Note: the following is NOT my politics. Just a reflection on the numbers.
First, I assume this is based on the American tax system, not some global average.
If it takes the top 5% to pay 50% of all taxes, and it only takes the top 2% to "own half the world's wealth" then there is something off in this part, skewed to taxing the greatest owners of wealth less (as a percentage) than the rest of the population.
When you get down to your claim of the top 50% paying 98%, if the top 50% own 98% of the wealth, then the numbers make sense. If the top 50% do now own 98% of the wealth then things are off here. Assuming the site you liked to is accurate, the last few recorded years show the bottom 40% owning 12% of the wealth. So one might suppose the bottom 40% should be paying 12% of the taxes. So 50% paying 98% (instead of 88%) is off.
All this assumes one feels that each should pay taxes according to their (economic) worth. A flat tax.
You may note that your claims of the top 50% paying 98% seem a little odd when the site you cite seems to say that the lowest 40% are paying 6%. That means the top 60% are paying 94%, and it's likely to be safe to assume the top 50% pay less than that.
He is expected to perform greater miracles in the future! afterall the sysadmin of the year should be able to fix anything!
"The computer doesn't work, fix it asshole, its your fault, you're the computer guy!"
"My password was 'iloveu' and now all my stuffs are gone, put them back you asshole!"
"I cant login to my account, I don't remember the password, fix it asshole!"
"The computer deleted my emails, put them back you asshole, now!!!"
You should be able to handle all four of these user requests at the same time, and resolve them all yesterday. If you don't people will wonder why they are paying extra to have the sys admin of the year, and will fire you and replace you with some one else at a lower payscale.
Woah! Now we all know where the Giz Wiz has his Gadget warehouse! It's in Akaihiryuu's basement! Aka, you blew it, the whole TWIT ARMY will be gathering around to visit the temple of all that is electronic!
Funny, earlier today on "The Daily Nut" (a G4 Podcast) there was a girl being repeatedly hit with a stungun voluntarily. She just got back up after a brief "GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKERTHATHURTLIKEASONEOFABITCH" and asked for another shock.
I'm a somewhat slender 32 year old man. That "kid" probably has forty pounds on me.
The "kid" is supposedly a 4th year college student. One usually is in college from the ages of (late) 17 to the mid 20 to late 20s (advanced degrees.) Given a young entry of 16 years of age(unusual) he is at least 20 [21 or 22 being more likely. [edit]RTFA he is 23] "Kid" indeed. One would assume because the guy was only being given the boot due to lack of a school ID that the officers would not search his person for weapons. When things went bad the officers did refrain from using any other form of force on Tabat. No nightsticks or firearms were brandished, much less used.
As for the requirement to show ID. 'NBC4's Colan Nolan asked Ross why the department requires library patrons to provide identification after 11 p.m.
"We've had sexual assaults that have occurred in the library," said Ross. "We've had numerous thefts that have occurred in the library. So, there's good reason for having that policy."'
A lot of police fear putting their hands on a citizen. Tasers are clean non-lethal means to subdue. No punching, kicking, arm twisting, etc. that looks very bad on camera. Speaking of cameras . . . what was missing at the start of this clip? One of the articles says that "According to Yagman, Tabatabainejad was approached by Community Service Officers, but declined to present his BruinCard when asked because he believed he was the subject of racial profiling." "[Tabat] fell limp to the floor because he did not want to participate . .." Basically, the video doesn't show us where Tabat is being a non-compliant block head.
Funny thing, the article says "Police said they shocked Tabatabainejad after he urged others to join his resistance and a crowd began to gather." Perhaps those guys thought that Tabat was trying to incite a situation where instead of being 'four on one' to becoming a 'dozen+ on four' mini-riot.
'The policy further states that the technique should be used when there is "a potential for injury to the officer(s) or others" or a "potential risk of serious injury to the individual being controlled."' Basically, this is the CSO (Campus Security Officers [civilians on some campuses]) giving the guy a few jolts rather than trying to struggle with the guy, a struggle that could result in a great deal of injury (strains, hyper-extensions, broken bones) that is often associated with trying to restrain non-compliant suspects. Tabat didn't want to co-operate because of a fear of "racial profiling". When asked to leave he "fell limp to the floor because he did not want to participate in a case of racial profiling, his attorney said."
Let me tell you, if I were on film and being zapped like that, I'd NEVER stop crying out in paid,never stop spasming, claim the taser was going full blast the entire time, then hire a lawyer to channel Johnny Cochraine for me. Particulary if I was a non-white or non-male person. Turns out, this guy thinks a lot like me. "Civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman announced separately that he plans to file a lawsuit charging that the American-born Tabatabainejad was singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." [from the article] Show me the money! Too bad for the lawsuit: "Students at the news conference [held regarding the taser incident] said there was no sign that Tabatabainejad was targeted because of his ethnicity."
