I know, I know, RTFA, but the point is that you can always tell a heavily biased article/news-bit by the sheer lack of an attempt to explain any motivation besides citing "evil."
If you really have these sort of doubts, why "Ask Slashdot"?
So we can all stick our noses in the air, act all high and mighty, and tell the poster to do a little more research on some search engine. After that we generally wear our monocles and top hats and feel king of the nerd-universe for about a day.
But no, of all the possible ways you could have approached the question, the one you decided on was submitting it to a web forum.
Not just any forum mind you, one filled with nerds, geeks, trolls and opinionated people. But in all seriousness, the OP isn't correct in assuming that forums act as a knowledgebase first, and as social interaction as a secondary role. While specialised forums can contain a wealth of information, more general ones often contain no useful information at all. Forums were designed as the world wide webs version of newsgroups. Some forums specialise in linux, some in programming, a lot of them in porn, and others are purely there for the fun of social interaction.
Forums aren't a good medium for storing information. Check out how often the same questions get asked over and over on your average linux forum. But they were never designed for that purpose anyway. They were designed for social interaction. Forums will contain "Hey guys, I'm having trouble configuring my modemjiggitythingy on my lunix 4.0. Do i need to use teh serial ports or will parallel do? kthxbye" instead of the "Howto configure you modem on slackware linux" you'll find on wikis (or the linux documentation project).
I doubt if you're going to get any "google is your friend" responses with this one.
Don't make me turn in my monocle and top hat... I've grown so accustomed to using that one line to act all high and mighty.:-D
Because the majority of The People do not beleive music theft to be a crime.
Saying that you didn't know something was a crime won't help you... Not believing something is a crime won't help you either. Ignorance of the law (just or not, which is a whole other dispute) is no excuse for not obeying it. If you want laws to change, defying them isn't the way to go.
We live in a democratic republic -- therefore if elected officials are not serving the people and allowing laws which directly contravene your wishes, you are under no moral obligation to obey them.
That's a good one... Hey, I don't like the way the government I voted (or didn't vote) for is punishing murder these days, so *clickety* *BLAMMO*...
Moral obligation is all fine and dandy, but that won't help you in court. If you're in court because someone sued you for something you shouldn't have done in the first place, saying that you did it out of civil disobedience won't cut you any slack. There are many laws I don't agree with, but if I break them I have to realise that there could be consequences to my actions.
If your elected officials aren't serving you, you either have to get rid of them by using the system (not very likely unless there's a huge scandal, or a military force planning a coup), or you have to wait until they finish their term and use your vote to keep them out of office, and get someone elected who will represent your wishes.
Can we have a limit please on the number of patents one company may have.
"Discord5 Industries" is happy to announce that it has recently aqcuired the patent to "limiting the amounts of patents one company may have". While one may wonder what my company could possible have invented (or will invent) with this patent, we are happy to report that we have opened a lawsuit against the company "Eneville Technologies" for infringing our intellectual property.
While we are certain that our ridiculous patent will not last long in court, we are certain that our legal team (this monkey we put in a suit) will scare off the offending company and will settle out of court for a few millions.
Parents set limit to 5mph - track kids everywhere they go.
Child has device rigged by friend with knowledge of electronics... Parents baffled.
Never underestimate the great lengths kids will go through to do something they're not supposed to and get away with it. In fact, adults probably'd do the same.
What's wrong with Israel modifying F-16 flight software and submitting patches back to the US?
I doubt that the hypothetical Israel would be sending patches back to the US government. If you created software that gave you a military tactical advantage over another country, ally or not, I doubt you'd give that advantage freely. After all, having an edge over someone tactically, even the slightest one, could mean the difference between victory or defeat when diplomatic ties for some reason go cold. (Please note that I'm speaking purely hypothetically here)
For the same reason, I doubt the US would open up their F-16 software. Any bugs (remember that all software contains them) that could be exploited by another government simply by scrutinizing the source code create a tactical disadvantage. If the source code ends up in the diplomatically wrong hands (as do so many things thanks to espionage), I'm sure you can imagine the alarmbells going off at the pentagon as someone mentions (*sigh* here we go) terrorists.
if they write their own software rather than modify or link GPLed stuff, they don't have to release anything
Which is exactly what 's being done right now. Open sourcing the F-16 software would give no advantage to any government, not even the one buying the F-16. They'll most likely just be more interested in the technical manual of the systems onboard and hand those to an engineer, than they would be in the source code itself.
