hmm, I don't know why the parent was modded offtopic....it's a direct answer to an on-topic question..
Those are pretty good answers...it does raise one more question for me.
From your answers, it appears that just about everybody ends up with more money off of this. However, the website claims that the program will also fully fund the government. Given that you still have the same amount of money, sliced differently (plus whatever savings you get from not having all those different tax laws to worry about), how much is the government's income affected? Is the current tax system really such a large drain on the economy that throwing it out can provide such big savings for everyone without driving the government into bankrupcy?
> So in summary, you would only keep 100% of your paycheck if you live in a state/locality that doesn't level an income tax of its own.
Given that.5% of the federal taxes are probably not enough to keep the state running, I would assume most states would need to either have thier own sales tax or continue to have property taxes (which this appears to be attempting to abolish) so my guess would be that the states would probably need to tack at least another 7-10% (remember that most of them charge sales tax now, in addition to other taxes; I'm lumping together city and state taxes here for simplicity) so you're edging towards 30-40% sales tax on everything except education.
>You log onto a site like dice or monster and you see thousands of jobs. The only problem is these jobs demand skill and knowledge. Real >knowledge, not the kind that a certifcate from a 5 month program gives you.
Alas, they also require X years of experience, which you need to be hired to get..
It's not enough to know how to program or create a database, you have to have been paid to do it..
hmm...I've encountered this before, but I haven't really taken a serious look at it until I read this post. Since you seem to be familiar with the proposal, can you answer a few questions for me?
1) The site repeatedly emphasises that you will now take home 100% of your paycheck - no taxes deducted. How does the split between federal and state taxes work? Are all states now required to take thier income solely from sales tax, and is the percentage they get fixed? Either way, is this an infringement on state's rights?
2) How does this affect retirement/pension plans other than social security? Personally, I don't pay into social security, but I do pay into a state retirement plan which is IMO much better; would this plan force me to switch to social security?
3) According to the website, everything would be taxed at 23% (with a refund for "necessities"). Given that, as a college student on a very limited income, I pay almost no taxes, wouldn't I be voting to have less money if I approved this?
4) Wouldn't this increase the rate at which society fractures into the "haves" and "have-nots", as those earning {m/b}illions would have almost none of it taxed unless they choose to spend?
5) Between the increase in sales tax and the decrease in the taxes corporations pay, what would you expect to be the net change in the price of goods?
6) Why should corporations be exempt from taxes and yet still be given rights as persons? And since businesses aren't taxed, wouldn't than encourage everyone to just incorporate as a business and claim everything is for "business use"?
Paradise lost May 8th 2003 From The Economist print edition
So far, information technology has thrived on exponentials. Now it has to get back to earth, says Ludwig Siegele
CLOSE your eyes and think of information technology. You might picture your PC crashing yet again, and recall that your teenager was supposed to fix it. That leads you to the 12-year-old hacker who broke into a bank's computer system the other day, which brings to mind the whizz-kids in a garage inventing the next big thing that will turn them into the youngest billionaires ever.
In IT, youth seems to spring eternal. But think again: the real star of the high-tech industry is in fact a grey-haired septuagenarian. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, came up with probably the most famous prediction in IT: that the number of transistors which could be put on a single computer chip would double every 18 months. (What Mr Moore actually predicted was that the figure would double every year, later correcting his forecast to every two years, the average of which has come to be stated as his "law".)
This forecast, which implies a similar increase in processing power and reduction in price, has proved broadly accurate: between 1971 and 2001, transistor density has doubled every 1.96 years (see chart 1). Yet this pace of development is not dictated by any law of physics. Instead, it has turned out to be the industry's natural rhythm, and has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. IT firms and their customers wanted the prediction to come true and were willing to put up the money to make it happen.
