Not if the tax is, as with the gasoline tax, a fixed dollar amount, not a percentage. Inflation eats away at the real value of the $0.184/gal federal gasoline tax.
The gas tax has been declining due to inflation to the point where it doesn't even pay for highway construction/maintenance anymore. The Highway Trust Fund has been running a deficit since 2008, and has to grab general tax revenues to pay for it. I think it's fair to raise the gas tax to a level where it covers the cost of maintaining highways, instead of subsidizing them out of general taxes.
In particular, having stupid theology isn't a crime in Belgium. The Scientologists here are being charged with a bunch of "regular" criminal conduct, which doesn't really depend on whether they're a real religion or not (you can be prosecuted for that even if you're a very well established religion, as some Catholic dioceses have discovered).
They don't take 30% of the average person's income. If you make $100,000, file single, and take only the standard deduction, under the 2012 tax rates you paid $18,700 in taxes, i.e. 18.7%.
The U.S. already has rather low government spending by first-world standards, though. Including lower than some countries who are outperforming us (e.g. Germany still has a successful manufacturing sector, and a positive trade balance).
It's worth noting that the airlines don't really greatly object to the system either, despite occasionally kvetching. Not only does the public weigh flight deaths at an irrationally high level, but their travel plans change based on it: people really are scared of these one-in-a-million crashes, and avoid flying if they hear about them too much. So it's in airlines' best interests for the public to feel that every incident is investigated fully, changes are made after each one, etc., etc., even if the changes might otherwise not be rationally justified.
It also helps them pass the buck: if an airline is in compliance with FAA regulations, it partly deflects responsibility for safety from the airline to the FAA.
Yeah, Apple's 11-inch devices are roughly a form factor that would be considered netbook-sized a few years ago. Slightly on the large end for screen size, since I think of 8-11" as typical netbook size, with the majority being 9-10". But spot-on for weight: the 11-inch Macbook Air weighs less than most 9-10-inch first-gen netbooks did. So the market got somewhat cannibalized from the top end by those kinds of devices. And from the bottom-end, the casual user who wants to browse the web occasionally in a coffee shop, everyone now has smartphones, and many people have iPads and similar.
Especially since some of the research seems to be focusing on how to reduce soldiers' critical thinking and ethical scruples. That's been going on for a while in other ways: after realizing that a lot of soldiers purposely fired above their enemies' heads due to an intrinsic distaste for shooting people, a lot of military training has been focused on overcoming the (otherwise generally desirable) "not a psycho who wants to put a bullet in another human" reflex. Could get a lot more problematic if it's actually drugs and/or genetic engineering...
One of my favorite recent/. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
The addition of gun-owner data might help to make it more of a bipartisan issue. Privacy protections are typically (though not exclusively) supported by liberals and opposed by anti-regulation conservatives, who see them as too much an EU-style approach. But gun owners are very wary of this kind of stuff and a significant GOP constituency.
I seem to recall that mobile-phone providers were worried about in-flight use of phones because it could cause a mess with the networks if thousands of customers were hopping cell towers at 500+ mph, instead of at usual walking/subway/biking/driving speeds. One per plane would presumably not cause the same problem.
The vast majority of DDoS participants are infected computers in botnets, and their owners are typically unaware. Will they even notice your naming sufficiently to be ashamed? Maybe if it's a corporation it'd have some effect: publishing that you were hit by a DDoS that included X computers from BigCorp might make BigCorp look bad. But not so much if the botnet is a bunch of random home PCs.
That's not what its charter says, which restricts it to "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" and prohibits the NSA "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons".
If anything, the dislike for C++ from people who use C++ regularly is much deeper than the more casual dislike that C programmers have. C programmers just think C++ is too complex and unnecessary, but C++ programmers find themselves so consumed by their dislike they end up doing things like writing a point-by-point rebuttal to the entire C++ FAQ.
Yeah, it'd have a large local/regional impact, but not planet-wide. Estimates of the impact seem to hover around 100-150 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is 2-3 Tsar Bombas.
In fact, if anything, corporations are more entangled in the military side of government than the commercial side. DoD facilities are full of commercial contractors of various kinds, some of which only exist to get government contracts (i.e. they have no real private-sector clients).
Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.
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Not if the tax is, as with the gasoline tax, a fixed dollar amount, not a percentage. Inflation eats away at the real value of the $0.184/gal federal gasoline tax.
The gas tax has been declining due to inflation to the point where it doesn't even pay for highway construction/maintenance anymore. The Highway Trust Fund has been running a deficit since 2008, and has to grab general tax revenues to pay for it. I think it's fair to raise the gas tax to a level where it covers the cost of maintaining highways, instead of subsidizing them out of general taxes.
