I agree with everything you said, particularly about the FICA pyramid scheme - except that dividends have already been taxed. An absurdly large portion (ok, I'm too lazy to go look it up) of corporate earnings are loopholed completely out of taxation. When you've got the degree of legalized corporate tax evasion that we do today in the USA, then it really isn't "fair" to allow dividends to go so lightly taxed in comparison to earned income.
Re:Read the damned article people
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know how it works in Wales, but in the USA innocent people plead guilty every day for any number of reasons including being tricked by the prosecution into believing that the case against them is strong that they will lose at trial and that pleading guilty will mitigrate the sentencing phase, or in order to protect someone else who may or may not be guilty either.
It does not take a conspiracy freak to see either of those options as possibilities in this case given the rather sketchy details presented in the article - particularly with the history the case has of the police getting a conviction against the wrong people to begin with. As a lowly security guard, the guy was probably only able to afford "poor man's justice" anyway.
Furthermore, check out this footnote from the paper:
"Note that the higher level of optimization (-O2) and SSE/SSE2 options in the Portland compiler degraded Jet3D performance on the P4 system, and were therefore not used."
Thus they are comparing the FP performance of the old x87 style, stack-based interface on the P4 - not to mention they are just using minimal optimization. When they start talking about how great vector peformance is, they need to be using SSE2, which is both modern and far more efficient than x87, plus SSE2 is essentially an implementation of a short-length vector processor, somewhat like altivec is on the G4/G5 chips.
This "report" sure smacks of the same bogosity that the original Apple benchmarks did - essentially hamstringing the competition before making a comparison. Since you can't *buy* a dual G5 system today, one must assume that Apple gave it to NASA and you can bet that early access comes with an NDA. So, Apple must have either approved or at least been involved in the generation of these results. Essentially making them just as biased as Apple's own.
Re:I don't mind working longer hours, as long as
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Unless you have an out-of-whack base hourly rate (which is a situation I constantly strive for), then direct proportion is nowhere near enough. As more of your time is consumed by work, less of your time is available for other things, often necessities. So, that 41st hour given over to work may not have too much of an impact on the rest of your life, but that 60th hour has pretty much eliminated any free time plus any time for things like going to the doctor, buying groceries or clothing, getting routine/preventative maintenance on the car or house, seeing your kids, spouse, or other family, etc. When those activities are prevented, the long-term consquences can be way more costly than the costs of handling them in a timely fashion which would have happened if work had not taken the time from you. That's why overtime needs to be more, often significantly more, than just straight time.
Now, if you are making, say $250/hr, I say screw those things(for now) and make hay while the sun shines because straight time of $250/hr goes a long way to cover a lot of long-term costs. But the people who are affected by this change in legislation aren't the ones making that kind of money, they are the ones who make enough to sustain a middle to lower class lifestyle, not the guy making $500K/year.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, the rest of them are in the People's Republic of Cambridge!
I guess my delivery was too deadpan - a mod didn't get it either. But, now that you mention it, big organizations like the navy and nasa are *infamous* for poor inter-agency communications...
Anyone else familiar with the geography of Kauai? The area where the plane was described to be flying is the PMRF - Pacific Missile Test Range. Not really the safest place to be flying around in. There is a good chance that the plane was accidentally shot down during a missile test firing at the facility when it was mistaken for a target drone.
You are correct to a degree. SpecFP and SpecInt are made up of functions from common applications. Therefore they are reasonable real-world benchmarks, if your world is like that of the applications that make up the suite of Spec benchmarks. For many people, this is the case. But, there will always be users who live in a world unlike any other, and for those people, the only accurate benchmark will be their actual applications.
Furthermore as a general comment not directly related to mozumber's post, I'd like to point out that this bit about using GCC on both platforms to normalize configuration is just bullshit. Spec reports two numbers, base and peak. The base numbers are what you get with no super-special flags, just the basic simple ones any dodo developer would use. The peak numbers are what you get when the architecture and compiler mad scientists get through with tweaking the build to squeeze every last iota out of the system. Thus using gcc might be analagous to the "base" numbers for the Intel boxes tested on. For the Mac, it may be a different story as others have already pointed out that Apple has put considerable resources into the PowerPC branch of gcc.
