I'd list more, but most states don't provide an easy to read
historical rate chart. In some cases you can get a breakdown of
yearly sales tax receipts, but this is further complicated by the
fact that they call sales tax something else, and it may be
collected by 2 or 3 separate entities.
I think that a close to ideal tax structure (at least for businesses) would be a sales tax - that way everyone would be up front about what the government gets.
Sales tax only works if you have an exemption on food (probably qualified as just those things that can be purchased with food stamps) and a higher rate on luxury consumables. The reality is that every US state (48 of em) that has instituted a sales tax has started out with a 2.0% rate that can never ever ever be raised and an exemption on basic necessities.
In the majority of cases the rate is 5%+ within 10 years and the exemptions for basic necessities are gone. So sales tax winds up as an unreasonable burden on the poor and middle class.
That way people still get their free stuff, the music companies get a shit load of revenue without much effort on their part and everyone is a little happy.
Oh I get it, they take a loss with every sale, but then make it up
on volume.
It's one of those paradoxes that you can bring up to question the whole idea of God. Sort of like, if God is all powerful, can he create a rock so big that even he can't lift it?
Those paradoxes have nothing to say about the existence of
god. The christian answer would be that god created (or
caused to be created) the physical reality we inhabit and that the
laws of the universe could never be applied to his actions. Since
god is not bound by time his foreknowledge does not
interfere with causality (or free will) in our universe.
I'm an agnostic myself, so I think the whole thing is silly either
way. If a god that created reality exists, there is no
real connection to be desired between that god and
inhabitants of our reality.
The latest books are all about baths. Baths, baths, baths! Woo-hoo!
Baths... and the bracelet rattling politics of nasty old women.
He may even have moved on to something new by now, I
stopped giving that thieving hack my time and money a couple
books ago. God I hate Jordan, a lot.
Over here, personal disagreements just get sat on and when people have disputes, rather than talk about it to fix it, they just never end up talking to that person again. Or if they do talk, it's under the cover of being insincerely "nice". This is just so the peace is not disturbed.
And this is different from American corporate culture how?
People gossip, form alliances, backstab, bully, and snub here
in the US too. A showdown or heart to heart to resolve
differences is actually fairly rare in any office, it's more likely
that a person will silently become your enemy and never show
it until they have a chance to screw you over.
Sure the Japanese are different, but so is every other country. I
think too much credence is still given to the "inscrutable
oriental" image.
though imperfect, for years we've had a version that destroys small arms fire...it's called "return fire";o)
The problem is that many of the enemies of the US at this point
are going to be fought in urban settings. Return fire and
preemptive strikes into civilian populated areas will tend to
create hostility among the surviving civilians.
When it comes to troubleshooting systems you always have the option of making an exact scale model. You scale it up for more precision. This is a simple concept and apparently a lot of people think just because a system is complex and antiquated the same ideas can't apply.
Even if you could create a model to test with that is identical to
the live system you cannot test every possible situation which
can occur in the real world. Integration testing can only test
those things which can be envisioned by those responsible for
testing.
You absolutely do the best testing you can, unit test every piece
of functionality, test subsystems and whole systems in
integration testing, but you will never test every single
possibility. The more complex (and antiquated) the system, the
greater the number of interactions, and the greater the potential
for bugs. I'm convinced that there are bugs lurking in every
piece of hardware and software I use, the conditions under
which those bugs manifest may have never occurred, but they
are there.
I'm not fatalistic about software quality, and I don't disagree that
we need to test better, but complexity to testing difficulty is
not linear and I dislike seeing it trivialized. People who
underestimate the difference between a system with 100
parts and 1000 parts are in for a rough time.
Gator is one of the ones we have to tread lightly with, because so many users actually want the damned thing
I'd bet those "users" were really shills in a scam to convince
strategic companies to not treat Gator as spyware. I don't
believe that any user that cared to run an anti-spyware utility
would want to run Gator.
For web development work I do I have a testing domain which is used to test sites to ensure that because they work here in my lab they will work when I hand them off to the client. Its 100% accurate, I've seen it done with countless other systems, so why wasn't it done here?
Mostly because web systems are still toys compared to real
systems.
These systems get real and very intensive testing in labs as
close to live as they can get. Even once they knew the conditions
and affected subsystems it took the dev and testing teams
months to recreate this bug in the lab. The lab is never just like
real life, it cannot be - because even real life now is not always
the real life of 10 seconds ago.
