Yes you're right, and it's arguably even worse than that. I'm not accusing Apple of this, because I have no evidence but I'm putting it out there because it's still a possibility. It's possible that when companies make such claims they are just weasel words such that to have some degree of certainty that the implied meaning is identical to the exact meaning, you need a far more explicit statement of fact than something general like that.
I know for a fact that "We don't connect the dots" can sometimes simply be shorthand for "We don't connect the dots. We pay someone else to do that for us and give us back the resultant information we ask for" because I've worked before for a company that did exactly this and used that exact disclaimer.
"We don't connect the dots" was technically true, but in practice it made no difference morally or ethically because they were still obtaining the exact same information they would have if they'd just done the analytics in house rather than outsourcing it.
In the UK (and Europe) data protection law even makes explicit provision for this precisely because it's not uncommon. This is why you have the terms "data controller" and "data processor" in the Data Protection Act because although a company can't legally pass over control of personal data they hold on you without your permission, they can pass it on to an outsourcing provider for processing providing the company processing it only processes it and doesn't otherwise disseminate or use it. The company that collects and holds your data is the data controller, but that doesn't mean they're not passing it on, they could well be passing it to a different company that acts as the data processor.
Lucky you then. Personally every time I've tried Linux I've had hardware outright not work, and not work for over a year - wireless connectivity, graphics cards, TV tuners. X just outright keeling over one day for apparently no reason forcing me to try and resolve the issues in the command line. That sort of thing.
It's not like any of my hardware was non-standard or uncommon either. Expensive Cisco and cheap Netgear wireless adapters alike had issues for example.
Granted I haven't tried it again for a good few years now but I always just went back to Windows for precisely the reason that stuff did just work there. No screwing about.
I like Linux as a server environment, but part the reason it's always failed to gain traction on the desktop is precisely because of shitty server support, lack of decent failsafe modes if something goes wrong (it took how many decades for X to get a safe mode?) and so forth.
Windows isn't just prominent because of it's monopoly, it's prominent because it works without any hassle.
I don't disagree that 8.1 is a shitty release but that's cherry picking. Take Windows 7 for example - fast, stable, secure, familiar, usable, great backwards compatibility. It's hard to argue that there was much wrong with it.
Actually I think the public do get it, the problem is that the public's threshold for saying enough is enough is just that much further down the line than that of the typical Slashdot poster.
We saw it under Gordon Brown's government where the move towards a surveillance state simply went too far and it actually became an election issue. Labour lost the last election in part because for many people ID card databases, an ever expanding CCTV network, terror laws that were used by councils to spy on people who didn't pick up their dog's poo and to seize Icelandic government assets, attempts to get everyone on the DNA database indefinitely, the government's greenlighting of Phorm and such, internet monitoring programmes and the digital economy act were just too much. Brown's government also regularly used the "think of the children" argument and it did in fact wear thin with voters quite quickly.
Of course it didn't do us much good as the guys that followed still had their flaws, and whilst they cancelled the ID card program, dealt with excessive DNA retention of people not convicted of crimes, and put curbs on some of the anti-terror laws they've still clearly let GCHQ spy on everyone and anyone, and although to be fair they seem to have delayed some of the Digital Economy Act ideas such as 3 strikes almost indefinitely at this point they still haven't scrapped it altogether.
But fundamentally I think it showed that the public does have it's limits in terms of not wanting a police state, those limits just tend towards a lot less freedom and a lot more surveillance than most of us here would like though the public in general would still not accept that type of encroachment on freedom and rights that Gordon Brown and friends wanted. Unfortunately though that's the cost of democracy, it means we don't get our way as a minority, even if we genuinely believe that what we believe makes more sense. Freedoms and rights weren't the most important election issue, it still fell behind the way more important economy arguments, but it was definitely enough of an issue to be brought up in debates, policy, and papers a fair bit - it made it onto the radar precisely because people had had enough.
This is why personally I don't really fear an out and out police state here in the UK - the general public wouldn't tolerate it, even with the paedo argument getting put forward, though I do fear things being a little more towards that direction than I'm personally comfortable with - we're already at that point.
"4.) Xbox does indeed worry me with regards to its ability to spy. I wonder if some sort of simple mechanism that gives a physical on/off switch to an ethernet port will catch on..."
This meme is already dead. Microsoft have now changed their minds so you can use Kinect in a variety of modes - always on, IR blaster mode which is used to send IR signals to your TV, turned off, or just outright unplugged. In other words, Kinect is no longer mandatory.
Besides, a video stream is no small amount of data, if Microsoft ever were going to spy on people with Kinect then you'd notice the data passing through your router so it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the get go anyway.
More likely the Skype/Microsoft deal is a bigger concern for those worried about the NSA, they'd be able to farm far more data from a Skype backdoor than they would a bunch of gamers sat on their arse in front of their XBox.
But now you can outright unplug the thing and still have the console function Kinect is a non-issue.
"International spying is not a trivial thing that is solved purely by money. China, Russia, the UK, and the USA are the only major players because they are the ones that have been doing it for a long time (China is the upstart, but there are multiple reasons for their quick up take beyond just money) and continue to focus on it."
Nonsense. Israel and France have two of the best spying agencies in the world and plenty of other nations have massive capability for this sort of thing, including many of our enemies. North Korea being the obvious example. The list you provided is just a reflection of your ethnocentric views about who the world's big boys are more than anything.
"I'm sorry, but you are childishly naive about human nature if you truly believe that. For it's security a nation needs to know as much as possible about both it's friends and foes. That is an undeniable fact."
After your ad-hominem attack you now seem to have trailed completely off-topic into the realm of general spying. I never argued countries don't spy in general, I argued that they don't engage in massively costly and arguably ineffective (at least very much so relative to the cost) dragnet operations.
"I would also point out that a few months ago the average American would have (equally naively) argued that the US doesn't go to the levels that has now been made clear. Just because a spy agency hasn't been caught doing such things doesn't mean that they aren't doing it and to trust that they aren't is sticking your head in the sand."
Yes, and I've long been pointing out that the US has been engaging in hypocrisy by complaining about Chinese cyber-attacks all the while getting involved in things like Stuxnet. But none of this means that everything is based on assumption.
