Connecticut experiemented with something called "Connecticut use tax". It's very similar, in principle, to any net tax, and is about as effective as this will be, and was despised for the same reasons.
It seems lots of people would buy stuff from Massachusetts or upstate New York (buy catalog or by driving up there) and get it tax free. *GASP* Tax free? So those geniuses in Hartford say "Hey, let's ask people to total up all the out-of-state purchases they make, and tax them because they're USING it in Connecticut!"
Needless to say, it didn't work to well. And I expect any net tax to work even LESS well.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I disagree. The whole point of government is to serve the people.
I disagree. The whole point of government is to protect the people: from other people (murderers, thieves, terrorist, etc.), and from other governments that the people don't feel would protect them as well (hence the American Revolution). The less the governement does beyond that simple goal, the better IMHO.
When the post office started, it was a Good Thing because no private organization would have/could have done it. Perhaps it is time the post office was removed from government control. You would of course still need to keep some way of maintainng standards, like in the assignment of ZIP codes, but the actual collection, sorting, transport and delivery of mail could probably be handled much better (cheaper, faster) by a private company. Just watch out for that incompatible Microsoft Mailbox with ActiveZipCode.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Does anyone else find it ammusing that one day the/. community will rabidly fight for privacy and anonimity and the government staying out for their web browsing etc. and the next day rabidly fight for accountability for and free public list of and government reulation of spammers the next.
Yes, I know there's a difference, but you can't have it both ways, which is why everyday we argue our way towards a compromise.
Personally, I almost never recieve any spam by email... I get more through ICQ now (but that's dropped off recently too).
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
What exactly do you expect the search engines to do? Okay, they can't instantly index new dynamic content: I don't expect them to.
If I'm looking for news about the plane crash in Yagadoodlestan that killed 8,000 people, I'm not going to go to a search engine and type in "Yagdoodlestan plane crash", I'm going to go the New York Times and see if they have an article, or an AP story in the margin. If I'm looking for a review for the G88-superdooper motherboard that I'm thinking about buying, I don't go to a search engine and type "G88-superdooper motherboard review", but I might type "computer hardware motherboard review" and expect to get links to a bunch of hardware review sites, any decent ones I expect would have a review of the product I'm looking for.
Conversely (inversely? whatever...) no one is going to type "international news" into a search engine, even though that might be the best way to find the NYT, they're going to go there because they heard about it from someplace else.
An example from my own recent web-browsing life: I heard about some site called bluesnews from a Quake'n friend a couple years ago, so I check it out. They have links to articles at some place called/. ("/.," I say, "what the $&*# is that?") so I check it out. I bookmark it, and now I'm happy. No search engine required. Last night I see the ad for Man on the Moon and start talking with my mother about Andy Kaufman "You didn't hear Mom? He died." "When," she says, "and from what?" I dunno, so I go to google and I type "Andy Kaufman" and find the answer.
So what, exactly, do you expect these search engines to do? Sites like the New York Times, BluesNews and SlashDot serve one purpose (bringing me news about topics I care about on constantly updated dynamic pages) and sites like AndyKaufmanFansOfIdaho.com bring the occasional bit of static triva goodness when I need it.
Works for me, what are all of you doing???
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
That line saying that it will change the web from "do it yourself" to "do it for me"... what does that mean? I really don't like the sound of it... There's enough poorly thought out, poorly designed garbage on the web as it is, we don't need umpteen-million morons saying "do it for me". On the other hand, there is that slight chance that this will enable morons to make well designed pages (although nothing can help them think things out less poorly).
And it better not clutter my bandwidth!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
If we are no better, then wouldn't whatever we do be "natural" as well??? If what we do is unnatural, you are admitting that there is something that sets us apart from nature.
(excuse me for the quotes I'm about to butcher, but I don't have copies of the Bible, Shakespear, or anything else handy. Consider the following as paraphrased.)
And they did eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge...
There is not good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
So, my view, yeah, ppl are different because we think about this stuff. Animals don't worry about the environment: take for example, deer. Where I live, deer are destroying the forest. The deer don't care, they're just eating. But the ppl around here do care (and the animal rights activist are saying "no, no, don't shoot bambi!") The problem is this: the reason the deer are eating so much is because there are so many, which is because there are fewer wolves, which is because ppl killed nearly all the wolves in this area.
