Pay for and run your own web site with an audience, traffic, and exposure (generally, and legally) like this, and see what you think about that subject. If nothing else, just being able to junk the spam is essential. That you think of this as censorship shows that you have no idea what the word means (and what the practice of actual censorship is). This isn't a publicly funded service, crap posts aren't deleted by the government, and dealing with what's posted here is no more censorship than is choosing which letters to the editor to include at the NYT web site.
You're confusing the 20,000% increase in the load on their network with being a 20,000% increase in their revenue. It's not even close to anything like that, which is exactly why they're running out of network to serve that enormous demand.
Are you referring to things like the GM bailout? Investors lost pretty much everything, the government got a big chunk of the company, and the labor unions were given the rest as a huge political reward for supporting the administration doing the giving. Yeah, that's quite corrupt. But the reason GM needed bailing out in the first place wasn't the investors, it was the unions.
but it's better to experiment and make mistakes on one of those, than, say, Greece.
True that working small is a good way to test. But the Greece analogy isn't very good. That wasn't about the form/format of money or the exchange thereof. That was about spending than you can afford and don't have the will to produce... which is just as bad when you're on a barter system as when you're on a currency system. Entitlement mentality killed the Greek economy, not the ebb and flow around currency mechanisms.
Right, because the government can only do one thing at a time.
Did you note that the president's new budget only adds $17,000 to your personal share of the national debt this year because of the number of things that it's setting out to do simultaneously? Regardless, which government policy would you change, in terms of how the government treats people based on skin color, since you bring that up? What is your worry in that area... that things like government contracts and government backing of things like student loans and home loans take skin color into account, and favor some over others? That is a worry. Regardless, please be specific.
What's your point? That it's hard and unlikely? It wasn't too hard or unlikely for it to actually work and kill people, so I'm not sure where you're going with that.
a fake problem based off what was essentially a hoax
How does your lying about the history and reality of binary explosives help whatever point you're trying to make? And, do you have any additional bits of ironic BS you can trot out that will bring back to life the people killed, by crazy jihaddists, using exactly the "fake" techniques you're mentioning? Please, do tell.
What liquid agent is a terrorist going to use to blow up a plane?
Are you really that uninformed, after years of coverage of binary liquid explosives, demonstrations of their effectiveness when used correctly, and actual use of them by actual terrorists who actually killed people? You can't possibly be. So, what's your real point?
It's not exactly mysterious. Here. If you want more details on the specific timing of when they interceded, what language they used, etc., it's all a few searches away on Google itself.
Note that I have no problem with them editing their content however they wish. I'm just pointing out that they have people/politics they publicly support, and that which they don't - and it plays out in how search results are handled by them, and which political figures they choose to leave to the their search bots and organic ratings, and which get handled with editorial priorities they set internally, for political reasons.
Simply ignoring their ads (via adblock, or the old fashion method of just ignoring it) doesn't make it stealing.
Did I say that ignoring their ads was stealing? I'm referring to the submitter's specious connection between paying your ISP for connectivty, and that somehow (in lieu of ads to generate the revenue needed to keep many sites operating) being what's needed to make web sites work. It's absurd on the face of it.
No, that's the only part that's worth talking about. Actors prepping for movies, and thousands of soldiers go through the "torture" part on purpose. That hand-wringing is best saved over people who are actual victims of it, not simply having Been Inconvenienced. So, yes, I'm more interested in the "for no reason" part, because that implies someone speaking pure BS. Which is easy to note, because of course they haven't responded.
Please go shoot yourself.
Well, at least we can tell you're a credible, thoughtful person. Oh, wait, you're not. You're a whiny ranter with nothing of substance to contribute, and only juvenile ad hominem claptrap with which to fill the white space.
It went into standard of living. A family of fifty years ago would have considered today's medicine, communications technology, textiles, entertainment, and the instant availability of unthinkable amounts of information to be the purest fantasy. Lower income homes with multiple televisions? Cars with airbags? Mobile phones that help you find your teenage kid on a Saturday night? Forums like this, used by people all over the globe, in real time? Living so long that cancer eventually gets you, instead of a simple gut infection? Laser eye surgery?
