So are you saying that there should be an additional tax bracket for the people who make seven figures?
The current taxation system is fair in that people making $32K a year can barely make ends meet as it were, while the people who make $250K or more a year can afford just about any luxury they want. Besides, if you're making $250K, the higher tax bracket only applies to any income over $250K, so it's actually very little extra in taxes for the next few thousand dollars of income.
But to go back to the idea that taxation is unfair, let's put it this way: Say one person spends $3000 on food a year. For a person making 30K a year, that's 10% of that person's income. For someone making $250K, it's less than 2%. After all, commodity prices and sales tax doesn't vary with income.
Actually, if you look carefully, everything happened during Reagan's administration. That was when Greenspan became the Federal Reserve chairman.
Reaganomics simply doesn't work, and it's time people realized that. Less regulation only leads to eventual self-destruction, as we bear witness to today.
At the same time, social welfare doesn't work either, and we've seen it with the ghettos in the 70's and 80's and we're seeing that with the banks now.
Small businesses generate the most amount of jobs. Large companies do not. Large companies generate a large amount of jobs at a time, but one large company will end up replacing a lot of small businesses, and the change in jobs is actually a net loss. And, when a small business fails, a small number of people are affected. It's easy for those a amount of people to find new jobs. When a large business fails, a large number of people are affected, and the job market is immediately and suddenly saturated.
There's a middle road, where the money from taxes goes into promoting new businesses and new markets, without direct subsidies. Putting the money into education, and restricting academic institutions that accept federal money, is potentially one such solution. Treating communications infrastructure like roads, and then leasing it out to anyone who wants to start a business in communications, is another.
Outright eliminating patents (and possibly eliminating or limiting copyright) may sound extreme, but the truth is, it will create many more small businesses. I've seen it happen, where one person has a great business idea, and suddenly, 10 other people jump on it. And the survivors of the initial flood are the ones who either innovate fast enough or differenciate themselves to pick up a niche market. Such businesses will never get big in the sense of Walmart big, but that's not a bad thing. And the whole, without patents, people would just hide behind trade secrets argument is BS, as the most advanced things are hidden behind trade secrets anyway.
I guess by government intrusion, you don't mean regulation. Because Greenspan specifically stated that his idea of a regulation-less free market was the cause of today's economic problems.
Companies can't be expected to regulate themselves. It's like asking children to not do wrong when you don't tell them what's right and what's wrong. In fact, it exactly like expecting regular people to not do wrong without laws.
At the same time, I agree that companies shouldn't have been bailed out. But then, it would be very painful in the short term, and since humans (especially in the modern day) only care about the short term, it would've been political suicide to advocate this.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
It's politics. To get support from, say, a senator from a particular state for a bill that said senator's constituents are on the line about, you have to give the senator something in return. Usually, this is in the form of earmarks.
There's also the massive "homeland security" waste going on, but nobody seems to complain about that.
Fermat's last theorem was proven true by Andrew Wiles in 1993/1994. But Fermat probably didn't have a proof for it, so the "theorem" portion really was a misnomer, maintained that way by mathematicians, I suspect, for romantic reasons. So it's not a hoax per se.
I think teenagers finding a login/password for a pay porn site on a BBS would count as "hacking" to these people.
Anyway, I remember one of the oldest tricks in the book from when I was a teenager that actually involved money. Somebody would get a list of credit card numbers, and that person would order some thing here and there online with one of those numbers. They'd get it shipped to an accomplice friend's house. Since there's some law that anything that gets delivered to a person belongs to that person regardless of whether that person ordered it or not, the accomplice then would own the items in the shipment. And then the accomplice would give the person who placed the order his stuff.
I never partook in such things, but I knew plenty of people who did, and was intimately familiar with it. I was asked on several occasions to be the collector, but I never gave a serious reply. I couldn't think of a good enough reason why I would give the address of my residence to someone who scammed others.
Anyway, I fail to see how this is news to anyone not living under a rock for the past 20 years.
Your misconception of what "spread the wealth" means is disappointing.
Spread the wealth happens in many different ways. School supplies for underfunded schools, after school programs to keep kids off the streets, subsidizing medical bills for veterans, maintaining parks and other public places, etc.
Since welfare reform in the 90's, the government is not giving away money to people who don't work. It's not taking your tax money and directly lining the pockets of people with a lower income. At most, "spread the wealth" may apply to people whom, after getting laid off, are collecting unemployment while looking for something to do. But these people have been paying taxes into the system for so long, you'd think it's only fair that they get a little bit of assistance when they're in trouble.
