Re:Why isn't online filing at IRS.Gov a reality?
on
Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 1
How can it be illegal? I mean, they're "competing" against printing and copying companies by giving away free copies of the forms in addition to allowing you to mail them the forms directly.
This is grossly off-topic, but this smells to me exactly what you get with "privitization" -- a system no more efficient than it was to begin with that enriches some specific individual with what appears to be a manditory revenue stream.
Why isn't online filing at IRS.Gov a reality?
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 1
That's what I don't get. If the IRS wanted to actually improve all around, they would enable online filing through their own web site and not require any third party software or services to electronically file taxes.
It could (should?) be as basic as a 1040 long form that does the math between boxes and has instructions along the side. It doesn't have to be like TurboTax or any other third-party application that coaches deductions, etc.
What I want to know is how much lobbying the tax software people have done to keep this from actually happening. I may gripe about my tax amounts, but it really frosts me if I'm required to pay taxes AND to pay some third party to get them paid.
I didn't realize it was decorative/antique/fragile like that. I've walked around MIT (5-6 years ago), but I don't remember anything specific about the buildings.
Who would pay for the repairs to the glass skylight in the ceiling? I.e. the one the ballons are directly underneath?
Since it's MIT, I'd guess that physics was one of the courses offered.
A.177 caliber pellet fired upward shouldn't have enough terminal energy to damage the skylights, especially if you hit the baloon. Remember, skylights must be designed to absorb the energy of random stuff falling on them, like at least marble-sized hail, ice blown from adjacent rooftops, birds, and so on.
While they don't directly use guns, they indirectly do by manipulating the laws and the legal system to obtain proxy use of the government's legally sanctioned use of violence.
Even better would be selling the right to shoot them down and using the money for some charity.
Even a novice should be able to hit a balloon with a scoped pellet gun.
Re:Voom went down because they had no customers
on
Voom No More
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· Score: 1
How much of their content really was upconverted crap and how much was 'original' HD crap material (such as older film material telecinned to HD)?
I note that HD Net or one of those other oddball HD channels on our cable system plays Hogan's Heroes in HD. OK, so it probably was telecinned to HD from film, and Hogan's is mildly amusing, but it's hard to call that blockbuster HD content.
If that's what Voom was offering, it's easy to see why they went down.
A friend swears his brother actually saw this happen:
Friend's brother flew from Hong Kong to Sydney. Flight was delayed on the ground in HK, somewhat significantly, so everyone was kind of late. The immigration person checking passports was, in the spirit of all good bureaucrats with functionally unlimited power within their sphere of influence, taking their time and making sure to ask the predominantly caucasian, Commonwealth-origin visitors lots of annoying questions.
The man in front of my friend's brother was a British businessman (suit, etc) who was kind of put out by the slowness and the delays previously experienced. Once he got to the head of the queue, the immigration official apparently sensed this and began asking a series of questions of dubious value, including asking if the man had ever been incarcerated.
Finally at his breaking point, the man said in a fairly haughty tone, "Why? Is that still a prerequisite for entry to Australia?"
At that point the Briton was refused entry and was told he had to go back to Hong Kong.
Like I said, I have no idea if this is true (did you ever need a passport to go from Britain, to HK, to Australia?) or not, but it's kind of a funny story.
I got a hard sell on leasing desktops from a reseller and I asked them "When the lease is up, what do I give back to you? Just the PC, mouse, monitor and keyboard? Or the box? The misc junk that ships inside?"
When they told me it was the whole fscking thing, I was appalled. We seldom have room for storing PCs/monitors, let alone all the crap AND the boxes. The odds that ANY of our PCs still has the same keyboard, mouse and monitor at the end of its life cycle is maybe 50/50. We'd have to hire a full time "lease integrity specialist" to deal with all the keep-track-of-it-all hassles.
If you do driving directions, it will tell you your driving distance, but there's no apparent scale on the maps, so you have no way to estimate distance between arbitrary points. Some kind of clickable interface that gives you distance between two points would be ideal, but even a scale legend would be desirable.
My other gripe is scaling maps. Again, a magnifying type scaling tool would help. No matter how hard I try to center my map view, scaling ALWAYS gets me way off center after about two clicks in magnification.
