Wealth distribution isn't "equal" or "unequal". It's a continuous measure. You already know this, of course. Perfect distribution is horrible, as is it's opposite.
So what we're talking about is where to set the mark, in terms of some kind of optimum. What I'm pointing out is that the "wealth distribution factor" that's served the country well for a long time appears to be changing rapidly.
You'd do well to leave your personal homo-superioris attitude behind.
I'm not American either, and your post is just a giant pile of stupid. You really can't think of any laws that are more draconian than copyright and IP silliness? "any pretense and get away with it"? There were some very specific (false) pretenses used, not just "anything".
American culture is not a mono-form. There's an active and ongoing fight for its soul. What you perceive as evil is, in fact, simple arrogance and ignorance. Very few people here on either side of the political divide are intentionally evil.
Do you really want the simplification game to be applied to Muslims in the same way you apply it Americans? Because that's what you're doing, and you harm all sides when you do it.
Your numerical analysis fails to consider the total tax burden. By focusing solely on income tax, it creates a distorted picture of how much tax is really being paid, and by whom.
The federal government treats the revenue from social security precisely the same as revenue from income tax. It goes into a general fund, and is used for general spending. There's a nebulous IOU out there, for paying future benefits, but social security money is just spent in the general fund.
If you were going to introduce a new tax, would you start by saying that the brand new tax would be 15% of the first $100,000 of income? You'd have an angry country-size mob on your hands, because of the unfairness of it all (as you should). Somehow we have managed to have precisely such a poll tax levied. What's more, by using the low-salary technique noted in the article, wealthy people can avoid paying most of it.
The really interesting breakdowns don't occur along the 1-5-10-50 lines. The interesting stuff happens all in the 1% area, when you break it down into 0.001 - 0.01 - 0.1, etc. That's when you find out just how concentrated income and wealth in this country really are.
What we should be doing is removing the wage cap on the collection of social security, and have it apply to all income (salary or cap gains or "profit"), while remaining revenue-neutral. That would result in lowering the rate by 40% (I think -- haven't calculated that one in a long time). So huge numbers of taxpayers get a nice break, and the tax system as a whole gets flatter.
What many people don't understand is that we already have a tax system that is fairly flat, when total tax burden is taken into account. The "flatness" breaks down once your income gets particularly high, and you stop having to pay social security.
Lastly -- you link to the Kiplinger article, and it's good to have sources. For some reason you specifically ignore its caveat:
(Note that these figures include only federal income taxes. According to one study, 56% of all wage earners pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than they do income tax and the percentage of those paying more payroll tax than income tax soars to 86% if you count both the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare taxes.)
Please take total tax burden into account before perpetuating (or encouraging) the myth that those under the 50% line don't pay taxes. Yes, I know you are only talking about income tax. I am saying it is disingenuous to do so.
Like always, there's a zillion stories floating around, and hardly any of them actually provide a reader with a link to the actual order. The anti-neutrality arguments take two main themes: That the FCC has no legal right to publish such orders, and that terrible harm will come to the internet if the existing de facto policy of neutrality is codified into law.
The first is a legal issue, and I have no idea whether the FCC has the authority to do this.
Based on the language in the order I've read, every argument I've seen so far in the second category is just full of crap. Any real argument against these specific rules should actually quote a rule, and describe in detail how it's wrong.
I've been trying to figure out if declining health insurance means that the declining individual should lose access to the emergency room. In car terms, someone who declines collision insurance shouldn't get a shiny new car from the government when they're at fault in a crash.
You know what they do in China? When you show up and need health care, you (and your family) pay for _everything_, up front. Later on, you (probably) get a check from the government to cover your expenses.
Clock the market. Accumulate all orders for 60 seconds against a master clock. Then evaluate all orders in that one minute block, with equal priority and random selection to break ties.
No tax necessary. Just mess with time, a little bit, and erase the most unfair advantage that HFT has.
It's been widely reported that there's a duplicated file, and indeed it there is something close to that. BUT! One thing you'll find missing in Oracle's Exhibit "J" are the package headers at the top of the file. There's a good reason for that. On the Android side the file is in package org.apache.harmony.security.tests.support.cert, in directory support/src/test/java. You can see this in the git repository for android. It's sitting in a directory of test support classes.
So the matching file that we have here is part of the test suite to ensure compliance with the interfaces. It is NOT part of the implementation itself. So the real question is, is it OK to have this kind of file sitting in the test branch, to ensure that the real implementation of it complies?
