Yeah, but practically speaking, I doubt NCSoft has any Glass Swords (as distinct from a glass sword, and much to my sadness there is a difference) lying around.
When Pons and Fleischmann put forward their (admittedly bizarre) cold fusion claims, the physics community tried to replicate the results. They did not start screaming from the rooftops that Pons and Fleischmann were frauds, hoaxers, etc...
Um... yeah they did. The denunciations were almost immediate, largely because Pons and Fleishmann didn't give anyone a chance to replicate the results or even submit a paper for peer-review before going to the press. Which is classic charlatan behavior. Then they tried to replicate the results and couldn't, which only confirmed what they already thought.
Funnily enough, it turns out there was more to Pons and Fleischmann than there is to Wakefield. Turns out that just skipping peer review isn't as good an indicator of charlatanism than skipping peer review when conducting research paid for by a lawyer to achieve a result favorable to the lawyer's case.
More like they weren't married and getting jabbed "just in case I get lucky" got old real fast, or they were married and getting jabbed knowing they weren't going to get lucky got old REALLY fast.
Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared.
Mixing SI and Imperial units instead of just saying "kilograms squared" is standard? Do you by chance work for NASA?
Oh, yes, of course, I do not agree with some PC idiot, then I MUST be a BIGOT.
No, you're a bigot because you automatically dismissed the potential contributions of billions of people due to their poverty and nations of birth without knowing anything about them. That's why you're a bigot. That's basically the definition of the term: "strongly prejudiced, forming opinions without just cause." It has nothing to do with disagreeing with anyone, your first post in this thread made it clear all on its own.
Yeah. Don't forget a RACIST. Hell, I probably personally tear poor little children apart limb by limb after and sell their organs to evil western corporations.
How ironically non-ironic. You truly are an edgy free thinker. Go tell yourself you're special because the crotch you were pulled from happened to be in a rich country, and people who think that's ignorant and bigoted are just PC idiots.
In some cases, yes. In plenty of others, no. But really, the fact that you automatically classify anyone from a poor country as a failure with no ideas to contribute guts any statement you make against PC idiots. Because of course a bigoted idiot thinks anyone who isn't also a bigot is naive and overly PC.
Re:This will get you shot...
on
Tactical Camera
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Sure, obviously it's a bad idea to run around with a camera attached to a gun stock. That's why instead I mount my camera to the front of my vest, with rows of cylindrical batteries with wires running to the camera (for extra picture-taking longevity) and a big digital timer (to indicate how long until I take a picture to anyone thinking of passing in front of me), and a dead-mans switch to activate the camera (for when I'm waiting forever for the perfect shot, and pass out just as the moment arrives). This should be much safer. Also great for those candid shots. People act different when they know you have a camera. So this way I can hide the camera-vest under my coat, and run up to people and throw the coat open so I can take a picture. Seems perfect to me.
The Maps anime had a super-weapon called the "Sacrifice Cannon." It was a BF-blaster/raygun powered by the sheer cruelty and evil of destroying a pile of Pikachu-like creatures in a big blender. Yes, really, not making this up, that's exactly what it was, a big-ass raygun hooked up to a blender full of quasi-Pokemon.
Yep, you're not making it up, I saw it too. And in the case of the biggest one they showed, "pile" doesn't even describe it. It's hard to say exactly, but I'm guesstimating that thing ground up around 100,000 cute fluffy critters every shot. It was about the only memorable thing about the show, really. And for reasons I can't quite explain, incredibly hilarious. Though I might want to keep that quiet in front of the jury.
russian (what a surprise) groups that sell perfect fakes on the Internet to people who want to then sell them on eBay. They do mass quantities (in the thousands). They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that, unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.
By cornering the market on mass spectrometers, of course!
In other words, who goes there to hear about real war? Real war is boring, tedious, outright dangerous. And the least of your time is spent collecting headshots.
I knew the military wasn't for me when I asked a recruiter and they told me that it's considered bad form, if not stupidly suicidal, for a sniper to shout "BOOM! Headshot!" after every kill. Well if you're going to take all the fun out of shooting people, then I'm not going to join is what I told them.
Your argument would work, except for the fact that (aside from the current issue of tax evasion) corporate taxes affect all companies in a given market fairly uniformly. This provides a mechanism for all prices to creep up, and the market actually does bear a higher price when there is no alternative, to a point. This absolutely does happen.
