I'm not sure which are exempt from offering the basic service tier (it's not clear); I thought it was required by law.
In theory, DirecTV offers international basic for $10/mo, which is your locals plus a short list of non-english channels. Not sure what the requirements are to get hooked up with that, but if all you need are the locals it might work.
It is legal, and it is just as safe as any small car on the road. It's far more safe in any collision than a bike. Yes, it looks a bit goofy, but that's basically the shape you're going to have to live with if you want a Cd of 0.11, which is what you'll need to get the kind of range/kWh they're getting. And you won't get the aptera's milage on a bike because the Cd of a biker is pretty darned poor (sorry, no cite).
Hell, as a non-recipient of non-reissuable coupons which have since expired, I'd love to get a replacement set. That said, I'd prefer my directTV signal to _not_ be an uplink of the abyssmally poor analog signal which the local stations are allowed to send. (Yes, DTV is complicit in only accepting their NTSC feed, but if the only feeds available were digital...)
If the pharm cos annual reports are correct, they spend less on development than they do on marketing. That's not to say that development isn't expensive, but rather that the bulk of the cost of the drugs is not tied up in research.
Chances are, if patents were not available, there would be slower progress in drugs is the "hot" markets, but would likely only slow a bit in many areas. The slack would be taken up by other research avenues. Humans have very diverse, but focused, goals - someone who is really good at research and strives to develop new cures will not be substantially deterred by less lavish facilities or a lower salary, simply less efficient. The advantage is that they will not be pressured into striving to determine a cure for what the marketing department thinks will make the most money and will more likely pursue personally gratifying projects (such as at research universities).
I won't argue that the windfall of blockbuster drugs helps fund a more rapid pace of development, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that if such monopolistic based funding were eliminated that there would be no furtherance of pharmaceutical research. Would your office eliminate all drug trials if you weren't paid? Would you still offer them for patients who are most likely to be benefited by a proposed new drug?
You watch PBS, so I presume you contribute. Most who contribute do so for more than the $40 a converter will cost. You seem to have enough spare cash for an internet connection, so I suppose you could just go fully online, too.
FWIW, I ordered two coupons (for the two TVs I have that are primarily antenna) and they never arrived. I also wrote to get replacements and got a "fuck off" response. *shrug* I don't care too much.
Besides, the best way to make the change is to cut off the signal. There _is_ a replacement signal, and it costs about 5 hours of pay, 3 cartons of cigarettes, or less than a month's worth of cable TV. Not really a deal breaker for all but the poorest of families. If you need TV, you'll buy a cheap converter form Wally World. If not, you won't.
x264 is very processor intensive to decode; you'd need a Core 2 duo running at (not sure here) probably 2.4-2.8 GHz to successfully decode that content at 720p. Not sure of other resolutions. Most people who are able to decode with slower processors likely have hardware decoders in their video cards which do most of the heavy lifting. When I built my media PC, I skimped on the processor (1.6GHz C2D clocked at 2.2) and made sure the video card could decode AVC (aka x264) in hardware.
My laptop, A 1.7GHz P mobile which can smoothly run WMVs at 720p (but not at 1080, also not sure of the actual codec...the stuff from MS website) can't even sniff at running a 720p x264.
Yes, but trains take a wickedly large amount of infrastructure per mile. Sure, airports are expensive, but they can go anywhere. Tracks go from point A to point B and cannot be retasked. Also, nobody seems to try and stop airplanes in flight, but everyone wants a train stop, which means by the time a high speed train gets up to speed it has to decelerate for the next stop. This is what makes traveling by train up and down the east coast as slow as automotive travel, and why a 500km/h train won't get from DC to Boston any faster, in practical terms, than a 100km/h train.
The problem with infrastructure is that we don't have slave labor to put it in place. It costs millions of dollars per mile to build a highway, and (if I remember correctly) tens of millions (to 100+M) per mile for high speed rail. There's just no payback for that kind of infrastructure cost. You can buy a commercial airliner for just several miles of track, and with the exception of the first and last mile of the journey there is no fixed infrastructure to build.