It would be nice if every single societal value wasn't measured in dollars.
Very true, but a media company has no value aside from making
money. If you are looking for social value in mass media then
we need to give PBS more money, so it can
produce programs that have little dollar value, but more
social value (educate viewers about art, critical thinking,
lifelong learning and
so on), without being beholden to merchandising and corporate
sponsors.
News programs are a good investment for media companies,
why would they kill the cash cow by confusing anyone?
The closest most news and entertainment can afford to get to
an actual discussion of any deep subject is to make
analogies of vastly varying aptness. It's not just computers, it's
also medicine, astronomy, law, finance, and so on.
The reason the host will do anything to deflect technobabble is
that they will just have to edit it anyway, why lose control of the
show? Time is money, and news as entertainment has a very
good return.
My point is that if you are looking to mass media for actual
news content then you are wrong. The people prefer nascar and
war, why try to force feed them things that will just confuse
them and make them change the channel?
Couple of important items left out of that picture:
institutionalized corruption and racketeering. The stink with
Haliburton and the VP would just not be a big deal in Japan, it
would be business as usual. The corruption involved in the
Boston "Big Dig" project would be business as usual in Japan.
I don't live in Japan, but I have family there and the general
attitude seems to be that the US is heaven compared to Japan.
Normal people just accept that the police and politicians are
corrupt and sold out. As long as politicians can deliver the
pork most people are apathetic.
Unless something changes in the next generation Japan may
start to have more violent crime. It's not that the tools of social
control are failing to work, it is that the demands have become
so high that young people are starting to fall out of the system.
Nothing wrong with liking Sailor Moon, I just hesitate to admit
it in public. Downloading the "Stars" fansub right now cause
they will probably never release it in the US.
Better a "monster of the week", than too many
recap episodes. It seems that many of the 26 ep
shows do at least 3 of these, not sure why - my
guess is to cut costs. The only ones I've
ever liked were the Utena recaps - which covered
old events with new animation and often from
a different perspective, and I think there were
only two of those in 39 episodes.
And who cares if you are outed as anime nerd? It's
not like you fessed up to liking "I, My, Me:
Strawberry Eggs" or "Sailor Moon":)
>> is the U.S. a republic, or a democracy?
> Tick question! Gotcha! It's a corporate oligarchy.
Nah, the idea that there is any sort of government
anywhere in the world is a fiction - what we call the US is a
wholly owned subsidiary of Evil Old Rich Fuckers International.
Just like every other nation on earth.
I agree with the philosophical point, the problem
is that highly configurable systems are subject to
a wide variety of fundamental errors. I've caught
flack on several occasions for implementing "early
verbose" failure, the powers that be want systems
to deal with the error and "figure out what to
do". This often results in some pretty heinous
code, but the servers must roll.
So a desire for "self-healing" is motivated more
by the bottom line than any sort of engineering
principle. (The question of good engineering
being a necessity for good business has been
fought and lost too many times for me to care
any more)
Successful RFCs are written by expert
practitioners and implementers of existing
technology. Ipv4, PPP, TCP, DNS, SMTP, and so on
involved very little in the way of basic research -
they were refined and open versions of existing
solutions to fairly well understood problems.
Writing standards actually work is the job of
engineers, just as basic research is the job of
scientists.
It's not that research can't and doesn't happen
at universities, it's that the success and mass
of the big corporate labs meant that larger
projects were within their grasp.
From what I've seen programming for money in the short time that I've been doing it, you need bright people to write maintainable code. They don't come off the assembly line.
No, but bright people have created some of the
most awful rotten code I've ever maintained.
The fact
is that professional development is often boring,
there is very little room for creativity in the
vast majority of actual coding that goes into a
huge system.
Programming is not mechanical enough that you
can have drudges do it, but you need people able
to function within a hierarchy, intelligent
enough to learn the rules that govern the system
being worked on, and able to understand how to
actually take the thing as designed and implement
it.
It's possible to have a one shot thing done in India or wherever, but if you need software to be expanded and maintained over any significant length of time, it MUST be done by competent people.
So why can't people in India or wherever be
competent?
I'm gonna have to disagree with the notion that
lack of scarcity leads to bad design.
I think more
often that low level optimization often locks
us into a bad design, look at the Mac System
software version 9 and lower or Windows before
XP for an extreme example of this. Locks and
crashes caused by apps were common because the
task scheduler and memory model were created with
scarcity in mind - developers at Apple and MS knew
better ways to do things, but were locked in by
those descisions made based on earlier hardware
capabilities.