There are two reasons I made the argument I did, the first regarding not wanting to get involved in that sort of operation we'll use the example of France. The dragnet operations have relied on tapping communications across the two main bottlenecks in the globe - the Atlantic, and the Pacific. On the Atlantic side the NSA led operation has had to tap conduits in five-eyes nations such as the UK, US and Canada to capture as much transatlantic data transfer as they can. On the Pacific side it's been the other two five-eyes nations - Australia and New Zealand. It's now well established that the US also tried to involved Japan but that they opted not to get involved for the same reasons I'm arguing France hasn't - because it's too costly relative to the benefit (or lack of) because once you have that data you have to do something with it and you're just going to end up with a larger noise ratio of false positives to actual useful intel.
So to go it alone, France would have to infiltrate NSA/GCHQ facilities and place it's own equipment and lay it's own cables to pipe the data out somewhere, something which it's obviously not going to be able to do. France has no transatlantic or pacific links of it's own outside five-eyes jurisdiction but within it's jurisdiction that it could tap. At best it has ex-colonial land or ex-colonial allies who may assist it in a similar project in the Africa-Middle East region which would be valuable to the NSA/GCHQ project as an addition, but not much benefit by itself.
If a nation like France wanted to get involved the most simple route would've been to join the NSA/GCHQ in their endeavour and add to their network but like Japan it obviously opted not to because again, it's expensive and it nets what exactly? I don't see any greater decrease in terrorist attacks, I don't see any effective improvements in five-eyes business opportunities compared to the general economy before these programs were in place (in fact the UK has now slipped behind Germany and France as an economic power despite this advantage) - countries like France and Japan got this too, they realise it's a waste of money.
But then there's the other side of the coin, Germany, Germany wouldn't get involved because it genuinely doesn't wan
I'm not a trusting fool, I'm just not a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
GCHQ got caught because it did it with the Americans. How exactly would France etc. get away with it? You don't think GCHQ etc. would find their cable taps when placing their own at key UK transit points as the NSA had to do?
We know France isn't doing large scale internet tapping for the simple reason they'd be named in the NSA files alongside GCHQ and Australia intelligence services.
The rest of your post just confused targeted spying which I never said they didn't do our argued against with the dragnet operations of global internet and telephony data that I was talking about but you obviously missed that in your bile fueled nationalist rage about the suggestion that anyone could dare suggest the the five eyes nations were doing this on a far worse scale than anyone else.
Countries like France and Germany have larger economies than the UK so could trivially be doing the same kind of blanket spying GCHQ has been doing but they don't.
So yes I genuinely believe there are countries who don't do what the NSA and GCHQ does, not because they can't, not even because they can't afford to, but because they either realise it's morally unacceptable, or that spying on your average citizen is just going to land you with more data than you can possibly do anything useful with which is why the Boston bombings still happened and why a soldier was still brutally murdered on British streets despite the people who committed those acts being known to the security services in both cases.
Staff at the NSA and GCHQ were probably just too busy giggling to themselves about some intercepted teenagers cybersex session that they stumbled across randomly to spot the guys that the Russian and South African security services had explicitly warned them about before it was too late.
There are both moral and logical reasons for not doing broad blanket surveillance of everyone you can as opposed to classic focussed intelligence work and the NSA and GCHQ are the only ones who don't seem to get that which is why despite their "technical superiority" coupled with no shortage of old school warnings about specific individuals by allies and enemies alike the US and UK are still both the most prominent targets of and arguably the largest victims to terrorism in the West.
Pretending "they're just jealous that they can't do this" which is what you're basically implying just gives them an excuse that is not valid and that they do not deserve.
LaTeX: Easy to write by hand, plenty of converters to output to a widely usable format, i.e. gif
MathML: Trivial to process with widely available XML parsers, unambiguous and easy to work with computationally and trivial to generate automatic output with a computer also.
Different tools, different use cases. Plenty of room for both in the world. Both are great technologies.
Sigh, I see you still struggle with simple math and the like. I guess you'll never change.
The fact you seem to think a flat tax is the same as a flat handout which is incredibly amusing.
If you can't see why increased tax based on increased level of wealth (the status quo, which the person I was referring to did not suggest changing) coupled with a flat handout results in wealth redistribution then you're a pre-school level of intelligent, I mean, it's really simple basic math.
This coupled with the fact that you believe something that's never been tried before is a conservative policy when the very definition of conservatism is resistance to change (let's just reiterate that to make it clear how stupid you sound - you're saying something that's never been done before is the sort of policy pursued by people who are against change) raises your nonsense to a new level of stupid.
I'm not surprised you got mod bombed to hell, you really are as stupid as they come. Your inability to fathom basic math or comprehend basic logic is astounding.
Except that's not true anymore and is just a meme that should've been retired a good few years ago. Windows has decent QA now and isn't really any more vulnerable than MacOS or Linux.
I had it crash randomly earlier (yes I reported to Mozilla) and I was doing some stuff with dynamically showing/hiding table rows with Javascript where the first row was full of th tags, bordered, 1px and the rest of the table cells had no border. When I showed the third row, and hid it again the whole table got vertical borders on table cells.
No other browser did this, and even inspecting the computed values showed no border set so a rendering bug I guess.
But seriously, what the fuck? the isn't new cutting edge advanced stuff, there wasn't anything new and fancy on the page like CSS3 or anything and they still can't get it right.
The problem is it never used to do this, and it never used to crash, so these silent updates are actually sometimes making my browser worse.
Agreed, I'm sure he made some impressive predictions but those in the summary aren't them.
The rise of China was always going to be an obvious one too, it's been massively strong in the past so has precedent for being a powerful force, and a nation that size is only ever going to be temporarily held back. Even if it lost half it's territory in rebellion it would've still been left with the population and resources to be a global powerhouse regardless.
Any nation with over 100 million people is going to matter in the world, let alone one with over 300 million, let alone one with over 800million as China had at the time.
I don't think autonomous weaponry was particularly surprising either. There were certainly enough sci-fi authors who predicted the exact same thing.
So whatever his grand successes at prediction have been I definitely don't think the examples in the summary are good ones. I'd wager you could've probably found such similar predictions regarding the USSR, China, and future weaponry amongst the general populace at a rate of at least 1 in 1000, if not 1 in 100 or less which I wouldn't say is particularly stand out.
"And yet that was exactly how you were trying to say this guy wasn't a republican but was advocating communist ideas. And yet he was advocating the same as Thatcher."
No, I didn't say he wasn't a Republican. I said he was proclaiming himself as the most patriotic ultra-conservative type of American you could imagine whilst pushing for a communist idea. If he simply said he was a Republican or whatever then that'd be one thing, but he was claiming to be more than that whilst arguing for something that contradicted that greatly. Specifically as I say he was claiming to be a conservative's conservative whilst asking for the most unconservative policy you could imagine given that by definition it was a massive and fundamental change.
