Those courts don't determine facts of law, they determine process and constitutionality. They can say a procedure was followed incorrectly by a lower court, or they can determine that law is unconstitutional, and therefore overturn the ruling or nullify the case, but they cannot overturn the facts determined by a jury.
The only body permitted to determine fact of law in the US is the jury. Technically congress can too, with their hearings, but those amount to fuck all and are completely irrelevant with regard to the rest of the law.
That's also why the higher courts never, ever hear an original case. It absolutely must come through a lower court first.
In my experience, dumb jurors rarely make it onto the jury box. If it's good for the prosecutor to have an idiot on the jury, then it's bad for the defendant and the guy gets tossed. The opposite is also true. So, what you end up with is a reasonably sound jury - unless of course the entire jury pool is dumb as shit, in which case the defendant and prosecutor and judge are all probably dumb as shit too, so it doesn't really matter.
Of course the facts are in dispute. That's the only thing a jury is there to determine. When a jury says "We find so and so guilty of such and such", what has actually happened is the judge has told them "These are the points of law - if A, B, and C are true, the defendant is guilty. If any one of them is not true, the defendant is not guilty." The jury decides the facts beyond a reasonable doubt (it is impossible to decide beyond all doubt), and if all the facts meet the definition of guilty, they find the defendant guilty. If not, they find him not guilty.
The only reason there is a trial is because the facts are in dispute. That's why someone says "Not Guilty" when charged with a crime - they are disputing the facts the prosecution has presented.
The wiggle room for getting off on a case is completely different from what people seem to think it is. It's not the law that gives the wiggle room, it's the facts. If the jurors are not 95% sure a fact is true, then they assume it is false.
Because of this, I would much rather have a group of people who have common sense than any sort of technical experts judging the case. Generally, whether or not something happened is only a portion of the case, and often times whether a person intended to do any harm is just as important as actually doing any harm. In that situation, highly technical people are often horrible judges of character and motivation, and they could really fuck you over because they are stuck on some stupid detail that doesn't matter.
I sat on a jury for a felony theft case, and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the jurors, considering the pool they were selected from. All the shitheads and dumbasses were weeded out by one party or the other, and the jury was pretty solid.
It's also worth noting that whether or not the guy stole the thing he stole was not in question - the defense didn't even bother trying to deny it. They basically argued that it wasn't worth $500, and not a felony, and therefore could not be held guilty for felony theft. Double jeopardy being what it is, the state would not have been able to come back and charge the guy with a misdemeanor, so it's a good thing he was found guilty.;)
What's funny is NC still wouldn't be able to participate, because that would violate federal interstate commerce laws (Amazon has no presence in NC). That's why the state of NC isn't asking for the taxes, just information about the taxes, which they also don't have the right to demand. I would be very surprised if Amazon lost this case.
These are sales receipts, they'd have to keep them for years just because of federal taxes. They also have to keep them for any states they operate out of. NC is not one of those, and they have no right to the information - they are just grasping at straws here, because their citizens are not reporting the sales and thus not paying this ridiculous tax.
They still have their own taxes to pay, and if they were to be subject to an audit they'd have to pony up.
This is different, Amazon does not do business in North Carolina - all of their sales occur outside the state, and as such NC has absolutely no right to demand anything of Amazon. It would be like Florida suing a book store in Minnesota for all the sales receipts for purchases made by Florida citizens. Never mind if the store knows who they are or not, Florida has absolutely no right to make such a request. It's the exact same thing here, shipping it after the sale is made doesn't change the fact that it was purchased somewhere else.
In fact, if NC were actually asking for the sales taxes themselves they'd be laughed out of court. They may still get laughed out of court - the people they need to be asking for the sales information from is their own citizens. If they won't pony up and you aren't willing to force them to, then tough.
That's called inter-state commerce, and it falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Also, if you managed to somehow get such a thing passed, you're ignoring the fact that a number of states have no sales tax (mine doesn't even have income tax, either), and it is their sovereign right to refuse such an agreement, and a number of states absolutely would refuse it.
Since the only real way to enact such a thing is by federal law, any taxes collected under such an "agreement" would go to the federal government, not the individual states.
Congratulations! You've just implemented a national sales tax and didn't do anything to solve the problem.
It would be illegal for Amazon to collect NC sales tax outside of NC. You could go to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for it, because it's a federal interstate commerce law violation. North Carolina doesn't have jurisdiction outside of North Carolina.
What they are asking for is information so they can send a nice fat tax bill to their own citizens. Even this, though is on shaky ground. I really doubt NC has the right to request information about sales that took place outside of NC. They are trying it anyway, though, because if they manage to win they'll be able to extort millions of dollars from their citizens.