Income taxes are a tax on profits. Raising or lowering them will not change a company's break-even point. They are not a cost. Therefore a company that wishes to raise revenue by undercutting their competitors will still be able to do so without hurting their profitability. All companies will experience a reduction in net profit, but an increase in price will not necessarily compensate.
Price creep happens in all markets regardless of taxes, simply because even when not cooperating, competitors have an incentive to charge more if they can get away with it, and if they all move in lockstep then they are more likely to be able to. Actual increases in costs, not a tax on gross profits, are much more likely to provide such an incentive.
It doesn't change the fact that no matter how you figure it, corporate taxes end up being paid by individuals, whether consumers or investors.
Trivially true, because all money a corporation has came from investors and customers. The question is whether raising the tax rate means consumers and investors pay more than otherwise, and lowering it means they pay less, and that is not a simple truism.
My point is that it's silly to argue for higher corporate taxes, because however you figure it, it increases the tax burden on individuals, except it's hidden so they don't even realize they're being taxed - and that's not a good thing.
And my point is that this is not necessarily true, and usually isn't, as prices are already set to what the market will bear so trying to increase prices to compensate for a higher tax rate is counter-productive. Unless it's your theory that, say, Dell is charging less for their computers than their customers are willing to pay, and thus deliberately reducing their profits today, and only a higher tax rate will cause them to take as much revenue as they can.
Pavlovian conditioning. Search engines have for the past decade consistently ignored grammar and thrown out those small additional words, often with a stern admonishment to the user that half their query is being ignored.
Which funnily enough makes them perfect as triggers for Google to know you want some computation done rather than a web search.
"Regrettably," he adds, sighing as he drops a Windows XP box with an "Ubuntu Linux" sticker placed over the product name into the trash. "Would have saved me so much money..."
The smart thing to do is just not broadcast your SSID in the first place.
*shrug* While that's a sensible thing to do (and I do it), it will make no difference in your security if your network is properly secured, and it will not make up for any deficiency in your security if it isn't.
At the end of the day, your packets are in the air. You don't *need* to spoof an SSID to see those packets, that just makes it easier. But either way, the wireless "channel" itself is insecure, and your wireless security must be predicated on that fact. With no security, or WEP, you're going to get pwned whether you broadcast SSID or not, and with WPA/WPA2 you're secure either way.
So basically it's just to prevent the most casual of hackers (or innocent laptop set to 'wander' mode) from jumping on your unsecured network. That was my "security" for the month before I figured out how to get WPA2 working with my wireless card. Now it's on mostly just for completeness. I don't allow random computers on my network, so why would I broadcast the name?
You seem to have missed my entire point. Corporations do not pay taxes, at all! If we impose a 75% tax on every corporation and eliminate all loopholes and tax havens, corporations still won't pay a cent in taxes. All wealth is held by individuals. When a corporation is taxed, you and I pay that tax when we buy their products. I don't know how to make this more simple. If only they'd teach economics in school these days, maybe people wouldn't be so easily duped.
When you argue for higher taxes on corporations, you're actually arguing for higher taxes on yourself. Think about it for a few minutes.
Yeah, think about it, using that economics knowledge you gained in school. Of course whatever money the corporation uses to pay taxes comes from either customers or investors. The thing you need to think about is -- if the tax rate is raised, is the amount of money payed by those customers going to increase? For the answer to be yes, the corporation must raise prices, and this price increase should not affect sales negatively such that they end up making more money overall. However, as basic economics tells you, if they could raise prices without impacting sales they already would have done so.
You may remember the term "what the market will bear" from your economics class. A business tries to maximize revenue by figuring out the price point where sales times price is maximized. As long as that revenue is more than their costs, they make money, and if it's a lot more than their costs, they make a lot of money. They do not continuously scale prices so that they always make a 10% or whatever margin as costs change. They try to maximize their margin, and if costs go down they don't lower prices they take that money straight to the bottom line.
So what I'm saying is, raising taxes will not in most cases raise the amount of money the customer is paying. Because the company is already charging as much as they think they can without adversely impacting sales and reducing revenue -- in other words they can't raise prices as a way to offset increasing taxes, because it will have the opposite effect.
