Why would Intel want to put Itanium in desktop/laptop machines? They have Pentium M/Centrino which has done well in laptops and in a quote from PCWorld in January 2005 "Notebook PCs based on the most powerful version of Intel's Centrino mobile technology now perform just as well as desktop PCs with Intel's fastest Pentium 4 processors, according to an Intel executive." I can see Intel letting Apple put Pentium M's in Apple boxes but Apple would get crushed by Dell in terms of assembly efficiency and thus cost, and why would you pay a premium for what amounts to a freeware Unix box?
If this were a hoax, Apple would have denied this report rather than simply refused to comment. Intel's incentive to do this is obvious; they get to squash this gnat that has been flying around their heads for a few years. Since AMD now has significant market share, Intel can do this without worrying about antitrust problems with the government.The article pointed out that Apple's recent market share was 1.8%. Intel doesn't give a rip about that 1.8% in terms of their overall strategy; they're worrying about AMD. I think Apple's incentive to do this is to give themselves a way to bow out of the desktop and server market in a gradual way without taking an instant hit to their revenues. Apple believers will keep buying Apple systems for a while until they realize that they'd be better off to buy a white box and install a Linux distro that they can skin to have the Apple GUI look and feel. why pay a premium for an OS that is just a freeware Unix bolted onto middleware that let the freeware run on a PPC chip? Microsoft will now kill all of it's wares that were targeted to Apple OS. I could see Microsoft Longhorn running on AMD crushing Apple OS running on Intel.
This movie caught your point dead on; when Tim and Sigourney have to go through the stamper thing she complains about the stamper being put in the ship just to create a pointless problem; this scene was priceless. Really though, pointless activity isn't limited to games. Most movies these days have gratuitous chases, gore, swearing, and sex that do nothing for the plot but just titillate/shock the viewer.
If KChart, Gnumeric, or Open Office can't do bar graphs, then you might as well flush them down the toilet. These must be some mighty fancy bar graphs...
Shuttle commander: We're not going to make orbit! Toss something overboard!
Copilot: Lets see, hmmm, let's toss those ASU satellites. Since they're nano-satellites I'll just send'em out our Lockheed Martin Super-duper Space Toilet. Don't want to bother with airlock.
In my mind one of the main reasons that the NYT is one of the most reputable papers is that a lot of the content is well written and solidly researched original content that addresses a variety of issues. Most local papers these days seem to do nothing more than put together a few self produced fluff pieces combined with a bunch of wire stories borrowed from the AP, or thinly disguised press releases. If you are doing research on US politics or foreign affairs the NYT is a solid resource. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of most other papers in the US.
Great comments, I agree with everything you say here. I have enjoyed many episodes of all of the different series. The main problem I had with ST is the limitations placed on the producers by Roddenberry's will and the framework of the storyline. Let's face it, every TV series reaches a point where it is creatively exhausted. Trek can really be considered one of the most successful series ever if you take all of the series and consider them as one. Of course, ST might have lasted longer if they had fired Berman and Braga. Those guys have obviously been phoning it in for a while. I think that a real opportunity was missed when the powers that be didn't let Frakes do more directing. The movie that he was in charge of was extremely well done. Must have been a power struggle with the B+B buttheads...
1. A robot must be operated with exclusively MS code. 2. A robot must obey orders given by permission of Bill Gates and his minions and no one else. 3. A robot must arrest any person or machine that attempts to force it to break the first or second law.
Are there any games out there that have concepts similar to Sim City or the Sims that compete? I like the Sim products but don't think they are perfect. It seems like there could be a market opportunity there. For example, using a hexagonal grid instead of squares might make for some interesting differences in game play.
How about hooking up a "Quake" type engine with a Sim type mapping engine so you could zoom in and enter buildings and interact with characters? Just thinking out loud...
With this tracking technology, now someone could go out and pick this stuff up. Greenpeace could use their Zodiacs for something besides chasing whalers. Seriously, this could lead to a potentially profitable salvage operation.
I think that this type of research would be better funded through the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation or DARPA. Certainly quantum wire would be useful in construction of spacecraft, but I think NASA should be focused more on space exploration. In other words, building spacecraft with existing technologies or tech that is likely to be feasible in the near term.