Citrix (or another similar product) is exactly what he should be looking into. Downloading entire disk images over a network is just a pain in the ass everytime someone boots. However Citrix isn't the solution to all things, yet it beats VMs for most practical applications.
But you'd be looking at maybe 5 minutes for the morning boot-up. Not to mention all the employees hammering the network for a 2~4gb image at 7am will really thrash the servers.
See, that's the big negative point in the entire setup. The bootup time is a pain in the neck, but people can live with that easily. They'll fetch their cups of coffee, have the morning conversation with coworkers and will return about 10 minutes after their machines have booted up. The real issue is the server getting hammered every morning, slowing these boottimes as more machines get added to the network.
I can hear it now: set up a second server, set up a third... etc etc. Yes, set up a bunch of servers that do nothing all day but hand out images, and don't forget about the backup servers (you don't want one of those servers to crash in the morning taking out the entire accounting department). I'm seeing an entire rack of machines at this point doing nothing but handing out images, wired up to really expensive network gear, doing nothing really useful. Don't get me wrong in this last statement, the usefulness of this construction is that you can easily exchange pc's and images not having to worry about hardware, software installed on each users pc, etc. But there's a lot of more cost-effective ways to achieving something that works similar.
Take that budget for those image servers, and backup servers, VM-software licenses, and networkgear, and buy a single server and a good backup mechanism (or a backup server in failover). Spend some time on setting up profiles and think about what software is present on all machines. Take an image of every machine you install differently, and copy that to the server. Buy software like Citrix (or anything else resembling it) to have special applications available at one server (think backups here), and you have a pretty decent solution that doesn't hammer your network/servers every morning and gives you a headache by 10am because some people aren't getting their images.
I've seen the concept of VM images on a server, and I've seen people get bitten by it because they didn't forsee the amount of storage and network traffic involved. Most of these people didn't have a need for such an elaborate solution. Hell, I've seen half a serverfarm run vmware because "it was a good way to virtualize systems, and make things easily interchangable" while those people would've been much more satisfied with a "simpler" failover solution (note those quotes, denoting that failover also requires thought, but usualy ends up being a cheaper solution hardware wise).
On top of it all, using VMs for desktop operating systems uses up a lot of resources. You're running an operating system, that runs software that runs another operating system. Some would say that it's hardly noticeable, but why waste the resources? You'll make todays hardware run like last years, which for most applications is not an issue, but most likely you're going to run last years hardware like hardware from two years ago because you'd have to invest in new desktops for the entire company otherwise.
Let's talk mobility for a moment. Imagine your salesman with his laptop and flashy UMTS (or whatever standard they've cooked up) connection on the road. He's going to want to be able to check his mail on the road, so he'll have to get an image over a connection that can hardly manage streaming video... Nope, you're going to give him his operating system, install his software and pray to god he doesn't send too many large documents over that very expensive UMTS connection. That sort of starts breaking the principle of having images f
I think that their needs to be a kind of rating system for players, so other players can rate them based on their experiences with them.. Sure it could be griefed... but I think overall it would be good.
Such a system will be abused. Suppose a really good player (player #1) makes a constructive remark to a less good player (player #2) on improving his skills. Player #2 is agitated, and puts a bad review on him with "steals items" as an explanation. Player #1 notices this and puts up a bad review with "needs to learn to play". You can see where I'm going here, right? Never doubt the immaturity of the audience of a game (or for that fact, people in real life). You can't fathom how upset people can get over virtual "property", until you've had some kid whine for an hour at you for having something he doesn't. Hell, I've even seen someone threaten to kill (yes, in real life) another person over virtual "property". Some people take videogames way too seriously, and a system like this would do more damage for good players than for bad ones.