The problem is in the US the states are sovereign, and while the Fed can add laws on top of the States, in a most cases the state laws apply in addition to the Fed laws. The only time a Fed law trumps a state law is when a state law is in direct opposition to a fed law. This is like a state with a $3/hr minimum wage when the Fed minimum is $5/hr, the $5/hr wins. However, if another state has a 6$/hr minimum wage, that applies to that state only, it can't be applied to someone in another state. Localities get to add their own taxes as well, which apply in addition to state and federal taxes.
In other words, all you'd be doing is adding a national sales tax, it wouldn't change anything. There is absolutely no way you could pass a law at the federal level that would set taxes at the state level, the government is not structured that way and such a law would be ruled unconstitutional by the first court that ever heard a case about it.
The fact is, taxing across state lines is a lot like taxing across country lines, except you don't get to make treaties that could allow for such a thing. In this respect the EU is actually much more free to set taxes in individual countries (assuming the countries agree to it, of course) than the US is to set taxes in individual states.
They can't require Amazon to collect NC state taxes - with Amazon having no physical presence in NC, it would actually be illegal for Amazon to do so. North Carolina can tax NC citizens for anything they want, but they can't force a non-NC entity which does not do business in NC to comply. That's actually why they want this information: to force NC citizens to comply.
I would think access to the information falls well outside NC's jurisdiction for the same reason they can't ask Amazon to collect sales tax for them. It would violate Federal Interstate Commerce laws.
That's common for poorly managed projects. All large bureaucracies seem to be especially good at managing projects poorly, from large businesses to state governments, it's easy to hide blame and shift responsibilities such that the people responsible for the poor management of such projects get more responsibility, not less.
You should be angry at the developer, but much more so you should be angry at the government for wasting your money. They take your money under threat of incarceration, and then waste it like they don't care. It should really piss you off.
What you people are completely ignoring is the fact that the State of North Carolina can tax any citizen of North Carolina for anything they want, and use any metric they damn well please.
So basically what NC is saying, is "That item is new to you, and we are taxing any new items in the State of North Carolina. The basis for the value of the item is the sales receipt."
It's no different than adding a 5% tax on cigarettes, it's just the criteria for the item to be taxed has been made broad enough to include everything, and the base for the tax is the sales receipt. If you didn't buy it, obviously 5% of nothing is nothing, so you don't pay any tax. If you did buy it, you owe 5% of the sale price.
It sounds like interstate commerce when the purchase is made out of state, but really there is nothing interstate about it. They aren't taxing anybody out of state, they aren't taxing the sale of goods across state lines, none of that. They are just being assholes and taxing anything within North Carolina that they can possibly think of.
Now, I think it's extremely unlikely that NC will be able to get a hold of out of state sales records, because that is an interstate commerce issue, and they have absolutely no right to the information since their tax cannot be based on the actual sale of the item, just the use of the item within NC the value for tax purposes based on the sales receipt. It cannot be a "sales" tax, or it violates interstate commerce laws.
If they attempt to have it both ways, they could risk getting the law struck down as unconstitutional by changing the implied basis for the law. If it is understood to be the same as a sales tax applied across state lines, they'll be in deep shit.
I've been 4 years now without a raise, despite being a dedicated and productive employee (I did no programming when I started, and now I am, yet I'm still making the same salary). I've been with the State for 10 years now, and of those 10 years, the only raises I've seen that weren't from me changing jobs were ~3% COL increases, which has happened 4 times. That's pretty crummy, considering the absolutely insane amount of growth the state saw over the past decade.
Welcome to the real world son, I've worked at my current job for 3 years, seen one promotion and a job change, and not a dime of extra pay - no COL, no nothing. I even saw a 5% cut when the economy went south. All that, and relatively speaking I have a good, secure job.
I'd be pretty happy with your 12% raises in the current economic climate.
Very few private companies have plush retirements that match State retirements. Of those that did have them, like GM, they've been getting rid of them.
My last employer even had a convoluted sliding-scale 401k matching system - they'd match up to 6%, but you'd have to put in 12% of your income to get that, and it took three years to get vested. My current employer is a bit better about that - matching % for % up to 6%, but that's still not as good as most State pensions.
The upside to public employment is you've got to really suck to get fired. It's almost unheard of. The only time you really see public employees get fired is when they screw up so bad that the public is made aware of it, and is demanding their head. Then it's a tossup. This is why government jobs tend to be filled by either idealists or nincompoops. It's not universally true, but it's common.
You east-westerners have no idea about size. Hell, my city is 30% bigger than Rhode Island, and nearly as big as Delaware. If you include the metropolitan area, it's bigger than 10 states - being a touch smaller than Main. In fact, there are only 10 states larger than our largest "county" (we call them boroughs). It's a two hour flight to get to work for me, and I don't cross any state lines to get there.
Granted, there is only one state that has fewer people than we do, but that's not the point.
or it is completely secret and noone knows what the conditions are like.
Well, obviously, if Noone knows about it they're getting the secrets from him. Duh.
Seriously, grammar police I know, but what the fuck is up with noone? That doesn't make any fucking sense. When you write it like that, it is pronounced "noon", the "e" is automatically silent. The phrase is no one. It isn't that hard, there is no reason to shove the words together. If you want to say nobody, say nobody. Seriously, you go from sounding relatively intelligent to a complete dumbass with one word.
The wide variety of users combined with the ability to install Windows on a wide variety of hardware leads to an impossibly large combination of hardware and software that you have to think about.
This from someone who obviously knows nothing of Windows hardware abstraction.
Windows has abstracted the hardware away from the developer from the beginning. With each release, they get better at it. By the time you got to XP, all a developer had to worry about was minimum system requirements and safe memory management. For 99% of applications, CPU/GPU is a non-issue, they'll run fine on 10 year old software. With.Net, you don't even have to worry about memory management any more. So long as they have enough RAM and enough CPU/GPU to run your app reasonably snappy there is nothing to worry about.
Seriously, software developers haven't had to worry about hardware bugs much at all for a decade now. The only time this would be the case if you were writing an application to manipulate a specific piece of hardware, and some driver bug is screwing things up. That sort of thing shows up in testing.
There aren't that many hardware combinations
There are dozens of different hardware sets, and each has different capabilities. This is actually more of an issue for Android because the capabilities of such small devices are so limited, it's pretty easy to max out one device while being at a reasonable level for another. Different model phones expose different portions of the Android market because of this - there is some software you can't get on some hardware unless you download it from an external source. It's one of the biggest shortcomings of Android devices.
The iPhone has this same problem as well - there a lot of new apps that don't work well on the original iPhone, but work just fine on the iPhone 3g. To hit the broadest market you'll want to scale things back for the original iPhone, but it might not be able to do what you want it to, so you'll have to make a choice: do you write your software such that all iPhone users will enjoy it? Or do you try to make your software the most advanced you can make it? Somewhere in between maybe?
The problem isn't really any different for PCs, Android phones, or iPhones. The scale changes, but the problem doesn't go away. Give the iPhone another three years and it will be a tangled mess as bad as any PC app for developers. And really, it isn't that bad anyway.
The driver sub-system is abstracted away from you. Unless you are creating a custom driver for your application, any driver issues will be rare and affect a relatively small portion of the market. The only reason this would not be quite as true for D3D and OGL is because there are a limited number of driver vendors - problems hit a broader market. Still it gets fixed very quickly, and a locked down hardware system is not immune to these same problems anyway (everybody screws up sometime).
System requirements issues
There is very little software on the market that cannot run on 5-6 year old hardware (even games). With a closed hardware system you'd have had to upgrade by now anyway.
You also know what minimum level of CPU, GPU, and RAM to expect from a "2007 Mac" and an end user can understand this.
The basic concepts are simple, and very few people cannot grasp them. All they have to do is go into a store and say "I want a computer that is good for games" and the salesman will outfit them with the fastest cpu, gpu, and most ram they can get the guy to buy. Very few people screw this up. It is, in fact, very hard to screw up. If it were easy to screw up, nobody would be buying computer games at all because they'd never work right.
Jobs doesn't see what people want, he tells them what they want.
None but a handful of people have actually wanted a tablet PC in the last 10 years. Jobs simply seems to know how to convince people they want something even if they don't really have any use for it.
Pretty much all the reviews I've seen of the iPad freely admit that it is next to useless, it can be a pain to work with in any normal sitting position, and the general limitations of the device really suck, yet at the same time they love it so much you'd have to pry it from their cold dead hands.
Apple delivers the whole package, and before they do they hype the hell out of all of it to make it the next "gotta have it" gadget. They did it with the iPod (there were hundreds of mp3 players before it), and they did it with the iPhone (again, the smartphone was nothing new). What will make the iPad popular is not the device, but just like the iPod and the iPhone, it will be the structure behind it. The app store and the book store are what will make it popular.
That doesn't make Jobs the visionary, it just means he's better at drumming up support for things people don't want than Gates was.
Its definitely cooler than any of the e-readers on the market right now...
