If I have a small business in CA and sell less than $400/year retail, the state doesn't want to be bothered setting up to collect sales tax from me. Similarly, if I run a small candy store in Vermont and ship something to CA a few times a year, it isn't worth anyone's trouble to collect sales tax. That said, if I do sell within my state, I have to compete with businesses that pay no taxes.
Here's a reasonable solution....
1) If you ship less than $5K/year into a state and you aren't located there, don't worry about it.
2) If you ship more than $5K/year into a state, then you must check with that state (in a nationally standardized way) to find out if they have opted to tax incoming items. If they have, you have to pay the same tax rate as their in-state businesses, but you get to send it to the state along with a standardized (probably CSV) file indicating the zip-codes and totals you have shipped to.
3) If you ship from outside the US, you can either follow the procedure in (2) above, you can let ebay/paypal/Visa/MasterCard/Google handle that for you, or you can pay a standardized 10% fee by the same mechanisms that handle import duties now. Common Carriers (USPS, DHL, FedEx, UPS) would find it necessary to ensure that they either have confirmation that the duties have been paid or that they collect them from the shipper (just as they presumably do now if you try to ship something non-duty-free from abroad).
For years, Hayes ended press releases with +++ATH0
on
A Brief History of Modems
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Its a shame that the article missed so much....
Like the times when much of the industry didn't want to license the Hetherington Patent from Hayes on the "guard time" surrounding the "+++" in the escape sequence, so Hayes ended all of their press releases with +++ATH0 (which would cause a lot of modems to hang up on the BBS systems of their day).
They also missed the interesting fact that the "56K" modem was an old idea that was rattling around Bellcore for years before 1996 and fairly common knowledge in the Bell system. [The big issue with getting there was the need to have digital trunks connecting all of the dial-in server pools with the telephone network.]
Probable never would have become a mainstream consumer device without AOL. Until AOL, you really had to be a geek to use one.
And, of course, the modem wars of 1996-1998, as the major technology companies duked it out, the vast majority of modem companies went bust, including Hayes.
A lot of applications really need to just send a few packets a month (alarms, metering, etc...) but all of the US wireless carriers insist on minimum charges of $30-$60/month for each distinct piece of hardware that sends data. Funny how the carriers don't care to meter usage in a downward direction.
The firefighter analogy is pretty bad. An off-duty firefighter is able to leave or drink or otherwise be unavailable for duty. An on-duty firefighter must be ready to roll and not get more than a minute or so from his truck. There are few places in the US at least where one would be paid to be "on-call" while "off duty."
So, if the expectation is that the person's life should be structured around being available, meaning he cannot go to a movie or out with friends while "on-call", that's pretty much "on-duty." If being on call means that, in the unlikely event that something comes up, he's the guy that gets the voice-mail and has to respond in an hour or so, that's pretty much "off-duty."
Write down mnemonics that make sense to you but would be of little help to anyone else. For example, "rabbit food" might remind you of a password like "bbl2e^s". That would be because you based the password on "bugs bunny like to eat carrots"
If you do this right, even someone who finds your list AND knows one or two of your passwords would not be able to infer the others.
Seriously.... they couldn't possibly assume that their affiliates can program, so the key would have to be in the users' web browser instead of on the affiliates' server.
The amazing thing about these "Information Security Awareness Monthly" postings is that they blame P2P and then cite the example of a user using a P2P network to download an executable that contains a trojan. I guess that executables taken from regular webservers are fine, then.
First, that's why most timing belts are really timing chains.
Second (to the earlier posters), testing is way to late to catch this type of problem.
This is the sort of thing that should be caught at design review where the "tenths of a second" are actually computed as INTEGER hundred-counts of a millisecond timer that is the fundamental time-base for the system and is "adjtime"d to prevent it from accumulating error relative to a very reliable time reference (like GPS).
Of course, this is what happens when managers think all programmers are interchangeable and don't value engineers who have a clear view of what they are doing and why.