If people today kept the same expectations for quality of day-to-day life, and harnessed all of that technology and productivity to save for retirement, hire better teachers, etc., it would be a different world. But people are lazy and like their toys. And only half of the people in the country are even asked to pay income taxes, despite the fact that lower income people today live like kings compared to lower income people 50 years ago. So, it's not exactly a mystery what happened over the last 50 years. Combine that with the fact that the rest of the world is actually starting to catch up and compete, and you've got some price pressure, too. Oh, that and crushing debt from over-spending personally and governmentally.
I see. The internet was better when it was in a little bubble, disconnected from the realities of its costs. I'm guessing you'd prefer The Guild Of Leech-Masters over instantly available "corporate" anti-biotics, too. Yeah, those were the good old days, when only the priesthood got to use the cool tools. Computers were better, too, when normal people couldn't possibly use them to increase their own productivity, or run a business without needing armies of file clerks. Only academics should have computers, dammit! In fact, only people with tenure, right?
It's not about what Vonnegut would or wouldn't like. I'm responding to the general "it's not fair that some people's lives are better than others" atmospherics that have people just as cranky about dumbing down education opportunities for kids (to suit the bottom of the barrel) as they are about wanting to tear down people who run businesses or just plain earn a dollar more an hour than they do. There is a loud contingent that sees "fair" as being "nobody should get or have something that somebody else doesn't have - no matter how they come by it." As someone that works 80-90 hours a week, that's a sore subject for me.
For example: surely you recall the ugly episode involving a monkeyed-up photo of his wife? Google not only de-listed the blog that was sporting the anti-Obama junk, but was also running an apologetic message in their image search area (but only when that exact search was done), telling people that sometimes offensive stuff can come back with certain searches, and that they - Google - were sorry for that, etc.
They did NOT just let the offensive stuff roll to the top and stay there, they actively acted to change the search results (and apologize, in so many words, for existing results) in the Obamas' particular case. They do not act to do the same thing with other politicians, and certainly didn't in the case of Obama's predecessor (just in case you think they're doing it only because of the office of the president, regardless of who that is).
Google's special treatment in this case was well documented, and widely commented upon. I'm surprised you don't remember it.
Actually, if all the poor would simply kill the rich and redistribute their wealth, everybody would be better off except 5% of the population.
I wonder how the people in the 10%-6% slot will feel about your plan, when the 5%-1% folks are dead, and they've just been promoted to the new top 5%. Obviously the only solution is to tax everyone as needed until everyone lives at exactly the same level of prosperity. Also, since some people will be at a disadvantage for having been born without working arms and legs, or with severely limited cognitive function, it will only be reasonable to surgically render everyone as invalids, and lobotomize them to make it all fair. Wow, someone should write a cautionary short story about that scenario or something.
The net was here and functioning perfectly with lots of people... The net was meant to be a collaborative medium
Let me guess - you've got someone else in your organization that actually pays the bandwidth bills, right? Do you have any idea what it costs to keep a highy visible web site (with millions of visitors looking at large binaries) on the air?
But then, I get the feeling you'd really prefer to keep the peasants off the internet. And shut down those pesky businesses that use it to transact billions of dollars worth of economic activity every day. You know - the people who foot the bill for making the whole thing so widely available. Silly me, I keep forgetting you don't want it to be widely available. Just hooked up between certain CS labs on certain campuses, and connected as appropriate to certain moms' basements. You know, for strictly collaborative activities. Let me guess - all paid for with federal grants, funded by the peasants, right?
