Since they CAN cut off specific states, and they also calculate shipping by state, they can certainly do sales tax by state.
It's not that simple.
You can't just assess sales tax according to the destination state. In many states, there are local taxes as well, and it varies based on the locality. A merchant calculates sales tax based on the MERCHANT's location, and the various taxing authorities make sure he/she knows what should be collected.
The shipping companies provide rate tables based on ZIP code, and it's a simple lookup. But, you can't even use ZIP codes to determine tax rates, because ZIP code boundaries don't necessary follow political boundaries.
All of their staff signed up for Clear and said it was either unavailable or pretty much worthless everywhere EXCEPT Orlando. There, seasoned travelers frequently found themselves in line behind hundreds of Disney-vacationing families [...]
This is the reason I signed up for Clear: I had to stand in line for hours at Orlando.
I used it a few other places, but was never able to bypass huge lines like those at Orlando.
What's wrong with trying to get the eye color or hair color you want? What is the difference with that and picking the sex?
I'm not sure I get it either. As a subsequent poster points out, it's screening, not "designing". Couples are choosing among existing embryos.
Screening has been going on for millions of years. Humans have always been able to choose their mates based on visible criteria like hair color, eye color, athletic ability, etc. Why is screening acceptable for invisible traits (like propensity for cancer and other genetic predispositions), but not for visible traits?
For God's sake, just READ once in awhile rather than have things spoon fed to you from the talking heads.
If a white male had said the same thing (with just a few substitutions to make it personally accurate), he would have been excoriated by the press and the very same people that are claiming that this is no big deal.
If you can look at yourself in a mirror and honestly be willing to excuse my hypothetical white male, then I respect your opinion. If you can't, then you're a hypocrite.
Doesn't matter.. you aren't going to get better than 10m accuracy without DGPS and 1m with it. Surveys have to be right to centimetres - no GPS can do that.
Yes, they can. They just aren't consumer handheld GPS receivers:
They don't give instant position: they accumulate data over a period of time and use that to derive the exact position, usually after correcting it with a comparable stream of data collected from a nearby known reference point.
Take the first episode, where McCoy meet an ex girlfriend. There is nothing so unknown about this. It simply takes the fear that someone we once loved have changed so much that we no longer will know them. Such a thing is a great loss.
I think you are reading too much into the choice of the first episode. The Naked Time was originally planned to be the premier episode of the regular series. But, NBC executives latched on to the "salt monster" in The Man Trap as a more exploitable (and promotable) subject.
That first episode got horrible reviews, and the show struggled to make up for it for the rest of the season.
As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
It depends on where you live, and what ILEC serves your area.
I live in an area served by Verizon, and have had fiber to my home for a couple of years. It's not a "hot spot": Verizon has been aggressively laying fiber and deploying throughout many of their service areas.
I currently have 20 megabit/sec down and 5 megabit/sec up, and could upgrade to 20/20 for another $10/month. 50/20 would be another $75/month on top of that.
AT&T doesn't deploy fiber to the home, at least not generally. They deploy fiber to the neighborhood, and use twisted pair for the last block.
Anybody who doesn't realize that Obama took on one of the biggest messes left by a precceding administration is seriously fooling themselves.
If you think this this is a mess, you should have been trying to find a job during the closing days of the Carter administration.
I don't absolve the Bush administration of any of their responsibility. But, I'll observe that things really went south during the last two years, when Congress was controlled by the same people that are both disclaiming responsibility and advocating more of the same to solve the problems.
But hey, there are those of you with no more of an agenda but to look, pray, hope and push for the new guy to fail, we understand you. We don't like you, but we understand you.
I don't really care if Obama personally succeeds or fails. But, I do expect his solutions to fail, simply because history is repeating itself.
We've been here before, about 30 years ago: a disgraced Republican administration (Nixon + Ford) resulted in the election of an "outsider", who turned out to be weak and ineffectual. The rest of the world realized they could take advantage of Carter, and they did.
The only question in my mind is what will be the triggering event. My guess is that it will involve Iran again.
Wait, you mean that Presidents have prepared remarks and speechwriters?
I was referring to candidate Obama. Every media outlet (except Fox News, predictably) showered praise on him about how articulate and electrifying his speeches were, ignoring the times that he had to ad-lib and stuttered uncontrollably.
But even as President, Obama read someone else's speech, thanking himself before he caught the error. One has to wonder what he could be induced to say if someone were to hack the teleprompter.
I'm neither left or right wing. But, I think Obama is even an emptier suit than Bush.
