" The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it."
I wish they had copied how firebird handles RSS. I love being able to put the rss feeds on my toolbar and just dropping them down to scan the headlines.
Looks like I will still be using firefox on the old powerbook.
"Well, I can happily report that my experience has been a happy one! After backing up/Users,/Documents and/Applications/apps (where I put any applications *I* install) - yes, I'm a paranoid bugger - I did a boot->nuke->install of Tiger last night onto my PowerBook G4"
I actually have two partitions, one for the OS one for my crap. I try installing all my apps in my partition with a symlink to/Applications/_Applications so it sorts first.
"Can you really, honestly, say that the only reasonable explanation for the difference is that MS is gaming the results?"
Yes I can. The variations are statistically significant and MS has a long and storied history of acting in the most unethical, sleazy, and destructive way possible. At every juncture when an MS executive makes a decision they always choose to act sleazy and unethical. It's built into their culture if not their genes.
I just typed tiger into google. The first link is about the animal, the second link is for tigerdirect, the third link is about the animal and the fourth is for apple.
I don't see what they are bitching about, they are the second link on google above apple.
You are confusing salary with wealth. Steve Jobs for example makes $1.00 per year, Bill Gates officially makes about 800K per year. Many of the billionaires in the US have zero income because they don't work and yet they have enourmous amounts of wealth.
"Why should you penalize those who work hard by taking what they have earned?"
Sounds like a fantastic argument for doing away with taxation. Oooops, sorry it seems like we have to tax people who work hard so we can get our streets plowed, schools for our kids and stealth fighters so we can launch missiles at arabs.
" don't earn that much, but proably will in my lifetime. Will I deserve to have my assets taken once I hit that level?"
Yes!. If we want to be fair you should. The people who control the most wealth should pay most of the taxes. It's perfectly fair.
"Apparently earning less than $130K is enough to qualify someone as being in the top 5% of wage earners. Is $130K/year 'rich?'"
Easy. All you have to is to break the population into percentile groups. You don't have to go super fine resolution maybe somewhat geometric pattern like this 1,2,3,4,5,10,25,50,75. Take each group, calculate how much of the wealth they control and adjust the tax rates so that they pay the same percent of the total tax load. It's math but not rocket science. I think you will find somebody who pays 130K won't complain too much over how much tax they pay under my system, for them it may even be a tax cut. For example the tenth richest person in America is Steve Ballmer and he is worth 11 billion dollars. He probably is still in the top 1%. So you see the vast majority of taxes would be paid by the super-duper rich who control the vast majority of wealth.
Your friend who makes 130K probably has no real wealth anyway. He probably owns a nice house, maybe a nice car, and probably has two to five hundred thousand dollars in various investments and 401Ks and such. Over all his total net worth is probably right around a million. That's nothing.
"Income redistribution is a scam to make people who have little feel worse about themselves by thinking that the only way to achieve is to 'stick it to the man' and take from him."
Income redistribution prevents violent revolutions. It's a good thing.
Just read some history OK? It wasn't that long ago when there was virtually no income redistribution in the world. There are lots of places in the world today where there is no income redistribution too. Iraq was one place, but we are making sure there is now socialized medicine, socialized education, govt control of natural resources and robust welfare class.
"If you want to live in a world where the boots of 'the man' are on your neck, go ahead. Seems a shame to me, but it's your life..."
I hate to break it to you but you already live in that world.
"So then you're suggesting that the wealth in this country be taken from those who have it and be given to those who don't for the express purpose of avoiding a revolutionary uprising of the poor against the wealthy?"
Precisely. He have hundreds of years of historical evidence that countries that do not do this end up with violent revolutions.
The Rich know this too which is why they don't by and large object to high taxes.
Then again the rich make out pretty well, even though the top 5% control 95% of the wealth but pay less then 50% of the taxes.
There can be no real evidence of motives. Furthermore MS will not reveal their source code to the public.
So all we can do is speculate about probabilities.
In this case given the sleazy and unethical nature of MS the corporation and MS executives the most likely explanation is that they are rigging the search. They have done similar things in the past and have a history of acting in dishonest ways.
