Jefferson lost that particular war to Hamilton, in his own time no less. Since Hamilton too was a Founding Father, I'd have to say America *was* meant to be capitalist. Regardless of intentions, the fact remains that during the intervening 200 years, America has become a capitalist country, and has benefited greatly from it.
Except those people aren't given that money --- they earn it. You might not ike how they earn it, or you might not think they deserve it, but they did earn that money in the free market.
I'm a progressive liberal. I believe the rich *do* have a duty to use their greater resources for the overall good of society. However, I think the villification of the rich is getting silly.
I know that's a popular thing to believe, but it isn't true. The 400 richest Americans paid 1.58% of total income taxes last year. The top 1% paid 35% of all taxes. Do the rich use fancy accountants to get out of some taxes? Sure. But the tax reciepts are part of the public record --- they paid a whole lot of taxes, there is no doubt about that.
While that's incorrect (the wealthiest 5% pay over 50% of the taxes), it doesn't make a difference. You've got 5% of people paying 50%+ of the taxes. That means a person making $200,000 a year pays 10x his share of the taxes, yet he doesn get 10x as much service. He sits in the same traffic as everyone else does. Given those circumstances, everyone not in the top 5% really are in no position to complain about *other* people getting services disproportionate to what they pay.
Your argument makes no sense. Yes, the rich pay proportionally on Social Security. However, they don't collection proportionally. As with other taxes, the disproportionate contributions of the rich subsidize everyone else. However, what does that have to do with social security as a service? If you've got two people making $50,000 a year, both are paying a (favorably) disproportionate share of the taxes. If, however, one collects social security and the other doesn't, then the latter is paying taxes disproportionately compared with the first person.
Does that really make a difference? If you send your children to a school largely paid for by someone else's tax dollars, and drive to work on roads paid for by someone else's tax dollars, can you really criticize a recent immigrant for doing the same, just because their parents didn't help pay for that infrastructure?
I'm just plain surprised at how ignorant so many people here are. If they knew anything about the world in general they'd know, a few IT jobs nonwithstanding, immigration is an absolute boon for the United States. Many parts of the world are suffering from what's called "brain drain". Their best and most educated workers leave the country to work elsewhere. Since the United States is a popular destination, we benefit from their loss.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that highly educated workers coming to our country is a good thing. The global market is competitive, and we have an incredible advantage because we are able to attract the best and brightest from around the world to work for us.
Say it with me: "My job does not belong to me." Try it again: "My job does not belong to me." Understand? A "job" belongs to the employer who offers it. He is free to give it to whomever he wants. Foreign workers cannot "steal" your job, because it was never yours to begin with.
This is how capitalism works. Either deal with it, or move to a non-capitalist country.
First, Social Security is pretty much the biggest service that you get from federal tax dollars, and education is the biggest you get from local tax dollars. If they don't take advantage of these, then they are paying a disproportionate share of taxes. Second, and more importantly, pretty much everyone is paying a (favorably) disproportionate share of taxes. The "My tax money payed for all these services" argument is a bit stupid when you consider that the top 5% of Americans pay over 50% of all the taxes. Unless you make more than $200,000 a year, you're disproportionately benefiting from services paid for by other peoples' tax money.
Given the usual level of Slashdot reviews, this one is actually surprisingly good. It's the first one in awhile that I've actually been able to read all the way trhough!
I think the point of contention is that people are saying that grades and learning *should* be related. Grades should reflect what you know --- they are utterly useless otherwise.
The point is that the submitter had an A average on the exams. To fail him for not finding enough security holes in open software seems to be rather abritrary.
My point was that if you were a programmer, you'd understand that tools that use automatic source analysis count things as bugs that are bugs from a programmer's standpoint (ie: they'll barf if you reuse the code in a different context, or if the code around it changes), but aren't necessarily things the user will see as a bug. Therefore, the "one bug everyday for 3 years" metric is highly misleading. Take something like using memory after it's freed. In a given release of the software, the user might never hit the bug, because the memory manager hasn't recycled that memory yet. So that's not a user-visible bug. Yet, when the memory manager is changed, the system breaks. Thus, it's a code bug.
The game gear didn't have dynamic clock scaling. All games would get only a couple of hours, even GameBoy-level ones. There was no way to do an even comparison. The PSP, on the other hand, can run both graphically complex games and graphically simple games, and it's battery life is different for each. So to do an even comparison, you should compare both playing the same sort of game.
Wait, you're accusing the PSP of having "rehashed crap"? What exactly do you think every game on the Advance and DS are? Heck, Mario 64 DS and Ridge Racers aren't even rehashes --- they are the same games!