"No. "To each according to their needs", and "to each the same" are fundamentally different things."
I think you have a rather binary view of the world, a mistake many people make on Slashdot. Your belief seems to be that it's not communist unless it fits one of the many exact definitions of communism that you've arbitrarily chosen as the definition of communism. This is nonsense though, because by this definition America isn't a capitalist society because it has regulations as to what corporations can do, the UK isn't truly democratic because MPs aren't elected in a manner truly representative of the vote of the people, and because some groups, such as prisoners can't vote.
The fact is, that flat wealth redistribution towards removal of class based on wealth is a move towards communism more so than any single other political ideology, and that is why I called it a communist policy. Just as a dictatorship moving to the UK's electoral system would be a democratic policy move, even though they wouldn't be truly democratic in the strictest terms afterwards.
"What the scientists are saying is "this is an exciting puzzle, it shouldn't happen according to what we know."
For what it's worth, that's how I read titles like "shouldn't exist" anyway, I assume they're saying "shouldn't exist according to current models and understanding" which ultimately means our current models and understanding still need adjustment and we just figure out how.
So I wouldn't worry too much about the sensationalism, I think a lot of us even those of us who know little about this sort of field know what they really mean. I doubt many people are actually assuming there's some kind of magic going on, and I suspect any who would argue "Look, Science doesn't know what it's doing!" are too far gone into their religious fervour or whatever their agenda is to listen even if the headline was less sensational and more precise.
I think in this case it's confusion of cause and effect though.
The assumption posted is that Kutcher has a good track record of spotting great and successful ideas and investing in them.
But I suspect the reality is instead that there's a lot of good ideas out there but most never get noticed and that Kutcher attaching his name and hence providing access to his celebrity, marketing, and finance network is what turns them from the unknown to the known.
I've mentioned it here before a couple of times but Summly is an example of this, it was sold as a boy genius' pet project that made him millions being sold to Yahoo, but the reality of Summly was in fact that the kids dad was a high end investment banker who had relationships with everyone from Kutcher and Stephen Fry to the Murdochs. Also, his Dad had the contacts to hire a couple of silicon valley veterans to run and develop Summly such that it seems his kid did very little at all, in fact, he may not have done anything more than a bit of UI work if that judging by comments from the developers and contractors they used. The kid's mother was a lawyer who worked for Yahoo, hence the Yahoo buyout deal. Having the Murdochs with their media empire, and famous star-bloggers like Stephen Fry behind your product is the quickest way to get your product heard of by a wide audience whether it's a particularly stellar idea or not - at that point the product, as long as it's reasonably not shit doesn't matter, you'll always do better than the product that's far superior, but not fortunate enough to have found the same level of backing.
So you see, the idea matters a bit, but there are literally millions of interesting ideas out there implemented as products. But if you want success, it's as it has always been - it's primarily about who you know, not what you know. That's not to say it's impossible to breakthrough without that as a startup, but if "goodness" of a product could be measured in percentage terms, then to go it alone you need a 90%+ "good" product, but if you've got a bunch of celebs and media moguls onside, then 50%+ "good" is probably "good" enough and that's the difference someone like Kutcher makes to your startup.
Lenovo's use of Kutcher is no different, they're not getting Kutcher onboard because of his genius or technical prowess, they're getting him onboard because he can use himself, and that of folks he knows who are also incredibly famous, like Stephen Fry, to go on about how awesome those products are.
Of course, part of being a successful startup is precisely about being able to get someone like Kutcher on board in the first place, so kudos is still owed to the likes of AirBnB for finding someone like him and getting him onboard. But make no mistake, people like Kutcher are company makers, they can turn a company from an unknown to something that's in the news daily, or at least weekly regardless of how relatively excellent the company's products are in practice.
As a semi-related aside, Microsoft has just taken on Jonathan Ross for their XBox division and he is at least somewhat of a geek with a decent track record of working with the games industry, but make no mistake, they took him on as much for the fact that he's got a multi-decade career as one of the UK's top interviewers of the who's who of the entertainment world and who has made literally hundreds of close celebrity friends at the highest echelons of the entertainment industry as a result. Having someone like Jonathan Ross convincing A-list stars to buy and tweet about the XBox One is going to be worth it's weight in whatever salary he's getting there so it's a smart move in a business sense to take someone like that on, even if you're jumping through hoops pretending you're letting them play "tech guru" when you're not.
"Thatcher also held this view. Are you saying she's communist?"
Right and I expect Nick Griffin is a left leaning liberal in your mind because some of his economic policies are? I'll let you figure out why your example is just braindead stupid - hint: one policy does not define someone's overriding leaning.
"Meanwhile it's a view that communists DON'T hold. "From each according to the means, to each according to their needs" is not the same as "To each the same.""
From each according to their means (those with plenty of wealth but who don't need the level of wealth they have) to each according to their needs (those less well off and in poverty) is exactly what wealth redistribution in this manner is due to higher income tax payments by those with higher wealth being taken from the wealthy and redistributed which ultimately removes the Western concept of wealth based class that communists long to be rid of.
You can bitch about things like Office all you want but it's still by far the best on the market and that's the point.
I can find things to bitch about Chrome, lots of things, but there's still nothing better out there, and that's really the point.
"Security? Who hasn't visited their aunt only to end up spending an hour cleaning crapware off a Vista/7 machine?"
But at this point it's about users being stupid and not about inherent security flaws in the OS anymore and this problem exists on every OS - there isn't an OS on the planet that would protect your aunt from her own stupidity but for what it's worth the last time I had to clear crapware off any PC was an XP machine many years ago so even less educated users are protected from themselves better than they used to be, that doesn't mean there aren't the especially stupid few who still manage to install shit though.
"What days you are referring to? Microsoft still produces second quality software to the competition, but is a monopoly."
Do they really though? The security arguments over Windows have been pretty much dead since Windows 7, and stability arguments dead going back to Windows 2000.
Their office suite is still better than anything else, and their database server is at the higher end of the offerings available. Their dev tools are excellent.
There is some shit they produce but Microsoft software is much better than it used to be, especially Windows itself. Windows Server is even a feasible option for hosting public internet facing servers now.
Microsoft is far, far from perfect and their attempts in the tablet and phone world have been laughable, but much of their software is still at least as good, if not better than the competition.