That's why the OP suggested subversion instead of CVS. The other laws are just like other files in the same repository. Then, the pending bill is a patch with one new file added and changes to the text of a while lot of other bills.
Seriously, though, it seems that a team of people could set up a repository that includes the other impacted bills and where the pending bill has been (manually) converted to such a patch file. It would be a rather effective use of staffer time and make it possible to visualize the pending bill. We have the CBO to estimate costs for legislators as a group. We need to create a "congressional version control office" to do the same for legislation.
A lot of posters (all of them) are mixing up 2 issues. The problem here is not that the crypto functions were exported from the US. The problem is that US companies are not permitted to do business with, for example, people or companies located with Iran.
When you make a product available on the internet, even a free one, people download it from all over and this could be considered "doing business" and IP filters are a rather silly way to try to stop it. The more straightforward approach is to "follow the money." In this case, there is no money to follow and... no money, no foul. Sounds like a good precedent for all kinds of TRADE restrictions.
I've been using Linux on servers for years but always used M$ on the desktop. When my MB blew and XP wouldn't run on the new one, I started using Ubuntu Desktop. Everything worked... generally with less drama than Windows. My DVD writer with Lightscribe worked, my laser printer worked of course. My Brother 5890 MFP scans and prints even though I can only get it to print from XP (It won't scan to XP... who knows why?).
I've been using Openoffice every since Word 2000 inexplicably stopped working on my XP machine even with a full reinstall. The only thing that was missing was Visio. Fortunately, my old version of Visio (which won't work on Vista) will work just fund under Wine on Linux... also without any messing around.
I used to be an advocate of Linux for people who didn't mind fiddling. Now I would suggest it for people who don't want to have to fiddle, so long as they don't need to get help from their local Windows-Geek.
Not only will they accept and deliver arbitrary messages, if their first attempt to deliver fails, they switch to a "backup" server and try again immediately and then forget the whole thing. Clearly never heard of greylisting.
Bad Law. [and I have successfully sued telemarketers under the TCPA]
This means that, if I run an e-commerce site and let my customers sign up for a newsletter or "special offers" by email when they make a purchase, I can be sued when a kid uses dad's credit card to make a purchase and asks to sign up for special offers, even if he lies about his age.
If this exempted sites using the data from their OWN site to follow up BY EMAIL, it would be different. If this only covered health information, it would be different. If this provided a reasonable standard for verification, it would be different. If this only applied to PREDATORY marketing, it would be different.
Unfortunately, it means that CellphoneShop can't send me the monthly discount code because, even though I opted-in as I made a purchase, they can't be sure I'm not really a kid in Maine and my email address is personal information.
I had these ants in my old house. Seal up one path and they find another. Put a pesticide on the baseboards and they run across the ceiling. The liquid ant bait/poison kills them, but they keep coming. I used a whole lot of the stuff and there was a 1/4" layer of dead ants in the room and they kept coming. It turns out that the anthills are all connected and they will even add a local hill if they find something that seems like a good source of food.
The same business ethics that make it "normal" to pirate software make it normal for employees to change jobs and take your designs and business information with them.
GWB's IT Staff managed to "lose" massive amounts of email. These aren't the career professionals that serve one administration after the next.
It looks like we may see a more technologically enlightened administration this time around. The changeover, while painful, at least should function as an effective purge of the incompetent and/or corrupt predecessors.
I've contributed to a number of OSS projects. In each, I've been able to figure out how to do a quick hack in a few hours and, after a number of hacks, learned the code and style well enough to contribute within a week.
I've tried to get my head around OO and it is much more difficult. Even interfacing via UNO is far from obvious unless you find an example that pretty much does exactly what you want.
I don't think the lack of community is the result of an intentional slight. I think it is the result of a lack of human-focused documentation. All the existing documentation seems to focus on the communication MECHANISMS.
Imagine how crippled the Web would be if all the javascript programming documentation focused on javascript ITSELF rather than describing "document" properly.
I agree with Bill Maher. Not every story has two sides. We don't expect every negative story about axe murderers to be balanced by a positive story about axe murderers.
