The 47% figure is rather misleading because it only refers to the percentage of people paying federal income tax. It turns out there are multiple federal taxes on income, only one of which is called the federal income tax. Most of those 47% pay the payroll tax which is a regressive income tax. For detailed numbers see this chart which Google image search found on this CNN Money video. For those that don't want to click the link, the breakdown according to CNN is 53.6% pay income tax and the rest not paying income tax are split up as 28.6% pay payroll tax, 10.3% elderly with no income tax, 6.9% non-elderly with income under $20,000, and 1% other.

Once you eliminate people paying income/payroll tax and the retired elderly, that leaves at most 8% not retired but not making enough money to owe federal taxes. Some of those are unable to work. Some of those are unable to find a job. Some small proportion might really be lazy and leeching off the system like you are worried about... but that is almost certainly much less than 8% of the population and definitely a lot less than 47% of the population.

On top of that, remember this entire discussion is only about federal taxes. There are also state taxes, which are pretty universally regressive. Particularly, most states have a sales tax which hits the poor much harder as anyone earning so little they aren't paying income tax is probably buying necessities with all the money they do earn and therefore immediately paying sales tax on a large proportion of their income.

This article that I came across while searching for those figures tells a similar story with more exposition and citations.

Posting to remove accidental negative moderation.

I agree. Computer users should not need to know the inner details of how everything works on their computer in order to use it. Also, this goes back to my sig: having (effectively) a single video sharing website on the internet is bad because it can unilaterally do things like this.

I'm actually not clear on exactly how copyright works for the source code of closed-source products. My understanding was that the source is never published, so it is never copyrighted. Instead, I would expect it to be protected as a trade secret. That said, copyright of the binaries of a published product should be the same as the copyright on the source code, but presently there is no incentive for Microsoft to release the source code when their copyright expires (as that won't be for a very long time, they will have likely lost the source or simply no longer exist by the time that happens anyway).

The siblings have covered a lot of the issues with your suggestion. Wikipedia's page on philosophy of copyright might be informative as well. Other common arguments include the tragedy of the anticommons (having rightsholders for everything means doing anything new requires negotiating with too many different rightsholders) and the general fact that essentially all creative works build on prior creative works in some way, either direct retellings like many of Disney's movies or more indirectly like many fantasy books have elves that look a lot like those in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

There is also the complication that IP covers a lot of different things. Particularly I think there is a difference between artistic works like a novel and utilitarian works like Windows (and that there is not necessary a clear line between the two), but they are both covered by copyright under the exact same terms. Having copyright act differently for different works sounds messy and should probably be avoided in order to keep the law sensible, but both types of work have to be considered when arguing for how copyright should work.

For artistic works, the idea is that any published work is part of the collective culture and anyone should be able to build on it... with the exception that the author should have a limited monopoly on it in order to make money off of it. By having that time get too long, you get absurdities like the copyright status of the song "Happy Birthday to You" where the song has become part of American culture.

For utilitarian works, I think the argument might be closer to patents: the government wants to give some protection to new inventions in order to ensure a profit motive for developing them, but other companies should have access to old inventions in order to build on them. This doesn't quite work with software because there is no requirement tor release source code in order to get copyright on software. Of course, binaries alone can be useful and with effort can be modified to some extent if necessary.

The correct time-frame for both of those arguments is subjective and may be different, so the number that appears in copyright law should be a compromise between the two.

I am not sure if this is exactly what you want, but you could get pretty close by setting your foe modifier to -6 (assuming you never browse at -1, of course) and marking those users as foes (and perhaps removing them from your foes list later if you think they might write something you would want to read in a later discussion). You can set modifiers here, which I got to by clicking on the score of a comment and clicking the edit link next to a modifier. Also, if you do want to block any comments from the sibling poster, you can set your anonymous modifier to -6.

Corn means maize in the US and some other places, but elsewhere it is a generic term for cereal crops. Perhaps the parent (or the author of the parent's source) is from one of those other countries.

There is one. It's called a convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution. If two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures call for a constitutional convention, then Congress is obligated to arrange for a national convention during which any arbitrary amendments to the constitution can be proposed (the legality of the "arbitrary" part is not entirely clear due to the lack of precedence). They do not go into effect unless ratified by 3/4th of the states, though. See also: Second Constitution of the United States.

I am curious about your experiences with the Nokia N9 as I was planning on buying one in part due to liking the Nokia N810 and being able to use it as a pocket-sized Linux computer (I never got an N900). I had thought it was pretty easy to get access to a root terminal and do whatever on it just like the N810. Is this not the case?

O_o How did I manage to double post? I did get a "resource not valid" error the first time I tried to post, but I reloaded the thread and my post wasn't there...

This is certainly not a new idea. It is sometimes referred to as the "rapture of the nerds" version of a technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a big fan of the idea and one of the major proponents.

As to the actual feasibility, I ran across Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap a little while ago, which discusses the possibility given our current knowledge of how the brain works. It provides dates on how long Moore's Law would have to continue based on varyingly optimistic assumptions about how much work is necessary to actually emulate a brain.

Overall, I think there are two main problems with expecting immortality via brain uploading: (1) 40+ years is a very long time to assume Moore's Law for and (2) even if we can emulate a human brain, scanning an existing one and transferring it into a computer may not be possible.

This is certainly not a new idea. It is sometimes referred to as the "rapture of the nerds" version of a technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a big fan of the idea and one of the major proponents.

As to the actual feasibility, I ran across Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap a little while ago, which discusses the possibility given our current knowledge of how the brain works. It provides dates on how long Moore's Law would have to continue based on varyingly optimistic assumptions about how much work is necessary to actually emulate a brain.

Overall, I think there are two main problems with expecting immortality via brain uploading: (1) 40+ years is a very long time to assume Moore's Law for and (2) even if we can emulate a human brain, scanning an existing one and transferring it into a computer may not be possible.

The GP is referring to the Physical (or "strong") Church–Turing thesis which says that all physical processes (including, say, any computation done by the human brain) are Turing-computable. I do not know if Turing or Church actually suggested that version or if only later computer scientists came up with it. It cannot actually be proven without a much better understanding of physics, but it is generally believed to be true.

Less importantly, e-mail verification: the third party is providing a federated e-mail verification service, which Mozilla hopes is a service which will be done by the e-mail provider but is also providing themselves (as well as allowing any other third-party to offer).

More importantly, by taking the [very common] assumption that control of the e-mail address for an account is equivalent to control of an account, this appears to essentially give the decision of which public keys are tied to an account to whoever controls the e-mail address. That means that having multiple devices with different keys is easy, and, more importantly, losing all of your private keys is not a problem as the public keys can be changed as long as you can still log into your e-mail. Of course, the downside to this is that, as far as I can tell, your e-mail provider can now log into any of your accounts without resetting the password. In fact, I am not seeing why this would not give Mozilla (or any other trusted third-party) the ability to log into any account supporting this. (Of course, to be fair, an OpenID provider has the same power and this has the additional advantage that the provider does not need to be told which websites the user is logging into.)

Using SSL Client Certificates, either each host you use would have to have the same certificate or each service you use would have to know about every public key you use. Or, I guess, you could give the service a public key used to sign the keys you do use, but then you would still have the problem of needing to use e-mail verification to recover if you lost your keys.