The idea that most wealth is previously owned wealth is simply not born out by the facts.
Previously owned? Wealth mostly transfers, not "is created" as wealth is generally measured in commodities, real estate, etc.
The number of the "super wealthy" families that you refer to isn't as large as you thing or that you would lead people to believe.
Given the amount of wealth concentrated in the top 1% at this point, it is absurd. As for generational wealth it was only something like 1% of that top 1% that had not had parents in the same bracket from what I read.
Most are from people who worked their asses off and made their own money.
Citation? Upward mobility in the US is lower than numerous EU countries these days. That is to say, working hard is more likely to allow you to become wealthy in many EU countries than in the US... but this was not true a few decades ago. It's only in the last few decades that things have turned around.
Actually the quality of life even of the poor is higher in America than most any other industrialized nation.
I've never seen an attempt at ranking quality of life that places the US as number 1. It's usually somewhere in the top 20, but most have some weird characteristics I'm not sure I'd include, like divorce rates. Your anecdotes, however, are in no way a scientific measure.
The idea that the quality of life of the poor is America is bad, is just complete nonsense and a lie.
It is certainly not ideal, especially if you consider violence and crime as negatives. Your assertion that is must be better than other countries for some unspecified reason baffles me.
Even our homeless have places to eat, and they get food stamps.
I was talking to an eastern european intern a few months ago and he didn't even understand the concept of "homeless people". He thought we meant kids who voluntarily lived outdoors as a lifestyle choice. The idea that people would live outdoors because they had no home and there was no government option for the desperately poor and drug addicted. This is one of those countries most people in the US scoff at as "third world". I'm not saying the US isn't a good place to live, nor trying to badmouth it. It's just not the best in all ways by objective metrics.
Of course all this is sort of beside the point. Wealth disparity is a real issue and a serious predictor of many problems including violence.
If Paul Ryan wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with private insurance, what does he propose for people whom all health insurance companies refuse to insure?
According to his page on the Republican party Website his plan addresses that point in that it:
...requires the Department of Health and Human Services to certify plans and publish an annual list of Medicare-approved plans, at least one of which must be targeted to the “special needs of Medicare’s highest cost seniors.”
I'm unclear as to how the DHHS certifying plans means that insurance providers must offer one, but perhaps it is somehow a requirement. It would be nice if they clarified the point.
Attacking someones position involves talking about their position.
Yes... or assuming your listeners know or can discover those positions.
If they believe that privatizing social security will destroy social security, then why are they talking about Paul Ryan instead of talking about Social Security and its privatization?
Who is? I asked for a citation. Where are people attacking him personally instead of his policies, or making statements about what they think the result of his policies would be?
You have to be joking. Given the way the Democrats have been attacking Republican Paul Ryan the last day or so? They are not civil, it's once again do as I say, not as I do.
Attacking someone's position is not the same as attacking a person.
They have been saying he wants to get rid of Medicare and destroy Social Security and wants to see all the old people die on the streets.
Citation please. I've seen numerous comments that he wants to privative SS, which many people think will destroy it and result in old people suffering and dying needlessly. I haven't seen anyone say he wants old people to suffer and die.
No one has ever talked about getting rid of Medicare or Social Security.
In 2010 Ryan did propose a "Roadmap for America" that included replacing Medicare and Medicaid with private vouchers with values that would slowly decrease as a way of weaning America off of what he called "the entitlement programs". I think maybe you need to do some research before you make assertions.
So much for being civil, and so much for no violent rhetoric.
Please do cite this "violent rhetoric" and "attacks" of which you speak, attacks on him, not his proposed plans.
That is the real face of the Democratic party.
I'm no supporter of the Democratic party, but I do watch the real news and I haven't seen what you're talking about. It takes about 30 seconds with Google to find evidence that Ryan did propose privatizing SS and eliminating Medicare/Medicaid. Maybe you should stop watching Fox news and try any other channel, or better yet look at a variety of sources.
It's not really very entertaining. Heck, there have been numerous Daily Show segments where Stewart tries to have a serious discussion of some topic, but can't get the politician in question to do anything but quote party lines and generalities. Talking about the issues isn't good marketing.
Your best response to the Tea Party is name calling? If that is the best the Democrats or the Republicans have then both parties really have become a joke.
The tea party is just a way to elect Republicans. When you look at people showing up to rallies and looking at tea party information when voting, surveys show them as:
a Tea Party Member “is essentially someone who would've earlier identified as a Republican but now calls himself an independent despite being a conservative and voting pretty much exclusively for Republicans.”
So when you talk about republicans and the tea party, the tea party pretty much always votes for republicans, even if those republicans are now calling themselves tea baggers as well. It's just a rebranding of some of the Republican party in a way to try to lure in Libertarians and Republican supporters who are too upset by their party to vote.
They try to stop you every single update by stopping jailbreaking.
No, they try to fix security holes every update. If they were serious about stopping you from running unapproved apps on iPhones they'd lock the hardware to the OS.
say hi to the huge gorilla in the room.... capitalism. other countries think broadband for everyone is a great idea, and fund it.
Actually, it might be responsible press or education that's more important. You see, the US funded broadband here too, to a tune of more money per individual than almost anywhere else. We're just as socialist, just more incompetent. Here the networking companies took a portion of the money we gave them and used it to hire lobbyists who made sure there were no actual requirements they deliver anything for all that taxpayer money. So they just kept it and didn't actually build out high speed networks everywhere. The press mostly ignored the issue and the people are too stupid, lazy, uninterested, and distracted to use the democratic process to solve the problem.
I agree, Google says "we will not sell this through our app store" whereas Apple says "you cannot have this app." There is no reason to liken Google to Apple here.
This isn't wholly true you know. Apple says, 'you can't have this through our store which is the only way without hacking to get it on our OS. You can have it if you hack the OS or install a different OS, but we won't support you."
