I think what Intuit actually blocked was the IRS providing a software solution similiar to all the other commercially available stuff. This would have effectively killed 90% of those commercial products business.
The US government could very well setup a system like much of the rest of the 1st world uses. That is the government tells you what it thinks your taxes for the year should be, and since those taxes are already being withheld they have the money. You then get to tell them if you think the amount is correct or not, some systems don't even require your input and you only contact them if it's wrong. In the event that they owe you money you provide the documentation via forms and receipts or whatever showing that they owe you money. The USA could very simply do this for a very large chunk of the population. Your W2 and 1099's are all sent to the Fed anyways, they have all they need to calculate the form for most people. Currently whether or not your taxes are simple or complex you have to file all the paperwork, and hope they don't disagree. They should just figure it out and the taxpayer only interacts with the Fed in the event they think the Fed has it wrong.
Maybe if in retirement you survive on cardboard boxes from the dumpster, and forsake modern luxuries like automobiles, electricity, and running water. Although I suppose you could possibly double that nest egg or more by selling the home and moving to one of those areas where homes are valued at $20k or under, presuming of course that you aren't already in that boat.
Personally I'm saving and plan to have enough to retire and maintain my current standard of living. I do hope to raise my children in such a way that they wouldn't mind sharing a multigenerational home with me. I've already let my parents and inlaws know they are welcome in my home if they should want or need that.
I used H&R Block for years because I was plainly speaking lazy. Then a few years ago the wife said she wanted to try doing it ourselves to save a bit of money. I had heard about TaxAct here on./ I think and so we tried it and have been using it ever since. We have to use some deluxe version because we itemize, state taxes, and whatever the investment income form is. I think our fee is under $40 for the whole thing, and the software is easy enough to use with plenty of feedback for stuff that doesn't add up.
I believe that the problems in the public education system are both due to the system it's self and the students that are in it.
Where I live now the school system is atrocious. Every year or so there is some big scandal that just befuddles me. The administrators and politicians manage to keep the thing broken most of the time. Then on top of that the poverty in the area means that a much larger chunk of the students than you might see elsewhere have no real hope of attending college. When they don't see college as a realistic possibility they start wondering why they are even bothering with HS. Parents who are working 2 to 3 jobs don't have the time and energy to help their children when they start to get off track and instead don't realize there is anything wrong until the kid is facing time in Juvy Hall.
Making 2 years of Community College free, or significantly cheaper simply as a result of getting good grades, could very well improve public education in K-12. Because then those kids that drop out now or just bide their time in the system might actually put in the effort knowing that they'll be able to go to college. It might be argued that with the current competitive academic scholarships this is already accomplished, but there is a big difference when you are just an average kid and know there is no way you'll out compete that really smart kid that aces every class.
When I was considering college that is pretty much what I did. I started a community college 2 year course track that was a direct tranistion to a 4 year course at the big state school. I never bothered finishing as my career was already moving and life got in the way but I definitely would have had small bills for school if I followed through.
My wife did much the same though she went all the way through getting her Masters. She eneded up with a relatively small amount of debt. She made payments a bit over the minimum and ten years later it's about paid off without ever having been a heavy load.
I haven't read up on it yet but they were probably pretty fast. Police response times are often pretty bad even in 1st world countries. Even if you get a fast response it isn't necessarily going to be enough to stop the attack or apprehend the attackers. In this incident two police officers arrived and were killed by the attackers as they left.
I don't see why you can't do more refined access than just granting everything to every program. Especially with the massive amounts of storage space and memory tha computers have today. Sandbox every application allowing it to only have full control over it's own little sandbox. If a program needs to look at stuff in other file structures then give it read access, not full control, to those directories. You want it to be able to write to files in those other directories, fine, it reads in a file it isn't allowed to overwrite or change, and then saves it's own copy that it can molest in whatever way it wants.
Virtual Box is still a form of defense because you've hopefully got snapshots of the system state and in the event that the malware does execute, you can just restore your snapshot. That is so long as you are using a virtual machine and it is the VM that ends up infected with the malware.
I very sadly sold my car about seven years ago that had a mechanical distributor. And it was only about six years before that when I lost my car with points. With any luck though I'll manage to get my Fathers car that has a Hydromatic Transmission and an in line 8 cyclinder engine.
