The data I found in the census isn't clear on whether that's before or after tax income, but my guess it that it would be before tax income. Assuming a person who makes exactly that median income, the the tax liability is $7,904 (using data from Wikipedia). Many states charge an additional income tax, and apparently some cities (including new York City as well). I live in a state without income tax, so I'm not sure how exactly this works, but it looks someone living in Manhattan would be liable for something like 10% of their income, so another $4,292 a year.
Health insurance for most workers at this level is actually provided by the employer, and almost certainly isn't accounted for in the income statistics. Lower-paid hourly worker (the bottom end of retail, fast food, etc.) are left to fend for themselves, but professional workers can expect a "benefits package" from their employer that includes things like health and dental insurance, some level of matching on retirement savings, and possibly life insurance. These benifits usually extends to the employees spouse and children, but the employee may have to pay a small amount for his dependents. The health insurance provided by an employer can range from excellent (will pay %100 of almost all medical expenses) to poor (will not pay for many procedures, will only pay 50% or so for many others). In my experience, Americans tend to just accept whatever health insurance is provided, and won't pay for additional health insurance. The average person probably have a several hundred dollar deductible per year for their health insurance, and will have to pay a capped "copay" to get a prescription filled. For example, it would cost me $40 for a month's supply of any name-brand drug my insurance is willing to pay for (which would be almost any medically necessary drug, but nothing like Viagra), and they insurance would pay the rest. Out of pocket medical expense for our average worker is probably on the order of $1000 a year. And that's a good deal more than I and many other people pay.
Other than health care, I don't really think there's anything other "mandatory" expensive that would be out of line with other countries. Certainly I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
So, ($42,922 - $7,904 - $4,292 - $1000) is $2,477 in take home pay a month, with health expenses accounted for. Those number jive with my salary vs. take home pay. Your impression of New York not being a cheap city is accurate, New York is a notoriously expensive city to live in, and Manhattan doubly so. I'm guessing our average Manhattanite wishes he had a lot more money, although he'd be fairly comfortable in most other cities in the US.
Anyway, this is all from my personal experience, and my cursory research, just since it seemed like an interested question. If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to do my best to answer them.
The tour operator seems to have his statistic completely wrong. The per capita income for New York County (which is the same thing as Manhattan) is $42,922 per year, according to 2000 census data. This works out to just under $3,577 per month. You are correct, $1,500 a month would be pitifully small, not too much above minimum wage, and an unlivably small amount for Manhattan,
How blatantly arbitrary and unfair. Why is the FCC flipping out over "fck" on the radio after this went unpunished
Because the FCC, as a rule, doesn't regulate indecency or profanity on subscription services, only free, over the air broadcasts. They mention this in their FAQ:
Do the FCC's rules apply to cable and satellite programming? In the past, the FCC has enforced the indecency and profanity prohibitions only against conventional broadcast services, not against subscription programming services such as cable and satellite. However, the prohibition against obscene programming applies to subscription programming services at all times.
Assuming I'm reading these correctgly, the energy density of ethanol is between 23 and 26 megajoules per kilogram. The energy density of Gasoline is about twice that, 45 MJ/Kg. So this is about the equivalent of $2 per gallon of gas. A pretty good deal these days, not so much 10 years ago, unfortunately
Creative Commons only addresses copyright. That is all. It implies the photographer has the authority to give up some of the rights reserved by copyright. That is it. And the photographer does have that authority. The text of the Creative Commons licenses include:
Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable*
The license explicitly makes no guarantee that the work is completely free to use in any other than a copyright sense. The photographer is free to license a photo under these terms. A company is not allowed to publish the photo without a model release. It's that simple.
Actually, I thought about this as I was writing my post, and I'm not sure if a photographer needs a model release simply to post a photo on flickr. It seems like they should, but nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. Even if the photographer did need a model release to publish on flickr, this is not a copyright issue, and is seperate from applying a copyright license to the work, which is well within the photographer's rights.
