Did you read the post? 12K was once the bottom of the tax brackets. Dems dropped it much lower, after promising to tax 'only the rich'.
There, short enough for you to get the point now?
what short memories we all have.
The last time we had the Dems in control of House+Senate+White House, they got there largely by promising to only raise taxes on the rich. I was back in college at the time, making less than $20K/yr, and not claimed as a dependent by anyone. What did those 'Raise taxes only on the rich' Dems do? They made NEW tax brackets AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCALE, so I was suddenly paying taxes. One year I paid nothing at all in taxes, because the tax brackets stopped at (I think) 12K. The next year, the 'Increases taxes ONLY on the rich' Dems brought the tax brackets down to something like 5K. Now they (through the Obama sock-puppet) are making the same promise. The guy who claims he will only raise taxes on people making 'more than 250K'. No, wait, that was several weeks ago. Last week it was 200K. Oh, hold on, that was last week. I think this week they dropped it again to 150K. By the time it comes down to business, it will probably be back down to the 50K that he voted in favor of last time he got the chance...
I don't want an Obama presidency. I can't afford it. If we are foolish enough to elect this guy, hang on to your wallet. It is YOUR wealth he is wanting to 'spread around', not Joe's.
The Puzzle Pirates model actually works beautifully. You *CAN* get anything in the game without ever having to pay any real money...if you want to spend that much time in the game. You also *COULD* get anything in the game by just shelling out (a fairly large amount of) real dollars. It is up to you to find a happy medium for yourself. Principle is simple: to buy in-game stuff you spend in-game money and real money. Then they have a auction block where players can trade real money for in-game money (important note, you can NOT take real money *out* of the game). It actually works really well.
There is a mandatory report law in Texas for KP. (I think it is federal, actually). If you find KP on a computer, the correct response is to reach to the back of the machine, unplug it, and call the FBI. Do not pass go, do not call your supervisor over. Anything else could land you in jail. Even with a PI lisence. (There is a guy in this state who had his PI, and was hired BY THE FEDS to do some KP work. He was convicted and sent to jail for posession of KP. Despite the fact that the feds both testified at his trial and provided the court with hardcopies of their requests and recipts).
10 book series, fairly short, written for teenagers. They are out of print and kinda hard to find, but they are wonderfully written SF, and great for that age group. I read them at about that age, and could hardly put them down. I checked once and was able to find them on Amazon. Failing that, you might be able to find soft-copies.
Granted, we require various professions to have licenses relative to their fields. This requirement is about the same as requiring all doctors to pass the State Bar exam.
As someone who lives in Texas, let me tell you what this law is really about: the Private Investigators lobby (which is rather powerful here) got a law passed in this state which requires anyone who is going to take the stand as an 'expert witness' to have a PI license. This means that no matter your profession (A+ tech, doctor, engineer) you can't testify as an 'expert witness' unless you have that license.
From what I understand of the law, this wouldn't stop a tech from testifying in court if he found something illicit on the computer in the normal execution of his duties. He would be providing first-person testimony of something that happened to him. He could not, however, be asked to 'investigate' a particular drive he received, or to check all drives he receives for (whatever). HOWEVER, that information would be somewhat easy for a lawyer to attack, since your repair techs generally don't have any idea how to collect the data in a fashion admissible in court. A PI license would do nothing to help with this problem. Last I checked Computer Forensics/eDiscovery was not really part of PI training.
So, the only reason for this thing is someone is planning on making money somewhere, probably whoever doles out the PI licenses. (that, or the gov't wants to be able to walk into any computer shop and make the techs run investigations on whatever equipment they are working on. Scary thought, but not too likely)
Anyway, INAL and YMMV, but I would think that this will get shot down on the basis of 'you can't require doctors to pass the Bar exam to practice medicine'. On the other hand, they could come back and require that all repair techs have a 'Computer Tech' license from the state, and include some requirements about evidence handling. That I don't think anyone could really argue with.
There is only one metric which could be called anything close to 'fair' if you are going to try to determine who is 'fat' and who isn't (for whatever purpose), and that is % body fat. Anything else is overgeneralization at best, and base psudeoscience at worst. The problem with that is that finding % body fat isn't easy.