Even more importantly, Moore's law provided the IT industry with a solid foundation for its optimism. In high-tech, the mantra goes, everything grows exponentially. This sort of thinking reached its peak during the internet boom of the late 1990s. Suddenly, everything seemed to be doubling in ever-shorter time periods: eyeballs, share prices, venture capital, bandwidth, network connections. The internet mania began to look like a global religious movement. Ubiquitous cyber-gurus, framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital land in which growth would be limitless, commerce frictionless and democracy direct. Sceptics were derided as bozos "who just don't get it".
Today, everybody is older and wiser. Given the current recession in IT, the idea of a parallel digital universe where the laws of economic gravity do not apply has been quietly abandoned. What has yet to sink in is that the current downturn is something more than the bottom of another cycle in the technology industry. Rather, as this survey will argue, the sector is going through deep structural changes which suggest that it is growing up or even, horrors, maturing. Silicon Valley, in particular, has not yet come to grips with the realities, argues Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, a database giant (who at 58 still sports a youthful hairdo). "There's a bizarre belief that we'll be young forever," he says.
It is not that Moore's law has suddenly ceased to apply. In fact, Mr Moore makes a good case that Intel can continue to double transistor density every 18 months for another decade. The real issue is whether this still matters. "The industry has entered its post-technological period, in which it is no longer technology itself that is central, but the value it provides to business and consumers," says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a senior manager at IBM and another grey-haired industry elder.
Scholars of economic history are not surprised. Whether steam or railways, electricity or steel, mass production or cars--all technological revolutions have gone through similar long-term cycles and have eventually come of age, argues Carlota Perez, a researcher at Britain's University of Sussex, in her book "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" (Edward Elgar, 2002).
Although I suppose economist.com can probably handle a slashdotting..
On the tube May 8th 2003 From The Economist print edition
A new type of computer memory uses carbon, rather than silicon
WAITING for a computer to turn on is a nuisance. That is why manufacturers have been trying to create "non-volatile" memories. These would be fast, like the random-access memory (RAM) chips that are currently used for often-accessed memory, but they would also continue to store information even without power, like hard drives, which are too slow to use except for long-term storage.
Several technologies have been competing to become the standard for fast, non-volatile memory. The best known is magnetic RAM, which IBM and Motorola are touting. Others are based on polymers or on strange-sounding metal alloys called chalcogenides that change shape when an electric charge is applied to them. But there is now a new entrant to the field: carbon.
New element on the block
Carbon comes in many forms. Diamonds and graphite are two of the most familiar ones. A less familiar variety is the nanotube, also known as a "buckytube" after Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes have a framework similar to the arrangement of the atoms in a nanotube. Nanotubes consist of a cylindrical array of carbon atoms whose diameter is only about 1 nanometre (a billionth of a metre). If Nantero, a firm based in Woburn, Massachusetts, proves correct, such tubes will soon be an integral part of computer memories.
Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer. Another wafer sits about 100 nanometres below the first. Because the nanotubes that Nantero uses conduct electricity, a small electric charge at one point on the second wafer will draw several dozen nanotubes towards it. Once they are there, they stay there. That is because they are bound by Van der Waals forces--intermolecular bonds that do not depend on external power for their maintenance. An additional application of current, however, will release the nanotubes. This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
If nanotubes were not so small, this would not be a big deal. Because they are, though, Nantero's technology can already achieve a data density considerably higher than existing RAMs. And because the wafers are so close together, those data can move rapidly from place to place. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond (billionth of a second). The best RAM chips, by contrast, need ten nanoseconds to perform a similar operation.
At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year. It thinks it will be able to tool up for commercial production quickly, because the fabrication technique it uses, though novel, relies on standard semiconductor-making technology.
The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
Though the recent chip is certainly impressive, the reason for getting excited about Nantero is not so much the present as the future. Unlike silicon, which is pushing against its physical limitations, carbon-nanotube technology is in its infancy. Greg Schmergel, Nantero's bos
hmm...I didn't see a price in the article, just a note that interested buyers should contact Sony directly. Anybody have any idea how much that thing will cost?
Somehow I tend to be suspicious of things with no price tag..
While it probably wouldn't work - the prof moving back and forth, not pronouncing words clearly - it'd be a great help if it actually did...
