How do you know this? The article summary includes "When the judge learned the Sun vs. Microsoft antitrust case had revealed that MS keeps backups of all emails on over 100,000 tapes stored offsite, he ordered them to come up with the missing messages" which, while admittedly not a direct contradiction of your claim, seems to imply that backups are kept long enough to move them off-site in the form of 100k tapes, which to me sounds like more than 30 days of email.
No doubt MS is capable of this, but I'm perplexed: assuming at least a few of the missing emails were between MS employees and burst.com employees, wouldn't the burst.com folks still have a copy?
Sure, MS employees probably wouldn't cc: burst.com on the most damaging emails, but just having the burst.com side of the threads during the period in question would no doubt provide the ammo needed to annihilate any claim by MS that the emails sent in the 35-week mystery gap were "uninteresting."
I'm supposed to prove a negative? Riight. Common knowledge my ass, if it's so common google would have something on it, and so far I find nothing. Cite something or STFU. Mod flamebat all you want, the original was flamebait, and needs to be backed up with something vaguely credible.
You know what? I think you're a good person, and I think you're smart and you mean well. But I completely disagree with almost every single point in your post. This perplexes me -- how is it that two decent, thinking people can be so diametrically opposed on one subject? I'm not kidding, this always baffles me every time I experience it.
I bet you could guess my stand on most of the issues you raised (i.e., you should master the game to twist it into what you want/need it to be -- it's your duty to help fix the game if it's broken, no one should be "given" anything, no one has the right to have society pay for them to reproduce, Darwinism is not a bad thing when allowed to flourish within reason, and it's an absolutely desirable thing when supressed for too long, etc.) So I'm not sure what to do here. If you're interested, I'll go through it line-by-line giving my (usually opposite) stance -- just reply and ask if you like.
But, I think I can summarize the difference, save us both time, and possibly lead to understanding (if not agreement) sooner. I don't think everyone deserves equal success, only equal opportunity (of course, genetics makes sure not everyone has exactly the same opportunity -- I mean other than genetics). That is, I don't think there should be even a tiny amount of imposed "balance" or even a trifling of upset or dissent in the event that the situation is woefully unbalanced. I think it will take care of itself in the most efficient, proper manner. And, correct me if I'm wrong here, I believe you think some balance should be imposed.
Wonder why that is? Both are reasonable ideas (when argued sans insane ad hominem attacks), but one seems obviously right to me, and one seems obviously wrong (well-intentioned, but doomed to fail).
It's getting sticky now, but old enough to be under the radar of most mods. So let's take the gloves off:
Not everyone is equally smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, or charismatic. In my opinion, it is not wrong for the more capable to acquire (even significantly) greater wealth than others.
The more intelligent pay for this advantage in the form of the unavoidable realization that life sucks. It's important to continue to allow for this "unfair" lack of balance compensation, or the smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, charismatic people will just kill themselves, and we'll all suffer for it, since a dozen hard-working laborers without direction are usually less efficient than 12 each working on thier own.
Corporations and the wealthy pay a far lower percentage of their income in federal tax than you or I do.
Way to miss the point entirely. The percentage may be lower, but the total dollar amount paid is higher. That was my original assertion, and it still stands, wholly unassailed by any of your fine links and references.
The contents, however, are marred by the lack of definitions. Also by a lack of detailed relevance.
Yeah, well, we may not agree on an exact definition of rich, but I think we can agree that the top 1% qualify, yes? (To me, even the top 5 or 10%, maybe more, are what I consider rich.) So how about this:
The most recent Internal Revenue Service data available indicate that the top one percent of taxpayers paid about 25 percent of federal income taxes in 1989 but paid 36 percent of income taxes in 1999. The share of federal income taxes that the top five percent pays increased as well, but virtually all of that increase was due to the substantial rise in the share of income taxes that the top one percent pays.
How is that not detailed enough? It's crystal clear to me.
How does that relate to the claim about MS taxes?
