The deficit is larger than the entire discretionary budget, unfortunately, so gp was correct that no amount of cost reduction will be sufficient to balance the budget.
It won't be soon but, at some point, enough cars will be electric that we will need an alternative to the fuel tax. But electric cars don't go to filling stations which makes a mileage tax based on visits to filling stations kind of pointless.
I should take this opportunity to you point out that Americans pay taxes on electricity already.
First, it is easy to fraudulently "roll back" an odometer in a number of ways. According to this site odometer fraud occurs at a rate of 45,000 vehicles per year.
Second, if calculated this way, you would getting taxed for wear and tear on privately owned and maintained roads. While this might be part of the intention, it seems ridiculous to tax people for driving on a private toll road that they've already paid to drive on. Heck, you'd be taxed for driving circles around your own driveway, if it had a loop in it.
I have to assume that this is related to this article.
Would this policy exempt electronic vehicles? Ethanol/Corn Derivatives? Motorcycles? Scooters?
The point of this device, I believe, was to specifically address the fact that these vehicle pay less tax on their gasoline and create some level of parity. Unless you want to put your tinfoil hat on and assume the real point is to install a GPS device in every car in the US (I concede that tin foil hats are probably not at all required for this interpretation).
Will I be taxed when driving on privately owned and maintained roads? The only way to exclude that would be some kind of GPS device, at which point, I'd rather be taxed per mile even from driving loops in my driveway, I can only imagine such a device being used for other nefarious purposes.
What I find most interesting about this summary is just how overvalued some of these companies became, and that someone actually was willing to pay that much:
reportedly trying to sell MySpace for $100 million, a fraction of the $580 million it originally paid for the social network in 2005. Parties interested in acquiring MySpace include private equity firm THL Partners, Redscout Ventures and Criterion Capital, owner of social network Bebo (the company AOL bought for $850 million and then sold for $10 million)
I mean... bought for $580M and sold for $100M... bought for $850M and sold for $10M... those are really big differences in the valuations of these things.
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
I can't wait until we 'learn' that neither Facebook nor Zynga are actually worth what people say they are now.
I'm confused. Is your "right" to internet access supposed to in some way make me want to let you free load off my internet connection? Or are you talking about my right to share my internet connection if I so choose? If it's the latter, that's something I can get behind, but I just want to be clear here. I know way too many people who think it's OK to steal their neighbor's bandwidth just because their neighbor set up an insecure access point. I use the term "steal" to describe this for two reasons. First, they really are stealing, as when they use the bandwidth, the person paying for it can't. Second, no one I know as taken the time to mention to their neighbor that a) they have a non-secured access point b) they are using it.
If you mean my right to share if I want, then I should point out that if I do share my connection, I am ultimately (for good reason) responsible for what you do with it. If I let you do some work in my garage and it turned out you were making meth or pipe bombs, I would be responsible to some extent for these actions. How is what you're doing using my internet connection any different?
If one of my neighbor's approached me about being allowed to share my internet access, I might let them, but I'd rather not let some random dude sitting in a car parked in front of my house do the same. Especially if he was on my lawn. Then I'd have to shake my cane at him.
Ten years ago, who even thought you could play music on a computer?
I was definitely playing mp3s on my computer in 2000. Limewire was very popular then, as was Kazaa (or however it was spelled). Torrenting didn't exist yet, but 2001 is certainly not a time when you couldn't play CD quality music on a computer.
The collision and delay reporting mechanism will be cool too, because we'll be able to feed fake reports into the system and ensure we get to work on empty roads.
This was the first thing I thought when I read the summary as well.
Actually, as noted in the summary (you didn't even read the summary?) the system stopped working when someone scanned an alcoholic beverage, as this requires a human to manually verify the id. It might actually have been that everyone who walked in the store at least tried to be honest, but just couldn't pay because the machine was "broken".
Of course, if you limit the MAC addresses of computers that your router will offer addresses to, it doesn't REALLY matter what kind of password you put on your network. This is a very simple and secure method, that really requires virtually no extra effort on your part (assuming you're moderately tech savvy).
I implemented this on my home network the other day when I noticed a suspicious looking connection to my network. I've been monitoring the network fairly closely since then, and I haven't seen anything I don't expect to be on the network since then.
On a side note, does anyone know if would be considered wire fraud in the US to do something malicious to someone that connects to your network illegitimately? Like present them with a fake page for their email service login page indicating their account has been terminated or something along those lines?
Parents can learn more about how entertainment media for children are rated here. This site describes the different ratings systems, and provides links to the organizations that sponsor them.
“[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” he said. “Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences.”
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
No, this all makes slightly less sense and is somewhat less coherent than the time cube. On the plus side, its shorter, so at least he comes to his "point" faster.
Every American who expressed negative feelings about the President would be suspected of racism.
Would I be a racist if I were to criticize (that is usually considered expressing negative feelings about something) the president's economic policy? Would that really make me a racist? How about if I criticized his healthcare reform? His choice of pet? Where would YOU draw the line? Where do you think the American government would?
I was waiting for the punchline reading your post, and then I realized you were serious. Then I got more than a little scared.
The only problem the US faces that is has not tried to fix is Washington DC. Entitlement spending will cripple this country. The discretionary spending (where those mythical 39 billion dollars from recent cuts came out of) is less than a third of the budget. The rest is guaranteed spending. Meaning we could cut everything but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense, and still be spending negatively.
You are absolutely correct, except for one thing. Defense spending is part of the discretionary budget.
There's already pretty damning video clips of many US politicians that are widely available. It doesn't seem to have any real impact on their ability to get (re) elected here. Watching the Daily Show for a week, you will come up with numerous examples.
Unless of course you're referring to the effects these sorts of things might have on the political proceedings in smoke filled rooms.
I work for a company that is currently trying to hire a java developer. We have a test we give applicants that basically involves reading in a file, doing some text processing on it and writing the file out again. I find it shocking that, interviewing 5-10 applicants a week for the last month, less than a handful were able to complete this task in an hour. More shocking are the number of people who have CS degrees who don't even end up writing a single line of code in their hour.
When I was a freshman in college (God, that was over 10 years ago!) there was a girl on my floor who was majoring in computer engineering. She had seriously never used a computer before. She lasted about two weeks.
I assume these are the kinds of people you are referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
The deficit is larger than the entire discretionary budget, unfortunately, so gp was correct that no amount of cost reduction will be sufficient to balance the budget.
It won't be soon but, at some point, enough cars will be electric that we will need an alternative to the fuel tax. But electric cars don't go to filling stations which makes a mileage tax based on visits to filling stations kind of pointless.
I should take this opportunity to you point out that Americans pay taxes on electricity already.
There are two problems with this approach.
First, it is easy to fraudulently "roll back" an odometer in a number of ways. According to this site odometer fraud occurs at a rate of 45,000 vehicles per year.
Second, if calculated this way, you would getting taxed for wear and tear on privately owned and maintained roads. While this might be part of the intention, it seems ridiculous to tax people for driving on a private toll road that they've already paid to drive on. Heck, you'd be taxed for driving circles around your own driveway, if it had a loop in it.
I have to assume that this is related to this article.
Would this policy exempt electronic vehicles? Ethanol/Corn Derivatives? Motorcycles? Scooters?
The point of this device, I believe, was to specifically address the fact that these vehicle pay less tax on their gasoline and create some level of parity. Unless you want to put your tinfoil hat on and assume the real point is to install a GPS device in every car in the US (I concede that tin foil hats are probably not at all required for this interpretation).
Will I be taxed when driving on privately owned and maintained roads? The only way to exclude that would be some kind of GPS device, at which point, I'd rather be taxed per mile even from driving loops in my driveway, I can only imagine such a device being used for other nefarious purposes.
I take my lunch at 1PM because of the terrible driving here. I also am usually not hungry until then either.
What I find most interesting about this summary is just how overvalued some of these companies became, and that someone actually was willing to pay that much:
I mean ... bought for $580M and sold for $100M ... bought for $850M and sold for $10M ... those are really big differences in the valuations of these things.
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
I can't wait until we 'learn' that neither Facebook nor Zynga are actually worth what people say they are now.
And groupon, don't forget them.
No offense, but your implication that you need a specialized degree to read an instruction manual makes absolutely no sense at all.
I'm confused. Is your "right" to internet access supposed to in some way make me want to let you free load off my internet connection? Or are you talking about my right to share my internet connection if I so choose? If it's the latter, that's something I can get behind, but I just want to be clear here. I know way too many people who think it's OK to steal their neighbor's bandwidth just because their neighbor set up an insecure access point. I use the term "steal" to describe this for two reasons. First, they really are stealing, as when they use the bandwidth, the person paying for it can't. Second, no one I know as taken the time to mention to their neighbor that a) they have a non-secured access point b) they are using it.
If you mean my right to share if I want, then I should point out that if I do share my connection, I am ultimately (for good reason) responsible for what you do with it. If I let you do some work in my garage and it turned out you were making meth or pipe bombs, I would be responsible to some extent for these actions. How is what you're doing using my internet connection any different?
If one of my neighbor's approached me about being allowed to share my internet access, I might let them, but I'd rather not let some random dude sitting in a car parked in front of my house do the same. Especially if he was on my lawn. Then I'd have to shake my cane at him.
Ten years ago, who even thought you could play music on a computer?
I was definitely playing mp3s on my computer in 2000. Limewire was very popular then, as was Kazaa (or however it was spelled). Torrenting didn't exist yet, but 2001 is certainly not a time when you couldn't play CD quality music on a computer.
The collision and delay reporting mechanism will be cool too, because we'll be able to feed fake reports into the system and ensure we get to work on empty roads.
This was the first thing I thought when I read the summary as well.
Actually, as noted in the summary (you didn't even read the summary?) the system stopped working when someone scanned an alcoholic beverage, as this requires a human to manually verify the id. It might actually have been that everyone who walked in the store at least tried to be honest, but just couldn't pay because the machine was "broken".
Reminds me of Clerks a bit, I must say
Of course, if you limit the MAC addresses of computers that your router will offer addresses to, it doesn't REALLY matter what kind of password you put on your network. This is a very simple and secure method, that really requires virtually no extra effort on your part (assuming you're moderately tech savvy).
I implemented this on my home network the other day when I noticed a suspicious looking connection to my network. I've been monitoring the network fairly closely since then, and I haven't seen anything I don't expect to be on the network since then.
On a side note, does anyone know if would be considered wire fraud in the US to do something malicious to someone that connects to your network illegitimately? Like present them with a fake page for their email service login page indicating their account has been terminated or something along those lines?
Parents can learn more about how entertainment media for children are rated here. This site describes the different ratings systems, and provides links to the organizations that sponsor them.
I guess you did read it too fast.
Is it my imagination, or is the summary one sentence short of being the entire text of the article?
How about libraries of congress? I understand those analogies too...
From TFA:
“[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” he said. “Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences.”
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
No, this all makes slightly less sense and is somewhat less coherent than the time cube. On the plus side, its shorter, so at least he comes to his "point" faster.
Every American who expressed negative feelings about the President would be suspected of racism.
Would I be a racist if I were to criticize (that is usually considered expressing negative feelings about something) the president's economic policy? Would that really make me a racist? How about if I criticized his healthcare reform? His choice of pet? Where would YOU draw the line? Where do you think the American government would?
I was waiting for the punchline reading your post, and then I realized you were serious. Then I got more than a little scared.
The only problem the US faces that is has not tried to fix is Washington DC. Entitlement spending will cripple this country. The discretionary spending (where those mythical 39 billion dollars from recent cuts came out of) is less than a third of the budget. The rest is guaranteed spending. Meaning we could cut everything but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense, and still be spending negatively.
You are absolutely correct, except for one thing. Defense spending is part of the discretionary budget.
Nerds with baseball bats in a field... what could possibly go wrong?
There's already pretty damning video clips of many US politicians that are widely available. It doesn't seem to have any real impact on their ability to get (re) elected here. Watching the Daily Show for a week, you will come up with numerous examples.
Unless of course you're referring to the effects these sorts of things might have on the political proceedings in smoke filled rooms.
That Anonymous Coward guy is going to have a mailbox full of goatse spam.
With the kinds of responses he's posted to some of my posts, let me assure you... he already does!
I work for a company that is currently trying to hire a java developer. We have a test we give applicants that basically involves reading in a file, doing some text processing on it and writing the file out again. I find it shocking that, interviewing 5-10 applicants a week for the last month, less than a handful were able to complete this task in an hour. More shocking are the number of people who have CS degrees who don't even end up writing a single line of code in their hour.
I have to wonder if that isn't because the Chinese just execute a lot of the criminals the US puts in prison.
When I was a freshman in college (God, that was over 10 years ago!) there was a girl on my floor who was majoring in computer engineering. She had seriously never used a computer before. She lasted about two weeks.
I assume these are the kinds of people you are referring to.