Beyond that the scrolling interface and the ability to see a WHOLE map and not just some lame 160x120 square is nice.
Will freedom of expression shrink to the lowest legal denominator? In order to be free of technical hassles and in compliance with all those countries that hobble freedom of expression in some way or other, will web sites simply constrain expression to match whatever country has the most restrictive standards?
Last I heard, no CableCard Tivos until 2006, which is idiotic. Rumor has it that a rev to the CableCard spec to make it somewhat saner (and more desirable to end-users) is why, but I still think it smells like either (another) bungle by Tivo or cable stalling, or both.
I can't see why CableCard would help with satellite systems, since you can make the argument that the satellite signal format is a function of competitive advantage (channels, dish sizes, etc).
The real reason is that both Dish and DTV want their systems as incompatible as possible, as it is a barrier to migration to the competitive product.
I do like the idea, though, of an uber-smart 'cablecard' enabled Tivo that can tune digital cable, DTV and Dish simultaenously (presumably with two, self-aiming dishes).
I guess you've never heard of a little 45,000 person company called Sun Microsystems.
Well, I'd hardly judge large business uptake of Firebox generally based on the sole and specific example of a company in direct competition with Microsoft and with a CEO known to hate Microsoft on a personal level.
It's a really poor example, as are most other computer industry businesses that compete with Microsoft. Show me the banks, insurance companies, real estate companies, etc. that use Firefox, not just those people with an axe to grind against MS.
I can do maybe 1 movie on the plane and then I'm waaaayyy to fidgety to sit in some plane seat for a zillion hours. MSP to SNA makes me edgy when a 2 hour movie is done. LAX to Fiji (pre-Ambien) about drove me around the bend -- 10 freaking hours in the dark at 45000 feet.
That's why I prefer Ambien to extra PC batteries. Nothing quite like waking at your destination airport on the other side of the world completely refreshed, and all those boring hours completely behind you.
Ativan works OK in a pinch, but you can end up kind of punchy. Better for shorter flights, thrown down with stiff cocktail.
The local Minneapolis newspaper did a review of the PSP and they mentioned they had to get a *3* PSPs before they got one that worked right. Problems included dead pixels and something else I forget.
I'm surprised they would have let quality control get so hammered on these things. Did they have the US models made at a new factory or did somebody let a decimal point slip on their defect sampling? Or did they just totally degrade the components for the US market, hoping to make a pile of money?
10.0 was buggy as hell, missing features and nobody really used it for production. 10.1 and 10.2 were massive bugfixes and feature adds. Hard-core Mac fans will dispute this, no doubt.
I actually think that 10.3 was where things leveled out, software vendors caught up with X versions of their applications that worked reliably and so on.
Apple's managed to produce an OS that was stable _enough_ that people would use it, but in reality was highly beta-ish. I think 10.4 is actually going to be more like a _true_ point upgrade to what should have been the 10.0 version, 10.3.
This must be an airport specific thing. At MSP, SLC and LGA the TSA inspection is literally out in the open in the main ticketing concourses, not deep in the bowels of the airport. Of the airports I've been too since they started doing this, I think only SNA (Irvine) did inspection underground as the airline rep just put my bag on the conveyor, and even then this was just for NWA, other carriers had TSA inspection by ticketing.
Opening and stealing would be a bold operation when you're out in the open. I've actually hung out and watched them do my luggage (through the mega x-ray machine). IMHO the TSA people are far more security conscious in most airports; it's the baggage monkeys who have much more opportunity to steal and tend to represent the "stealing" demographic. I think only the TSA people in really crappy areas where corruption is high and the people they've hired are low-rent are a pilfering threat.
I'm glad the font thing isn't just my imagination. I find/found it to be kind of troubling, as the font rendering layer of the Tivo system I would have suspected to be largely immune to the feature sets that were being added -- usually when you see the GUI start to act erratically, something is usually very wrong under the hood.
Apparently, though, it looks like we're getting a major rewrite of the entire system. I guess the good news is that they didn't obsolete the entire Series 2 standalones, the bad news is that this will be the last upgrade we'll ever see as it barely runs on our hardware.
