I grew up and lived in Michigan for most of my life until 2005 when I moved to Chicagoland. I was amazed at how many people did not respect the left lane to be reserved for those that want to pass or go faster. I guess I have since gotten used to it. Now the left lane is seldom where you want to be for the reason you just stated. I find myself going slower in that lane than others.
Oh, and I would second that there are seldom people driving the posted speed limits in Chicago when not in rush hour.
Ahh, I see my mistake. What I meant to say was checking ID's and boarding passes while at the gate. I was at work and just writing without proofreading. I hope this clarifies what you might see as my petty indignation. I don't see the point of having my boarding pass and ID checked at security to then again have it checked at gate. It's pointless.
The reason I brought up my service was not to have a big dick contest. It was more to illustrate that there are certain rights given to us as US citizens and as a Vet I swore to defend them. The one most relevant to this type of discussion of course is the 4th. I am a firm believer that the full body scanners and frisking are totally in violation of this amendment. I don't care that Chertoff and others think that they can make airports a Bill of Rights exclusion zone. The Bill of Rights says in plain English that you and I and others should be secure in our persons and not subject to unlawful searches without a warrant and have probable cause to instigate the search. It says nothing about only in certain physical areas are the Bill of Rights valid. This is to protect us from the tyranny of the state, which I see the TSA as baby steps to this end game. (Yes I have dawned my tinfoil hat at this point). Government has a hard time giving up power once they have had a taste of its divine goodness. I certainly would not join the military today, since I have been jaded from the past ten years of disgrace that has happened in the name of security for the people. Namely things like the Patriot Act, Guantanmo Bay, and the TSA come to mind.
Now I agree that some security is required to operate an airline. Only an idiot would think otherwise. Certainly the airlines themselves would have some security if it was not provided by the government since airplanes just cost too much. But there is always some risk that you will die when boarding a plane. It's not natural for humans to be at >30k feet flying at 500 knots. And sure, while someone who is determined could blow it up at any minute because they were crazy. I understand these are the risks you take, but I refuse to be paralyzed by fear otherwise I would never leave the house. If I were to see someone trying to commandeer the plane or something else as malicious then you bet I would do what I could to stop them. I don't think that I would be the only one. Realistically, if this person has his way, then you are likely going to die. So the rational options are do nothing and die, try to stop the guy and while you might still die there is also a good chance you will live since he will likely be outnumbered on the plane and people would gang up on him. Given those choices, I would fight since it is the only option in surviving is a viable outcome.
I am, frankly, quite surprised that the body cavity bomb hasn't been tried yet. Give it time. Your planeload of vigilante passengers won't have time to stop him; he'll walk into the lavatory and detonate and evereyone else will be going "WTF, asshole, come back out here where we can whip your ass before you blow us all up." Except they'll not be saying it out loud, they'll be dead.
You have heard of the underwear bomber, right? He failed miserably,and he even entered onto the plane where there is probably negligible security. Oh yeah, and he failed. Now, I agree that it is possible that something malicious will happen again. (no need to be a troll with quoting my 'like' phrase). However, I am willing to uphold the rights provided to everyone in the US Constitution. I already did it once while I was in the Navy while sacrificing my own freedom. It is what I put my life on the line for. What have you done?
Two weeks ago was the first time that I flew in several 2 years. I fortunately was spared being patted down or going through the whole body scanner. However, this time they did something that I had never seen before, and that was that they randomly checked people's boarding pass as they were getting on the plane. All I could think to myself was 'WTF?'. Was not the circus that I just went through enough for me to get on the plane? I was pissed off.
The TSA just needs to go away. I am a firm believer that it has outlived its usefulness and now is just a money sink for federal taxes. Not to mention the fact that their entire existence is just Washington wiping their ass's with the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
An attack like 9/11 will not occur again, plain and simple. The people on the airplane will do what they can to keep some random jack asses from doing anything stupid that would keep them from landing safely since the passengers now know that death is a possibility for them if they allow the hijacker/terrorist to have control of the airplane or execute their plans.