Further, even if the photographer should have had model release and didn't, additional publisher aren't absolved of responsibility for making sure a model release exists, and are still liable if they don't have one. They must do due dilligence.
And, again, Creative Commons licensing only addresses copyright. It does not address the existence of a model release. These are two seperate issues. The legal text of the Creative Commons licenses make it clear that is a copyright license. They make not assertion that there are no other legal problems with distributing the work.
A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing.
This isn't a problem with the CC at all, or even with the photographer. The photographer in the case you mention had every right to post the photo under any license he wanted to, including a Creative Commons license without the "No Commercial Use" tag, or heck, even public domain. By releasing the photo under CC, the photographer is only addressing the copyright of the photo, not other issues such as the need for a model release. Further, it is the publisher of an image (in this case, Virgin Mobile) who is responsible for making sure there is a model release. Again, this has nothing to do with copyright. The copyright on an image may be free and clear, even with no model relase in place. And as the sole creator of the image, the photographer is free to license the image under any license he or she wants, regardless of the existence of a model release or really any other legal complication for publishing the photo that may exist. The photographer is simply saying it's ok to use the photo commercially from a copyright point of view
Dvorak, apart from being a moron, has clearly never even seen an iPhone (or, I assume, and of serveral other decent smart phones, but I have a iPhone, so it's what I know), let alone use one:
>I've actually used various phones with Web capability. They never work right. The iPhone works perfectly.
>They take forever to navigate. Navigation is incredibly intuitive. It's almost even fun.
>It's hard to read the screens. The screen is large, high resolution, high contrast, and incredibly crisp and readable.
>If there are a lot of images, the page may never load. The page always loads.
>No matter what browser you use, there are issues. Safari on the iPhone works as well as Safari on a Mac.
>In short, the experience sucks. The experience is awesome. I use my iPhone for the web more then I use it for a phone. Hell, I almost use it for the web more than I use my laptop.
So right off, he's completely misunderstood the potential for smartphones, and obviously never used a good one. And Google is not staffed by moron's I'm fairly sure they can get this right, or at least not completely screw it up.
In addition to completely misundestanding what's available and possible with an smartphone, he's obviously completely people, and what they want: %gt; o what is Google trying to do with a phone? First of all, it wants to put Google search on a phone. It wants to do this because it is obvious to the folks at Google that people need to do Web searches from their phone, so they can, uh, get directions to the restaurant? Of course, they can simply use the phone itself to call the restaurant and ask!
Seriosuly? You want people to call 411 to get the restaurant's number, call teh restaurant, ask for direction from someone who doesn't really understand where you are, copy them down, hope they're right, and then call again when they get lost of the way? I use my iPhone for web-based directions all the time. In fact, it was one of the major selling points. II just click on map, seach for where I want to go, and hit directions. I instantly have directions in an easy to read list and accompanying map. If I miss a turn on the way, I can look at the map to figure out where I am. And I never have to have an awkward conversation with someone I don't know who doesn't know where I am or the best way to get to the restaurant from my house.
Dvorak in a complete moron.
>There are no Google fanboys. There are no Google addicts
Seriosuly?
>... Google is actually not a charismatic company...
Seriously??
Blargh! My head is going to explode with how stupid this column is! Has Dvorak ever even been online? Or ever talked to a person? Or ever used any kind of technology ever? Ackkkk! The Mind boggles! He's made me overuse exclamation points he's so dumb!
> bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.
No it's not. It's not really that impressive at all. They made a web remote control UI for the existing PC-based program, and then went to the website from their Palm. This has nothing to do with bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone.
Keep in mind that the vast amounts of CO2 produced is from carbon that was pulled out of the atmosphere that season by the grapes. The grapes you grow next year will pull the CO2 back out. So, in all, there is no net CO2 added to the atmosphere, it's just the same carbon going around and around. Carbon neutral.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they liberate carbon that's been buried and out of the cycle for millions of years.
