"For the states they operate in" is the relevant phrase here. Just because you can handle sales tax for one state doesn't mean you can scale that to handle 50 states (and the varying county/city taxes that might go with it). If this is allowed to pass, then every state will soon tax sales online and it will become impossible for small players to operate online. If I opened an online shop based in New York, I'd (right now) only need to worry about NY sales tax. But, were these laws to become the norm, I'd need to worry about the sales tax rates for all 50 states. This would give an advantage to the big businesses (which would have more accounting power) and would give a disadvantage to small businesses.
I'm not sure how it was determined, but I do know that my "ideal weight" (according to BMI) isn't my real ideal weight. A few years back, I seriously worked hard to lose weight. I went from 255 down to 173. At my height (5' 11"), BMI says that my ideal weight is 133 - 178.5. However, when I dropped below 180, people started telling me how I looked *too skinny.* (The first time I've been called that ever in my life.) Sure enough, my bones were showing way too much in my shoulders and face. So I intentionally put some weight back on. I determined that my ideal weight is about 185 - 190 so that's what I shoot for every time the pounds sneak back on*. According to BMI, I'm overweight, but I feel that I'm perfect weight-wise when I'm in that range.
*Fighting my weight is going to be a lifelong battle. I'm on the path to healthy eating, but old habits can sneak back into my life all too easily. I just need to recognize when they're beginning to do so and nip the weight gain in the bud.
It is when it runs counter to how they want things done. But when they see an opportunity to use Hollywood and Western culture to their advantage, they won't shy away from it. In the end, they are just politicians. Highly corrupt, brutal politicians, but politicians nonetheless.
Kind of reminds me of something one of my college Computer Science professors told us. He said that everything he taught us would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but we'd be able to use the basic principals of his teachings going forward. Sure enough, coding simple C programs (not even C++) isn't my day-to-day job, but I took those concepts and use them every day in my job as a web developer.
Well, duh, the reporters aren't reporting to Iran.
Increasingly, the reporters aren't even reporting *from* Iran. They've all been kicked out except for a few and even those have been confined to their hotel rooms. There are stories/photos/videos trickling out via the Internet/cell phones, but the reporters want to give their own contribution. So they latch onto the "Is America Doing Enough" angle and run with it. After all, they can interview countless American politicians and American people on the street as freely as they want. Toss in some Internet-obtained shots of Iranian protesters and they reporters pass off their story as being about Iran when it's really about the reporters struggling to report about Iran.
You see it as disturbing, I see an opportunity. We should form the Church of Internetology. Our high priests will use E(thernet)-Meters to diagnose what is wrong with people's Internet connections and save their connections (for a modest fee, of course). Now we just need a semi-religious backstory. Maybe something about alien overlords digitizing and trapping souls in the Internet until Al Gore showed up to stop them....
A better method is to have a Contact Me form that doesn't display your e-mail address anywhere on it. Yes, you'll get spammers filling it out, but you can cut down on those with some simple techniques. For example, make a "Phone Number" field and set the CSS display attribute to none. Normal users won't see this field and won't fill it out. Spam-bots will see it and attempt to fill it out. Then, have your submission script silently fail to send to e-mail if the "Phone Number" is filled out. (If you toss an error, the spammer might figure out the trick.) No method is fool-proof, of course, but this is much better than putting your e-mail address on your webpage and hoping that someone doesn't de-mung it.
I find it funny that they think the Bay area's lack of a major sports championship counts against them but then, in the same sentence, count Boston's championships as negatives as well. Is a sports championship a positive or a negative? It can be either one or neither, but it can't be both!
There's something even better than a stable relationship: Two young kids. Try having some "private time" when, at any second, a little one could come running in.
Actually, they're not suing because they can't compete. They're suing because they don't want to compete. To my knowledge, many, if not most, of the municipal internet access plans are being put forward by towns that don't have broadband service from the local cable or phone monopolies. So the town steps in and says "We'll do it." At this point, the monopolies say "Hey! We don't want to serve your area, but if we ever change our mind, we don't want to compete against you. Shut down your operation so we can continue to ignore your area in peace."
I'm guessing by "Patents should be 70 years..." you mean Copyrights. Because Patents are completely different entities and already have a pretty decent expiration date on them. For Copyrights, I'm a fan of reverting to the original format we had when the Constitution was written. When your work is created, you get 14 years of copyright protection. (I'm willing to keep the "no need to file every thing for copyright" rule.) After that 14 years, you need to apply for a one-time 14 year extension. Otherwise, your work goes into the Public Domain. After that 14 year extension, your work goes into the Public Domain.
