we have a progressive tax system, meaning that as income goes up, the tax rate as a percentage of income goes up as well
And, as income goes up, the ability to make tax deductible donations goes up. This effectively negates the percentage of income increase. Convenient for the people with big incomes: they get the cash, they get the deductions, and they get to bemoan their higher tax rate as well so that they look like they're paying their share.
Funny you should mention that. Every time I try to suggest that,"In real life you would be a bit more pleasant" the usual response is along the lines of,"Is SilverspurG making his veiled threats again?"
It's completely silly... but these people are really and truly indicative of the voting majority in the US.
I completely agree that criticism should be allowed. I'm pointing out that, for the vast majority of people, criticism is synonymous with harassment. Come to IRC with me. These people don't know how to make a point without including a personal sleight like "stupid", "moronic", or recruiting more than one person so that the group can say "you're just wrong". The harassment becomes even more obvious when, six weeks later, you're still being trolled for the same topic. Many of the trolls have advanced degrees or sit in positions of relatively high power (upper middle management, lower upper management).
The problem is not with university professors. The problem is more ingrained in society than that. Personally I think it comes from 50 years of blaming everything on the evil USSR--when those arguments would be exposed as bunk the proper method was to use belittlement tactics to curb the unpatriotic dissenter. Not surprisingly it's working the same way in today's world with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criticism of a dissenting opinion is nearly completely inseparable from harassment. It's almost guaranteed that civil discourse and debate will give way to insidious insults within 10 minutes.
it often portrays students as mindless autobots who have no ability to think critically and develop their own perspective
Which is, for the greatest part, true. Students who go through public school get 12 years of criteria carefully selected to discourage critical examination of the government. Students who attend private schools prior to moving on to college are often so well shielded and pampered by their priveleged financial positions that they have little experience with the way things work for the people who aren't financially priveleged and pampered.
So we get two groups: Students who have been carefully indoctrinated not to ask hard questions, and students who don't need to ask hard questions because the answer will always be,"Society would be better if those other people would just do what we tell them to without asking so many questions."
are completely incapable of peacefully accepting the views of others
I read this and just had to laugh. Have you visited IRC lately? I can point to a couple channels where, for five years, I can't express a point of view on the flavor of a breakfast cereal without catching an Inquisition style interrogation.
I mean, criticism shouldn't turn into full-blown harrassment, but if your employer decides that they no longer wish to associate with you, why shouldn't they be able to make that decision?
In many cases I've seen that, when an employer no longer chooses to associate with someone, the standard operating procedure is to harass them out the door. Most employers don't know how to productively terminate a relationship. Rather, they know, but they're trying every underhanded trick in the book not to be responsible for it. Insidiously harassing someone will usually result in a paper trail where the employer can show, legally, that the employee was terminated for behavioral problems--thus absolving the employer of any unemployment responsibility.
What a beautiful world it would be if criticism could be separated from harassment.
Just the fact that you would even consider using this obvious flamebait as part of your post demonstrates that you would be one of the "academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal".
Some things are accidents. Some things are deliberate. Some things are somewhere in between. It looks to be the popular slam of the day to attack Gibson over this. Just like it's always popular to slam MS and, for a year or two, it was popular to slam the GPL.
Step back off the tinfoilophobery, close your eyes (so you don't get too scared), and just think for a moment... "What if?" I know it may be a frightening experience for you, and you may need to broaden your horizons just a little... but "What if?"
If you go with "What if?" then hiding a backdoor in WMF is a very logical thing to do.
They could put one anywhere. They chose to put it in association with WMF. They could distribute trojans through updates but then everyone would notice.
You're not very good at circumventing security without getting caught, are you?
There's no doubt that the general employees and even middle management align themselves more with the OSS than with Microsoft. At the end of the day, however, the senior executives are playing in the same ballparks as other executives who have made fortunes on the proprietary software charge led empowered by Microsoft's dominance. Everyone knows where the money is and currently it's not in GPL software. If only because the executives haven't figured out how to properly take their cut should they allow it to be financed in the business and consumer realms.