I think that it is naive at best to consider Reed Hastings for doing this for 'greed' alone. Now that Netflix had established themselves as a leader in online video distribution and more than just a niche geek thing, he knew he wasn't going to get the cheap deals again from the studios like he might have before. Again, take for example the Dreamworks deal that happened recently. People are complaining about Netflix having good current streaming content (myself included), so they did what they thought would provide more value to the customer and went with this deal. However Dreamworks want 25 million per picture available on Netflix. And you know that other studios are going to want a sweetheart deal like that. This would inevitably mean the good deal that was Netflix was going to have to raise prices to be able to afford content.
Now I, like everyone else, can grumble about the price increase, but I feel that their hands were tied and can accept it. Netflix is trying to improve their product, but they knew that it was going to cost them more. Like any business, one way or another, these costs are passed onto the customer.
No problem. It actually is probably one of my favorite movies/books and has a pretty good twist for an ending. I won't spoil it but if you like movies with twist endings like the sixth sense, then this is one worth checking out. The movie does a pretty good job of representing the book too.
What I am thinking of isn't the once a month tornado warning. This would be a commercial, followed by some guy saying 'this is a test of the emergency broadcast system...' and then there would be a tone for about 20 seconds, with more talking about how that was only a test and if it were real, you would have been given more instruction. That commercial is the specific one that I was thinking of.
slightly off topic, but I remember when I was younger there would be tv 'commercials' on Saturdays which would have these on. To give a time reference, this would have been during the very early 80's. (i know...get off my lawn, yada yada yada...) and it would have been in Michigan, but I am guessing it would have been a nationwide sort of thing. But now to think of it, I haven't seen one of these in ages! I am guessing they must have changed the requirements on this or something. Does anyone remember when the last time they saw one or what happened that they actually stopped this? Or is it possible that it still goes on, but now its just sandwiched between infomercials late at night?
While I somewhat agree with you, I haven't followed it too closely. However, I believe that Greg mentions what some limitations are of SAR and that would be the real time processing to make it viable for field use. I think how things were done before was that you had several radar images taken by a single radar that had physically been moved at some small increment apart. Now here, he has several antennas so that all he as to do is electronically switch between antennas in his array to capture the images. This would reduce the time for the total image capture while still getting the physical separation required to be able to create a SAR image.
Computing has also improved to a point where an off site computer is no longer required to compute the resultant image which I think was/is done with satellite images.
And I think I read this in the attached article that was there is still some work to be done on the resolution of the images from this application. I could see how this could be difficult since there is still some finite delay time between image captures from the individual antennas. I would imagine this would cause the object of interest to be more disperse in the resultant image. Usually SAR images are done on static objects, so I myself don't know what the impact would be on the added difficulty of a moving target on a SAR image. I think I read that they were using a difference algorithm between images to detect the motion of the object.
Finally, I think that Greg may be down playing the difficulty of 'seeing' through the wall. He uses percent to show how much attenuation the transmitted and reflected signal experiences, but being an RF guy myself, am used to dB. It sounded like it would be about 30 dB of attenuation each direction through the wall. That doesn't even account for free space path loss. To go through the wall twice, you lose 60 dB of transmit power. Additionally, not all object will reflect the power completely. Assume maybe you lose another 20 dB due to imperfect reflection (admittedly a guess) then we are now up to 80 dB of the initial power lost that was transmitted to be able to make a reliable return from the object that is an imperfect RF scatterer. Looking at his rig, it didn't look like he was using too large of a transmitter, so that would put a lot of work on the receiver to detect these signals. He is correct when saying though that he can just use amplifiers to get the signal to a usable level, but at the same time you would like to have a larger SNR on the receive signal since it would make each radar snapshot clearer.
