Aside from the fact that he'll be testifying remotely, the plane that they grounded that time was headed to somewhere in Latin America (Cuba or Ecuador I think). Do you really think the US would be allowed ground and search a plane anywhere in Europe that's chartered in and bound for an EU country?
The only reason you might avoid a "stable" release, is if you have newer hardware that isn't supported by the old, "stable" kernel and supporting software.
This is exactly the reason that I have a workstation in our lab running Fedora instead of CentOS. I'd prefer to use a distro closer to RHEL, since that's what run some of our expensive instruments, but the drivers just weren't there and it's really not worth my time to sort out all the dependencies or compile a newer kernel without breaking other stuff in order to get support for newer hardware.
I'd also like to know what nasty bugs you're talking about in Fedora releases. I've had a few non-critical packages break for a week or so after an update, nearly all of them in rpmfusion and not the core Fedora repos, but that's about all.
It would probably lead to a better trade show, but I suspect that if you ban sales people, many companies, especially larger ones, will pull their sponsorship of the show.
Truly not sure whether to mod this funny or insightful.
On a related note, I love the number of trucks I see that are of the "Sport Offroad 4x4" variety that never have and never will go any further off road than parking on the grass at some local festival. It's all about appearances, you know.
Metamaterials Developed To Bend Sound Waves, Deflect Tsunamis
Is it really "developed" when it's not actually been made yet?
No, it's not, but making grandiose claims about what something could become in mere decades (just possibly, if everything falls perfectly into place) is how you try to get a bigger slice of the ever dwindling pie of research funding. You need to grossly oversell every result.
For those unaware, due to congressional meddling, the NSF effectively now requires you to tell it what great societal or economic problem your research is going to solve in the grant application, i.e. before you even get preliminary data. I'm afraid that overselling of all research is going to balloon in the next few years, as if it hasn't already.
That's what it sounds like, and furthermore, it also seems that they need a microphone near the computer in question - for a cell phone, nearly touching, or within ~4 meters with specialized equipment.
Given the level of social engineering to get the target to execute the code, or at least know they're using an email client/plugin combination that will autoexecute, combined with getting a microphone in the necessary location, it seems to me that it would be easier to just coerce the target into giving up their key. Blackmail, seduction, or the oft-cited xkcd $5 wrench method all seem much easier to pull off.
Unless I'm reading something wrong as I'm just starting on my morning coffee, yes, what you have in the last paragraph is something like I would propose, although it would probably need to be tweaked a bit for those way at the bottom of things. I'd personally probably still keep some sort of progressive tax rates, but cutting loopholes and giveaways that only practically apply at the upper end would go a long way on their own.
The problem comes when we have someone like Warren Buffet who self-admittedly ends up paying a much lower percentage of income in taxes than his secretary does, or the Mitt Romneys of the world who pay something like 12% total federal tax on ~$250M of income.
Although I made no comment as to whether the numbers were fair or not, since you asked IMO that point comes when the percentage of all income taxes paid by the rich is roughly equal to the percentage of all income they make - and we should include capital gains in the calculation. I'm pretty sure we'll disagree on this.
I realize that the rich do have a top federal tax bracket of something like 39%. They also stop paying payroll tax somewhere in the 28% bracket if I'm recalling the ranges correctly.
My relatively modest income requires almost 45% of my income go to income taxes, but if you make half of what I do, tax liability drops nearly to 15% (payroll tax only). At what point are the supposed rich paying their fair share? Are you thinking something closer to 75% of their income, or perhaps 100%....
I usually don't jump into these sorts of threads, but I have to call foul on the above.
Assuming SS (payroll) taxes take out 7% and you live in an expensive state with 10% upper tax bracket, that means you're paying 28% in federal taxes. That rate starts at just under $88k of AGI, which means before deductions you're probably making at least $100k. I can only consider that "modest" if you live in a very expensive area (NYC, SF, etc.).
