Yeah, typically. I have found times when it was cheaper to buy something in a store and pay sales tax, than it was to order it online and pay shipping. I have found other times where it wasn't.
What this is really about is the states getting their "fair" share of the money that's in circulation. They look at it this way: You live in jurisdiction X. You sat in front of your computer in X where you placed your order for a product from a company in jurisdiction Y. The product is taxable in X. It is being shipped to X where it will presumably be used in X. Therefore, you owe tax in X on that purchase/use.
Where it gets tricky is when I am in jurisdiction X and I order something from jurisdiction Y to be shipped as a gift to someone in jurisdiction Z. Is Z or X owed the tax, now? Also, what about Y? Don't you think that before too long they are going to want a piece of the action, and that they will come up with some kind of variation of a sales or use tax that they can slap onto merchants who operate or ship from their jurisdictions? Well, maybe not if they're keen on having jobs in their economy.
What it comes down to now is that in America the gov't at all levels has a sense of entitlement to your money. While the rich have a sense of entitlement to not pay taxes. Just look at the IRS' own numbers on who pays more of their income in taxes and you'll see very plainly what is going on in the U.S. and what has been going on since the '70s, if not longer.
Massachusetts, Representative Delahunt's home state, is one such state. The income tax forms' instructions also contain a chart that if you pay X dollars on this line based on your income, then the state won't say you owe more if they audit you. Of course, that amount excludes purchases of $1,000 or more. On those, you are to report the full amount owed. They typically call it a "Use Tax," and I mostly grew up in Kentucky which has pretty much the same laws, and it is typically charged at the same rate as a sales tax.
I live about 1 mile (1.6 km for those with a rational measurement system) from the border with New Hampshire, a state that does not have a sales tax. (They do have a service tax on restaurant meals and hotel visits, etc. that is higher than the sales tax and similar taxes in Massachusetts.) There has also been a lot of bluster from Massachusetts lately, including some court cases where the judge basically said "What, are you crazy?" to the Mass. AG, about having certain businesses on the NH side of the border collect Mass. sales tax on Mass. residents who buy from them. The latest row was over car parts and tires.
Interestingly, the car dealerships in Salem, NH (the fist town you come to if you cross the border where I live) do collect the Mass. sales taxes and will often handle your Mass. vehicle registration, etc. as would a Mass. car dealer.
The reason that states like Mass. want the business owner to collect the taxes is that they know that they cannot rely on self-reporting by the tax payer to get the amount of tax that they say that they are owed. I typically report the minimum listed by our family's income in the chart, just to be safe, because I do not keep track of purchases that I make in New Hampshire. My wife and I typically shop at several store in Salem, NH because they are physically closer to our house than other stores that might carry the same goods in Mass. We do NOT do it to avoid paying sales tax. However, we typically buy more food than anything else at these stores, and food is exempt from sales and use tax in Massachusetts. The taxable goods that we buy in these stores are typically smaller items, such as household necessities: cleaning powders and fluids, batteries, etc. We occasionally buy toys for our daughter, books and other inexpensive items.
By reporting the minimum, I'm hedging my bets if audited (not likely to happen since we don't really make enough to raise any flags) and in our case we could be over reporting the amount we actually owe. I don't know anyone who has said to me that they shop in New Hampshire to avoid paying sales tax. Typically, it's a convenience thing because the closest outlet of the particular store that you want to visit to get something is just a couple miles away in New Hampshire or 20 miles away in Bedford, MA. I have heard, of course, that people do all their shopping in New Hampshire to avoid sales tax, but no one has ever told me that they do this, and none of my friends or my wife's relations seem to do this, since they seem to always get the same goods or types of goods at the same store in Mass. and in NH.
Personally, I think the constitutionality of the Use Tax is dubious, but then I think the constitutionality of nearly everything done by gov't at all levels today is dubious. I pay the use tax simply to keep out of trouble. The few dollars that it costs me in a typical refund is nothing compared the aggravation of an audit and then having to prove that you don't owe whatever the state says you owe on out of state purchases.
Someone who made the point above about getting gov't to reduce spending and reduce taxation has an excellent point. Those of us who work for a living and those who have a "fixed" income have to learn to live within a certain budget. The gov't ought to be held to the same standard and they ought to be required to function on a fixed budget. They need to stop paying for unnecessary or obsolete programs. They need to try earning their keep for a change and see how far that goes.
To twist the words of Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with [government] is you soon run out of other people's money."