Rail is a great solution for isolated cases, but it is severely limited in the US due to the locations where it is actually financially viable.
If everyone is in ownership or upper management, how do you get any work done? We need people to do the grunt work, or the owners and management will have nothing to live off of, as they don't actually produce anything - they simply guide the real workforce. You need to stop discouraging people from rising above their lot as proels, or you'll have to go get a real job.
Disclaimer: I am owner and management, but since it's a small business I spend about 80% of my time doing actual work (engineering) as well...when I'm not surfing slashdot.
I beg to disagree on the cheap/free front. Most of the best business applications are fee based. I say this because although there exists free/OSS software to perform most of the functions that can be done, the most efficient and independent versions cost real money. I would be very disappointed to have to return to a pencil and paper calendar, for example. The best (imho) application for calendaring is a commercial program. Google might be an option, but you have to be connected to use the full functionality...and there just isn't data (or even voice) coverage everywhere, especially in the US where 80+% of the country's land mass has no digital service. Also, my phone is my GPS. There are monthly subscriptions for the GPS software from my provider, and Google earth is free, but both are critically flawed in that they require a data connection to perform properly. That's great, but I usually don't get lost in big cities; I get lost in the middle of nowhere and have to find my way back home. For that, you need persistent maps, and to get that you have to pay.
You don't need complex programs, I'll admit, but the programs you do carry become mission critical apps. They must perform in real time and there's precious little leeway. It may be fine to reboot your computer due to an exception while you go get a cup of coffee, but when you need to find information on a meeting that's about to begin or place a call, a 5 minute time-out isn't an option. (For the record, I've spend close to 15 minutes trying to look up the phone number for a restaurant that I was sure was less than 5 minutes from my location - I couldn't get it because the "free" browser didn't support Flash, and the company's website required flash to enter.)
The rejection of the making available argument appears to have stuck, but in dismissing the case does the law still recognize the summary judgment as a precedent for future cases?
I can't say for certain, but I suspect your town got taken for a ride - or the astronomers managed to get you to pay for better lighting. Here's a point reference (from http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/equipment/lighting/section3.cfm?attr=0) which puts LED around 20-40 lumens per watt (commercial stuff; there's development which has it closer to 75), vs LPS at 100 to 180 lumens per watt. So chances are you're fixtures are throwing out a lot less light (which is typical) to save the energy.
Now, on the astronomy side, it's a big win - LPS has a shitty spectrum and intereferes mightily with any night viewing which doesn't require that illumination.
Don't feel bad, though. My town would eat it up, too - they're a bunch of hippies. I'd be happy for the darker skies, even if it cost a bit more. But it's not going to get you brighter roads for less money - the physics just isn't on LED's side.
I seem to remember the economy of California, taken by itself, would be ranked in the top ten countries in the world. Sure, you could ignore it, but you do so at your own financial peril. See, somebody will sell to them; eventually many ideas from California are co-opted by other places. Then instead of having your product ready to go you find your market shrinking with each added jurisdiction. Eventually you have very little market or you have to do the R&D to comply, and the others who did it before you have already retooled.
There are some advantages to being a laggard, but often the big strike is made early - everybody else ends up just pushing commodity products.
Too late, CFLs are already mandated. LEDs aren't mature enough for general lighting*.
1 Yes, they exist; no they're not even close to economical even if you gave them away for free. The number of fixtures required to produce the desired general illumination levels in a typical large room (family/living) would still cost more than even the best CFLs at full retail. And there's no $/lumen savings.
Actually, 0.5mm, better known in these parts as 0.020", is a pretty decently thick if stiffened properly. It also, I should add, has an extra mm on the exterior side, which forms the bottom of the computer. There's more space "wasted" in this form factor due to the use of cylindrical Li-Ion cells than case material.