So when you say their software is second rate compared to the competition what competition are you referring to? are you implying all their software is second rate? If so then who provides, say, a better office suite? I know Bing isn't really as great as Google and so forth either but I don't think Microsoft is universally worse. The vast majority of the flack they used to get was about their OS being unstable and insecure, and it was, but now it's not so something has certainly changed, even if they still have a lot to do.
Nonsense. If your problem with liberals is that the people in power pretend to be liberals but aren't then don't attack liberalism because that's not what you mean, attack the people in power for not being liberals despite what they claim.
Anything else and you're just falling right into their trap, you're attacking a group of people that you want them to be rather than attacking the people you want to attack which leaves them scot free to just pretend you're illiberal.
That said (and I'm not from the US so it's got nothing to do with the "opposition" for me) the only time I see the people in power in the US referred to as liberals is in tea party/Fox News attack pieces so if you want to blame anyone for defining them as liberals when they're actually entirely illiberal then blame the extremely partisan right wing press as a starting point for deciding to use "liberal" as the new bogeyman.
You can't pretend it's okay to use liberal as an insult when you don't even understand what liberalism is with a 3rd grader argument like "but mum, they used that nasty word first!". That's precisely the sort of child like thinking at the core of the problem I'm bitching about. Your he-said, she-said type argument is precisely why your country is stuck with a fucked up two party system, because you're actively engaging in that sort of two party he-said, she-said childlike mentality. You realise it's quite possible that neither of the two big parties are genuinely very liberal right?
If rights and equality are what you genuinely stand for then start referring to yourself as a liberal because that's what you are. If others are not standing for that but calling themselves liberals then call them out on their lies. Don't pretend you're something you're not, and don't let them keep pretending they're something they're not either. This does however mean that when you call yourself what you are - a liberal if that's what you are - then you may find Fox News* is writing nasty things about you, and at that point you have to ask if Fox News really has your interests at heart, or if Fox News is in fact pursuing an illiberal, possibly even fascist agenda and you have to make a choice based on that, either campaign for Fox News to stop misrepresenting liberalism, or accept that Fox News is supporting fascism or whatever and is not actually the friend it tries to pretend it is.
But one final point is to keep in mind that there are shades of grey, you can support equal rights for women and be against gay marriage and still be far more liberal than the Saudi who thinks women shouldn't drive, shouldn't vote, and should always have their face covered for example and that's what I refer to when I say the West is built on liberalism- yes we could do much better on that front, but we're far freer and far more equal in Western societies than most other parts of the world. For all the anti-rights stuff I hate Obama for, he at least is still way more liberal than the tea partiers who are against gay marriage so even then he does have some right to refer to himself as the more liberal option, even if generally calling himself a liberal is a bit of a stretch.
* I use Fox News as a single example here. It could be any outlet that's misrepresenting it's, or others views. This discussion could just as well be switched around to the "liberal" media that isn't actually liberal so please don't read this as a partisan point - my point applies to ALL sides of the discussion whatever your political leaning.
Sure, there are always arguments that you can't measure a party explicitly by right, left or whatever else you may want to because they often have policies that sit elsewhere.
But that's ultimately nitpicking, because really when we say, right, left, far-right, far-left, we talk about their overriding policies and goals, and there's really no doubt that the BNPs overriding policies and goals aren't sat firmly within the far right, just as UKIP's nationalist goals also clearly are. The BNPs ultimate and primary goal is to remove people who are not white skinned and born British from the UK - it's never tried to get elected on it's leftist economic platform, only it's far right nationalism platform.
So it doesn't really matter if they have some left wing policies, just as it didn't matter that the Nazis had some left wing policies ultimately the overriding balance of their policies situated them firmly in the far right which is why in common shorthand we simply say they are far right.
You're not replacing the entire OS any more than you do when you do a Linux kernel upgrade or an update to Mac OS X, you can still upgrade Windows, though most people prefer to take upgrade time (seeing as it only comes infrequently) as an opportunity to start afresh and clear out the plethora of applications they don't use any more and so forth.
If you mean "Why do I have to pay for a whole new OS?" then the answer is instead simply that Microsoft make things easy for people and you'd never get end users to put up with needing to pay for an upgrade to the kernel one week, the networking stack a few months later and so forth. End users would get sick of doing it in bits and pieces and paying each time.
If you're asking why does it cost anything to update at all, well, that's Microsoft's business model, a different discussion that's been well had over the years.
But both Linux and MacOS have changed at least as much since 2002 as Windows has, if not more. So it's silly to pretend there's something unusual about upgrading Windows after 11 years. Most people upgrade their OS in that timeframe whatever their preferred OS is. You wont find many people sat on MacOS from 2002 or Linux from the same era. Most will have upgraded substantially at some point.
Agreed, it's the same with home secretaries. One or two of them have been against the interception modernisation program (so was Cameron) prior to election, then the election passes and suddenly they're all for it.
Though as I've theorised before, I suspect this is as much about successive home secretaries finding out GCHQ is doing illegal monitoring already which we're now all aware of and wanting to make it legal by pretending it'll be a new thing they're creating when in reality they're just legalising what they've been doing illegally all along.
I guess it's easy to be against something when you naively believe you'll just be saying "no" but much harder when you find out the security services are already doing it illegally and if you don't help them make it legal you'll be implicated in their illegal actions and likely be used as a scapegoat if it comes out with claims you "authorised it" or whatever.
In some ways I bet Theresa May is actually relieved that she doesn't need to have that battle for the IMP now given it's now widely know it's already there illegally from before her time and given that it was one of a number of things that Labour lost the last election with trying to push it through against the will of the populace. It certainly makes her life easier I guess in removing the need for her to face a tough political battle in arguing for billions in funding for it.
The ultimate goal of communism is to move to a classless society (which is ultimately what the quote your referenced refers to).
If you can't understand why taking tax money which is paid to some degree dependent on wealth (yes, tax avoidance skews it a bit) and redistributing it equally to everyone would be a key policy in moving towards that goal then I'm afraid I can't help you "educated" yourself any further. It's called wealth redistribution and used in this particular manner ultimately eliminates class based on wealth which is fundamental for achieving communism because you can't have "to each according to his need; from each according to his ability." whilst there is still the concept of differing levels of wealth in play.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you're right, and it's arguably even worse than that. I'm not accusing Apple of this, because I have no evidence but I'm putting it out there because it's still a possibility. It's possible that when companies make such claims they are just weasel words such that to have some degree of certainty that the implied meaning is identical to the exact meaning, you need a far more explicit statement of fact than something general like that.