I don't see how you can legitimately call it an e-reader, as far as e-reader technology goes the iPad is a decade behind the curve.
It's a giant iPhone, if you spend all your time on your iPhone but never make phone calls, or if you think the iPod Touch is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then there is a good chance you'll love the iPad, but reading? I don't think too many people could handle more than an hour or so of reading on that thing, it's exactly the same as reading on your computer monitor - it hurts after a while.
Other than that though, I hear it's a sweet device. It doesn't do what I would want it to do, but those who have used it have said it is awesome.
Because they abandoned it. At the time, they obviously didn't want it. They might have even left it there for you, and are simply changing their mind later. Either way, it isn't stealing because you never took it from them. In fact, you took it from nobody.
What if... the guy left the bar, so I took his phone. He got to his car, realized his mistake, and came back to get it, but it was gone? Did I 'find' it, or did I 'steal' it?
You found it. The decent thing to do would be to just give it back, but it's not uncommon to ask for a finder's fee before returning it (though it is uncommon if someone lost it for such a short period of time).
What if the guy left it for a few minutes to take a leak, and I took it then?
Seriously, what kind of dumbass is this guy? You still found it, you didn't steal it.
Sure, the engineer screwed up, but legal or not, it ain't right to keep the phone.
"Right" is subjective, but I'd agree that giving it back is the decent thing to do. It still isn't theft.
It actually probably protects him quite a bit, assuming this wasn't a marketing ploy to begin with.
Think about it, they know which phone it was because they wiped it the day after it was lost. More than likely the employee himself reported it missing (again, assuming it wasn't a marketing ploy) in order to protect what little chance he had to keep his job. Obviously they've known since day one who lost it, either way.
By publicly outing the guy, he is going to have a lot of people who think he should keep his job in spite of the mistake. That's what they call "public pressure". Now Apple could harm their public image by firing the guy, or they could improve it by keeping him on. That's a lot more support than a nameless employee is going to get.
You won't be able to tell if it is a marketing ploy, by the way, unless they fire the guy. If they fire him, it almost certainly is not a marketing ploy. If he keeps his job, it could have been a ploy all along, or it could just be Apple deciding it would be worth more than this guy's job for them to look merciful to their subjects... I mean employees.
What the submitter is talking about is a 21st Century Firewall (capitalized out of reverence). Why not have automatic host discovery? Why should I have to painstakingly come up with a list of all target machines with IP addresses? Is this not 2010?:)
Firewall Builder does this. What part of "try firewall builder" do you not understand?
Did everyone miss the question about "jdoe's" computer being connected, and then (and ONLY then) her needed ports being enabled in some other PC on the network? That would actually be a VERY nice capability.
It also completely defeats the purpose of a firewall. UPnP does this already anyway, at the cost of reduced security. I'm not sure if Linux distros come with UPnP by default, but it is certainly available. Windows has had it since XP.
You don't get to have it all. It is almost universally true regarding computer security that anything that increases convenience reduces security, and vice versa. The whole purpose of a firewall is to block unknown traffic. If you have it set up to automatically allow new hosts to access resources across the firewall without direct administrative intervention then you might as well replace your firewall with a repeater, because that is all it is doing.
It's not that you couldn't do some sort of auto-discovery for firewalls - that's extremely easy (it already gets the IP address at the very least). However, if every time a new IP connected to your firewall it asked if you wanted to add new firewall rules for it, you'd never do anything except decline such requests. Firewalls are flooded with new host IP's constantly which makes what you describe at the very least extremely impractical.
The only practical way to handle firewalls after they have been configured initially is to manually enter each new host as they are connected to the network. Just take a look at chatty software firewalls to see just how annoying this can be. That on a hardware firewall would be ridiculous.
For home routers, pretty much all of them have simple router config software that walks a user through setting up their network and configuring all devices.
For enterprise grade network equipment, Cisco at least already has everything the OP is asking for. You still need to know what you are doing, since there is a hell of a lot more that a Cisco router can do than a Linksys can do (oddly enough Linksys home routers come with cisco branding, don't be fooled, it's the same old shitty linksys), but if you want to go that rout you can use a GUI to manage each router and a management software package to manage the whole kit - network diagram and all.
Frankly, if the OP wants to operate in the here and now, he should stop using equipment from the 90's and try some modern hardware.
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Those courts don't determine facts of law, they determine process and constitutionality. They can say a procedure was followed incorrectly by a lower court, or they can determine that law is unconstitutional, and therefore overturn the ruling or nullify the case, but they cannot overturn the facts determined by a jury.
