You get to say "I fucking told you so" over, and over, and over, and over....
That's pretty funny. I'm sure you probably do say that over and over to yourselves. Those fever swamp gases are pretty heady, I hear. Here on planet Earth the situation's a little different.
Slavery
Ended in this country by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and not the slightest bit "left". In fact, abolition of slavery throughout the world, and by that I mean the British empire, was pretty much accomplished by those religious people you love to pooh pooh so much.
racism
I'm not sure what you mean. Fringies notwithstanding, the mainstream right certainly isn't racist. For real racists you have to look to the left where you find people who think racial minorities just can't be "equal" without discrimination in their favor.
abortion
Huh? You think this is an "I told you so" point? There's no concensus here, and in fact the public shifting right on this one.
gay rights
Rights we're OK with. Special privileges? No.
war in iraq
The left is flat wrong here. Read the news lately?
vietnam
Yeah, OK. According to general Giap, they would have made peace after the disaster (for the VC, which was completely crushed) of the Tet offensive, but then they realized, what with Walter Cronkite and all, the lefties would eventually sap the country's morale and we'd leave, if they could just hold out. On behalf of the rest of the country and millions of murdered Vietnamese and Cambodians - Thanks, lefties! You were right - you could cause us to lose that war!
global warming
Oh, the Earth is warming, but there's not much proof human activity is the cause (Cally's bleatings notwithstanding). The planet has been both warmer and colder in the past, and the link between global warming and CO2 is tenuous to say the least.
But let's say for the sake of argument human activity is the cause. Nobody on the left has proposed an actual workable plan that doesn't involve the destruction of industrial economies. You know, the economies that provide jobs and food and such. All I've heard so far is whining. I'll know you folks are serious when you start to support nuclear power - until then is just, well, hot air.
peak oil
Eh, don't see any evidence. But even so, peak production is entirely irrelevant. So what? If the price goes up people will conserve. That's really the only mechanism that will do it. When crude oil gets too expensive we can use tar sands, alcohol, or coal-based synthetic gas. Our grandchildren will be long dead before all that's exhausted.
Personally I would mind all those lefty SUV drivers here in the SF bay area getting forced into that public transportation they so like to push other people into. Oh, you talk the talk, but then you buy Suburbans as soon as you have a kid. Like to see a little more "walking the walk" here.
I hope these medals were presented on the basis of some sort of reasonable criteria. Hopefully these awards will be what the Nobel prizes used to be before they became a political joke.
I began to suspect this might be the case when I realized (many years ago) record companies were flogging music from "hot" bands that didn't have any record of popularity, i.e. no record sales and no radio play. There are enough sheep out there to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophesy if they hype it enough.
Its like most of the kids now have the same bland taste in music (i said most), they prolly are impressed more by what they see than hear too. And each generation seems to give its own definition of wat rock is !! Or maybe i am getting old. "Rock is dead" anyway.
You gotta realize to her it's all new and different. That's what kept (keeps?) the boy bands going for so many years - every year there's a new crop of twelve-year-old girls that doesn't realize the "new" music they're listening to is just a mushy retread of last year's music. I call it "factory" music. The thrust is the selling, not the making.
I know this is slashdot, and here Bush-bashing has become a ritual, but you can't hang this on Bush - Congress writes the budget. Not only that, but this is a problem that's been getting steadily worse over time. It was clear by the mid '80s the shuttle would never live up to expectations and should be replaced, but replacement was a political non-starter.
Ask yourself why we have so many "space centers". Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one big center, so all your scientists could talk to each other without hopping on a plane? And why did they build the Johnson Space Center? Why didn't they control Apollo from the Cape? They could, but Texas is one of the larger states and needed some big government lovin'. That was forty years ago.
Pork, my friend, pork. That's why we have too many military bases, that's why we're building a multi-million dollar bridge for fifty people in Alaska. The manned space program functions as another horse in the big horse-trading bazaar we have for a Congress.
When the Democrats take back control of Congress the flow of money will reverse. Space centers in Democrat districts will get more money, while Republican districts will get cut. This will happen whether or not we have a Republican president. What you've been seeing in the last couple years can oddly be traced back to 1994...
A bizarre claim, given that there were plans to turn the X-15 into an orbital spacecraft launched on an expendable booster (similar to the Dynasoar).
Yes, and what came of those plans? That's what I meant by "dead end". They couldn't make it work.
Odds are very high that Rutan will put people into orbit in the next decade in a spacecraft he's designed and built. I can't say the same about NASA.
We'll see. Rutan's a smart guy, but he simply doesn't have any experience with hypersonic flight control or heat shielding. Those are the two critical technologies for orbital craft. I suspect if he actually gets to orbit with a manned craft it will probably look a lot more like Apollo than X-15 as a result of heat problems.