You need one card per device. Every 6 months (or every new device) you buy one with double the capacity. It costs you the same as the last one and you have the extra space you think you might need. Keep the old one as a blank backup, in case you happen to need more space all of a sudden and find your current card full and a laptop to dump to unavailable. Hell, if your devices use the same size card, you only really need one emergency card, and you clock through the ones you have every 6 months, putting the new, big one in the "prime" device and pushing the stack down through the less used devices.
I have uSD in 1, 2, and 8 GB varieties, and will pony for a 16 when they hit $40 (then practically my whole music collection will fit on my phone)
The 2 is in a super small usb reader (Adata) that resides in my wallet for emergency transfers I have SD in 1,2,4,8, and now 16GB for my SD cameras, of which I "own" 3 (two for work and one for my daughter). Yup, the 16 is in mine, 8 in daughter's, 4 in the second work camera, I carry the 2 as a backup.
Nothing resides on my SD cards for longer than necessary, because they have no way to get automatically backed up. Everything gets dumped and deleted from the SD asap. The files then reside on a redundant array (mirrored drives on W2003 or an Unraid array), and get backed up to a removable drive every night with syncback.
Actually, and 8 hour life implies about 7.5 hours of maximum working time, as you'll need to shut down with a safe margin of power. It's also at some reduced functional level generally. The mystery is how they got the energy density up without crippling the processor(s) by significantly underclocking/undervolting them to provide a lower wattage drain on the system. Apple does not use magical parts that use less energy when it comes to the core items (nvidia/intel graphics, intel processors, COTS drives and displays). They can tweak the rest of the system, but the real power hogs are still going to control.
6.6lbs is pretty nice, though, as that's what my 15.4" dell workstation weighs (though it's a bit old; almost 4 years), and most 17 inchers are north of 8 lbs.
My biggest question about the battery life is how it compares with real world / real work. I would presume discrete graphics is a must (who does onboard on a high end laptop?), as is bluetooth and wireless network on 100%, and screen brightness at max. If that's the 7 hours, it'll dual boot into XP/Vista, and can dock with my desktop monitor/kbd/speakers/network/usb hub I'll put one on order. That would be a sweet system for $2700.
My Dell 70 battery's case is less than 0.5mm thick, and about 0.1mm thick on at least one side. Even at 1.5mmx2 though, you're still only getting a 6% recovery of volume.
It's a pissing match now; there's no way apple will back down.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
It's much better now. 4 years ago (last major foray) there was a lot less content, and 8 years ago (initial foray) there was precious little.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
I did that with an O'reilly Redhat book. Didn't really help much. It told you how to set up various parts of the system, mostly from the GUI, and how to use the various GUI apps, but not what they did. Man pages don't help at all, really. Oh, sure, they tell you what the command syntax is, and some of them are very good (which implies...), but if you don't know what command you need to run your stuck (dir? catalog? oh, ls...that was my next guess!).
I think most of what I've picked up of use came from hacking around in my old DTivo. I'm still not 100% certain of where/what all the startup files are, but the need to knwo what started when, and where the specific drivers are was helpful. Windows has fucked up everything with the registry (and the zillion different places to hide stuff), but knowing where and how to deal with the old win.ini, autoexec.bat, and config.sys files, and putting programs in/programs, temporary files in/temp (or/temp/system), user data in/files (fuck MS and the "My" prefix, btw), system files in Windows (and fonts in/windows/fonts...etc) allows an understanding of how the system is organized and where to look when things don't act like they should.
My issue with most books is that they either don't have the patience for these fundamentals, or they're geared at power administrators and delve so deep into the functions that the overall structure gets lost in the details.
Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It sounds trite, but there's a dearth of documentation for those of us who know Windows (and, probably more specifically, *-DOS and other CLIs) who can get thoroughly lost in Linux GUIs simply because we lack the fundamentals taught in a 7th grade linux programming class (which probably doesn't exist like the ones we took back in the 70s, when GUIs effectively didn't exist for the home user). I'm convinced linux isn't hard, though I've tried and abandoned it two or three times now for failure to run "required" apps that are windows only, or because the care and feeding is beyond my ability. In that time, though, I've found an inverse bell curve of documentation. Exploring GUI widgets is commonplace in tutorials; discussing minutiae is easily found on forums. Getting a really good walk through of the basics (directory structure, startup options/scripts - where they are and how to use them, etc.) is hard to find.