Therefore, people like to try to come up with some shorthand method (like the various forms of BMI), but they are just no good. I (like your Rugby friend) am a prime example of an outlying case for pretty much any of those metrics people want to use. When I graduated HS I was 6ft tall, weighed 200lbs and had a 40 inch waist. Overweight a bit, right? Not a bit. I was also a competitive swimmer putting between 3 and 4 miles a day in at the pool, and my body fat was very very low.
This is something that I see as a symptom of a much larger problem in medical science and society in general these days. We are convinced that every problem has a simple solution which can be judged by a simple metric. that we forget how complex real-world systems are.
You look at 2 things:
1. Do that teacher's students tend to do better the year they are with the teacher AND the year after than they did the year before?
(a really great teacher will see an increase of the average grade of the kids for the year AFTER the teacher has them. One who is inflating grades to make him/herself look good will see average grade drop)
2. Is there a stealth/whisper campaign going on in the district (mostly the teachers, but spreading to councilors and admins) to oust the teacher?
If yes to both, triple that teacher's pay and fire anyone who is working to get rid of him/her.
Groupthink is probably the biggest cause of our public school woes. There is this attitude that education is the process of shoveling information into those little heads, and getting them to spit it back out on cue. Teachers who fail to subscribe to this get pounded down. Hard. Want to see where it has happened? Take a look at State and Federal 'Teacher of The Year' award winners. You will find that very few of those who receive the award are in teaching much longer. Find out the reason they keep leaving, and you will find one of the big problems with our schools.
Are NOT restore systems.
Restoration is a totally different operation, and not one that the backup solutions people invest a lot of effort in. You doubt me? Try to restore an Exchange Server from tapes (Backupexec) after losing and re-building the server.
Base it around puzzles...ya...that's the ticket. Make everything puzzle stuff that you can do. And..and..make it non-fee based, play for free but buy in-game money. Ya. Great idea. After all, its never been done before.
(sorry, no pop)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the post? 12K was once the bottom of the tax brackets. Dems dropped it much lower, after promising to tax 'only the rich'.
There, short enough for you to get the point now?
what short memories we all have.
The last time we had the Dems in control of House+Senate+White House, they got there largely by promising to only raise taxes on the rich. I was back in college at the time, making less than $20K/yr, and not claimed as a dependent by anyone. What did those 'Raise taxes only on the rich' Dems do? They made NEW tax brackets AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCALE, so I was suddenly paying taxes. One year I paid nothing at all in taxes, because the tax brackets stopped at (I think) 12K. The next year, the 'Increases taxes ONLY on the rich' Dems brought the tax brackets down to something like 5K.
Now they (through the Obama sock-puppet) are making the same promise. The guy who claims he will only raise taxes on people making 'more than 250K'. No, wait, that was several weeks ago. Last week it was 200K. Oh, hold on, that was last week. I think this week they dropped it again to 150K. By the time it comes down to business, it will probably be back down to the 50K that he voted in favor of last time he got the chance...
I don't want an Obama presidency. I can't afford it. If we are foolish enough to elect this guy, hang on to your wallet. It is YOUR wealth he is wanting to 'spread around', not Joe's.
The Puzzle Pirates model actually works beautifully. You *CAN* get anything in the game without ever having to pay any real money...if you want to spend that much time in the game. You also *COULD* get anything in the game by just shelling out (a fairly large amount of) real dollars. It is up to you to find a happy medium for yourself.
Principle is simple: to buy in-game stuff you spend in-game money and real money. Then they have a auction block where players can trade real money for in-game money (important note, you can NOT take real money *out* of the game).
It actually works really well.
There is a mandatory report law in Texas for KP. (I think it is federal, actually). If you find KP on a computer, the correct response is to reach to the back of the machine, unplug it, and call the FBI. Do not pass go, do not call your supervisor over. Anything else could land you in jail. Even with a PI lisence. (There is a guy in this state who had his PI, and was hired BY THE FEDS to do some KP work. He was convicted and sent to jail for posession of KP. Despite the fact that the feds both testified at his trial and provided the court with hardcopies of their requests and recipts).
