Molotov cocktails require knowledge and preparation
Molotov cocktails require: an empty bottle, some gasoline, a rag, and a match. Preparation: a couple of minutes. Knowledge: having watched TV once or twice. Having guns, with a fair supply of ammunition, and the apparent understanding how to use them effectively requires (in this society), a LOT more trouble and practice than torching a room full of people.
If your reference to the Middle East is to the roadside bombs then that is a case of different task, different tool. A roadside bomb is a device with which you can kill without putting yourself in danger, an AK47 is not.
My point is that even where you CAN easily get the same (well, worse) weapons than the VT guy used, many people still choose to strap on simple explosives laden with $10 of nails from the hardware store, and kill a couple dozen people all the time. Road side bombs are a special case... I'm talking about someone with a death wish, like the guy that did this mess in Virgina, and like the people who take out markets and restraurants in the middle east. An engineering student with as much deliberation as this guy exhibited, might actually have killed MORE people if he'd put his mind to do and didn't have his head full of cinematic, glamorous shooting spree imagery.
does a lot less damage when armed with a toothpick
Except, we see examples in the middle east, every day (where you can buy fully automatic AK47s like hot dogs on the street corner) where some disillusioned wack job kills just as many people using materials that half-decent engineering student at Va. Tech would also be able to put together. Hell, you could open the one door to your average classroom, throw three $1.00 molotov cocktails in, chain the door, walk down the hall and do it one or two more times, and ALSO kill and horribly wound dozens or people. None of this happens without the person doing it.
There's being careful, and there's being ridiculously obsessed over every little thing that could possibly go wrong
Let's say you're in the warehousing and trucking industry, and your facility it served by three major highways, and some small back roads. Do you think it might be smart to think through how you'd handle your daily (and only) source of revenue on the off chance that there was a major disruption to all but the back roads? Or, say you're a highly competitive (read, low-margin) dot-com business. No internet, no business. Do you think you might want to think through what you'd do if the only thing that allows you to stay in business was suddenly broken? How is that ridiculously obsessed? Not doing it is completely negligent.
...for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop.
Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think allows sites like Slashdot to even exist? Do you really think that the vast majority of the decent content on the web would be available to (even after you've stripped it down to your liking) if the people that labor to produce what you're looking for had no ability to attract revenue from advertisers? Do you really want to have to subscribe to thousands of web sites? Do you want them to be subsidized with my tax dollars? Should the people who run them operate at a financial loss and only survive on un-announced, invisible patronage and sponsorship? Ads that are in fact more relevent to a given audience are far more effective for everyone involved - the publisher (whose work you seem to value, whether or not you value their ability to provide it to you for the long haul because you want to consume it without it being paid for), the advertisors (who are willing to write a check to the people producing the content you're looking for), and you: the person who seeks out and consumes the content made available by the fact that all of the people involved in creating and presenting it to you can actually eat and have a roof over their heads because advertising works, and subscription models only barely do.
Sites that are completely saturated with cheesy ads fade away for a reason - they're desparate to start with, and they alienate their audience as they're dying off and grasping at straws. Sites that know who their audience is, and which strike deals with advertisors that know they've got a more useful message to send to the right people, are able to show you LESS advertising. The ones that know that, and are smart about it, will thrive - and it does take the sort of technology being discussed here to allow the site to earn their keep without committing suicide through the use of context-less, over-placed, low-earning ads.
I'm sorry, you'll have to keep your list just a little more contemporary if you want some traction. "Terrorism" and "Global Warming" are so last-year's-Oscars. Try:
You have nothing to fear but fear itself. Now quit being a chickenshit.
Do you wear a seatbelt? I guess not, since you're not worried about the difference between being hit head on by a drunk driver while wearing one and being hit while not wearing one, right?
Why does wanting to prepare for a network outage equate, in your mind, to "fearing?" Preparation to avoid a disruptive pain in the ass isn't the same as sitting there quaking in fear of it.
I bet you think taking off your shoes and turning in your bottled water at the airport gate is making you safer.
Do you think you'd feel any different at all if you or someone you care about had been sitting next to the guy that was caught actually trying to set off real shoe bombs on an actual airplane? Are you of the "well, we lucked out on that one, caught him, and since they know we know that trick now, they would never try it again, and we can stop looking for it now" camp? How does your brain work on topics like that?
The folks who do stuff like that repeat their attacks. It's not guesswork, it's observable history. If you actually TELL them you're not going to check for stuff you KNOW they've done in the past, what exactly is you think is going to happen? They'll appreciate your honesty, and rethink their opinion of western civilization?
