That's not true at all. The only reason the IRS is huge and complicated is because the income tax laws are huge and complicated due to all the special rules and exemptions which have been added over the years. Income tax itself is not inherently complicated and the IRS isn't required for it. If we wanted to, we could throw out all the special rules and eliminate the IRS without changing the basis for our taxes.
I think it's pretty self evident that it would be vastly easier to both collect and enforce collections on income which happens once every week or two per person and from the same business entities every time than do the same with sales which happen dozens of times per person per week and frequently involve new entities, many of whom don't have an established business relationship with the government.
Also sales taxes are regressive. Someone that makes $20,000 and has to spend that entire amount on buying things to sustain life has to pay tax on their entire income. Someone who makes $200,000 and spends $50,000 of it on living expenses only pays tax on the $50,000. The more someone makes, the less tax they pay. People making millions would be virtually untaxed. For that reason, a sales-tax-only approach would never be accepted by liberals. Furthermore, large sales taxes discourage spending which would be bad for the economy, and encourage criminal activity (black markets, tax evasion). Thus it would never be accepted by conservatives, either.:)
The AI cars crash into things constantly. If they are clearly in your field of view when this happens, you get a "pysche-out" unless they can attribute the crash to a different NPC car. However, if they crash while not in your field of view (you can still watch this happening in the corner of the screen or when viewing aftertouch) they just warp around the obstacles and keep going at full speed.
I think if it wasn't for this the NPCs would never keep up with you.:)
The patent, which is already public, isn't the thing they're trying to keep secret. It's the "underwater application" and/or whatever the government is planning to do with it they're worried about.
Well, sure. But they are shining the spotlight on the fact that there is a big secret project that involves this patent. This naturally leads to whoever is concerned to trying to work out what exactly that project is. People are very good at following trails like this. From TFA:
A Navy spokeswoman declined to comment on the Crater case, but outside experts say it's easy enough to guess the nature of the top-secret project the government is protecting. "It's all but self-evident that it has to do with the clandestine monitoring of fiber-optics communications cables on the ocean floor," says Aftergood.
This may or may not be accurate, but it's easy to see that it would have served government interests a lot more to send someone over to Lucent to say "what the hell guys - pay for this thing NOW and shut everyone up. Remember we're paying you guys to help us with a SECRET project." The licensing costs would easily be worth not drawing everyone's attention to trying to figure out what the secret is, even disregarding whether or not payment is "just".
Secrets are most easily kept when no one else even knows they exist.
My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.
I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.
I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.
Uh, yes - for the world of computers, relying on someone picking up a telephone and reading a list of numbers to you over it is pretty low-tech. It's the net equivilent of noticing someone's picture on the post office wall.
The high-tech version would involve automatically recognizing the NAT or soft/hardware installed on it that sends out a tracking signal of some sort.
The fact that the people involved live in 3 different places and can communicate with each other isn't exactly cutting edge.
According to the SFGate article (Top link here as posted by AKAImBatman above), the buyer called IBM tech support.
I imagine they just asked him for the serial number and it popped up on their screen as having been reported stolen. Sometimes the low-tech approach works.:)
I have a locking mailbox and it isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
Unless you live at an apartment complex with a huge block of locking mailboxes that the mailperson has a master key for, they won't carry around a key to YOUR mailbox. Therefore they must have a way of depositing the mail into your mailbox without a key. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.
The most effective is to have a slot they can stuff letters into that will then fall into a locked area that you have the key to. This requires a fairly large and unwieldy unit (won't fit onto the nice row with your neighbors mailboxes, if you have that) and means that they can't deliver any packages that don't fit through your letter slot.
The other popular method is to have a mailbox door that will open once and then locks when you close it. This is what I have. One problem is if anyone (say, a thief) opens the door before the mailperson does, the mail cannot be delivered. They then typically just leave the mail on the ground or your porch, which isn't very secure. Sufficiently resourceful thieves could do this on purpose. This is also a problem if you forget to get yesterday's mail. Another problem with this method is that it requires the mailperson to close the mailbox door firmly to engage the lock. Frequently they are leaning out of their little trucks and just barely close the mailbox door leaving it unlocked. Someone could examine the mail inside and put it back and lock the door themselves, leaving you feeling secure even though your mail has been stolen/seen. A third problem is many of these locks rely on things like little hanging flanges that use gravity to latch the lock into place. If the mailbox can be moved (by, say, pulling the whole thing out of the ground), you can tilt it over and unlock the unit and put it back without the owner knowing anything is wrong.
