It would be unethical to track an individual we suspected of doing something wrong. It's not unethical to track "the rapist." We're not assuming anyone's guilt, we're tabulating a list of crimes and evidence related to the crimes.
If you modify your vehicle, you'll likely void your warranty. If you live somewhere like California modifying your vehicle with non-oem or non-CARB components can result in fines. If you modify the vehicle with racing parts and use it on the streets, you forfeit your vehicle (it will be taken and destroyed).
That's not true, any mods you make only void the warranty on parts that the mods damage. If I put aftermarket brakes on, and the car throws a rod in the warranty period, they still have to fix it. Now since after modding the exhaust the next step is usually modding the ECU, most people who evenly modestly tune their cars void large portions of their warranty - but to me, that's pretty reasonable, if you're going to mess with the engine you're on the hook if it breaks.
If you live in the United States, you can't take working emission control devises off your car, but this isn't the manufacturers being dicks, this is the duly elected US Congress deciding in the Clean Air Act that it's not ok to spew NOxs in exchange for a few more horses - similarly you're not allowed to store your groceries in an open pool of freon - even if it is more effective.
And finally, yeah, if you make your car not-street-legal - which (outside of slapping racing slicks on) is actually pretty hard to do, you're not allowed to drive on the streets. In order to make your car not street legal you have to do something like take out the windshield or pull out the head lamps. You can completely rebuild your intake, engine, exhaust (caveat regarding cats), and suspension, add as many turbos and as much nitrous as you want, all without effecting whether or not you're allowed to drive on public streets. And even if you do manage to get busted for driving a non-street legal car, it would have to be a pretty egregious violation for the cops to seize it (like drag racing.)
Good manuals, like good liner notes will be missed. The vast majority of game manuals, like the vast majority of liner notes are, and have always been completely superfluous crap.
Actually, I think it's a bit worse than that. It used to be that games were completely both incapable of conveying a story line and had extremely poor graphics, so the best manuals filled in the gaps. Now a days games are so much better at the narrative and have such vastly superior graphics that game manuals only exist to tell you how to install the game and what pushing button 'x' does. The game itself has picked up the slack as far as plot and art.
.The original Super Mario Bro's on 8-bit Nintendo still remains one of the most enjoyable games to play.
I disagree. I know there's a lot of platformer nostalgia - and hey I still play Mario from time to time, but it really isn't that fun. It's linear, it's static, it's frustrating, and there is no story. Platformers died because they're all the same. The differences between Mario and Sonic and Megaman are Castlevania superficial.
It's more enjoyable than the newest Mario on Wii.
Not that that's saying much.
In fact quite a lot of those games are way more enjoyable than the current string of games that are out.
Again, I have to disagree. Megaman drove it's franchise into the ground, Mario got lucky with timing and just as it was getting stale along came 3D. Many of the recent Zelda games are superior to the originals, and examples like Tekken and Final Fantasy are examples not of the gaming industry dying, but of watching studios trying to get every last penny out of their golden boy. I'd rather play Bio Shock than Duke Nukem or World of Warcraft than Ultima online.
The problem with looking at old games is that you only remember the good ones. There was a whole lot of derivative stink available for the NES, but you're only fondly remembering the groundbreaking ones. I played Ghostbusters on the NES, and even as a 15 year old, couldn't figure out how someone could sell that crap. I had an Atari 2600, and really, how many pong/breakout clones can you produce? I too would rather play Half-Life over Crysis, but that's a little like saying that movies were better in 1959 than now because you'd rather watch Ben Hur than Avatar - forgetting of course that 1959 also gave us Plan 9 from Outer space.
I have a hunch what that what you consider a lot of shares and what Steve Jobs considers a lot of shares are two vastly different things.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The SEC review process exists so that new monopolies aren't created. The anti-trust statutes deal with any monopolies who act in an anti-competitive manner regardless of whether the monopoly was formed through acquisition or organic growth. This looks to me like vertical integration, which is an anti-competitive practice. Incidentally, it's not illegal to operate a monopoly, it's only illegal for a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive practices.
