But it annoys the HELL out of me when people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates complain that they don't pay enough taxes. Here's a solution, tell you accountant to quit taking all the extra F'ing deductions, stop hiding income, and pay more taxes.
The primary reason the ultra rich don't pay much in the way of income tax is because the don't earn much income. Instead, they get "compensated" in ways that aren't taxed as much. For example, long-term capital gains tax is about half of the highest income tax rate.
Then, there's the extreme example of Steve Jobs, who "earns" $1/year, and yet somehow manages to feed and clothe himself. Other executives aren't as bad (e.g., $100K/year income, with $500K/year "total compensation"), but the key is that once you earn enough to keep yourself alive, you can use the tax law to reduce your tax burden while still putting money away for retirement.
In response to your FYI, the top 5% is earners over $157K, and above 250K is a meager 1.57%. Thus that $700B will be distributed over a mere 1,699 households over the next 10 years.
These numbers have to be wrong, because I can guarantee you there are at least 2000 homes over 250K just because of sports (MLB has 1200 players with a minimum salary of $400K, NFL has 1280 players with a minimum of over $300K).
I also know that my home makes over $250K/year, and we're in the "poor" neighborhood in our county. There are hundreds of homes that make than we do, just in our county.
(Breaking encryption can also be called "cracking encryption", but those people aren't usually called "crackers", at least not without some other adjective, like "code crackers".)
So, if "Weird Al" can get it right, why can't everyone else?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
Today, however, a gas turbine connected to a generator to charge the batteries for a pure-electric drive car might be a feasible solution, as it would allow the turbine to only run at full load, and thus achieve its best efficiencies.
I suppose a hybid could work, too, again with the turbine only running when the vehicle needs a lot of power, but then you get into transmission losses that you could avoid with a pure electric motor drive.
Are ya'll not worried at ALL about getting caught using bittorrent?
I don't think anyone has been sued (or even "notified") for downloading current TV shows.
I suspect that any case that got as far as a trial would see the the fair use argument reduce damages to a value not worth the legal expenses of the copyright holder.
Also, most (all?) of the RIAA lawsuits were about software/technology other than BitTorrent (LimeWire, etc.). Although at least some of the current crop of "pre-settlement letters" are about BitTorrent, most are aimed at targets that might be embarrassed by the content (mostly gay porn) being revealed in open court.
Bittorrent is great, but just a tiny bit more cumbersome than simply pulling up a DVR menu or punching in a 4-digit channel number, and then there's the question of legality.
The TV shows I torrent are ones that for some reason my DVR did not record, so I don't really care if I'm technically infringing copyright. That said...
There are already torrent clients that can use RSS feeds to grab the shows you are interested in. With a very small amount of extra coding, you could end up with the downloaded files renamed the way you want and in the right place for your media player to be able to access them, all with no human intervention. It's probably already been done, but I've never bothered to investigate.
The only real downside to this is that at times you might wait a day or two after the original broadcast before you have access. Since I'm currently a few months behind on TV, this wouldn't be a problem for me.
you can access the engine compartment from the underside of the car...
Not every car.
I know of several models where you have to have a pit or ramps to do anything significant under the vehicle. Sure, if you can find a person who is less than about 5" thick, they could get under the car, but that doesn't mean they could do any real work.
Also, the last few cars I have owned have skid plates that basically cover the entire bottom of the engine compartment. Removing them without putting the car on a lift means that you're going to be taking over an hour to plant the tracking device.
Well, replay gain is pretty much what I wanted, though it would be nice if you could easily manually set it.
Although there are no MP3 players that "remember custom volume settings for individual files" (which is what you seem to want), it's trivial to use replay gain metadata on individual files to set whatever volume you want, even though that wasn't the original intent of the system.
Basically, after you analyze the file, you can use the tools and manually set the volume 3dB higher, etc., to your heart's content. MP3Gain even lets you set the volume level differently on each channel of the MP3 (although I don't know why you'd want to).
Any automatic for me is just hell, it never knows when to shift down or up. Always to late on both and fails to shift down when I want to pass.