Also, you're neglecting a couple of things. First, the hybrid engine they used for X-prize isn't even close to being efficient enough for orbit. So they'll have to gain some expertise in liquid engines - that will take some time and money. And they have to figure out why SS-1 went loopy on them (probably the hybrid engine, but who knows?).
Personally, I think he'll run out of money long before he has anything working. It took NASA more than $50 Bn. to get the shuttle working. Even if Scaled is 100x more effiecient than NASA, they'll need $500 million dollars for development. Private investors aren't going to provide that kind of money, and NASA will see to it the government doesn't either.
Wow! Does anybody really believe this is about science?
NASA isn't about science. NASA exists to funnel tax money to specific congressional districts. The shuttle can't be cancelled because that would put too many people out of work. As far as Congress is concerned, well, if we get some science it's a great side effect, but jobs is the motivation.
For reasons given in the above point we will never pay the Russians for launch services. Space is not the point, jobs are the point. Congress would rather accomplish nothing with 20,000 extra American jobs than go to Andromeda on a Russian rocket.
Enough with the Spaceship 1 talk. It's nothing close to an orbital craft and doesn't lead to an orbital craft. What Rutan did, while pretty cool, is orders of magnitude less difficult than what the shuttle does. That's why SS-1 is orders of magnitude cheaper. SS-1 pretty much a copy of the X-15, which is a dead-end as far as getting into orbit is concerned.
Note I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but if you want an actual space program instead of a white-elephant jobs program you have to address the real problem. The continued existance of the shuttle program is a symptom of a structural problem in Congress, and that has to get fixed before you can expect anything useful from NASA beyond the odd robotic probe.
That's just silly. Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done.
If we knew the chemical trigger that causes the virus to come out of dormancy we could certainly cure it - either by forcing all dormant cells to start producing virus and then killing them (along with the virus).
Or do you think that the Bush admin has the scruples not to tap its allies?
I don't see why you think our government was doing the tapping. Every country spies on every other country - in recent years just off the top of my head I can think of incidents where the US government was spied on by Russia, France, the Phillipines, China, and Israel. Those were efforts that were discovered by the FBI - I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm sure the US embassy already has recording devices on all the phones; it's hard for me to believe US spies would tap the US embassy.
I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?
I think it's great. We're talkin' about a frickin' cart here, not Giant Robo, and I'd rather have the Army use Linux than give some contractor 2 billion dollars to develop an operating system from scratch.
Spot on. When Moe from the local auto shop gets busted for hiring a hooker, it's one thing. When it's Jimmy Swaggart, well, there's a whole new hypocracy dimension.
So what? Do you call it double taxation when the profits are taxed at the corporate level, then taxed when payroll is dispersed to employees?
That's not the same thing. Companies deduct payroll before profits are calculated - employees are considered an expense. So, no, that money only gets taxed once when the employee receives it.
When someone receives income, they pay taxes. Double taxation isn't some strange exception, it's a natural result of incorporating to form a new legal entity.
I don't see why the creation of a "new legal entity" entitles society to take another slice of pie. Is this some law of nature I've missed?
It's a shameful handout to a subset of the population.
There's nothing shameful in allowing people to accrue benefit from risking their money. That's what provides jobs for the rest of us.
Taxes on dividends no more encourages companies to see other ways to pay shareholders than taxes on salaries encourages companies to find other ways to pay employees. Maybe it will change some details (indeed, benefits like health insurance are a common non-taxed form of compensation), but people still want the cash.
Clearly not true. As I pointed out in my earlier post, taxes on dividends result in companies not disbursing money through dividends. They can accomplish the same transfer of money back to shareholders by doing stock buybacks or acquisitions which raise the price of the stock. So the shareholders still get the same amount of company profits, but they don't pay tax until they sell the stock (which gives them some control, i.e. they can wait until they retire or write off gains against losses).
What does this mean? Well, it means the government doesn't collect much from taxing dividends, for one thing. In fact, I'm surprised any company would pay a dividend when the tax rate is greater than long term capital gains.
It also means we get the kind of murky accounting that led to the corporate scandals of the last couple of years. If dividend payout made sense from a tax perspective we wouldn't have lots of companies that only show profit through growth. Growth can be intentionally mis-measured in lots of different ways.
Ruben Bolling summarized the situation effectively in his Tom the Dancing Bug comic "Can you spot the double taxation?"