Last semester I had an interpreter for one of my classes. (I'm deaf and the teacher had a heavy accent) My interpreter couldn't understand him either!
What if you disconnect and reconnect with a totally different IP address? (especially likely if you're a mobile user...you could be connecting to a completely different network).
What if it's a public computer? Your cookies might be stored separately from someone else's (presumably you have different logins) but then you connect from the same IP address..
2. Session based on URL- or POST-embedded token.
Cool, so if I want to get to your information, all I have to do it pull up your history folder:-)
Of course, in how many countries is Mandarin a major language? My first guess (and this is total guesswork) would be one..
English has the advantage of being the native language of several of the most powerful countries in the world. (Plus, of course, just about every country has to deal with the US, so they'd darned well better have people who speak English;-))
I may not be fully familiar with all of the metric units, but once you get used to them they're so much simpler to use. When I took physics in college, we started out with metric units, and then the teacher made us solve problems in American units, so we had to start converting back and forth, which annoyed me no end.
But then, I'm terrible at distances anyway....kilometers mean as much to me as miles do (not much:-))
I haven't read this book, but I second the motion to read Singh's work; I have both Fermat's Enigma and The Code Book and I thought they were very well written.
You never know....several states have managed to pass them, maybe the feds will too.
Of course, I don't know about the other dates, but I can tell you that when this was passed in Colorado, the democrats had a senate majority...and the republicans killed it in the house the first time through..
I live in Colorado, and I tell you, you would not BELIEVE the effect the no-call lists had here. In the days leading up to the law taking effect we were getting a dozen telemarketing calls a day...now, none:-)
Granted, I'm currently not getting any spam, either, since I just changed email addresses...but that isn't something you want to do every day:-)
Total agreement there....Analog has IMO some of the best science fiction available. You can see the table of contents and subscribe at http://www.analogsf.com/ I particularly recommend the probability zero section, and they're currently running an interesting novel entitled "Shootout at the Nokai Corral"
A surplus means that the government can pay off some of the debt, reducing future interest payments, leading to more surpluses, further reducing interest payments, until we eventually don't have a lot of money wasted paying off interest for loans and taxes can be cut permanently.
Or I suppose we could cut taxes now and keep spending more of the budget on interest...
>Say it with me: You can't discriminate against those who are on top.
You can dicriminate against anyone. Suppose I have a business that provides political consulting. Can I refuse to hire Republicans?
>Let's take the theoretical situation that a white man and a black woman go for the same job. They both have the same qualifications, >and are equally competent.
In that case, either could be hired. Now let's take the case where one is more qualified than the other, but the less qualified person gets the job instead. If the less qualified person is the white man, that's racism and you're headed for a lawsuit. If it's the black woman, that's "affirmative action"....but it's still racism. Race shouldn't play a role in the decision either way.
In another post, someone pointed out that some jobs are better performed by people of a specific gender, which is true. I wouldn't hire a man to play the part of Juliet, and I would expect the majority of workers in a profession that depends on physical strength (such as construction workers) to be men. But that's a case of gender *affecting* the qualifications for something, not overriding the qualifications.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm, I don't know why the parent was modded offtopic....it's a direct answer to an on-topic question..
.5% of the federal taxes are probably not enough to keep the state running, I would assume most states would need to either have thier own sales tax or continue to have property taxes (which this appears to be attempting to abolish) so my guess would be that the states would probably need to tack at least another 7-10% (remember that most of them charge sales tax now, in addition to other taxes; I'm lumping together city and state taxes here for simplicity) so you're edging towards 30-40% sales tax on everything except education.
Those are pretty good answers...it does raise one more question for me.
From your answers, it appears that just about everybody ends up with more money off of this. However, the website claims that the program will also fully fund the government. Given that you still have the same amount of money, sliced differently (plus whatever savings you get from not having all those different tax laws to worry about), how much is the government's income affected? Is the current tax system really such a large drain on the economy that throwing it out can provide such big savings for everyone without driving the government into bankrupcy?
