I'm not so sure even "I" believe that....I mean, there is just another on this thread saying that his reading shows that the really rich...those making well over $250-$350K, really pay today, in this progressive system, with its loopholes and deductions.....pay very little tax...maybe like 11%?
Do your own research. Its simply not true. There are cases where its true, but as a whole the group pay the highest rate of tax.
So, would not a FairTAx type consumption tax replacement NOT finally get them?
First most proposed 'flat taxes' are on income not consumption. And if you look into them you'll find they are INVARIABLY backed by the rich. You really think someone like Forbes is backing a system to dramatically increase his tax bill ?
Secondly, most flat income taxes, wouldn't get the "dodgers" anyway because they are usually dodging reporting income, and/or creating offsetting paper losses that reduce their income on paper. So it doesn't really matter what the tax rate is if I make 5 million but report 200k, and pay taxes on 200k.
As for flat consumption taxes... don't be daft. That would translate directly into increased prices at the cash register - which would kill tourism outright, and the rich would simply dodge it by buying everything abroad.
So no, that wouldn't achieve your goals at all either.
Except there is significantly more software for all flavors of Windows that will not work correctly if the user doesn't have admin rights.
That will change as time goes on, now that windows has finally forced the issue. In point of fact, I currently run Vista, and don't have a single piece of software installed that requires admin priviledges that it shouldn't need.
I have open office, acrobat reader, itunes, firefox, thunderbird, visual studio, eclipse, photoshop, virtual pc, simply accounting, utorrent, notepad++, filezilla, pgadminiii, filemaker pro, citrix ica client, vnc, and a variety of games mostly new ones.
The only time *any* of it needs admin privs is when I have 'auto-update' turned on, and it needs to update itself.
The ONLY software I have that needs admin privs to run are some old games (half life) and yes, I've left that behind (and I wouldn't be surprised if the latest half-life retro-pack on steam has resolved that issue). But regardless that's software from the same era that Mac were PPC and ran OS9, and its not like THEY can run OS9/PPC games on their new intels osx macs either.
Except that that an admin password was needed first if the user was not running as an admin.
No. The first versions of the littlesnitch ran a process in user space that could be killed within the user account without an admin password.
Yes it is for any user not running under an admin account.
I provided a list of other ways for programs to get started in a normal user account. I'm am 100% certain that most of them work.
Moving or erasing that file eliminates all non-admin user accessible startup commands. Therefore simply trashing that file as well as the/users/username/library/preference/com.apple.loginitems.plist restores the user account to what it was when first created. Any malware created startup commands will be removed, thus effectively killing it.
If malware injects itself into a folder action, than trashing the login/startup items will have no effect whatsoever. All the malware does is wait until the folder action is triggered (probably something common like adding a file to the desktop), which then launches the malware, and adds itself to the startup items again.
If its anything like the nasty multi-vector PC malware, there will be a browser extension, a folder action, a start up item, and so on, and so on, and any of them will regenerate the rest.
Seriously, you are being naive. OS X is very much as vulnerable to this sort of crud as Windows is.
There is but one minor flaw in this statement. If neither candidate receives the necessary electoral votes to win, then the House of Representatives must choose from among the top 3 electoral finishers.
You might be right. That's certainly true in the case of a tie, for example.
However, under normal voting systems, if a party abstains, the total needed for a majority is -reduced-. e.g. If Florida abstains, than instead of 538 electoral college votes, there are only 513 electoral college, and you only need 257 to have a majority of them. I'm not saying this is how it =is=, but it it is how it =should be=.
Your scenario raises an interesting question -- what happens in a theoretical United States with 3+ strong parties? Is 270 REALLY needed to win an election by actual US LAW, or is that merely the simple mathematical result calculated by the media of a 538 vote pool where its been =assumed= all votes will be cast in an effectively 2-party system.
Forget abstentions for a minute... what if Florida had cast its 25 votes for Bob Barr? So we had: Gore 266 / Bush 246 / Barr 25, then the House of Representatives picks a president? That doesn't seem democratic.
For even more fun and games take a look at Canada. Their minority government is likely to be broken by a vote-of non-confidence 6 weeks after it was elected --- (that in and of itself isn't unusual fate for a minority government, although 6 weeks is unusually fast) but the interest pieces is the potential for a 2+1 coalition of the other minority parties to attempt to form a government... bizarre to say the least. But at least the 2+1 coalition genuinely reflects the majority of Canadians better than the current minority government does...so at least its reflective of the democratic process...)
While I agree with the majority of you post...you have me completely baffled at your taxpayer comment. What tax system would you propose we use that doesn't 'hurt ourselves'?
He's saying that the lower and middle class vote for and generally support tax reforms that would only benefit them if they were considerably richer than they currently are, and actually hurt them at their current income level.
Ask any blue collar democrat or bible-belt small town republican or white-collar pointy-haired-middle-manager middle-class joe average whether he thinks we should scrap progressive tax and switch to a flat tax. The number that think this would be a good idea is shocking, given than it will only reduce the tax load on people wealthier than them, and shift that load onto them.
Either these people are categorically bad at math (which is probably true), have delusions about how wealthy they actually are (everybody thinks they are "upper middle class"), or have unrealistic expecations about how wealthy they will be in the near future).
In truth its probably all of the above.
And with Obama coming into office...I don't think the system in place will be very friendly to "the rich"..who already pay a disproportionate amount of the US tax.
The vote for Obama vs McCain was a lot more than simply picking a tax plan, so we can't and shouldn't really equate voting for Obama with understanding how tax reforms will affect them.
