One reason the rich get a lot of these tax breaks, is that they assume higher risks... Yes, if you got $100M in the bank, it's pretty easy to assume risk on new investments. Nonetheless, the risk is what is being rewarded.
Uh-Huh. So the risk is really about going from SUPER-DUPER-DUPER rich, to just SUPER-DUPER rich for a few years. Somehow I don't see that as much of a "risk", especially one worth rewarding with lower tax rates. If you take a 100% safe job earning a specific salary,
Where are these 100% safe jobs you're referring too? Because I'll take one of those, thanks. The truth is that economies bust, people get sick, and people screw up. No job is "100% safe". The only thing that's even close to "100% safe" is having 100 million dollars sitting in the bank. but you're not assuming much risk either
Uh-huh. Tell that to the people who've just lost thousands of dollars in equity on their major investment, their home do to the credit crisis. Tell that to the people who've been laid off over the various recessions the country has experienced. If you think being middle class (and to a much larger extent lower class) isn't taking a lot more risks than some guy who's super-rich, then I guess you don't know the true meaning of the word risk.
Even worse when it is not simple tax evasion but the proceeds of crime.
Everything I've heard and read says this is simply not true. Swiss law allows the courts to crack open the banking privacy when a crime has been committed. I don't think that's any different from most other countries banking laws. What's different is that tax evasion isn't a crime (a misdemeanor) in Switzerland.
So while you can't really accuse the Swiss of profiting any more off criminals than anyone else, you can, and you'd be entirely accurate in doing so to accuse them of profiting from hiding assets from other countries Tax Man.
There's other countries in the world that have aided criminals in hiding assets at different times. I'm not sure which ones those currently are, but Switzerland isn't among them from everything I've read.
From what I gather, most Americans aren't aware of what their troops are doing overseas.
It's hard to generalize about something like this. But I'd say there's a large portion of Americans that don't pay much attention to what's happening outside the US. A lot of people don't know about GITMO and the lack of any legal process to actually find out who's guilty of anything and who's not. Abu-Graib was widely reported, so most people should have an idea that it went on. I'm not sure about the whole waterboarding thing. It's been quite widely reported here in the media for quite a long time. So you'd have to be REALLY not paying attention to hear about it.
Anyway, I think one data point of your New York friend isn't really much to base an opinion on. In general I'd say people in the US are less informed about what's going on outside the US. But you have to realize that the US is an enormous country with a large population. Foreign news just isn't as relevant to us as it is to people in Europe where international relations are much more important because the countries are just much closer and the ties a lot more important.
Our TV news shows are also just of a lower quality. I was in Europe earlier this month and quickly noticed that CNN International was a much better news source than the crappy Big-Name-Guy laden, talk-about-nothing CNN we get in the US. The other cable news shows are about as bad, or worse (I'm looking at you FOX.) It's bad enough that Comedy Central has a "fake" news program (The Daily Show) that's been reported as being as accurate and relevant as our other cable news shows. This isn't because Comedy Central has some kind of brilliant, hard-nosed news team.
Tax evasion is illegal in switzerland by law but the banking secret usually makes it impossible to track it down.
What I've been told, but don't have a hard source for, is that the Swiss court system will crack-open the privacy for cases where a crime is likely to have occurred (like say you're a Columbian drug lord, or a Terrorist). But it won't crack open the privacy where tax-evasion in a foreign country has occurred. The explanation in this difference (both being a crime in the foreign country) was that tax-evasion in Switzerland is a crime, but tax-evasion from foreign taxes is not a crime in Switzerland. As evidence to this, wikipedia has the following to say about tax evasion in Switzerland:
Swiss law distinguishes between tax evasion and tax fraud. If any holdings are not declared to the taxation authorities, a natural or legal person commits tax evasion. Tax evasion is not considered an offence, but only a misdemeanour. It is assumed that failed declaration of one's assets is not sufficient evidence for criminal intent, as the chance of unintentional failure is too high. However, tax fraud is considered a criminal offence under Swiss law and prosecuted according to the Swiss Penal Code. A forged tax declaration, like the statement of significantly below-market valuation of real estate or the counterfeiting of bank statements, is such a criminal offence of tax fraud.