My only concession to the extra-long copyrights that we have now would be a system to phase in the new copyright lengths. Something like items copyrighted just before the new system but under 20 years automatically get a full 28 years while other items slowly get phased into the public domain one decade at a time (starting with the earliest decades). In the end, though, I think that the 14+14 system would be the best.
I've often thought that someone should come up with a Public Domain "Happy Birthday" song to replace the covered-by-copyright one. Since "Good Morning To You" (the song that Happy Birthday is based off of) is in Public Domain and is only 1 note away from Happy Birthday, we could base it off of "Good Morning To You." Of course, there would be more of a chance of the RIAA opening a torrent search site than of the new Happy Birthday song catching on.
I've found that the ultra-thin models (Trojan, I think), are the next best thing to none at all. They allow as much of the sensation through as possible and, sometimes, can almost feel like nothing's on at all. Not sure if those are more prone to breakage, but I haven't had a single condom (of any brand) break on me yet.
Glad I wasn't the only one to think of Get Fuzzy. Still, robot Bucky Katt's seem easy to beat. Pin them down and they go into sleep mode: http://comics.com/get_fuzzy/2009-06-22/
In my case, I think a woman who was completely wrong for me actually (in a roundabout way) gave me the confidence I needed when I met my wife online. This woman basically threw herself at me. Every guy's fantasy, right? Well, something kept nagging at me that this is wrong and don't go through with it. So I didn't sleep with her. After a few dates, we met my best friend for dinner. She regaled him with the story of a guy she went out with the previous night, their trip to the beach, and some X-rated details of what went on there. Now call me old-fashioned, but when I was dating someone, I focused all my attention on that person, so this revelation (especially in front of my best friend) hurt me. We broke it off soon afterwords. Actually she broke up with me, my one regret was that I wasn't emotionally strong enough to break it off with her. Still, the fact that she had selected me as someone she wanted to sleep with bolstered my confidence. Before, I didn't think anyone could ever see me in that light. After her, though, I didn't let those nagging doubts hold me back. When I met my wife online, I didn't fret about how I should present myself so that she'd like me. I decided that it was best to be myself and she would have to like me for that. Luckily, my wife fell in love with the real me (and I fell in love with the real her).
Yeah, I know, anecdotes and all, but... I met my wife online (Yahoo chat room). I think what helped us out a lot was that we were able to converse without any face-to-face stress. If she asked me a question, I could take a minute or two to think over my answer without it seeming awkward. I could even, in mid reply, delete what had already been typed (but not sent) and rephrase my reply. This lag and buffer in the conversation helped give me a sense of confidence that I usually didn't have. By the time we met in person, we already knew each other's personalities pretty well. We'll be celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. So, yes, romantic meetings online can and do work.
I'd definitely like to see bloggers identify when they get financial compensation from a company. Especially if the blog is running a review on a product/service. I wouldn't want to buy a product only to find out that the blogger was paid $100 to rewrite some boilerplate company-supplied text into their own style. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the government needs to step in here. Perhaps if, on a case by case basis, it is found that a company is buying many positive reviews and using sleazy tactics to silence critics, but otherwise full disclosure should be a "best practice policy", not an "enforced by the Federal government rule."
Ok, not opposite sex specifically (I'm married with 2 kids), but been feeling kind of isolated at times. At work, I'm stuck in a windowless office in the back of the server room all day. The server room's AC means that I need to shut my door (or get frozen out). The end result is that I'll often leave work at the end of the day having had no real face to face conversations. Then I come home, shift into "dad/husband gear" and do "dad/husband things" for the rest of the day (cook dinner, play with kids, change diapers, get kids in bed, etc). I like my work life and I like my "dad/husband" life, but I miss having a non-family social life. I don't have any actual friends where I live and no family. (I moved to be closer to my wife so she has friends/family here.) I'd like to be able to discuss issues that interest me (e.g. copyright laws and geeky movies) without my wife rolling her eyes. (She tries hard to put up with it, but for all her patience, she's just not into some of those topics.) In my case, it would be "how does one find local, off-line friends with similar interests."
If I recall correctly from when I signed up to GrandCentral (Google Voice's predecessor), signing up a number meant that Google would call that number. You would then need to approve the addition by typing in a code.
