No they don't. Really. At first glance, it may appear that companies pay taxes but they really don't. In fact, it is their customers that pay the taxes as part of the final price, the company is just a middleman.
No serious Libertarian wants to "eradicate" whole departments of the federal government. Everyone more sophisticated than the teenagers that have just finished their first Ayn Rand novel understands that a slow transition away from the government providing these "essential" services is the only feasible approach. To imply, or in your case, outright state, otherwise is misleading and a pretty blatant mischaracterization of the Libertarian party.
I sure hope your.sig applies to that message, because in case you haven't noticed you are already down to one party - the $$$ party. Some members are a little more embarrassed to be part of the $$$ party, but in the big picture, that's the only difference.
He also did it wrong. He wanted people to pay for what they already had. That's just stupid because it is against human nature to pay for something you already have. No matter how much people preach and moan about honor and rewarding good work, people automatically devalue what they already have (it is no longer "fresh" or "new"). His approach was clearly doomed from the start and I almost had to wonder if that was on purpose as a scheme to discredit online sales since he is a product of the old-world publishing industry. Just like Metallica is a product of the old-world music industry.
What King should have done is escrow the release of future chapters. Release the first couple of chapters for free to hook people and then set a price and an escrow account for each future chapter. Once his price has been met (or he decides to lower the price if demand is not there) he can write and release each chapter to the public domain, or at least a creative commons style license.
The escrow approach is reinforced by human nature instead of trying to fight it. People who have been hooked on the story line will want to know "what happens next" and so will be motivated to pay up.
Personally, I believe that escrowed releases to the public domain are the *only* viable long-term solution for the majority of digitizeable works of art. All other approaches like "tip jars" or DRM try to fight two fundamental (and somewhat contradictory) elements in the human psyche:
What I already have isn't worth as much as something I don't have - aka "The Grass is Always Greener On the Other Side of the Fence."
If I have something good, I want to share it with my buddies do they can enjoy it too (and increase my status with them as a finder of "good things").
Escrow uses both of those elements to make people want to pay, so far, everything else just tries to deny them in some fashion or another.
Absofuckinglutely. And if it is only a two-lane road, count the cars behind you, some states have laws that say if you are impeding N vehicles, generally in the 4-6 range, you are required to pull over and let them pass.
And while I am venting, don't fucking turn out into a two lane road if there is approaching traffic moving at or greater than the speed limit if you aren't able to accelerate fast enough to avoid impeding their progress. Holy fucknuts! The number of people who pull out in front of me and then proceed to drive 30- in a 40mph zone is ridiculous. Probably happens at least 50% of the time on my daily commute.
I don't know why it isn't clear. Once the veil of WMD was removed, Bush has been pretty consistent about his real reasons for invading Iraq - liberating the people from a ruthless dictator and bringing them freedom. If that isn't a liberal party line, I don't know what is. That ain't in the interests of our national security. The USA can't be the world's policeman, no matter how much the liberals in this country think it is our job to go around sacricifing the lives our nation's soldiers, making the "world a better place." What's next? All the oppressed people in China?
That's why the OP is a god damn liberal, he walks like a duck, and totally sqwaks like a duck, he is a freakin duck. All those people moding me troll just don't like to admit that they are god damn liberals too.
Oh, I can't wait until the left starts spouting this en masse. "Iraq shouldn't have cooperated with the inspectors! They were American shills!" or something.
How about we let the chinese and russian intelligence agencies send a couple of their operatives along on some nuclear-non-profileration treaty inspections of American facilities? Are you some sort of communist that you want them to be able to spy on us? You god damn liberals are all the same.
You anti-American vitriol is all politically correct and stuff, but in your zeal to be negative, you aren't leaving any actual alternatives that America could have taken that makes any sense.
How about not lying to the American public to get our troops killed and encouraging even more people to support al-quaeda? You god damn liberals don't support the troops and you clearly don't give a rat's ass about national security.
There couldn't possibly be another reason to prevent the UN weapons inspectors from having carte blanche access to secure facilities in Iraq, right? I mean, those guys are all about the inspections and are completely trustworthy right? They would NEVER abuse that level of access to go "beyond scope" of their charter would they?