Why, then, are we expecting that the bizarre campaign of a man who is a shadow of who he was running with an uninformed hatemonger and which wants to continue
the massive shift of economic benefits to the super-rich,
corrupt government with the further invasion of government-sponsored religion into our personal lives,
and cowboy diplomacy
would get as much positive press as a smooth campaign by two qualified candidates running on a platform of
equitable economic policy,
ethical government that leaves people free to make their own religious choices
the return of the USA to the community of nations
Sometimes the reason the story is positive is because the subject is positive.
You could claim to have a better path from Bank of America's SMTP servers to Time Warner Cable's SMTP servers. Then, request password resets for a bunch of accounts and intercept the emails with the tokens.
As long as you can handle the bandwidth for that small slice, you've done it.
Skum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner --- more slices from Chicken Little --- and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could shop, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what might have been, you could go to sleep.
In The Space Merchants (Frederick Pohl &
C. M. Kornbluth, 1952), Chicken Little was a huge amorphous blob of growing meat that fed all of society. Much of the rest of Pohl's vision has become eerily true, consumers.
They've probably had this in their terms and conditions on their purchase agreements for years.
Imagine you run a monster distribution center. You order from a zillion vendors and pallets of merchandise appear. Some pallets have a nice list attached to them describing what is in them so you can route them to the store without unpacking them. Others just show up with a pile of boxes and you have to, at least partially, unpack and re-wrap them to confirm the contents.
1. Your next version of your terms and conditions require a packing list.
Then, you find that most of the lists have the PO number on them and list the items by part number, but a few just say something like "Here's 10 cases of green shirts." Most have the packing list printed on a label on the side of the wrapped pallet. Some have it inaccessible from the outside.
2. Your next revision of your terms and conditions require the list to be on the outside and dictate the format.
After a few rounds, you realize that these lists are very expensive to produce and to read and all of your suppliers have (or should have) computers anyway, so you have them electronically send you the packing list and specify a shipment number. That number goes on a bar-code label at a specific place on the shipment. On your receiving dock, you have someone dance around each pallet to scan it and then it disappears into your warehouse.
3. Your next Ts and Cs require the bar-code
You find that the bar-code requires stopping the flow of items in all sorts of places. You invest in RFID readers for your whole distribution line. You tag all the incoming shipments as they arrive, and you find that it works.
4. Your next Ts and Cs require RFID labels.
A grace period comes and goes. Tagged shipments fly right through your distribution center smoothly, but you have some suppliers who still don't comply with your agreements with them and you have to stop each of those shipments on your dock and slap an RFID label on them yourself. The industry gets to the point where labels with tags are down to 40 cents in tiny quantities and the equipment to program them is down to under a thousand. There are also companies that will sell tags preprogrammed for a dollar or two. Still, some of your suppliers who were eager to sell to you and signed the Ts and Cs the day they took the order, fail to follow through.
5. You start to either refuse to accept shipments that don't comply with the contract or you charge a fee to fix the sloppy shipments.
Now, a legitimate issue is where the power in the relationship is. WM is well known for holding all the power and that really can be viewed as being all about price and accepting the Ts and Cs in the first place. That's an issue that comes up anytime they meet with a supplier. If your Verizon service stinks, you cannot do anything about it because, when you "negotiated" your contract, you could either sign THEIR terms or you could go to one of a tiny number of serious competitors who seem to have conspired to have equally onerous terms. (This is exactly why legislators keep looking at things like "customer bill of rights" legislation... the individual customer doesn't have the ability to choose a better contract).
This 1984 patent kills their first 12 claims and this product shipping in 2005 kills their remaining 13 claims unless you believe that the product had a wiring harness going from an lcd driver not on the keytop down up to the keytop.
That's all 25 claims dead right there.
Very inefficient compared to grid-tied panels
on
Solar Tree Bears Fruit
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So long as fossil fuels are being burned to make power during the day, it is far more efficient to take the daytime output of the most cost-effective possible panels (usually nice unimaginative rectangular ones that mount on existing roofs or new carport structures) and feed it directly to the grid to reduce the load on the inefficient plants that peak during the daytime. There is no reason to lose a major chunk of the power charging batteries, to build expensive battery arrays or to build bizarre structures to support the cells.