"Making programming fundamentally better might be the single most important challenge we face -- and the most difficult one." Today's software world is simply too "brittle" -- one tiny error and everything grinds to a halt: "We're constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe." Nature and biological systems are much more flexible, adaptable and forgiving, and we should look to them for new answers. "The path forward is being biomimetic."
This is easy to say, but what to do about
it? A CPU is controlled by a set of registers
and the contents of a stack, even if you
virtualize those things (JVM, smalltalk,.NET,...) and give them access controls you still have
a system that is subject to massive failure once
a single part of the system falls.
So for this biomimetic approach to work would
require a dramatically different machine
architecture from what we have now. Of course
this would also require the rewrites of all
existing Operating Systems and lots of existing
application and library software. So 'emulate
biological systems' is a nice easy answer that
does not really answer anything in the near term.
great cinematography and use of color...what I love most about Japanese filmmaking.
Those are great things about Japanese films, but the thing I
love best is that the Japanese love their melodrama as much
as I do - and they can take it seriously and lightly with just
the right balance.
You also forget to point out that most of the new jobs being created in the US to replace the outsourced jobs do not pay nearly as much nor do the have near the same level of benefits.
This is considered a bonus, the middle class has sided with the
wealthy for a long time, but if the middle class is too large they
forget their place. Shrink the middle class a tiny bit (with the
labor cost savings going to the super rich of course) and put the
fear of sliding into the lower class into the remainder.
Remember most successful revolutions have had a large middle
class component and since the industrial revolution warring
nations have often been more afraid of their own people than
their enemies.
Slashdot Mirror
Current sales tax overview by state.
I can not find any single site with good historical data, but here are a few histories by state:
-
Idaho
-
Maine
-
Texas
I'd list more, but most states don't provide an easy to read historical rate chart. In some cases you can get a breakdown of yearly sales tax receipts, but this is further complicated by the fact that they call sales tax something else, and it may be collected by 2 or 3 separate entities.Sales tax only works if you have an exemption on food (probably qualified as just those things that can be purchased with food stamps) and a higher rate on luxury consumables. The reality is that every US state (48 of em) that has instituted a sales tax has started out with a 2.0% rate that can never ever ever be raised and an exemption on basic necessities.
In the majority of cases the rate is 5%+ within 10 years and the exemptions for basic necessities are gone. So sales tax winds up as an unreasonable burden on the poor and middle class.
Oh I get it, they take a loss with every sale, but then make it up on volume.
Those paradoxes have nothing to say about the existence of god. The christian answer would be that god created (or caused to be created) the physical reality we inhabit and that the laws of the universe could never be applied to his actions. Since god is not bound by time his foreknowledge does not interfere with causality (or free will) in our universe.
I'm an agnostic myself, so I think the whole thing is silly either way. If a god that created reality exists, there is no real connection to be desired between that god and inhabitants of our reality.
Baths... and the bracelet rattling politics of nasty old women. He may even have moved on to something new by now, I stopped giving that thieving hack my time and money a couple books ago. God I hate Jordan, a lot.
And this is different from American corporate culture how?
People gossip, form alliances, backstab, bully, and snub here in the US too. A showdown or heart to heart to resolve differences is actually fairly rare in any office, it's more likely that a person will silently become your enemy and never show it until they have a chance to screw you over.
Sure the Japanese are different, but so is every other country. I think too much credence is still given to the "inscrutable oriental" image.
As long as it is an obviously false accusation, then this is more likely to be funny than tragic.
The problem is that many of the enemies of the US at this point are going to be fought in urban settings. Return fire and preemptive strikes into civilian populated areas will tend to create hostility among the surviving civilians.
Even if you could create a model to test with that is identical to the live system you cannot test every possible situation which can occur in the real world. Integration testing can only test those things which can be envisioned by those responsible for testing.
You absolutely do the best testing you can, unit test every piece of functionality, test subsystems and whole systems in integration testing, but you will never test every single possibility. The more complex (and antiquated) the system, the greater the number of interactions, and the greater the potential for bugs. I'm convinced that there are bugs lurking in every piece of hardware and software I use, the conditions under which those bugs manifest may have never occurred, but they are there.