Your couple of anecdotal examples aside, the major trend in clearly towards darker skin nearer the equator. Look at any of the countless skin color maps that researchers have generated.
There were no injuries whatsoever from the Three Mile Island incident. The highest dose of radiation anyone received was less than the average amount of background radiation any given US resident will receive in a year. The number of projected "excess fatal cancers" due to Three Mile Island is "approximately one." Much, much safer than your average radiation-spewing coal plant.
Did, you, by any chance, actually look at the pictures? The patterns they refer to (and that appear on the first page of TFA) are pretty clearly more than just random patterns. Sure, much of it is noise, but there are long sequences that repeat, and the pictures make it clear. The overall "color" (literally and figuratively) of some of the crops also make it clear some one chemical dominates the others in many parts of the DNA sequence.
Sure, I agree that any time someone purpose to find a special pattern in a long sequence of nearly-random data, it's worth being skeptical. But it would be foolish to thing there wouldn't be patterns found in DNA. And this method makes some of them very plain to see.
The fact is that iTMS was the FIRST legal online music store.
That is patently and verifiably untrue. eMusic, at least, was open as a digital music store in 1998. They sold (and still sell, I believe) completely unencumbered MP3 files, completely legally. ITMS didn't open until 2003.
Of course it didn't have the depth that Half Life 2 did. It's a single episode. That's like saying that an episode of a TV show doesn't have the same depth as a movie.
As for your costs, Episode One is $20. Half Life 2 was $60 when it was released, I believe.
It really depends, I think, on the region. Or maybe people just don't like Starbuck's coffee, and assume they don't know what they're doing. However, my brother is a Starbucks barista and "Coffee Master" (which involved rather a lot of training in coffee) here in Seattle, and I get the impression that they really, really care about their coffee. He can tell you volumes about any one of their varieties (of coffee, not coffee drink), and even more about they're blends and why they're blended that way. He routinely gives and attends coffee tastings.
It's important to make the distinction between brewed coffee and espresso. To be fair, Starbuck's espresso is admitedly a weak point. Like you say, it has to be strong do make an impression in the coffee drinks. But their brewed coffee varieties are something they spend a lot of effort on. They do roast darker than a lot of people, but as far as I can tell, it because they genuinely like it better that way.
I know it's popular to assume that Starbucks doesn't care about coffee, but that's simply not true.
Not that I disagree with you're point at all, but racquetball racquets do actually have safety straps. Just thought it was an interesting bit of trivia.
Do you honestly believe that blind people are so dumb as to go around shooting an nothing or other people simply because they can't see them? Blind people are blind, they're not stupid. It's as easy to check if a gun is loaded by feeling inside the chamber as it is by looking. It is as easy to tell if a safety is on by feeling is as it is by looking. And it it as easy to not pull the trigger of a fucking gun when you're blind than it is when you're not blind. Hunters are trained not to fire a gun unless they're absolutely certain of their target. A blind person can absolutely do that by having someone assist them is sighting the gun.
Most explanations I've read also point to the gelatin and gun arabic in the mentos, saying it reduces the surface tension of the soda, which also makes the bubbles for much more easily. It seems the added nucleation sites and the reduced surface tension both contribute to the explosion. The same thing applies to root beer floats. There's a decent write-up here.
From THE WAL-MART EFFECT by Charles Fishman. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Charles Fishman, 2006. Charles is a senior writer for Fast Company magazine.
From THE WAL-MART EFFECT by Charles Fishman. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Charles Fishman, 2006. Charles is a senior writer for Fast Company magazine.
I completely understand that. That's my one complaint about RSS is that instead of being able to waste a few minutes checking/. or whatever at work, I'm always up to date, so I have to actually be productive instead of spending a few mintues finding out there are no new stories.
