Actually, a red herring. Nowhere in the civilized world is the criterion for murder "proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt". It is "proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". They are entirely different things.
You do not know that. He could have been paralyzed or killed. You might think that is not very likely, but unarmed people are paralyzed and killed by unarmed people all the time.
"Slashdot seems THIS" - "NO - slashdot seems THAT".
Slashdot is like people, since it IS an assortment of people. Slashdot seems like whatever goes against your own beliefs. It's human nature to see people who can't see the merits of the philosophy you've spent spent your life developing as dangerous and obtuse idiots, while those who agree with you are only seeing what is obvious. Except for the ciphers who never troubled themselves to have any philosophy at all.
The moral. If you are threatened on your own ground, warn like you mean it, give them a couple of seconds, and if they don't smarten up then shoot to kill dammit. Dead punks tell no lies.
Your state's stupid policy of taxing clothing is acknowledged and noted. Property tax has absolutely nothing to do with this issue. It is not a sales tax. Of course cars are sales-taxed everywhere that I know of in sales-tax states. I already stated that and pointed out that it acts quite progressively.
Contrary to your utterly unfounded beliefs, the fair tax would eliminate federal tax entirely on the lower class, benefit the middle class to a significant extent, and come down hard on the upper class. But you can educate yourself much more efficiently than I could do for you.
Whether or not you see it is not the issue. It is revenue neutral (5th Q&A). If you think a 23% consumption tax is "very high percentage", fine for you. Considering what it would replace, a lot of us do not consider it high.
Capital gains tax is double taxation, simple as that. If you think double taxation is just dandy, then the status quo works for you. Other than objecting to this, I think your suggestion is infinitely superior to what we have now. On economic analysis, 10% wouldn't do it. It would have to be much more than that to be revenue neutral. Also, this solution does not do anything to eliminate the burden of the IRS and its enforcement operations.
Oh, for christ sake. EVERYTHING connected with the government is "wide open to just removing" something (or adding something!) and making things worse. Fire is wide open to getting out of control. Maybe we should not use fire. Apologists for the shitty status quo always use arguments like this.
The EITC is not a prebate. It's not really even a rebate. It's what it says it is. A credit.
The fair tax prebate (Q&A #3) would be paid out monthly so those of limited means would not have to pay their sales tax and carry the burden while waiting for a rebate.
So one of the regime's big thugs is out. This would be a good time for the president to declare DHS a failed idea and abolish it. Of course he wouldn't phrase it that way. he would laud this thug's accomplishments and declare the department's ten year reign of terror a grand success and say it was no longer needed due the regime's advancements, and he will be able to save a lot of money due to his superior administrative skills with DHS' duties performed by some of its components, and other activities not performed at all, same as the situation for the 214 years prior to 2003. Not in exactly those words; his speechwriters could make hay out of the wording.
As a % of income, rich people pay maybe 1% sales tax, while poor people pay 5-10% sales tax or more.
Bullshit. In the states I know about, food, clothing and rent are not taxed. There's not a whole hell of a lot "poor" people are buying that is not food, clothing, and rent. The exception would be a car. If they can even afford one at all, usually they have to make do with a used car 7-15 years old, and the sales tax on that is not very much. Gas has its own tax and is not really covered by "sales tax".
If we had the national so-called "fair tax" (a kind of consumption tax; i.e., sales tax), poor people would pay none at all, because the "prebate" would cover all their purchases, and actually it would give the really poor a surplus (subsidy).
Only it doesn't work that way. They have the ability to decrypt because they have full control of the endpoint software either via software updates. If they get a letter saying "Hey assholes, we need to get access to this system (IP number) and you are not allowed to tell anyone ever" they have to comply thanks to the Patriot act, and the encryption is invalidated in a jiffy. Most of these companies already use key escrow anyway.
SpiderOak does not escrow your key; they never see your key; and they do not have a master key. Sure, they could be lying, or government thugs could beat them mercilessly until they violate their own stated privacy policy in secrecy, but they are a step above other services (Dropbox) who tell you right out they control the master key and they will cooperate with government thugs. But yes, if you have data you really really will not tolerate anyway seeing in the clear ever, you will encrypt it yourself and then use one of these services or not.
As far as software updates: it is via a normal yum repository. You can shut them the hell out of ever updating your software if you want to. Of course that won't help you if they have already gone evil and the copy you have is already evil. The government thugs would LOVE for you to believe everyone is evil.
A meteor could also strike both of us dead so we wouldn't have to worry about any of this.
Dropbox only ever gets cyphertext (which it might wrap another layer around for extra security), and if the FBI hands them a warrant, they've got nothing useful to hand over.