I realize this may seem like nit-picking but it's important to note that Apple doesn't actually stop anyone from getting an app legally, they just make it inconvenient if you want to use their mobile OS on the hardware they sell. The point still stands though.
I'm still waiting for Google to decide it's time to create a new, better store that incorporates the advantages of a vetted system for all apps with the advantages of many sources and no completely banned apps. It is certainly possible to build such a system, although it may be complex. It would be nice to see them leapfrog Apple on this front.
The top 1% owns about 40% of the wealth and pays about 40% of the taxes.
Wealth is irrelevant here (except where it indirectly influences other things); what's important is income.
Your argument is hard to swallow since wealth is such a huge factor influencing so many other things. I mean seriously; paying rent, mortgage, tuition loans? All those are taxes on not being wealthy enough as a circumstance of birth and it's a tax paid to the very wealthy. Wealth condensation in our country is a much more important factor in achieving financial independence than any other factor including intelligence or dedication. Without taking accumulated and especially inherited wealth into consideration we can never have a meritocracy (or approximation thereof) which is the ideal system for providing incentive to all people in a capitalist eonomy. In an ideal world we'd only tax wealth, but of course we'd also all inherit equal shares of everything from society. Because of the horrible inefficiencies of implementing such a system in real life, we approximate a wealth tax with a progressive income tax (or we did until 20 years ago when we started making our taxes increasingly less progressive and consolidating wealth among the wealthiest few).
But as I said before "quality of life" is a very fuzzy term. It's important to look at more concrete terms such as self reported happiness.
The countries with the greatest economic freedoms...
I don't even know what that means. What makes one country less economically free? How do you quantify that?
The "evil" countries with economic freedom are doing quite well. You may not want to admit it, so here is a god damned citation [gapminder.org]
I don't know what you're trying to show with that citation. It is a correlation of wealth and healthcare in countries. It does not seem to take wealth disparity into account at all. Since socialized medicine correlates so strongly with wealth of nations and also with longevity, it's hard to determine any specific causality. Also what's with calling some countries "evil"? Are you trying to be hyperbolic?
Wealth disparity leads to higher rates of violent crime and lower rates of self reported happiness according to almost every sociological study to ever consider the topic. The correlation is extreme.
Self reported happiness? What kind of hogwash shit is that?
Self reported happiness is when you survey people and ask them to quantify how happy they are as opposed to making up some measurement of supposed quality of life like "how many cars owned" or other arbitrary metric. "Self reported happiness" is a fairly specific measure of quality of life, as opposed to a general term that can mean many different things depending upon what study you're looking at. If you're care to propose a better, specific metric and some reasoning I'd be happy to consider it.
In other words, you failed to cite the stuff and even then feel that you have to qualify the un-cited sources as contradictory bullshit.
No, I'm saying the term you brought up has various meanings and I thought it important to clarify if we're to have a productive discussion going forward instead of a bunch of empty, unscientific rhetoric that fails to define the terminology in use.
Apparently you failed to learn what science is. Go to my citation above and play around.
Your citation above doesn't address wealth disparity at all. One might as well go to the winning horses at the track in the paper today. Do you know what wealth disparity is and what I'm talking about? Did you bother to find out? Nations with similar or dissimilar wealth can have similar or dissimilar rates of wealth disparity. It's a related but independent measure. Countries wealthier than the US per capita often have lower rates of wealth disparity.
Contrary to popular belief, Americans are fucking very well off in spite of your rantings based on economic "hes too rich" jealousy.
You seem to have an opinion that is unlikely to be swayed by facts or research or science. You seem intent on attributing a completely unsupported motivation and ignoring what I actually write. If you bother to respond, please actually read my comments and look up the terms you don't understand.
Why should wealth be taxed, aside from the income it might generate? I see this '% of wealth' figure mentioned often, but I never see an explanation as to why income taxes should depend on wealth.
Mostly to counteract wealth condensation. Basically, we do best economically when we live in a meritocracy, where the most work is rewarded and people that don't contribute are not rewarded. Because of wealth condensation, most income is the result of previously owned wealth, not actual work. So we try to use tax brackets to progressively tax the wealthy at higher rates than the poor so everyone is motivated to be productive and so that our economy does not constantly concentrate the wealth into fewer and fewer hands until we reach an economic collapse.
The problem is, tax rates for the very wealthy have been lowered consistently for the last 20 years such that the wealth is consolidating. It doesn't matter if you work hard or not, statistically it's a lot more important who your parents are. If you were born to wealth you can sit on your butt and that wealth will generate more wealth than the average poor person who works themselves extremely hard. Thus we move further from a meritocracy and people both rich and poor aren't motivated to work hard and be awesome because it isn't hard work or brilliance or anything that is rewarded financially, just happenstance of birth. Additionally, the wealth continues to alarmingly consolidate into a very few hands, upward mobility increasingly drops, reinvestment drops, more US money is invested overseas, and our economy spirals downward. The last time this happened was the great depression. We raised taxes on the wealthy and instituted public works and social benefits programs to spread the wealth back out. This time, the very wealthy in power are not yet scared enough of being murdered by the throngs of poor people to allow our bought and paid for legal system to raise taxes on the high end.
Why is this a problem? The big fallacy is that an unequal distribution of wealth is 'evil.'
First, because wealth distribution is probably the single best predictor of both general quality of life and levels of violent crime in a country. Second, we're not talking about just unequal distribution of wealth, we're talking about rapidly increasing inequality in wealth distribution, which is an unsupportable economic system and inevitably leads to collapse if not corrected. It's a lot like someone saying, "who cares if the car is accelerating really fast we're only going 60mph now". Progressiveness of taxation is the accelerator of wealth distribution.