You've never programmed for a 3270 workstation, then. Basic field validation was part of it's firmware for the simple reason that users wanted fast, immediate feedback for basic errors (like trying to enter letters into a numeric field, or trying to put too many characters into a text field with a maximum size), and with block-mode communication between the workstation and the server that meant the workstation had to do that validation. You simply couldn't submit the entire form back to the server on each and every keystroke without killing performance. So the IBM designers gave the 3270 enough intelligence to do some of the processing locally, without having to send anything back to the server, and added a simple language to the form definition to allow for programming the workstation to do the needed validation.
You've actually doubled up on MVC. The workstation you describe has its own local MVC which then communicates with the server which has its own controller / model.
The fact that OSX does NOT have an arcane, obtuse construct, such as that miserable thing called a registry, goes a long way in protecting OSX.
Not really. What Windows accomplishes with its registry *nix accomplishes in its file system along with hard and symlinks. And really, browsing the registry is no harder than browsing the file system.
Windows "System Configuration" applet is equivalent to OSX's "Startup Items".
Any program that wants to start automatically upon user login, has to install itself into an easily understood and very visible entry in the login items preferences panel.
Which is just a GUI interface to \System\Library\StartupItems and \Libary\StartupItems\ in the filesystem not much different than what Windows System Configuration (msconfig) does.
Plus is that REALLY the only place programs get get started up on OSX? Or is that just the obvious approved way?
I honestly don't know enough about OSX, but I find it doubtful that you couldn't manage to get an application started up very easily in user space from half a dozen other places.
Folder Actions triggers? launchd? cron? Safari extensions? dashboard items? hook something up as keyboard shortcut? modify an existing perl / shell scripts that are run at start up or run regularly "enough"? (A lot of people have apache running in userspace, lots of places to hook something malicious in there.)
A non-admin OSX user account will offer a large measure of protection from malware.
Not relevantly more than a non-admin Vista account.
A simple, unobtrusive program such as "Little Snitch" will alert a user that some program is wanting to go somewhere new on the Internet and give the user the opportunity to deny this access.
And one of the first OSX bits of pseudo-malware, called 'opener' revealed that "LittleSnitch" could simply be killed before the app phoned home, and then started up again afterwards. Ooops. Although I'm sure that hole has been patched now the fact of the matter was that it was trivial to bypass and a lot of people thought they were safe.
Furthermore, LittleSnitch type software isn't unique to OSX. Windows has equivalent software... ZoneAlarm for example has been around forever. The built in Windows firewall introduced in XP SP2 can do this too.
High latency or intermittent connection scenarios where you can't check back with the controller all the time and it's better to avoid unnecessary calls if you can tell the user that the input is invalid anyway?
But that's funadmentally not doing MVC anymore. You've got the presentation (view) module is doing validation (controller function).
Sure, the controller would of course still do validation but that doesn't mean the view can't tell you what's wrong without needing to connect to the controller.
The 'correct' thing to do if you really want to be doing MVC in a high latency / semi-disconnected environment is to create distinct client and server MVCs. That way the client controller can tell the client view that the data is invalid without talking to the server. And when the client view hits submit, the client controller can pass the client model to the server controller for synchronization with the server model.
By not being affected by anything, say, a torrent client might do, in order to acquire a greater share of bandwidth for itself than the ISP wishes to provide you.
I'm not really suggesting that you in particular, by getting what you pay for, have somehow "lost" the war... but simultaneously, you have nothing to gain from the 'arms-race' you invited when you said:
"The ISPs started this war, I say bring it on."
And anyone one who does have something to gain, will ultimately lose. And if your ISP decides tomorrow to start giving you 'less than think you paid for', changing torrent clients etc isn't going to help your cause. Your only option will be to either pay for increased access or switch to another ISP...(of which in most places there are very few).
Even if it were 99.5%, that means it's wrong for 1 out of every 200 people.
How wrong is wrong, and is its wrongness regional?
If it gets the country/state/province right... but wrong town/city, that's not all that bad for this purpose.
Or If the wrong results / sketchy results are heavily concentrated in Africa and Eastern Europe that's not really going to impact me much, again, that's just fine... at least for me.
Control-H = ^H = ASCII 08 (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet)
Historically this is the code mapped to the backspace key. So typing abc^H^H^H represents abc and then pressing backspace 3 times. In practice, if the terminal you were using wasn't set up right, when you hit backspace it would actually write ^H instead of moving the cursor back. Interestingly, it would usually still "work" as intended.
So if prompted for your user name 'abc' you could type ac^Hbc and that would be what was displayed, but it would still correctly interpret it as abc when you hit enter.
Were I to rate-limit my upstream, at the router, to 1Mbps and my downstream to 12Mbps (QoS allows for this) to avoid bursting
Your ISP is already be doing this -at their end- plus rules for burst traffic. It shouldn't be possible for you to exceed the amount of bandwidth they want you to have.
I could run my connection maxed out 24x7 and my ISP wouldn't give a damn.
Maybe =you= can. Not all internet connections are created equally even on the same ISP. I've got friends where one gets throttled right away, while others don't... all on the same package of the same ISP in the same city. Their official policy is that they throttle and have soft caps. The reality is some parts of underlying network have a lot more capacity than others, and they only throttle on the parts that are older and congested. If you are in a more modern neighborhood where there is more fiber etc, and they don't need to throttle, then they don't.
In my experience the "what's the best ISP" question is usually answered by "it depends on your address" - go with who ever has the best network in your neighborhood.
Hmmm... I had to really think about this. I GUESS it's possible that code could be executed by a user's process that then causes some more code to be auto-executed at the user login with the privileges of that user only... Would be VERY noticeable to the system though,
Really? I doubt most Mac users would know how to get a list of running processes. Most windows users sure don't.
and killing it would be trivial,
You've got know its there.
so I guess some kind of "very light" antivirus may be employed to guard against this kind of thing if anyone considers it to be a potential threat.
Very much so. Hell, most XP malware runs in user space too. Sure there is some bad stuff that gets deep into the system, but a shocking amount really doesn't do much more than setup a start up item in the registry.