Assuming I understand what you are claiming, which I am not sure of, according to Dropbox that is categorically incorrect. "Dropbox applies encryption to your files after they have been uploaded, and we manage the encryption keys... As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement."
If instead you mean that you pre-encrypt your data yourself, then clearly it doesn't matter what any third party's policy is (such as Dropbox). You could just as well chisel the encrypted data on the Washington monument and nobody else could decrypt it.
With SpiderOak, you do not have to worry about going to the trouble of pre-encryption. Their software encapsulates that step and forces it on you. There is nothing to forget or screw up. SpiderOak's privacy policy is very different. It is essentially "Sorry NSA. We do not have the ability to decrypt; end of story."
They had way more soldiers back then today, and payroll did not seem to be a problem. Maybe the Pentagon should go back to using whatever system they had back then.
What the army used then, I believe you will find, was cheap uncomplaining labor (bitching is not really balking), much of it conscripted, something which has been so far gone for so long now that it is difficult to even imagine (outside of taking merciless advantage of undocumented immigrants).
The army peaked at 8.3 million in 1945, on a population of 140 million. The number of those actually fighting at any given time were much, much smaller. The others were hauling supplies, building bridges, digging latrines, doing KP, staff work, and yes, handling payroll. It worked because pay was almost nothing. Following figures are for 1942. A private with less than three years service was paid 50 bucks a month. Tech sergeant with 5 years, $120. Captain with over 10 years, $230. General with over 30 years, $667.
Yeah, median household income in 1945 was only $2400, but a private with a pay of $600 was a hell of a lot cheaper than a business worker even after adding the expense of housing, clothing, and feeding the private.
It's not all waste. Bloat, corruption, greed and fraud are the most serious contributors to the expense of the government. Most of your tax dollars are lining the pockets of legislators and their staff, executives and their staff, courts and their staff, agency bureacracies, tax collectors and enforcers, vast networks of "authorities" accountable to no one, public worker union management, contractor management, contractor shareholders, lobbyists, assorted fat pigs who hire lobbyists to get their own pockets lined, and finally, yes, public union employees.
I am sure you realize that which choices are "good" ones is very subjective. I happen to agree with you that Xfce and LXDE are strong candidates, but Enlightenment and others have strong fans. Your point about the extremely modest resources available to many of the projects is well taken. I was very enthusiastic to hear that Xfce is being ported to Qt, if sad that GTK2 is fading as a viable option.
I am not sure what the angst about Qt is; I've heard a lot of it, and it has never been well defined. Qt is not quasi-proprietary as far as I can tell. Yes, there is an option for commercial licensing, but so what? It's only one of several options. Qt was GPL'ed as far back as 2000 with version 2.2, with a further option for LGPL added in 2009 with version 4.5. Having both GPL and LGPL options seems to me to cover all bases without having to resort to the commercial licensing option. The Qt Project is under open governance. As far as I am concerned, any legitimate foundation for angst has dissipated. Could it conceivably be closed up in the future? Maybe; I don't think it would be easy, and the open source is out there and could be forked if necessary.
You make an interesting case. There is also a case to be made that the free Cygwin on Windows 7 gives you a pretty darn good environment. Cygwin has grown to be pretty remarkable, given that it now actually gives you/dev including sda, sr0, null, zero, etc;/proc including/proc/sys and/proc/registry; true hardlinks and symbolic links on NTFS; mapping NT users to *nix UIDs; a single / root with all your drives mounted on it; a really beautiful dynamically resizable bash terminal window; an ssh demon; and they have fixed the rough edges, like with ^C working in emacs for example. The biggest shortcoming is that they cannot implement sudo, but you can "run as administrator" a bash window .
IMHO, and this is not meant as a lecture, you SEEM to have given up on linux without really exploring it. Sure, GNOME went full-on acid-trip batshit insane with version 3, and a lot of people think KDE took a fundamentally wrong turn with version 4, but for full DE's you still have MATE (actively maintained GNOME 2 clone) Trinity (actively maintained KDE 3 clone, for some definition of "actively"), Xfce, LXDE, Razor-Qt and the lesser known Étoilé and EDE. There is Enlightenment, a "semi-DE". And you can just use WMs without a DE: awesome, Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM and the lesser known Ratpoison, wmii, dwm, xmonad, WindowLab, and Ion. I don't claim this list is exhaustive either.
It's pretty hard for me to believe you wouldn't find one of those more agreeable to you than the Mac with its busted ass file manager and lack of a taskbar.
Why do you suppose that the Trinity team needs to "support" newer distro versions? The job of the DE team is to develop and maintain the DE code, period. It is the job of the distro to package it and put it in their repo. I would rag on the distros for ignoring Trinity and supporting failed acid-trip experiments like Gnome 3.