I know for a fact that "We don't connect the dots" can sometimes simply be shorthand for "We don't connect the dots. We pay someone else to do that for us and give us back the resultant information we ask for" because I've worked before for a company that did exactly this and used that exact disclaimer.
"We don't connect the dots" was technically true, but in practice it made no difference morally or ethically because they were still obtaining the exact same information they would have if they'd just done the analytics in house rather than outsourcing it.
In the UK (and Europe) data protection law even makes explicit provision for this precisely because it's not uncommon. This is why you have the terms "data controller" and "data processor" in the Data Protection Act because although a company can't legally pass over control of personal data they hold on you without your permission, they can pass it on to an outsourcing provider for processing providing the company processing it only processes it and doesn't otherwise disseminate or use it. The company that collects and holds your data is the data controller, but that doesn't mean they're not passing it on, they could well be passing it to a different company that acts as the data processor.
Lucky you then. Personally every time I've tried Linux I've had hardware outright not work, and not work for over a year - wireless connectivity, graphics cards, TV tuners. X just outright keeling over one day for apparently no reason forcing me to try and resolve the issues in the command line. That sort of thing.
It's not like any of my hardware was non-standard or uncommon either. Expensive Cisco and cheap Netgear wireless adapters alike had issues for example.
Granted I haven't tried it again for a good few years now but I always just went back to Windows for precisely the reason that stuff did just work there. No screwing about.
I like Linux as a server environment, but part the reason it's always failed to gain traction on the desktop is precisely because of shitty server support, lack of decent failsafe modes if something goes wrong (it took how many decades for X to get a safe mode?) and so forth.
Windows isn't just prominent because of it's monopoly, it's prominent because it works without any hassle.
I don't disagree that 8.1 is a shitty release but that's cherry picking. Take Windows 7 for example - fast, stable, secure, familiar, usable, great backwards compatibility. It's hard to argue that there was much wrong with it.
Actually I think the public do get it, the problem is that the public's threshold for saying enough is enough is just that much further down the line than that of the typical Slashdot poster.
We saw it under Gordon Brown's government where the move towards a surveillance state simply went too far and it actually became an election issue. Labour lost the last election in part because for many people ID card databases, an ever expanding CCTV network, terror laws that were used by councils to spy on people who didn't pick up their dog's poo and to seize Icelandic government assets, attempts to get everyone on the DNA database indefinitely, the government's greenlighting of Phorm and such, internet monitoring programmes and the digital economy act were just too much. Brown's government also regularly used the "think of the children" argument and it did in fact wear thin with voters quite quickly.
Of course it didn't do us much good as the guys that followed still had their flaws, and whilst they cancelled the ID card program, dealt with excessive DNA retention of people not convicted of crimes, and put curbs on some of the anti-terror laws they've still clearly let GCHQ spy on everyone and anyone, and although to be fair they seem to have delayed some of the Digital Economy Act ideas such as 3 strikes almost indefinitely at this point they still haven't scrapped it altogether.
But fundamentally I think it showed that the public does have it's limits in terms of not wanting a police state, those limits just tend towards a lot less freedom and a lot more surveillance than most of us here would like though the public in general would still not accept that type of encroachment on freedom and rights that Gordon Brown and friends wanted. Unfortunately though that's the cost of democracy, it means we don't get our way as a minority, even if we genuinely believe that what we believe makes more sense. Freedoms and rights weren't the most important election issue, it still fell behind the way more important economy arguments, but it was definitely enough of an issue to be brought up in debates, policy, and papers a fair bit - it made it onto the radar precisely because people had had enough.
This is why personally I don't really fear an out and out police state here in the UK - the general public wouldn't tolerate it, even with the paedo argument getting put forward, though I do fear things being a little more towards that direction than I'm personally comfortable with - we're already at that point.
"4.) Xbox does indeed worry me with regards to its ability to spy. I wonder if some sort of simple mechanism that gives a physical on/off switch to an ethernet port will catch on..."
This meme is already dead. Microsoft have now changed their minds so you can use Kinect in a variety of modes - always on, IR blaster mode which is used to send IR signals to your TV, turned off, or just outright unplugged. In other words, Kinect is no longer mandatory.
Besides, a video stream is no small amount of data, if Microsoft ever were going to spy on people with Kinect then you'd notice the data passing through your router so it was a nonsense conspiracy theory from the get go anyway.
More likely the Skype/Microsoft deal is a bigger concern for those worried about the NSA, they'd be able to farm far more data from a Skype backdoor than they would a bunch of gamers sat on their arse in front of their XBox.
But now you can outright unplug the thing and still have the console function Kinect is a non-issue.
"International spying is not a trivial thing that is solved purely by money. China, Russia, the UK, and the USA are the only major players because they are the ones that have been doing it for a long time (China is the upstart, but there are multiple reasons for their quick up take beyond just money) and continue to focus on it."
Nonsense. Israel and France have two of the best spying agencies in the world and plenty of other nations have massive capability for this sort of thing, including many of our enemies. North Korea being the obvious example. The list you provided is just a reflection of your ethnocentric views about who the world's big boys are more than anything.
"I'm sorry, but you are childishly naive about human nature if you truly believe that. For it's security a nation needs to know as much as possible about both it's friends and foes. That is an undeniable fact."
After your ad-hominem attack you now seem to have trailed completely off-topic into the realm of general spying. I never argued countries don't spy in general, I argued that they don't engage in massively costly and arguably ineffective (at least very much so relative to the cost) dragnet operations.
"I would also point out that a few months ago the average American would have (equally naively) argued that the US doesn't go to the levels that has now been made clear. Just because a spy agency hasn't been caught doing such things doesn't mean that they aren't doing it and to trust that they aren't is sticking your head in the sand."
Yes, and I've long been pointing out that the US has been engaging in hypocrisy by complaining about Chinese cyber-attacks all the while getting involved in things like Stuxnet. But none of this means that everything is based on assumption.
There are two reasons I made the argument I did, the first regarding not wanting to get involved in that sort of operation we'll use the example of France. The dragnet operations have relied on tapping communications across the two main bottlenecks in the globe - the Atlantic, and the Pacific. On the Atlantic side the NSA led operation has had to tap conduits in five-eyes nations such as the UK, US and Canada to capture as much transatlantic data transfer as they can. On the Pacific side it's been the other two five-eyes nations - Australia and New Zealand. It's now well established that the US also tried to involved Japan but that they opted not to get involved for the same reasons I'm arguing France hasn't - because it's too costly relative to the benefit (or lack of) because once you have that data you have to do something with it and you're just going to end up with a larger noise ratio of false positives to actual useful intel.
