go beyond low earth orbit, we'll spend tens of billions turning the existing shuttles into unmanned cargo lifters inferior to present unmanned launch vehicles, and we'll do it all to preserve the ISS.
Vote for me! I promise a chicken in every pot, a subcontractor in every district! And no pesky science to get in the way of your religious beliefs!
>
> I'll thank you to not use my colon as a whistle!
How about a tuba?
Sure you're not thinking of Marc Goodman's Bilestoad?
BTW: Bilestoad rocked.
> "Two Guys from Andromeda" = a Good Comedy in Space.
> John Carmack = a Great First Person Shooter.
> Richard Garriot = a Great RPG.
Sony Online Entertainment = Crap. :)
Let's go back in time 20 years.
Front cover:
Inside cover:
Back Cover:
-- Actual packaging for Axis Assassin, 1983, as published by Electronic Arts.
Similar packaging and developer recognition came with every other EA game of the era.
My, how the mighty have fallen. "EA:Brandslap 2004 : What, you mean actual developers work on this stuff?!?"
And there's no need to do so unless you know there's a lunar weapons base. Lunar weapons bases are pretty hard to hide. If nothing else, the infrared signature of any lunar complex large enough to house a mass driver capable of hurling big hunks of metal towards Earth would be pretty unmistakable, even from the ground.
Too bad, really. I'd love to see a brand-new boxcar-sized meteorite land - with total plausible deniability - on top of an football-sized meteorite in a certain location in the Middle East.
Y'know, that couldn't be ANY MORE WRONG than an HTML rendering of a .GIF of a psychotic nun in a bondage outfit clubbing a baby seal to death with an Al Gore doll.
(With apologies to the denizen of the Monastery, from whom I stole the idea.)
Because digging to 45 meters costs your adversary a small fortune. And because maybe you can see to 60 meters.
And because publishing a picture that proves you can see at 30m means that anything new you see next year at 60m depth and not at 30m depth must be pretty important :)
"FUCK."
- A Dalek, upon being Photoshopped into an M.C. Escher painting of recursive staircases.
>
> Bully: "Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself! Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself! Hey Billy, stop hitting yourself!"
>
> Billy: *DUNK* *Sniffle* *THUD* *Blood Spitting* *DUNK*
Geek: *hacks into unit, points Pringles can at Billy the cripple*
Billy: *WHAM*, huh WTF? Sorry bully!
Bully: AAAaah! It hurts! Stop!
Geek: Yeah! Stop hitting the bully! *clickity-click-WHAM!*
Bully: UUnnngh! *blood spurts*
Billy: *CHOP/HACK/SLASH* I... I can't control it! What's happening to me?
Geek: I don't know! *pushes button* Honest! Must be one of them computer viruses! Are you sure you're patched and up to date Billy?
Billy: *SLAM* Yeah, I'm up to date. Sorry bully, that's gonna leave a mark, damn computer viruses again!
Bully: *bleed, whimper*
Of course, there's nothing like curing goons chasing you on bikes... by using your powered exoskeletal legs and arms to rip their ugly pink fleshsticks from their sockets.
"It's Payback Time!"
- The Terminator
"And at the instant that you walk out of the store with your cart, every item in your cart (including the cart!) is magically duplicated back in its original positions on the store shelves for the next Slashdotter!"
Life is not a MMORPG. Bugs in the system that allow item duping are fine with me.
>
> Eventually this sort of behavior will get its comeuppance, but an awful lot of blood winds up on the floor before it happens. Unfortunately.
>
> Controlling this kind of thing is what's driven political change since the days of bearskins and flint axes. Needless to say, NOBODY has come up with an effective solution to the problem in all that time. Expect no magic bullets any time soon. Or ever.
I think you made a typo. You came to the correct conclusion ("expect no solution to 'this kind of thing' soon, or ever"), but your conclusion does not follow from your premises.
Allow me to provide a correction.
Gaining control of "this kind of thing" to your own advantage promising to control "this kind of thing" to protect others is what's driven political change since the days of bearskins and flint axes.
You're welcome.
Now, if you'll kindly send me 1% of your harvest, and let me feed this plant to your daughter while she spends the night in my grass hut, I'll make sure the Gods send rain this season and protect us from the tribe over the next hill. Being a Shaman is hard work, but it's a sacrifice I'm glad to make for my fellow tribsemen.
For 38.6% of your harvest (and a blowjob or two), I'll not only protect you, I'll even feel your pain!
For 33% of your harvest, I'll lay off your daughters. I'll even install cameras in your house and monitor everything everyone says, does, or thinks, just to make sure they're safe. How do I do it for less cost than the guy before me? It's all on the convenient layaway plan!