So who's fault is it that the forest is getting eaten to the ground? I think the intelligent answer is to say WE are responsible. We started the problem, it's our fault, now what do we do about it? Do we WANT to be custodians of every living creature on the planet? Do we let sportsmen take responsiblity for the role the wolves played? We have to be very cautious in the decisions we make. Another example: have you heard about the new beetle they're introducing to the US to eat some fungus (also introduced from another country, accidentally I believe) that's killing all the Hemlock trees? How long until that beetle becomes a problem and we have to introduce something to take care of IT. I'm not saying that this bug is a bad idea, I just hope that carefull considerations have been made. Unlike every other creature, we don't just do stuff, we worry about wether it's "right" or "wrong". (Wether that's a side effect of an advanced, enlarged brain or the gift/punishment of the gods is another debate.)
I say, go on, do the experiments, but Procede With Caution.
If we wanna save the environment, well, that is for us.
That's right. This rock we call Earth was here long before us, long before the plants and animals, long before any life, and it will be here long after us, long after plants and animals, and long after any life. Don't protect the environment because it's the 'good thing to do'. Protect it because YOU are a part of it, and if it goes, it's taking you with it.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Yes, DNA can be thought of as source code, but this code does nothing w/o some hardware to run on. (Bear with me here... my major is CE, not CS.) Your example for creating a new lifeform leaves the entire hardware desription as 'running on the platform of cytoplasm'. IMHO, rather shortchanging the hardware, isn't it?
This is one of the big problems I had w/ Jurassic Park: yeah, you got Dino DNA, but where ya gonna put it? You got a Dino Egg sitting around? (This is why, unlike many JP fans, I actualy read The Lost World: they used some kind of large birds egg, but that caused other problems (think running your DNA code on the wrong platform... yucky...)
To create a new organism from scratch, you can't JUST make new DNA, because the DNA has to interact with the rest of the body in all kinds of bizzare ways that have no anologies to computers. Consider this: you have a fertalized human egg. It divides and you implant one of the two cells in another women: there will be slight diffences in the two develop fetuses because they're pre-birth envirtonments are different. Put it in a non-human (a chimp for example) and what would you get? (I dunno, IANAGeneticits). The 'platform' controls the 'code' much more than in a computer.
Okay, that was all probably a little off topic... but I had to get that out. Mock not ye hardware ye heretics of code!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"I can't seem to find an email service (a la hotmail, netscape mail, etc...) that will let you get a mail box without supplying a valid email address."
MyPad doesn't require one. It's also 100% spam free. Supports pop3 but not smtp, and they've had some reliability trouble lately, but for the price (free) it's great!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Re:what if you photocopy the front of an envelope.
on
IDs in Color Copies
·
· Score: 1
But then the postage would be cancelled, and I believe the board detects that. It only needs to know if your copying non-cancelled postage.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Why do we have fax machines when we have the post office? Why do we have email when we have fax machines? Why do we have IMs when we have email? Each one does something slightly different. Email doesn't tell wether or not my friend is sitting at his computer right NOW or not, and while email is fast, IMs are fastER.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"Assembly is just a human readable form of machine code, There is no reason for a compiler to create assembly, beacuse humans arn't going to be reading it."
I beg to differ. Even in my few years as an ECE major I know this is not true. In fact for one my first 300-level courses we had some simple C++ programs that we compiled (assembled? I'm mixing my verbs here, I know, sorry) into human-readable assembly (and then we had to verify that code etc. etc.) and I know of several programers who often compile their code and then go in and tweak the human-readable assembly.
C-code -> assembly-> machine
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
...and having discovered the secrets of space travel, humanity spread across the stars, in a way not disimilar to the way fungus spores spread in the forest.
Yes, in the long term would should focus on getting a new rock to live on. I don't think Mars is the way to go at the moment. First, we need to get to the point were it is cheap and commonplace for normal people and companies to go to orbit for either travel or manufacturing, then the moon, then mars...
