So many people think OJ never should have been tried in a civil court because he had already been aquitted. The fact of the matter is the government had a chance to make a criminal case, and they failed. They didn't get a second chance. The Goldmans and Browns had a chance to make a civil case against OJ, and they made thier case. I for one am glad that we live in a country where it is harder to make a criminal case than a civil case, and contrary to popular opinion, the government doesn't get a second chance to convict.
It's interesting to note that hard drives will likely soon be cheaper than video tape. I went to Walmart.com and found video tapes for $0.9 per video tape. That's $0.15 - $0.45 per hour of recording. Hard drives have recently reached the $1.00 per GB level. at VCD quality, that's roughly $0.62 per hour. Divx could probably cut that in half at the same quality. I currently use my computer as a VCR, only I record an entire season of programs at a time so I can watch them uninterrupted. I also have bought several hundred DVD's, but I have no backups, and It's a pain to sort through them and figure out which one to watch, so I rarely watch them. I'd like to rip them to hard drive so I can just come in, turn on my own personal TV station, and watch.
It would also violate a couple of other laws. This is the last straw. We need to force Congress to repeal the law of relativity now. Maybe we should do something about the DMCA as well.
I don't think this is a feasable way of generating electricity, but not for the reason you stated. Any conductive loop traveling through a magnetic field will generate a current (Assuming the plane of the loop is not parallel with the field). This current is also relatively easy to tap (this is more or less the basis on which all electrical generators operate). The problem is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. It's been a while since I worked in this field, so I may be a little off, but the basic problem is that the current generated creates a magnetic field which opposes the initial magnetic field. This has the effect of turning the loop parallel to the magnetic field thus destroying the current. You could solve this problem by making three mutually perpendicular conducting loops, but even then, the opposing magnitic fields would attract each other, causing your satellite to de-orbit (trading potential energy for electrical energy). The interesting thing I have wondered, however, is could this principle be used to de-orbit obsolete satelites, or more interestingly, could you use it in reverse to boost satellites into higher orbit using electrical power alone. I believe I read somewhere that the useful life of most satellites is determined by how much fuel they can carry for station keeping. Wouldn't it be interesting if the vast majority of that station keeping could be done with solar cells instead of propellant.
It can be reasonable argued that the application programmers could be blamed for poor multi-user support, but it could also (and I think rightly) be argued that the original windows paradigm was single user, and thus it was accepted to write single user applications. Because Unix is fundamentally designed to not be run in Admin mode by everyone, application programmers are forced (or at least strongly encouraged) to write multi-user applications. You'r argument is somewhat akin to saying, "It's not the mayors fault that crime is rampant in this city, it's the criminals fault." While that statement is true, it is the mayor's fault for allowing an environment where such behavior can thrive. Similarly, it's Microsofts fault for creating an environment where single-user applications can thrive. By the way, in my view, the situation is getting much better, and much as I hate to say it, Windows XP is making many improvements in this regard. It's still not as good as Linux by a long shot however.
Not really. A conversation between two personallities may make a person insane, but it doesn't necessarily make him incoherent. Coherent means:
# Marked by an orderly, logical, and aesthetically consistent relation of parts: a coherent essay.
Whenever I read the conversation Gollum had with himself, it always came across to me as rambling. I never really looked closely enough at the conversation close enough to realize that there was a dialogue in it. I thought it was just mindless babling. The central test is whether something is coherent is if you can decipher any meaning in it. Take, for example, the string 14159265. Most people would consider this an incoherent string of numbers, but if you look a little closer, it turns out it is quite coherent.
I think the problem may be that he did his job too well. They say the greatest honor you can give to a special effects artist is to say you didn't see any special effects. Perhaps this was the problem with Gollum. Until this moment, it didn't really even occur to me that Gollum was played by an actor. He was just Gollum. One thing I will say, however, is that I've read the books three times, and seen the cartoon movie version a few times as well, and while I distinctly remember the scene, I had always seen it as the incoherent ramblings of an insane Gollum. Serkis' performance is the first one I've seen that made it clear to me that Gollum was having a coherent conversation between his two personallities. In my mind I gave Peter Jackson credit for that performance. I'm glad I have now been set straight.
In reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other Eric Raymond works, it became clear to me that the best argument for Open Source was that software is fundamentally a service, not a product. When you treat it as a product, it is in the best interest of the producer to create a crappy product. If they do it right the first time around, they have just coded themselves out of a job. The fundamental thing about Open Source is that it turns software into a service. You pay someone (Say Microsoft) to provide a service (code a word processor to suit my needs.) If you like the job they do, you can hire them for another job. If they deliver you a bug ridden bloated piece of crap, you can take it to another service provider to have them fix it. At all points, you actually own what you pay for. If you don't like how Microsoft did what you paid for, you can take your code base, and have someone else fix it. This gives Microsoft a motivation to do it right the first time to gain follow on work. In any propriatary structure, it is in the producers interest to produce a product which is just good enough, but never quite finished. You lock them in, and soak them for as much as you can. This model is not possible with Open Source, but it is possible with shared source.
And it seems everyone else is missing the point as well. It's not that fundamentally one shouldn't pay taxes for online purchases. The problem is who should be forced to collect it. When you buy something from an online store that doesn't collect tax, you are actually legally obligated to figure out the tax you owe, and include it on your state income tax. It's just such a pain that no one does it. The real issue here is that huge companies like Walmart and Target are already set up to collect taxes from every state in the union, but if I want to buy a custom fishing lure from Raysfishinglures.com, he probably won't get enough business to make collecting tax for 50 different states, and thousands of municipalities worth his time. It means the rich diverse world of botique internet sites could shrivel and die in favor more mass market crap. And don't forget the biggest plum of all, eBay. How are you going to properly sort out who gets taxed how much on eBay? I think the best answer is implied in your post. Tax "the UPS guy that was driving on the road that local taxes paid for." Those taxes will get passed back to the shipper, and then on to the customer, and viola, the internet is taxed without the huge hassle to every mom and pop shop on the internet. If you want to collect according to value, have every mom and pop shop declare the value of what they are shipping, and collect based on that. The point is that the local mom and pop shop is only using government resources in thier locality, why should they have to collect taxes for every state in the union. UPS is the one using resources in all 50 states. Make them collect the tax, and pass it on to the customer.
IBM makes a 1GB microdrive for about $250, and toshiba makes a 5 GB type 2 PCMCIA hard drive for about $150. I would guess a variant of one of these is on the inside of this camcorder. What I don't understand is why they wouldn't make it removable? It couldn't add more than $20 to what is already likely to be a very expensive toy. I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
I suspect that gut instinct gets human chess players into trouble more often than it helps. It's more pattern recognition (the same sort of skills used in face recognition), combined with an understanding of how computers play chess. I read an interview with him once in which he explained that he plays computers very differently than he plays humans. He actively avoids gut instincts since they usually rely on "spooking" the opponent into making a mistake. Computers don't make mistakes, they simply follow the rules provided to them. Kasparov simply plays chess to never allow a computer to get into a position it can recognize or attack. It's almost as if he plays for a standoff, attacking very patiently, and in a very non-directed fashion so the computer can't pin down what he's trying to do. It's the same thing most of us do when we beat AI in our favorite strategy game. We find the one or two stupid things the computer does, and use them over and over until the computer is defeated. How many times have you had a new game which seemed difficult until you figured out that the computer never builds airplanes, or always attacks the last city attacked. After you find this out, winning becomes trivial. Kasparov is essentially doing the same thing, except in his case, there are very few flaws, and exploiting them is not trivial.
One could argue that the only truely free society is one in which I'm allowed to shoot anyone I want, and steal anything I want from anyone I want. It's true that both of those freedoms are abridged by the government so that more freedoms are retained by all. A BSD license is anarchy. You are free to do whatever you like with the code including modifying it and then selling it back to me. There is nothing wrong with modifying my code and selling it back to me, it's just that the GPL promotes a chain of freedom which is self reinforcing. BSD promotes no such chain, so while it may be true that BSD promotes more freedom in the short term, a simple analysis of the GPL code base shows empirically that GPL stimulates more free code shareing, and thus more freedom in the long run. In short BSD provides more freedom in an academic (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin) sense. GPL (as evidenced by simple observation) generates more free (as in freedom) code in the practical sense.