Though since what we're talking about is income tax, it isn't even a cost to begin with. It's something that comes out of profits, which is revenue minus cost. If the cost is higher than their revenue, they take a loss and pay no tax (like my company has done for the last couple years:P). So raising taxes doesn't even change their break-even point. All it will do is reduce their profit. And unless they want even less profit, they aren't going to raise prices to try to compensate.
Business taxes are just indirect taxes on people. Consumers pay more for goods, investors receive fewer dividends or the value of their shares decreases, and employees receive lower wages and have fewer job opportunities.
Yeah, it is funny how the price of everything went down when corporate tax cuts were given. Oh wait, they stayed the same. If we actually start collecting corporate income taxes, I'm betting what will happen is that the companies will earn somewhat less net profit, and continue charging whatever the market will bear like they always do.
Businesses do not set prices at (cost to produce) * (1 + modest profit ratio). They set prices to maximize revenue by maximizing price times expected sales at that price. If that's less than it costs to produce, then they find another business, if it's more, even a lot more, then yee-ha! When their costs go down, they only tell you they're "passing the savings on to you!" when they think they can get more money by undercutting others. When their costs go up, they might like to charge more, but if that means fewer people will buy and they end up with less money, they suck it up and go on at the current prices.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's mostly income taxes that are at issue with foreign tax havens anyway, which are based on profit and shouldn't push a company from black to red. On the other hand if things like payroll taxes on U.S. employees increase, that's more incentive for them to outsource, not that they really need any more. Outsourcing is a bucket of worms to be sure, since just about anything you do to try to stop it just encourages it, and doing nothing means it's happening rapidly regardless.
Either way, don't expect the price of your next Dell to go up 12.4% because their tax rate did too. It just doesn't work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Why waste money on the fake red noses rather than just use Bozosaurs to begin with?
Actually ostrich tastes and looks like beef.
Naturally lean and flavorful beef, no less.
I miss Kroger; I'd have ostrich steak once a week when I lived near one.
Yeah, but practically speaking, I doubt NCSoft has any Glass Swords (as distinct from a glass sword, and much to my sadness there is a difference) lying around.
"No reason was given for this, merely an upraised middle finger and a 'Go to hell!'"
Sounds like the rhythm method - without which, I wouldn't be here at all.
Heh. Reminds me of an exchange from a Heinlein book (paraphrased in script form).
Doctor: "We have a term for women who rely on the rhythm method."
Woman: "What is it?"
Doctor: "Mothers."
Yeah, I'm going straight to hell.....
I dunno about that, it sounds like the perfect way to say "sorry the condom slipped off!" to me. :)
When Pons and Fleischmann put forward their (admittedly bizarre) cold fusion claims, the physics community tried to replicate the results. They did not start screaming from the rooftops that Pons and Fleischmann were frauds, hoaxers, etc...
Um... yeah they did. The denunciations were almost immediate, largely because Pons and Fleishmann didn't give anyone a chance to replicate the results or even submit a paper for peer-review before going to the press. Which is classic charlatan behavior. Then they tried to replicate the results and couldn't, which only confirmed what they already thought.
Funnily enough, it turns out there was more to Pons and Fleischmann than there is to Wakefield. Turns out that just skipping peer review isn't as good an indicator of charlatanism than skipping peer review when conducting research paid for by a lawyer to achieve a result favorable to the lawyer's case.
More like they weren't married and getting jabbed "just in case I get lucky" got old real fast, or they were married and getting jabbed knowing they weren't going to get lucky got old REALLY fast.
Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared.
Mixing SI and Imperial units instead of just saying "kilograms squared" is standard? Do you by chance work for NASA?
Oh, yes, of course, I do not agree with some PC idiot, then I MUST be a BIGOT.
No, you're a bigot because you automatically dismissed the potential contributions of billions of people due to their poverty and nations of birth without knowing anything about them. That's why you're a bigot. That's basically the definition of the term: "strongly prejudiced, forming opinions without just cause." It has nothing to do with disagreeing with anyone, your first post in this thread made it clear all on its own.
Yeah. Don't forget a RACIST. Hell, I probably personally tear poor little children apart limb by limb after and sell their organs to evil western corporations.
How ironically non-ironic. You truly are an edgy free thinker. Go tell yourself you're special because the crotch you were pulled from happened to be in a rich country, and people who think that's ignorant and bigoted are just PC idiots.