I agree that this petition, allthough a nice idea, will achieve exactly zero: no business or government is going to shoot for Mars now. OTOH, some companies are already working on commercial rockets, and orbital/sub-orbital mass transit vehicles, so in another way it's useless because it's already being done.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
First, I see no mention of this using a multi-frequency tunable laser, and as near as I know no such animal exist (if it did the fiber optic companies would be all over it!), but rather that a single laser excites several layers of flourescent material, and it is these different frequencies that come from the materials that are interpretted in order to read the data.
Second, arstechnica has a follow up article about a british venture capital company that's working on something even better: think multiple terabytes on a single cd!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Something like Big Brothers/Sisters you say? I'm sure they could match you up with an above-average intelligence male from a dysfunctional family who's had experience with bullying and declining academic performance. The organization already exist. Volunteer. Today.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Slashdot Mirror
It seems lots of people would buy stuff from Massachusetts or upstate New York (buy catalog or by driving up there) and get it tax free. *GASP* Tax free? So those geniuses in Hartford say "Hey, let's ask people to total up all the out-of-state purchases they make, and tax them because they're USING it in Connecticut!"
Needless to say, it didn't work to well. And I expect any net tax to work even LESS well.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
No, but I would rather some private company be contracted to do it (and do it cheaper, faster and better) than have to pay another 1/2% sales tax.
What's orange and sleeps six?
A Department of Transportation truck.
And how many of you have heard the phrase "Good enough for government work"?
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I disagree. The whole point of government is to protect the people: from other people (murderers, thieves, terrorist, etc.), and from other governments that the people don't feel would protect them as well (hence the American Revolution). The less the governement does beyond that simple goal, the better IMHO.
When the post office started, it was a Good Thing because no private organization would have/could have done it. Perhaps it is time the post office was removed from government control. You would of course still need to keep some way of maintainng standards, like in the assignment of ZIP codes, but the actual collection, sorting, transport and delivery of mail could probably be handled much better (cheaper, faster) by a private company. Just watch out for that incompatible Microsoft Mailbox with ActiveZipCode.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Yes, I know there's a difference, but you can't have it both ways, which is why everyday we argue our way towards a compromise.
Personally, I almost never recieve any spam by email... I get more through ICQ now (but that's dropped off recently too).
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
If I'm looking for news about the plane crash in Yagadoodlestan that killed 8,000 people, I'm not going to go to a search engine and type in "Yagdoodlestan plane crash", I'm going to go the New York Times and see if they have an article, or an AP story in the margin. If I'm looking for a review for the G88-superdooper motherboard that I'm thinking about buying, I don't go to a search engine and type "G88-superdooper motherboard review", but I might type "computer hardware motherboard review" and expect to get links to a bunch of hardware review sites, any decent ones I expect would have a review of the product I'm looking for.
Conversely (inversely? whatever...) no one is going to type "international news" into a search engine, even though that might be the best way to find the NYT, they're going to go there because they heard about it from someplace else.
An example from my own recent web-browsing life: I heard about some site called bluesnews from a Quake'n friend a couple years ago, so I check it out. They have links to articles at some place called /. ("/.," I say, "what the $&*# is that?") so I check it out. I bookmark it, and now I'm happy. No search engine required. Last night I see the ad for Man on the Moon and start talking with my mother about Andy Kaufman "You didn't hear Mom? He died." "When," she says, "and from what?" I dunno, so I go to google and I type "Andy Kaufman" and find the answer.
So what, exactly, do you expect these search engines to do? Sites like the New York Times, BluesNews and SlashDot serve one purpose (bringing me news about topics I care about on constantly updated dynamic pages) and sites like AndyKaufmanFansOfIdaho.com bring the occasional bit of static triva goodness when I need it.
Works for me, what are all of you doing???
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
And it better not clutter my bandwidth!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Think of your four closest friends...
If they're fine, then it must be you.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
(excuse me for the quotes I'm about to butcher, but I don't have copies of the Bible, Shakespear, or anything else handy. Consider the following as paraphrased.)
And they did eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge...