The fact that the package headers have been removed and that this file is from the test suite can't be anything other than a deliberate attempt to deceive, well, someone.;)
It's rather unbelievable that with thousands of stories out there on this file nobody is talking about WHERE it fits into the android tree.
Page down through it, and you'll see that it's a simple set of questions, usually song-by-song. Near the end the jury is asked to set damages for each song. Each entry has $80,000 entered, which is pretty much half-way between the minimum ($750) and the maximum ($150,000).
Every song has the same damages assigned. Were all the songs downloaded the same number of times? We don't know...there is no evidence that the songs were ever downloaded by anyone else, as far as I can tell.
Are all these songs equal money-earners for the label? Who knows?
It's a remarkably lazy bit of life destruction from a senseless and cruel jury.
This is exactly why a judge revised the verdict, calling it "monstrous". He isn't name-calling the plaintiffs. It's directed squarely at an idiot jury.
This article manages to completely miss the major reason you might want to use Blekko. As a logged-in user you can personally tag a site as spam, and you'll _never_ see it again in any search you do. A large body of users, tagging as spam, produces a nice database of statistics that can be used to drive the _global_ spam tag. It already does a pretty good job pulling spam out of your search results, and if it really takes off they're going to be delivering pretty high quality.
Blekko doesn't make any money from google adsense, and google does -- a lot of money. Which of the two companies is going to drive search traffic towards their ad network?
Blekko opens up quite a bit of the information they have about sites, letting you see their scores and scoring system, and the links in and out.
It deserves to do well -- I hope it gets the chance.
What's missing from page rank is "page crap factor". In other words, it drop the rank of a page when it includes ads. Ad-free pages get higher ranks.
Of course, if you're google, you really don't have any incentive to do this, do you? And if your advertisements are ubiquitous on the net, you're not even violating neutrality, or in need of a system that ranks one type of advertising above another.
The WSJ story has a little more detail than the others. Turns out that Kittinger (the first guy to do anything like this, decades ago) used to work for Daniel Hogan as a consultant on the project. After the meetings with Red Bull, RB informed Hogan that the deal was off, and Kittinger started working for RB on a freshly minted version of the same thing.
The right answer here is, as usual, "who knows?" It looks like there might really be something to the case, and it needs litigating to resolve the problem.
I don't think *still in the process of closing* is particularly easy to determine. A straight-up clock time limit is what is used now, I believe. Each process is given some amount of time to close up shop after it's told to terminate.
How would you tell, from an OS level, if the app is still busy shutting down? Can't use CPU -- might just be stuck in a loop. The app might stop responding to the top-level message loop while shutting down, so that's out. Disk activity? Might be valid, might not be.
Because the data recorders can lose their information if disconnected from the car's battery or if the battery dies—as could happen after a crash—the agency is focusing only on recent accidents, said a person familiar with the situation.
What the hell? Who designs a black box that needs continuous power to properly log information, and retain it? That makes no sense at all.
The ironic thing about an anti-photography law is that during an investigation of a terrorist incident or the run-up to it, all the "tourism" photographs might contain clues useful for finding the bad guys. A Seadragon composite might help a lot. And if smart folks figure out how to do Seadragon video (assuming they haven't already), the more photography, the better the result will be. You then have the problem of collecting the pictures; a public appeal to send in outdoor tourist shots might help.
Of course, there in the UK, maybe you'll pass a law that secretly sends all digital photographs back to the "home office" via 3G, straight from the camera.;) "Mommy, why does my camera have an antenna?"
Are you generalizing your comments on Flash player speed to current mac architectures, or restricting to PPC? Given that Apple isn't building anything more with PPC, why should Adobe invest resources there? Flash works fine on my Intel-based iMac. I've never had the slightest hiccup with it, and it certainly doesn't use up "100% of CPU cycles".
I've never gotten quite clear on exactly what the anti-flash crowd was saying was wrong with Flash. I haven't done much Flash development, but what little I have done involved working with generating the bytecode for SWF files, so I know pretty much how that works.
Which leads to this: On a design basis, given the _requirements_ placed on something like Flash, what would you do differently? How should it be "designed better", to do what it does? What would _your_ flash-like wire format look like? What would your API look like?
The _implementation_ of the Flash player is a separate topic, and I suppose there's plenty of room for empirical analysis of what Adobe has done.
