Your source doesn't support your assertion. In fact it directly contradicts it in every way. It doesn't mention mortgages or home ownership and shows itemized deductions as responsible for only 5% of the people who don't pay taxes (mortgage interest is an itemized deduction). It clearly shows that most people who aren't paying federal income taxes are very low income. From the abstract
About 46 percent of American households will pay no federal individual income tax in 2011, roughly half of them because of structural features of the income tax that provide basic exemptions for subsistence level income and for dependents. The other half are nontaxable because tax expenditures— special provisions of the tax code that benefit selected taxpayers or activities—wipe out tax liabilities and, in the case of refundable credits, result in net payments from the government. Most important of those tax expenditures are provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children. While those factors particularly affect lower-income households, different provisions eliminate taxes for other households. Itemized deductions and credits for children and education are more important for middle-income households, while the relatively few high-income nontaxable households benefit most from above-the-line and itemized deductions and reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
But a mule is thousands of times cheaper (don't actually know how much the military pays for one of these, but I would guess it's in the millions, plus R&D costs). And providing fuel for the war in remote parts of Afghanistan is a huge cost, in money and lives (lots of troops die protecting fuel convoys). So it's really rather ridiculous to try to replace a mule with this thing, especially for a nation that is spiraling into financial disaster.
Yes, easy and fun to take apart hard drives. Just be careful bending the disks, sometimes that shatter into many sharp shards (wrap them in something thick or wear thick gloves and eye protection).
Do you own a home? Do you have a source to cite for that info? The tax breaks are not that much - you only get to write off the interest on the mortgage. In fact you effectively only get to write off the part of the interest that is bigger than the standard deduction, unless you have a bunch of other things to itemize anyway. In my case that only amounts to about $4000 in deductions (which only saves me about $1000 on taxes), and I have a fairly large home and a new mortgage (which means most of my payment is interest). So I call BS.
And that is just income tax. There is payroll tax (FICA), sales tax, and of course the property tax that all those homeowner's you are referring to have to pay.
Because it might wake people up to the fact the government wants a populace that is drugged and stupid? They are just using TV and NCLB rather than soma and stunted fetuses. And let's lot forget all that evil sex in the book.
He gives the kids free samples, Because he knows full well That today's young innocent faces Will be tomorrow's clientele. - Tom Lehrer, "The Old Dope Peddler"
Yes, but Sony sold way more than 2 PlayStations, so R&D is spread out over millions of units. The chances of this boondoggle ever flying more that 2 flights is infinitesimal, so it really is $15 billion per flight. Actually the chances of it even flying 1 flight is small, so cost per probable flight is approaching infinity.
From what I read on the MMS Wikipedia page it looks like MMS uses the data channel anyway - there is an initial SMS message which refers to the attachment, and the attachment is downloaded by HTTP or WAP. I would think the carrier would charge you for that data.
Oil's value is gone once it is used. Gold can be recycled and reused. It has lots of industrial uses too, not just making pretty things. And regardless of whether YOU prefer silver or gold jewelry, the fact is you are pretty much guaranteed you can find someone to trade you something you want for your gold. I agree with you that it's "intrinsic vale" is not really as much as what most people think it is. But unlike money the government can't just print more, so the limited supply is an important feature; it's rare, it's compact for it's value (unlike iron, which is highly useful but you don't want to carry around $1000 worth of iron) and it doesn't spoil, rust, rot, so it makes for pretty good money. But so does paper money if you have sound fiscal policy.
I may be the product, but they still have to keep me happy or else I will take my business elsewhere, then they won't have me to sell to the advertisers and they loose that business. Just like TV has to make good shows or I won't watch it. In that way I am still a customer.
