I was aware that there once was a 90% tax rate for the super-rich. Yet somehow, people managed to carry on. I don't remember those days, but I miss them.
Note, too, at least in the United States, in the 1950's that corporations tax rate was something like 49% and corporations ended up funding a significant fraction of the revenue going into the U S Treasury.
Now, corporate taxes as a fraction of the total are way down. Individuals pay 90% of taxes.
Depending on the variability in routing causing different timing delays, I would imagine you could get a fair bit of information across two points without communicating anything that doesn't look like attempted gibberish over IP.
To say it the slashdot troll way:
1. Let people pirate your software
2. Be the dominant player in yet an other market
3. Now start to campaign for stricter intellectual property laws in these countries.
4. Profit.;-D
If you count GPL enforcement, then not just Microsoft software, but free and open source software also goes through the same steps 1,2,3.
The 4th, step, profit, effectively gets dispersed among the users instead of concentrated into one place.
If the librarians were stocking the shelves with Mein Kampf...all the pious liberals now deploring censorship would be bitching front and center at the next school board meeting.
Frankly, I wish more people would become familiar with Mein Kampf because of Hitler's worldview ("I'm intrinsically better than other people and all my problems are their fault") that enabled him to gain sympathy and grab controls of a world power.
In many countries today, there are influential demagogues spouting local adaptations of Hitler's philosophy and gaining followers.
If more people were aware of how propaganda worked, maybe we wouldn't be in so much of a mess.
Now, there's a philosophical issue about the desirability of increasingly complex software, but I'm not going to discuss it here. For all practical purposes, I don't think there's much benefit to getting into a discussion about it.
But there is a benefit to discussing complexity because it does seem to impact how many bugs arise and the maintainability, upgradeability, and usability of the software.
It's not merely a philosophical issue, either. This is a real, practical issue that impacts millions of people everyday.
The complexity of interacting software components is like the dark side of Metcalfe's Law about the usefulness of networks increasing quadratically with the number of participants in the network.
The maintainability of software decreases as the number of interacting components increase and as the number of ways of interaction increases.
I've developed code for a long time and seen great ideas turn into great code with creeping useful features gradually added on until a day comes when you wonder how you ended up working on such a monstrosity.
I still squirm at the thought of how many successful women now seem to view a large percentage of decent single men. Namely, as lesser and lower.
Squirm, hell - it's a tragedy that these women of achievement will be less likely to find mates (because they're predisposed to only settle for "superior" males) and to propagate their DNA onto the next generation.
"Pretty women out walkin' with gorillas down my street..."
Not that complicated, not discriminatory.... Also note that the scoring was largely subjective
While I admire efforts to recruit and hire underrepresented groups to the extent possible, there is no escaping that subjective scoring is both complicated and discriminatory.
And it continues to this day, to cut both ways, both for and against underrepresented groups.
in this market you have to make sure that you're not seen as a leech or people won't buy your stuff.
Dead on.
Examining that more closely you can determine that "hiding bad actions" or "killing the messenger" can be successful business strategies as long as the cover of darkness can be maintained.
If the risk of exposure is suitably small, then a strict, unconstratined optimization of actions in the free market might indicate that unethical behavior will make you more money.
How about old scientific works, journals up to say 1920's?
I know the more recent journal articles are copyrighted and therefore must have some lengthy protection on them, but what about classic old articles (like some of Einstein's work in the early 1900's)?
It's a stupid law, but it's the law, so obedience and enforcement go along with it.
For much of the public this is a real yawner, as in, how exactly do these fileswappers hurt me?
Answer: They don't, any more than Joe Average buying a hooker, smoking dope in the privacy of his own home, or driving 4 mph over the speed limit on a deserted road hurts you.
I'll obey stupid laws, but having them on the books decreases my respect for the law in general.
The actual costs of copying and distribution having dropped so much, the market is crying out for copyright holders to drop their prices accordingly. Having lived for so long on selling $16 CDs, they just don't want to let go of the old business model.
Besides, you know how it will all go ahead of time anyway.
Questioner: "Precisely what are your plans to restore fiscal solvency to the operations of the federal government?"
Kerry: Good sounding populist rhetoric about giving Americans jobs, vague on cost details, delivered with hound dog face, slighting the current administration for screwing up even if the current administration isn't sufficiently competent to orchestrate such a screwup.
Bush:Random, disconnected homilies about American values, tax cuts magically stimulating voodoo economics that Daddy know won't work, delivered with a deer in the headlights trying not to get run over, tying things into how bad a character that Saddam was anyhow.
Next question? Answer: see above.
[It's the Veep debate between Dick "Grand Vizier" Cheney and John "Aw Shuck's I'm Jes A Country Boy" Edwards that is going to be fun to watch - certainly not the Prez debates.]
User's get more than even by calling in to Tech Support with compliants that:
"netscape isn't working anymore", when it's really IE, when it's really, really Mozilla, when it's really, really, really Mozilla with IE7 style, when it's really Opera with a different User Agent String, claiming to be Mozilla, just like IE User Agent String has claimed to be like Netscape...aargh!!