Well, for one, MS taxes were brought up in an anecdotal way, with no reference, and claiming that some year MS paid zero income tax. I doubt that. More likely, they received a tax break for doing something the government wanted, such as in this case, and a tax break does not contradict my claim that croporations and the rich pay the majority of taxes in the US. Re-read the thread -- someone tried to tell us that the US government supports the rich and corporations at the expense of the poor.
In any case, most of his fulminations were against the corporate taxes, to which this was totally non-responsive. I also suspect that the years in question, 1989 & 1999, were selected by the author of the page to make his conclusions come out appropriately. But for this to be more than suspicion, I'd need to do a bit of research.
...such as read more than the first paragraph, which is the only one that supports my position, and you'll see how the author tries to attack may view while supporting yours, really. But the base facts are hard to deny. He puts a good spin on them thouugh!
Still, two datapoints don't present a very strong case, particularly when they are used to argue about terms (high income) that don't have a clear definition. E.g., what proportion of the population qualified as "high income households" in each of those two respective years? Without knowing that, the page doesn't mean anything.
Um hey, it says exactly what qualifies: those in the top 1% of income paid 25-36% of all taxes. It's actually more now, and I'm looking for links to show that. Why is that not already specific enough though?
But, $400M received in tax breaks by an industry that pays $33 BILLION dollars in taxes isn't a big deal, considering we're getting cleaner air out of the deal, which I'd say falls within the realm of the public good, which is what our collective taxes are supposed to be used for.
Government directly subsidizes oil consumption through preferential treatment in tax codes. A multitude of federal corporate income tax credits and deductions results in an effective income tax rate of 11% for the oil industry, compared to the non-oil industry average of 18%. If the oil industry paid the industrywide average tax rate (including oil) of 17%, they would have paid an additional $2.0 billion in 1991. Our results are consistent with a report by the Alliance to Save Energy that estimated the benefits of individual federal corporate income tax provisions. Their results showed that in 1989 preferential treatment yielded $1.8 billion to $4.6 billion in individual income tax benefits to the oil industry (Koplow, 1993).
The pay raises usually end up in the pockets of the business owners.
I don't follow this. Are you suggesting it belongs elsewhere?
But weren't the same American business owners, albeit in other industries
I believe that's impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely.
Isn't that what the entire anti-dumping, WTO policies are about?
No, dumping refers to selling a product at a price below its value to damage competition. It's usually only enacted against countries like Taiwan and Japan where the government heavily subsidizes a tech sector (not just one company) to gain a foothold in a new industry.
Big corporations, and in general the rich class, are continuously being subsidized by the government in US.
How is this possible? Since government doesn't produce, it gets all of its income from the people and companies whop pay taxes. Coproprations and rich people pay the vast majority of all taxes in the US. Sow how again, exactly, does the government subsidize corps and the rich while the corps and rich simultanously subsidize the government? Are you suggesting that the poor, who pay little or no (or negative!) taxes, somehow subsidize corporations and the rich?
Please explain. This is neither troll nor flamebait; I am curious.
That is interesting. I even doubted you (well, you did post as AC), so I middle-clicked the link to open it in a new tab (I'm using Slimbrowser on WinXP). It opened fine! But a left click (open link in same tab) yielded the "no slashdot" error message.
So, at least in sbrowser, opening in a new tab sends no referer, even though you're clicking a link on a "referring" page. I assume Opera is the same.
Um, I don't think this is really about deep linking. There's not much meat in the story summary, but as I understand it they are blocking access to AOL users' hosted web space (the "free" 20-50MB or whatever, usually with a monthly BW limit, that comes with most ISP accounts.)
Seems to me that this comes down to a question of the wording in the AOL user contract -- if it allows this, then the folks are SOL and chould change ISPs. If it doesn't allow this (such as my cable modem accont, which only mentions limits on total space and bandwidth, NOT referer) AOL should stop doing it, and if they want to revise the contract, do so before trying it again.