It is interesting to note that for most recent Spec submissions on Intel (IA32) platforms, the base and peak numbers only differ by a couple of percent, at the most. Compare that to other platforms and the implication is that getting the utmost performance out of the Intel compiler on Intel hardware is not rocket science, that it defaults to some pretty good settings. Of course, one might take it to mean that Intel has hardcoded Spec into their compiler ala Nvidia's recent fiasco with that 3D benchmark. But, just like Nvidia was caught, Intel would also be caught - competing vendors have people that regularly go over the other guy's results looking for those kinds of games.
Why bother having it learn from your past behavior? Instead why don't they just preprogram it with mindless consumerism from the factory? That way all the advertising expenses that the RIAA, MPAA and CPAA (Corporate-owned Politician Association of America) have to cover today could be elimintated. No need to waste money on brainwashing vis-a-vis advertising, just make us slaves to our pre-brainwashed phones to begin with!
If you find yourself in such a situation, get 1-800-MC-ASSIST on the phone while you are arguing with the store (that's for mastercard, visa has a similar number, I just don't remember it off-hand). The store's merchant contract has a number of consumer-friendly requirements of the merchant. In this case, they are not allowed to set minimum purchase requirements to use a credit card. You should be able to buy a 1 cent gumball with your CC if you wanted to.
Another useful fact is that the merchant contract prevents the store from requiring seperate ID beyond the card itself. However, they are allowed to ask for ID, they just aren't allowed to require ID unless they have reason to believe that the transaction is fraudulent (note, blanket policy of requiring ID from all CC users is not sufficient, that is the equivalent of saying, "if you shop at our store, we think you are trying to commit fraud" and thus is not acceptable under their merchant contract).
Some people claim that these requirements aren't fair and that in the case of minimum purchase requirements, the vendor loses money on the transaction and that in the case of not being able to require ID the vendor has to make good on fraudulent charges either directly through chargebacks or indirectly through increased fees for being a more risky business. Well, tough noogies, the store signed the contract with these terms, they have the choice of either not accepting credit cards or accepting them with the terms offered. The reason these terms are in all the contracts is that the CC companies wish to be as easy to use as cash - cash does not require an ID, and there is no minimum purchase to use cash. either.
So, stand up for your rights. Most people pay very dearly for them with the exorbitant interest rates that the CC companies charge, at least you should be able to get the benefit of the few actual contractual terms that are in your favor.
By law, the SSN can not be used for any other purpose.
You almost got it right. You should have said, "By law, the SSN can not be used for any other purpose by the government." There is absolutely no legislation specifying or controlling what non-governmental orgarnizations do with SSNs. That's why this is such a big mess today.
It isn't too hard to do. In overly simplistic terms -- Sadam sends his nephew's wife's cousin to drive over to Saudi or Syria or Turkey or wherever is convienent enough, he goes down to the local CompuUAE and picks up equipment just like any other local buyer, puts it in the back of his truck and drives back to Iraq. Maybe be bribes the outgoing border guards, maybe he just takes a route that is unguarded. Now the equipment has been officially smuggled into Iraq and is available for resale with an extreme mark-up, much of which goes to Sadam's coffers or the equipment goes straight into Sadam's own facility.
That scenario holds true for pretty much any physical good and it happened all the time, helping to pay for all of those new-money gaudy palaces of Sadam's. Now, the data-lines? I dunno, was data even embargoed? I bet not, I bet the framers of the embargo didn't even know what data was, much less how to ban it.
That source offer was made by people with no management connection to McBride...
So? That doesn't make it any less valid of an offer, nor any less applicable to the current situation. (Not that I necessarily believe that it is particulary applicable, but for the sake of argument) If the code was once given away by the owner, any new owner can't just revoke and/or retroactively criminalize the original offer. They can only change the terms going forward.
Theft does not mean depriving the owner of value. If I invent a new kind of car which runs on air, then I would deprive the oil company of value. But it's perfectly legal, and, in fact, a Good Thing.