I have found that most people in IT, who should know better, are blissfully ignorant of RFCs. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to point out RFC 2822 to a "professional" mail server administrator, and explain to them point by point why their server is broken. And these are admins at businesses, like banks, publishers, etc. These are people who are paid with the expectation that they know these things. Half of the time, the first words out of their mouth is "What's a RFC?"
There is a lot of "cargo cult" programming and administration going on, and I suspect that is largely where problems like those outlined in the article come from.
Oh, and after reading the above, I thought it was a complete waste of my time. The author makes no suggestions for correcting these problems. I've dealt with a lot of issues with names over the years as a database programmer. There are no universal solutions. Everything depends on the needs of the users and the specification that you're given.
None of the above. It's the fault of the owner for having such a thing installed and/or not replacing/fixing it so it does not work that way.
"SQL Injection Attacks" are not the fault of SQL, but of programmers who don't realize that people will either deliberately or accidentally submit bad data, and that data might even include executable code.
There are many, very simple ways to avoid SQL injection attacks. If your web programming environment doesn't help you avoid them, then you are doing something wrong, very wrong.
That's actually a much older use of the term open source in the intelligence community. "Open source intelligence" means getting your intelligence from open, i.e. public, sources. It's used in intelligence predates the "coining" of the term for use with software. [citation needed.]
I much prefer just calling free and "open source" software, because without the source code, it isn't really "soft" ware, is it? Well, sure, you can hack the binaries, but that isn't as useful.
It's like "when I'm drivin' in my car and a man comes on the radio, tellin' me more and more about some useless information supposed to fire my imagination."
Actually, the kid in the picture is my younger brother. The picture was taken 15 to 17 years ago. One of his friends must have scanned it and put it online somewhere.
He doesn't look like that today. He started a weight lifting regimen about 10 years ago and he is probably in much better shape than most of the people making fun of this picture online.
However, I hear a lot of people, who should know better, talking lately as if the simple act of performing labor has value, when it only has value if you or someone else values the results of your labor.
I mean, I could spend my time digging a hole in my backyard but that doesn't mean that the hole or my act of digging the hole has any value at all.
[T]this bozo is not an economist, he's an historian with a masters in political sciences...
He also comes over as an elitist snob in many of his writings about the Internet.
He makes the same fatal mistake that nearly all economists make when talking about labor. They assume that labor in and of itself has value. It doesn't. Only the products of the labor have value, and then only if someone is willing to value it.
Your labor is worthless if you work on something that no one values.
Sure, it would be nice if we could all be compensated for all of our labor all the time, but the real economy doesn't work that way. It only works that way in the wet dreams of Marxist economists.
Then consider it a stupid filter for the 'net. If you can't answer those questions, then maybe, just maybe you shouldn't be posting on Internet forums, either.
The real problem is that Greenspan and Bernanke seem to have failed both basic economics and remedial math. Also, they must have been absent on the day that Keynesian monetary policy was explained.
As unpopular as it may be with some people, what you are seeing today are the fruits of Reagan-era economic policy, "Reaganomics" or as G.H.W. Bush called it "Voodoo Economics."
Basically, the Fed. has kept their lending rates artificially low for the past 20+ years. They have kept this rate well below the rate of inflation. Banks are paying and charging interest using this rate as the basis, since this rate essentially determines the "cost" of money.
Keeping this rate below the inflation rate encourages spending and borrowing rather than savings. After all, why save at 1% when inflation is 8% and you can borrow at 6%? By borrowing now, you can increase your buying power immediately, and get more for the same amount of money, instead of losing money in a savings account.
That's all fine, assuming your wages increase along with the inflation rate, but for most people, they haven't. When wages are not increasing to match the rate of inflation, then people are effectively getting a cut in pay and can afford to buy less stuff. (Obvious, right, but many people need this simple fact explained to them.)
So, as mentioned above, the low Fed. rates encourage borrowing, and even with the modest income increases most people can afford to keep on borrowing, but only for so long. Unless wages make a dramatic increase, borrowing consumers reach the point where they have borrowed all that they can afford to borrow. They reach the point where they are making minimum payments on their loans, paying bills, and for food, energy and other essentials, and there is no money left over. Upon reaching this point, even the most obtuse consumers will cut back on spending and borrowing. Those who don't will default and go bankrupt, whether they file papers to seek bankruptcy protection or not, they will for all intents and purposes be bankrupt.
This is, essentially, what has happened to the U.S. economy. The orgy of spending and borrowing has ended because the sun has come up and all the drunkards are staggering home after the party with massive hangovers.