A guild, corporation or clan easily weeds out bad players. In WoW, high ranking guild members tend to notice when people incessantly nag about items (even though there is a DKP system, or other thing, blah blah), don't pay attention in raids, etc... Most of the time, you'll find out what kind of player you're dealing with before they actually go on a raid.
They understood that although I might be ripping someone's spine out in Mortal Kombat, I was still writing A+ history reports and still knew my sines from my cosines.
Oh I can imagine what the history reports would look like if you got an F:-)
And then Napoleon crushed his mortal enemy scorpion with his cannonball fatality : back back forward up highkick block. This combo has remained historically important up until the 20th century, during the second world war. It was required tactics at the german war academies, until Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchil formed the alliance known today as the "Allies" and found a way to succesfully block this combo which Hitler had renamed "Blitzkrieg". Some people are convinced that the Blitzkrieg combo was in many ways superiour to Napoleons combo, but in fact it is just a matter of updated graphics due to the increase in CPU power.
Yet I'm still a well-adjusted member of society, an upstanding citizen, have never committed a crime, vote, am involved in charitable works, have a good sense of morality
People often forget that videogames are just some fun. If some kid gets the idea to shoot (not so) random people, they used to blame music. "If you play this album backwards, you can hear the artist clearly saying we should all worship Stan." Now it's videogames, and tomorrow it'll be sunshine (because nuclear fusion emits radiation, and everyone knows that radiation is the work of the devil, and not physics).
The adolescent kids that are inspired by a game like GTA to go out and shoot people, didn't need a ban on videogames, they needed some professional help because they most likely had issues beforehand. I'd agree that small children shouldn't be playing GTA (nor should they have access to guns), but in all honesty I played games that involved shooting stuff when I was 8 too.
At work, my machine is on 24/7, and reboots only when it has to. At home however, I pay the electricity bill, and there is no real use in leaving the thing on 24/7. Uptime is nice to brag about if you don't have to pay for it.
I would have thought that if people wanted to escape technology, they would perhaps go to a park, read a book, pen-and-paper RP, do one of those sport things, or the like. Not play a video game using technology.
I know that all the previous B5 spin-offs have been rather anti-climatic, abortive affairs (although I haven't seen nearly all of it)
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but the spin-offs were really bad... They really lacked the depth that B5 created (granted they didn't run as long), and added bad dialogue, wooden acting and the desire to turn the tv off. B5 has a special place in my memory as the show that proved sci-fi doesn't have to be all phasers, photon torpedos or tetrion-particle-chocolate-dohdoh-wave-buffer-over loads and can actually have a complex background story, opposed to "We're the federation, within the next 40 minutes the universe will collapse on itself, we'll fix it, and merrily go where previous episodes have gone over and over".
To be honest, I'd rather have Babylon 5 remain what it was. It doesn't need anymore movies with half the original cast, nor anymore spin-offs that make it all the more obvious we're being milked for our cash. JMS created a good show with B5, but the "franchise" was ruined by the spinoffs and some of the movies.
Sci-fi needs a new breath, something original that won't go "more of the same" or was made exclusively for teens, or has terrible writing (combined with low budget special effects). There's very little good sci-fi left that hasn't jumped the shark, or is doing so as I write this.
[quote]open source pioneers will rule the world of research, development, and jobs all funded by large corporations.[/quote]
Nice troll, and you even got away with it
If people started identifying with their government, and had an interest in having the budget work for them rather than being small minded and thinking of how to keep the government from getting any more money out of them, they'd stop thinking of taxes as inherantly evil and participate in making fair and intelligent plans for raising and allocating collective funds for collective problems and obligations.
I'd agree with this statement if the government didn't spend so much of my taxes on useless things. My government built bridges that go nowhere, tunnels that nobody uses (which coincidentally have a toll system making a loss in yearly operation alone, let's not get into the fact that they wanted the toll to pay for maintenance), and spends millions each year on projects like this. Yet, our healthcare system has budget cuts every year, social security has been making cuts since the early 90s, retirement date is being pushed back further and further.
