"About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000."
the fact is this is total bullshit, the top 1% in america pay almost 50% of the tax
Actually, its the two 2% paying 53% (which is also in the cite I provided). But close enough.
The trouble however, is that a middle class american pays 30-35% in taxes, while a high-income american pays, on average only 18%.
So sure, if you make 146M bucks, yeah, your paying $26M in taxes. But if you take 1460 families that each make $100,000, that's the same 146 million in aggregate, but they each pay ~33k in taxes on average,... or 48M in aggregate.
Why do they pay 48M when you only pay 26M?
The high-income earners have considerable income from 'investments' not just 'wage/salary' which is taxed differently and wage income has far fewer loopholes and options than investment income, and there are countless more ways to leverage your money too the more you've got to shuffle around to maximize tax savings.
They're more likely to be 'self employed' at least with respect to some investment or other and suddenly that trip to the bahamas is a tax deductible 'annual meeting' instead of a 'vacation', and the twice yearly jaunts to Mexico? Tax deductable trips to inspect their investment rental properties....
Their car? Tax deductible lease payments, maintenance, and fuel... Their mortgage? Bah, who are we kidding they don't have a mortgage, but they do have a HELOC to buy even more investments, and the interest on the HELOC? Because its being used to buy goverment approved investments...you guessed it... tax deductible. The tax savings more than offset the interest, meanwhile the investments themselves can make money too.
The wealthy pay more taxes than the middle in total, but its the ones in the middle who see the largest chunk of each dollar bitten off by the IRS never to be seen again.
Just how few MIBF (Mean Instructions Before Failure) is your CPU rated for? Afraid you're going to use it all up? Wear out the gears and levers and such?
Pointlessly wear out his wallet maybe?
Hint: Electricity costs money.
A CPU in hibernate takes next to nothing. A modern CPU 'tearing' along at max utilisation 24x7 will make a noticeable bump in your utility bill.
Figure 24h *30 days = 720 hours / month, so a 300Watt PC going full tilt for a month burns 216kWh. Average kWh in the US is.10 cents. So $21 bucks a month on average just to 'tear up your CPU'. (or $250 a year on average... up to $500 a year in California or New York where electricity is higher...)
A few years of 'tearing up your CPU' and you could have bought a whole new computer.
Then you are one of those with a non-literal interpretation of the bible.
Yes I am. But that's beside the point.
You should try to keep in mind that there are a great number of people out there who take exactly what is said as the absolute truth in a very literal way.
Yes I don't deny that. But even if you take the bible literally; God creating something 'in his own image' literally means to create something that looks like God. That's it. If God had created a ritz cracker in his image that wouldn't mean god was ritz cracker.
My point is that EVEN if you are going to interpret the bible LITERALLY, it STILL doesn't say that God is a person. It only says at most that people -look- like God.
Its true some people believe God is a person, but that's not driven from a 'literal' interpretation of what is written, its a purely fabricated belief of just one possibility that is consistent with a literal interpretation.
God could be a giant robot filled with jelly beans, and we could still be LITERALLY created in his image as long as Jelly-bot looks like us.
Unless you are Christian and believe that God made man in His image.
Nope. That doesn't make God a person. Just as if I make a carving 'in my image', its not a person; its a piece of wood that sort of looks like me. If I make a painting 'in my image', not only is it not a person, but its a projection into fewer dimensions, that doesn't even look like me unless you are standing in the right place.
Not that I beleive in Christianity, but if I did I would take that passage to mean little more than there was some recognizable characteristic(s) of God that he has been imparted to man.
Yeah 12 whole volts of zip zap, scary! I take it you have never touched an actual car battery and realized to your great dismay, it did not shock you at all;)
Don't you worry I'll bring the coil too and step it up to 40,000 Volts.
Precisely. So you should do anything you can do to win the fastest, and that would be to break the EASIEST computer. Taking even an extra 10 seconds to break into the mac means someone else might win the 10k and you get nothing.
You don't need to flip anything. Besides, why flip it when that's the computer he and everyone else wanted?
I was just suggesting a possible use for the computer you won if it -wasn't- the one you wanted. ie... if you wanted the Mac but broke the Vista box because it was faster you could flip the vista box.
You think that's cute, yet I'll bet you wonder why the world hates America.
That's a bet you'd lose. I'm not an American. Rather, I'm part of that 'the world' that thinks America has its head up its ass.
Well, Q*bert-inspired gameplay wasn't modified much, so when penis touched/entered vagina (with a suggestive sound, as far as SID capabilities went) you actually...lost a life.
Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
In other words, the first to hack it gets it! Who wants a Vaio or a Fujitsu anyway? Given a choice between the three, I'm sure everybody wanted the MacBook Air. Naturally, the only machine getting the pounding is going to be the first to crack.
Yes, that sounds logical, if your genitals are hooked up to a car battery.
The winner got to keep the unit AND 10,000. So OBVIOUSLY they should crack the easiest unit, flip it on ebay, and then buy whatever they actually want, while pocketing the remaining 8-9 grand...
So... the moral of this story? Never underestimate the ability of an Apple fan to rationalize how the Mac could be the first to fail, yet still be the finest computer in the competition. d(^_~) [Thumbs up!]
People are having software that they have no license to use being automatically installed on their systems. I would think a term like that is not valid (non-obvious terms may not be valid in the US), but if it does hold, they will have millions of people in the US infringing on their IP. If they decide they are desperate and start suing (not likely any time soon) there are a lot of potential targets.
What court is going to hold me responsible for an alleged infringement *you* imposed on me 'automatically' at *your* discretion.
This is like the RIAA giving away MP3s on their website, saying "you agree to listen to this on only RIAA approved devices". When you suddenly have millions of people acting innocently illegally using your product it is not good for them.
No. That would be an honest case compared to this. *This case* would be like the RIAA automatically installing MP3s on any Windows OS computer when you insert a CD under a license that says you can't have them on your PC unless you have Vista Ultimate x64.
You can't break into someone's house and leave your stuff in their living room and then charge them with theft. All the defendant has to do is show that you left the stuff in their home without their approval (which will be easy as this whole fiasco is being well documented) and the whole 'case' goes down the drain.