Here is the text of an old essay about GL that appeared on Salon a while back; I found it insightful. Helps to have a little perspective on why a guy does what he does:
By Jim Paul May 18, 1999 | In August 1976, George Lucas was exhausted and desperate. He had been in London, directing the actors in "Star Wars," a film he had every reason to believe would fail. The usual turmoil and sheer labor of the set had been made worse by the lordly British studio unions, who quit promptly at 5:30 for tea, and by the money people back in Burbank, Calif., who in the end pulled the fiscal plug on the filming. At the end of 16 weeks of shooting, Fox gave Lucas three days to finish two weeks of work, a cost-saving move that appears at least ironic now that "Star Wars" and its succeeding films have gone on to gross billions. At the time Lucas had to hire triple crews and divide the stage into three sets, on each of which he directed the action for the final three days. "I cared about every single detail," he recalled (including the duct-taping of Princess Leia's breasts -- "No jiggling in the Empire," noted Carrie Fisher). By the end of shooting Lucas was pale, ill, ready to drop.
At that point he flew from London to Los Angeles, where Lucasfilm was headquartered in those days, and found that his special effects unit, having spent more than $1 million of its $2 million budget, had completed only three shots. Lucas was outraged. He made arrangements to assume control of the unit, then flew home to San Francisco, where he began having chest pains. He was taken to Marin General Hospital, diagnosed with exhaustion and held overnight. The next morning he took a vow. "That's when I really confirmed to myself that I was going to change," he told biographer Dale Pollock. "I wasn't going to make more films, I wasn't going to direct anymore. I was going to get my life a bit more under control."
George Lucas has more or less stuck to his vow. He has made more films, but at a distance, as a producer. The release of "The Phantom Menace" will show us George Lucas the director for the first time since the original "Star Wars." Indeed, Lucas also seems to have gotten his life "a bit more under control." In interviews of late he has described the last 20 years as being taken up with parenting his children and recovering from his divorce. But this puts a homey gloss on an astoundingly successful and labor-intensive enterprise.
Much that eluded him in the beginning is now within Lucas' grasp. He has amassed and consolidated his fortune (in the last 10 years his net worth has gone from about $25 million to somewhere near $2 billion) and made solid investments, so that now he can finance his films entirely. Never again will someone give George Lucas three days to do what should take two weeks.
George Lucas' gifts are difficult to categorize in conventional film-industry terms; he has defied Hollywood's expectations all along. In his early days as a rebel filmmaker, he made a student film called "1:42:08: A Man and His Car," which mostly consisted of a yellow race car doing laps at speed. Escape from and defiance of authority have always been a central theme for Lucas, both in his films and in his career as a whole. In his first feature, "THX-1138," the hero flees an oppressive, sexless, bureaucratic society, where robotic police give up the chase only when they exceed their budget for the operation. In perhaps his farthest-out moment, in 1969, Lucas was hired by David Maysles to shoot the Rolling Stones in concert at Altamont. (Pollock reports that Lucas "can't remember" whether he filmed a young black man, Meredith Hunter, being stabbed to death by Hell's Angels, as Mick Jagger sang "Under my Thumb.") In any case, Lucas continued to challenge the industry through the 1970s and '80s, when it represented the Evil Empire, and does so even more profoundly now, as lord of the manor on Skywalker Ranch in Northern California's Marin County.
Though he has said of directing "The Phantom Menace" that it was "much m
I saw the M&M commercial the other night introducing dark chocolate ones: Darth Vader chokes the yellow one into submission. This has to be up there in the top marketing events. Forbes has him at #194 on their list of world's richest people with $3 billion. I think that is a lowball estimate.
Don't forget this one: I have fond memories. Here's the editorial review from Amazon.com:
Here's how critic Roger Ebert described the unique and lasting value of George Lucas's 1973 box-office hit, American Graffiti: "[It's] not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie's success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant." The time to which Ebert and the film refers is the summer of 1962, and American Graffiti captures the look, feel, and sound of that era by chronicling one memorable night in the lives of several young Californians on the cusp of adulthood. (In essence, Lucas was making a semiautobiographical tribute to his own days as a hot-rod cruiser, and the film's phenomenal success paved the way for Star Wars.) The action is propelled by the music of Wolfman Jack's rock & roll radio show--a soundtrack of pop hits that would become as popular as the film itself. As Lucas develops several character subplots, American Graffiti becomes a flawless time capsule of meticulously re-created memory, as authentic as a documentary and vividly realized through innovative use of cinematography and sound. The once-in-a-lifetime ensemble cast members inhabit their roles so fully that they don't seem like actors at all, comprising a who's who of performers--some of whom went on to stellar careers--including Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, and Paul Le Mat. A true American classic, the film ranks No. 77 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time greatest American movies. --Jeff Shannon
Obviously, that is why some of them wanted to establish an estate or inheritance tax. Here is some info from responsiblewealth.org:
Thomas Paine
"God gave the Earth as an inheritance for all God's children."
