e.g. if one day your undisclosed profits amount to something significant and you have a more lavish lifestyle, more expensive house and car than explainable by your tax filings the Tax Dept may require you to prove yourself innocent or get in big trouble.
Maybe I should stop complaining about the US government, maybe it isn't so bad if such nonsense happens in Europe.
How I live is none of the government's business, unless they have cause to investigate, most private financial transactions are out of reach of the IRS.
The only real exception would be the NSA looking for national security reasons, but frankly the NSA doesn't care about tax cheats, they are concerned with terrorism. Since I have zero intention of ever being a terrorist, I'm not really worried about the NSA.
When the time comes that you can easily buy a Ferrari for bitcoins they will also have a chance of noticing, and will ask you how you could afford that Ferrari.
How or why would they ever know I bought a Ferrari? Are such purchases reportable in Norway? (they aren't in the US)
You're right, if they do catch you cheating, the penalties are harsh... the question to ask is, what are the odds of being caught?
Very little of the US tax system is based on self-reporting.
Employers report wages, capital gains are reported by the big wall street firms, and PayPal reports if you do a lot of online sales.
Beyond that, almost nothing is reported and you can turn in any numbers you want. The IRS does audit some people, but if you keep two sets of books, how are they to know?
The IRS doesn't have access to bank accounts or other private financial transactions outside of a detailed audit.
That is generally illegal here, at least in some parts of the US. You can fire the employee, but you can't take it out of their pay unless you can prove they are stealing.
It is generally very bad for moral to go after petty employee theft, most low wage employees take small stuff, just consider it part of their total pay and move on.
If someone makes a bunch of profit on Bitcoins, how is Norway going to know if the person doesn't self report?
Also, how are capital gains taxed there? In the US, capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than most normal income, so if the choice is between normal income and capital gains, I'll take the latter every time (since I'm in the US).
The transmissions used were line of site, VHF, the transmissions to the moon were followed by replies from the moon.
Both sides of the transmissions could be monitored by other nations, including the USSR who would have been VERY fast to call phony.
Also, the USSR had spacecraft that could listen in and could tell where it was all coming from, so because of the time of travel and source of the transmissions, the only way to fake it would be to have the entire thing prerecorded before launch.
But you would still have had to land the recordings and transmitter on the moon as well as send back the images of the moon, which would have to be faked ahead of time and sent to the moon.
Except that much storage didn't exist back then.
So no, it couldn't have been faked, unless the USSR and perhaps several other nations were in on it. I guess that part is possible, but frankly I think in 1969 it would have been easier to just send men to the moon than it would be to fake the whole thing and get the USSR on board.
That, plus I've personally met two of the moon astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Gene Cernan. I met Buzz only briefly, however I've spoken with Gene for more than an hour about his experiences.
He could be lying, but frankly, I believe him and I don't think you'd get those 12 men to lie about it for as long as it has been.
Yes, that is true... however, in all fairness... once you have a trio of 30" monitors that cost over $3,000 to buy, spending $1,400 on video cards isn't quite as insane.
Yea, ok, it is... a bit...:)
People spend money on funny things, I've posted here before what I drive and where I live, so, well, this isn't the end of the world. Hopefully I get 2 to 3 years of good gaming out of these cards.
Frankly, I would have been happy crossfiring a second 7970 (or 280x) with my current card, if the prices hadn't gone up and if the drivers didn't still suck.
I could have purchased a pair of standard 780 cards and saved $400, but I figure if you're going to do it, do it right.
You could have crossfired an amd 7970 with a r9 280x.
Yes, but two problems with that... the 280x cards are expensive and hard to find, and the microstutter when running on 3 monitors has not been solved by AMD yet.
They did solve it in hardware on the 290/290x cards, so crossfiring those would have been fine, but the 7970/280x cards still have microstutter and it is annoying.
:) AMD said they would have a driver for it last month (November). That came and went without so much as a squeak.
The thing is, the 290/290x cards were released without finished drivers. The 280x is just a 7970 rebadge so I'm sure those drivers are fine, so long as you don't use both crossfire and eyefinity.
Since I use both, it is annoying. I actually used to crossfire and pulled the second card because of this issue. I thought it would be fixed a year ago, then it was, for single cards.
I watched several youtube reviews of BF4 and other modern games played on the 780 in SLI on 3 monitors, looked very smooth to me, so NVidia just got $1,400 from me yesterday. (well, Newegg did, don't know how much goes to NVidia).
Playing games on three 30" monitors at 7680x1600 with a single 7970 has sucked for awhile now.:)
For example, Mass Effect 3 is playable, so long as AA is turned off and you don't mind slowdowns here and there. Turn AA on even 2x and it is unbearable. More modern stuff like BF4 is completely unplayable on my 3 monitors with my current card.