I don't see how the comic does anything but suport my point. I do see a difference that doesn't involve "taxation of WEALTHY PEOPLE". The banker is the only recipient in the comic who isn't getting taxed. He's just an agent of the shareholder. So if you want to show the people who are actually getting taxed, you'd have to replace the banker with the shareholder, which would accurately show the double taxation. Of course, that wouldn't support the point of the comic very well.
aStock (dividend income) sales are taxed at a much lower rate than Regular Income.
This is clearly wrong, as stock sales and dividends are two totally separate things. The sale of stock generates either ordinary or capital gains income (depending on how long you hold the stock). Dividends reflect the stockholders share of the profit in ongoing operations, and you don't surrender your stock to get them.
When people talk about 'tax cuts for the rich', the dividend income tax change was the biggie.
Yes, well, people say lots of foolish things. Taxes on dividends are "double taxation", as profits have been taxed at the corporate level once, and then they get taxed again when they're dispersed to the shareholders. The most reasonable thing to do would to eliminate the dividend tax altogether, since it really doesn't increase tax receipts so much as force companies to distribute profits in other ways. Lots of (most?) companies either don't have dividends or have insignificant dividends for that reason. Typically you wouldn't buy a stock that disburses dividends unless it's in your IRA account where you won't pay taxes on it until you retire.
You could make the argument a tax on dividends makes sense because corporations are able to avoid corporate taxes through offset pricing schemes, but the real fix there is to fix the corporate tax system, not add another layer of taxes. Of course, if we did that the super rich would actually pay more in taxes, so you won't see much support for it in Congress.
In the case of The Google Boys, it's the difference between paying a base 35% on $1.4Bn in Income, or paying a base 15% on $1.4Bn. That's over $200 million dollars less in tax
If I'm reading yahoo correctly, Google doesn't even have a dividend, so the dividend tax rate is meaningless to the founders. Since Google just went public recently they're probably paying ordinary income taxes on most of the stock they've sold.
I don't understand why so many people on slashdot are quick to dismiss this. Clearly there's something happening. Here's my question, though:
Let's assume they can increase efficiency enough orders of magnitude they get much more heat out than they put in. Clearly they won't be able to run the "reactor" at super high temperatures, since it depends on the liquid phase of the water to work. So how will they extract enough electricity out of a relatively small temperature gradient to make the whole thing worthwhile?
I'm not a supporter of ID, but this article doesn't bear on the argument. The point was "it's so complicated we can't understand it, so how could it possibly have evolved?" This discovery only changes the question to "it was so complicated we didn't understand it until 2006, so how could it possible have evolved?"
It would have had much more to say for evolution if they'd shown how bees evolved flight, but there's no indication of that in the article.
What I don't understand is why so many people who believe in "intelligent design" think any process not simple enough for us to understand readily can't be the product of evolution. I don't see any logical connection.
This should be a fun post. At any rate, the interest of the Air Force does not provide any more credibility to this story. I've seen some *really* whacky ideas based on science fiction rather than science fact move through the DOD that says more to me about the state of science education in the US than anything else.
Looking into these kinds of claims is just due dilligence. Lots of transformative military technology was originally considered outside the realm of possibility. So they put a physicist on it and he prints up a report saying "we don't think this is possible since it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" or whatever.
I don't think this really says anything about the state of science education in the US. You can't expect normal people (in any country) to actually be able to decipher pages and pages of formulae well enough to put it down and write, with certainty, "this us just bullshit" in a memo to the boss.
Doesn't really matter, in the end. When you file a lawsuit it's absolutely free to add names to a lawsuit - it costs them the same to sue one as to sue everyone in the house. That's why in malpractice suits they sue the doctor, the nurse, the hospital, the department chair, the gardener, the bum sleeping on the heating grate... No matter how innocent you are you'll have to pay a lawyer to defend you.
The whole point of the exercise is for you to realize you'll spend the least money by settling, no matter what the facts of the case are. Lawyers like settlements, since they don't have to do as much work and they still get paid.
In the end it costs you minimum a couple grand to be sued even if you win, unless you can prove that was the intent of the suit. Good luck on that one - judges, former lawyers all, are in no hurry to discourage the filing of lawsuits. You'll pretty much need a memo that says "let's sue them until they run out of money, even though we don't have a case." Anyone who can pass the bar exam is too smart to write a memo like that.
In more civilized countries they have "loser pays" systems to discourage this sort of thing, but that's why lawyers donate millions to political campaigns, isn't it?
I submit that the phrasing of the question shows something awry -- that Bush "tolerates" these people is not a point in his favor, but a point NOT AGAINST him. There is plenty else to dislike him for.
