Recent Posts
Turns it into wine.Some believe wearing fetishes will turn bullets into waterHow do they feel about shelling?-cranioscopical (October 21, 2010, 09:35 PM)-4wd (October 22, 2010, 06:39 AM)
+1. Microsoft might be a monopoly, but I find Apple to be a lot scarier... and a lot more closed.-f0dder (October 22, 2010, 02:48 PM)
But as soon as there's big financial interest involved, and considering censorship and the license terms Apple enforces on the iPhone App store - ugh. And there's rumors that apple might be removing Flash and Java support for OS X...-f0dder (October 22, 2010, 02:48 PM)
In the end, it's just another step towards Apple absolute control over their own products.-Lashiec (October 22, 2010, 03:16 PM)
Looks like the lines of battle are starting to get drawn.
In *this* corner wearing the "CLOSED/PROPRIETARY" silks: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, and the MPAA...with Novell watching intently from the sidelines!
And in *this* corner: Just about everything and everybody else - including the consumers.
-40hz (October 22, 2010, 03:24 PM)
Sorry for the nostalgia, but I am reminded of this video:
Video-Josh (October 22, 2010, 02:40 PM)
When it comes to taxation and loopholes, my favorite story is Clark Clifford. A big time man of influence, he made a phone call to a contact in the U.S. Senate and saved the owner of a corporation about $3Million in taxes for the year. He hung up the phone, turned to the head of the company and said, "that will be $25,000 please." Whereupon the client turned red and propounded that he'd be damned if he was going to pay anyone $25,000 to make a 10 second phone call. Clifford said "as you wish" and dialed the contact again. He just said "never mind" and hung up.-MilesAhead (October 22, 2010, 01:57 AM)
I don't know much about how all the stuff would work, accounting and all that. But I think the reason it took a constitutional amendment in the U S of A to get income taxes is because, once you have income taxes, you have deductions. Once you have deductions, you have to justify them. Once you have to justify them, then you have "well this amount here, what did you spend that on? You then went here, why did you go there? Was it a business meeting or a vacation? Who did you talk to and what about?" yadda' yadda'. I'd rather just have a 10% sales tax and not keep tabs on my life under pain of perjury.
Perjury should be way more fun than that!-MilesAhead (October 22, 2010, 01:57 AM)
Yes, that's an interesting find: but the readers' comments were somewhat disconcerting... concerning the unbiased nature of the book. If you do read it I'd be interested in what you thought.
Certainly the Spirit Level comes with an outstanding pedigree-Perry Mowbray (October 21, 2010, 10:49 PM)
Read Karl Marx.
He's got a few good points to make.-Renegade (October 21, 2010, 09:04 PM)
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better has a lot of good things to say based on a lot of data over many years...-Perry Mowbray (October 21, 2010, 09:57 PM)
Only the super rich can afford to play games like this with the legal system.-mouser (October 21, 2010, 09:15 PM)
...find tricks around the law [so] you can take advantage to circumvent the spirit of the law while avoiding prosecution...-mouser (October 21, 2010, 09:15 PM)
A flat 10% is not equitable as the people with more money have greater responsability and should be contributing more, and what the poor have often doesn't cover their needs.-Perry Mowbray (October 21, 2010, 08:46 PM)
I disagree with this statement. 10% is equitable because everyone is paying an equal percentage. Now, obviously if it costs $500 a month to pay for cost of living then 10% is going to dip a lot more into the person's income who makes $500 a month than the person making $50,000/mo.
And I also don't think it's the government's job to take from the "rich" to give to the "poor." Let the rich be charitable to the poor if they choose to. The rich are not necessarily responsible for the poor just because they have more money.
If I happen to have more money than someone else through my own sheer luck, due diligence, etc., why should I be punished and have my money forcibly taken away from me and given to someone else who through their own bad luck, wastefulness, etc., lost (or did not gain) money?