There are probably other locking techniques, but those are the two I've seen.
If you are really concerned about the security of your mail, you really ought to get a post office box...
When we have laws that will revoke habeas corpus for the bizarre and impossible crime of loitering with space aliens (1982, Department of defense appropriations bill)
Well, I work full time because no one hires part time for a decent wage. I make more money than I need but working less hours isn't really an option. Not to mention part time jobs don't generally get insurance provided either and getting your own insurance would probably cost enough to make you work full time anyway.
I guess I can retire early, but it would be nice if I could work half the hours and get half the pay...
Um, try looking at some of the droppable items it takes raids to get. Blade of Carnage, Flayed Barbarian Skin Leggings/Mask, Crystalized Acid Bracer, Scepter of Destruction for examples... I saw the leggings for sale for 650k the other day and Boots of Flowing Slime are only 60k on my server.
Mmm, as someone who could beat Cliff Hanger only dying once I think there was a bug with the ninjas.
All of the hard core players I knew agreed that it was impossible to finish that scene without dying the first time. When you restarted the scene after death, it worked fine.
I never knew anyone who could finish the game without dying once at the ninjas, but since I lived in a small town with only one copy of the game, it might have been that particular console. That seems odd too though. *shrug*
I wrote an Apple II program that required you to type in all the moves to continue on as my way of memorizing the game without actually spending money. 'Twas a stupid game, but Lupin is cool.
That's what happened to me too, except I wasn't using a poleroid so I didn't find out until later.
After that I didn't feel motivated to worry about it any more.
(Pitfall 2, BTW)
-Trevor
And how did I find out about them? I downloaded some pirate songs... (How else? I don't know of any stations around here - Seattle - that are likely to play them.)
So there are couple of sales that were caused by pirate MP3s rather than lost to them. Heavens.
Slashdot Mirror
Simpler, less expensive overall (bye bye, IRS...)
:)
That's not true at all. The only reason the IRS is huge and complicated is because the income tax laws are huge and complicated due to all the special rules and exemptions which have been added over the years. Income tax itself is not inherently complicated and the IRS isn't required for it. If we wanted to, we could throw out all the special rules and eliminate the IRS without changing the basis for our taxes.
I think it's pretty self evident that it would be vastly easier to both collect and enforce collections on income which happens once every week or two per person and from the same business entities every time than do the same with sales which happen dozens of times per person per week and frequently involve new entities, many of whom don't have an established business relationship with the government.
Also sales taxes are regressive. Someone that makes $20,000 and has to spend that entire amount on buying things to sustain life has to pay tax on their entire income. Someone who makes $200,000 and spends $50,000 of it on living expenses only pays tax on the $50,000. The more someone makes, the less tax they pay. People making millions would be virtually untaxed. For that reason, a sales-tax-only approach would never be accepted by liberals. Furthermore, large sales taxes discourage spending which would be bad for the economy, and encourage criminal activity (black markets, tax evasion). Thus it would never be accepted by conservatives, either.
The AI cars crash into things constantly. If they are clearly in your field of view when this happens, you get a "pysche-out" unless they can attribute the crash to a different NPC car. However, if they crash while not in your field of view (you can still watch this happening in the corner of the screen or when viewing aftertouch) they just warp around the obstacles and keep going at full speed.
:)
I think if it wasn't for this the NPCs would never keep up with you.
The patent, which is already public, isn't the thing they're trying to keep secret. It's the "underwater application" and/or whatever the government is planning to do with it they're worried about.
Well, sure. But they are shining the spotlight on the fact that there is a big secret project that involves this patent. This naturally leads to whoever is concerned to trying to work out what exactly that project is. People are very good at following trails like this. From TFA:
A Navy spokeswoman declined to comment on the Crater case, but outside experts say it's easy enough to guess the nature of the top-secret project the government is protecting. "It's all but self-evident that it has to do with the clandestine monitoring of fiber-optics communications cables on the ocean floor," says Aftergood.
This may or may not be accurate, but it's easy to see that it would have served government interests a lot more to send someone over to Lucent to say "what the hell guys - pay for this thing NOW and shut everyone up. Remember we're paying you guys to help us with a SECRET project." The licensing costs would easily be worth not drawing everyone's attention to trying to figure out what the secret is, even disregarding whether or not payment is "just".