Thomas Paine sparked the first bestseller in American history - a fiery pamphlet entitled, Common Sense (1776), which sold over 120,000 copies in its first few months of publication and successfully encouraged a declaration of independence from England. The heart of Paine's famous pamphlet contains a withering criticism of hereditary government. This critique extends through all his works. "All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny." "Hereditary succession . . . is in its nature an absurdity, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary . ... History informs us that the son of Solomon was a fool." "To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second . . . is an insult and an imposition on posterity."
Later in life, Paine extended this critique of inherited political power to a critique of inherited economic power. It is important to remember that Paine distrusted governments, disliked taxes, and heartily approved of late night tea parties in Boston Harbor! He opens Common Sense with an attack not only on monarchy, but also on government itself. "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil."
Modern libertarians tend to adopt Paine as their patron saint, stressing his description of government as evil while forgetting the modifier, "necessary." Paine, unlike modern libertarians, never viewed "the government" and "the people" as mortal enemies. As he says, "Government and the people do not in America constitute distinct bodies." His love of liberty was tempered by a commitment to the common good. Ironically for a revolutionary, he wrote an entire pamphlet, The Necessity of Taxation (1782), arguing that taxation is the "criterion of public spirit."
In two works, The Rights of Man (1791) and Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine argues for the adoption of an inheritance tax in England to balance out the unfair distribution of "landed property." For Paine it is common sense that God gave "the Earth as an inheritance" to all of God's children. Therefore, he proposed an inheritance tax to create a national fund that (1) would give the sum of 15 pounds sterling to everyone turning 21 years old as a compensation for the loss of their "natural inheritance," and (2) would give a sum of 10 pounds a year to every person over the age of 50 as an early version of Social Security.
Paine viewed democracy as a sensible middle ground between aristocracy and socialism. He was not an enemy of private property (far from it), but a fierce critic of inherited privilege. In the Rights of Man he justifies the inheritance tax as being a derivative of the existing luxury tax. As he says, "an overgrown estate is a luxury at all times, and as such is the proper object of taxation."
At least one founding father was in favor of an inheritance tax.
In 1916 Congress for the first time levied a tax upon the transfer of a decedent's net estate. The Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives explained that a new type of tax was needed, because the "consumption taxes" in effect at that time bore most heavily upon those least able to pay them. The Committee further explained that the revenue system should be more evenly and equitably balanced and "a larger portion of our necessary revenues collected from the incomes and inheritances of those deriving the most benefit and protection from the Government."
The Committee recommended an estate tax rather than an inheritance tax because many states already imposed inheritance taxes. It felt that the estate tax helped to form a well-balanced system of inheritance taxation between the Federal Government and the various states and that an estate tax could be readily administered with less conflict than a tax based upon inherited shares.
Various changes in the estate tax provisions of law, as well as their repeal, have been proposed over the years, but the principle has been retained. Our office has available an excerpt from the Ways and Means Committee's report on the Revenue Act of 1935. The report reproduces a June 19, 1935, message from President Roosevelt to Congress advocating an inheritance tax, in addition to the estate tax. Although the inheritance tax proposal was not adopted, the message provides information on why the taxation of individuals' estates was considered appropriate.
From the National Conference of State Legislatures:
Since 1826, death taxes traditionally had been an area of state jurisdiction. Federal death taxes were levied intermittently from 1797 through 1915, but only to serve as a supplementary revenue source during wartime. In 1916, however, the federal government imposed a permanent estate tax. A controversy arose as the states felt that the federal government was infringing upon one of their traditional tax bases. The controversy heightened in the 1920s when state government finances became stressed. As the opposition increased, the federal government was forced to act.
In 1924, Congress offered a compromise. The federal estate tax rates were increased, but Congress provided for a credit of up to 25 percent against the federal tax for death taxes paid to the states. Under the Federal Estate Tax Act of 1926, the maximum credit increased from 25 percent to 80 percent. Today this credit is commonly referred to as a "pick-up" tax. As discussed earlier, the total tax liability for the beneficiaries does not increase and all states currently impose this tax up to the allowable federal credit.