Furthermore, every time I see anyone trot out numbers like 45% in taxes, they invariably are doing one of two things:
1. Including ALL taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. which are levied locally
2. Stating the rate on only the highest taxed portion of income and ignoring that due to tax brackets a large portion of the total income is taxed at a much lower rate.
If I give the benefit of the doubt here and assume neither of these is the case,to have a 45% overall probably means at least some of your income has to be in the 33% bracket, which starts at $183k and is way above "modest".
Not sure where you're located, but can't you use bill pay through your bank/credit union to avoid the $1 charge to pay your gas and trash companies online directly?
Seriously, and I think both parent and GP would agree, all this Javascript just bloats the internet. If it's all about the content, most of what I care about could be presented nearly as well, faster, and in some cases better, using 1990s era pure HTML. There are places it makes sense to use code (if it actually does something useful) but I think most web "developers" do it just because they can or because they don't want their site to look outdated.
2. I just looked up and here is the content of my URL bar: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/28/2241252/web-literacy-standard-announced-by-mozilla
So, it at least looks like FF 24 can do what you want - even the main domain is in bold (ok, actually it's normal, the rest is slightly greyed out). The URL bar is only about half the width of the browser window, however. I unfortunately do not remember what "new" setting I had to unchange to restore this behavior.
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and
2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to the library is, and then, at that stage, she will have access to _one_ journal.
I don't think it would be that difficult. I've spent most of my adult life getting degrees and then working in college/university settings. Most (all?) do restrict off-campus access to their electronic resources to students/faculty, but nearly every university library I've been in allows almost anyone to come in and you can either use their computers or in many cases your own laptop via wifi to access their electronic journals while you're on their network. You can usually buy a copy/print card for about $0.10/page and then print copies for personal use. Most libraries charge nothing, although I think I've seen a model where you can pay something like $10/semester for what amounts to a community access library card.
Another possibility, while I don't know if it's applicable to the journals being discussed in TFA, is that both places I have degrees from allow alumni free access to scientific literature via JSTOR. Other institutions do the same.
Unfortunately, we've been hit with the latter of these the last few days (data visualization, actually required for submitting the data to a public repo), and it's pissing my boss off. Not that it's that hard to check the "I understand the risks" box and click allow, but it is annoying. Yes, I suppose we could figure out how to whitelist that site - it's probably easy enough if I ever bother to take the 5 seconds to do so.
The rich didn't like their 12.4% + 2.9% haircut on something they'll never use, so the SS and Medicare taxes cap out at $113,700.
Half right - there is no cap on Medicare, but SS (FICA) taxes do cap out at $113,700.
We could solve a lot of SS's future problems by getting rid of that cap. I do agree that the self-employed get somewhat screwed, but it would be relatively easy to reduce how much of the "second half" of that they need to pay.
Of course, I'd much prefer to see capital gains taxed as ordinary income. If they government really wanted to do what the supposed purpose of the lower capitals gains rate is, i.e. encourage normal people to invest, they could exempt the first $20k or so of capital gains in any given year. Does anyone really think that someone like Warren Buffet is going to pull all of his money out of the markets because his (purely bogus example) 12% investment return is "only" ~8% after taxes? Also, if we did this, we wouldn't have to worry about the really rich shielding much of their earnings as "carried interest" or a "guaranteed bonus", both of which are taxed at capital gains rates.
The reserve has been turning a profit (a small one by federal standards at a few $10s of millions/year) for a while now. Depending on who you believe, all debts previously incurred by the reserve have been or are about to be paid off within the next 2 weeks. So, keeping it running costs taxpayers nothing at this point. And the larger companies using it do pay fees for access although I'm not completely sure what the fee structure is.
I don't know of any fusion reactors, other than maybe a few on again/off again research ones that require more energy in than they put out, so we're not getting helium from nuclear reactors but extracting it from natural gas mining.
Government labs and research products use a lot of the supply, but nowhere near "almost entirely". MRIs are probably the biggest use overall. Now, a lot of the helium is purchased using government research grants, but that's another story.
I'm unaware of any particular regulations as far as who can or can't buy helium. During the shutdown threat, the industrial gas providers were planning to prioritize "healthcare users", and some supply was to be guaranteed to federal users, but that's different than any sort of true regulation.
Oddly enough, that's essentially what at least 2 of the big 3 industrial gas suppliers suggested during the month or so leading up to the new bill - that they would pay 100% of the costs to run and maintain the facility. But the government (or at least BLM) told them they couldn't do that.
It probably shouldn't be the federal government's job, but the problem is that they were going to shut off the spigot essentially overnight. The helium reserve we're talking about supplies nearly 45% of all helium used in the US and roughly worldwide.
The newer ones are, or close enough. A direct quote from the director of our research MRI facility when I was looking to see if he'd be interested in possibly going in with our NMR facility on a helium recapture and liquefaction system:
Our current scanner already has a cryo-cooler built into the system. This can keep up the general boil off, but we do exceed the capacity of capture when the gradients are pulsing. It might be be hard to retro-fit this system with a secondary system to capture this residual boil off. The new 7T actually has two cryo-coolers and is zero boil of even when the gradients are running.
So, the older, less efficient, and smaller system boils off a bit of helium only when the MRI is actually collecting data, and the monstrous new scanner nearly never needs to have helium added to it.
And helium cannot be enriched or purified? Is it really better to let a (practically) non-renewable resource escape into space than save it for when it becomes economical to refine?
Emphasis mine
That's exactly what's been happening. Most of the natural gas extractors decided that as long as the government was selling helium at a very low price, it wasn't economical to collect it. AFAIK, Exxon-Mobil has one major site in Wyoming and that's about it (and it's currently down for "maintenance"). Of course, this is complete crap - they just don't want to be bothered.
Currently the BLM charges $84 per million cubic feet of crude helium (scroll halfway down the page or so). It takes ~27 cu.ft. of gas to make 1 liter of liquid. We get pretty good pricing and pay roughly $10/L of liquid helium. If we assume it costs $1 to purify and liquefy gas to make one liter, heck, if it costs $5 and the gas is only 50% pure, the "big 3" suppliers aren't losing any money and could easily pay more if the natural gas producers collected and sold the helium.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the fact that he'll be testifying remotely, the plane that they grounded that time was headed to somewhere in Latin America (Cuba or Ecuador I think). Do you really think the US would be allowed ground and search a plane anywhere in Europe that's chartered in and bound for an EU country?
This is exactly the reason that I have a workstation in our lab running Fedora instead of CentOS. I'd prefer to use a distro closer to RHEL, since that's what run some of our expensive instruments, but the drivers just weren't there and it's really not worth my time to sort out all the dependencies or compile a newer kernel without breaking other stuff in order to get support for newer hardware.
I'd also like to know what nasty bugs you're talking about in Fedora releases. I've had a few non-critical packages break for a week or so after an update, nearly all of them in rpmfusion and not the core Fedora repos, but that's about all.
It would probably lead to a better trade show, but I suspect that if you ban sales people, many companies, especially larger ones, will pull their sponsorship of the show.
Truly not sure whether to mod this funny or insightful.
On a related note, I love the number of trucks I see that are of the "Sport Offroad 4x4" variety that never have and never will go any further off road than parking on the grass at some local festival. It's all about appearances, you know.
Metamaterials Developed To Bend Sound Waves, Deflect Tsunamis
Is it really "developed" when it's not actually been made yet?
No, it's not, but making grandiose claims about what something could become in mere decades (just possibly, if everything falls perfectly into place) is how you try to get a bigger slice of the ever dwindling pie of research funding. You need to grossly oversell every result.