Beyond that, you're underestimating the DS's battery life, while overestimating the PSP's. The PSP will give you 3 hours running graphically challenging games, while the DS will not give you more than 8 under the same conditions.
I'm guessing you're not a programmer... As for the "jab" at Microsoft --- I'm not going to defend their methods, but I hope you understand that it's impossible to do a comparative study of bug counts in Linux without comparing it to Microsoft.
As someone who runs several WinXP machines at home, I can definitely tell you it's more stable. One of my XP machines decides to boot up to a "no system disk found" error once every four or five boots. Reboot it, and it's fine. The damn thing hard-locks at least half the time when it's going to sleep, and will randomly crash for no good reason.
XP *can* be stable. If have to be careful about what software you install, install virus protection, install a third-party firewall, install spyware blocking tools, keep up with Windows Update --- basically, you have to babysit the damn thing. At least Win2K could take a bit of abuse and still be stable. Linux can be abused pretty heavily and still be stable.
The bugs are usually things you hit in corner cases, or you'd hit if the user passed incorrect input data or whatever. Your simulation may have tons of bugs in it, but if you verify your results on small data sets (or known data sets), before doing large-scale tests, you can be pretty safe in assuming that your results are accurate. However, the bugs could still bite you if you decide to simulate more than a certain number of nodes, or specify something in the wrong format or whatever.
That's not a fair comparison. You can't compare the PSP running a graphically rich game for 1.5-3 hours straight to the DS running a graphically rich (for the DS) game for 6 hours straight. The PSP's graphics are much better, so it's not surprising you need to trade some battery life. If you're running games at the same level of complexity as what you could run on the DS, the numbers are much more even.
And I would be surprised if a game that looks like Super Mario 64 DS wouldn't run for well more than 3 hours on the PSP.:P
So true. Something like Mario DS wouldn't use more than a quarter of the power of the PSP, and you could load half the game into RAM at a time and still have as much RAM as the DS left over. I bet under those conditions, the PSP's battery life would be comparable to the numbers posted by IGN.
It's all a matter of value. If people don't see enough value in Opera vs Minimo to pay for Opera, it makes no sense for them to buy Opera. "Quality" counts for jack-shit --- the only thing that matters is cost vs benefit. That's just how capitalism works, and so far, we haven't found any better model.
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Jefferson lost that particular war to Hamilton, in his own time no less. Since Hamilton too was a Founding Father, I'd have to say America *was* meant to be capitalist. Regardless of intentions, the fact remains that during the intervening 200 years, America has become a capitalist country, and has benefited greatly from it.
Except those people aren't given that money --- they earn it. You might not ike how they earn it, or you might not think they deserve it, but they did earn that money in the free market.
I'm a progressive liberal. I believe the rich *do* have a duty to use their greater resources for the overall good of society. However, I think the villification of the rich is getting silly.
I know that's a popular thing to believe, but it isn't true. The 400 richest Americans paid 1.58% of total income taxes last year. The top 1% paid 35% of all taxes. Do the rich use fancy accountants to get out of some taxes? Sure. But the tax reciepts are part of the public record --- they paid a whole lot of taxes, there is no doubt about that.
While that's incorrect (the wealthiest 5% pay over 50% of the taxes), it doesn't make a difference. You've got 5% of people paying 50%+ of the taxes. That means a person making $200,000 a year pays 10x his share of the taxes, yet he doesn get 10x as much service. He sits in the same traffic as everyone else does. Given those circumstances, everyone not in the top 5% really are in no position to complain about *other* people getting services disproportionate to what they pay.
Your argument makes no sense. Yes, the rich pay proportionally on Social Security. However, they don't collection proportionally. As with other taxes, the disproportionate contributions of the rich subsidize everyone else. However, what does that have to do with social security as a service? If you've got two people making $50,000 a year, both are paying a (favorably) disproportionate share of the taxes. If, however, one collects social security and the other doesn't, then the latter is paying taxes disproportionately compared with the first person.
Does that really make a difference? If you send your children to a school largely paid for by someone else's tax dollars, and drive to work on roads paid for by someone else's tax dollars, can you really criticize a recent immigrant for doing the same, just because their parents didn't help pay for that infrastructure?
I'm just plain surprised at how ignorant so many people here are. If they knew anything about the world in general they'd know, a few IT jobs nonwithstanding, immigration is an absolute boon for the United States. Many parts of the world are suffering from what's called "brain drain". Their best and most educated workers leave the country to work elsewhere. Since the United States is a popular destination, we benefit from their loss.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that highly educated workers coming to our country is a good thing. The global market is competitive, and we have an incredible advantage because we are able to attract the best and brightest from around the world to work for us.