I'm annoyed that the Tivo-to-my-PC (the proper name escapes me) is intentionally crippled (yes, I know about the hacks) to only burn DVDs with their lame software, but I'm almost MORE annoyed that the the software revision to support this feature reduces my standalone S2's GUI performance SIGNIFICANTLY. Screen redraws, hitting the Tivo button, etc all take eons now. There's also an annoying font bug where if you go into a show's description in Now Playing and then channel up/down to other shows, the font changes to a kind of blurry, bolder typeface.
I can only imagine that Tivo will eventually bog my S2 down to the point with crap that it's nearly unusable. And this I could probably live with even this and the ads IF Tivo had the brains to come out with an updated standalone box that was worth buying other than for a slightly faster CPU or slightly bigger disk.
But no, Tivo's been staking their future on getting knocked up by a cable company, not on innovating their hardware, so there's no new standalone I can buy that would have WORTHWHILE features like cablecard support (planned for fscking '06???), digital audio recording and playback, a real fast ethernet interface, etc.
Even though I love my Tivo, given what the thing costs relative to my financial commitment with a cable company box, I may have to get used to liking their box, which at least records HiDef.
OT: Loving vs. loathing as the only choices
on
What's Next At Apple
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Can you be mildly indifferent? Half-assed curious?
I get my Unix needs met by FreeBSD and for GUI use I get my needs met by XP Pro.
I guess I'd be interested in using a Mac more, maybe, but I don't feel that anything is really missing in my current world, and a fast enough box to handle OS X in a manner I'd consider worthwhile is outside what I'm willing to personally pay.
The two Macs I have (G4 at work, G3 w/1Ghz upgrade CPU) are just too slow on OS X to do anything worthwhile. Disk I/O is especially painful.
They now have TSA-approved locks which have some kind of TSA symbol on them that identify them as "OK". There's a master key for the key locks and the combination locks.
Prior to this I used tie wraps (the good ones with the metal in the latching end) through the lock holes on the zippers. I stashed an ancient wire cutters in an outer pocket for opening at my destination.
I don't know 'secure' these really are, but I suppose it makes it just hard enough that the crackheads working in baggage will choose someone else's luggage to rifle. I'm sure the master key component of the TSA-approved locks is trivial as well.
But as someone said above, if someone wants it, they'll just rip the fscking thing open. But it should be good enough. People have long complained about pilfering from luggage, but the complaints REALLY went up when the TSA banned luggage locking. IMHO most of the luggage pilfered was unlocked to begin with, and once everyone's was, it was open season for luggage handlers to steal, so a trivial amount of locking ought to deny them the easy opportunities.
You're missing the fact that the *source* of the rift between Islam and the West IS a cultural disagreement. Western social and political freedoms are a major part of what OBL/Al Queida are against; their goal is a totalitarian reliigious theocracy, NOT a democratic, pluralistic society that guarantees any individual civil liberties.
"They hate us for our freedom" isn't a complete geopolitical analysis, but it's also not factually incorrect, either.
If the US was a totalitarian dictatorship that strongly supported Israel and put troops in Saudi Arabia to protect our oil interests there and in Kuwait, Osama would hate us just as much as he does now.
An incorrect analysis. If the USA was a totalitarian dictatorship, we would never have supported the Israelis in the first place. US support for Israel had a cold war geostrategic component to it, but was and is largely driven by Jewish PACs.
Reading through some of their other positions, they seem like a group set up to astroturf for all the major big corporate interests -- banking (criticizing Argentina's successful debt renegotiation), cheap labor (pro-mass immigration), and "intellectual property".
But somehow it's too shoddy looking to be purely an invention of MS. Anyone know who's behind this group? Do they have a real agenda, or are they really an astroturf factory for big corporate interests?
I've found that unless you were a total bastard, 512M was the sweet spot between cost and performance for Win2k. WinXP is more piggish about memory usage, IMHO, and that spot moved up to 1G.
I'm not sure if NTFS can do this or if it can even be hacked to do this, but a performance improvement might be for the pagefile to be defined as a file on disk, but provide for a raw disk driver that can read the disk blocks the pagefile is defined as using in a raw mode, bypassing NTFS altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
How can it be illegal? I mean, they're "competing" against printing and copying companies by giving away free copies of the forms in addition to allowing you to mail them the forms directly.