If Gizmodo were Joe Blow on the street, this action would be questionably moral. As it is Gizmodo is a news organization, so what they're doing is reporting. Something like a "lost" iPhone may be trivial, but the same principle applies to something like "lost" Pentagon Papers. If anyone did anything immoral it would be if the person who "lost" the phone did so without apple's permission. Gizmodo is in the clear - at least according to my moral compass.
And back before the DMCA you could also infringe on copyright using nothing more than a pencil and paper - you didn't even need intellect - and private use was not exempt then either.
Look, I get it, some people have issues with the law restricting information, but it's not entirely without advantages. Say what you will, but a significant portion of this countries GDP derives from creative industries e.g. Hollywood, software, etc. These business models could not exist without copyright. The alternative is to fall back to patronage, which I think, has more negative consequences to culture and the rate of innovation than copyright.
I've got real issues with the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA, mostly because it flies in the face of a long history of fair use, but there's nothing new with the idea that the government restricts your ability to do what you want with a pen and paper - even in your own house. (I've also got issues with the Sonny Bono/Disney perpetual copyright because things that are only constitutional on a technicality bother me.)
It's always been that way. The whole innocent until proven guilty concept is actually quite radical - and even then it only applies to the governments assumptions - private citizens are free to assume whatever they want.
Yes, rich people spend more money than poor people, so yes, they would pay more tax.
However, that's not a useful metric, because it doesn't say anything about taxation as a percentage of income.
In the simplest schemes, a national sales tax would be applied to all goods - if this happened, since the poor spend all their money, they would be taxed on all their income. The richer you are, the smaller percentage of your income you actually spend, and thus the lower your effective tax rate. This is why sales taxes are regressive, and regressive taxes are not fair.
Ninthly, the sovereignty alone has the right to make war and peace with other nations, and commonwealths, i.e. the right to judge when war is for the public good, to decide what size of military forces are to be assembled for that purpose and armed and paid for, and to tax the subjects to get money to defray the expenses of those forces
and
the stubbornness of the subjects themselves, who are unwilling to contribute to their own defence, and so make it necessary for their governors to get what they can from them in taxes
Two things that are important to note, once you allow for taxation for the common defense, taxtion for the common good is a difference of degree, not of kind. Second, Hobbes was a precursor to the enlightenment, much of his work assumes a more or less authoritarian regime. Democracies are different, we vote for the people who tax us, and we can throw them out if they overtax us.
it's impossible to derive an income in this country without benefiting from the government.
That is so false that it's almost laughable.
Name one. Even illicit trades like drug dealers transport their goods on public roads.
We have a constitution, and if the framers did not foresee a need for a income tax at the time they also, in their wisdom, allowed for a process to amend the constitution. The sixteenth amendment is no less a part of the constitution than the second.
You can squat on federal land - there's quite a lot of it. It might be of questionable legality, but no one's going to come looking for you unless you're negatively interacting with society.
You could also take a flight to Somalia and disappear - there's no government likely to steal from you there.
Well, that 47% pay sales tax, gasoline tax, they pay into social security if they're working, their employer pays payroll tax on their behalf, etc. etc.
They may not pay federal income tax, but that's quite different from not paying any tax - I think you'd find the number of people who pay less than 1% of their income in tax to be vanishingly small.
As for who decides what's fair - well that's what the democratic process tries to achieve, albeit imperfectly. There's a balance between the populist who complain that the wealth is much more unequally distributed than the tax burden, and the wealth and the corporatist who complain that they're paying for benefits that they don't use.
It's called the social contract. You implicitly allow the government to take some of your income by participating in society, and lets face it, it's impossible to derive an income in this country without benefiting from the government.
Go take a tent into the wilderness if you don't like it. You won't owe any taxes if you live off the land.
I'll agree that the US tax code is over-complex, but the fundamental problem is that things like "income" are actually very hard to define.
