My issue is that the authorities seem to assume by default that certain classes of person are likely to underdeclare. Income tax whether for a legal or a physical person is essentially a fair tax (I believe originally a temporary measure introduced by Peel in the UK for the Napoleonic wars).
The problem is that there are so many exemptions, that the tax become unfair. Probably one of the worst is Germany, where the various income related taxes easily add up to 50% of your income and almost everyone employs an accountant to get the deductions down to a more reasonable 30% or so.
The more possible deductions there are, the more likely that you will have to fight the tax man as they try to challenge your self-assessments. If you don't try to claim everything then you may well find that the system assumes that you have underdeclared.
Once you have been assessed, you must pay, however this doesn't stop the games being played either side to reduce/increase it. Just think of all that energy that is being spent, which could otherwise be employed productively.
I don't like property taxes because it is difficult to make them fair (valuation is very subjective), however I agree with consumption and income taxes.
Personally, I'm strict about paying my taxes on time and paying the appropriate amount. Not just because I'm afraid of the IRS, but because I feel it's the right thing to do (my civic duty, as it were)
I used to think the same way. I have paid taxes in three countries and I will only now grudgingkly do so. If you don't complain about assesments, the authorities will alway try to increase the amount next time.
Same for airline reservations systems. It needs more skills to use the command based interface but it is *much* faster than the GUI based versions and requires less resources.
The real problem comes in that the way reservations systems work with no locking is that a seat can go if the reservation takes too long. The command line allows for very quick repeats for alternate flights.
There are a number of Russian companies doing outsourcing but there is nowhere near the same numbers as in Moscow. Moscow has more MBAs than programmers, but the money is much better. Most people from St. Petersburg wouldn't choose to move to Moscow unless they received a really good offer (ask V.V. Putin).
St. Petersburg colleges always do well in these competitions, and all that happens is the people end up emigrating.
What IBM did was to restrict their mainframe operating system code so that it could not be licensed for use on non-IBM hardware. Eventually this was thrown out allowing vendors to build IBM compatibles. In the case of Linux, and the open source movement, IBM is well locked in now.
No, you can quite nicely run the X server under Linux (or even under Windows) and talk to multiple users logged in under Windows 2000. Of course, they need to be X clients or Cygwin command-line apps - but it does work.
I'm no Windows fan, but my main issue is with the GUI not the kernel itself.
I can run multiuser on Windows anytime. I just install Cygwin, and ssh across to it. I ssh to it, point DISPLAY at my Linux box and fire up a window manager under Cygwin.
I'm currently working at a large bank. We even have an 'own' distro of Windows-XP for internal use. We also have one of Linux (a SUSE variant). I would agree that it is common for a large organisation to have its own internal distro.
What about Sun's SunRay appliance platform. Not only can the appliance crash but you walk around taking your sessions with you.
As for freezes, it depnds upon the server. A server restart under Xfree is easy (Ctrl-Alt Backspace) and I don't think you need to be so much of an expert to kill a process.
I have heard the same about specialised transcription - pathology being a good example of where there is a highly specialised vocabulary in a relatively quiet environment with someone able to speak clearly. A doctor in an ER is in rather different area. because of ambient noise, the doctor is in a hurry and a number of other problems.
In some places, it easy to get hold os a pay as you go SIM. However, with the usual crap about terrorism/drug dealers/insert bogeyman of choice, it is very difficult in many countries to buy a SIM card without having proof of legal residence in the country where you are visiting. For someone coming from the US to say, Germany and living out of a hotel, this would not be possible. The workaround is to ask the host organisation to organise a SIM in their name. Not possible for tourists but businessmen can try this one. I believe that the UK will still allow you to buy a pay as you go SIM without a postal address.
It depends on where you are. Personally, I think that my teacher friends in the public sector should have concealed weapons permits. When I hear stories about the young kids that they have to del with it really frightens me. When they dare say anything against little johnny, they then have to face an abusive parent.
Again an actual story - a friend was teaching a girll of about 14 or 15, who was pregnant with her stepfather's child for the second time. They didn't particularly want to send the stepfather down because he was the only source of support for the family and the sex wasn't forced (as decided by the social workers). Of course, the girl had major psychological problems and was disruptive in class which is why my friend was warned of the situation.
At work I deal with some hiigh stress levels, but not s bad as many teachers and at leats the system doen't undermine me to the same degree. On the other hand a friend went from IT Sales to teaching in the pivate sector - she loved it! With the assisted housing, the pay cut wasn't so hard to take and the stress level was a fraction of her previous job.
It really depends upon whetherb the teachers are in the public sector (they have to deal with the dregs, both the kids and the parents from hell) to the private sector (they deal with motivated kids and supportive parents). You will find most of the 8% in the latter half, not the ones dealing with the 12 year old crack-heads and 13 year old prostitutes.