> People forget that CMYK can represent less than half the contents of a Pantone swash; it is not the be-all and end-all of colour handling.
It is the be all and end all of color handling if you're targeting four color offset printing. And having your printer to the conversion is no substitute. CMYK can't represent all of RGB, and you want to know about the difference *before* you shell out for set up costs.
Professionals will never, ever, not even a little bit be able to use GIMP for print design until it has much much better color space handling, including CMYK.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's a late reply, but there actually is a service where, if you ask nicely, they might run an arbitrary SQL query for you: http://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Query_service
The data I found in the census isn't clear on whether that's before or after tax income, but my guess it that it would be before tax income. Assuming a person who makes exactly that median income, the the tax liability is $7,904 (using data from Wikipedia). Many states charge an additional income tax, and apparently some cities (including new York City as well). I live in a state without income tax, so I'm not sure how exactly this works, but it looks someone living in Manhattan would be liable for something like 10% of their income, so another $4,292 a year.
Health insurance for most workers at this level is actually provided by the employer, and almost certainly isn't accounted for in the income statistics. Lower-paid hourly worker (the bottom end of retail, fast food, etc.) are left to fend for themselves, but professional workers can expect a "benefits package" from their employer that includes things like health and dental insurance, some level of matching on retirement savings, and possibly life insurance. These benifits usually extends to the employees spouse and children, but the employee may have to pay a small amount for his dependents. The health insurance provided by an employer can range from excellent (will pay %100 of almost all medical expenses) to poor (will not pay for many procedures, will only pay 50% or so for many others). In my experience, Americans tend to just accept whatever health insurance is provided, and won't pay for additional health insurance. The average person probably have a several hundred dollar deductible per year for their health insurance, and will have to pay a capped "copay" to get a prescription filled. For example, it would cost me $40 for a month's supply of any name-brand drug my insurance is willing to pay for (which would be almost any medically necessary drug, but nothing like Viagra), and they insurance would pay the rest. Out of pocket medical expense for our average worker is probably on the order of $1000 a year. And that's a good deal more than I and many other people pay.
Other than health care, I don't really think there's anything other "mandatory" expensive that would be out of line with other countries. Certainly I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
So, ($42,922 - $7,904 - $4,292 - $1000) is $2,477 in take home pay a month, with health expenses accounted for. Those number jive with my salary vs. take home pay. Your impression of New York not being a cheap city is accurate, New York is a notoriously expensive city to live in, and Manhattan doubly so. I'm guessing our average Manhattanite wishes he had a lot more money, although he'd be fairly comfortable in most other cities in the US.
Anyway, this is all from my personal experience, and my cursory research, just since it seemed like an interested question. If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to do my best to answer them.
The tour operator seems to have his statistic completely wrong. The per capita income for New York County (which is the same thing as Manhattan) is $42,922 per year, according to 2000 census data. This works out to just under $3,577 per month. You are correct, $1,500 a month would be pitifully small, not too much above minimum wage, and an unlivably small amount for Manhattan,
Because the FCC, as a rule, doesn't regulate indecency or profanity on subscription services, only free, over the air broadcasts. They mention this in their FAQ:
Assuming I'm reading these correctgly, the energy density of ethanol is between 23 and 26 megajoules per kilogram. The energy density of Gasoline is about twice that, 45 MJ/Kg. So this is about the equivalent of $2 per gallon of gas. A pretty good deal these days, not so much 10 years ago, unfortunately
The license explicitly makes no guarantee that the work is completely free to use in any other than a copyright sense. The photographer is free to license a photo under these terms. A company is not allowed to publish the photo without a model release. It's that simple.
*case changed to avoid lameness filter
Actually, I thought about this as I was writing my post, and I'm not sure if a photographer needs a model release simply to post a photo on flickr. It seems like they should, but nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. Even if the photographer did need a model release to publish on flickr, this is not a copyright issue, and is seperate from applying a copyright license to the work, which is well within the photographer's rights.