As for punishing "violations of UN resolutions" shouldn't the UN be responsible for that? Just exactly whose resolutions are these anyway? As if the Bush league has any interest in enforcing UN resolutions against other countries that are routinely broken on a daily basis anyhow.
the so-called American Civil Liberties Union, is currently pursuing legal action against the County of Los Angeles because that county's seal includes a small image of a Christian cross, symbolizing the Mission that was the first settlement in the area. This is a form of rewriting history
By that same logic, inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance during the middle of the 20th century was also "a form of rewriting history" since it is in direct contradiction with the deist beliefs held by many of the founding fathers and just about all of the prominent ones.
Any chance you are in favor of correcting that error? Or is "re-writing history" and all this talk of Big Brother just rationalization for your own particular flavor of Big Brother.
Perhaps you could actually provide a link to this review you speak of? Or at least explain why a 64-bit OS would make any difference at all in the utilization of memory channels. All the benchmarks of memory-intensive applications that I have seen on opteron and athlon64 vs athlonFX reviews show otherwise.
Find some diet code-red, that stuff is 10x better than regular diet dew. Also, keep an eye out for drinks that use "splenda" it is a "real" sugar that is like 100x sweeter than regular sugar so 2 kcals of splenda give the same sweetening power as 200 kcals of sugar. This stuff is great. Probably killing me, but it is so close to the real thing that you'll never know the difference.
No, I'm citing the Washington Post, never even heard of the rense.com site before, they just had a nice summary that was convenient to link to. Does this make you any happier?
More to the point: there is no such thing as "brainwashing". We simply perceive the facts as they are delivered to us, and we make our own judgments based on our own personal values and reasons.
Tada! You have described "brainwashing" as the term applies to the public at large. Control the delivery of "facts" to limit a group's perception and let them "freely" make up their own mind.
17 UN Security Council resolutions that were violated since 1990.
I just had to single this one out. The Bush League would have to have cojones bigger than all of Texas to use the UN to justify anything anymore. This is the UN that is controlled by "obsolete," "chocolate-making" countries and is full of "enemies of America."
I don't think the Bush League has tried to use the UN as an excuse since the invasion, but I'm just saying it would be exceptionally hypocritical if they did so. Not like hypocrisy is foreign to politicians or anything.
Anyone who thinks that voting for nader is a wasted vote, as you did not say, but certainly implied, is ten times the cheese dick the other poster is. A vote for nader is worth 10x a vote for Kerry or Bush. I dislike much of the details of the Green party's platform, and I don't even think Nader is running with the Greens this year, is he? But damn, at least the greens and he aren't a part of the two-faced monopoly that owns the federal government.
Instead of all the hypnotized Dems voting against Bush this year and then all the hypontized Repubs voting against Kerry 4 years down the road, why don't y'all wake up and vote FOR candidates that have something new to say and aren't part of this political ruling class?
So just what is "On Topic" for an Oscar award ceremony? "Come spend more money on this movie which the studio has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting to the oscar judges?" Or maybe, "thank's to all the little people?"
The Oscars are purely a marketing machine nowadays (probably were never very much more than that ever). So Moore makes the exact same speech that he gave about a week earlier at another, smaller awards ceremony where it was appplauded but is booed off the stage at the Oscars because it is off-topic. No, I don't think so because A) it generated more coverage than any other event at the Oscars that year, thus acheiving the goal of the ceremony to bring in more business for the movie and B) It was a hell of a lot more interesting than all the other people performing anulingus up there on stage.
As with any other over-the-top commentary made in the US, the movie will be revered by the extremists on his side, reviled by extremist opponents, and tuned out by thinking people who would rather shed light than heat on a controversial topic
Didja see "Bowling for Columbine?" I did, and the first thing that came to mind upon the conclusion was that the movie was hardly anti-gun. Yet all the mainstream press couldn't help but fall over themselves reporting it as so, when in fact, the movie was essentially anti-mainstream-press. That's hardly "shedding more heat than light." I fully expect Farenheit 911 to be the same - insightful, inciteful, pointed and though-provoking.
Because we here at slashdot tend to be a technical crowd, we have the background to generally see promptly through this sort of deception.