For those unaware, due to congressional meddling, the NSF effectively now requires you to tell it what great societal or economic problem your research is going to solve in the grant application, i.e. before you even get preliminary data. I'm afraid that overselling of all research is going to balloon in the next few years, as if it hasn't already.
That's what it sounds like, and furthermore, it also seems that they need a microphone near the computer in question - for a cell phone, nearly touching, or within ~4 meters with specialized equipment.
Given the level of social engineering to get the target to execute the code, or at least know they're using an email client/plugin combination that will autoexecute, combined with getting a microphone in the necessary location, it seems to me that it would be easier to just coerce the target into giving up their key. Blackmail, seduction, or the oft-cited xkcd $5 wrench method all seem much easier to pull off.
Unless I'm reading something wrong as I'm just starting on my morning coffee, yes, what you have in the last paragraph is something like I would propose, although it would probably need to be tweaked a bit for those way at the bottom of things. I'd personally probably still keep some sort of progressive tax rates, but cutting loopholes and giveaways that only practically apply at the upper end would go a long way on their own.
The problem comes when we have someone like Warren Buffet who self-admittedly ends up paying a much lower percentage of income in taxes than his secretary does, or the Mitt Romneys of the world who pay something like 12% total federal tax on ~$250M of income.
Although I made no comment as to whether the numbers were fair or not, since you asked IMO that point comes when the percentage of all income taxes paid by the rich is roughly equal to the percentage of all income they make - and we should include capital gains in the calculation. I'm pretty sure we'll disagree on this.
I realize that the rich do have a top federal tax bracket of something like 39%. They also stop paying payroll tax somewhere in the 28% bracket if I'm recalling the ranges correctly.
My relatively modest income requires almost 45% of my income go to income taxes, but if you make half of what I do, tax liability drops nearly to 15% (payroll tax only). At what point are the supposed rich paying their fair share? Are you thinking something closer to 75% of their income, or perhaps 100%....
I usually don't jump into these sorts of threads, but I have to call foul on the above.
Assuming SS (payroll) taxes take out 7% and you live in an expensive state with 10% upper tax bracket, that means you're paying 28% in federal taxes. That rate starts at just under $88k of AGI, which means before deductions you're probably making at least $100k. I can only consider that "modest" if you live in a very expensive area (NYC, SF, etc.).
Furthermore, every time I see anyone trot out numbers like 45% in taxes, they invariably are doing one of two things:
If I give the benefit of the doubt here and assume neither of these is the case ,to have a 45% overall probably means at least some of your income has to be in the 33% bracket, which starts at $183k and is way above "modest".
What will happen is that companies will spawn off sub-contractors which do all the coding and are completely offshore entities.
No, what will happen is that $BIG_COMPANY will bribe^Wlobby $GOVERNMENT to make sure that no such compulsory program ever exists.
Not sure where you're located, but can't you use bill pay through your bank/credit union to avoid the $1 charge to pay your gas and trash companies online directly?
But, but, the new shiny!
Seriously, and I think both parent and GP would agree, all this Javascript just bloats the internet. If it's all about the content, most of what I care about could be presented nearly as well, faster, and in some cases better, using 1990s era pure HTML. There are places it makes sense to use code (if it actually does something useful) but I think most web "developers" do it just because they can or because they don't want their site to look outdated.
So, Google just patented Facebook?
I was going to mod up, but:
1. You're already at +5
2. I just looked up and here is the content of my URL bar: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/28/2241252/web-literacy-standard-announced-by-mozilla
So, it at least looks like FF 24 can do what you want - even the main domain is in bold (ok, actually it's normal, the rest is slightly greyed out). The URL bar is only about half the width of the browser window, however. I unfortunately do not remember what "new" setting I had to unchange to restore this behavior.
She will have to find out:
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and 2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to the library is, and then, at that stage, she will have access to _one_ journal.