Yet every single year, the government raises taxes on the most silly things. Take garbage for instance. I pay a federal tax on garbage processing, a communal tax on garbage disposal, and a city tax on garbage collection. Now, all in all that's not bad yet. But I also have to pay the city for garbagebags (unofficial garbagebags are fined and not picked up), on those garbagebags I have to pay the standard commerce tax of 21%. Add to that the eco-tax I'm paying on anything that's not recyclable. Now they implementing an extra tax based on the weight of your garbage.
Want to talk nerd-tax? How about a tax on CD-R and DVD-Rs because our government feels that these items make it easy to copy music/movies/etc? Oh, mind you, it's illegal to do so in many cases (except for fair-use which includes copying stuff you own and lent from a library), but still they raise a tax on it. Every computer that is sold is taxed with commerce tax and a tax for recycling. Mind you, every computer store/company has to accept broken computers, and pay for their recycling.
Don't get me wrong on this. I agree with the argument that we need to collect money for improving our environment, etc etc... But I loathe how they are doing it. My employer pays 33% of my gross income in taxes, making it very expensive for companies to hire people. My gross income consists of 60% income + 17% social security tax + 23% income tax (this number gets higher as you earn more). Every item that is not food has a 21% commerce tax on it. A good solution might be not spending your money, putting it on a savings account... WRONG Intrest is taxed by 6%, oh and by the way you have to report that once your interest goes over a certain (rather low) amount, so they can tax you on it with income tax.
Got a car? Congratulations, you're now paying: roadtax, initial tax on the registration of your car, tax on your license plates, tax on your drivers license, tax on the amount of horse power your car has (depending on the type of fuel you use), tax on your fuel,...
Yet with all these taxes (and yes, there are quite a lot more), our beloved government can't seem to balance its budget. For the past couple of years, our government has been balancing the budget by borrowing money from private companies. They borrowed money from a former government-run company to fill the gap in the retirement budget (note that they have to pay it back in x years, long after this administration is gone).
This government has created an insane economical climate, with the largest pressure on new companies being taxes. It's demotivating people to start a company here, hiring more laborers, and creating more incentive for companies to move their activities abroad where the wages (plus the extra costs) are less and the tax-policy is a bit friendler.
And what did we get? Better social security? No, that has been on a steady decline since the early '90s. Better healthcare? No, again, since the early '90s on a steep decline. No, we got fr
Slashdot Mirror
Although you're right, flamewar in 5..4..3..2..1.. *ducks*
You sir, have won the internet!!!
Sorry, had to get that out of my system before I loudly burst out in laughter having my coworkers stare at me once again.
Didn't you read the article? They are evil ;-)
So we can all stick our noses in the air, act all high and mighty, and tell the poster to do a little more research on some search engine. After that we generally wear our monocles and top hats and feel king of the nerd-universe for about a day.
Not just any forum mind you, one filled with nerds, geeks, trolls and opinionated people. But in all seriousness, the OP isn't correct in assuming that forums act as a knowledgebase first, and as social interaction as a secondary role. While specialised forums can contain a wealth of information, more general ones often contain no useful information at all. Forums were designed as the world wide webs version of newsgroups. Some forums specialise in linux, some in programming, a lot of them in porn, and others are purely there for the fun of social interaction.
Forums aren't a good medium for storing information. Check out how often the same questions get asked over and over on your average linux forum. But they were never designed for that purpose anyway. They were designed for social interaction. Forums will contain "Hey guys, I'm having trouble configuring my modemjiggitythingy on my lunix 4.0. Do i need to use teh serial ports or will parallel do? kthxbye" instead of the "Howto configure you modem on slackware linux" you'll find on wikis (or the linux documentation project).
Don't make me turn in my monocle and top hat... I've grown so accustomed to using that one line to act all high and mighty. :-D
Saying that you didn't know something was a crime won't help you... Not believing something is a crime won't help you either. Ignorance of the law (just or not, which is a whole other dispute) is no excuse for not obeying it. If you want laws to change, defying them isn't the way to go.