The TOS applies to the party playing the game. The developer of WOW Glider isn't logging on as a level 25 wizard (or whatever is in Wow) and level grinding. The developer of WoW is checking his paypal account and smiling.
Blizzard will nuke this guy by burying him in legal fees.
Your phone must really pity the foo that needs to type doo.
Seriously when I need a word fragment it is often faster for me to t9 a longer word "door" and backspace the "r" off instead of "foo"[next][next][next][next][next][next][JUST GIVE ME THE DAMNED WORD I WANT][Change to Alpha][Backspace the entire word][Start Over]
Come on, the QWERTY arrangement to slow down typing is a myth. Don't beleive me? Turn off your Dell TV, fire up the series of tubes, and search for it on The Google!
Computers in the under $600 category sell like hotcakes to the non-gamer community. Five years ago you could play games with the integrated GFX processor. Today even kids games (Lego Star Wars II) needs a dedicated GFX card (a nice ATI RADEON card from five years ago I used for better-than-basic gaming is not enough to run the game, it's too old to be supported hardware. Wish my wife would have consulted with me on the game buying for our oldest son, going to have to get a new motherboard[up to pci-express or at least agp] and new gfx card to upgrade the kids computer to the point where it can run that game. I think it'll be cheaper to exchange the game for the PS2 version+buy a ps2 than upgrading the kids machine.) Email and the web are still going to be easy on the box, but games are quite a bit more demanding than they used to be.
I can work, play games, watch TV or movies...why do I need a new computer?
You can do the same work you did 5 years ago. Watch the same TV channels you watched 5 years ago. View movies at the same resolution as you did five years ago. You play the same five year old games. When you want to do something new you will find some part of your system lacking (give that you mentioned games I'd bet on the video card first.)
You have to understand that is not me. But it does describe something like 30% of home PC users (if you consider that a recent news report said DSL/CABLE has a market penetration of fourty-some percent of home PC users, and a good majority of home PC users will be using windows XP.) People like that will not be aware of the existance of 'service packs.' They will not know the value of such things and will not know that microsoft offers to send you SP2 on a disk. They most likely will not be knowledgeabl enough to navigate the MS knowledge base to learn any of those facts. These are the people who can not support them selves(IE: they aren't slashdot readers.)
Jebsis, the world is not slashdot. Every third person in the real world does not contribute to OSS projects. They do not know what the hell Linux is, and they are not even likely to know what Vista is.
'There's little reason for anyone to still be running SP1
Except for those people who bought and paid for SP1 and do not have a good fast internet connection to download the hundgreds of MBs of patches released to bring SP1 up to the current 'standard'.
They aren't working to get money to Sudan. They are working to "raise awareness about the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan."
So it goes like this:
1) Get a cause 2) get a band 3) sell tickets to band 4) get some thing to the venue to "raise awareness about the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan." [think posters, a few hippies manning an info booth, the band making a brief comment about "the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan."] 5) ??? 6) profit (if the band can fill the venue with paying customers)
Same story as hardware hackers who got scanners modified to listen into cell phone and cordless phone frequencies.
Most calls go as follows: I can't belive what my [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] told me. I can't belive what my [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] did. My [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] is so [great/craptastic]. I am so [great/craptastic]
It'll be mostly inane crap. Think about all the cell phone converstations you end up overhearing in public spaces. That's noise. There is alot of it. The good stuff (people giving out credit card numbers and mailing addresses to mail/phone order companies, trade secrets, juicy gossip) is signal. The signal to noise ratio is terrible. Random eavesdropping will result in little result for alot of effort. Unless the eavesdropping is targeted or some sort of AI/speech recongnition is involved little of any diffrence (positive or negative) will happen.
In the USA the FCC gives permission to specific persons or agencies to operate radios on specific frequencies. The frequencies vary depending on the availibity of spectrum and the needs of the agency. A metro agency with many sky-rises will have diffrent needs from those of a rural agency in the plains states. Thus some agencies use relatively low frequencies, some in the 400mhz bands (mostly because most of the radio gear available on the market works here), others in the 800mhz bands(because the remainder of the radio gear on the market works here, with a few exceptions), and others scattered about diffrent parts of the spectrum.