So to go it alone, France would have to infiltrate NSA/GCHQ facilities and place it's own equipment and lay it's own cables to pipe the data out somewhere, something which it's obviously not going to be able to do. France has no transatlantic or pacific links of it's own outside five-eyes jurisdiction but within it's jurisdiction that it could tap. At best it has ex-colonial land or ex-colonial allies who may assist it in a similar project in the Africa-Middle East region which would be valuable to the NSA/GCHQ project as an addition, but not much benefit by itself.
If a nation like France wanted to get involved the most simple route would've been to join the NSA/GCHQ in their endeavour and add to their network but like Japan it obviously opted not to because again, it's expensive and it nets what exactly? I don't see any greater decrease in terrorist attacks, I don't see any effective improvements in five-eyes business opportunities compared to the general economy before these programs were in place (in fact the UK has now slipped behind Germany and France as an economic power despite this advantage) - countries like France and Japan got this too, they realise it's a waste of money.
But then there's the other side of the coin, Germany, Germany wouldn't get involved because it genuinely doesn't wan
I'm not a trusting fool, I'm just not a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
GCHQ got caught because it did it with the Americans. How exactly would France etc. get away with it? You don't think GCHQ etc. would find their cable taps when placing their own at key UK transit points as the NSA had to do?
We know France isn't doing large scale internet tapping for the simple reason they'd be named in the NSA files alongside GCHQ and Australia intelligence services.
The rest of your post just confused targeted spying which I never said they didn't do our argued against with the dragnet operations of global internet and telephony data that I was talking about but you obviously missed that in your bile fueled nationalist rage about the suggestion that anyone could dare suggest the the five eyes nations were doing this on a far worse scale than anyone else.
Yes actually.
Countries like France and Germany have larger economies than the UK so could trivially be doing the same kind of blanket spying GCHQ has been doing but they don't.
So yes I genuinely believe there are countries who don't do what the NSA and GCHQ does, not because they can't, not even because they can't afford to, but because they either realise it's morally unacceptable, or that spying on your average citizen is just going to land you with more data than you can possibly do anything useful with which is why the Boston bombings still happened and why a soldier was still brutally murdered on British streets despite the people who committed those acts being known to the security services in both cases.
Staff at the NSA and GCHQ were probably just too busy giggling to themselves about some intercepted teenagers cybersex session that they stumbled across randomly to spot the guys that the Russian and South African security services had explicitly warned them about before it was too late.
There are both moral and logical reasons for not doing broad blanket surveillance of everyone you can as opposed to classic focussed intelligence work and the NSA and GCHQ are the only ones who don't seem to get that which is why despite their "technical superiority" coupled with no shortage of old school warnings about specific individuals by allies and enemies alike the US and UK are still both the most prominent targets of and arguably the largest victims to terrorism in the West.
Pretending "they're just jealous that they can't do this" which is what you're basically implying just gives them an excuse that is not valid and that they do not deserve.
Find me a piece of software that's never had bugs.
Despite the size of the community, Linux releases have always had far more and far more problematic issues for example.
Yes, and therein lies all the reasoning you need.
LaTeX: Easy to write by hand, plenty of converters to output to a widely usable format, i.e. gif
MathML: Trivial to process with widely available XML parsers, unambiguous and easy to work with computationally and trivial to generate automatic output with a computer also.
Different tools, different use cases. Plenty of room for both in the world. Both are great technologies.
Sigh, I see you still struggle with simple math and the like. I guess you'll never change.
The fact you seem to think a flat tax is the same as a flat handout which is incredibly amusing.
If you can't see why increased tax based on increased level of wealth (the status quo, which the person I was referring to did not suggest changing) coupled with a flat handout results in wealth redistribution then you're a pre-school level of intelligent, I mean, it's really simple basic math.
This coupled with the fact that you believe something that's never been tried before is a conservative policy when the very definition of conservatism is resistance to change (let's just reiterate that to make it clear how stupid you sound - you're saying something that's never been done before is the sort of policy pursued by people who are against change) raises your nonsense to a new level of stupid.
I'm not surprised you got mod bombed to hell, you really are as stupid as they come. Your inability to fathom basic math or comprehend basic logic is astounding.
Except that's not true anymore and is just a meme that should've been retired a good few years ago. Windows has decent QA now and isn't really any more vulnerable than MacOS or Linux.
It's not even mature, or at least, stable-mature.
I had it crash randomly earlier (yes I reported to Mozilla) and I was doing some stuff with dynamically showing/hiding table rows with Javascript where the first row was full of th tags, bordered, 1px and the rest of the table cells had no border. When I showed the third row, and hid it again the whole table got vertical borders on table cells.
No other browser did this, and even inspecting the computed values showed no border set so a rendering bug I guess.
But seriously, what the fuck? the isn't new cutting edge advanced stuff, there wasn't anything new and fancy on the page like CSS3 or anything and they still can't get it right.
The problem is it never used to do this, and it never used to crash, so these silent updates are actually sometimes making my browser worse.
Agreed, I'm sure he made some impressive predictions but those in the summary aren't them.
The rise of China was always going to be an obvious one too, it's been massively strong in the past so has precedent for being a powerful force, and a nation that size is only ever going to be temporarily held back. Even if it lost half it's territory in rebellion it would've still been left with the population and resources to be a global powerhouse regardless.
Any nation with over 100 million people is going to matter in the world, let alone one with over 300 million, let alone one with over 800million as China had at the time.
I don't think autonomous weaponry was particularly surprising either. There were certainly enough sci-fi authors who predicted the exact same thing.
So whatever his grand successes at prediction have been I definitely don't think the examples in the summary are good ones. I'd wager you could've probably found such similar predictions regarding the USSR, China, and future weaponry amongst the general populace at a rate of at least 1 in 1000, if not 1 in 100 or less which I wouldn't say is particularly stand out.
Which are?
You seem to be making an awful lot of noise, but providing a complete lack of substance.
"And yet that was exactly how you were trying to say this guy wasn't a republican but was advocating communist ideas. And yet he was advocating the same as Thatcher."
