we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
Thank $diety. Some things should not be replaced. Flash is one of them. There is absolutely nothing Flash did that I miss.
flash wasn't perfect - it certainly had it's fair share of issues.
That's like saying Napoleon's invasion of Russia didn't go perfectly. It was a terrible, awful product that has caused FAR more problems than it ever solved.
Of course it has its uses. That's not a valid excuse to keep such a buggy, proprietary, piece of crap security hole around.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
"SOME"? Talk about understatement. It was very widely abused and remains so to this day. And its security issues are clearly irreparable which alone should be enough to condemn it to the trash heap of yesterday.
But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
Fuck legacy support. Not worth it even a little bit.
That's not what this is about. Traditional robots can build complex things, but only because we've carefully designed the whole assembly process around the robots. "Pick up this part, which is guaranteed to be at exactly this position. Move it to this other position. Insert a screw that is fed directly into the robot. Let the conveyor belt carry it on to the next robot which does some other very specialized task."
While it is true that a lot of robotics is done just the way you describe, I was working with vision systems and pick and place and similar technologies 20 years ago which could deal with a sizeable amount of imprecision with sufficient programming. Robots have been able to deal with work that isn't carefully organized for a long time - it's just usually easier and cheaper to organize the workflow than to program a smarter robot. (that's true of human workflows in general too) I'm sure current stuff is far better than the stuff I used but it's definitely not new. Very cool to see it continue to advance though.
But the real question is price. Having a robot that can do advanced assembly is nice but how many tens of thousands of dollars will it cost? How much engineering time goes into making it do these tasks?
No, I'm dead serious. Until about 3 years ago, I'd get my stuff from Amazon within 2-3 days as standard delivery, free of charge.
Interesting. I wonder if you must have been located close to one of their distribution hubs because I certainly did not have that experience. Free shipping for me without Prime even back in the day took the better part of a week most of the time. Still fine for most items (I'm not usually in a hurry) but not as fast as with Prime. I could pay for faster delivery but it wasn't free or cheap.
So your excuse for ignoring these human rights abuses is to say that everyone's doing it? Nice clean hands you have there.
Never claimed to have clean hands. What I do have is perspective. I'm annoyed by people that pretend to have clean hands with a bogus boycott when their real purpose has nothing to do with worker rights. I'm annoyed by people like you who act all self righteous and try to drag down others despite their own hypocrisy. Or are you going to pretend you are somehow really doing something meaningful about the problem?
And frankly if you think Amazon is really engaged in "human rights abuses" then you really don't know what the term means. Modestly tougher than average working conditions at a place with 100% voluntary employment isn't exactly what I consider abusive. I've visited literal sweat shops in third world countries so I know what the word means first hand.
Whereas your public proclamation of your own moral superiority is motivated from a desire to be a role model to the youth of the world?
Nice strawman. Exactly where did I claim to be a moral paragon? As opposed to you who are trying to drag me down to make yourself look good.
If this place had any actual engineers, the rate of production would have also been quantified in kg/s. And J/kg, too, with their current rig.
I'm guessing you aren't from the US if you think actual engineers always us SI units. I'll agree that they SHOULD use SI units but the fact of the matter is that in the real world they often do not.
There are no month long voyages anymore since about 100 years... just saying.
Do you ever check your facts before spouting off on a topic? Container ships routinely are at see for approximately a month. It takes around 25 days to transit across the Pacific from Sydney to LA. The trip from Germany to Chile takes 28 days. Typical travel speed of a large container ship is something like 15-20 knots. Do the math.
Until now, that was too much to ask of even a sophisticated robot. But researchers have finally broken the dexterity barrier by combining commercially available hardware, including 3D cameras and force sensors, to build two chair-building bots.
Umm, this is complete bullshit. We've been able to do this for decades. The problem has NEVER been in making robots that could assemble something complex. The problem is doing it for a reasonable cost and with minimal engineering oversight. We use robots to build things FAR more complex than a piece of IKEA furniture and have for a long long time.