Why not? I don't think the poster said individual privacy rights were inviable. Get a warrant issued by a judge for a valid reason and the government can look at mostly whatever it likes. The only exceptions (I think) are lawyer confidentiality, and doctor/patient confidentiality.
The only difference here is that Switzerland seems to have a banker/client confidentiality, which seems a bit strange to the rest of us to throw it in with doctors and lawyers. Even that may I believe is cracked open for criminal cases, just not for tax evasion in a foreign country (which I believe isn't illegal in Switzerland).
This statement actually surprised me: During a meeting of his Rotary Club in Zurich, his fellow members were appalled that Swiss bankers might be managing the money of foreign tax evaders. "We had no idea," Mr. Hummler recalls them saying, "that you did things like that."
I don't pay a hell of a lot of attention to financial news, or banking laws.. but even _I_ know that the Swiss have built a long reputation on providing accounts to foreigners trying to avoid taxes in their home country. Isn't this just common knowledge? I'd think it'd be even more common knowledge in Switzerland.
well yes it is nice that you don't have to panic if you forget to lock a door or something there.
I don't think that makes up for calling 911 potentially dying while the paramedics try to get in the building behind the multiple locks, then try to find the apartment you're in.
"Security" also works against the guys you WANT in the building as well.
Just because two people take different paths to a goal, if both paths cross the same unsafe bridge they will both fail.
I think what I'm saying is MS and Mozilla are pursuing different goals, but people are using the same word "integration" to describe them.
As to the rest of your argument, I'm not sure what XPI has to do with changing the usability and UI one comes to expect from a web-browser. Are you just trying to say you "don't trust these mozilla guys"? If so, that's fine I guess. I just don't think it has anything to do with the two different ideas presented here.
Is it just me, or is this hideously inefficient, ugly, and Wrong(tm)?
Maybe it's inefficient, ugly, and "wrong", but having a client on essentially every computer that speaks the same language, and being actively developed is a major advantage over trying to develop your own client and display language. (And then have to distribute and maintain that whole package).
The web-browser as client, http as transport, html as display, and javascript as client language has problems, (and large ones). But it's not going away anytime soon for the above reasons. Many of those problems are slowly going away as people build layers so you don't have to directly mess with html, javascript, or deal with the limitations of http.
To all the people panicking about IE like OS integration, I think you're all over-reacting and missunderstanding. There's more than one way to join two things together.
The article doesn't go into specifics, but I'd imagine that what Beard is talking about is creating a browser that has a richer UI, and not limited by the traditional browser window. The effect would be a browser that doesn't look like a browser, and webapps that don't look like webapps. This doesn't mean a tightly-coupled OS/Browser combo like IE is/was. Obviously Mozilla can't really do that, since they don't have control over any OS.
Because I would like my browser to interact with my machine as little as possible
I think the point, at least of Weave is to eliminate the idea of "a web browser is a nice square window that delivers web pages". And create the idea that "Firefox 4 is a platform that can render webapps that don't look like they live inside a traditional "web browser". That doesn't really mean your browser is going to change anything else on your computer.
I'm not sure why you think this kind of technology is limited to social networking. To me it sounds very general-purpose, and has the potential to create webapps that you didn't even realize were webapps. The only reason google-maps looks like a webapp is because it's rendered inside a traditional web-browser.
You mean, they put out a new version of their main product, it was widely ridiculed, and their brand suffered as a result?
That's certainly a part of it, but the article says Microsoft has been declining consistently for 4 years. Vista is only a little over a year old. If this were just a problem of one poor product, I don't think Microsoft should be concerned. But a decline over 4 years should have Microsoft very worried.
What do I care who's first? What I care about is who has the best browser that complies with standards. That may also include render speed, stability, javascript compatibility, security, or whatever. "Who's first" is about the thing I care about the least.
Ironically, asbestos is quite safe, as long as you leave it in the wall where it belongs.