No, I didn't say he wasn't a Republican. I said he was proclaiming himself as the most patriotic ultra-conservative type of American you could imagine whilst pushing for a communist idea. If he simply said he was a Republican or whatever then that'd be one thing, but he was claiming to be more than that whilst arguing for something that contradicted that greatly. Specifically as I say he was claiming to be a conservative's conservative whilst asking for the most unconservative policy you could imagine given that by definition it was a massive and fundamental change.
"No. "To each according to their needs", and "to each the same" are fundamentally different things."
I think you have a rather binary view of the world, a mistake many people make on Slashdot. Your belief seems to be that it's not communist unless it fits one of the many exact definitions of communism that you've arbitrarily chosen as the definition of communism. This is nonsense though, because by this definition America isn't a capitalist society because it has regulations as to what corporations can do, the UK isn't truly democratic because MPs aren't elected in a manner truly representative of the vote of the people, and because some groups, such as prisoners can't vote.
The fact is, that flat wealth redistribution towards removal of class based on wealth is a move towards communism more so than any single other political ideology, and that is why I called it a communist policy. Just as a dictatorship moving to the UK's electoral system would be a democratic policy move, even though they wouldn't be truly democratic in the strictest terms afterwards.
"What the scientists are saying is "this is an exciting puzzle, it shouldn't happen according to what we know."
For what it's worth, that's how I read titles like "shouldn't exist" anyway, I assume they're saying "shouldn't exist according to current models and understanding" which ultimately means our current models and understanding still need adjustment and we just figure out how.
So I wouldn't worry too much about the sensationalism, I think a lot of us even those of us who know little about this sort of field know what they really mean. I doubt many people are actually assuming there's some kind of magic going on, and I suspect any who would argue "Look, Science doesn't know what it's doing!" are too far gone into their religious fervour or whatever their agenda is to listen even if the headline was less sensational and more precise.
I think in this case it's confusion of cause and effect though.
The assumption posted is that Kutcher has a good track record of spotting great and successful ideas and investing in them.
But I suspect the reality is instead that there's a lot of good ideas out there but most never get noticed and that Kutcher attaching his name and hence providing access to his celebrity, marketing, and finance network is what turns them from the unknown to the known.
I've mentioned it here before a couple of times but Summly is an example of this, it was sold as a boy genius' pet project that made him millions being sold to Yahoo, but the reality of Summly was in fact that the kids dad was a high end investment banker who had relationships with everyone from Kutcher and Stephen Fry to the Murdochs. Also, his Dad had the contacts to hire a couple of silicon valley veterans to run and develop Summly such that it seems his kid did very little at all, in fact, he may not have done anything more than a bit of UI work if that judging by comments from the developers and contractors they used. The kid's mother was a lawyer who worked for Yahoo, hence the Yahoo buyout deal. Having the Murdochs with their media empire, and famous star-bloggers like Stephen Fry behind your product is the quickest way to get your product heard of by a wide audience whether it's a particularly stellar idea or not - at that point the product, as long as it's reasonably not shit doesn't matter, you'll always do better than the product that's far superior, but not fortunate enough to have found the same level of backing.
So you see, the idea matters a bit, but there are literally millions of interesting ideas out there implemented as products. But if you want success, it's as it has always been - it's primarily about who you know, not what you know. That's not to say it's impossible to breakthrough without that as a startup, but if "goodness" of a product could be measured in percentage terms, then to go it alone you need a 90%+ "good" product, but if you've got a bunch of celebs and media moguls onside, then 50%+ "good" is probably "good" enough and that's the difference someone like Kutcher makes to your startup.
Lenovo's use of Kutcher is no different, they're not getting Kutcher onboard because of his genius or technical prowess, they're getting him onboard because he can use himself, and that of folks he knows who are also incredibly famous, like Stephen Fry, to go on about how awesome those products are.
Of course, part of being a successful startup is precisely about being able to get someone like Kutcher on board in the first place, so kudos is still owed to the likes of AirBnB for finding someone like him and getting him onboard. But make no mistake, people like Kutcher are company makers, they can turn a company from an unknown to something that's in the news daily, or at least weekly regardless of how relatively excellent the company's products are in practice.
As a semi-related aside, Microsoft has just taken on Jonathan Ross for their XBox division and he is at least somewhat of a geek with a decent track record of working with the games industry, but make no mistake, they took him on as much for the fact that he's got a multi-decade career as one of the UK's top interviewers of the who's who of the entertainment world and who has made literally hundreds of close celebrity friends at the highest echelons of the entertainment industry as a result. Having someone like Jonathan Ross convincing A-list stars to buy and tweet about the XBox One is going to be worth it's weight in whatever salary he's getting there so it's a smart move in a business sense to take someone like that on, even if you're jumping through hoops pretending you're letting them play "tech guru" when you're not.
"Thatcher also held this view. Are you saying she's communist?"
Right and I expect Nick Griffin is a left leaning liberal in your mind because some of his economic policies are? I'll let you figure out why your example is just braindead stupid - hint: one policy does not define someone's overriding leaning.
"Meanwhile it's a view that communists DON'T hold. "From each according to the means, to each according to their needs" is not the same as "To each the same.""
From each according to their means (those with plenty of wealth but who don't need the level of wealth they have) to each according to their needs (those less well off and in poverty) is exactly what wealth redistribution in this manner is due to higher income tax payments by those with higher wealth being taken from the wealthy and redistributed which ultimately removes the Western concept of wealth based class that communists long to be rid of.
Right, but what is better?
You can bitch about things like Office all you want but it's still by far the best on the market and that's the point.
I can find things to bitch about Chrome, lots of things, but there's still nothing better out there, and that's really the point.
"Security? Who hasn't visited their aunt only to end up spending an hour cleaning crapware off a Vista/7 machine?"
But at this point it's about users being stupid and not about inherent security flaws in the OS anymore and this problem exists on every OS - there isn't an OS on the planet that would protect your aunt from her own stupidity but for what it's worth the last time I had to clear crapware off any PC was an XP machine many years ago so even less educated users are protected from themselves better than they used to be, that doesn't mean there aren't the especially stupid few who still manage to install shit though.
"What days you are referring to? Microsoft still produces second quality software to the competition, but is a monopoly."
Do they really though? The security arguments over Windows have been pretty much dead since Windows 7, and stability arguments dead going back to Windows 2000.
Their office suite is still better than anything else, and their database server is at the higher end of the offerings available. Their dev tools are excellent.
There is some shit they produce but Microsoft software is much better than it used to be, especially Windows itself. Windows Server is even a feasible option for hosting public internet facing servers now.
