Even here in Canada, we're seeing an emergence of increased cultural aggression from the US and many American companies are trying to bring their American values to Canada. Traditionally, we're valued our social programs, healthcare and unemployment benefits as a cultural force that has helped us to provide better governance and lifestyle to the vast majority. The American (corporate) values are really starting to push the view of letting the aggressive superstar individual succeed and everyone else fail. I'm sorry if anyone is offended but today's American values tend to let the entire middle class suffer and hurt the lower class significantly. The old adage that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor has been tilted to the extreme in today's economic reality.
I'm American but love Canada; lived on the border for most of my childhood and worked there for 3 years. But you have to understand that nobody is "forcing" American values onto you. You always have to agree to it, whether it's because the American stuff is lower price or has better features, or in a contract negotiation they're big and you're small. You can always say no. If you choose not to, then it is you who are selling out your values, not the Americans who are forcing theirs upon you.
If you consider it to be "forcing" their values onto you when they sell a product or negotiate a contract based on what they want, then likewise if you try to buy a product or negotiate contract based on what you want, you are "forcing" your values onto them.
If Canadian culture and values are changing, then it's because of the choices of Canadians. There's no American standing above you with a whip and chair forcing you to dance the American way. You always have a choice. The French (and to a lesser extent the Quebecois) understand this, and take steps to actively ban foreign cultural influences. I think it's a silly way to do it (IMHO individual freedom is more important than cultural preservation), but I respect that they're taking a stand to preserve their unique cultural values, even if costs them some trade contracts and international treaties. That is what it means to stand up for yourself, instead of blaming others for your own choices.
Don't take this the wrong way. I would dearly love for Canadians to "export" some of their values to the U.S. But you have to grow a backbone and be willing to take a stand and make the personal sacrifices that entails (like some people here refuse to buy from Sony for the rootkit fiasco despite drooling over the PS3 and PS4). If you just blame others for your own decisions to assuage your own guilt, you'll remain a pushover and lose more and more of your personal identity. So stand proud to be Canadian, and don't be afraid to refuse to buy American goods or to tell them "no" if it somehow infringes your values.
Listen, part of the reason anonymous (and to a lesser extent, pseudonymous) commenting is a good thing is because you can say something you wouldn't normally be able to say for fear of some sort of real life consequences. I'm not talking about "trolling," I'm talking about political opinions or affinity for ideas or concepts that are looked down upon in polite society.
That's really the conundrum here. To correctly target trolling means distinguishing between trolling and political opinions. And to distinguish between them means they have to have been written and read. By which point it's too late. Any preventative measures you can take to eliminate one eliminates the other (and vice versa - allowing one allows the other). Punitive measures leave the class you want to protect open to having their RL identity blown by someone abusing any method you implement to expose the RL identities of people deemed trolls.
There's no simple or single "right" answer to this. If there were, it'd have been implemented already. Moderation is only effective if the entire community takes part. Hired or anointed moderators don't work because they don't work as many hours as trolls (henceforth Ts to avoid the lameness filter) have free time. You need the massive power of crowdsourcing to keep the Ts at bay. And that still only works when the crowd willing to moderate outnumbers the Ts by a certain margin. The catch being that a concerted community effort to eliminate Ts actually encourages them, because Ts adore attention. Reading about the community discussing how to eliminate them just feeds their ego. The crowdsourcing has to be low-key and something that just happens without being discussed extensively.
This move away toward "real name" tie-ins is bad any way you cut it. Yes, it cuts down on "trolling," but the cost is too high. There are other ways to cut back on that, anyway, like hiring more effective moderation staff.
I've been on the Internet since the days when everyone used their real names and there was no anonymity (go read the Google Groups Usenet archives from the 1980s - everyone uses their real name and some even include their personal contact info in their signatures). All sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a practice of making sure nobody was anonymous because they feared the chaos which would arise from anonymous behavior. It isn't the terrible place you seem to think it is. It's different, but it's still functional. Just like the opposite places (like 4chan) are different but functional. Kinda ironic that you fear the non-anonymous Internet the same as they feared the anonymous Internet.
I think the way this is going to go is that some sites will be anonymous and some will not. The non-anonymous sites will have less trolling, but you know opinions will be more guarded. The anonymous sites will have opinions openly posted, but you know there will be trolling. When there is no single best solution, all solutions tend to be implemented in different places.
Example, there's a troll (who I won't name for fear she'll find her way here and see *my* real name) who has harassed me in the past. She didn't know my real name (Slashdot is one of the few places I use it) so her power over me was limited. One of her targets, though, used his real name and mentioned where he worked. She called up his job, reporting him for child abuse (he's a teacher), found and contacted all of his family on Facebook, and contacted his local police department to report him for child pornography. None of those charges were true, and luckily he had warned enough people about her that the damage was minimal, but he's still had to endure years of not knowing who she would contact next to spread lies.
The problem here isn't that she spread lies about him. The problem is that people believed an anonymous individual spreading lies. We're so used to face-to-face communication that we give the word of an anonymous phone tipster or anonymous Internet post as much weight as a someone telling us something face-to-face (a non-anonymous meeting).
For the job/police aspect in particular, the problem is the current procedure is to get the report of child abuse, place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated, then reinstate him when they're found to be false. The correct procedure is to get the report of child abuse, investigate the reporter to validate their credibility, then place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated. The threshold at which an individual should be placed on administrative leave (even for something as serious as child abuse) has to be much higher than can be triggered by an anonymous accusation. With a non-anonymous accusation, the accuser has "skin in the game" so it may reach that threshold. And the mistake is giving the anonymous accuser the same credibility as the non-anonymous accuser.
