if you own a small house by the seaside, you are taxed by what similar houses have been sold for
Except that you cannot put that seaside house up on a web site so a million people could all download it and live in their own identical copies.
Real estate has a "fair market value" because it is inherently limited in quantity. That's what the word "real" is all about. The uniqueness of any given property automatically gives it value.
Free software has infinite supply and negligible costs. Any first year Economics textbook will tell you that its perceived value should be (near) zero.
Yes, the US estate tax is intentionally coercive. It encourages the rich to distribute their wealth charitably rather than create lazy inheritors. It's not fair capitalism, but neither is reposessing people's houses, building a baseball stadium, and giving it to a rich frat boy with good family connections. Of the two, I'm more opposed to corporate giveaways.
GIVE you a car, free and clear, the transaction still requires that you pay taxes
Riddle me this: if the government stopped taxing large gifts, exactly how many seconds would it take before all executive salaries were eliminated and replaced by weekly "gifts"? 'nuff said.
my car is paid off, yet every year, I still have to pay the county
Gee, I don't suppose the county uses that money to build the roads that you drive on? But what if you don't even drive that car? In that case, what the US really ought to do instead is charge $1 or 2 per gallon gasoline tax, like all the other western nations, so that people pay a fair share for their use of public resources.
Americans bitch too much about taxes. We have it easy compared to most countries (with a similar standard of living). Heck, even compared to many lower-ranked countries -- wasn't that the whole point of this Poland article?
I think it'll take putting the metric units in big print and the english in small. I think it'll take students being taught metric before english.
Bingo. The US is perfectly comfortable wallowing in british units forever. Left to inertia, it will take a thousand years. Metric won't take hold without a hard kick in the public's collective ass.
A simple first step would be for the federal government to require all-metric measurements on government documents and contracts. Big industries would have to use metric. Their workers would have to learn metric. And so on.
Except that Dubya certainly would never do such a thing, just like he'd never install solar panels on the White House roof. Guess metric will have to wait for another decade...
he didn't show the video in his defence because the video didn't show him..
Directly from the 2600 article:
Parisi claimed McGuckin was captured on video later in the tape but didn't show it since he was just walking down a street.
viewing of Law and Order tells me that the prosecution has to prove the call was malicious, not the defence;
As I said in my post, "innocent until proven guilty" is a nice platitude, but that's not how it works in the real world. If it's your word against a cop's word, you better present a lot of evidence that the cop was wrong or you're going to lose. Trials have little to do with law, and a lot to do with lawyers.
The 2600 article is mainly relevant for what it leaves out.
Why did he choose a nonjury trial? Of course a judge will take a cop's word over that of an "evil hacker", unless there's good evidence to the contrary.
Where are his own phone records? Who was he actually talking to at the time? If his call was so innocent, he should have explained it.
So the prosecution didn't show their video footage of him. Well, why didn't the defense show it? The police is required to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence.
In summary: were his lawyers incompetent, or did he have something to hide? Yes, yes, I know that US law is supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty". In the real world, it's "guilty unless you have money and/or look respectable". It sounds like he didn't present much of a defense.
Much less obnoxious than Netscape 6. AOL's marketroid's really did a number on that puppy. Too bad for Netscape, because I really wanted to see their share go up in next month's UserAgent logs. Too bad for me, because I really wanted to use it (Mozilla Mac still has too many showstoppers).
Is it me, or does every single movie that bends the laws of physics even slightly get trashed here? [...] In fact, I think that if the old Star Wars movies were first released today, we'd trash them, too.
No, and no. I for one have two completely separate categories for my sci-fi enjoyment:
Hard Science Fiction -- generally set in the present or near-future, heavily based on reality with specific changes. I absolutely expect this category to get the facts right, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science in a story if you don't know science.
Example of a success: Earth, by David Brin
Science Fantasy -- often set in distant parts of time, using technology that is nearly indistinguishable from magic. I absolutely expect this category to ignore the facts, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science half-assed if it breaks the illusion.
Example of a success: The Uplift War, by David Brin
we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" slip by with little complaint.