The end game is simply getting your internet bandwidth metered. X$ for access to speed Y + Z$ per GB on a sliding scale. If you push the ISPs that's what they'll strike back with.
Then they don't care if you blast your connection full bore 24x7; you'll be paying $4500/mo for the privilege though. Hell, they'll even upsell you to a partial T3 and offer you an up-time SLA.
The ONLY reason they haven't gone that route already is that its too 'confusing'; customers don't understand bandwidth, so trying to explain how much they are using, or how much they need is difficult. And for the time being they aren't using what their metered caps would be anyway, so its simpler to just offer them 'unlimited'.
But if push really comes to shove they'll simply meter it.
Al Gore "won" the popular vote by less than 1% nationwide. That means that all you can say is he had a statistical dead heat in the popular vote. If you wanted to have a national recount, there were plenty of states with margins that could easily have swung the other way around and not gone for Gore in a recount,
I'd be willing to take that bet. For what its worth the voting process itself is implicitly biased towards republicans. Your generally going to find more voting errors made by Democrats, and manual recounts will find more Democrat votes than otherwise. (not the republicans fault, just a reality resulting from the demographics the parties draw from... poor non-english speaking people trend as democrats, and these are the people most likely to vote "incorrectly". (circling a name instead of following the instructions and checking-off a box... etc)
it's just that Florida (and in particular, a couple of Florida counties) got focused on.
Because that it was where it was the closest.
Of course, the OTHER option would have been to throw Florida's votes out, and then turn it over to the constitutional option when nobody has a majority...
Really? What voting system requires you to have a majority of the POSSIBLE votes? All that I've ever seen have required you to have the majority of CAST votes. I.e. if there are 501 senators and 301 of them don't show up, and the rest vote 150-50 on some vote than the 150 vote wins. You don't need 251 to 'win', unless EVERYONE votes. You just need the majority of the votes actually cast... you need more votes than the other side.
So, if you throw the votes out (or if Florida had abstained), you would reduce the total possible votes by that amount, and it would have given Gore the majority. (But even if it had given Bush the majority I wouldn't have complained. It would at least have been fair.
And frankly, setting it up that way would be pretty lousy policy regardless, since it would give Florida that much less clout overall (ever noticed that nobody, political campaigning/advertising-wise, gives a crap about the couple of states that DO send in a "roughly proportional" number of electors?)
Its pretty lousy policy at the -federal- level that you can even have swing states that decide elections. Too many states simply don't matter and have no real voice. The electoral college is a joke.
The perpetual argument seems to be that it costs oh so much to actually provide what ISPs sell.
ISPs don't sell 10Mbps 24x7 bandwidth. They sell 24x7 access to lines that deliver burst bandwidth at 10Mbps. See the difference? The reality is not just that ISPs are 'grossly overselling' its that a certain subset of users are grossly mis-interpreting what the ISP actually IS selling.
Ask ANY ISP upfront whether you will be allowed to download and upload at your caps 24x7. Everyone of them will say NO this isn't what they are offering, and that if you want THAT you need to upgrade to their commercial grade T1/T3/and beyond stuff.
Ok. Why doesn't anyone argue the other way around? What can be provided for the 50ish bucks we pay a month for our internet connection?
They can provide 24x7 access to lines capable of delivering all multiple GB of data, more than an average non-commercial susbscriber needs at 10Mbps burst speeds, usually to 'soft caps' that are defined by localized network load/infrastructure limitations.
Al Gore did not win the election. He had the majority of the popular vote.
Al Gore -did- win the election, by any rational measure, including the electoral college.
Aside from Florida Bush had 246 electoral votes Gore at 266.
Giving Bush Florida gave him 271, and won him the election. Winning Florida requires winning the popular vote in Florida; ie having the most vote for him. but Bush VERY didn't likely do that. The voting machines and process was defective, and the manual recounts were consistently adding votes to Gore's tally.
The Bush campaign essentially ultimately blocked and stalled the recounts to 'allow' Florida to declare a winner without having been allowed to make an accurate count of the votes. (Especially if you consider Katherine Harris' blatant conflict of interest in the situation as a republican in charge of 'certifying the result' and who participated enthusiastically with the Bush campaigns efforts to prevent and stall recount efforts.)
Now we can dig further and talk about overvotes, undervotes, hanging and dimpled chad, etc, but the real test should have been 'can the voter's intention be discerned'? And by that measure Gore won.
I mean seriously, their were some 1200+ votes (mostly for Gore) where the voter had selected a candidate on the ballot, and then wrote his name in the write-in line as well. To not count those votes for either party, in race this close, is completely idiotic.
Frankly, given Florida was as close as it was, and a recount effort was not possible, and a federal deadline was looming, the fairest thing for Florida to have done, would have been to allocate its electoral votes evenly... say 13 for Bush, 12 for Gore. (Given that Bush had won the initial count.) And the election would have gone to Gore (278 to 259). Of course that would probably violate the Florida constitution/rules/whatever...
But abstaining would have been practically equivalent (Gore wins 266 to 246), and it would not have been impossible for them to simply say "We cannot certify a result in time for the deadline and will abstain from the electoral college vote.' I suspect this is might have happened if Katherine Harris & co had been democrat. Or even better -- neutral non-partisans -- which is how it SHOULD BE.
I pay for 12/1, I get 12/1, burstable to faster than 30/2 (I've seen 33/2.2). There's a no servers clause in the TOS only to cover them if they NEED to block a port because a server is using too much BW; then they call and let you know they did it. Speeds and reliability are awesome and always improving.
If you pay for 12/1 and get 12/1, then how you could your server ever use too much bandwidth? Why exactly would they EVER "need" to block a port? How can you use to much bandwidth if they are providing you only the 12/1 you are paying for?
Unless, you maybe aren't really getting 12/1 after all... but some sort of shared 12/1 that where they'll block ports and call you if you use too much...