Just in the last year we've seen how a single earthquake in Taiwan can bring connectivity between Asia and the rest of the world nearly to a halt. Natural disasters like that are a sure thing and it makes much more sense to me to worry about that than about the latest episode of "24" coming true.
So, you don't even WANT to know what we might/should/could do if someone/group (unlike an earthquake in California) actually simultaneously destroyed or just plain hosed up some key fiber routes and datacenters in LA, San Fransisco, New York, Vegas, and Northern Virginia at the same time? It's not like it takes nukes to still really screw it up. The sort of truck bombs that did the Murrah federal building would be pretty effective against a lot of infrastructure points. And a day or three of very latent or completely absent routes in and out of those areas and the ones that depend on them would be fantastically painful to businesses large and small... and thus to all of us. You don't have to be a Russia-backed super-hacker '24'-class villain to do that sort of stuff. Mostly, you just have to be willing to do things just like have already happened overseas plenty of times. Trucks, fertalizer, diesel fuel... and being willing to crash your rented truck through or up to the front door of a few not-very-unknown buildings.
Never mind the loss of backbones... just half a dozen Level3 or Savvis datacenters would send serious shockwaves. Savvis has decent enough datacenter security when it comes to the walk-up, gun-toting sort of thing... but they're hardly truck-bomb proof.
Terrorism is "the worst," in this sense, because it can be a distributed attack. Not a quake in one city, or a hurrican that hits two... but far more surgical, with far wider implications, economically, at least for long enough to genuinely smack the country's cash flow around. That's the peril of just-in-time manufacturing, drop-shipping retailers, internet-based payroll processing, and so on. Just the civil unrest from the loss of pr0n, alone... think of it!
Anyway, point of the matter is that even though the top income earners pay the vast majority of income taxes, people who make less than $90,000 a year pay almost *ALL* of the social security taxes!
You're forgetting the entire HALF of the FICA bill, which is paid by their employers (frequently, those very "rich" people you're talking about). The other HALF of it.
Which is exactly my point. Letting people like Al Gore buy "offsets" of carbon emissions from other people so that he can use 20x the energy that the rest of do is not creating more green tech. It's letting a rich guy preach to us about what we should do while he doesn't do it.
Maybe for once your partisan republican ass should stop making blatant lies?
You're actually saying that, and then linking to an "analysis" that cites a fictional town with a flat tax rate as an example of why he's wrong?
Income, property, and other tax rates are NOT flat. They are largely "progressive," which translates to "punitive." Here are the numbers, released by the IRS, based on last year's taxes:
84.6% of all federal income taxes are paid by the top 25% of earners
96.7% of those taxes are paid by the top 50%
The top 1% pay over a third of those taxes.
And just to flesh out the picture: the lowest-earning fifth of the citizenry receive over $8.00 in government spending for every $1.00 in taxes paid. Middle income households receive $1.40 for every dollar paid, and the high end people receive $0.41 for every $1.00 they spend. Government spending aimed at the lowest-earning 60% exceeds that which is collected from them. It's simple redistribution, and the more you make, the more it tilts away from you. Your flat rate fantasy example is complete BS (but, you knew that).
wow. The war in iraq must be getting dicey if we are chasing after the income of less than a million people.
Why should that surprise or amuse you? All of the talk about how the "rich" should pay more taxes is talk about a lot less than 1 million people. And, um... why focus on DoD spending? What about people who buy their blood pressure medicine with money that was taxed from you, rather than just eating fewer cheeseburgers and giving up smoking (especially since the cigarettes cost more than the dose of statins anyway!)? Taxing income is taxing income. People who specifically look for a way to run a retail business that will, at least temporarily, get them around paying taxes are deliberately trying to get away with skipping something the rest of us aren't. Why would it make you "chuckle" to see the government trying to keep up with an obvious, and very huge, segment of the evolving economy? I just bought something from an eBay-centric retailer the other day, and the company had completed over 50,000 auctions. Would you rather that that person's income tax obligations were just pushed over onto someone else who just happens to be running their own shop in a more traditional format?
If you're just for lower taxes in general, then why aren't you arguing for completely universal tax enforcement so that your share (and mine, and everyone else who does the right thing) of taxes CAN be lower, as they then could and should be? Anyway, nice flamebait. I'm sure you had to go to a special school to perfect that really smooth disengenuous, ironic tone. Were you able to write that cost off your taxes?
There still has been no peer-reviewed studied refuting global warming; are all those scientists in on the plot too?