Your argument that someone is motivated to clear doesn't really hold water, except possibly for the lowest wage earners. It leaves out the idea that people have a choice with what to do with thier time and money. Take someone who is working 40 hours per week just to put a roof over thier head and food on the table. If you raise taxes from 15 to 30%, they may be motivated to work 50 hours per week just to hold on to what they already have. If you shoot it up to 60%, rather than working 80 hours per week, they might just say screw it, and get a smaller house, or even say I might as well live on welfare. Lets say I work 40 hours per week and make 50,000 per year. If my goal is to make 800,000 per year, all I have to do is work 640 hours/week. I'm not very likely to attempt this:) When you talk about the rich, however, they have many more choices. They generally make thier money not by laboring for it, but instead by risking what they already have. Don't get me wrong, many of them had to labor for it initially. I'm currently laboring my ass off so I can have enough that I can make money by risking it rather than making money by laboring for it. If I can risk my million dollars for a chance of making a million, and a chance of losing half a million.I might make that bet. If the government is going to take half of my profits, I'd be less likely to make that bet, and instead I might just sit on my money. Or I might move to a country where they take less of my money. At any rate, my job (when I have finally made enough money to be able to invest in this fashion) is to provide resources to people who are trying to create wealth in the fashion which you suggested earlier. The fact that I have built my own wealth by choosing how to distrubute resources inherently qualifies me for this role. If the government makes it less profitable for me to distribute my resources to create wealth, I'll be less likely to distribute my resources. It's as simple as that. Now people who inheret wealth have no particular qualifications as to how to distribute it effectively, and that's why I think the inheretance tax is one of the fairest taxes around, but that is a completely different conversation. The original point I was trying to make is that lowering taxes clearly can stimulate an economy, and supply side economics clearly can work under certain conditions. It's just that no one knows exactly what those conditions are, and I suspect that that those conditions change depending on the current psychology of both consumers and investors, but as I alluded to before, I tend to believe that all economics is "Voodoo" economics. That's not to say that economics is useless. It's just that it's extremely debatable and hard to develop rules for, and as soon as you have some rules that seem to work, the whole system changes.
If you do any reading of the thoughts the founding fathers did on the subject of copyright, your notion is in fact quite a strange thought. Unfortunately, it's a thought shared by many these days. If you are an author, and you don't want people spreading your ideas around, you have a simple recourse: don't share them. Once you share them I have a fundamental freedom of speech right to do with that knowledge what I will. The founding fathers realized that in some cases it may serve the public good to infringe our personal freedoms for practical purposes (eg. I can't yell fire in a crowed theater. I can, however, yell fire in my own home.) That's why the copyright provision of the Constitution is written the way it is. We, as a society, agree to abridge our fundamental rights, to motivate authors to share thier ideas with us. The fundamental goal is to ensure that many works become available to the public. Once you share your ideas with us, you have no more fundamental right to them than I do. You have no right to profit by them. What you have is a social contract in which we collectively agree to abridge our findamental rights so that we as a society get something in return. Extending copyright alters that contract after the fact, and amounts to government welfare. It's like a used car dealer selling you a car for $300 per month for 3 years, and then lobbying congress to extend the term of all such contracts to 5 years, 7 years, 120 years. You as the buyer of that car get no more consideration, simply a higher bill. It is indeed a wildly strange thought to think that just because someone came up with an idea, that he somehow owns it.
I think you have a misunderstanding of supply side economics. It's not a matter of wealth creation, it's a matter of motivation. It derives from a few simple calculations regarding revenue. You'r revenue = (tax rate) * (tax base), but as your tax rate rises, peoples motivation for creating wealth decreases. This is trivially true. Think about it. If I tell you that I am going to tax you 100% (assuming we still live in a free society) are you going to bother to go to work tomorrow? A similar arguement might also apply for a 99% tax rate. Now granted, everyone is going to have to eat, and is thus going to have to do a little bit of work, but (especially) in a progressive tax system, as you earn more, you get to keep less. That means we are giving you an incentive to not create as much wealth. As I said before, it's trivially true that extremely high taxes will reduce wealth creation (by reducing motivation), so the only question is, "how much is too much". I believe this is where the term Voodoo economics is most applicable, primarily because the nature of this relationship is so complex that you essentially have to try things based on your magical voodoo sense of what will help, and see if it works, and even if it does, it could be for completely unrelated reasons. One other thing to note is that as you lower taxes, you reduce people's motivation to spend huge sums of money to hire tax lawyers to help them avoid paying taxes. I was reading an article last year about the current economic prosperity in Ireland due to tax cuts from about 60% to about 10%. The most interesting thing in the article, however, was a contention that worldwide, large corporations and individuals pay roughly 10-15% in actual taxes regardless of the tax rate. They do this by either hireing lawyers to find loopholes, or by moving out of the countries where they can't find such loopholes. In essence, I guess I have 3 points.