In fact, I just stopped by Google Voice's help pages and that's exactly what they do:
Signing up: Verifying the new phones you're forwarding to Print When you add a new phone number to the Phones tab of your Google Voice Settings, you will need to verify the number for security and abuse prevention reasons. Any new numbers you're setting up to forward to when your contacts call your Google number will need to be verified by following the steps below:
1. Click Settings at the top of the Google Voice page.
2. Select the Phones tab.
3. Click the 'Add another phone' link to add a new phone number to forward your calls to.
4. Enter the name of the phone you're adding, the number, and select the appropriate phone type. You can adjust more advanced settings by clicking the 'Show advanced settings' link.
5. When you're finished, click Save. Once you click Save, a 'Verify your Phone' pop-up will appear with you a phone verification code.
6. Click Connect and Google Voice will call the phone you're verifying.
7. When prompted, enter the verification code you see in the 'Verify your Phone' pop-up to complete the verification process.
Please note that if you don't verify the new phone you've added to your settings, it won't be able to receive calls from Google Voice. You won't be able to select it as one of the numbers Google Voice forwards to. You can click the 'Verify Now' link at any time to verify your number.
If you're experiencing problems with entering the verification code using a SIP phone, make sure your SIP phone has DTMF set to RFC2833 to ensure your phone recognizes the verification code you're entering to complete the verification process.
Even if you only have one line, you might like to use this. If a business asks for your phone number, you could give them the Google Talk number. Then, if they abuse it, you simply tell Google Talk to either always push them to voice mail or (better yet) to play the "this line is disconnected" message.
Have you tried Xenocode's Web Browser Sandbox ( http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ )? It's been a godsend for me since I don't need to boot up two different VMs just to test pages in IE6, IE7, and IE8. I just load the appropriate browser sandbox app and the browser looks and feels like it's really installed on my system.
Ours has too, unfortunately. One of our web apps (*not* one I designed, mind you, a third party tool) doesn't support IE7/8 or FireFox. So we're stuck with IE6 until the vendor upgrades. I might ask today what the timeline on that upgrade is (if there even is one). Since it is a tool that I think relatively few people use, perhaps we can use Xenocode's Browser Sandbox ( http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ ) for the users who need the IE6-only tool.
(Yes, I prefer FireFox over IE, but IE7 or IE8 would still be a vast improvement over IE6!)
Spam filtering can be useful, but there are some blacklists that will add you as a spammer simply because your website is on the same ISP as an accused spammer. Any attempts to reason with them are met with "Don't like it? Change ISPs!" In other words, you need to go through the time and expense of switching ISPs every time that ISP happens to sign someone up who spams. If you're going to have a blacklist, you need some provision for allowing falsely accused spammers off your list and for minimizing collateral damage. Simply saying the electronic equivalent of "well, you live three houses down from a spammer so it is your fault that your house was hit with that grenade" isn't good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"For the states they operate in" is the relevant phrase here. Just because you can handle sales tax for one state doesn't mean you can scale that to handle 50 states (and the varying county/city taxes that might go with it). If this is allowed to pass, then every state will soon tax sales online and it will become impossible for small players to operate online. If I opened an online shop based in New York, I'd (right now) only need to worry about NY sales tax. But, were these laws to become the norm, I'd need to worry about the sales tax rates for all 50 states. This would give an advantage to the big businesses (which would have more accounting power) and would give a disadvantage to small businesses.
I'm not sure how it was determined, but I do know that my "ideal weight" (according to BMI) isn't my real ideal weight. A few years back, I seriously worked hard to lose weight. I went from 255 down to 173. At my height (5' 11"), BMI says that my ideal weight is 133 - 178.5. However, when I dropped below 180, people started telling me how I looked *too skinny.* (The first time I've been called that ever in my life.) Sure enough, my bones were showing way too much in my shoulders and face. So I intentionally put some weight back on. I determined that my ideal weight is about 185 - 190 so that's what I shoot for every time the pounds sneak back on*. According to BMI, I'm overweight, but I feel that I'm perfect weight-wise when I'm in that range.
*Fighting my weight is going to be a lifelong battle. I'm on the path to healthy eating, but old habits can sneak back into my life all too easily. I just need to recognize when they're beginning to do so and nip the weight gain in the bud.
That's when you go back to the old Mom question of "If all the other countries were jumping off a bridge, would you jump too?"
It is when it runs counter to how they want things done. But when they see an opportunity to use Hollywood and Western culture to their advantage, they won't shy away from it. In the end, they are just politicians. Highly corrupt, brutal politicians, but politicians nonetheless.