Further, even if the photographer should have had model release and didn't, additional publisher aren't absolved of responsibility for making sure a model release exists, and are still liable if they don't have one. They must do due dilligence.
And, again, Creative Commons licensing only addresses copyright. It does not address the existence of a model release. These are two seperate issues. The legal text of the Creative Commons licenses make it clear that is a copyright license. They make not assertion that there are no other legal problems with distributing the work.
This isn't a problem with the CC at all, or even with the photographer. The photographer in the case you mention had every right to post the photo under any license he wanted to, including a Creative Commons license without the "No Commercial Use" tag, or heck, even public domain. By releasing the photo under CC, the photographer is only addressing the copyright of the photo, not other issues such as the need for a model release. Further, it is the publisher of an image (in this case, Virgin Mobile) who is responsible for making sure there is a model release. Again, this has nothing to do with copyright. The copyright on an image may be free and clear, even with no model relase in place. And as the sole creator of the image, the photographer is free to license the image under any license he or she wants, regardless of the existence of a model release or really any other legal complication for publishing the photo that may exist. The photographer is simply saying it's ok to use the photo commercially from a copyright point of view
Dvorak, apart from being a moron, has clearly never even seen an iPhone (or, I assume, and of serveral other decent smart phones, but I have a iPhone, so it's what I know), let alone use one:
...
>I've actually used various phones with Web capability. They never work right.
The iPhone works perfectly.
>They take forever to navigate.
Navigation is incredibly intuitive. It's almost even fun.
>It's hard to read the screens.
The screen is large, high resolution, high contrast, and incredibly crisp and readable.
>If there are a lot of images, the page may never load.
The page always loads.
>No matter what browser you use, there are issues.
Safari on the iPhone works as well as Safari on a Mac.
>In short, the experience sucks.
The experience is awesome. I use my iPhone for the web more then I use it for a phone. Hell, I almost use it for the web more than I use my laptop.
So right off, he's completely misunderstood the potential for smartphones, and obviously never used a good one. And Google is not staffed by moron's I'm fairly sure they can get this right, or at least not completely screw it up.
In addition to completely misundestanding what's available and possible with an smartphone, he's obviously completely people, and what they want:
%gt; o what is Google trying to do with a phone? First of all, it wants to put Google search on a phone. It wants to do this because it is obvious to the folks at Google that people need to do Web searches from their phone, so they can, uh, get directions to the restaurant? Of course, they can simply use the phone itself to call the restaurant and ask!
Seriosuly? You want people to call 411 to get the restaurant's number, call teh restaurant, ask for direction from someone who doesn't really understand where you are, copy them down, hope they're right, and then call again when they get lost of the way? I use my iPhone for web-based directions all the time. In fact, it was one of the major selling points. II just click on map, seach for where I want to go, and hit directions. I instantly have directions in an easy to read list and accompanying map. If I miss a turn on the way, I can look at the map to figure out where I am. And I never have to have an awkward conversation with someone I don't know who doesn't know where I am or the best way to get to the restaurant from my house.
Dvorak in a complete moron.
>There are no Google fanboys. There are no Google addicts
Seriosuly?
>... Google is actually not a charismatic company
Seriously??
Blargh! My head is going to explode with how stupid this column is! Has Dvorak ever even been online? Or ever talked to a person? Or ever used any kind of technology ever? Ackkkk! The Mind boggles! He's made me overuse exclamation points he's so dumb!
> bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.
No it's not. It's not really that impressive at all. They made a web remote control UI for the existing PC-based program, and then went to the website from their Palm. This has nothing to do with bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone.
Keep in mind that the vast amounts of CO2 produced is from carbon that was pulled out of the atmosphere that season by the grapes. The grapes you grow next year will pull the CO2 back out. So, in all, there is no net CO2 added to the atmosphere, it's just the same carbon going around and around. Carbon neutral.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they liberate carbon that's been buried and out of the cycle for millions of years.
