This past week I had a very interesting debate with JoeUser's resident socialist, Col Gene. He is always trying to find new and creative ways to advocate higher taxes on anyone who makes more money than he does. His argument always boils down to the deficit and that rich people can afford it.  The former argument is nonsensical because politicans will simply spend all they get and more. The latter is a classic socialist argument.  Below is some of the conversation.

Wealth isn't distributed. In a capitalistic society, wealth is earned. Person A provides Person B with a product or service in exchange for money.

Of course. That's because social security is CAPPED. There's only so much you pay in and that's how much gets paid back. 

What does fairness have to do with it. If I make $1 million and put $60k into a bank aboutn I am putting in .6%. On the other hand, if I make $20k and put in $1000 into the bank then I am putting in 5%.  So what is your point?

Social Security is, in theory, supposed to be a retirement plan by the government.  If I were emperor, I would do away with it entirely and then no one would have to put anything into it.

There are so many things wrong with this statement I'm not sure where to begin.

First, what we pay in has nothing to do with whether we can afford it or not. The government, like the electric company, exists to provide its individual citizens with a service.  Stealing one man's earned income to give to another is wrong.

Secondly, you clearly have no idea of what the "rich" do with money. You are correct in that their lifestyles wouldn't change if you taxed them more. That isn't the point. The people with the highest incomes INVEST their money. That's HOW you get rich in the first place. You keep investing your money to make more money.  That investment is what creates jobs, opportunity, and new goodies for us to use. 

Taxing the rich more won't hurt the rich personally, but it will, in the long-run, hurt everyone else through fewer jobs, a slower increasing in standard of living.

Moreover, the # of Americans who don't have access to "basic needs" is trivial. I've mentioned this before but the poorest 25% of Americans live pretty well on average. Most have DVD players, TVs, Internet access, cars, and a slight majority of them even own their own home. They even get free medical care via Medicaid.  But even that's irrelevant. It is not the responsibility of the government to give away other people's earned money to other people.

You basically see the government as something that RULES us. This is completely contrary to what the founding fathers intended.  They saw the government as a glorified neighborhood association. For the first hundred years or so, the govenrment only taxed for services rendered.
 

You are correct, it wouldn't affect my lifestyle. I'd just have to lay off a worker or two because that's where my excess income goes to -- investing in my business.

I have also pointed out, repeatedly, that it is well known that the budget would be easily balanced if we simply FROZE spending increases for a couple years. No cuts needed. Just quit increasing spending until the tax receipts catch up.  The tax recepts of the federal government have nearly doubled since Bush came in. Imagine the surplus we would have if they hadn't increased spending at an even faster rate.

So you admit social security is a pyramid scheme. 

I also work but see it as a moral obligation to help my family myself and not rely on the government.  Free citizens do not need the government to do the right thing. They do the right thing because they are free people.  I'm sorry you need the government to intercede for to take care of your parents and grandparents.

The issue that socialists have is that they want the government to take over the economy.  For the past 60 years, the normal level of government intrusion in the economy has been around 18%. By 1998, the government had managed to get to over 21% of the economy. Something needed to be done -- tax cuts. 

Take a look at this graph from the CBO:

Historically, the federal government was only confiscating around 18% of the generated wealth of the country. Bush helped get it back to something approaching normal. As you can see, however, social security is slowly going to intrude more and more as you get out into the future. Socialists think that's a good thing. They prefer the government rule us.

The basic problem with most socialists is that they have no understanding of economics. They  think if we just raise taxes everything will be fine. But that's not how it works. If you raise taxes, you are simply shifting wealth from the private sector into the public sector.  And who has a better track record of producing wealth? People like me or some clueless politician in Washington? 

Moreover, even if you raised taxes the 40% needed on the wealth to balance the budget next year, it would only be a temporary solution. In other countries, the government represents up to 30% of the GDP and guess what? They have debts too. Governments will always spend what they get because they have an incentive to do so. 

That is why the tax recepts and spending receipts aren't a good measure of what our tax rate should be.  The real question is, what % of our economy do we want the government confiscating.  Once you make that decision, then it's just a matter of the government living within its needs and making sure enough taxes are being collected to meet that number.

Look closely at this graph.  The government's tax income today is the same as it was when Bush came in.  Yet we have these scary deficits you mention.   So what is the cause then? Spending. We increased spending across the board:

You see the problem? Since Bush came in, spending just went berserk. And it's not because of the Iraq war alone. The government went on a spending spree.