I don't think it would be that difficult. I've spent most of my adult life getting degrees and then working in college/university settings. Most (all?) do restrict off-campus access to their electronic resources to students/faculty, but nearly every university library I've been in allows almost anyone to come in and you can either use their computers or in many cases your own laptop via wifi to access their electronic journals while you're on their network. You can usually buy a copy/print card for about $0.10/page and then print copies for personal use. Most libraries charge nothing, although I think I've seen a model where you can pay something like $10/semester for what amounts to a community access library card.
Another possibility, while I don't know if it's applicable to the journals being discussed in TFA, is that both places I have degrees from allow alumni free access to scientific literature via JSTOR. Other institutions do the same.
And here I thought that Active View abomination was only bad because my computer at work is getting long in the tooth.
Unfortunately, we've been hit with the latter of these the last few days (data visualization, actually required for submitting the data to a public repo), and it's pissing my boss off. Not that it's that hard to check the "I understand the risks" box and click allow, but it is annoying. Yes, I suppose we could figure out how to whitelist that site - it's probably easy enough if I ever bother to take the 5 seconds to do so.
The rich didn't like their 12.4% + 2.9% haircut on something they'll never use, so the SS and Medicare taxes cap out at $113,700.
Half right - there is no cap on Medicare, but SS (FICA) taxes do cap out at $113,700.
We could solve a lot of SS's future problems by getting rid of that cap. I do agree that the self-employed get somewhat screwed, but it would be relatively easy to reduce how much of the "second half" of that they need to pay.
Of course, I'd much prefer to see capital gains taxed as ordinary income. If they government really wanted to do what the supposed purpose of the lower capitals gains rate is, i.e. encourage normal people to invest, they could exempt the first $20k or so of capital gains in any given year. Does anyone really think that someone like Warren Buffet is going to pull all of his money out of the markets because his (purely bogus example) 12% investment return is "only" ~8% after taxes? Also, if we did this, we wouldn't have to worry about the really rich shielding much of their earnings as "carried interest" or a "guaranteed bonus", both of which are taxed at capital gains rates.
The reserve has been turning a profit (a small one by federal standards at a few $10s of millions/year) for a while now. Depending on who you believe, all debts previously incurred by the reserve have been or are about to be paid off within the next 2 weeks. So, keeping it running costs taxpayers nothing at this point. And the larger companies using it do pay fees for access although I'm not completely sure what the fee structure is.
Wrong on several levels:
Oddly enough, that's essentially what at least 2 of the big 3 industrial gas suppliers suggested during the month or so leading up to the new bill - that they would pay 100% of the costs to run and maintain the facility. But the government (or at least BLM) told them they couldn't do that.
It probably shouldn't be the federal government's job, but the problem is that they were going to shut off the spigot essentially overnight. The helium reserve we're talking about supplies nearly 45% of all helium used in the US and roughly worldwide.
So, the older, less efficient, and smaller system boils off a bit of helium only when the MRI is actually collecting data, and the monstrous new scanner nearly never needs to have helium added to it.
And helium cannot be enriched or purified? Is it really better to let a (practically) non-renewable resource escape into space than save it for when it becomes economical to refine?
Emphasis mine
That's exactly what's been happening. Most of the natural gas extractors decided that as long as the government was selling helium at a very low price, it wasn't economical to collect it. AFAIK, Exxon-Mobil has one major site in Wyoming and that's about it (and it's currently down for "maintenance"). Of course, this is complete crap - they just don't want to be bothered.
Currently the BLM charges $84 per million cubic feet of crude helium (scroll halfway down the page or so). It takes ~27 cu.ft. of gas to make 1 liter of liquid. We get pretty good pricing and pay roughly $10/L of liquid helium. If we assume it costs $1 to purify and liquefy gas to make one liter, heck, if it costs $5 and the gas is only 50% pure, the "big 3" suppliers aren't losing any money and could easily pay more if the natural gas producers collected and sold the helium.
Actually, the US reserve is crude helium - the big industrial gas companies buy it and then purify it more.