You can't "act poor to bilk the system", since everyone gets the same rebate. I'm sure someone will find a way to commit fraud, but I don't see how it will be easy or very profitable.
And you understand that an agency charged with enforcing a simple, flat sales tax can be a lot smaller than the IRS? You really don't see a benefit to that? Not to mention the enormous savings nationwide in time, money and energy otherwise spent on paying (and trying not to pay) taxes? Or the advantages to the economy?
What's so complicated about a rebate? I've heard they have these newfangled inventions these days that can transfer money to an account with very little human effort...
And what is you think the rich do with their money? If they salt it away and never use it the money might as well have been taxed 100%. (The government can print more money.) Of course, the rich don't do that. They invest their money. This is good. It causes growth and makes it cheaper to borrow money. And then what? Sooner or later the (hopefully increased) fortune is spent. And then it's taxed. I'm not seeing the downside.
The FairTax proposal addresses most of your objections.
Everyone gets a monthly prebate covering the tax on spending up to the poverty level. This eliminates taxes altogether for the truly poor, and makes the tax effectively progressive.
True, there's a limit to how hard you can punish success and productivity with such a tax, but the overall effect on the economy and, dare I say it, fairness, more than makes up for that.
You're right. It doesn't seem to matter though, as (like I said) it worked fine the way I did it. I got a confirmation message and my Acer laptop no longer runs calc.exe with the code from the article.
Why not just create a website that will use this vulnerability to run this "unregister" command on our machines and eliminate the vulnerability? I copied the command posted by valeurnutritive into the html demonstration code from the article. Worked just fine as far as I can tell. It has a certain poetry to it.:)
The fact remains, however, that in the end, they lost the race, and that would point towards some sort of ultimate inferiority.
Just like the fact that white Europeans defeated, subjugated or even exterminated native populations all over the world points towards some sort of ultimate inferiority of non-whites?
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008
Two armed thugs confront you in a dark alley. They give you a choice. Only one of them will rob you. One will take all your money. The other will take all your clothes.
Do you have a right to complain about getting robbed if you don't tell them what you "want"?
What if you do tell them? Do you then have a right to complain about "getting your wish"?
..."Guy with an ego is in the TopGun problem, guy's buddy dies, guy questions ego, guy comes out stronger." is a plot someone went to trouble to think up and is protected,...
No it's not. You can't copyright a plot.
(Or did you mean "protected" under some other law?)
According to the studies linked from the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph) it seems that while the test has a high false positive rate, the false negative rate is lower than one would expect of random chance.
That's to be expected. The real test would be to hook up the machine, make sure it appears to be working from the subjects point of view, and then put a motivated and trained professional in charge of the interrogation. Without the assistance of any real data from the polygraph. If the polygraph experts still do better, the polygraph (or its operators) could be good for something.
Of course, as I have not read any of the studies, they may well have tried this.
You examine everything and separate it into "cat" and "not cat".
I'll grant you that's quite a task if you're dealing with the entire universe, and pretty tricky "even" if it's just the Earth, but it's not fundamentally impossible. On a smaller scale you use the same principle to determine if a single cat has a tail or not. You examine the entire cat and then you determine if a tail is part of the whole. How do you prove (or know) that you've examine the entire cat?
Nonsense. All you have to do is examine all cats and see if they all have tails.
(Of course, from a certain philosophical standpoint nothing can be proven. I'm assuming "prove" actually means something outside of a high-flying philosophical discussion.)
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein
If you read that quote in context ( http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/einbucky.htm ) you'll see that it's highly misleading quoted alone. By "religion" he seems to mean "admiration for the mysteries of the universe". (My attempt at a summary, not a direct quote.) Einstein's ideas about "religion" aren't exactly mainstream.
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." -- Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It"
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Princeton University Press.
I see this a lot from theists and fuzzy-headed agnostics. However, atheism has proof.
The proof: There is no good reason to belive in a god or gods.
Not happy about this proof? Then give me an example of a "proven fact". But remember: if I can come up with some claim - any claim - that contradicts your "fact", then by the usual agnostic standards you have no real proof. Pointing out that there's no good reason to believe my claim won't do. Even if you find some additional "proof" to contradict my claim, I can keep it up forever by introducing some far fetched explanation for why your new proof doesn't apply, ad nauseam. Old favorites like "I think therefore I am" are easily countered by positing that while it *seems* logical enough, we could be making an unspecified mistake of some sort. Or maybe the incorporeal and invisible Martians hiding in the center of the moon makes us *think* it makes sense with their magical mind-control ray. Or maybe an incomprehensible God with incomprehensible powers is manipulating us for some incomprehensible reason. Who *knows*, right?