That's a good one... Hey, I don't like the way the government I voted (or didn't vote) for is punishing murder these days, so *clickety* *BLAMMO*...
Moral obligation is all fine and dandy, but that won't help you in court. If you're in court because someone sued you for something you shouldn't have done in the first place, saying that you did it out of civil disobedience won't cut you any slack. There are many laws I don't agree with, but if I break them I have to realise that there could be consequences to my actions.
If your elected officials aren't serving you, you either have to get rid of them by using the system (not very likely unless there's a huge scandal, or a military force planning a coup), or you have to wait until they finish their term and use your vote to keep them out of office, and get someone elected who will represent your wishes.
"Discord5 Industries" is happy to announce that it has recently aqcuired the patent to "limiting the amounts of patents one company may have". While one may wonder what my company could possible have invented (or will invent) with this patent, we are happy to report that we have opened a lawsuit against the company "Eneville Technologies" for infringing our intellectual property.
While we are certain that our ridiculous patent will not last long in court, we are certain that our legal team (this monkey we put in a suit) will scare off the offending company and will settle out of court for a few millions.
Child has device rigged by friend with knowledge of electronics... Parents baffled.
Never underestimate the great lengths kids will go through to do something they're not supposed to and get away with it. In fact, adults probably'd do the same.
I doubt that the hypothetical Israel would be sending patches back to the US government. If you created software that gave you a military tactical advantage over another country, ally or not, I doubt you'd give that advantage freely. After all, having an edge over someone tactically, even the slightest one, could mean the difference between victory or defeat when diplomatic ties for some reason go cold. (Please note that I'm speaking purely hypothetically here)
For the same reason, I doubt the US would open up their F-16 software. Any bugs (remember that all software contains them) that could be exploited by another government simply by scrutinizing the source code create a tactical disadvantage. If the source code ends up in the diplomatically wrong hands (as do so many things thanks to espionage), I'm sure you can imagine the alarmbells going off at the pentagon as someone mentions (*sigh* here we go) terrorists.
Which is exactly what 's being done right now. Open sourcing the F-16 software would give no advantage to any government, not even the one buying the F-16. They'll most likely just be more interested in the technical manual of the systems onboard and hand those to an engineer, than they would be in the source code itself.
Citrix (or another similar product) is exactly what he should be looking into. Downloading entire disk images over a network is just a pain in the ass everytime someone boots. However Citrix isn't the solution to all things, yet it beats VMs for most practical applications.
See, that's the big negative point in the entire setup. The bootup time is a pain in the neck, but people can live with that easily. They'll fetch their cups of coffee, have the morning conversation with coworkers and will return about 10 minutes after their machines have booted up. The real issue is the server getting hammered every morning, slowing these boottimes as more machines get added to the network.
I can hear it now: set up a second server, set up a third... etc etc. Yes, set up a bunch of servers that do nothing all day but hand out images, and don't forget about the backup servers (you don't want one of those servers to crash in the morning taking out the entire accounting department). I'm seeing an entire rack of machines at this point doing nothing but handing out images, wired up to really expensive network gear, doing nothing really useful. Don't get me wrong in this last statement, the usefulness of this construction is that you can easily exchange pc's and images not having to worry about hardware, software installed on each users pc, etc. But there's a lot of more cost-effective ways to achieving something that works similar.
Take that budget for those image servers, and backup servers, VM-software licenses, and networkgear, and buy a single server and a good backup mechanism (or a backup server in failover). Spend some time on setting up profiles and think about what software is present on all machines. Take an image of every machine you install differently, and copy that to the server. Buy software like Citrix (or anything else resembling it) to have special applications available at one server (think backups here), and you have a pretty decent solution that doesn't hammer your network/servers every morning and gives you a headache by 10am because some people aren't getting their images.