Should there be a clause in the GPL that prohibits users and distributors of, say, the GNU toolchain, from prohibiting downstream usage with the front-end processor of their choice?
What this looks like to me is a crack in the GPL. Apple builds everything it has with a toolchain that is designed and licensed for freedom. Apple is free to create a new language and use it with the toolchain, and perhaps grant it to others. Downstream entities are not permitted to do this.
Based on the reasons Jobs gives, the same logic should apply to Mac OS X. No more advanced language use; just crappy, archaic Objective C.
There's a legal principle that says that the degree of protection you can gain from copyright is proportional to the range of expression, on a given concept. In other words, if there's only a very few ways that you can actually say something, there's very little copyright protection to be had.
We need to recognize that there's a similar principle at work when any organization, public or private, gains "control" over a significant range of communications, in a (mostly) free country. Once certain thresholds of market range are reached, an organization's ability to inhibit the free flow of information for arbitrary reasons ought to become limited. Simultaneously, as their ability to censor or control information is reduced, their legal liability should also be reduced.
We protect common carriers in this way. Maybe we need to expand the concept.
After reading the patent I couldn't help but think of Mickey Mouse, Sorcerer, in Fantasia. That's gestural control, and it's definitely prior art (if not in the patent sense).
You are a funny boy! To misquote David Pogue, Microsoft will lose when businesses decide that computers are no longer useful.
It's good to have more than one ecosystem out there. There's every chance that the engineers at Microsoft knew about this vulnerability and, in the interests of simplification, decided to allow it for business reasons. Those happen sometimes;). Credit card companies could engage mechanisms that would make it MUCH more difficult to do fraudulent charges against a card, but they elect not to because they don't want to impose a "drag" on sales of any kind. They're clearly calculated that their losses from "drag" would exceed their losses from fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
Wealth distribution isn't "equal" or "unequal". It's a continuous measure. You already know this, of course. Perfect distribution is horrible, as is it's opposite.
So what we're talking about is where to set the mark, in terms of some kind of optimum. What I'm pointing out is that the "wealth distribution factor" that's served the country well for a long time appears to be changing rapidly.
You'd do well to leave your personal homo-superioris attitude behind.
I'm not American either, and your post is just a giant pile of stupid. You really can't think of any laws that are more draconian than copyright and IP silliness? "any pretense and get away with it"? There were some very specific (false) pretenses used, not just "anything".
American culture is not a mono-form. There's an active and ongoing fight for its soul. What you perceive as evil is, in fact, simple arrogance and ignorance. Very few people here on either side of the political divide are intentionally evil.
Do you really want the simplification game to be applied to Muslims in the same way you apply it Americans? Because that's what you're doing, and you harm all sides when you do it.
Your numerical analysis fails to consider the total tax burden. By focusing solely on income tax, it creates a distorted picture of how much tax is really being paid, and by whom.
The federal government treats the revenue from social security precisely the same as revenue from income tax. It goes into a general fund, and is used for general spending. There's a nebulous IOU out there, for paying future benefits, but social security money is just spent in the general fund.
If you were going to introduce a new tax, would you start by saying that the brand new tax would be 15% of the first $100,000 of income? You'd have an angry country-size mob on your hands, because of the unfairness of it all (as you should). Somehow we have managed to have precisely such a poll tax levied. What's more, by using the low-salary technique noted in the article, wealthy people can avoid paying most of it.
The really interesting breakdowns don't occur along the 1-5-10-50 lines. The interesting stuff happens all in the 1% area, when you break it down into 0.001 - 0.01 - 0.1, etc. That's when you find out just how concentrated income and wealth in this country really are.
What we should be doing is removing the wage cap on the collection of social security, and have it apply to all income (salary or cap gains or "profit"), while remaining revenue-neutral. That would result in lowering the rate by 40% (I think -- haven't calculated that one in a long time). So huge numbers of taxpayers get a nice break, and the tax system as a whole gets flatter.
What many people don't understand is that we already have a tax system that is fairly flat, when total tax burden is taken into account. The "flatness" breaks down once your income gets particularly high, and you stop having to pay social security.
Lastly -- you link to the Kiplinger article, and it's good to have sources. For some reason you specifically ignore its caveat:
(Note that these figures include only federal income taxes. According to one study, 56% of all wage earners pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than they do income tax and the percentage of those paying more payroll tax than income tax soars to 86% if you count both the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare taxes.)