This is grossly off-topic, but this smells to me exactly what you get with "privitization" -- a system no more efficient than it was to begin with that enriches some specific individual with what appears to be a manditory revenue stream.
That's what I don't get. If the IRS wanted to actually improve all around, they would enable online filing through their own web site and not require any third party software or services to electronically file taxes.
It could (should?) be as basic as a 1040 long form that does the math between boxes and has instructions along the side. It doesn't have to be like TurboTax or any other third-party application that coaches deductions, etc.
What I want to know is how much lobbying the tax software people have done to keep this from actually happening. I may gripe about my tax amounts, but it really frosts me if I'm required to pay taxes AND to pay some third party to get them paid.
I didn't realize it was decorative/antique/fragile like that. I've walked around MIT (5-6 years ago), but I don't remember anything specific about the buildings.
Who would pay for the repairs to the glass skylight in the ceiling? I.e. the one the ballons are directly underneath?
.177 caliber pellet fired upward shouldn't have enough terminal energy to damage the skylights, especially if you hit the baloon. Remember, skylights must be designed to absorb the energy of random stuff falling on them, like at least marble-sized hail, ice blown from adjacent rooftops, birds, and so on.
Since it's MIT, I'd guess that physics was one of the courses offered.
A
This is largely what the RIAA/MPAA do!
While they don't directly use guns, they indirectly do by manipulating the laws and the legal system to obtain proxy use of the government's legally sanctioned use of violence.
They would take down those balloons easily.
Even better would be selling the right to shoot them down and using the money for some charity.
Even a novice should be able to hit a balloon with a scoped pellet gun.
How much of their content really was upconverted crap and how much was 'original' HD crap material (such as older film material telecinned to HD)?
I note that HD Net or one of those other oddball HD channels on our cable system plays Hogan's Heroes in HD. OK, so it probably was telecinned to HD from film, and Hogan's is mildly amusing, but it's hard to call that blockbuster HD content.
If that's what Voom was offering, it's easy to see why they went down.
WSUS (nee WUS) isn't out of beta yet and MS will not support it in production, as they state in bold letters on their web site.
SUS is still the supported the "current" product.
A friend swears his brother actually saw this happen:
Friend's brother flew from Hong Kong to Sydney. Flight was delayed on the ground in HK, somewhat significantly, so everyone was kind of late. The immigration person checking passports was, in the spirit of all good bureaucrats with functionally unlimited power within their sphere of influence, taking their time and making sure to ask the predominantly caucasian, Commonwealth-origin visitors lots of annoying questions.
The man in front of my friend's brother was a British businessman (suit, etc) who was kind of put out by the slowness and the delays previously experienced. Once he got to the head of the queue, the immigration official apparently sensed this and began asking a series of questions of dubious value, including asking if the man had ever been incarcerated.
Finally at his breaking point, the man said in a fairly haughty tone, "Why? Is that still a prerequisite for entry to Australia?"
At that point the Briton was refused entry and was told he had to go back to Hong Kong.
Like I said, I have no idea if this is true (did you ever need a passport to go from Britain, to HK, to Australia?) or not, but it's kind of a funny story.
I got a hard sell on leasing desktops from a reseller and I asked them "When the lease is up, what do I give back to you? Just the PC, mouse, monitor and keyboard? Or the box? The misc junk that ships inside?"
When they told me it was the whole fscking thing, I was appalled. We seldom have room for storing PCs/monitors, let alone all the crap AND the boxes. The odds that ANY of our PCs still has the same keyboard, mouse and monitor at the end of its life cycle is maybe 50/50. We'd have to hire a full time "lease integrity specialist" to deal with all the keep-track-of-it-all hassles.
If you do driving directions, it will tell you your driving distance, but there's no apparent scale on the maps, so you have no way to estimate distance between arbitrary points. Some kind of clickable interface that gives you distance between two points would be ideal, but even a scale legend would be desirable.
My other gripe is scaling maps. Again, a magnifying type scaling tool would help. No matter how hard I try to center my map view, scaling ALWAYS gets me way off center after about two clicks in magnification.
Beyond that the scrolling interface and the ability to see a WHOLE map and not just some lame 160x120 square is nice.
Will freedom of expression shrink to the lowest legal denominator? In order to be free of technical hassles and in compliance with all those countries that hobble freedom of expression in some way or other, will web sites simply constrain expression to match whatever country has the most restrictive standards?
Is this capitalism's flaw relative to freedom?
Last I heard, no CableCard Tivos until 2006, which is idiotic. Rumor has it that a rev to the CableCard spec to make it somewhat saner (and more desirable to end-users) is why, but I still think it smells like either (another) bungle by Tivo or cable stalling, or both.
I can't see why CableCard would help with satellite systems, since you can make the argument that the satellite signal format is a function of competitive advantage (channels, dish sizes, etc).
The real reason is that both Dish and DTV want their systems as incompatible as possible, as it is a barrier to migration to the competitive product.
I do like the idea, though, of an uber-smart 'cablecard' enabled Tivo that can tune digital cable, DTV and Dish simultaenously (presumably with two, self-aiming dishes).
I guess you've never heard of a little 45,000 person company called Sun Microsystems.
Well, I'd hardly judge large business uptake of Firebox generally based on the sole and specific example of a company in direct competition with Microsoft and with a CEO known to hate Microsoft on a personal level.
It's a really poor example, as are most other computer industry businesses that compete with Microsoft. Show me the banks, insurance companies, real estate companies, etc. that use Firefox, not just those people with an axe to grind against MS.
I can do maybe 1 movie on the plane and then I'm waaaayyy to fidgety to sit in some plane seat for a zillion hours. MSP to SNA makes me edgy when a 2 hour movie is done. LAX to Fiji (pre-Ambien) about drove me around the bend -- 10 freaking hours in the dark at 45000 feet.
That's why I prefer Ambien to extra PC batteries. Nothing quite like waking at your destination airport on the other side of the world completely refreshed, and all those boring hours completely behind you.
Ativan works OK in a pinch, but you can end up kind of punchy. Better for shorter flights, thrown down with stiff cocktail.
The local Minneapolis newspaper did a review of the PSP and they mentioned they had to get a *3* PSPs before they got one that worked right. Problems included dead pixels and something else I forget.
I'm surprised they would have let quality control get so hammered on these things. Did they have the US models made at a new factory or did somebody let a decimal point slip on their defect sampling? Or did they just totally degrade the components for the US market, hoping to make a pile of money?
IMHO OS X wasn't fully baked out of the oven.
10.0 was buggy as hell, missing features and nobody really used it for production. 10.1 and 10.2 were massive bugfixes and feature adds. Hard-core Mac fans will dispute this, no doubt.
I actually think that 10.3 was where things leveled out, software vendors caught up with X versions of their applications that worked reliably and so on.
Apple's managed to produce an OS that was stable _enough_ that people would use it, but in reality was highly beta-ish. I think 10.4 is actually going to be more like a _true_ point upgrade to what should have been the 10.0 version, 10.3.
This must be an airport specific thing. At MSP, SLC and LGA the TSA inspection is literally out in the open in the main ticketing concourses, not deep in the bowels of the airport. Of the airports I've been too since they started doing this, I think only SNA (Irvine) did inspection underground as the airline rep just put my bag on the conveyor, and even then this was just for NWA, other carriers had TSA inspection by ticketing.
Opening and stealing would be a bold operation when you're out in the open. I've actually hung out and watched them do my luggage (through the mega x-ray machine). IMHO the TSA people are far more security conscious in most airports; it's the baggage monkeys who have much more opportunity to steal and tend to represent the "stealing" demographic. I think only the TSA people in really crappy areas where corruption is high and the people they've hired are low-rent are a pilfering threat.
I'm glad the font thing isn't just my imagination. I find/found it to be kind of troubling, as the font rendering layer of the Tivo system I would have suspected to be largely immune to the feature sets that were being added -- usually when you see the GUI start to act erratically, something is usually very wrong under the hood.
Apparently, though, it looks like we're getting a major rewrite of the entire system. I guess the good news is that they didn't obsolete the entire Series 2 standalones, the bad news is that this will be the last upgrade we'll ever see as it barely runs on our hardware.
I'm annoyed that the Tivo-to-my-PC (the proper name escapes me) is intentionally crippled (yes, I know about the hacks) to only burn DVDs with their lame software, but I'm almost MORE annoyed that the the software revision to support this feature reduces my standalone S2's GUI performance SIGNIFICANTLY. Screen redraws, hitting the Tivo button, etc all take eons now. There's also an annoying font bug where if you go into a show's description in Now Playing and then channel up/down to other shows, the font changes to a kind of blurry, bolder typeface.
I can only imagine that Tivo will eventually bog my S2 down to the point with crap that it's nearly unusable. And this I could probably live with even this and the ads IF Tivo had the brains to come out with an updated standalone box that was worth buying other than for a slightly faster CPU or slightly bigger disk.
But no, Tivo's been staking their future on getting knocked up by a cable company, not on innovating their hardware, so there's no new standalone I can buy that would have WORTHWHILE features like cablecard support (planned for fscking '06???), digital audio recording and playback, a real fast ethernet interface, etc.
Even though I love my Tivo, given what the thing costs relative to my financial commitment with a cable company box, I may have to get used to liking their box, which at least records HiDef.
Can you be mildly indifferent? Half-assed curious?
I get my Unix needs met by FreeBSD and for GUI use I get my needs met by XP Pro.
I guess I'd be interested in using a Mac more, maybe, but I don't feel that anything is really missing in my current world, and a fast enough box to handle OS X in a manner I'd consider worthwhile is outside what I'm willing to personally pay.
The two Macs I have (G4 at work, G3 w/1Ghz upgrade CPU) are just too slow on OS X to do anything worthwhile. Disk I/O is especially painful.
They now have TSA-approved locks which have some kind of TSA symbol on them that identify them as "OK". There's a master key for the key locks and the combination locks.
Prior to this I used tie wraps (the good ones with the metal in the latching end) through the lock holes on the zippers. I stashed an ancient wire cutters in an outer pocket for opening at my destination.
I don't know 'secure' these really are, but I suppose it makes it just hard enough that the crackheads working in baggage will choose someone else's luggage to rifle. I'm sure the master key component of the TSA-approved locks is trivial as well.
But as someone said above, if someone wants it, they'll just rip the fscking thing open. But it should be good enough. People have long complained about pilfering from luggage, but the complaints REALLY went up when the TSA banned luggage locking. IMHO most of the luggage pilfered was unlocked to begin with, and once everyone's was, it was open season for luggage handlers to steal, so a trivial amount of locking ought to deny them the easy opportunities.
You're missing the fact that the *source* of the rift between Islam and the West IS a cultural disagreement. Western social and political freedoms are a major part of what OBL/Al Queida are against; their goal is a totalitarian reliigious theocracy, NOT a democratic, pluralistic society that guarantees any individual civil liberties.
"They hate us for our freedom" isn't a complete geopolitical analysis, but it's also not factually incorrect, either.
If the US was a totalitarian dictatorship that strongly supported Israel and put troops in Saudi Arabia to protect our oil interests there and in Kuwait, Osama would hate us just as much as he does now.
An incorrect analysis. If the USA was a totalitarian dictatorship, we would never have supported the Israelis in the first place. US support for Israel had a cold war geostrategic component to it, but was and is largely driven by Jewish PACs.
Reading through some of their other positions, they seem like a group set up to astroturf for all the major big corporate interests -- banking (criticizing Argentina's successful debt renegotiation), cheap labor (pro-mass immigration), and "intellectual property".
But somehow it's too shoddy looking to be purely an invention of MS. Anyone know who's behind this group? Do they have a real agenda, or are they really an astroturf factory for big corporate interests?
I've found that unless you were a total bastard, 512M was the sweet spot between cost and performance for Win2k. WinXP is more piggish about memory usage, IMHO, and that spot moved up to 1G.
I'm not sure if NTFS can do this or if it can even be hacked to do this, but a performance improvement might be for the pagefile to be defined as a file on disk, but provide for a raw disk driver that can read the disk blocks the pagefile is defined as using in a raw mode, bypassing NTFS altogether.