1) Supply Side economics doesn't say that lowering the tax rate will always generate more revenue, it simply says that raising taxes won't always generate more revenue, and that there is some optimim tax rate which may even change from time to time depending on a huge number of factors.
2) Like you say there are only a few ways to create wealth, but taxes are about distributing wealth , not creating wealth. They are also used to motivate economies. Finding better ways of distributing wealth and motivating wealth creation can leave you with lower taxes, and higher tax revenue. We can argue about what the best way to do that is, but saying that either raising or lowering taxes will always result in more revenue is naive.
3) Worldwide, wealthy individuals seem to pay around 10-15% no matter what your tax code looks like, and having a complex tax code only serves the wealthy, while hiding the truely regressive nature of many tax structures. Often times, tax cuts which appear to favor the rich, simply reduce motivation for the rich to find loopholes.
I've got much more I could say on the subject, but if you've read this far, I'm sure you will respond, or dismiss me as a crackpot, and I can make more points in a later post.
That rollover was faked for Dateline NBC( By Stone Phillips I believe). The Flintstones car was really quite stable, and generally can handle any size Brontosaurus ribs you can find. Damn liberal stone age media.....
My favorite part of the game, (until I got bored of it) was early game MIRVed missles. I would build a Cruiser hull as quickly as possible and load it with 2x missles. Also make a scout ship with no weapons, but all the speed/turning enhancements. I called this the Observer. Take the pair into battle, have the Missle Cruiser Launch both rounds of Missles, and retreat. As long as the Observer remains in the battle, the missles continue to fly. Have the Observer Run like hell. Usually, your missles will destroy the defending force before thier missles reach your Observer. After the battle is over, your cruiser (which retreated) returns for the ground battle. If you've chosen a telepathic race, mind control the colony, and repeat as necessary. Like I said, it's so easy, it's not really much of a challenge, but if you just feel like taking over the galaxy without too much trouble, this strategy can easily end a game in a Huge galaxy in under two hours.
I have a huge collection of DVD's exactly because I don't like to watch movies on someone else's timetable. Unfortunately, however, I'm starting to get so many that it's hard to keep track of them all. I'd sign up for netflix, but the thought of mailing all of those DVD's back and forth sounds like a pain. PVR's provide the perfect solution. Let me have 3 or 5 or 10 movies at any one time, and as soon I delete one from my PVR, the next one on my list gets downloaded automatically. Maybe it takes 8 or 12 hours to download, but that's still better than netflix can do. Hell, I'd even watch a commercial or two at the beginning of the feature, as long as I had to option to skip through an excessive list. Once again, we have to drag the media companies kicking and screaming into the future where they will make more money than ever. You could even set it up so each family member could have thier own listing of shows so that ad's could be targeted perfectly. I don't care how many commercials they force me to watch, I'm just not going to buy any tampons, get over it. Let me skip the commercial. If you want to throw them into my wife's shows, however, be my guest. I'd bet that's true for 80% of the commercials people watch. This technology could give advertisers direct feedback on how to get people to actually watch commercials. What could be a more powerful sales tool than that. Give me a 30 second commercial at the beginning of the show, and another 30 seconds at the end. I'll probably watch them rather than getting up to get a sandwich or take a bathroom break every 15 minutes.
A friend of mine shared this little tip with me and said it would work, but I've never tried it myself so YMMV.
After your contract expires (and they have finished subsidizing the phone) there is really nothing to keep you from jumping ship, so they are much more open to unlocking your phone if they think it will keep you as a customer. Call them up and tell them you are planning on traveling to Europe and would like to use some of the pre-paid calling SIMs available there, but you need them to unlock your phone for it to work. If they balk, tell them how you like the service, but if they can't help you, you'll find another provider who can. Apparently, once they unlock it in this fashion, it cannot be relocked. Has anyone else tried this?
No, He's saying Linux beta quality is generally better than windows release quality. I know this sounds like a standard slap at Microsoft, and I guess it is, but I've found it to usually be true as well.
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So many people think OJ never should have been tried in a civil court because he had already been aquitted. The fact of the matter is the government had a chance to make a criminal case, and they failed. They didn't get a second chance. The Goldmans and Browns had a chance to make a civil case against OJ, and they made thier case. I for one am glad that we live in a country where it is harder to make a criminal case than a civil case, and contrary to popular opinion, the government doesn't get a second chance to convict.