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Really this whole thing just reveals that the real problem is that apple isn't thinking about windows even when its doing cross platform products. The 'apple only' language in the EULA comes from only thinking about Apple users not out of some anti-windows malevolence.
IN FACT, I believe the whole 'automatic update' of safari on windows computers where it wasn't installed is itself part of the same problem -- only thinking about apple users, which by default all do have safari installed. So this whole fiasco of installing new software safari as an "update" was an arrogant but ultimately unthinking lazy oversight; in their mind no different than MS pushing Internet Explorer updates to users - for to Apple thinking about Apple -- who has Safari? Who needs its updates? Answer: Everyone.
Its pretty clear a big chunk of Apple hasn't caught on yet to the Windows side of the business. This whole situation reeks of poor management, not malice.
That's not to say Apple should be simply forgiven but rather that they should be burned in effigy for the right reasons.
If the index funds drop out of the indices, then the ETFs will sell, and then the company will only be held by real investors and actively managed funds -- shareholders which cannot be ignored.
These funds only attempt to match a particular index, so they have no reason to invest resources to to maximise the profits of companies that they own (or rather, to prevent abuses that reduce stockholder value). Resources to work with companies that they hold cost money and these funds try to match the indix as closely as possible with minimum overhead.
index tracking funds are designed allow -small- investors the ability to maintain a diversified portfolio without being eaten alive by transaction costs.
Its a good concept.
Its true they have very low management fees because they aren't actively 'managed' only periodically rebalanced according to simple algorithms that could even be automated; or in your words 'they don't care'. But in practice they tend to outperform more actively managed funds, because 'management' costs money -- meaning it has to perform that much better just to break even.
Your theory that this encourages/enables companies to operate with disregard for their 'proxy shareholders' is really quite interesting. Are index-tracking mutuals and ETFs actually a dominant or even substantial position in companies? Do you have any cite to that? I.e. Do these funds collectively hold more than 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? of any company?
Furthermore, many indexes like the S&P500 have profitability requirements, so if a company is being consistently mismanaged it should fall off the index, and trigger a sell-off of any shares held by the index-tracking funds.
When you go to an all you can eat buffet you can't buy one plate for your entire extended family, nor can you fill up boxes of food to take home with you. Nor can you feed your pets. Nor can you bring in a giant robot garburetor and stuff endless quantities of food into it.
They sold -YOU- access with the (clearly defined) expectation that -YOU- would be playing.
They didn't sell you X access for you to attach a robot to. They didn't sell you X access for you and everyone you know to use. They didn't sell you X access for you to resell by the hour on ebay.
Like it or not, unlike Comcast's, Blizzards TOS on this point are extremely clear (though largely unenforced).
Read the Blizzard TOS. Its not like they make it hard to find.
That's not to say I agree with suing this guy; but anyone who uses his product deserves to be banned.
I have Vista. Its not sluggish at all on the PCs I run it on. Are you speaking from experience or just anecdotes?
Vista wastes so much resource on graphics and 'caching' that it runs very sluggish even on well specced hardware.
Most of that is offloaded to the GPU, which is designed for those graphics. If its running sluggish you got duped into buying something that was marketed as vista capable that really isn't. Join the class action lawsuit.
If you've got truly Vista capable hardware, its mostly just fine (apart from some known specific issues/bugs.)
As for caching? Get real.
Most of the benchmarks I've seen for vista put its FPS framerate on average like 2-3fps behind XP SP2. So if XP is getting 68 fps, Vista SP1 is getting 66. I don't dispute Vista is slower than XP, but I'd hardly call that 'very sluggish', and unusable.
And XP2 will be expected to have the advantage until development is focussed on Vista. We see at all the time in video game ports, the game always runs best on the platform it was developed for, even if the ported-to-system is technically superior.
Not to mention that Vista is still new enough that the driver base is still considerably less mature than XP.
When they started developing Vista, they could not imagine the rise of Ubuntu's success
Given that it has marketshare that is a fraction of OS X, I don't think Microsoft is exactly reeling at the 'rise of ubuntu' right now. Its a blip on the radar.
or the coming of the XO PC and, eeePC,
This might have taken them by surprise, but really, the RAM requirement is not really the issue there. The PRICE is. Sure RAM factors into that, but the Windows license is a bigger factor.
which is why they thought they'd give a hand to their friends the computer vendors by making 2G of RAM a requirement. (I would check the dates if was not in a hurry).
No. They really simply didn't care. You can get 2GB of desktop ram for ~$45 now. They didn't care that it takes like 12GB to install either, for the same reason.
It looks like they understood this now, and reacted by making that "minimal kernel" stuff on the next windows (even a non graphic server version),
No. Minimal kernal/non-gui interface has EVERYTHING to do with virtualization. Whether or not a single windows server uses a little extra RAM and CPU overhead to support a gui and some extraneous processes is pretty much irrelevant in the big scheme of things... but 100 of them in a virtual cluster -- that overhead really adds up.
They are slimming windows server to make it more competitive in virtual environments.
and by planning to release it one year early.
I think that's more marketing than anything else. Marketing can promise the world in their 'as yet unreleased next version'. That's what marketing does. As for releasing it a year early? Do you really think that's going to help the product? (Hint: its what marketing ALWAYS wants...nuff said...)
What I'm saying is: we (linux evangelists) have a huge opportunity right now, but it might not last. So let's make the most of it.
I don't dispute there is an opportunity to capitalize on Vista's widespread negative perception in the media and in IT, but the reality is that most MS shops are more tied to microsoft than they might like. If they want to switch to Linux before XP is gone, they better get their asses in gear.
The shops that are digging in on XP, and refusing to even properly evaluate and develop support for Vista are just digging themselves into a hole. Because they guys aren't planning a Linux migration either.
When XP is no longer for sale, they'll be caught totally unprepared, and look like fools.
Bottom line: They better be planning SOMETHING now, whether its how they are going to support vista, or how they are going to migrate to linux; it doesn't matter... but if they are just digging in and saying..."I'm sticking with XP"...