This particular judge disallowed Samsung from showing the jury its prior art (phones that it had in the design pipeline before the iPhone was announced) because the Samsung lawyers missed a filing deadline. She let the letter of the law (a filing deadline) override the intent of the law (to get to the truth of the matter).
Apple's tablet infringement claims were thrown out because of the copious amounts of prior art which the jury saw. The $1 billion judgement likely would've been thrown out too if they'd seen Samsung was working on iPhone-like designs before anyone outside Apple even knew what an iPhone was. In this particular case, the prejudice is in the jury, not the general public which got to see the documents the judge disallowed because of a technicality.
Sounds to me like closing a loophole more than instituting a new tax.
The thing is, it's not a loophole. It's the normal state of things. The taxes are the artificial construct, not the tax-avoidance "loophole."
I ran across this when helping set up an Internet retailer in Canada. If someone buys something from a retailer in the same U.S. state, they have to pay sales tax. If they buy it from a retailer outside the state, they don't have to pay sales tax. Loophole! So close the loophole and they always have to pay sales tax, right?
Not so fast. If they buy from a retailer in Canada they don't have to pay sales tax (individual states are not empowered to negotiate tax treaties with foreign countries). So now you've got another loophole.
Say you manage to close that loophole. Now you're done, right? Nope. Say in the future there's a colony on the moon. You buy from the moon colony and you don't have to pay sales tax. Another loophole. And even if you close that, we invent warp drives and establish commerce with aliens from another planet. No sales tax on that. Another loophole.
After you go through enough iterations of this, it dawns on you that this isn't a loophole. This is the natural way the system (economic transactions) wants to work, and it's the tax you're trying to impose which is the flawed artificial construct. You can fix it by shifting the taxes to a different source which doesn't suffer from this problem (see my other post). Or you can continue pounding your head on the desk trying to make this flawed tax work.
> If Italian products are being advertised to Italians, then the service tax on the adds should be paid to the Italian government
A contemporary, but yet outmoded thought, in my opinion. The internet really shows exactly how old
fashioned this line of thinking is.
You're missing the real nugget of gold in OP's post.
The purpose of taxes is to shift a certain percentage of the country's productivity (its GDP) to the government's treasury. Where you extract that percentage is irrelevant. If you wish to divert 35% of GDP to the government and all of it comes from only an income tax, the people would only have 65 cents per $ or Euro of productivity they generated to spend for themselves. If the 35% comes from only corporate taxes, then companies would just raise their prices/reduce salaries and the people would effectively 65 cents per $ or Euro of productivity they generated to spend for themselves. Both have the same result.
So whether you tax individuals or tax corporations is irrelevant. The net end-result is the same. So you should place the taxes where they are easiest (cheapest) and fairest to collect. All you accomplish by making a gazillion different taxes is increase the cost to collect the same amount of money. Income taxes are probably the best way to extract the money because it affects all individuals (only people generate productivity). If an income tax is how you choose to collect the 35%, then you should get rid of all the other taxes and their money-wasting collection. If you want the rich to pay more, then make sure the income taxes scale progressively to your satisfaction. If you don't want people avoiding income taxes by living vicariously through their companies (having companies buy their personal goods and services for them), make strict penalties for that.
The only other reason to tax specific activities is if you wish to manipulate the market. e.g. fuel taxes to discourage energy use/encourage energy efficiency, sin taxes to discourage people from killing themselves with cigarettes, VATs to discourage middlemen, property taxes to encourage better economic use of property in high-value areas, etc. Unless there's some reason you don't want Italians buying ads from foreigners, there's no point taxing that specific activity.
Sony has been schizophrenic ever since they bought Columbia/CBS Records. Before then they were pro-technology, anti-strict IP. Sony was the defendant in the infamous Betamax case, where the TV/movie companies tried to argue we could only watch TV live, and shouldn't be able to use VCRs to time-shift broadcasts.
In other words, some people give, some people take. It's part of life. If you feel superior because you are one and not the other, then you are missing out on how life really works.
Everyone gives and takes. Every legitimate economic transaction involves both giving something and receiving something. So anyone with a significant non-criminal income is also a giver. You have to give something to earn money. Contrary to the implications of this thread, it's actually the artist and software communities which are the exception to the rule, because they can work to create something once and give it away repeatedly for more money. Most regular people have to constantly give away stuff (e.g. their labor) every time they want more money.
So despite being a programmer and photographer, I'd take exception to the characterization in this thread that the programmer/artist is the giver and the pirate is the taker. If you look at it based on net work vs income ratios, most of the highly successful programmers and artists are takers. Piracy is rampant because of the mismatch between how much they charge for their work, and how much society feels it should cost given their success.
The best way to see this problem in action without resorting to the piracy extreme (by which point it's so distorted it's not educational) is to look at how things work in hardware. When VCRs first came out, they cost over $1000. They were incredibly popular and successful, and eventually every Western household had one (if not several). More sales meant you could amortize R&D costs over more units, you could buy more supplies meaning discounts for bulk purchases, and it also meant more competition which insured those manufacturing savings were passed on to the customer. By the time the DVD player came out, VCRs had dropped to about $20.
That's the kind of price drop people expect from successful products, and aren't seeing with software or music or movies. And that's why they feel justified pirating it.
Close. I played around a lot with different dpi, printing different resolution photos at different resolution. The old rule of thumb is correct. At hand-held distance (which is a bit closer than a monitor screen's distance), 150 dpi is when things start to look really sharp, and 300 dpi is about the limit beyond which you'll see no improvement.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to resolve a line pair 1 arc-minute apart. The actual limit of human acuity is about 0.4 arc-minutes (that's the spacing between your cones at your fovea), but due to optical defects in the cornea and lens it's rare to get an individual who approaches that (20/10 or 20/8 vision). If you work out the math (I need to get going so I can't show you the calcs), at a handheld viewing distance this works out to about 300 dpi as the upper limit for 20/20 vision.