The only important metric is how well off people are, more specifically their standard of living, and that is NOT tied to wealth distribution at all.
Wealth disparity leads to higher rates of violent crime and lower rates of self reported happiness according to almost every sociological study to ever consider the topic. The correlation is extreme.
In America, the poor get richer.. the standard of living for everyone in America has been growing fairly consistently here in spite of wealth not being evenly distributed.
Standard of living is a very flexible term and studies show exactly opposite results based upon how someone decides to measure it.
You can respond with something about standard of living, but I will not accept responses that cry about wealth distribution... because thats just a fucking appeal to jealousy...
No, it's science. Maybe you should have read the Slashdot thread in the previous article about engineers and scientists in politics and how science is ignored.
In case you're wondering studies have noted that money does not correlate with happiness (assuming one's above the poverty line).
I don't believe this is true. There was a very recent study and the correlation between happiness and income ended at about $70,000 per person. Poverty levels in the US as a whole are usually considered about $11,000 per person. That's a pretty significant difference. In fact, it seemed to follow the VW mantra of good enough to not be a concern. When you don't have to worry about money on a daily basis or consider it when making day to day purchases and decisions, it stops making you unhappy and more money on top of that makes little or no difference.
Terrible ergonomics. Your hand will block the view when using the mouse as it's meant to be used, and so see it you have to take your eyes off the screen. Seems like a bad idea to me.
The example in the patent application is a number pad, I can see it being useful in that sort of context, if I was using mathematica, or balancing my budget. Of course I always use a laptop and occasionally a trackball, so I still won't use this, but I could see people with desktops finding it useful.
The idea that government spending creates "growth" is, at best, arguable.
Not really. You see government taxation and spending are the only way to stabilize a primarily capitalist economy. In straight capitalism (which no country has or not for long) a few people end up out ahead of the game. Those people are at an advantage because money can be used to make more money and gives you an advantage over those with less. This is called the wealth condensation principal. So if there isn't government taxation and spending and if that taxation and spending is not significantly progressive (that means tax the wealthy enough more than the poor to balance enough wealth condensation) then the economy becomes a one way system that gradually consolidates all the wealth into fewer and fewer hands until there is a revolution. Historically this is usually the poor rising up and killing the wealthy and redistributing said wealth, but sometimes it is a social revolution where tax reforms and government programs redistribute wealth, like the new deal.
That's pretty much where we are right now. Our wealth disparity is worse than the banana republics we used to predict (correctly) the economic collapse of. The problem isn't that the government taxes and spends right now (although there is always inefficiency in such a process). The problem is that we taxed the poor at too high of rates compared to the rich for so long the bottom 50% of our country has no net wealth at all. None! The debt balances the wealth and that's without taking into account the loans taken on their behalf by the government in the form of deficit.
There's still lots of wealth in our country, it's just all in the hands of about 4% at the very top. Most any economist not being paid to have a specific opinion will tell you that we need to change our tax structure to not only stop the flow, but reverse it. This is what stimulates growth in the domestic economy.
So the real problem is, cutting government spending cuts programs going primarily to the poor, because they have the least say in government. This hastens wealth condensation even if taxes are lowered at the same time. That reduces investment in the economy (unless you subscribe to the debunked trickle down theory that has been tried over and over and never worked) and leads to a worse overall economy. The worse economy means lower tax income, less jobs, and the necessity to cut more programs as everything spirals down the drain. Increased government spending in the short term is key, but it needs to be paired with increased taxation on the very high end where people can afford it. Resetting tax levels to what they were in the 50's or 60's would be ideal.
"Common myth still spreading around that macs do not have viruses."
Myth? Please point to a current Mac virus.
Alrescha seems to to be challenging the idea that Macs can get viruses and the assertion that it is a myth that Macs do not get viruses.
That's not what he wrote. He challenged the idea that Macs get viruses, not that they can get viruses. Physically, it is of course possible. Proof of concepts have been demonstrated in the lab, mostly to highlight a vulnerability. Realistically, more Mac users were probably struck by lightening over the last decade than were negatively effected by a virus on their Mac. It just doesn't happen. It's important to realize this can change in future. The whole point of this article is Cisco speculating (somewhat speciously) that malware is targeting the Mac and other platforms more instead of Windows.
...it was only natural that he assume...
There seems to be a whole lot of assuming going on. Assuming people mean something other than what they wrote and assuming people believe some argument then put forward and attacked. Assuming that because someone asks for an example of Macs getting viruses that they believe that macs are immune to viruses is NOT a valid assumption. It is a biased assumption.
Stenchwarrior is merely attempting to point out that malicious programs "CAN" do damage to Macs...
Except he never wrote that, he just posted links to vulnerabilities and proof of concept code. He never wrote, "hey, while they don't really propagate in the wild, it's possible as demonstrated by this". Instead he responded to a specific request for a virus currently in the wild with a lot of links that only make sense if you are either misinterpreting the original request or are mistaken about the content of the examples you're providing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was the latter, while making sure to be very clear about why those examples did not match the original request.
Now I can't speak to any specific examples of people on/. stating that Mac's can't be infected or exploited, but I know that's the impression many Mac users among my friends have...
Are they computer geeks? If so educate them, it's easy enough. If not, fine, it's close enough to the truth to drive them away from Windows and semi-accuratly describe a difference between the platforms. Anything that moves people off of Windows will only result in better security in the long run.
...so I wouldn't be surprised to find people on/. that believe the same thing.
There's a bi difference between not being surprised and leaping to the conclusion that the people you're responding to hold some belief despite having never stated any such thing... in fact to go so far as making that argument on their behalf as a straw man.
My original post was in reply to someone who wanted an example of a current virus, if you recall. Does that not sound like someone who's saying that it's impossible for a Mac to become infected?