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Actually, a red herring. Nowhere in the civilized world is the criterion for murder "proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt". It is "proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". They are entirely different things.
You do not know that. He could have been paralyzed or killed. You might think that is not very likely, but unarmed people are paralyzed and killed by unarmed people all the time.
"Slashdot seems THIS" - "NO - slashdot seems THAT".
Slashdot is like people, since it IS an assortment of people. Slashdot seems like whatever goes against your own beliefs. It's human nature to see people who can't see the merits of the philosophy you've spent spent your life developing as dangerous and obtuse idiots, while those who agree with you are only seeing what is obvious. Except for the ciphers who never troubled themselves to have any philosophy at all.
The moral. If you are threatened on your own ground, warn like you mean it, give them a couple of seconds, and if they don't smarten up then shoot to kill dammit. Dead punks tell no lies.
Bull.
Nor have I (as already plainly stated). Your point?
Your state's stupid policy of taxing clothing is acknowledged and noted. Property tax has absolutely nothing to do with this issue. It is not a sales tax. Of course cars are sales-taxed everywhere that I know of in sales-tax states. I already stated that and pointed out that it acts quite progressively.
Contrary to your utterly unfounded beliefs, the fair tax would eliminate federal tax entirely on the lower class, benefit the middle class to a significant extent, and come down hard on the upper class. But you can educate yourself much more efficiently than I could do for you.
Whether or not you see it is not the issue. It is revenue neutral (5th Q&A). If you think a 23% consumption tax is "very high percentage", fine for you. Considering what it would replace, a lot of us do not consider it high.
Capital gains tax is double taxation, simple as that. If you think double taxation is just dandy, then the status quo works for you. Other than objecting to this, I think your suggestion is infinitely superior to what we have now. On economic analysis, 10% wouldn't do it. It would have to be much more than that to be revenue neutral. Also, this solution does not do anything to eliminate the burden of the IRS and its enforcement operations.
Oh, for christ sake. EVERYTHING connected with the government is "wide open to just removing" something (or adding something!) and making things worse. Fire is wide open to getting out of control. Maybe we should not use fire. Apologists for the shitty status quo always use arguments like this.
The EITC is not a prebate. It's not really even a rebate. It's what it says it is. A credit.
The fair tax prebate (Q&A #3) would be paid out monthly so those of limited means would not have to pay their sales tax and carry the burden while waiting for a rebate.
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
So one of the regime's big thugs is out. This would be a good time for the president to declare DHS a failed idea and abolish it. Of course he wouldn't phrase it that way. he would laud this thug's accomplishments and declare the department's ten year reign of terror a grand success and say it was no longer needed due the regime's advancements, and he will be able to save a lot of money due to his superior administrative skills with DHS' duties performed by some of its components, and other activities not performed at all, same as the situation for the 214 years prior to 2003. Not in exactly those words; his speechwriters could make hay out of the wording.
Bullshit. In the states I know about, food, clothing and rent are not taxed. There's not a whole hell of a lot "poor" people are buying that is not food, clothing, and rent. The exception would be a car. If they can even afford one at all, usually they have to make do with a used car 7-15 years old, and the sales tax on that is not very much. Gas has its own tax and is not really covered by "sales tax".
If we had the national so-called "fair tax" (a kind of consumption tax; i.e., sales tax), poor people would pay none at all, because the "prebate" would cover all their purchases, and actually it would give the really poor a surplus (subsidy).
Citation or it's a fantasy.
SpiderOak does not escrow your key; they never see your key; and they do not have a master key. Sure, they could be lying, or government thugs could beat them mercilessly until they violate their own stated privacy policy in secrecy, but they are a step above other services (Dropbox) who tell you right out they control the master key and they will cooperate with government thugs. But yes, if you have data you really really will not tolerate anyway seeing in the clear ever, you will encrypt it yourself and then use one of these services or not.
As far as software updates: it is via a normal yum repository. You can shut them the hell out of ever updating your software if you want to. Of course that won't help you if they have already gone evil and the copy you have is already evil. The government thugs would LOVE for you to believe everyone is evil.
A meteor could also strike both of us dead so we wouldn't have to worry about any of this.
Assuming I understand what you are claiming, which I am not sure of, according to Dropbox that is categorically incorrect. "Dropbox applies encryption to your files after they have been uploaded, and we manage the encryption keys ... As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement."
If instead you mean that you pre-encrypt your data yourself, then clearly it doesn't matter what any third party's policy is (such as Dropbox). You could just as well chisel the encrypted data on the Washington monument and nobody else could decrypt it.
