Look, I never liked Clinton, but it's surely not his fault when the "fiscally conservative" Republicans who came after him act "fiscally conservative" and balloon both the debt and deficit with their warmaking. Of course the potential long-term result of the Clinton administration's policies wouldn't actually come to fruition after the Republicans got involved and screw everything up. It's not Clinton's fault that the Republicans did this.
Bush was a fiscal conservative?!? Since when? Even outside the wars the stupid b*st*rd kept spending. Remember the trillion dollar pill bill?
And frankly, let's not forget that it isn't just the president who decides the budget. Clinton delivered a budget that was $210B in the red. It was Newt and congress that balanced it (and generated the surplus).
Xerox could have sold the stock anytime from when Apple went IPO to today.
Go back to the parent of my original reply -- the dude claimed that Xerox "got" $1M for the tour. I pointed out how that was false -- not whether Xerox was compensated or not -- but the proposal was not for Xerox to receive $1M but to pay $1M for stock. I pass no judgement if it was good, bad, or indifferent deal for Xerox. Merely pointing out that the parent I replied to has his facts flipped.
A chance to spend $1M on Apple stock - that is now worth over $300M (stock has split 8 times, original purchase was 100k shares)
And between when the offer was made and now, Apple nearly went bankrupt and was almost bought out by Sun.
So sure, in 20/20 hindsight buying $1M of Apple stock would have been a great investment, but there was no guarantee at the time it was going to be worth much.
Depends on how you define got. According to The New Yorker:
So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.”
Xerox didn't get a $1M, they were given the chance to spend $1M on Apple stock.
If half of the parasite population survives, won't selection quickly favour the resistant part of the population?
If it were an antibiotic and not a vaccine, you'd be right.
With a vaccine, you're encouraging the child's immune system to combat malaria. If the half that the vaccine doesn't work for die before procreation then overtime the vaccine would become more effective (assuming that why the vaccine works for some and not for others is genetic based).
Setting up false comparisons is not an insult, it is just shows your own ignorance (or malice).
Can you give an example of Stallman doing an outlandish socially unacceptable act for publicity? Walking around barefoot? Holding up a placard? Wearing a computer disk platter on his head? I know it's a crime to be a bit of a hippie in these 'enlightened' times, but seriously, I think you will find that Stallman's main activisim revolves around arguing the case for free software using words.
If that's your idea of extreme publicity events, I'd hate to know what you think about Mahatma Ghandi.
Hmmm. Maybe you're right. Maybe you should try to emulate RMS. Next time you're talking with your boss, pull off your shoes and begin eating the foot cheese growing there (yes, you'll probably have to skip your regular grooming habits to grow a sufficient quantity). See how effective you are in convincing your boss of anything other than the fact that you're a nut job.
I'll be very happy when RMS is no longer trying to take center stage and claim he's the spokesperson for FOSS.
Except that you didn't bother to mention any socially unacceptable acts for publicity that Stallman has done.
You must be new here -- or don't follow RMS very much. Picking your toe fungus and eating it while giving a lecture is generally consider socially unacceptable. Google the man -- he's a walking creep show.
There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?
If ACT-UP was still throwing AIDS infected blood on people they didn't like the anti-gay movement would be far stronger, not fighting a losing rear guard action (yes, you can have the pun for free).
When I'm in a meeting pushing the removal of Microsoft from all of our systems and someone brings up RMS picking his toe fungus and eating it, it usually gets a chuckle from the decision makers and makes it harder to refocus on the issues. I am not saying the FOSS doesn't need leaders (thank you for the false strawman). I am saying that they need some sane leaders who are at least half-way presentable in public (and fortunately we have them). I just will be very glad when RMS is no longer center stage acting like everyone's creepy uncle.
Dunno about you, but it would pretty much change buying habits for most purchases around here. Sure, some things would still be cheaper online after figuring in shipping costs and (now this proposed) sales tax, but things online would end up being far less attractive than before... including a lot of Amazon's stock.
I have no idea why Amazon is behind this unless it is to ease their accounting systems. But you're 100% right, it is designed to protect the brick-and-mortar stores.
Ah, so it's not so dissimilar to the UK setup.
I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much? I know Income Tax is lower in the US than the UK, but do the individual States not get any of that funding? Is there no equivalent of Council Tax (i.e. a tax collected solely for the use of the state)?
It gets a little more complicated than just that: you have Federal tax, state tax, and possibly county tax and city tax.
The Federal Tax is mainly through income tax; there is also a fuel tax, but not currently a sales/consumption/value-added tax . How they dispose of those taxes is up to Congress and the President. Some does go back to the states in the form of "block grants" -- usually with strings attached.
States taxes vary by state and include (off the top of my head): income tax, sales tax, real-estate tax, and personal property tax. How those taxes get divvied up between state, county, and city varies by state. Some cities and counties have their own taxes in addition to the state.