This is also why injecting $700 billion to buy "bad" debt won't solve a thing. Even if the gov't buys the debt, the consumers will still owe that debt, and the conscientious ones will still try to pay it. As long as the consumers have to pay that debt, spending in the short term will be curtailed.
In the short term, there is no easy fix. In fact, many would think the cure to be worse than the disease. The long term cure is to return to the days of higher interest rates, less spending and more saving. Quite simply, Greenspan's little experiment on the American people has failed to produce the endless growth that he promised.
Exactly. Which is why, when I want security that I can trust, I use my own certificate authority to sign the server certs and the client certs used to access the server.
I provide a simple link for my users to get the crt from my authority. I also tell them how to check that that my CA actually signed the certificate of the server when they connect. (I'm usually dealing with people who already know how to do this anyway.)
I configure sensitive parts of the site to require a client cert. signed by my CA. Sometimes, even going so far as to require certain information in the client cert. itself.
All of the nonsense about having "legitimate" certificates assumes that you can trust the certificate authorities issuing the certificates. I don't necessarily trust them, but I do trust myself.
My psychic abilities tell me you're wondering why this wall of text was worth your time. It probably wasn't.
What he talks about in terms of PHP is precisely what Lisp macros are about: you identify common patterns in your code, and then you generally break the patterns into a couple of short, generic functions and a macro, or sometimes, just a macro will do.
In any other language you build a library of functions, classes, etc. to do the common things that you want to reuse.
The above applies to PHP as well. It has the include filename construct for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, typically. I have found times when it was cheaper to buy something in a store and pay sales tax, than it was to order it online and pay shipping. I have found other times where it wasn't.
What this is really about is the states getting their "fair" share of the money that's in circulation. They look at it this way: You live in jurisdiction X. You sat in front of your computer in X where you placed your order for a product from a company in jurisdiction Y. The product is taxable in X. It is being shipped to X where it will presumably be used in X. Therefore, you owe tax in X on that purchase/use.
Where it gets tricky is when I am in jurisdiction X and I order something from jurisdiction Y to be shipped as a gift to someone in jurisdiction Z. Is Z or X owed the tax, now? Also, what about Y? Don't you think that before too long they are going to want a piece of the action, and that they will come up with some kind of variation of a sales or use tax that they can slap onto merchants who operate or ship from their jurisdictions? Well, maybe not if they're keen on having jobs in their economy.
What it comes down to now is that in America the gov't at all levels has a sense of entitlement to your money. While the rich have a sense of entitlement to not pay taxes. Just look at the IRS' own numbers on who pays more of their income in taxes and you'll see very plainly what is going on in the U.S. and what has been going on since the '70s, if not longer.
Massachusetts, Representative Delahunt's home state, is one such state. The income tax forms' instructions also contain a chart that if you pay X dollars on this line based on your income, then the state won't say you owe more if they audit you. Of course, that amount excludes purchases of $1,000 or more. On those, you are to report the full amount owed. They typically call it a "Use Tax," and I mostly grew up in Kentucky which has pretty much the same laws, and it is typically charged at the same rate as a sales tax.
I live about 1 mile (1.6 km for those with a rational measurement system) from the border with New Hampshire, a state that does not have a sales tax. (They do have a service tax on restaurant meals and hotel visits, etc. that is higher than the sales tax and similar taxes in Massachusetts.) There has also been a lot of bluster from Massachusetts lately, including some court cases where the judge basically said "What, are you crazy?" to the Mass. AG, about having certain businesses on the NH side of the border collect Mass. sales tax on Mass. residents who buy from them. The latest row was over car parts and tires.
Interestingly, the car dealerships in Salem, NH (the fist town you come to if you cross the border where I live) do collect the Mass. sales taxes and will often handle your Mass. vehicle registration, etc. as would a Mass. car dealer.
The reason that states like Mass. want the business owner to collect the taxes is that they know that they cannot rely on self-reporting by the tax payer to get the amount of tax that they say that they are owed. I typically report the minimum listed by our family's income in the chart, just to be safe, because I do not keep track of purchases that I make in New Hampshire. My wife and I typically shop at several store in Salem, NH because they are physically closer to our house than other stores that might carry the same goods in Mass. We do NOT do it to avoid paying sales tax. However, we typically buy more food than anything else at these stores, and food is exempt from sales and use tax in Massachusetts. The taxable goods that we buy in these stores are typically smaller items, such as household necessities: cleaning powders and fluids, batteries, etc. We occasionally buy toys for our daughter, books and other inexpensive items.