Please take total tax burden into account before perpetuating (or encouraging) the myth that those under the 50% line don't pay taxes. Yes, I know you are only talking about income tax. I am saying it is disingenuous to do so.
Like always, there's a zillion stories floating around, and hardly any of them actually provide a reader with a link to the actual order. The anti-neutrality arguments take two main themes: That the FCC has no legal right to publish such orders, and that terrible harm will come to the internet if the existing de facto policy of neutrality is codified into law.
The first is a legal issue, and I have no idea whether the FCC has the authority to do this.
Based on the language in the order I've read, every argument I've seen so far in the second category is just full of crap. Any real argument against these specific rules should actually quote a rule, and describe in detail how it's wrong.
I've been trying to figure out if declining health insurance means that the declining individual should lose access to the emergency room. In car terms, someone who declines collision insurance shouldn't get a shiny new car from the government when they're at fault in a crash.
You know what they do in China? When you show up and need health care, you (and your family) pay for _everything_, up front. Later on, you (probably) get a check from the government to cover your expenses.
A better system? Sure.
Clock the market. Accumulate all orders for 60 seconds against a master clock. Then evaluate all orders in that one minute block, with equal priority and random selection to break ties.
No tax necessary. Just mess with time, a little bit, and erase the most unfair advantage that HFT has.
It's been widely reported that there's a duplicated file, and indeed it there is something close to that. BUT! One thing you'll find missing in Oracle's Exhibit "J" are the package headers at the top of the file. There's a good reason for that. On the Android side the file is in package org.apache.harmony.security.tests.support.cert, in directory support/src/test/java. You can see this in the git repository for android. It's sitting in a directory of test support classes.
So the matching file that we have here is part of the test suite to ensure compliance with the interfaces. It is NOT part of the implementation itself. So the real question is, is it OK to have this kind of file sitting in the test branch, to ensure that the real implementation of it complies?
The fact that the package headers have been removed and that this file is from the test suite can't be anything other than a deliberate attempt to deceive, well, someone. ;)
It's rather unbelievable that with thousands of stories out there on this file nobody is talking about WHERE it fits into the android tree.
Lawyer: Mr. Smith, have you ever beaten your dog? Your hamster?
Mr. Smith: Uh, no. Never. Definitely not. Not even when he's being a little asshole.
Lawyer: You're in.
The interesting bit here is the "redacted special jury verdict".
Page down through it, and you'll see that it's a simple set of questions, usually song-by-song. Near the end the jury is asked to set damages for each song. Each entry has $80,000 entered, which is pretty much half-way between the minimum ($750) and the maximum ($150,000).
Every song has the same damages assigned. Were all the songs downloaded the same number of times? We don't know...there is no evidence that the songs were ever downloaded by anyone else, as far as I can tell.
Are all these songs equal money-earners for the label? Who knows?
It's a remarkably lazy bit of life destruction from a senseless and cruel jury.
This is exactly why a judge revised the verdict, calling it "monstrous". He isn't name-calling the plaintiffs. It's directed squarely at an idiot jury.
This article manages to completely miss the major reason you might want to use Blekko. As a logged-in user you can personally tag a site as spam, and you'll _never_ see it again in any search you do. A large body of users, tagging as spam, produces a nice database of statistics that can be used to drive the _global_ spam tag. It already does a pretty good job pulling spam out of your search results, and if it really takes off they're going to be delivering pretty high quality.
Blekko doesn't make any money from google adsense, and google does -- a lot of money. Which of the two companies is going to drive search traffic towards their ad network?
Blekko opens up quite a bit of the information they have about sites, letting you see their scores and scoring system, and the links in and out.
It deserves to do well -- I hope it gets the chance.
What's missing from page rank is "page crap factor". In other words, it drop the rank of a page when it includes ads. Ad-free pages get higher ranks.
Of course, if you're google, you really don't have any incentive to do this, do you? And if your advertisements are ubiquitous on the net, you're not even violating neutrality, or in need of a system that ranks one type of advertising above another.
Yeah. That Blue Rhino thing for BBQ fuel will never work. I'm not swapping my crappy old rusted out...oh wait I am. Works perfectly.
The WSJ story has a little more detail than the others. Turns out that Kittinger (the first guy to do anything like this, decades ago) used to work for Daniel Hogan as a consultant on the project. After the meetings with Red Bull, RB informed Hogan that the deal was off, and Kittinger started working for RB on a freshly minted version of the same thing.