Those aren't very portable. They're large, and you have to carry around a power supply as well
Not a problem.
I've carried my 200 GB drive and the power supply in my two extra-sized shirt pocket protectors for over a year now. Duct tape helps to hold the devices in place more securely, too. It's not too much hassle to duct tape your clothing like this because it only needs to be done once a week or two right after you shower and put your clothes back on.
The only problem, really, was that I keep tripping over the power cord. As soon as I wire up the car battery backpack I hope to overcome this small impediment to achieving nerdvana.
Offering open net access is a black hole to throw labor hours into.
Despite the complaints, the Linux boxes work for years at a time.
The Windows boxes crash a lot, but they can work well too.
And no matter what you go with, people will bitch about whatever you have set up.
You can't fool me. I recognize those four sentences as a direct rip-off, coming straight off the stone tablets thrown down the mountain of ultimate tech support knowledge.
The pirate has acquired something that, by all rights, he should have paid for.
All rights? Only one "right".
The original poster was correct. The "pirate" has only infringed the "temporary right of monopoly on distribution of copies".
In a human rights sense, this is an artificial "right" (no direct harm is inflicted on the originator of the idea because a copy of it has been made). The original purpose of granting this lucrative "right" was to encourage the production and distribution of more works by creators.
Now, of course, the creators of works see little of the monetary gains derived from temporary monopoly status; most of the revenue goes to the distributors.
And, unfortunately, a rational and logical analysis of whether the copyright system ought to be changed in some way to possibly encourage more creation of higher quality works will be heavily influenced by the industries that make money by virtue of the current system.
A long time ago, when I worked on a system with dumb terminals connected via serial ports, they started to have keys you could program by sending the proper escape sequences.
Of course, if you were unscrupulous, you could use things akin to write(1) or talk(1) to, uh, "help" other users program their function keys "properly".
Slashdot Mirror
I was aware that there once was a 90% tax rate for the super-rich. Yet somehow, people managed to carry on. I don't remember those days, but I miss them.
Note, too, at least in the United States, in the 1950's that corporations tax rate was something like 49% and corporations ended up funding a significant fraction of the revenue going into the U S Treasury.
Now, corporate taxes as a fraction of the total are way down. Individuals pay 90% of taxes.
Counterpoint: I've sat on my Windows 95 CD by mistake and hardly noticed.
Sat on an Ethernet card once, though, and it bit me. I call that predatory.
Maybe like pure timing-based protocols for communicating over the net?
Depending on the variability in routing causing different timing delays, I would imagine you could get a fair bit of information across two points without communicating anything that doesn't look like attempted gibberish over IP.
To say it the slashdot troll way:
1. Let people pirate your software
2. Be the dominant player in yet an other market
3. Now start to campaign for stricter intellectual property laws in these countries.
4. Profit.
If you count GPL enforcement, then not just Microsoft software, but free and open source software also goes through the same steps 1,2,3.
The 4th, step, profit, effectively gets dispersed among the users instead of concentrated into one place.
A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs
Rich API's - "like bacon bits embedded in bacon grease."
If the librarians were stocking the shelves with Mein Kampf
Not all liberals.
Frankly, I wish more people would become familiar with Mein Kampf because of Hitler's worldview ("I'm intrinsically better than other people and all my problems are their fault") that enabled him to gain sympathy and grab controls of a world power.
In many countries today, there are influential demagogues spouting local adaptations of Hitler's philosophy and gaining followers.
If more people were aware of how propaganda worked, maybe we wouldn't be in so much of a mess.
I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure).
Emacs keeps auto-save files, too.
IIRC, it's setup by default to be something like 300 keystrokes before autosaving.
Many, many years ago with NFS over a flaky network and fast typing I could detect a noticeable pause in Emacs when it did its autosave thing.
From the article
But there is a benefit to discussing complexity because it does seem to impact how many bugs arise and the maintainability, upgradeability, and usability of the software.
It's not merely a philosophical issue, either. This is a real, practical issue that impacts millions of people everyday.
The complexity of interacting software components is like the dark side of Metcalfe's Law about the usefulness of networks increasing quadratically with the number of participants in the network.
The maintainability of software decreases as the number of interacting components increase and as the number of ways of interaction increases.
I've developed code for a long time and seen great ideas turn into great code with creeping useful features gradually added on until a day comes when you wonder how you ended up working on such a monstrosity.
A good friend once told me years ago
I still squirm at the thought of how many successful women now seem to view a large percentage of decent single men. Namely, as lesser and lower.
Squirm, hell - it's a tragedy that these women of achievement will be less likely to find mates (because they're predisposed to only settle for "superior" males) and to propagate their DNA onto the next generation.
"Pretty women out walkin' with gorillas down my street..."
Not that complicated, not discriminatory.... Also note that the scoring was largely subjective
While I admire efforts to recruit and hire underrepresented groups to the extent possible, there is no escaping that subjective scoring is both complicated and discriminatory.
And it continues to this day, to cut both ways, both for and against underrepresented groups.
I thought Todd was unemployed.
in this market you have to make sure that you're not seen as a leech or people won't buy your stuff.
Dead on.