Back in the good old pre-Prime days, Amazon delivered within 2-3 days. Standard.
And you generally paid a handsome freight charge for it. Yes they are encouraging you to use Prime and prior to Prime I didn't use Amazon much. If you don't like it there are other places to shop and that's totally fine. I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over something that is 100% optional. If it's valuable to you get a Prime membership. If it is not valuable to you, that's fine too. I don't shop much at Walmart because they don't offer me a value proposition that works for me for example. I don't have a Costco membership because I wouldn't go there often enough to justify it. Use what works for you.
Unless you pay about as much as a prime subscription for the once-normal 2-3 days. Of course you could also sign up for Prime and get the 2-3 days again for "free"...
Of course it isn't free. But if you order enough stuff it's really economical. I think my average freight cost last year was something like $0.72 per package which is a darn good deal.
I used to order a lot from Amazon. Their prices were nearly always the lowest, and at the time I didn't have to pay tax.
Amazon has always had good prices but they never were the lowest if you were willing to do the work of hunting around. The value is that they have (generally) good prices and awesomely broad selection and reliable two day delivery with Prime. Amazon is just hugely convenient compared to most of the alternatives which is why they've been such a success. As for tax you'll just have to get over that. Sales tax is coming to internet sales in one form or another and that won't be just through Amazon.
some of their business practices irritate me.
Is there any company that does not fit this description? I haven't found one yet. I guess it depends on what is important to you.
still order from them but first try finding it somewhere else at a competitive price. And will never pay for Prime.
Nothing wrong with shopping around if you feel a better deal is important to you. For me I just want a reasonable price and minimal hassle which Amazon is quite good at. As for "never pay for Prime" that's fine too but frankly much of the value of Amazon comes from their Prime service. I find it hugely valuable but your mileage may vary. If I didn't have it I doubt I would order nearly as much from Amazon. I think you need to order something like 50+ deliveries per year to really make it worthwhile. I think last year my average freight charge on Prime deliveries worked out to about $0.72 per delivery. I realize some of the cost is rolled into the product price but even so it is a fantastic deal for me given my shopping preferences.
Amazon prime is probably only interesting if you use their video on demand services.
Umm, no. I make light use of the video services but HEAVY use of their two day shipping. The video is just a nice little bonus. The real value to me comes from their ability to consistently find and deliver stuff I need in a timely manner for reasonable prices without a lot of fuss and excellent return policies when needed.
Not me not ever. I stay away from Amazon as much as possible because I keep reading how they treat their employees like shit.
Do you avoid buying clothing from overseas sweatshops? Do you only buy produce picked by well paid white people? How consistent are you really about your claims to the moral high ground?
I'm always puzzled about claims like this which seem more like self aggrandizement rather than a genuine moral stance. If you want to bash Amazon go ahead (plenty to critique) but don't pretend you really are so ethically superior or that you really care about worker conditions.
Are there really many people that order so infrequently?
Some but they are the same sorts that have a Costco membership and go once a quarter.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
Exactly. I do a lot of shopping through Amazon and a few other online places and it has been life changing. It is FAR more convenient for me to have stuff delivered for most of what I buy. I still go to stores occasionally for stuff I need Right Now or if it's conveniently located (like on my commute) or for groceries. But I place somewhere around 100 orders through Amazon and other places a year. The amount of time I save not having to drive around to randomly located stores in my limited free time is hugely helpful.
"There is genuinely zero reason why essentially the entire tax system could not be automated."
Which is correct. And note the word ESSENTIALLY. It's there for a reason. While it would require a huge overhaul to the tax system from what we have today, it absolutely could be highly if not completely automated. The reasons why we do not are not technical, they are political.
Wrong, you can get an automatic extension, but you still have to pay anything you owe by April 15 (or 17).