That's what you think. Just wait until the OIAA (Oil Industry Association of America) takes you to court for stealing their profits! Hell, if the RIAA/MPAA could get the DMCA rammed through when half of congress hates them for being so liberal, just image what kind of laws the OIAA can get passed to smother your air car invention...
On the plus side their actions do go a long way towards validating open-source as a profitable, capitalistic endeavour. Thus IBM's adoption of linux and other OSS may have much stronger and more far-reaching effects on the market than IBM management may have ever anticipated.
Frankly OSS is the only point of sanity and some morality left to the industry (I can't quite believe that the IBM of the 70s and 80s is suddenly transposed itself to that touchstone).
They haven't, not one bit. It is just business for IBM. They made a business decision that making the OS a commodity would be good for them. They see it as a way to knock Microsoft off their revenue base and to similarly make the hundreds of millions if not billions invested in Solaris, HPUX, IRIX and even SCO as moot. Yeah, it hurts them in short run with the waste of their AIX development dollars, but AIX was always an also-ran in the unix space and IBM is a hardware and services company and Linux is the perfect complement to that business model.
But don't ever forget that IBM is first and foremost a ruthless, amoral business just as it has always been, Microsoft is, HP has become and Sun wants to be. If management decided that fighting linux instead of supporting it would benefit their corporate coffers, you can bet that IBM would turn on OSS in an instant.
As others have pointed out, the quality of work produced under this kind of schedule is going to be utter shit. That means that even after the deadline, there will be way too much work to do. Plus, your employer may have a hard timing billing for any after-the-fact fixes - if they were such poor negotiators that they agreed to such a bullshit timeline, they've probably painted themselves into a corner on support issues to.
So, what this all means is that if your employer is small to medium-sized, there is a good chance that this job will break them. They may find themselves bankrupted by the results of pushing you guys to such an insane deadline. Either you quit now or you get laid-off later. I suggest you start looking for a job, do it on company time too because you don't have anything to lose (what are they going to do, fire you, during crunch time? no way). That way you get out under your terms with a perpared landing place, not just quiting to make a statement nor being laid off when "they" feel like it.
No surprise that TigerDirect would do something like this. Bill is probably giving them a hefty profit margin on the sales too. TigerDirect would sell their own mother into slavery if it would turn a profit. About 6 years ago I bought some rinky-dink thing from them and got on their spam-list. Ever since then, I get spam about once a day from them. No matter what I do, phone, email, snail-mail, "unsubscribe" via their web server - nothing will get me off the list.
Not only that, but they sell (er, "Rent") their spam list to other spammers. I know this because I have my own domain, so I can track who does what with my addresses - for example, amazon thinks my address is amazon@mydomain.com and tigerdirect things I am tigerdirect@mydomain.com - so when I start getting non-tigerdirect email sent to tigerdirect@mydomain.com I know they gave away my address. I wouldn't be surprised if Bill has bought a list of TigerDirect's lindows customers to use for targetted FUD. Hell, if he has their email addresses, they may end up being the recipient of the world's first linux email trojan...
I've long since put any mail addressed to tigerdirect@mydomain.com into a direct-to-devnull kill filter, but according to my logs they still keep sending me crap. Don't trust them for a minute.
As others have pointed out, it is not *linux* powered. But now thanks to Ashcroft and his straight man, bin Laden - anyone using model rocket fuel is considered a terrorist threat. So, not only is not linux powered, it probably won't be powered at all.
In Japan it isn't illegal, although recently there has been a self-enforced ban by the merchants. In Germany it is legal and common. I'm sure there are other countries that permit vending machines stocked with alcohol.
In fact, he's fortunate that they gave him complete freedom to talk, since that degree of freedom is somewhat rare.
I think they did it because of arrogance. Their plan was probably to let him talk, to let him tell the world how the RIAA raped him in order to put the fear of God (our corporate master, hallowed be thy name) into other kids.
Their arrogance kept them from seeing that by telling the world about the RIAA's actions, they weren't going to generate fear of the RIAA, they were going to generate anger at the RIAA and thus encourage even more people to fuck the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with everything you said, particularly about the FICA pyramid scheme - except that dividends have already been taxed. An absurdly large portion (ok, I'm too lazy to go look it up) of corporate earnings are loopholed completely out of taxation. When you've got the degree of legalized corporate tax evasion that we do today in the USA, then it really isn't "fair" to allow dividends to go so lightly taxed in comparison to earned income.