The U.S. Tax Reform Act (TRA) of 1976 and The Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981 brought about major changes in the administration of the pick-up tax. The end result was fewer estates being subject to the tax and sharply reduced taxes for those that were. This, in turn, resulted in less state revenue collected because state pick-up taxes are levied as a specified percentage of the federal estate tax. Most recently, The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 changed the federal estate tax law. The current $600,000 estate tax exemption will increase gradually to $1 million by the year 2006, again resulting in less state revenue collected under the pick-up tax.
I found this link: http://www.boygenius.com/cfb/newsletters/1997-Q2.h tml. It says that the price in NYC is $.76 per unit. It looks like my guess may have been off base. Apparently this particular medication is somewhat difficult to produce.
At a company I used to work at, it was very interesting to see how the local press reported on us. Basically we were ignored except when we released our quarterly earnings announcement; then the local papers would just reprint our press release practically verbatim with no comment or discussion other than "Company X made y dollars last quarter". It was very disappointing. Basically I have stopped consuming mainstream news outlets such as national evening news, local tv news and newspapers. They are all just pointless blather. I use WWW resources to keep myself informed.
An invented language that never got off the ground; I can't remember who the guy was that invented this back in the seventies but the developers could have gotten this language with samples of it spoken for free I am sure.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you wanted to get people to adopt an invented language a great way to do it would be to build a MMORPG(gotta love the acronym) that responds to voice control rather than mouse and keyboard. If enough people got hooked a la EQ or FFXI you'd have a population base.
Just out of curiosity, do you know what it costs the manufacturer to actually produce this stuff? I am imagining maybe $100 per cc at most. As you say, the pricing is obscene. The manufacturer probably would cover their research costs after 5 years at the most.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would Intel want to put Itanium in desktop/laptop machines? They have Pentium M/Centrino which has done well in laptops and in a quote from PCWorld in January 2005 "Notebook PCs based on the most powerful version of Intel's Centrino mobile technology now perform just as well as desktop PCs with Intel's fastest Pentium 4 processors, according to an Intel executive."
I can see Intel letting Apple put Pentium M's in Apple boxes but Apple would get crushed by Dell in terms of assembly efficiency and thus cost, and why would you pay a premium for what amounts to a freeware Unix box?
If this were a hoax, Apple would have denied this report rather than simply refused to comment. Intel's incentive to do this is obvious; they get to squash this gnat that has been flying around their heads for a few years. Since AMD now has significant market share, Intel can do this without worrying about antitrust problems with the government.The article pointed out that Apple's recent market share was 1.8%. Intel doesn't give a rip about that 1.8% in terms of their overall strategy; they're worrying about AMD.
I think Apple's incentive to do this is to give themselves a way to bow out of the desktop and server market in a gradual way without taking an instant hit to their revenues. Apple believers will keep buying Apple systems for a while until they realize that they'd be better off to buy a white box and install a Linux distro that they can skin to have the Apple GUI look and feel. why pay a premium for an OS that is just a freeware Unix bolted onto middleware that let the freeware run on a PPC chip?
Microsoft will now kill all of it's wares that were targeted to Apple OS.
I could see Microsoft Longhorn running on AMD crushing Apple OS running on Intel.
I did a double take when I saw the title of this post. I thought it said "Marijuana extinction caused by...". Must have been a Freudian thing:)
This movie caught your point dead on; when Tim and Sigourney have to go through the stamper thing
she complains about the stamper being put in the ship just to create a pointless problem; this scene was priceless.
Really though, pointless activity isn't limited to games. Most movies these days have gratuitous chases, gore, swearing, and sex that do nothing for the plot but just titillate/shock the viewer.
Anyone who questions whether an artist deserves proceeds from paying purchasers of the artist's work clearly lacks a brain or a moral compass.
It would be simple to have functionality that interrupts the music to notify you of an incoming phone call...
MMORPARG....massively multiplayer online roleplaying alternate reality game. Try saying that ten times fast.
If KChart, Gnumeric, or Open Office can't do bar graphs, then you might as well flush them down the toilet. These must be some mighty fancy bar graphs...
I can see it now:
Shuttle commander: We're not going to make orbit! Toss something overboard!