> So in summary, you would only keep 100% of your paycheck if you live in a state/locality that doesn't level an income tax of its own.
Given that
>You log onto a site like dice or monster and you see thousands of jobs. The only problem is these jobs demand skill and knowledge. Real
>knowledge, not the kind that a certifcate from a 5 month program gives you.
Alas, they also require X years of experience, which you need to be hired to get..
It's not enough to know how to program or create a database, you have to have been paid to do it..
hmm...I've encountered this before, but I haven't really taken a serious look at it until I read this post. Since you seem to be familiar with the proposal, can you answer a few questions for me?
1) The site repeatedly emphasises that you will now take home 100% of your paycheck - no taxes deducted. How does the split between federal and state taxes work? Are all states now required to take thier income solely from sales tax, and is the percentage they get fixed? Either way, is this an infringement on state's rights?
2) How does this affect retirement/pension plans other than social security? Personally, I don't pay into social security, but I do pay into a state retirement plan which is IMO much better; would this plan force me to switch to social security?
3) According to the website, everything would be taxed at 23% (with a refund for "necessities"). Given that, as a college student on a very limited income, I pay almost no taxes, wouldn't I be voting to have less money if I approved this?
4) Wouldn't this increase the rate at which society fractures into the "haves" and "have-nots", as those earning {m/b}illions would have almost none of it taxed unless they choose to spend?
5) Between the increase in sales tax and the decrease in the taxes corporations pay, what would you expect to be the net change in the price of goods?
6) Why should corporations be exempt from taxes and yet still be given rights as persons? And since businesses aren't taxed, wouldn't than encourage everyone to just incorporate as a business and claim everything is for "business use"?
hmm, I missed something...how is it redundant when nobody else posted it?
Paradise lost
May 8th 2003
From The Economist print edition
So far, information technology has thrived on exponentials. Now it has to get back to earth, says Ludwig Siegele
CLOSE your eyes and think of information technology. You might picture your PC crashing yet again, and recall that your teenager was supposed to fix it. That leads you to the 12-year-old hacker who broke into a bank's computer system the other day, which brings to mind the whizz-kids in a garage inventing the next big thing that will turn them into the youngest billionaires ever.
In IT, youth seems to spring eternal. But think again: the real star of the high-tech industry is in fact a grey-haired septuagenarian. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, came up with probably the most famous prediction in IT: that the number of transistors which could be put on a single computer chip would double every 18 months. (What Mr Moore actually predicted was that the figure would double every year, later correcting his forecast to every two years, the average of which has come to be stated as his "law".)
This forecast, which implies a similar increase in processing power and reduction in price, has proved broadly accurate: between 1971 and 2001, transistor density has doubled every 1.96 years (see chart 1). Yet this pace of development is not dictated by any law of physics. Instead, it has turned out to be the industry's natural rhythm, and has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. IT firms and their customers wanted the prediction to come true and were willing to put up the money to make it happen.
Even more importantly, Moore's law provided the IT industry with a solid foundation for its optimism. In high-tech, the mantra goes, everything grows exponentially. This sort of thinking reached its peak during the internet boom of the late 1990s. Suddenly, everything seemed to be doubling in ever-shorter time periods: eyeballs, share prices, venture capital, bandwidth, network connections. The internet mania began to look like a global religious movement. Ubiquitous cyber-gurus, framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital land in which growth would be limitless, commerce frictionless and democracy direct. Sceptics were derided as bozos "who just don't get it".
Today, everybody is older and wiser. Given the current recession in IT, the idea of a parallel digital universe where the laws of economic gravity do not apply has been quietly abandoned. What has yet to sink in is that the current downturn is something more than the bottom of another cycle in the technology industry. Rather, as this survey will argue, the sector is going through deep structural changes which suggest that it is growing up or even, horrors, maturing. Silicon Valley, in particular, has not yet come to grips with the realities, argues Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, a database giant (who at 58 still sports a youthful hairdo). "There's a bizarre belief that we'll be young forever," he says.