It's not really a "new" problem. Engineers have been making stupid decisions like this for decades. I remember a GM car, I think it was a Berreta, in the 80's or 90's that required partially unmounting the engine and tilting it forward to access the spark plugs otherwise they were flush against the firewall. And around that same time Toyota Corrola's required dropping the front axle or somesuch to replace the starter.
Generally in the US it means a car that is produced for sale to the public, usually in quantities numbering in the thousands or higher but sometimes less. Concept cars, test vehicles, race cars and stuff like that is what I would exclude. Although I believe one of the requirements for Stock Car Racing is that the vehicle in theory has to be based on a car they actually sell, or something like that.
I would wager that 90% of cars on the road aren't even capable of going 150 mph under their own power. Even if you had a super car capable of reaching a high enough speed to beat the speed trap camera you'd need to be traveling that speed or faster when you actually pass a trap. Honestly the idea of going that fast anywhere but at the track should make most anyone shit their pants. At 170 mph you would very likely be closing on other vehicles at 100mph, which is probably five to ten times what anyone glancing in their mirror would be expecting.
Did we see the same episode. I believe they showed that you couldn't beat them by driving insanely fast. I seem to remember them doing the math to show that even the fastest production cars at absolute top speed wouldn't beat the camera.
This kind of reminds me of 1984 and Newspeak. Only it seems that in reality many people are willing to self limit their vocabulary. I wonder what ramificaions that will have in our society in the long term.
I didn't start playing until 2nd edition I believe, but I feel much the same way. The more I read about the newer editions the more it sounds like they are trying to imitate video games. Which is amusing because what I always wanted was a video game that would imitate the open world sandbox and freedom of D&D and similiar games.
I played a good bit of these types of games as a kid, D&D, Shadowrun, various White Wolf games. And we played them as games, none of us cared to actually try and act out scenes or conversations. Even my Thespian friends didn't care to play some predetermined role, just playing the game using the established rules and systems was all we wanted. This probably worked well because we were all too broke to afford buying silly modules anyways. So the stories and adventures we had were almost entirely of our own making.
This is making an assumption but it's probably not far off. Assume that all incidents of officers using were previously reported, that would account for a very large chunk of the 87%. We could guess that use of force declined 59% and that 28% of previous reports against officers were unjustified or false accusations. I would argue that the use of force is still the larger and more concerning number.
It's not really necessary to prove that he went for the gun. Witness testimony and the physical evidence shows that he was involved in a violent struggle inside of the car. If he was not the agressor in that struggle how do you explain him being in the vehicle for more than the briefest of moments. Brown had the advantage of size, strength, leverage, and position. Are you saying that Wilson pulled Brown through the cruiser window into his lap, then pulled his firearm and shot him? I'll admit that isn't beyong the realm of possibility, but it doesn't make much sense. Brown assaulting Wilson sounds much more plausible, especially after he had just succesfully commited a strongarm robbery.
Even if Brown did not go for the gun Wilson is still justified in drawing and possibly using his firearm. He is authorized by law to use the minimum force required to stop/apprehend a criminal or suspect. In the previous struggle he would have already determined that he was not a physical match for Brown and so would have to use some other force multiplying tool or strategy. Drawing his firearm if it wasn't already out would then be appropriate given that he was not equiped with a taser.
Was Wilson justified in actually shooting Brown after the initial physical confrontation, I don't know, and I probably never will. If Brown was threatening another physical assault, then I would say "yes". If Brown was doing pretty much anything else, then "no".
"Basically the officer drew his gun when Brown wouldn't get off the street."
I thought the story was that Brown assaulted Wilson while Wilson was seated in the cruiser with the weapon holstered. In the course of the struggle the weapon was drawn and discharged.
I agree that cameras for recording police activity should be the status quo.
My wife watched American History X once with me and some friends on cable or something where a lot of the swearing was bleeped out. She commented that the profuse swearing seemed totally unrealistic to her. My friends thought it was hilarous because it made very evident her different upbringing and social circles. Some people really do talk like that, and yes it probably means that they don't mean that swearing as emphatically as if my wife were to do it. The context of swearing, as with anything else, is a key part of understanding it. If you think a movie is over using swearing you probably are missing the context.
