I'm not suggesting taxing corporations --- corporate taxation tends to discourage investment rather than anything else. I'm suggesting taxing well-off individuals. In theory, this discourages economic growth to a lesser degree. At least, economists see such taxes as a legitimate method of redistributing income in a capitalist economy.
And taxing people doesn't prevent them from making money. It takes that money away once they have made it.
I think the point is that while you may be able to understand physics, at an abstract level, can you understand it at a concrete level? Our real world experience is mainly a matter of the concrete. Things we can see, and touch, and hear. I drop something, it falls down. I push something, it moves, etc. Physics, however, is completely abstract. You can't see an atom --- you can't even visualize what it would look like if you could see it. The only way to truely understand it is to understand the mathematical model of it. But even when you have that understanding, you don't have something equivilent to your real world experiences. You still can't see it.
That's a silly question. I care because I'm an American and I want to see my country propser. Capitalism has gotten us where we are, and I see no reason to get scared of it now.
I also realize that the more money we have, the more money we have to work with. I want to see important issues like national healthcare, education, etc, addressed. Its easier to address these things when your country's economy doesn't suck. And I don't mean suck as in the occasional recession, I mean suck as the decades-long depressions that other countries are in.
Of course, maybe Americans are content to watch the world pass them by. Moving to Europe is always an option --- ironically, the forces of enterprise seem stronger there now.
I mean that by and large, Americans are employed in skilled (for some definition of skilled) rather than unskilled professions. And there is no evidence that the number of skilled jobs are decreasing. There is merely evidence that the number of skilled *programming* jobs are decreasing. This is to be expected --- when skilled shoemakers got replaced by automated factory machines, the job of shoe-making became much less skilled. That doesn't mean that there weren't other skilled jobs to replace it.
That is a separate issue. Indeed, I am arguing this at a somewhat abstract level --- how do you keep capitalism without making everyone poor. Definitely, more work has to be done in getting our money spent properly. That doesn't necessarily mean that using government to redistribute income is unworkable.
In general, the federal government does a better job of this than the states do. However, it is still massively inefficient. And honestly, I don't know how to fix it within the framework of our current system --- where politicians are driven more by special interests than anything else.
You are arguing my point. A good programmer wouldn't use operator+ for boat's. A good programmer would reserve it for something like:
r = (a + b) * c
Where a, b, and c are vectors, and the operations are vector add and vector multiply (dot-product). Java constrains bad programmers from doing this. It even mocks the programmer by doing it themselves in the String "class," but preventing the programmer from doing it.
There is a fine line between offering safety for a good programmer, and keeping a bad programmer from hurting himself. Array bounds-checking is an example of the former. Even great programmers sometimes overstep their arrays. Banning operator-overloading is an example of the latter --- a good programmer doesn't just make a confusing overload by accident.
Again, the purpose of these "features" is to make code more portable between programmers, and to lower the bar for what kind of programmer is required.
Sure it does. People *want* money to be spent on missiles and bombs and whatnot, for their protection. Thus, they vote for people who vote for more defense spending. I think people vote for too much defense spending, but I can't argue with the fact that people are getting what they vote for.
Is a more complex, punitive tax system the answer? The tax system need not be more complex, nor more punative. There is a lot of crap (loopholes, etc) that you can throw away. The end result is likely to be simpler rather than more complex.
According to this article http://www.frissell.com/taxpat/FORBES1.HTM when taxes are raised on the rich, they just move. Well, that's their prerogative, but US citizenship has many benefits, and I doubt the phenomena you are seeing (*extremely* rich people moving away) can be sufficiently generalized.
Also, if you tax them, how is the income distributed? Do less wealthy people pay less in taxes? That's generally the idea. Say you have a 20% income tax. A person who makes $20,000 pays $4,000 into the common pool. A person who makes $20,000,000 pays $4,000,000 into the common pool. If each person then receives a more or less equal share of public services (health care, education, etc) then that $4,000,000 is effectively redistributed to the others.
Code re-use existed, but it was hard to take advantage of it. That's why people kept looking for better ways to achieve code reuse
And by "severely restrictive" I mean that Java places lots of limits on the programmer. For example: no operator overloading, no multiple inheritence, etc. The overall goal is to make code more readable by those who did not right it --- and thus more reusable by those who did not write it.
And good programmers will always produce better code, but usually, code just needs to be "good enough." You need certain code, at a certain level of quality, written in a certain timeframe. Then you look for the cheapest way to achieve those particular metrics. *That's* why outsourcing is becoming so popular --- you can get mediocre code more cheaply.
Not that I know of. There are a couple of programs (gnetmd, xmd, Open/NMD) but none currently support song upload or download. The most promising project, Open/NMD, seems to be defunct.