You know, the funny thing is, unless you were earning over $250K a year, "spreading the wealth" probably would make you wealthier, or at the least no worse off than now. Wealthier in terms of quality of life, in terms of how many growth opportunities you have (as a small-business owner) or the quality and integrity of your employees.
It means you don't have to worry about the guy who cuts your lawn for you for $20 because he's not worried about what his kid is doing after school, or worried that his kid can't afford college. It means you can walk down the street at night without fear of being harassed by drunks or mugged by someone trying to make ends meet without an honest job. It means your business will get customers, and you won't have to undercut your competition by a lot because your existing customers are shopping for the best deal for their money because they don't have much money anymore.
This is incorrect. Federal funds are used for roads, especially interstates. E.g. the "minimum" drinking age is enforced on a national level even though it's a state power by the Feds threatening to withhold highway funding for non-conforming states. And, the Feds do provide funding for schools ("No Child Left Behind" anyone?) however little it amounts to. The majority of your property taxes do go towards local services and infrastructure, but you'd be wrong if you think the Feds don't have their hand in it as well.
If you think you can be the judge of a topic you know nothing about, I must question your ability to make judgments.
You have every right to make a judgment, just as everybody else has the right to ignore you. And if you try to make the claim that you are somehow qualified when you are clearly not, then you would and should be considered a fraud.
Actually, he just got famous. And I'm certain he reveled in it as well.
If you become famous, people will dig up dirt on you. Just because.
Besides, remember that it was McCain who brought him up during the third presidential debate, not Obama. If McCain had left things alone, the guy would've just been another person Obama visited on his campaign trail. How many others have Obama visited whom were vetted so thoroughly? None, regardless of whether they liked Obama or not. And remember that it is the media who vetted him, both the conservative and the "liberal," and this was after he paraded himself around as the quintessential American small business owner.
On the contrary, language, especially English, is particularly ambigious, and a highly inefficient means of communication. However, it is practical when nothing else is available except your mouth. Writing, by extension, is the most practical method of record keeping, as it requires the least technology to create and replicate. There is also an advantage to language in that it can express the abstract. However, abstractions are more practical for social settings, of which language dominates as the preferred means of communication.
But there are many better methods of communication and recording, though such methods have only recently become viable. Actually, the recording part has been easy for the past 40 or so years, but the duplication part only recently became ubiquitous.
There is value to the old way, and value to the new way. I wouldn't shun either just for the sake of doing so.
To be honest, nobody will actually know for sure until somebody examines the code. I find it unlikely that Google will kill apps acquired outside of their services, but it may very well be an intended side effect that once a program is killed, not even reinstalling it from an outside source will help.
I trust Google as far as I can throw some of its employees. That having been said, that the software is open source makes it so that trust isn't really necessary. And as Google has a decent track record, I'd rather wait and see before immediately vilifying them.
Apple, on the other hand, has a terrible track record. I did initially try to give them the benefit of the doubt (even though knowing full well that they'd kill any app that interfered with their business plan), but quite frankly, the fears of the fearmongers and Apple "haters" have been proven to be quite founded.
If the author of crapware was advertising it as the second coming and is charging for it as if it were the second coming, it's pretty much a scam then. And I think Google would reserve the right to remove those apps from the store and try to refund money to people who already bought into the scam.
That having been said, the next logical step would be to compare the amount of compensation that mainframe operators are getting versus that of other server operators.
Selling you narcotics itself in an of itself is not entrapment. Repeatedly pestering you to buy narcotics until you do is entrapment.
Cops are, by and large, dumb. Local (exclusing large cities) and state cops are typically dumber than federal agents. Even for TFA, the FBI was logging into their server from a government IP block. I'm typically skeptical, but I don't see anything glaringly inconsistent with this anecdote. And quite frankly, there have been many such sting operations, and I wouldn't be surprised if a/.er got to experience it firsthand.
Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if a/.er got caught by such an operation and thrown in prison either...
Slashdot Mirror
So are you saying that there should be an additional tax bracket for the people who make seven figures?
The current taxation system is fair in that people making $32K a year can barely make ends meet as it were, while the people who make $250K or more a year can afford just about any luxury they want. Besides, if you're making $250K, the higher tax bracket only applies to any income over $250K, so it's actually very little extra in taxes for the next few thousand dollars of income.