So to sum up:

1. Rich people are rich because they invest their money.
2. If you tax the rich more, it won't affect their lifestyle but it will mean they have less to invest (look at how quickly the economy jumped back largely thanks to the tax cuts).
3. If the rich invest less, people lose jobs.
4. It is immoral IMO to advocate that the government should confiscate money from one person to hand to another who provided no service to the original person.
5. Tax rates and spending levels are the wrong metric. It's what % of the economy you want the government to be involved in.
6. We have a deficit today because we increased spending.
7. Tax cuts are why the economy grew so fast after the recession.

The reason why the United States has been at the forefront of economic progress is because we have laws that encourage people to work very hard.  The moment you start penalizing people from working hard, the worse off all of us are.  I work on average 55 to 70 hours per week depending on how busy I am.  I do that all year round. I take maybe 2 weeks off per year (which is really just making up all the weekends I work).  As it stands today,  I am working about 20 to 30 hours per week for the government. That is, I'm working what amounts to nearly a second full-time job just to pay for the government.

And I support paying taxes because my country does so mcuh for me.  What I don't support is the government confiscating my income to give to others who hasn't earned it.  I think it's a toxic, evil thing for a government to do. It robs the earner of freedom and it saps the will out of the receiver. It's certainly not compassionate.

Free men and women control their own destiny. When we give power to the men with guns, we cease being free.

 

In a new Macintosh advertisement, the PC has what looks like a body guard who keeps interupting the conversation with the Mac in the name of  "security".  The feature Apple is making fun of is called the User Account Control.

The idea behind UAC is to protect users from malicious software and other content that could affect the stability and integrity of the user's computer.  But many users have expressed utter disdain for it. As a result, UAC ends up being disabled by users much to the chagrin of Microsoft.

But what if there was a different solution? What if third-parties were able to modify how UAC worked?

For example, imagine the UAC remembering what users had given it permission to previously? Right now, every time I open up Stardock Central, I'm prompted by UAC. Very annoying.  What if after I selected "continue" it saved Stardock Central and its checksum such that it wouldn't come up again for that program as long as it was unchanged?

Another example would be after I select continue on the UAC, the account remains in an elevated state for say 5 minutes (or some user-defined time) so that anything else that needs UAC would automatically be passed.

I think just these two changes would significantly improve the usability of UAC to the point where most of the complaints would go away.

And I think these kinds of changes are absolutely necessary because, right now, users are just turning it off completely which is definitely not a good thing. You should definitely not turn off UAC but it is very understandable how annoying its current implementation can tend to be.

Microsoft has stated that any attempt to alter the functionality of UAC would be considered a security violation that would be dealt with accordingly. It's scary sounding stuff.  But if the alternative is that millions simply turn off this functionality or the bad reputation of UAC slows migration to Windows Vista then what's the best path? 

Which brings us back, should third-parties like Stardock step in and fix UAC on their own?  Or should the user base wait and hope that Microsoft enhances the UAC experience?

 

As the # of animated wallpapers submitted increases, we're having to establish some guidelines on what is and isn't going to be accepted:

1. Content MUST loop. An animated wallpaper should have a reasonably transitioning loop.
   
2. Do NOT submit content other people's work without their permission. We are allowing some leeway right now on this rule for content that is based on content distributed on the net until we determine the legality of this.
   
3. Content must be high-definition. That means the vertical resolution needs to be at least 720 pixels.
   

Additional rules on fair use of video clips:

Fair Use allows for the limited reuse of copyrighted material so long as it is not done for financial gain of the person reusing the work, nor does it financially harm the original author by denying them sales etc.  In the case of Dream animated wallpapers, users can make limited reuse of video files created by other authors provided they meet the following requirements:

1. The animations used in the .Dream file is either 15 seconds in length of shorter OR less than 25% of the original video file in length (whichever is shorter).  So if you found a 20 second video you want to use in a Dream, you can use no more than 5 seconds of that video.  Anything else, you are limited to 15 seconds.
2. You provide credit to the original author in the skin comments AND provide a link to your original source.
3. Understand that if the original owner of the work asks us to take it down, provided proof of ownership, we will comply immediately.

Failure to comply with these fair use rules will result in an item being rejected from the submission queue. 

If you find your work is being redistributed here against your wishes, please contact a site admin with some form of proof that you own the original work, and we will remove the offending entry immediately.

