Is that why cures have been discovered for so many other diseases in the last 100 years? Mostly, if I'm not mistaken, by researchers in capitalist countries. Indeed, if the situation you describe were true, the US would not have done so much in the last 50 years to curb tobacco use: tobacco is an industry, and it was a much larger industry. And treating lung cancer and other diseases that tobacco causes is also an industry.
I'm not sure, but I suspect lots of parents who home school (including the religious ones) do so for reasons more related to many of the comments in this/. article. Namely, they don't believe the current US school system is teaching well; too tied up with frequent testing, teaching to the test, being PC, Common Core, and so forth. And I have to believe they have a point.
"IT and teaching are not meant to be mixed... computers make people stop thinking while school should make them think more." I'm not sure about that.
Teaching--any teaching, I'll claim--can be done in different ways. Years ago I taught linguistics in one of the best colleges in a certain third world country. The students were paying a lot to be there (college students who couldn't pay could attend one of the national colleges/ universities), and they'd probably done well in high school. But as in many countries, they had been taught facts, not thinking on their own. So one of my first assignments was to explain why one of the analyses in the linguistics text book was wrong. That the textbook could be wrong was an astonishing idea to them. (Not to me, I'd grown up in the 60s.) I'd like to think that that assignment helped teach them to think, not just regurgitate facts.
What I did with linguistics could, I believe, be done in computing or indeed in any other domain. Teach them programming--the programming language doesn't matter, you could use WordBasic or Excel (don't quote me on the latter, though, my knowledge of Excel--and for that matter of WordBasic--is pretty meager). If you assign a problem to a class with 30 students, there will probably be 25 different programs (allowing for a few students who copy someone else's work, or don't bother to do it). Chose 3 or 4 of these solutions, put them up on the screen or print them out, and discuss which ones are better--and why. There, you're teaching them how to think. It's in a particular domain, and I can't guarantee it will generalize to other domains, but you can--should, IMO--do similar things in all the classes: make the students reason about things, not just learn facts.
Disclaimer: I haven't taught since 1981, so I don't have any experience with today's students, so I could be blowing smoke. But then my suspicion is that people today aren't different in what they *could* learn than people in Plato's Academy.
There are books on this; a co-worker, Amalia Gnanadesikan, has written a book on the history of writing systems; there are other good books on writing systems as well. Also museums, like the Museum of the Alphabet in Waxhaw, North Carolina (USA). (The latter was created by missionaries with SIL; SIL has created writing systems for hundreds, if not thousands, of small languages. But the museum is more about the history of the alphabet, and can IMO be appreciated from a purely secular viewpoint.)
There's also the linguistic viewpoint, which I personally find even more fascinating. (Disclaimer: I'm a linguist.)
He changed it because the Arabic script is a terrible way to write the Turkish vowels; you have to have diacritics all over the place. Uyghur does it, but it's not easy.
There must have been a Soviet joke about that, da? Maybe this one (stolen from wikipedia):
Stalin loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Lavrenti calls Stalin: "Have you found your pipe?" "Yes," replies Stalin. "I found it under the sofa." "This is impossible!" exclaims Beria. "Three people have already confessed to this crime!"
Computers are becoming more so, but they're not there yet for all writing systems. Before Unicode, you could do ASCII-based alphabets just fine, but anything else was variable. (Hint:/.)
There's still lots more to supporting a writing system than having code points for all the letters. Even after Unicode was invented, Arabic script was hard for a long time--not only right-to-left, but also with some characters that changed shape depending on their position in a word. There's an entire block of Unicode which is a kludgy solution to this problem (Arabic Presentation Forms). Fortunately, fonts have caught up, and that block is no longer strictly necessary for Naskh or Kufic styles. The Nasta'liq style of Arabic script (which is, btw, quite beautiful as a script) has been approximated with less or more success for some time; SIL recently came out with a Nasta'liq font that is quite nice (IMO). But it wasn't long ago--maybe a decade (and for all I know, more recently)--that Urdu newspapers were written by calligraphers (humans!) and then printed by photo-offset, because Nasta'liq is so hard to get right.
Another script that can still be difficult to render well on computers is Burmese. Indic scripts aren't that easy; some versions of TeX (notably LuaTeX) don't do well with Indic fonts (including those for both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages). (But XeTeX does well with virtually all of these, afaik.)
And the last time I checked (maybe five years ago), Java-based apps mess up on Thaana (used for writing Dhivehi). There's been a bug report on that for a long time (ever since I noticed the bug--the folks at XMLMind submitted the report, IIRC), but afaik it's still not fixed.