I don't know how it works in Wales, but in the USA innocent people plead guilty every day for any number of reasons including being tricked by the prosecution into believing that the case against them is strong that they will lose at trial and that pleading guilty will mitigrate the sentencing phase, or in order to protect someone else who may or may not be guilty either.
It does not take a conspiracy freak to see either of those options as possibilities in this case given the rather sketchy details presented in the article - particularly with the history the case has of the police getting a conviction against the wrong people to begin with. As a lowly security guard, the guy was probably only able to afford "poor man's justice" anyway.
Furthermore, check out this footnote from the paper:
"Note that the higher level of optimization (-O2) and SSE/SSE2 options in the Portland compiler degraded Jet3D performance on the P4 system, and were therefore not used."
Thus they are comparing the FP performance of the old x87 style, stack-based interface on the P4 - not to mention they are just using minimal optimization. When they start talking about how great vector peformance is, they need to be using SSE2, which is both modern and far more efficient than x87, plus SSE2 is essentially an implementation of a short-length vector processor, somewhat like altivec is on the G4/G5 chips.
This "report" sure smacks of the same bogosity that the original Apple benchmarks did - essentially hamstringing the competition before making a comparison. Since you can't *buy* a dual G5 system today, one must assume that Apple gave it to NASA and you can bet that early access comes with an NDA. So, Apple must have either approved or at least been involved in the generation of these results. Essentially making them just as biased as Apple's own.
One word. ::Cue::Cat
Well, sort of.
Aussies hate Paul Hogan already.
Unless you have an out-of-whack base hourly rate (which is a situation I constantly strive for), then direct proportion is nowhere near enough. As more of your time is consumed by work, less of your time is available for other things, often necessities. So, that 41st hour given over to work may not have too much of an impact on the rest of your life, but that 60th hour has pretty much eliminated any free time plus any time for things like going to the doctor, buying groceries or clothing, getting routine/preventative maintenance on the car or house, seeing your kids, spouse, or other family, etc. When those activities are prevented, the long-term consquences can be way more costly than the costs of handling them in a timely fashion which would have happened if work had not taken the time from you. That's why overtime needs to be more, often significantly more, than just straight time.
Now, if you are making, say $250/hr, I say screw those things(for now) and make hay while the sun shines because straight time of $250/hr goes a long way to cover a lot of long-term costs. But the people who are affected by this change in legislation aren't the ones making that kind of money, they are the ones who make enough to sustain a middle to lower class lifestyle, not the guy making $500K/year.
Yeah, the rest of them are in the People's Republic of Cambridge!
I guess my delivery was too deadpan - a mod didn't get it either. But, now that you mention it, big organizations like the navy and nasa are *infamous* for poor inter-agency communications...
Anyone else familiar with the geography of Kauai? The area where the plane was described to be flying is the PMRF - Pacific Missile Test Range. Not really the safest place to be flying around in. There is a good chance that the plane was accidentally shot down during a missile test firing at the facility when it was mistaken for a target drone.
You are correct to a degree. SpecFP and SpecInt are made up of functions from common applications. Therefore they are reasonable real-world benchmarks, if your world is like that of the applications that make up the suite of Spec benchmarks. For many people, this is the case. But, there will always be users who live in a world unlike any other, and for those people, the only accurate benchmark will be their actual applications.
Furthermore as a general comment not directly related to mozumber's post, I'd like to point out that this bit about using GCC on both platforms to normalize configuration is just bullshit. Spec reports two numbers, base and peak. The base numbers are what you get with no super-special flags, just the basic simple ones any dodo developer would use. The peak numbers are what you get when the architecture and compiler mad scientists get through with tweaking the build to squeeze every last iota out of the system. Thus using gcc might be analagous to the "base" numbers for the Intel boxes tested on. For the Mac, it may be a different story as others have already pointed out that Apple has put considerable resources into the PowerPC branch of gcc.