Oh, there's a great deal more he could do even within the law to vilify his political opponents. As far as illegal things, as far as I know he hasn't used the FBI to dig into promenent opponents' backgrounds like some of his predecessors (including Bill Clinton, only one president back). I think he could get away with that kind of stuff but hasn't tried. I think it's patently ridiculous to compare someone like that to a guy who had all his political opponents (illegally) rounded up and shot.
As for your "crack open a history book" suggestion, I will not even dignify that by responding to it. I'm trying not to insult you, you could at least do the same.
I apologize for that remark. I get worked up on this topic at times.
The plain fact is, Bush has taken real steps TOWARDS facism, even if he isn't there yet. Okay?
Ooookaaay. Maybe you could get a little more specific here. I really don't see it, especially given the situation.
Again, like I just said, the "left" is far less a monolithic, easy-to-pin-down-with-a-sentence entity than the "right" is right now, and a much lesser target.
From your perspective that may be true, but not from mine. The left seems pretty monolithic to me. The "right", as people term it, is shorthand for two very different and uneasy allies - "government off my back" people like me and social conservatives. An easily exploitable rift in my opinion. The Democrats seem fixated on the social conservatives for some reason. I'm not sure why.
(Imagining Bush reading the Gettysburg address.)
(Shuddering.)
Now that's just gratuitous. I agree he's hardly in Tony Blair's league when it comes to public speaking, but I think at least some of that is a deliberate attempt to separate himself politically from Washington "insiders". Which he is, in any case.
What war? Are you buying into their "war on terror" terminology? 'Cause I doubt that, when the founding fathas' thought of war, they considered it an ambiguouly defined, declared struggle against an unknown body of men carried out by attacking a nation who had nothing to do with them. If you look at a wartime president's success as being judged by how far he progresses towards the goal of beating the enemy, then Bush is a spectacularly bad president -- he leveled the barrel of the U.S. Armed Forces, and he missed. He attacked the wrong guys.
I'll assume you're not talking about Afghanistan here - correct me if I'm wrong.
Saddam was certainly supporting terrorists of various stripes over the years. Was he supporting al queda? Probably a little bit, but not anything significant. The real reason we invaded Iraq was a combination of 1) sanctions were crumbling as a result of bribes in Europe and economic pressure in Asia, 2) His behavior in the past, and 3) He would have had nuclear weapons within a couple of years, removing the option. I'm glad we don't have a third of the set to go with North Korea and Iran. I supported the war for that reason.
A civil war is a serious affair, one of the most serious the U.S. has ever been involved in.
My point was the civil war was far more serious than it had to be as a result of (at least to some extent) Union ineptitude. Lincoln was part of that. Literally, the only way the North could actually lose was to decide the cost was too much. Lincoln forestalled that possibility by arresting anyone who said it.
Personally I don't think the civil war had to happen at all, but the evidence is sketchier there.
You say Bush is a wartime president and thus should get special consideration or something despite the fact that he started it on pretty spurious grounds, but you ALSO say the war lasted only a couple of days. Well in t
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean Hitler would have tolerated Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, and our paranoid friend Shanen(the GP)? Crack your history book, my friend. I always wonder what the left will call an actual fascist after pining that label on everyone they don't like.
Lincoln wasn't president during a fakey war "on Terror" in practice fought thousands of miles away. It was the U.S. Civil War. Open combat on our own damn soil. Where "dissenters" were likely to be the actual people on the other side. (And no, the "fight" against domestic terrorists ain't the same thing. We don't have entire states, not adjacent to the Union, but actually IN the Union rebelling.)
I'm not talking about domestic terrorists. I'm talking about idiots like Jack Murtha who think they're doing the right thing, but are actually causing the deaths of our troops in Iraq by giving the enemy strength to carry on. Lincoln had a former congressman arrested for doing exactly the same thing. Oh, and getting back to Hitler, in fascist Germany it was considered sedition punishable by death. That's a long way from being ignored, isn't it?
I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect Republicans in WW II (you know, another war that was "thousands of miles away") would have gotten the same treatment (as Lincoln's Democrats) if they were dumb enough to deserve it.
Would you say that G. W. Bush is even a tenth the president Lincoln was? Even half the president Reagan was?
I would say GWB is probably a better wartime president than Lincoln. The South never really had a chance in the civil war, and it was a tribute to Lee's skill and the Union's ineptitude that the Confederacy made a four year war out of a conflict that should have lasted mere months. I don't think Lincoln can be completely absolved, as he was the commander-in-cheif. In GWB's case a war that should have taken a couple of days took, well, a couple of days. Will GWB's reconstruction be as successful as Lincoln's? Who knows, Lincoln didn't live to do it.