Maybe Linux was just a copy and the original version wasn't great but a huge number of people have put effort to make it great. Meanwhile from MS we get Windows ME and Vista - and other versions of Windows that don't stand out as being complete crap but almost no one would call them great. MS has a huge amount of money and a huge amount of man-power to go with it but it is all wasted on making crap and trying to abuse their position to force it down everyone's throat. BASIC was a fine product for the time, the original version of DOS wasn't too bad for it's time, but what have they done since? I am sure someone will name the few good products they have but it's mostly second rate crap. And my original point was that it's not just Ballmer, the same was true when Gates was in charge, maybe even more so.
MS did well under Gates because he was a ruthless business man, not because he was an inspired technical genius - most of their products have always been second rate replicas of other people's products, but he got a lucky break with the IBM/DOS deal and then played his cards very well. Ballmer is mostly doing the same things, and MS is still very successful, they are starting to weaken because no amount of business genius and momentum will carry you through 3 decades of making crappy products.
I work for a large US corporation... it took several months, many emails and forms, and many managers to get my mailbox size increased from 50 MB to 250 MB - which is about $0.02 worth of storage at today's prices. This was about a year ago.
I don't think anyone said that in this thread. But spontaneous generated life will probably be carbon based, even if it is not amino-acid based. Those digital "lifeforms" did not arise naturally and never would, and need a digital world to already exist. Carbon has properties that are not even remotely matched by any other element - nothing else forms complex compounds like it does.
"fragile" really isn't the right word for your first statement. The question is what are the chances of a bunch of molecules coming together in just the right way for life to happen (ignoring panspermia or divine intervention, both of which I consider equally (un)plausible). This is hard to answer, so life could be everywhere or nowhere but earth. Once it occurs it rapidly diversifies which makes it very robust.
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Your source doesn't support your assertion. In fact it directly contradicts it in every way. It doesn't mention mortgages or home ownership and shows itemized deductions as responsible for only 5% of the people who don't pay taxes (mortgage interest is an itemized deduction). It clearly shows that most people who aren't paying federal income taxes are very low income. From the abstract
About 46 percent of American households will pay no federal individual income tax in 2011, roughly half of them because of structural features of the income tax that provide basic exemptions for subsistence level income and for dependents. The other half are nontaxable because tax expenditures— special provisions of the tax code that benefit selected taxpayers or activities—wipe out tax liabilities and, in the case of refundable credits, result in net payments from the government. Most important of those tax expenditures are provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children. While those factors particularly affect lower-income households, different provisions eliminate taxes for other households. Itemized deductions and credits for children and education are more important for middle-income households, while the relatively few high-income nontaxable households benefit most from above-the-line and itemized deductions and reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
But a mule is thousands of times cheaper (don't actually know how much the military pays for one of these, but I would guess it's in the millions, plus R&D costs). And providing fuel for the war in remote parts of Afghanistan is a huge cost, in money and lives (lots of troops die protecting fuel convoys). So it's really rather ridiculous to try to replace a mule with this thing, especially for a nation that is spiraling into financial disaster.
Yes, easy and fun to take apart hard drives. Just be careful bending the disks, sometimes that shatter into many sharp shards (wrap them in something thick or wear thick gloves and eye protection).
I know some banks block Opera Mini for this reason. I would think they'll block Silk too.
Do you own a home? Do you have a source to cite for that info? The tax breaks are not that much - you only get to write off the interest on the mortgage. In fact you effectively only get to write off the part of the interest that is bigger than the standard deduction, unless you have a bunch of other things to itemize anyway. In my case that only amounts to about $4000 in deductions (which only saves me about $1000 on taxes), and I have a fairly large home and a new mortgage (which means most of my payment is interest). So I call BS.
And that is just income tax. There is payroll tax (FICA), sales tax, and of course the property tax that all those homeowner's you are referring to have to pay.
Because it might wake people up to the fact the government wants a populace that is drugged and stupid? They are just using TV and NCLB rather than soma and stunted fetuses. And let's lot forget all that evil sex in the book.
no, but it is trivial to setup an alias or work with a friend and split the profits
He gives the kids free samples,
Because he knows full well
That today's young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow's clientele.