I just purchased my first car without a manual transmission, and I felt the same way until I realized the problem was the design of previous automatics.
What I have is a well-designed gasoline turbo (the Ford Flex, but other Fords have this same engine/transmission). It goes when you press the gas (almost no turbo lag) and uses engine braking when you take your foot off (i.e., it leaves the transmission engaged, just like a manual).
I have heard that good turbo diesels have similar performance, so those might be something you should look at, as well.
I'd be tempted to stick it to the underside of a garbage truck. Either they raid a landfill, or some poor agent gets to crawl under a few garbage trucks looking for their expensive doohickey.
Drop it into your trash can and leave your car sitting at home until the trash is collected. Then, drive away to wherever it is you need to be (work, school, etc.).
By the time the authorities figure out that your car movements don't match the GPS unit movements, the unit might be in a landfill three states away.
If they ever find the unit, then just say "I found that in my driveway...I think I ran over it with my car, 'cause it was pretty beat up. I didn't know what it was, so I just tossed it in the trash." At that point, you know from their questions that it was a device that had been attached to your car, so it's unlikely they'll attach another one and ask you to make sure it stays on.
HDMI takes the basic electronics of DVI, corrects all those problems, and makes the HDCP support manditory rather than an optional extension.
People keep saying that HDMI requires HDCP, but that's obviously not true in the real world. There have been many devices (most notably video cards) that have HDMI connectors but do not support HDCP over that connector.
I think people are getting confused because of the recent change in the HDMI spec that requires a device to fully and correctly implement HDCP if the device implements HDCP at all.
(Also, I doubt it would be "easy", since the amount of data contained in an uncompressed HD stream is pretty daunting. Like they say, they still can't decrypt it in realtime, to say nothing of encoding it. Just getting it onto a disk fast enough might be a challenge.)
HDMI without HDCP is basically just plain DVI (yes, I know that technically DVI can also carry HDCP). There are DVI to component converters available, and there is at least one device that can record component video to MPEG-4 in realtime.
So, it's not really hard, but it might cost some money.
Use the same browser across all those machines and you will have the same functionality. Xmarks was only really good at syncing across browsers, which is a pretty niche market when you get down to it.
One of the best features of Xmarks was "profiles", which is not a feature of Firefox Sync.
Basically, profiles allowed you to have all of your bookmarks from all machines stored on the server, but then pick which folders are part of the sync for a specific machine. This allowed me to keep my "only at work" (i.e., private Intranet) bookmarks in sync across all the work machines I use, but never see those bookmarks at home (or vice-versa).
Call me paranoid but I like keeping my data private and you can learn too much about a person by data mining their bookmarks. So any non privacy destroying suggestions?
I already gave in to buying an iPod because it's the only device that works nicely with my car stereo. USB drives work too but it takes ages to read the filing system every time you switch the car on.
See, this is because your car stereo doesn't have Microsoft software.
Seriously, Microsoft Sync works great with USB drives. It does take a few seconds to read the drive (about a second per 1000 files), but not much. But, the iPhone is one of the more problematic to use with Sync, because Apple chose to implement only the part of the Bluetooth spec that they felt their users would need.
Slashdot Mirror
But it annoys the HELL out of me when people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates complain that they don't pay enough taxes. Here's a solution, tell you accountant to quit taking all the extra F'ing deductions, stop hiding income, and pay more taxes.
The primary reason the ultra rich don't pay much in the way of income tax is because the don't earn much income. Instead, they get "compensated" in ways that aren't taxed as much. For example, long-term capital gains tax is about half of the highest income tax rate.
Then, there's the extreme example of Steve Jobs, who "earns" $1/year, and yet somehow manages to feed and clothe himself. Other executives aren't as bad (e.g., $100K/year income, with $500K/year "total compensation"), but the key is that once you earn enough to keep yourself alive, you can use the tax law to reduce your tax burden while still putting money away for retirement.
In response to your FYI, the top 5% is earners over $157K, and above 250K is a meager 1.57%. Thus that $700B will be distributed over a mere 1,699 households over the next 10 years.