You may be surprised to know I don't think much of Ronald Reagan. His conduct in Lebanon was disgraceful, first because of the cut-and-run after the marine baracks were blown up, and then later giving the Iranians weapons to get hostages released. I would take GWB over that kind of double-dealing any day.
If you have nothing to say, why do you feel compelled to spew your mindless blather? Do you really fantacize you can change reality with more repetitions? Are you really so ignorant, or just stupid?
Nope, nope, don't see any substance there.
Hint: I don't care. Please mark me as "foe" and we'll happily ignore each other.
Unfortunately, it isn't a joke. Dubya thinks he hears voices from Jesus and the result is all too reminiscent of some of Hitler's actions.
I really don't know what it is about slashdot that makes people want to post this kind of ritual Chimpybushhitler obeisance to moonbattery every fucking article, no matter what the subject is. Unfortunately, there's no medicine to cure this kind of idiocy - certainly reality doesn't seem to help. If Bush were really a fascist along the lines of Hitler you would have already been arrested for posting that comment. Idiot.
And remember that "fascist" Abraham Lincoln had Democrats thrown in jail for being less defeatist during wartime than Democrats today.
As for problems with java, its got issues. The write once, run anywhere "Promise" is a big lie. Try to write a swing app and run it on windows, linux and OSX to see what i mean.
I see this over and over on slashdot. I write java apps for a living and I've never had this problem. My swing apps work just fine on all three platforms (to be fair, I don't test them as much on OSX since it's not around much, but I haven't had any problems with my small sample set). I'm real curious if anybody can come up with a specific, nontrivial example of something in swing that doesn't behave correctly across platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty funny. I'm sure you probably do say that over and over to yourselves. Those fever swamp gases are pretty heady, I hear. Here on planet Earth the situation's a little different.
Slavery
Ended in this country by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and not the slightest bit "left". In fact, abolition of slavery throughout the world, and by that I mean the British empire, was pretty much accomplished by those religious people you love to pooh pooh so much.
racism
I'm not sure what you mean. Fringies notwithstanding, the mainstream right certainly isn't racist. For real racists you have to look to the left where you find people who think racial minorities just can't be "equal" without discrimination in their favor.
abortion
Huh? You think this is an "I told you so" point? There's no concensus here, and in fact the public shifting right on this one.
gay rights
Rights we're OK with. Special privileges? No.
war in iraq
The left is flat wrong here. Read the news lately?
vietnam
Yeah, OK. According to general Giap, they would have made peace after the disaster (for the VC, which was completely crushed) of the Tet offensive, but then they realized, what with Walter Cronkite and all, the lefties would eventually sap the country's morale and we'd leave, if they could just hold out. On behalf of the rest of the country and millions of murdered Vietnamese and Cambodians - Thanks, lefties! You were right - you could cause us to lose that war!
global warming
Oh, the Earth is warming, but there's not much proof human activity is the cause (Cally's bleatings notwithstanding). The planet has been both warmer and colder in the past, and the link between global warming and CO2 is tenuous to say the least.
But let's say for the sake of argument human activity is the cause. Nobody on the left has proposed an actual workable plan that doesn't involve the destruction of industrial economies. You know, the economies that provide jobs and food and such. All I've heard so far is whining. I'll know you folks are serious when you start to support nuclear power - until then is just, well, hot air.
peak oil
Eh, don't see any evidence. But even so, peak production is entirely irrelevant. So what? If the price goes up people will conserve. That's really the only mechanism that will do it. When crude oil gets too expensive we can use tar sands, alcohol, or coal-based synthetic gas. Our grandchildren will be long dead before all that's exhausted.
Personally I would mind all those lefty SUV drivers here in the SF bay area getting forced into that public transportation they so like to push other people into. Oh, you talk the talk, but then you buy Suburbans as soon as you have a kid. Like to see a little more "walking the walk" here.
I hope these medals were presented on the basis of some sort of reasonable criteria. Hopefully these awards will be what the Nobel prizes used to be before they became a political joke.
That's why it took me 39 years to learn how to spell "forty".
I began to suspect this might be the case when I realized (many years ago) record companies were flogging music from "hot" bands that didn't have any record of popularity, i.e. no record sales and no radio play. There are enough sheep out there to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophesy if they hype it enough.
You gotta realize to her it's all new and different. That's what kept (keeps?) the boy bands going for so many years - every year there's a new crop of twelve-year-old girls that doesn't realize the "new" music they're listening to is just a mushy retread of last year's music. I call it "factory" music. The thrust is the selling, not the making.
Ask yourself why we have so many "space centers". Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one big center, so all your scientists could talk to each other without hopping on a plane? And why did they build the Johnson Space Center? Why didn't they control Apollo from the Cape? They could, but Texas is one of the larger states and needed some big government lovin'. That was forty years ago.
