and don't forget, in the federal civil service, you can take vacation time in hours. so if have a lot of vacation time, you can take a half day off every friday afternoon or skip monday mornings.
this was actually done (not the digital part, the high frequency encoding part) back in the early seventies.
at least one four channel vinyl format called for encoding the rear channels in the ultrasonic portion of a vinyl record's bandwidth. you needed a special decoder and a really good phono cartridge for it to work.
be a little realistic. the irs is not going to go after anyone selling off an old laptop or the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. mailing the letter asking for the taxes on the sale of a pair of old sneakers would likely cost more than the taxes collected. and if they have even a small fraction of taxpayers substantiate their original purchase price and selling costs etc. the total effort won't be worth the tax collected.
more likley, the irs wants to capture taxes on income from undocumented businesses - that is, people who sell stuff on e-bay on a continuing basis by making things to sell (like soap, homemade tomato sauce, etc) or who buy things from local wholesalers for resale on e-bay.
the pitfall i see for the irs is that it's actually rather expensive to do business on e-bay. unless an e-bay seller's product has a huge markup, the actual profits are rather small, if there is any profit at all. the irs may create a hugely expensive documentation requirement for itself as well as e-bay to generate very little in the way of tax revenue. it would be a disaster if it cost more to collect the taxes than the tax revenue generated.
money, fiat or specie, is pretty much worthless without goods to trade. one example i could give was the late roman empire - with so few goods and services being produced, money (which was already debased coinage) was of little use to anyone and roman tax collectors preferred to collect taxes in kind - as grain, meat, or whatever goods and services they could squeeze out of the peasantry.
in fact, real wealth in economic terms is land, labor, and capital (or at least the ability to command and control land, labor, and capital). money is really just a tool for equating the value of one good or service with another. there may even be evidence to suggest that money is, in economic terms, an inferior good, that is, a good that you demand less of when you have ample supplies of real wealth.
so if money is really just tokens or scrip that is used to equate the value of one good with another, then anything can serve as money. in our society, money is really just a number recorded by a bank. when you buy something with a debit or credit card or with a check you are ordering the bank to reduce your number by a set amount while increasing someone else's number by the same amount. banks are prohibited from raising and lowering numbers willy nilly by their higher level banks (like the federal reserve system). we rely on the reserve system's self discipline for not changing it's numbers.
cash, paper bills and coins, are really just tokens representing the numbers normally kept by the banks, but in portable form. physical money is a holdover when transferring money from one bank to another was a lot less efficient because there were no computers. money is still used when the amounts being transferred are too small to make electronic or bank-to-bank transfers practical or when you want some anonymity in the transaction.
money can be inflated by the reserve system by simply increasing the number in one account (such as the government's treasury account) or by producing more tokens without reducing the number in another account. money can be deflated but reducing the number in an account without increasing the number in another account. money also inflates or deflates if the amount of wealth in an economy increases or decreases without a corresponding increase or decrease in the amount of money in any of the reserve system's accounts.
now the problem with virtual money such as money created in a virtual world by a video game company is that there is no discipline in creating or destroying it. even if there is, the creating of virtual money is dependent on the virtual economy - that is, if the virtual economy is growing at a breakneck pace (like the way second life just creates more 'land' as needed) there is no way to keep virtual currencies from inflating or deflating at random. a danger arises when users start taking the virtual money too seriously and start trading it against a more disciplined currency (such as, say, the australian dollar). would you invest in the currency of a country managed by a mercurial dictator (or ceo) who, anytime his country (or company) needed an infusion of well managed money, just created more of his own country's money for sale at random?
agreed, but the real problem is when communities, frustrated at cable and telco's unwillingness or inability to bring in broadband (justified or not), decide to create their own community broadband networks and are blocked by the very telco's that don't want to spend the mony themselves. the ilecs have copped an atitude that they will provide broadband, if they decide it's worth the investment, and no one else will.
there's more to patents than just encouraging inventions.
the patent system is intended to encourage invention and the publication of inventions (as opposed to keeping inventions 'trade secret'). without a patent system, inventors would still invent, but they would keep their inventions secret denying others the opportunity to build on the invention.
the publication part of the patent process was short circuited, however, by a court system that has declared that only lawyers (specifically patent lawyers) are qualified to determine if a product or process infringes on a patent. so engineers, the people most likley to build on a patent, can no longer look at published patents without worrying about whether they will be accused of willful infringement.
clearly, slashdot is the perfect forum for this discussion. i am sure there is no shortage of outdoorsey honeybee experts here who can contribute some valuable theories as to why bee colonies are failing all over the country.
really, how many apiarists (i got that from wikipedia!) are there on slashdot?