I have no doubt that it goes back way before Bush. For all his faults, Bush seemed rather upfront about his powergrabs so I don't really feel bad naming the road after him. But you are quite correct -- we've been on this road for longer than we likely know.
Bush has been quite brazen about it, but no more or less so than his predecessors.
We've apparently been on this road for longer than you know.:-) I'm quite aware of how long we have been on it, 'cause I've been involuntarily along for the ride for longer than I care to admit.
But, I'll retract my admonishment to "grow up", and instead suggest that you spend some time with a history book -- preferably a different one than the propaganda they distribute in the public schools.
My problem is your characterization of it as "the Bush road". This particular "road" stretches back decades, across many administrations and both major political parties.
This "road" belongs to the people that continue to vote for Presidential candidates that follow it. And it really pisses me off that anyone thought Obama was going to be any different. Even his abbreviated voting record demonstrated exactly what he believed.
Obama's only redeeming quality is that he has a talent for reading speeches from a teleprompter. I seriously doubt that he even wrote any of them.
But then again the USSR got progressively less despotic, until it eventually crumbled from its internal inefficiencies. There was no need for an apocalyptic war to achieve its destruction.
Forgive me if I missed something, but I don't remember an apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union.
Also, you will probably be surprised, but some former East Germans are quite nostalgic about their old ways, many not having adjusted to the dog-eat-dog economic realities of the West and having found most of the cunningly implied innuendos and outright false promises of prosperity that were made to them during the Soviet times to be just that, the prosperity never having materialized after the unification.
No, the country I am in was never in danger of that, as Germany would have lost to the USSR quite handsomely, just a year or so later. How would have history looked after that is anyone's guess.
It's not too hard to guess, given the fate of East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe. The only question is how long the Iron Curtain would have stayed up under those circumstances.
Perhaps you should ask someone who lived under the influence of the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall fell. You would probably find that it wasn't much fun.
I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt insofar as this is a mess that the bush administration created
If Obama wants to be an effective President, he will have to set aside that first envelope and take responsibility for his actions, rather than blaming it on his predecessors.
Otherwise, he will be opening that second envelope soon.
Ever since I was a kid, I've been prone to sinus infections. Every couple of years, I'll have one. They have never---and I do mean never---gone away on their own. I've left them for well over a week just to see. Never happens.
I read this article (and others about the same subject) and had the same response. I know when I have a sinus infection, because the symptoms are unambiguous. And a broad spectrum antibiotic is the only thing that will end it. I don't take antibiotics unless I need them -- for personal reasons. My doctor knows why, and never questions me when I think it's time.
But, I've been fortunate: I was at my dentist's office one day when he discovered that another patient's sinus infection had basically destroyed the roots of several teeth in his upper jaw. His doctor's PA (physician's assistant) had been giving him various antibiotics, but never followed up to be sure that it worked. The poor guy apparently had a sufficiently high pain threshold, and he never realized that something was really wrong.
Even in the case of sinus/ear infections, his few is dangerous. My ear infections have gotten painfully close to rupturing my ear drum. If I did not take antibiotics, there is a very good chance that I would have hearing damage today.
I've never had a rupture: as a child, my doctor lanced my eardrum several times to relieve the pressure before that could happen. I finally spent a few months with temporary tubes in my ears and it broke the cycle. My father wasn't so lucky: his ears ruptured several times and had significant hearing damage. I have some damage: I have a hard time hearing high frequencies, which makes it really difficult to understand someone in a high-noise environment.
It's just plain irresponsible to not treat a known bacterial infection with antibiotics. They are a large contributor to the rapid increase in life expectancy in the past century.
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
Short version: a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod was torpedoed by Kennedy with a poison-pill amendment to a bill. It wasn't just his constituent's backyard: it was his backyard.
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"
I have to give kudos to the Guardian... it's going to be hard to top this one.
They've certainly gone to a respectable amount of effort with this one. I was expecting Taco's achievements page to be static HTML, but it seems we all get them.
I was surprised by that, too. I'm trying to decide how far back they went in the database to come up with the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Since they CAN cut off specific states, and they also calculate shipping by state, they can certainly do sales tax by state.
It's not that simple.
You can't just assess sales tax according to the destination state. In many states, there are local taxes as well, and it varies based on the locality. A merchant calculates sales tax based on the MERCHANT's location, and the various taxing authorities make sure he/she knows what should be collected.
The shipping companies provide rate tables based on ZIP code, and it's a simple lookup. But, you can't even use ZIP codes to determine tax rates, because ZIP code boundaries don't necessary follow political boundaries.