Asbestos was also put around exposed pipes, which can sometimes be damaged and the fibers released. It was also sometimes put into concrete in trace amounts. Which is no-big-deal of course, unless you start drilling into the concrete (which people do all the time) and don't realize it contains small amounts of asbestos (which is often hard to detect).
You're right though that people tend to freak out too much about asbestos though. It's not a substance without concern though.
In his science fiction novel Firestar , Michael Flynn points to the hysteria over electric blankets as proof that a large portion of society is too dumb to appreciate technological advance.
It's not really a question of smarts, but more to do with a general distrust of the government and science. Government lies and deceives all the time, as we've seen in the last 7 1/4 years. Science is poorly presented by the mass media where "study X says A causes cancer." then the next year "Study Y says A doesn't cause cancer". All the important details are left out, like maybe Study Y had a small sample size, and was conducted in rats. So people get trained to distrust anything they hear, even if it's become a well established "fact".
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop?
Given that laptop sales are at an all-time high, I'd say the answer is "yes". Do people want more? Sure, but they're willing to settle for 3 hours.
Part of them problem is laptops are just an extension of desktops, and desktops are driven by more and more resource usage (and thus more power). I'm sure someone could come out with a laptop with a 12 hour battery life, but:
It'd run modern desktop software slowly. It'd have a smaller storage space (20 gigs of flash ram?) (this isn't so bad really) The screen wouldn't be quite as "nice" as the 3 hour laptop. The maker would likely have to compromise on the screen technology to reduce power consumption.
low-power devices like this exist, of course. They're just identified in a different class of device because of the above compromises.
This isn't a new market, it's a well established one. Intel already has serious competition in this market, as evidenced in the article: The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors.
I'm not sure that anyone really cares about what the instruction set for a handheld device is, since the operating systems for handheld devices has been relatively chip-agnostic.
I predict, within the first 20 posts someone will be remarking how they would destroy it if they encountered it.
Why would any slashdot poster do that?
I'd try to hack the damn thing, and take control over it. It can't be using anything more sophisticated that off the shelf parts. You'd likely just have to buy a remote control of the same type and frequency and turn-the-tables.
Fortunately for this guy, I don't live in Atlanta, am not a drug dealer and am not a bum.
Second, many people should rejoice, this is a golden opportunity to decommission a warhead or two for the plutonium in it.
No dice.
Nasa uses Plutonium-238 in it's RTGs because it's a strong alpha-emitter, and has a short half-life on 87 years. I also believe it's non-fissile (meaning it can't be used for an nuclear weapon).
Plutonium-239 is the stuff they use in nuclear weapons, and it's fairly useless as an RTG generator.
If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s.
I have to totally agree. Several months ago I was recovering data from my old C64/128 disks. The word processor of the time was really good by the standards of the time (80 columns? WOW!). In 2008 however it was a total piece of garbage. Forget about data sharing of export, those things didn't really exist. As far as features, one decent programmer could pretty easily recode the thing with the features it included in maybe a month.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous
That's probably true. The other effect is your applications would do 1/5 as much, and there'd be 1/5 the choices.
Programmers don't use processor and memory resources because they have some perverse need to use more and more resources. They do it because they can develop applications faster because they can develop applications faster by re-using code, working in memory-managed application, etc.
I do agree that Microsoft has pursued a "keep it expensive" strategy by using their monopoly power. The word processor and Spreadsheet haven't made any real improvements since at best Office 97, but the requirements keep going up. But the rest of the computing world has done the same thing. I can't really run a modern desktop Linux distribution like Ubuntu on a machine with 64 MB of memory. It might not be quite as aggressive as MS pursues, but the resource use is still prevalent.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason the rich get a lot of these tax breaks, is that they assume higher risks
Yes, if you got $100M in the bank, it's pretty easy to assume risk on new investments. Nonetheless, the risk is what is being rewarded.
Uh-Huh. So the risk is really about going from SUPER-DUPER-DUPER rich, to just SUPER-DUPER rich for a few years. Somehow I don't see that as much of a "risk", especially one worth rewarding with lower tax rates.