When, as a kid, I first took an interest in computers, 300dpi laser printers were all the rage. Now they boast around 2400dpi. No one seems to complain that images and text are sharper.
The manufacturers knew long ago that 300 dpi was about the limit of human acuity for a sheet of paper held in your hand. Laser printers can only print in black or white. The 2400 dpi is so they can render greyscales better using halftones at an effective 300 dpi.
As such, a 72 point font should always be an inch high when displayed on screen, irrespective of how many pixels are required to render it.
That's what the Mac did (does). It queries the monitor you connect to determine its physical size (the Apple-branded monitors report their size), then based on the screen resolution you select it auto-scales everything so a 72 point font is always an inch high. It's the right way to do this. People shouldn't be selecting 125% screen resolution as their preferred text size because that's not a constant. You may prefer 100% on one screen while you prefer 150% on another.
Which has me totally baffled why Apple abandoned this approach with iOS. As much as I dislike Apple's current practices, this is one problem they solved the right way. Then they tossed it out the window with iOS and went with fixed resolution for everything. With the iPhone you program for 480x320 or 960x640 (the iPhone 5's 1136x640 is just a slice of extra pixels added to one end which is ignored with legacy apps). With the iPad you program for 1024x768 or 2048x1536. This worked great when your only choices were a 3.5" or 9.7" screen. But it's causing problems now that they've got the iPad mini (same resolution as the full iPad, but now everything on the screen is smaller) and are thinking of enlarging the iPhone screen even more.
For many applications such as web browsing you have tons of unused white space on the left and/or right with 1080p, but you are constantly scrolling up and down.
Yeah, that has baffled me too. I just unlock Windows' task bar and move it to the side, and use the tree-style tab extension to move the browser tabs to the side.
I really can't understand why PC manufacturers are shunning people asking for 16:10 displays.
It's pretty obvious to me. The vast majority of people are content consumers. The vast majority of people buy PC laptops. Most video is now 16:9, so a 16:9 laptop display makes sense.
A significant chunk of Apple's customer-base are (artistic) content creators. If you're editing a 16:9 movie on a 16:9 screen, there's no room for additional graphical editing controls. In particular, if you're showing a 1920x1080 movie on a 1920x0180 display, the only way to add controls is to cover up part of the image, or to shrink the image down to smaller than a 1:1 pixel representation. Neither of those choices is acceptable when you're supposed to be reviewing the movie for graphical artifacts and defects. 16:10 with a thin row of extra pixels at the top of bottom is much more preferable. (Actually a second monitor is most preferable, but we're talking about laptop screens here.)
16:10 is also a lot closer to the golden ratio (1.618) than 16:9 (1.778), so appeals to artistic types (who are frequently the only ones outside of mathematicians who know what the golden ratio is).
Why not 4:3? The original draw of 16:10 was that you could display two full-size working apps side-by-side (16:10 becomes 2x 8:10, which is almost exactly the aspect ratio of 8.5x11 US letter-sized paper).
In tablet space (dual-use display in landscape and portrait mode), I've been playing with a Nook tablet which comes in a 3:2 aspect ratio. I think I like it even better than 16:10. 16:10 or 16:9 plays movies well in landscape mode, but has broad black bars on the top and bottom in portrait mode when displaying documents. 4:3 displays documents well in portrait mode, but has broad black bars when showing movies in landscape. 3:2 has thin black bars in either orientation, and seems like the least compromise.
I don't remember any CS classes having a "culture" of any kind. Unless they are saying that "dry and sometimes boring" is "white culture"?
CS culture is the same any other cultural block - the sense that your peer group is superior because you believe or know something that other groups do not. You see it in Mac vs PC, Android vs iOS, Windows vs Unix, Debian vs Ubuntu, x86 vs MIPS, etc. It's the same thing that made the football team superior to the basketball team. Or Hondas better than Toyotas, or domestic cars better than foreign cars. Or vegan better than a regular diet. Or heavy metal better than pop. (Or vice versa for all of these)
In other words, it's just the way people are. It affects all aspects of society including CS. If there's one black mark I'd give CS about this, it's that it tends to have a greater percentage of socially mal-adjusted people, and so tends to hang on to this sense of superiority more than other cultural blocks. Most regular people eventually figure out that it's not really important whether the football team is better than the basketball team, or whether you bought a Toyota or a Ford. But people in CS tend to defend and promote their preferred systems with almost religious fervor well into adulthood. This can be very off-putting to regular people thinking of getting into CS. (To be fair, it's a minority of people in CS who behave like this. But they can be a very vocal minority.)
Ultimately, it's a bunch of people all wanting to live in the same place which drives up the price of housing. The mismatch between supply and demand causes the price to increase. The more people there are who want to live in a place, the higher the price will go, up until the price is high enough that the number of people who want to live there decreases to equals the number of housing spaces available.
If you try to artificially keep the price in check (e.g. rent control) you'll end up with waiting lists because demand still exceeds supply. The only solutions that work are to build more houses (which isn't always an option if you're talking about a limited space like bay area with a water view), or to make the area a less desirable place to live (which isn't exactly a laudable goal).
That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.
That's actually the purpose of property taxes. The alternative is to have some guy who owns a strawberry farm in the middle of what is now a major city just sitting on that property and impeding growth (sometimes they're just waiting for its value to go up), instead of selling it to someone who'll make better use of the property. (True story. Disneyland eventually bought the 52 acre farm for ~$90 million.)
What's best for you is not necessarily what is best for the public at large. Rising property taxes are a way to "encourage" people doing economically inefficient things with their property to sell to someone who could make better use of the property. "Better" defined based on what sort of business or residence the surrounding area has turned into. It's a less drastic measure than eminent domain.