Sales tax becomes interesting because if I live in California, drive to Nevada and buy something, which sales tax do I pay? The current answer is Nevada's. If I stay in California and mail-order purchase something in Nevada, which sales tax do I pay? California claims that I need to pay California sales tax, but it won't be collected by the Nevada establishment (there's a place on my California Income Tax form to specify out-of-state purchases). Now if I stay in California, connect to a server in Nevada and make a purchase, where did transaction occur? The general agreement is that I should pay California sales tax.
Complicating the matter is that the Federal Government is the only one that is allowed to levy taxes on interstate commerce. This is to prevent California from deciding to protect their citrus growers by imposing a 100% tariff on Florida produce. Does the sales tax fall into this category? That's for the courts to decide.
If you're still following (and care), if I live in a county in California and go to a different county to purchase a car, I have to pay the sales tax as if I bought the car in the county where I live -- not where the car dealer is located. This is to keep people in high sales tax counties from going to low sales tax counties to make car purchases. But this is all within the state of California so California makes the rules, not the Federal.
And speaking of cars, if I buy a car out of state and move it to California with six months, in order to register the car California demands that I pay the sales tax on the car as if I bought it in the same county that I am registering it in.
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement...
Agreed. To paraphrase Stallman, once Stallman is dead, I'll be sorry that he is dead, but glad that he is gone.
The gay movement had their Stallman in the form of ACT-UP -- people doing outlandish, socially unacceptable acts for publicity (such as throwing blood on people they disagreed with). Stallman fits the same mold. Once the gay movement grew up and ACT-UP faded away, the gay movement became far more accepted.
What was cause? What was effect? I don't care. ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
That is why someone needs to innovate a good system of finding books that will interest you.
I am thinking of some kind of genre-tagging and element-tagging system with publisher tags, and also community tags/ratings, and some good search tools to wade through it all.
So people can search for murder mysteries that include horses and an aristocratic prose. Or romance stories with low violence and only heterosexual encounters. Or whatever combinations people seem to care about.
Possibly also an automated system to evaluate the quality of the writing style. Back in the '80s I used an e-mail system that would evaluate what grade level your e-mail was written to. Something similar to weed out the chaff would be useful to the consumer. (And sadly enough, my boss preferred 6th grade level versus 13th or above).
If people are going to pay 99 cents for one book, then why not just publish the same story in multiple shorter books (like 50 pages each)? This way there would more more constant income all the time. Also this would reduce the effort to get something published for young writers.
Because it would be a good way to piss off your audience? I find it bad enough when novels are split across multiple books. If you start dribbling the story out in 50 page chunks (with each chunk required to have a cliff hanger to keep me coming back), I'll quickly find a different author.
If it takes someone 5 years to a decade to write his book, he'll be seriously struggling.
If it takes someone 5 years to write a book they should find another profession. Of the authors I follow -- only one is so slow that it takes him 4 years to complete a book (and while I think his books are excellent, I wish he was starving more so that he would increase his production rate). Most authors I follow are able to get a book out in a year or less (and/or have other jobs).
In IT, you can't generally advance within a company as well as you can by switching companies. This is because a company with a current employee has (short-sighted, self-serving) incentive
To butcher a famous quote: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by laziness.
Most companies have a single time of year where they divvy up a pay pool among all the employees -- and everyone gets roughly the the same raise. What they fail to understand is that people on the personal growth end of their career usually deserve bigger raises than people who just turn the crank.
Do what's best for you and your family.
Absolutely. If you don't do that, no one else will.
Oh nice, another company influencing government.
When can I get a PAC of my own?
Nothing stops you from forming your own PAC now. Without a lot of seed money, you'll have to work that much harder to make it influential. But a PAC with a 1,000 people donating $10 is worth more than a PAC with 1 person donating $10,000.
According to open secrets, Facebook employees support Democrats 97% of the time. But Zuckerberg personally hadn't donated enough to show up on the Fed's radar in 2008 or 2010.
Yeah, because the Y2K bubble, 9/11, and the two and half useless wars didn't have any effect on the economy. It must all be the tax rate. Thank you for clearing that up for us.
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Look, I never liked Clinton, but it's surely not his fault when the "fiscally conservative" Republicans who came after him act "fiscally conservative" and balloon both the debt and deficit with their warmaking. Of course the potential long-term result of the Clinton administration's policies wouldn't actually come to fruition after the Republicans got involved and screw everything up. It's not Clinton's fault that the Republicans did this.
Bush was a fiscal conservative?!? Since when? Even outside the wars the stupid b*st*rd kept spending. Remember the trillion dollar pill bill?