If we just stacked up, like cordwood , everyone who strings together things like this...
a blessing in disguise for people caught between a rock and a hard place
...and burned them, the poor could be warmer, and the world would be instantly improved. I mean, not as much as if we were to make Soylent Green out of everybody who can't mange to distinguish between "loose" and "lose" - but, baby steps.
and points out that users pay good money to ISPs for those 'free' sites
Could he possibly have pointed out anything less informed, causality-related, and meaningful in the context of the topic at hand? Unless he's suggesting the introduction of some insanely complex madness that involves your local ISP somehow distributing part of their operational revenue to the owners of web sites that their clients visit, what the hell is he talking about? I thought the "I pay for internet access, so anything I can find a way to grab online for free is really paid for" meme was limited to 12 year olds using Napster for the first time back in the days when people could almost play that dumb and pretend to mean it.
income past a certain point will be taxed at a higher rate
That means that your income is taxed at a higher rate. When you go past the threshold, the number of cents taxed per dollar of all of your income will be higher when you sit down to file your taxes. Go ahead, fire up a copy of TurboTax, and run some numbers. Watch what happens. When you slip into the next bracket, your tax rate goes up, and the bottom line is that more pennies per dollar for all of your income are now taxed.
And just in case you're curious why people mention that jumping tax brackets can lower your net income, it's because it's actually true. But it usually involves things like being married, and living in place that uses a convoluted derivative of your federal tax scenario to set your state and local taxes. I live in Maryland. I actually did jump brackets once, in the middle of a year, and by the time the dust settled, a not unpleasant little salary increase resulted in me taking home about $50 less every week. That was pretty annoying. I declined the raise, because only if it were about half again the size offered would I have avoided losing net money every month. But that doesn't usually happen on federal taxes alone - it takes your county and state's income taxes to compound the situation and enter at different thresholds to make it work out that way.
I was unlucky because of exactly where the numbers were... but luck really shouldn't have anything to do with it. Having an employer offer you more money shouldn't leave you poorer. A tax code that works in that way is insane... but that's exactly how it shakes out in some places. Why you would derisively refer to people that unlucky with a sniffing "those people" when you're the one who has his numbers and his entire thinking on the subject incorrect is a bit mysterious. It's a defense mechanism, I suppose?
Slashdot Mirror
Sad
Well, something is. Just not what you think.
You're confusing the 20,000% increase in the load on their network with being a 20,000% increase in their revenue. It's not even close to anything like that, which is exactly why they're running out of network to serve that enormous demand.
Are you referring to things like the GM bailout? Investors lost pretty much everything, the government got a big chunk of the company, and the labor unions were given the rest as a huge political reward for supporting the administration doing the giving. Yeah, that's quite corrupt. But the reason GM needed bailing out in the first place wasn't the investors, it was the unions.
but it's better to experiment and make mistakes on one of those, than, say, Greece.
True that working small is a good way to test. But the Greece analogy isn't very good. That wasn't about the form/format of money or the exchange thereof. That was about spending than you can afford and don't have the will to produce ... which is just as bad when you're on a barter system as when you're on a currency system. Entitlement mentality killed the Greek economy, not the ebb and flow around currency mechanisms.
Right, because the government can only do one thing at a time.
... that things like government contracts and government backing of things like student loans and home loans take skin color into account, and favor some over others? That is a worry. Regardless, please be specific.
Did you note that the president's new budget only adds $17,000 to your personal share of the national debt this year because of the number of things that it's setting out to do simultaneously? Regardless, which government policy would you change, in terms of how the government treats people based on skin color, since you bring that up? What is your worry in that area
What's your point? That it's hard and unlikely? It wasn't too hard or unlikely for it to actually work and kill people, so I'm not sure where you're going with that.
a fake problem based off what was essentially a hoax
How does your lying about the history and reality of binary explosives help whatever point you're trying to make? And, do you have any additional bits of ironic BS you can trot out that will bring back to life the people killed, by crazy jihaddists, using exactly the "fake" techniques you're mentioning? Please, do tell.
What liquid agent is a terrorist going to use to blow up a plane?