That is probably the extent of my knowledge on SAR imaging, and I am no expert. I just know enough to be dangerous:)
The person who designed the radar was posted before, but this was about his PhD project. Here is the link and you too can build your own SAR (as long as you can read his cat scratch of notes on his blog)
I got it! I got,got it. I got the number off the wall...
Re:For the uninformed like me....
on
Arduino Goes ARM
·
· Score: 1
Some things that come to mind....
ADCs samples with more bits (12 bits vs 8 bits). This is would be important to someone who cared about getting better dynamic range from an analog signal. It is roughly a 6 dB improvement per bit. (effectively a bit less when considering non-ideal things such as clock jitter). Possible applications would be SW defined radios
Clock speed is faster than current Arduinos. If you were running something that was computationally intense and had a small window to complete this computation, this would be beneficial. A project that I am working on now could benefit from this. I would like to to do FFTs in a really short time span. This would help here.
While I am not familiar with the exact architecture here, if it has 32 bit address fields, it probably has 32 bit computational registers too. Again, this could be beneficial if you have need precise computations in your application. Again, when doing something like FFTs, or digital filtering, round off errors could be problematic with smaller registers. In general, more bits means less round off error.
These would be the first things that come to mind for my applications. I am sure others will provide more, especially if they are more familiar with the architecture.
As an ex submariner, I will add my $0.02. I would agree that the food on the sub wasn't too bad. It was certainly better than some of the other mess halls that I had eaten in, and I would attribute it to a few factors. The first one being was that I was probably never out to sea for more than three weeks between port visits. When we would visit a port we would always bring on fresh produce, milk, and meats. Also, the cooks only have to cook for about 120 men. This would mean that they could almost take their time and not rush to get the food out. And usually, the captain knew everyone on the ship, including the cooks, by name. If the captain likes your cooking, it looks good for you and your performance reviews. You mix all of these things together (pun intended), and I would say that you have all of the makings of usually* pretty good food.
*I say usually, because when we are in port, and if the cook got sh!tfaced the night before, he probably isn't going to have is A game that day when cooking. But hey, we were sailors after all.
Nice. I just read "Guards, Guards", where they mention this sort of logic. I haven't made it through all of his books yet. (man, there's a bunch!). My chances of reading them all, however, are a million- to-one.
As a better answer to the two others who posted, I will give an example. C and C++ (and others) start array indexing from zero.If you have a 10 element array, in C/C++ you would access the last element as myarray[9]. You know that you have 10 elements, and if you are not careful you might try to index the last element as myarray[10]. This will generally cause errors in you program and you hope the compiler can catch them for you. In languages like C/C++, this could even be a hidden error since if you are not careful with your pointers, you could access data outside of the array and the program would keep on chugging along without throwing an error since the compiler may not be able to catch the error. If you are lucky, you will be a runtime error, but that can be difficult to track down.
this type of error is generally called a fence post error.
It is a similar idea. The RF energy will tend to travel on the outside of the person rather than on the inside. The phenomena is usually called RF burn. Wikipedia calls it microwave burn, but that is the first time that I have heard it called that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn
I know what you mean. I have a box of all the games that I have bought over the years, most of which I have never finished. I installed Max Payne a few months ago and started playing it again, and I still haven't finished it. I actually had to look in that box last night and I saw the instruction manual for SimCity 300 and was half tempted to look for the CD to install and play again:)
I think you sort of alluded to why publishers have taken this approach now, much to the disappointment of us hardcore gamers. We, as serious gamers, are not buying enough games for one reason or another. In my case, it's a matter of free time. For others it might be a matter money and $50 to $60 for a title might be too much to spend.
Marketing departments are always looking for additional revenue sources. From their standpoint, we serious gamers have no serious business growth to them, so they need to find a way to grow the company more. Enter the casual gamer. This would be their new target audience for growth. If they can create games on a smaller budget, have it be over and done with in 10 hours of game play, and create a more consistent revenue stream (meaning that they buy another game after they finish the previous game) then it's a win for them.
The optimist in me would still like to think that they would make AAA titles for us serious gamer types, but reality has usually proven me wrong.
I am going to have to call you out on that BS. Provide a source. I will give you one from my own anecdotal data point. I served in the Navy for 6 years. Guess what? I paid federal income taxes. Since I entered the military as a resident of Michigan, I did not have to pay state taxes but that is definitely the exception and not the rule.
Also, my father-in-law works for the government. Guess what? He pays federal taxes too.
Before you go posting your extreme rhetoric around here (and I have seen plenty of your rants about adopting the gold standard and the abolishing the fed for example), please research a little better before posting just incredulously false claims.
You're doing your foot notes all wrong. They are too easy to find. Might I suggest creating a new comment ( possibly even in an entirely different topic from the/. home page) to bury your foot notes in. This is the true way to obfuscate your points while appearing to be a referenced paper or piece of evidence.
And through in a good electromagnetics course to learn about transmission lines and possibly basic EMI. However, the first time the see Maxwell's equations might blow their minds.
If you are comparing a B&M (a la Best Buy for example) to a mail retailer these are not the same beast. There may not be a store in every county of every state. A mail based retailer would need to be responsible for tax code in ALL counties/states/municipalities. A B&M only needs to be aware of the tax code where they have a presence.
And I am sure that it works out fine when you have set taxes at the state level. However, I live in the Chicago suburbs. My sales tax consists of some base state tax. An additional tax assessed by the county. Even some cities have an additional sales tax on top of that. Take for example Cook county. The total sales tax for state and cook county is 9.75%. It was up to 10.25% for about a year until it was repealed. I happen to live near the border of Cook county and DuPage county. The taxes in DuPage county are only 7.75%. It would be bad enough if Amazon had to collect different taxes for all 50 states, but it would be a nightmare for Amazon to have to adapt to even different tax codes at a county level like they are here in Illinois.
Slashdot Mirror
THIS x 100
I grew up and lived in Michigan for most of my life until 2005 when I moved to Chicagoland. I was amazed at how many people did not respect the left lane to be reserved for those that want to pass or go faster. I guess I have since gotten used to it. Now the left lane is seldom where you want to be for the reason you just stated. I find myself going slower in that lane than others.
Oh, and I would second that there are seldom people driving the posted speed limits in Chicago when not in rush hour.
Ahh, I see my mistake. What I meant to say was checking ID's and boarding passes while at the gate. I was at work and just writing without proofreading. I hope this clarifies what you might see as my petty indignation. I don't see the point of having my boarding pass and ID checked at security to then again have it checked at gate. It's pointless.
The reason I brought up my service was not to have a big dick contest. It was more to illustrate that there are certain rights given to us as US citizens and as a Vet I swore to defend them. The one most relevant to this type of discussion of course is the 4th. I am a firm believer that the full body scanners and frisking are totally in violation of this amendment. I don't care that Chertoff and others think that they can make airports a Bill of Rights exclusion zone. The Bill of Rights says in plain English that you and I and others should be secure in our persons and not subject to unlawful searches without a warrant and have probable cause to instigate the search. It says nothing about only in certain physical areas are the Bill of Rights valid. This is to protect us from the tyranny of the state, which I see the TSA as baby steps to this end game. (Yes I have dawned my tinfoil hat at this point). Government has a hard time giving up power once they have had a taste of its divine goodness. I certainly would not join the military today, since I have been jaded from the past ten years of disgrace that has happened in the name of security for the people. Namely things like the Patriot Act, Guantanmo Bay, and the TSA come to mind.
Now I agree that some security is required to operate an airline. Only an idiot would think otherwise. Certainly the airlines themselves would have some security if it was not provided by the government since airplanes just cost too much. But there is always some risk that you will die when boarding a plane. It's not natural for humans to be at >30k feet flying at 500 knots. And sure, while someone who is determined could blow it up at any minute because they were crazy. I understand these are the risks you take, but I refuse to be paralyzed by fear otherwise I would never leave the house. If I were to see someone trying to commandeer the plane or something else as malicious then you bet I would do what I could to stop them. I don't think that I would be the only one. Realistically, if this person has his way, then you are likely going to die. So the rational options are do nothing and die, try to stop the guy and while you might still die there is also a good chance you will live since he will likely be outnumbered on the plane and people would gang up on him. Given those choices, I would fight since it is the only option in surviving is a viable outcome.
You have heard of the underwear bomber, right? He failed miserably,and he even entered onto the plane where there is probably negligible security. Oh yeah, and he failed. Now, I agree that it is possible that something malicious will happen again. (no need to be a troll with quoting my 'like' phrase). However, I am willing to uphold the rights provided to everyone in the US Constitution. I already did it once while I was in the Navy while sacrificing my own freedom. It is what I put my life on the line for. What have you done?
Two weeks ago was the first time that I flew in several 2 years. I fortunately was spared being patted down or going through the whole body scanner. However, this time they did something that I had never seen before, and that was that they randomly checked people's boarding pass as they were getting on the plane. All I could think to myself was 'WTF?'. Was not the circus that I just went through enough for me to get on the plane? I was pissed off.
The TSA just needs to go away. I am a firm believer that it has outlived its usefulness and now is just a money sink for federal taxes. Not to mention the fact that their entire existence is just Washington wiping their ass's with the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
An attack like 9/11 will not occur again, plain and simple. The people on the airplane will do what they can to keep some random jack asses from doing anything stupid that would keep them from landing safely since the passengers now know that death is a possibility for them if they allow the hijacker/terrorist to have control of the airplane or execute their plans.
I think that it is naive at best to consider Reed Hastings for doing this for 'greed' alone. Now that Netflix had established themselves as a leader in online video distribution and more than just a niche geek thing, he knew he wasn't going to get the cheap deals again from the studios like he might have before. Again, take for example the Dreamworks deal that happened recently. People are complaining about Netflix having good current streaming content (myself included), so they did what they thought would provide more value to the customer and went with this deal. However Dreamworks want 25 million per picture available on Netflix. And you know that other studios are going to want a sweetheart deal like that. This would inevitably mean the good deal that was Netflix was going to have to raise prices to be able to afford content.
Now I, like everyone else, can grumble about the price increase, but I feel that their hands were tied and can accept it. Netflix is trying to improve their product, but they knew that it was going to cost them more. Like any business, one way or another, these costs are passed onto the customer.
No problem. It actually is probably one of my favorite movies/books and has a pretty good twist for an ending. I won't spoil it but if you like movies with twist endings like the sixth sense, then this is one worth checking out. The movie does a pretty good job of representing the book too.
That is certainly a 'whoosh' for you. This is a quote from the movie/book Fight Club, where the main character did this for his job.
What I am thinking of isn't the once a month tornado warning. This would be a commercial, followed by some guy saying 'this is a test of the emergency broadcast system...' and then there would be a tone for about 20 seconds, with more talking about how that was only a test and if it were real, you would have been given more instruction. That commercial is the specific one that I was thinking of.
slightly off topic, but I remember when I was younger there would be tv 'commercials' on Saturdays which would have these on. To give a time reference, this would have been during the very early 80's. (i know...get off my lawn, yada yada yada...) and it would have been in Michigan, but I am guessing it would have been a nationwide sort of thing. But now to think of it, I haven't seen one of these in ages! I am guessing they must have changed the requirements on this or something. Does anyone remember when the last time they saw one or what happened that they actually stopped this? Or is it possible that it still goes on, but now its just sandwiched between infomercials late at night?
While I somewhat agree with you, I haven't followed it too closely. However, I believe that Greg mentions what some limitations are of SAR and that would be the real time processing to make it viable for field use. I think how things were done before was that you had several radar images taken by a single radar that had physically been moved at some small increment apart. Now here, he has several antennas so that all he as to do is electronically switch between antennas in his array to capture the images. This would reduce the time for the total image capture while still getting the physical separation required to be able to create a SAR image.