From the numbers I've seen, a pair of 290x cards in Crossfire would have been beautiful, oh well...
Bitcoin is designed to be issued at a steady rate. If a dozen supercomputers suddenly starting mining, far fewer bitcoins would be issued. It would force the workload to the next harder level much sooner and thus reduce everyone's income.
Ironically, if the NSA wanted to mess with bitcoin, just spending a few weeks mining would really mess up the income of a lot of miners.
I would love to buy a pair of 290x cards and Crossfire them, but the delay in aftermarket coolers has hurt and the overall beta state of their newest drivers hurts as well.
NewEgg shipped my new pair of 780 TI cards today, equipped with Gigabyte Windforce aftermarket coolers, I'll finally get rid of most of the crappy FPS problem on my 3 Dell 30" monitors thanks to only having a single AMD 7970 card.
Why not just buy a second 7970 card and Crossfire them? I considered it, but since they are impossible to find for a reasonable price, forget it (2 months ago they were under $300, today they are closer to $500). The microstutter problem also remains when Crossfiring two cards and also running Eyefinity.
Given that the problem has been known for a year and still isn't fixed, I'm not giving AMD any more time.
Off to NVidia for me! Oh well, shame on you AMD, loyal customer here, but you just didn't leave me any options.
Millions and millions of people go around all day, every day, and don't kill anyone. If someone goes out and murders someone in cold blood for no reason, then frankly we'd all be better off without them on Earth.
This guy in Texas found a man sexually assualting his 5 year old daughter, and proceeded to beat him to death with his bare hands.
It is considered homicide, but it is lawful in Texas in this situation.
So killing someone else is acceptable, when the right situation exists. We can debate what those situations are. I doubt very many parents would have a problem with beating to death someone who was raping their 5 year old daughter, clearly that is the extreme example.
Beyond that it becomes a series of viewpoints and opinons as to what crimes justify execution.
My personal viewpoint is that anyone who clearly demonstrates a complete lack of interest in respecting the rights of others and has done so either in single crimes such as this (rape, murder, etc.) or in lessor crimes that have been repeated many times (such as robbing banks dozens of times or commiting dozens of acts of assualt or stealing millions of dollars over time from many people).
If you spend years being a criminal and don't care that you're breaking the law, then frankly I have no use for you and you can just go die and be removed from the human gene pool.
BTW, the above being said, a number of things that are currently illegal, I would make legal (or at least make them very minor crimes). Using drugs for example, putting people in jail for years for smoking pot is just stupid beyond belief. Unless of course they do it while driving and hurt people because of it, but that is just poor decision making. If they smoke it at home and hurt no one, I have no interest in getting into their business.
I guess to sum up... if you aren't hurting anyone else and are leaving everyone else alone, then I think you should be able to be left alone. If you're hurting other people, stealing, getting into other people's business, then you are scum. Live and let live.
Drunk driving is a serious problem that a lot of people don't take seriously enough.
If you drink and drive and kill someone, then the problem comes back to, "you chose to drink, while keep the keys, thus you had the choice to avoid it".
Frankly, I think you should have to hand over your keys before a bar serves you a second drink, or maybe we shouldn't have bars. I enjoy a drink or two at home, but I would never go driving and I don't drink to get drunk. I have one or two, then go to bed, like a sane member of society.
Frankly, we need to make it unacceptable to behave in socially unacceptable ways. How to do that is the $64,000 question.
If you harm someone truely by mistake, it is forgiveable. If you harm someone because you're a jackass, then you're dog meat, as far as I'm concerned.
Then again, I was never the type to get into bar fights, I walk away from people who want to get into dick measuring contests, and generally obey the rules of society. People who fail to do all that? Worthless for a civil society.
The parent poster is advocating a more severe sentence because of the total amount of suffering caused. If I punch someone in the face, that's assault, but the damage is limited to 1 person and is relatively minor. It is also in most cases not a permanent cause of pain and suffering. The punishment is light.
This, exactly...
If I go and punch one person, the crime is real, but not deserving of 18 years in prison. If I go around and punch 1,000 people, 10 every day, frankly I'm beyond help at that point and need to be put down like the rabid dog I would be... if I did such a thing.
Someone who goes around and steals $100 each from 100,000 people is a sociopath, human garbage, there just isn't anything you can do for such a person, clearly they care nothing for the rules of society.
You're right, we shouldn't blame the criminal, we should blame the banks!!!
Really? So if someone crashes into me because they had too much to drink, I should blame the car company and the beer company and not the idiot drinking and driving?