By reporting the minimum, I'm hedging my bets if audited (not likely to happen since we don't really make enough to raise any flags) and in our case we could be over reporting the amount we actually owe. I don't know anyone who has said to me that they shop in New Hampshire to avoid paying sales tax. Typically, it's a convenience thing because the closest outlet of the particular store that you want to visit to get something is just a couple miles away in New Hampshire or 20 miles away in Bedford, MA. I have heard, of course, that people do all their shopping in New Hampshire to avoid sales tax, but no one has ever told me that they do this, and none of my friends or my wife's relations seem to do this, since they seem to always get the same goods or types of goods at the same store in Mass. and in NH.
Personally, I think the constitutionality of the Use Tax is dubious, but then I think the constitutionality of nearly everything done by gov't at all levels today is dubious. I pay the use tax simply to keep out of trouble. The few dollars that it costs me in a typical refund is nothing compared the aggravation of an audit and then having to prove that you don't owe whatever the state says you owe on out of state purchases.
Someone who made the point above about getting gov't to reduce spending and reduce taxation has an excellent point. Those of us who work for a living and those who have a "fixed" income have to learn to live within a certain budget. The gov't ought to be held to the same standard and they ought to be required to function on a fixed budget. They need to stop paying for unnecessary or obsolete programs. They need to try earning their keep for a change and see how far that goes.
To twist the words of Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with [government] is you soon run out of other people's money."
I have found that most people in IT, who should know better, are blissfully ignorant of RFCs. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to point out RFC 2822 to a "professional" mail server administrator, and explain to them point by point why their server is broken. And these are admins at businesses, like banks, publishers, etc. These are people who are paid with the expectation that they know these things. Half of the time, the first words out of their mouth is "What's a RFC?"
There is a lot of "cargo cult" programming and administration going on, and I suspect that is largely where problems like those outlined in the article come from.
Oh, and after reading the above, I thought it was a complete waste of my time. The author makes no suggestions for correcting these problems. I've dealt with a lot of issues with names over the years as a database programmer. There are no universal solutions. Everything depends on the needs of the users and the specification that you're given.
None of the above. It's the fault of the owner for having such a thing installed and/or not replacing/fixing it so it does not work that way.
"SQL Injection Attacks" are not the fault of SQL, but of programmers who don't realize that people will either deliberately or accidentally submit bad data, and that data might even include executable code.
There are many, very simple ways to avoid SQL injection attacks. If your web programming environment doesn't help you avoid them, then you are doing something wrong, very wrong.
Usenet died in September 1993. In fact, on Usenet it is always September 1993.
That's actually a much older use of the term open source in the intelligence community. "Open source intelligence" means getting your intelligence from open, i.e. public, sources. It's used in intelligence predates the "coining" of the term for use with software. [citation needed.]
I much prefer just calling free and "open source" software, because without the source code, it isn't really "soft" ware, is it? Well, sure, you can hack the binaries, but that isn't as useful.
Read the RFCs, you should be using 587, not 465!
Back? The world never left, my friend.
I'd prefer focus-follows-brain, but I'll settle for focus-follows-eyes.
Ah, thanks for that.... I was worried for a minute.
I'm not sure how in the hell capitalists here in the U.S. decided we could do fair business with a totalitarian communist nation.
They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
And neither do the capitalists here in the States.
It's like "when I'm drivin' in my car and a man comes on the radio, tellin' me more and more about some useless information supposed to fire my imagination."
Actually, the kid in the picture is my younger brother. The picture was taken 15 to 17 years ago. One of his friends must have scanned it and put it online somewhere.
He doesn't look like that today. He started a weight lifting regimen about 10 years ago and he is probably in much better shape than most of the people making fun of this picture online.
If you RTFA, you might find out the answer to that question. It does mention "Canadian operations."
Didn't you guys get the press release?
Processes are the new Threads
If they are going web-only at DDJ, they seriously need to do something about their site design. It is atrociously ugly and horribly inconvenient.
Dr. Kevorkian?
The main use that I see for this is as a means of suicide.
Yep. Copper prices have dropped considerably in the past few months:
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp
Now, in my neighborhood, there's a McCain supporter flying his flag upside down....
There are only 2 typically significant reasons to do that:
1. You're on a ship at sea and you require assistance from another vessel.
2. As a sign of disrespect for the flag and the nation.
Since it is hanging on his garage, I don't think he's on a ship at sea.....