So, are you saying that there is an equivalent crowd of people for whom politics is equally transparent? Is that group's number larger or smaller than the membership of slashdot? I'm not sure there is such a group, maybe a couple of savants, but nothing resembling the size of the slashdot crowd because there seems to be a whole lot more factors involved. Thus fewer people are able to keep them all in their head enough to have as close to complete a picture as we have of the MS vs Linux war.
Why is ADTI's (and MS's) FUD so obvious?
on
More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It strikes me that all of microsoft's "covert" attacks against Linux and Free software in general have terribly transparent. Literally all it takes is about 10 minutes of "follow the money" to find microsoft behind almost any over-the-top criticism of Linux.
Why is this FUD so easy to debunk while similar FUD in other domains, particularly politics, is so much harder to really get a firm handle on? Is it because the people who care about politics are a much broader cross-section of society and thus the average level of domain-knowledge and general intelligence is significantly lower? Or is it because there are more players all with their own sets of agendas and (self)interests? Or maybe I'm just been brainwashed by the slashdot collective group-think into seeing MS behind every corner when they really aren't (although the trail seems sooo absurdly blatant most of the time that I just can't believe that I'm brainwashed like that).
I dunno, it just struck me how easy life would be if the rest of the FUD in the world were as transparent as MS's.
No they are technically not fake in that at least some, if not all that do not include a motorcycle, are indeed from that area. But, her husband probably took them since she is *in* most of them herself.
So, the lesson to be learned from this is that hot single science chicks with motorcycles and coolness to bike through radioactive deadzones on their own don't really exist except in the dreams of the slashdot collective mind.
Question Authority and Authority will question you.
But in the past, for most of us, that was just a quaint saying to chuckle over in the dorm lounge. This is the first time this shit is coming HOME for many of us. If you think this list of users isn't going to go into a database somewhere, you probably aren't on the list in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
with the dot com bust, I think the tech skills in the non-profit arena are rising.
Well, that sure is one way to put it!
Companies pay taxes as well.
No they don't. Really. At first glance, it may appear that companies pay taxes but they really don't.
In fact, it is their customers that pay the taxes as part of the final price, the company is just a middleman.
No serious Libertarian wants to "eradicate" whole departments of the federal government. Everyone more sophisticated than the teenagers that have just finished their first Ayn Rand novel understands that a slow transition away from the government providing these "essential" services is the only feasible approach. To imply, or in your case, outright state, otherwise is misleading and a pretty blatant mischaracterization of the Libertarian party.
I sure hope your .sig applies to that message, because in case you haven't noticed you are already down to one party - the $$$ party. Some members are a little more embarrassed to be part of the $$$ party, but in the big picture, that's the only difference.
What King should have done is escrow the release of future chapters. Release the first couple of chapters for free to hook people and then set a price and an escrow account for each future chapter. Once his price has been met (or he decides to lower the price if demand is not there) he can write and release each chapter to the public domain, or at least a creative commons style license.
The escrow approach is reinforced by human nature instead of trying to fight it. People who have been hooked on the story line will want to know "what happens next" and so will be motivated to pay up.
Personally, I believe that escrowed releases to the public domain are the *only* viable long-term solution for the majority of digitizeable works of art. All other approaches like "tip jars" or DRM try to fight two fundamental (and somewhat contradictory) elements in the human psyche:
- What I already have isn't worth as much as something I don't have - aka "The Grass is Always Greener On the Other Side of the Fence."
- If I have something good, I want to share it with my buddies do they can enjoy it too (and increase my status with them as a finder of "good things").
Escrow uses both of those elements to make people want to pay, so far, everything else just tries to deny them in some fashion or another.Plenty of kids watch cartoons more than 24 hours a day,
Somehow I really don't think there are many kids watching cartoons more than 24 hours a day. Just a gut feeling though.
Absofuckinglutely. And if it is only a two-lane road, count the cars behind you, some states have laws that say if you are impeding N vehicles, generally in the 4-6 range, you are required to pull over and let them pass.
And while I am venting, don't fucking turn out into a two lane road if there is approaching traffic moving at or greater than the speed limit if you aren't able to accelerate fast enough to avoid impeding their progress. Holy fucknuts! The number of people who pull out in front of me and then proceed to drive 30- in a 40mph zone is ridiculous. Probably happens at least 50% of the time on my daily commute.