As for the cover...well, at least my 6 year old daughter would approve.
There wouldn't be a financial incentive to underproduce, since the tax is on receipts rather than fixed assets (which is another way to tax). I dislike social engineering via the tax code, but this one does have some interesting side effects. The main one is that is rewards efficient supply chains - the more middlemen there are, the higher the effective tax on a product since the money gets taxed at each exchange. That may seem to benefit the largest corporations, and it does to an extent, but is also discourages phantom corporations in tax havens, where a conglomerate sells to a shadow company in a low-tax state, which then resells to the actual retail stores. The price to the shadow company is low, the price to the retail store is high. The retail stores never make money, but the shadow corporation in the low-tax state makes a lot (but pays little or no state tax due to local tax laws). This would effectively double tax such endeavors at the federal level.
One other effect is that it would favor the direct-to-market vendors such as local craftsmen and farmers. If you consider a farmer selling to a wholesaler, selling to a distributer, selling to a corporate market, the direct sale is not only cheaper by the overhead but also by the tax in between. I gives the local producer an extra cushion when selling his own wares locally.
The devil is still in the details. Stocks would, I expect, be subject to the receipts tax (you are, of course, buying equity), but I'm not sure how it would affect the various forms of bank accounts. I believe loans and deposits would reasonably be exempt since no actual sale transaction occured, but I'm not intimate with the law regarding that sort of thing.
I keep telling people we should drop the tax rate on corporations in the US to about 2-4%. That would make it one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Of course, I recommend that they do that and change the tax system to gross receipts basis. Nobody seems to like that part.
Slashdot Mirror
As an add on to the sibling post, you might see the fcc flier: http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cablechannels.pdf
I'm not sure which are exempt from offering the basic service tier (it's not clear); I thought it was required by law.
In theory, DirecTV offers international basic for $10/mo, which is your locals plus a short list of non-english channels. Not sure what the requirements are to get hooked up with that, but if all you need are the locals it might work.
It is legal, and it is just as safe as any small car on the road. It's far more safe in any collision than a bike. Yes, it looks a bit goofy, but that's basically the shape you're going to have to live with if you want a Cd of 0.11, which is what you'll need to get the kind of range/kWh they're getting. And you won't get the aptera's milage on a bike because the Cd of a biker is pretty darned poor (sorry, no cite).
Hell, as a non-recipient of non-reissuable coupons which have since expired, I'd love to get a replacement set. That said, I'd prefer my directTV signal to _not_ be an uplink of the abyssmally poor analog signal which the local stations are allowed to send. (Yes, DTV is complicit in only accepting their NTSC feed, but if the only feeds available were digital...)
If the pharm cos annual reports are correct, they spend less on development than they do on marketing. That's not to say that development isn't expensive, but rather that the bulk of the cost of the drugs is not tied up in research.
Chances are, if patents were not available, there would be slower progress in drugs is the "hot" markets, but would likely only slow a bit in many areas. The slack would be taken up by other research avenues. Humans have very diverse, but focused, goals - someone who is really good at research and strives to develop new cures will not be substantially deterred by less lavish facilities or a lower salary, simply less efficient. The advantage is that they will not be pressured into striving to determine a cure for what the marketing department thinks will make the most money and will more likely pursue personally gratifying projects (such as at research universities).
I won't argue that the windfall of blockbuster drugs helps fund a more rapid pace of development, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that if such monopolistic based funding were eliminated that there would be no furtherance of pharmaceutical research. Would your office eliminate all drug trials if you weren't paid? Would you still offer them for patients who are most likely to be benefited by a proposed new drug?
You watch PBS, so I presume you contribute. Most who contribute do so for more than the $40 a converter will cost. You seem to have enough spare cash for an internet connection, so I suppose you could just go fully online, too.