Well, you'd be looking at next years unemployed IT administrators, or at the very least, a group of people who will be stressed out and working around the clock with management whipping them likes dogs as they play catchup on the work they should have been doing now.
Gambling that either MS will extend XP further, or that Windows 7 will be a magic bullet is beyond stupid.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
This is a myth. On any PC that actually really and truly supports Vista, Vista is within a hair of XP on most benchmarks. (Yes there are a few known Vista bugs [like network + mp3]) but overall, Vista flies just fine on hardware that meets its directx10 requirements and has solid drivers.
Even in games, its only a few percentage points off, and a lot of that is considered to be driver optimization stuff, which just isn't as refined as XP's -yet-.
Vista is only a dog on older hardware that's not up to its requirements, lacks sufficient RA, or where drivers are highly generic/rudimentary and/or not remotely optimized. (Think booting XP into 'standard VGA' on your new geforce 9800.)
Of course, they could do quite a bit of this anonymously.
With enough 'anonymous' data you can unmask the identity. A few cases have already shown this.
While they can get some information from the IP address, it's not nearly as useful as information from the Google Cookie.
That's true in theory. In practice its very nearly as good in a great deal of cases. If you sign into gmail from home, they'll be able to link the ip address to the account. So even when you aren't logged in they can attach data to the profile, with a 'liklihood' of being the same, or at least an affiliated person. (affiliated people are likely in similiar demographics...)
Once they have a list of ip addresses you use your account from, you might as well be logged in. Sure it won't be 100% accurate, but the link is strong enough to be useful. And if your dynamic ip address changes, they'll pick you up again next time you log-in.
Proxy servers etc can also help, but even the proxy is useful... if your proxying in from webgate5.marketing.ibm.com that's useful information too. And they still have session cookies.
Even the combination of NAT address + browser + windows size + java version + etc can make a usable session variable. Its more than enough to track a session from page to page, especially on smaller sites, even if they are behind a proxy and have cookies disabled. If that session is at any pointed linked back to a 'authenticated' connection -- e.g. logging into a google app, all your 'supposedly' anonymous surfing can be linked.
Sure if you go to a web cafe and surf around they might not be able to make any useful inferences if you don't login to your gmail, but that's the exception not the rule.
Consider a scenario where two PCs are behind a NAT/Proxy - person X accesses gmail then continues along to a number of other sites: A, B, C, and D. Later on someone else, person Y, behind the same proxy accesses sites E,F,G,H and then logs into gmail. In both cases google can reliably link the history to the correct account.
Over time, someone from behind the proxy visits sites A,B,C on a regular basis. Google can with high probability link all that data to person X, even if its an isolated session that never visited gmail. If someone later visits E,F,H, that data can be linked to profile Y.
Sure it -might- be wrong, but odds are its not. And its right often enough to be worth making these inferences for the purposes of placing targeted ads.
There's no reason why Google (et al) need keep logs of who's doing what.
Ok, how naive are you?
Websites keep logs largely to trace attacks, don't they?
That's one element of it, but for most sites its a minor element. Most sites keep logs to trace where users are going, how they are using the site, etc.
Most site-admins are interested in where users are going on the site, how they get their, where they leave, how they arrive, how long they spend on each page, etc. They want to know which pages are popular, they want to know at which stage people usually abandon their shopping cart, etc, etc.
They generally want to make the site more effective, and logs (and analysis of those logs) are a primary tool.
Google, of course, being an ADVERTISNG company first and foremost, is further interested in logs in order to generate profiles, to attach your surfing habits to demographics. They want to know how old your are, what your interests are, how much you make, your ethnicity, level of education, etc. Now, getting that from one site would be nearly impossible. But when you consider that every site that has 'ads by google' on it, is doing its best to track you, they actually CAN get a lot of that information with a high degree of accuracy.
These logs are valuable. If they develop a new algorithm to extract new information they can run it against their logs and pull out that additional information.
And with google its not just -logs-, its content. Google apps like gmail, groups, documents, maps, store your content. So now they have your content (your email messages, your text documents and spreadhseets + a good chunk of your browsing history, possibly including what you've bought online... or at least what you've added to shopping carts, etc.
Google isn't in business to provide you with free useful applications. The value to google of google docs and gmail is to be able to data mine the content to generate profile information.
Can't they have a standard EFF-approved `we keep logs for 24 hours` policy, after which time they're removed permanently?
Even if they -would- delete your logs after 24 hours (They won't without a huge fight.) that still doesn't address the issue of google hosting (and data mining) your content, not to mention the risk they might turn it over to the us government if they ask.
Flawed analogy: People didn't buy whips anymore because they had no more meed for them. On the contrary, people nowadays still want to get writers' works, they just don't want to pay for it anymore.
Nope.
Your analysis is flawed. People don't pay buggy whip manufacturers for whips because they could get their new fangled buggy's to go without them.
Today, people don't pay pay publishers to reproduce content because they found their new fangled book readers to get content without them.
people nowadays still want to get writers' works
Oh... ok, no problem then. So there is still a demand for writers' works, just no demand for a service to reproduce them at inflated prices. So clearly writers need to find a new way of getting compensated for their works, as collecting a royalty at the point of reproduction is going to go nowhere.
So clearly the writer will need to be compensated -prior- to releasing the book. But how could that work? Lots of ways. Use your imagination. You could release the first chapter, and hold the rest for ransom, and only release the book once you've made your ransom... and its true you might have to release a few books gratis to build up a reputation so that others will be following your work, and be willing to pay your ransom... for example I'd toss a few bucks towards getting new books release from a few dozen authors out there, or you can look to sell the rights to the movie industry, and at the end of the day people will still pay a small amount of money if you make it easier to buy from you than to steal. And there will be a market for handsome printed dead-tree books for a long while yet... (I'm only for legalzing non-commericial reproduction -- if someone wants to re-sell your books in some form, or make a movie out of it, I fully support protecting those rights for you.
"But but but... I'll make less money and won't be motivated to write," you moan.
Tough shit. How many thousands of garage bands never break even yet they create music endlessly. Hell, how many get signed to a label and still never get into the black? Tolkien really wrote Lord of the Rings for his kids. Van Gogh never made it big while alive yet he never stopped painting. How many authors have faced thousands of rejection letters yet keep writing?