The only body permitted to determine fact of law in the US is the jury. Technically congress can too, with their hearings, but those amount to fuck all and are completely irrelevant with regard to the rest of the law.
That's also why the higher courts never, ever hear an original case. It absolutely must come through a lower court first.
In my experience, dumb jurors rarely make it onto the jury box. If it's good for the prosecutor to have an idiot on the jury, then it's bad for the defendant and the guy gets tossed. The opposite is also true. So, what you end up with is a reasonably sound jury - unless of course the entire jury pool is dumb as shit, in which case the defendant and prosecutor and judge are all probably dumb as shit too, so it doesn't really matter.
Of course the facts are in dispute. That's the only thing a jury is there to determine. When a jury says "We find so and so guilty of such and such", what has actually happened is the judge has told them "These are the points of law - if A, B, and C are true, the defendant is guilty. If any one of them is not true, the defendant is not guilty." The jury decides the facts beyond a reasonable doubt (it is impossible to decide beyond all doubt), and if all the facts meet the definition of guilty, they find the defendant guilty. If not, they find him not guilty.
The only reason there is a trial is because the facts are in dispute. That's why someone says "Not Guilty" when charged with a crime - they are disputing the facts the prosecution has presented.
The wiggle room for getting off on a case is completely different from what people seem to think it is. It's not the law that gives the wiggle room, it's the facts. If the jurors are not 95% sure a fact is true, then they assume it is false.
Because of this, I would much rather have a group of people who have common sense than any sort of technical experts judging the case. Generally, whether or not something happened is only a portion of the case, and often times whether a person intended to do any harm is just as important as actually doing any harm. In that situation, highly technical people are often horrible judges of character and motivation, and they could really fuck you over because they are stuck on some stupid detail that doesn't matter.
I sat on a jury for a felony theft case, and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the jurors, considering the pool they were selected from. All the shitheads and dumbasses were weeded out by one party or the other, and the jury was pretty solid.
It's also worth noting that whether or not the guy stole the thing he stole was not in question - the defense didn't even bother trying to deny it. They basically argued that it wasn't worth $500, and not a felony, and therefore could not be held guilty for felony theft. Double jeopardy being what it is, the state would not have been able to come back and charge the guy with a misdemeanor, so it's a good thing he was found guilty. ;)
What's funny is NC still wouldn't be able to participate, because that would violate federal interstate commerce laws (Amazon has no presence in NC). That's why the state of NC isn't asking for the taxes, just information about the taxes, which they also don't have the right to demand. I would be very surprised if Amazon lost this case.
It's the exact opposite, actually. They are required to keep them for at least 7 years for federal audits, possibly longer for certain states.
These are sales receipts, they'd have to keep them for years just because of federal taxes. They also have to keep them for any states they operate out of. NC is not one of those, and they have no right to the information - they are just grasping at straws here, because their citizens are not reporting the sales and thus not paying this ridiculous tax.
They still have their own taxes to pay, and if they were to be subject to an audit they'd have to pony up.
This is different, Amazon does not do business in North Carolina - all of their sales occur outside the state, and as such NC has absolutely no right to demand anything of Amazon. It would be like Florida suing a book store in Minnesota for all the sales receipts for purchases made by Florida citizens. Never mind if the store knows who they are or not, Florida has absolutely no right to make such a request. It's the exact same thing here, shipping it after the sale is made doesn't change the fact that it was purchased somewhere else.
In fact, if NC were actually asking for the sales taxes themselves they'd be laughed out of court. They may still get laughed out of court - the people they need to be asking for the sales information from is their own citizens. If they won't pony up and you aren't willing to force them to, then tough.
That's called inter-state commerce, and it falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Also, if you managed to somehow get such a thing passed, you're ignoring the fact that a number of states have no sales tax (mine doesn't even have income tax, either), and it is their sovereign right to refuse such an agreement, and a number of states absolutely would refuse it.
Since the only real way to enact such a thing is by federal law, any taxes collected under such an "agreement" would go to the federal government, not the individual states.
Congratulations! You've just implemented a national sales tax and didn't do anything to solve the problem.
It would be illegal for Amazon to collect NC sales tax outside of NC. You could go to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for it, because it's a federal interstate commerce law violation. North Carolina doesn't have jurisdiction outside of North Carolina.
What they are asking for is information so they can send a nice fat tax bill to their own citizens. Even this, though is on shaky ground. I really doubt NC has the right to request information about sales that took place outside of NC. They are trying it anyway, though, because if they manage to win they'll be able to extort millions of dollars from their citizens.