I don't know why it isn't clear. Once the veil of WMD was removed, Bush has been pretty consistent about his real reasons for invading Iraq - liberating the people from a ruthless dictator and bringing them freedom. If that isn't a liberal party line, I don't know what is. That ain't in the interests of our national security. The USA can't be the world's policeman, no matter how much the liberals in this country think it is our job to go around sacricifing the lives our nation's soldiers, making the "world a better place." What's next? All the oppressed people in China?
That's why the OP is a god damn liberal, he walks like a duck, and totally sqwaks like a duck, he is a freakin duck. All those people moding me troll just don't like to admit that they are god damn liberals too.
Oh, I can't wait until the left starts spouting this en masse. "Iraq shouldn't have cooperated with the inspectors! They were American shills!" or something.
How about we let the chinese and russian intelligence agencies send a couple of their operatives along on some nuclear-non-profileration treaty inspections of American facilities? Are you some sort of communist that you want them to be able to spy on us? You god damn liberals are all the same.
You anti-American vitriol is all politically correct and stuff, but in your zeal to be negative, you aren't leaving any actual alternatives that America could have taken that makes any sense.
How about not lying to the American public to get our troops killed and encouraging even more people to support al-quaeda? You god damn liberals don't support the troops and you clearly don't give a rat's ass about national security.
Typical US-centric, head-in-the-sand bullshit.
2 23.htm 1 165,00.html
There couldn't possibly be another reason to prevent the UN weapons inspectors from having carte blanche access to secure facilities in Iraq, right? I mean, those guys are all about the inspections and are completely trustworthy right? They would NEVER abuse that level of access to go "beyond scope" of their charter would they?
OF COURSE THEY WOULD:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq0
http://www.fair.org/activism/unscom-history.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,35
As for punishing "violations of UN resolutions" shouldn't the UN be responsible for that? Just exactly whose resolutions are these anyway? As if the Bush league has any interest in enforcing UN resolutions against other countries that are routinely broken on a daily basis anyhow.
the so-called American Civil Liberties Union, is currently pursuing legal action against the County of Los Angeles because that county's seal includes a small image of a Christian cross, symbolizing the Mission that was the first settlement in the area. This is a form of rewriting history
By that same logic, inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance during the middle of the 20th century was also "a form of rewriting history" since it is in direct contradiction with the deist beliefs held by many of the founding fathers and just about all of the prominent ones.
Any chance you are in favor of correcting that error? Or is "re-writing history" and all this talk of Big Brother just rationalization for your own particular flavor of Big Brother.
Perhaps you could actually provide a link to this review you speak of? Or at least explain why a 64-bit OS would make any difference at all in the utilization of memory channels. All the benchmarks of memory-intensive applications that I have seen on opteron and athlon64 vs athlonFX reviews show otherwise.
Find some diet code-red, that stuff is 10x better than regular diet dew. Also, keep an eye out for drinks that use "splenda" it is a "real" sugar that is like 100x sweeter than regular sugar so 2 kcals of splenda give the same sweetening power as 200 kcals of sugar. This stuff is great. Probably killing me, but it is so close to the real thing that you'll never know the difference.
If you're not a super-model, then we're not interested.
No, I'm citing the Washington Post, never even heard of the rense.com site before, they just had a nice summary that was convenient to link to. Does this make you any happier?
. 20 030906.wpoll0906/BNStory/International/
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM
More to the point: there is no such thing as "brainwashing". We simply perceive the facts as they are delivered to us, and we make our own judgments based on our own personal values and reasons.
Tada! You have described "brainwashing" as the term applies to the public at large. Control the delivery of "facts" to limit a group's perception and let them "freely" make up their own mind.
For example - even after the invasion, 70% of Americans believed that Sadam had something to do with the 9/11 terrorists. If that ain't mass-brainwashing, I don't know what is.
17 UN Security Council resolutions that were violated since 1990.
I just had to single this one out. The Bush League would have to have cojones bigger than all of Texas to use the UN to justify anything anymore. This is the UN that is controlled by "obsolete," "chocolate-making" countries and is full of "enemies of America."