These numbers have to be wrong, because I can guarantee you there are at least 2000 homes over 250K just because of sports (MLB has 1200 players with a minimum salary of $400K, NFL has 1280 players with a minimum of over $300K).
I also know that my home makes over $250K/year, and we're in the "poor" neighborhood in our county. There are hundreds of homes that make than we do, just in our county.
(Breaking encryption can also be called "cracking encryption", but those people aren't usually called "crackers", at least not without some other adjective, like "code crackers".)
So, if "Weird Al" can get it right, why can't everyone else?
There are probably loads of people who think Colbert is what conservatives are.
Likewise, many people believe that Rush Limbaugh's parody of himself on Family Guy is what conservatives are.
Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
Today, however, a gas turbine connected to a generator to charge the batteries for a pure-electric drive car might be a feasible solution, as it would allow the turbine to only run at full load, and thus achieve its best efficiencies.
I suppose a hybid could work, too, again with the turbine only running when the vehicle needs a lot of power, but then you get into transmission losses that you could avoid with a pure electric motor drive.
Look, it's an extra technology that improves movie for those that like the 3-D effect. It doesn't affect the quality of the movie.
If the director and DP are overly conscious of the "need" for 3-D effects, then, yes, it will very likely negatively impact the quality of the movie.
Are ya'll not worried at ALL about getting caught using bittorrent?
I don't think anyone has been sued (or even "notified") for downloading current TV shows.
I suspect that any case that got as far as a trial would see the the fair use argument reduce damages to a value not worth the legal expenses of the copyright holder.
Also, most (all?) of the RIAA lawsuits were about software/technology other than BitTorrent (LimeWire, etc.). Although at least some of the current crop of "pre-settlement letters" are about BitTorrent, most are aimed at targets that might be embarrassed by the content (mostly gay porn) being revealed in open court.
Bittorrent is great, but just a tiny bit more cumbersome than simply pulling up a DVR menu or punching in a 4-digit channel number, and then there's the question of legality.
The TV shows I torrent are ones that for some reason my DVR did not record, so I don't really care if I'm technically infringing copyright. That said...
There are already torrent clients that can use RSS feeds to grab the shows you are interested in. With a very small amount of extra coding, you could end up with the downloaded files renamed the way you want and in the right place for your media player to be able to access them, all with no human intervention. It's probably already been done, but I've never bothered to investigate.
The only real downside to this is that at times you might wait a day or two after the original broadcast before you have access. Since I'm currently a few months behind on TV, this wouldn't be a problem for me.
you can access the engine compartment from the underside of the car...
Not every car.
I know of several models where you have to have a pit or ramps to do anything significant under the vehicle. Sure, if you can find a person who is less than about 5" thick, they could get under the car, but that doesn't mean they could do any real work.
Also, the last few cars I have owned have skid plates that basically cover the entire bottom of the engine compartment. Removing them without putting the car on a lift means that you're going to be taking over an hour to plant the tracking device.
Well, replay gain is pretty much what I wanted, though it would be nice if you could easily manually set it.
Although there are no MP3 players that "remember custom volume settings for individual files" (which is what you seem to want), it's trivial to use replay gain metadata on individual files to set whatever volume you want, even though that wasn't the original intent of the system.
Basically, after you analyze the file, you can use the tools and manually set the volume 3dB higher, etc., to your heart's content. MP3Gain even lets you set the volume level differently on each channel of the MP3 (although I don't know why you'd want to).
Any automatic for me is just hell, it never knows when to shift down or up. Always to late on both and fails to shift down when I want to pass.
I just purchased my first car without a manual transmission, and I felt the same way until I realized the problem was the design of previous automatics.
What I have is a well-designed gasoline turbo (the Ford Flex, but other Fords have this same engine/transmission). It goes when you press the gas (almost no turbo lag) and uses engine braking when you take your foot off (i.e., it leaves the transmission engaged, just like a manual).
I have heard that good turbo diesels have similar performance, so those might be something you should look at, as well.
I'd be tempted to stick it to the underside of a garbage truck. Either they raid a landfill, or some poor agent gets to crawl under a few garbage trucks looking for their expensive doohickey.