Well, if I were an AOL user right now (quite a stretch to imagine, I'm afraid), I'd be loving to check my contract to see if it provides for such limitations on user personal space. If not, I'd call to complain (I'd probably do that anyway, right before I called my new ISP). I know that my cable modem "free" hosted space included has a very specific contract that limits the monthly bandwidth usage, but does not mention anything about blocking access for links or clicks from other domains. I wouldn't be happy if they suddenly started returning 404 Page Not Found errors when anyone linked or clicked from foo.com.
Maybe they can claim technical difficulties if called on it, or maybe the contract does let them yank their users around like this. I don't know. Does anyone here use AOL and will admit it long enogh to post a link or copy of the appropriate contract?
Of course, there's the tinfoil-hat theory that AOL is planning to start thier own blogging service and wants to drag LiveJournal down from it's #1 spot a bit. Seems like a particularly blatant and non-clever way to do this though, or maybe that's the "beauty" of the whole ingenious plot?;)
Finally, I'm going to hope the/. editors checked this out somehow. I don't have AOL space. Can anyone else verify this is true and not just some EBKAC or hoax?
potential Iranian terrorists can now go snooping around the net anonymously
Eh? Why are they potential terrorists? You do it and it's "surfing" or "browsing", they do it and they're "snooping"? What, is it now your personal private internet or something?
the average American citizen is liable to be scrutinized by John Ashcroft
Total FUD. The average American is most certanly not "liable to be scrutinized by John Ashcroft". That's so far from reality that it doesn't even warrant this response, but I used my last mod point in the last thread, so I have no choice but to post to point out how stupid your post was. Sigh.
now they can surf anonymously and determine the best way to build improvised explosive devices or whatnot.
No, I'm pretty sure the Iranian government wasn't blocking sites with bomb-making tips since those are so useful for the, er, "cause". In fact, the fine article says:
[Iranian] government ministers issued a blacklist of 15,000 forbidden "immoral" websites that ISPs in the country must block -- reportedly a mix of adult sites and political news and information outlets
So, they were blocking porn and news, but no mention of bomb-making-R-us.com.
they also will get the benefit of goatse.cx
Hmm, wrong again:
Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for," says Berman.
Perhaps most interesting is this little tidbit, which seems to be saying anonymizer.com, and by extension, the US gubmint, is spamming Iran to get the word out:
The deliberately generic-sounding URLs for the service are publicized over Radio Farda broadcasts and through bulk e-mails that Anonymizer sends to addresses in the country. The addresses are provided by human rights groups and other sources, says Anonymizer president Lance Cottrell.
Troll? Redundant maybe, since the same general joke was posted by several people at around the same time. But Troll? C'mon mods, put down the crack pipe.
1. Well, that's up to you to decide. In some states your drivers license number is the same as your social security number, and in that case might pose an identity-fraud concern. Then again, engrave marks can be made relatively small in an inconspicuous location (such as inside the covered battery compartment), so it's not like your advertising your info by normal use of most devices. The point is to make a way for them to track you down, so a phone number (straight to voivemail if your system supports that), address, or whatever else you prefer should be OK.
2. You don't, since you borrowed the engraver from the library. If you buy your own, you can borrow one to engrave it:)
Slashdot Mirror
No one is denying the companies talked. What you will find in those letters is a sort of dissemblance I would believe.
Huh? (This is not grammar nazi mod material, I'm truly baffled as to what you mean.)
The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the Dictionary search box to the right.
Suggestions for dissemblance:
1. dissemblers
2. dissembling
3. disassembles
4. dissembled
5. dissembles
6. disemboweled
7. disembowelled
8. dissembler
9. disembowels
10. disassemble
How do you know this? The article summary includes "When the judge learned the Sun vs. Microsoft antitrust case had revealed that MS keeps backups of all emails on over 100,000 tapes stored offsite, he ordered them to come up with the missing messages" which, while admittedly not a direct contradiction of your claim, seems to imply that backups are kept long enough to move them off-site in the form of 100k tapes, which to me sounds like more than 30 days of email.