Your couple of anecdotal examples aside, the major trend in clearly towards darker skin nearer the equator. Look at any of the countless skin color maps that researchers have generated.
There were no injuries whatsoever from the Three Mile Island incident. The highest dose of radiation anyone received was less than the average amount of background radiation any given US resident will receive in a year. The number of projected "excess fatal cancers" due to Three Mile Island is "approximately one." Much, much safer than your average radiation-spewing coal plant.
Did, you, by any chance, actually look at the pictures? The patterns they refer to (and that appear on the first page of TFA) are pretty clearly more than just random patterns. Sure, much of it is noise, but there are long sequences that repeat, and the pictures make it clear. The overall "color" (literally and figuratively) of some of the crops also make it clear some one chemical dominates the others in many parts of the DNA sequence.
Sure, I agree that any time someone purpose to find a special pattern in a long sequence of nearly-random data, it's worth being skeptical. But it would be foolish to thing there wouldn't be patterns found in DNA. And this method makes some of them very plain to see.
Of course it didn't have the depth that Half Life 2 did. It's a single episode. That's like saying that an episode of a TV show doesn't have the same depth as a movie.
As for your costs, Episode One is $20. Half Life 2 was $60 when it was released, I believe.
Half Life 2: Episode One. And coming soon, episodes Two and then Three.
(Episode One is really good, btw).
It really depends, I think, on the region. Or maybe people just don't like Starbuck's coffee, and assume they don't know what they're doing. However, my brother is a Starbucks barista and "Coffee Master" (which involved rather a lot of training in coffee) here in Seattle, and I get the impression that they really, really care about their coffee. He can tell you volumes about any one of their varieties (of coffee, not coffee drink), and even more about they're blends and why they're blended that way. He routinely gives and attends coffee tastings.
It's important to make the distinction between brewed coffee and espresso. To be fair, Starbuck's espresso is admitedly a weak point. Like you say, it has to be strong do make an impression in the coffee drinks. But their brewed coffee varieties are something they spend a lot of effort on. They do roast darker than a lot of people, but as far as I can tell, it because they genuinely like it better that way.
I know it's popular to assume that Starbucks doesn't care about coffee, but that's simply not true.
Not that I disagree with you're point at all, but racquetball racquets do actually have safety straps. Just thought it was an interesting bit of trivia.
Do you honestly believe that blind people are so dumb as to go around shooting an nothing or other people simply because they can't see them? Blind people are blind, they're not stupid. It's as easy to check if a gun is loaded by feeling inside the chamber as it is by looking. It is as easy to tell if a safety is on by feeling is as it is by looking. And it it as easy to not pull the trigger of a fucking gun when you're blind than it is when you're not blind. Hunters are trained not to fire a gun unless they're absolutely certain of their target. A blind person can absolutely do that by having someone assist them is sighting the gun.
Most explanations I've read also point to the gelatin and gun arabic in the mentos, saying it reduces the surface tension of the soda, which also makes the bubbles for much more easily. It seems the added nucleation sites and the reduced surface tension both contribute to the explosion. The same thing applies to root beer floats. There's a decent write-up here.
Way to bitch about the summary, but not read it.
I completely understand that. That's my one complaint about RSS is that instead of being able to waste a few minutes checking /. or whatever at work, I'm always up to date, so I have to actually be productive instead of spending a few mintues finding out there are no new stories.
> People forget that CMYK can represent less than half the contents of a Pantone swash; it is not the be-all and end-all of colour handling.
It is the be all and end all of color handling if you're targeting four color offset printing. And having your printer to the conversion is no substitute. CMYK can't represent all of RGB, and you want to know about the difference *before* you shell out for set up costs.
Professionals will never, ever, not even a little bit be able to use GIMP for print design until it has much much better color space handling, including CMYK.