No it doesn't. It sounds like someone who doesn't believe viruses are currently spreading that effect the Mac. If someone asked "has someone had hit president Obama in the face with a pie since he was elected," would you interpret that as their belief that it is impossible to hit the president in the face with a pie?
I read/. A LOT, as I'm sure you do, and I see people talk all the time about how superior their distro-of-the-week is to the M$ Nazis out there and I think it's just a bunch of elitist bullshit.
I do read Slashdot a lot, but I don't see this kind of claim either. I do see people pointing out various ways in which a distro or OS is superior to others, but that's a pretty useful thing to point out both so people know how things are better and so OS developers are informed about where they are behind. I do see a lot of people writing they would never use a given OS, but that doesn't imply general superiority.
I know this is/. and anyone who even thinks about defending Microsoft is a newb clearly in need of a flogging by stuffed-penguin.
I have, numerous times, pointed out a laudable act on behalf of MS or a feature where they are ahead of the curve in OS development. Usually it is fairly well received. Sometimes it sparks debate, but mostly from people going back and forth discussing the state of the art on each OS, something very few people seem to know across platforms.
Like I said before, all OSes have their place, but I constantly see two trains of thought around here; Microsoft vs. *NIX...not many people are right in the middle.
So here's the thing, when you have one single company dominating an industry as important and high tech as desktop OS's, well that one company then becomes a gatekeeper for advancement. That is incredibly frustrating to high tech loving geeks such as populate Slashdot. It's especially frustrating when progress slows to such a glacial pace. Frustration and anger with Microsoft and with a government uninterested in competition in the market will be found in almost nay forum for computer geeks. I find that perfectly understandable. At the same time, I try not to let it color my perceptions of the things MS has gotten right over the years and where other OS vendors are still lacking.
I know that vulnerabilities do not equal viruses, but if you read the link there were several viruses listed as well.
Look, please be specific. I followed your link. It's dozens of pages long and contains the word "virus 35 times. The first dozen or so are not referencing any virus that effects OS X. I'm not going to read a whole listing of potential vulnerabilities again, as I've already done several times because that's all anyone seems to be able to link to. (Under some sort of assumption there must be some in there somewhere?)
But people want to say that they are completely bullet proof and the point of my original post was to show they are not.
What people? The only people that have mentioned that here so far that I've seen have been people setting up strawman arguments. Who said that?
People get offended when someone points out the fact that their special OS is not flawless...
Really? Who? Who here has acted offended when you pointed out their OS isn't flawless. A number of people took exception to the claim that there are viruses in the wild, but that's because for all practical purposes, that doesn't seem to be a supportable statement.
Really what I see here is a lot more of people who don't really know what they're talking about making the argument that someone claims OS X is perfect and then attacking that claim no one made. I've worked in security for years and you know what, I don't recommend to Mac users that they get active scanning antivirus software because so far misbehaving antivirus software is a bigger risk than malware in the wild. I do recommend they follow safe practices with regard to potential trojans. Should the situation change, it might be that antivirus becomes more useful than a liability, but I don't see that case today. Others implying or stating the opposite here need to back up those claims lest they do more damage than good.
Trojans do not count. By their very nature they require user interaction to function. These kinds of attacks will always succeed as long as there are users willing to click "Allow" regardless of the OS type involved.
While trojans are a different discussion from viruses, they are still a fairly solvable problem. I deal with them today by installing software I don't trust in a restricted VM, running the software, examining the changes from outside the VM, and resetting the VM to its default state. This process can and is being automated by OS's using more lightweight but just as restrictive of sandboxes. I also take exception to the idea that users should be presented with an "allow" button. That's an example from a very broken UI Microsoft uses. Users should not be given the option to allow malware free reign to control their computer with an "allow" button, particularly one that has a huge level of false positives and a repetitive, nonspecific uninformative interface.
virus requires no user interaction. It is designed to replicate and spread autonomously.
You are mistaken. To qualify as a virus, malware merely has to replicate itself. Viruses that do this autonomously are called "worms".
You may be interested in the invisible, lightweight, and bulletproof armor I've developed in my basement lab. Since completion, I've never been successfully shot.
The difference is, there have been attempts to make a propagating OS X worm and virus and none have worked. Further, even some generic attacks on services that OS X shares with other OS's were unable to work on OS X because of the sandboxing. Finally, while you may think features like sandboxing and default settings that have very few exposed services are invisible to you, it just reflects your lack of expertise.
Ok ok, I just did a quick search. Here's a whole page [securemac.com] of vulnerabilities.
Vulnerabilities != viruses. Realistically, to date more Mac users have been compromised by faulty antivirus software than have had problems because of viruses.
The point is that OSX, nor any platform, is completely without flaws and impossible to infect.
That's a straw man argument. No one said it was.
As I'm sure several people have pointed out, as OSX becomes more prevalent, you'll see people working harder to develop malware.
That's quite likely, but doesn't support the conclusion that they will be successful enough to impact the average user.
And no, I'm not a Windows fanboi. I have several computers with OSes ranging from XP to Haiku, including OSX. To say that a Mac is unable to get a virus is like Hitler saying his army didn't need cold weather gear in Siberia.
Neither MacOS nor Linux is immune to viruses, but to date the security measures implemented by both OS's have been sufficient to make the threat a non-issue for the vast majority of users. I hypothesize that this has more to do with the fact that Apple and Linux developers lose money when there are significant security issues, while Microsoft, with monopoly influence on the desktop OS market, has less motivation to actually create working solutions. I don't see the malware problem for OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, or really anything other than Windows getting nearly as bad as it is for Windows users today.
Slashdot Mirror
seconded
The idea that most wealth is previously owned wealth is simply not born out by the facts.
Previously owned? Wealth mostly transfers, not "is created" as wealth is generally measured in commodities, real estate, etc.