Whether you need accents (acute, circumflex, grave, tilde,...) is entirely dependent on how many phonemes the language has and how many distinct letters the writing system (I'm assuming alphabetic) has. Most alphabetic writing systems have 20-30 symbols, not counting diacriticized letters as distinct. That works fine for languages like Hawai`an, but it stinks for languages that have to distinguish lots of consonants and vowels. That's precisely the reason (IIUC) that Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin script; Turkish has to distinguish lots of vowels, and Arabic makes that hard. (Uyghur manages by using diacritics.)
Right. There are a few others that are modern: Cherokee (it sort of looks like Latin script, but it isn't), Vai (a language/ script of Liberia), Khom (a script used in the early 20th century for Lao), Pahawh Hmong. A bit older is Thaana, a script sort of based on Arabic (in somewhat the same sense that Cherokee is based on the Latin script) used to write Dhivehi. Probably others that I don't know.
There are of course lots of alphabets that have been invented in the last 100 or so years by missionaries (especially SIL), but afaik these are all based on a local script (often Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic). Often they need to add new letters for a phoneme. Usually these are based on letters of the regular alphabet plus diacritics, but occasionally you get s.t. new, which eventually gets added to Unicode. But of course this are not new writing systems in the same way that Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics or these other scripts are.
Nothing primitive about other writing systems (although I guess you could make a case for alphabetic writing systems being better). And if you want imperfection in writing systems, you need look no further than written English. Learning to spell English takes years, and we even have contests for accurate spelling. I think that's absurd. Part of the problem is that we spell etymologically (why is there a 'y' in 'etymological'? why not spell it like it sounds, 'etimological'? what's the 'gh' for in 'though' and 'enough'?). Part of the problem is that we have well over ten distinct vowels in English, and only five vowel letters (we could have used 'y' as an additional vowel letter, but we use it instead as another way of writing 'i'). And part of the problem is that we spell the same sound in multiple ways (the aforementioned/i/ sound with 'i' and 'y'; the/k' sound with 'k', 'c', and 'ck'; the first sound in 'Jill' with 'j' in some words and 'g' in others. And for some sounds we need--or use--digraphs (more than one letter, like 'sh', 'ch', the aforementioned 'ck', not to mention the "silent e"). In sum, it's a mess, and we have the Latins (who only had five vowels) in part to blame for it.
That said, there are lots of languages written in some variant of the Latin script. Unlike English, when they need extra sounds, they often use accent marks or digraphs. And when languages are newly written (as for example all the Amerindian and Polynesian languages), one can at least ignore etymology (ok, you usually have to deal with loan words, which is a sort of etymological issue). So if you want a more perfect tool, you should write in Tzeltal (a Mayan language), or Navajo, or some other language that uses the Latin script in an reasonable way. Not English.
In English, right, you don't have to write tone, although we write some kinds of intonation using punctuation, like commas, question marks, exclamation marks and periods (full stops for the Brits here). But tone languages are different; in a tone language, you can have two or more words that have exactly the same consonants and vowels, but differ in tone. If you write such pairs (or triplets or...) in isolation (without context), and you don't write the tone, you can't tell which word it is--just like if we wrote/p/ and/b/ with the same letter, you couldn't distinguish 'pit' from 'bit'.
Tone languages vary as to how important tone is. In some languages, there are relatively few words that differ only by tone, so that if you write sentences in such languages without writing the tone, it's usually not hard to figure out the tones (assuming you are fluent in the language!). But in languages that have many words distinguished only by tone, writing without marking tone makes for confusing reading.
The majority of languages in the world (but not the majority by population) are tone languages. Chinese, of course (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and others), Vietnamese, Thai, Lao. Many languages of Africa, including Yoruba (but while Yoruba is "correctly" written with tone, in practice it tends to be written without tones). Many Amerindian languages, including Dene (Navajo).
Some tone languages have only two tones, but others have more. Thai has 5.
mostly right, but "phonetic language" should read "phonemic writing system". All spoken languages are phonetic, in the sense that words are represented by sequences of sounds. There's also a distinction between the phonetics of a language and its phonemics, but that would be getting into the weeds...
Not sure what you're saying. FYI, Ubuntu (as in the terminal) has been running under Win10 for over a year now. While they say it's not supported, I've also been running some Ubuntu gui's via Ming.
My point is that referring the case to the law system should never have been necessary. It should instead have been possible for the employees who audit returns to come up with the right answer without a lawyer.