For 62% of your harvest, I'll undo everything the last guy did, because I'd rather sue your daughters in order to better ensure Jobs for Working Class Families in Your Neighborhood. Or something like that. Whatever it takes to get your vote, man.
>
> Outsource the spending part. That gives you more time to earn money. And purely concidental, I happen to be an excellent spender, so I'll be your outsourcing company for very reasonable fee.
Tinfoil hats rejoice! Proof positive that the Government does read Slashdot!
Furthermore, small-scale fraud is pretty much guaranteed to cancel itself out. A corrupt Republican stuffs 20 dead peoples' ballots in one precinct, and a corrupt Democrat gets another 20 corpses to vote in the next precinct. Net effect: ZERO.
Electronic voting practically guarantees that the corrupt side with the best crackers to win. The only proof of electoral fraud in an electronic system is likely to come in the form "A team of hackers for Our Guy knows it stuffed 100,000,000 ballots. We hired them and watched it happen, but the popular vote came out 101,000,000 to 99,000,000 in favor of Their Guy. Obviously, Their Guy also hired crackers to rig the election! We want a do-over!"
Personally, I'm OK with a society in which the Side That Gains The Political Allegiance Of The Best Hackers gets to rule the world. I think a society in which the Democratic candidate campaigns on a platform "We'll execute all RIAA members in exchange for your help in rigging the vote", only to be countered with a Republican candidate running on "We'll execute all RIAA members, and because we're also pro-gun, we'll let you pull the trigger on them in exchange for your help in rigging the vote!" would be pretty fucking cool.
Would it be a free society? Given the influence the techno-elite would have, it might be even more free than our present one. But I'd never pretend to call it a democratic one. I'm OK with that, because I happen to believe that democracy is overrated. The Constitution in its current form differs with me on that point. The one that governs the country in which I live says the society is supposed to be a representative republic in which the votes cast by the people for their representatives count.
Because I also believe in the rule of law , and because that Constitution is the law, however cool a society ruled by h4x0rz might be, I must therefore oppose electronic voting. Pisses me off to be consistent in my beliefs sometimes, but there you go.
Any decent occupational health and safety professional will also tell you stuff like "go outside and exercise, rather than spend all night gaming."
What do you mean? Nothing broke! Prove that something broke! C'mon! I dare ya!
Right! For a brand new 1999 Roadster, a BRAND NEW TOASTER, and a Year's Supply of MEAT!. BIG MONEY! BIG PRIZES! I LOVE IT!
Seriously, Eugene, thanks. From Defender, to Robotron, to Blaster, to NARC, to Smash TV, to Total Carnage (how could they forget the "Baby Milk Factory!")... if Target: Terror is even half as intense, immersive, and just plain fun as your prior work, I'm not just gonna go to the arcade and buy that for a dollar, I'll wait a few months and get a full-size machine for myself.
And that system would be... what?
Altria creates wealth. It harvests tobacco out of the ground for a fraction of a cent per gram, and sells it to nicotine addicts for dollars a gram.
If you've a moral problem with the fact that their product kills people, invest in something like a chipmaker, an outsourcing firm (!), a mining company, a shipping company, a tractor-trailer maker, an environmental reclamation firm, a rocket fuel maker, an electric utility, a company that sells health insurance, whatever. There are plenty of companies out there that have figured out how to turn capital ("We buy stuff and hire workers") into wealth ("We sell products and services that workers make, and we do so at a profit").
Whether you get that profit in the form of dividends ("We can't use the capital to grow bigger, so we give it back to the shareholders") or capital gains ("We stick it in the bank until we want to buy a more efficient plant, or build a 90mm fab") doesn't matter.
Wealth doesn't grow on trees. (A government can print dollars, but it'll merely debase the value of those dollars through inflation. Dollars may grow on trees, but unless you're in the forestry sector, wealth doesn't.)
So if the economy grows at around 3% per year, you're going to need about $1M in invested wealth to generate $30,000 a year.
I advocate a system in which you own the wealth, and earn your $30,000 a year.
What system do you advocate? How do you generate $30,000 a year? Whose $1M capital do you invest? On what? And where do you get that capital, since you obviously don't intend that the $30,000 in added value goes to the original owner of that capital?
How does your system differ from "Convince a bunch of thugs to steal your retirement for you -- whether by seizing $1M in assets outright, or by taxing at 50% the income generated by $2M -- from people who earned it, in order to give it away to those who did not?"
If you cannot come up with a good answer to that one, you are worse than a beggar -- you are a thief.
"After about 10 floors, it doesn't matter what side of the cat you staple the bread to, nor does it matter if anyone's there to observe it or not."
- Schrodinger's Dog.