Say it with me: "My job does not belong to me." Try it again: "My job does not belong to me." Understand? A "job" belongs to the employer who offers it. He is free to give it to whomever he wants. Foreign workers cannot "steal" your job, because it was never yours to begin with.
This is how capitalism works. Either deal with it, or move to a non-capitalist country.
First, Social Security is pretty much the biggest service that you get from federal tax dollars, and education is the biggest you get from local tax dollars. If they don't take advantage of these, then they are paying a disproportionate share of taxes. Second, and more importantly, pretty much everyone is paying a (favorably) disproportionate share of taxes. The "My tax money payed for all these services" argument is a bit stupid when you consider that the top 5% of Americans pay over 50% of all the taxes. Unless you make more than $200,000 a year, you're disproportionately benefiting from services paid for by other peoples' tax money.
Given the usual level of Slashdot reviews, this one is actually surprisingly good. It's the first one in awhile that I've actually been able to read all the way trhough!
The AGP bus isn't designed for more than one slot. That's why there aren't any dual AGP motherboards.
Doh. You are, of course, completely correct :)
I think the point of contention is that people are saying that grades and learning *should* be related. Grades should reflect what you know --- they are utterly useless otherwise.
I wonder how many people will get the joke :)
The point is that the submitter had an A average on the exams. To fail him for not finding enough security holes in open software seems to be rather abritrary.
My point was that if you were a programmer, you'd understand that tools that use automatic source analysis count things as bugs that are bugs from a programmer's standpoint (ie: they'll barf if you reuse the code in a different context, or if the code around it changes), but aren't necessarily things the user will see as a bug. Therefore, the "one bug everyday for 3 years" metric is highly misleading. Take something like using memory after it's freed. In a given release of the software, the user might never hit the bug, because the memory manager hasn't recycled that memory yet. So that's not a user-visible bug. Yet, when the memory manager is changed, the system breaks. Thus, it's a code bug.
The game gear didn't have dynamic clock scaling. All games would get only a couple of hours, even GameBoy-level ones. There was no way to do an even comparison. The PSP, on the other hand, can run both graphically complex games and graphically simple games, and it's battery life is different for each. So to do an even comparison, you should compare both playing the same sort of game.
Wait, you're accusing the PSP of having "rehashed crap"? What exactly do you think every game on the Advance and DS are? Heck, Mario 64 DS and Ridge Racers aren't even rehashes --- they are the same games!
Beyond that, you're underestimating the DS's battery life, while overestimating the PSP's. The PSP will give you 3 hours running graphically challenging games, while the DS will not give you more than 8 under the same conditions.
I'm guessing you're not a programmer... As for the "jab" at Microsoft --- I'm not going to defend their methods, but I hope you understand that it's impossible to do a comparative study of bug counts in Linux without comparing it to Microsoft.
As someone who runs several WinXP machines at home, I can definitely tell you it's more stable. One of my XP machines decides to boot up to a "no system disk found" error once every four or five boots. Reboot it, and it's fine. The damn thing hard-locks at least half the time when it's going to sleep, and will randomly crash for no good reason.
XP *can* be stable. If have to be careful about what software you install, install virus protection, install a third-party firewall, install spyware blocking tools, keep up with Windows Update --- basically, you have to babysit the damn thing. At least Win2K could take a bit of abuse and still be stable. Linux can be abused pretty heavily and still be stable.
The bugs are usually things you hit in corner cases, or you'd hit if the user passed incorrect input data or whatever. Your simulation may have tons of bugs in it, but if you verify your results on small data sets (or known data sets), before doing large-scale tests, you can be pretty safe in assuming that your results are accurate. However, the bugs could still bite you if you decide to simulate more than a certain number of nodes, or specify something in the wrong format or whatever.
That's not a fair comparison. You can't compare the PSP running a graphically rich game for 1.5-3 hours straight to the DS running a graphically rich (for the DS) game for 6 hours straight. The PSP's graphics are much better, so it's not surprising you need to trade some battery life. If you're running games at the same level of complexity as what you could run on the DS, the numbers are much more even.
And I would be surprised if a game that looks like Super Mario 64 DS wouldn't run for well more than 3 hours on the PSP. :P
So true. Something like Mario DS wouldn't use more than a quarter of the power of the PSP, and you could load half the game into RAM at a time and still have as much RAM as the DS left over. I bet under those conditions, the PSP's battery life would be comparable to the numbers posted by IGN.
The PSP plays regular old MP3 files off the MemoryStick.
It's all a matter of value. If people don't see enough value in Opera vs Minimo to pay for Opera, it makes no sense for them to buy Opera. "Quality" counts for jack-shit --- the only thing that matters is cost vs benefit. That's just how capitalism works, and so far, we haven't found any better model.