Pork, my friend, pork. That's why we have too many military bases, that's why we're building a multi-million dollar bridge for fifty people in Alaska. The manned space program functions as another horse in the big horse-trading bazaar we have for a Congress.
When the Democrats take back control of Congress the flow of money will reverse. Space centers in Democrat districts will get more money, while Republican districts will get cut. This will happen whether or not we have a Republican president. What you've been seeing in the last couple years can oddly be traced back to 1994...
Yes, and what came of those plans? That's what I meant by "dead end". They couldn't make it work.
Odds are very high that Rutan will put people into orbit in the next decade in a spacecraft he's designed and built. I can't say the same about NASA.
We'll see. Rutan's a smart guy, but he simply doesn't have any experience with hypersonic flight control or heat shielding. Those are the two critical technologies for orbital craft. I suspect if he actually gets to orbit with a manned craft it will probably look a lot more like Apollo than X-15 as a result of heat problems.
Also, you're neglecting a couple of things. First, the hybrid engine they used for X-prize isn't even close to being efficient enough for orbit. So they'll have to gain some expertise in liquid engines - that will take some time and money. And they have to figure out why SS-1 went loopy on them (probably the hybrid engine, but who knows?).
Personally, I think he'll run out of money long before he has anything working. It took NASA more than $50 Bn. to get the shuttle working. Even if Scaled is 100x more effiecient than NASA, they'll need $500 million dollars for development. Private investors aren't going to provide that kind of money, and NASA will see to it the government doesn't either.
Note I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but if you want an actual space program instead of a white-elephant jobs program you have to address the real problem. The continued existance of the shuttle program is a symptom of a structural problem in Congress, and that has to get fixed before you can expect anything useful from NASA beyond the odd robotic probe.
If we knew the chemical trigger that causes the virus to come out of dormancy we could certainly cure it - either by forcing all dormant cells to start producing virus and then killing them (along with the virus).
I don't see why you think our government was doing the tapping. Every country spies on every other country - in recent years just off the top of my head I can think of incidents where the US government was spied on by Russia, France, the Phillipines, China, and Israel. Those were efforts that were discovered by the FBI - I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm sure the US embassy already has recording devices on all the phones; it's hard for me to believe US spies would tap the US embassy.
I think it's great. We're talkin' about a frickin' cart here, not Giant Robo, and I'd rather have the Army use Linux than give some contractor 2 billion dollars to develop an operating system from scratch.
Spot on. When Moe from the local auto shop gets busted for hiring a hooker, it's one thing. When it's Jimmy Swaggart, well, there's a whole new hypocracy dimension.
That's not the same thing. Companies deduct payroll before profits are calculated - employees are considered an expense. So, no, that money only gets taxed once when the employee receives it.
When someone receives income, they pay taxes. Double taxation isn't some strange exception, it's a natural result of incorporating to form a new legal entity.
I don't see why the creation of a "new legal entity" entitles society to take another slice of pie. Is this some law of nature I've missed?
It's a shameful handout to a subset of the population.
There's nothing shameful in allowing people to accrue benefit from risking their money. That's what provides jobs for the rest of us.
Taxes on dividends no more encourages companies to see other ways to pay shareholders than taxes on salaries encourages companies to find other ways to pay employees. Maybe it will change some details (indeed, benefits like health insurance are a common non-taxed form of compensation), but people still want the cash.
Clearly not true. As I pointed out in my earlier post, taxes on dividends result in companies not disbursing money through dividends. They can accomplish the same transfer of money back to shareholders by doing stock buybacks or acquisitions which raise the price of the stock. So the shareholders still get the same amount of company profits, but they don't pay tax until they sell the stock (which gives them some control, i.e. they can wait until they retire or write off gains against losses).
What does this mean? Well, it means the government doesn't collect much from taxing dividends, for one thing. In fact, I'm surprised any company would pay a dividend when the tax rate is greater than long term capital gains.
It also means we get the kind of murky accounting that led to the corporate scandals of the last couple of years. If dividend payout made sense from a tax perspective we wouldn't have lots of companies that only show profit through growth. Growth can be intentionally mis-measured in lots of different ways.
Ruben Bolling summarized the situation effectively in his Tom the Dancing Bug comic "Can you spot the double taxation?"
I don't see how the comic does anything but suport my point. I do see a difference that doesn't involve "taxation of WEALTHY PEOPLE". The banker is the only recipient in the comic who isn't getting taxed. He's just an agent of the shareholder. So if you want to show the people who are actually getting taxed, you'd have to replace the banker with the shareholder, which would accurately show the double taxation. Of course, that wouldn't support the point of the comic very well.