It's interesting to note that hard drives will likely soon be cheaper than video tape. I went to Walmart.com and found video tapes for $0.9 per video tape. That's $0.15 - $0.45 per hour of recording. Hard drives have recently reached the $1.00 per GB level. at VCD quality, that's roughly $0.62 per hour. Divx could probably cut that in half at the same quality. I currently use my computer as a VCR, only I record an entire season of programs at a time so I can watch them uninterrupted. I also have bought several hundred DVD's, but I have no backups, and It's a pain to sort through them and figure out which one to watch, so I rarely watch them. I'd like to rip them to hard drive so I can just come in, turn on my own personal TV station, and watch.
It would also violate a couple of other laws. This is the last straw. We need to force Congress to repeal the law of relativity now. Maybe we should do something about the DMCA as well.
I don't think this is a feasable way of generating electricity, but not for the reason you stated. Any conductive loop traveling through a magnetic field will generate a current (Assuming the plane of the loop is not parallel with the field). This current is also relatively easy to tap (this is more or less the basis on which all electrical generators operate). The problem is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. It's been a while since I worked in this field, so I may be a little off, but the basic problem is that the current generated creates a magnetic field which opposes the initial magnetic field. This has the effect of turning the loop parallel to the magnetic field thus destroying the current. You could solve this problem by making three mutually perpendicular conducting loops, but even then, the opposing magnitic fields would attract each other, causing your satellite to de-orbit (trading potential energy for electrical energy). The interesting thing I have wondered, however, is could this principle be used to de-orbit obsolete satelites, or more interestingly, could you use it in reverse to boost satellites into higher orbit using electrical power alone. I believe I read somewhere that the useful life of most satellites is determined by how much fuel they can carry for station keeping. Wouldn't it be interesting if the vast majority of that station keeping could be done with solar cells instead of propellant.
Did you hear about the new French Tank?
It has 5 gears for reverse, and 1 for forward in case they get attacked from behind.
It can be reasonable argued that the application programmers could be blamed for poor multi-user support, but it could also (and I think rightly) be argued that the original windows paradigm was single user, and thus it was accepted to write single user applications. Because Unix is fundamentally designed to not be run in Admin mode by everyone, application programmers are forced (or at least strongly encouraged) to write multi-user applications. You'r argument is somewhat akin to saying, "It's not the mayors fault that crime is rampant in this city, it's the criminals fault." While that statement is true, it is the mayor's fault for allowing an environment where such behavior can thrive. Similarly, it's Microsofts fault for creating an environment where single-user applications can thrive. By the way, in my view, the situation is getting much better, and much as I hate to say it, Windows XP is making many improvements in this regard. It's still not as good as Linux by a long shot however.
Not really.
A conversation between two personallities may make a person insane, but it doesn't necessarily make him incoherent. Coherent means:
# Marked by an orderly, logical, and aesthetically consistent relation of parts: a coherent essay.
Whenever I read the conversation Gollum had with himself, it always came across to me as rambling. I never really looked closely enough at the conversation close enough to realize that there was a dialogue in it. I thought it was just mindless babling. The central test is whether something is coherent is if you can decipher any meaning in it. Take, for example, the string 14159265. Most people would consider this an incoherent string of numbers, but if you look a little closer, it turns out it is quite coherent.
I think the problem may be that he did his job too well. They say the greatest honor you can give to a special effects artist is to say you didn't see any special effects. Perhaps this was the problem with Gollum. Until this moment, it didn't really even occur to me that Gollum was played by an actor. He was just Gollum. One thing I will say, however, is that I've read the books three times, and seen the cartoon movie version a few times as well, and while I distinctly remember the scene, I had always seen it as the incoherent ramblings of an insane Gollum. Serkis' performance is the first one I've seen that made it clear to me that Gollum was having a coherent conversation between his two personallities. In my mind I gave Peter Jackson credit for that performance. I'm glad I have now been set straight.
Did anyone else see the sentance:
Powerful words should be used carefully, other wise their glib use leaves our language impoverished and trivialized.
and wonder what g-lib has to do with a conversation on the Trail of Tears? Perhaps I've been coding too long.
In reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other Eric Raymond works, it became clear to me that the best argument for Open Source was that software is fundamentally a service, not a product. When you treat it as a product, it is in the best interest of the producer to create a crappy product. If they do it right the first time around, they have just coded themselves out of a job. The fundamental thing about Open Source is that it turns software into a service. You pay someone (Say Microsoft) to provide a service (code a word processor to suit my needs.) If you like the job they do, you can hire them for another job. If they deliver you a bug ridden bloated piece of crap, you can take it to another service provider to have them fix it. At all points, you actually own what you pay for. If you don't like how Microsoft did what you paid for, you can take your code base, and have someone else fix it. This gives Microsoft a motivation to do it right the first time to gain follow on work. In any propriatary structure, it is in the producers interest to produce a product which is just good enough, but never quite finished. You lock them in, and soak them for as much as you can. This model is not possible with Open Source, but it is possible with shared source.
And it seems everyone else is missing the point as well. It's not that fundamentally one shouldn't pay taxes for online purchases. The problem is who should be forced to collect it. When you buy something from an online store that doesn't collect tax, you are actually legally obligated to figure out the tax you owe, and include it on your state income tax. It's just such a pain that no one does it. The real issue here is that huge companies like Walmart and Target are already set up to collect taxes from every state in the union, but if I want to buy a custom fishing lure from Raysfishinglures.com, he probably won't get enough business to make collecting tax for 50 different states, and thousands of municipalities worth his time. It means the rich diverse world of botique internet sites could shrivel and die in favor more mass market crap. And don't forget the biggest plum of all, eBay. How are you going to properly sort out who gets taxed how much on eBay? I think the best answer is implied in your post. Tax "the UPS guy that was driving on the road that local taxes paid for." Those taxes will get passed back to the shipper, and then on to the customer, and viola, the internet is taxed without the huge hassle to every mom and pop shop on the internet. If you want to collect according to value, have every mom and pop shop declare the value of what they are shipping, and collect based on that. The point is that the local mom and pop shop is only using government resources in thier locality, why should they have to collect taxes for every state in the union. UPS is the one using resources in all 50 states. Make them collect the tax, and pass it on to the customer.
IBM makes a 1GB microdrive for about $250, and toshiba makes a 5 GB type 2 PCMCIA hard drive for about $150. I would guess a variant of one of these is on the inside of this camcorder. What I don't understand is why they wouldn't make it removable? It couldn't add more than $20 to what is already likely to be a very expensive toy. I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
I suspect that gut instinct gets human chess players into trouble more often than it helps. It's more pattern recognition (the same sort of skills used in face recognition), combined with an understanding of how computers play chess. I read an interview with him once in which he explained that he plays computers very differently than he plays humans. He actively avoids gut instincts since they usually rely on "spooking" the opponent into making a mistake. Computers don't make mistakes, they simply follow the rules provided to them. Kasparov simply plays chess to never allow a computer to get into a position it can recognize or attack. It's almost as if he plays for a standoff, attacking very patiently, and in a very non-directed fashion so the computer can't pin down what he's trying to do. It's the same thing most of us do when we beat AI in our favorite strategy game. We find the one or two stupid things the computer does, and use them over and over until the computer is defeated. How many times have you had a new game which seemed difficult until you figured out that the computer never builds airplanes, or always attacks the last city attacked. After you find this out, winning becomes trivial. Kasparov is essentially doing the same thing, except in his case, there are very few flaws, and exploiting them is not trivial.
One could argue that the only truely free society is one in which I'm allowed to shoot anyone I want, and steal anything I want from anyone I want. It's true that both of those freedoms are abridged by the government so that more freedoms are retained by all. A BSD license is anarchy. You are free to do whatever you like with the code including modifying it and then selling it back to me. There is nothing wrong with modifying my code and selling it back to me, it's just that the GPL promotes a chain of freedom which is self reinforcing. BSD promotes no such chain, so while it may be true that BSD promotes more freedom in the short term, a simple analysis of the GPL code base shows empirically that GPL stimulates more free code shareing, and thus more freedom in the long run. In short BSD provides more freedom in an academic (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin) sense. GPL (as evidenced by simple observation) generates more free (as in freedom) code in the practical sense.
orichter writes: does anyone know how, with a with a few minor adjustments, you turn a regular gun into five guns?