Are you really that uninformed, after years of coverage of binary liquid explosives, demonstrations of their effectiveness when used correctly, and actual use of them by actual terrorists who actually killed people? You can't possibly be. So, what's your real point?
It's not exactly mysterious. Here . If you want more details on the specific timing of when they interceded, what language they used, etc., it's all a few searches away on Google itself.
Note that I have no problem with them editing their content however they wish. I'm just pointing out that they have people/politics they publicly support, and that which they don't - and it plays out in how search results are handled by them, and which political figures they choose to leave to the their search bots and organic ratings, and which get handled with editorial priorities they set internally, for political reasons.
Simply ignoring their ads (via adblock, or the old fashion method of just ignoring it) doesn't make it stealing.
Did I say that ignoring their ads was stealing? I'm referring to the submitter's specious connection between paying your ISP for connectivty, and that somehow (in lieu of ads to generate the revenue needed to keep many sites operating) being what's needed to make web sites work. It's absurd on the face of it.
That's the part you think is important?
No, that's the only part that's worth talking about. Actors prepping for movies, and thousands of soldiers go through the "torture" part on purpose. That hand-wringing is best saved over people who are actual victims of it, not simply having Been Inconvenienced. So, yes, I'm more interested in the "for no reason" part, because that implies someone speaking pure BS. Which is easy to note, because of course they haven't responded.
Please go shoot yourself.
Well, at least we can tell you're a credible, thoughtful person. Oh, wait, you're not. You're a whiny ranter with nothing of substance to contribute, and only juvenile ad hominem claptrap with which to fill the white space.
Thanks for confirming the stereotype. Keep up the good work.
Where did all this extra production go?
It went into standard of living. A family of fifty years ago would have considered today's medicine, communications technology, textiles, entertainment, and the instant availability of unthinkable amounts of information to be the purest fantasy. Lower income homes with multiple televisions? Cars with airbags? Mobile phones that help you find your teenage kid on a Saturday night? Forums like this, used by people all over the globe, in real time? Living so long that cancer eventually gets you, instead of a simple gut infection? Laser eye surgery?
If people today kept the same expectations for quality of day-to-day life, and harnessed all of that technology and productivity to save for retirement, hire better teachers, etc., it would be a different world. But people are lazy and like their toys. And only half of the people in the country are even asked to pay income taxes, despite the fact that lower income people today live like kings compared to lower income people 50 years ago. So, it's not exactly a mystery what happened over the last 50 years. Combine that with the fact that the rest of the world is actually starting to catch up and compete, and you've got some price pressure, too. Oh, that and crushing debt from over-spending personally and governmentally.
I see. The internet was better when it was in a little bubble, disconnected from the realities of its costs. I'm guessing you'd prefer The Guild Of Leech-Masters over instantly available "corporate" anti-biotics, too. Yeah, those were the good old days, when only the priesthood got to use the cool tools. Computers were better, too, when normal people couldn't possibly use them to increase their own productivity, or run a business without needing armies of file clerks. Only academics should have computers, dammit! In fact, only people with tenure, right?
It's not about what Vonnegut would or wouldn't like. I'm responding to the general "it's not fair that some people's lives are better than others" atmospherics that have people just as cranky about dumbing down education opportunities for kids (to suit the bottom of the barrel) as they are about wanting to tear down people who run businesses or just plain earn a dollar more an hour than they do. There is a loud contingent that sees "fair" as being "nobody should get or have something that somebody else doesn't have - no matter how they come by it." As someone that works 80-90 hours a week, that's a sore subject for me.
For example: surely you recall the ugly episode involving a monkeyed-up photo of his wife? Google not only de-listed the blog that was sporting the anti-Obama junk, but was also running an apologetic message in their image search area (but only when that exact search was done), telling people that sometimes offensive stuff can come back with certain searches, and that they - Google - were sorry for that, etc.