Copilot: Lets see, hmmm, let's toss those ASU satellites. Since they're nano-satellites I'll just send'em out our Lockheed Martin Super-duper Space Toilet. Don't want to bother with airlock.
"Flushing sound"
I went to U of A anyway. Go Wildcats!!!
If it is, how about "Butt head Astronomer"?
In my mind one of the main reasons that the NYT is one of the most reputable papers is that a lot of the content is well written and solidly researched original content that addresses a variety of issues. Most local papers these days seem to do nothing more than put together a few self produced fluff pieces combined with a bunch of wire stories borrowed from the AP, or thinly disguised press releases.
If you are doing research on US politics or foreign affairs the NYT is a solid resource. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of most other papers in the US.
Great comments, I agree with everything you say here. I have enjoyed many episodes of all of the different series. The main problem I had with ST is the limitations placed on the producers by Roddenberry's will and the framework of the storyline. Let's face it, every TV series reaches a point where it is creatively exhausted. Trek can really be considered one of the most successful series ever if you take all of the series and consider them as one.
Of course, ST might have lasted longer if they had fired Berman and Braga. Those guys have obviously been phoning it in for a while.
I think that a real opportunity was missed when the powers that be didn't let Frakes do more directing. The movie that he was in charge of was extremely well done. Must have been a power struggle with the B+B buttheads...
1. A robot must be operated with exclusively MS code.
2. A robot must obey orders given by permission of Bill Gates and his minions and no one else.
3. A robot must arrest any person or machine that attempts to force it to break the first or second law.
Are there any games out there that have concepts similar to Sim City or the Sims that compete? I like the Sim products but don't think they are perfect. It seems like there could be a market opportunity there. For example, using a hexagonal grid instead of squares might make for some interesting differences in game play.
How about hooking up a "Quake" type engine with a Sim type mapping engine so you could zoom in and enter buildings and interact with characters? Just thinking out loud...
With this tracking technology, now someone could go out and pick this stuff up. Greenpeace could use their Zodiacs for something besides chasing whalers. Seriously, this could lead to a potentially profitable salvage operation.
I think that this type of research would be better funded through the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation or DARPA. Certainly quantum wire would be useful in construction of spacecraft, but I think NASA should be focused more on space exploration. In other words, building spacecraft with existing technologies or tech that is likely to be feasible in the near term.
Here is the text of an old essay about GL that appeared on Salon a while back; I found it insightful. Helps to have a little perspective on why a guy does what he does:
By Jim Paul
May 18, 1999 | In August 1976, George Lucas was exhausted and desperate. He had been in London, directing the actors in "Star Wars," a film he had every reason to believe would fail. The usual turmoil and sheer labor of the set had been made worse by the lordly British studio unions, who quit promptly at 5:30 for tea, and by the money people back in Burbank, Calif., who in the end pulled the fiscal plug on the filming. At the end of 16 weeks of shooting, Fox gave Lucas three days to finish two weeks of work, a cost-saving move that appears at least ironic now that "Star Wars" and its succeeding films have gone on to gross billions. At the time Lucas had to hire triple crews and divide the stage into three sets, on each of which he directed the action for the final three days. "I cared about every single detail," he recalled (including the duct-taping of Princess Leia's breasts -- "No jiggling in the Empire," noted Carrie Fisher). By the end of shooting Lucas was pale, ill, ready to drop.
At that point he flew from London to Los Angeles, where Lucasfilm was headquartered in those days, and found that his special effects unit, having spent more than $1 million of its $2 million budget, had completed only three shots. Lucas was outraged. He made arrangements to assume control of the unit, then flew home to San Francisco, where he began having chest pains. He was taken to Marin General Hospital, diagnosed with exhaustion and held overnight. The next morning he took a vow. "That's when I really confirmed to myself that I was going to change," he told biographer Dale Pollock. "I wasn't going to make more films, I wasn't going to direct anymore. I was going to get my life a bit more under control."
George Lucas has more or less stuck to his vow. He has made more films, but at a distance, as a producer. The release of "The Phantom Menace" will show us George Lucas the director for the first time since the original "Star Wars." Indeed, Lucas also seems to have gotten his life "a bit more under control." In interviews of late he has described the last 20 years as being taken up with parenting his children and recovering from his divorce. But this puts a homey gloss on an astoundingly successful and labor-intensive enterprise.