This is all very silly of course. In order for words like "proof", "fact" and "know" to have any real meaning to anyone but lofty philosophers you need the assumption that claims need only be considered if there is a good reason to. People can and do disagree endlessly over what constitutes a "good reason", but they should agree that such a reason (or reasons) must be present.
(I won't even get into disproving the non-existence of specific, defined, gods.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can't "act poor to bilk the system", since everyone gets the same rebate. I'm sure someone will find a way to commit fraud, but I don't see how it will be easy or very profitable.
And you understand that an agency charged with enforcing a simple, flat sales tax can be a lot smaller than the IRS? You really don't see a benefit to that? Not to mention the enormous savings nationwide in time, money and energy otherwise spent on paying (and trying not to pay) taxes? Or the advantages to the economy?
What's so complicated about a rebate? I've heard they have these newfangled inventions these days that can transfer money to an account with very little human effort...
And what is you think the rich do with their money? If they salt it away and never use it the money might as well have been taxed 100%. (The government can print more money.) Of course, the rich don't do that. They invest their money. This is good. It causes growth and makes it cheaper to borrow money. And then what? Sooner or later the (hopefully increased) fortune is spent. And then it's taxed. I'm not seeing the downside.
The FairTax proposal addresses most of your objections.
Everyone gets a monthly prebate covering the tax on spending up to the poverty level. This eliminates taxes altogether for the truly poor, and makes the tax effectively progressive.
True, there's a limit to how hard you can punish success and productivity with such a tax, but the overall effect on the economy and, dare I say it, fairness, more than makes up for that.
Website: http://www.fairtax.org/
Summary: : http://www.fairtax.org/fairtax/thumbnail.htm
Acer TravelMate 3210, bought 2005, Norway. Positive.
You're right. It doesn't seem to matter though, as (like I said) it worked fine the way I did it. I got a confirmation message and my Acer laptop no longer runs calc.exe with the code from the article.
Do you have a right to complain about getting robbed if you don't tell them what you "want"?
What if you do tell them? Do you then have a right to complain about "getting your wish"?
(Or did you mean "protected" under some other law?)
Of course, as I have not read any of the studies, they may well have tried this.
You examine everything and separate it into "cat" and "not cat".
I'll grant you that's quite a task if you're dealing with the entire universe, and pretty tricky "even" if it's just the Earth, but it's not fundamentally impossible. On a smaller scale you use the same principle to determine if a single cat has a tail or not. You examine the entire cat and then you determine if a tail is part of the whole. How do you prove (or know) that you've examine the entire cat?
Nothing can prove that all cats have tails.
Nonsense. All you have to do is examine all cats and see if they all have tails.
(Of course, from a certain philosophical standpoint nothing can be proven. I'm assuming "prove" actually means something outside of a high-flying philosophical discussion.)
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
a hs-witn/msg/d7aef3818e7ab1e6?dmode=source&hl=en .
- Albert Einstein
If you read that quote in context ( http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/einbucky.htm ) you'll see that it's highly misleading quoted alone. By "religion" he seems to mean "admiration for the mysteries of the universe". (My attempt at a summary, not a direct quote.) Einstein's ideas about "religion" aren't exactly mainstream.
A Usenet post (via Google) with some interesting quotes: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.jehov
Samples:
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." -- Albert Einstein, "The World as I See It"
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Princeton University Press.
Even Atheism has no proof...
I see this a lot from theists and fuzzy-headed agnostics. However, atheism has proof.
The proof: There is no good reason to belive in a god or gods.
Not happy about this proof? Then give me an example of a "proven fact". But remember: if I can come up with some claim - any claim - that contradicts your "fact", then by the usual agnostic standards you have no real proof. Pointing out that there's no good reason to believe my claim won't do. Even if you find some additional "proof" to contradict my claim, I can keep it up forever by introducing some far fetched explanation for why your new proof doesn't apply, ad nauseam. Old favorites like "I think therefore I am" are easily countered by positing that while it *seems* logical enough, we could be making an unspecified mistake of some sort. Or maybe the incorporeal and invisible Martians hiding in the center of the moon makes us *think* it makes sense with their magical mind-control ray. Or maybe an incomprehensible God with incomprehensible powers is manipulating us for some incomprehensible reason. Who *knows*, right?
This is all very silly of course. In order for words like "proof", "fact" and "know" to have any real meaning to anyone but lofty philosophers you need the assumption that claims need only be considered if there is a good reason to. People can and do disagree endlessly over what constitutes a "good reason", but they should agree that such a reason (or reasons) must be present.
(I won't even get into disproving the non-existence of specific, defined, gods.)