But to go back to the idea that taxation is unfair, let's put it this way: Say one person spends $3000 on food a year. For a person making 30K a year, that's 10% of that person's income. For someone making $250K, it's less than 2%. After all, commodity prices and sales tax doesn't vary with income.
Actually, if you look carefully, everything happened during Reagan's administration. That was when Greenspan became the Federal Reserve chairman.
Reaganomics simply doesn't work, and it's time people realized that. Less regulation only leads to eventual self-destruction, as we bear witness to today.
At the same time, social welfare doesn't work either, and we've seen it with the ghettos in the 70's and 80's and we're seeing that with the banks now.
Small businesses generate the most amount of jobs. Large companies do not. Large companies generate a large amount of jobs at a time, but one large company will end up replacing a lot of small businesses, and the change in jobs is actually a net loss. And, when a small business fails, a small number of people are affected. It's easy for those a amount of people to find new jobs. When a large business fails, a large number of people are affected, and the job market is immediately and suddenly saturated.
There's a middle road, where the money from taxes goes into promoting new businesses and new markets, without direct subsidies. Putting the money into education, and restricting academic institutions that accept federal money, is potentially one such solution. Treating communications infrastructure like roads, and then leasing it out to anyone who wants to start a business in communications, is another.
Outright eliminating patents (and possibly eliminating or limiting copyright) may sound extreme, but the truth is, it will create many more small businesses. I've seen it happen, where one person has a great business idea, and suddenly, 10 other people jump on it. And the survivors of the initial flood are the ones who either innovate fast enough or differenciate themselves to pick up a niche market. Such businesses will never get big in the sense of Walmart big, but that's not a bad thing. And the whole, without patents, people would just hide behind trade secrets argument is BS, as the most advanced things are hidden behind trade secrets anyway.
You can thank Al Gore for the internet revolution.
I guess by government intrusion, you don't mean regulation. Because Greenspan specifically stated that his idea of a regulation-less free market was the cause of today's economic problems.
Companies can't be expected to regulate themselves. It's like asking children to not do wrong when you don't tell them what's right and what's wrong. In fact, it exactly like expecting regular people to not do wrong without laws.
At the same time, I agree that companies shouldn't have been bailed out. But then, it would be very painful in the short term, and since humans (especially in the modern day) only care about the short term, it would've been political suicide to advocate this.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
It's politics. To get support from, say, a senator from a particular state for a bill that said senator's constituents are on the line about, you have to give the senator something in return. Usually, this is in the form of earmarks.
There's also the massive "homeland security" waste going on, but nobody seems to complain about that.
I suspect it has to do with the lack of blood making it up there.
"God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time." - Robin Williams
Or perhaps nothingness is a state of equilibrium.
Fermat's last theorem was proven true by Andrew Wiles in 1993/1994. But Fermat probably didn't have a proof for it, so the "theorem" portion really was a misnomer, maintained that way by mathematicians, I suspect, for romantic reasons. So it's not a hoax per se.
I think teenagers finding a login/password for a pay porn site on a BBS would count as "hacking" to these people.
Anyway, I remember one of the oldest tricks in the book from when I was a teenager that actually involved money. Somebody would get a list of credit card numbers, and that person would order some thing here and there online with one of those numbers. They'd get it shipped to an accomplice friend's house. Since there's some law that anything that gets delivered to a person belongs to that person regardless of whether that person ordered it or not, the accomplice then would own the items in the shipment. And then the accomplice would give the person who placed the order his stuff.
I never partook in such things, but I knew plenty of people who did, and was intimately familiar with it. I was asked on several occasions to be the collector, but I never gave a serious reply. I couldn't think of a good enough reason why I would give the address of my residence to someone who scammed others.
Anyway, I fail to see how this is news to anyone not living under a rock for the past 20 years.
Your misconception of what "spread the wealth" means is disappointing.
Spread the wealth happens in many different ways. School supplies for underfunded schools, after school programs to keep kids off the streets, subsidizing medical bills for veterans, maintaining parks and other public places, etc.
Since welfare reform in the 90's, the government is not giving away money to people who don't work. It's not taking your tax money and directly lining the pockets of people with a lower income. At most, "spread the wealth" may apply to people whom, after getting laid off, are collecting unemployment while looking for something to do. But these people have been paying taxes into the system for so long, you'd think it's only fair that they get a little bit of assistance when they're in trouble.