Not exactly true. There are penalties for not paying by that date but you don't actually have to do it. You also don't have to pay the complete amount either and you can set up a payment agreement with the IRS if you are having trouble paying. And you can pay the amount owed by phone, online, or by sending a check with the appropriately dated post mark. Not that hard.
In any case the point is that if you wait until the last possible day and things go sideways you really only have yourself to blame.
Whose tax system? No seriously that's the fundamental flaw in anyone thinking their tax system can be automated completely. There is no agreed international tax system or transfer of private information between countries.
I'm worried about the country I live in so let's start there. Don't make perfect the enemy of good. The vast majority of the public could/should have their taxes automatically collected through their employers. Get rid of most of the complicated deductions and viola - life is simpler with no tax deadline stress.
That I agree with. I have income in multiple countries, depreciating assets in multiple countries, shares in multiple countries some subject to deferral schemes, and my own business on the side.
That makes you wildly outside the norm. For guys like you then we can have some extra paperwork and that's probably fine. You obviously can handle it. But even for you some amount of your taxes probably could be automated more than it is.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
More than you might think. They are well aware of the ways in which people try to game the system. If all it took to get the date postponed was to take down a website how long do you think it would be before some black hats started attacking every IRS webpage they could find?
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
Or you can just request a deferral. It's easy and you just have to drop it in the mail by today. Or not be lazy and wait until the last possible second. If you roll the dice on doing things last minute that is on you and isn't the fault of the IRS.
The wtc complex had 230acres of floor space./3 it could feed 76 families.
Again you are thinking in two dimensions. It had a LOT more space than the amount of floor space. We are concerned with the VOLUME of the building rather than the SURFACE AREA in an indoor farm. You could stack each floor several levels high so you probably could get something like 5-10X the volume of crops depending on how closely you could pack them vertically.
And 230 acres could feed more like 120-150 families using traditional farming metrics. (about 1.5-2 acres per person per year) But that assumes no improvement in inventory turns (more crops per year), no improvement in crop yields, no improvement in crop planting density, etc.
In reality indoor farms will tend to specialize in certain types of crops and you aren't going to raise cattle or orange trees indoors.
He was using the site EXACTLY as it was intended to be used: ask the system to provide information associated with some number at the end. This was not exploiting some unintended consequence to make the system behave in an unusual or unforeseen manner. This was making the computer system act in EXACTLY the manner the developer(s) intended.
By that logic you could claim any penetration of a system was merely the system behaving exactly as intended because that was how the developer programmed it. I understand where you are going with your argument but it's perhaps a bit more fraught than you realize? After all, how are we as users to know what the developer intended and why should that even matter? It's an interesting question.
The real question here is when does the system cross the line from no security to bad security from a legal standpoint. Technologically there is no difference but legally their can be. Because that is the point where legally it goes from using a system to "hacking" a system in the negative legal sense. Something as simple as ROT13 could be considered intent to secure the system despite being laughably easy to bypass but you could still find yourself in a court room for bypassing it under certain laws.
Lets be clear, editing the address line is not hacking, not in any way, shape or form.
It is hacking if the government defines it to be hacking. Not disagreeing with you just pointing out that we're talking about the fact that the people who make the laws are the ones we're dealing with here. The scary bit is that they can define something quite innocuous to be against the law. Any time you go against the folks that make the rules things tend to get dicey for the defendant.
A request for access was made and it as legally given, the government is screwed and a penalty should be applied for false prosecution.
Again I don't disagree but do you really expect the government to admit fault like that?
The interesting question is when does it become "security" and therefore "hacking"? In all fairness it's not as easy a question as it might seem. Does ROT13 count as encryption and therefore security? It's certainly bad security to the point of being laughable but it will keep the technologically impaired out so it's clearly effective to a degree. And it's possible to pass laws where it could be a violation of the law to crack their system even if doing so is absurdly simple. (see DMCA for example) Where is the bright line that distinguishes bad security from no security from a legal standpoint? (from a technical standpoint they are identical)
You know lots of these rural people don't even know their physical location? That's not a joke. I deal with them every day. They have a P.O. Box for getting letters and they only know their physical location from rough driving directions. If you asked them to state the actual standard identifying information they couldn't tell you. Even the ones that can have disagreements about what city they are really considered a part of or if they are an address on the highway -- things that will definitely come into play when computing local taxes.