Secrets are most easily kept when no one else even knows they exist.
My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.
I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.
I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.
Uh, yes - for the world of computers, relying on someone picking up a telephone and reading a list of numbers to you over it is pretty low-tech. It's the net equivilent of noticing someone's picture on the post office wall.
The high-tech version would involve automatically recognizing the NAT or soft/hardware installed on it that sends out a tracking signal of some sort.
The fact that the people involved live in 3 different places and can communicate with each other isn't exactly cutting edge.
According to the SFGate article (Top link here as posted by AKAImBatman above), the buyer called IBM tech support.
:)
I imagine they just asked him for the serial number and it popped up on their screen as having been reported stolen. Sometimes the low-tech approach works.
I have a locking mailbox and it isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
Unless you live at an apartment complex with a huge block of locking mailboxes that the mailperson has a master key for, they won't carry around a key to YOUR mailbox. Therefore they must have a way of depositing the mail into your mailbox without a key. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.
The most effective is to have a slot they can stuff letters into that will then fall into a locked area that you have the key to. This requires a fairly large and unwieldy unit (won't fit onto the nice row with your neighbors mailboxes, if you have that) and means that they can't deliver any packages that don't fit through your letter slot.
The other popular method is to have a mailbox door that will open once and then locks when you close it. This is what I have. One problem is if anyone (say, a thief) opens the door before the mailperson does, the mail cannot be delivered. They then typically just leave the mail on the ground or your porch, which isn't very secure. Sufficiently resourceful thieves could do this on purpose. This is also a problem if you forget to get yesterday's mail. Another problem with this method is that it requires the mailperson to close the mailbox door firmly to engage the lock. Frequently they are leaning out of their little trucks and just barely close the mailbox door leaving it unlocked. Someone could examine the mail inside and put it back and lock the door themselves, leaving you feeling secure even though your mail has been stolen/seen. A third problem is many of these locks rely on things like little hanging flanges that use gravity to latch the lock into place. If the mailbox can be moved (by, say, pulling the whole thing out of the ground), you can tilt it over and unlock the unit and put it back without the owner knowing anything is wrong.
There are probably other locking techniques, but those are the two I've seen.
If you are really concerned about the security of your mail, you really ought to get a post office box...
I fail to see anything on that page referring to "space aliens".
You know someone that "went down" for associating with space aliens? I thought you said that crime was "impossible"?
Huh? Sounds like a badly mangled version of this urban legend.
Well, I work full time because no one hires part time for a decent wage. I make more money than I need but working less hours isn't really an option. Not to mention part time jobs don't generally get insurance provided either and getting your own insurance would probably cost enough to make you work full time anyway.
I guess I can retire early, but it would be nice if I could work half the hours and get half the pay...
Um, try looking at some of the droppable items it takes raids to get. Blade of Carnage, Flayed Barbarian Skin Leggings/Mask, Crystalized Acid Bracer, Scepter of Destruction for examples... I saw the leggings for sale for 650k the other day and Boots of Flowing Slime are only 60k on my server.
There are many items worth more than the Boots.
> Win ME kept on locking up all the time when running Civ 3
I had that problem and fixed it by installing new reference drivers for my GeForce 2 card.
-Trevor
Mmm, as someone who could beat Cliff Hanger only dying once I think there was a bug with the ninjas.
All of the hard core players I knew agreed that it was impossible to finish that scene without dying the first time. When you restarted the scene after death, it worked fine.
I never knew anyone who could finish the game without dying once at the ninjas, but since I lived in a small town with only one copy of the game, it might have been that particular console. That seems odd too though. *shrug*
I wrote an Apple II program that required you to type in all the moves to continue on as my way of memorizing the game without actually spending money. 'Twas a stupid game, but Lupin is cool.
-Trevor
That's what happened to me too, except I wasn't using a poleroid so I didn't find out until later. After that I didn't feel motivated to worry about it any more. (Pitfall 2, BTW) -Trevor
And how did I find out about them? I downloaded some pirate songs... (How else? I don't know of any stations around here - Seattle - that are likely to play them.)
So there are couple of sales that were caused by pirate MP3s rather than lost to them. Heavens.