The number of the "super wealthy" families that you refer to isn't as large as you thing or that you would lead people to believe.
Given the amount of wealth concentrated in the top 1% at this point, it is absurd. As for generational wealth it was only something like 1% of that top 1% that had not had parents in the same bracket from what I read.
Most are from people who worked their asses off and made their own money.
Citation? Upward mobility in the US is lower than numerous EU countries these days. That is to say, working hard is more likely to allow you to become wealthy in many EU countries than in the US... but this was not true a few decades ago. It's only in the last few decades that things have turned around.
Actually the quality of life even of the poor is higher in America than most any other industrialized nation.
I've never seen an attempt at ranking quality of life that places the US as number 1. It's usually somewhere in the top 20, but most have some weird characteristics I'm not sure I'd include, like divorce rates. Your anecdotes, however, are in no way a scientific measure.
The idea that the quality of life of the poor is America is bad, is just complete nonsense and a lie.
It is certainly not ideal, especially if you consider violence and crime as negatives. Your assertion that is must be better than other countries for some unspecified reason baffles me.
Even our homeless have places to eat, and they get food stamps.
I was talking to an eastern european intern a few months ago and he didn't even understand the concept of "homeless people". He thought we meant kids who voluntarily lived outdoors as a lifestyle choice. The idea that people would live outdoors because they had no home and there was no government option for the desperately poor and drug addicted. This is one of those countries most people in the US scoff at as "third world". I'm not saying the US isn't a good place to live, nor trying to badmouth it. It's just not the best in all ways by objective metrics.
Of course all this is sort of beside the point. Wealth disparity is a real issue and a serious predictor of many problems including violence.
If Paul Ryan wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with private insurance, what does he propose for people whom all health insurance companies refuse to insure?
According to his page on the Republican party Website his plan addresses that point in that it:
...requires the Department of Health and Human Services to certify plans and publish an annual list of Medicare-approved plans, at least one of which must be targeted to the “special needs of Medicare’s highest cost seniors.”
I'm unclear as to how the DHHS certifying plans means that insurance providers must offer one, but perhaps it is somehow a requirement. It would be nice if they clarified the point.
Attacking someones position involves talking about their position.
Yes... or assuming your listeners know or can discover those positions.
If they believe that privatizing social security will destroy social security, then why are they talking about Paul Ryan instead of talking about Social Security and its privatization?
Who is? I asked for a citation. Where are people attacking him personally instead of his policies, or making statements about what they think the result of his policies would be?
You have to be joking. Given the way the Democrats have been attacking Republican Paul Ryan the last day or so? They are not civil, it's once again do as I say, not as I do.
Attacking someone's position is not the same as attacking a person.
They have been saying he wants to get rid of Medicare and destroy Social Security and wants to see all the old people die on the streets.
Citation please. I've seen numerous comments that he wants to privative SS, which many people think will destroy it and result in old people suffering and dying needlessly. I haven't seen anyone say he wants old people to suffer and die.
No one has ever talked about getting rid of Medicare or Social Security.
In 2010 Ryan did propose a "Roadmap for America" that included replacing Medicare and Medicaid with private vouchers with values that would slowly decrease as a way of weaning America off of what he called "the entitlement programs". I think maybe you need to do some research before you make assertions.
So much for being civil, and so much for no violent rhetoric.
Please do cite this "violent rhetoric" and "attacks" of which you speak, attacks on him, not his proposed plans.
That is the real face of the Democratic party.
I'm no supporter of the Democratic party, but I do watch the real news and I haven't seen what you're talking about. It takes about 30 seconds with Google to find evidence that Ryan did propose privatizing SS and eliminating Medicare/Medicaid. Maybe you should stop watching Fox news and try any other channel, or better yet look at a variety of sources.
It's not really very entertaining. Heck, there have been numerous Daily Show segments where Stewart tries to have a serious discussion of some topic, but can't get the politician in question to do anything but quote party lines and generalities. Talking about the issues isn't good marketing.
Your best response to the Tea Party is name calling? If that is the best the Democrats or the Republicans have then both parties really have become a joke.
The tea party is just a way to elect Republicans. When you look at people showing up to rallies and looking at tea party information when voting, surveys show them as:
a Tea Party Member “is essentially someone who would've earlier identified as a Republican but now calls himself an independent despite being a conservative and voting pretty much exclusively for Republicans.”
So when you talk about republicans and the tea party, the tea party pretty much always votes for republicans, even if those republicans are now calling themselves tea baggers as well. It's just a rebranding of some of the Republican party in a way to try to lure in Libertarians and Republican supporters who are too upset by their party to vote.
They try to stop you every single update by stopping jailbreaking.
No, they try to fix security holes every update. If they were serious about stopping you from running unapproved apps on iPhones they'd lock the hardware to the OS.
say hi to the huge gorilla in the room.... capitalism. other countries think broadband for everyone is a great idea, and fund it.
Actually, it might be responsible press or education that's more important. You see, the US funded broadband here too, to a tune of more money per individual than almost anywhere else. We're just as socialist, just more incompetent. Here the networking companies took a portion of the money we gave them and used it to hire lobbyists who made sure there were no actual requirements they deliver anything for all that taxpayer money. So they just kept it and didn't actually build out high speed networks everywhere. The press mostly ignored the issue and the people are too stupid, lazy, uninterested, and distracted to use the democratic process to solve the problem.
I agree, Google says "we will not sell this through our app store" whereas Apple says "you cannot have this app." There is no reason to liken Google to Apple here.
This isn't wholly true you know. Apple says, 'you can't have this through our store which is the only way without hacking to get it on our OS. You can have it if you hack the OS or install a different OS, but we won't support you."