The right answer here is, as usual, "who knows?" It looks like there might really be something to the case, and it needs litigating to resolve the problem.
I don't think *still in the process of closing* is particularly easy to determine. A straight-up clock time limit is what is used now, I believe. Each process is given some amount of time to close up shop after it's told to terminate.
How would you tell, from an OS level, if the app is still busy shutting down? Can't use CPU -- might just be stuck in a loop. The app might stop responding to the top-level message loop while shutting down, so that's out. Disk activity? Might be valid, might not be.
Consumer's Digest. I'd be shocked if their web site hasn't been a runaway success.
I guarantee these legal fees have been charged back to the artists, against their advances. ;)
Moreover, from a WSJ article, the following:
Because the data recorders can lose their information if disconnected from the car's battery or if the battery dies—as could happen after a crash—the agency is focusing only on recent accidents, said a person familiar with the situation.
What the hell? Who designs a black box that needs continuous power to properly log information, and retain it? That makes no sense at all.
I should have narrowed Seadragon to the Photosynth part of it.
How can that 1:1 duty-to-desk ratio be improved? Is it the amount of paperwork? A poor workflow?
The ironic thing about an anti-photography law is that during an investigation of a terrorist incident or the run-up to it, all the "tourism" photographs might contain clues useful for finding the bad guys. A Seadragon composite might help a lot. And if smart folks figure out how to do Seadragon video (assuming they haven't already), the more photography, the better the result will be. You then have the problem of collecting the pictures; a public appeal to send in outdoor tourist shots might help.
Of course, there in the UK, maybe you'll pass a law that secretly sends all digital photographs back to the "home office" via 3G, straight from the camera. ;) "Mommy, why does my camera have an antenna?"
Are you generalizing your comments on Flash player speed to current mac architectures, or restricting to PPC? Given that Apple isn't building anything more with PPC, why should Adobe invest resources there? Flash works fine on my Intel-based iMac. I've never had the slightest hiccup with it, and it certainly doesn't use up "100% of CPU cycles".
I've never gotten quite clear on exactly what the anti-flash crowd was saying was wrong with Flash. I haven't done much Flash development, but what little I have done involved working with generating the bytecode for SWF files, so I know pretty much how that works.
Which leads to this: On a design basis, given the _requirements_ placed on something like Flash, what would you do differently? How should it be "designed better", to do what it does? What would _your_ flash-like wire format look like? What would your API look like?
The _implementation_ of the Flash player is a separate topic, and I suppose there's plenty of room for empirical analysis of what Adobe has done.
Should there be a clause in the GPL that prohibits users and distributors of, say, the GNU toolchain, from prohibiting downstream usage with the front-end processor of their choice?
What this looks like to me is a crack in the GPL. Apple builds everything it has with a toolchain that is designed and licensed for freedom. Apple is free to create a new language and use it with the toolchain, and perhaps grant it to others. Downstream entities are not permitted to do this.
Based on the reasons Jobs gives, the same logic should apply to Mac OS X. No more advanced language use; just crappy, archaic Objective C.
There's a legal principle that says that the degree of protection you can gain from copyright is proportional to the range of expression, on a given concept. In other words, if there's only a very few ways that you can actually say something, there's very little copyright protection to be had.
We need to recognize that there's a similar principle at work when any organization, public or private, gains "control" over a significant range of communications, in a (mostly) free country. Once certain thresholds of market range are reached, an organization's ability to inhibit the free flow of information for arbitrary reasons ought to become limited. Simultaneously, as their ability to censor or control information is reduced, their legal liability should also be reduced.
We protect common carriers in this way. Maybe we need to expand the concept.
After reading the patent I couldn't help but think of Mickey Mouse, Sorcerer, in Fantasia. That's gestural control, and it's definitely prior art (if not in the patent sense).
You are a funny boy! To misquote David Pogue, Microsoft will lose when businesses decide that computers are no longer useful.
It's good to have more than one ecosystem out there. There's every chance that the engineers at Microsoft knew about this vulnerability and, in the interests of simplification, decided to allow it for business reasons. Those happen sometimes ;). Credit card companies could engage mechanisms that would make it MUCH more difficult to do fraudulent charges against a card, but they elect not to because they don't want to impose a "drag" on sales of any kind. They're clearly calculated that their losses from "drag" would exceed their losses from fraud.