I'm not fatalistic about software quality, and I don't disagree that we need to test better, but complexity to testing difficulty is not linear and I dislike seeing it trivialized. People who underestimate the difference between a system with 100 parts and 1000 parts are in for a rough time.
I'd bet those "users" were really shills in a scam to convince strategic companies to not treat Gator as spyware. I don't believe that any user that cared to run an anti-spyware utility would want to run Gator.
Mostly because web systems are still toys compared to real systems.
These systems get real and very intensive testing in labs as close to live as they can get. Even once they knew the conditions and affected subsystems it took the dev and testing teams months to recreate this bug in the lab. The lab is never just like real life, it cannot be - because even real life now is not always the real life of 10 seconds ago.
Very true, but a media company has no value aside from making money. If you are looking for social value in mass media then we need to give PBS more money, so it can produce programs that have little dollar value, but more social value (educate viewers about art, critical thinking, lifelong learning and so on), without being beholden to merchandising and corporate sponsors.
The closest most news and entertainment can afford to get to an actual discussion of any deep subject is to make analogies of vastly varying aptness. It's not just computers, it's also medicine, astronomy, law, finance, and so on.
The reason the host will do anything to deflect technobabble is that they will just have to edit it anyway, why lose control of the show? Time is money, and news as entertainment has a very good return.
My point is that if you are looking to mass media for actual news content then you are wrong. The people prefer nascar and war, why try to force feed them things that will just confuse them and make them change the channel?
I don't live in Japan, but I have family there and the general attitude seems to be that the US is heaven compared to Japan. Normal people just accept that the police and politicians are corrupt and sold out. As long as politicians can deliver the pork most people are apathetic.
Unless something changes in the next generation Japan may start to have more violent crime. It's not that the tools of social control are failing to work, it is that the demands have become so high that young people are starting to fall out of the system.
Nothing wrong with liking Sailor Moon, I just hesitate to admit it in public. Downloading the "Stars" fansub right now cause they will probably never release it in the US.
And who cares if you are outed as anime nerd? It's not like you fessed up to liking "I, My, Me: Strawberry Eggs" or "Sailor Moon" :)
> Tick question! Gotcha! It's a corporate oligarchy.
Nah, the idea that there is any sort of government anywhere in the world is a fiction - what we call the US is a wholly owned subsidiary of Evil Old Rich Fuckers International. Just like every other nation on earth.
So a desire for "self-healing" is motivated more by the bottom line than any sort of engineering principle. (The question of good engineering being a necessity for good business has been fought and lost too many times for me to care any more)
Writing standards actually work is the job of engineers, just as basic research is the job of scientists.
It's not that research can't and doesn't happen at universities, it's that the success and mass of the big corporate labs meant that larger projects were within their grasp.
No, but bright people have created some of the most awful rotten code I've ever maintained. The fact is that professional development is often boring, there is very little room for creativity in the vast majority of actual coding that goes into a huge system.
Programming is not mechanical enough that you can have drudges do it, but you need people able to function within a hierarchy, intelligent enough to learn the rules that govern the system being worked on, and able to understand how to actually take the thing as designed and implement it.
It's possible to have a one shot thing done in India or wherever, but if you need software to be expanded and maintained over any significant length of time, it MUST be done by competent people.
So why can't people in India or wherever be competent?
I think more often that low level optimization often locks us into a bad design, look at the Mac System software version 9 and lower or Windows before XP for an extreme example of this. Locks and crashes caused by apps were common because the task scheduler and memory model were created with scarcity in mind - developers at Apple and MS knew better ways to do things, but were locked in by those descisions made based on earlier hardware capabilities.
So for this biomimetic approach to work would require a dramatically different machine architecture from what we have now. Of course this would also require the rewrites of all existing Operating Systems and lots of existing application and library software. So 'emulate biological systems' is a nice easy answer that does not really answer anything in the near term.
Older versions of the mac hardware and software were not even close to hacker friendly.
Those are great things about Japanese films, but the thing I love best is that the Japanese love their melodrama as much as I do - and they can take it seriously and lightly with just the right balance.
This is considered a bonus, the middle class has sided with the wealthy for a long time, but if the middle class is too large they forget their place. Shrink the middle class a tiny bit (with the labor cost savings going to the super rich of course) and put the fear of sliding into the lower class into the remainder.
Remember most successful revolutions have had a large middle class component and since the industrial revolution warring nations have often been more afraid of their own people than their enemies.