The problem is in the US the states are sovereign, and while the Fed can add laws on top of the States, in a most cases the state laws apply in addition to the Fed laws. The only time a Fed law trumps a state law is when a state law is in direct opposition to a fed law. This is like a state with a $3/hr minimum wage when the Fed minimum is $5/hr, the $5/hr wins. However, if another state has a 6$/hr minimum wage, that applies to that state only, it can't be applied to someone in another state. Localities get to add their own taxes as well, which apply in addition to state and federal taxes.
In other words, all you'd be doing is adding a national sales tax, it wouldn't change anything. There is absolutely no way you could pass a law at the federal level that would set taxes at the state level, the government is not structured that way and such a law would be ruled unconstitutional by the first court that ever heard a case about it.
The fact is, taxing across state lines is a lot like taxing across country lines, except you don't get to make treaties that could allow for such a thing. In this respect the EU is actually much more free to set taxes in individual countries (assuming the countries agree to it, of course) than the US is to set taxes in individual states.
They can't require Amazon to collect NC state taxes - with Amazon having no physical presence in NC, it would actually be illegal for Amazon to do so. North Carolina can tax NC citizens for anything they want, but they can't force a non-NC entity which does not do business in NC to comply. That's actually why they want this information: to force NC citizens to comply.
I would think access to the information falls well outside NC's jurisdiction for the same reason they can't ask Amazon to collect sales tax for them. It would violate Federal Interstate Commerce laws.
That's common for poorly managed projects. All large bureaucracies seem to be especially good at managing projects poorly, from large businesses to state governments, it's easy to hide blame and shift responsibilities such that the people responsible for the poor management of such projects get more responsibility, not less.
You should be angry at the developer, but much more so you should be angry at the government for wasting your money. They take your money under threat of incarceration, and then waste it like they don't care. It should really piss you off.
What you people are completely ignoring is the fact that the State of North Carolina can tax any citizen of North Carolina for anything they want, and use any metric they damn well please.
So basically what NC is saying, is "That item is new to you, and we are taxing any new items in the State of North Carolina. The basis for the value of the item is the sales receipt."
It's no different than adding a 5% tax on cigarettes, it's just the criteria for the item to be taxed has been made broad enough to include everything, and the base for the tax is the sales receipt. If you didn't buy it, obviously 5% of nothing is nothing, so you don't pay any tax. If you did buy it, you owe 5% of the sale price.
It sounds like interstate commerce when the purchase is made out of state, but really there is nothing interstate about it. They aren't taxing anybody out of state, they aren't taxing the sale of goods across state lines, none of that. They are just being assholes and taxing anything within North Carolina that they can possibly think of.
Now, I think it's extremely unlikely that NC will be able to get a hold of out of state sales records, because that is an interstate commerce issue, and they have absolutely no right to the information since their tax cannot be based on the actual sale of the item, just the use of the item within NC the value for tax purposes based on the sales receipt. It cannot be a "sales" tax, or it violates interstate commerce laws.
If they attempt to have it both ways, they could risk getting the law struck down as unconstitutional by changing the implied basis for the law. If it is understood to be the same as a sales tax applied across state lines, they'll be in deep shit.
I've been 4 years now without a raise, despite being a dedicated and productive employee (I did no programming when I started, and now I am, yet I'm still making the same salary). I've been with the State for 10 years now, and of those 10 years, the only raises I've seen that weren't from me changing jobs were ~3% COL increases, which has happened 4 times. That's pretty crummy, considering the absolutely insane amount of growth the state saw over the past decade.
Welcome to the real world son, I've worked at my current job for 3 years, seen one promotion and a job change, and not a dime of extra pay - no COL, no nothing. I even saw a 5% cut when the economy went south. All that, and relatively speaking I have a good, secure job.
I'd be pretty happy with your 12% raises in the current economic climate.
Very few private companies have plush retirements that match State retirements. Of those that did have them, like GM, they've been getting rid of them.
My last employer even had a convoluted sliding-scale 401k matching system - they'd match up to 6%, but you'd have to put in 12% of your income to get that, and it took three years to get vested. My current employer is a bit better about that - matching % for % up to 6%, but that's still not as good as most State pensions.
The upside to public employment is you've got to really suck to get fired. It's almost unheard of. The only time you really see public employees get fired is when they screw up so bad that the public is made aware of it, and is demanding their head. Then it's a tossup. This is why government jobs tend to be filled by either idealists or nincompoops. It's not universally true, but it's common.
You east-westerners have no idea about size. Hell, my city is 30% bigger than Rhode Island, and nearly as big as Delaware. If you include the metropolitan area, it's bigger than 10 states - being a touch smaller than Main. In fact, there are only 10 states larger than our largest "county" (we call them boroughs). It's a two hour flight to get to work for me, and I don't cross any state lines to get there.