FWIW, I ordered two coupons (for the two TVs I have that are primarily antenna) and they never arrived. I also wrote to get replacements and got a "fuck off" response. *shrug* I don't care too much.
Besides, the best way to make the change is to cut off the signal. There _is_ a replacement signal, and it costs about 5 hours of pay, 3 cartons of cigarettes, or less than a month's worth of cable TV. Not really a deal breaker for all but the poorest of families. If you need TV, you'll buy a cheap converter form Wally World. If not, you won't.
Hardly earth shattering.
"Breakdown in security at the detention facility" and
"Shot while trying to flee"
I'm not much for the death penalty, but this kid should fry.
x264 is very processor intensive to decode; you'd need a Core 2 duo running at (not sure here) probably 2.4-2.8 GHz to successfully decode that content at 720p. Not sure of other resolutions. Most people who are able to decode with slower processors likely have hardware decoders in their video cards which do most of the heavy lifting. When I built my media PC, I skimped on the processor (1.6GHz C2D clocked at 2.2) and made sure the video card could decode AVC (aka x264) in hardware.
My laptop, A 1.7GHz P mobile which can smoothly run WMVs at 720p (but not at 1080, also not sure of the actual codec...the stuff from MS website) can't even sniff at running a 720p x264.
Yes, but trains take a wickedly large amount of infrastructure per mile. Sure, airports are expensive, but they can go anywhere. Tracks go from point A to point B and cannot be retasked. Also, nobody seems to try and stop airplanes in flight, but everyone wants a train stop, which means by the time a high speed train gets up to speed it has to decelerate for the next stop. This is what makes traveling by train up and down the east coast as slow as automotive travel, and why a 500km/h train won't get from DC to Boston any faster, in practical terms, than a 100km/h train.
The problem with infrastructure is that we don't have slave labor to put it in place. It costs millions of dollars per mile to build a highway, and (if I remember correctly) tens of millions (to 100+M) per mile for high speed rail. There's just no payback for that kind of infrastructure cost. You can buy a commercial airliner for just several miles of track, and with the exception of the first and last mile of the journey there is no fixed infrastructure to build.
Rail is a great solution for isolated cases, but it is severely limited in the US due to the locations where it is actually financially viable.
If everyone is in ownership or upper management, how do you get any work done? We need people to do the grunt work, or the owners and management will have nothing to live off of, as they don't actually produce anything - they simply guide the real workforce. You need to stop discouraging people from rising above their lot as proels, or you'll have to go get a real job.
Disclaimer: I am owner and management, but since it's a small business I spend about 80% of my time doing actual work (engineering) as well...when I'm not surfing slashdot.
I beg to disagree on the cheap/free front. Most of the best business applications are fee based. I say this because although there exists free/OSS software to perform most of the functions that can be done, the most efficient and independent versions cost real money. I would be very disappointed to have to return to a pencil and paper calendar, for example. The best (imho) application for calendaring is a commercial program. Google might be an option, but you have to be connected to use the full functionality...and there just isn't data (or even voice) coverage everywhere, especially in the US where 80+% of the country's land mass has no digital service. Also, my phone is my GPS. There are monthly subscriptions for the GPS software from my provider, and Google earth is free, but both are critically flawed in that they require a data connection to perform properly. That's great, but I usually don't get lost in big cities; I get lost in the middle of nowhere and have to find my way back home. For that, you need persistent maps, and to get that you have to pay.
You don't need complex programs, I'll admit, but the programs you do carry become mission critical apps. They must perform in real time and there's precious little leeway. It may be fine to reboot your computer due to an exception while you go get a cup of coffee, but when you need to find information on a meeting that's about to begin or place a call, a 5 minute time-out isn't an option. (For the record, I've spend close to 15 minutes trying to look up the phone number for a restaurant that I was sure was less than 5 minutes from my location - I couldn't get it because the "free" browser didn't support Flash, and the company's website required flash to enter.)
The rejection of the making available argument appears to have stuck, but in dismissing the case does the law still recognize the summary judgment as a precedent for future cases?
