> Think about where you store price for line item (if your a 3rd normal form purist). Can't be on lineitem, redundant to pricing, so has to link to pricing data with full history.
PricePaid / PriceCharged is part of the invoice. It has nothing whatever to do with what is on sale today, or the price of tea in China today. The price you're currently offering on your web site has nothing to do with how much you charged the church three years ago. Different different prices today, which may depend on whether they bought 3 for $5 or 1 for $2.
Very often, you wouldn't store line items for invoices, as the invoice is a thing unto itself - you might give your brother half off, so you can very well have an invoice table which has information about the invoice - including the grand total.
What would be a violation would be to have both, where they may contradict: Item1 paid: $5 Item2 paid: $4 Item3 paid: $11 Grand total: $7
The length of a passphrase is most important. Using punctuation or not doesn't make as much difference. That's true of passphrases generally.
For WPA2 specifically, it ends up being turned into a 128-bit key, which is 22 random keyboard characters. You can easily get the same 128 bits by using a few words, especially non-dictionary words such as Greystone or Jamerican.
>> I started my cost comparison based on a three-person company renting a quarter rack (11U) duplicated in two data centers.... 32 hard drives
> you had a non redundancy
Let me guess, with your keen eye for detail, you're a Bernie Sanders supporter?
What exactly is confusing to you about "DUPLICATED in TWO data centers"? How do you think 32 drives per unit would be configured? Perhaps as a RAID, aka Redundant Array of Independent Drives?
I started my cost comparison based on a three-person company renting a quarter rack (11U) duplicatds in two data centers. 6U was 32 hard drives, 3U was CPU, and the remaining 2U was the network switch and IP KVM.
Even at that level AWS was much more expensive, mostly due to the man power of occasionally maintaining it. Economies of scale make your own hardware cheaper as you scale up.
I suspect the benefit to splitting things up may be obvious enough that I don't need to state it. On the other hand, over the years I've put a lot of thought into why companies use these clouds, and particularly AWS.
Years ago I developed a small private cloud using a lot of technology I designed and architected myself, with coding help from my employees and a contractor for the UI. It was mostly about storage, and some really nifty ways of managing virtual machines, but the main cost was storage. Multiple people asked me why we didn't use AWS for storage, so even after I had already looked into AWS I double checked a couple more times. What I found was that their storage was MUCH more expensive than some very solid, very flexible storage built from standard open source Linux storage components (cLVM, etc) and some 16-bay Supermicro chassis. AWS was super expensive for storage, and for virtual machines. So why are so many companies using them so much? Years later, I think I have a couple of answers.
There are a few reasons, but one is the level of integration of advanced things like auto-scale groups. Even getting just a load balancer working PROPERLY and configuring a static cluster of web servers is tricky normally. More often than not, the server clusters I see people deploy aren't actually clusters at all. They are a screwed up hybrid of a true cluster and a bunch of independent mirrors, which breaks things. AWS gives you a solid cluster in a few clicks. You can the easily save your entire cluster setup to your git repo as a Cloud Formation template.
The big clouds aren't the best way to get storage, they aren't the best way to run virtual machines, they aren't the best way to run databases. The magic is the integration - with a few clicks you have all the right DNS entries pointed to your new cluster of web servers, which talk to your DB cluster through the Lamda functions, all backed by the magic storage in a seamless way. With a beautiful API for programming it all. That's where the value is, how Amazon brings all these different things together seamlessly.
Breaking your operations up across a bunch of cloud providers meana giving up this seamless integration, duplicating whole data centers to another physical location with a few clicks, and haing everything still work.
If you're not going to take advantage of how everything is put together, you may as well save a few bucks and have a rack full of Supermicro gear on premises.
What exactly are you proposing? Bring more small businesses to town by having proportionately greater incentives to move into your city? Should your city offer me a 10 year property tax deferral to get me to bring my three-person company to wherever you live? Do you think that would work to get me to move?