The rich have just as much a right to their own money as the poor. If it is not so, then that is when it becomes an inequitable society.-Deozaan (October 21, 2010, 08:58 PM)
But this latest deal will not actually include the intellectual property rights to Angry Birds – those will remain with Rovio, the Finnish company that created and developed the game.
...Mr Zarza Manresa had been "shaved completely by Ibrahim (a rebel leader) who believes in magical fetishes made with hair and body hair of whites".
Gunmen from Congo's plethora of rebel and pro-government armed groups often adorn themselves with trinkets or traditional garments before heading into battle, in the belief that they will protect them from the bullets of the enemy.
Some believe wearing fetishes will turn bullets into water.
We definitely need taxes to be simple. Something incredibly simple and stupid such as 10% for EVERYONE would make it so easy to make sure everyone and everything paid properly.
But that's coming from someone who doesn't know much about how the tax system works.-Deozaan (October 21, 2010, 08:03 PM)
Google is “flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they’re perpetrating evil under our noses,” said Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College in New York who has examined Google’s tax disclosures.
I heard a rumor about the new OSX version, Lion. It will by default behave like iOS so you can only have 1 application running at a time. It's a massive stupification of the OS. How stupid do you need to be to not be able to deal with having more than 1 application open? If you've never used a computer before, or you're under 10 years old, well, then there's an excuse. Steve Jobs has some good ideas about making things easier, but this?-Renegade (October 21, 2010, 05:09 PM)
That's not a rumor, but nonsense. And I think I don't have to explain why, do I?
What Lion will have, and probably fueled such rumour, it's the ability to auto save and auto resume documents and applications state, which it's a fantastic feature I'd like to see under other operating systems, even though many applications are already coded to that on their own.-Lashiec (October 21, 2010, 05:59 PM)
There is no way MS, Adobe or any of the producer for big expensive graphics and music production applications are going to pay Steve 30% per purchase. However without those applications the Mac is a dead duck. So 3rd party program suppliers will always have to be available.
Of course Steve would love if everyone did pay him 30%, but in this case he won't get it.-Eóin (October 21, 2010, 05:49 PM)
grumpygamer Ron Gilbert
Step 1: Mac App Store + 3rd party apps. Step 2: User option to disallow 3rd party apps for "safety". Step 3: Remove that option.
grumpygamer Ron Gilbert
For you Apple apologists claiming Apple will never lock down the Mac, step one is in place and you all let it happen.
How this is different than repository that we see in UNIX/LINUX/Android world ? i mean linux has it for free and apple made it paid service or maybe mix (free/paid).-mahesh2k (October 21, 2010, 11:23 AM)
So basically you're saying, Star Trek's ultimate gaming system, the Holodeck was not portable.
-Stoic Joker (October 20, 2010, 10:12 PM)
Yeah, but once they get those paper-thin OLED displays that you can roll up in your laptop bag, the desktop is DOOMED!-Deozaan (October 20, 2010, 12:40 PM)
Macs will soon have an online application store, similar to the one for the iPhone and iPad...
...the Mac store will make it easier to reach the almost 50 million Mac owners, Jobs said
In consideration of this it occurred to me I was subsidizing the government via...
- The use of my computer.
- The use of my paper.
- The use of my printer and ink.
- ... Well, you get the idea....
...
I'm not sure WHAT we can do about any of these types of oppression.-CodeTRUCKER (October 19, 2010, 12:12 PM)
You claim the costs involved on your Tax Return, that's what I do, so I don't end up paying any more tax than what I should, (of course that's a purely subjective amount).
If you already do your Tax Return via computer then you should already be claiming some of its cost as a tax deduction - you add a little more. Same with the printer and its supplies.
About the only thing you can't claim is your time, (in Australia anyway).-4wd (October 19, 2010, 07:55 PM)
CUPS (standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems) worked flawlessly on a dozen or so Linux distros I was playing with at the time ... However it could not manage to successfully toss a page from OSX to a printer in less than a half an hour. Apples "support" forum (kinda/sorta) admitted to the existence of the issue, but offered nothing useful beyond that.-Stoic Joker (October 19, 2010, 06:58 AM)