So remember, if you don't sell your SUV, and buy and Apple, you support terrorism and alien attack respectively :)
Your argument that someone is motivated to clear doesn't really hold water, except possibly for the lowest wage earners. It leaves out the idea that people have a choice with what to do with thier time and money. Take someone who is working 40 hours per week just to put a roof over thier head and food on the table. If you raise taxes from 15 to 30%, they may be motivated to work 50 hours per week just to hold on to what they already have. If you shoot it up to 60%, rather than working 80 hours per week, they might just say screw it, and get a smaller house, or even say I might as well live on welfare. Lets say I work 40 hours per week and make 50,000 per year. If my goal is to make 800,000 per year, all I have to do is work 640 hours/week. I'm not very likely to attempt this:) When you talk about the rich, however, they have many more choices. They generally make thier money not by laboring for it, but instead by risking what they already have. Don't get me wrong, many of them had to labor for it initially. I'm currently laboring my ass off so I can have enough that I can make money by risking it rather than making money by laboring for it. If I can risk my million dollars for a chance of making a million, and a chance of losing half a million.I might make that bet. If the government is going to take half of my profits, I'd be less likely to make that bet, and instead I might just sit on my money. Or I might move to a country where they take less of my money. At any rate, my job (when I have finally made enough money to be able to invest in this fashion) is to provide resources to people who are trying to create wealth in the fashion which you suggested earlier. The fact that I have built my own wealth by choosing how to distrubute resources inherently qualifies me for this role. If the government makes it less profitable for me to distribute my resources to create wealth, I'll be less likely to distribute my resources. It's as simple as that. Now people who inheret wealth have no particular qualifications as to how to distribute it effectively, and that's why I think the inheretance tax is one of the fairest taxes around, but that is a completely different conversation. The original point I was trying to make is that lowering taxes clearly can stimulate an economy, and supply side economics clearly can work under certain conditions. It's just that no one knows exactly what those conditions are, and I suspect that that those conditions change depending on the current psychology of both consumers and investors, but as I alluded to before, I tend to believe that all economics is "Voodoo" economics. That's not to say that economics is useless. It's just that it's extremely debatable and hard to develop rules for, and as soon as you have some rules that seem to work, the whole system changes.
If you do any reading of the thoughts the founding fathers did on the subject of copyright, your notion is in fact quite a strange thought. Unfortunately, it's a thought shared by many these days. If you are an author, and you don't want people spreading your ideas around, you have a simple recourse: don't share them. Once you share them I have a fundamental freedom of speech right to do with that knowledge what I will. The founding fathers realized that in some cases it may serve the public good to infringe our personal freedoms for practical purposes (eg. I can't yell fire in a crowed theater. I can, however, yell fire in my own home.) That's why the copyright provision of the Constitution is written the way it is. We, as a society, agree to abridge our fundamental rights, to motivate authors to share thier ideas with us. The fundamental goal is to ensure that many works become available to the public. Once you share your ideas with us, you have no more fundamental right to them than I do. You have no right to profit by them. What you have is a social contract in which we collectively agree to abridge our findamental rights so that we as a society get something in return. Extending copyright alters that contract after the fact, and amounts to government welfare. It's like a used car dealer selling you a car for $300 per month for 3 years, and then lobbying congress to extend the term of all such contracts to 5 years, 7 years, 120 years. You as the buyer of that car get no more consideration, simply a higher bill. It is indeed a wildly strange thought to think that just because someone came up with an idea, that he somehow owns it.
I think you have a misunderstanding of supply side economics. It's not a matter of wealth creation, it's a matter of motivation. It derives from a few simple calculations regarding revenue. You'r revenue = (tax rate) * (tax base), but as your tax rate rises, peoples motivation for creating wealth decreases. This is trivially true. Think about it. If I tell you that I am going to tax you 100% (assuming we still live in a free society) are you going to bother to go to work tomorrow? A similar arguement might also apply for a 99% tax rate. Now granted, everyone is going to have to eat, and is thus going to have to do a little bit of work, but (especially) in a progressive tax system, as you earn more, you get to keep less. That means we are giving you an incentive to not create as much wealth. As I said before, it's trivially true that extremely high taxes will reduce wealth creation (by reducing motivation), so the only question is, "how much is too much". I believe this is where the term Voodoo economics is most applicable, primarily because the nature of this relationship is so complex that you essentially have to try things based on your magical voodoo sense of what will help, and see if it works, and even if it does, it could be for completely unrelated reasons. One other thing to note is that as you lower taxes, you reduce people's motivation to spend huge sums of money to hire tax lawyers to help them avoid paying taxes. I was reading an article last year about the current economic prosperity in Ireland due to tax cuts from about 60% to about 10%. The most interesting thing in the article, however, was a contention that worldwide, large corporations and individuals pay roughly 10-15% in actual taxes regardless of the tax rate. They do this by either hireing lawyers to find loopholes, or by moving out of the countries where they can't find such loopholes. In essence, I guess I have 3 points.