I've seen the concept of VM images on a server, and I've seen people get bitten by it because they didn't forsee the amount of storage and network traffic involved. Most of these people didn't have a need for such an elaborate solution. Hell, I've seen half a serverfarm run vmware because "it was a good way to virtualize systems, and make things easily interchangable" while those people would've been much more satisfied with a "simpler" failover solution (note those quotes, denoting that failover also requires thought, but usualy ends up being a cheaper solution hardware wise).
On top of it all, using VMs for desktop operating systems uses up a lot of resources. You're running an operating system, that runs software that runs another operating system. Some would say that it's hardly noticeable, but why waste the resources? You'll make todays hardware run like last years, which for most applications is not an issue, but most likely you're going to run last years hardware like hardware from two years ago because you'd have to invest in new desktops for the entire company otherwise.
Let's talk mobility for a moment. Imagine your salesman with his laptop and flashy UMTS (or whatever standard they've cooked up) connection on the road. He's going to want to be able to check his mail on the road, so he'll have to get an image over a connection that can hardly manage streaming video... Nope, you're going to give him his operating system, install his software and pray to god he doesn't send too many large documents over that very expensive UMTS connection. That sort of starts breaking the principle of having images f
It says, 85% believes in evolution. The other 15% just don't care.
Such a system will be abused. Suppose a really good player (player #1) makes a constructive remark to a less good player (player #2) on improving his skills. Player #2 is agitated, and puts a bad review on him with "steals items" as an explanation. Player #1 notices this and puts up a bad review with "needs to learn to play". You can see where I'm going here, right? Never doubt the immaturity of the audience of a game (or for that fact, people in real life). You can't fathom how upset people can get over virtual "property", until you've had some kid whine for an hour at you for having something he doesn't. Hell, I've even seen someone threaten to kill (yes, in real life) another person over virtual "property". Some people take videogames way too seriously, and a system like this would do more damage for good players than for bad ones.
A guild, corporation or clan easily weeds out bad players. In WoW, high ranking guild members tend to notice when people incessantly nag about items (even though there is a DKP system, or other thing, blah blah), don't pay attention in raids, etc... Most of the time, you'll find out what kind of player you're dealing with before they actually go on a raid.
Oh I can imagine what the history reports would look like if you got an F :-)
And then Napoleon crushed his mortal enemy scorpion with his cannonball fatality : back back forward up highkick block. This combo has remained historically important up until the 20th century, during the second world war. It was required tactics at the german war academies, until Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchil formed the alliance known today as the "Allies" and found a way to succesfully block this combo which Hitler had renamed "Blitzkrieg". Some people are convinced that the Blitzkrieg combo was in many ways superiour to Napoleons combo, but in fact it is just a matter of updated graphics due to the increase in CPU power.
People often forget that videogames are just some fun. If some kid gets the idea to shoot (not so) random people, they used to blame music. "If you play this album backwards, you can hear the artist clearly saying we should all worship Stan." Now it's videogames, and tomorrow it'll be sunshine (because nuclear fusion emits radiation, and everyone knows that radiation is the work of the devil, and not physics).
The adolescent kids that are inspired by a game like GTA to go out and shoot people, didn't need a ban on videogames, they needed some professional help because they most likely had issues beforehand. I'd agree that small children shouldn't be playing GTA (nor should they have access to guns), but in all honesty I played games that involved shooting stuff when I was 8 too.
At work, my machine is on 24/7, and reboots only when it has to. At home however, I pay the electricity bill, and there is no real use in leaving the thing on 24/7. Uptime is nice to brag about if you don't have to pay for it.
By popular demand: 1.21 JIGAWATTS!!!!!
Oh hi neighbour... I was checking my network traffic yesterday, and I just want to ask you one thing: sexyponies.com ?
I can see the headlines already: Mankind Harnasses Power of Lightning Operating computers may be dangerous to your health
Don't you mean : dominant... acting... talent... ?