It always amazes me how little everything changes. Hundreds of years of social "advancement" and we are still living in a quasi serfdom while the good citizens or kansas debate whether evolution is a valid scientific threory and whether the fact that god doesn't like homosexuality is grounds enough to deny people rights.
Will we ever rise above hording goods and looking to the sky for answers?
"It seems to me that the logical extension of this is that the poor countries of the world should be expected to rise up to eliminate the rich ones. They certainly outnumber us."
No that's not a logical extension. You just pulled that out of your ass so you could erect a straw man to argue against. You did this because you had no counter argument to what I was actually saying.
Next time try to argue against my actual words OK?
"Do you favor worldwide wealth redistribution? Really?"
If I believed that then I would have said it. Since I didn't say it then you can safely assume I don't believe it.
We judge human beings and corporations by their past behavior. In this case people are questioning the motive of MS to rank IIS sites higher in their search engine.
So is it reasonable to assume that MS is a corrupt, unethical, sleazy corporation who would do things like this to give their server a boost?
"If it is necessary for the government to intervene to compel people to give, then why have charities in the US received more than $1B in private donations just for tsunami relief?"
A billion is nothing. Do you know how much it costs to feed the homeless, house the indigent, to take care of the elderly and sick?
"Why is it estimated that Americans gave $241B in charitable donations in 2003?"
Again miniscule amount compared to what the taxpayers put up to educate, feed, and care for those in need.
"The US government is forecasted to spend $1.3T in annual entitlement spending during 2005. How much is enough?"
That's what elections are for. The public gets to decide by voting things like farm subsidies, coal mining etc.
"Do you realize that the poor in the US are living with orders of magnitude greater wealth that the rest of the developing world?"
Yes I realize that. SO what? Are you saying we should all live like palestenians?
"Should we liquidate the US assets and give them to the Indians, Chinese, and Indonesians? Would that prevent them from rising up and killing us?"
YOu didn't read my post did you? Why don't you go back, read it and then answer.
Income distribution from the rich to the poor is a relatively new invention of mankind. Throught almost all of our history the rich always got richer. The more money you had, the more power you had the easier it was to gather more money and power. Eventually everything in a country was owned by the king or a handful of famillies. What usually followed was a revolution in which the rich were killed and the cycle started over again.
Of course you can see this going on all over the workd right now. There are lots of countries with no income redistribution and where a handful of families own everything. Oddly enough they always seem to be having coups and violent surpressions of dissent. Iraq and afghanistan come immediately to mind.
What you fail to understand is that the natural tendency of money is to flow "uphill". Income redistribution is a good thing. It prevents violent revolutions.
"For what it's worth, I believe that we who have a great deal must have compassion on those who have substantially less. We should give generaously to those in need. I don't need the government to compel me to do it. "
I hear this a lot but see very little evidence for it. Rich people tend to give a miniscule percentage of their income to charity and most of their charity seems to go to their alma matter or the opera or something.
As long as you present them with the whole picture there is nothing wrong with that. My guess is that most people don't really consider the problems they are likeyly to have with proprietary software though. For most windows programs there is very little support when things go to hell. You need to find a geek friend.
"But if I create something (a program, a piece of art, whatever) and someone buys it for $100, did I take anything away from someone else?"
YEs, you used up natural resources which took something away from everybody. Even if you created something of exceedingly low impact like a program. You used a computer, electricity, food, and water. You needed a house or an office, a car to get around, clothes to wear, heating and cooling etc.
"Economics is not a zero-sum game. "
Only if you look at it in the narrowest possible framework. In order for economics NOT to be a zero sum game would be for there to be an infinate amount of money out there in some alternate universe which you can tap into. In the real universe there is not an infinate amount of anything. Money has to come from someplace. Most often it comes from other people. Money gets "created" when you turn natural resources into goods and services to be sold.
So indeed economy IS a zero sum game when you take the entire planet (or the universe) into account. There is more money on the planet today then there was 200 years ago but there are also less natural resources. All those trees, land, fish, animals, plants, water, minerals etc all got turned into money.