10 book series, fairly short, written for teenagers. They are out of print and kinda hard to find, but they are wonderfully written SF, and great for that age group. I read them at about that age, and could hardly put them down. I checked once and was able to find them on Amazon. Failing that, you might be able to find soft-copies.
Granted, we require various professions to have licenses relative to their fields. This requirement is about the same as requiring all doctors to pass the State Bar exam.
As someone who lives in Texas, let me tell you what this law is really about: the Private Investigators lobby (which is rather powerful here) got a law passed in this state which requires anyone who is going to take the stand as an 'expert witness' to have a PI license. This means that no matter your profession (A+ tech, doctor, engineer) you can't testify as an 'expert witness' unless you have that license.
From what I understand of the law, this wouldn't stop a tech from testifying in court if he found something illicit on the computer in the normal execution of his duties. He would be providing first-person testimony of something that happened to him. He could not, however, be asked to 'investigate' a particular drive he received, or to check all drives he receives for (whatever). HOWEVER, that information would be somewhat easy for a lawyer to attack, since your repair techs generally don't have any idea how to collect the data in a fashion admissible in court. A PI license would do nothing to help with this problem. Last I checked Computer Forensics/eDiscovery was not really part of PI training.
So, the only reason for this thing is someone is planning on making money somewhere, probably whoever doles out the PI licenses. (that, or the gov't wants to be able to walk into any computer shop and make the techs run investigations on whatever equipment they are working on. Scary thought, but not too likely)
Anyway, INAL and YMMV, but I would think that this will get shot down on the basis of 'you can't require doctors to pass the Bar exam to practice medicine'. On the other hand, they could come back and require that all repair techs have a 'Computer Tech' license from the state, and include some requirements about evidence handling. That I don't think anyone could really argue with.
There is only one metric which could be called anything close to 'fair' if you are going to try to determine who is 'fat' and who isn't (for whatever purpose), and that is % body fat. Anything else is overgeneralization at best, and base psudeoscience at worst. The problem with that is that finding % body fat isn't easy. Therefore, people like to try to come up with some shorthand method (like the various forms of BMI), but they are just no good. I (like your Rugby friend) am a prime example of an outlying case for pretty much any of those metrics people want to use. When I graduated HS I was 6ft tall, weighed 200lbs and had a 40 inch waist. Overweight a bit, right? Not a bit. I was also a competitive swimmer putting between 3 and 4 miles a day in at the pool, and my body fat was very very low. This is something that I see as a symptom of a much larger problem in medical science and society in general these days. We are convinced that every problem has a simple solution which can be judged by a simple metric. that we forget how complex real-world systems are.
You look at 2 things: 1. Do that teacher's students tend to do better the year they are with the teacher AND the year after than they did the year before? (a really great teacher will see an increase of the average grade of the kids for the year AFTER the teacher has them. One who is inflating grades to make him/herself look good will see average grade drop) 2. Is there a stealth/whisper campaign going on in the district (mostly the teachers, but spreading to councilors and admins) to oust the teacher? If yes to both, triple that teacher's pay and fire anyone who is working to get rid of him/her. Groupthink is probably the biggest cause of our public school woes. There is this attitude that education is the process of shoveling information into those little heads, and getting them to spit it back out on cue. Teachers who fail to subscribe to this get pounded down. Hard. Want to see where it has happened? Take a look at State and Federal 'Teacher of The Year' award winners. You will find that very few of those who receive the award are in teaching much longer. Find out the reason they keep leaving, and you will find one of the big problems with our schools.
Are NOT restore systems. Restoration is a totally different operation, and not one that the backup solutions people invest a lot of effort in. You doubt me? Try to restore an Exchange Server from tapes (Backupexec) after losing and re-building the server.
quote: Pretty is cool, but it gets old. Fun never does (sigh) If only we could convince the ladies that this is true when it comes to boyfriends...
Base it around puzzles...ya...that's the ticket. Make everything puzzle stuff that you can do. And..and..make it non-fee based, play for free but buy in-game money. Ya. Great idea. After all, its never been done before. (sorry, no pop)