Slashdot Mirror
e.g. if one day your undisclosed profits amount to something significant and you have a more lavish lifestyle, more expensive house and car than explainable by your tax filings the Tax Dept may require you to prove yourself innocent or get in big trouble.
Maybe I should stop complaining about the US government, maybe it isn't so bad if such nonsense happens in Europe.
How I live is none of the government's business, unless they have cause to investigate, most private financial transactions are out of reach of the IRS.
The only real exception would be the NSA looking for national security reasons, but frankly the NSA doesn't care about tax cheats, they are concerned with terrorism. Since I have zero intention of ever being a terrorist, I'm not really worried about the NSA.
When the time comes that you can easily buy a Ferrari for bitcoins they will also have a chance of noticing, and will ask you how you could afford that Ferrari.
How or why would they ever know I bought a Ferrari? Are such purchases reportable in Norway? (they aren't in the US)
You're right, if they do catch you cheating, the penalties are harsh... the question to ask is, what are the odds of being caught?
Employers report wages, capital gains are reported by the big wall street firms, and PayPal reports if you do a lot of online sales.
Beyond that, almost nothing is reported and you can turn in any numbers you want. The IRS does audit some people, but if you keep two sets of books, how are they to know?
The IRS doesn't have access to bank accounts or other private financial transactions outside of a detailed audit.
"Pray I don't alter it any further" said in Darth Vader's voice doesn't sound like the "right thing" to do.
No, perhaps not... but if you're Darth Vader, then you really don't have to give a damm, now do you?
It is generally very bad for moral to go after petty employee theft, most low wage employees take small stuff, just consider it part of their total pay and move on.
Also, how are capital gains taxed there? In the US, capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than most normal income, so if the choice is between normal income and capital gains, I'll take the latter every time (since I'm in the US).
The transmissions used were line of site, VHF, the transmissions to the moon were followed by replies from the moon.
Both sides of the transmissions could be monitored by other nations, including the USSR who would have been VERY fast to call phony.
Also, the USSR had spacecraft that could listen in and could tell where it was all coming from, so because of the time of travel and source of the transmissions, the only way to fake it would be to have the entire thing prerecorded before launch.
But you would still have had to land the recordings and transmitter on the moon as well as send back the images of the moon, which would have to be faked ahead of time and sent to the moon.
Except that much storage didn't exist back then.
So no, it couldn't have been faked, unless the USSR and perhaps several other nations were in on it. I guess that part is possible, but frankly I think in 1969 it would have been easier to just send men to the moon than it would be to fake the whole thing and get the USSR on board.
That, plus I've personally met two of the moon astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Gene Cernan. I met Buzz only briefly, however I've spoken with Gene for more than an hour about his experiences.
He could be lying, but frankly, I believe him and I don't think you'd get those 12 men to lie about it for as long as it has been.
You can always find one for sale, if you're willing to pay over the moon for it.
A trio of 30" monitors just to play a video game isn't insane enough?
No, not really... :)
A have a friend who is serious into bicycles, he has single bicycles that cost over $2K and has over $10K worth in his garage.
We each have our hobbies...
It was solved last march for single cards and for crossfire cards on single monitors... for cards in crossfire on multiple monitors, it was not.
Yea, ok, it is... a bit... :)
People spend money on funny things, I've posted here before what I drive and where I live, so, well, this isn't the end of the world. Hopefully I get 2 to 3 years of good gaming out of these cards.
Frankly, I would have been happy crossfiring a second 7970 (or 280x) with my current card, if the prices hadn't gone up and if the drivers didn't still suck.
I could have purchased a pair of standard 780 cards and saved $400, but I figure if you're going to do it, do it right.
Must... not... respond... to... flamebait... :)
You could have crossfired an amd 7970 with a r9 280x.
Yes, but two problems with that... the 280x cards are expensive and hard to find, and the microstutter when running on 3 monitors has not been solved by AMD yet.
They did solve it in hardware on the 290/290x cards, so crossfiring those would have been fine, but the 7970/280x cards still have microstutter and it is annoying.
People that operate supercomputers are a bit more rational than the Bitcoin fanatics.
Unless the owner of a supercomputer wants to crash the Bitcoin market. :)
The thing is, the 290/290x cards were released without finished drivers. The 280x is just a 7970 rebadge so I'm sure those drivers are fine, so long as you don't use both crossfire and eyefinity.
Since I use both, it is annoying. I actually used to crossfire and pulled the second card because of this issue. I thought it would be fixed a year ago, then it was, for single cards.
I watched several youtube reviews of BF4 and other modern games played on the 780 in SLI on 3 monitors, looked very smooth to me, so NVidia just got $1,400 from me yesterday. (well, Newegg did, don't know how much goes to NVidia).
