Third_Way_Idea_Brief_-_A_Taxpayer_Receipt.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Third_Way_Idea_Brief_-_A_Taxpayer_Receipt.pdf (application/pdf Object):
What You Paid For
2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying
$5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items)
4

Social Security $ 1,040.70
Medicare $ 625.51
Medicaid $ 385.28
Interest on the National Debt $ 287.03
Combat Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan $229.17
Military Personnel $192.79
Veteran’s Benefits $74.65
National Parks $ 69.36
Federal Highways $ 63.89
Health care research (NIH) $ 46.54

PolitiFact | Tim Pawlenty says the U.S. is not undertaxed compared to its competitors

PolitiFact | Tim Pawlenty says the U.S. is not undertaxed compared to its competitors: "Actually,' Marcus wrote, 'the United States is on the low end in terms of the overall tax burden -- 28 percent of gross domestic product in 2007, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compared with an average of 36 percent in the 30 OECD countries. Only South Korea, Mexico and Turkey were lower.'

By locating the OECD chart -- which is exactly what we would have done -- Marcus ably did much of our work for us. But we still wanted to check with a few tax experts to make sure that she didn't miss anything in her analysis.

Three experts we queried -- Daniel J. Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, William Ahern, the director of policy and communications at the Tax Foundation, a tax research group, and Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research -- all agreed with Marcus's conclusion, though Ahern and Mitchell took the opportunity to add some additional context.

Ahern said that tax-burden-to-GDP ratios -- the data that underlies the OECD chart -- should be used carefully because they can obscure deficits. A country with a low tax-to-GDP ratio may have a substantial deficit, and in time, that deficit will put upward pressure on taxes. So nations with low tax-to-GDP ratios may not find those ratios sustainable over the long term.

Mitchell, for his part, agreed with Marcus' point about the overall tax burden, but he noted that in the U.S., the burden from different types of taxes varies. Some types of taxes, such as corporate taxes, are among the highest of the OECD nations. Others are closer to average, such as the top income tax rate and the capital gains tax rate.

'The big reason the U.S. has a lower aggregate tax burden when measured as a share of GDP is that we don't -- yet -- have a value-added tax,' Mitchell said. 'Our payroll taxes also tend to be lower than average.'

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How Popular Is the iPhone, Really? [INFOGRAPHIC]

How Popular Is the iPhone, Really? [INFOGRAPHIC]: "nifty infographic that puts many facts about the iPhone into perspective

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Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money - Politics - GOOD

Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money - Politics - GOOD: "The richest 20 percent, represented by that blue line, has about 85 percent of the wealth. The next richest 20 percent, represented by that red line, has about 10 percent of the wealth. And the remaining three-fifths of America shares a tiny sliver of the country's wealth.

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Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch: MicroISV on a Shoestring

Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch: MicroISV on a Shoestring: "This is what kills most encryption systems in real life. You don’t have to beat encryption to beat the system, you just have to beat the weakest link in the chain around it. That almost certainly isn’t the encryption algorithm — it is some inadequacy in the larger system added by a developer who barely understands crypto but who trusts that sprinkling it in magically makes it better. Crypto is not soy sauce for security.

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Support Certificates In Your Apps with the .NET Framework 2.0

Support Certificates In Your Apps with the .NET Framework 2.0
SSL Support
The SSL authentication protocol relies on certificates. Support for SSL in the .NET Framework consists of two parts. The special (but most widely used) case of SSL over HTTP is implemented by the HttpWebRequest class (this is also ultimately used for Web service client proxies). To enable SSL, you don't have to do anything special besides specify a URL that uses the https: protocol.
When connecting to an SSL secured endpoint, the server certificate is validated on the client. If validation fails, by default the connection is immediately closed. You can override this behavior by providing a callback to a class called ServicePointManager. Whenever the HTTP client stack does certificate validation, it first checks if a callback is provided-if that's the case, it executes your code. To hook up the callback, you have to provide a delegate of type RemoteCertificateValidationCallback: Copy Code // override default certificate policy
// (for example, for testing purposes)
ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback =
new RemoteCertificateValidationCallback(VerifyServerCertificate);

Intel's upgradable processor: good sense or utter catastrophe?

Intel's upgradable processor: good sense or utter catastrophe?: "Intel is about to experiment with a new concept in mass-market processors with its forthcoming Pentium G6951 CPU: upgradability."


Instead, the company designs a few processors that can do everything ("real" variations include core count, presence of QPI connections, number of memory channels, and a few other things), and then selectively disables features. Sometimes the decision is made for Intel—a chip might have a manufacturing defect that limits the amount of cache it can use, and not all chips can run at the same frequency within a given power envelope—but a lot of the time, the company is disabling functional hardware. For example, every Pentium G6950 processor has the hardware to do hyperthreading. It's just that it's been permanently disabled at the factory, because Intel's bean-counters have decided that that particular grade of processor won't have hyperthreading

eWeek

eWeek: ". “Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.”
That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it. What ultimately snapped the wishbone and made Gosling want to holler and throw up his hands Marvin-Gaye style was that “My job seemed to be to get up on stage and be a public presence for Java for Oracle. I’m from the wrong Myers-Briggs quadrant for that,” he said."

Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock - Boing Boing

Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock - Boing Boing: "This idea, which Siva Vaidhyanathan calls 'If value, then right,' sounds reasonable on its face. But it's a principle that flies in the face of the entire human history of innovation. By this reasoning, the company that makes big tins of juice should be able to charge you extra for the right to use the empty cans to store lugnuts; the company that makes your living room TV should be able to charge more when you retire it to the cottage; the company that makes your coat-hanger should be able to charge more when you unbend it to fish something out from under the dryer.
Moreover, it's an idea that is fundamentally anti-private-property. Under the 'If value, then right' theory, you don't own anything you buy. You are a mere licensor, entitled to extract only the value that your vendor has deigned to provide you with. The matchbook is to light birthday candles, not to fix a wobbly table. The toilet roll is to hold the paper, not to use in a craft project. 'If value, then right,' is a business model that relies on all the innovation taking place in large corporate labs, with none of it happening at the lab in your kitchen, or in your skull. It's a business model that says only companies can have the absolute right of property, and the rest of us are mere tenants."

The truth about iPad: It's only good for two things | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com

The truth about iPad: It's only good for two things Tech Sanity Check TechRepublic.com: "I’ve often said, “The iPad is only good for two things: Reading and Scrabble.”"

Official Google Enterprise Blog: A more secure cloud for millions of Google Apps users

Official Google Enterprise Blog: A more secure cloud for millions of Google Apps users: "After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device"

IBM to acquire Netezza for $1.7 billion | Business Tech - CNET News

IBM to acquire Netezza for $1.7 billion Business Tech - CNET News: "The field is one that has grabbed IBM's attention in a big way. The company said that in the last four years it has invested more than $12 billion in 23 analytics-related acquisitions"

Pharyngula

Pharyngula: "I really like that last line of hers. This is why she doesn't like masturbation.

If he already knows what pleases him and can please himself, then why am I in the picture?

Because, apparently, her only purpose in the relationship is to provide a little friction, and the only way she can improve on her man's experience is by keeping him ignorant. So yes, why is she in the picture?

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FarmVillains - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly

FarmVillains - Page 1 - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly: "'I don't fucking want innovation,' the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. 'You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'

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Apple Continued To Lose U.S. Marketshare Despite Spike From iPhone 4 Sales | mocoNews

Apple Continued To Lose U.S. Marketshare Despite Spike From iPhone 4 Sales | mocoNews: "Apple’s iPhone 4 did not give the company the bump in sales it needed to put Android’s momentum in check. Instead, Apple’s smartphone marketshare in the U.S. dropped by 1.3 percent in the three months ended in July while Android’s share grew by an impressive five percentage points"

Controlling a PC, Straight from an iPad - NYTimes.com

Controlling a PC, Straight from an iPad - NYTimes.com: "You can, for $6.99. Splashtop Remote is an iPad app that pairs with a free Windows application to display your PC screen on your iPad, provided both are on the same wireless network. Splashtop is the name of a small quick-boot program that comes pre-installed on many PCs. You may know it as Lenovo Quick Start, Asus ExpressGate, or HP QuickWeb. Splashtop Remote is made by the same company, Device VM."

Criminals 'go cloud' with attacks-as-a-service | Malware - InfoWorld

Criminals 'go cloud' with attacks-as-a-service | Malware - InfoWorld: "Attacks-as-a-service"

Intel investing $30 million in software companies - Yahoo! News

Intel investing $30 million in software companies - Yahoo! News: "The investment arm of chip maker Intel is investing more than $30 million total into four different software developers.
Three of the companies, Adaptive Computing, Joyent and Nexant provide 'cloud computing' technology, which allows computer users or companies to access software and data storage space over the Web"

Boxee Box goes Intel, gets priced for preorder

Boxee Box goes Intel, gets priced for preorder: "Boxee and D-Link have announced that the upcoming Boxee Box set-top box is now available for preorder from Amazon and set to ship in November. The long-awaited device for accessing a variety of online video and content directly from a television is also ditching Tegra2 for Atom."

The Man Who Makes Your iPhone - BusinessWeek

The Man Who Makes Your iPhone - BusinessWeek: "The suicides introduced Foxconn to much of the world in the worst terms imaginable—as an industrial monster that treats its workers like machines, leveraging masses of cheap labor, mainly 18-to-25-year-olds from rural areas, to make products like the iPhone at seemingly impossible prices"

Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014

Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014: "Forecast: Mobile Communications Device Open OS Sales to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)
OS2009201020112014
Symbian80,876.3107,662.4141,278.6264,351.8
Market Share (%)46.940.134.230.2
Android6,798.447,462.191,937.7259,306.4
Market Share (%)3.917.722.229.6
Research In Motion34,346.846,922.962,198.2102,579.5
Market Share (%)19.917.515.011.7
iOS24,889.841,461.870,740.0130,393.0
Market Share (%)14.415.417.114.9
Windows Phone15,031.112,686.521,308.834,490.2
Market Share (%)8.74.75.23.9
Other Operating Systems10,431.912,588.126,017.384,452.9
Market Share (%)6.14.76.39.6
Total Market172,374.3268,783.7413,480.5875,573.8"

"Here You Have" Virus Demonstrates Need to Improve Malware Security - PCWorld Business Center

"Here You Have" Virus Demonstrates Need to Improve Malware Security - PCWorld Business Center: "The Anna Kournikova virus that spread around the world in 2001 used the exact same subject line. Here we are nearly a decade later and essentially the same attack that worked in 2001 is once again compromising tens of thousands of machines around the globe."

Avivah Litan — A Member of the Gartner Blog Network

Avivah Litan — A Member of the Gartner Blog Network
Well sorry to say, at least from a fraud detection perspective, that tagging machines and linking the machines to a user’s identity works well for identifying good guys but does nothing to help identify the bad ones. Bad guys know how to take over good-guy user machines and launch their stealth attacks from them, masquerading their true identities under the cloak of a ‘good’ PC or mobile computing device.

Of course, hardware level machine identification is a good way to tag a PC, but there are other options available that are in fact more effective at catching the crooks. One thing is obvious – fraudsters won’t let the computing devices they use to perpetrate their crimes be tagged as ‘bad.’ They will just delete the tags, if they can, or use a different PC that is either not tagged or tagged as ‘good.’

In sum, hardware level tagging of users’ computing devices is a good way to tag good users and is a good way to track them. But good security means we need to identify the bad users, not just the good ones. And this approach, on its own, does nothing to stop a bad user from taking over a good machine.

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading: "PC inspection software provides richer information than server-based clientless CDI software. It can read information from the operating system registry, serial numbers off a hard drive or the Media Access Control ID from an Ethernet card."

Online service providers, such as online banks and e-commerce sites, should start planning to phase out their reliance on Flash local storage (also referred to as local shared objects and Flash cookies) for device identification-based fraud detection, according to Gartner, Inc. Mounting global regulatory concerns over consumer privacy, and Adobe's responses with new privacy settings in its Flash player, are driving this transition.