But you're right in that the law system worked as it should have in this case.
You're right that it doesn't prove much, except: 1) that the data set is complete, and 2) that the provided code is really what was used to produce the claimed results, without anyone's thumb on the scale.
You might think that this would be obvious; I'm told it's not. Indeed, I know that I have (unintentionally!) delivered code to a customer that was incomplete, and in some cases it's unclear when a set of code is truly complete. How far down the list of dependencies should you go? Clearly you don't want to include Linux itself, or grep or sed... Docker provides one answer to this, but it is (IMO) rather clumsy. There's also the issue of version numbers.
Maybe there should be a distinct term for this, like validation. But it's not as easy and straightforward as it appears. And IMO it's a pre-requisite to someone writing different software to run over the same data, much less using a different dataset.
"Simply releasing software and data sets is not enough. Those also aren't peer-reviewed. The bigger issue is that there just isn't a lot of funding to ensure that results are reproducible." Preach it, brother! I just got done reviewing some conference papers, at least one of which was accompanied by software + data. Do you think I took the time to run the software on their data? No. Much less examine their data to see if it was representative, clean, etc. I don't have time for that, and as you say, there is no funding for it. There ought to be, IMO.
Re the notebooks turning to dust: in some fields, it almost doesn't matter that this happens. I'm guessing that high energy physics is one of those fields; who wants/ needs to re-run a cyclotron experiment from the 1950s? But the other part of this--software becoming obsolete--is a much shorter time period, and I suspect a lot of fields get caught in that.
For some fields, both things matter. I'm a linguist, and a grammar + dictionary of some indigenous language written in the 1940s is just as important today as it was the day it was written--much more so, if the language has become extinct, as many have. In fact I was just in a conversation last week with another linguist about converting old dictionaries into XML. Image PDFs are of course the worst, but even text-based PDFs make it hard to extract the conceptual structure of the dictionary (as opposed to its layout, e.g. in two columns on pages, which is relatively easy to extract).
Not sure, but I think that's what ClickOnThis was saying. At any rate, the notion of making the data + code freely available is exactly what the recent reproducible research mantra is. (The notion of reproducible research has of course been around a long time, but it's only recently--the last decade or two--that making data + code + analysis all available on-line has been feasible.)
IANL, but I think you're both right. There are complicated things in this world, and laws need to be complicated to account for them (not to mention unambiguous). But when the tax code for ordinary citizens (I'm not even talking corporations) is so complicated that IRS employees who are answering questions from the public can't understand it, perhaps it's gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
True story. About ten years ago, the IRS told me I had miscalculated my taxes. In fear and trembling, I looked back at the line of my return they were disputing. Read it and its explanation five or more times, decided I was right and they were wrong. Got on the phone with one of their agents, pointed out exactly the wording that meant I was right, and argued back and forth for fifteen minutes. The employee was still convinced I was wrong, but finally got tired of me and told me she would connect me with one of their legal people. The legal person heard my explanation, and immediately agreed with me. She said "You understand the tax law well." I would dispute that, but at least I understood this particular piece of it. And at least two IRS employees (the one who had audited my return, and the first one I spoke to on the phone) did not. There's something wrong with that, and I don't believe it's that IRS employees are any dumber than the rest of us. Rather, it's that the tax code is too complicated.
I'm sure there are other laws (Obama Care, whether you agree with it or not, is an example).
In case anyone's interested, my base income (salary) had put me just over the limit for social security taxes (above that limit, you don't pay taxes on additional income). Besides my salary, I had reported consulting income on a separate form. The claim was that I owed social security tax on that consulting income. Of course I didn't; the max for social security included the sum of salary and consulting, and my salary had already put me over that max.
Guess that makes me a 67 year old kid, Anonymous Coward. I rather like that... sort of like Han Solo: "Scoundrel... I like the sound of that." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMk0-pZfx5Q @1:11)
"Retarded", otoh, I can do without for a few more years. At least until that Alzheimer's cure they're talking about in another/. thread comes through.
As AC says, yes. I have a Windows program called Ace Money that I just now launched from bash. I had to provide the full path, I guess I could have added the path to that exe; but of course the Windows model puts almost every exe (etc.) in its own dir, so it might be complicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that why cures have been discovered for so many other diseases in the last 100 years? Mostly, if I'm not mistaken, by researchers in capitalist countries. Indeed, if the situation you describe were true, the US would not have done so much in the last 50 years to curb tobacco use: tobacco is an industry, and it was a much larger industry. And treating lung cancer and other diseases that tobacco causes is also an industry.