Speaking of mediocre to poor movies and swearing though. My wife got me Dark Shadows this year as a gag gift. One of the few redeeming bits of the movie was the main characters insults. He didn't use swear words because they weren't part of his vocabularly but instead used eloquent verses of curse.
I've always wondered if anyone has tried the exact opposite of asking an undercover agent if they are a cop.
Simply work under the assumption that everyone is a police or law enforcement officer. And only conduct business with them after signing legal contracts recognizing them as an agent of the law whereby they are authorizing your activity for some other lawful purpose like entrapping, errr I mean prosecuting someone else.
"complete fabrications" is a bit of a stretch. The game didn't get an individual review of it's own. It did however get at least one very positive mention that I remember reading personally. And that kind of off hand remark is often worth a lot more in terms of advertising than a whole article. Whether or not that was a result of the two having a sexual relationship is anyones guess.
Risky or not people of all walks of life can be idiots and it wouldn't surprise me if some, none, or all of the threats were faked. I'm not really sure that the odds of being caught making a false threat against yourself are all that high given a modicum of intelligence and technical know how, especially for an anonymous threat. It would get really tricky though if you actually try to frame a specific person or group though.
If you are talking about the same twitter screen shots I'm thinking of, then weren't they already debunked as fakes? Something about the number of characters per tweet exceeding the limit that Twitter actually gives you.
Usually people get better at activities in which they regularly participate. So even if they did go straight back to commiting bank robberies to get by, or at least get the capital to start an honest life, it's not hard to imagine that they just weren't caught. Go look at the FBI statistics for the last few years and you'll see that just identifying the suspects in a bank robbery is tough, the best number I saw was 54% of suspects identified in 2011. Note, that is identified, not apprehended, which is kind of amazing in todays world with the prevalence of cameras and all the other tools law enforcement has access to that they didn't all those years ago.
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In some cases though (x==2) is completely different than ( x==2 ) it's one of the things that frequently trips me up when writing shell scripts.
I think what Intuit actually blocked was the IRS providing a software solution similiar to all the other commercially available stuff. This would have effectively killed 90% of those commercial products business.
The US government could very well setup a system like much of the rest of the 1st world uses. That is the government tells you what it thinks your taxes for the year should be, and since those taxes are already being withheld they have the money. You then get to tell them if you think the amount is correct or not, some systems don't even require your input and you only contact them if it's wrong. In the event that they owe you money you provide the documentation via forms and receipts or whatever showing that they owe you money. The USA could very simply do this for a very large chunk of the population. Your W2 and 1099's are all sent to the Fed anyways, they have all they need to calculate the form for most people. Currently whether or not your taxes are simple or complex you have to file all the paperwork, and hope they don't disagree. They should just figure it out and the taxpayer only interacts with the Fed in the event they think the Fed has it wrong.
Maybe if in retirement you survive on cardboard boxes from the dumpster, and forsake modern luxuries like automobiles, electricity, and running water. Although I suppose you could possibly double that nest egg or more by selling the home and moving to one of those areas where homes are valued at $20k or under, presuming of course that you aren't already in that boat.
Personally I'm saving and plan to have enough to retire and maintain my current standard of living. I do hope to raise my children in such a way that they wouldn't mind sharing a multigenerational home with me. I've already let my parents and inlaws know they are welcome in my home if they should want or need that.
I used H&R Block for years because I was plainly speaking lazy. Then a few years ago the wife said she wanted to try doing it ourselves to save a bit of money. I had heard about TaxAct here on ./ I think and so we tried it and have been using it ever since. We have to use some deluxe version because we itemize, state taxes, and whatever the investment income form is. I think our fee is under $40 for the whole thing, and the software is easy enough to use with plenty of feedback for stuff that doesn't add up.
I believe that the problems in the public education system are both due to the system it's self and the students that are in it.
Where I live now the school system is atrocious. Every year or so there is some big scandal that just befuddles me. The administrators and politicians manage to keep the thing broken most of the time. Then on top of that the poverty in the area means that a much larger chunk of the students than you might see elsewhere have no real hope of attending college. When they don't see college as a realistic possibility they start wondering why they are even bothering with HS. Parents who are working 2 to 3 jobs don't have the time and energy to help their children when they start to get off track and instead don't realize there is anything wrong until the kid is facing time in Juvy Hall.