I don't think the Bush League has tried to use the UN as an excuse since the invasion, but I'm just saying it would be exceptionally hypocritical if they did so. Not like hypocrisy is foreign to politicians or anything.
Anyone who thinks that voting for nader is a wasted vote, as you did not say, but certainly implied, is ten times the cheese dick the other poster is. A vote for nader is worth 10x a vote for Kerry or Bush. I dislike much of the details of the Green party's platform, and I don't even think Nader is running with the Greens this year, is he? But damn, at least the greens and he aren't a part of the two-faced monopoly that owns the federal government.
Instead of all the hypnotized Dems voting against Bush this year and then all the hypontized Repubs voting against Kerry 4 years down the road, why don't y'all wake up and vote FOR candidates that have something new to say and aren't part of this political ruling class?
So just what is "On Topic" for an Oscar award ceremony? "Come spend more money on this movie which the studio has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting to the oscar judges?" Or maybe, "thank's to all the little people?"
The Oscars are purely a marketing machine nowadays (probably were never very much more than that ever). So Moore makes the exact same speech that he gave about a week earlier at another, smaller awards ceremony where it was appplauded but is booed off the stage at the Oscars because it is off-topic. No, I don't think so because A) it generated more coverage than any other event at the Oscars that year, thus acheiving the goal of the ceremony to bring in more business for the movie and B) It was a hell of a lot more interesting than all the other people performing anulingus up there on stage.
As with any other over-the-top commentary made in the US, the movie will be revered by the extremists on his side, reviled by extremist opponents, and tuned out by thinking people who would rather shed light than heat on a controversial topic
Didja see "Bowling for Columbine?" I did, and the first thing that came to mind upon the conclusion was that the movie was hardly anti-gun. Yet all the mainstream press couldn't help but fall over themselves reporting it as so, when in fact, the movie was essentially anti-mainstream-press. That's hardly "shedding more heat than light." I fully expect Farenheit 911 to be the same - insightful, inciteful, pointed and though-provoking.
Because we here at slashdot tend to be a technical crowd, we have the background to generally see promptly through this sort of deception.
So, are you saying that there is an equivalent crowd of people for whom politics is equally transparent? Is that group's number larger or smaller than the membership of slashdot? I'm not sure there is such a group, maybe a couple of savants, but nothing resembling the size of the slashdot crowd because there seems to be a whole lot more factors involved. Thus fewer people are able to keep them all in their head enough to have as close to complete a picture as we have of the MS vs Linux war.
It strikes me that all of microsoft's "covert" attacks against Linux and Free software in general have terribly transparent. Literally all it takes is about 10 minutes of "follow the money" to find microsoft behind almost any over-the-top criticism of Linux.
Why is this FUD so easy to debunk while similar FUD in other domains, particularly politics, is so much harder to really get a firm handle on? Is it because the people who care about politics are a much broader cross-section of society and thus the average level of domain-knowledge and general intelligence is significantly lower? Or is it because there are more players all with their own sets of agendas and (self)interests? Or maybe I'm just been brainwashed by the slashdot collective group-think into seeing MS behind every corner when they really aren't (although the trail seems sooo absurdly blatant most of the time that I just can't believe that I'm brainwashed like that).
I dunno, it just struck me how easy life would be if the rest of the FUD in the world were as transparent as MS's.
No they are technically not fake in that at least some, if not all that do not include a motorcycle, are indeed from that area. But, her husband probably took them since she is *in* most of them herself.
So, the lesson to be learned from this is that hot single science chicks with motorcycles and coolness to bike through radioactive deadzones on their own don't really exist except in the dreams of the slashdot collective mind.
It has been said before:
Question Authority
and Authority will question you.
But in the past, for most of us, that was just a quaint saying to chuckle over in the dorm lounge. This is the first time this shit is coming HOME for many of us. If you think this list of users isn't going to go into a database somewhere, you probably aren't on the list in the first place.
they're scared of anything any politically active group might call wrong leading to boycotts.
So, the answer is simple -- We should organize a mass boycott of paypal for being such a bunch of pussies!
Yes it does, which is why I mentioned it, but that was worded poorly.