This is true. You'd basically have to have to use some sort of global coordinate system perhaps combined with a GPS to really make it work. Some parts of the world are actually doing something along those lines because street addresses have some pretty significant limitations.
All of them (in practice). If you are rich, you don't pay sales taxes. You get tax credits and deductions for them. You are too poor to understand, or you'd already know that.
Well I'm an accountant and I'll disagree. Rich people pay sales tax too and it's easy to prove that they do. The difference is that sales tax amounts to a rounding error in their overall financial picture. A sales tax of 6% on groceries affects someone making $20K/year a LOT more than someone making $200K/year. Rich people don't get a special rich person discount at the grocery store or at the car dealership. In some they can run some expenses through a corporation which gets some deductions (not credits) but most of what they buy they pay sales tax on too, same as anyone else.
That's the stupidest argument ever. Yes, you aren't the first I've heard say that. If people, not corporations pay taxes, then my employer, a corporation, pays all my taxes, not any people.
Not only is that not a stupid argument, it's got a name and it's a well understood concept. It's called tax incidence and it's demonstrably correct. Let's use an example. If we tax gasoline sales the oil companies are going to be able to pass most or all of that cost to consumers so the party bearing the burden of that tax isn't the shareholders of the oil company but the car owners.
You should be in politics. Yes, that's an insult.
If you disagree with his argument fine but no need to be a dick about it.
And computers do do that. That's why taxes are withheld from your paycheck.
Not good enough. There is genuinely zero reason why essentially the entire tax system could not be automated. Sure it would look a bit different than it does today but that's not a bad thing. 99% of it could be completely automated. For people with more complicated tax situations we have them file some paperwork but the vast majority of the public should never have to pay an accountant or a tax software company. I'm accountant and it's just not that hard.
But your employer can't possibly know about all your deductions or other income so the withholdings are sort of a guess.
Sure they can. You just have to tell them. Or tell the IRS directly for bits that don't concern your employer. Or we do away with the deductions and handle the taxes with a more rational tax system. One has to admit that the US tax system is more than a little bonkers.
Carbon taxes on traditional ships could make nuclear power competitive again?
Interesting thought though politically rather difficult since it involves getting a lot of countries to agree and cooperate. But the real cost to nuclear comes in the form of insurance and maintenance. The carbon offset is important but something of a minor player in the economics for the time being.
Realistically though I think the notion of nuclear fission based propulsion for civilian cargo ships is probably never going to become a widespread reality without some sort of technological breakthrough. Too many risks and the proof of this is in the fact that insurance companies by and large won't touch nuclear due to the excessive financial risk. Nuclear accidents are (fortunately) rare but when they happen they tend to be colossally expensive to deal with both to mitigate as well as litigate. This makes them really hard to profitably underwrite at rates that the operators of ships can accept in a competitive marketplace.
They could use thorium, which is safer than uranium.
Still dangerous since a notable percentage of ships can be counted on to sink. Doesn't really matter though since nuclear powered cargo ships have been tried and they were not economically competitive. Thorium will not solve that problem. Plus insurance is a huge problem for civilian nuclear vessels.
You could design the ships in such a way that the last-ditch safety mechanism for the reactor would be to eject the core into the ocean, where it would have essentially infinite cooling.
And how do you plan to account for the now radioactive particles that will be conveniently spread throughout the ocean? Cooling is not the main problem with nuclear propulsion - pollution is.
Also don't most cargo ships employ their own private security anyway? Just arm them better against pirates.
Historically no, most cargo ships haven't been armed. More have been lately but not all are.