It is interesting to note that for most recent Spec submissions on Intel (IA32) platforms, the base and peak numbers only differ by a couple of percent, at the most. Compare that to other platforms and the implication is that getting the utmost performance out of the Intel compiler on Intel hardware is not rocket science, that it defaults to some pretty good settings. Of course, one might take it to mean that Intel has hardcoded Spec into their compiler ala Nvidia's recent fiasco with that 3D benchmark. But, just like Nvidia was caught, Intel would also be caught - competing vendors have people that regularly go over the other guy's results looking for those kinds of games.
Why bother having it learn from your past behavior? Instead why don't they just preprogram it with mindless consumerism from the factory? That way all the advertising expenses that the RIAA, MPAA and CPAA (Corporate-owned Politician Association of America) have to cover today could be elimintated. No need to waste money on brainwashing vis-a-vis advertising, just make us slaves to our pre-brainwashed phones to begin with!
If you find yourself in such a situation, get 1-800-MC-ASSIST on the phone while you are arguing with the store (that's for mastercard, visa has a similar number, I just don't remember it off-hand). The store's merchant contract has a number of consumer-friendly requirements of the merchant. In this case, they are not allowed to set minimum purchase requirements to use a credit card. You should be able to buy a 1 cent gumball with your CC if you wanted to.
Another useful fact is that the merchant contract prevents the store from requiring seperate ID beyond the card itself. However, they are allowed to ask for ID, they just aren't allowed to require ID unless they have reason to believe that the transaction is fraudulent (note, blanket policy of requiring ID from all CC users is not sufficient, that is the equivalent of saying, "if you shop at our store, we think you are trying to commit fraud" and thus is not acceptable under their merchant contract).
Some people claim that these requirements aren't fair and that in the case of minimum purchase requirements, the vendor loses money on the transaction and that in the case of not being able to require ID the vendor has to make good on fraudulent charges either directly through chargebacks or indirectly through increased fees for being a more risky business. Well, tough noogies, the store signed the contract with these terms, they have the choice of either not accepting credit cards or accepting them with the terms offered. The reason these terms are in all the contracts is that the CC companies wish to be as easy to use as cash - cash does not require an ID, and there is no minimum purchase to use cash. either.
So, stand up for your rights. Most people pay very dearly for them with the exorbitant interest rates that the CC companies charge, at least you should be able to get the benefit of the few actual contractual terms that are in your favor.
By law, the SSN can not be used for any other purpose.
You almost got it right. You should have said, "By law, the SSN can not be used for any other purpose by the government." There is absolutely no legislation specifying or controlling what non-governmental orgarnizations do with SSNs. That's why this is such a big mess today.
It isn't too hard to do. In overly simplistic terms -- Sadam sends his nephew's wife's cousin to drive over to Saudi or Syria or Turkey or wherever is convienent enough, he goes down to the local CompuUAE and picks up equipment just like any other local buyer, puts it in the back of his truck and drives back to Iraq. Maybe be bribes the outgoing border guards, maybe he just takes a route that is unguarded. Now the equipment has been officially smuggled into Iraq and is available for resale with an extreme mark-up, much of which goes to Sadam's coffers or the equipment goes straight into Sadam's own facility.
That scenario holds true for pretty much any physical good and it happened all the time, helping to pay for all of those new-money gaudy palaces of Sadam's. Now, the data-lines? I dunno, was data even embargoed? I bet not, I bet the framers of the embargo didn't even know what data was, much less how to ban it.
Nor a wise comment speak a Yoda. Heretofore, BTW.
That source offer was made by people with no management connection to McBride...
So? That doesn't make it any less valid of an offer, nor any less applicable to the current situation. (Not that I necessarily believe that it is particulary applicable, but for the sake of argument) If the code was once given away by the owner, any new owner can't just revoke and/or retroactively criminalize the original offer. They can only change the terms going forward.
Theft does not mean depriving the owner of value. If I invent a new kind of car which runs on air, then I would deprive the oil company of value. But it's perfectly legal, and, in fact, a Good Thing.