I realize this may seem like nit-picking but it's important to note that Apple doesn't actually stop anyone from getting an app legally, they just make it inconvenient if you want to use their mobile OS on the hardware they sell. The point still stands though.
I'm still waiting for Google to decide it's time to create a new, better store that incorporates the advantages of a vetted system for all apps with the advantages of many sources and no completely banned apps. It is certainly possible to build such a system, although it may be complex. It would be nice to see them leapfrog Apple on this front.
The top 1% owns about 40% of the wealth and pays about 40% of the taxes.
Wealth is irrelevant here (except where it indirectly influences other things); what's important is income.
Your argument is hard to swallow since wealth is such a huge factor influencing so many other things. I mean seriously; paying rent, mortgage, tuition loans? All those are taxes on not being wealthy enough as a circumstance of birth and it's a tax paid to the very wealthy. Wealth condensation in our country is a much more important factor in achieving financial independence than any other factor including intelligence or dedication. Without taking accumulated and especially inherited wealth into consideration we can never have a meritocracy (or approximation thereof) which is the ideal system for providing incentive to all people in a capitalist eonomy. In an ideal world we'd only tax wealth, but of course we'd also all inherit equal shares of everything from society. Because of the horrible inefficiencies of implementing such a system in real life, we approximate a wealth tax with a progressive income tax (or we did until 20 years ago when we started making our taxes increasingly less progressive and consolidating wealth among the wealthiest few).
First, because wealth distribution is probably the single best predictor of both general quality of life and levels of violent crime in a country.
You got a citation for the quality of life part?
Sure: http://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/sites/www.pdx.edu.sustainability/files/media_assets/iss/fellow_publications/chs1112f.pdf
But as I said before "quality of life" is a very fuzzy term. It's important to look at more concrete terms such as self reported happiness.
The countries with the greatest economic freedoms...
I don't even know what that means. What makes one country less economically free? How do you quantify that?
The "evil" countries with economic freedom are doing quite well. You may not want to admit it, so here is a god damned citation [gapminder.org]
I don't know what you're trying to show with that citation. It is a correlation of wealth and healthcare in countries. It does not seem to take wealth disparity into account at all. Since socialized medicine correlates so strongly with wealth of nations and also with longevity, it's hard to determine any specific causality. Also what's with calling some countries "evil"? Are you trying to be hyperbolic?
Wealth disparity leads to higher rates of violent crime and lower rates of self reported happiness according to almost every sociological study to ever consider the topic. The correlation is extreme.
Self reported happiness? What kind of hogwash shit is that?
Self reported happiness is when you survey people and ask them to quantify how happy they are as opposed to making up some measurement of supposed quality of life like "how many cars owned" or other arbitrary metric. "Self reported happiness" is a fairly specific measure of quality of life, as opposed to a general term that can mean many different things depending upon what study you're looking at. If you're care to propose a better, specific metric and some reasoning I'd be happy to consider it.
In other words, you failed to cite the stuff and even then feel that you have to qualify the un-cited sources as contradictory bullshit.
No, I'm saying the term you brought up has various meanings and I thought it important to clarify if we're to have a productive discussion going forward instead of a bunch of empty, unscientific rhetoric that fails to define the terminology in use.
Apparently you failed to learn what science is. Go to my citation above and play around.
Your citation above doesn't address wealth disparity at all. One might as well go to the winning horses at the track in the paper today. Do you know what wealth disparity is and what I'm talking about? Did you bother to find out? Nations with similar or dissimilar wealth can have similar or dissimilar rates of wealth disparity. It's a related but independent measure. Countries wealthier than the US per capita often have lower rates of wealth disparity.
Contrary to popular belief, Americans are fucking very well off in spite of your rantings based on economic "hes too rich" jealousy.
You seem to have an opinion that is unlikely to be swayed by facts or research or science. You seem intent on attributing a completely unsupported motivation and ignoring what I actually write. If you bother to respond, please actually read my comments and look up the terms you don't understand.
Why should wealth be taxed, aside from the income it might generate? I see this '% of wealth' figure mentioned often, but I never see an explanation as to why income taxes should depend on wealth.
Mostly to counteract wealth condensation. Basically, we do best economically when we live in a meritocracy, where the most work is rewarded and people that don't contribute are not rewarded. Because of wealth condensation, most income is the result of previously owned wealth, not actual work. So we try to use tax brackets to progressively tax the wealthy at higher rates than the poor so everyone is motivated to be productive and so that our economy does not constantly concentrate the wealth into fewer and fewer hands until we reach an economic collapse.
The problem is, tax rates for the very wealthy have been lowered consistently for the last 20 years such that the wealth is consolidating. It doesn't matter if you work hard or not, statistically it's a lot more important who your parents are. If you were born to wealth you can sit on your butt and that wealth will generate more wealth than the average poor person who works themselves extremely hard. Thus we move further from a meritocracy and people both rich and poor aren't motivated to work hard and be awesome because it isn't hard work or brilliance or anything that is rewarded financially, just happenstance of birth. Additionally, the wealth continues to alarmingly consolidate into a very few hands, upward mobility increasingly drops, reinvestment drops, more US money is invested overseas, and our economy spirals downward. The last time this happened was the great depression. We raised taxes on the wealthy and instituted public works and social benefits programs to spread the wealth back out. This time, the very wealthy in power are not yet scared enough of being murdered by the throngs of poor people to allow our bought and paid for legal system to raise taxes on the high end.
Why is this a problem? The big fallacy is that an unequal distribution of wealth is 'evil.'
First, because wealth distribution is probably the single best predictor of both general quality of life and levels of violent crime in a country. Second, we're not talking about just unequal distribution of wealth, we're talking about rapidly increasing inequality in wealth distribution, which is an unsupportable economic system and inevitably leads to collapse if not corrected. It's a lot like someone saying, "who cares if the car is accelerating really fast we're only going 60mph now". Progressiveness of taxation is the accelerator of wealth distribution.