No doubt MS is capable of this, but I'm perplexed: assuming at least a few of the missing emails were between MS employees and burst.com employees, wouldn't the burst.com folks still have a copy?
Sure, MS employees probably wouldn't cc: burst.com on the most damaging emails, but just having the burst.com side of the threads during the period in question would no doubt provide the ammo needed to annihilate any claim by MS that the emails sent in the 35-week mystery gap were "uninteresting."
I thought so too, then I realized that the period of time in which MS discussed the issue is not specified. If it's 30 weeks, it all adds up fine.
I'm supposed to prove a negative? Riight. Common knowledge my ass, if it's so common google would have something on it, and so far I find nothing. Cite something or STFU. Mod flamebat all you want, the original was flamebait, and needs to be backed up with something vaguely credible.
You know what? I think you're a good person, and I think you're smart and you mean well. But I completely disagree with almost every single point in your post. This perplexes me -- how is it that two decent, thinking people can be so diametrically opposed on one subject? I'm not kidding, this always baffles me every time I experience it.
I bet you could guess my stand on most of the issues you raised (i.e., you should master the game to twist it into what you want/need it to be -- it's your duty to help fix the game if it's broken, no one should be "given" anything, no one has the right to have society pay for them to reproduce, Darwinism is not a bad thing when allowed to flourish within reason, and it's an absolutely desirable thing when supressed for too long, etc.) So I'm not sure what to do here. If you're interested, I'll go through it line-by-line giving my (usually opposite) stance -- just reply and ask if you like.
But, I think I can summarize the difference, save us both time, and possibly lead to understanding (if not agreement) sooner. I don't think everyone deserves equal success, only equal opportunity (of course, genetics makes sure not everyone has exactly the same opportunity -- I mean other than genetics). That is, I don't think there should be even a tiny amount of imposed "balance" or even a trifling of upset or dissent in the event that the situation is woefully unbalanced. I think it will take care of itself in the most efficient, proper manner. And, correct me if I'm wrong here, I believe you think some balance should be imposed.
Wonder why that is? Both are reasonable ideas (when argued sans insane ad hominem attacks), but one seems obviously right to me, and one seems obviously wrong (well-intentioned, but doomed to fail).
It's getting sticky now, but old enough to be under the radar of most mods. So let's take the gloves off:
Not everyone is equally smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, or charismatic. In my opinion, it is not wrong for the more capable to acquire (even significantly) greater wealth than others.
The more intelligent pay for this advantage in the form of the unavoidable realization that life sucks. It's important to continue to allow for this "unfair" lack of balance compensation, or the smart, capable, clever, ingenious, entrepenurial, enthusiastic, charismatic people will just kill themselves, and we'll all suffer for it, since a dozen hard-working laborers without direction are usually less efficient than 12 each working on thier own.
What do you mean, "how?". Your tired labor theory of value nonsense is alarming, even in the context of largely left-wing slashdot.
Corporations and the wealthy pay a far lower percentage of their income in federal tax than you or I do.
Way to miss the point entirely. The percentage may be lower, but the total dollar amount paid is higher. That was my original assertion, and it still stands, wholly unassailed by any of your fine links and references.
EBKAC = Error Between Keyboard And Chair. Google knows, so it's not hard to figure out.
Sorry you're disappointed, but it's not a pyramid scheme. And you can hide sigs if you don't likey.
The contents, however, are marred by the lack of definitions. Also by a lack of detailed relevance.
...such as read more than the first paragraph, which is the only one that supports my position, and you'll see how the author tries to attack may view while supporting yours, really. But the base facts are hard to deny. He puts a good spin on them thouugh!