the danger behind a law like this is that insurance companies could latch onto it as a way out of having to pay a claim.
all that has to happen is for an insurance company to find out you were carrying an ipod, phone, or other music player when you were hit by a car and they can deny your claim. never mind that you weren't listening to it or that the battery was dead at the time.
keep in mind that the media companies are one of the groups turning up the heat on apple to license fairplay. the record companies hate how apple has gotten a virtual monopoly on legal digital music downloads (like when it interferes with their desire to charge different prices for different tracks).
when EU politicians talk about forcing apple to open up fairplay, does anyone think they're responding to european slashdotters? oh, they might be responding to european mp3 hardware makers (though, now that microsoft has the zune and is trying to copy apple's business model, microsoft may abandon it's effort to force apple to open up fairplay), but i think it's more likely an effort by the record companies to break apple's monopoly on downloaded music. basically apple is saying, "we'll open up our monopoly if you open up yours".
more to the point. i don't think us sub has built a luxury submarine yet. at least not last time i checked their site. all their pictures are computer generated.
Article 51. The exercise by citizens of the People's Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.
with the united states constitution tenth amendment.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
perhaps the best way to compare the two constitutions is to say that according to the united states constitution, all rights and powers belong to the people except those specifically reserved for the state while the chinese constitution says that all rights and powers belong to the state except those that are extended to the people.
i think randall stross is making a very important argument from two and a half years ago. honestly, where was he when everyone was hashing out the same arguments when the iTunes music store first opened?
strictly speaking, there is no such thing as net neutrality.
for example, cable communication services (cable teevee, cable internet, etc.) provide different amounts of bandwidth and different priorities to different services.
dsl and voice communication coexist on the same pair of copper wires and recieve different amounts of bandwidth and priority based on the type of service.
i don't hear a lot of complaints about this existing asymmetry in how bandwidth is assigned to different communication services.
ultimately, the net neutrality debate is going to come down to quality of service. if, for example, my local ilec wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own voip service, then that's fine, as long as their voip service doesn't interfere with the bandwidth i'm purchasing and using to access third party voip services.
if a cable teevee company wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own video on demand service, then that ought to be ok - as long as there is some guranatee that there is no interference in how i use the general purpose bandwidth i buy for other services including rival video on demand services.
the pity is that incumbent communications companies (ilec and cable) do not want to provide any guaranteed quality of service. they are even quick to cut off or penalize users who have the temerity to actually use the bandwidth they think they are paying for. give me a guarantee that i can actually use the bandwidth i'm buying 24/7 for any purpose i see fit, then they can provide extra bandwidth for their own specialized services all they like.
of course, i don't see this happening.
why are the only interesting materials only fluids
on
5 Strangest Materials
·
· Score: 1
united nuclear also makes aerogel. that's an interesting material and it's a solid
this is no joke. early versions of the (windows ce based) idrive system on bmw 7-series cars would crash taking the enitre car with them. nothing would work including the windows and door locks. as i understand it, drivers, on occasion, would get trapped inside their cars and would have to break the car's window to get out.
wow, what a concept! promote ceedee sales by giving away low fidelity versions of the same songs on p2p networks! what'll these music biz people think of next!
the only way i could see the publisher's plan to work is if they get all (or at least all significant) content providers on to their program; essentially creating a content shortage for the search engines and increasing its value. then they can play the different search engine companies against each other.
but if a few content providers 'cheat' - that is, make private side deals with one or more search engines, then the royalty system will very likley break down.
one way search engines could break the content providers' monopoly on content would be to boycott the big players. deny them the links to customers that search engines currently provide for free. when a content provider's web site stops getting hits and their advertisers get angry, then they'd be more willing to deal on the search engines' terms.the question is, would we, the public, spank the search engines like google if google suddently decieded to boycott a content provider such as cnn.
also remember, search engine companies also want content to be a little hard to get or cost a little money, the idea being that this would make it hard for new, possibly less well funded search engine companies to get a foothold in the market.
more to the point, getting the color accuracy of digital cameras to match film is probably going to take even longer. film manufacturers have had decades to perfect the color accuracy and expand the gamut of color film. digital cameras are, relatively speaking, a new technology. i've taken pictures of objects that were decidedly one color (such as purple) and when i took a digital photo, the same object came up as a bright royal blue.
try an experiment - take a clean white sheet of paper and a box of crayons and make nice big marks of each crayon color. take a picture of the crayon marks and compare the digital image with the original. now count how much time it's going to take to correct the colors.
