Personally, I would agree with you entirely.

Now, everyone has their own preference on what a "simplified" tax code would look like.

For myself, I'd use something similar to an S-curve. Maybe even use that family of curves directly. What you want is for those who earn very little to pay very little, for there to be a region where this increases substantially (because life ain't cheap, even when you can use scale efficiencies meaningfully), and for an asymptotic region for the mega-wealthy. You feed in the expected earnings for the year, you integrate over the curve, and you divide by 12. That's the tax per month for the financial year. If a person changes earnings, either due to a raise, unemployment, or whatever, you use a weighted average, recalculate, then subtract what has already been paid.

This is simple, quick, easy, and only requires that you have expected earnings reported to somewhere central, which needs to be true for taxes anyway.

No tax brackets, no deductions, just a straight calculation by a computer. And, as computers do the taxes anyway these days, that's not much of a hardship. You simply set the parameters for the curve to be such that nobody really needs anything to be deductable.

I'm sure there will be plenty of others who advocate flat taxes or other schemes, and some of those may even work out better than what I'm suggesting. I have no ego at stake here, so if others can do better, go for it. My point is not that my idea is somehow good, it's rather that we can indeed close the loopholes and simplify the tax code - enormously - without creating massive unfairness and without having to rely on naive assumptions about economies.

Except, a hundred years ago, they didn't. And the government knows this. As do many in the public. The taxes in the 1960s and 70s were around 90% for the rich, not 5%, and yet billionaires stayed in America.

You can hate taxes all you like, but even with posting, you're using services that were invented because those taxes existed and for no other reason. The commercial sector FAR preferred the X.25 technology they were using, because they could charge a fortune and get away with it. You have Internet today because of those taxes you loathe.

And I can sympathise with that stance, too. He was in a position of authority and misused that position, escalating rather than de-escalating the situation.

The problem a lot of us on the outside have is that we can't know all the details, we can't know all the ins and outs of the situation, so I'm trying to be fair to all sides whilst not approving or condoning any behaviours that were abusive by any side. It's a very delicate line to walk, with only one side presented. Hence all the hedging in my post regarding how honest or accurate the OP is.

Players I can understand being heated - their emotional investment is, after all, absolute and total. It has to be, at that level. But the players appear to be the calmest and most rational of all the sides. I'm impressed there.

Instead of dealing with the issue privately, calmly, and respectfully, the judges decided to push the issue, causing the winner and the defeated player to demand an explanation, and another judge to go nuclear. Going nuclear is rarely the best option, but is frequently the only meaningful option because the other side has made any kind of civil discourse impossible due to their conduct and attitude.

Whilst I cannot judge what happened at the tournament, as I wasn't there, I can judge that the complete breakdown in communication was the fault of the judges - as they are the ones responsible for managing that communication and the situation. "They're only human" is to ignore the fact that if you assume a position of responsibility, then you are the one responsible and if you're not up to the job then that is indeed your fault. If you're not capable of handling responsibility, then you're not capable of handling positions of authority. It really is that simple.

Rex may have overstepped bounds, in order to try and force the judges to actually have some sense, but that is when you CALM THE SITUATION DOWN. You do NOT inflame it further. Competent figures of authority have an obligation to de-escalate situations that are spiralling out of control in order to ensure that everyone gets heard and everyone is happy - or at least happier. The judges were clearly not competent.

Does that mean Rex was competent, or that he should be given a license to violate confidences? No. He was also in a position of authority, albeit in other respects, and that means that he needed to be competent too and to de-escalate. However, I am sympathetic to his stance and feel that his attitude was probably the more understandable and rational, to the extent that the information in the OP is correct.

The players concerned are the only ones I consider to be wholly innocent in this matter and the only ones who seem to be interested in handling it maturely. They got emotional, nerds and geeks do that. And, yes, the table should have been set up to cope. They have decided who morally won, regardless of who technically won, and I consider that their right.

Newbie.

Nobody "forces". Nobody "leeches". (Unless they're called Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Ubuntu...) But not because of any mystery - but because open source is about scratching itches. AND THERE IS NO OBLIGATION THAT THE ITCHES BE YOURS.

For f's sake, you're a bloody idiot if you honestly think that capitalist concepts of motivation are remotely interesting. Indeed, you should read the psychology paper on the FSF website and learn how people actually work.

I am perfectly happy to maintain the drivers, I don't NEED the hardware because I know that the drivers worked previously (and worked perfectly well). The only thing I need to do is to ensure that the connection to the kernel is working correctly and that the communication with the bus is working corrctly. Neither of which is exactly difficult. Any dweeb can do that. The device is an irrelevancy. If it's not under development, then the API can't change. That should be obvious, even to an idiot like you.

The drivers have, however, been removed from the kernel, so the issue is moot. However, that too is an irrelevancy. It is NOT HARD to maintain this stuff. The stuff I've done for work was hard. Developing the drivers in the first place would have been hard. But all the hard work has been done. This is simply logic to interface correctly to modern kernels and get the instructions over a modern bus. And that's trivial. There is no actual hard stuff left to do, that was all done.

You seem to think that us programmers care about money. Some might, and frankly I don't hold anything but contempt for them. I care about doing a good job. Yes, it's nice to have a roof over my head, but that's something a regular job can do. If there was universal income, I'd still be writing software and maintaining systems, same as I do today, but I'd be willing to do so for free because it's stuff I enjoy. Computers are actually worth talking you. You, not so much. Frankly, people like you could get run over by a bus tomorrow and it wouldn't bother me. I hold money grubbers like yourself somewhere between contempt and disgust.

Far as I'm concerned, I'm paid only because it's necessary in the current economic climate, because politicians are too stupid to cope with the idea that people ENJOY technical stuff.

Back when Freshmeat was running, I was managing 120 records for Open Source projects, ran 5 of my own, maintained 7 MUDs/MUSHes, an IPv6 node on the 6Bone, ran assorted mainling lists, and provided an open web cache and search engine for anyone in the north of England wanting to access the Internet faster than the transatlantic link provided at the time. I did this for free, because it was trivial, fun, and provided a service to others. I barely noticed the workload because it wasn't work.

I don't "force" others. Nor am I "forced". Such imagery is for the morons of this world, which you clearly identify yourself as being. I exist, therefore I do.

Now, I *DO* have the knowledge to write and maintain Linux drivers - and have done so professionally.

I am willing to write code under an open source license for free - and have done that as well.

Anyone who claims "proficiency" in a language has missed the entire point of programming. You design software around a paradigm, the syntactic sugar is an irrelevancy. Which is why I can use something in the order of 20-25 languages with effective fluency and around 17 operating systems. Because I simply don't care about the trivia, and care only about the mechanics.

Open Source is not, and never has been, about the money.

That surprises me. Obviously, if it's true it's true, but with satellite Internet availability decided by politics, and Internet traffic regularly monitored, I'd have thought some people in remote communities would prefer alternatives. I've been known to be wrong on occasion, and if this happens to be such an occasion, then ok. It just seems... odd that people desperate to be seen as independent and off the regular grid would deliberately not use technology that would permit them to communicate long-distance on a grid they themselves had control over.

Never talk about fig....No, wait, that's management.

To do QA well is very very hard, but you have to absolutely hammer everything, test extremes, etc. If the QA people are playing it safe, it's because they're nervous that it's a really bad product. QA should haunt the dreams of developers and fill them with existential dread, to the point they don't make silly mistakes.

It is. The reviews and "we did this amazing pocket-protector design by AI" columns don't really tell us what AI can do, what the limits are, and where the problems lie. As long as AI is never used for anything that you'd actually want/need help with, this isn't something anyone can really answer.

Can AI design a piston engine? If the answer to that is yes, then it's obviously capable of handling incredibly intricate constraints and optimisation.

Chances are, the answer is no, but it'd be good to know. The other designs are lower complexity and have a much narrower band of areas they combine.

I would need to know how well these would work, but the ultimate goal is to develop a large set of such projects, each testing different permutations of abilities the AI would need to have to do anything useful at this level of complexity.

Once I have a heat-map of AI talent, then people can use AI where it's actually better. And we really don't know that right now.

Nobody comes up with interesting conspiracy theories, they're all boring and much of a muchness.

To combat this, I am working on some next-gen conspiracy theories which will improve this shoddy market.

1. Line noise was caused not by faulty connectors, but by a herd of buffalo that wandered onto the networks by mistake when someone left the back of a network cabinet open. What you were hearing was the buffalo grazing on passing connections.

2. Symphonic metal was invented as a way to smuggle the elder gods, disguised as musicians. to Earth without anyone noticing. This explains the typical themes of songs and why Odin and Loki have played bass for Nightwish.

3. The missing Doctor Who stories were all penned by actual Time Lords. The High Council found out and tried to erase them from existence.

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.