This is clearly wrong, as stock sales and dividends are two totally separate things. The sale of stock generates either ordinary or capital gains income (depending on how long you hold the stock). Dividends reflect the stockholders share of the profit in ongoing operations, and you don't surrender your stock to get them.
When people talk about 'tax cuts for the rich', the dividend income tax change was the biggie.
Yes, well, people say lots of foolish things. Taxes on dividends are "double taxation", as profits have been taxed at the corporate level once, and then they get taxed again when they're dispersed to the shareholders. The most reasonable thing to do would to eliminate the dividend tax altogether, since it really doesn't increase tax receipts so much as force companies to distribute profits in other ways. Lots of (most?) companies either don't have dividends or have insignificant dividends for that reason. Typically you wouldn't buy a stock that disburses dividends unless it's in your IRA account where you won't pay taxes on it until you retire.
You could make the argument a tax on dividends makes sense because corporations are able to avoid corporate taxes through offset pricing schemes, but the real fix there is to fix the corporate tax system, not add another layer of taxes. Of course, if we did that the super rich would actually pay more in taxes, so you won't see much support for it in Congress.
In the case of The Google Boys, it's the difference between paying a base 35% on $1.4Bn in Income, or paying a base 15% on $1.4Bn. That's over $200 million dollars less in tax
If I'm reading yahoo correctly, Google doesn't even have a dividend, so the dividend tax rate is meaningless to the founders. Since Google just went public recently they're probably paying ordinary income taxes on most of the stock they've sold.
And yet, apparently the first round of indictments will include a couple of Democrats. Why is that?
Let's assume they can increase efficiency enough orders of magnitude they get much more heat out than they put in. Clearly they won't be able to run the "reactor" at super high temperatures, since it depends on the liquid phase of the water to work. So how will they extract enough electricity out of a relatively small temperature gradient to make the whole thing worthwhile?
It would have had much more to say for evolution if they'd shown how bees evolved flight, but there's no indication of that in the article.
What I don't understand is why so many people who believe in "intelligent design" think any process not simple enough for us to understand readily can't be the product of evolution. I don't see any logical connection.
Looking into these kinds of claims is just due dilligence. Lots of transformative military technology was originally considered outside the realm of possibility. So they put a physicist on it and he prints up a report saying "we don't think this is possible since it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" or whatever.
I don't think this really says anything about the state of science education in the US. You can't expect normal people (in any country) to actually be able to decipher pages and pages of formulae well enough to put it down and write, with certainty, "this us just bullshit" in a memo to the boss.
The whole point of the exercise is for you to realize you'll spend the least money by settling, no matter what the facts of the case are. Lawyers like settlements, since they don't have to do as much work and they still get paid.
In the end it costs you minimum a couple grand to be sued even if you win, unless you can prove that was the intent of the suit. Good luck on that one - judges, former lawyers all, are in no hurry to discourage the filing of lawsuits. You'll pretty much need a memo that says "let's sue them until they run out of money, even though we don't have a case." Anyone who can pass the bar exam is too smart to write a memo like that.
In more civilized countries they have "loser pays" systems to discourage this sort of thing, but that's why lawyers donate millions to political campaigns, isn't it?
Oh, there's a great deal more he could do even within the law to vilify his political opponents. As far as illegal things, as far as I know he hasn't used the FBI to dig into promenent opponents' backgrounds like some of his predecessors (including Bill Clinton, only one president back). I think he could get away with that kind of stuff but hasn't tried. I think it's patently ridiculous to compare someone like that to a guy who had all his political opponents (illegally) rounded up and shot.
As for your "crack open a history book" suggestion, I will not even dignify that by responding to it. I'm trying not to insult you, you could at least do the same.
I apologize for that remark. I get worked up on this topic at times.
The plain fact is, Bush has taken real steps TOWARDS facism, even if he isn't there yet. Okay?
Ooookaaay. Maybe you could get a little more specific here. I really don't see it, especially given the situation.
Again, like I just said, the "left" is far less a monolithic, easy-to-pin-down-with-a-sentence entity than the "right" is right now, and a much lesser target.
From your perspective that may be true, but not from mine. The left seems pretty monolithic to me. The "right", as people term it, is shorthand for two very different and uneasy allies - "government off my back" people like me and social conservatives. An easily exploitable rift in my opinion. The Democrats seem fixated on the social conservatives for some reason. I'm not sure why.
(Imagining Bush reading the Gettysburg address.)
(Shuddering.)