Microsoft is far, far from perfect and their attempts in the tablet and phone world have been laughable, but much of their software is still at least as good, if not better than the competition.
So when you say their software is second rate compared to the competition what competition are you referring to? are you implying all their software is second rate? If so then who provides, say, a better office suite? I know Bing isn't really as great as Google and so forth either but I don't think Microsoft is universally worse. The vast majority of the flack they used to get was about their OS being unstable and insecure, and it was, but now it's not so something has certainly changed, even if they still have a lot to do.
Nonsense. If your problem with liberals is that the people in power pretend to be liberals but aren't then don't attack liberalism because that's not what you mean, attack the people in power for not being liberals despite what they claim.
Anything else and you're just falling right into their trap, you're attacking a group of people that you want them to be rather than attacking the people you want to attack which leaves them scot free to just pretend you're illiberal.
That said (and I'm not from the US so it's got nothing to do with the "opposition" for me) the only time I see the people in power in the US referred to as liberals is in tea party/Fox News attack pieces so if you want to blame anyone for defining them as liberals when they're actually entirely illiberal then blame the extremely partisan right wing press as a starting point for deciding to use "liberal" as the new bogeyman.
You can't pretend it's okay to use liberal as an insult when you don't even understand what liberalism is with a 3rd grader argument like "but mum, they used that nasty word first!". That's precisely the sort of child like thinking at the core of the problem I'm bitching about. Your he-said, she-said type argument is precisely why your country is stuck with a fucked up two party system, because you're actively engaging in that sort of two party he-said, she-said childlike mentality. You realise it's quite possible that neither of the two big parties are genuinely very liberal right?
If rights and equality are what you genuinely stand for then start referring to yourself as a liberal because that's what you are. If others are not standing for that but calling themselves liberals then call them out on their lies. Don't pretend you're something you're not, and don't let them keep pretending they're something they're not either. This does however mean that when you call yourself what you are - a liberal if that's what you are - then you may find Fox News* is writing nasty things about you, and at that point you have to ask if Fox News really has your interests at heart, or if Fox News is in fact pursuing an illiberal, possibly even fascist agenda and you have to make a choice based on that, either campaign for Fox News to stop misrepresenting liberalism, or accept that Fox News is supporting fascism or whatever and is not actually the friend it tries to pretend it is.
But one final point is to keep in mind that there are shades of grey, you can support equal rights for women and be against gay marriage and still be far more liberal than the Saudi who thinks women shouldn't drive, shouldn't vote, and should always have their face covered for example and that's what I refer to when I say the West is built on liberalism- yes we could do much better on that front, but we're far freer and far more equal in Western societies than most other parts of the world. For all the anti-rights stuff I hate Obama for, he at least is still way more liberal than the tea partiers who are against gay marriage so even then he does have some right to refer to himself as the more liberal option, even if generally calling himself a liberal is a bit of a stretch.
* I use Fox News as a single example here. It could be any outlet that's misrepresenting it's, or others views. This discussion could just as well be switched around to the "liberal" media that isn't actually liberal so please don't read this as a partisan point - my point applies to ALL sides of the discussion whatever your political leaning.
Sure, there are always arguments that you can't measure a party explicitly by right, left or whatever else you may want to because they often have policies that sit elsewhere.
But that's ultimately nitpicking, because really when we say, right, left, far-right, far-left, we talk about their overriding policies and goals, and there's really no doubt that the BNPs overriding policies and goals aren't sat firmly within the far right, just as UKIP's nationalist goals also clearly are. The BNPs ultimate and primary goal is to remove people who are not white skinned and born British from the UK - it's never tried to get elected on it's leftist economic platform, only it's far right nationalism platform.
So it doesn't really matter if they have some left wing policies, just as it didn't matter that the Nazis had some left wing policies ultimately the overriding balance of their policies situated them firmly in the far right which is why in common shorthand we simply say they are far right.
You're not replacing the entire OS any more than you do when you do a Linux kernel upgrade or an update to Mac OS X, you can still upgrade Windows, though most people prefer to take upgrade time (seeing as it only comes infrequently) as an opportunity to start afresh and clear out the plethora of applications they don't use any more and so forth.
If you mean "Why do I have to pay for a whole new OS?" then the answer is instead simply that Microsoft make things easy for people and you'd never get end users to put up with needing to pay for an upgrade to the kernel one week, the networking stack a few months later and so forth. End users would get sick of doing it in bits and pieces and paying each time.
If you're asking why does it cost anything to update at all, well, that's Microsoft's business model, a different discussion that's been well had over the years.
But both Linux and MacOS have changed at least as much since 2002 as Windows has, if not more. So it's silly to pretend there's something unusual about upgrading Windows after 11 years. Most people upgrade their OS in that timeframe whatever their preferred OS is. You wont find many people sat on MacOS from 2002 or Linux from the same era. Most will have upgraded substantially at some point.
Agreed, it's the same with home secretaries. One or two of them have been against the interception modernisation program (so was Cameron) prior to election, then the election passes and suddenly they're all for it.
Though as I've theorised before, I suspect this is as much about successive home secretaries finding out GCHQ is doing illegal monitoring already which we're now all aware of and wanting to make it legal by pretending it'll be a new thing they're creating when in reality they're just legalising what they've been doing illegally all along.
I guess it's easy to be against something when you naively believe you'll just be saying "no" but much harder when you find out the security services are already doing it illegally and if you don't help them make it legal you'll be implicated in their illegal actions and likely be used as a scapegoat if it comes out with claims you "authorised it" or whatever.
In some ways I bet Theresa May is actually relieved that she doesn't need to have that battle for the IMP now given it's now widely know it's already there illegally from before her time and given that it was one of a number of things that Labour lost the last election with trying to push it through against the will of the populace. It certainly makes her life easier I guess in removing the need for her to face a tough political battle in arguing for billions in funding for it.
The ultimate goal of communism is to move to a classless society (which is ultimately what the quote your referenced refers to).
If you can't understand why taking tax money which is paid to some degree dependent on wealth (yes, tax avoidance skews it a bit) and redistributing it equally to everyone would be a key policy in moving towards that goal then I'm afraid I can't help you "educated" yourself any further. It's called wealth redistribution and used in this particular manner ultimately eliminates class based on wealth which is fundamental for achieving communism because you can't have "to each according to his need; from each according to his ability." whilst there is still the concept of differing levels of wealth in play.