Consider: what is the purpose of Java? To make programming entirely a matter of plugging black-boxes together. The language is severely restrictive, to make it easy to plug existing code into new code. The language comes with a huge amount of stuff already written for you. All in all, Java lowers the bar for what kind of programmer it takes to do a given job. And that's precisely what it was supposed to do! I don't see why anyone is surprised that people are now taking advantage of this to export certain jobs to commodity programmeres in other countries.
Of course, this points out the inherent Luddism of the anti-outsouring position. An improvement in tools leads to a certain class of skilled people becoming irrelevent. It happened when factories took over for skilled artisans. It happened when automation took over for factory workers. Its happening again. Opposing the natural evolution of the labor market caused by improved tools is silly. The best thing to do is adapt to it --- not to fight it.
That's awfully cynical. The US is not nearly corrupted enough where taxes go immediately into the politicians' pockets. Most of it does come back to the public, through social security, medicare, and national defense. Not to mention all the pork-barrel projects each politician does for its constituents.
Oh, one more thing. Yes, there is the issue of context switching if each app has its own OpenGL context. However, that won't necessarily be the case. Applications will not be using OpenGL, but Cairo. One way to use Cairo is to have the Cairo client-side library send drawing commands to the X server, and have the X server render them (via OpenGL). That way, you only need a single OpenGL context --- for the X server.
Not necessarily. You see, the graphics card has two major components: geometry and rasterization. The geometry portion handles manipulation of all those meshes, while the rasterizer draws the 2D triangles generated by the geometry portion after mapping from 3D space to 2D (screen) space. Now, when you do a 2D engine in OpenGL, you usually set up the geometry portion, say using an orthogonal projection, so most of that manipulation is bypassed. So the net result is that the rasterizer does what it is good at --- drawing textured 2D triangles, and the geometry engine handles relatively simple tasks like transforms (rotation, scaling, etc).
Economists theorize that the fact that people don't understand basic economics is the main reason why potential-sapping protectionist trade barriers are almost guaranteed to exist. And every time an outsourcing article on Slashdot comes out, the modern day Luddites here prove t hem right.
I don't get conservatives. They espouse the merits of capitalism and the free market(one of their few good ideas), yet when it comes to actually breaking down trade barriers to free the market, they do a 180 to bend over for their base --- few of which actually understand capitalism.
Such is the nature of a capitalist economy. The more money you have, the easier it is to make more money. If you don't want that kind of disparity, the solution is not to prevent people from making money, but to vote for higher taxes and thus greater income redistribution.
1) Free trade has worked out well for more than a hundred years. And even then, people were still bitching about it. Take Europe as an example. The striking down of trade barriers, first within countries like France, then between countries, is *strongly* correlated with a prospering European economy. Its been happening this way since the fucking Napoleonic era.
2) Americans, by and large, are not laborers. Many programming jobs are increasingly becoming jobs for laborers. The popularity of Java is a testament to this. Thus, Americans shouldn't be doing jobs where the value is based on the cost of labor, but should switch to jobs where value is based on skill.
The underlying framework supports drop-shadows and translucent menus, but can be used for much more:
- OpenGL will be used for drawing, so you can have very rich, yet fast, vector-graphics based applications.
- Back-buffering each window (which is what enables transparency and shadows) allows you to eliminate all sorts of flicker and lag during resizing and window moving.
- New extensions (Composite + XDamage) allow for clever window managers to do useful things like Expose-style features, screen-scrapers (for things like VNC), magnification tools, etc.
I have to admit. I didn't RTFA:) Details of the transition problems are presented better here The best source is the heise.de and Computerwoche articles, but those are in German:)
The main problems are as follows: - The project's timeline was too short. They specified two years to migrate 14,000 desktops. That's a challenge for a Windows->Windows transition, much less a Linux->Windows transition. - They are hitting funding problems. - Users need to be retrained for the new software. - Contractors need to move their apps to the new platform.
Most of these are inherent to any transition, especially one of this magnitude.
You're the one who doesn't understand how economics works. A trade-deficit is not inherently a problem. When you import a car, uou get a car, and the other country gets cash, with which they can buy something equal to the value of the car. Thus, the transaction is even, independent of other transactions you may make.
Now, large trade deficits can be a symptom of an economy that is not generating enough value internally, but they are not the cause of such problems.
Actually the "infant industry" argument is a textbook fallacy in the economic world. Quotas, like all forms of protectionism, ultimately hurt the economy in question.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not suggesting taxing corporations --- corporate taxation tends to discourage investment rather than anything else. I'm suggesting taxing well-off individuals. In theory, this discourages economic growth to a lesser degree. At least, economists see such taxes as a legitimate method of redistributing income in a capitalist economy.