Like I said the only way it could not be a zero sum game is if there is an infinitate amount of money, alas there is not an infinate amount of anything in the universe, not even atoms.
" What I've noticed is that the average computer user wants a turn-key solution."
That's funny what I have noticed is that the average computer user wants an open system and in fact will turn down an easier to use turnkey solution if they have an harder to use open system if it costs a little less.
Maybe it's because my perpective is longer then yours. I lived through the "golden years" of the computer revolution from the eighties, nineties and today.
Time after time I have seen more integrated, easier to use, turnkey systems fall by the wayside while systems that were perceived to be open and cheaper won. Here are some examles.
CP/M vs dozens of other long gone 8 bit computer makers. Apple II vs Atari, TI, HP etc. IBM pc vw Mac. DOS vs OS/2 Windows vs MacOS IBM PS2 vs Clones Microchannel vs ISA PC vs Amiga Compuserve vs Internet. AOL vs internet
The list goes on and on. If users truly prefered a cohesive, turn key, easy to use system we would all be griping about Apple instead of MS. In every single one of my examples the better, easier to use, more performant solution lost to a cheaper and more open one.
This dynamic is still going on today. Look at windows/PC vs the Mac. With a mac you get a compresensive turnkey system with windows you get to cobble together the software and hardware. But it's considered more open and costs less so voila, apple still can't gain significant traction into the PC market.
There is one more factor I should mention. Corporate adoption drives home adoption. If you are watching keep an eye out for corporate adoption of linux and other open source technologies. The minute you see corporations embracing linux on the desktop sell your MS stock.
"Here's a quiz : You have $1, I have $10. The next year, you have $10 and I have $100. Are you worse off than you were a year ago? Why not? Income disparity between us has grown tenfold. But it means NOTHING, you're still ten times better off than you were."
Only if you live in a universe where there is an infinitate amount of money. I live in a universe where there is not an infiniate amount of anything, not even atoms or subatomic particles.
In the real universe your extra money came from other people, you didn't print it right? Somebody gave it to you. That money either came from somebody else or by converting natural resources into some finished product.
Of course I should know better then to fight with your straw man. The real point is that if you own 95% of the wealth you should pay 95% of the taxes. Income redistribution is another topic which I would be happy to talk with you about.
"How about this question : Would you rather be a king 100 years ago or a lower middle class American today? I know what my choice would be. The tide has risen, a king 100 years ago lived in squalor compared to the average modern American."
"So, with several logical explanations for a statistical difference, your preference is to form an illogical explanation with no evidence to back it up?"
What part of "decades of well established behavior patterns" do you not understand? That's my evidence you fucking moron.
"but making baseless claims based on your colored perspective of Microsoft's history is absurd."
It's not baseless if it's based on evidence.
"I live in a world where MS has made good decisions and bad decisions. I don't live in a world where I filter out everything that doesn't agree with my opinion."
LOL, apparently you have filtered out everything bad they have done.
Next time you need a babysitter why don't you hire a sexual molester? I hear they have made some good and bad decisions. You can ignore their past history, it means nothing. Just because they have abused children in the past does not mean they will do it now. Don't filter out all the good things they have done, why I hear they gave a few coins to the homeless guy on the corner!
Re:commercial use of government software
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
"Besides, the rich pay a higher share of taxes now [typepad.com] than they did in 1979."
The rich also own more wealth then they did in 1979. Since the op 5% of the rich control 95% of the wealth they should pay 95% of the taxes too.
The rich are getting a great deal. The income disparity grows, the rich get richer but their tax burden does not increase as fast as their wealth.
That's a perfectly good response to somebody who calls you a zealot. He didn't really expect to be treated civilly after he started defaming people did he?
Slashdot Mirror
" The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it."
I wish they had copied how firebird handles RSS. I love being able to put the rss feeds on my toolbar and just dropping them down to scan the headlines.
Looks like I will still be using firefox on the old powerbook.