That's what you think. Just wait until the OIAA (Oil Industry Association of America) takes you to court for stealing their profits! Hell, if the RIAA/MPAA could get the DMCA rammed through when half of congress hates them for being so liberal, just image what kind of laws the OIAA can get passed to smother your air car invention...
On the plus side their actions do go a long way towards validating open-source as a profitable, capitalistic endeavour. Thus IBM's adoption of linux and other OSS may have much stronger and more far-reaching effects on the market than IBM management may have ever anticipated.
Frankly OSS is the only point of sanity and some morality left to the industry (I can't quite believe that the IBM of the 70s and 80s is suddenly transposed itself to that touchstone).
They haven't, not one bit. It is just business for IBM. They made a business decision that making the OS a commodity would be good for them. They see it as a way to knock Microsoft off their revenue base and to similarly make the hundreds of millions if not billions invested in Solaris, HPUX, IRIX and even SCO as moot. Yeah, it hurts them in short run with the waste of their AIX development dollars, but AIX was always an also-ran in the unix space and IBM is a hardware and services company and Linux is the perfect complement to that business model.
But don't ever forget that IBM is first and foremost a ruthless, amoral business just as it has always been, Microsoft is, HP has become and Sun wants to be. If management decided that fighting linux instead of supporting it would benefit their corporate coffers, you can bet that IBM would turn on OSS in an instant.
As others have pointed out, the quality of work produced under this kind of schedule is going to be utter shit. That means that even after the deadline, there will be way too much work to do. Plus, your employer may have a hard timing billing for any after-the-fact fixes - if they were such poor negotiators that they agreed to such a bullshit timeline, they've probably painted themselves into a corner on support issues to.
So, what this all means is that if your employer is small to medium-sized, there is a good chance that this job will break them. They may find themselves bankrupted by the results of pushing you guys to such an insane deadline. Either you quit now or you get laid-off later. I suggest you start looking for a job, do it on company time too because you don't have anything to lose (what are they going to do, fire you, during crunch time? no way). That way you get out under your terms with a perpared landing place, not just quiting to make a statement nor being laid off when "they" feel like it.
No surprise that TigerDirect would do something like this. Bill is probably giving them a hefty profit margin on the sales too. TigerDirect would sell their own mother into slavery if it would turn a profit. About 6 years ago I bought some rinky-dink thing from them and got on their spam-list. Ever since then, I get spam about once a day from them. No matter what I do, phone, email, snail-mail, "unsubscribe" via their web server - nothing will get me off the list.
Not only that, but they sell (er, "Rent") their spam list to other spammers. I know this because I have my own domain, so I can track who does what with my addresses - for example, amazon thinks my address is amazon@mydomain.com and tigerdirect things I am tigerdirect@mydomain.com - so when I start getting non-tigerdirect email sent to tigerdirect@mydomain.com I know they gave away my address. I wouldn't be surprised if Bill has bought a list of TigerDirect's lindows customers to use for targetted FUD. Hell, if he has their email addresses, they may end up being the recipient of the world's first linux email trojan...
I've long since put any mail addressed to tigerdirect@mydomain.com into a direct-to-devnull kill filter, but according to my logs they still keep sending me crap. Don't trust them for a minute.
As others have pointed out, it is not *linux* powered. But now thanks to Ashcroft and his straight man, bin Laden - anyone using model rocket fuel is considered a terrorist threat. So, not only is not linux powered, it probably won't be powered at all.
In Japan it isn't illegal, although recently there has been a self-enforced ban by the merchants. In Germany it is legal and common. I'm sure there are other countries that permit vending machines stocked with alcohol.
Next!
In fact, he's fortunate that they gave him complete freedom to talk, since that degree of freedom is somewhat rare.
I think they did it because of arrogance. Their plan was probably to let him talk, to let him tell the world how the RIAA raped him in order to put the fear of God (our corporate master, hallowed be thy name) into other kids.
Their arrogance kept them from seeing that by telling the world about the RIAA's actions, they weren't going to generate fear of the RIAA, they were going to generate anger at the RIAA and thus encourage even more people to fuck the RIAA.
Dude, harsh. It is just one letter. Do people need to die just for one letter now?