The problem with the "bunch of people around you overpaid" scenario is that many municipalities are greedy and (1) increase property taxes every year, when a 5-year or 10-year average would help smooth out a lot of the bumps in market prices, and (2) don't have provisions for lowering property taxes when the value of real estate decreases. Otherwise, if the real estate value remains high, those people didn't overpay.
Let's wait to hear what RSA has to say before condemning them. Based on what the cell phone carriers and online mail services have been saying they've been forced to disclose, NSA may have shoved a court order in RSA's face saying they must implement this in the name of national security. And when they fought against it, the secret court ruled against them and put a gag order on them prohibiting them from disclosing any of this ever happened. The $10 million may have just been court-ordered payments from NSA to defray costs to implement the new algorithm in RSA's products.
Unless your backup is not visible to the virus, you are toast. This is a situation where unattached, or off-site backups and cloud solutions win. A simple user with an always attached USB drive will still be toast.
An always-attached USB drive is not a backup. It's just additional storage where you happen to be keeping a copy of your files.
The whole point of a backup is that you have a safe copy of your files should you accidentally delete the wrong thing, a lightning bolt fries your equipment, burglars break in and steal the computer equipment you've left sitting out in the open, a fire burns down your house, or yes, some virus encrypts all your files.
Make the backup, detach the drive, and either store it in a drawer at work or put it in a locked fireproof safe. Leaving it always attached defeats the purpose of a backup.
Free won't work for computer hardware, at least not in the current state of the industry. The technological advances in hardware come much too quickly. An open source software program from 8 years ago is still usable, and the code can easily be updated to bring it up to modern standards. A laptop from 8 years ago is horribly outdated, and you can't easily update it to bring it up to modern standards.
The reason for this is that software runs on hardware, and not the other way around. Old software benefits from the speed improvements of newer hardware. Old hardware does not benefit from speed improvements of newer software. Quite the opposite in fact. Newer software tends to be slower because it has a lot more marginally useful cruft added on - because the speedup of newer hardware eliminates the penalty for running that cruft.
In a well-established hardware industry with slow technological improvement, free can work. Boats are a good example. The basic hydrodynamics were solved centuries ago, and most of the near-optimal solutions were derived by computer modeling in the last few decades. And the basics of laying down fiberglass can be learned in a week. It is perfectly viable to buy or borrow plans from a well-known design and build your own boat. Maybe not cost-effective, but it's perfectly viable. It can also work in hardware which has huge demand but is being held back by stifling patents (Sony jealously protected Betamax and tried to keep it exclusive, while JVC openly licensed anyone who wanted to build a VHS machine).
But with the rate at which computer technology advances and how willing its participants (mostly) are to license their patents to each other, there's no way for an open-source laptop to keep up with the pace of proprietary laptop improvements. That's how I read OP's "but what can you do on it besides run gcc?" comment. Not that there was a lack of software - there's plenty of open software from 8 years ago which will run on it just fine. But that the hardware was too slow to run what anyone would consider a viable alternative to modern software.
The real point here that this tangent is missing is KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. You shouldn't need to look through schematics or take apart your laptop or decompile firmware to figure out if the light cannot be decoupled from the camera, when a simple non-motorized sliding cover would make it indisputably clear to the user that their image is not being surreptitiously captured. That's what people are saying. There are times when complexity needs to be hidden from the user. This is not one of those times because a simple alternative solution that even a 5 year old can understand exists. KISS.
You're making the common mistake of assuming that if the minimum wage were $20/hr, all the low-wage jobs would become $20/hr.
That's not what will happen. The low wage jobs which are truly underpaid (i.e. they generate more than $20/hr of productivity) would indeed have their pay increased to $20/hr.
But all the other low wage jobs would simply disappear. There's absolutely no point for an employer to pay someone $20/hr is they're only getting $10/hr or $15/hr of benefit from it.
CEOs being overpaid is a legitimate problem. But their effect on overall incomes is not as big as you think it is. According to the IRS tax stats, the total income of everyone making over $500,000 in 2011 was $1.351 trillion. If you confiscated all their income and distributed it to the ~150 million workers, it comes out to about $9000/yr per worker. Or about a $5/hr increase assuming you work 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year.
Once it reaches a critical mass it will. It won't be pretty.
You're misunderstanding the fundamental problem here, which OP put rather well. The problem isn't pay; the problem is productivity. These people do not generate enough productivity to warrant a $20/hr wage. If they caused a revolution and recreated society to their liking, the only way the math balances out is if you lower the standard of living (i.e. productivity per person) to where their standard is the new average.
Fixing the problem isn't as simple as just increasing their wages. That just increases their standard of living by dragging down everyone else's. The proper fix is to increase their productivity. Whether it be by education, re-training, or a more efficient employment program which better matches these people with available jobs. Their productivity has to be increased if you want to see a real improvement in the country overall, not just a reassignment of money from high income people to lower income people with no net difference.
A common theme I see over and over with people I know stuck at minimum wage is that they want to improve themselves, but between all the bills they have to pay, they cannot afford neither the time nor the money to finish their high school degree, or training they'd need to get a new, better job that interests them. While free K-12 schooling is a great idea, I think most kids are... naive (some would say stupid) when it comes to how the real world works. They don't appreciate what a great the opportunity the free schooling represents until it's too late and the opportunity has passed by Somehow we need to change that. Maybe something even as crazy as K-10 schooling, everyone is forced to work for a living for 2 years, then finish 11-12. I'm reluctant to continue the college loan programs because while they do give poorer people opportunity, they're even better at driving up the cost of tuition.