"Well, I can happily report that my experience has been a happy one! After backing up /Users, /Documents and /Applications/apps (where I put any applications *I* install) - yes, I'm a paranoid bugger - I did a boot->nuke->install of Tiger last night onto my PowerBook G4"
/Applications/_Applications so it sorts first.
I actually have two partitions, one for the OS one for my crap. I try installing all my apps in my partition with a symlink to
Interesting. .NET ended up being pretty much a server side platform like java is. I guess it makes sense considering C# is just a java clone anyway.
"Can you really, honestly, say that the only reasonable explanation for the difference is that MS is gaming the results?"
Yes I can. The variations are statistically significant and MS has a long and storied history of acting in the most unethical, sleazy, and destructive way possible. At every juncture when an MS executive makes a decision they always choose to act sleazy and unethical. It's built into their culture if not their genes.
He is using the legal system to carry out his convictions. What's wrong with that?
Thank you, that was one of the most insightful and funny posts I have ever read on /. Now you are going to make me go learn lisp you bastard.
I just typed tiger into google. The first link is about the animal, the second link is for tigerdirect, the third link is about the animal and the fourth is for apple.
I don't see what they are bitching about, they are the second link on google above apple.
You are confusing salary with wealth. Steve Jobs for example makes $1.00 per year, Bill Gates officially makes about 800K per year. Many of the billionaires in the US have zero income because they don't work and yet they have enourmous amounts of wealth.
"Why should you penalize those who work hard by taking what they have earned?"
Sounds like a fantastic argument for doing away with taxation. Oooops, sorry it seems like we have to tax people who work hard so we can get our streets plowed, schools for our kids and stealth fighters so we can launch missiles at arabs.
" don't earn that much, but proably will in my lifetime. Will I deserve to have my assets taken once I hit that level?"
Yes!. If we want to be fair you should. The people who control the most wealth should pay most of the taxes. It's perfectly fair.
"Apparently earning less than $130K is enough to qualify someone as being in the top 5% of wage earners. Is $130K/year 'rich?'"
Easy. All you have to is to break the population into percentile groups. You don't have to go super fine resolution maybe somewhat geometric pattern like this 1,2,3,4,5,10,25,50,75. Take each group, calculate how much of the wealth they control and adjust the tax rates so that they pay the same percent of the total tax load. It's math but not rocket science. I think you will find somebody who pays 130K won't complain too much over how much tax they pay under my system, for them it may even be a tax cut. For example the tenth richest person in America is Steve Ballmer and he is worth 11 billion dollars. He probably is still in the top 1%. So you see the vast majority of taxes would be paid by the super-duper rich who control the vast majority of wealth.
Your friend who makes 130K probably has no real wealth anyway. He probably owns a nice house, maybe a nice car, and probably has two to five hundred thousand dollars in various investments and 401Ks and such. Over all his total net worth is probably right around a million. That's nothing.
"Income redistribution is a scam to make people who have little feel worse about themselves by thinking that the only way to achieve is to 'stick it to the man' and take from him."
Income redistribution prevents violent revolutions. It's a good thing.
Just read some history OK? It wasn't that long ago when there was virtually no income redistribution in the world. There are lots of places in the world today where there is no income redistribution too. Iraq was one place, but we are making sure there is now socialized medicine, socialized education, govt control of natural resources and robust welfare class.
"If you want to live in a world where the boots of 'the man' are on your neck, go ahead. Seems a shame to me, but it's your life..."
I hate to break it to you but you already live in that world.
"So then you're suggesting that the wealth in this country be taken from those who have it and be given to those who don't for the express purpose of avoiding a revolutionary uprising of the poor against the wealthy?"
Precisely. He have hundreds of years of historical evidence that countries that do not do this end up with violent revolutions.
The Rich know this too which is why they don't by and large object to high taxes.
Then again the rich make out pretty well, even though the top 5% control 95% of the wealth but pay less then 50% of the taxes.
Nice ride for them, sucks for you.
There can be no real evidence of motives. Furthermore MS will not reveal their source code to the public.
So all we can do is speculate about probabilities.