And mail yourself the receipts or something. I have been searched for reciepts before at Heathrow. Btw, claiming that the $1500 receipt from Dell for a laptop was really a girlie from a lap-dancing bar won't work.
Yep, you can be a complete bastard legally, but don't expect to be loved for it. It appears that even if the US government was bought off, the EU hasn't been yet which is why Mircosoft is being fined there.
Your average businessman doesn't have to worry about anti-monopolistic behaviour. Those that do, take careful advice on how not to beat the opposition into the ground. His company is in dock again for their monopolistic behaviour, and although he has bought the US government off, the EU comes a little more expensive (too many scattered politicians to buy at once).
The reason I compare Gates with Soros, is that Soros didn't wait until he was being forced to give money away (or being advised by his accountants). I don't hold the amount against Gates, I hold the way it was given with possible linkages to the inroads that open source was making in some countries (and maybe certain universities).
Which brings us back to Ethics. They teach it these days even at the big busines schools. Sooner or later, if you ignore the ethics, you will eventually lose.
There is an EU wide custome directive which sets duty at about 4% for such goods (computers aren't affected by the recent tarif war). On top of that you pay 17.5% VAT (I think, for the UK). If you know how to order a laptop w/o paying sales tax then overall with the current weak dollar, it is still possible to save money.
How much does that mean to him, not a lot and its tax deductible! I prefer the charity of George Soros - one of the reasons that so many Eastern Europeans now appreceate things like democracy and mostly don't have missiles pointed at us. He has been woring on supporting the conversion from communism of Eastern Europe over the last 15 years - yep, they have been working that long. Charity on that scale isn't "Fire and Forget" - he actively participates in the running of his charities.
Oh what did I do, I went and stole one of his workforce whilst I was working on an aid project in Russia and turned her into my wife! This is why I know a little about what he has done over the years (it isn't nearly as well advertised in the West).
I know Billl G is tackling aids and so on now so his money is busy - but wouldn't it be niice if someone did a "Soros" on the middle-East?
I wouldn't be crital of Warren Buffet. He is a shrewd investor, but mostly of other people's money and they benefit. Nobody complains about his business ethics. George Soros is definitely poorer, but as I have already said, he has been giving money away for some fifteen years now for the support of people (not politicians) in eastern europe. A wealthy man, who broke the pound, but nobody holds it against him.
Billy G has behaved lik a shark from the beginning. He certainly never went near an ethics course. The thing is that whilst I have a certain admiration for Buffet and Soros - I certainly don't for Mr Gates. Funny that?
George Soros made a lot of money out of his financial speculations (including that one against the pound). He doesn't have the Bill Gates level of wealth because his charitable organisations (Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute) have been eating between 300 and 500 million dollars pro year since about 1989. Check out their web site for further details. His contributions are totally unrelated to his commercial activities.
Sir, perhaps its the fact that we put the self destruct button next to the light button on our new combat vehicle that causes a large number of them to explode?"
"Button proximity does not cause explosions! Careless operators cause explosions!!"
Seen at a holiday residence (dasha) for US consulate staff in Russia - two adjacent switches. One turns on the lights, the other is the panic button summoning marines, the local police, etc. Neither switch is that distinctive. I hate to think how many times that particular button was pressed by accident.
Back to the subject in hand. OOP is great and suprisingly enough, it can even be done in C. C++ is, after all, based on a C preprocessor. However, it slows things down which sometimes you don't want.
Suprisingly enough, there isn't much call for wire wrapping in the pcs that I have seen. In fact the last time I dealt with wire wrapping was a Unibus backplane on a VAX 11/750 (it was removing the bus grant jumper).
As for soldering, are you going to work with SMDs? Sorry, there isn't much call for these skills now.
Yep, this really annoys me. You are on the road in some godforsaken place but your link to the outside world is through your Win notebook. You really want to keep the patches up to date, especially Outlook ones. Do you really want to haul your original CDs everywhere with you?
Luckily in that particlar case, I was able to buy and use a pirate CD ($2) so that I could update my fully licensed Office-Pro.
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The problem is that there are so many exemptions, that the tax become unfair. Probably one of the worst is Germany, where the various income related taxes easily add up to 50% of your income and almost everyone employs an accountant to get the deductions down to a more reasonable 30% or so.
The more possible deductions there are, the more likely that you will have to fight the tax man as they try to challenge your self-assessments. If you don't try to claim everything then you may well find that the system assumes that you have underdeclared.
Once you have been assessed, you must pay, however this doesn't stop the games being played either side to reduce/increase it. Just think of all that energy that is being spent, which could otherwise be employed productively.
I don't like property taxes because it is difficult to make them fair (valuation is very subjective), however I agree with consumption and income taxes.
The real problem comes in that the way reservations systems work with no locking is that a seat can go if the reservation takes too long. The command line allows for very quick repeats for alternate flights.