I'll say it again: This is how an ISP should be run. Period.
It sounds like you've got a good ISP overall, and they have managed their capacity and network better than some others, and adapted to growing B/W demands better than others... but bottom line... they aren't any different than other ISPs... maybe less oversold than some, but they are still oversold -- otherwise they wouldn't need a no servers TOS, for example.
Nobody's asking for 100% of the internet bandwidth (as per your using all the electricity example), just 100% of the bandwidth they were sold (whether what they were billed for it is enough to pay for it is a matter to be dealt with by the ISP's accountants).
You weren't sold a 24x7 10Mbps line. You might think you were, and you might have a valid argument that the ISP was a bit deceptive about what they sold you, but you weren't sold a 24x7 10Mbps line.
You were sold access to a line that can do 10Mbps in bursts, that you have 24x7 access to.
That's not the same as a line that can do 10Mbps 24x7.
If you'd like one of those, you can get a quarter T3, they run around $5000/month.
We'll also ignore the fact that, with most utilities, you are billed for what you use because it is simple and straightforward to meter and control your usage. This doesn't apply to bandwidth. Period.
It is very simple and straightforward to meter and control your bandwidth usage. Up until relatively recently it wasn't really much of a problem. We used to have 'unlimited water service' for a low flat annual rate, but as the population grew and the demand on the supply increased, they've been gradually raising the price and adding metering to the system. This will happen with bandwidth too.
Soon enough you'll be paying for "10GB at 10Mbps and unlimited at 1MBps with SmartBurst(tm) service" and a thousand variations on the theme. And yes, unlimited at 40Mbps will be available... for $18000/mo. And the prices may drop if technology advances capacity faster than demand increases.
Indeed this is precisely why we're in the mess we're in... the shift from dial-up to dsl/cable was such a boost to capacity that for a while, they really could offer unlimited data... few users would even try to max it out, and most of the internet itself was a just low res images and text, so the average user really couldn't use 'too much'. So, 10 years later we have torrents and youtube and netflix and hula and the capacity hasn't really increased to keep up... so ISPs are starting to add caps, throttle, and so on.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing.
Unless of course warming it past a certain point changes the path of crucial heat exchanging currents in the ocean and plunges us into an ice age...
Warmer temperatures will lead to a reduced need for fuel used in heating and it will reduce deaths due to exposure and the stresses placed on people during cold weather.
Unless it causes an ice age...
The reason to fight climate change is because we DON'T know what it will bring. Sure it might actually be better... but it could also be FAR worse. We only have one planet, we don't understand it very well, and we have no backups. One should be extremely cautious of 'upgrades'.
Well part of your point was that a "strong adult influence" drove her to commit suicide, and that an adult's influnce has more impact than another her own age.
Not at all. This isn't about degree of influence. This is about responsibility. An adult is responsible for their influence over a minor. Someone else her own age would be a minor, and wouldn't be responsible.
First, that would be a flaw in the law that doesn't reconize the difference between a three year old and 13 year old. Second, you're largely wrong. Children as young as 10 have been tried as adults before. So the law seems to be reconizing that yes, certain minors DO have the capablity to reconize right from wrong.
Right. Adults are automatically tried as adults unless they're determined mentally unfit by psychologists and other experts. Children start out as 'mentally unfit' and you need a bunch of experts to agree that this specific child 'knew right from wrong' in this specific circumstance, before you can try them as an adult.
So until this kid is deemed to be an 'adult' for the purposes of this case, she's not.
I doubt you're speaking for any kind of experience. My wife was a victim of sexual abuse by her parents. Her and her siblings have hate, not love, for their parents. If in the past they keep things bottled up, it's out of shame, not because of any loyality to thier parents.
I'm really sorry to hear that. However, I didn't say that victims 'loved' their parents, merely that their parents had tremendous influence over them that keeps them silent. You claimed for example, that 'shame' is the motivator. Why are they ashamed about? They were the victim, they did nothing wrong! If they went to the police the police would tell them exactly that. So where is this overpowering shame coming from? It comes from the adults in their life - especially their parents.
So you're telling me that a 13 year old isn't smart enough to simply go to go myspace anymore?
Some yes. Some no. I know adults that aren't smart enough to simply walk away.
The girl's mental condition however doesn't change the crime committed, and it still doesn't make it murder.
If the girl isn't responsible for her actions due to her metal state, and another person is deliberately and maliciously influencing her at that point, then that person can be held responsible for what happens.
That's the law, that's why Drew wasn't charged with murder.
It would be really hard to prove she actually intended for the kid to kill herself (and I'm not even convinced of that myself.) To my mind this more like involuntary manslaughter, recklessness, etc. In some (but not all) states if the recklessness achieves a certain threshold - that it reaches 'willful indifference to human life' it can be argued that it constitues 'malice' and the offense can be elevated to 'murder'.
This is the reasoning I use to reach murder. She set out to completely destroy this kids self esteem, succeeded, then called her worthless and told her to kill herself. Personally I think this meets the threshold of 'recklessness' needed to elevate involuntary manslaughter to 2nd degree murder, but I'll concede that's a matter of opinion.
In any case I'm disappointed she wasn't charged with involuntary manslaughter, because I think that definitely applies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure even "I" believe that....I mean, there is just another on this thread saying that his reading shows that the really rich...those making well over $250-$350K, really pay today, in this progressive system, with its loopholes and deductions.....pay very little tax...maybe like 11%?
Do your own research. Its simply not true. There are cases where its true, but as a whole the group pay the highest rate of tax.
So, would not a FairTAx type consumption tax replacement NOT finally get them?
First most proposed 'flat taxes' are on income not consumption. And if you look into them you'll find they are INVARIABLY backed by the rich. You really think someone like Forbes is backing a system to dramatically increase his tax bill ?
Secondly, most flat income taxes, wouldn't get the "dodgers" anyway because they are usually dodging reporting income, and/or creating offsetting paper losses that reduce their income on paper. So it doesn't really matter what the tax rate is if I make 5 million but report 200k, and pay taxes on 200k.
As for flat consumption taxes... don't be daft. That would translate directly into increased prices at the cash register - which would kill tourism outright, and the rich would simply dodge it by buying everything abroad.
So no, that wouldn't achieve your goals at all either.
Except there is significantly more software for all flavors of Windows that will not work correctly if the user doesn't have admin rights.
That will change as time goes on, now that windows has finally forced the issue. In point of fact, I currently run Vista, and don't have a single piece of software installed that requires admin priviledges that it shouldn't need.
I have open office, acrobat reader, itunes, firefox, thunderbird, visual studio, eclipse, photoshop, virtual pc, simply accounting, utorrent, notepad++, filezilla, pgadminiii, filemaker pro, citrix ica client, vnc, and a variety of games mostly new ones.
The only time *any* of it needs admin privs is when I have 'auto-update' turned on, and it needs to update itself.
The ONLY software I have that needs admin privs to run are some old games (half life) and yes, I've left that behind (and I wouldn't be surprised if the latest half-life retro-pack on steam has resolved that issue). But regardless that's software from the same era that Mac were PPC and ran OS9, and its not like THEY can run OS9/PPC games on their new intels osx macs either.
Except that that an admin password was needed first if the user was not running as an admin.
No. The first versions of the littlesnitch ran a process in user space that could be killed within the user account without an admin password.
Yes it is for any user not running under an admin account.
I provided a list of other ways for programs to get started in a normal user account. I'm am 100% certain that most of them work.
Moving or erasing that file eliminates all non-admin user accessible startup commands. Therefore simply trashing that file as well as the /users/username/library/preference/com.apple.loginitems.plist restores the user account to what it was when first created. Any malware created startup commands will be removed, thus effectively killing it.
If malware injects itself into a folder action, than trashing the login/startup items will have no effect whatsoever. All the malware does is wait until the folder action is triggered (probably something common like adding a file to the desktop), which then launches the malware, and adds itself to the startup items again.
If its anything like the nasty multi-vector PC malware, there will be a browser extension, a folder action, a start up item, and so on, and so on, and any of them will regenerate the rest.
Seriously, you are being naive. OS X is very much as vulnerable to this sort of crud as Windows is.
There is but one minor flaw in this statement. If neither candidate receives the necessary electoral votes to win, then the House of Representatives must choose from among the top 3 electoral finishers.
You might be right. That's certainly true in the case of a tie, for example.
However, under normal voting systems, if a party abstains, the total needed for a majority is -reduced-. e.g. If Florida abstains, than instead of 538 electoral college votes, there are only 513 electoral college, and you only need 257 to have a majority of them. I'm not saying this is how it =is=, but it it is how it =should be=.
Your scenario raises an interesting question -- what happens in a theoretical United States with 3+ strong parties? Is 270 REALLY needed to win an election by actual US LAW, or is that merely the simple mathematical result calculated by the media of a 538 vote pool where its been =assumed= all votes will be cast in an effectively 2-party system.
Forget abstentions for a minute... what if Florida had cast its 25 votes for Bob Barr? So we had: Gore 266 / Bush 246 / Barr 25, then the House of Representatives picks a president? That doesn't seem democratic.
For even more fun and games take a look at Canada. Their minority government is likely to be broken by a vote-of non-confidence 6 weeks after it was elected --- (that in and of itself isn't unusual fate for a minority government, although 6 weeks is unusually fast) but the interest pieces is the potential for a 2+1 coalition of the other minority parties to attempt to form a government... bizarre to say the least. But at least the 2+1 coalition genuinely reflects the majority of Canadians better than the current minority government does...so at least its reflective of the democratic process...)
While I agree with the majority of you post...you have me completely baffled at your taxpayer comment. What tax system would you propose we use that doesn't 'hurt ourselves'?
He's saying that the lower and middle class vote for and generally support tax reforms that would only benefit them if they were considerably richer than they currently are, and actually hurt them at their current income level.
Ask any blue collar democrat or bible-belt small town republican or white-collar pointy-haired-middle-manager middle-class joe average whether he thinks we should scrap progressive tax and switch to a flat tax. The number that think this would be a good idea is shocking, given than it will only reduce the tax load on people wealthier than them, and shift that load onto them.
Either these people are categorically bad at math (which is probably true), have delusions about how wealthy they actually are (everybody thinks they are "upper middle class"), or have unrealistic expecations about how wealthy they will be in the near future).
In truth its probably all of the above.
And with Obama coming into office...I don't think the system in place will be very friendly to "the rich"..who already pay a disproportionate amount of the US tax.
The vote for Obama vs McCain was a lot more than simply picking a tax plan, so we can't and shouldn't really equate voting for Obama with understanding how tax reforms will affect them.
I can't think of any rpg/fantasy world where half-elves are sterile. This implies different phenotypes of the same species.
Or it implies magic and divine intervention. And we KNOW both are present in abundant quantities in virtually EVERY rpg/fantasy world.
Has any company that makes electronic/mechanical (complex) devices shipped 1B of anything?
Seagate claims to have shipped 1 billion hard drives.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=null&vgnextoid=43afb55a61379110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
You've never programmed for a 3270 workstation, then. Basic field validation was part of it's firmware for the simple reason that users wanted fast, immediate feedback for basic errors (like trying to enter letters into a numeric field, or trying to put too many characters into a text field with a maximum size), and with block-mode communication between the workstation and the server that meant the workstation had to do that validation. You simply couldn't submit the entire form back to the server on each and every keystroke without killing performance. So the IBM designers gave the 3270 enough intelligence to do some of the processing locally, without having to send anything back to the server, and added a simple language to the form definition to allow for programming the workstation to do the needed validation.