Slashdot Mirror
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
Thank $diety. Some things should not be replaced. Flash is one of them. There is absolutely nothing Flash did that I miss.
flash wasn't perfect - it certainly had it's fair share of issues.
That's like saying Napoleon's invasion of Russia didn't go perfectly. It was a terrible, awful product that has caused FAR more problems than it ever solved.
Flash just-works and has its uses.
Of course it has its uses. That's not a valid excuse to keep such a buggy, proprietary, piece of crap security hole around.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
"SOME"? Talk about understatement. It was very widely abused and remains so to this day. And its security issues are clearly irreparable which alone should be enough to condemn it to the trash heap of yesterday.
But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
Fuck legacy support. Not worth it even a little bit.
That's not what this is about. Traditional robots can build complex things, but only because we've carefully designed the whole assembly process around the robots. "Pick up this part, which is guaranteed to be at exactly this position. Move it to this other position. Insert a screw that is fed directly into the robot. Let the conveyor belt carry it on to the next robot which does some other very specialized task."
While it is true that a lot of robotics is done just the way you describe, I was working with vision systems and pick and place and similar technologies 20 years ago which could deal with a sizeable amount of imprecision with sufficient programming. Robots have been able to deal with work that isn't carefully organized for a long time - it's just usually easier and cheaper to organize the workflow than to program a smarter robot. (that's true of human workflows in general too) I'm sure current stuff is far better than the stuff I used but it's definitely not new. Very cool to see it continue to advance though.
But the real question is price. Having a robot that can do advanced assembly is nice but how many tens of thousands of dollars will it cost? How much engineering time goes into making it do these tasks?
No, I'm dead serious. Until about 3 years ago, I'd get my stuff from Amazon within 2-3 days as standard delivery, free of charge.
Interesting. I wonder if you must have been located close to one of their distribution hubs because I certainly did not have that experience. Free shipping for me without Prime even back in the day took the better part of a week most of the time. Still fine for most items (I'm not usually in a hurry) but not as fast as with Prime. I could pay for faster delivery but it wasn't free or cheap.
So your excuse for ignoring these human rights abuses is to say that everyone's doing it? Nice clean hands you have there.
Never claimed to have clean hands. What I do have is perspective. I'm annoyed by people that pretend to have clean hands with a bogus boycott when their real purpose has nothing to do with worker rights. I'm annoyed by people like you who act all self righteous and try to drag down others despite their own hypocrisy. Or are you going to pretend you are somehow really doing something meaningful about the problem?
And frankly if you think Amazon is really engaged in "human rights abuses" then you really don't know what the term means. Modestly tougher than average working conditions at a place with 100% voluntary employment isn't exactly what I consider abusive. I've visited literal sweat shops in third world countries so I know what the word means first hand.
Whereas your public proclamation of your own moral superiority is motivated from a desire to be a role model to the youth of the world?
Nice strawman. Exactly where did I claim to be a moral paragon? As opposed to you who are trying to drag me down to make yourself look good.
If this place had any actual engineers, the rate of production would have also been quantified in kg/s. And J/kg, too, with their current rig.
I'm guessing you aren't from the US if you think actual engineers always us SI units. I'll agree that they SHOULD use SI units but the fact of the matter is that in the real world they often do not.
There are no month long voyages anymore since about 100 years ... just saying.
Do you ever check your facts before spouting off on a topic? Container ships routinely are at see for approximately a month. It takes around 25 days to transit across the Pacific from Sydney to LA. The trip from Germany to Chile takes 28 days. Typical travel speed of a large container ship is something like 15-20 knots. Do the math.
Until now, that was too much to ask of even a sophisticated robot. But researchers have finally broken the dexterity barrier by combining commercially available hardware, including 3D cameras and force sensors, to build two chair-building bots.
Umm, this is complete bullshit. We've been able to do this for decades. The problem has NEVER been in making robots that could assemble something complex. The problem is doing it for a reasonable cost and with minimal engineering oversight. We use robots to build things FAR more complex than a piece of IKEA furniture and have for a long long time.