"The days of tagging customer PCs to identify 'good' customers logging into user accounts are numbered, as regulatory privacy concerns and privacy settings in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 give end users explicit control over information downloaded to their PCs using Flash Player," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Service providers who depend on Flash to identify client devices — such as PCs — in order to prevent fraud should evaluate and implement alternative technologies."

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading
Online service providers, such as online banks and e-commerce sites, should start planning to phase out their reliance on Flash local storage (also referred to as local shared objects and Flash cookies) for device identification-based fraud detection, according to Gartner, Inc. Mounting global regulatory concerns over consumer privacy, and Adobe's responses with new privacy settings in its Flash player, are driving this transition.


"The days of tagging customer PCs to identify 'good' customers logging into user accounts are numbered, as regulatory privacy concerns and privacy settings in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 give end users explicit control over information downloaded to their PCs using Flash Player," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Service providers who depend on Flash to identify client devices — such as PCs — in order to prevent fraud should evaluate and implement alternative technologies."

Greg Brown -- Lyrics for FURTHER IN

Greg Brown -- Lyrics for FURTHER IN: "I got two little feet to get me across the mountain two little feet to carry me away into the woods two little feet big mountain and a cloud comin' down cloud comin' down cloud comin' down

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Apple Music Event Heavy on Metrics | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Apple Music Event Heavy on Metrics | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD: "300 Apple Stores in 10 countries (soon to be 11)
More than 1 million visitors to those stores on some days
120 million iOS devices sold since the first iPhone debuted
230,000 iOS devices activated each day
6.5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store to date
200 apps downloaded from the App Store each second
1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads to the iPod touch alone
250,000 apps currently available in the App Store
25,000 of those are iPad apps
275 million iPods sold to date
160 million active iTunes accounts
12 million songs in the iTunes store
11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
450 million TV episodes downloaded via iTunes
100 million movies downloaded via iTunes
35 million books downloaded via iTunes
The iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
Apple’s share of the portable gaming market: 50 percent"

AMD's Chip Architect Brad Burgess on Mobile Computing's Future | Fast Company

AMD's Chip Architect Brad Burgess on Mobile Computing's Future | Fast Company: "AMD is in a prime position to capitalize on this as it's got expertise in designing both types of processor (unlike Intel, as pretty much anyone who's ever had to rely on Intel's 'integrated graphics' solutions will attest)."

Ouch!

Scientist at Work - Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com

Scientist at Work - Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com: "While Dr. Redelmeier enjoys his patient interactions, he appears incapable of resisting the lure of a good research topic. Several years ago he compared medical school class presidents to a control group of others in the class and found that the presidents died an average 2.5 years earlier than those in the control group. The type who would run for class president, he concluded in the resulting paper, “may also be the type who fails to look after their health or is otherwise prone to early mortality.”

The idea came to him one day in a hallway at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where he had stopped to admire a century’s worth of class photos showing mostly white men.

“Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ ” Dr. Redelmeier said. “But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ” Thus was born another Redelmeier classic.

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My Way News - Arizona governor stumbles during debate

My Way News - Arizona governor stumbles during debate: "'We have, uh, did what was right for Arizona,'
AZ Governor Jan Brewer showing her true intellectual prowess

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com: "Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Not only is this novel a celebration of the monastic life of scholars, but it is also a series of lessons about science, math and philosophy. A group of young researchers first discover, then analyze, an object that has arrived in orbit around their planet, and we learn with them about the most rational way to approach that which is truly alien. Theories of mind and matter are the subjects of entire chapters in this story about the struggle between logic and superstition

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The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions

The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions: "An Electronic Passport is the same as a traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit (or “chip”) embedded in the back cover. The chip stores:
The same data visually displayed on the data page of the passport;
A biometric identifier in the form of a digital image of the passport photograph, which will facilitate the use of face recognition technology at ports-of-entry;
The unique chip identification number; and
A digital signature to protect the stored data from alteration"