Strategically it would be very logical for any BSD vs. proprietary software competition to be a dog'n'pony show meant to get in the way of the GPL movement. This isn't in the technology arena. This is in the financing arena. The fact that open source companies were up to $500 million in venture capital this year is a very important step forward and there's no doubt that the major players in the industry take notice.
Uh-huh. Right. So just what are those mega Google cubes doing? I suppose they're all just innocently serving up web-pages. The marketers surely wouldn't bother putting together things as easy as an IP log and a cookie database. That'd be much too difficult for them.
If you read the bottom of that web page it seems that WHAT-WG is a consortium whose goal is to subverting the W3C and forcing them to accept junk like this PING (think embrace, extend, extinguish). Read between the lines of the following. The answer to the title question should be a "Yes. Period."
Shouldn't this work be done at the W3C or IETF?
Many of the members of this working group are active supporters and members of the W3C and other standardization bodies. Parts of the work have already been submitted to the W3C, and we intend to work more closely with the W3C in future. The technical work is currently focused on developing the specifications to levels appropriate for the W3C Last Call stage.
Oh please. Everyone already knows that only cookies which contain "personally identifiable information" can be used to profile the users.
You're going to have to try a lot harder if you want to convince me that IP address logs aren't cross-referenced with cookie databases on a regular basis.
That doesn't mean that MS isn't funding Wasabe through some investment broker and encouraging them to use the freer-than-free BSD license to try and bog down the GPL machine which has started to actually mean something in the marketplace.
Seriously. Would anyone even know if the VC firm working with Wasabe was owned primarily by big MS shareholders? For many years I've wanted to see a mapping of social connections for the leading industry giants.
It's yet another network request which serves no purpose except for tracking. There's an IP address attached to that network request. A little cross-referencing with other available recent databases makes the need for cookies just silly. What are you hiding?
Read what else Mr. Goldstein is involved in by Googling. His business ventures are clearly at odds with any real effort to safeguard users.
Is this the same fellow who teaches at CMU? Looking at the Google pages, if it's all the same gentlemen, he has about 5 different paychecks. He must be loaded.
Somehow the print advertising industry doesn't have this problem even though the inflation of distribution numbers is known and accepted. I don't see any counters, let alone license plate trackers, on roadside billboards. I have no problem with checking the authenticity of the books but every other industry has reached and equilibrium of trust. It's no secret that clicks are easily falsified on the 'net using bots. Yet another tracking mechanism isn't going to do diddly to fix inflated page ranks.
No more drivel about this being necessary for advertising. Other industries have figured it out without tagging every man woman and child who walks the street.
Slashdot Mirror
What a rough life.
Funny you should mention that. Every time I try to suggest that,"In real life you would be a bit more pleasant" the usual response is along the lines of,"Is SilverspurG making his veiled threats again?"
It's completely silly... but these people are really and truly indicative of the voting majority in the US.
I completely agree that criticism should be allowed. I'm pointing out that, for the vast majority of people, criticism is synonymous with harassment. Come to IRC with me. These people don't know how to make a point without including a personal sleight like "stupid", "moronic", or recruiting more than one person so that the group can say "you're just wrong". The harassment becomes even more obvious when, six weeks later, you're still being trolled for the same topic. Many of the trolls have advanced degrees or sit in positions of relatively high power (upper middle management, lower upper management).
The problem is not with university professors. The problem is more ingrained in society than that. Personally I think it comes from 50 years of blaming everything on the evil USSR--when those arguments would be exposed as bunk the proper method was to use belittlement tactics to curb the unpatriotic dissenter. Not surprisingly it's working the same way in today's world with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criticism of a dissenting opinion is nearly completely inseparable from harassment. It's almost guaranteed that civil discourse and debate will give way to insidious insults within 10 minutes.
So we get two groups: Students who have been carefully indoctrinated not to ask hard questions, and students who don't need to ask hard questions because the answer will always be,"Society would be better if those other people would just do what we tell them to without asking so many questions."
I saw this earlier on the board, so I thought I'd share it with you. :)
What a beautiful world it would be if criticism could be separated from harassment.
CyricZ always seems to be one of the few voices of objective reason on this board. More power to them.
Given Sony's track record I was hoping to see more of the right to read references.