The only important metric is how well off people are, more specifically their standard of living, and that is NOT tied to wealth distribution at all.
Wealth disparity leads to higher rates of violent crime and lower rates of self reported happiness according to almost every sociological study to ever consider the topic. The correlation is extreme.
In America, the poor get richer.. the standard of living for everyone in America has been growing fairly consistently here in spite of wealth not being evenly distributed.
Standard of living is a very flexible term and studies show exactly opposite results based upon how someone decides to measure it.
You can respond with something about standard of living, but I will not accept responses that cry about wealth distribution... because thats just a fucking appeal to jealousy...
No, it's science. Maybe you should have read the Slashdot thread in the previous article about engineers and scientists in politics and how science is ignored.
I found an article about the study I was thinking of. I guess it as $75,000 a year.
In case you're wondering studies have noted that money does not correlate with happiness (assuming one's above the poverty line).
I don't believe this is true. There was a very recent study and the correlation between happiness and income ended at about $70,000 per person. Poverty levels in the US as a whole are usually considered about $11,000 per person. That's a pretty significant difference. In fact, it seemed to follow the VW mantra of good enough to not be a concern. When you don't have to worry about money on a daily basis or consider it when making day to day purchases and decisions, it stops making you unhappy and more money on top of that makes little or no difference.
Terrible ergonomics. Your hand will block the view when using the mouse as it's meant to be used, and so see it you have to take your eyes off the screen. Seems like a bad idea to me.
The example in the patent application is a number pad, I can see it being useful in that sort of context, if I was using mathematica, or balancing my budget. Of course I always use a laptop and occasionally a trackball, so I still won't use this, but I could see people with desktops finding it useful.
The idea that government spending creates "growth" is, at best, arguable.
Not really. You see government taxation and spending are the only way to stabilize a primarily capitalist economy. In straight capitalism (which no country has or not for long) a few people end up out ahead of the game. Those people are at an advantage because money can be used to make more money and gives you an advantage over those with less. This is called the wealth condensation principal. So if there isn't government taxation and spending and if that taxation and spending is not significantly progressive (that means tax the wealthy enough more than the poor to balance enough wealth condensation) then the economy becomes a one way system that gradually consolidates all the wealth into fewer and fewer hands until there is a revolution. Historically this is usually the poor rising up and killing the wealthy and redistributing said wealth, but sometimes it is a social revolution where tax reforms and government programs redistribute wealth, like the new deal.
That's pretty much where we are right now. Our wealth disparity is worse than the banana republics we used to predict (correctly) the economic collapse of. The problem isn't that the government taxes and spends right now (although there is always inefficiency in such a process). The problem is that we taxed the poor at too high of rates compared to the rich for so long the bottom 50% of our country has no net wealth at all. None! The debt balances the wealth and that's without taking into account the loans taken on their behalf by the government in the form of deficit.
There's still lots of wealth in our country, it's just all in the hands of about 4% at the very top. Most any economist not being paid to have a specific opinion will tell you that we need to change our tax structure to not only stop the flow, but reverse it. This is what stimulates growth in the domestic economy.
So the real problem is, cutting government spending cuts programs going primarily to the poor, because they have the least say in government. This hastens wealth condensation even if taxes are lowered at the same time. That reduces investment in the economy (unless you subscribe to the debunked trickle down theory that has been tried over and over and never worked) and leads to a worse overall economy. The worse economy means lower tax income, less jobs, and the necessity to cut more programs as everything spirals down the drain. Increased government spending in the short term is key, but it needs to be paired with increased taxation on the very high end where people can afford it. Resetting tax levels to what they were in the 50's or 60's would be ideal.
"Common myth still spreading around that macs do not have viruses."
Myth? Please point to a current Mac virus.
Alrescha seems to to be challenging the idea that Macs can get viruses and the assertion that it is a myth that Macs do not get viruses.
That's not what he wrote. He challenged the idea that Macs get viruses, not that they can get viruses. Physically, it is of course possible. Proof of concepts have been demonstrated in the lab, mostly to highlight a vulnerability. Realistically, more Mac users were probably struck by lightening over the last decade than were negatively effected by a virus on their Mac. It just doesn't happen. It's important to realize this can change in future. The whole point of this article is Cisco speculating (somewhat speciously) that malware is targeting the Mac and other platforms more instead of Windows.
...it was only natural that he assume...
There seems to be a whole lot of assuming going on. Assuming people mean something other than what they wrote and assuming people believe some argument then put forward and attacked. Assuming that because someone asks for an example of Macs getting viruses that they believe that macs are immune to viruses is NOT a valid assumption. It is a biased assumption.
Stenchwarrior is merely attempting to point out that malicious programs "CAN" do damage to Macs...
Except he never wrote that, he just posted links to vulnerabilities and proof of concept code. He never wrote, "hey, while they don't really propagate in the wild, it's possible as demonstrated by this". Instead he responded to a specific request for a virus currently in the wild with a lot of links that only make sense if you are either misinterpreting the original request or are mistaken about the content of the examples you're providing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was the latter, while making sure to be very clear about why those examples did not match the original request.
Now I can't speak to any specific examples of people on /. stating that Mac's can't be infected or exploited, but I know that's the impression many Mac users among my friends have...
Are they computer geeks? If so educate them, it's easy enough. If not, fine, it's close enough to the truth to drive them away from Windows and semi-accuratly describe a difference between the platforms. Anything that moves people off of Windows will only result in better security in the long run.
...so I wouldn't be surprised to find people on /. that believe the same thing.
There's a bi difference between not being surprised and leaping to the conclusion that the people you're responding to hold some belief despite having never stated any such thing... in fact to go so far as making that argument on their behalf as a straw man.