It is NOT against FEDERAL LAW to own radios capable of receiving or broadcasting in these bands, as frequencies in these bands are liscenced out to all sorts of parties (private citizens, city workers, fire, police, ems, bus companies, etc.) It is also NOT AGAINST FEDERAL LAW to listen/receive tranmissions on ANY BAND. Decrypting, recording, and re-tranmission are another issue. If it is in the spectrum you are allowed to receive it (given you can past an FCC test to prove you know how to operate any equiptment you might use that is capable of transmission [Tx]) It is illegal to Tx on any frequency assigned to other persons or agencies. That goes for police, fire, ems, and civil users. Additionaly there are likely to be state and local laws regarding using of radio technlogy to impede the work of public saftey and/or the interference of civil use of radio spectrum in so far that it causes a cost to be incurred by the properly FCC liscenced party (IE: can't dispatch a taxi 'cause some prick is Txing all over your channel.)
Most TX is NOT encrypted as a form of security. Some transmissions are digital in nature and can not be parsed by the human ear as they are broadcasted. Other TX is "trunked" and spread over many frequencies, these can be both digital and analog trunked systems, and are hard to follow as users are moved from frequency to frequency as they become available for use, and the same frequencies are often shared by multiple users [a city that uses 10 channels for PD, FIRE, EMS, and civil functions for example.]
I am not aware of the legal status of decrypting signals where the encrypition is intended to protect the contents of said signal. Someone else will have to speak up on that.
I had been raving about GAL CIV 2 for a while. A friend pirated. Said it did rock. Went and paid for a legitmiate copy. Got patched up and enjoys a wonderful bug free game.
I like their system, sure you can pirate it and play it, but it will be an older buggy unbalanced and unpatched version. Want to get it good? Then you have to get it the good way.
Slashdot Mirror
"I like "Cisc-o-Fone" myself. It's got a retro sound to it. "Disco Stu! Loves his Cisc-o-Fone!""
On that Eureka show on sci-fi they are all Cisco phones!
Note: the following is NOT my politics. Just a reflection on the numbers.
First, I assume this is based on the American tax system, not some global average.
If it takes the top 5% to pay 50% of all taxes, and it only takes the top 2% to "own half the world's wealth" then there is something off in this part, skewed to taxing the greatest owners of wealth less (as a percentage) than the rest of the population.
When you get down to your claim of the top 50% paying 98%, if the top 50% own 98% of the wealth, then the numbers make sense. If the top 50% do now own 98% of the wealth then things are off here. Assuming the site you liked to is accurate, the last few recorded years show the bottom 40% owning 12% of the wealth. So one might suppose the bottom 40% should be paying 12% of the taxes. So 50% paying 98% (instead of 88%) is off.
All this assumes one feels that each should pay taxes according to their (economic) worth. A flat tax.
You may note that your claims of the top 50% paying 98% seem a little odd when the site you cite seems to say that the lowest 40% are paying 6%. That means the top 60% are paying 94%, and it's likely to be safe to assume the top 50% pay less than that.
He is expected to perform greater miracles in the future! afterall the sysadmin of the year should be able to fix anything!
"The computer doesn't work, fix it asshole, its your fault, you're the computer guy!"
"My password was 'iloveu' and now all my stuffs are gone, put them back you asshole!"
"I cant login to my account, I don't remember the password, fix it asshole!"
"The computer deleted my emails, put them back you asshole, now!!!"
You should be able to handle all four of these user requests at the same time, and resolve them all yesterday. If you don't people will wonder why they are paying extra to have the sys admin of the year, and will fire you and replace you with some one else at a lower payscale.
When cell phones are transmitting -- even as bugs -- certain things are going to happen every time that the alert phone user can often notice.
For example, when using a Palm Treo 650, the phone will crash and reset often, and without notice.
Dude! My XP box must be bugged!
My iPod is used for audiobooks and mp3 of class lectures. Does this mean that Universal will owe me whatever pirate-fee they want on each iPod?
Woah! Now we all know where the Giz Wiz has his Gadget warehouse! It's in Akaihiryuu's basement! Aka, you blew it, the whole TWIT ARMY will be gathering around to visit the temple of all that is electronic!
Funny, earlier today on "The Daily Nut" (a G4 Podcast) there was a girl being repeatedly hit with a stungun voluntarily. She just got back up after a brief "GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKERTHATHURTLIKEASONEOFABITCH" and asked for another shock.
"Four Officers... one kid come on."
." Basically, the video doesn't show us where Tabat is being a non-compliant block head.
I'm a somewhat slender 32 year old man. That "kid" probably has forty pounds on me.