All of their staff signed up for Clear and said it was either unavailable or pretty much worthless everywhere EXCEPT Orlando. There, seasoned travelers frequently found themselves in line behind hundreds of Disney-vacationing families [...]
This is the reason I signed up for Clear: I had to stand in line for hours at Orlando.
I used it a few other places, but was never able to bypass huge lines like those at Orlando.
What's wrong with trying to get the eye color or hair color you want? What is the difference with that and picking the sex?
I'm not sure I get it either. As a subsequent poster points out, it's screening, not "designing". Couples are choosing among existing embryos.
Screening has been going on for millions of years. Humans have always been able to choose their mates based on visible criteria like hair color, eye color, athletic ability, etc. Why is screening acceptable for invisible traits (like propensity for cancer and other genetic predispositions), but not for visible traits?
For God's sake, just READ once in awhile rather than have things spoon fed to you from the talking heads.
If a white male had said the same thing (with just a few substitutions to make it personally accurate), he would have been excoriated by the press and the very same people that are claiming that this is no big deal.
If you can look at yourself in a mirror and honestly be willing to excuse my hypothetical white male, then I respect your opinion. If you can't, then you're a hypocrite.
You assume she's a member of "La Raza" (a supremacist group) just because she's latina?
In addition to her work on the bench, Judge Sotomayor is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. She is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York Women's Bar Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage, and the National Council of La Raza.
Doesn't matter.. you aren't going to get better than 10m accuracy without DGPS and 1m with it. Surveys have to be right to centimetres - no GPS can do that.
Yes, they can. They just aren't consumer handheld GPS receivers:
http://www.trimble.com/survey/GNSS-Surveying-Systems.aspx
They don't give instant position: they accumulate data over a period of time and use that to derive the exact position, usually after correcting it with a comparable stream of data collected from a nearby known reference point.
Under ideal situations the accuracy of GPS equipment can approach 5 millimeter[...]
I'm pretty certain I've seen a film where that was the plot.
Federal agents used a video camera to sneak a weapon into a hostage situation in True Lies.
Take the first episode, where McCoy meet an ex girlfriend. There is nothing so unknown about this. It simply takes the fear that someone we once loved have changed so much that we no longer will know them. Such a thing is a great loss.
I think you are reading too much into the choice of the first episode. The Naked Time was originally planned to be the premier episode of the regular series. But, NBC executives latched on to the "salt monster" in The Man Trap as a more exploitable (and promotable) subject.
That first episode got horrible reviews, and the show struggled to make up for it for the rest of the season.
As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
It depends on where you live, and what ILEC serves your area.
I live in an area served by Verizon, and have had fiber to my home for a couple of years. It's not a "hot spot": Verizon has been aggressively laying fiber and deploying throughout many of their service areas.
I currently have 20 megabit/sec down and 5 megabit/sec up, and could upgrade to 20/20 for another $10/month. 50/20 would be another $75/month on top of that.
AT&T doesn't deploy fiber to the home, at least not generally. They deploy fiber to the neighborhood, and use twisted pair for the last block.
Anybody who doesn't realize that Obama took on one of the biggest messes left by a precceding administration is seriously fooling themselves.
If you think this this is a mess, you should have been trying to find a job during the closing days of the Carter administration.
I don't absolve the Bush administration of any of their responsibility. But, I'll observe that things really went south during the last two years, when Congress was controlled by the same people that are both disclaiming responsibility and advocating more of the same to solve the problems.
But hey, there are those of you with no more of an agenda but to look, pray, hope and push for the new guy to fail, we understand you. We don't like you, but we understand you.
I don't really care if Obama personally succeeds or fails. But, I do expect his solutions to fail, simply because history is repeating itself.
We've been here before, about 30 years ago: a disgraced Republican administration (Nixon + Ford) resulted in the election of an "outsider", who turned out to be weak and ineffectual. The rest of the world realized they could take advantage of Carter, and they did.
The only question in my mind is what will be the triggering event. My guess is that it will involve Iran again.
When your only choice is Kang or Kodos, it's hard to pick an alternative.
Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos!
Wait, you mean that Presidents have prepared remarks and speechwriters?
I was referring to candidate Obama. Every media outlet (except Fox News, predictably) showered praise on him about how articulate and electrifying his speeches were, ignoring the times that he had to ad-lib and stuttered uncontrollably.
But even as President, Obama read someone else's speech, thanking himself before he caught the error. One has to wonder what he could be induced to say if someone were to hack the teleprompter.
I'm neither left or right wing. But, I think Obama is even an emptier suit than Bush.
Redeeming? I find it sad.