St. Petersburg colleges always do well in these competitions, and all that happens is the people end up emigrating.
What IBM did was to restrict their mainframe operating system code so that it could not be licensed for use on non-IBM hardware. Eventually this was thrown out allowing vendors to build IBM compatibles. In the case of Linux, and the open source movement, IBM is well locked in now.
I'm no Windows fan, but my main issue is with the GUI not the kernel itself.
But it won't list the $10000/plate campaign dinners though will it?
I can run multiuser on Windows anytime. I just install Cygwin, and ssh across to it. I ssh to it, point DISPLAY at my Linux box and fire up a window manager under Cygwin.
I'm currently working at a large bank. We even have an 'own' distro of Windows-XP for internal use. We also have one of Linux (a SUSE variant). I would agree that it is common for a large organisation to have its own internal distro.
As for freezes, it depnds upon the server. A server restart under Xfree is easy (Ctrl-Alt Backspace) and I don't think you need to be so much of an expert to kill a process.
I have heard the same about specialised transcription - pathology being a good example of where there is a highly specialised vocabulary in a relatively quiet environment with someone able to speak clearly. A doctor in an ER is in rather different area. because of ambient noise, the doctor is in a hurry and a number of other problems.
In some places, it easy to get hold os a pay as you go SIM. However, with the usual crap about terrorism/drug dealers/insert bogeyman of choice, it is very difficult in many countries to buy a SIM card without having proof of legal residence in the country where you are visiting. For someone coming from the US to say, Germany and living out of a hotel, this would not be possible. The workaround is to ask the host organisation to organise a SIM in their name. Not possible for tourists but businessmen can try this one. I believe that the UK will still allow you to buy a pay as you go SIM without a postal address.
Again an actual story - a friend was teaching a girll of about 14 or 15, who was pregnant with her stepfather's child for the second time. They didn't particularly want to send the stepfather down because he was the only source of support for the family and the sex wasn't forced (as decided by the social workers). Of course, the girl had major psychological problems and was disruptive in class which is why my friend was warned of the situation.
At work I deal with some hiigh stress levels, but not s bad as many teachers and at leats the system doen't undermine me to the same degree. On the other hand a friend went from IT Sales to teaching in the pivate sector - she loved it! With the assisted housing, the pay cut wasn't so hard to take and the stress level was a fraction of her previous job.
It really depends upon whetherb the teachers are in the public sector (they have to deal with the dregs, both the kids and the parents from hell) to the private sector (they deal with motivated kids and supportive parents). You will find most of the 8% in the latter half, not the ones dealing with the 12 year old crack-heads and 13 year old prostitutes.
And mail yourself the receipts or something. I have been searched for reciepts before at Heathrow. Btw, claiming that the $1500 receipt from Dell for a laptop was really a girlie from a lap-dancing bar won't work.
Swiss-German, Swiss-French or Swiss-Italian? They are all options.
Your average businessman doesn't have to worry about anti-monopolistic behaviour. Those that do, take careful advice on how not to beat the opposition into the ground. His company is in dock again for their monopolistic behaviour, and although he has bought the US government off, the EU comes a little more expensive (too many scattered politicians to buy at once).
The reason I compare Gates with Soros, is that Soros didn't wait until he was being forced to give money away (or being advised by his accountants). I don't hold the amount against Gates, I hold the way it was given with possible linkages to the inroads that open source was making in some countries (and maybe certain universities).
Which brings us back to Ethics. They teach it these days even at the big busines schools. Sooner or later, if you ignore the ethics, you will eventually lose.
There is an EU wide custome directive which sets duty at about 4% for such goods (computers aren't affected by the recent tarif war). On top of that you pay 17.5% VAT (I think, for the UK). If you know how to order a laptop w/o paying sales tax then overall with the current weak dollar, it is still possible to save money.
Oh what did I do, I went and stole one of his workforce whilst I was working on an aid project in Russia and turned her into my wife! This is why I know a little about what he has done over the years (it isn't nearly as well advertised in the West).
I know Billl G is tackling aids and so on now so his money is busy - but wouldn't it be niice if someone did a "Soros" on the middle-East?
Billy G has behaved lik a shark from the beginning. He certainly never went near an ethics course. The thing is that whilst I have a certain admiration for Buffet and Soros - I certainly don't for Mr Gates. Funny that?
George Soros made a lot of money out of his financial speculations (including that one against the pound). He doesn't have the Bill Gates level of wealth because his charitable organisations (Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute) have been eating between 300 and 500 million dollars pro year since about 1989. Check out their web site for further details. His contributions are totally unrelated to his commercial activities.
As for soldering, are you going to work with SMDs? Sorry, there isn't much call for these skills now.
Luckily in that particlar case, I was able to buy and use a pirate CD ($2) so that I could update my fully licensed Office-Pro.