I'm not sure, but I suspect lots of parents who home school (including the religious ones) do so for reasons more related to many of the comments in this /. article. Namely, they don't believe the current US school system is teaching well; too tied up with frequent testing, teaching to the test, being PC, Common Core, and so forth. And I have to believe they have a point.
"IT and teaching are not meant to be mixed... computers make people stop thinking while school should make them think more." I'm not sure about that.
Teaching--any teaching, I'll claim--can be done in different ways. Years ago I taught linguistics in one of the best colleges in a certain third world country. The students were paying a lot to be there (college students who couldn't pay could attend one of the national colleges/ universities), and they'd probably done well in high school. But as in many countries, they had been taught facts, not thinking on their own. So one of my first assignments was to explain why one of the analyses in the linguistics text book was wrong. That the textbook could be wrong was an astonishing idea to them. (Not to me, I'd grown up in the 60s.) I'd like to think that that assignment helped teach them to think, not just regurgitate facts.
What I did with linguistics could, I believe, be done in computing or indeed in any other domain. Teach them programming--the programming language doesn't matter, you could use WordBasic or Excel (don't quote me on the latter, though, my knowledge of Excel--and for that matter of WordBasic--is pretty meager). If you assign a problem to a class with 30 students, there will probably be 25 different programs (allowing for a few students who copy someone else's work, or don't bother to do it). Chose 3 or 4 of these solutions, put them up on the screen or print them out, and discuss which ones are better--and why. There, you're teaching them how to think. It's in a particular domain, and I can't guarantee it will generalize to other domains, but you can--should, IMO--do similar things in all the classes: make the students reason about things, not just learn facts.
Disclaimer: I haven't taught since 1981, so I don't have any experience with today's students, so I could be blowing smoke. But then my suspicion is that people today aren't different in what they *could* learn than people in Plato's Academy.
There are books on this; a co-worker, Amalia Gnanadesikan, has written a book on the history of writing systems; there are other good books on writing systems as well. Also museums, like the Museum of the Alphabet in Waxhaw, North Carolina (USA). (The latter was created by missionaries with SIL; SIL has created writing systems for hundreds, if not thousands, of small languages. But the museum is more about the history of the alphabet, and can IMO be appreciated from a purely secular viewpoint.)
There's also the linguistic viewpoint, which I personally find even more fascinating. (Disclaimer: I'm a linguist.)
"The French don't care what they say, actually, so long as they pronounce it properly." --Henry Higgins, c1906.
He changed it because the Arabic script is a terrible way to write the Turkish vowels; you have to have diacritics all over the place. Uyghur does it, but it's not easy.
There must have been a Soviet joke about that, da? Maybe this one (stolen from wikipedia):
Stalin loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Lavrenti calls Stalin: "Have you found your pipe?" "Yes," replies Stalin. "I found it under the sofa." "This is impossible!" exclaims Beria. "Three people have already confessed to this crime!"
Computers are becoming more so, but they're not there yet for all writing systems. Before Unicode, you could do ASCII-based alphabets just fine, but anything else was variable. (Hint: /.)
There's still lots more to supporting a writing system than having code points for all the letters. Even after Unicode was invented, Arabic script was hard for a long time--not only right-to-left, but also with some characters that changed shape depending on their position in a word. There's an entire block of Unicode which is a kludgy solution to this problem (Arabic Presentation Forms). Fortunately, fonts have caught up, and that block is no longer strictly necessary for Naskh or Kufic styles. The Nasta'liq style of Arabic script (which is, btw, quite beautiful as a script) has been approximated with less or more success for some time; SIL recently came out with a Nasta'liq font that is quite nice (IMO). But it wasn't long ago--maybe a decade (and for all I know, more recently)--that Urdu newspapers were written by calligraphers (humans!) and then printed by photo-offset, because Nasta'liq is so hard to get right.
Another script that can still be difficult to render well on computers is Burmese. Indic scripts aren't that easy; some versions of TeX (notably LuaTeX) don't do well with Indic fonts (including those for both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages). (But XeTeX does well with virtually all of these, afaik.)
And the last time I checked (maybe five years ago), Java-based apps mess up on Thaana (used for writing Dhivehi). There's been a bug report on that for a long time (ever since I noticed the bug--the folks at XMLMind submitted the report, IIRC), but afaik it's still not fixed.
I'm going out on a limb, but I believe the 'ch' also used to be considered a different letter in Spanish.