Making 2 years of Community College free, or significantly cheaper simply as a result of getting good grades, could very well improve public education in K-12. Because then those kids that drop out now or just bide their time in the system might actually put in the effort knowing that they'll be able to go to college. It might be argued that with the current competitive academic scholarships this is already accomplished, but there is a big difference when you are just an average kid and know there is no way you'll out compete that really smart kid that aces every class.
When I was considering college that is pretty much what I did. I started a community college 2 year course track that was a direct tranistion to a 4 year course at the big state school. I never bothered finishing as my career was already moving and life got in the way but I definitely would have had small bills for school if I followed through.
My wife did much the same though she went all the way through getting her Masters. She eneded up with a relatively small amount of debt. She made payments a bit over the minimum and ten years later it's about paid off without ever having been a heavy load.
I haven't read up on it yet but they were probably pretty fast. Police response times are often pretty bad even in 1st world countries. Even if you get a fast response it isn't necessarily going to be enough to stop the attack or apprehend the attackers. In this incident two police officers arrived and were killed by the attackers as they left.
I don't see why you can't do more refined access than just granting everything to every program. Especially with the massive amounts of storage space and memory tha computers have today. Sandbox every application allowing it to only have full control over it's own little sandbox. If a program needs to look at stuff in other file structures then give it read access, not full control, to those directories. You want it to be able to write to files in those other directories, fine, it reads in a file it isn't allowed to overwrite or change, and then saves it's own copy that it can molest in whatever way it wants.
Virtual Box is still a form of defense because you've hopefully got snapshots of the system state and in the event that the malware does execute, you can just restore your snapshot. That is so long as you are using a virtual machine and it is the VM that ends up infected with the malware.
I very sadly sold my car about seven years ago that had a mechanical distributor. And it was only about six years before that when I lost my car with points. With any luck though I'll manage to get my Fathers car that has a Hydromatic Transmission and an in line 8 cyclinder engine.
It's not really a "new" problem. Engineers have been making stupid decisions like this for decades. I remember a GM car, I think it was a Berreta, in the 80's or 90's that required partially unmounting the engine and tilting it forward to access the spark plugs otherwise they were flush against the firewall. And around that same time Toyota Corrola's required dropping the front axle or somesuch to replace the starter.
Generally in the US it means a car that is produced for sale to the public, usually in quantities numbering in the thousands or higher but sometimes less. Concept cars, test vehicles, race cars and stuff like that is what I would exclude. Although I believe one of the requirements for Stock Car Racing is that the vehicle in theory has to be based on a car they actually sell, or something like that.
I would wager that 90% of cars on the road aren't even capable of going 150 mph under their own power. Even if you had a super car capable of reaching a high enough speed to beat the speed trap camera you'd need to be traveling that speed or faster when you actually pass a trap. Honestly the idea of going that fast anywhere but at the track should make most anyone shit their pants. At 170 mph you would very likely be closing on other vehicles at 100mph, which is probably five to ten times what anyone glancing in their mirror would be expecting.
Did we see the same episode. I believe they showed that you couldn't beat them by driving insanely fast. I seem to remember them doing the math to show that even the fastest production cars at absolute top speed wouldn't beat the camera.
I was actually thinking of self limiting vocabulary in the opposite direction, people using profuse vulgarities instead of a more diverse vocabulary.
This kind of reminds me of 1984 and Newspeak. Only it seems that in reality many people are willing to self limit their vocabulary. I wonder what ramificaions that will have in our society in the long term.
I didn't start playing until 2nd edition I believe, but I feel much the same way. The more I read about the newer editions the more it sounds like they are trying to imitate video games. Which is amusing because what I always wanted was a video game that would imitate the open world sandbox and freedom of D&D and similiar games.
Exactly!
I played a good bit of these types of games as a kid, D&D, Shadowrun, various White Wolf games. And we played them as games, none of us cared to actually try and act out scenes or conversations. Even my Thespian friends didn't care to play some predetermined role, just playing the game using the established rules and systems was all we wanted. This probably worked well because we were all too broke to afford buying silly modules anyways. So the stories and adventures we had were almost entirely of our own making.