We probably both see how ridiculous this conversation is:
Fred: Trump shouldn't be recklessly tweeting whatever comes to his mind. What a US president says impact, in the US and around the world.
Bob: That's the argument. However Obama shouldn't have claimed to unilaterally declare new laws, after he himself said it would be unconstitutional to do exactly what he ended up doing.
What Fred said is right, and while Bob says something else that's true, it in no way changes that Fred made a true statement.
I ran small businesses for many years. The tax and government related thing that would have helped my companies had to do with paperwork. I filled out quite a few tax forms showing that the company owed less than $10 for a particular tax. The government probably spent $20 of employee times processing the form and my $4 payment, so it was a waste of taxpayer resources and a waste of my time. What would help small businesses, and save the taxpayers money, would be to exempt them from the many taxes types of taxes designed for large companies, where preparing and processing the tax paperwork costs more than the tax due. I've literally had the state call me about a 17 cent tax bill. The state employee's time cost them more than the 17 cents they collected. A paid a yearly tax for owning my desk and chair, with paperwork I have to full out every year showing how much my desk is worth.
Large investments, billions of dollars bring brought into the city, are aided by deferring the property tax untill later year, rather than having to pay those the same year they just spent billions on a new headquarters.
It's not an either-or. How about both? How about the various governments, local, state, and federal, stop being a huge pain in the ass for small businesses AND encourage large businesses to invest in the community? Its very, very good for small businesses like gas stations, dry cleaners, and day cares when a company brings 50,000 high paying jobs to town. That's 50,000 customers with money to spend.
Like it or not, other cities WILL encourage investment and jobs by waiting on the property taxes, so unless YOUR city does the same, or is otherwise very attractive, your city won't get the 50,000 jobs. Fortunately, it ends up working out well most of the time, which is good because there is no way to make it illegal. Congress shows us why.
Congress of course passes thousands of pages of tax law. Taxes vary based on hundreds, if not thousands, of factors. The government can of course set different tax rebates and such for base load power plants than for companies who talk about one day making solar panels. Without a Constitutional amendment, it's legal to say solar power companies get a 250% tax credit. Unwise maybe, but perfectly legal. They can institute a tax on building new buildings, or a tax credit for building new facilities. Perhaps building a new factory over 100,000 square feet gets you a $500,000 tax credit.
Following that line of thought, if they can give solar panel companies a negative tax, and they can hand out a tax credit for new construction, they can of course write a tax credit for "solar panel companies who build new factories" (no actual production of solar panels required).
One could intelligently argue that it should be a flat, equal tax for everyone. That would mean deleting 99.99% of the tax code. One could also intelligently argue that the government may make the tax laws arbitrarily complex. What doesn't make sense is to say "it should be illegal for them to write various different rules, for different situations, except for all the ones I like. It should be legal to give billions to companies who have "green" or "solar" in their name, but illegal to allow natural gas companies to deduct their expenses just like every other business in the country". Make sense? Either they can make complex tax law, favoring some groups, or they can't.
Congress passed a law with special treatment for "recycling companies founded in 1913 in Kenosha, Wisconsin". Of course, there was approximately one family owning company which met those conditions. Shockingly, that family had donated a bunch of money to the Congressman who wrote the clause.
If the government can make different tax laws for different *groups* of people or companies, if they can favor any group or industry, they can combine those to favor arbitrarily small groups, down to single individuals or companies.
Either you have a flat tax where everyone pays the same rate, or you let the politicians decide who pays what. They're clever enough (or their donors lawyers are clever enough) to write the rules to benefit the particular donor if you let them write the rules at all.
Typically, yes, the contracts would have such clauses.
Where those can fall through is when a small city brings in a upstart, relatively small company and they end up going bankrupt within the three years or so that it would be painful.
Amazon isn't likely to go bankrupt any time soon, so not much to worry about there. They can afford to pay taxes due and any penalties if their plans change.