Back in the good old pre-Prime days, Amazon delivered within 2-3 days. Standard.
And you generally paid a handsome freight charge for it. Yes they are encouraging you to use Prime and prior to Prime I didn't use Amazon much. If you don't like it there are other places to shop and that's totally fine. I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over something that is 100% optional. If it's valuable to you get a Prime membership. If it is not valuable to you, that's fine too. I don't shop much at Walmart because they don't offer me a value proposition that works for me for example. I don't have a Costco membership because I wouldn't go there often enough to justify it. Use what works for you.
Unless you pay about as much as a prime subscription for the once-normal 2-3 days. Of course you could also sign up for Prime and get the 2-3 days again for "free"...
Of course it isn't free. But if you order enough stuff it's really economical. I think my average freight cost last year was something like $0.72 per package which is a darn good deal.
I used to order a lot from Amazon. Their prices were nearly always the lowest, and at the time I didn't have to pay tax.
Amazon has always had good prices but they never were the lowest if you were willing to do the work of hunting around. The value is that they have (generally) good prices and awesomely broad selection and reliable two day delivery with Prime. Amazon is just hugely convenient compared to most of the alternatives which is why they've been such a success. As for tax you'll just have to get over that. Sales tax is coming to internet sales in one form or another and that won't be just through Amazon.
some of their business practices irritate me.
Is there any company that does not fit this description? I haven't found one yet. I guess it depends on what is important to you.
still order from them but first try finding it somewhere else at a competitive price. And will never pay for Prime.
Nothing wrong with shopping around if you feel a better deal is important to you. For me I just want a reasonable price and minimal hassle which Amazon is quite good at. As for "never pay for Prime" that's fine too but frankly much of the value of Amazon comes from their Prime service. I find it hugely valuable but your mileage may vary. If I didn't have it I doubt I would order nearly as much from Amazon. I think you need to order something like 50+ deliveries per year to really make it worthwhile. I think last year my average freight charge on Prime deliveries worked out to about $0.72 per delivery. I realize some of the cost is rolled into the product price but even so it is a fantastic deal for me given my shopping preferences.
Amazon prime is probably only interesting if you use their video on demand services.
Umm, no. I make light use of the video services but HEAVY use of their two day shipping. The video is just a nice little bonus. The real value to me comes from their ability to consistently find and deliver stuff I need in a timely manner for reasonable prices without a lot of fuss and excellent return policies when needed.
Not me not ever. I stay away from Amazon as much as possible because I keep reading how they treat their employees like shit.
Do you avoid buying clothing from overseas sweatshops? Do you only buy produce picked by well paid white people? How consistent are you really about your claims to the moral high ground?
I'm always puzzled about claims like this which seem more like self aggrandizement rather than a genuine moral stance. If you want to bash Amazon go ahead (plenty to critique) but don't pretend you really are so ethically superior or that you really care about worker conditions.
Are there really many people that order so infrequently?
Some but they are the same sorts that have a Costco membership and go once a quarter.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
Exactly. I do a lot of shopping through Amazon and a few other online places and it has been life changing. It is FAR more convenient for me to have stuff delivered for most of what I buy. I still go to stores occasionally for stuff I need Right Now or if it's conveniently located (like on my commute) or for groceries. But I place somewhere around 100 orders through Amazon and other places a year. The amount of time I save not having to drive around to randomly located stores in my limited free time is hugely helpful.
"There is genuinely zero reason why essentially the entire tax system could not be automated."
Which is correct. And note the word ESSENTIALLY. It's there for a reason. While it would require a huge overhaul to the tax system from what we have today, it absolutely could be highly if not completely automated. The reasons why we do not are not technical, they are political.
Wrong, you can get an automatic extension, but you still have to pay anything you owe by April 15 (or 17).