At night, the worst power plants are throttled back or shut down and the most efficient plants are handling the load.
When no further fossil fuels are used to make daytime power, then storing electricity from daylight becomes interesting and, even then, batteries are a loser.
Slashdot Mirror
If I have a small business in CA and sell less than $400/year retail, the state doesn't want to be bothered setting up to collect sales tax from me. Similarly, if I run a small candy store in Vermont and ship something to CA a few times a year, it isn't worth anyone's trouble to collect sales tax. That said, if I do sell within my state, I have to compete with businesses that pay no taxes.
Here's a reasonable solution....
1) If you ship less than $5K/year into a state and you aren't located there, don't worry about it.
2) If you ship more than $5K/year into a state, then you must check with that state (in a nationally standardized way) to find out if they have opted to tax incoming items. If they have, you have to pay the same tax rate as their in-state businesses, but you get to send it to the state along with a standardized (probably CSV) file indicating the zip-codes and totals you have shipped to.
3) If you ship from outside the US, you can either follow the procedure in (2) above, you can let ebay/paypal/Visa/MasterCard/Google handle that for you, or you can pay a standardized 10% fee by the same mechanisms that handle import duties now. Common Carriers (USPS, DHL, FedEx, UPS) would find it necessary to ensure that they either have confirmation that the duties have been paid or that they collect them from the shipper (just as they presumably do now if you try to ship something non-duty-free from abroad).
Its a shame that the article missed so much....
Like the times when much of the industry didn't want to license the Hetherington Patent from Hayes on the "guard time" surrounding the "+++" in the escape sequence, so Hayes ended all of their press releases with +++ATH0 (which would cause a lot of modems to hang up on the BBS systems of their day).
They also missed the interesting fact that the "56K" modem was an old idea that was rattling around Bellcore for years before 1996 and fairly common knowledge in the Bell system. [The big issue with getting there was the need to have digital trunks connecting all of the dial-in server pools with the telephone network.]
Probable never would have become a mainstream consumer device without AOL. Until AOL, you really had to be a geek to use one.
And, of course, the modem wars of 1996-1998, as the major technology companies duked it out, the vast majority of modem companies went bust, including Hayes.
A lot of applications really need to just send a few packets a month (alarms, metering, etc...) but all of the US wireless carriers insist on minimum charges of $30-$60/month for each distinct piece of hardware that sends data. Funny how the carriers don't care to meter usage in a downward direction.
http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.1/index.html seems to have the source and patches. Is this the end of it or is something missing?
Sounds like a great new UI feature from KDE. Microsoft better get working on their patent application.
The firefighter analogy is pretty bad. An off-duty firefighter is able to leave or drink or otherwise be unavailable for duty. An on-duty firefighter must be ready to roll and not get more than a minute or so from his truck. There are few places in the US at least where one would be paid to be "on-call" while "off duty."
So, if the expectation is that the person's life should be structured around being available, meaning he cannot go to a movie or out with friends while "on-call", that's pretty much "on-duty." If being on call means that, in the unlikely event that something comes up, he's the guy that gets the voice-mail and has to respond in an hour or so, that's pretty much "off-duty."
Write down mnemonics that make sense to you but would be of little help to anyone else. For example, "rabbit food" might remind you of a password like "bbl2e^s". That would be because you based the password on "bugs bunny like to eat carrots"
If you do this right, even someone who finds your list AND knows one or two of your passwords would not be able to infer the others.
Seriously.... they couldn't possibly assume that their affiliates can program, so the key would have to be in the users' web browser instead of on the affiliates' server.
The amazing thing about these "Information Security Awareness Monthly" postings is that they blame P2P and then cite the example of a user using a P2P network to download an executable that contains a trojan. I guess that executables taken from regular webservers are fine, then.
First, that's why most timing belts are really timing chains.