I can't say for certain, but I suspect your town got taken for a ride - or the astronomers managed to get you to pay for better lighting. Here's a point reference (from http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/equipment/lighting/section3.cfm?attr=0) which puts LED around 20-40 lumens per watt (commercial stuff; there's development which has it closer to 75), vs LPS at 100 to 180 lumens per watt. So chances are you're fixtures are throwing out a lot less light (which is typical) to save the energy.
Now, on the astronomy side, it's a big win - LPS has a shitty spectrum and intereferes mightily with any night viewing which doesn't require that illumination.
Don't feel bad, though. My town would eat it up, too - they're a bunch of hippies. I'd be happy for the darker skies, even if it cost a bit more. But it's not going to get you brighter roads for less money - the physics just isn't on LED's side.
I seem to remember the economy of California, taken by itself, would be ranked in the top ten countries in the world. Sure, you could ignore it, but you do so at your own financial peril. See, somebody will sell to them; eventually many ideas from California are co-opted by other places. Then instead of having your product ready to go you find your market shrinking with each added jurisdiction. Eventually you have very little market or you have to do the R&D to comply, and the others who did it before you have already retooled.
There are some advantages to being a laggard, but often the big strike is made early - everybody else ends up just pushing commodity products.
Too late, CFLs are already mandated. LEDs aren't mature enough for general lighting*.
1 Yes, they exist; no they're not even close to economical even if you gave them away for free. The number of fixtures required to produce the desired general illumination levels in a typical large room (family/living) would still cost more than even the best CFLs at full retail. And there's no $/lumen savings.
Actually, 0.5mm, better known in these parts as 0.020", is a pretty decently thick if stiffened properly. It also, I should add, has an extra mm on the exterior side, which forms the bottom of the computer. There's more space "wasted" in this form factor due to the use of cylindrical Li-Ion cells than case material.
You need one card per device. Every 6 months (or every new device) you buy one with double the capacity. It costs you the same as the last one and you have the extra space you think you might need. Keep the old one as a blank backup, in case you happen to need more space all of a sudden and find your current card full and a laptop to dump to unavailable. Hell, if your devices use the same size card, you only really need one emergency card, and you clock through the ones you have every 6 months, putting the new, big one in the "prime" device and pushing the stack down through the less used devices.
I have uSD in 1, 2, and 8 GB varieties, and will pony for a 16 when they hit $40 (then practically my whole music collection will fit on my phone)
The 2 is in a super small usb reader (Adata) that resides in my wallet for emergency transfers
I have SD in 1,2,4,8, and now 16GB for my SD cameras, of which I "own" 3 (two for work and one for my daughter). Yup, the 16 is in mine, 8 in daughter's, 4 in the second work camera, I carry the 2 as a backup.
Nothing resides on my SD cards for longer than necessary, because they have no way to get automatically backed up. Everything gets dumped and deleted from the SD asap. The files then reside on a redundant array (mirrored drives on W2003 or an Unraid array), and get backed up to a removable drive every night with syncback.
Actually, and 8 hour life implies about 7.5 hours of maximum working time, as you'll need to shut down with a safe margin of power. It's also at some reduced functional level generally. The mystery is how they got the energy density up without crippling the processor(s) by significantly underclocking/undervolting them to provide a lower wattage drain on the system. Apple does not use magical parts that use less energy when it comes to the core items (nvidia/intel graphics, intel processors, COTS drives and displays). They can tweak the rest of the system, but the real power hogs are still going to control.
6.6lbs is pretty nice, though, as that's what my 15.4" dell workstation weighs (though it's a bit old; almost 4 years), and most 17 inchers are north of 8 lbs.
My biggest question about the battery life is how it compares with real world / real work. I would presume discrete graphics is a must (who does onboard on a high end laptop?), as is bluetooth and wireless network on 100%, and screen brightness at max. If that's the 7 hours, it'll dual boot into XP/Vista, and can dock with my desktop monitor/kbd/speakers/network/usb hub I'll put one on order. That would be a sweet system for $2700.