Examining that more closely you can determine that "hiding bad actions" or "killing the messenger" can be successful business strategies as long as the cover of darkness can be maintained.
If the risk of exposure is suitably small, then a strict, unconstratined optimization of actions in the free market might indicate that unethical behavior will make you more money.
How about old scientific works, journals up to say 1920's?
I know the more recent journal articles are copyrighted and therefore must have some lengthy protection on them, but what about classic old articles (like some of Einstein's work in the early 1900's)?
Nice fairy tale. I send OO docs saved as DOC files to my boss all the time. He has never once complained.
Same here. I produce equally ugly documents using MS Word and OpenOffice.org and no one knows the difference.
I think any OO.o glitches are starting to fit under the S/N ratio that Word has for creating its own glitchy behavior.
Amen.
A resolution independent system would really help out on this problem.
NeWS, Display Postscript didn't catch on.
Maybe SVG will.
But I've wondered whether the underlying ddx for X shouldn't move towards a generic OpenGL driver...
Exactly.
It's a stupid law, but it's the law, so obedience and enforcement go along with it.
For much of the public this is a real yawner, as in, how exactly do these fileswappers hurt me?
Answer: They don't, any more than Joe Average buying a hooker, smoking dope in the privacy of his own home, or driving 4 mph over the speed limit on a deserted road hurts you.
I'll obey stupid laws, but having them on the books decreases my respect for the law in general.
The actual costs of copying and distribution having dropped so much, the market is crying out for copyright holders to drop their prices accordingly. Having lived for so long on selling $16 CDs, they just don't want to let go of the old business model.
Does this work on the Neuros II?
Yeah, it's too good to be true.
Besides, you know how it will all go ahead of time anyway.
Questioner: "Precisely what are your plans to restore fiscal solvency to the operations of the federal government?"Kerry: Good sounding populist rhetoric about giving Americans jobs, vague on cost details, delivered with hound dog face, slighting the current administration for screwing up even if the current administration isn't sufficiently competent to orchestrate such a screwup.
Bush:Random, disconnected homilies about American values, tax cuts magically stimulating voodoo economics that Daddy know won't work, delivered with a deer in the headlights trying not to get run over, tying things into how bad a character that Saddam was anyhow.
Next question? Answer: see above.
[It's the Veep debate between Dick "Grand Vizier" Cheney and John "Aw Shuck's I'm Jes A Country Boy" Edwards that is going to be fun to watch - certainly not the Prez debates.]
I am not sure I agree with these sort of tactics.
's OK. What goes around, comes around.
User's get more than even by calling in to Tech Support with compliants that:
Those aren't very portable. They're large, and you have to carry around a power supply as well
Not a problem.
I've carried my 200 GB drive and the power supply in my two extra-sized shirt pocket protectors for over a year now. Duct tape helps to hold the devices in place more securely, too. It's not too much hassle to duct tape your clothing like this because it only needs to be done once a week or two right after you shower and put your clothes back on.
The only problem, really, was that I keep tripping over the power cord. As soon as I wire up the car battery backpack I hope to overcome this small impediment to achieving nerdvana.
Electromagnetism is one place to use the word "induce", but most of the population that reads warnings on the sides of bottles associate:
Must be that whoever came up with names like:
- "Digital Rights Management",
- "Patriot Act",
- "Clear Skies Initiative",
- "Digital Millenium Copyright Act",
- "Healthy Forests Initiative",
etc. was on vacation that day. They missed their chance to name it the that would help it to fly under the radar and gain approval from legislators who read only titles and listen only to lobbyists and pollsters.Offering open net access is a black hole to throw labor hours into.
Despite the complaints, the Linux boxes work for years at a time.
The Windows boxes crash a lot, but they can work well too.
And no matter what you go with, people will bitch about whatever you have set up.
You can't fool me. I recognize those four sentences as a direct rip-off, coming straight off the stone tablets thrown down the mountain of ultimate tech support knowledge.
The pirate has acquired something that, by all rights, he should have paid for.
All rights? Only one "right".
The original poster was correct. The "pirate" has only infringed the "temporary right of monopoly on distribution of copies".
In a human rights sense, this is an artificial "right" (no direct harm is inflicted on the originator of the idea because a copy of it has been made). The original purpose of granting this lucrative "right" was to encourage the production and distribution of more works by creators.
Now, of course, the creators of works see little of the monetary gains derived from temporary monopoly status; most of the revenue goes to the distributors.
And, unfortunately, a rational and logical analysis of whether the copyright system ought to be changed in some way to possibly encourage more creation of higher quality works will be heavily influenced by the industries that make money by virtue of the current system.
Mmmmm...programmable keys.
A long time ago, when I worked on a system with dumb terminals connected via serial ports, they started to have keys you could program by sending the proper escape sequences.
Of course, if you were unscrupulous, you could use things akin to write(1) or talk(1) to, uh, "help" other users program their function keys "properly".
[I'm not a Gentoo user, but might try it out later this year - hopefully on a dual Opteron workstation.]
So how are Gentoo users faring with the 2004.2 release?
And is the organization healthy despite Daniel Robbins stepping down from the top spot?