Kind of reminds me of something one of my college Computer Science professors told us. He said that everything he taught us would be obsolete by the time we graduated, but we'd be able to use the basic principals of his teachings going forward. Sure enough, coding simple C programs (not even C++) isn't my day-to-day job, but I took those concepts and use them every day in my job as a web developer.
Maybe, but it would be a bad idea to have your browser auto-fill out your phone number on any page that asks for it.
Increasingly, the reporters aren't even reporting *from* Iran. They've all been kicked out except for a few and even those have been confined to their hotel rooms. There are stories/photos/videos trickling out via the Internet/cell phones, but the reporters want to give their own contribution. So they latch onto the "Is America Doing Enough" angle and run with it. After all, they can interview countless American politicians and American people on the street as freely as they want. Toss in some Internet-obtained shots of Iranian protesters and they reporters pass off their story as being about Iran when it's really about the reporters struggling to report about Iran.
You see it as disturbing, I see an opportunity. We should form the Church of Internetology. Our high priests will use E(thernet)-Meters to diagnose what is wrong with people's Internet connections and save their connections (for a modest fee, of course). Now we just need a semi-religious backstory. Maybe something about alien overlords digitizing and trapping souls in the Internet until Al Gore showed up to stop them....
A better method is to have a Contact Me form that doesn't display your e-mail address anywhere on it. Yes, you'll get spammers filling it out, but you can cut down on those with some simple techniques. For example, make a "Phone Number" field and set the CSS display attribute to none. Normal users won't see this field and won't fill it out. Spam-bots will see it and attempt to fill it out. Then, have your submission script silently fail to send to e-mail if the "Phone Number" is filled out. (If you toss an error, the spammer might figure out the trick.) No method is fool-proof, of course, but this is much better than putting your e-mail address on your webpage and hoping that someone doesn't de-mung it.
I find it funny that they think the Bay area's lack of a major sports championship counts against them but then, in the same sentence, count Boston's championships as negatives as well. Is a sports championship a positive or a negative? It can be either one or neither, but it can't be both!
There's something even better than a stable relationship: Two young kids. Try having some "private time" when, at any second, a little one could come running in.
Actually, they're not suing because they can't compete. They're suing because they don't want to compete. To my knowledge, many, if not most, of the municipal internet access plans are being put forward by towns that don't have broadband service from the local cable or phone monopolies. So the town steps in and says "We'll do it." At this point, the monopolies say "Hey! We don't want to serve your area, but if we ever change our mind, we don't want to compete against you. Shut down your operation so we can continue to ignore your area in peace."
I'm guessing by "Patents should be 70 years..." you mean Copyrights. Because Patents are completely different entities and already have a pretty decent expiration date on them. For Copyrights, I'm a fan of reverting to the original format we had when the Constitution was written. When your work is created, you get 14 years of copyright protection. (I'm willing to keep the "no need to file every thing for copyright" rule.) After that 14 years, you need to apply for a one-time 14 year extension. Otherwise, your work goes into the Public Domain. After that 14 year extension, your work goes into the Public Domain.
My only concession to the extra-long copyrights that we have now would be a system to phase in the new copyright lengths. Something like items copyrighted just before the new system but under 20 years automatically get a full 28 years while other items slowly get phased into the public domain one decade at a time (starting with the earliest decades). In the end, though, I think that the 14+14 system would be the best.
I've often thought that someone should come up with a Public Domain "Happy Birthday" song to replace the covered-by-copyright one. Since "Good Morning To You" (the song that Happy Birthday is based off of) is in Public Domain and is only 1 note away from Happy Birthday, we could base it off of "Good Morning To You." Of course, there would be more of a chance of the RIAA opening a torrent search site than of the new Happy Birthday song catching on.
I've found that the ultra-thin models (Trojan, I think), are the next best thing to none at all. They allow as much of the sensation through as possible and, sometimes, can almost feel like nothing's on at all. Not sure if those are more prone to breakage, but I haven't had a single condom (of any brand) break on me yet.