If you take a 100% safe job earning a specific salary,
Where are these 100% safe jobs you're referring too? Because I'll take one of those, thanks. The truth is that economies bust, people get sick, and people screw up. No job is "100% safe". The only thing that's even close to "100% safe" is having 100 million dollars sitting in the bank.
but you're not assuming much risk either
Uh-huh. Tell that to the people who've just lost thousands of dollars in equity on their major investment, their home do to the credit crisis. Tell that to the people who've been laid off over the various recessions the country has experienced. If you think being middle class (and to a much larger extent lower class) isn't taking a lot more risks than some guy who's super-rich, then I guess you don't know the true meaning of the word risk.
Even worse when it is not simple tax evasion but the proceeds of crime.
Everything I've heard and read says this is simply not true. Swiss law allows the courts to crack open the banking privacy when a crime has been committed. I don't think that's any different from most other countries banking laws. What's different is that tax evasion isn't a crime (a misdemeanor) in Switzerland.
So while you can't really accuse the Swiss of profiting any more off criminals than anyone else, you can, and you'd be entirely accurate in doing so to accuse them of profiting from hiding assets from other countries Tax Man.
There's other countries in the world that have aided criminals in hiding assets at different times. I'm not sure which ones those currently are, but Switzerland isn't among them from everything I've read.
From what I gather, most Americans aren't aware of what their troops are doing overseas.
It's hard to generalize about something like this. But I'd say there's a large portion of Americans that don't pay much attention to what's happening outside the US. A lot of people don't know about GITMO and the lack of any legal process to actually find out who's guilty of anything and who's not. Abu-Graib was widely reported, so most people should have an idea that it went on. I'm not sure about the whole waterboarding thing. It's been quite widely reported here in the media for quite a long time. So you'd have to be REALLY not paying attention to hear about it.
Anyway, I think one data point of your New York friend isn't really much to base an opinion on. In general I'd say people in the US are less informed about what's going on outside the US. But you have to realize that the US is an enormous country with a large population. Foreign news just isn't as relevant to us as it is to people in Europe where international relations are much more important because the countries are just much closer and the ties a lot more important.
Our TV news shows are also just of a lower quality. I was in Europe earlier this month and quickly noticed that CNN International was a much better news source than the crappy Big-Name-Guy laden, talk-about-nothing CNN we get in the US. The other cable news shows are about as bad, or worse (I'm looking at you FOX.) It's bad enough that Comedy Central has a "fake" news program (The Daily Show) that's been reported as being as accurate and relevant as our other cable news shows. This isn't because Comedy Central has some kind of brilliant, hard-nosed news team.
Tax evasion is illegal in switzerland by law but the banking secret usually makes it impossible to track it down.
What I've been told, but don't have a hard source for, is that the Swiss court system will crack-open the privacy for cases where a crime is likely to have occurred (like say you're a Columbian drug lord, or a Terrorist). But it won't crack open the privacy where tax-evasion in a foreign country has occurred. The explanation in this difference (both being a crime in the foreign country) was that tax-evasion in Switzerland is a crime, but tax-evasion from foreign taxes is not a crime in Switzerland. As evidence to this, wikipedia has the following to say about tax evasion in Switzerland:
You can't have it both ways.
Why not? I don't think the poster said individual privacy rights were inviable. Get a warrant issued by a judge for a valid reason and the government can look at mostly whatever it likes. The only exceptions (I think) are lawyer confidentiality, and doctor/patient confidentiality.
The only difference here is that Switzerland seems to have a banker/client confidentiality, which seems a bit strange to the rest of us to throw it in with doctors and lawyers. Even that may I believe is cracked open for criminal cases, just not for tax evasion in a foreign country (which I believe isn't illegal in Switzerland).
This statement actually surprised me:
During a meeting of his Rotary Club in Zurich, his fellow members were appalled that Swiss bankers might be managing the money of foreign tax evaders. "We had no idea," Mr. Hummler recalls them saying, "that you did things like that."