* sigh *
We're not TALKING about global warming. We're talking about the politicized body of actions that people on Gore's side of the political spectrum (or, really, compared to him... well, WELL left of him) seem completely prepared to endorse because of their assertions about the cause of climate change. The seemingly prevailing pop-culture sense that man is THE cause of a changing climate, and that largely shutting down western economies while allowing India and China to go full-on while very dirtily burning sulfrous oil from Hugo Chavez, Inc. and Iran is somehow going to be a good thing... well, that's the sort of stuff that I doubt Al Gore believes, but because he doesn't want to alienate the lefter side of the topic, he's allowing his soapboxisms to prop that sort of stuff up. It's actually dangerous. NOTHING will create cleaner, more energy efficient technologies than a society that can actually afford to maintain its current productivity and invest cold hard cash into the research that's already racing ahead. Impounding every car in North America wouldn't do ANYTHING to the wider climate picture for the next 100 years, but that's not exactly the message you're getting from Mr. Private Jet... that's all I'm saying. He knows better than to say that getting 5 more MPG on every mom's minivan will be the key to avoiding the end of civilization, but he allows his sound bites and tone to propel notions just like that.
Probably because the executable inside is a Windows executable, and won't run on a Mac or Linux.
Except, I was responding to the guy who said: "All the more reason to get grandma off windows and onto at least a Mac, if not Linux."
Since this is a social hack that gets people to run arbitrary code, getting more people over to Macs and Linux boxes will just get the people delivering the social hacks to do the math, and wait for when it's worth the trouble to also deliver payloads for Mac and Linux users. In a case like this, the Mac and Linux users are safe BECAUSE there are so few of them. Be careful what you wish for!
No, it seriouly demonstrates a little bit of professionalism. I don't want to distort my client's traffic stats, I don't want to burn up a bunch of his bandwidth and storage with even a minor slashdotting that will very likely not result in business for him, and I don't want to cross-link a discussion about business behavior/history/demographics with his actual business web presence in a discussion board that will be archived/googled/etc. That these things didn't already leap to mind before you fired off your anonymous note suggests that you're not really coming to the conversation with any sort of business savvy, ethics, or a thought for how a business owner might see the results of such a disclosure. Pal.
All the more reason to get grandma off windows and onto at least a Mac, if not Linux.
Out of curiosity... since this is a completely social hack, and is just a means to trick somebody into opening up a compressed file and running the included executable... why would a Mac or Linux user be immune? Cannot Mac and Linux users also run executable programs from their desktops? You're confusing the ability to run a program of your choice with the means by which someone is fooling you into thinking you should choose to run it, right?
What I don't understand is why don't we get a chance to vote on these things? Pervasive security cameras, too. It's a pretty clear-cut issue and a matter of opinion. I want a vote.
You do get a vote. Or... are the people that run your county and/or municipality that are putting up the lights in no way answering to elected officials? Don't you have a city or county council authorizing and procuring these systems? Are the in office for life, or something? You vote for them, and they put up the lights. You can vote for their replacements, who can take them down.
And in the amount of time they spent looking at your site deciding what to order they could have Firefox 1.5 that runs on windows all the way back to 98! The internet is new an evolving... staying behind more than 5 years is a foolish expectation, especially when it's FREE to be up to date.
I'm a little foggy here. Most people, on the site in question, go from showing up to placing a straight-forward order and be done with checkout in about 12 minutes. Are you suggesting that we redirect people with older browsers to a nag page, explain that even though the site they're visiting will work just fine right that moment, that they're really behind the times, and don't let them spend money until the go off to download something they've probably never heard of, and trust the retailer that they're visiting that a software upgrade is really the right thing to do, etc...? Might as well just redirect them to slashdot and hope for the best.
People will upgrade when they're good and ready, usually because a fading system just won't keep up with them any longer. When a retailer (like the one in question) is still seeing enough of that sort of traffic, it makes more sense to sell them things and provide customer service than it does to evangelize about a system upgrade. I want them to upgrade. EVERYONE wants them to. But doing so while in the middle of trying to buy a product and have it shipped is a little tone deaf, I think.