In this case given the sleazy and unethical nature of MS the corporation and MS executives the most likely explanation is that they are rigging the search. They have done similar things in the past and have a history of acting in dishonest ways.
It always amazes me how little everything changes. Hundreds of years of social "advancement" and we are still living in a quasi serfdom while the good citizens or kansas debate whether evolution is a valid scientific threory and whether the fact that god doesn't like homosexuality is grounds enough to deny people rights.
Will we ever rise above hording goods and looking to the sky for answers?
"It seems to me that the logical extension of this is that the poor countries of the world should be expected to rise up to eliminate the rich ones. They certainly outnumber us."
No that's not a logical extension. You just pulled that out of your ass so you could erect a straw man to argue against. You did this because you had no counter argument to what I was actually saying.
Next time try to argue against my actual words OK?
"Do you favor worldwide wealth redistribution? Really?"
If I believed that then I would have said it. Since I didn't say it then you can safely assume I don't believe it.
We judge human beings and corporations by their past behavior. In this case people are questioning the motive of MS to rank IIS sites higher in their search engine.
So is it reasonable to assume that MS is a corrupt, unethical, sleazy corporation who would do things like this to give their server a boost?
The answer is yes.
"If it is necessary for the government to intervene to compel people to give, then why have charities in the US received more than $1B in private donations just for tsunami relief?"
A billion is nothing. Do you know how much it costs to feed the homeless, house the indigent, to take care of the elderly and sick?
"Why is it estimated that Americans gave $241B in charitable donations in 2003?"
Again miniscule amount compared to what the taxpayers put up to educate, feed, and care for those in need.
"The US government is forecasted to spend $1.3T in annual entitlement spending during 2005. How much is enough?"
That's what elections are for. The public gets to decide by voting things like farm subsidies, coal mining etc.
"Do you realize that the poor in the US are living with orders of magnitude greater wealth that the rest of the developing world?"
Yes I realize that. SO what? Are you saying we should all live like palestenians?
"Should we liquidate the US assets and give them to the Indians, Chinese, and Indonesians? Would that prevent them from rising up and killing us?"
YOu didn't read my post did you? Why don't you go back, read it and then answer.
Income distribution from the rich to the poor is a relatively new invention of mankind. Throught almost all of our history the rich always got richer. The more money you had, the more power you had the easier it was to gather more money and power. Eventually everything in a country was owned by the king or a handful of famillies. What usually followed was a revolution in which the rich were killed and the cycle started over again.
Of course you can see this going on all over the workd right now. There are lots of countries with no income redistribution and where a handful of families own everything. Oddly enough they always seem to be having coups and violent surpressions of dissent. Iraq and afghanistan come immediately to mind.
What you fail to understand is that the natural tendency of money is to flow "uphill". Income redistribution is a good thing. It prevents violent revolutions.
"For what it's worth, I believe that we who have a great deal must have compassion on those who have substantially less. We should give generaously to those in need. I don't need the government to compel me to do it. "
I hear this a lot but see very little evidence for it. Rich people tend to give a miniscule percentage of their income to charity and most of their charity seems to go to their alma matter or the opera or something.
As long as you present them with the whole picture there is nothing wrong with that. My guess is that most people don't really consider the problems they are likeyly to have with proprietary software though. For most windows programs there is very little support when things go to hell. You need to find a geek friend.
"But if I create something (a program, a piece of art, whatever) and someone buys it for $100, did I take anything away from someone else?"
YEs, you used up natural resources which took something away from everybody. Even if you created something of exceedingly low impact like a program. You used a computer, electricity, food, and water. You needed a house or an office, a car to get around, clothes to wear, heating and cooling etc.
"Economics is not a zero-sum game. "
Only if you look at it in the narrowest possible framework. In order for economics NOT to be a zero sum game would be for there to be an infinate amount of money out there in some alternate universe which you can tap into. In the real universe there is not an infinate amount of anything. Money has to come from someplace. Most often it comes from other people. Money gets "created" when you turn natural resources into goods and services to be sold.