And frankly, let's not forget that it isn't just the president who decides the budget. Clinton delivered a budget that was $210B in the red. It was Newt and congress that balanced it (and generated the surplus).
The govt. can still issue bonds even if they have no debt, to assist the global market, the question being what they do with the cash that is raised.
Well, obviously the answer is to invest in U.S. Treasury Bonds ... oh, wait.
Xerox could have sold the stock anytime from when Apple went IPO to today.
Go back to the parent of my original reply -- the dude claimed that Xerox "got" $1M for the tour. I pointed out how that was false -- not whether Xerox was compensated or not -- but the proposal was not for Xerox to receive $1M but to pay $1M for stock. I pass no judgement if it was good, bad, or indifferent deal for Xerox. Merely pointing out that the parent I replied to has his facts flipped.
A chance to spend $1M on Apple stock - that is now worth over $300M (stock has split 8 times, original purchase was 100k shares)
And between when the offer was made and now, Apple nearly went bankrupt and was almost bought out by Sun.
So sure, in 20/20 hindsight buying $1M of Apple stock would have been a great investment, but there was no guarantee at the time it was going to be worth much.
I believe Xerox got Apple stock worth $1M for it.
Depends on how you define got. According to The New Yorker:
Xerox didn't get a $1M, they were given the chance to spend $1M on Apple stock.
Keep repeating a myth and people believe it. Apple did not steal from Xerox. Apple was already developing a GUI back in the late '70s.
And yet Xerox PARC had it in '73. Wikipedia also has an interesting read on the history of GUI.
If half of the parasite population survives, won't selection quickly favour the resistant part of the population?
If it were an antibiotic and not a vaccine, you'd be right.
With a vaccine, you're encouraging the child's immune system to combat malaria. If the half that the vaccine doesn't work for die before procreation then overtime the vaccine would become more effective (assuming that why the vaccine works for some and not for others is genetic based).
You call it an advertisement, I call it an unexplainable irresistible urge to consume.
I think enough people already have that.
Setting up false comparisons is not an insult, it is just shows your own ignorance (or malice).
Can you give an example of Stallman doing an outlandish socially unacceptable act for publicity? Walking around barefoot? Holding up a placard? Wearing a computer disk platter on his head? I know it's a crime to be a bit of a hippie in these 'enlightened' times, but seriously, I think you will find that Stallman's main activisim revolves around arguing the case for free software using words.
If that's your idea of extreme publicity events, I'd hate to know what you think about Mahatma Ghandi.
Hmmm. Maybe you're right. Maybe you should try to emulate RMS. Next time you're talking with your boss, pull off your shoes and begin eating the foot cheese growing there (yes, you'll probably have to skip your regular grooming habits to grow a sufficient quantity). See how effective you are in convincing your boss of anything other than the fact that you're a nut job.
I'll be very happy when RMS is no longer trying to take center stage and claim he's the spokesperson for FOSS.
Except that you didn't bother to mention any socially unacceptable acts for publicity that Stallman has done.
You must be new here -- or don't follow RMS very much. Picking your toe fungus and eating it while giving a lecture is generally consider socially unacceptable. Google the man -- he's a walking creep show.
There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?
If ACT-UP was still throwing AIDS infected blood on people they didn't like the anti-gay movement would be far stronger, not fighting a losing rear guard action (yes, you can have the pun for free).
When I'm in a meeting pushing the removal of Microsoft from all of our systems and someone brings up RMS picking his toe fungus and eating it, it usually gets a chuckle from the decision makers and makes it harder to refocus on the issues. I am not saying the FOSS doesn't need leaders (thank you for the false strawman). I am saying that they need some sane leaders who are at least half-way presentable in public (and fortunately we have them). I just will be very glad when RMS is no longer center stage acting like everyone's creepy uncle.
Dunno about you, but it would pretty much change buying habits for most purchases around here. Sure, some things would still be cheaper online after figuring in shipping costs and (now this proposed) sales tax, but things online would end up being far less attractive than before... including a lot of Amazon's stock.
I have no idea why Amazon is behind this unless it is to ease their accounting systems. But you're 100% right, it is designed to protect the brick-and-mortar stores.
Ah, so it's not so dissimilar to the UK setup. I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much? I know Income Tax is lower in the US than the UK, but do the individual States not get any of that funding? Is there no equivalent of Council Tax (i.e. a tax collected solely for the use of the state)?
It gets a little more complicated than just that: you have Federal tax, state tax, and possibly county tax and city tax.
The Federal Tax is mainly through income tax; there is also a fuel tax, but not currently a sales/consumption/value-added tax . How they dispose of those taxes is up to Congress and the President. Some does go back to the states in the form of "block grants" -- usually with strings attached.