:)
Computing has also improved to a point where an off site computer is no longer required to compute the resultant image which I think was/is done with satellite images.
And I think I read this in the attached article that was there is still some work to be done on the resolution of the images from this application. I could see how this could be difficult since there is still some finite delay time between image captures from the individual antennas. I would imagine this would cause the object of interest to be more disperse in the resultant image. Usually SAR images are done on static objects, so I myself don't know what the impact would be on the added difficulty of a moving target on a SAR image. I think I read that they were using a difference algorithm between images to detect the motion of the object.
Finally, I think that Greg may be down playing the difficulty of 'seeing' through the wall. He uses percent to show how much attenuation the transmitted and reflected signal experiences, but being an RF guy myself, am used to dB. It sounded like it would be about 30 dB of attenuation each direction through the wall. That doesn't even account for free space path loss. To go through the wall twice, you lose 60 dB of transmit power. Additionally, not all object will reflect the power completely. Assume maybe you lose another 20 dB due to imperfect reflection (admittedly a guess) then we are now up to 80 dB of the initial power lost that was transmitted to be able to make a reliable return from the object that is an imperfect RF scatterer. Looking at his rig, it didn't look like he was using too large of a transmitter, so that would put a lot of work on the receiver to detect these signals. He is correct when saying though that he can just use amplifiers to get the signal to a usable level, but at the same time you would like to have a larger SNR on the receive signal since it would make each radar snapshot clearer.
That is probably the extent of my knowledge on SAR imaging, and I am no expert. I just know enough to be dangerous
The person who designed the radar was posted before, but this was about his PhD project. Here is the link and you too can build your own SAR (as long as you can read his cat scratch of notes on his blog)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/1350259/diy-synthetic-aperture-radar
Also on his blog, you will see similarities to what he developed for his PhD and what he is working on now.
http://www.mit.edu/~gr20603/Dr.%20Gregory%20L.%20Charvat%20Projects/Synthetic%20Aperture%20Radar%20(SAR).html
Oh, and I am not a groupie. I happen to actually know Greg.
I got it! I got,got it. I got the number off the wall...
Some things that come to mind....
ADCs samples with more bits (12 bits vs 8 bits). This is would be important to someone who cared about getting better dynamic range from an analog signal. It is roughly a 6 dB improvement per bit. (effectively a bit less when considering non-ideal things such as clock jitter). Possible applications would be SW defined radios
Clock speed is faster than current Arduinos. If you were running something that was computationally intense and had a small window to complete this computation, this would be beneficial. A project that I am working on now could benefit from this. I would like to to do FFTs in a really short time span. This would help here.
While I am not familiar with the exact architecture here, if it has 32 bit address fields, it probably has 32 bit computational registers too. Again, this could be beneficial if you have need precise computations in your application. Again, when doing something like FFTs, or digital filtering, round off errors could be problematic with smaller registers. In general, more bits means less round off error.
These would be the first things that come to mind for my applications. I am sure others will provide more, especially if they are more familiar with the architecture.
As an ex submariner, I will add my $0.02. I would agree that the food on the sub wasn't too bad. It was certainly better than some of the other mess halls that I had eaten in, and I would attribute it to a few factors. The first one being was that I was probably never out to sea for more than three weeks between port visits. When we would visit a port we would always bring on fresh produce, milk, and meats. Also, the cooks only have to cook for about 120 men. This would mean that they could almost take their time and not rush to get the food out. And usually, the captain knew everyone on the ship, including the cooks, by name. If the captain likes your cooking, it looks good for you and your performance reviews. You mix all of these things together (pun intended), and I would say that you have all of the makings of usually* pretty good food.
*I say usually, because when we are in port, and if the cook got sh!tfaced the night before, he probably isn't going to have is A game that day when cooking. But hey, we were sailors after all.