And taxing people doesn't prevent them from making money. It takes that money away once they have made it.
I think the point is that while you may be able to understand physics, at an abstract level, can you understand it at a concrete level? Our real world experience is mainly a matter of the concrete. Things we can see, and touch, and hear. I drop something, it falls down. I push something, it moves, etc. Physics, however, is completely abstract. You can't see an atom --- you can't even visualize what it would look like if you could see it. The only way to truely understand it is to understand the mathematical model of it. But even when you have that understanding, you don't have something equivilent to your real world experiences. You still can't see it.
That's a silly question. I care because I'm an American and I want to see my country propser. Capitalism has gotten us where we are, and I see no reason to get scared of it now.
I also realize that the more money we have, the more money we have to work with. I want to see important issues like national healthcare, education, etc, addressed. Its easier to address these things when your country's economy doesn't suck. And I don't mean suck as in the occasional recession, I mean suck as the decades-long depressions that other countries are in.
Of course, maybe Americans are content to watch the world pass them by. Moving to Europe is always an option --- ironically, the forces of enterprise seem stronger there now.
I mean that by and large, Americans are employed in skilled (for some definition of skilled) rather than unskilled professions. And there is no evidence that the number of skilled jobs are decreasing. There is merely evidence that the number of skilled *programming* jobs are decreasing. This is to be expected --- when skilled shoemakers got replaced by automated factory machines, the job of shoe-making became much less skilled. That doesn't mean that there weren't other skilled jobs to replace it.
That is a separate issue. Indeed, I am arguing this at a somewhat abstract level --- how do you keep capitalism without making everyone poor. Definitely, more work has to be done in getting our money spent properly. That doesn't necessarily mean that using government to redistribute income is unworkable.
In general, the federal government does a better job of this than the states do. However, it is still massively inefficient. And honestly, I don't know how to fix it within the framework of our current system --- where politicians are driven more by special interests than anything else.
You are arguing my point. A good programmer wouldn't use operator+ for boat's. A good programmer would reserve it for something like:
r = (a + b) * c
Where a, b, and c are vectors, and the operations are vector add and vector multiply (dot-product).
Java constrains bad programmers from doing this. It even mocks the programmer by doing it themselves in the String "class," but preventing the programmer from doing it.
There is a fine line between offering safety for a good programmer, and keeping a bad programmer from hurting himself. Array bounds-checking is an example of the former. Even great programmers sometimes overstep their arrays. Banning operator-overloading is an example of the latter --- a good programmer doesn't just make a confusing overload by accident.
Again, the purpose of these "features" is to make code more portable between programmers, and to lower the bar for what kind of programmer is required.
Sure it does. People *want* money to be spent on missiles and bombs and whatnot, for their protection. Thus, they vote for people who vote for more defense spending. I think people vote for too much defense spending, but I can't argue with the fact that people are getting what they vote for.
Does that work?
Quite often, it does.
Is a more complex, punitive tax system the answer?
The tax system need not be more complex, nor more punative. There is a lot of crap (loopholes, etc) that you can throw away. The end result is likely to be simpler rather than more complex.
According to this article http://www.frissell.com/taxpat/FORBES1.HTM when taxes are raised on the rich, they just move.
Well, that's their prerogative, but US citizenship has many benefits, and I doubt the phenomena you are seeing (*extremely* rich people moving away) can be sufficiently generalized.
Also, if you tax them, how is the income distributed? Do less wealthy people pay less in taxes?
That's generally the idea. Say you have a 20% income tax. A person who makes $20,000 pays $4,000 into the common pool. A person who makes $20,000,000 pays $4,000,000 into the common pool. If each person then receives a more or less equal share of public services (health care, education, etc) then that $4,000,000 is effectively redistributed to the others.
Code re-use existed, but it was hard to take advantage of it. That's why people kept looking for better ways to achieve code reuse
And by "severely restrictive" I mean that Java places lots of limits on the programmer. For example: no operator overloading, no multiple inheritence, etc. The overall goal is to make code more readable by those who did not right it --- and thus more reusable by those who did not write it.
And good programmers will always produce better code, but usually, code just needs to be "good enough." You need certain code, at a certain level of quality, written in a certain timeframe. Then you look for the cheapest way to achieve those particular metrics. *That's* why outsourcing is becoming so popular --- you can get mediocre code more cheaply.
Not that I know of. There are a couple of programs (gnetmd, xmd, Open/NMD) but none currently support song upload or download. The most promising project, Open/NMD, seems to be defunct.