Not me. I thought that was the single worst part of the whole movie. He took the biggest mystical concept in all of sci-fi-dom's belief structure and turned it into fucking nano-symbiotes straight out of a bad ST:TNG episode. Much worse than the virgin birth, Jar-Jar, and Jake Lloyd's acting.
Re:Post vote confirmation is what is needed.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
I trust you voted for our company's preferred candidate?"
"Why no I didn't. But thank you for asking that question directly into my Sharper Image microphone tie. Would you like to just give me your ass now, or should we let a jury decide whether I get your head on a platter as well?"
Duh. Why would you assume that if the government uses new technologies, then old rights automatically disappear? Although this may disappoint you, we are not living in the world of Blade Runner.
Lastly, I'm guessing that the Regen was thinking about a simple confirmation receipt -- "you have voted" -- not an itemized receipt -- "you have voted for FOO and BAR". Vote confirmation is not a privacy issue, it's a public record.
Thanks much for the information. You're absolutely right, the news media certainly ought to have known about states with multiple time zones and waited at least until the last polls closed.
As for waiting until the last voter finishes up, maybe. Where I voted (suburban Maryland) the ballots were really easy to understand, quick to fill out, and I waited in line for a total of 20 seconds -- 15 seconds to get my ballot, 0 seconds to get a cubicle, 5 seconds to feed it into the scanner. I see many places are not so efficient, but perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about procrastinators? I dunno.
A friend of mine lives in Palm Beach county, and he agreed that the ballot was confusing and difficult. He spent a good long time looking it over in the voting booth before he stabbed it with the little toothpick thingy that they used.
Is it reasonable to pick the most powerful job in the world because a minor clerk didn't understand good user interface design?
This could be stuck in the courts for months. If it takes until New Year's, I hope Gore will gracefully concede rather than force a national crisis. I'd rather have a calm nation grumbling about President Nitwit than risk rioting and martial law and whatever else could happen.
I've collated several links and images about this on my personal pages:
p.s. Having half the candidates in a second row may be a violation of Florida election laws. I've heard that mentioned several times on NPR but unfortunately don't have a link.
The problem being Florida was called while the polls in florida were still opened.
No. I was channel surfing between CNN, CBS, and various others before, during, and after the bad call. Every single channel said "the polls in Florida will close at X o'clock, and we'll have announcements then". Then some commercials. Then "the polls in Florida are now closed, and our exit polls indicate..."
If you're going to throw out an accusation like that, you better back it up with solid URLs from reputable news sources.
It's obvious that we need to use a different method of voting [...] I think we'd be well off using a Borda count
Two problems with Borda. First, it would be exceedingly painful to explain preference ranking to everyone in the country, and it would drastically increase the time needed to cast each vote. Second, most current voting machines would need to be heavily rewired or completely scrapped.
A much easier method that is arguably equal to Borda is Approval Voting. It's trivial -- each candidate has a yes/no checkbox that says "would you approve if this guy won?" You check yes for the ones you like, and the most yesses wins. Easy to explain, avoids "spoiler vote" problems, and most current voting machines can handle the counting.
Gore loves big corporations as much as the next guy.
He loves some big corporations, but he doesn't love big tobacco (IMO, this ciggies for votes thing sounds like a setup) and he doesn't love Microsoft. In fact, on a campaign trip to Redmond last year, he got right in their faces and said that antitrust law should be applied to the software industry.
And HERE is a picture of the real reason why penguins can survive attacks by skuas, sea lions, and even terrorists. Sorry I couldn't find a better picture from the original series, but it's been out of print since the mid-80s.
Fortunately, not even Channel One casts its demonic tendrils on my college.
I'd be a little skeptical about the quality of your college if Channel Onewere there, because it's designed for children in middle and high school. So is ZapMe, AFAIK.
I used to teach at a school that had Channel One. A TV set mounted on the wall of every classroom is a fair trade for watching a reasonably informative 5 minute news broadcast each day. One minute of commercials (ChannelOne) is MUCH less evil than continuous streaming adverts with audio (ZapMe). Not to mention having to use NT Workstation...shudder.
I'd set up the systems that students use for surfing and what not, so that they could not submit this kind of data to begin with
Last year my department went to a ZapMe demo session at a local school. I'm pretty sure that the ZapMe contract specifically forbids altering the systems they loan you.
