I'm really failing to see how this is an issue at all, as businesses get audited all the time. If you're throwing around a lot of money, it's no surprise that the taxman is going to raise an eyebrow.
This is nothing more than an audit and a crackdown on unregistered businesses. In other words, the Canada Revenue Agency is doing its job (this concept may be unfamiliar to Americans when relating to governmental agencies)
If you're operating a business, then you should be paying taxes as such. Plain and simple.
Last time I checked, ordinary sunlight was sufficient to melt chocolate, and I'm sure that if you got a nice big converging lens, you could make yourself a damn good waffle to go with it;-)
The subway was indeed extended out to JFK, and a spur-line was built off of the Northeast Corridor (Amtrak & NJTransit) to serve Penn Station (in turn connecting to Long Island Railroad and the NYC Subway, which will also take you to Metro North trains at Grand Central)
The PATH doesn't really get involved in the Newark Airport equation. The solution they chose wasn't the best, but it was most likely the least expensive by far, and adequately dealt with the existing infrastructure already in place. I don't think the pols would have been too happy if they ripped out the recently completed (at great expense and frustrating delay) monorail system, no matter how much it sucked.
I'm not so sure about the politics involved in the construction of the AirTrain, as from what I understand, there were already adequate transportation options to JFK from the subway (whereas none exist for LaGuardia that are advertised as such)
And all the while I can't help but think of how freakin' huge this would be in the UK
It was sort of weird to move to the UK, and suddenly discover that my relatively obscure musical tastes in the US were mainstream in the UK. At the very least, parties are a whole lot more enjoyable now.
How often do you ride the 4/5/6 (Lexington Ave) line?
How often are the trains packed, and/or late on the 4/5/6?
If you wanted to add some sort of uber-high-tech addition to the NYC subway, it'd be a replacement of the 4/5/6 line to accommodate the huge amount of traffic it gets (ie. more than double the entire population of Boston every day).
Of course, the MTA's still having trouble dealing with the insurmountable technical hurdle of providing air conditioning on the platforms. I think a maglev would be a bit beyond the scope of their competence.
If we want to connect to Airports, how about any sort of train service to LaGuardia? Right now, you need to take a bus. If you want to get there in a reasonable amount of time, you also have to switch to the subway (at no cost), and then transfer again to a different line. Not awful for a seasoned New Yorker, but forget about it for a tourist. While we're at it, how about single-seat rides to JFK, LaGuardia, AND Newark from Penn and/or Grand Central?
Oh, and NYC's one of the last transit systems in the world not to utilize ATO (automated train operation) on the bulk of its system. AFAIK only the L train uses it at night at the moment.
Not that I'm discounting the NYC transit system in any way. I still believe that it's one of the best in the world, simply for its gigantic scale and 24 hour operation. However, the fact that such silly and unnecessary gaps exist in its service is baffling.
Unless I'm missing something, uploading multiple files in google isn't exactly a Shift-Click sort of affair. Each file needs to be selected separately -- 4 clicks minimum per file, probably more.
When you're uploading 60 files like you would frequently do on Facebook, this becomes a HUGE hassle. Plus the thumbnails and check-marks are nice for users who have Operating systems that don't make thumbnails available in their file-chooser (or for those who do, but don't know how to use it)
I know your post was sarcastic, but any mac users dealing with the agonizing slowness of their photo upload applet should be cheering for joy if what you're saying is true.
Flash on Mac isn't all that hot either. Adobe's more or less been shitting all over the platform ever since Apple started directly competing with them. A single Youtube video can easily suck up 80% of the CPU cycles on a modern Core Duo machine.
As long as the number of competitors remains small (ie. 2), I think that Silverlight will actually boost the quality of web applications on ALL platforms.
Java's had its time, and frankly, while it's found niches in other fields, it sucks for web applets. Java applets need to disappear into the ether, resting alongside VRML. (Facebook IS in a pickle, because at the moment, Java probably is the best solution for multiple photo uploads...)
Battlestar Galactica's still on, and even though it's entering into its last season, I imagine that it wasn't ever meant to last much longer. The great thing about BSG is that it's enjoyable from the perspective of Nerds, SciFi geeks, and normal people alike. The writing's good, and the acting is well above-par as far as primetime TV is concerned. It's accessible in the sort of way that the original 1970s Star Wars films were.