Slashdot Mirror
and don't forget, in the federal civil service, you can take vacation time in hours. so if have a lot of vacation time, you can take a half day off every friday afternoon or skip monday mornings.
this was actually done (not the digital part, the high frequency encoding part) back in the early seventies.
at least one four channel vinyl format called for encoding the rear channels in the ultrasonic portion of a vinyl record's bandwidth. you needed a special decoder and a really good phono cartridge for it to work.
be a little realistic. the irs is not going to go after anyone selling off an old laptop or the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. mailing the letter asking for the taxes on the sale of a pair of old sneakers would likely cost more than the taxes collected. and if they have even a small fraction of taxpayers substantiate their original purchase price and selling costs etc. the total effort won't be worth the tax collected.
more likley, the irs wants to capture taxes on income from undocumented businesses - that is, people who sell stuff on e-bay on a continuing basis by making things to sell (like soap, homemade tomato sauce, etc) or who buy things from local wholesalers for resale on e-bay.
the pitfall i see for the irs is that it's actually rather expensive to do business on e-bay. unless an e-bay seller's product has a huge markup, the actual profits are rather small, if there is any profit at all. the irs may create a hugely expensive documentation requirement for itself as well as e-bay to generate very little in the way of tax revenue. it would be a disaster if it cost more to collect the taxes than the tax revenue generated.
try to think of money like this...
money, fiat or specie, is pretty much worthless without goods to trade. one example i could give was the late roman empire - with so few goods and services being produced, money (which was already debased coinage) was of little use to anyone and roman tax collectors preferred to collect taxes in kind - as grain, meat, or whatever goods and services they could squeeze out of the peasantry.
in fact, real wealth in economic terms is land, labor, and capital (or at least the ability to command and control land, labor, and capital). money is really just a tool for equating the value of one good or service with another. there may even be evidence to suggest that money is, in economic terms, an inferior good, that is, a good that you demand less of when you have ample supplies of real wealth.
so if money is really just tokens or scrip that is used to equate the value of one good with another, then anything can serve as money. in our society, money is really just a number recorded by a bank. when you buy something with a debit or credit card or with a check you are ordering the bank to reduce your number by a set amount while increasing someone else's number by the same amount. banks are prohibited from raising and lowering numbers willy nilly by their higher level banks (like the federal reserve system). we rely on the reserve system's self discipline for not changing it's numbers.
cash, paper bills and coins, are really just tokens representing the numbers normally kept by the banks, but in portable form. physical money is a holdover when transferring money from one bank to another was a lot less efficient because there were no computers. money is still used when the amounts being transferred are too small to make electronic or bank-to-bank transfers practical or when you want some anonymity in the transaction.
money can be inflated by the reserve system by simply increasing the number in one account (such as the government's treasury account) or by producing more tokens without reducing the number in another account. money can be deflated but reducing the number in an account without increasing the number in another account. money also inflates or deflates if the amount of wealth in an economy increases or decreases without a corresponding increase or decrease in the amount of money in any of the reserve system's accounts.
now the problem with virtual money such as money created in a virtual world by a video game company is that there is no discipline in creating or destroying it. even if there is, the creating of virtual money is dependent on the virtual economy - that is, if the virtual economy is growing at a breakneck pace (like the way second life just creates more 'land' as needed) there is no way to keep virtual currencies from inflating or deflating at random. a danger arises when users start taking the virtual money too seriously and start trading it against a more disciplined currency (such as, say, the australian dollar). would you invest in the currency of a country managed by a mercurial dictator (or ceo) who, anytime his country (or company) needed an infusion of well managed money, just created more of his own country's money for sale at random?
agreed, but the real problem is when communities, frustrated at cable and telco's unwillingness or inability to bring in broadband (justified or not), decide to create their own community broadband networks and are blocked by the very telco's that don't want to spend the mony themselves. the ilecs have copped an atitude that they will provide broadband, if they decide it's worth the investment, and no one else will.
i for one welcome our new genetically modified mosquito overlords.
there's more to patents than just encouraging inventions.
the patent system is intended to encourage invention and the publication of inventions (as opposed to keeping inventions 'trade secret'). without a patent system, inventors would still invent, but they would keep their inventions secret denying others the opportunity to build on the invention.
the publication part of the patent process was short circuited, however, by a court system that has declared that only lawyers (specifically patent lawyers) are qualified to determine if a product or process infringes on a patent. so engineers, the people most likley to build on a patent, can no longer look at published patents without worrying about whether they will be accused of willful infringement.
a 1958 cadillac eldorado with tri-carb power, and a blonde.
or a marilyn monroebot.
cut them some slack jack. they've still got a couple hundred years to miniaturize the thing.
clearly, slashdot is the perfect forum for this discussion. i am sure there is no shortage of outdoorsey honeybee experts here who can contribute some valuable theories as to why bee colonies are failing all over the country.