I was being charitable. :-)
I have no doubt that it goes back way before Bush. For all his faults, Bush seemed rather upfront about his powergrabs so I don't really feel bad naming the road after him. But you are quite correct -- we've been on this road for longer than we likely know.
Bush has been quite brazen about it, but no more or less so than his predecessors.
We've apparently been on this road for longer than you know. :-) I'm quite aware of how long we have been on it, 'cause I've been involuntarily along for the ride for longer than I care to admit.
But, I'll retract my admonishment to "grow up", and instead suggest that you spend some time with a history book -- preferably a different one than the propaganda they distribute in the public schools.
Thank you, we can agree on all those points.
My problem is your characterization of it as "the Bush road". This particular "road" stretches back decades, across many administrations and both major political parties.
This "road" belongs to the people that continue to vote for Presidential candidates that follow it. And it really pisses me off that anyone thought Obama was going to be any different. Even his abbreviated voting record demonstrated exactly what he believed.
Obama's only redeeming quality is that he has a talent for reading speeches from a teleprompter. I seriously doubt that he even wrote any of them.
We are apparently continuing fast down the Bush road to a completely independent, unaccountable, all-powerful presidency.
Wow. Even now, people like you still think "it's Bush's fault".
Grow up.
This isn't change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.
But then again the USSR got progressively less despotic, until it eventually crumbled from its internal inefficiencies. There was no need for an apocalyptic war to achieve its destruction.
Forgive me if I missed something, but I don't remember an apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union.
Also, you will probably be surprised, but some former East Germans are quite nostalgic about their old ways, many not having adjusted to the dog-eat-dog economic realities of the West and having found most of the cunningly implied innuendos and outright false promises of prosperity that were made to them during the Soviet times to be just that, the prosperity never having materialized after the unification.
Were they among the estimated one in seven East Germans that worked as informants for the Stasi?
No, the country I am in was never in danger of that, as Germany would have lost to the USSR quite handsomely, just a year or so later. How would have history looked after that is anyone's guess.
It's not too hard to guess, given the fate of East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe. The only question is how long the Iron Curtain would have stayed up under those circumstances.
Perhaps you should ask someone who lived under the influence of the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall fell. You would probably find that it wasn't much fun.
I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt insofar as this is a mess that the bush administration created
If Obama wants to be an effective President, he will have to set aside that first envelope and take responsibility for his actions, rather than blaming it on his predecessors.
Otherwise, he will be opening that second envelope soon.
Three Envelopes
As a Senator, Obama voted for retroactive immunity to the telcos. What made you think he wouldn't continue this policy?
Ever since I was a kid, I've been prone to sinus infections. Every couple of years, I'll have one. They have never---and I do mean never---gone away on their own. I've left them for well over a week just to see. Never happens.
I read this article (and others about the same subject) and had the same response. I know when I have a sinus infection, because the symptoms are unambiguous. And a broad spectrum antibiotic is the only thing that will end it. I don't take antibiotics unless I need them -- for personal reasons. My doctor knows why, and never questions me when I think it's time.
But, I've been fortunate: I was at my dentist's office one day when he discovered that another patient's sinus infection had basically destroyed the roots of several teeth in his upper jaw. His doctor's PA (physician's assistant) had been giving him various antibiotics, but never followed up to be sure that it worked. The poor guy apparently had a sufficiently high pain threshold, and he never realized that something was really wrong.
Even in the case of sinus/ear infections, his few is dangerous. My ear infections have gotten painfully close to rupturing my ear drum. If I did not take antibiotics, there is a very good chance that I would have hearing damage today.
I've never had a rupture: as a child, my doctor lanced my eardrum several times to relieve the pressure before that could happen. I finally spent a few months with temporary tubes in my ears and it broke the cycle. My father wasn't so lucky: his ears ruptured several times and had significant hearing damage. I have some damage: I have a hard time hearing high frequencies, which makes it really difficult to understand someone in a high-noise environment.
It's just plain irresponsible to not treat a known bacterial infection with antibiotics. They are a large contributor to the rapid increase in life expectancy in the past century.
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
No, you just need a powerful Senator:
Kennedy doesn't play by the rules
Short version: a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod was torpedoed by Kennedy with a poison-pill amendment to a bill. It wasn't just his constituent's backyard: it was his backyard.
I have to give kudos to the Guardian... it's going to be hard to top this one.
They've certainly gone to a respectable amount of effort with this one. I was expecting Taco's achievements page to be static HTML, but it seems we all get them.
I was surprised by that, too. I'm trying to decide how far back they went in the database to come up with the numbers.