We know that rich people tend to have more complicated finances, which makes it easier for them to obfuscate their actual income than poor people. Thus a simple tax would tend to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor. On the other hand, moneyed interests have been pretty adroit at inserting favorable positions for themselves into the tax code, limiting their tax liability, the elimination of these loop-holes would tend to shift the tax burden from the poor to the rich.
So I guess the moral of the story is that it's impossible to have a (fair) tax system that you can figure out with your paystub and a multiplication operation, but it's also true that you win some, you lose some.
The tax code could stand to be improved, it could even stand to be simplified, but it will never be that easy.
It's unrealistic to think you can allow all speech.
In the US you can't engage in obscene speech acts, you can't say something likely to lead to "imminent lawless action," nor can you engage in libel or slander.
The Canadians may have drawn a different line than us, but there are genuine social interests that outweigh certain types of speech.
It may have been that the conditions during the industrial revolution were inevitable, and it is certainly true that conditions during the industrial revolution made it possible for the eventual largest expansion of both the economy and the middle class in history.
My issue is with that the post I replied to asserted that we didn't know if industries would regulate themselves because we haven't tried in 100 years. This is technically true, the last time we tried was about 120 years ago. That time we discovered that industrialists weren't interested in improving the lot of their workers, they were interested only in their self-interests. Hence the violent reaction to the nascent union movement, and the largest concentration of wealth in history. As FDR would go on to say, "heedless self-interest was bad morals; we now know that it is bad economics." On that note, it's often impossible to separate things that are economically wrong from things that are morally or actually damaging, c.f. Countrywide Financial.
Dubai has a completely free market system. Why don't you move there?
Feeling generous today? I normally suggest Somalia;)
Actually, I hear westerners do pretty well for themselves in Dubai, especially if they have backgrounds in finance or engineering, or can teach English. Well, provided that you don't have a problem with the fact that your six or seven figure salary is being subsidized by with what amounts to slave labor on the part of the immigrants from India and South Asia - wait is slave labor part of the "free market"?
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It would be unethical to track an individual we suspected of doing something wrong. It's not unethical to track "the rapist." We're not assuming anyone's guilt, we're tabulating a list of crimes and evidence related to the crimes.
That's not true, any mods you make only void the warranty on parts that the mods damage. If I put aftermarket brakes on, and the car throws a rod in the warranty period, they still have to fix it. Now since after modding the exhaust the next step is usually modding the ECU, most people who evenly modestly tune their cars void large portions of their warranty - but to me, that's pretty reasonable, if you're going to mess with the engine you're on the hook if it breaks.
If you live in the United States, you can't take working emission control devises off your car, but this isn't the manufacturers being dicks, this is the duly elected US Congress deciding in the Clean Air Act that it's not ok to spew NOxs in exchange for a few more horses - similarly you're not allowed to store your groceries in an open pool of freon - even if it is more effective.
And finally, yeah, if you make your car not-street-legal - which (outside of slapping racing slicks on) is actually pretty hard to do, you're not allowed to drive on the streets. In order to make your car not street legal you have to do something like take out the windshield or pull out the head lamps. You can completely rebuild your intake, engine, exhaust (caveat regarding cats), and suspension, add as many turbos and as much nitrous as you want, all without effecting whether or not you're allowed to drive on public streets. And even if you do manage to get busted for driving a non-street legal car, it would have to be a pretty egregious violation for the cops to seize it (like drag racing.)
Good manuals, like good liner notes will be missed. The vast majority of game manuals, like the vast majority of liner notes are, and have always been completely superfluous crap.
Actually, I think it's a bit worse than that. It used to be that games were completely both incapable of conveying a story line and had extremely poor graphics, so the best manuals filled in the gaps. Now a days games are so much better at the narrative and have such vastly superior graphics that game manuals only exist to tell you how to install the game and what pushing button 'x' does. The game itself has picked up the slack as far as plot and art.
Yes, that is what I meant. I mixed up my grossly ineffectual TLAs.