You've actually doubled up on MVC. The workstation you describe has its own local MVC which then communicates with the server which has its own controller / model.
The fact that OSX does NOT have an arcane, obtuse construct, such as that miserable thing called a registry, goes a long way in protecting OSX.
Not really. What Windows accomplishes with its registry *nix accomplishes in its file system along with hard and symlinks. And really, browsing the registry is no harder than browsing the file system.
Windows "System Configuration" applet is equivalent to OSX's "Startup Items".
Any program that wants to start automatically upon user login, has to install itself into an easily understood and very visible entry in the login items preferences panel.
Which is just a GUI interface to \System\Library\StartupItems and \Libary\StartupItems\ in the filesystem not much different than what Windows System Configuration (msconfig) does.
Plus is that REALLY the only place programs get get started up on OSX? Or is that just the obvious approved way?
I honestly don't know enough about OSX, but I find it doubtful that you couldn't manage to get an application started up very easily in user space from half a dozen other places.
Folder Actions triggers?
launchd? cron?
Safari extensions?
dashboard items?
hook something up as keyboard shortcut?
modify an existing perl / shell scripts that are run at start up or run regularly "enough"? (A lot of people have apache running in userspace, lots of places to hook something malicious in there.)
A non-admin OSX user account will offer a large measure of protection from malware.
Not relevantly more than a non-admin Vista account.
A simple, unobtrusive program such as "Little Snitch" will alert a user that some program is wanting to go somewhere new on the Internet and give the user the opportunity to deny this access.
And one of the first OSX bits of pseudo-malware, called 'opener' revealed that "LittleSnitch" could simply be killed before the app phoned home, and then started up again afterwards. Ooops. Although I'm sure that hole has been patched now the fact of the matter was that it was trivial to bypass and a lot of people thought they were safe.
Furthermore, LittleSnitch type software isn't unique to OSX. Windows has equivalent software... ZoneAlarm for example has been around forever. The built in Windows firewall introduced in XP SP2 can do this too.
High latency or intermittent connection scenarios where you can't check back with the controller all the time and it's better to avoid unnecessary calls if you can tell the user that the input is invalid anyway?
But that's funadmentally not doing MVC anymore. You've got the presentation (view) module is doing validation (controller function).
Sure, the controller would of course still do validation but that doesn't mean the view can't tell you what's wrong without needing to connect to the controller.
The 'correct' thing to do if you really want to be doing MVC in a high latency / semi-disconnected environment is to create distinct client and server MVCs. That way the client controller can tell the client view that the data is invalid without talking to the server. And when the client view hits submit, the client controller can pass the client model to the server controller for synchronization with the server model.
What specific functions go where (is sorting on the model? is validation of this field in the view?) is specific to the problem domain.
I'd be hard pressed to envision a scenario where field validation is logically a -view- function.
"If you have three modules, one doing presentation, one doing state, and one mediating, you're doing MVC."
But if your presentation module is mediating with the state then you aren't.
How?
By not being affected by anything, say, a torrent client might do, in order to acquire a greater share of bandwidth for itself than the ISP wishes to provide you.
I'm not really suggesting that you in particular, by getting what you pay for, have somehow "lost" the war... but simultaneously, you have nothing to gain from the 'arms-race' you invited when you said:
"The ISPs started this war, I say bring it on."
And anyone one who does have something to gain, will ultimately lose. And if your ISP decides tomorrow to start giving you 'less than think you paid for', changing torrent clients etc isn't going to help your cause. Your only option will be to either pay for increased access or switch to another ISP...(of which in most places there are very few).
Even if it were 99.5%, that means it's wrong for 1 out of every 200 people.
How wrong is wrong, and is its wrongness regional?
If it gets the country/state/province right... but wrong town/city, that's not all that bad for this purpose.
Or If the wrong results / sketchy results are heavily concentrated in Africa and Eastern Europe that's not really going to impact me much, again, that's just fine... at least for me.
Control-H = ^H = ASCII 08 (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet)
Historically this is the code mapped to the backspace key. So typing abc^H^H^H represents abc and then pressing backspace 3 times. In practice, if the terminal you were using wasn't set up right, when you hit backspace it would actually write ^H instead of moving the cursor back. Interestingly, it would usually still "work" as intended.
So if prompted for your user name 'abc' you could type ac^Hbc and that would be what was displayed, but it would still correctly interpret it as abc when you hit enter.
My ISP throttles the connection once I reach my quota, so how am I going to get a $4500?
1) Then your ISP has already 'won' the war.
2) The bill will go up if/when you decide you don't want to be throttled at your quota.
Were I to rate-limit my upstream, at the router, to 1Mbps and my downstream to 12Mbps (QoS allows for this) to avoid bursting
Your ISP is already be doing this -at their end- plus rules for burst traffic. It shouldn't be possible for you to exceed the amount of bandwidth they want you to have.
I could run my connection maxed out 24x7 and my ISP wouldn't give a damn.
Maybe =you= can. Not all internet connections are created equally even on the same ISP. I've got friends where one gets throttled right away, while others don't... all on the same package of the same ISP in the same city. Their official policy is that they throttle and have soft caps. The reality is some parts of underlying network have a lot more capacity than others, and they only throttle on the parts that are older and congested. If you are in a more modern neighborhood where there is more fiber etc, and they don't need to throttle, then they don't.
In my experience the "what's the best ISP" question is usually answered by "it depends on your address" - go with who ever has the best network in your neighborhood.
Hmmm... I had to really think about this. I GUESS it's possible that code could be executed by a user's process that then causes some more code to be auto-executed at the user login with the privileges of that user only... Would be VERY noticeable to the system though,
Really? I doubt most Mac users would know how to get a list of running processes. Most windows users sure don't.
and killing it would be trivial,
You've got know its there.
so I guess some kind of "very light" antivirus may be employed to guard against this kind of thing if anyone considers it to be a potential threat.