For the record, here's how it worked (IIRC): ZapMe equips one or more labs with a bunch of mid-range PCs running a modified NT workstation. The PC desktop is not accessible -- instead there is a shell with a corner advert box and buttons for access to various apps, mainly MS Office & a stripped-down MSIE with no address bar (to prevent kids from wandering off to "unapproved" sites). These are not general-purpose PCs by any stretch of the imagination.
The PCs connect to the Net by way of an NT server. The server uses a modem for outbound traffic (mainly just GET requests and the all-important user data) and a satellite dish for inbound traffic.
the speed of sound goes UP as the air pressure goes down.
Not quite -- due to decreasing air temperature, the speed of sound actually decreases as you go up for a while, then increases again until you hit near-vacuum.
Sea level -- 1116 fps
36000 to 82000 feet -- 968 fps
150000 feet -- 1075 fps
250000 feet and up -- by a quirk of physics, 1116 fps again!
certain Senators have been known for putting "holds" on nominations for seats
True. But this is mostly because the Senate Judiciary committee hates Clinton passionately. They're willing to hobble the court system with vacancies for a few years rather than let Slick Willie have more say in future rulings. The holds will pretty much end in January, whether it's for Bush or Gore appointees.
it doesn't matter what either one promises, it'll be the congress that decides what is done
On most economic issues, yes, they'll end up in roughly the same place. But there are also things a President can affect unilaterally:
Abortion Rights -- the President appoints new Supreme Court Justices. He also appoints the FDA, which has the authority to allow or withdraw RU-486.
the environment -- the President appoints the the EPA, Interior, etc. They control mileage and emission standards for vehicles. They choose between spotted owls and logging companies. etc.
Microsoft -- the President appoints the Attorney General and DOJ prosecutors. They decide whether or not to keep Bill Gates in court for the rest of his life. The President also appoints the federal judges who hear these cases.
If you care about these issues, then there is a difference between them.
A listserv of my friends has already arranged vote swaps just like the Slate article. Folks in politically safe states (such as Maryland) will give a green thumbs up for Nader, while our pals in closer states (such as Illinois) will hold their noses for Gore. Same final numbers, everyone benefits.
Bzzt. Just an example of the stupid shit that was going on before they made the rule. Lots and lots of folks got.edu addresses in the early 90's -- community colleges, K-12 schools, even some random pseudo-educational stuff like Biosphere. That's why they decided to crack down.
Personally, I think the rule is too harsh. Any accredited general educational institution from elementary through grad school should be allowed to use.edu, perhaps with a warning that higher universities have first dibs (to prevent, say, Columbia Junior High from cybersquatting).
Slashdot Mirror
This is great news! But I can hardly believed that we actually discovered Wave Motion Energy without the help of Queen Starsha.
Except that you cannot put that seaside house up on a web site so a million people could all download it and live in their own identical copies.
Real estate has a "fair market value" because it is inherently limited in quantity. That's what the word "real" is all about. The uniqueness of any given property automatically gives it value.
Free software has infinite supply and negligible costs. Any first year Economics textbook will tell you that its perceived value should be (near) zero.
Yes, the US estate tax is intentionally coercive. It encourages the rich to distribute their wealth charitably rather than create lazy inheritors. It's not fair capitalism, but neither is reposessing people's houses, building a baseball stadium, and giving it to a rich frat boy with good family connections. Of the two, I'm more opposed to corporate giveaways.
GIVE you a car, free and clear, the transaction still requires that you pay taxesRiddle me this: if the government stopped taxing large gifts, exactly how many seconds would it take before all executive salaries were eliminated and replaced by weekly "gifts"? 'nuff said.
my car is paid off, yet every year, I still have to pay the countyGee, I don't suppose the county uses that money to build the roads that you drive on? But what if you don't even drive that car? In that case, what the US really ought to do instead is charge $1 or 2 per gallon gasoline tax, like all the other western nations, so that people pay a fair share for their use of public resources.
Americans bitch too much about taxes. We have it easy compared to most countries (with a similar standard of living). Heck, even compared to many lower-ranked countries -- wasn't that the whole point of this Poland article?Bingo. The US is perfectly comfortable wallowing in british units forever. Left to inertia, it will take a thousand years. Metric won't take hold without a hard kick in the public's collective ass.