Heroes also has huge nerd appeal, and is currently NBC's top-ranked show -- and it deserves it too. Almost everyone I know who's watched it has become immediately hooked.
For what it's worth, Google is stopping to call it GMail.
All of the icons were changed over the past few days to say "Google Mail" instead of GMail with little fanfare. Not sure if this is any indication of things to come, or simply a branding effort coming from the top-down. Guess we'll have to wait and see...
I have no problem with immigrant labor. What I have a problem with is illegal immigrant labor. Sure, it helps me get a cheaper burger at Chili's, but when I have to pay $50 for an aspirin at a hospital, I figure I'm not saving all that much.
I'm all for raising the immigration quotas, and dealing with the illegal immigration problem by reforming our immigration system so that a reasonable path to immigration exists for the reasons you list. However, I have yet to see a single study that shows that illegal immigration has any perceptible effect upon the cost of healthcare. If you want to complain about the state of healthcare in the US, I'd turn to the corrupt insurance lobby.
Fry: Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. (laughs) Leela: I don't get it. Professor: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. Fry: Oh. What's it called now? Professor: Urectum.
To be perfectly honest, I sort of like it when configuration options are sort of organically integrated into the application instead of displayed in a long list in some preference panel.
And then again, there are many cases in which it's perfectly acceptable to leave them out altogether.
Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application. Gnome and KDE have routinely shat upon this paradigm, and it's only been recently that we're finally starting to return to it.
I've used Xfce quite a bit as well, and despite the lack of advanced configuration options, I must say that everything more or less works the way I expect it to, and it's all rather intuitive. The fact that it's ridiculously snappy is a very nice bonus (remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were? Xfce is sort of like that, but with a real operating system underneath, and a full complement of modern features). The configuration options were sparse, and in one or two cases there were things I'd change, but as far as the whole package goes, I'm a big big fan.
If I want to do something tricky, I'll go to the command line. GUIs simply aren't elegant for every function imaginable, and it's sort of assumed that you know at least a few basic unix commands if you're going to be using something as obscure as Xfce. Besides... how many normal users have to pipe their routing table into grep on a daily basis?
KDE's a prime example of feature bloat. From a technical standpoint, it's probably the better of the top two desktops, but from a usability standpoint, I find it horribly unintuitive. Lots of toolbars full of tiny similar-looking blue icons don't help either. If Microsoft did Unix, it'd look something like KDE.
wxWidgets always seems to be just as bad as a foreign toolkit in the apps that I've used it in. The interfaces always wind up being awkward and clunky.
I'd argue pretty strongly that GTK+ is the more versatile of the platforms. Pidgin feels pretty darn close to native on Windows. If you can come up with another toolkit that comes close, I'll retract my claim.
Firefox also does a great job, although I'd disqualify it for having tons of OS-specific code, not to mention a shitty Mac version.
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US if you payed for the system via credit card, you're entitled to quite a few additional rights along the lines of warranties and return policies.
Amex (and Visa IIRC), will resolve any sort of warranty dispute for up to one additional year after the original manufacturers warranty. They'll usually also extend the return policy up to 90 days.
If the retailer doesn't cooperate, go to the credit card company. You'll find that their word carries quite a bit of sway with the retailer.
I've only had to use this once, but when I did it worked like a charm. I bought some pre-manufactured custom-built building supplies that were built to the completely wrong dimensions. After repeated phone calls, the retailer eventually admitted that it was their error, but that because it was a custom product they still wouldn't take it back. After about three weeks, we called Visa, and in one (relatively brief) phone call, the issue was completely resolved.
A few years ago, a friend of mine forgot to put enough money in the parking meter, and came back to his car with a boot on it. Nevermind that getting the boot was a rather severe punishment for the most minor parking violation imaginable, when he examined it up close, he noticed that the boot never actually got attached to the wheel.
Being only a block away from the police station, he simply lifted the boot off, and carried it down to the office, where he explained the situation, returned the boot, and offered to pay the fine up-front. The receptionist told him to wait a minute, and disappeared into the back room, and a few minutes later returned with a police officer who arrested him on the spot for stealing police property, and some other nonsense....
The charges were dropped, but he did have to pay the parking fine in addition to the $50 "boot removal fee"
If you prefer not knowing what your government is doing, I suggest relocating to one of these locations: China, Vietnam, Burma...
The thing is that this is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that should be kept confidential.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's the duty of a democratic government to be as transparent as possible, and to disclose as much as it can on its inner workings to the public.
HOWEVER, information on the whereabouts and transportation of nuclear warheads is at the top of a very short list of things that should unequivocally be kept as a closely guarded state secret no matter what.
The risks of releasing that sort of information staggeringly outweigh the benefits if there even are any.
At some point in the past 100 years, I think civilization may have hit a critical point at which we've stopped moving "forward", and at which any further increases in the global population will cause some serious problems.
People aren't happy. Depression is a major problem in "first-world" nations. We're no closer to achieving global peace. Although life expectancy has increased, humans are rapidly losing their immunities to simple bacteria, while antibiotic-resistant strains flourish. How exactly are we moving "forward"?
And all the time, humans worry more and more about shit that doesn't matter.
Maybe I'm just naive, but I seriously wish I could live in "simpler" times. As long as I had some sort of safety net to fall back upon should my crops fail, the life of a farmer doesn't seem all that bad.
Maybe someday humanity will get its act together, and stop destroying and overpopulating the planet, but for now...
I'm not going to doubt you, since I'm not a developer. However, you'd be a fool to argue that KDE's more user-friendly at the moment.
Gnome's got the advantage of being simplistic and easy to use, with the added bonus that GTK is pretty fast even on old hardware. This is what matters right now.
Of course, If I were ruler of the universe, Ubuntu would be using Xfce as the default desktop environment. It's *very* slick, and flies on every piece of hardware I've used it on.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, sure. I'm no fan of the government taking my money (especially when that money's being used to murder Iraqis)
However, as long as we've got taxes in place, it's only fair that everyone pays their share. That way, the rest of us pay a wee bit less.
I'm really failing to see how this is an issue at all, as businesses get audited all the time. If you're throwing around a lot of money, it's no surprise that the taxman is going to raise an eyebrow.
This is nothing more than an audit and a crackdown on unregistered businesses. In other words, the Canada Revenue Agency is doing its job (this concept may be unfamiliar to Americans when relating to governmental agencies)
If you're operating a business, then you should be paying taxes as such. Plain and simple.
Last time I checked, ordinary sunlight was sufficient to melt chocolate, and I'm sure that if you got a nice big converging lens, you could make yourself a damn good waffle to go with it ;-)
The subway was indeed extended out to JFK, and a spur-line was built off of the Northeast Corridor (Amtrak & NJTransit) to serve Penn Station (in turn connecting to Long Island Railroad and the NYC Subway, which will also take you to Metro North trains at Grand Central)
The PATH doesn't really get involved in the Newark Airport equation. The solution they chose wasn't the best, but it was most likely the least expensive by far, and adequately dealt with the existing infrastructure already in place. I don't think the pols would have been too happy if they ripped out the recently completed (at great expense and frustrating delay) monorail system, no matter how much it sucked.
I'm not so sure about the politics involved in the construction of the AirTrain, as from what I understand, there were already adequate transportation options to JFK from the subway (whereas none exist for LaGuardia that are advertised as such)
Sounds like a Catch-22 to me.
Playing WoW makes you particularly Orcish, but you can't be Orcish unless you play WoW.
Eh. Sounds like this scheme would be beneficial to the population in general. Fewer Orcs AND WoW players!
And all the while I can't help but think of how freakin' huge this would be in the UK
It was sort of weird to move to the UK, and suddenly discover that my relatively obscure musical tastes in the US were mainstream in the UK. At the very least, parties are a whole lot more enjoyable now.
How often do you go to JFK?
How often do you ride the 4/5/6 (Lexington Ave) line?
How often are the trains packed, and/or late on the 4/5/6?
If you wanted to add some sort of uber-high-tech addition to the NYC subway, it'd be a replacement of the 4/5/6 line to accommodate the huge amount of traffic it gets (ie. more than double the entire population of Boston every day).
Of course, the MTA's still having trouble dealing with the insurmountable technical hurdle of providing air conditioning on the platforms. I think a maglev would be a bit beyond the scope of their competence.
If we want to connect to Airports, how about any sort of train service to LaGuardia? Right now, you need to take a bus. If you want to get there in a reasonable amount of time, you also have to switch to the subway (at no cost), and then transfer again to a different line. Not awful for a seasoned New Yorker, but forget about it for a tourist. While we're at it, how about single-seat rides to JFK, LaGuardia, AND Newark from Penn and/or Grand Central?
Oh, and NYC's one of the last transit systems in the world not to utilize ATO (automated train operation) on the bulk of its system. AFAIK only the L train uses it at night at the moment.
Not that I'm discounting the NYC transit system in any way. I still believe that it's one of the best in the world, simply for its gigantic scale and 24 hour operation. However, the fact that such silly and unnecessary gaps exist in its service is baffling.
Unless I'm missing something, uploading multiple files in google isn't exactly a Shift-Click sort of affair. Each file needs to be selected separately -- 4 clicks minimum per file, probably more.
When you're uploading 60 files like you would frequently do on Facebook, this becomes a HUGE hassle. Plus the thumbnails and check-marks are nice for users who have Operating systems that don't make thumbnails available in their file-chooser (or for those who do, but don't know how to use it)
I know your post was sarcastic, but any mac users dealing with the agonizing slowness of their photo upload applet should be cheering for joy if what you're saying is true.
Flash on Mac isn't all that hot either. Adobe's more or less been shitting all over the platform ever since Apple started directly competing with them. A single Youtube video can easily suck up 80% of the CPU cycles on a modern Core Duo machine.
As long as the number of competitors remains small (ie. 2), I think that Silverlight will actually boost the quality of web applications on ALL platforms.
Java's had its time, and frankly, while it's found niches in other fields, it sucks for web applets. Java applets need to disappear into the ether, resting alongside VRML. (Facebook IS in a pickle, because at the moment, Java probably is the best solution for multiple photo uploads...)
If he's already paying $65,000 a month on rent, I think he just needs to find a new place altogether.
I have this horrifying image of the SWAT team bursting into my house, doing a reenactment of the "Punch the Monkey" series of ads....
Battlestar Galactica's still on, and even though it's entering into its last season, I imagine that it wasn't ever meant to last much longer. The great thing about BSG is that it's enjoyable from the perspective of Nerds, SciFi geeks, and normal people alike. The writing's good, and the acting is well above-par as far as primetime TV is concerned. It's accessible in the sort of way that the original 1970s Star Wars films were.
Heroes also has huge nerd appeal, and is currently NBC's top-ranked show -- and it deserves it too. Almost everyone I know who's watched it has become immediately hooked.
He's exactly correct.
Isn't it written into the GL Spec that all OpenGL benchmarks must include some sort of tea kettle?
For what it's worth, Google is stopping to call it GMail.
All of the icons were changed over the past few days to say "Google Mail" instead of GMail with little fanfare. Not sure if this is any indication of things to come, or simply a branding effort coming from the top-down. Guess we'll have to wait and see...
I'm all for raising the immigration quotas, and dealing with the illegal immigration problem by reforming our immigration system so that a reasonable path to immigration exists for the reasons you list. However, I have yet to see a single study that shows that illegal immigration has any perceptible effect upon the cost of healthcare. If you want to complain about the state of healthcare in the US, I'd turn to the corrupt insurance lobby.
Scroll down on the LinuxDevices article on the Hava to the screenshot that shows the "remote control".
Look familiar?
To be perfectly honest, I sort of like it when configuration options are sort of organically integrated into the application instead of displayed in a long list in some preference panel.
And then again, there are many cases in which it's perfectly acceptable to leave them out altogether.
Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application. Gnome and KDE have routinely shat upon this paradigm, and it's only been recently that we're finally starting to return to it.
I've used Xfce quite a bit as well, and despite the lack of advanced configuration options, I must say that everything more or less works the way I expect it to, and it's all rather intuitive. The fact that it's ridiculously snappy is a very nice bonus (remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were? Xfce is sort of like that, but with a real operating system underneath, and a full complement of modern features). The configuration options were sparse, and in one or two cases there were things I'd change, but as far as the whole package goes, I'm a big big fan.
If I want to do something tricky, I'll go to the command line. GUIs simply aren't elegant for every function imaginable, and it's sort of assumed that you know at least a few basic unix commands if you're going to be using something as obscure as Xfce. Besides... how many normal users have to pipe their routing table into grep on a daily basis?
KDE's a prime example of feature bloat. From a technical standpoint, it's probably the better of the top two desktops, but from a usability standpoint, I find it horribly unintuitive. Lots of toolbars full of tiny similar-looking blue icons don't help either. If Microsoft did Unix, it'd look something like KDE.
Eh.
wxWidgets always seems to be just as bad as a foreign toolkit in the apps that I've used it in. The interfaces always wind up being awkward and clunky.
I'd argue pretty strongly that GTK+ is the more versatile of the platforms. Pidgin feels pretty darn close to native on Windows. If you can come up with another toolkit that comes close, I'll retract my claim.
Firefox also does a great job, although I'd disqualify it for having tons of OS-specific code, not to mention a shitty Mac version.
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US if you payed for the system via credit card, you're entitled to quite a few additional rights along the lines of warranties and return policies.
Amex (and Visa IIRC), will resolve any sort of warranty dispute for up to one additional year after the original manufacturers warranty. They'll usually also extend the return policy up to 90 days.
If the retailer doesn't cooperate, go to the credit card company. You'll find that their word carries quite a bit of sway with the retailer.
I've only had to use this once, but when I did it worked like a charm. I bought some pre-manufactured custom-built building supplies that were built to the completely wrong dimensions. After repeated phone calls, the retailer eventually admitted that it was their error, but that because it was a custom product they still wouldn't take it back. After about three weeks, we called Visa, and in one (relatively brief) phone call, the issue was completely resolved.
A few years ago, a friend of mine forgot to put enough money in the parking meter, and came back to his car with a boot on it. Nevermind that getting the boot was a rather severe punishment for the most minor parking violation imaginable, when he examined it up close, he noticed that the boot never actually got attached to the wheel.
Being only a block away from the police station, he simply lifted the boot off, and carried it down to the office, where he explained the situation, returned the boot, and offered to pay the fine up-front. The receptionist told him to wait a minute, and disappeared into the back room, and a few minutes later returned with a police officer who arrested him on the spot for stealing police property, and some other nonsense....
The charges were dropped, but he did have to pay the parking fine in addition to the $50 "boot removal fee"
You could always try small aircraft.... a crop-duster would be particularly amusing.
Or if you're looking for poetic justice, you could rig the device to only function properly while airborne, and place it on a police helicopter.
The thing is that this is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that should be kept confidential.
I wholeheartedly agree that it's the duty of a democratic government to be as transparent as possible, and to disclose as much as it can on its inner workings to the public.
HOWEVER, information on the whereabouts and transportation of nuclear warheads is at the top of a very short list of things that should unequivocally be kept as a closely guarded state secret no matter what.
The risks of releasing that sort of information staggeringly outweigh the benefits if there even are any.
But are we any better off for it?
At some point in the past 100 years, I think civilization may have hit a critical point at which we've stopped moving "forward", and at which any further increases in the global population will cause some serious problems.
People aren't happy. Depression is a major problem in "first-world" nations. We're no closer to achieving global peace. Although life expectancy has increased, humans are rapidly losing their immunities to simple bacteria, while antibiotic-resistant strains flourish. How exactly are we moving "forward"?
And all the time, humans worry more and more about shit that doesn't matter.
Maybe I'm just naive, but I seriously wish I could live in "simpler" times. As long as I had some sort of safety net to fall back upon should my crops fail, the life of a farmer doesn't seem all that bad.
Maybe someday humanity will get its act together, and stop destroying and overpopulating the planet, but for now...
KDE fanboy are we?
I'm not going to doubt you, since I'm not a developer. However, you'd be a fool to argue that KDE's more user-friendly at the moment.
Gnome's got the advantage of being simplistic and easy to use, with the added bonus that GTK is pretty fast even on old hardware. This is what matters right now.
Of course, If I were ruler of the universe, Ubuntu would be using Xfce as the default desktop environment. It's *very* slick, and flies on every piece of hardware I've used it on.