Very much so. Hell, most XP malware runs in user space too. Sure there is some bad stuff that gets deep into the system, but a shocking amount really doesn't do much more than setup a start up item in the registry.
The ISPs started this war, I say bring it on.
Its not a "war" you can win.
The end game is simply getting your internet bandwidth metered. X$ for access to speed Y + Z$ per GB on a sliding scale. If you push the ISPs that's what they'll strike back with.
Then they don't care if you blast your connection full bore 24x7; you'll be paying $4500/mo for the privilege though. Hell, they'll even upsell you to a partial T3 and offer you an up-time SLA.
The ONLY reason they haven't gone that route already is that its too 'confusing'; customers don't understand bandwidth, so trying to explain how much they are using, or how much they need is difficult. And for the time being they aren't using what their metered caps would be anyway, so its simpler to just offer them 'unlimited'.
But if push really comes to shove they'll simply meter it.
Al Gore "won" the popular vote by less than 1% nationwide. That means that all you can say is he had a statistical dead heat in the popular vote. If you wanted to have a national recount, there were plenty of states with margins that could easily have swung the other way around and not gone for Gore in a recount,
I'd be willing to take that bet. For what its worth the voting process itself is implicitly biased towards republicans. Your generally going to find more voting errors made by Democrats, and manual recounts will find more Democrat votes than otherwise. (not the republicans fault, just a reality resulting from the demographics the parties draw from... poor non-english speaking people trend as democrats, and these are the people most likely to vote "incorrectly". (circling a name instead of following the instructions and checking-off a box... etc)
it's just that Florida (and in particular, a couple of Florida counties) got focused on.
Because that it was where it was the closest.
Of course, the OTHER option would have been to throw Florida's votes out, and then turn it over to the constitutional option when nobody has a majority...
Really? What voting system requires you to have a majority of the POSSIBLE votes? All that I've ever seen have required you to have the majority of CAST votes. I.e. if there are 501 senators and 301 of them don't show up, and the rest vote 150-50 on some vote than the 150 vote wins. You don't need 251 to 'win', unless EVERYONE votes. You just need the majority of the votes actually cast... you need more votes than the other side.
So, if you throw the votes out (or if Florida had abstained), you would reduce the total possible votes by that amount, and it would have given Gore the majority. (But even if it had given Bush the majority I wouldn't have complained. It would at least have been fair.
And frankly, setting it up that way would be pretty lousy policy regardless, since it would give Florida that much less clout overall (ever noticed that nobody, political campaigning/advertising-wise, gives a crap about the couple of states that DO send in a "roughly proportional" number of electors?)
Its pretty lousy policy at the -federal- level that you can even have swing states that decide elections. Too many states simply don't matter and have no real voice. The electoral college is a joke.
... and Obama won by a "landslide".
I never said that, and I don't believe it to be true. Frankly, I was shocked by how close that race ultimately was.
The perpetual argument seems to be that it costs oh so much to actually provide what ISPs sell.
ISPs don't sell 10Mbps 24x7 bandwidth. They sell 24x7 access to lines that deliver burst bandwidth at 10Mbps. See the difference? The reality is not just that ISPs are 'grossly overselling' its that a certain subset of users are grossly mis-interpreting what the ISP actually IS selling.
Ask ANY ISP upfront whether you will be allowed to download and upload at your caps 24x7. Everyone of them will say NO this isn't what they are offering, and that if you want THAT you need to upgrade to their commercial grade T1/T3/and beyond stuff.
Ok. Why doesn't anyone argue the other way around? What can be provided for the 50ish bucks we pay a month for our internet connection?
They can provide 24x7 access to lines capable of delivering all multiple GB of data, more than an average non-commercial susbscriber needs at 10Mbps burst speeds, usually to 'soft caps' that are defined by localized network load/infrastructure limitations.
Al Gore did not win the election. He had the majority of the popular vote.
Al Gore -did- win the election, by any rational measure, including the electoral college.
Aside from Florida Bush had 246 electoral votes Gore at 266.
Giving Bush Florida gave him 271, and won him the election. Winning Florida requires winning the popular vote in Florida; ie having the most vote for him. but Bush VERY didn't likely do that. The voting machines and process was defective, and the manual recounts were consistently adding votes to Gore's tally.
The Bush campaign essentially ultimately blocked and stalled the recounts to 'allow' Florida to declare a winner without having been allowed to make an accurate count of the votes. (Especially if you consider Katherine Harris' blatant conflict of interest in the situation as a republican in charge of 'certifying the result' and who participated enthusiastically with the Bush campaigns efforts to prevent and stall recount efforts.)
Now we can dig further and talk about overvotes, undervotes, hanging and dimpled chad, etc, but the real test should have been 'can the voter's intention be discerned'? And by that measure Gore won.
I mean seriously, their were some 1200+ votes (mostly for Gore) where the voter had selected a candidate on the ballot, and then wrote his name in the write-in line as well. To not count those votes for either party, in race this close, is completely idiotic.
Frankly, given Florida was as close as it was, and a recount effort was not possible, and a federal deadline was looming, the fairest thing for Florida to have done, would have been to allocate its electoral votes evenly ... say 13 for Bush, 12 for Gore. (Given that Bush had won the initial count.) And the election would have gone to Gore (278 to 259). Of course that would probably violate the Florida constitution/rules/whatever...
But abstaining would have been practically equivalent (Gore wins 266 to 246), and it would not have been impossible for them to simply say "We cannot certify a result in time for the deadline and will abstain from the electoral college vote.' I suspect this is might have happened if Katherine Harris & co had been democrat. Or even better -- neutral non-partisans -- which is how it SHOULD BE.