No, though. I think he's pretty smart, actually. So, he's actually very disengenuous. He knows he's being over the top, and he's being really condescending and patronizing in the way he's trying to get little school kids to think that their mom's Hyundai spits out more carbon than a volcano. His whole end-of-civilization schtick is something that I don't think he actually believes, and he's using the same fire and brimstone techniques that scammy witch doctors and priests have used for thousands of years. The obnoxious people are the zealots who buy into it and then march out wagging their fingers and their tongues just like every true believer. The climate issue is so much more vague, nuanced, and variable than could possibly warrant most of that nearly fundamentalist carrying on.
the uncontested evidence of the Libby trial is that the Vice-President Cheney ordered that her identify be spread about
That's "uncontested" in the same sense that it's "not true." If the special prosecutor had any indication that that was actually true, don't you think he'd have perhaps mentioned that in months of investigation, grand jury proceedings, and in his many summary and post-trial comments? He's expressly said that he doesn't have anything else to look into. You need to brush up on the difference between "evidence" and "what someone with an axe to grind has said."
The flaw in your "reasoning" is patent:
1. If Plame were covert, Armitage would not have known
2. Artmitage knew
3. Therefore, Plame was not covert.
It might be easier to make your point (about me) if you weren't making up things I didn't say. I'm saying that in practice, she was anything but covert. In her circles and the related orbits in which she and her husband operated, she was reasonably well known. And your qualifying her as a "spy" is laughable. But we're still back to the same thing: since the special prosecutor knew exactly who spilled the info to Novak (Bush critic Armitage), why isn't your ire aimed at the guy who actually did it and the special prosecutor who also seems to disagree with your take on it?
you continue to talk about Plame's covert status as a "myth"
The fact that a deputy undersecretary of state was casually aware of where she worked is exactly what I'm talking about. Actually covert agents aren't known at all to people that far removed from their food chain. That's the entire point to this little soap opera.
And do you REALLY think that the loudest, angriest, most anxious-to-sign-Kyoto types are really the well-rounded, scientifically trained experts that they should be, if they're going to comment on the degree to which humans, specifically, are a driver in climate change? Really ask yourself how most people digest those pronounciations, and you'll have more of that "true believer" stuff than you'll care to choke down.
And the folks in the White House weren't stunned at all when reporters brought it up in regular conversation, since it was well known in the state-diplo circles, which is probably why Richard Armitage was so cavalier about spilling it to Novak in the first place. My neighbors have no idea what I do, by they way. And the few people that do really couldn't get past "he does computer stuff." And anyone that lives in the DC area (which I do) and pretends to be "stunned" when someone with an ex-ambassador husband has ties to the diplo-intel world is, frankly, either BSing themselves or too dumb about life in DC to be worth quoting on this sort of thing. You can't swing a dead cat in the DC suburbs without hitting someone who isn't real obvious about their job, but who also has lots of cocktails with people who know exactly what line of work they're in, legitimately or not.
Denying Plame's covert status at the time of her outing is like denying global warming.
You've rather inadvertantly, I think, hit on a better analogy than perhaps you intended. When you say "denying global warming," even you must know that different people are going to hear different things. Some people will simply hear you expressing an observation about temperatures, as measured in certain ways over a certain period of time. Other people will hear you making an observation about a specific and fully understood cause for those complex observations (meaning, some people will only hear you talking about someone who drives a larger minivan than they do, and other people will hear you talking about hydrogen as if it were a source of energy, etc). Arguing over Plames status doesn't matter. Armitage shouldn't have talked to Novak about it, because it's just a bad habit, no matter which precise side of the 1982 IIP ruling her particular gig was sitting on. But to suggest that questioning the myth of her super-secret-spy-status, or the credibility of her blowhard husband, is the same as "denying global warming" is exactly the same as attitude exhibited by the highly politicized eco-types that have a vested interest in shouting down discussions over causality and trends in climatology.
The "global warming is all the fault of people with SUVs" religion is pretty similar to the "Karl Rove is an all-powerful demon" religion. The more quickly people reach for those rants, the more it says about them (and the less it tends to say about the subject at hand).
Seeing as we're a mouse click away from forming our own judgements.. what's the site?
For obvious reasons, I decline. I'm happy to report my experiences here, to help address the "are there still IE5 users out there" question, but it would be uncool to link to the site in the context of this thread.
Plame was covert - the CIA just confirmed it before her appearance before Congress. She wasn't "well known"
Still being debated, including by the very people that wrote the IIP act in 1982. Since she wasn't overseas in more than the years needed to invoke that, it's questionable. But it doesn't matter. Richard Armitage probably shouldn't have said it to Novak in the first place.
had their cover effectively blown by the outing.
No one is saying this a good thing. We're scratching our heads over why the special prosecutor doesn't consider Armitage's actions to be illegal, if outing her was illegal. Which is it? Can't have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Molotov cocktails require knowledge and preparation
Molotov cocktails require: an empty bottle, some gasoline, a rag, and a match. Preparation: a couple of minutes. Knowledge: having watched TV once or twice. Having guns, with a fair supply of ammunition, and the apparent understanding how to use them effectively requires (in this society), a LOT more trouble and practice than torching a room full of people.