I can think of many cliches about flags, patriotism and jingoism, but they often miss the deeper things at play.
I have thought of actually knocking on the door and asking why he flies the flag upside down.
And this gets modded insightful...
Yeah, go figure....
So, maybe I should have said non-economists.
However, I hear a lot of people, who should know better, talking lately as if the simple act of performing labor has value, when it only has value if you or someone else values the results of your labor.
I mean, I could spend my time digging a hole in my backyard but that doesn't mean that the hole or my act of digging the hole has any value at all.
[T]this bozo is not an economist, he's an historian with a masters in political sciences...
He also comes over as an elitist snob in many of his writings about the Internet.
He makes the same fatal mistake that nearly all economists make when talking about labor. They assume that labor in and of itself has value. It doesn't. Only the products of the labor have value, and then only if someone is willing to value it.
Your labor is worthless if you work on something that no one values.
Sure, it would be nice if we could all be compensated for all of our labor all the time, but the real economy doesn't work that way. It only works that way in the wet dreams of Marxist economists.
Then consider it a stupid filter for the 'net. If you can't answer those questions, then maybe, just maybe you shouldn't be posting on Internet forums, either.
The real problem is that Greenspan and Bernanke seem to have failed both basic economics and remedial math. Also, they must have been absent on the day that Keynesian monetary policy was explained.
As unpopular as it may be with some people, what you are seeing today are the fruits of Reagan-era economic policy, "Reaganomics" or as G.H.W. Bush called it "Voodoo Economics."
Basically, the Fed. has kept their lending rates artificially low for the past 20+ years. They have kept this rate well below the rate of inflation. Banks are paying and charging interest using this rate as the basis, since this rate essentially determines the "cost" of money.
Keeping this rate below the inflation rate encourages spending and borrowing rather than savings. After all, why save at 1% when inflation is 8% and you can borrow at 6%? By borrowing now, you can increase your buying power immediately, and get more for the same amount of money, instead of losing money in a savings account.
That's all fine, assuming your wages increase along with the inflation rate, but for most people, they haven't. When wages are not increasing to match the rate of inflation, then people are effectively getting a cut in pay and can afford to buy less stuff. (Obvious, right, but many people need this simple fact explained to them.)
So, as mentioned above, the low Fed. rates encourage borrowing, and even with the modest income increases most people can afford to keep on borrowing, but only for so long. Unless wages make a dramatic increase, borrowing consumers reach the point where they have borrowed all that they can afford to borrow. They reach the point where they are making minimum payments on their loans, paying bills, and for food, energy and other essentials, and there is no money left over. Upon reaching this point, even the most obtuse consumers will cut back on spending and borrowing. Those who don't will default and go bankrupt, whether they file papers to seek bankruptcy protection or not, they will for all intents and purposes be bankrupt.
This is, essentially, what has happened to the U.S. economy. The orgy of spending and borrowing has ended because the sun has come up and all the drunkards are staggering home after the party with massive hangovers.
This is also why injecting $700 billion to buy "bad" debt won't solve a thing. Even if the gov't buys the debt, the consumers will still owe that debt, and the conscientious ones will still try to pay it. As long as the consumers have to pay that debt, spending in the short term will be curtailed.
In the short term, there is no easy fix. In fact, many would think the cure to be worse than the disease. The long term cure is to return to the days of higher interest rates, less spending and more saving. Quite simply, Greenspan's little experiment on the American people has failed to produce the endless growth that he promised.
Exactly. Which is why, when I want security that I can trust, I use my own certificate authority to sign the server certs and the client certs used to access the server.
I provide a simple link for my users to get the crt from my authority. I also tell them how to check that that my CA actually signed the certificate of the server when they connect. (I'm usually dealing with people who already know how to do this anyway.)
I configure sensitive parts of the site to require a client cert. signed by my CA. Sometimes, even going so far as to require certain information in the client cert. itself.
All of the nonsense about having "legitimate" certificates assumes that you can trust the certificate authorities issuing the certificates. I don't necessarily trust them, but I do trust myself.
To quote from the fine article itself:
My psychic abilities tell me you're wondering why this wall of text was worth your time. It probably wasn't.
What he talks about in terms of PHP is precisely what Lisp macros are about: you identify common patterns in your code, and then you generally break the patterns into a couple of short, generic functions and a macro, or sometimes, just a macro will do.
In any other language you build a library of functions, classes, etc. to do the common things that you want to reuse.
The above applies to PHP as well. It has the include filename construct for a reason.