States taxes vary by state and include (off the top of my head): income tax, sales tax, real-estate tax, and personal property tax. How those taxes get divvied up between state, county, and city varies by state. Some cities and counties have their own taxes in addition to the state.
Sales tax becomes interesting because if I live in California, drive to Nevada and buy something, which sales tax do I pay? The current answer is Nevada's. If I stay in California and mail-order purchase something in Nevada, which sales tax do I pay? California claims that I need to pay California sales tax, but it won't be collected by the Nevada establishment (there's a place on my California Income Tax form to specify out-of-state purchases). Now if I stay in California, connect to a server in Nevada and make a purchase, where did transaction occur? The general agreement is that I should pay California sales tax.
Complicating the matter is that the Federal Government is the only one that is allowed to levy taxes on interstate commerce. This is to prevent California from deciding to protect their citrus growers by imposing a 100% tariff on Florida produce. Does the sales tax fall into this category? That's for the courts to decide.
If you're still following (and care), if I live in a county in California and go to a different county to purchase a car, I have to pay the sales tax as if I bought the car in the county where I live -- not where the car dealer is located. This is to keep people in high sales tax counties from going to low sales tax counties to make car purchases. But this is all within the state of California so California makes the rules, not the Federal.
And speaking of cars, if I buy a car out of state and move it to California with six months, in order to register the car California demands that I pay the sales tax on the car as if I bought it in the same county that I am registering it in.
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement ...
Agreed. To paraphrase Stallman, once Stallman is dead, I'll be sorry that he is dead, but glad that he is gone.
The gay movement had their Stallman in the form of ACT-UP -- people doing outlandish, socially unacceptable acts for publicity (such as throwing blood on people they disagreed with). Stallman fits the same mold. Once the gay movement grew up and ACT-UP faded away, the gay movement became far more accepted.
What was cause? What was effect? I don't care. ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
That is why someone needs to innovate a good system of finding books that will interest you.
I am thinking of some kind of genre-tagging and element-tagging system with publisher tags, and also community tags/ratings, and some good search tools to wade through it all.
So people can search for murder mysteries that include horses and an aristocratic prose. Or romance stories with low violence and only heterosexual encounters. Or whatever combinations people seem to care about.
Possibly also an automated system to evaluate the quality of the writing style. Back in the '80s I used an e-mail system that would evaluate what grade level your e-mail was written to. Something similar to weed out the chaff would be useful to the consumer. (And sadly enough, my boss preferred 6th grade level versus 13th or above).
If people are going to pay 99 cents for one book, then why not just publish the same story in multiple shorter books (like 50 pages each)? This way there would more more constant income all the time. Also this would reduce the effort to get something published for young writers.
Because it would be a good way to piss off your audience? I find it bad enough when novels are split across multiple books. If you start dribbling the story out in 50 page chunks (with each chunk required to have a cliff hanger to keep me coming back), I'll quickly find a different author.
If it takes someone 5 years to a decade to write his book, he'll be seriously struggling.
If it takes someone 5 years to write a book they should find another profession. Of the authors I follow -- only one is so slow that it takes him 4 years to complete a book (and while I think his books are excellent, I wish he was starving more so that he would increase his production rate). Most authors I follow are able to get a book out in a year or less (and/or have other jobs).
When people recognize you as a real human being, one with whom their share a bond through your creations, they will be willing to pay.
+1 insightful
And how many people have 1 million downloads? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
And how many books are worth reading? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
And I'm sure they will be boring and formulaic.
And how is that different from 90% of the writers out there?
In IT, you can't generally advance within a company as well as you can by switching companies. This is because a company with a current employee has (short-sighted, self-serving) incentive
To butcher a famous quote: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by laziness.
Most companies have a single time of year where they divvy up a pay pool among all the employees -- and everyone gets roughly the the same raise. What they fail to understand is that people on the personal growth end of their career usually deserve bigger raises than people who just turn the crank.
Do what's best for you and your family.
Absolutely. If you don't do that, no one else will.
Oh nice, another company influencing government. When can I get a PAC of my own?
Nothing stops you from forming your own PAC now. Without a lot of seed money, you'll have to work that much harder to make it influential. But a PAC with a 1,000 people donating $10 is worth more than a PAC with 1 person donating $10,000.
The don't have much of a choice. It's either pay up you r lobbyists and campaign contributions, or be trampled. Politics has become a racket.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. -- P. J. O'Rourke
An honest politician is one who, when he's bought, stays bought. -- Simon Cameron
In 2008, Zuckerberg hosted Obama.
According to open secrets, Facebook employees support Democrats 97% of the time. But Zuckerberg personally hadn't donated enough to show up on the Fed's radar in 2008 or 2010.
Yeah, because the Y2K bubble, 9/11, and the two and half useless wars didn't have any effect on the economy. It must all be the tax rate. Thank you for clearing that up for us.