Second (to the earlier posters), testing is way to late to catch this type of problem.
This is the sort of thing that should be caught at design review where the "tenths of a second" are actually computed as INTEGER hundred-counts of a millisecond timer that is the fundamental time-base for the system and is "adjtime"d to prevent it from accumulating error relative to a very reliable time reference (like GPS).
Of course, this is what happens when managers think all programmers are interchangeable and don't value engineers who have a clear view of what they are doing and why.
That's why the OP suggested subversion instead of CVS. The other laws are just like other files in the same repository. Then, the pending bill is a patch with one new file added and changes to the text of a while lot of other bills.
Seriously, though, it seems that a team of people could set up a repository that includes the other impacted bills and where the pending bill has been (manually) converted to such a patch file. It would be a rather effective use of staffer time and make it possible to visualize the pending bill. We have the CBO to estimate costs for legislators as a group. We need to create a "congressional version control office" to do the same for legislation.
NO MONEY ... NO FOUL
... no money, no foul. Sounds like a good precedent for all kinds of TRADE restrictions.
A lot of posters (all of them) are mixing up 2 issues. The problem here is not that the crypto functions were exported from the US. The problem is that US companies are not permitted to do business with, for example, people or companies located with Iran.
When you make a product available on the internet, even a free one, people download it from all over and this could be considered "doing business" and IP filters are a rather silly way to try to stop it. The more straightforward approach is to "follow the money." In this case, there is no money to follow and
I've been using Linux on servers for years but always used M$ on the desktop. When my MB blew and XP wouldn't run on the new one, I started using Ubuntu Desktop. Everything worked... generally with less drama than Windows. My DVD writer with Lightscribe worked, my laser printer worked of course. My Brother 5890 MFP scans and prints even though I can only get it to print from XP (It won't scan to XP... who knows why?).
I've been using Openoffice every since Word 2000 inexplicably stopped working on my XP machine even with a full reinstall. The only thing that was missing was Visio. Fortunately, my old version of Visio (which won't work on Vista) will work just fund under Wine on Linux... also without any messing around.
I used to be an advocate of Linux for people who didn't mind fiddling. Now I would suggest it for people who don't want to have to fiddle, so long as they don't need to get help from their local Windows-Geek.
Amazing layers of stupidity....
Not only will they accept and deliver arbitrary messages, if their first attempt to deliver fails, they switch to a "backup" server and try again immediately and then forget the whole thing. Clearly never heard of greylisting.
Bad Law. [and I have successfully sued telemarketers under the TCPA]
This means that, if I run an e-commerce site and let my customers sign up for a newsletter or "special offers" by email when they make a purchase, I can be sued when a kid uses dad's credit card to make a purchase and asks to sign up for special offers, even if he lies about his age.
If this exempted sites using the data from their OWN site to follow up BY EMAIL, it would be different.
If this only covered health information, it would be different.
If this provided a reasonable standard for verification, it would be different.
If this only applied to PREDATORY marketing, it would be different.
Unfortunately, it means that CellphoneShop can't send me the monthly discount code because, even though I opted-in as I made a purchase, they can't be sure I'm not really a kid in Maine and my email address is personal information.
I had these ants in my old house. Seal up one path and they find another. Put a pesticide on the baseboards and they run across the ceiling. The liquid ant bait/poison kills them, but they keep coming. I used a whole lot of the stuff and there was a 1/4" layer of dead ants in the room and they kept coming. It turns out that the anthills are all connected and they will even add a local hill if they find something that seems like a good source of food.
I finally sold the house.... Sucker!!
The same business ethics that make it "normal" to pirate software make it normal for employees to change jobs and take your designs and business information with them.
It's a whole different ball game there.
GWB's IT Staff managed to "lose" massive amounts of email. These aren't the career professionals that serve one administration after the next.
It looks like we may see a more technologically enlightened administration this time around. The changeover, while painful, at least should function as an effective purge of the incompetent and/or corrupt predecessors.
I've contributed to a number of OSS projects. In each, I've been able to figure out how to do a quick hack in a few hours and, after a number of hacks, learned the code and style well enough to contribute within a week.