Much that eluded him in the beginning is now within Lucas' grasp. He has amassed and consolidated his fortune (in the last 10 years his net worth has gone from about $25 million to somewhere near $2 billion) and made solid investments, so that now he can finance his films entirely. Never again will someone give George Lucas three days to do what should take two weeks.
George Lucas' gifts are difficult to categorize in conventional film-industry terms; he has defied Hollywood's expectations all along. In his early days as a rebel filmmaker, he made a student film called "1:42:08: A Man and His Car," which mostly consisted of a yellow race car doing laps at speed. Escape from and defiance of authority have always been a central theme for Lucas, both in his films and in his career as a whole. In his first feature, "THX-1138," the hero flees an oppressive, sexless, bureaucratic society, where robotic police give up the chase only when they exceed their budget for the operation. In perhaps his farthest-out moment, in 1969, Lucas was hired by David Maysles to shoot the Rolling Stones in concert at Altamont. (Pollock reports that Lucas "can't remember" whether he filmed a young black man, Meredith Hunter, being stabbed to death by Hell's Angels, as Mick Jagger sang "Under my Thumb.") In any case, Lucas continued to challenge the industry through the 1970s and '80s, when it represented the Evil Empire, and does so even more profoundly now, as lord of the manor on Skywalker Ranch in Northern California's Marin County.
Though he has said of directing "The Phantom Menace" that it was "much m
I saw the M&M commercial the other night introducing dark chocolate ones: Darth Vader chokes the yellow one into submission. This has to be up there in the top marketing events.
Forbes has him at #194 on their list of world's richest people with $3 billion. I think that is a lowball estimate.
Don't forget this one: I have fond memories. Here's the editorial review from Amazon.com:
Here's how critic Roger Ebert described the unique and lasting value of George Lucas's 1973 box-office hit, American Graffiti: "[It's] not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie's success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant." The time to which Ebert and the film refers is the summer of 1962, and American Graffiti captures the look, feel, and sound of that era by chronicling one memorable night in the lives of several young Californians on the cusp of adulthood. (In essence, Lucas was making a semiautobiographical tribute to his own days as a hot-rod cruiser, and the film's phenomenal success paved the way for Star Wars.) The action is propelled by the music of Wolfman Jack's rock & roll radio show--a soundtrack of pop hits that would become as popular as the film itself. As Lucas develops several character subplots, American Graffiti becomes a flawless time capsule of meticulously re-created memory, as authentic as a documentary and vividly realized through innovative use of cinematography and sound. The once-in-a-lifetime ensemble cast members inhabit their roles so fully that they don't seem like actors at all, comprising a who's who of performers--some of whom went on to stellar careers--including Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, and Paul Le Mat. A true American classic, the film ranks No. 77 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time greatest American movies. --Jeff Shannon
I totally agree with this review.
Obviously, that is why some of them wanted to establish an estate or inheritance tax. Here is some info from responsiblewealth.org:
.. History informs us that the son of Solomon was a fool." "To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second . . . is an insult and an imposition on posterity."
Thomas Paine
"God gave the Earth as an inheritance for all God's children."
Thomas Paine sparked the first bestseller in American history - a fiery pamphlet entitled, Common Sense (1776), which sold over 120,000 copies in its first few months of publication and successfully encouraged a declaration of independence from England. The heart of Paine's famous pamphlet contains a withering criticism of hereditary government. This critique extends through all his works. "All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny." "Hereditary succession . . . is in its nature an absurdity, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary . .
Later in life, Paine extended this critique of inherited political power to a critique of inherited economic power. It is important to remember that Paine distrusted governments, disliked taxes, and heartily approved of late night tea parties in Boston Harbor! He opens Common Sense with an attack not only on monarchy, but also on government itself. "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil."
Modern libertarians tend to adopt Paine as their patron saint, stressing his description of government as evil while forgetting the modifier, "necessary." Paine, unlike modern libertarians, never viewed "the government" and "the people" as mortal enemies. As he says, "Government and the people do not in America constitute distinct bodies." His love of liberty was tempered by a commitment to the common good. Ironically for a revolutionary, he wrote an entire pamphlet, The Necessity of Taxation (1782), arguing that taxation is the "criterion of public spirit."