It is not that Moore's law has suddenly ceased to apply. In fact, Mr Moore makes a good case that Intel can continue to double transistor density every 18 months for another decade. The real issue is whether this still matters. "The industry has entered its post-technological period, in which it is no longer technology itself that is central, but the value it provides to business and consumers," says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a senior manager at IBM and another grey-haired industry elder.
Scholars of economic history are not surprised. Whether steam or railways, electricity or steel, mass production or cars--all technological revolutions have gone through similar long-term cycles and have eventually come of age, argues Carlota Perez, a researcher at Britain's University of Sussex, in her book "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" (Edward Elgar, 2002).
In her model (see cha
>over 1 terabit per cm^2
So, in terms of actual storage space in the computer, this means...what?
Although I suppose economist.com can probably handle a slashdotting..
On the tube
May 8th 2003
From The Economist print edition
A new type of computer memory uses carbon, rather than silicon
WAITING for a computer to turn on is a nuisance. That is why manufacturers have been trying to create "non-volatile" memories. These would be fast, like the random-access memory (RAM) chips that are currently used for often-accessed memory, but they would also continue to store information even without power, like hard drives, which are too slow to use except for long-term storage.
Several technologies have been competing to become the standard for fast, non-volatile memory. The best known is magnetic RAM, which IBM and Motorola are touting. Others are based on polymers or on strange-sounding metal alloys called chalcogenides that change shape when an electric charge is applied to them. But there is now a new entrant to the field: carbon.
New element on the block
Carbon comes in many forms. Diamonds and graphite are two of the most familiar ones. A less familiar variety is the nanotube, also known as a "buckytube" after Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes have a framework similar to the arrangement of the atoms in a nanotube. Nanotubes consist of a cylindrical array of carbon atoms whose diameter is only about 1 nanometre (a billionth of a metre). If Nantero, a firm based in Woburn, Massachusetts, proves correct, such tubes will soon be an integral part of computer memories.
Nantero's memory chips consist of billions of nanotubes, each a few hundred nanometres long, suspended from a silicon wafer. Another wafer sits about 100 nanometres below the first. Because the nanotubes that Nantero uses conduct electricity, a small electric charge at one point on the second wafer will draw several dozen nanotubes towards it. Once they are there, they stay there. That is because they are bound by Van der Waals forces--intermolecular bonds that do not depend on external power for their maintenance. An additional application of current, however, will release the nanotubes. This means that a group of a few dozen nanotubes can act as a memory element, storing a single bit (either a one or a zero) of the binary code that computers use to operate. If the connection between the wafers is live at a particular point, the bit represented is a one. If not, it is a zero.
If nanotubes were not so small, this would not be a big deal. Because they are, though, Nantero's technology can already achieve a data density considerably higher than existing RAMs. And because the wafers are so close together, those data can move rapidly from place to place. Nantero's new memory can read or write a bit in as little as half a nanosecond (billionth of a second). The best RAM chips, by contrast, need ten nanoseconds to perform a similar operation.
At the moment, Nantero has only a working prototype. But the firm aims to have memories on the market within a year. It thinks it will be able to tool up for commercial production quickly, because the fabrication technique it uses, though novel, relies on standard semiconductor-making technology.
The main difficulty faced by others who have tried to go down the buckytube route is getting the tubes to align with each other when they are hung from the first wafer. Until now, the approach has been to try to grow all of the tubes in the correct orientation to start with. But Nantero's founders came up with a simpler, if less elegant, solution. They use established lithographic techniques to get rid of tubes that are pointing in the wrong direction by zapping them with an electron beam. That leaves only those that are hanging down towards the opposite wafer.
Though the recent chip is certainly impressive, the reason for getting excited about Nantero is not so much the present as the future. Unlike silicon, which is pushing against its physical limitations, carbon-nanotube technology is in its infancy. Greg Schmergel, Nantero's bos
hmm...I didn't see a price in the article, just a note that interested buyers should contact Sony directly. Anybody have any idea how much that thing will cost?