A simple first step would be for the federal government to require all-metric measurements on government documents and contracts. Big industries would have to use metric. Their workers would have to learn metric. And so on.
Except that Dubya certainly would never do such a thing, just like he'd never install solar panels on the White House roof. Guess metric will have to wait for another decade...
Directly from the 2600 article:
viewing of Law and Order tells me that the prosecution has to prove the call was malicious, not the defence;As I said in my post, "innocent until proven guilty" is a nice platitude, but that's not how it works in the real world. If it's your word against a cop's word, you better present a lot of evidence that the cop was wrong or you're going to lose. Trials have little to do with law, and a lot to do with lawyers.
Do you have a URL to back that up? Because it sounds like pure bullshit to me, due to a few tiny rules:
Given that the ACLU is not screaming bloody murder about this, I simply don't believe you without a reputable news article.
In summary: were his lawyers incompetent, or did he have something to hide? Yes, yes, I know that US law is supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty". In the real world, it's "guilty unless you have money and/or look respectable". It sounds like he didn't present much of a defense.
Much less obnoxious than Netscape 6. AOL's marketroid's really did a number on that puppy. Too bad for Netscape, because I really wanted to see their share go up in next month's UserAgent logs. Too bad for me, because I really wanted to use it (Mozilla Mac still has too many showstoppers).
No, and no. I for one have two completely separate categories for my sci-fi enjoyment:
- Hard Science Fiction -- generally set in the present or near-future, heavily based on reality with specific changes. I absolutely expect this category to get the facts right, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science in a story if you don't know science.
- Science Fantasy -- often set in distant parts of time, using technology that is nearly indistinguishable from magic. I absolutely expect this category to ignore the facts, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science half-assed if it breaks the illusion.
we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" slip by with little complaint.Example of a success: Earth, by David Brin
Example of a success: The Uplift War, by David Brin
Not me. I thought that was the single worst part of the whole movie. He took the biggest mystical concept in all of sci-fi-dom's belief structure and turned it into fucking nano-symbiotes straight out of a bad ST:TNG episode. Much worse than the virgin birth, Jar-Jar, and Jake Lloyd's acting.
"Why no I didn't. But thank you for asking that question directly into my Sharper Image microphone tie. Would you like to just give me your ass now, or should we let a jury decide whether I get your head on a platter as well?"
Duh. Why would you assume that if the government uses new technologies, then old rights automatically disappear? Although this may disappoint you, we are not living in the world of Blade Runner.
Lastly, I'm guessing that the Regen was thinking about a simple confirmation receipt -- "you have voted" -- not an itemized receipt -- "you have voted for FOO and BAR". Vote confirmation is not a privacy issue, it's a public record.
Thanks much for the information. You're absolutely right, the news media certainly ought to have known about states with multiple time zones and waited at least until the last polls closed.
As for waiting until the last voter finishes up, maybe. Where I voted (suburban Maryland) the ballots were really easy to understand, quick to fill out, and I waited in line for a total of 20 seconds -- 15 seconds to get my ballot, 0 seconds to get a cubicle, 5 seconds to feed it into the scanner. I see many places are not so efficient, but perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about procrastinators? I dunno.
Wrong -- there are only 337 card carrying Reformers in PBC. Sodium Attack was kind enough to find a link to official Florida voter registrations.
And to add insult to your injury, ChiChi, even Pat Buchanan doesn't think those votes are his. The man may be misguided and racist, but he's honest to a fault.
A friend of mine lives in Palm Beach county, and he agreed that the ballot was confusing and difficult. He spent a good long time looking it over in the voting booth before he stabbed it with the little toothpick thingy that they used.
Is it reasonable to pick the most powerful job in the world because a minor clerk didn't understand good user interface design?
This could be stuck in the courts for months. If it takes until New Year's, I hope Gore will gracefully concede rather than force a national crisis. I'd rather have a calm nation grumbling about President Nitwit than risk rioting and martial law and whatever else could happen.