Seriously if your only motivation is a guaranteed income become a plumber or an electrician.
There are plenty of people out their who will create in there spare time because they love the arts. And there are plenty of ways for artists to get compensated without tying their income to having basic non-commercial reproduction illegal.
If its a memo you send to 100,000 customers, and 90% of the responses are bounce messages, spam, and cruft from customers asking to be removed from the list (which is handled by clicking the 'remove me from the list link').
If they have a question about their last order, they'll just have to contact customer service. Having people wade through this crud, find the real odd customer question like 'what is the status of my last order' which is invariably missing crucial information like what they ordered, or which subsidiary in which country they placed an order with, or is in foreign language.
Its often simply just not practical nor worth the expense, even if it is good customer service.
Also there are countless scnearios where donotreply@company.com is used for internal memos etc. Where its your OWN employees that are the recipients. If I tell them do not reply, they shouldn't reply. There are other channels if they have questions or follow up... like their manager, or HR, or whoever is identified in the memo as their follow up option.
For a while now gamers have been complaining that in-game ads don't offset the cost of the game
So I don't get it, ad's have offset sony PC prices, and we're complaining about it?
Objectively its the same, but its the semantics.
There is a semantic difference between 'we'll offer you a discount to sell you a PC with bloat' vs 'we profit more by selling you a bloated pc and we'll only remove it if you compensate us to make up that extra profit. ie... you are basically bidding against the bloatware providers over the state of your desktop.'
If Sony offered the PC clean for X, and then as an option offered to reduce its price by $70 dollars to ALLOW them to install a bunch of cruft their affiliates will pay them to install... people would be a lot less pissed I think. Even though its just changing the semantics.
As for gamers, game prices haven't gone down, so the presumption is that the publishers are just pocketing extra ad profit and not passing any of the savings to gamers. You -could- argue that game prices would have gone up (or up more) if it weren't for the ads... but I think the gamers are justifiably skeptical.
So, just have the reply address be foo@donotreply.company.com and have your incoming mailswerver send all mail addressed to that subdomain to/dev/null.
I was thinking that originally, but now I wonder if I could instead have an MX setup for donotreply.company.com that sends the mail to 127.0.0.1
Would there be any pitfalls to that? Worst case it would try to deliver the mail to localhost, which assuming the guy was actually running an smtp server, it would probably just reject it as an invalid recipient, refuse to relay it, or deliver it to a default account. The latter is the most 'risky', but the default account is likely managed by the person you sent the mail to in the first place.
In any case, the real risk is zilch, as even if it does go somewhere 'unexpected' it wouldn't really be 'abuseable' as it would go somewhere depending on each indivually owned smtp server. I couldn't just register a domain or squat on an ip and receive it.
And besides the person who received it who runs an smtp on localhost can forward your mail anywhere he wants anyway, so if he wants to send it on, he can, and whether he just uses the forward button or sends it via some automatic handling of an smtp server on his own machine its the same difference.
The final concern is that he's been pwned and botted... and the smtp server he's running is not his... but really if that's the case you can assume whoever pwned him can read all his email anyway if he wants to, regardless.
Never attribute to malice, or even conscious though, what can be attributed to incompetence.
Anyone bright enough to -think- having the messages bounce to another domain would save them money should be able to think that maybe just maybe if they have the messages bounce to another domain that this other domain might actually exist, accept that bounced mail, and even read it.
If they really wanted to save money, and not take that risk they could blacklist an address at their mail gates front door. That would eliminate most, but not all the cost of handling the return mail.
And it would be a simple matter to simply have it go to "donotreplay@donotreplay.company.com" which wouldn't have an MX record configured, and would thus never get anywhere. And being a subdomain of your own, it wouldn't be incidently delivered to someone else either.
Nice hyperbole. Anyway, you can live outside of the city center without owning a car. I live way outside of Vancouver, but I work downtown. I take transit. It actually takes me *less* time to get to work than people who drive the same distance, because of traffic and parking. I can read a book or play Advance Wars DS while I ride. I don't pay for fuel, insurance, maintenance, or for a parking space that costs as much per month as a small apartment. And I don't live in a Dickensian blockhouse with 1000 other people; I live in a nice, large apartment, in a quiet building, in a wooded suburb.
You probably shouldn't have outed yourself as a vancouverite.
Your description of transit here is atypical. I've tried transit...here's my rush hour commute home: standing room only on over crowded buses to an over crowed sky-train station, and at the other end, another bus and then a transfer to another bus. It doesn't save me any time, its not relaxing. I can sometimes read a book on the train if less busy than normal, but the buses and roads are rough and I get nauseous. I often wait up to 20 minutes for my final connection, outside, in a city that sees more rain than sun. Getting to work is about the same, in reverse, of course.
I can actually save a small amount of time and aggravation by driving to the sky train station, but I'd actually have to drive 20 minutes in the opposite direction from where I work to reach a sky-train station with a park-and-ride lot. Still it knocks 10 minutes and some aggravation off the commute... but then I'd have to insure my car for 'to and from work' again plus pay for gas for that part of the trip, and of course pay $300/year for parking.
I'm sure Vancouver is great for some people, e.g. if you live/work within walking distance of the skytrain or west coast express terminals, or you are commuting to the downtown core. Most of us don't. Those systems don't even reach into the cities of Richmond, Delta or North Vancouver or West Vancouver. Hell they don't even reach into the south end of Vancouver or Burnaby. Skytrain has what? one terminal in the north corner of Surrey, a city spanning 120 square miles, and nothing in Langley or beyond.
Vancouver's transit system SUCKS. The one in Calgary on the other hand is gold by comparison. Even Toronto's transit and go-train system is superior.
Slashdot Mirror
One myth that people keep repeating is that the wealthy don't pay tax.
And it would be a myth if it weren't true...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/business/03tax.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
"About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000."
the fact is this is total bullshit, the top 1% in america pay almost 50% of the tax
Actually, its the two 2% paying 53% (which is also in the cite I provided). But close enough.
The trouble however, is that a middle class american pays 30-35% in taxes, while a high-income american pays, on average only 18%.
So sure, if you make 146M bucks, yeah, your paying $26M in taxes. But if you take 1460 families that each make $100,000, that's the same 146 million in aggregate, but they each pay ~33k in taxes on average,... or 48M in aggregate.
Why do they pay 48M when you only pay 26M?
The high-income earners have considerable income from 'investments' not just 'wage/salary' which is taxed differently and wage income has far fewer loopholes and options than investment income, and there are countless more ways to leverage your money too the more you've got to shuffle around to maximize tax savings.
They're more likely to be 'self employed' at least with respect to some investment or other and suddenly that trip to the bahamas is a tax deductible 'annual meeting' instead of a 'vacation', and the twice yearly jaunts to Mexico? Tax deductable trips to inspect their investment rental properties....
Their car? Tax deductible lease payments, maintenance, and fuel... Their mortgage? Bah, who are we kidding they don't have a mortgage, but they do have a HELOC to buy even more investments, and the interest on the HELOC? Because its being used to buy goverment approved investments...you guessed it... tax deductible. The tax savings more than offset the interest, meanwhile the investments themselves can make money too.
The wealthy pay more taxes than the middle in total, but its the ones in the middle who see the largest chunk of each dollar bitten off by the IRS never to be seen again.
Just how few MIBF (Mean Instructions Before Failure) is your CPU rated for? Afraid you're going to use it all up? Wear out the gears and levers and such?
.10 cents. So $21 bucks a month on average just to 'tear up your CPU'. (or $250 a year on average... up to $500 a year in California or New York where electricity is higher...)
Pointlessly wear out his wallet maybe?
Hint: Electricity costs money.
A CPU in hibernate takes next to nothing. A modern CPU 'tearing' along at max utilisation 24x7 will make a noticeable bump in your utility bill.
Figure 24h *30 days = 720 hours / month, so a 300Watt PC going full tilt for a month burns 216kWh. Average kWh in the US is
A few years of 'tearing up your CPU' and you could have bought a whole new computer.
Then you are one of those with a non-literal interpretation of the bible.
Yes I am. But that's beside the point.
You should try to keep in mind that there are a great number of people out there who take exactly what is said as the absolute truth in a very literal way.
Yes I don't deny that. But even if you take the bible literally; God creating something 'in his own image' literally means to create something that looks like God. That's it. If God had created a ritz cracker in his image that wouldn't mean god was ritz cracker.
My point is that EVEN if you are going to interpret the bible LITERALLY, it STILL doesn't say that God is a person. It only says at most that people -look- like God.
Its true some people believe God is a person, but that's not driven from a 'literal' interpretation of what is written, its a purely fabricated belief of just one possibility that is consistent with a literal interpretation.
God could be a giant robot filled with jelly beans, and we could still be LITERALLY created in his image as long as Jelly-bot looks like us.
Unless you are Christian and believe that God made man in His image.
Nope. That doesn't make God a person. Just as if I make a carving 'in my image', its not a person; its a piece of wood that sort of looks like me. If I make a painting 'in my image', not only is it not a person, but its a projection into fewer dimensions, that doesn't even look like me unless you are standing in the right place.
Not that I beleive in Christianity, but if I did I would take that passage to mean little more than there was some recognizable characteristic(s) of God that he has been imparted to man.
Yeah 12 whole volts of zip zap, scary! I take it you have never touched an actual car battery and realized to your great dismay, it did not shock you at all ;)
Don't you worry I'll bring the coil too and step it up to 40,000 Volts.
$10000 will buy any laptop you want.
Precisely. So you should do anything you can do to win the fastest, and that would be to break the EASIEST computer. Taking even an extra 10 seconds to break into the mac means someone else might win the 10k and you get nothing.
You don't need to flip anything. Besides, why flip it when that's the computer he and everyone else wanted?
I was just suggesting a possible use for the computer you won if it -wasn't- the one you wanted. ie... if you wanted the Mac but broke the Vista box because it was faster you could flip the vista box.
You think that's cute, yet I'll bet you wonder why the world hates America.
That's a bet you'd lose. I'm not an American. Rather, I'm part of that 'the world' that thinks America has its head up its ass.
Well, Q*bert-inspired gameplay wasn't modified much, so when penis touched/entered vagina (with a suggestive sound, as far as SID capabilities went) you actually...lost a life.
Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
But I... I do deny them my essence.
In other words, the first to hack it gets it! Who wants a Vaio or a Fujitsu anyway? Given a choice between the three, I'm sure everybody wanted the MacBook Air. Naturally, the only machine getting the pounding is going to be the first to crack.
... Zzzzzzzap.... couldn't.... Zzzzzzzzzap. ... agree... Zzzzzzzzzzap.... more. ;)
Yes, that sounds logical, if your genitals are hooked up to a car battery.
The winner got to keep the unit AND 10,000. So OBVIOUSLY they should crack the easiest unit, flip it on ebay, and then buy whatever they actually want, while pocketing the remaining 8-9 grand...
So... the moral of this story? Never underestimate the ability of an Apple fan to rationalize how the Mac could be the first to fail, yet still be the finest computer in the competition. d(^_~) [Thumbs up!]
I
The EULA is not a red herring.
This whole situation is a red herring.
People are having software that they have no license to use being automatically installed on their systems. I would think a term like that is not valid (non-obvious terms may not be valid in the US), but if it does hold, they will have millions of people in the US infringing on their IP. If they decide they are desperate and start suing (not likely any time soon) there are a lot of potential targets.
What court is going to hold me responsible for an alleged infringement *you* imposed on me 'automatically' at *your* discretion.
This is like the RIAA giving away MP3s on their website, saying "you agree to listen to this on only RIAA approved devices". When you suddenly have millions of people acting innocently illegally using your product it is not good for them.
No. That would be an honest case compared to this. *This case* would be like the RIAA automatically installing MP3s on any Windows OS computer when you insert a CD under a license that says you can't have them on your PC unless you have Vista Ultimate x64.
You can't break into someone's house and leave your stuff in their living room and then charge them with theft. All the defendant has to do is show that you left the stuff in their home without their approval (which will be easy as this whole fiasco is being well documented) and the whole 'case' goes down the drain.
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Really this whole thing just reveals that the real problem is that apple isn't thinking about windows even when its doing cross platform products. The 'apple only' language in the EULA comes from only thinking about Apple users not out of some anti-windows malevolence.
IN FACT, I believe the whole 'automatic update' of safari on windows computers where it wasn't installed is itself part of the same problem -- only thinking about apple users, which by default all do have safari installed. So this whole fiasco of installing new software safari as an "update" was an arrogant but ultimately unthinking lazy oversight; in their mind no different than MS pushing Internet Explorer updates to users - for to Apple thinking about Apple -- who has Safari? Who needs its updates? Answer: Everyone.
Its pretty clear a big chunk of Apple hasn't caught on yet to the Windows side of the business. This whole situation reeks of poor management, not malice.
That's not to say Apple should be simply forgiven but rather that they should be burned in effigy for the right reasons.
I'm not sure ignoring it is entirely a bad thing.
Then withdraw from it, and you can glibly ignore anything it says.
(Of course, then you'd have to stop using it to bully other countries around too...)
So what?
If the index funds drop out of the indices, then the ETFs will sell, and then the company will only be held by real investors and actively managed funds -- shareholders which cannot be ignored.
These funds only attempt to match a particular index, so they have no reason to invest resources to to maximise the profits of companies that they own (or rather, to prevent abuses that reduce stockholder value). Resources to work with companies that they hold cost money and these funds try to match the indix as closely as possible with minimum overhead.
index tracking funds are designed allow -small- investors the ability to maintain a diversified portfolio without being eaten alive by transaction costs.
Its a good concept.
Its true they have very low management fees because they aren't actively 'managed' only periodically rebalanced according to simple algorithms that could even be automated; or in your words 'they don't care'. But in practice they tend to outperform more actively managed funds, because 'management' costs money -- meaning it has to perform that much better just to break even.
Your theory that this encourages/enables companies to operate with disregard for their 'proxy shareholders' is really quite interesting. Are index-tracking mutuals and ETFs actually a dominant or even substantial position in companies? Do you have any cite to that? I.e. Do these funds collectively hold more than 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? of any company?
Furthermore, many indexes like the S&P500 have profitability requirements, so if a company is being consistently mismanaged it should fall off the index, and trigger a sell-off of any shares held by the index-tracking funds.
When you go to an all you can eat buffet you can't buy one plate for your entire extended family, nor can you fill up boxes of food to take home with you. Nor can you feed your pets. Nor can you bring in a giant robot garburetor and stuff endless quantities of food into it.
They sold -YOU- access with the (clearly defined) expectation that -YOU- would be playing.
They didn't sell you X access for you to attach a robot to. They didn't sell you X access for you and everyone you know to use. They didn't sell you X access for you to resell by the hour on ebay.
Like it or not, unlike Comcast's, Blizzards TOS on this point are extremely clear (though largely unenforced).
Read the Blizzard TOS. Its not like they make it hard to find.
That's not to say I agree with suing this guy; but anyone who uses his product deserves to be banned.
It really isn't.
I have Vista. Its not sluggish at all on the PCs I run it on. Are you speaking from experience or just anecdotes?
Vista wastes so much resource on graphics and 'caching' that it runs very sluggish even on well specced hardware.
Most of that is offloaded to the GPU, which is designed for those graphics. If its running sluggish you got duped into buying something that was marketed as vista capable that really isn't. Join the class action lawsuit.
If you've got truly Vista capable hardware, its mostly just fine (apart from some known specific issues/bugs.)
As for caching? Get real.
Most of the benchmarks I've seen for vista put its FPS framerate on average like 2-3fps behind XP SP2. So if XP is getting 68 fps, Vista SP1 is getting 66. I don't dispute Vista is slower than XP, but I'd hardly call that 'very sluggish', and unusable.
And XP2 will be expected to have the advantage until development is focussed on Vista. We see at all the time in video game ports, the game always runs best on the platform it was developed for, even if the ported-to-system is technically superior.
Not to mention that Vista is still new enough that the driver base is still considerably less mature than XP.
When they started developing Vista, they could not imagine the rise of Ubuntu's success
..."I'm sticking with XP"...
Given that it has marketshare that is a fraction of OS X, I don't think Microsoft is exactly reeling at the 'rise of ubuntu' right now. Its a blip on the radar.
or the coming of the XO PC and, eeePC,
This might have taken them by surprise, but really, the RAM requirement is not really the issue there. The PRICE is. Sure RAM factors into that, but the Windows license is a bigger factor.
which is why they thought they'd give a hand to their friends the computer vendors by making 2G of RAM a requirement. (I would check the dates if was not in a hurry).
No. They really simply didn't care. You can get 2GB of desktop ram for ~$45 now. They didn't care that it takes like 12GB to install either, for the same reason.
It looks like they understood this now, and reacted by making that "minimal kernel" stuff on the next windows (even a non graphic server version),
No. Minimal kernal/non-gui interface has EVERYTHING to do with virtualization. Whether or not a single windows server uses a little extra RAM and CPU overhead to support a gui and some extraneous processes is pretty much irrelevant in the big scheme of things... but 100 of them in a virtual cluster -- that overhead really adds up.
They are slimming windows server to make it more competitive in virtual environments.
and by planning to release it one year early.
I think that's more marketing than anything else. Marketing can promise the world in their 'as yet unreleased next version'. That's what marketing does. As for releasing it a year early? Do you really think that's going to help the product? (Hint: its what marketing ALWAYS wants...nuff said...)
What I'm saying is: we (linux evangelists) have a huge opportunity right now, but it might not last. So let's make the most of it.
I don't dispute there is an opportunity to capitalize on Vista's widespread negative perception in the media and in IT, but the reality is that most MS shops are more tied to microsoft than they might like. If they want to switch to Linux before XP is gone, they better get their asses in gear.
The shops that are digging in on XP, and refusing to even properly evaluate and develop support for Vista are just digging themselves into a hole. Because they guys aren't planning a Linux migration either.
When XP is no longer for sale, they'll be caught totally unprepared, and look like fools.