In two works, The Rights of Man (1791) and Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine argues for the adoption of an inheritance tax in England to balance out the unfair distribution of "landed property." For Paine it is common sense that God gave "the Earth as an inheritance" to all of God's children. Therefore, he proposed an inheritance tax to create a national fund that (1) would give the sum of 15 pounds sterling to everyone turning 21 years old as a compensation for the loss of their "natural inheritance," and (2) would give a sum of 10 pounds a year to every person over the age of 50 as an early version of Social Security.
Paine viewed democracy as a sensible middle ground between aristocracy and socialism. He was not an enemy of private property (far from it), but a fierce critic of inherited privilege. In the Rights of Man he justifies the inheritance tax as being a derivative of the existing luxury tax. As he says, "an overgrown estate is a luxury at all times, and as such is the proper object of taxation."
At least one founding father was in favor of an inheritance tax.
From the US Treasury website:
In 1916 Congress for the first time levied a tax upon the transfer of a decedent's net estate. The Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives explained that a new type of tax was needed, because the "consumption taxes" in effect at that time bore most heavily upon those least able to pay them. The Committee further explained that the revenue system should be more evenly and equitably balanced and "a larger portion of our necessary revenues collected from the incomes and inheritances of those deriving the most benefit and protection from the Government."
The Committee recommended an estate tax rather than an inheritance tax because many states already imposed inheritance taxes. It felt that the estate tax helped to form a well-balanced system of inheritance taxation between the Federal Government and the various states and that an estate tax could be readily administered with less conflict than a tax based upon inherited shares.
Various changes in the estate tax provisions of law, as well as their repeal, have been proposed over the years, but the principle has been retained. Our office has available an excerpt from the Ways and Means Committee's report on the Revenue Act of 1935. The report reproduces a June 19, 1935, message from President Roosevelt to Congress advocating an inheritance tax, in addition to the estate tax. Although the inheritance tax proposal was not adopted, the message provides information on why the taxation of individuals' estates was considered appropriate.
From the National Conference of State Legislatures:
Since 1826, death taxes traditionally had been an area of state jurisdiction. Federal death taxes were levied intermittently from 1797 through 1915, but only to serve as a supplementary revenue source during wartime. In 1916, however, the federal government imposed a permanent estate tax. A controversy arose as the states felt that the federal government was infringing upon one of their traditional tax bases. The controversy heightened in the 1920s when state government finances became stressed. As the opposition increased, the federal government was forced to act.
In 1924, Congress offered a compromise. The federal estate tax rates were increased, but Congress provided for a credit of up to 25 percent against the federal tax for death taxes paid to the states. Under the Federal Estate Tax Act of 1926, the maximum credit increased from 25 percent to 80 percent. Today this credit is commonly referred to as a "pick-up" tax. As discussed earlier, the total tax liability for the beneficiaries does not increase and all states currently impose this tax up to the allowable federal credit.
The U.S. Tax Reform Act (TRA) of 1976 and The Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981 brought about major changes in the administration of the pick-up tax. The end result was fewer estates being subject to the tax and sharply reduced taxes for those that were. This, in turn, resulted in less state revenue collected because state pick-up taxes are levied as a specified percentage of the federal estate tax. Most recently, The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 changed the federal estate tax law. The current $600,000 estate tax exemption will increase gradually to $1 million by the year 2006, again resulting in less state revenue collected under the pick-up tax.
I found this link: http://www.boygenius.com/cfb/newsletters/1997-Q2.h tml. It says that the price in NYC is $.76 per unit. It looks like my guess may have been off base. Apparently this particular medication is somewhat difficult to produce.
At a company I used to work at, it was very interesting to see how the local press reported on us. Basically we were ignored except when we released our quarterly earnings announcement; then the local papers would just reprint our press release practically verbatim with no comment or discussion other than "Company X made y dollars last quarter". It was very disappointing. Basically I have stopped consuming mainstream news outlets such as national evening news, local tv news and newspapers. They are all just pointless blather. I use WWW resources to keep myself informed.
An invented language that never got off the ground; I can't remember who the guy was that invented this back in the seventies but the developers could have gotten this language with samples of it spoken for free I am sure.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you wanted to get people to adopt an invented language a great way to do it would be to build a MMORPG(gotta love the acronym) that responds to voice control rather than mouse and keyboard. If enough people got hooked a la EQ or FFXI you'd have a population base.
Just out of curiosity, do you know what it costs the manufacturer to actually produce this stuff? I am imagining maybe $100 per cc at most. As you say, the pricing is obscene. The manufacturer probably would cover their research costs after 5 years at the most.