In some cases, yes. In plenty of others, no. But really, the fact that you automatically classify anyone from a poor country as a failure with no ideas to contribute guts any statement you make against PC idiots. Because of course a bigoted idiot thinks anyone who isn't also a bigot is naive and overly PC.
Sure, obviously it's a bad idea to run around with a camera attached to a gun stock. That's why instead I mount my camera to the front of my vest, with rows of cylindrical batteries with wires running to the camera (for extra picture-taking longevity) and a big digital timer (to indicate how long until I take a picture to anyone thinking of passing in front of me), and a dead-mans switch to activate the camera (for when I'm waiting forever for the perfect shot, and pass out just as the moment arrives). This should be much safer. Also great for those candid shots. People act different when they know you have a camera. So this way I can hide the camera-vest under my coat, and run up to people and throw the coat open so I can take a picture. Seems perfect to me.
'expertsexchange' (WFT? 'expert sex change'??)
You think that's bad, try this one.
The Maps anime had a super-weapon called the "Sacrifice Cannon." It was a BF-blaster/raygun powered by the sheer cruelty and evil of destroying a pile of Pikachu-like creatures in a big blender. Yes, really, not making this up, that's exactly what it was, a big-ass raygun hooked up to a blender full of quasi-Pokemon.
Yep, you're not making it up, I saw it too. And in the case of the biggest one they showed, "pile" doesn't even describe it. It's hard to say exactly, but I'm guesstimating that thing ground up around 100,000 cute fluffy critters every shot. It was about the only memorable thing about the show, really. And for reasons I can't quite explain, incredibly hilarious. Though I might want to keep that quiet in front of the jury.
russian (what a surprise) groups that sell perfect fakes on the Internet to people who want to then sell them on eBay. They do mass quantities (in the thousands). They even guarantee them against several types of scientific tests (including fluorescence and mass spectrography) ! I have no idea how they can do that, unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.
By cornering the market on mass spectrometers, of course!
In other words, who goes there to hear about real war? Real war is boring, tedious, outright dangerous. And the least of your time is spent collecting headshots.
I knew the military wasn't for me when I asked a recruiter and they told me that it's considered bad form, if not stupidly suicidal, for a sniper to shout "BOOM! Headshot!" after every kill. Well if you're going to take all the fun out of shooting people, then I'm not going to join is what I told them.
Your argument would work, except for the fact that (aside from the current issue of tax evasion) corporate taxes affect all companies in a given market fairly uniformly. This provides a mechanism for all prices to creep up, and the market actually does bear a higher price when there is no alternative, to a point. This absolutely does happen.
Income taxes are a tax on profits. Raising or lowering them will not change a company's break-even point. They are not a cost. Therefore a company that wishes to raise revenue by undercutting their competitors will still be able to do so without hurting their profitability. All companies will experience a reduction in net profit, but an increase in price will not necessarily compensate.
Price creep happens in all markets regardless of taxes, simply because even when not cooperating, competitors have an incentive to charge more if they can get away with it, and if they all move in lockstep then they are more likely to be able to. Actual increases in costs, not a tax on gross profits, are much more likely to provide such an incentive.
It doesn't change the fact that no matter how you figure it, corporate taxes end up being paid by individuals, whether consumers or investors.
Trivially true, because all money a corporation has came from investors and customers. The question is whether raising the tax rate means consumers and investors pay more than otherwise, and lowering it means they pay less, and that is not a simple truism.
My point is that it's silly to argue for higher corporate taxes, because however you figure it, it increases the tax burden on individuals, except it's hidden so they don't even realize they're being taxed - and that's not a good thing.
And my point is that this is not necessarily true, and usually isn't, as prices are already set to what the market will bear so trying to increase prices to compensate for a higher tax rate is counter-productive. Unless it's your theory that, say, Dell is charging less for their computers than their customers are willing to pay, and thus deliberately reducing their profits today, and only a higher tax rate will cause them to take as much revenue as they can.
Pavlovian conditioning.
Search engines have for the past decade consistently ignored grammar and thrown out those small additional words, often with a stern admonishment to the user that half their query is being ignored.
Which funnily enough makes them perfect as triggers for Google to know you want some computation done rather than a web search.
Saying "no matter what" is always silly, no matter what.
Absolutely everyone who makes sweeping generalizations is an idiot.
(What, I had to deal with the irony somehow!)
"Regrettably," he adds, sighing as he drops a Windows XP box with an "Ubuntu Linux" sticker placed over the product name into the trash. "Would have saved me so much money..."