Yeah, well, we may not agree on an exact definition of rich, but I think we can agree that the top 1% qualify, yes? (To me, even the top 5 or 10%, maybe more, are what I consider rich.) So how about this:
The most recent Internal Revenue Service data available indicate that the top one percent of taxpayers paid about 25 percent of federal income taxes in 1989 but paid 36 percent of income taxes in 1999. The share of federal income taxes that the top five percent pays increased as well, but virtually all of that increase was due to the substantial rise in the share of income taxes that the top one percent pays.
How is that not detailed enough? It's crystal clear to me.
How does that relate to the claim about MS taxes?
Well, for one, MS taxes were brought up in an anecdotal way, with no reference, and claiming that some year MS paid zero income tax. I doubt that. More likely, they received a tax break for doing something the government wanted, such as in this case, and a tax break does not contradict my claim that croporations and the rich pay the majority of taxes in the US. Re-read the thread -- someone tried to tell us that the US government supports the rich and corporations at the expense of the poor.
In any case, most of his fulminations were against the corporate taxes, to which this was totally non-responsive. I also suspect that the years in question, 1989 & 1999, were selected by the author of the page to make his conclusions come out appropriately. But for this to be more than suspicion, I'd need to do a bit of research.
Still, two datapoints don't present a very strong case, particularly when they are used to argue about terms (high income) that don't have a clear definition. E.g., what proportion of the population qualified as "high income households" in each of those two respective years? Without knowing that, the page doesn't mean anything.
Um hey, it says exactly what qualifies: those in the top 1% of income paid 25-36% of all taxes. It's actually more now, and I'm looking for links to show that. Why is that not already specific enough though?
But, $400M received in tax breaks by an industry that pays $33 BILLION dollars in taxes isn't a big deal, considering we're getting cleaner air out of the deal, which I'd say falls within the realm of the public good, which is what our collective taxes are supposed to be used for.
Doubt it? Check this out:
Government directly subsidizes oil consumption through preferential treatment in tax codes. A multitude of federal corporate income tax credits and deductions results in an effective income tax rate of 11% for the oil industry, compared to the non-oil industry average of 18%. If the oil industry paid the industrywide average tax rate (including oil) of 17%, they would have paid an additional $2.0 billion in 1991. Our results are consistent with a report by the Alliance to Save Energy that estimated the benefits of individual federal corporate income tax provisions. Their results showed that in 1989 preferential treatment yielded $1.8 billion to $4.6 billion in individual income tax benefits to the oil industry (Koplow, 1993).
0.17x - 0.11x = 2B, x = 33.3B
Sorry, you're just wrong. Your hearsay anecdote is insufficient argument, please cite.
Me neither. I believe there is a Troll-modding troll on the loose. There are lots of examples of his or her work on slashdot recently.
The pay raises usually end up in the pockets of the business owners.
I don't follow this. Are you suggesting it belongs elsewhere?
But weren't the same American business owners, albeit in other industries
I believe that's impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely.
Isn't that what the entire anti-dumping, WTO policies are about?
No, dumping refers to selling a product at a price below its value to damage competition. It's usually only enacted against countries like Taiwan and Japan where the government heavily subsidizes a tech sector (not just one company) to gain a foothold in a new industry.
Big corporations, and in general the rich class, are continuously being subsidized by the government in US.
How is this possible? Since government doesn't produce, it gets all of its income from the people and companies whop pay taxes. Coproprations and rich people pay the vast majority of all taxes in the US. Sow how again, exactly, does the government subsidize corps and the rich while the corps and rich simultanously subsidize the government? Are you suggesting that the poor, who pay little or no (or negative!) taxes, somehow subsidize corporations and the rich?
Please explain. This is neither troll nor flamebait; I am curious.
That is interesting. I even doubted you (well, you did post as AC), so I middle-clicked the link to open it in a new tab (I'm using Slimbrowser on WinXP). It opened fine! But a left click (open link in same tab) yielded the "no slashdot" error message.
So, at least in sbrowser, opening in a new tab sends no referer, even though you're clicking a link on a "referring" page. I assume Opera is the same.