Yes and no.
This is making an assumption but it's probably not far off. Assume that all incidents of officers using were previously reported, that would account for a very large chunk of the 87%. We could guess that use of force declined 59% and that 28% of previous reports against officers were unjustified or false accusations. I would argue that the use of force is still the larger and more concerning number.
It's not really necessary to prove that he went for the gun. Witness testimony and the physical evidence shows that he was involved in a violent struggle inside of the car. If he was not the agressor in that struggle how do you explain him being in the vehicle for more than the briefest of moments. Brown had the advantage of size, strength, leverage, and position. Are you saying that Wilson pulled Brown through the cruiser window into his lap, then pulled his firearm and shot him? I'll admit that isn't beyong the realm of possibility, but it doesn't make much sense. Brown assaulting Wilson sounds much more plausible, especially after he had just succesfully commited a strongarm robbery.
Even if Brown did not go for the gun Wilson is still justified in drawing and possibly using his firearm. He is authorized by law to use the minimum force required to stop/apprehend a criminal or suspect. In the previous struggle he would have already determined that he was not a physical match for Brown and so would have to use some other force multiplying tool or strategy. Drawing his firearm if it wasn't already out would then be appropriate given that he was not equiped with a taser.
Was Wilson justified in actually shooting Brown after the initial physical confrontation, I don't know, and I probably never will. If Brown was threatening another physical assault, then I would say "yes". If Brown was doing pretty much anything else, then "no".
"Basically the officer drew his gun when Brown wouldn't get off the street."
I thought the story was that Brown assaulted Wilson while Wilson was seated in the cruiser with the weapon holstered. In the course of the struggle the weapon was drawn and discharged.
I agree that cameras for recording police activity should be the status quo.
My wife watched American History X once with me and some friends on cable or something where a lot of the swearing was bleeped out. She commented that the profuse swearing seemed totally unrealistic to her. My friends thought it was hilarous because it made very evident her different upbringing and social circles. Some people really do talk like that, and yes it probably means that they don't mean that swearing as emphatically as if my wife were to do it. The context of swearing, as with anything else, is a key part of understanding it. If you think a movie is over using swearing you probably are missing the context.
Speaking of mediocre to poor movies and swearing though. My wife got me Dark Shadows this year as a gag gift. One of the few redeeming bits of the movie was the main characters insults. He didn't use swear words because they weren't part of his vocabularly but instead used eloquent verses of curse.
I've always wondered if anyone has tried the exact opposite of asking an undercover agent if they are a cop.
Simply work under the assumption that everyone is a police or law enforcement officer. And only conduct business with them after signing legal contracts recognizing them as an agent of the law whereby they are authorizing your activity for some other lawful purpose like entrapping, errr I mean prosecuting someone else.
"complete fabrications" is a bit of a stretch. The game didn't get an individual review of it's own. It did however get at least one very positive mention that I remember reading personally. And that kind of off hand remark is often worth a lot more in terms of advertising than a whole article. Whether or not that was a result of the two having a sexual relationship is anyones guess.
Risky or not people of all walks of life can be idiots and it wouldn't surprise me if some, none, or all of the threats were faked. I'm not really sure that the odds of being caught making a false threat against yourself are all that high given a modicum of intelligence and technical know how, especially for an anonymous threat. It would get really tricky though if you actually try to frame a specific person or group though.
If you are talking about the same twitter screen shots I'm thinking of, then weren't they already debunked as fakes? Something about the number of characters per tweet exceeding the limit that Twitter actually gives you.
Usually people get better at activities in which they regularly participate. So even if they did go straight back to commiting bank robberies to get by, or at least get the capital to start an honest life, it's not hard to imagine that they just weren't caught. Go look at the FBI statistics for the last few years and you'll see that just identifying the suspects in a bank robbery is tough, the best number I saw was 54% of suspects identified in 2011. Note, that is identified, not apprehended, which is kind of amazing in todays world with the prevalence of cameras and all the other tools law enforcement has access to that they didn't all those years ago.