Not exactly true. There are penalties for not paying by that date but you don't actually have to do it. You also don't have to pay the complete amount either and you can set up a payment agreement with the IRS if you are having trouble paying. And you can pay the amount owed by phone, online, or by sending a check with the appropriately dated post mark. Not that hard.
In any case the point is that if you wait until the last possible day and things go sideways you really only have yourself to blame.
Whose tax system? No seriously that's the fundamental flaw in anyone thinking their tax system can be automated completely. There is no agreed international tax system or transfer of private information between countries.
I'm worried about the country I live in so let's start there. Don't make perfect the enemy of good. The vast majority of the public could/should have their taxes automatically collected through their employers. Get rid of most of the complicated deductions and viola - life is simpler with no tax deadline stress.
That I agree with. I have income in multiple countries, depreciating assets in multiple countries, shares in multiple countries some subject to deferral schemes, and my own business on the side.
That makes you wildly outside the norm. For guys like you then we can have some extra paperwork and that's probably fine. You obviously can handle it. But even for you some amount of your taxes probably could be automated more than it is.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
More than you might think. They are well aware of the ways in which people try to game the system. If all it took to get the date postponed was to take down a website how long do you think it would be before some black hats started attacking every IRS webpage they could find?
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
Or you can just request a deferral. It's easy and you just have to drop it in the mail by today. Or not be lazy and wait until the last possible second. If you roll the dice on doing things last minute that is on you and isn't the fault of the IRS.
The wtc complex had 230acres of floor space. /3 it could feed 76 families.
Again you are thinking in two dimensions. It had a LOT more space than the amount of floor space. We are concerned with the VOLUME of the building rather than the SURFACE AREA in an indoor farm. You could stack each floor several levels high so you probably could get something like 5-10X the volume of crops depending on how closely you could pack them vertically.
And 230 acres could feed more like 120-150 families using traditional farming metrics. (about 1.5-2 acres per person per year) But that assumes no improvement in inventory turns (more crops per year), no improvement in crop yields, no improvement in crop planting density, etc.
In reality indoor farms will tend to specialize in certain types of crops and you aren't going to raise cattle or orange trees indoors.
He was using the site EXACTLY as it was intended to be used: ask the system to provide information associated with some number at the end. This was not exploiting some unintended consequence to make the system behave in an unusual or unforeseen manner. This was making the computer system act in EXACTLY the manner the developer(s) intended.
By that logic you could claim any penetration of a system was merely the system behaving exactly as intended because that was how the developer programmed it. I understand where you are going with your argument but it's perhaps a bit more fraught than you realize? After all, how are we as users to know what the developer intended and why should that even matter? It's an interesting question.
The real question here is when does the system cross the line from no security to bad security from a legal standpoint. Technologically there is no difference but legally their can be. Because that is the point where legally it goes from using a system to "hacking" a system in the negative legal sense. Something as simple as ROT13 could be considered intent to secure the system despite being laughably easy to bypass but you could still find yourself in a court room for bypassing it under certain laws.
Lets be clear, editing the address line is not hacking, not in any way, shape or form.
It is hacking if the government defines it to be hacking. Not disagreeing with you just pointing out that we're talking about the fact that the people who make the laws are the ones we're dealing with here. The scary bit is that they can define something quite innocuous to be against the law. Any time you go against the folks that make the rules things tend to get dicey for the defendant.
A request for access was made and it as legally given, the government is screwed and a penalty should be applied for false prosecution.
Again I don't disagree but do you really expect the government to admit fault like that?
The interesting question is when does it become "security" and therefore "hacking"? In all fairness it's not as easy a question as it might seem. Does ROT13 count as encryption and therefore security? It's certainly bad security to the point of being laughable but it will keep the technologically impaired out so it's clearly effective to a degree. And it's possible to pass laws where it could be a violation of the law to crack their system even if doing so is absurdly simple. (see DMCA for example) Where is the bright line that distinguishes bad security from no security from a legal standpoint? (from a technical standpoint they are identical)
You know lots of these rural people don't even know their physical location? That's not a joke. I deal with them every day. They have a P.O. Box for getting letters and they only know their physical location from rough driving directions. If you asked them to state the actual standard identifying information they couldn't tell you. Even the ones that can have disagreements about what city they are really considered a part of or if they are an address on the highway -- things that will definitely come into play when computing local taxes.