If your reference to the Middle East is to the roadside bombs then that is a case of different task, different tool. A roadside bomb is a device with which you can kill without putting yourself in danger, an AK47 is not.
My point is that even where you CAN easily get the same (well, worse) weapons than the VT guy used, many people still choose to strap on simple explosives laden with $10 of nails from the hardware store, and kill a couple dozen people all the time. Road side bombs are a special case... I'm talking about someone with a death wish, like the guy that did this mess in Virgina, and like the people who take out markets and restraurants in the middle east. An engineering student with as much deliberation as this guy exhibited, might actually have killed MORE people if he'd put his mind to do and didn't have his head full of cinematic, glamorous shooting spree imagery.
does a lot less damage when armed with a toothpick
Except, we see examples in the middle east, every day (where you can buy fully automatic AK47s like hot dogs on the street corner) where some disillusioned wack job kills just as many people using materials that half-decent engineering student at Va. Tech would also be able to put together. Hell, you could open the one door to your average classroom, throw three $1.00 molotov cocktails in, chain the door, walk down the hall and do it one or two more times, and ALSO kill and horribly wound dozens or people. None of this happens without the person doing it.
There's being careful, and there's being ridiculously obsessed over every little thing that could possibly go wrong
Let's say you're in the warehousing and trucking industry, and your facility it served by three major highways, and some small back roads. Do you think it might be smart to think through how you'd handle your daily (and only) source of revenue on the off chance that there was a major disruption to all but the back roads? Or, say you're a highly competitive (read, low-margin) dot-com business. No internet, no business. Do you think you might want to think through what you'd do if the only thing that allows you to stay in business was suddenly broken? How is that ridiculously obsessed? Not doing it is completely negligent.
...for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop.
Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think allows sites like Slashdot to even exist? Do you really think that the vast majority of the decent content on the web would be available to (even after you've stripped it down to your liking) if the people that labor to produce what you're looking for had no ability to attract revenue from advertisers? Do you really want to have to subscribe to thousands of web sites? Do you want them to be subsidized with my tax dollars? Should the people who run them operate at a financial loss and only survive on un-announced, invisible patronage and sponsorship? Ads that are in fact more relevent to a given audience are far more effective for everyone involved - the publisher (whose work you seem to value, whether or not you value their ability to provide it to you for the long haul because you want to consume it without it being paid for), the advertisors (who are willing to write a check to the people producing the content you're looking for), and you: the person who seeks out and consumes the content made available by the fact that all of the people involved in creating and presenting it to you can actually eat and have a roof over their heads because advertising works, and subscription models only barely do.
Sites that are completely saturated with cheesy ads fade away for a reason - they're desparate to start with, and they alienate their audience as they're dying off and grasping at straws. Sites that know who their audience is, and which strike deals with advertisors that know they've got a more useful message to send to the right people, are able to show you LESS advertising. The ones that know that, and are smart about it, will thrive - and it does take the sort of technology being discussed here to allow the site to earn their keep without committing suicide through the use of context-less, over-placed, low-earning ads.
I'm sorry, you'll have to keep your list just a little more contemporary if you want some traction. "Terrorism" and "Global Warming" are so last-year's-Oscars. Try:
*Don Imus
*Al Sharpton
*Nancy Pelosi
*Google's Purchase Of DoubleClick
*CowboyNeal
You have nothing to fear but fear itself. Now quit being a chickenshit.
Do you wear a seatbelt? I guess not, since you're not worried about the difference between being hit head on by a drunk driver while wearing one and being hit while not wearing one, right?
Why does wanting to prepare for a network outage equate, in your mind, to "fearing?" Preparation to avoid a disruptive pain in the ass isn't the same as sitting there quaking in fear of it.
I bet you think taking off your shoes and turning in your bottled water at the airport gate is making you safer.
Do you think you'd feel any different at all if you or someone you care about had been sitting next to the guy that was caught actually trying to set off real shoe bombs on an actual airplane? Are you of the "well, we lucked out on that one, caught him, and since they know we know that trick now, they would never try it again, and we can stop looking for it now" camp? How does your brain work on topics like that?
The folks who do stuff like that repeat their attacks. It's not guesswork, it's observable history. If you actually TELL them you're not going to check for stuff you KNOW they've done in the past, what exactly is you think is going to happen? They'll appreciate your honesty, and rethink their opinion of western civilization?