I've tried to get my head around OO and it is much more difficult. Even interfacing via UNO is far from obvious unless you find an example that pretty much does exactly what you want.
I don't think the lack of community is the result of an intentional slight. I think it is the result of a lack of human-focused documentation. All the existing documentation seems to focus on the communication MECHANISMS.
Imagine how crippled the Web would be if all the javascript programming documentation focused on javascript ITSELF rather than describing "document" properly.
Why, then, are we expecting that the bizarre campaign of a man who is a shadow of who he was running with an uninformed hatemonger and which wants to continue
would get as much positive press as a smooth campaign by two qualified candidates running on a platform of
Sometimes the reason the story is positive is because the subject is positive.
You could claim to have a better path from Bank of America's SMTP servers to Time Warner Cable's SMTP servers. Then, request password resets for a bunch of accounts and intercept the emails with the tokens.
As long as you can handle the bandwidth for that small slice, you've done it.
Imagine you run a monster distribution center. You order from a zillion vendors and pallets of merchandise appear. Some pallets have a nice list attached to them describing what is in them so you can route them to the store without unpacking them. Others just show up with a pile of boxes and you have to, at least partially, unpack and re-wrap them to confirm the contents.
1. Your next version of your terms and conditions require a packing list.
Then, you find that most of the lists have the PO number on them and list the items by part number, but a few just say something like "Here's 10 cases of green shirts." Most have the packing list printed on a label on the side of the wrapped pallet. Some have it inaccessible from the outside.
2. Your next revision of your terms and conditions require the list to be on the outside and dictate the format.
After a few rounds, you realize that these lists are very expensive to produce and to read and all of your suppliers have (or should have) computers anyway, so you have them electronically send you the packing list and specify a shipment number. That number goes on a bar-code label at a specific place on the shipment. On your receiving dock, you have someone dance around each pallet to scan it and then it disappears into your warehouse.
3. Your next Ts and Cs require the bar-code
You find that the bar-code requires stopping the flow of items in all sorts of places. You invest in RFID readers for your whole distribution line. You tag all the incoming shipments as they arrive, and you find that it works.
4. Your next Ts and Cs require RFID labels.
A grace period comes and goes. Tagged shipments fly right through your distribution center smoothly, but you have some suppliers who still don't comply with your agreements with them and you have to stop each of those shipments on your dock and slap an RFID label on them yourself. The industry gets to the point where labels with tags are down to 40 cents in tiny quantities and the equipment to program them is down to under a thousand. There are also companies that will sell tags preprogrammed for a dollar or two. Still, some of your suppliers who were eager to sell to you and signed the Ts and Cs the day they took the order, fail to follow through.
5. You start to either refuse to accept shipments that don't comply with the contract or you charge a fee to fix the sloppy shipments.
Now, a legitimate issue is where the power in the relationship is. WM is well known for holding all the power and that really can be viewed as being all about price and accepting the Ts and Cs in the first place. That's an issue that comes up anytime they meet with a supplier. If your Verizon service stinks, you cannot do anything about it because, when you "negotiated" your contract, you could either sign THEIR terms or you could go to one of a tiny number of serious competitors who seem to have conspired to have equally onerous terms. (This is exactly why legislators keep looking at things like "customer bill of rights" legislation... the individual customer doesn't have the ability to choose a better contract).
That's all 25 claims dead right there.
So long as fossil fuels are being burned to make power during the day, it is far more efficient to take the daytime output of the most cost-effective possible panels (usually nice unimaginative rectangular ones that mount on existing roofs or new carport structures) and feed it directly to the grid to reduce the load on the inefficient plants that peak during the daytime. There is no reason to lose a major chunk of the power charging batteries, to build expensive battery arrays or to build bizarre structures to support the cells.
At night, the worst power plants are throttled back or shut down and the most efficient plants are handling the load.
When no further fossil fuels are used to make daytime power, then storing electricity from daylight becomes interesting and, even then, batteries are a loser.