With SpiderOak, you do not have to worry about going to the trouble of pre-encryption. Their software encapsulates that step and forces it on you. There is nothing to forget or screw up. SpiderOak's privacy policy is very different. It is essentially "Sorry NSA. We do not have the ability to decrypt; end of story."
Not if they control the encryption key and it is shared among all users. But there are much better solutions than Dropbox. With SpiderOak your computer generates your own unique encryption key, it is at no point ever transmitted to their servers, and there is no way they can gain access to it.
About 56 million. It is the third most visited country in the world.
What the army used then, I believe you will find, was cheap uncomplaining labor (bitching is not really balking), much of it conscripted, something which has been so far gone for so long now that it is difficult to even imagine (outside of taking merciless advantage of undocumented immigrants).
The army peaked at 8.3 million in 1945, on a population of 140 million. The number of those actually fighting at any given time were much, much smaller. The others were hauling supplies, building bridges, digging latrines, doing KP, staff work, and yes, handling payroll. It worked because pay was almost nothing. Following figures are for 1942. A private with less than three years service was paid 50 bucks a month. Tech sergeant with 5 years, $120. Captain with over 10 years, $230. General with over 30 years, $667.
Yeah, median household income in 1945 was only $2400, but a private with a pay of $600 was a hell of a lot cheaper than a business worker even after adding the expense of housing, clothing, and feeding the private.
It's not all waste. Bloat, corruption, greed and fraud are the most serious contributors to the expense of the government. Most of your tax dollars are lining the pockets of legislators and their staff, executives and their staff, courts and their staff, agency bureacracies, tax collectors and enforcers, vast networks of "authorities" accountable to no one, public worker union management, contractor management, contractor shareholders, lobbyists, assorted fat pigs who hire lobbyists to get their own pockets lined, and finally, yes, public union employees.
Sorry; Xfce -> LXDE of course.
I am sure you realize that which choices are "good" ones is very subjective. I happen to agree with you that Xfce and LXDE are strong candidates, but Enlightenment and others have strong fans. Your point about the extremely modest resources available to many of the projects is well taken. I was very enthusiastic to hear that Xfce is being ported to Qt, if sad that GTK2 is fading as a viable option.
I am not sure what the angst about Qt is; I've heard a lot of it, and it has never been well defined. Qt is not quasi-proprietary as far as I can tell. Yes, there is an option for commercial licensing, but so what? It's only one of several options. Qt was GPL'ed as far back as 2000 with version 2.2, with a further option for LGPL added in 2009 with version 4.5. Having both GPL and LGPL options seems to me to cover all bases without having to resort to the commercial licensing option. The Qt Project is under open governance. As far as I am concerned, any legitimate foundation for angst has dissipated. Could it conceivably be closed up in the future? Maybe; I don't think it would be easy, and the open source is out there and could be forked if necessary.
I do not think I believe this, though I recognize it is a completely subjective topic.
See extensive list. Most of the listed options were available then.
You make an interesting case. There is also a case to be made that the free Cygwin on Windows 7 gives you a pretty darn good environment. Cygwin has grown to be pretty remarkable, given that it now actually gives you /dev including sda, sr0, null, zero, etc; /proc including /proc/sys and /proc/registry; true hardlinks and symbolic links on NTFS; mapping NT users to *nix UIDs; a single / root with all your drives mounted on it; a really beautiful dynamically resizable bash terminal window; an ssh demon; and they have fixed the rough edges, like with ^C working in emacs for example. The biggest shortcoming is that they cannot implement sudo, but you can "run as administrator" a bash window .
IMHO, and this is not meant as a lecture, you SEEM to have given up on linux without really exploring it. Sure, GNOME went full-on acid-trip batshit insane with version 3, and a lot of people think KDE took a fundamentally wrong turn with version 4, but for full DE's you still have MATE (actively maintained GNOME 2 clone) Trinity (actively maintained KDE 3 clone, for some definition of "actively"), Xfce, LXDE, Razor-Qt and the lesser known Étoilé and EDE. There is Enlightenment, a "semi-DE". And you can just use WMs without a DE: awesome, Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM and the lesser known Ratpoison, wmii, dwm, xmonad, WindowLab, and Ion. I don't claim this list is exhaustive either.
It's pretty hard for me to believe you wouldn't find one of those more agreeable to you than the Mac with its busted ass file manager and lack of a taskbar.
Jeeze guys. It's nice to be passionate, but ...
Interesting discussion though.
Why do you suppose that the Trinity team needs to "support" newer distro versions? The job of the DE team is to develop and maintain the DE code, period. It is the job of the distro to package it and put it in their repo. I would rag on the distros for ignoring Trinity and supporting failed acid-trip experiments like Gnome 3.