The smart thing to do is just not broadcast your SSID in the first place.
*shrug* While that's a sensible thing to do (and I do it), it will make no difference in your security if your network is properly secured, and it will not make up for any deficiency in your security if it isn't.
At the end of the day, your packets are in the air. You don't *need* to spoof an SSID to see those packets, that just makes it easier. But either way, the wireless "channel" itself is insecure, and your wireless security must be predicated on that fact. With no security, or WEP, you're going to get pwned whether you broadcast SSID or not, and with WPA/WPA2 you're secure either way.
So basically it's just to prevent the most casual of hackers (or innocent laptop set to 'wander' mode) from jumping on your unsecured network. That was my "security" for the month before I figured out how to get WPA2 working with my wireless card. Now it's on mostly just for completeness. I don't allow random computers on my network, so why would I broadcast the name?
You seem to have missed my entire point. Corporations do not pay taxes, at all! If we impose a 75% tax on every corporation and eliminate all loopholes and tax havens, corporations still won't pay a cent in taxes. All wealth is held by individuals. When a corporation is taxed, you and I pay that tax when we buy their products. I don't know how to make this more simple. If only they'd teach economics in school these days, maybe people wouldn't be so easily duped.
When you argue for higher taxes on corporations, you're actually arguing for higher taxes on yourself. Think about it for a few minutes.
Yeah, think about it, using that economics knowledge you gained in school. Of course whatever money the corporation uses to pay taxes comes from either customers or investors. The thing you need to think about is -- if the tax rate is raised, is the amount of money payed by those customers going to increase? For the answer to be yes, the corporation must raise prices, and this price increase should not affect sales negatively such that they end up making more money overall. However, as basic economics tells you, if they could raise prices without impacting sales they already would have done so.
You may remember the term "what the market will bear" from your economics class. A business tries to maximize revenue by figuring out the price point where sales times price is maximized. As long as that revenue is more than their costs, they make money, and if it's a lot more than their costs, they make a lot of money. They do not continuously scale prices so that they always make a 10% or whatever margin as costs change. They try to maximize their margin, and if costs go down they don't lower prices they take that money straight to the bottom line.
So what I'm saying is, raising taxes will not in most cases raise the amount of money the customer is paying. Because the company is already charging as much as they think they can without adversely impacting sales and reducing revenue -- in other words they can't raise prices as a way to offset increasing taxes, because it will have the opposite effect.
Though since what we're talking about is income tax, it isn't even a cost to begin with. It's something that comes out of profits, which is revenue minus cost. If the cost is higher than their revenue, they take a loss and pay no tax (like my company has done for the last couple years :P). So raising taxes doesn't even change their break-even point. All it will do is reduce their profit. And unless they want even less profit, they aren't going to raise prices to try to compensate.
Business taxes are just indirect taxes on people. Consumers pay more for goods, investors receive fewer dividends or the value of their shares decreases, and employees receive lower wages and have fewer job opportunities.
Yeah, it is funny how the price of everything went down when corporate tax cuts were given. Oh wait, they stayed the same. If we actually start collecting corporate income taxes, I'm betting what will happen is that the companies will earn somewhat less net profit, and continue charging whatever the market will bear like they always do.
Businesses do not set prices at (cost to produce) * (1 + modest profit ratio). They set prices to maximize revenue by maximizing price times expected sales at that price. If that's less than it costs to produce, then they find another business, if it's more, even a lot more, then yee-ha! When their costs go down, they only tell you they're "passing the savings on to you!" when they think they can get more money by undercutting others. When their costs go up, they might like to charge more, but if that means fewer people will buy and they end up with less money, they suck it up and go on at the current prices.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's mostly income taxes that are at issue with foreign tax havens anyway, which are based on profit and shouldn't push a company from black to red. On the other hand if things like payroll taxes on U.S. employees increase, that's more incentive for them to outsource, not that they really need any more. Outsourcing is a bucket of worms to be sure, since just about anything you do to try to stop it just encourages it, and doing nothing means it's happening rapidly regardless.
Either way, don't expect the price of your next Dell to go up 12.4% because their tax rate did too. It just doesn't work that way.
Seriously, LOL.
Don't get bent out of shape, it's okay, I have a solution! A link which, if it can spin fast enough, just might reverse the process and save the day.