Bottom line: They better be planning SOMETHING now, whether its how they are going to support vista, or how they are going to migrate to linux; it doesn't matter... but if they are just digging in and saying
Well, you'd be looking at next years unemployed IT administrators, or at the very least, a group of people who will be stressed out and working around the clock with management whipping them likes dogs as they play catchup on the work they should have been doing now.
Gambling that either MS will extend XP further, or that Windows 7 will be a magic bullet is beyond stupid.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
This is a myth. On any PC that actually really and truly supports Vista, Vista is within a hair of XP on most benchmarks. (Yes there are a few known Vista bugs [like network + mp3]) but overall, Vista flies just fine on hardware that meets its directx10 requirements and has solid drivers.
Even in games, its only a few percentage points off, and a lot of that is considered to be driver optimization stuff, which just isn't as refined as XP's -yet-.
Vista is only a dog on older hardware that's not up to its requirements, lacks sufficient RA, or where drivers are highly generic/rudimentary and/or not remotely optimized. (Think booting XP into 'standard VGA' on your new geforce 9800.)
Of course, they could do quite a bit of this anonymously.
With enough 'anonymous' data you can unmask the identity. A few cases have already shown this.
While they can get some information from the IP address, it's not nearly as useful as information from the Google Cookie.
That's true in theory. In practice its very nearly as good in a great deal of cases. If you sign into gmail from home, they'll be able to link the ip address to the account. So even when you aren't logged in they can attach data to the profile, with a 'liklihood' of being the same, or at least an affiliated person. (affiliated people are likely in similiar demographics...)
Once they have a list of ip addresses you use your account from, you might as well be logged in. Sure it won't be 100% accurate, but the link is strong enough to be useful. And if your dynamic ip address changes, they'll pick you up again next time you log-in.
Proxy servers etc can also help, but even the proxy is useful... if your proxying in from webgate5.marketing.ibm.com that's useful information too. And they still have session cookies.
Even the combination of NAT address + browser + windows size + java version + etc can make a usable session variable. Its more than enough to track a session from page to page, especially on smaller sites, even if they are behind a proxy and have cookies disabled. If that session is at any pointed linked back to a 'authenticated' connection -- e.g. logging into a google app, all your 'supposedly' anonymous surfing can be linked.
Sure if you go to a web cafe and surf around they might not be able to make any useful inferences if you don't login to your gmail, but that's the exception not the rule.
Consider a scenario where two PCs are behind a NAT/Proxy - person X accesses gmail then continues along to a number of other sites: A, B, C, and D. Later on someone else, person Y, behind the same proxy accesses sites E,F,G,H and then logs into gmail. In both cases google can reliably link the history to the correct account.
Over time, someone from behind the proxy visits sites A,B,C on a regular basis. Google can with high probability link all that data to person X, even if its an isolated session that never visited gmail. If someone later visits E,F,H, that data can be linked to profile Y.
Sure it -might- be wrong, but odds are its not. And its right often enough to be worth making these inferences for the purposes of placing targeted ads.
There's no reason why Google (et al) need keep logs of who's doing what.
Ok, how naive are you?
Websites keep logs largely to trace attacks, don't they?
That's one element of it, but for most sites its a minor element. Most sites keep logs to trace where users are going, how they are using the site, etc.
Most site-admins are interested in where users are going on the site, how they get their, where they leave, how they arrive, how long they spend on each page, etc. They want to know which pages are popular, they want to know at which stage people usually abandon their shopping cart, etc, etc.
They generally want to make the site more effective, and logs (and analysis of those logs) are a primary tool.
Google, of course, being an ADVERTISNG company first and foremost, is further interested in logs in order to generate profiles, to attach your surfing habits to demographics. They want to know how old your are, what your interests are, how much you make, your ethnicity, level of education, etc. Now, getting that from one site would be nearly impossible. But when you consider that every site that has 'ads by google' on it, is doing its best to track you, they actually CAN get a lot of that information with a high degree of accuracy.
These logs are valuable. If they develop a new algorithm to extract new information they can run it against their logs and pull out that additional information.
And with google its not just -logs-, its content. Google apps like gmail, groups, documents, maps, store your content. So now they have your content (your email messages, your text documents and spreadhseets + a good chunk of your browsing history, possibly including what you've bought online... or at least what you've added to shopping carts, etc.
Google isn't in business to provide you with free useful applications. The value to google of google docs and gmail is to be able to data mine the content to generate profile information.
Can't they have a standard EFF-approved `we keep logs for 24 hours` policy, after which time they're removed permanently?
Even if they -would- delete your logs after 24 hours (They won't without a huge fight.) that still doesn't address the issue of google hosting (and data mining) your content, not to mention the risk they might turn it over to the us government if they ask.
Flawed analogy: People didn't buy whips anymore because they had no more meed for them. On the contrary, people nowadays still want to get writers' works, they just don't want to pay for it anymore.
... (I'm only for legalzing non-commericial reproduction -- if someone wants to re-sell your books in some form, or make a movie out of it, I fully support protecting those rights for you.
Nope.
Your analysis is flawed. People don't pay buggy whip manufacturers for whips because they could get their new fangled buggy's to go without them.
Today, people don't pay pay publishers to reproduce content because they found their new fangled book readers to get content without them.
people nowadays still want to get writers' works
Oh... ok, no problem then. So there is still a demand for writers' works, just no demand for a service to reproduce them at inflated prices. So clearly writers need to find a new way of getting compensated for their works, as collecting a royalty at the point of reproduction is going to go nowhere.
So clearly the writer will need to be compensated -prior- to releasing the book. But how could that work? Lots of ways. Use your imagination. You could release the first chapter, and hold the rest for ransom, and only release the book once you've made your ransom... and its true you might have to release a few books gratis to build up a reputation so that others will be following your work, and be willing to pay your ransom... for example I'd toss a few bucks towards getting new books release from a few dozen authors out there, or you can look to sell the rights to the movie industry, and at the end of the day people will still pay a small amount of money if you make it easier to buy from you than to steal. And there will be a market for handsome printed dead-tree books for a long while yet
"But but but... I'll make less money and won't be motivated to write," you moan.
Tough shit. How many thousands of garage bands never break even yet they create music endlessly. Hell, how many get signed to a label and still never get into the black? Tolkien really wrote Lord of the Rings for his kids. Van Gogh never made it big while alive yet he never stopped painting. How many authors have faced thousands of rejection letters yet keep writing?
Seriously if your only motivation is a guaranteed income become a plumber or an electrician.
There are plenty of people out their who will create in there spare time because they love the arts. And there are plenty of ways for artists to get compensated without tying their income to having basic non-commercial reproduction illegal.
If its a memo you send to 100,000 customers, and 90% of the responses are bounce messages, spam, and cruft from customers asking to be removed from the list (which is handled by clicking the 'remove me from the list link').
... like their manager, or HR, or whoever is identified in the memo as their follow up option.
If they have a question about their last order, they'll just have to contact customer service. Having people wade through this crud, find the real odd customer question like 'what is the status of my last order' which is invariably missing crucial information like what they ordered, or which subsidiary in which country they placed an order with, or is in foreign language.
Its often simply just not practical nor worth the expense, even if it is good customer service.
Also there are countless scnearios where donotreply@company.com is used for internal memos etc. Where its your OWN employees that are the recipients. If I tell them do not reply, they shouldn't reply. There are other channels if they have questions or follow up
For a while now gamers have been complaining that in-game ads don't offset the cost of the game
So I don't get it, ad's have offset sony PC prices, and we're complaining about it?
Objectively its the same, but its the semantics.
There is a semantic difference between 'we'll offer you a discount to sell you a PC with bloat' vs 'we profit more by selling you a bloated pc and we'll only remove it if you compensate us to make up that extra profit. ie... you are basically bidding against the bloatware providers over the state of your desktop.'
If Sony offered the PC clean for X, and then as an option offered to reduce its price by $70 dollars to ALLOW them to install a bunch of cruft their affiliates will pay them to install... people would be a lot less pissed I think. Even though its just changing the semantics.
As for gamers, game prices haven't gone down, so the presumption is that the publishers are just pocketing extra ad profit and not passing any of the savings to gamers. You -could- argue that game prices would have gone up (or up more) if it weren't for the ads... but I think the gamers are justifiably skeptical.
So, just have the reply address be foo@donotreply.company.com and have your incoming mailswerver send all mail addressed to that subdomain to /dev/null.
I was thinking that originally, but now I wonder if I could instead have an MX setup for donotreply.company.com that sends the mail to 127.0.0.1
Would there be any pitfalls to that? Worst case it would try to deliver the mail to localhost, which assuming the guy was actually running an smtp server, it would probably just reject it as an invalid recipient, refuse to relay it, or deliver it to a default account. The latter is the most 'risky', but the default account is likely managed by the person you sent the mail to in the first place.
In any case, the real risk is zilch, as even if it does go somewhere 'unexpected' it wouldn't really be 'abuseable' as it would go somewhere depending on each indivually owned smtp server. I couldn't just register a domain or squat on an ip and receive it.
And besides the person who received it who runs an smtp on localhost can forward your mail anywhere he wants anyway, so if he wants to send it on, he can, and whether he just uses the forward button or sends it via some automatic handling of an smtp server on his own machine its the same difference.
The final concern is that he's been pwned and botted... and the smtp server he's running is not his... but really if that's the case you can assume whoever pwned him can read all his email anyway if he wants to, regardless.
Never attribute to malice, or even conscious though, what can be attributed to incompetence.
Anyone bright enough to -think- having the messages bounce to another domain would save them money should be able to think that maybe just maybe if they have the messages bounce to another domain that this other domain might actually exist, accept that bounced mail, and even read it.
If they really wanted to save money, and not take that risk they could blacklist an address at their mail gates front door. That would eliminate most, but not all the cost of handling the return mail.
And it would be a simple matter to simply have it go to "donotreplay@donotreplay.company.com" which wouldn't have an MX record configured, and would thus never get anywhere. And being a subdomain of your own, it wouldn't be incidently delivered to someone else either.
If its got any security at all, even WEP, or even if broadcast ssid is off and you are on it, I can reasonably allege that you did it on purpose.
Nice hyperbole. Anyway, you can live outside of the city center without owning a car. I live way outside of Vancouver, but I work downtown. I take transit. It actually takes me *less* time to get to work than people who drive the same distance, because of traffic and parking. I can read a book or play Advance Wars DS while I ride. I don't pay for fuel, insurance, maintenance, or for a parking space that costs as much per month as a small apartment. And I don't live in a Dickensian blockhouse with 1000 other people; I live in a nice, large apartment, in a quiet building, in a wooded suburb.
You probably shouldn't have outed yourself as a vancouverite.
Your description of transit here is atypical. I've tried transit...here's my rush hour commute home: standing room only on over crowded buses to an over crowed sky-train station, and at the other end, another bus and then a transfer to another bus. It doesn't save me any time, its not relaxing. I can sometimes read a book on the train if less busy than normal, but the buses and roads are rough and I get nauseous. I often wait up to 20 minutes for my final connection, outside, in a city that sees more rain than sun. Getting to work is about the same, in reverse, of course.
I can actually save a small amount of time and aggravation by driving to the sky train station, but I'd actually have to drive 20 minutes in the opposite direction from where I work to reach a sky-train station with a park-and-ride lot. Still it knocks 10 minutes and some aggravation off the commute... but then I'd have to insure my car for 'to and from work' again plus pay for gas for that part of the trip, and of course pay $300/year for parking.
I'm sure Vancouver is great for some people, e.g. if you live/work within walking distance of the skytrain or west coast express terminals, or you are commuting to the downtown core. Most of us don't. Those systems don't even reach into the cities of Richmond, Delta or North Vancouver or West Vancouver. Hell they don't even reach into the south end of Vancouver or Burnaby. Skytrain has what? one terminal in the north corner of Surrey, a city spanning 120 square miles, and nothing in Langley or beyond.
Vancouver's transit system SUCKS. The one in Calgary on the other hand is gold by comparison. Even Toronto's transit and go-train system is superior.