Just in the last year we've seen how a single earthquake in Taiwan can bring connectivity between Asia and the rest of the world nearly to a halt. Natural disasters like that are a sure thing and it makes much more sense to me to worry about that than about the latest episode of "24" coming true.
So, you don't even WANT to know what we might/should/could do if someone/group (unlike an earthquake in California) actually simultaneously destroyed or just plain hosed up some key fiber routes and datacenters in LA, San Fransisco, New York, Vegas, and Northern Virginia at the same time? It's not like it takes nukes to still really screw it up. The sort of truck bombs that did the Murrah federal building would be pretty effective against a lot of infrastructure points. And a day or three of very latent or completely absent routes in and out of those areas and the ones that depend on them would be fantastically painful to businesses large and small... and thus to all of us. You don't have to be a Russia-backed super-hacker '24'-class villain to do that sort of stuff. Mostly, you just have to be willing to do things just like have already happened overseas plenty of times. Trucks, fertalizer, diesel fuel... and being willing to crash your rented truck through or up to the front door of a few not-very-unknown buildings.
Never mind the loss of backbones... just half a dozen Level3 or Savvis datacenters would send serious shockwaves. Savvis has decent enough datacenter security when it comes to the walk-up, gun-toting sort of thing... but they're hardly truck-bomb proof.
Terrorism is "the worst," in this sense, because it can be a distributed attack. Not a quake in one city, or a hurrican that hits two... but far more surgical, with far wider implications, economically, at least for long enough to genuinely smack the country's cash flow around. That's the peril of just-in-time manufacturing, drop-shipping retailers, internet-based payroll processing, and so on. Just the civil unrest from the loss of pr0n, alone... think of it!
Anyway, point of the matter is that even though the top income earners pay the vast majority of income taxes, people who make less than $90,000 a year pay almost *ALL* of the social security taxes!
You're forgetting the entire HALF of the FICA bill, which is paid by their employers (frequently, those very "rich" people you're talking about). The other HALF of it.
Green tech is a great economic opportunity
Which is exactly my point. Letting people like Al Gore buy "offsets" of carbon emissions from other people so that he can use 20x the energy that the rest of do is not creating more green tech. It's letting a rich guy preach to us about what we should do while he doesn't do it.
Maybe for once your partisan republican ass should stop making blatant lies?
You're actually saying that, and then linking to an "analysis" that cites a fictional town with a flat tax rate as an example of why he's wrong?
Income, property, and other tax rates are NOT flat. They are largely "progressive," which translates to "punitive." Here are the numbers, released by the IRS, based on last year's taxes:
84.6% of all federal income taxes are paid by the top 25% of earners
96.7% of those taxes are paid by the top 50%
The top 1% pay over a third of those taxes.
And just to flesh out the picture: the lowest-earning fifth of the citizenry receive over $8.00 in government spending for every $1.00 in taxes paid. Middle income households receive $1.40 for every dollar paid, and the high end people receive $0.41 for every $1.00 they spend. Government spending aimed at the lowest-earning 60% exceeds that which is collected from them. It's simple redistribution, and the more you make, the more it tilts away from you. Your flat rate fantasy example is complete BS (but, you knew that).
wow. The war in iraq must be getting dicey if we are chasing after the income of less than a million people.
Why should that surprise or amuse you? All of the talk about how the "rich" should pay more taxes is talk about a lot less than 1 million people. And, um... why focus on DoD spending? What about people who buy their blood pressure medicine with money that was taxed from you, rather than just eating fewer cheeseburgers and giving up smoking (especially since the cigarettes cost more than the dose of statins anyway!)? Taxing income is taxing income. People who specifically look for a way to run a retail business that will, at least temporarily, get them around paying taxes are deliberately trying to get away with skipping something the rest of us aren't. Why would it make you "chuckle" to see the government trying to keep up with an obvious, and very huge, segment of the evolving economy? I just bought something from an eBay-centric retailer the other day, and the company had completed over 50,000 auctions. Would you rather that that person's income tax obligations were just pushed over onto someone else who just happens to be running their own shop in a more traditional format?
If you're just for lower taxes in general, then why aren't you arguing for completely universal tax enforcement so that your share (and mine, and everyone else who does the right thing) of taxes CAN be lower, as they then could and should be? Anyway, nice flamebait. I'm sure you had to go to a special school to perfect that really smooth disengenuous, ironic tone. Were you able to write that cost off your taxes?
There still has been no peer-reviewed studied refuting global warming; are all those scientists in on the plot too?