The "kid" is supposedly a 4th year college student. One usually is in college from the ages of (late) 17 to the mid 20 to late 20s (advanced degrees.) Given a young entry of 16 years of age(unusual) he is at least 20 [21 or 22 being more likely. [edit]RTFA he is 23] "Kid" indeed. One would assume because the guy was only being given the boot due to lack of a school ID that the officers would not search his person for weapons. When things went bad the officers did refrain from using any other form of force on Tabat. No nightsticks or firearms were brandished, much less used.
As for the requirement to show ID. 'NBC4's Colan Nolan asked Ross why the department requires library patrons to provide identification after 11 p.m.
"We've had sexual assaults that have occurred in the library," said Ross. "We've had numerous thefts that have occurred in the library. So, there's good reason for having that policy."'
A lot of police fear putting their hands on a citizen. Tasers are clean non-lethal means to subdue. No punching, kicking, arm twisting, etc. that looks very bad on camera. Speaking of cameras . . . what was missing at the start of this clip? One of the articles says that "According to Yagman, Tabatabainejad was approached by Community Service Officers, but declined to present his BruinCard when asked because he believed he was the subject of racial profiling." "[Tabat] fell limp to the floor because he did not want to participate . .
Funny thing, the article says "Police said they shocked Tabatabainejad after he urged others to join his resistance and a crowd began to gather." Perhaps those guys thought that Tabat was trying to incite a situation where instead of being 'four on one' to becoming a 'dozen+ on four' mini-riot.
'The policy further states that the technique should be used when there is "a potential for injury to the officer(s) or others" or a "potential risk of serious injury to the individual being controlled."' Basically, this is the CSO (Campus Security Officers [civilians on some campuses]) giving the guy a few jolts rather than trying to struggle with the guy, a struggle that could result in a great deal of injury (strains, hyper-extensions, broken bones) that is often associated with trying to restrain non-compliant suspects. Tabat didn't want to co-operate because of a fear of "racial profiling". When asked to leave he "fell limp to the floor because he did not want to participate in a case of racial profiling, his attorney said."
Let me tell you, if I were on film and being zapped like that, I'd NEVER stop crying out in paid,never stop spasming, claim the taser was going full blast the entire time, then hire a lawyer to channel Johnny Cochraine for me. Particulary if I was a non-white or non-male person. Turns out, this guy thinks a lot like me. "Civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman announced separately that he plans to file a lawsuit charging that the American-born Tabatabainejad was singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." [from the article] Show me the money! Too bad for the lawsuit: "Students at the news conference [held regarding the taser incident] said there was no sign that Tabatabainejad was targeted because of his ethnicity."
The TOS applies to the party playing the game. The developer of WOW Glider isn't logging on as a level 25 wizard (or whatever is in Wow) and level grinding. The developer of WoW is checking his paypal account and smiling.
Blizzard will nuke this guy by burying him in legal fees.
Your phone must really pity the foo that needs to type doo.
Seriously when I need a word fragment it is often faster for me to t9 a longer word "door" and backspace the "r" off instead of
"foo"[next][next][next][next][next][next][JUST GIVE ME THE DAMNED WORD I WANT][Change to Alpha][Backspace the entire word][Start Over]
Come on, the QWERTY arrangement to slow down typing is a myth. Don't beleive me? Turn off your Dell TV, fire up the series of tubes, and search for it on The Google!
I love slashdot. Somehow the dozen question marks after PLAYSTATION 3 were eaten by /.. But all the ............ and !!!!!!!!!! survive. Go figure.
I love the webpage title. "PLAYSTATION 3"
I have to say, yes, that is indeed a PLAYSTATION 3............
Or maybe YES IT IS A PLAYSTATION 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Zune(tm) from Microsoft, the people who brought you EDLIN."
No brainer there.
My girlfriend is blond and she resents this joke. My wife is a brunette and loves that you have hurt me girlfriend's feelings.
The parent poster obviously has read some Larry Niven (The Smokering perhaps?)
Down is faster. Up is slower. Forward is up. Backwards is down.
And I wonder how you can get into service providers' systems without a SIM card?
Software emulation of hardware.
Computers in the under $600 category sell like hotcakes to the non-gamer community. Five years ago you could play games with the integrated GFX processor. Today even kids games (Lego Star Wars II) needs a dedicated GFX card (a nice ATI RADEON card from five years ago I used for better-than-basic gaming is not enough to run the game, it's too old to be supported hardware. Wish my wife would have consulted with me on the game buying for our oldest son, going to have to get a new motherboard[up to pci-express or at least agp] and new gfx card to upgrade the kids computer to the point where it can run that game. I think it'll be cheaper to exchange the game for the PS2 version+buy a ps2 than upgrading the kids machine.) Email and the web are still going to be easy on the box, but games are quite a bit more demanding than they used to be.