Planescape Torment was a game with a great storyline, unfortunatly the RPG didn't do so well.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but the spin-offs were really bad... They really lacked the depth that B5 created (granted they didn't run as long), and added bad dialogue, wooden acting and the desire to turn the tv off. B5 has a special place in my memory as the show that proved sci-fi doesn't have to be all phasers, photon torpedos or tetrion-particle-chocolate-dohdoh-wave-buffer-over loads and can actually have a complex background story, opposed to "We're the federation, within the next 40 minutes the universe will collapse on itself, we'll fix it, and merrily go where previous episodes have gone over and over".
To be honest, I'd rather have Babylon 5 remain what it was. It doesn't need anymore movies with half the original cast, nor anymore spin-offs that make it all the more obvious we're being milked for our cash. JMS created a good show with B5, but the "franchise" was ruined by the spinoffs and some of the movies.
Sci-fi needs a new breath, something original that won't go "more of the same" or was made exclusively for teens, or has terrible writing (combined with low budget special effects). There's very little good sci-fi left that hasn't jumped the shark, or is doing so as I write this.
kded has crashed... freeze freeze
But the stability of KDE at work is most likely to blame on the poor choice of distribution, rather than on KDE itself.
[quote]open source pioneers will rule the world of research, development, and jobs all funded by large corporations.[/quote] Nice troll, and you even got away with it
I'd agree with this statement if the government didn't spend so much of my taxes on useless things. My government built bridges that go nowhere, tunnels that nobody uses (which coincidentally have a toll system making a loss in yearly operation alone, let's not get into the fact that they wanted the toll to pay for maintenance), and spends millions each year on projects like this. Yet, our healthcare system has budget cuts every year, social security has been making cuts since the early 90s, retirement date is being pushed back further and further.
Yet every single year, the government raises taxes on the most silly things. Take garbage for instance. I pay a federal tax on garbage processing, a communal tax on garbage disposal, and a city tax on garbage collection. Now, all in all that's not bad yet. But I also have to pay the city for garbagebags (unofficial garbagebags are fined and not picked up), on those garbagebags I have to pay the standard commerce tax of 21%. Add to that the eco-tax I'm paying on anything that's not recyclable. Now they implementing an extra tax based on the weight of your garbage.
Want to talk nerd-tax? How about a tax on CD-R and DVD-Rs because our government feels that these items make it easy to copy music/movies/etc? Oh, mind you, it's illegal to do so in many cases (except for fair-use which includes copying stuff you own and lent from a library), but still they raise a tax on it. Every computer that is sold is taxed with commerce tax and a tax for recycling. Mind you, every computer store/company has to accept broken computers, and pay for their recycling.
Don't get me wrong on this. I agree with the argument that we need to collect money for improving our environment, etc etc... But I loathe how they are doing it. My employer pays 33% of my gross income in taxes, making it very expensive for companies to hire people. My gross income consists of 60% income + 17% social security tax + 23% income tax (this number gets higher as you earn more). Every item that is not food has a 21% commerce tax on it. A good solution might be not spending your money, putting it on a savings account... WRONG Intrest is taxed by 6%, oh and by the way you have to report that once your interest goes over a certain (rather low) amount, so they can tax you on it with income tax.
Got a car? Congratulations, you're now paying: roadtax, initial tax on the registration of your car, tax on your license plates, tax on your drivers license, tax on the amount of horse power your car has (depending on the type of fuel you use), tax on your fuel, ...
Yet with all these taxes (and yes, there are quite a lot more), our beloved government can't seem to balance its budget. For the past couple of years, our government has been balancing the budget by borrowing money from private companies. They borrowed money from a former government-run company to fill the gap in the retirement budget (note that they have to pay it back in x years, long after this administration is gone).
This government has created an insane economical climate, with the largest pressure on new companies being taxes. It's demotivating people to start a company here, hiring more laborers, and creating more incentive for companies to move their activities abroad where the wages (plus the extra costs) are less and the tax-policy is a bit friendler.
And what did we get? Better social security? No, that has been on a steady decline since the early '90s. Better healthcare? No, again, since the early '90s on a steep decline. No, we got fr
Kirk: Can't ... let... it ... end... like... this... Must... milk... franchise