Drop it into your trash can and leave your car sitting at home until the trash is collected. Then, drive away to wherever it is you need to be (work, school, etc.).
By the time the authorities figure out that your car movements don't match the GPS unit movements, the unit might be in a landfill three states away.
If they ever find the unit, then just say "I found that in my driveway...I think I ran over it with my car, 'cause it was pretty beat up. I didn't know what it was, so I just tossed it in the trash." At that point, you know from their questions that it was a device that had been attached to your car, so it's unlikely they'll attach another one and ask you to make sure it stays on.
Everything within thirty miles of an airport is declared a restricted area with access without permission being a felony.
Fixed that for you. There are many airports where the flight path keeps the planes within range of a man-portable SAM for that long.
HDMI takes the basic electronics of DVI, corrects all those problems, and makes the HDCP support manditory rather than an optional extension.
People keep saying that HDMI requires HDCP, but that's obviously not true in the real world. There have been many devices (most notably video cards) that have HDMI connectors but do not support HDCP over that connector.
I think people are getting confused because of the recent change in the HDMI spec that requires a device to fully and correctly implement HDCP if the device implements HDCP at all.
Speaking of which, I'm really surprised that there isn't a mp3 player that lets you select volume for individual songs as well as the overall volume.
There are many MP3 players that do, but you need the right data in the MP3 file.
You can also use software to non-destructively modify the MP3 file for players that do not support replay gain directly.
(Also, I doubt it would be "easy", since the amount of data contained in an uncompressed HD stream is pretty daunting. Like they say, they still can't decrypt it in realtime, to say nothing of encoding it. Just getting it onto a disk fast enough might be a challenge.)
HDMI without HDCP is basically just plain DVI (yes, I know that technically DVI can also carry HDCP). There are DVI to component converters available, and there is at least one device that can record component video to MPEG-4 in realtime.
So, it's not really hard, but it might cost some money.
Use the same browser across all those machines and you will have the same functionality. Xmarks was only really good at syncing across browsers, which is a pretty niche market when you get down to it.
One of the best features of Xmarks was "profiles", which is not a feature of Firefox Sync.
Basically, profiles allowed you to have all of your bookmarks from all machines stored on the server, but then pick which folders are part of the sync for a specific machine. This allowed me to keep my "only at work" (i.e., private Intranet) bookmarks in sync across all the work machines I use, but never see those bookmarks at home (or vice-versa).
Call me paranoid but I like keeping my data private and you can learn too much about a person by data mining their bookmarks. So any non privacy destroying suggestions?
Although the info might be out of date, Foxmarks had instructions on how to use your own server.
FF native sync would be fine for those forced to use IE sometimes if they could bring back that IE Tab add-on.
I don't know that IE Tab ever left, although it has changed names.
I already gave in to buying an iPod because it's the only device that works nicely with my car stereo. USB drives work too but it takes ages to read the filing system every time you switch the car on.
See, this is because your car stereo doesn't have Microsoft software.
Seriously, Microsoft Sync works great with USB drives. It does take a few seconds to read the drive (about a second per 1000 files), but not much. But, the iPhone is one of the more problematic to use with Sync, because Apple chose to implement only the part of the Bluetooth spec that they felt their users would need.
Or what about this slashdot post? typing <p> takes 8 keyboard strokes on the iPad. </p> takes 11.
I'm curious...what are the key "presses" you need on the iPad for those constructs?
On a normal keyboard, I count 5 for <p> (shift , p shift .) and 6 for </p> (shift , / p shift .).
Maybe because parent is trolling. I have a MacBook Pro that just works.
And many millions more people have Windows (or Linux) laptops that "just work".
we also don't have 200 year old potatoes.
Obviously, you've never eaten in a school food service facility.
I don't have a computer in my cabin.
Please turn in your /. geek card on the way out. Thanks.
I don't know if Montreal has ever played in the WS, but they too have a team in MLB - the Expos.
Montreal had a team until 2004. The franchise became the Washington Nationals in 2005.
They would almost certainly have gone to the World Series in 1994 if not for the player's strike.