Granted, there is only one state that has fewer people than we do, but that's not the point.
Can you guess the state I live in?
or it is completely secret and noone knows what the conditions are like.
Well, obviously, if Noone knows about it they're getting the secrets from him. Duh.
Seriously, grammar police I know, but what the fuck is up with noone? That doesn't make any fucking sense. When you write it like that, it is pronounced "noon", the "e" is automatically silent. The phrase is no one. It isn't that hard, there is no reason to shove the words together. If you want to say nobody, say nobody. Seriously, you go from sounding relatively intelligent to a complete dumbass with one word.
Whynotjuststartshovingallthewordstogether? Fuckspacesman,thisiswaymoreefficient! Ofcourse,it'sveryhardtoread,butwhogivesadamn? LookhowmuchspaceI'msaving! Plus,itmakesmesoundalotsmarter,doesn'tit? Well,doesn'tit?
The wide variety of users combined with the ability to install Windows on a wide variety of hardware leads to an impossibly large combination of hardware and software that you have to think about.
This from someone who obviously knows nothing of Windows hardware abstraction.
Windows has abstracted the hardware away from the developer from the beginning. With each release, they get better at it. By the time you got to XP, all a developer had to worry about was minimum system requirements and safe memory management. For 99% of applications, CPU/GPU is a non-issue, they'll run fine on 10 year old software. With .Net, you don't even have to worry about memory management any more. So long as they have enough RAM and enough CPU/GPU to run your app reasonably snappy there is nothing to worry about.
Seriously, software developers haven't had to worry about hardware bugs much at all for a decade now. The only time this would be the case if you were writing an application to manipulate a specific piece of hardware, and some driver bug is screwing things up. That sort of thing shows up in testing.
There aren't that many hardware combinations
There are dozens of different hardware sets, and each has different capabilities. This is actually more of an issue for Android because the capabilities of such small devices are so limited, it's pretty easy to max out one device while being at a reasonable level for another. Different model phones expose different portions of the Android market because of this - there is some software you can't get on some hardware unless you download it from an external source. It's one of the biggest shortcomings of Android devices.
The iPhone has this same problem as well - there a lot of new apps that don't work well on the original iPhone, but work just fine on the iPhone 3g. To hit the broadest market you'll want to scale things back for the original iPhone, but it might not be able to do what you want it to, so you'll have to make a choice: do you write your software such that all iPhone users will enjoy it? Or do you try to make your software the most advanced you can make it? Somewhere in between maybe?
The problem isn't really any different for PCs, Android phones, or iPhones. The scale changes, but the problem doesn't go away. Give the iPhone another three years and it will be a tangled mess as bad as any PC app for developers. And really, it isn't that bad anyway.
Driver issues.
The driver sub-system is abstracted away from you. Unless you are creating a custom driver for your application, any driver issues will be rare and affect a relatively small portion of the market. The only reason this would not be quite as true for D3D and OGL is because there are a limited number of driver vendors - problems hit a broader market. Still it gets fixed very quickly, and a locked down hardware system is not immune to these same problems anyway (everybody screws up sometime).
System requirements issues
There is very little software on the market that cannot run on 5-6 year old hardware (even games). With a closed hardware system you'd have had to upgrade by now anyway.
You also know what minimum level of CPU, GPU, and RAM to expect from a "2007 Mac" and an end user can understand this.
The basic concepts are simple, and very few people cannot grasp them. All they have to do is go into a store and say "I want a computer that is good for games" and the salesman will outfit them with the fastest cpu, gpu, and most ram they can get the guy to buy. Very few people screw this up. It is, in fact, very hard to screw up. If it were easy to screw up, nobody would be buying computer games at all because they'd never work right.
So he sees what people want
Jobs doesn't see what people want, he tells them what they want.
None but a handful of people have actually wanted a tablet PC in the last 10 years. Jobs simply seems to know how to convince people they want something even if they don't really have any use for it.
Pretty much all the reviews I've seen of the iPad freely admit that it is next to useless, it can be a pain to work with in any normal sitting position, and the general limitations of the device really suck, yet at the same time they love it so much you'd have to pry it from their cold dead hands.
Apple delivers the whole package, and before they do they hype the hell out of all of it to make it the next "gotta have it" gadget. They did it with the iPod (there were hundreds of mp3 players before it), and they did it with the iPhone (again, the smartphone was nothing new). What will make the iPad popular is not the device, but just like the iPod and the iPhone, it will be the structure behind it. The app store and the book store are what will make it popular.