1) Supply Side economics doesn't say that lowering the tax rate will always generate more revenue, it simply says that raising taxes won't always generate more revenue, and that there is some optimim tax rate which may even change from time to time depending on a huge number of factors.
2) Like you say there are only a few ways to create wealth, but taxes are about distributing wealth , not creating wealth. They are also used to motivate economies. Finding better ways of distributing wealth and motivating wealth creation can leave you with lower taxes, and higher tax revenue. We can argue about what the best way to do that is, but saying that either raising or lowering taxes will always result in more revenue is naive.
3) Worldwide, wealthy individuals seem to pay around 10-15% no matter what your tax code looks like, and having a complex tax code only serves the wealthy, while hiding the truely regressive nature of many tax structures. Often times, tax cuts which appear to favor the rich, simply reduce motivation for the rich to find loopholes.
I've got much more I could say on the subject, but if you've read this far, I'm sure you will respond, or dismiss me as a crackpot, and I can make more points in a later post.
That rollover was faked for Dateline NBC( By Stone Phillips I believe). The Flintstones car was really quite stable, and generally can handle any size Brontosaurus ribs you can find. Damn liberal stone age media.....
My favorite part of the game, (until I got bored of it) was early game MIRVed missles. I would build a Cruiser hull as quickly as possible and load it with 2x missles. Also make a scout ship with no weapons, but all the speed/turning enhancements. I called this the Observer. Take the pair into battle, have the Missle Cruiser Launch both rounds of Missles, and retreat. As long as the Observer remains in the battle, the missles continue to fly. Have the Observer Run like hell. Usually, your missles will destroy the defending force before thier missles reach your Observer. After the battle is over, your cruiser (which retreated) returns for the ground battle. If you've chosen a telepathic race, mind control the colony, and repeat as necessary. Like I said, it's so easy, it's not really much of a challenge, but if you just feel like taking over the galaxy without too much trouble, this strategy can easily end a game in a Huge galaxy in under two hours.
I have a huge collection of DVD's exactly because I don't like to watch movies on someone else's timetable. Unfortunately, however, I'm starting to get so many that it's hard to keep track of them all. I'd sign up for netflix, but the thought of mailing all of those DVD's back and forth sounds like a pain. PVR's provide the perfect solution. Let me have 3 or 5 or 10 movies at any one time, and as soon I delete one from my PVR, the next one on my list gets downloaded automatically. Maybe it takes 8 or 12 hours to download, but that's still better than netflix can do. Hell, I'd even watch a commercial or two at the beginning of the feature, as long as I had to option to skip through an excessive list. Once again, we have to drag the media companies kicking and screaming into the future where they will make more money than ever. You could even set it up so each family member could have thier own listing of shows so that ad's could be targeted perfectly. I don't care how many commercials they force me to watch, I'm just not going to buy any tampons, get over it. Let me skip the commercial. If you want to throw them into my wife's shows, however, be my guest. I'd bet that's true for 80% of the commercials people watch. This technology could give advertisers direct feedback on how to get people to actually watch commercials. What could be a more powerful sales tool than that. Give me a 30 second commercial at the beginning of the show, and another 30 seconds at the end. I'll probably watch them rather than getting up to get a sandwich or take a bathroom break every 15 minutes.
I thought all of those stations went off the air in the 70's.
A friend of mine shared this little tip with me and said it would work, but I've never tried it myself so YMMV.
After your contract expires (and they have finished subsidizing the phone) there is really nothing to keep you from jumping ship, so they are much more open to unlocking your phone if they think it will keep you as a customer. Call them up and tell them you are planning on traveling to Europe and would like to use some of the pre-paid calling SIMs available there, but you need them to unlock your phone for it to work. If they balk, tell them how you like the service, but if they can't help you, you'll find another provider who can. Apparently, once they unlock it in this fashion, it cannot be relocked. Has anyone else tried this?
No, He's saying Linux beta quality is generally better than windows release quality. I know this sounds like a standard slap at Microsoft, and I guess it is, but I've found it to usually be true as well.