really, how many apiarists (i got that from wikipedia!) are there on slashdot?
the danger behind a law like this is that insurance companies could latch onto it as a way out of having to pay a claim.
all that has to happen is for an insurance company to find out you were carrying an ipod, phone, or other music player when you were hit by a car and they can deny your claim. never mind that you weren't listening to it or that the battery was dead at the time.
keep in mind that the media companies are one of the groups turning up the heat on apple to license fairplay. the record companies hate how apple has gotten a virtual monopoly on legal digital music downloads (like when it interferes with their desire to charge different prices for different tracks).
when EU politicians talk about forcing apple to open up fairplay, does anyone think they're responding to european slashdotters? oh, they might be responding to european mp3 hardware makers (though, now that microsoft has the zune and is trying to copy apple's business model, microsoft may abandon it's effort to force apple to open up fairplay), but i think it's more likely an effort by the record companies to break apple's monopoly on downloaded music. basically apple is saying, "we'll open up our monopoly if you open up yours".
more to the point. i don't think us sub has built a luxury submarine yet. at least not last time i checked their site. all their pictures are computer generated.
with the united states constitution tenth amendment.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
perhaps the best way to compare the two constitutions is to say that according to the united states constitution, all rights and powers belong to the people except those specifically reserved for the state while the chinese constitution says that all rights and powers belong to the state except those that are extended to the people.
i think randall stross is making a very important argument from two and a half years ago. honestly, where was he when everyone was hashing out the same arguments when the iTunes music store first opened?
strictly speaking, there is no such thing as net neutrality.
for example, cable communication services (cable teevee, cable internet, etc.) provide different amounts of bandwidth and different priorities to different services.
dsl and voice communication coexist on the same pair of copper wires and recieve different amounts of bandwidth and priority based on the type of service.
i don't hear a lot of complaints about this existing asymmetry in how bandwidth is assigned to different communication services.
ultimately, the net neutrality debate is going to come down to quality of service. if, for example, my local ilec wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own voip service, then that's fine, as long as their voip service doesn't interfere with the bandwidth i'm purchasing and using to access third party voip services.
if a cable teevee company wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own video on demand service, then that ought to be ok - as long as there is some guranatee that there is no interference in how i use the general purpose bandwidth i buy for other services including rival video on demand services.
the pity is that incumbent communications companies (ilec and cable) do not want to provide any guaranteed quality of service. they are even quick to cut off or penalize users who have the temerity to actually use the bandwidth they think they are paying for. give me a guarantee that i can actually use the bandwidth i'm buying 24/7 for any purpose i see fit, then they can provide extra bandwidth for their own specialized services all they like.
of course, i don't see this happening.
united nuclear also makes aerogel. that's an interesting material and it's a solid
http://www.unitednuclear.com/aerogel.htm
or a magnifying glass.
this is no joke. early versions of the (windows ce based) idrive system on bmw 7-series cars would crash taking the enitre car with them. nothing would work including the windows and door locks. as i understand it, drivers, on occasion, would get trapped inside their cars and would have to break the car's window to get out.
wow, what a concept! promote ceedee sales by giving away low fidelity versions of the same songs on p2p networks! what'll these music biz people think of next!
the only way i could see the publisher's plan to work is if they get all (or at least all significant) content providers on to their program; essentially creating a content shortage for the search engines and increasing its value. then they can play the different search engine companies against each other.
but if a few content providers 'cheat' - that is, make private side deals with one or more search engines, then the royalty system will very likley break down.
one way search engines could break the content providers' monopoly on content would be to boycott the big players. deny them the links to customers that search engines currently provide for free. when a content provider's web site stops getting hits and their advertisers get angry, then they'd be more willing to deal on the search engines' terms.the question is, would we, the public, spank the search engines like google if google suddently decieded to boycott a content provider such as cnn.
also remember, search engine companies also want content to be a little hard to get or cost a little money, the idea being that this would make it hard for new, possibly less well funded search engine companies to get a foothold in the market.
too bad it's going to be on g4. otherwise, people might see it.
"As long as the ladies still have short mini skirts, I'll be happy!"
even better. now they can make them shorter!
more to the point, getting the color accuracy of digital cameras to match film is probably going to take even longer. film manufacturers have had decades to perfect the color accuracy and expand the gamut of color film. digital cameras are, relatively speaking, a new technology. i've taken pictures of objects that were decidedly one color (such as purple) and when i took a digital photo, the same object came up as a bright royal blue.
try an experiment - take a clean white sheet of paper and a box of crayons and make nice big marks of each crayon color. take a picture of the crayon marks and compare the digital image with the original. now count how much time it's going to take to correct the colors.