My original post was in reply to someone who wanted an example of a current virus, if you recall. Does that not sound like someone who's saying that it's impossible for a Mac to become infected?
No it doesn't. It sounds like someone who doesn't believe viruses are currently spreading that effect the Mac. If someone asked "has someone had hit president Obama in the face with a pie since he was elected," would you interpret that as their belief that it is impossible to hit the president in the face with a pie?
I read /. A LOT, as I'm sure you do, and I see people talk all the time about how superior their distro-of-the-week is to the M$ Nazis out there and I think it's just a bunch of elitist bullshit.
I do read Slashdot a lot, but I don't see this kind of claim either. I do see people pointing out various ways in which a distro or OS is superior to others, but that's a pretty useful thing to point out both so people know how things are better and so OS developers are informed about where they are behind. I do see a lot of people writing they would never use a given OS, but that doesn't imply general superiority.
I know this is /. and anyone who even thinks about defending Microsoft is a newb clearly in need of a flogging by stuffed-penguin.
I have, numerous times, pointed out a laudable act on behalf of MS or a feature where they are ahead of the curve in OS development. Usually it is fairly well received. Sometimes it sparks debate, but mostly from people going back and forth discussing the state of the art on each OS, something very few people seem to know across platforms.
Like I said before, all OSes have their place, but I constantly see two trains of thought around here; Microsoft vs. *NIX...not many people are right in the middle.
So here's the thing, when you have one single company dominating an industry as important and high tech as desktop OS's, well that one company then becomes a gatekeeper for advancement. That is incredibly frustrating to high tech loving geeks such as populate Slashdot. It's especially frustrating when progress slows to such a glacial pace. Frustration and anger with Microsoft and with a government uninterested in competition in the market will be found in almost nay forum for computer geeks. I find that perfectly understandable. At the same time, I try not to let it color my perceptions of the things MS has gotten right over the years and where other OS vendors are still lacking.
I know that vulnerabilities do not equal viruses, but if you read the link there were several viruses listed as well.
Look, please be specific. I followed your link. It's dozens of pages long and contains the word "virus 35 times. The first dozen or so are not referencing any virus that effects OS X. I'm not going to read a whole listing of potential vulnerabilities again, as I've already done several times because that's all anyone seems to be able to link to. (Under some sort of assumption there must be some in there somewhere?)
But people want to say that they are completely bullet proof and the point of my original post was to show they are not.
What people? The only people that have mentioned that here so far that I've seen have been people setting up strawman arguments. Who said that?
People get offended when someone points out the fact that their special OS is not flawless...
Really? Who? Who here has acted offended when you pointed out their OS isn't flawless. A number of people took exception to the claim that there are viruses in the wild, but that's because for all practical purposes, that doesn't seem to be a supportable statement.
Really what I see here is a lot more of people who don't really know what they're talking about making the argument that someone claims OS X is perfect and then attacking that claim no one made. I've worked in security for years and you know what, I don't recommend to Mac users that they get active scanning antivirus software because so far misbehaving antivirus software is a bigger risk than malware in the wild. I do recommend they follow safe practices with regard to potential trojans. Should the situation change, it might be that antivirus becomes more useful than a liability, but I don't see that case today. Others implying or stating the opposite here need to back up those claims lest they do more damage than good.
Trojans do not count. By their very nature they require user interaction to function. These kinds of attacks will always succeed as long as there are users willing to click "Allow" regardless of the OS type involved.
While trojans are a different discussion from viruses, they are still a fairly solvable problem. I deal with them today by installing software I don't trust in a restricted VM, running the software, examining the changes from outside the VM, and resetting the VM to its default state. This process can and is being automated by OS's using more lightweight but just as restrictive of sandboxes. I also take exception to the idea that users should be presented with an "allow" button. That's an example from a very broken UI Microsoft uses. Users should not be given the option to allow malware free reign to control their computer with an "allow" button, particularly one that has a huge level of false positives and a repetitive, nonspecific uninformative interface.
virus requires no user interaction. It is designed to replicate and spread autonomously.
You are mistaken. To qualify as a virus, malware merely has to replicate itself. Viruses that do this autonomously are called "worms".
You may be interested in the invisible, lightweight, and bulletproof armor I've developed in my basement lab. Since completion, I've never been successfully shot.
The difference is, there have been attempts to make a propagating OS X worm and virus and none have worked. Further, even some generic attacks on services that OS X shares with other OS's were unable to work on OS X because of the sandboxing. Finally, while you may think features like sandboxing and default settings that have very few exposed services are invisible to you, it just reflects your lack of expertise.
Ok ok, I just did a quick search. Here's a whole page [securemac.com] of vulnerabilities.
Vulnerabilities != viruses. Realistically, to date more Mac users have been compromised by faulty antivirus software than have had problems because of viruses.
The point is that OSX, nor any platform, is completely without flaws and impossible to infect.
That's a straw man argument. No one said it was.
As I'm sure several people have pointed out, as OSX becomes more prevalent, you'll see people working harder to develop malware.
That's quite likely, but doesn't support the conclusion that they will be successful enough to impact the average user.
And no, I'm not a Windows fanboi. I have several computers with OSes ranging from XP to Haiku, including OSX. To say that a Mac is unable to get a virus is like Hitler saying his army didn't need cold weather gear in Siberia.
Neither MacOS nor Linux is immune to viruses, but to date the security measures implemented by both OS's have been sufficient to make the threat a non-issue for the vast majority of users. I hypothesize that this has more to do with the fact that Apple and Linux developers lose money when there are significant security issues, while Microsoft, with monopoly influence on the desktop OS market, has less motivation to actually create working solutions. I don't see the malware problem for OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, or really anything other than Windows getting nearly as bad as it is for Windows users today.