Well, that's assuming the median income is post-tax income. If it's pre-tax, then the cost of government programs and health insurance are included. And even if it is post-tax and you add in the US$4338 PPP Germans get as universal health care, they still lag the U.S. in median income. (The real story is a bit more complex, as about half of U.S. health expenditure per capita is government spending, so equivalent to the unmeasured health insurance in European countries. But due to the higher health care costs in the U.S. the net effect is about the same as just adding per capita health expenditure to European median income.)
Eyeballing the median income stats, the U.S. still ends up in the top 8 if you adjust for health insurance, ahead of most of the European nations.
Incinerating money doesn't make it go away. The value that money represented just gets distributed into raising the value of the remaining money. That's probably the outcome you want anyway - society is benefiting from the fine paid. Just be aware that it doesn't work quite the way you think it does (e.g. since the value of each dollar increases by the same minute fraction, the people with more dollars get a bigger gain.)
I know that red light cameras have sometimes been abused, but what are we supposed to do about the pandemic of red-light-running?
Adjust the timing so after your light goes from yellow to red, the cross-traffic light remains red for a couple more seconds before turning green.
It would also help if the length of a yellow were standardized across the country. When I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, the first month I was screeching to a stop at yellow lights. Then I'd sit there like an idiot for about 3-5 seconds while the light stayed yellow. I suspect that a good portion of the "pandemic" of red-light running is due to certain municipalities programming in excessively short yellows to try to generate more red light ticket revenue.
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I'm American but love Canada; lived on the border for most of my childhood and worked there for 3 years. But you have to understand that nobody is "forcing" American values onto you. You always have to agree to it, whether it's because the American stuff is lower price or has better features, or in a contract negotiation they're big and you're small. You can always say no. If you choose not to, then it is you who are selling out your values, not the Americans who are forcing theirs upon you.
If you consider it to be "forcing" their values onto you when they sell a product or negotiate a contract based on what they want, then likewise if you try to buy a product or negotiate contract based on what you want, you are "forcing" your values onto them.
If Canadian culture and values are changing, then it's because of the choices of Canadians. There's no American standing above you with a whip and chair forcing you to dance the American way. You always have a choice. The French (and to a lesser extent the Quebecois) understand this, and take steps to actively ban foreign cultural influences. I think it's a silly way to do it (IMHO individual freedom is more important than cultural preservation), but I respect that they're taking a stand to preserve their unique cultural values, even if costs them some trade contracts and international treaties. That is what it means to stand up for yourself, instead of blaming others for your own choices.
Don't take this the wrong way. I would dearly love for Canadians to "export" some of their values to the U.S. But you have to grow a backbone and be willing to take a stand and make the personal sacrifices that entails (like some people here refuse to buy from Sony for the rootkit fiasco despite drooling over the PS3 and PS4). If you just blame others for your own decisions to assuage your own guilt, you'll remain a pushover and lose more and more of your personal identity. So stand proud to be Canadian, and don't be afraid to refuse to buy American goods or to tell them "no" if it somehow infringes your values.
That's really the conundrum here. To correctly target trolling means distinguishing between trolling and political opinions. And to distinguish between them means they have to have been written and read. By which point it's too late. Any preventative measures you can take to eliminate one eliminates the other (and vice versa - allowing one allows the other). Punitive measures leave the class you want to protect open to having their RL identity blown by someone abusing any method you implement to expose the RL identities of people deemed trolls.
There's no simple or single "right" answer to this. If there were, it'd have been implemented already. Moderation is only effective if the entire community takes part. Hired or anointed moderators don't work because they don't work as many hours as trolls (henceforth Ts to avoid the lameness filter) have free time. You need the massive power of crowdsourcing to keep the Ts at bay. And that still only works when the crowd willing to moderate outnumbers the Ts by a certain margin. The catch being that a concerted community effort to eliminate Ts actually encourages them, because Ts adore attention. Reading about the community discussing how to eliminate them just feeds their ego. The crowdsourcing has to be low-key and something that just happens without being discussed extensively.
I've been on the Internet since the days when everyone used their real names and there was no anonymity (go read the Google Groups Usenet archives from the 1980s - everyone uses their real name and some even include their personal contact info in their signatures). All sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a practice of making sure nobody was anonymous because they feared the chaos which would arise from anonymous behavior. It isn't the terrible place you seem to think it is. It's different, but it's still functional. Just like the opposite places (like 4chan) are different but functional. Kinda ironic that you fear the non-anonymous Internet the same as they feared the anonymous Internet.
I think the way this is going to go is that some sites will be anonymous and some will not. The non-anonymous sites will have less trolling, but you know opinions will be more guarded. The anonymous sites will have opinions openly posted, but you know there will be trolling. When there is no single best solution, all solutions tend to be implemented in different places.
The problem here isn't that she spread lies about him. The problem is that people believed an anonymous individual spreading lies. We're so used to face-to-face communication that we give the word of an anonymous phone tipster or anonymous Internet post as much weight as a someone telling us something face-to-face (a non-anonymous meeting).
For the job/police aspect in particular, the problem is the current procedure is to get the report of child abuse, place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated, then reinstate him when they're found to be false. The correct procedure is to get the report of child abuse, investigate the reporter to validate their credibility, then place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated. The threshold at which an individual should be placed on administrative leave (even for something as serious as child abuse) has to be much higher than can be triggered by an anonymous accusation. With a non-anonymous accusation, the accuser has "skin in the game" so it may reach that threshold. And the mistake is giving the anonymous accuser the same credibility as the non-anonymous accuser.
This particular judge disallowed Samsung from showing the jury its prior art (phones that it had in the design pipeline before the iPhone was announced) because the Samsung lawyers missed a filing deadline. She let the letter of the law (a filing deadline) override the intent of the law (to get to the truth of the matter).