* sigh *
We're not TALKING about global warming. We're talking about the politicized body of actions that people on Gore's side of the political spectrum (or, really, compared to him... well, WELL left of him) seem completely prepared to endorse because of their assertions about the cause of climate change. The seemingly prevailing pop-culture sense that man is THE cause of a changing climate, and that largely shutting down western economies while allowing India and China to go full-on while very dirtily burning sulfrous oil from Hugo Chavez, Inc. and Iran is somehow going to be a good thing... well, that's the sort of stuff that I doubt Al Gore believes, but because he doesn't want to alienate the lefter side of the topic, he's allowing his soapboxisms to prop that sort of stuff up. It's actually dangerous. NOTHING will create cleaner, more energy efficient technologies than a society that can actually afford to maintain its current productivity and invest cold hard cash into the research that's already racing ahead. Impounding every car in North America wouldn't do ANYTHING to the wider climate picture for the next 100 years, but that's not exactly the message you're getting from Mr. Private Jet... that's all I'm saying. He knows better than to say that getting 5 more MPG on every mom's minivan will be the key to avoiding the end of civilization, but he allows his sound bites and tone to propel notions just like that.
Probably because the executable inside is a Windows executable, and won't run on a Mac or Linux.
Except, I was responding to the guy who said: "All the more reason to get grandma off windows and onto at least a Mac, if not Linux."
Since this is a social hack that gets people to run arbitrary code, getting more people over to Macs and Linux boxes will just get the people delivering the social hacks to do the math, and wait for when it's worth the trouble to also deliver payloads for Mac and Linux users. In a case like this, the Mac and Linux users are safe BECAUSE there are so few of them. Be careful what you wish for!
Sorry, what? Obvious?
This seriously weakens your point, pal.
No, it seriouly demonstrates a little bit of professionalism. I don't want to distort my client's traffic stats, I don't want to burn up a bunch of his bandwidth and storage with even a minor slashdotting that will very likely not result in business for him, and I don't want to cross-link a discussion about business behavior/history/demographics with his actual business web presence in a discussion board that will be archived/googled/etc. That these things didn't already leap to mind before you fired off your anonymous note suggests that you're not really coming to the conversation with any sort of business savvy, ethics, or a thought for how a business owner might see the results of such a disclosure. Pal.
All the more reason to get grandma off windows and onto at least a Mac, if not Linux.
Out of curiosity... since this is a completely social hack, and is just a means to trick somebody into opening up a compressed file and running the included executable... why would a Mac or Linux user be immune? Cannot Mac and Linux users also run executable programs from their desktops? You're confusing the ability to run a program of your choice with the means by which someone is fooling you into thinking you should choose to run it, right?
What I don't understand is why don't we get a chance to vote on these things? Pervasive security cameras, too. It's a pretty clear-cut issue and a matter of opinion. I want a vote.
You do get a vote. Or... are the people that run your county and/or municipality that are putting up the lights in no way answering to elected officials? Don't you have a city or county council authorizing and procuring these systems? Are the in office for life, or something? You vote for them, and they put up the lights. You can vote for their replacements, who can take them down.
And in the amount of time they spent looking at your site deciding what to order they could have Firefox 1.5 that runs on windows all the way back to 98! The internet is new an evolving... staying behind more than 5 years is a foolish expectation, especially when it's FREE to be up to date.
I'm a little foggy here. Most people, on the site in question, go from showing up to placing a straight-forward order and be done with checkout in about 12 minutes. Are you suggesting that we redirect people with older browsers to a nag page, explain that even though the site they're visiting will work just fine right that moment, that they're really behind the times, and don't let them spend money until the go off to download something they've probably never heard of, and trust the retailer that they're visiting that a software upgrade is really the right thing to do, etc...? Might as well just redirect them to slashdot and hope for the best.
People will upgrade when they're good and ready, usually because a fading system just won't keep up with them any longer. When a retailer (like the one in question) is still seeing enough of that sort of traffic, it makes more sense to sell them things and provide customer service than it does to evangelize about a system upgrade. I want them to upgrade. EVERYONE wants them to. But doing so while in the middle of trying to buy a product and have it shipped is a little tone deaf, I think.
BTW: are you calling Al Gore "obnoxious"???
Heh!