- Tom Lehrer, "The Old Dope Peddler"
Yes, but Sony sold way more than 2 PlayStations, so R&D is spread out over millions of units. The chances of this boondoggle ever flying more that 2 flights is infinitesimal, so it really is $15 billion per flight. Actually the chances of it even flying 1 flight is small, so cost per probable flight is approaching infinity.
regardless of how special you think Craigslist is, what does it have that could possibly be a trade secret?
Newsflash: a known algorithm implemented in a Turing-complete language poorly suited for that algorithm
fixed that for you.
I implemented it last night using my abacus and slide rule
I think you meant yocto, but seriously who uses those prefixes? I had to look it up. 10^-24 is much clearer.
He seemed to go out of his way to insult the Pope, rather than just advocating his views. That's political.
Earth must have at least 50 creation stories all by itself.
From what I read on the MMS Wikipedia page it looks like MMS uses the data channel anyway - there is an initial SMS message which refers to the attachment, and the attachment is downloaded by HTTP or WAP. I would think the carrier would charge you for that data.
Oil's value is gone once it is used. Gold can be recycled and reused. It has lots of industrial uses too, not just making pretty things. And regardless of whether YOU prefer silver or gold jewelry, the fact is you are pretty much guaranteed you can find someone to trade you something you want for your gold. I agree with you that it's "intrinsic vale" is not really as much as what most people think it is. But unlike money the government can't just print more, so the limited supply is an important feature; it's rare, it's compact for it's value (unlike iron, which is highly useful but you don't want to carry around $1000 worth of iron) and it doesn't spoil, rust, rot, so it makes for pretty good money. But so does paper money if you have sound fiscal policy.
read the second part of the sentence ... I didn't say I watched
I may be the product, but they still have to keep me happy or else I will take my business elsewhere, then they won't have me to sell to the advertisers and they loose that business. Just like TV has to make good shows or I won't watch it. In that way I am still a customer.
Maybe Linux was just a copy and the original version wasn't great but a huge number of people have put effort to make it great. Meanwhile from MS we get Windows ME and Vista - and other versions of Windows that don't stand out as being complete crap but almost no one would call them great. MS has a huge amount of money and a huge amount of man-power to go with it but it is all wasted on making crap and trying to abuse their position to force it down everyone's throat. BASIC was a fine product for the time, the original version of DOS wasn't too bad for it's time, but what have they done since? I am sure someone will name the few good products they have but it's mostly second rate crap. And my original point was that it's not just Ballmer, the same was true when Gates was in charge, maybe even more so.
Executives should get stock that they can't sell for 10 years. This removes the incentive for short term stock manipulation.
MS did well under Gates because he was a ruthless business man, not because he was an inspired technical genius - most of their products have always been second rate replicas of other people's products, but he got a lucky break with the IBM/DOS deal and then played his cards very well. Ballmer is mostly doing the same things, and MS is still very successful, they are starting to weaken because no amount of business genius and momentum will carry you through 3 decades of making crappy products.
I work for a large US corporation ... it took several months, many emails and forms, and many managers to get my mailbox size increased from 50 MB to 250 MB - which is about $0.02 worth of storage at today's prices. This was about a year ago.
I don't think anyone said that in this thread. But spontaneous generated life will probably be carbon based, even if it is not amino-acid based. Those digital "lifeforms" did not arise naturally and never would, and need a digital world to already exist. Carbon has properties that are not even remotely matched by any other element - nothing else forms complex compounds like it does.
like I said, hard to answer. But I still wouldn't call it fragile.
"fragile" really isn't the right word for your first statement. The question is what are the chances of a bunch of molecules coming together in just the right way for life to happen (ignoring panspermia or divine intervention, both of which I consider equally (un)plausible). This is hard to answer, so life could be everywhere or nowhere but earth. Once it occurs it rapidly diversifies which makes it very robust.