Nice. I just read "Guards, Guards", where they mention this sort of logic. I haven't made it through all of his books yet. (man, there's a bunch!). My chances of reading them all, however, are a million- to-one.
As a better answer to the two others who posted, I will give an example. C and C++ (and others) start array indexing from zero.If you have a 10 element array, in C/C++ you would access the last element as myarray[9]. You know that you have 10 elements, and if you are not careful you might try to index the last element as myarray[10]. This will generally cause errors in you program and you hope the compiler can catch them for you. In languages like C/C++, this could even be a hidden error since if you are not careful with your pointers, you could access data outside of the array and the program would keep on chugging along without throwing an error since the compiler may not be able to catch the error. If you are lucky, you will be a runtime error, but that can be difficult to track down.
this type of error is generally called a fence post error.
It is a similar idea. The RF energy will tend to travel on the outside of the person rather than on the inside. The phenomena is usually called RF burn. Wikipedia calls it microwave burn, but that is the first time that I have heard it called that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn
I know what you mean. I have a box of all the games that I have bought over the years, most of which I have never finished. I installed Max Payne a few months ago and started playing it again, and I still haven't finished it. I actually had to look in that box last night and I saw the instruction manual for SimCity 300 and was half tempted to look for the CD to install and play again :)
I think you sort of alluded to why publishers have taken this approach now, much to the disappointment of us hardcore gamers. We, as serious gamers, are not buying enough games for one reason or another. In my case, it's a matter of free time. For others it might be a matter money and $50 to $60 for a title might be too much to spend.
Marketing departments are always looking for additional revenue sources. From their standpoint, we serious gamers have no serious business growth to them, so they need to find a way to grow the company more. Enter the casual gamer. This would be their new target audience for growth. If they can create games on a smaller budget, have it be over and done with in 10 hours of game play, and create a more consistent revenue stream (meaning that they buy another game after they finish the previous game) then it's a win for them.
The optimist in me would still like to think that they would make AAA titles for us serious gamer types, but reality has usually proven me wrong.
I am going to have to call you out on that BS. Provide a source. I will give you one from my own anecdotal data point. I served in the Navy for 6 years. Guess what? I paid federal income taxes. Since I entered the military as a resident of Michigan, I did not have to pay state taxes but that is definitely the exception and not the rule.
Also, my father-in-law works for the government. Guess what? He pays federal taxes too.
Before you go posting your extreme rhetoric around here (and I have seen plenty of your rants about adopting the gold standard and the abolishing the fed for example), please research a little better before posting just incredulously false claims.
You're doing your foot notes all wrong. They are too easy to find. Might I suggest creating a new comment ( possibly even in an entirely different topic from the /. home page) to bury your foot notes in. This is the true way to obfuscate your points while appearing to be a referenced paper or piece of evidence.
And through in a good electromagnetics course to learn about transmission lines and possibly basic EMI. However, the first time the see Maxwell's equations might blow their minds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates
Read the portion in his early life. He was a hacker while in HS. Also, it looks like he also had a paying job finding bugs in code for CCC.
If you are comparing a B&M (a la Best Buy for example) to a mail retailer these are not the same beast. There may not be a store in every county of every state. A mail based retailer would need to be responsible for tax code in ALL counties/states/municipalities. A B&M only needs to be aware of the tax code where they have a presence.
And I am sure that it works out fine when you have set taxes at the state level. However, I live in the Chicago suburbs. My sales tax consists of some base state tax. An additional tax assessed by the county. Even some cities have an additional sales tax on top of that. Take for example Cook county. The total sales tax for state and cook county is 9.75%. It was up to 10.25% for about a year until it was repealed. I happen to live near the border of Cook county and DuPage county. The taxes in DuPage county are only 7.75%. It would be bad enough if Amazon had to collect different taxes for all 50 states, but it would be a nightmare for Amazon to have to adapt to even different tax codes at a county level like they are here in Illinois.