She was caught repeatedly sitting on Pinocchio's face and demanding that he tell another lie.
I can't believe you fell for that.
Now that even the FBI can put a quantifiable sum of money on this may we please begin dismembering the EULA which makes this such an enormous problem?
"We'll just create this broken product... and let everyone else deal with the billions of lost dollars which it causes."
Why did Raggedy-Ann get kicked out of the toybox?
Some things are accidents. Some things are deliberate. Some things are somewhere in between. It looks to be the popular slam of the day to attack Gibson over this. Just like it's always popular to slam MS and, for a year or two, it was popular to slam the GPL.
Step back off the tinfoilophobery, close your eyes (so you don't get too scared), and just think for a moment... "What if?" I know it may be a frightening experience for you, and you may need to broaden your horizons just a little... but "What if?"
If you go with "What if?" then hiding a backdoor in WMF is a very logical thing to do.
They could put one anywhere. They chose to put it in association with WMF. They could distribute trojans through updates but then everyone would notice.
You're not very good at circumventing security without getting caught, are you?
There's no doubt that the general employees and even middle management align themselves more with the OSS than with Microsoft. At the end of the day, however, the senior executives are playing in the same ballparks as other executives who have made fortunes on the proprietary software charge led empowered by Microsoft's dominance. Everyone knows where the money is and currently it's not in GPL software. If only because the executives haven't figured out how to properly take their cut should they allow it to be financed in the business and consumer realms.
Strategically it would be very logical for any BSD vs. proprietary software competition to be a dog'n'pony show meant to get in the way of the GPL movement. This isn't in the technology arena. This is in the financing arena. The fact that open source companies were up to $500 million in venture capital this year is a very important step forward and there's no doubt that the major players in the industry take notice.
Uh-huh. Right. So just what are those mega Google cubes doing? I suppose they're all just innocently serving up web-pages. The marketers surely wouldn't bother putting together things as easy as an IP log and a cookie database. That'd be much too difficult for them.
Right.
If you read the bottom of that web page it seems that WHAT-WG is a consortium whose goal is to subverting the W3C and forcing them to accept junk like this PING (think embrace, extend, extinguish). Read between the lines of the following. The answer to the title question should be a "Yes. Period."
Shouldn't this work be done at the W3C or IETF?
Many of the members of this working group are active supporters and members of the W3C and other standardization bodies. Parts of the work have already been submitted to the W3C, and we intend to work more closely with the W3C in future. The technical work is currently focused on developing the specifications to levels appropriate for the W3C Last Call stage.
Oh please. Everyone already knows that only cookies which contain "personally identifiable information" can be used to profile the users.
You're going to have to try a lot harder if you want to convince me that IP address logs aren't cross-referenced with cookie databases on a regular basis.
That doesn't mean that MS isn't funding Wasabe through some investment broker and encouraging them to use the freer-than-free BSD license to try and bog down the GPL machine which has started to actually mean something in the marketplace.
Seriously. Would anyone even know if the VC firm working with Wasabe was owned primarily by big MS shareholders? For many years I've wanted to see a mapping of social connections for the leading industry giants.
It's yet another network request which serves no purpose except for tracking. There's an IP address attached to that network request. A little cross-referencing with other available recent databases makes the need for cookies just silly. What are you hiding?
There is no good reason for this.
Read what else Mr. Goldstein is involved in by Googling. His business ventures are clearly at odds with any real effort to safeguard users.
Is this the same fellow who teaches at CMU? Looking at the Google pages, if it's all the same gentlemen, he has about 5 different paychecks. He must be loaded.
If the stats are worthless then we need to add HTTP PING counters. That will fix everything.
Somehow the print advertising industry doesn't have this problem even though the inflation of distribution numbers is known and accepted. I don't see any counters, let alone license plate trackers, on roadside billboards. I have no problem with checking the authenticity of the books but every other industry has reached and equilibrium of trust. It's no secret that clicks are easily falsified on the 'net using bots. Yet another tracking mechanism isn't going to do diddly to fix inflated page ranks.
No more drivel about this being necessary for advertising. Other industries have figured it out without tagging every man woman and child who walks the street.