Apple's tablet infringement claims were thrown out because of the copious amounts of prior art which the jury saw. The $1 billion judgement likely would've been thrown out too if they'd seen Samsung was working on iPhone-like designs before anyone outside Apple even knew what an iPhone was. In this particular case, the prejudice is in the jury, not the general public which got to see the documents the judge disallowed because of a technicality.
The thing is, it's not a loophole. It's the normal state of things. The taxes are the artificial construct, not the tax-avoidance "loophole."
I ran across this when helping set up an Internet retailer in Canada. If someone buys something from a retailer in the same U.S. state, they have to pay sales tax. If they buy it from a retailer outside the state, they don't have to pay sales tax. Loophole! So close the loophole and they always have to pay sales tax, right?
Not so fast. If they buy from a retailer in Canada they don't have to pay sales tax (individual states are not empowered to negotiate tax treaties with foreign countries). So now you've got another loophole.
Say you manage to close that loophole. Now you're done, right? Nope. Say in the future there's a colony on the moon. You buy from the moon colony and you don't have to pay sales tax. Another loophole. And even if you close that, we invent warp drives and establish commerce with aliens from another planet. No sales tax on that. Another loophole.
After you go through enough iterations of this, it dawns on you that this isn't a loophole. This is the natural way the system (economic transactions) wants to work, and it's the tax you're trying to impose which is the flawed artificial construct. You can fix it by shifting the taxes to a different source which doesn't suffer from this problem (see my other post). Or you can continue pounding your head on the desk trying to make this flawed tax work.
You're missing the real nugget of gold in OP's post.
The purpose of taxes is to shift a certain percentage of the country's productivity (its GDP) to the government's treasury. Where you extract that percentage is irrelevant. If you wish to divert 35% of GDP to the government and all of it comes from only an income tax, the people would only have 65 cents per $ or Euro of productivity they generated to spend for themselves. If the 35% comes from only corporate taxes, then companies would just raise their prices/reduce salaries and the people would effectively 65 cents per $ or Euro of productivity they generated to spend for themselves. Both have the same result.
So whether you tax individuals or tax corporations is irrelevant. The net end-result is the same. So you should place the taxes where they are easiest (cheapest) and fairest to collect. All you accomplish by making a gazillion different taxes is increase the cost to collect the same amount of money. Income taxes are probably the best way to extract the money because it affects all individuals (only people generate productivity). If an income tax is how you choose to collect the 35%, then you should get rid of all the other taxes and their money-wasting collection. If you want the rich to pay more, then make sure the income taxes scale progressively to your satisfaction. If you don't want people avoiding income taxes by living vicariously through their companies (having companies buy their personal goods and services for them), make strict penalties for that.
The only other reason to tax specific activities is if you wish to manipulate the market. e.g. fuel taxes to discourage energy use/encourage energy efficiency, sin taxes to discourage people from killing themselves with cigarettes, VATs to discourage middlemen, property taxes to encourage better economic use of property in high-value areas, etc. Unless there's some reason you don't want Italians buying ads from foreigners, there's no point taxing that specific activity.
Sony has been schizophrenic ever since they bought Columbia/CBS Records. Before then they were pro-technology, anti-strict IP. Sony was the defendant in the infamous Betamax case, where the TV/movie companies tried to argue we could only watch TV live, and shouldn't be able to use VCRs to time-shift broadcasts.
Everyone gives and takes. Every legitimate economic transaction involves both giving something and receiving something. So anyone with a significant non-criminal income is also a giver. You have to give something to earn money. Contrary to the implications of this thread, it's actually the artist and software communities which are the exception to the rule, because they can work to create something once and give it away repeatedly for more money. Most regular people have to constantly give away stuff (e.g. their labor) every time they want more money.
So despite being a programmer and photographer, I'd take exception to the characterization in this thread that the programmer/artist is the giver and the pirate is the taker. If you look at it based on net work vs income ratios, most of the highly successful programmers and artists are takers. Piracy is rampant because of the mismatch between how much they charge for their work, and how much society feels it should cost given their success.
The best way to see this problem in action without resorting to the piracy extreme (by which point it's so distorted it's not educational) is to look at how things work in hardware. When VCRs first came out, they cost over $1000. They were incredibly popular and successful, and eventually every Western household had one (if not several). More sales meant you could amortize R&D costs over more units, you could buy more supplies meaning discounts for bulk purchases, and it also meant more competition which insured those manufacturing savings were passed on to the customer. By the time the DVD player came out, VCRs had dropped to about $20.
That's the kind of price drop people expect from successful products, and aren't seeing with software or music or movies. And that's why they feel justified pirating it.
Close. I played around a lot with different dpi, printing different resolution photos at different resolution. The old rule of thumb is correct. At hand-held distance (which is a bit closer than a monitor screen's distance), 150 dpi is when things start to look really sharp, and 300 dpi is about the limit beyond which you'll see no improvement.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to resolve a line pair 1 arc-minute apart. The actual limit of human acuity is about 0.4 arc-minutes (that's the spacing between your cones at your fovea), but due to optical defects in the cornea and lens it's rare to get an individual who approaches that (20/10 or 20/8 vision). If you work out the math (I need to get going so I can't show you the calcs), at a handheld viewing distance this works out to about 300 dpi as the upper limit for 20/20 vision.
The manufacturers knew long ago that 300 dpi was about the limit of human acuity for a sheet of paper held in your hand. Laser printers can only print in black or white. The 2400 dpi is so they can render greyscales better using halftones at an effective 300 dpi.