I pay for 12/1, I get 12/1, burstable to faster than 30/2 (I've seen 33/2.2). There's a no servers clause in the TOS only to cover them if they NEED to block a port because a server is using too much BW; then they call and let you know they did it. Speeds and reliability are awesome and always improving.
If you pay for 12/1 and get 12/1, then how you could your server ever use too much bandwidth? Why exactly would they EVER "need" to block a port? How can you use to much bandwidth if they are providing you only the 12/1 you are paying for?
Unless, you maybe aren't really getting 12/1 after all... but some sort of shared 12/1 that where they'll block ports and call you if you use too much...
I'll say it again: This is how an ISP should be run. Period.
It sounds like you've got a good ISP overall, and they have managed their capacity and network better than some others, and adapted to growing B/W demands better than others... but bottom line... they aren't any different than other ISPs... maybe less oversold than some, but they are still oversold -- otherwise they wouldn't need a no servers TOS, for example.
Nobody's asking for 100% of the internet bandwidth (as per your using all the electricity example), just 100% of the bandwidth they were sold (whether what they were billed for it is enough to pay for it is a matter to be dealt with by the ISP's accountants).
You weren't sold a 24x7 10Mbps line. You might think you were, and you might have a valid argument that the ISP was a bit deceptive about what they sold you, but you weren't sold a 24x7 10Mbps line.
You were sold access to a line that can do 10Mbps in bursts, that you have 24x7 access to.
That's not the same as a line that can do 10Mbps 24x7.
If you'd like one of those, you can get a quarter T3, they run around $5000/month.
We'll also ignore the fact that, with most utilities, you are billed for what you use because it is simple and straightforward to meter and control your usage. This doesn't apply to bandwidth. Period.
It is very simple and straightforward to meter and control your bandwidth usage. Up until relatively recently it wasn't really much of a problem. We used to have 'unlimited water service' for a low flat annual rate, but as the population grew and the demand on the supply increased, they've been gradually raising the price and adding metering to the system. This will happen with bandwidth too.
Soon enough you'll be paying for "10GB at 10Mbps and unlimited at 1MBps with SmartBurst(tm) service" and a thousand variations on the theme. And yes, unlimited at 40Mbps will be available... for $18000/mo. And the prices may drop if technology advances capacity faster than demand increases.
Indeed this is precisely why we're in the mess we're in... the shift from dial-up to dsl/cable was such a boost to capacity that for a while, they really could offer unlimited data... few users would even try to max it out, and most of the internet itself was a just low res images and text, so the average user really couldn't use 'too much'. So, 10 years later we have torrents and youtube and netflix and hula and the capacity hasn't really increased to keep up... so ISPs are starting to add caps, throttle, and so on.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing.
Unless of course warming it past a certain point changes the path of crucial heat exchanging currents in the ocean and plunges us into an ice age...
Warmer temperatures will lead to a reduced need for fuel used in heating and it will reduce deaths due to exposure and the stresses placed on people during cold weather.
Unless it causes an ice age...
The reason to fight climate change is because we DON'T know what it will bring. Sure it might actually be better... but it could also be FAR worse. We only have one planet, we don't understand it very well, and we have no backups. One should be extremely cautious of 'upgrades'.
Well part of your point was that a "strong adult influence" drove her to commit suicide, and that an adult's influnce has more impact than another her own age.
Not at all. This isn't about degree of influence. This is about responsibility. An adult is responsible for their influence over a minor. Someone else her own age would be a minor, and wouldn't be responsible.
First, that would be a flaw in the law that doesn't reconize the difference between a three year old and 13 year old. Second, you're largely wrong. Children as young as 10 have been tried as adults before. So the law seems to be reconizing that yes, certain minors DO have the capablity to reconize right from wrong.
Right. Adults are automatically tried as adults unless they're determined mentally unfit by psychologists and other experts. Children start out as 'mentally unfit' and you need a bunch of experts to agree that this specific child 'knew right from wrong' in this specific circumstance, before you can try them as an adult.
So until this kid is deemed to be an 'adult' for the purposes of this case, she's not.
I doubt you're speaking for any kind of experience. My wife was a victim of sexual abuse by her parents. Her and her siblings have hate, not love, for their parents. If in the past they keep things bottled up, it's out of shame, not because of any loyality to thier parents.
I'm really sorry to hear that. However, I didn't say that victims 'loved' their parents, merely that their parents had tremendous influence over them that keeps them silent. You claimed for example, that 'shame' is the motivator. Why are they ashamed about? They were the victim, they did nothing wrong! If they went to the police the police would tell them exactly that. So where is this overpowering shame coming from? It comes from the adults in their life - especially their parents.
So you're telling me that a 13 year old isn't smart enough to simply go to go myspace anymore?
Some yes. Some no. I know adults that aren't smart enough to simply walk away.
The girl's mental condition however doesn't change the crime committed, and it still doesn't make it murder.
If the girl isn't responsible for her actions due to her metal state, and another person is deliberately and maliciously influencing her at that point, then that person can be held responsible for what happens.
That's the law, that's why Drew wasn't charged with murder.
It would be really hard to prove she actually intended for the kid to kill herself (and I'm not even convinced of that myself.) To my mind this more like involuntary manslaughter, recklessness, etc. In some (but not all) states if the recklessness achieves a certain threshold - that it reaches 'willful indifference to human life' it can be argued that it constitues 'malice' and the offense can be elevated to 'murder'.
This is the reasoning I use to reach murder. She set out to completely destroy this kids self esteem, succeeded, then called her worthless and told her to kill herself. Personally I think this meets the threshold of 'recklessness' needed to elevate involuntary manslaughter to 2nd degree murder, but I'll concede that's a matter of opinion.
In any case I'm disappointed she wasn't charged with involuntary manslaughter, because I think that definitely applies.