Somehow I tend to be suspicious of things with no price tag..
While it probably wouldn't work - the prof moving back and forth, not pronouncing words clearly - it'd be a great help if it actually did... Last semester I had an interpreter for one of my classes. (I'm deaf and the teacher had a heavy accent) My interpreter couldn't understand him either!
If they're anything like UPS, they put it under the door mat.
I swear, every time they try to deliver a package and I'm not home they stick it under the mat, even if that means the mat is a foot in the air..
Odd...I've been through several versions of Mozilla and my old profile works just fine.
Why bother creating a new profile at all?
Is there something wrong with the old one?
Well, the original post said methods that are more reliable/secure than cookies...I just want to know how these qualify.
>1. Session based on incoming IP address.
:-)
What if you disconnect and reconnect with a totally different IP address? (especially likely if you're a mobile user...you could be connecting to a completely different network).
What if it's a public computer? Your cookies might be stored separately from someone else's (presumably you have different logins) but then you connect from the same IP address..
2. Session based on URL- or POST-embedded token.
Cool, so if I want to get to your information, all I have to do it pull up your history folder
Of course, in how many countries is Mandarin a major language? My first guess (and this is total guesswork) would be one..
;-))
English has the advantage of being the native language of several of the most powerful countries in the world. (Plus, of course, just about every country has to deal with the US, so they'd darned well better have people who speak English
As an American....I agree :-)
:-))
I may not be fully familiar with all of the metric units, but once you get used to them they're so much simpler to use. When I took physics in college, we started out with metric units, and then the teacher made us solve problems in American units, so we had to start converting back and forth, which annoyed me no end.
But then, I'm terrible at distances anyway....kilometers mean as much to me as miles do (not much
I haven't read this book, but I second the motion to read Singh's work; I have both Fermat's Enigma and The Code Book and I thought they were very well written.
Would you happen to know where you can find those algorithms?
I suppose I ought to be able to find them on google..
If you sell him a rock for a million dollars, theoretically it's worth a million dollars to him...otherwise he wouldn't buy it!
Well, for those employed at universities, I imagine they made good use of their grad students..
You never know....several states have managed to pass them, maybe the feds will too.
Of course, I don't know about the other dates, but I can tell you that when this was passed in Colorado, the democrats had a senate majority...and the republicans killed it in the house the first time through..
I live in Colorado, and I tell you, you would not BELIEVE the effect the no-call lists had here. In the days leading up to the law taking effect we were getting a dozen telemarketing calls a day...now, none :-)
:-)
Granted, I'm currently not getting any spam, either, since I just changed email addresses...but that isn't something you want to do every day
Total agreement there....Analog has IMO some of the best science fiction available. You can see the table of contents and subscribe at http://www.analogsf.com/ I particularly recommend the probability zero section, and they're currently running an interesting novel entitled "Shootout at the Nokai Corral"
A surplus means that the government can pay off some of the debt, reducing future interest payments, leading to more surpluses, further reducing interest payments, until we eventually don't have a lot of money wasted paying off interest for loans and taxes can be cut permanently.
Or I suppose we could cut taxes now and keep spending more of the budget on interest...
>Say it with me: You can't discriminate against those who are on top.
You can dicriminate against anyone. Suppose I have a business that provides political consulting. Can I refuse to hire Republicans?
>Let's take the theoretical situation that a white man and a black woman go for the same job. They both have the same qualifications,
>and are equally competent.
In that case, either could be hired. Now let's take the case where one is more qualified than the other, but the less qualified person gets the job instead. If the less qualified person is the white man, that's racism and you're headed for a lawsuit. If it's the black woman, that's "affirmative action"....but it's still racism. Race shouldn't play a role in the decision either way.
In another post, someone pointed out that some jobs are better performed by people of a specific gender, which is true. I wouldn't hire a man to play the part of Juliet, and I would expect the majority of workers in a profession that depends on physical strength (such as construction workers) to be men. But that's a case of gender *affecting* the qualifications for something, not overriding the qualifications.