So indeed economy IS a zero sum game when you take the entire planet (or the universe) into account. There is more money on the planet today then there was 200 years ago but there are also less natural resources. All those trees, land, fish, animals, plants, water, minerals etc all got turned into money.
Like I said the only way it could not be a zero sum game is if there is an infinitate amount of money, alas there is not an infinate amount of anything in the universe, not even atoms.
" What I've noticed is that the average computer user wants a turn-key solution."
That's funny what I have noticed is that the average computer user wants an open system and in fact will turn down an easier to use turnkey solution if they have an harder to use open system if it costs a little less.
Maybe it's because my perpective is longer then yours. I lived through the "golden years" of the computer revolution from the eighties, nineties and today.
Time after time I have seen more integrated, easier to use, turnkey systems fall by the wayside while systems that were perceived to be open and cheaper won. Here are some examles.
CP/M vs dozens of other long gone 8 bit computer makers.
Apple II vs Atari, TI, HP etc.
IBM pc vw Mac.
DOS vs OS/2
Windows vs MacOS
IBM PS2 vs Clones
Microchannel vs ISA
PC vs Amiga
Compuserve vs Internet.
AOL vs internet
The list goes on and on. If users truly prefered a cohesive, turn key, easy to use system we would all be griping about Apple instead of MS. In every single one of my examples the better, easier to use, more performant solution lost to a cheaper and more open one.
This dynamic is still going on today. Look at windows/PC vs the Mac. With a mac you get a compresensive turnkey system with windows you get to cobble together the software and hardware. But it's considered more open and costs less so voila, apple still can't gain significant traction into the PC market.
There is one more factor I should mention. Corporate adoption drives home adoption. If you are watching keep an eye out for corporate adoption of linux and other open source technologies. The minute you see corporations embracing linux on the desktop sell your MS stock.
"Here's a quiz : You have $1, I have $10. The next year, you have $10 and I have $100. Are you worse off than you were a year ago? Why not? Income disparity between us has grown tenfold. But it means NOTHING, you're still ten times better off than you were."
Only if you live in a universe where there is an infinitate amount of money. I live in a universe where there is not an infiniate amount of anything, not even atoms or subatomic particles.
In the real universe your extra money came from other people, you didn't print it right? Somebody gave it to you. That money either came from somebody else or by converting natural resources into some finished product.
Of course I should know better then to fight with your straw man. The real point is that if you own 95% of the wealth you should pay 95% of the taxes. Income redistribution is another topic which I would be happy to talk with you about.
"How about this question : Would you rather be a king 100 years ago or a lower middle class American today? I know what my choice would be. The tide has risen, a king 100 years ago lived in squalor compared to the average modern American."
Completely off topic.
"So, with several logical explanations for a statistical difference, your preference is to form an illogical explanation with no evidence to back it up?"
What part of "decades of well established behavior patterns" do you not understand? That's my evidence you fucking moron.
"but making baseless claims based on your colored perspective of Microsoft's history is absurd."
It's not baseless if it's based on evidence.
"I live in a world where MS has made good decisions and bad decisions. I don't live in a world where I filter out everything that doesn't agree with my opinion."
LOL, apparently you have filtered out everything bad they have done.
Next time you need a babysitter why don't you hire a sexual molester? I hear they have made some good and bad decisions. You can ignore their past history, it means nothing. Just because they have abused children in the past does not mean they will do it now. Don't filter out all the good things they have done, why I hear they gave a few coins to the homeless guy on the corner!
"Besides, the rich pay a higher share of taxes now [typepad.com] than they did in 1979."
The rich also own more wealth then they did in 1979. Since the op 5% of the rich control 95% of the wealth they should pay 95% of the taxes too.
The rich are getting a great deal. The income disparity grows, the rich get richer but their tax burden does not increase as fast as their wealth.
If that's your idea of a joke you should definately keep your day job.
That's a perfectly good response to somebody who calls you a zealot. He didn't really expect to be treated civilly after he started defaming people did he?
By the way you make a wonderful MS spokesman.
the minute you used the word zealot I knew you were lying your ass off.
You make a false distinction between social and economic policies. All economic policies have social effects and vice versa.