BTW, the origin of the ñ was two 'n's written, one above the other. Got simplified to ñ.
Son, if you were old enough to remember it, you wouldn't remember it. Take it from me: I'm old enough, but I don't remember it.
A variant on this: Judy Collins reportedly said if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.
Whether you need accents (acute, circumflex, grave, tilde,...) is entirely dependent on how many phonemes the language has and how many distinct letters the writing system (I'm assuming alphabetic) has. Most alphabetic writing systems have 20-30 symbols, not counting diacriticized letters as distinct. That works fine for languages like Hawai`an, but it stinks for languages that have to distinguish lots of consonants and vowels. That's precisely the reason (IIUC) that Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin script; Turkish has to distinguish lots of vowels, and Arabic makes that hard. (Uyghur manages by using diacritics.)
Right. There are a few others that are modern: Cherokee (it sort of looks like Latin script, but it isn't), Vai (a language/ script of Liberia), Khom (a script used in the early 20th century for Lao), Pahawh Hmong. A bit older is Thaana, a script sort of based on Arabic (in somewhat the same sense that Cherokee is based on the Latin script) used to write Dhivehi. Probably others that I don't know.
There are of course lots of alphabets that have been invented in the last 100 or so years by missionaries (especially SIL), but afaik these are all based on a local script (often Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic). Often they need to add new letters for a phoneme. Usually these are based on letters of the regular alphabet plus diacritics, but occasionally you get s.t. new, which eventually gets added to Unicode. But of course this are not new writing systems in the same way that Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics or these other scripts are.
Nothing primitive about other writing systems (although I guess you could make a case for alphabetic writing systems being better). And if you want imperfection in writing systems, you need look no further than written English. Learning to spell English takes years, and we even have contests for accurate spelling. I think that's absurd. Part of the problem is that we spell etymologically (why is there a 'y' in 'etymological'? why not spell it like it sounds, 'etimological'? what's the 'gh' for in 'though' and 'enough'?). Part of the problem is that we have well over ten distinct vowels in English, and only five vowel letters (we could have used 'y' as an additional vowel letter, but we use it instead as another way of writing 'i'). And part of the problem is that we spell the same sound in multiple ways (the aforementioned /i/ sound with 'i' and 'y'; the /k' sound with 'k', 'c', and 'ck'; the first sound in 'Jill' with 'j' in some words and 'g' in others. And for some sounds we need--or use--digraphs (more than one letter, like 'sh', 'ch', the aforementioned 'ck', not to mention the "silent e"). In sum, it's a mess, and we have the Latins (who only had five vowels) in part to blame for it.
That said, there are lots of languages written in some variant of the Latin script. Unlike English, when they need extra sounds, they often use accent marks or digraphs. And when languages are newly written (as for example all the Amerindian and Polynesian languages), one can at least ignore etymology (ok, you usually have to deal with loan words, which is a sort of etymological issue). So if you want a more perfect tool, you should write in Tzeltal (a Mayan language), or Navajo, or some other language that uses the Latin script in an reasonable way. Not English.
In English, right, you don't have to write tone, although we write some kinds of intonation using punctuation, like commas, question marks, exclamation marks and periods (full stops for the Brits here). But tone languages are different; in a tone language, you can have two or more words that have exactly the same consonants and vowels, but differ in tone. If you write such pairs (or triplets or...) in isolation (without context), and you don't write the tone, you can't tell which word it is--just like if we wrote /p/ and /b/ with the same letter, you couldn't distinguish 'pit' from 'bit'.
Tone languages vary as to how important tone is. In some languages, there are relatively few words that differ only by tone, so that if you write sentences in such languages without writing the tone, it's usually not hard to figure out the tones (assuming you are fluent in the language!). But in languages that have many words distinguished only by tone, writing without marking tone makes for confusing reading.
The majority of languages in the world (but not the majority by population) are tone languages. Chinese, of course (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and others), Vietnamese, Thai, Lao. Many languages of Africa, including Yoruba (but while Yoruba is "correctly" written with tone, in practice it tends to be written without tones). Many Amerindian languages, including Dene (Navajo).
Some tone languages have only two tones, but others have more. Thai has 5.
mostly right, but "phonetic language" should read "phonemic writing system". All spoken languages are phonetic, in the sense that words are represented by sequences of sounds. There's also a distinction between the phonetics of a language and its phonemics, but that would be getting into the weeds...
Not sure what you're saying. FYI, Ubuntu (as in the terminal) has been running under Win10 for over a year now. While they say it's not supported, I've also been running some Ubuntu gui's via Ming.