I can work, play games, watch TV or movies...why do I need a new computer?
You can do the same work you did 5 years ago. Watch the same TV channels you watched 5 years ago. View movies at the same resolution as you did five years ago. You play the same five year old games. When you want to do something new you will find some part of your system lacking (give that you mentioned games I'd bet on the video card first.)
You have to understand that is not me. But it does describe something like 30% of home PC users (if you consider that a recent news report said DSL/CABLE has a market penetration of fourty-some percent of home PC users, and a good majority of home PC users will be using windows XP.) People like that will not be aware of the existance of 'service packs.' They will not know the value of such things and will not know that microsoft offers to send you SP2 on a disk. They most likely will not be knowledgeabl enough to navigate the MS knowledge base to learn any of those facts. These are the people who can not support them selves(IE: they aren't slashdot readers.)
Jebsis, the world is not slashdot. Every third person in the real world does not contribute to OSS projects. They do not know what the hell Linux is, and they are not even likely to know what Vista is.
'There's little reason for anyone to still be running SP1
Except for those people who bought and paid for SP1 and do not have a good fast internet connection to download the hundgreds of MBs of patches released to bring SP1 up to the current 'standard'.
They aren't working to get money to Sudan. They are working to "raise awareness about the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan."
So it goes like this:
1) Get a cause
2) get a band
3) sell tickets to band
4) get some thing to the venue to "raise awareness about the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan." [think posters, a few hippies manning an info booth, the band making a brief comment about "the humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan."]
5) ???
6) profit (if the band can fill the venue with paying customers)
And then they'll be listening in on VOIP.
Same story as hardware hackers who got scanners modified to listen into cell phone and cordless phone frequencies.
Most calls go as follows:
I can't belive what my [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] told me.
I can't belive what my [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] did.
My [co-worker,sibling,child,parent,doctor,whatever] is so [great/craptastic].
I am so [great/craptastic]
It'll be mostly inane crap. Think about all the cell phone converstations you end up overhearing in public spaces. That's noise. There is alot of it. The good stuff (people giving out credit card numbers and mailing addresses to mail/phone order companies, trade secrets, juicy gossip) is signal. The signal to noise ratio is terrible. Random eavesdropping will result in little result for alot of effort. Unless the eavesdropping is targeted or some sort of AI/speech recongnition is involved little of any diffrence (positive or negative) will happen.
In the USA the FCC gives permission to specific persons or agencies to operate radios on specific frequencies. The frequencies vary depending on the availibity of spectrum and the needs of the agency. A metro agency with many sky-rises will have diffrent needs from those of a rural agency in the plains states. Thus some agencies use relatively low frequencies, some in the 400mhz bands (mostly because most of the radio gear available on the market works here), others in the 800mhz bands(because the remainder of the radio gear on the market works here, with a few exceptions), and others scattered about diffrent parts of the spectrum.
It is NOT against FEDERAL LAW to own radios capable of receiving or broadcasting in these bands, as frequencies in these bands are liscenced out to all sorts of parties (private citizens, city workers, fire, police, ems, bus companies, etc.) It is also NOT AGAINST FEDERAL LAW to listen/receive tranmissions on ANY BAND. Decrypting, recording, and re-tranmission are another issue. If it is in the spectrum you are allowed to receive it (given you can past an FCC test to prove you know how to operate any equiptment you might use that is capable of transmission [Tx]) It is illegal to Tx on any frequency assigned to other persons or agencies. That goes for police, fire, ems, and civil users. Additionaly there are likely to be state and local laws regarding using of radio technlogy to impede the work of public saftey and/or the interference of civil use of radio spectrum in so far that it causes a cost to be incurred by the properly FCC liscenced party (IE: can't dispatch a taxi 'cause some prick is Txing all over your channel.)
Most TX is NOT encrypted as a form of security. Some transmissions are digital in nature and can not be parsed by the human ear as they are broadcasted. Other TX is "trunked" and spread over many frequencies, these can be both digital and analog trunked systems, and are hard to follow as users are moved from frequency to frequency as they become available for use, and the same frequencies are often shared by multiple users [a city that uses 10 channels for PD, FIRE, EMS, and civil functions for example.]
I am not aware of the legal status of decrypting signals where the encrypition is intended to protect the contents of said signal. Someone else will have to speak up on that.
I had been raving about GAL CIV 2 for a while. A friend pirated. Said it did rock. Went and paid for a legitmiate copy. Got patched up and enjoys a wonderful bug free game.
I like their system, sure you can pirate it and play it, but it will be an older buggy unbalanced and unpatched version. Want to get it good? Then you have to get it the good way.