That's what the Mac did (does). It queries the monitor you connect to determine its physical size (the Apple-branded monitors report their size), then based on the screen resolution you select it auto-scales everything so a 72 point font is always an inch high. It's the right way to do this. People shouldn't be selecting 125% screen resolution as their preferred text size because that's not a constant. You may prefer 100% on one screen while you prefer 150% on another.
Which has me totally baffled why Apple abandoned this approach with iOS. As much as I dislike Apple's current practices, this is one problem they solved the right way. Then they tossed it out the window with iOS and went with fixed resolution for everything. With the iPhone you program for 480x320 or 960x640 (the iPhone 5's 1136x640 is just a slice of extra pixels added to one end which is ignored with legacy apps). With the iPad you program for 1024x768 or 2048x1536. This worked great when your only choices were a 3.5" or 9.7" screen. But it's causing problems now that they've got the iPad mini (same resolution as the full iPad, but now everything on the screen is smaller) and are thinking of enlarging the iPhone screen even more.
Yeah, that has baffled me too. I just unlock Windows' task bar and move it to the side, and use the tree-style tab extension to move the browser tabs to the side.
It's pretty obvious to me. The vast majority of people are content consumers. The vast majority of people buy PC laptops. Most video is now 16:9, so a 16:9 laptop display makes sense.
A significant chunk of Apple's customer-base are (artistic) content creators. If you're editing a 16:9 movie on a 16:9 screen, there's no room for additional graphical editing controls. In particular, if you're showing a 1920x1080 movie on a 1920x0180 display, the only way to add controls is to cover up part of the image, or to shrink the image down to smaller than a 1:1 pixel representation. Neither of those choices is acceptable when you're supposed to be reviewing the movie for graphical artifacts and defects. 16:10 with a thin row of extra pixels at the top of bottom is much more preferable. (Actually a second monitor is most preferable, but we're talking about laptop screens here.)
16:10 is also a lot closer to the golden ratio (1.618) than 16:9 (1.778), so appeals to artistic types (who are frequently the only ones outside of mathematicians who know what the golden ratio is).
Why not 4:3? The original draw of 16:10 was that you could display two full-size working apps side-by-side (16:10 becomes 2x 8:10, which is almost exactly the aspect ratio of 8.5x11 US letter-sized paper).
In tablet space (dual-use display in landscape and portrait mode), I've been playing with a Nook tablet which comes in a 3:2 aspect ratio. I think I like it even better than 16:10. 16:10 or 16:9 plays movies well in landscape mode, but has broad black bars on the top and bottom in portrait mode when displaying documents. 4:3 displays documents well in portrait mode, but has broad black bars when showing movies in landscape. 3:2 has thin black bars in either orientation, and seems like the least compromise.
CS culture is the same any other cultural block - the sense that your peer group is superior because you believe or know something that other groups do not. You see it in Mac vs PC, Android vs iOS, Windows vs Unix, Debian vs Ubuntu, x86 vs MIPS, etc. It's the same thing that made the football team superior to the basketball team. Or Hondas better than Toyotas, or domestic cars better than foreign cars. Or vegan better than a regular diet. Or heavy metal better than pop. (Or vice versa for all of these)
In other words, it's just the way people are. It affects all aspects of society including CS. If there's one black mark I'd give CS about this, it's that it tends to have a greater percentage of socially mal-adjusted people, and so tends to hang on to this sense of superiority more than other cultural blocks. Most regular people eventually figure out that it's not really important whether the football team is better than the basketball team, or whether you bought a Toyota or a Ford. But people in CS tend to defend and promote their preferred systems with almost religious fervor well into adulthood. This can be very off-putting to regular people thinking of getting into CS. (To be fair, it's a minority of people in CS who behave like this. But they can be a very vocal minority.)
Ultimately, it's a bunch of people all wanting to live in the same place which drives up the price of housing. The mismatch between supply and demand causes the price to increase. The more people there are who want to live in a place, the higher the price will go, up until the price is high enough that the number of people who want to live there decreases to equals the number of housing spaces available.
If you try to artificially keep the price in check (e.g. rent control) you'll end up with waiting lists because demand still exceeds supply. The only solutions that work are to build more houses (which isn't always an option if you're talking about a limited space like bay area with a water view), or to make the area a less desirable place to live (which isn't exactly a laudable goal).
That's actually the purpose of property taxes. The alternative is to have some guy who owns a strawberry farm in the middle of what is now a major city just sitting on that property and impeding growth (sometimes they're just waiting for its value to go up), instead of selling it to someone who'll make better use of the property. (True story. Disneyland eventually bought the 52 acre farm for ~$90 million.)
What's best for you is not necessarily what is best for the public at large. Rising property taxes are a way to "encourage" people doing economically inefficient things with their property to sell to someone who could make better use of the property. "Better" defined based on what sort of business or residence the surrounding area has turned into. It's a less drastic measure than eminent domain.
The problem with the "bunch of people around you overpaid" scenario is that many municipalities are greedy and (1) increase property taxes every year, when a 5-year or 10-year average would help smooth out a lot of the bumps in market prices, and (2) don't have provisions for lowering property taxes when the value of real estate decreases. Otherwise, if the real estate value remains high, those people didn't overpay.
Let's wait to hear what RSA has to say before condemning them. Based on what the cell phone carriers and online mail services have been saying they've been forced to disclose, NSA may have shoved a court order in RSA's face saying they must implement this in the name of national security. And when they fought against it, the secret court ruled against them and put a gag order on them prohibiting them from disclosing any of this ever happened. The $10 million may have just been court-ordered payments from NSA to defray costs to implement the new algorithm in RSA's products.
An always-attached USB drive is not a backup. It's just additional storage where you happen to be keeping a copy of your files.
The whole point of a backup is that you have a safe copy of your files should you accidentally delete the wrong thing, a lightning bolt fries your equipment, burglars break in and steal the computer equipment you've left sitting out in the open, a fire burns down your house, or yes, some virus encrypts all your files.