There is not good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
So, my view, yeah, ppl are different because we think about this stuff. Animals don't worry about the environment: take for example, deer. Where I live, deer are destroying the forest. The deer don't care, they're just eating. But the ppl around here do care (and the animal rights activist are saying "no, no, don't shoot bambi!") The problem is this: the reason the deer are eating so much is because there are so many, which is because there are fewer wolves, which is because ppl killed nearly all the wolves in this area.
So who's fault is it that the forest is getting eaten to the ground? I think the intelligent answer is to say WE are responsible. We started the problem, it's our fault, now what do we do about it? Do we WANT to be custodians of every living creature on the planet? Do we let sportsmen take responsiblity for the role the wolves played? We have to be very cautious in the decisions we make. Another example: have you heard about the new beetle they're introducing to the US to eat some fungus (also introduced from another country, accidentally I believe) that's killing all the Hemlock trees? How long until that beetle becomes a problem and we have to introduce something to take care of IT. I'm not saying that this bug is a bad idea, I just hope that carefull considerations have been made. Unlike every other creature, we don't just do stuff, we worry about wether it's "right" or "wrong". (Wether that's a side effect of an advanced, enlarged brain or the gift/punishment of the gods is another debate.)
I say, go on, do the experiments, but Procede With Caution.
If we wanna save the environment, well, that is for us.
That's right. This rock we call Earth was here long before us, long before the plants and animals, long before any life, and it will be here long after us, long after plants and animals, and long after any life. Don't protect the environment because it's the 'good thing to do'. Protect it because YOU are a part of it, and if it goes, it's taking you with it.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Yes, DNA can be thought of as source code, but this code does nothing w/o some hardware to run on. (Bear with me here... my major is CE, not CS.) Your example for creating a new lifeform leaves the entire hardware desription as 'running on the platform of cytoplasm'. IMHO, rather shortchanging the hardware, isn't it?
This is one of the big problems I had w/ Jurassic Park: yeah, you got Dino DNA, but where ya gonna put it? You got a Dino Egg sitting around? (This is why, unlike many JP fans, I actualy read The Lost World: they used some kind of large birds egg, but that caused other problems (think running your DNA code on the wrong platform... yucky...)
To create a new organism from scratch, you can't JUST make new DNA, because the DNA has to interact with the rest of the body in all kinds of bizzare ways that have no anologies to computers. Consider this: you have a fertalized human egg. It divides and you implant one of the two cells in another women: there will be slight diffences in the two develop fetuses because they're pre-birth envirtonments are different. Put it in a non-human (a chimp for example) and what would you get? (I dunno, IANAGeneticits). The 'platform' controls the 'code' much more than in a computer.
Okay, that was all probably a little off topic... but I had to get that out. Mock not ye hardware ye heretics of code!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
MyPad doesn't require one. It's also 100% spam free. Supports pop3 but not smtp, and they've had some reliability trouble lately, but for the price (free) it's great!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
I beg to differ. Even in my few years as an ECE major I know this is not true. In fact for one my first 300-level courses we had some simple C++ programs that we compiled (assembled? I'm mixing my verbs here, I know, sorry) into human-readable assembly (and then we had to verify that code etc. etc.) and I know of several programers who often compile their code and then go in and tweak the human-readable assembly.
C-code -> assembly-> machine
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Admitedly, it would be a very nice game.... but as a movie, I felt a bit cheapened. I wouldn't pay $8 to watch someone play a video game.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Or maybe I'm just cheap...
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Like Tang. Yum.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Yes, in the long term would should focus on getting a new rock to live on. I don't think Mars is the way to go at the moment. First, we need to get to the point were it is cheap and commonplace for normal people and companies to go to orbit for either travel or manufacturing, then the moon, then mars...
I agree that this petition, allthough a nice idea, will achieve exactly zero: no business or government is going to shoot for Mars now. OTOH, some companies are already working on commercial rockets, and orbital/sub-orbital mass transit vehicles, so in another way it's useless because it's already being done.
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Second, arstechnica has a follow up article about a british venture capital company that's working on something even better: think multiple terabytes on a single cd!
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein