There is a company that specializes in local tax calculations and they have an API. They handle the problem as it stands by keeping track of your points of physical presence and maintaining an absolutely immense number of rules/exceptions (I work with people that worked for them.). They also handle paying taxes on behalf of their customers to the various local/state governments to take the burden off their customers.
They can't hire enough people to keep up with the ever-shifting sand, it's that immense a problem.
I remember a while back that they had a pilot program that I encountered a few times where experienced travelers with some specific rules could go into a special lane. I met whatever the requirements were and that was always like 2 minutes, tops, because I had everything prepared and everyone else in that lane was completely prepared, so there was never a delay in that line.
I really miss that... It was nothing like standing in an hour-long lines with a bunch of mouth-breathers that rarely fly and can't follow simple directions.
10+ years ago, when I made about what I do now and had 1.5x the vacation, plus a 4-day work week, and ticket prices were 1/4-1/2 the current prices, I flew very regularly. It might have been worth it back then, but with the 1-2 flights I make a year now, it's just not worth it.
Then again, I'd happily pay for Global Entry if it meant I could avoid all security theater and customs PLUS ended my paying any more outrageous TSA fees.
I guess my point is that it's way too expensive. At $40, I'd do Pre Check without hesitation. At $80 as an addition to my passport renewal (with the same period of validity), Global Entry would be an obvious choice. At no more than one international flight every couple years, with most to adjacent countries with really smooth customs processes, it just isn't worth $200 for 10 years for GE or $170 for 10 years with PC. They're simply not cheap enough and don't have enough benefits for a very casual irregular traveler.
His position is completely accurate. Linux hackers will work tirelessly to reverse engineer some pile of shit and write something comparable to support it, while *BSD people simply ignore it for being closed crap. All decent hardware from reasonable vendors is well supported in the BSDs.
Beyond that, they don't really target desktops much beyond the FreeBSD distro (even then, it's not as good as a Linux experience on most hardware). If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.
This is Seagate you're talking about here... We're not dealing with a flash memory manufacturer like Samsung, Intel, Micron, SanDisk, or Toshiba, so who knows what grade F- stuff Seagate has purchased for the lowest price possible.
I want to know where these raises are going. I haven't seen an appreciable raise at any point in the last 15 years. If our skills were so valuable, it wouldn't take regular job changes to bump your income. Clearly, we're not that rare or valuable.
I'm absolutely with you. In my experience, H1B visa holders fill the lowest ranks as a rule. Having worked with a lot of immigrants in the tech industry, it's pretty consistent (that is, those that immigrate through other means are invariably good at what they do in my experience). I could find you a huge number of bright high school grads and community college students that would jump at the chance to learn and gain experience for 40-50k a year (even in my expensive locale), filling these same positions.
I see the plight of tech as that of an emergent form of the medical industry. The market just doesn't know how to deal with paying what our skills are worth. If a tech worker costs more than a senator, that's not surprising, considering surgeons make a lot more as well. The problem isn't the workers, it's the fact nobody wants to pay for them.
H1B has been a complete failure to this country. If someone is actually worth the effort to import, they should be worth the effort to jump through traditional immigration hoops to get.
Dude, why? Seriously. You can buy COTS stuff for this and if you really want to roll your own, why not simply build something with a cheap motherboard/CPU combo. Under $100 and you'll have radically better performance.
Because they're cheap and have decent performance for their cheapness. I don't actually give a flying crap about I/O speed. About the only thing I wish it had was a variant with two of those USB-Ethernet dongles built in, wifi built in, and retaining at least a couple USB ports. If I need multiple Ethernet ports, I've been attaching dongles anyhow, so why not build them in?
The benefit is the device is that it is dirt cheap. I have a number of them in service in manufacturing acting as web servers for performing specific tasks (mostly for flashing microcontrollers and loading configurations on boards that cost 3-50 times as much). Sure, I could put a cheap desktop in there, but we're talking a massive increase in cost and physical size (I do use one of these where I/O would be a problem with a RasPi). It's all about using the right tool for the job...
Nicotine is a poison. The reason smoking is so bad for you is that nicotine increases the risk of cancer throughout one's body due to the way it disrupts apoptosis. It actually amplifies the negative effect of the other components.
If nicotine had any medicinal properties, why is it not a pharmaceutical? Why do we use it as a pesticide?
Make US regs match EU regs, along with an agreement to change regulations together in unison. The problem with the US has always been that our regulations were far behind, incompatible with others, and enshrined strange requirements (literally over a century of cruft).
The list is immense: Headlights (sealed beam lights were required for decades after the industry moved on in every other country), the corner reflectors we still have that nobody else requires (you probably don't realize they are there, but they require design changes just for the US on many cars), the weird lighting rules (red signal indicators, for example), bumpers (they have learned to hide them with enormous fake grilles), and the list goes on... All these weird regulation differences make cars more expensive for everybody.
Main task on the primary, secondary tools for the main task are on another, terminals/utilities in another (sometimes a couple), then low-importance things as far from me as necessary. Usually terminals/utilities are "left" and secondary tools are "right". Low importance things are the greatest difficulty to access as they are of low importance.
At least, that's how I've always done it with XFCE, fluxbox, and most other window managers I've used. Sadly, I suffer through using Win8 on most of my computers that aren't in VMs these days.
Technology moves so quickly that any investment in voting equipment beyond the bare minimum to produce decent results in a reasonable amount of time is not worth wasting money on. At no more than one or two uses a year, voting machines are extremely under-utilized equipment. Even paper ballots that don't have alternate uses are a waste of effort.
The only way to get sufficient use out of voting equipment would be to shorten term limits to days and/or change the role of representatives so their purpose is to vote on whether or not a potential law should be presented to the voting public. That should keep them busy and increase the value derived from voting equipment investments.
This is merely because hardware has been fairly stagnant for years now. Cycles are turning into a fungible commodity again and therefore hardware prices are being driven down. In the 1970s it was similar, but Moore's Law was devaluing it at a rapid pace, while network connections were still slow. Eventually the Big Iron that was managed by groups of highly trained people in clean rooms couldn't compete.
However, you're deluded if you think fast and reliable lines are cheap. They're not. This is why anything involving large quantities of data is staying local... The easy stuff that was designed decades ago for those slow links are the only low-hanging fruit that have experienced a strong shift to outsourced service ("cloud") providers due to the fact that they do not depend on a big pipe. Email, documents, and spreadsheets are one thing; terabytes of data are completely different... "Cloud" services are only good for easy problems.
Unless they are literally in abject poverty and/or homeless, I can't fathom even $300 being a huge deal for anyone financially able to raise a child. There's no way a parent couldn't kick back a few less beers or smoke a couple fewer packs so they could afford a decent computer. We're not talking the third world where people get by on lard and beans here; these are people that drive cars and probably spend money on vices.
I grew up in, by American standards, abject poverty. My parents owned an unreliable 20+ year old car that was given to them. Gas was so expensive that riding in a car was an exciting luxury to me. My clothing had patches and my siblings would be wearing those clothes when I outgrew them. We're talking so poor that I got free school lunches and ate government cheese. I still had a pocket calculator.
Now, let's get real: If you can't cobble together a computer out of 5+ year old parts for somewhere between cheap and free, you're way too picky. I guarantee every one of you either sells all their old tech or has some working old computers in your closet gathering dust. A quick search of ebay turns up decent workable tablets/netbooks for under $20. Full laptops for under $40. We're talking pocket calculator money here, less than I spend on a cheap dinner out, less than a single trip to the movies for two, less than it costs to fill my car with gas, less than buying a latte every day for a week. How do you even afford to have children if you can't afford a computer? What happens to these children that grow up in a home and world without technology? There's simply no excuse.
Unless grocery baggers are hired based on their lack of education (ex: 8th or 10th grade being the last completed), we're already massively wasting education. They are not using any skills they have in any subject taught in a school that cannot be taught in five minutes. However, most of these companies require a high school diploma, GED, or similar, for a job requiring none of the implied skills.
There's no reason that the VP of Manufacturing in my company refuses to hire anyone without a BSME to work as a clerk managing paperwork that comes from Engineering, but they always fill that position with someone with a BSME that eventually leaves unless we poach them into our department first. However, it does prove that their employment options are limited even with a STEM degree, so they're willing to make $28k/year doing something that technically doesn't require their skills just to get their foot in the door somewhere. The mentality is spreading, with many other menial jobs within the company requiring as least a 4-year-degree in a STEM field. Our Field Service department recently started demanding a degree for glorified plumbers and their secretary has a masters in some hard science field.
Nothing opened my eyes to the situation more than this. It's clear that degrees are moving downmarket.
You're crazy. Watches are already dated-looking "jewelry". They'll be melted down to recover their constituent materials and some particularly-unusual ones will be stored in museums. The styles have changed very regularly, although they have been pretty stabilized since the advent of the cell phone because they're dying.
Your belief that people will still pay a lot of money just because their bracelet has some mechanical components is very short-sighted. One day people will realize that a bracelet is just as useful for showing off wealth and far more flexible in design if it isn't based around an archaic and redundant mechanical assembly.
I'd argue that wristwatches, particularly analog ones, are a multi-generational fad. They are simply approaching the end of their fad stage as their proponents die out. They haven't been a necessity at any point in their history, but were quite popular and expected in certain contexts, which reflects their fad status. Some might argue they're jewelry, but those people are deluded. They're only jewelry in the sense that bracelets are jewelry, but just as bracelets are subject to social fads and some have died out, so too will the wristwatch.
There are plenty of similar fads that will eventually be supplanted. Those in these industries are just too oblivious to realize that is what they are peddling.
The fact it took this long is shocking. The only people I know that wear watches are GenX or older, or they have a collecting hobby associated with them. Watchmakers, particularly mechanical ones, are going to become very small niche players soon.
I sometimes appreciate these ads, too. About 1-in-100, but if they're really well targeted, they are useful, especially if you're looking to buy something unusual.
Most of that was link latency and artifacts caused by poor encoding. This looks like it was recorded at a remote location, presumably the launch location. The video recorded on the drone would be of much higher quality.
Source: 7 years developing digital/IP cameras used in covert surveillance.
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There is a company that specializes in local tax calculations and they have an API. They handle the problem as it stands by keeping track of your points of physical presence and maintaining an absolutely immense number of rules/exceptions (I work with people that worked for them.). They also handle paying taxes on behalf of their customers to the various local/state governments to take the burden off their customers.
They can't hire enough people to keep up with the ever-shifting sand, it's that immense a problem.
But you pay no income tax... WA has something like half the state tax burden of CA. OR has less than WA...
On the other hand, you also get stuff almost instantly that takes a while to ship to a lot of other states.
I remember a while back that they had a pilot program that I encountered a few times where experienced travelers with some specific rules could go into a special lane. I met whatever the requirements were and that was always like 2 minutes, tops, because I had everything prepared and everyone else in that lane was completely prepared, so there was never a delay in that line.
I really miss that... It was nothing like standing in an hour-long lines with a bunch of mouth-breathers that rarely fly and can't follow simple directions.
US security used to be like this. It was a little shocking that it was very similar to the old way the last time I was in Europe...
10+ years ago, when I made about what I do now and had 1.5x the vacation, plus a 4-day work week, and ticket prices were 1/4-1/2 the current prices, I flew very regularly. It might have been worth it back then, but with the 1-2 flights I make a year now, it's just not worth it.
Then again, I'd happily pay for Global Entry if it meant I could avoid all security theater and customs PLUS ended my paying any more outrageous TSA fees.
I guess my point is that it's way too expensive. At $40, I'd do Pre Check without hesitation. At $80 as an addition to my passport renewal (with the same period of validity), Global Entry would be an obvious choice. At no more than one international flight every couple years, with most to adjacent countries with really smooth customs processes, it just isn't worth $200 for 10 years for GE or $170 for 10 years with PC. They're simply not cheap enough and don't have enough benefits for a very casual irregular traveler.
His position is completely accurate. Linux hackers will work tirelessly to reverse engineer some pile of shit and write something comparable to support it, while *BSD people simply ignore it for being closed crap. All decent hardware from reasonable vendors is well supported in the BSDs.
Beyond that, they don't really target desktops much beyond the FreeBSD distro (even then, it's not as good as a Linux experience on most hardware). If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.
This is Seagate you're talking about here... We're not dealing with a flash memory manufacturer like Samsung, Intel, Micron, SanDisk, or Toshiba, so who knows what grade F- stuff Seagate has purchased for the lowest price possible.
I want to know where these raises are going. I haven't seen an appreciable raise at any point in the last 15 years. If our skills were so valuable, it wouldn't take regular job changes to bump your income. Clearly, we're not that rare or valuable.
I'm absolutely with you. In my experience, H1B visa holders fill the lowest ranks as a rule. Having worked with a lot of immigrants in the tech industry, it's pretty consistent (that is, those that immigrate through other means are invariably good at what they do in my experience). I could find you a huge number of bright high school grads and community college students that would jump at the chance to learn and gain experience for 40-50k a year (even in my expensive locale), filling these same positions. I see the plight of tech as that of an emergent form of the medical industry. The market just doesn't know how to deal with paying what our skills are worth. If a tech worker costs more than a senator, that's not surprising, considering surgeons make a lot more as well. The problem isn't the workers, it's the fact nobody wants to pay for them. H1B has been a complete failure to this country. If someone is actually worth the effort to import, they should be worth the effort to jump through traditional immigration hoops to get.
Dude, why? Seriously. You can buy COTS stuff for this and if you really want to roll your own, why not simply build something with a cheap motherboard/CPU combo. Under $100 and you'll have radically better performance.
Because they're cheap and have decent performance for their cheapness. I don't actually give a flying crap about I/O speed. About the only thing I wish it had was a variant with two of those USB-Ethernet dongles built in, wifi built in, and retaining at least a couple USB ports. If I need multiple Ethernet ports, I've been attaching dongles anyhow, so why not build them in? The benefit is the device is that it is dirt cheap. I have a number of them in service in manufacturing acting as web servers for performing specific tasks (mostly for flashing microcontrollers and loading configurations on boards that cost 3-50 times as much). Sure, I could put a cheap desktop in there, but we're talking a massive increase in cost and physical size (I do use one of these where I/O would be a problem with a RasPi). It's all about using the right tool for the job...
Nicotine is a poison. The reason smoking is so bad for you is that nicotine increases the risk of cancer throughout one's body due to the way it disrupts apoptosis. It actually amplifies the negative effect of the other components.
If nicotine had any medicinal properties, why is it not a pharmaceutical? Why do we use it as a pesticide?
Make US regs match EU regs, along with an agreement to change regulations together in unison. The problem with the US has always been that our regulations were far behind, incompatible with others, and enshrined strange requirements (literally over a century of cruft). The list is immense: Headlights (sealed beam lights were required for decades after the industry moved on in every other country), the corner reflectors we still have that nobody else requires (you probably don't realize they are there, but they require design changes just for the US on many cars), the weird lighting rules (red signal indicators, for example), bumpers (they have learned to hide them with enormous fake grilles), and the list goes on... All these weird regulation differences make cars more expensive for everybody.
Main task on the primary, secondary tools for the main task are on another, terminals/utilities in another (sometimes a couple), then low-importance things as far from me as necessary. Usually terminals/utilities are "left" and secondary tools are "right". Low importance things are the greatest difficulty to access as they are of low importance.
At least, that's how I've always done it with XFCE, fluxbox, and most other window managers I've used. Sadly, I suffer through using Win8 on most of my computers that aren't in VMs these days.
Technology moves so quickly that any investment in voting equipment beyond the bare minimum to produce decent results in a reasonable amount of time is not worth wasting money on. At no more than one or two uses a year, voting machines are extremely under-utilized equipment. Even paper ballots that don't have alternate uses are a waste of effort.
The only way to get sufficient use out of voting equipment would be to shorten term limits to days and/or change the role of representatives so their purpose is to vote on whether or not a potential law should be presented to the voting public. That should keep them busy and increase the value derived from voting equipment investments.
This is merely because hardware has been fairly stagnant for years now. Cycles are turning into a fungible commodity again and therefore hardware prices are being driven down. In the 1970s it was similar, but Moore's Law was devaluing it at a rapid pace, while network connections were still slow. Eventually the Big Iron that was managed by groups of highly trained people in clean rooms couldn't compete.
However, you're deluded if you think fast and reliable lines are cheap. They're not. This is why anything involving large quantities of data is staying local... The easy stuff that was designed decades ago for those slow links are the only low-hanging fruit that have experienced a strong shift to outsourced service ("cloud") providers due to the fact that they do not depend on a big pipe. Email, documents, and spreadsheets are one thing; terabytes of data are completely different... "Cloud" services are only good for easy problems.
Unless they are literally in abject poverty and/or homeless, I can't fathom even $300 being a huge deal for anyone financially able to raise a child. There's no way a parent couldn't kick back a few less beers or smoke a couple fewer packs so they could afford a decent computer. We're not talking the third world where people get by on lard and beans here; these are people that drive cars and probably spend money on vices.
I grew up in, by American standards, abject poverty. My parents owned an unreliable 20+ year old car that was given to them. Gas was so expensive that riding in a car was an exciting luxury to me. My clothing had patches and my siblings would be wearing those clothes when I outgrew them. We're talking so poor that I got free school lunches and ate government cheese. I still had a pocket calculator.
Now, let's get real: If you can't cobble together a computer out of 5+ year old parts for somewhere between cheap and free, you're way too picky. I guarantee every one of you either sells all their old tech or has some working old computers in your closet gathering dust. A quick search of ebay turns up decent workable tablets/netbooks for under $20. Full laptops for under $40. We're talking pocket calculator money here, less than I spend on a cheap dinner out, less than a single trip to the movies for two, less than it costs to fill my car with gas, less than buying a latte every day for a week. How do you even afford to have children if you can't afford a computer? What happens to these children that grow up in a home and world without technology? There's simply no excuse.
Unless grocery baggers are hired based on their lack of education (ex: 8th or 10th grade being the last completed), we're already massively wasting education. They are not using any skills they have in any subject taught in a school that cannot be taught in five minutes. However, most of these companies require a high school diploma, GED, or similar, for a job requiring none of the implied skills.
There's no reason that the VP of Manufacturing in my company refuses to hire anyone without a BSME to work as a clerk managing paperwork that comes from Engineering, but they always fill that position with someone with a BSME that eventually leaves unless we poach them into our department first. However, it does prove that their employment options are limited even with a STEM degree, so they're willing to make $28k/year doing something that technically doesn't require their skills just to get their foot in the door somewhere. The mentality is spreading, with many other menial jobs within the company requiring as least a 4-year-degree in a STEM field. Our Field Service department recently started demanding a degree for glorified plumbers and their secretary has a masters in some hard science field.
Nothing opened my eyes to the situation more than this. It's clear that degrees are moving downmarket.
The greens to be freaking perfect every day. No excuses anymore, run those electric lawnmowers twice a day...
You're crazy. Watches are already dated-looking "jewelry". They'll be melted down to recover their constituent materials and some particularly-unusual ones will be stored in museums. The styles have changed very regularly, although they have been pretty stabilized since the advent of the cell phone because they're dying.
Your belief that people will still pay a lot of money just because their bracelet has some mechanical components is very short-sighted. One day people will realize that a bracelet is just as useful for showing off wealth and far more flexible in design if it isn't based around an archaic and redundant mechanical assembly.
Tablets are not killing computers, they are simply computers with different packaging.
I'd argue that wristwatches, particularly analog ones, are a multi-generational fad. They are simply approaching the end of their fad stage as their proponents die out. They haven't been a necessity at any point in their history, but were quite popular and expected in certain contexts, which reflects their fad status. Some might argue they're jewelry, but those people are deluded. They're only jewelry in the sense that bracelets are jewelry, but just as bracelets are subject to social fads and some have died out, so too will the wristwatch.
There are plenty of similar fads that will eventually be supplanted. Those in these industries are just too oblivious to realize that is what they are peddling.
The fact it took this long is shocking. The only people I know that wear watches are GenX or older, or they have a collecting hobby associated with them. Watchmakers, particularly mechanical ones, are going to become very small niche players soon.
I sometimes appreciate these ads, too. About 1-in-100, but if they're really well targeted, they are useful, especially if you're looking to buy something unusual.
Most of that was link latency and artifacts caused by poor encoding. This looks like it was recorded at a remote location, presumably the launch location. The video recorded on the drone would be of much higher quality.
Source: 7 years developing digital/IP cameras used in covert surveillance.