Make the backup, detach the drive, and either store it in a drawer at work or put it in a locked fireproof safe. Leaving it always attached defeats the purpose of a backup.
Free won't work for computer hardware, at least not in the current state of the industry. The technological advances in hardware come much too quickly. An open source software program from 8 years ago is still usable, and the code can easily be updated to bring it up to modern standards. A laptop from 8 years ago is horribly outdated, and you can't easily update it to bring it up to modern standards.
The reason for this is that software runs on hardware, and not the other way around. Old software benefits from the speed improvements of newer hardware. Old hardware does not benefit from speed improvements of newer software. Quite the opposite in fact. Newer software tends to be slower because it has a lot more marginally useful cruft added on - because the speedup of newer hardware eliminates the penalty for running that cruft.
In a well-established hardware industry with slow technological improvement, free can work. Boats are a good example. The basic hydrodynamics were solved centuries ago, and most of the near-optimal solutions were derived by computer modeling in the last few decades. And the basics of laying down fiberglass can be learned in a week. It is perfectly viable to buy or borrow plans from a well-known design and build your own boat. Maybe not cost-effective, but it's perfectly viable. It can also work in hardware which has huge demand but is being held back by stifling patents (Sony jealously protected Betamax and tried to keep it exclusive, while JVC openly licensed anyone who wanted to build a VHS machine).
But with the rate at which computer technology advances and how willing its participants (mostly) are to license their patents to each other, there's no way for an open-source laptop to keep up with the pace of proprietary laptop improvements. That's how I read OP's "but what can you do on it besides run gcc?" comment. Not that there was a lack of software - there's plenty of open software from 8 years ago which will run on it just fine. But that the hardware was too slow to run what anyone would consider a viable alternative to modern software.
The real point here that this tangent is missing is KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. You shouldn't need to look through schematics or take apart your laptop or decompile firmware to figure out if the light cannot be decoupled from the camera, when a simple non-motorized sliding cover would make it indisputably clear to the user that their image is not being surreptitiously captured. That's what people are saying. There are times when complexity needs to be hidden from the user. This is not one of those times because a simple alternative solution that even a 5 year old can understand exists. KISS.
You're making the common mistake of assuming that if the minimum wage were $20/hr, all the low-wage jobs would become $20/hr.
That's not what will happen. The low wage jobs which are truly underpaid (i.e. they generate more than $20/hr of productivity) would indeed have their pay increased to $20/hr.
But all the other low wage jobs would simply disappear. There's absolutely no point for an employer to pay someone $20/hr is they're only getting $10/hr or $15/hr of benefit from it.
CEOs being overpaid is a legitimate problem. But their effect on overall incomes is not as big as you think it is. According to the IRS tax stats, the total income of everyone making over $500,000 in 2011 was $1.351 trillion. If you confiscated all their income and distributed it to the ~150 million workers, it comes out to about $9000/yr per worker. Or about a $5/hr increase assuming you work 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year.
You're misunderstanding the fundamental problem here, which OP put rather well. The problem isn't pay; the problem is productivity. These people do not generate enough productivity to warrant a $20/hr wage. If they caused a revolution and recreated society to their liking, the only way the math balances out is if you lower the standard of living (i.e. productivity per person) to where their standard is the new average.
Fixing the problem isn't as simple as just increasing their wages. That just increases their standard of living by dragging down everyone else's. The proper fix is to increase their productivity. Whether it be by education, re-training, or a more efficient employment program which better matches these people with available jobs. Their productivity has to be increased if you want to see a real improvement in the country overall, not just a reassignment of money from high income people to lower income people with no net difference.
A common theme I see over and over with people I know stuck at minimum wage is that they want to improve themselves, but between all the bills they have to pay, they cannot afford neither the time nor the money to finish their high school degree, or training they'd need to get a new, better job that interests them. While free K-12 schooling is a great idea, I think most kids are... naive (some would say stupid) when it comes to how the real world works. They don't appreciate what a great the opportunity the free schooling represents until it's too late and the opportunity has passed by Somehow we need to change that. Maybe something even as crazy as K-10 schooling, everyone is forced to work for a living for 2 years, then finish 11-12. I'm reluctant to continue the college loan programs because while they do give poorer people opportunity, they're even better at driving up the cost of tuition.
Well, that's assuming the median income is post-tax income. If it's pre-tax, then the cost of government programs and health insurance are included. And even if it is post-tax and you add in the US$4338 PPP Germans get as universal health care, they still lag the U.S. in median income. (The real story is a bit more complex, as about half of U.S. health expenditure per capita is government spending, so equivalent to the unmeasured health insurance in European countries. But due to the higher health care costs in the U.S. the net effect is about the same as just adding per capita health expenditure to European median income.)
Eyeballing the median income stats, the U.S. still ends up in the top 8 if you adjust for health insurance, ahead of most of the European nations.
Incinerating money doesn't make it go away. The value that money represented just gets distributed into raising the value of the remaining money. That's probably the outcome you want anyway - society is benefiting from the fine paid. Just be aware that it doesn't work quite the way you think it does (e.g. since the value of each dollar increases by the same minute fraction, the people with more dollars get a bigger gain.)
Adjust the timing so after your light goes from yellow to red, the cross-traffic light remains red for a couple more seconds before turning green.
It would also help if the length of a yellow were standardized across the country. When I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, the first month I was screeching to a stop at yellow lights. Then I'd sit there like an idiot for about 3-5 seconds while the light stayed yellow. I suspect that a good portion of the "pandemic" of red-light running is due to certain municipalities programming in excessively short yellows to try to generate more red light ticket revenue.