I don't pay a hell of a lot of attention to financial news, or banking laws.. but even _I_ know that the Swiss have built a long reputation on providing accounts to foreigners trying to avoid taxes in their home country. Isn't this just common knowledge? I'd think it'd be even more common knowledge in Switzerland.
well yes it is nice that you don't have to panic if you forget to lock a door or something there.
I don't think that makes up for calling 911 potentially dying while the paramedics try to get in the building behind the multiple locks, then try to find the apartment you're in.
"Security" also works against the guys you WANT in the building as well.
Just because two people take different paths to a goal, if both paths cross the same unsafe bridge they will both fail.
I think what I'm saying is MS and Mozilla are pursuing different goals, but people are using the same word "integration" to describe them.
As to the rest of your argument, I'm not sure what XPI has to do with changing the usability and UI one comes to expect from a web-browser. Are you just trying to say you "don't trust these mozilla guys"? If so, that's fine I guess. I just don't think it has anything to do with the two different ideas presented here.
Is it just me, or is this hideously inefficient, ugly, and Wrong(tm)?
Maybe it's inefficient, ugly, and "wrong", but having a client on essentially every computer that speaks the same language, and being actively developed is a major advantage over trying to develop your own client and display language. (And then have to distribute and maintain that whole package).
The web-browser as client, http as transport, html as display, and javascript as client language has problems, (and large ones). But it's not going away anytime soon for the above reasons. Many of those problems are slowly going away as people build layers so you don't have to directly mess with html, javascript, or deal with the limitations of http.
To all the people panicking about IE like OS integration, I think you're all over-reacting and missunderstanding. There's more than one way to join two things together.
The article doesn't go into specifics, but I'd imagine that what Beard is talking about is creating a browser that has a richer UI, and not limited by the traditional browser window. The effect would be a browser that doesn't look like a browser, and webapps that don't look like webapps. This doesn't mean a tightly-coupled OS/Browser combo like IE is/was. Obviously Mozilla can't really do that, since they don't have control over any OS.
Because I would like my browser to interact with my machine as little as possible
I think the point, at least of Weave is to eliminate the idea of "a web browser is a nice square window that delivers web pages". And create the idea that "Firefox 4 is a platform that can render webapps that don't look like they live inside a traditional "web browser". That doesn't really mean your browser is going to change anything else on your computer.
I'm not sure why you think this kind of technology is limited to social networking. To me it sounds very general-purpose, and has the potential to create webapps that you didn't even realize were webapps. The only reason google-maps looks like a webapp is because it's rendered inside a traditional web-browser.
You mean, they put out a new version of their main product, it was widely ridiculed, and their brand suffered as a result?
That's certainly a part of it, but the article says Microsoft has been declining consistently for 4 years. Vista is only a little over a year old. If this were just a problem of one poor product, I don't think Microsoft should be concerned. But a decline over 4 years should have Microsoft very worried.
This isn't a race, it's a competition.
What do I care who's first? What I care about is who has the best browser that complies with standards. That may also include render speed, stability, javascript compatibility, security, or whatever. "Who's first" is about the thing I care about the least.
Ironically, asbestos is quite safe, as long as you leave it in the wall where it belongs.
Asbestos was also put around exposed pipes, which can sometimes be damaged and the fibers released. It was also sometimes put into concrete in trace amounts. Which is no-big-deal of course, unless you start drilling into the concrete (which people do all the time) and don't realize it contains small amounts of asbestos (which is often hard to detect).
You're right though that people tend to freak out too much about asbestos though. It's not a substance without concern though.
In his science fiction novel Firestar , Michael Flynn points to the hysteria over electric blankets as proof that a large portion of society is too dumb to appreciate technological advance.
It's not really a question of smarts, but more to do with a general distrust of the government and science. Government lies and deceives all the time, as we've seen in the last 7 1/4 years. Science is poorly presented by the mass media where "study X says A causes cancer." then the next year "Study Y says A doesn't cause cancer". All the important details are left out, like maybe Study Y had a small sample size, and was conducted in rats. So people get trained to distrust anything they hear, even if it's become a well established "fact".
But they cost as much as an OLPC, what gives?
I guess because someone didn't have the capacity to produce a zillion of these things.
It also looks like technology stolen from the 1980s. Who really wants a display that looks like it belongs on a calculator?
It's a neat idea though. It just seems it's over-priced, and under-performing.
If you're a developer it can be the difference between using well-tested, well-supported tools or some barely limping along vendor-provided tools.
That's true. Though I think the point is mostly moot. The low-power MIPS chips tools are quite mature, as they've been around for forever.
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop?
Given that laptop sales are at an all-time high, I'd say the answer is "yes". Do people want more? Sure, but they're willing to settle for 3 hours.
Part of them problem is laptops are just an extension of desktops, and desktops are driven by more and more resource usage (and thus more power). I'm sure someone could come out with a laptop with a 12 hour battery life, but:
It'd run modern desktop software slowly.
It'd have a smaller storage space (20 gigs of flash ram?) (this isn't so bad really)
The screen wouldn't be quite as "nice" as the 3 hour laptop. The maker would likely have to compromise on the screen technology to reduce power consumption.
low-power devices like this exist, of course. They're just identified in a different class of device because of the above compromises.
This isn't a new market, it's a well established one. Intel already has serious competition in this market, as evidenced in the article:
The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors.
I'm not sure that anyone really cares about what the instruction set for a handheld device is, since the operating systems for handheld devices has been relatively chip-agnostic.
The guy was talking about assembly programming, so that wouldn't be applicable here.
Actually, he was talking about assembly on the 8 bit machines. Along with Basic, that was about your only option to program in.
The 16 bit machines had C compilers available for them, so programming was quite a bit easier.
That may explain the "easier to get into" comment.
I predict, within the first 20 posts someone will be remarking how they would destroy it if they encountered it.
Why would any slashdot poster do that?
I'd try to hack the damn thing, and take control over it. It can't be using anything more sophisticated that off the shelf parts. You'd likely just have to buy a remote control of the same type and frequency and turn-the-tables.
Fortunately for this guy, I don't live in Atlanta, am not a drug dealer and am not a bum.
Second, many people should rejoice, this is a golden opportunity to decommission a warhead or two for the plutonium in it.
No dice.
Nasa uses Plutonium-238 in it's RTGs because it's a strong alpha-emitter, and has a short half-life on 87 years. I also believe it's non-fissile (meaning it can't be used for an nuclear weapon).
Plutonium-239 is the stuff they use in nuclear weapons, and it's fairly useless as an RTG generator.
So at some point, circa 1988, somebody in either Reagan or Bush's administration decided it'd be easier to get Plutonium from the Soviet Union?
I'd say this is unlikely. The summary says we haven't PRODUCED plutonium since 1988, it says nothing about when we decided to purchase from Russia.
It could very well be the case that we had sufficient stockpiles in 1988 to last us several years until after the collapase of the Soviet Union.
If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s.
I have to totally agree. Several months ago I was recovering data from my old C64/128 disks. The word processor of the time was really good by the standards of the time (80 columns? WOW!). In 2008 however it was a total piece of garbage. Forget about data sharing of export, those things didn't really exist. As far as features, one decent programmer could pretty easily recode the thing with the features it included in maybe a month.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous
That's probably true. The other effect is your applications would do 1/5 as much, and there'd be 1/5 the choices.
Programmers don't use processor and memory resources because they have some perverse need to use more and more resources. They do it because they can develop applications faster because they can develop applications faster by re-using code, working in memory-managed application, etc.
I do agree that Microsoft has pursued a "keep it expensive" strategy by using their monopoly power. The word processor and Spreadsheet haven't made any real improvements since at best Office 97, but the requirements keep going up. But the rest of the computing world has done the same thing. I can't really run a modern desktop Linux distribution like Ubuntu on a machine with 64 MB of memory. It might not be quite as aggressive as MS pursues, but the resource use is still prevalent.