I disagree. I know there's a lot of platformer nostalgia - and hey I still play Mario from time to time, but it really isn't that fun. It's linear, it's static, it's frustrating, and there is no story. Platformers died because they're all the same. The differences between Mario and Sonic and Megaman are Castlevania superficial.
Not that that's saying much.
Again, I have to disagree. Megaman drove it's franchise into the ground, Mario got lucky with timing and just as it was getting stale along came 3D. Many of the recent Zelda games are superior to the originals, and examples like Tekken and Final Fantasy are examples not of the gaming industry dying, but of watching studios trying to get every last penny out of their golden boy. I'd rather play Bio Shock than Duke Nukem or World of Warcraft than Ultima online.
The problem with looking at old games is that you only remember the good ones. There was a whole lot of derivative stink available for the NES, but you're only fondly remembering the groundbreaking ones. I played Ghostbusters on the NES, and even as a 15 year old, couldn't figure out how someone could sell that crap. I had an Atari 2600, and really, how many pong/breakout clones can you produce? I too would rather play Half-Life over Crysis, but that's a little like saying that movies were better in 1959 than now because you'd rather watch Ben Hur than Avatar - forgetting of course that 1959 also gave us Plan 9 from Outer space.
I have a hunch what that what you consider a lot of shares and what Steve Jobs considers a lot of shares are two vastly different things.
The SEC review process exists so that new monopolies aren't created. The anti-trust statutes deal with any monopolies who act in an anti-competitive manner regardless of whether the monopoly was formed through acquisition or organic growth. This looks to me like vertical integration, which is an anti-competitive practice. Incidentally, it's not illegal to operate a monopoly, it's only illegal for a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive practices.
(of course IANAL)
If Gizmodo were Joe Blow on the street, this action would be questionably moral. As it is Gizmodo is a news organization, so what they're doing is reporting. Something like a "lost" iPhone may be trivial, but the same principle applies to something like "lost" Pentagon Papers. If anyone did anything immoral it would be if the person who "lost" the phone did so without apple's permission. Gizmodo is in the clear - at least according to my moral compass.
And back before the DMCA you could also infringe on copyright using nothing more than a pencil and paper - you didn't even need intellect - and private use was not exempt then either.
Look, I get it, some people have issues with the law restricting information, but it's not entirely without advantages. Say what you will, but a significant portion of this countries GDP derives from creative industries e.g. Hollywood, software, etc. These business models could not exist without copyright. The alternative is to fall back to patronage, which I think, has more negative consequences to culture and the rate of innovation than copyright.
I've got real issues with the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA, mostly because it flies in the face of a long history of fair use, but there's nothing new with the idea that the government restricts your ability to do what you want with a pen and paper - even in your own house. (I've also got issues with the Sonny Bono/Disney perpetual copyright because things that are only constitutional on a technicality bother me.)
Lately?
It's always been that way. The whole innocent until proven guilty concept is actually quite radical - and even then it only applies to the governments assumptions - private citizens are free to assume whatever they want.
Yes, rich people spend more money than poor people, so yes, they would pay more tax.
However, that's not a useful metric, because it doesn't say anything about taxation as a percentage of income.
In the simplest schemes, a national sales tax would be applied to all goods - if this happened, since the poor spend all their money, they would be taxed on all their income. The richer you are, the smaller percentage of your income you actually spend, and thus the lower your effective tax rate. This is why sales taxes are regressive, and regressive taxes are not fair.
Hobbes on taxation related to national defense.
and
Two things that are important to note, once you allow for taxation for the common defense, taxtion for the common good is a difference of degree, not of kind. Second, Hobbes was a precursor to the enlightenment, much of his work assumes a more or less authoritarian regime. Democracies are different, we vote for the people who tax us, and we can throw them out if they overtax us.
Name one. Even illicit trades like drug dealers transport their goods on public roads.
We have a constitution, and if the framers did not foresee a need for a income tax at the time they also, in their wisdom, allowed for a process to amend the constitution. The sixteenth amendment is no less a part of the constitution than the second.