My point is that referring the case to the law system should never have been necessary. It should instead have been possible for the employees who audit returns to come up with the right answer without a lawyer.
But you're right in that the law system worked as it should have in this case.
You're right that it doesn't prove much, except: 1) that the data set is complete, and 2) that the provided code is really what was used to produce the claimed results, without anyone's thumb on the scale.
You might think that this would be obvious; I'm told it's not. Indeed, I know that I have (unintentionally!) delivered code to a customer that was incomplete, and in some cases it's unclear when a set of code is truly complete. How far down the list of dependencies should you go? Clearly you don't want to include Linux itself, or grep or sed... Docker provides one answer to this, but it is (IMO) rather clumsy. There's also the issue of version numbers.
Maybe there should be a distinct term for this, like validation. But it's not as easy and straightforward as it appears. And IMO it's a pre-requisite to someone writing different software to run over the same data, much less using a different dataset.
"Simply releasing software and data sets is not enough. Those also aren't peer-reviewed. The bigger issue is that there just isn't a lot of funding to ensure that results are reproducible." Preach it, brother! I just got done reviewing some conference papers, at least one of which was accompanied by software + data. Do you think I took the time to run the software on their data? No. Much less examine their data to see if it was representative, clean, etc. I don't have time for that, and as you say, there is no funding for it. There ought to be, IMO.
Re the notebooks turning to dust: in some fields, it almost doesn't matter that this happens. I'm guessing that high energy physics is one of those fields; who wants/ needs to re-run a cyclotron experiment from the 1950s? But the other part of this--software becoming obsolete--is a much shorter time period, and I suspect a lot of fields get caught in that.
For some fields, both things matter. I'm a linguist, and a grammar + dictionary of some indigenous language written in the 1940s is just as important today as it was the day it was written--much more so, if the language has become extinct, as many have. In fact I was just in a conversation last week with another linguist about converting old dictionaries into XML. Image PDFs are of course the worst, but even text-based PDFs make it hard to extract the conceptual structure of the dictionary (as opposed to its layout, e.g. in two columns on pages, which is relatively easy to extract).
Not sure, but I think that's what ClickOnThis was saying.
At any rate, the notion of making the data + code freely available is exactly what the recent reproducible research mantra is. (The notion of reproducible research has of course been around a long time, but it's only recently--the last decade or two--that making data + code + analysis all available on-line has been feasible.)
IANL, but I think you're both right. There are complicated things in this world, and laws need to be complicated to account for them (not to mention unambiguous). But when the tax code for ordinary citizens (I'm not even talking corporations) is so complicated that IRS employees who are answering questions from the public can't understand it, perhaps it's gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
True story. About ten years ago, the IRS told me I had miscalculated my taxes. In fear and trembling, I looked back at the line of my return they were disputing. Read it and its explanation five or more times, decided I was right and they were wrong. Got on the phone with one of their agents, pointed out exactly the wording that meant I was right, and argued back and forth for fifteen minutes. The employee was still convinced I was wrong, but finally got tired of me and told me she would connect me with one of their legal people. The legal person heard my explanation, and immediately agreed with me. She said "You understand the tax law well." I would dispute that, but at least I understood this particular piece of it. And at least two IRS employees (the one who had audited my return, and the first one I spoke to on the phone) did not. There's something wrong with that, and I don't believe it's that IRS employees are any dumber than the rest of us. Rather, it's that the tax code is too complicated.
I'm sure there are other laws (Obama Care, whether you agree with it or not, is an example).
In case anyone's interested, my base income (salary) had put me just over the limit for social security taxes (above that limit, you don't pay taxes on additional income). Besides my salary, I had reported consulting income on a separate form. The claim was that I owed social security tax on that consulting income. Of course I didn't; the max for social security included the sum of salary and consulting, and my salary had already put me over that max.
Guess that makes me a 67 year old kid, Anonymous Coward. I rather like that... sort of like Han Solo: "Scoundrel... I like the sound of that." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMk0-pZfx5Q @1:11)
"Retarded", otoh, I can do without for a few more years. At least until that Alzheimer's cure they're talking about in another /. thread comes through.
Yeah, I'm not sure what that person meant. At any rate, from WSL you get to the C drive via /mnt/c
As AC says, yes. I have a Windows program called Ace Money that I just now launched from bash. I had to provide the full path, I guess I could have added the path to that exe; but of course the Windows model puts almost every exe (etc.) in its own dir, so it might be complicated.