My Dell 70 battery's case is less than 0.5mm thick, and about 0.1mm thick on at least one side. Even at 1.5mmx2 though, you're still only getting a 6% recovery of volume.
It's a pissing match now; there's no way apple will back down.
It's much better now. 4 years ago (last major foray) there was a lot less content, and 8 years ago (initial foray) there was precious little.
I did that with an O'reilly Redhat book. Didn't really help much. It told you how to set up various parts of the system, mostly from the GUI, and how to use the various GUI apps, but not what they did. Man pages don't help at all, really. Oh, sure, they tell you what the command syntax is, and some of them are very good (which implies...), but if you don't know what command you need to run your stuck (dir? catalog? oh, ls...that was my next guess!).
I think most of what I've picked up of use came from hacking around in my old DTivo. I'm still not 100% certain of where/what all the startup files are, but the need to knwo what started when, and where the specific drivers are was helpful. Windows has fucked up everything with the registry (and the zillion different places to hide stuff), but knowing where and how to deal with the old win.ini, autoexec.bat, and config.sys files, and putting programs in /programs, temporary files in /temp (or /temp/system), user data in /files (fuck MS and the "My" prefix, btw), system files in Windows (and fonts in /windows/fonts...etc) allows an understanding of how the system is organized and where to look when things don't act like they should.
My issue with most books is that they either don't have the patience for these fundamentals, or they're geared at power administrators and delve so deep into the functions that the overall structure gets lost in the details.
It sounds trite, but there's a dearth of documentation for those of us who know Windows (and, probably more specifically, *-DOS and other CLIs) who can get thoroughly lost in Linux GUIs simply because we lack the fundamentals taught in a 7th grade linux programming class (which probably doesn't exist like the ones we took back in the 70s, when GUIs effectively didn't exist for the home user). I'm convinced linux isn't hard, though I've tried and abandoned it two or three times now for failure to run "required" apps that are windows only, or because the care and feeding is beyond my ability. In that time, though, I've found an inverse bell curve of documentation. Exploring GUI widgets is commonplace in tutorials; discussing minutiae is easily found on forums. Getting a really good walk through of the basics (directory structure, startup options/scripts - where they are and how to use them, etc.) is hard to find.
As for the cover...well, at least my 6 year old daughter would approve.
There wouldn't be a financial incentive to underproduce, since the tax is on receipts rather than fixed assets (which is another way to tax). I dislike social engineering via the tax code, but this one does have some interesting side effects. The main one is that is rewards efficient supply chains - the more middlemen there are, the higher the effective tax on a product since the money gets taxed at each exchange. That may seem to benefit the largest corporations, and it does to an extent, but is also discourages phantom corporations in tax havens, where a conglomerate sells to a shadow company in a low-tax state, which then resells to the actual retail stores. The price to the shadow company is low, the price to the retail store is high. The retail stores never make money, but the shadow corporation in the low-tax state makes a lot (but pays little or no state tax due to local tax laws). This would effectively double tax such endeavors at the federal level.
One other effect is that it would favor the direct-to-market vendors such as local craftsmen and farmers. If you consider a farmer selling to a wholesaler, selling to a distributer, selling to a corporate market, the direct sale is not only cheaper by the overhead but also by the tax in between. I gives the local producer an extra cushion when selling his own wares locally.
The devil is still in the details. Stocks would, I expect, be subject to the receipts tax (you are, of course, buying equity), but I'm not sure how it would affect the various forms of bank accounts. I believe loans and deposits would reasonably be exempt since no actual sale transaction occured, but I'm not intimate with the law regarding that sort of thing.
Yes, but the flames will be white and the farts won't smell. That's what will make it an apple experience.
I keep telling people we should drop the tax rate on corporations in the US to about 2-4%. That would make it one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Of course, I recommend that they do that and change the tax system to gross receipts basis. Nobody seems to like that part.
What kind of /. post are you playing at, AC?