In particular, having stupid theology isn't a crime in Belgium. The Scientologists here are being charged with a bunch of "regular" criminal conduct, which doesn't really depend on whether they're a real religion or not (you can be prosecuted for that even if you're a very well established religion, as some Catholic dioceses have discovered).
They don't take 30% of the average person's income. If you make $100,000, file single, and take only the standard deduction, under the 2012 tax rates you paid $18,700 in taxes, i.e. 18.7%.
The U.S. already has rather low government spending by first-world standards, though. Including lower than some countries who are outperforming us (e.g. Germany still has a successful manufacturing sector, and a positive trade balance).
It's worth noting that the airlines don't really greatly object to the system either, despite occasionally kvetching. Not only does the public weigh flight deaths at an irrationally high level, but their travel plans change based on it: people really are scared of these one-in-a-million crashes, and avoid flying if they hear about them too much. So it's in airlines' best interests for the public to feel that every incident is investigated fully, changes are made after each one, etc., etc., even if the changes might otherwise not be rationally justified.
It also helps them pass the buck: if an airline is in compliance with FAA regulations, it partly deflects responsibility for safety from the airline to the FAA.
Yeah, Apple's 11-inch devices are roughly a form factor that would be considered netbook-sized a few years ago. Slightly on the large end for screen size, since I think of 8-11" as typical netbook size, with the majority being 9-10". But spot-on for weight: the 11-inch Macbook Air weighs less than most 9-10-inch first-gen netbooks did. So the market got somewhat cannibalized from the top end by those kinds of devices. And from the bottom-end, the casual user who wants to browse the web occasionally in a coffee shop, everyone now has smartphones, and many people have iPads and similar.
Especially since some of the research seems to be focusing on how to reduce soldiers' critical thinking and ethical scruples. That's been going on for a while in other ways: after realizing that a lot of soldiers purposely fired above their enemies' heads due to an intrinsic distaste for shooting people, a lot of military training has been focused on overcoming the (otherwise generally desirable) "not a psycho who wants to put a bullet in another human" reflex. Could get a lot more problematic if it's actually drugs and/or genetic engineering...
One of my favorite recent /. stories along these lines was this anonymous anecdote from last year. A company "flexes" staff in times of low engineering demand, then decides to expand a plant later, only to find out that, oops, they have nobody left who understands how the plant works. The unsurprising result is that they had to hire back some old employees as contractors at 2-3x their previous salaries and try to recover the know-how.
The addition of gun-owner data might help to make it more of a bipartisan issue. Privacy protections are typically (though not exclusively) supported by liberals and opposed by anti-regulation conservatives, who see them as too much an EU-style approach. But gun owners are very wary of this kind of stuff and a significant GOP constituency.
I seem to recall that mobile-phone providers were worried about in-flight use of phones because it could cause a mess with the networks if thousands of customers were hopping cell towers at 500+ mph, instead of at usual walking/subway/biking/driving speeds. One per plane would presumably not cause the same problem.
The vast majority of DDoS participants are infected computers in botnets, and their owners are typically unaware. Will they even notice your naming sufficiently to be ashamed? Maybe if it's a corporation it'd have some effect: publishing that you were hit by a DDoS that included X computers from BigCorp might make BigCorp look bad. But not so much if the botnet is a bunch of random home PCs.
Regular Salmon does just fine for me, thank you!
I hope you only buy wild-caught salmon, then, because farm-raised salmon is already unnaturally bred & raised for specific commercial goals.
That's not what its charter says, which restricts it to "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" and prohibits the NSA "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons".
If anything, the dislike for C++ from people who use C++ regularly is much deeper than the more casual dislike that C programmers have. C programmers just think C++ is too complex and unnecessary, but C++ programmers find themselves so consumed by their dislike they end up doing things like writing a point-by-point rebuttal to the entire C++ FAQ.
Yeah, it'd have a large local/regional impact, but not planet-wide. Estimates of the impact seem to hover around 100-150 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is 2-3 Tsar Bombas.
The actual DARPA page, with rules/etc., is here.
I don't disagree, but the debate here is about the nuclear weapons stockpile, not about nuclear power plants.
Hah, I meant "...than the civilian side", of course...
In fact, if anything, corporations are more entangled in the military side of government than the commercial side. DoD facilities are full of commercial contractors of various kinds, some of which only exist to get government contracts (i.e. they have no real private-sector clients).
Sounds like a pulp-novel word for people who fight in wars. Specializations include gunshooter and woundfixer.
Did Kurzweil become some kind of expert in machine translation when I wasn't looking?
This 2005 patent from Danny Hillis seems to be one of the main things the reexamination is noting as prior art.
Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.
This poll does, and strangely enough doesn't find much difference.