You know, the funny thing is, unless you were earning over $250K a year, "spreading the wealth" probably would make you wealthier, or at the least no worse off than now. Wealthier in terms of quality of life, in terms of how many growth opportunities you have (as a small-business owner) or the quality and integrity of your employees.
It means you don't have to worry about the guy who cuts your lawn for you for $20 because he's not worried about what his kid is doing after school, or worried that his kid can't afford college. It means you can walk down the street at night without fear of being harassed by drunks or mugged by someone trying to make ends meet without an honest job. It means your business will get customers, and you won't have to undercut your competition by a lot because your existing customers are shopping for the best deal for their money because they don't have much money anymore.
This is incorrect. Federal funds are used for roads, especially interstates. E.g. the "minimum" drinking age is enforced on a national level even though it's a state power by the Feds threatening to withhold highway funding for non-conforming states. And, the Feds do provide funding for schools ("No Child Left Behind" anyone?) however little it amounts to. The majority of your property taxes do go towards local services and infrastructure, but you'd be wrong if you think the Feds don't have their hand in it as well.
And one of those responsibilities is to maintain vigilance over government to prevent it from getting too intrusive.
Follow up with a confirmation e-mail.
If you think you can be the judge of a topic you know nothing about, I must question your ability to make judgments.
You have every right to make a judgment, just as everybody else has the right to ignore you. And if you try to make the claim that you are somehow qualified when you are clearly not, then you would and should be considered a fraud.
Actually, he just got famous. And I'm certain he reveled in it as well.
If you become famous, people will dig up dirt on you. Just because.
Besides, remember that it was McCain who brought him up during the third presidential debate, not Obama. If McCain had left things alone, the guy would've just been another person Obama visited on his campaign trail. How many others have Obama visited whom were vetted so thoroughly? None, regardless of whether they liked Obama or not. And remember that it is the media who vetted him, both the conservative and the "liberal," and this was after he paraded himself around as the quintessential American small business owner.
On the contrary, language, especially English, is particularly ambigious, and a highly inefficient means of communication. However, it is practical when nothing else is available except your mouth. Writing, by extension, is the most practical method of record keeping, as it requires the least technology to create and replicate. There is also an advantage to language in that it can express the abstract. However, abstractions are more practical for social settings, of which language dominates as the preferred means of communication.
But there are many better methods of communication and recording, though such methods have only recently become viable. Actually, the recording part has been easy for the past 40 or so years, but the duplication part only recently became ubiquitous.
There is value to the old way, and value to the new way. I wouldn't shun either just for the sake of doing so.
The easiest thing for Jaron Lanier to do in this case is to publish an autobiography and source that. He might even make a few quick bucks off it.
If you ask the question with a GWB accent, some your positive response rate will be even higher!
To be honest, nobody will actually know for sure until somebody examines the code. I find it unlikely that Google will kill apps acquired outside of their services, but it may very well be an intended side effect that once a program is killed, not even reinstalling it from an outside source will help.
I trust Google as far as I can throw some of its employees. That having been said, that the software is open source makes it so that trust isn't really necessary. And as Google has a decent track record, I'd rather wait and see before immediately vilifying them.
Apple, on the other hand, has a terrible track record. I did initially try to give them the benefit of the doubt (even though knowing full well that they'd kill any app that interfered with their business plan), but quite frankly, the fears of the fearmongers and Apple "haters" have been proven to be quite founded.
If the author of crapware was advertising it as the second coming and is charging for it as if it were the second coming, it's pretty much a scam then. And I think Google would reserve the right to remove those apps from the store and try to refund money to people who already bought into the scam.
That having been said, the next logical step would be to compare the amount of compensation that mainframe operators are getting versus that of other server operators.
Selling you narcotics itself in an of itself is not entrapment. Repeatedly pestering you to buy narcotics until you do is entrapment.
Cops are, by and large, dumb. Local (exclusing large cities) and state cops are typically dumber than federal agents. Even for TFA, the FBI was logging into their server from a government IP block. I'm typically skeptical, but I don't see anything glaringly inconsistent with this anecdote. And quite frankly, there have been many such sting operations, and I wouldn't be surprised if a /.er got to experience it firsthand.
Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if a /.er got caught by such an operation and thrown in prison either...
Sure, someone's looking for Bin Laden. The question is (or perhaps the questions are), who, how many, and what for.
I guess in the end, you don't need smart cops, just cops smarter than the criminals.