You can squat on federal land - there's quite a lot of it. It might be of questionable legality, but no one's going to come looking for you unless you're negatively interacting with society.
You could also take a flight to Somalia and disappear - there's no government likely to steal from you there.
Well, that 47% pay sales tax, gasoline tax, they pay into social security if they're working, their employer pays payroll tax on their behalf, etc. etc.
They may not pay federal income tax, but that's quite different from not paying any tax - I think you'd find the number of people who pay less than 1% of their income in tax to be vanishingly small.
As for who decides what's fair - well that's what the democratic process tries to achieve, albeit imperfectly. There's a balance between the populist who complain that the wealth is much more unequally distributed than the tax burden, and the wealth and the corporatist who complain that they're paying for benefits that they don't use.
That's not fair because the rich spend a much smaller portion of their income than the poor do.
Sales taxes are the very definition of regressive.
It's called the social contract. You implicitly allow the government to take some of your income by participating in society, and lets face it, it's impossible to derive an income in this country without benefiting from the government.
Go take a tent into the wilderness if you don't like it. You won't owe any taxes if you live off the land.
What hidden taxes?
The only one I know about is the AMT - which is a serious problem. And if you hit it, you certainly won't be complaining about nickles and dimes.
You seem to be complaining that the government is making you pay less than you expected.
oh great.
The IRS website was working just fine until now. Then somebody had to post a direct link to a 175 page pdf on slashdot.
I'll agree that the US tax code is over-complex, but the fundamental problem is that things like "income" are actually very hard to define.
We know that rich people tend to have more complicated finances, which makes it easier for them to obfuscate their actual income than poor people. Thus a simple tax would tend to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor. On the other hand, moneyed interests have been pretty adroit at inserting favorable positions for themselves into the tax code, limiting their tax liability, the elimination of these loop-holes would tend to shift the tax burden from the poor to the rich.
So I guess the moral of the story is that it's impossible to have a (fair) tax system that you can figure out with your paystub and a multiplication operation, but it's also true that you win some, you lose some.
The tax code could stand to be improved, it could even stand to be simplified, but it will never be that easy.
complain all you want. Just don't call it robbery - that's hyperbolic.
You realize that the 20th century is by far the bloodiest century in History.
Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, J Edger Hoover.
As for empires, the US (and cultural colonies), the USSR, etc. etc.
We've got more Khans than ever before - we've just got less unorganized land for them to run roughshod over.
Hmmm.
If what you say is accurate, I'm honesty more concerned that you can be tried in absentia in Canada than I am with this discovery.
It's unrealistic to think you can allow all speech.
In the US you can't engage in obscene speech acts, you can't say something likely to lead to "imminent lawless action," nor can you engage in libel or slander.
The Canadians may have drawn a different line than us, but there are genuine social interests that outweigh certain types of speech.
It may have been that the conditions during the industrial revolution were inevitable, and it is certainly true that conditions during the industrial revolution made it possible for the eventual largest expansion of both the economy and the middle class in history.
My issue is with that the post I replied to asserted that we didn't know if industries would regulate themselves because we haven't tried in 100 years. This is technically true, the last time we tried was about 120 years ago. That time we discovered that industrialists weren't interested in improving the lot of their workers, they were interested only in their self-interests. Hence the violent reaction to the nascent union movement, and the largest concentration of wealth in history. As FDR would go on to say, "heedless self-interest was bad morals; we now know that it is bad economics." On that note, it's often impossible to separate things that are economically wrong from things that are morally or actually damaging, c.f. Countrywide Financial.
Feeling generous today? I normally suggest Somalia ;)
Actually, I hear westerners do pretty well for themselves in Dubai, especially if they have backgrounds in finance or engineering, or can teach English. Well, provided that you don't have a problem with the fact that your six or seven figure salary is being subsidized by with what amounts to slave labor on the part of the immigrants from India and South Asia - wait is slave labor part of the "free market"?