No, though. I think he's pretty smart, actually. So, he's actually very disengenuous. He knows he's being over the top, and he's being really condescending and patronizing in the way he's trying to get little school kids to think that their mom's Hyundai spits out more carbon than a volcano. His whole end-of-civilization schtick is something that I don't think he actually believes, and he's using the same fire and brimstone techniques that scammy witch doctors and priests have used for thousands of years. The obnoxious people are the zealots who buy into it and then march out wagging their fingers and their tongues just like every true believer. The climate issue is so much more vague, nuanced, and variable than could possibly warrant most of that nearly fundamentalist carrying on.
the uncontested evidence of the Libby trial is that the Vice-President Cheney ordered that her identify be spread about
That's "uncontested" in the same sense that it's "not true." If the special prosecutor had any indication that that was actually true, don't you think he'd have perhaps mentioned that in months of investigation, grand jury proceedings, and in his many summary and post-trial comments? He's expressly said that he doesn't have anything else to look into. You need to brush up on the difference between "evidence" and "what someone with an axe to grind has said."
The flaw in your "reasoning" is patent:
1. If Plame were covert, Armitage would not have known
2. Artmitage knew
3. Therefore, Plame was not covert.
It might be easier to make your point (about me) if you weren't making up things I didn't say. I'm saying that in practice, she was anything but covert. In her circles and the related orbits in which she and her husband operated, she was reasonably well known. And your qualifying her as a "spy" is laughable. But we're still back to the same thing: since the special prosecutor knew exactly who spilled the info to Novak (Bush critic Armitage), why isn't your ire aimed at the guy who actually did it and the special prosecutor who also seems to disagree with your take on it?
you continue to talk about Plame's covert status as a "myth"
The fact that a deputy undersecretary of state was casually aware of where she worked is exactly what I'm talking about. Actually covert agents aren't known at all to people that far removed from their food chain. That's the entire point to this little soap opera.
And do you REALLY think that the loudest, angriest, most anxious-to-sign-Kyoto types are really the well-rounded, scientifically trained experts that they should be, if they're going to comment on the degree to which humans, specifically, are a driver in climate change? Really ask yourself how most people digest those pronounciations, and you'll have more of that "true believer" stuff than you'll care to choke down.
Her neighbors were "stunned" to hear she was CIA.
And the folks in the White House weren't stunned at all when reporters brought it up in regular conversation, since it was well known in the state-diplo circles, which is probably why Richard Armitage was so cavalier about spilling it to Novak in the first place. My neighbors have no idea what I do, by they way. And the few people that do really couldn't get past "he does computer stuff." And anyone that lives in the DC area (which I do) and pretends to be "stunned" when someone with an ex-ambassador husband has ties to the diplo-intel world is, frankly, either BSing themselves or too dumb about life in DC to be worth quoting on this sort of thing. You can't swing a dead cat in the DC suburbs without hitting someone who isn't real obvious about their job, but who also has lots of cocktails with people who know exactly what line of work they're in, legitimately or not.
Denying Plame's covert status at the time of her outing is like denying global warming.
You've rather inadvertantly, I think, hit on a better analogy than perhaps you intended. When you say "denying global warming," even you must know that different people are going to hear different things. Some people will simply hear you expressing an observation about temperatures, as measured in certain ways over a certain period of time. Other people will hear you making an observation about a specific and fully understood cause for those complex observations (meaning, some people will only hear you talking about someone who drives a larger minivan than they do, and other people will hear you talking about hydrogen as if it were a source of energy, etc). Arguing over Plames status doesn't matter. Armitage shouldn't have talked to Novak about it, because it's just a bad habit, no matter which precise side of the 1982 IIP ruling her particular gig was sitting on. But to suggest that questioning the myth of her super-secret-spy-status, or the credibility of her blowhard husband, is the same as "denying global warming" is exactly the same as attitude exhibited by the highly politicized eco-types that have a vested interest in shouting down discussions over causality and trends in climatology.
The "global warming is all the fault of people with SUVs" religion is pretty similar to the "Karl Rove is an all-powerful demon" religion. The more quickly people reach for those rants, the more it says about them (and the less it tends to say about the subject at hand).
Seeing as we're a mouse click away from forming our own judgements.. what's the site?
For obvious reasons, I decline. I'm happy to report my experiences here, to help address the "are there still IE5 users out there" question, but it would be uncool to link to the site in the context of this thread.
Plame was covert - the CIA just confirmed it before her appearance before Congress. She wasn't "well known"
Still being debated, including by the very people that wrote the IIP act in 1982. Since she wasn't overseas in more than the years needed to invoke that, it's questionable. But it doesn't matter. Richard Armitage probably shouldn't have said it to Novak in the first place.
had their cover effectively blown by the outing.
No one is saying this a good thing. We're scratching our heads over why the special prosecutor doesn't consider Armitage's actions to be illegal, if outing her was illegal. Which is it? Can't have it both ways.