Glad I wasn't the only one to think of Get Fuzzy. Still, robot Bucky Katt's seem easy to beat. Pin them down and they go into sleep mode: http://comics.com/get_fuzzy/2009-06-22/
In my case, I think a woman who was completely wrong for me actually (in a roundabout way) gave me the confidence I needed when I met my wife online. This woman basically threw herself at me. Every guy's fantasy, right? Well, something kept nagging at me that this is wrong and don't go through with it. So I didn't sleep with her. After a few dates, we met my best friend for dinner. She regaled him with the story of a guy she went out with the previous night, their trip to the beach, and some X-rated details of what went on there. Now call me old-fashioned, but when I was dating someone, I focused all my attention on that person, so this revelation (especially in front of my best friend) hurt me. We broke it off soon afterwords. Actually she broke up with me, my one regret was that I wasn't emotionally strong enough to break it off with her. Still, the fact that she had selected me as someone she wanted to sleep with bolstered my confidence. Before, I didn't think anyone could ever see me in that light. After her, though, I didn't let those nagging doubts hold me back. When I met my wife online, I didn't fret about how I should present myself so that she'd like me. I decided that it was best to be myself and she would have to like me for that. Luckily, my wife fell in love with the real me (and I fell in love with the real her).
Yeah, I know, anecdotes and all, but... I met my wife online (Yahoo chat room). I think what helped us out a lot was that we were able to converse without any face-to-face stress. If she asked me a question, I could take a minute or two to think over my answer without it seeming awkward. I could even, in mid reply, delete what had already been typed (but not sent) and rephrase my reply. This lag and buffer in the conversation helped give me a sense of confidence that I usually didn't have. By the time we met in person, we already knew each other's personalities pretty well. We'll be celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. So, yes, romantic meetings online can and do work.
I'd definitely like to see bloggers identify when they get financial compensation from a company. Especially if the blog is running a review on a product/service. I wouldn't want to buy a product only to find out that the blogger was paid $100 to rewrite some boilerplate company-supplied text into their own style. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the government needs to step in here. Perhaps if, on a case by case basis, it is found that a company is buying many positive reviews and using sleazy tactics to silence critics, but otherwise full disclosure should be a "best practice policy", not an "enforced by the Federal government rule."
Ok, not opposite sex specifically (I'm married with 2 kids), but been feeling kind of isolated at times. At work, I'm stuck in a windowless office in the back of the server room all day. The server room's AC means that I need to shut my door (or get frozen out). The end result is that I'll often leave work at the end of the day having had no real face to face conversations. Then I come home, shift into "dad/husband gear" and do "dad/husband things" for the rest of the day (cook dinner, play with kids, change diapers, get kids in bed, etc). I like my work life and I like my "dad/husband" life, but I miss having a non-family social life. I don't have any actual friends where I live and no family. (I moved to be closer to my wife so she has friends/family here.) I'd like to be able to discuss issues that interest me (e.g. copyright laws and geeky movies) without my wife rolling her eyes. (She tries hard to put up with it, but for all her patience, she's just not into some of those topics.) In my case, it would be "how does one find local, off-line friends with similar interests."
If I recall correctly from when I signed up to GrandCentral (Google Voice's predecessor), signing up a number meant that Google would call that number. You would then need to approve the addition by typing in a code.
In fact, I just stopped by Google Voice's help pages and that's exactly what they do:
Even if you only have one line, you might like to use this. If a business asks for your phone number, you could give them the Google Talk number. Then, if they abuse it, you simply tell Google Talk to either always push them to voice mail or (better yet) to play the "this line is disconnected" message.
Have you tried Xenocode's Web Browser Sandbox ( http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ )? It's been a godsend for me since I don't need to boot up two different VMs just to test pages in IE6, IE7, and IE8. I just load the appropriate browser sandbox app and the browser looks and feels like it's really installed on my system.
Ours has too, unfortunately. One of our web apps (*not* one I designed, mind you, a third party tool) doesn't support IE7/8 or FireFox. So we're stuck with IE6 until the vendor upgrades. I might ask today what the timeline on that upgrade is (if there even is one). Since it is a tool that I think relatively few people use, perhaps we can use Xenocode's Browser Sandbox ( http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ ) for the users who need the IE6-only tool.
(Yes, I prefer FireFox over IE, but IE7 or IE8 would still be a vast improvement over IE6!)
Spam filtering can be useful, but there are some blacklists that will add you as a spammer simply because your website is on the same ISP as an accused spammer. Any attempts to reason with them are met with "Don't like it? Change ISPs!" In other words, you need to go through the time and expense of switching ISPs every time that ISP happens to sign someone up who spams. If you're going to have a blacklist, you need some provision for allowing falsely accused spammers off your list and for minimizing collateral damage. Simply saying the electronic equivalent of "well, you live three houses down from a spammer so it is your fault that your house was hit with that grenade" isn't good enough.