Today Stardock Design released its first "Master" Dream to the Dream (animated wallpaper) gallery. It's the one Microsoft showed off at some of its events.  As some know, Microsoft worked with Stardock to make some of the animated wallpapers for use with Windows DreamScene. Windows DreamScene (the software) is a feature for Windows Vista Ultimate users.  Most of the content we created for Microsoft hasn't been released yet (it will be available from Microsoft).  In the process of creating the animated wallpapers for Microsoft, we made a bunch of extra ones for WinCustomize.com which had nothing to do with our work with Microsoft.

So far, Stardock Design has released 6 free .Dreams and 1 premium .Dream.  On top of that, Stardock has released DeskScapes as freeware and DreamMaker as freeware.  And of course, we host the Dreams here on WiniCustomize which, on their own, used over 2 TERRABYTES of bandwidth.  So from our vantage point, Stardock's been "the good guy". Providing lots of free stuff, lots of free software and providing a free site to get it on. 

But Stardock's also a business. The costs of producing all this has to be made up somewhere or else we wouldn't be able to keep doing it.  But some people seem to be very vocal in their outrage that artists won't work for free. They'll happily pay Microsoft $400 for Windows Vista Ultimate but cry bloody murder about paying third party artists $4.95 for content.  My Xbox 360 cost quite a bit too but amazingly, the games aren't free. Those "greedy" game companies! 

Here's some of the comments on Blissful Sunset:

"It's absolutely ridiculous that they're charging for this-- it's just wrong. But for people who own Vista Ultimate, just wait, I guarantee you that this will come w/ the final Dreamscene when it's released. "

According to this user, it's morally wrong for artists to be paid for their work.  He's quite incorrect about Blissful Sunset coming with the final.

Another user wrote this:

"The implication (with MS showing it at official events) is that this development is work that was part of your contract with MS and therefore has already been subsidized and is in fact being paid for by all of us by our shelling out extra bucks for Ultimate edition."

This falls under the "no good deed goes unpunished" category.  Microsoft was looking for high quality content to show off during their demos but didn't want to give away some of the stuff that will be coming in the final release so they asked us if they could show the extra content we made. We agreed to let them. After all, it's pretty cool to see your work up on stage. But this person (and others) have tried to argue that we should simply give away all the animated wallpaper for free that we've made because we made the ones that come with it.  How does that make sense?

Over at Valve's Steam website, a user posted "Stardock sux" and writes:

"This is just unbelievable. Stardock is now charging us for what is supposed to be a FREE Vista Ultimate Extra"

This line of thinking is equivalent to saying that someone who bought say Half-Life 2 via Steam is somehow entitled to HL2: Episode 0 and HL2: Episode 1 and so forth. After all, they paid for Half-Life, why should they have to pay for additional content?  In fact, that's been one of the trends in the "outrage" group. Sure, there's 18 dreams that are free. But they shouldn't have to pay for anything because they bought Windows Vista Ultimate. I just totally can't grasp that mindset.  In what universe does someone buying a version of Windows entitle them to free software and content created by third parties?  Heck, my cell phone tries to get me to pay money for additional ring tones!

So here's what's going to happen -- one of these 2 things are going to occur:

Possibility #1: Users decide animated wallpaper is worthless.  In that case, Stardock Design won't be creating any more for consumers. Remember, Stardock Design currently has a 6 to 1 ratio in free to premium content.  At that point, consumers would just have to hope that individual artists  --who understand that there's no chance they'll ever be able to even make some extra side income from their efforts-- will take the time to create spectacular animated wallpapers that loop perfectly and are encoded in high quality at high-definition. Maybe that would happen but I wouldn't count on it.

In addition, since the bandwidth bill would still exist, users would have to buy WinCustomize subscriptions to download after awhile.  So the "free beer" crowd would have to find their content elsewhere. But don't count on these being available on most sites. At 50+ megabytes a pop, it's a lot of bandwidth. Someone has to pay for it.

And of course, that would mean the software would have to start charging for extra features. Want to pay 3D dynamic content? The user would have to get the "Pro" version.  The point being, the costs of producing, supporting, and developing this stuff has to come from somewhere. Personally, I think a system which nearly everything is free but a handful of premium content isn't free is a pretty good arrangement for everyone.

Possibility #2: Enough users decide that there's value to animated wallpaper. If something comes along that is of exceptional quality happens to ask for a few bucks, then it's worth buying.  In that event, what would happen is that it would attract more and more talented people who would submit lots of free ones in the hope of eventually being able to occasionally release premium ones to help recoup their time and costs. It's worth mentioning one more time - Stardock Design's free to non-free ratio so far is 6 to 1. If other studios and independent artists of great skill start to do the same, that sounds like a win-win.