That doesn't make Jobs the visionary, it just means he's better at drumming up support for things people don't want than Gates was.
Its definitely cooler than any of the e-readers on the market right now...
I don't see how you can legitimately call it an e-reader, as far as e-reader technology goes the iPad is a decade behind the curve.
It's a giant iPhone, if you spend all your time on your iPhone but never make phone calls, or if you think the iPod Touch is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then there is a good chance you'll love the iPad, but reading? I don't think too many people could handle more than an hour or so of reading on that thing, it's exactly the same as reading on your computer monitor - it hurts after a while.
Other than that though, I hear it's a sweet device. It doesn't do what I would want it to do, but those who have used it have said it is awesome.
How is that not stealing?
Because they abandoned it. At the time, they obviously didn't want it. They might have even left it there for you, and are simply changing their mind later. Either way, it isn't stealing because you never took it from them. In fact, you took it from nobody.
What if... the guy left the bar, so I took his phone. He got to his car, realized his mistake, and came back to get it, but it was gone? Did I 'find' it, or did I 'steal' it?
You found it. The decent thing to do would be to just give it back, but it's not uncommon to ask for a finder's fee before returning it (though it is uncommon if someone lost it for such a short period of time).
What if the guy left it for a few minutes to take a leak, and I took it then?
Seriously, what kind of dumbass is this guy? You still found it, you didn't steal it.
Sure, the engineer screwed up, but legal or not, it ain't right to keep the phone.
"Right" is subjective, but I'd agree that giving it back is the decent thing to do. It still isn't theft.
It actually probably protects him quite a bit, assuming this wasn't a marketing ploy to begin with.
Think about it, they know which phone it was because they wiped it the day after it was lost. More than likely the employee himself reported it missing (again, assuming it wasn't a marketing ploy) in order to protect what little chance he had to keep his job. Obviously they've known since day one who lost it, either way.
By publicly outing the guy, he is going to have a lot of people who think he should keep his job in spite of the mistake. That's what they call "public pressure". Now Apple could harm their public image by firing the guy, or they could improve it by keeping him on. That's a lot more support than a nameless employee is going to get.
You won't be able to tell if it is a marketing ploy, by the way, unless they fire the guy. If they fire him, it almost certainly is not a marketing ploy. If he keeps his job, it could have been a ploy all along, or it could just be Apple deciding it would be worth more than this guy's job for them to look merciful to their subjects... I mean employees.
What the submitter is talking about is a 21st Century Firewall (capitalized out of reverence). Why not have automatic host discovery? Why should I have to painstakingly come up with a list of all target machines with IP addresses? Is this not 2010? :)
Firewall Builder does this. What part of "try firewall builder" do you not understand?
Did everyone miss the question about "jdoe's" computer being connected, and then (and ONLY then) her needed ports being enabled in some other PC on the network? That would actually be a VERY nice capability.
It also completely defeats the purpose of a firewall. UPnP does this already anyway, at the cost of reduced security. I'm not sure if Linux distros come with UPnP by default, but it is certainly available. Windows has had it since XP.
You don't get to have it all. It is almost universally true regarding computer security that anything that increases convenience reduces security, and vice versa. The whole purpose of a firewall is to block unknown traffic. If you have it set up to automatically allow new hosts to access resources across the firewall without direct administrative intervention then you might as well replace your firewall with a repeater, because that is all it is doing.
It's not that you couldn't do some sort of auto-discovery for firewalls - that's extremely easy (it already gets the IP address at the very least). However, if every time a new IP connected to your firewall it asked if you wanted to add new firewall rules for it, you'd never do anything except decline such requests. Firewalls are flooded with new host IP's constantly which makes what you describe at the very least extremely impractical.
The only practical way to handle firewalls after they have been configured initially is to manually enter each new host as they are connected to the network. Just take a look at chatty software firewalls to see just how annoying this can be. That on a hardware firewall would be ridiculous.
For home routers, pretty much all of them have simple router config software that walks a user through setting up their network and configuring all devices.
For enterprise grade network equipment, Cisco at least already has everything the OP is asking for. You still need to know what you are doing, since there is a hell of a lot more that a Cisco router can do than a Linksys can do (oddly enough Linksys home routers come with cisco branding, don't be fooled, it's the same old shitty linksys), but if you want to go that rout you can use a GUI to manage each router and a management software package to manage the whole kit - network diagram and all.
Frankly, if the OP wants to operate in the here and now, he should stop using equipment from the 90's and try some modern hardware.
Oh yeah, and the books came out after '94 anyway. Way too late to the party - still no quote though.