Um, I don't think this is really about deep linking. There's not much meat in the story summary, but as I understand it they are blocking access to AOL users' hosted web space (the "free" 20-50MB or whatever, usually with a monthly BW limit, that comes with most ISP accounts.)
Seems to me that this comes down to a question of the wording in the AOL user contract -- if it allows this, then the folks are SOL and chould change ISPs. If it doesn't allow this (such as my cable modem accont, which only mentions limits on total space and bandwidth, NOT referer) AOL should stop doing it, and if they want to revise the contract, do so before trying it again.
Well, if I were an AOL user right now (quite a stretch to imagine, I'm afraid), I'd be loving to check my contract to see if it provides for such limitations on user personal space. If not, I'd call to complain (I'd probably do that anyway, right before I called my new ISP). I know that my cable modem "free" hosted space included has a very specific contract that limits the monthly bandwidth usage, but does not mention anything about blocking access for links or clicks from other domains. I wouldn't be happy if they suddenly started returning 404 Page Not Found errors when anyone linked or clicked from foo.com.
;)
/. editors checked this out somehow. I don't have AOL space. Can anyone else verify this is true and not just some EBKAC or hoax?
Maybe they can claim technical difficulties if called on it, or maybe the contract does let them yank their users around like this. I don't know. Does anyone here use AOL and will admit it long enogh to post a link or copy of the appropriate contract?
Of course, there's the tinfoil-hat theory that AOL is planning to start thier own blogging service and wants to drag LiveJournal down from it's #1 spot a bit. Seems like a particularly blatant and non-clever way to do this though, or maybe that's the "beauty" of the whole ingenious plot?
Finally, I'm going to hope the
Huh? Citation? link? reference of any kind? Oh wait, you're an AC spewing FUD. Nevermind. IHBW, IHBT, I will now HAND.
potential Iranian terrorists can now go snooping around the net anonymously
Eh? Why are they potential terrorists? You do it and it's "surfing" or "browsing", they do it and they're "snooping"? What, is it now your personal private internet or something?
the average American citizen is liable to be scrutinized by John Ashcroft
Total FUD. The average American is most certanly not "liable to be scrutinized by John Ashcroft". That's so far from reality that it doesn't even warrant this response, but I used my last mod point in the last thread, so I have no choice but to post to point out how stupid your post was. Sigh.
now they can surf anonymously and determine the best way to build improvised explosive devices or whatnot.
No, I'm pretty sure the Iranian government wasn't blocking sites with bomb-making tips since those are so useful for the, er, "cause". In fact, the fine article says:
[Iranian] government ministers issued a blacklist of 15,000 forbidden "immoral" websites that ISPs in the country must block -- reportedly a mix of adult sites and political news and information outlets
So, they were blocking porn and news, but no mention of bomb-making-R-us.com.
they also will get the benefit of goatse.cx
Hmm, wrong again:
Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for," says Berman.
Perhaps most interesting is this little tidbit, which seems to be saying anonymizer.com, and by extension, the US gubmint, is spamming Iran to get the word out:
The deliberately generic-sounding URLs for the service are publicized over Radio Farda broadcasts and through bulk e-mails that Anonymizer sends to addresses in the country. The addresses are provided by human rights groups and other sources, says Anonymizer president Lance Cottrell.
Troll? Redundant maybe, since the same general joke was posted by several people at around the same time. But Troll? C'mon mods, put down the crack pipe.
. . . slashdotted. :)
Can we get an AC post of a mirror or the article text please?
1. Well, that's up to you to decide. In some states your drivers license number is the same as your social security number, and in that case might pose an identity-fraud concern. Then again, engrave marks can be made relatively small in an inconspicuous location (such as inside the covered battery compartment), so it's not like your advertising your info by normal use of most devices. The point is to make a way for them to track you down, so a phone number (straight to voivemail if your system supports that), address, or whatever else you prefer should be OK.
:)
2. You don't, since you borrowed the engraver from the library. If you buy your own, you can borrow one to engrave it