Consider: what is the purpose of Java? To make programming entirely a matter of plugging black-boxes together. The language is severely restrictive, to make it easy to plug existing code into new code. The language comes with a huge amount of stuff already written for you. All in all, Java lowers the bar for what kind of programmer it takes to do a given job. And that's precisely what it was supposed to do! I don't see why anyone is surprised that people are now taking advantage of this to export certain jobs to commodity programmeres in other countries.
Of course, this points out the inherent Luddism of the anti-outsouring position. An improvement in tools leads to a certain class of skilled people becoming irrelevent. It happened when factories took over for skilled artisans. It happened when automation took over for factory workers. Its happening again. Opposing the natural evolution of the labor market caused by improved tools is silly. The best thing to do is adapt to it --- not to fight it.
IIRC, Linus made a lot of money off VA Linux and Redhat stock. At least the latter is doing quite well for itself selling 100% free software.
That's awfully cynical. The US is not nearly corrupted enough where taxes go immediately into the politicians' pockets. Most of it does come back to the public, through social security, medicare, and national defense. Not to mention all the pork-barrel projects each politician does for its constituents.
Oh, one more thing. Yes, there is the issue of context switching if each app has its own OpenGL context. However, that won't necessarily be the case. Applications will not be using OpenGL, but Cairo. One way to use Cairo is to have the Cairo client-side library send drawing commands to the X server, and have the X server render them (via OpenGL). That way, you only need a single OpenGL context --- for the X server.
Not necessarily. You see, the graphics card has two major components: geometry and rasterization. The geometry portion handles manipulation of all those meshes, while the rasterizer draws the 2D triangles generated by the geometry portion after mapping from 3D space to 2D (screen) space. Now, when you do a 2D engine in OpenGL, you usually set up the geometry portion, say using an orthogonal projection, so most of that manipulation is bypassed. So the net result is that the rasterizer does what it is good at --- drawing textured 2D triangles, and the geometry engine handles relatively simple tasks like transforms (rotation, scaling, etc).
Economists theorize that the fact that people don't understand basic economics is the main reason why potential-sapping protectionist trade barriers are almost guaranteed to exist. And every time an outsourcing article on Slashdot comes out, the modern day Luddites here prove t hem right.
I don't get conservatives. They espouse the merits of capitalism and the free market(one of their few good ideas), yet when it comes to actually breaking down trade barriers to free the market, they do a 180 to bend over for their base --- few of which actually understand capitalism.
Do you really have any evidence that the middle class is shrinking?
Such is the nature of a capitalist economy. The more money you have, the easier it is to make more money. If you don't want that kind of disparity, the solution is not to prevent people from making money, but to vote for higher taxes and thus greater income redistribution.
There are so many things wrong with this:
1) Free trade has worked out well for more than a hundred years. And even then, people were still bitching about it. Take Europe as an example. The striking down of trade barriers, first within countries like France, then between countries, is *strongly* correlated with a prospering European economy. Its been happening this way since the fucking Napoleonic era.
2) Americans, by and large, are not laborers. Many programming jobs are increasingly becoming jobs for laborers. The popularity of Java is a testament to this. Thus, Americans shouldn't be doing jobs where the value is based on the cost of labor, but should switch to jobs where value is based on skill.
The underlying framework supports drop-shadows and translucent menus, but can be used for much more:
- OpenGL will be used for drawing, so you can have very rich, yet fast, vector-graphics based applications.
- Back-buffering each window (which is what enables transparency and shadows) allows you to eliminate all sorts of flicker and lag during resizing and window moving.
- New extensions (Composite + XDamage) allow for clever window managers to do useful things like Expose-style features, screen-scrapers (for things like VNC), magnification tools, etc.
MiniDisc has no Linux support :(
I have to admit. I didn't RTFA :) Details of the transition problems are presented better here :)
The best source is the heise.de and Computerwoche articles, but those are in German
The main problems are as follows:
- The project's timeline was too short. They specified two years to migrate 14,000 desktops. That's a challenge for a Windows->Windows transition, much less a Linux->Windows transition.
- They are hitting funding problems.
- Users need to be retrained for the new software.
- Contractors need to move their apps to the new platform.
Most of these are inherent to any transition, especially one of this magnitude.
You're the one who doesn't understand how economics works. A trade-deficit is not inherently a problem. When you import a car, uou get a car, and the other country gets cash, with which they can buy something equal to the value of the car. Thus, the transaction is even, independent of other transactions you may make.
Now, large trade deficits can be a symptom of an economy that is not generating enough value internally, but they are not the cause of such problems.
Actually the "infant industry" argument is a textbook fallacy in the economic world. Quotas, like all forms of protectionism, ultimately hurt the economy in question.