They did NOT just let the offensive stuff roll to the top and stay there, they actively acted to change the search results (and apologize, in so many words, for existing results) in the Obamas' particular case. They do not act to do the same thing with other politicians, and certainly didn't in the case of Obama's predecessor (just in case you think they're doing it only because of the office of the president, regardless of who that is).
Google's special treatment in this case was well documented, and widely commented upon. I'm surprised you don't remember it.
Never actually run a business, have you?
Actually, if all the poor would simply kill the rich and redistribute their wealth, everybody would be better off except 5% of the population.
I wonder how the people in the 10%-6% slot will feel about your plan, when the 5%-1% folks are dead, and they've just been promoted to the new top 5%. Obviously the only solution is to tax everyone as needed until everyone lives at exactly the same level of prosperity. Also, since some people will be at a disadvantage for having been born without working arms and legs, or with severely limited cognitive function, it will only be reasonable to surgically render everyone as invalids, and lobotomize them to make it all fair. Wow, someone should write a cautionary short story about that scenario or something.
The net was here and functioning perfectly with lots of people ... The net was meant to be a collaborative medium
Let me guess - you've got someone else in your organization that actually pays the bandwidth bills, right? Do you have any idea what it costs to keep a highy visible web site (with millions of visitors looking at large binaries) on the air?
But then, I get the feeling you'd really prefer to keep the peasants off the internet. And shut down those pesky businesses that use it to transact billions of dollars worth of economic activity every day. You know - the people who foot the bill for making the whole thing so widely available. Silly me, I keep forgetting you don't want it to be widely available. Just hooked up between certain CS labs on certain campuses, and connected as appropriate to certain moms' basements. You know, for strictly collaborative activities. Let me guess - all paid for with federal grants, funded by the peasants, right?
Wow, what a spectacular case of poor reading comprehension.
a blessing in disguise for people caught between a rock and a hard place
and points out that users pay good money to ISPs for those 'free' sites
Could he possibly have pointed out anything less informed, causality-related, and meaningful in the context of the topic at hand? Unless he's suggesting the introduction of some insanely complex madness that involves your local ISP somehow distributing part of their operational revenue to the owners of web sites that their clients visit, what the hell is he talking about? I thought the "I pay for internet access, so anything I can find a way to grab online for free is really paid for" meme was limited to 12 year olds using Napster for the first time back in the days when people could almost play that dumb and pretend to mean it.
income past a certain point will be taxed at a higher rate
That means that your income is taxed at a higher rate. When you go past the threshold, the number of cents taxed per dollar of all of your income will be higher when you sit down to file your taxes. Go ahead, fire up a copy of TurboTax, and run some numbers. Watch what happens. When you slip into the next bracket, your tax rate goes up, and the bottom line is that more pennies per dollar for all of your income are now taxed.
And just in case you're curious why people mention that jumping tax brackets can lower your net income, it's because it's actually true. But it usually involves things like being married, and living in place that uses a convoluted derivative of your federal tax scenario to set your state and local taxes. I live in Maryland. I actually did jump brackets once, in the middle of a year, and by the time the dust settled, a not unpleasant little salary increase resulted in me taking home about $50 less every week. That was pretty annoying. I declined the raise, because only if it were about half again the size offered would I have avoided losing net money every month. But that doesn't usually happen on federal taxes alone - it takes your county and state's income taxes to compound the situation and enter at different thresholds to make it work out that way.
I was unlucky because of exactly where the numbers were... but luck really shouldn't have anything to do with it. Having an employer offer you more money shouldn't leave you poorer. A tax code that works in that way is insane... but that's exactly how it shakes out in some places. Why you would derisively refer to people that unlucky with a sniffing "those people" when you're the one who has his numbers and his entire thinking on the subject incorrect is a bit mysterious. It's a defense mechanism, I suppose?
Tolerance of bigotry is counterproductive ... the very real threat that Santorum poses.
Would that be the same threat that Barack Obama poses (since he, also, opposes gay marriage, and has said so many times).
Why should Santorum get special treatment?
Maybe for the same reason they gave Obama special treatment?