Now that's just gratuitous. I agree he's hardly in Tony Blair's league when it comes to public speaking, but I think at least some of that is a deliberate attempt to separate himself politically from Washington "insiders". Which he is, in any case.
What war? Are you buying into their "war on terror" terminology? 'Cause I doubt that, when the founding fathas' thought of war, they considered it an ambiguouly defined, declared struggle against an unknown body of men carried out by attacking a nation who had nothing to do with them. If you look at a wartime president's success as being judged by how far he progresses towards the goal of beating the enemy, then Bush is a spectacularly bad president -- he leveled the barrel of the U.S. Armed Forces, and he missed. He attacked the wrong guys.
I'll assume you're not talking about Afghanistan here - correct me if I'm wrong.
Saddam was certainly supporting terrorists of various stripes over the years. Was he supporting al queda? Probably a little bit, but not anything significant. The real reason we invaded Iraq was a combination of 1) sanctions were crumbling as a result of bribes in Europe and economic pressure in Asia, 2) His behavior in the past, and 3) He would have had nuclear weapons within a couple of years, removing the option. I'm glad we don't have a third of the set to go with North Korea and Iran. I supported the war for that reason.
A civil war is a serious affair, one of the most serious the U.S. has ever been involved in.
My point was the civil war was far more serious than it had to be as a result of (at least to some extent) Union ineptitude. Lincoln was part of that. Literally, the only way the North could actually lose was to decide the cost was too much. Lincoln forestalled that possibility by arresting anyone who said it.
Personally I don't think the civil war had to happen at all, but the evidence is sketchier there.
You say Bush is a wartime president and thus should get special consideration or something despite the fact that he started it on pretty spurious grounds, but you ALSO say the war lasted only a couple of days. Well in t
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean Hitler would have tolerated Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, and our paranoid friend Shanen(the GP)? Crack your history book, my friend. I always wonder what the left will call an actual fascist after pining that label on everyone they don't like.
Lincoln wasn't president during a fakey war "on Terror" in practice fought thousands of miles away. It was the U.S. Civil War. Open combat on our own damn soil. Where "dissenters" were likely to be the actual people on the other side. (And no, the "fight" against domestic terrorists ain't the same thing. We don't have entire states, not adjacent to the Union, but actually IN the Union rebelling.)
I'm not talking about domestic terrorists. I'm talking about idiots like Jack Murtha who think they're doing the right thing, but are actually causing the deaths of our troops in Iraq by giving the enemy strength to carry on. Lincoln had a former congressman arrested for doing exactly the same thing. Oh, and getting back to Hitler, in fascist Germany it was considered sedition punishable by death. That's a long way from being ignored, isn't it?
I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect Republicans in WW II (you know, another war that was "thousands of miles away") would have gotten the same treatment (as Lincoln's Democrats) if they were dumb enough to deserve it.
Would you say that G. W. Bush is even a tenth the president Lincoln was? Even half the president Reagan was?
I would say GWB is probably a better wartime president than Lincoln. The South never really had a chance in the civil war, and it was a tribute to Lee's skill and the Union's ineptitude that the Confederacy made a four year war out of a conflict that should have lasted mere months. I don't think Lincoln can be completely absolved, as he was the commander-in-cheif. In GWB's case a war that should have taken a couple of days took, well, a couple of days. Will GWB's reconstruction be as successful as Lincoln's? Who knows, Lincoln didn't live to do it.
You may be surprised to know I don't think much of Ronald Reagan. His conduct in Lebanon was disgraceful, first because of the cut-and-run after the marine baracks were blown up, and then later giving the Iranians weapons to get hostages released. I would take GWB over that kind of double-dealing any day.
Nope, nope, don't see any substance there.
Hint: I don't care. Please mark me as "foe" and we'll happily ignore each other.
Then why did you bother trying to annoy me?
I really don't know what it is about slashdot that makes people want to post this kind of ritual Chimpybushhitler obeisance to moonbattery every fucking article, no matter what the subject is. Unfortunately, there's no medicine to cure this kind of idiocy - certainly reality doesn't seem to help. If Bush were really a fascist along the lines of Hitler you would have already been arrested for posting that comment. Idiot.
And remember that "fascist" Abraham Lincoln had Democrats thrown in jail for being less defeatist during wartime than Democrats today.
I see this over and over on slashdot. I write java apps for a living and I've never had this problem. My swing apps work just fine on all three platforms (to be fair, I don't test them as much on OSX since it's not around much, but I haven't had any problems with my small sample set). I'm real curious if anybody can come up with a specific, nontrivial example of something in swing that doesn't behave correctly across platforms.
Or better yet, how about a company that accepts deliveries from merchant in NH and then trans-ships them to the end customer for a couple bucks.