This is true. You'd basically have to have to use some sort of global coordinate system perhaps combined with a GPS to really make it work. Some parts of the world are actually doing something along those lines because street addresses have some pretty significant limitations.
All of them (in practice). If you are rich, you don't pay sales taxes. You get tax credits and deductions for them. You are too poor to understand, or you'd already know that.
Well I'm an accountant and I'll disagree. Rich people pay sales tax too and it's easy to prove that they do. The difference is that sales tax amounts to a rounding error in their overall financial picture. A sales tax of 6% on groceries affects someone making $20K/year a LOT more than someone making $200K/year. Rich people don't get a special rich person discount at the grocery store or at the car dealership. In some they can run some expenses through a corporation which gets some deductions (not credits) but most of what they buy they pay sales tax on too, same as anyone else.
That's the stupidest argument ever. Yes, you aren't the first I've heard say that. If people, not corporations pay taxes, then my employer, a corporation, pays all my taxes, not any people.
Not only is that not a stupid argument, it's got a name and it's a well understood concept. It's called tax incidence and it's demonstrably correct. Let's use an example. If we tax gasoline sales the oil companies are going to be able to pass most or all of that cost to consumers so the party bearing the burden of that tax isn't the shareholders of the oil company but the car owners.
You should be in politics. Yes, that's an insult.
If you disagree with his argument fine but no need to be a dick about it.
And computers do do that. That's why taxes are withheld from your paycheck.
Not good enough. There is genuinely zero reason why essentially the entire tax system could not be automated. Sure it would look a bit different than it does today but that's not a bad thing. 99% of it could be completely automated. For people with more complicated tax situations we have them file some paperwork but the vast majority of the public should never have to pay an accountant or a tax software company. I'm accountant and it's just not that hard.
But your employer can't possibly know about all your deductions or other income so the withholdings are sort of a guess.
Sure they can. You just have to tell them. Or tell the IRS directly for bits that don't concern your employer. Or we do away with the deductions and handle the taxes with a more rational tax system. One has to admit that the US tax system is more than a little bonkers.
Carbon taxes on traditional ships could make nuclear power competitive again?
Interesting thought though politically rather difficult since it involves getting a lot of countries to agree and cooperate. But the real cost to nuclear comes in the form of insurance and maintenance. The carbon offset is important but something of a minor player in the economics for the time being.
Realistically though I think the notion of nuclear fission based propulsion for civilian cargo ships is probably never going to become a widespread reality without some sort of technological breakthrough. Too many risks and the proof of this is in the fact that insurance companies by and large won't touch nuclear due to the excessive financial risk. Nuclear accidents are (fortunately) rare but when they happen they tend to be colossally expensive to deal with both to mitigate as well as litigate. This makes them really hard to profitably underwrite at rates that the operators of ships can accept in a competitive marketplace.
They could use thorium, which is safer than uranium.
Still dangerous since a notable percentage of ships can be counted on to sink. Doesn't really matter though since nuclear powered cargo ships have been tried and they were not economically competitive. Thorium will not solve that problem. Plus insurance is a huge problem for civilian nuclear vessels.
You could design the ships in such a way that the last-ditch safety mechanism for the reactor would be to eject the core into the ocean, where it would have essentially infinite cooling.
And how do you plan to account for the now radioactive particles that will be conveniently spread throughout the ocean? Cooling is not the main problem with nuclear propulsion - pollution is.
Also don't most cargo ships employ their own private security anyway? Just arm them better against pirates.
Historically no, most cargo ships haven't been armed. More have been lately but not all are.