So far, the results have been good. In the first 4 hours of "Blissful Sunset" we sold over 200 copies of it. Whether that trend continues remains to be seen. There's always a big bump at the beginning. The typical WindowBlinds Master skin has an initial bump and then eventually trends to around 5 per day after awhile.  But even 5 per day, put over time, is worth it.  The author's share of that ends up being around $3,500 per year per skin (not counting the initial bump) -- enough to buy a new computer.  But skins are different because it's an established thing.  Animated wallpapers are brand-new. How things progress with animated wallpaper remains to be seen.

 

WindowBlinds 5.5 has gone into final release candidate mode.  WindowBlinds is the program that enables users to change the look and feel of the Windows GUI to whatever they'd like. Version 5.5 adds support for Windows Vista. This week, Stardock plans to release WindowBlinds 5.5 officially to Object Desktop users and registered users of WindowBlinds.

Making WindowBlinds work on Windows Vista was non-trivial. There were two challenges Stardock had to make WindowBlinds work on Vista. 

The first challenge Stardock has faced with running WindowBlinds on Windows Vista is the most obvious -- there are over 5,000 skins already made for WindowBlinds. Since Windows Vista has a lot of new user interface parts, Stardock had to find a way to take skins designed for Windows XP and make them look native to Windows Vista.  The result was a new technology called SmartSkinning(tm) which automatically converts pieces of a skin to be used on new controls.

The second challenge is making use of the new Desktop Window Manager (DWM) on Vista.  Rather than simply "port" WindowBlinds onto Windows Vista, Stardock wanted to make sure that WindowBlinds made use of the new 3D accelerated desktop that Windows Vista users have.  The result is that WindowBlinds 5.5 isn't just faster on Windows Vista (due to making use of some off-screen caching that Aero doesn't make use of) than Aero, it uses much less power. In a recent internal test involving Dell and Lenova laptops, a machine running WindowBlinds gained an extra 42 minutes in battery life over the one running Aero. 

Along with working on WindowBlinds, Stardock has a new version of SkinStudio in development that makes it easier to create Windows Vista specific skins. A shareware version of WindowBlinds 5.5 will be made available later this month.

 

Legendary skin author, Essorant, has created his first Master skin for WindowBlinds.  Nuage is a subtle but outstanding looking skin that works on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Check it out!

 

 

Windows DreamScene is Microsoft's animated wallpaper program that's currently in "preview" (beta) for users of Windows Vista Ultimate.  So far, reactions have been mixed.

While users seem to love the concept, the amount of CPU used to do it seems to vary wildly.  From 12% or so on my ThinkPad T60 to nearly 50% on systems that are much faster.

The difference? So far, it basically can be thrown to the feet of nVidia. Their drivers, which not only seem to crash PC games do double-duty in being very inefficient with DreamScene.

Below are the results on my laptop. Note the very low (as in not great) performance rating and yet its relatively low CPU use while running a DreamScene. It has an ATI card.

 

Lest someone thinks I have it out for nVidia, my primray machine has two nVidia 7950s in it. I just wish nVidia would take its drivers more seriously. They were crummy on Windows XP. Some may recall how you'd see reports about how WindowBlinds or WindowFX "slowed my machine to a crawl" and called our software bloated not realizing that no, our stuff runs great if the drivers are decent (like the ATI ones or the occasional nVidia one).

Now, Microsoft is getting a taste of what we've gone through. Maybe this time, nVidia will be motivated to worry about desktop drivers rather than trying to show they can get an extra frame per sec in a first person shooter.

Still, if you have a good machine, nVidia or ATI, the CPU use isn't a big deal in actual use, especially if the .DREAM file's content is in MPEG and not WMV (WMV is more CPU intensive).  And hopefully soon nVidia's drivers will get better. Because I want to get an Geforce 8800 but am not going to get one until they fix this stuff.

 

Great article about an intern's experience at the 3 major search giants.

Read the whole thing.

 

Modders like LogicSequence help make GalCiv II even better

One of the lesser known features of Galactic Civilizations II is just how moddable it is. Players can replace art, add to it, add ships, techs, planets, improvements, UI, you name it.

As a side note: Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition should be appearing at retail this week. It integrates the original GalCiv II with the brand-new Dark Avatar expansion pack as a single game.

Have fun!

Read the whole thing...