Playing games on three 30" monitors at 7680x1600 with a single 7970 has sucked for awhile now. :)
For example, Mass Effect 3 is playable, so long as AA is turned off and you don't mind slowdowns here and there. Turn AA on even 2x and it is unbearable. More modern stuff like BF4 is completely unplayable on my 3 monitors with my current card.
From the numbers I've seen, a pair of 290x cards in Crossfire would have been beautiful, oh well...
Newegg has them priced $50-100 over retail, the demand is huge and when they restock, they tend to sell out within an hour or two.
Ironically, if the NSA wanted to mess with bitcoin, just spending a few weeks mining would really mess up the income of a lot of miners.
NewEgg shipped my new pair of 780 TI cards today, equipped with Gigabyte Windforce aftermarket coolers, I'll finally get rid of most of the crappy FPS problem on my 3 Dell 30" monitors thanks to only having a single AMD 7970 card.
Why not just buy a second 7970 card and Crossfire them? I considered it, but since they are impossible to find for a reasonable price, forget it (2 months ago they were under $300, today they are closer to $500). The microstutter problem also remains when Crossfiring two cards and also running Eyefinity.
Given that the problem has been known for a year and still isn't fixed, I'm not giving AMD any more time.
Off to NVidia for me! Oh well, shame on you AMD, loyal customer here, but you just didn't leave me any options.
Millions and millions of people go around all day, every day, and don't kill anyone. If someone goes out and murders someone in cold blood for no reason, then frankly we'd all be better off without them on Earth.
He'll lose much more sleep over seeing his 5 year old raped than over killing the scum who did it.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/charges-texas-father-beat-death-daughters-molester/story?id=16612071
This guy in Texas found a man sexually assualting his 5 year old daughter, and proceeded to beat him to death with his bare hands.
It is considered homicide, but it is lawful in Texas in this situation.
So killing someone else is acceptable, when the right situation exists. We can debate what those situations are. I doubt very many parents would have a problem with beating to death someone who was raping their 5 year old daughter, clearly that is the extreme example.
Beyond that it becomes a series of viewpoints and opinons as to what crimes justify execution.
My personal viewpoint is that anyone who clearly demonstrates a complete lack of interest in respecting the rights of others and has done so either in single crimes such as this (rape, murder, etc.) or in lessor crimes that have been repeated many times (such as robbing banks dozens of times or commiting dozens of acts of assualt or stealing millions of dollars over time from many people).
If you spend years being a criminal and don't care that you're breaking the law, then frankly I have no use for you and you can just go die and be removed from the human gene pool.
BTW, the above being said, a number of things that are currently illegal, I would make legal (or at least make them very minor crimes). Using drugs for example, putting people in jail for years for smoking pot is just stupid beyond belief. Unless of course they do it while driving and hurt people because of it, but that is just poor decision making. If they smoke it at home and hurt no one, I have no interest in getting into their business.
I guess to sum up... if you aren't hurting anyone else and are leaving everyone else alone, then I think you should be able to be left alone. If you're hurting other people, stealing, getting into other people's business, then you are scum. Live and let live.
If you drink and drive and kill someone, then the problem comes back to, "you chose to drink, while keep the keys, thus you had the choice to avoid it".
Frankly, I think you should have to hand over your keys before a bar serves you a second drink, or maybe we shouldn't have bars. I enjoy a drink or two at home, but I would never go driving and I don't drink to get drunk. I have one or two, then go to bed, like a sane member of society.
Frankly, we need to make it unacceptable to behave in socially unacceptable ways. How to do that is the $64,000 question.
If you harm someone truely by mistake, it is forgiveable. If you harm someone because you're a jackass, then you're dog meat, as far as I'm concerned.
Then again, I was never the type to get into bar fights, I walk away from people who want to get into dick measuring contests, and generally obey the rules of society. People who fail to do all that? Worthless for a civil society.
The parent poster is advocating a more severe sentence because of the total amount of suffering caused. If I punch someone in the face, that's assault, but the damage is limited to 1 person and is relatively minor. It is also in most cases not a permanent cause of pain and suffering. The punishment is light.
This, exactly...
If I go and punch one person, the crime is real, but not deserving of 18 years in prison. If I go around and punch 1,000 people, 10 every day, frankly I'm beyond help at that point and need to be put down like the rabid dog I would be... if I did such a thing.
Someone who goes around and steals $100 each from 100,000 people is a sociopath, human garbage, there just isn't anything you can do for such a person, clearly they care nothing for the rules of society.
I'm just saying that we shouldn't leave the criminal alone who actually did the crime of using the information illegally.
Really? So if someone crashes into me because they had too much to drink, I should blame the car company and the beer company and not the idiot drinking and driving?