I've collated several links and images about this on my personal pages:
p.s. Having half the candidates in a second row may be a violation of Florida election laws. I've heard that mentioned several times on NPR but unfortunately don't have a link.
No. I was channel surfing between CNN, CBS, and various others before, during, and after the bad call. Every single channel said "the polls in Florida will close at X o'clock, and we'll have announcements then". Then some commercials. Then "the polls in Florida are now closed, and our exit polls indicate..."
If you're going to throw out an accusation like that, you better back it up with solid URLs from reputable news sources.
Two problems with Borda. First, it would be exceedingly painful to explain preference ranking to everyone in the country, and it would drastically increase the time needed to cast each vote. Second, most current voting machines would need to be heavily rewired or completely scrapped.
A much easier method that is arguably equal to Borda is Approval Voting . It's trivial -- each candidate has a yes/no checkbox that says "would you approve if this guy won?" You check yes for the ones you like, and the most yesses wins. Easy to explain, avoids "spoiler vote" problems, and most current voting machines can handle the counting.
He loves some big corporations, but he doesn't love big tobacco (IMO, this ciggies for votes thing sounds like a setup) and he doesn't love Microsoft. In fact, on a campaign trip to Redmond last year, he got right in their faces and said that antitrust law should be applied to the software industry.
Bush keeps claiming he claimed that. Here's the real story in Gore's own words. And here's a viewpoint you may not have heard.
clear-cut reason for a Linux-loving computer geek to get out there and vote, it's for GoreIt is true that a vote for Bush is a vote for Microsoft. He'll shut down the antitrust case faster than you can crash Windows 98.
And HERE is a picture of the real reason why penguins can survive attacks by skuas, sea lions, and even terrorists. Sorry I couldn't find a better picture from the original series, but it's been out of print since the mid-80s.
I'd be a little skeptical about the quality of your college if Channel One were there, because it's designed for children in middle and high school. So is ZapMe, AFAIK.
I used to teach at a school that had Channel One. A TV set mounted on the wall of every classroom is a fair trade for watching a reasonably informative 5 minute news broadcast each day. One minute of commercials (ChannelOne) is MUCH less evil than continuous streaming adverts with audio (ZapMe). Not to mention having to use NT Workstation...shudder.
Last year my department went to a ZapMe demo session at a local school. I'm pretty sure that the ZapMe contract specifically forbids altering the systems they loan you.
For the record, here's how it worked (IIRC): ZapMe equips one or more labs with a bunch of mid-range PCs running a modified NT workstation. The PC desktop is not accessible -- instead there is a shell with a corner advert box and buttons for access to various apps, mainly MS Office & a stripped-down MSIE with no address bar (to prevent kids from wandering off to "unapproved" sites). These are not general-purpose PCs by any stretch of the imagination.
The PCs connect to the Net by way of an NT server. The server uses a modem for outbound traffic (mainly just GET requests and the all-important user data) and a satellite dish for inbound traffic.
Not quite -- due to decreasing air temperature, the speed of sound actually decreases as you go up for a while, then increases again until you hit near-vacuum.
- Sea level -- 1116 fps
- 36000 to 82000 feet -- 968 fps
- 150000 feet -- 1075 fps
- 250000 feet and up -- by a quirk of physics, 1116 fps again!
NASA has a nice web tutorial on this topic. Greg Roth has a more precise javascript calculator.True. But this is mostly because the Senate Judiciary committee hates Clinton passionately. They're willing to hobble the court system with vacancies for a few years rather than let Slick Willie have more say in future rulings. The holds will pretty much end in January, whether it's for Bush or Gore appointees.
On most economic issues, yes, they'll end up in roughly the same place. But there are also things a President can affect unilaterally:
If you care about these issues, then there is a difference between them.
Well, everyone except Dubya. We hope.
Bzzt. Just an example of the stupid shit that was going on before they made the rule. Lots and lots of folks got .edu addresses in the early 90's -- community colleges, K-12 schools, even some random pseudo-educational stuff like Biosphere. That's why they decided to crack down.
Personally, I think the rule is too harsh. Any accredited general educational institution from elementary through grad school should be allowed to use .edu, perhaps with a warning that higher universities have first dibs (to prevent, say, Columbia Junior High from cybersquatting).