I mentioned small companies. Once on a while a somewhat larger company can be a fad too. A company whose stock sells for $64 billion can certainly fail if they are losing hundreds of millions per month and have little to no cash to cover their huge losses. A charismatic CEO touting big dreams only provides cover for a few years before arithmetic takes over.
We'll give you the exact same deal. You spend $5 billion developing local real estate and provide 50,000 high paying jobs here in Dallas, we'll make it easier for you to bring $5 billion here by deferring the property taxes for a few years.
> primary reason for that difference is the cost of housing in California. It has nothing to do with government programs and everything to do with the tech sector driving up the cost of housing to bats**t crazy levels
You seem to have momentarily forgotten how prices are determined - by supply vs demand. If people want more homes like the did here in Dallas, builders build more homes, like they did here in Dallas. If the wood and other materials to build the condo costs $30K and the labor costs $12K, the builder can make a nice profit selling it for $55K. That's what they've done in Dallas.
I bought my house in Dallas two years ago. I paid $240K for 3,500 square feet. There was demand, and builders supplied.
Prices go sky high when supply isn't allowed to meet demand - when someone makes it very difficult or impossible to build new housing. In California, that includes things like proposition 13 and CEQA.
Under prop 13, cities and counties aren't allowed to get much property tax revenue if they allow land to be used for housing; they have to zone it commercial or office so they get much more property tax revenue from a given parcel of land. So each city is very strongly incentived to approve a shopping center being built on a particular piece of land rather than an apartment complex.
CEQA is another California law that adds an average of 2 1/2 years to each construction project, and sometimes five years, according to the California government's own Legistlative Analysts' Office.
The costs of both labor and materials is also higher in California. With the largest number of immigrants of any state, you'd think construction labor would be inexpensive on California. Government mandates make it one of the most expensive places to hire people. Materials such as wood and dryall also cost more. With such a large percentage of the nation's timber being produced right there in California and Oregon, lumber should be inexpensive in California, but it's actually cheaper for California's lumber producers to send it half way across the country than to deal with the bureacracy required to sell it in California.
If the supply of housing matched the demand, you wouldn't have sky high prices. Builders can't suppy the needed housing affordably because of the tens of thousands of pages of red tape BS, and many years of bureaucracy required to even hope that maybe the project will eventaully be allowed to be built.
This isn't theory. The population of Texas has been growing quickly, including a lot of refugees from California getting tech jobs here, and my 3,500 square foot house actually cost $240,000. It's not maybe getting rid of the nanny state could work; it does work. We're doing it and we've been doing it.
"No longer cool?" I've been on Slashdot and it sure seems to me that most people I've talked to here never read past the second sentence of the summary, much less the article.
Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's fun when we have this exchange:
MD Solar: Fucking Trump screwing everything up again.
Me: The first sentence of the summary is "In 2015, the TSA stripped searched 4,800 people". Can you read the first two words? I didn't know Trump was running the TSA in 2015.
Right up there with Mexico and India. A very large pile of shit actually isn't something to brag about. That's what the silliest of the liberals always say when people point put the economic problems in California, as of having 8 million people living in poverty is the goal.
What matters are the *rates*. For example, what *percentage* of residents are living in poverty. California has the #1 highest poverty rate in the country, according to the US Census Bureau.
That's mostly because all of Californias government programs and edicts cost a lot of money. For example, groceries cost 26% more in Los Angeles than they do in Dallas, because all the extra government red tape and PC bullshit costs the stores a lot more money. Nominal incomes in California aren't bad, but when the government takes $266 billion out of the economy every year (twice as much as Texas) in order to spend $100 billion and ten years failing to build a railroad track, while also burdening everyone with the most expensive pile of ridiculous regulations in the country, including the law regulating cow farts (SB 1383).
Big isn't good when it's a big pile of shit. With the highest supplemental poverty rate in the nation, California's economy is a very large pile of cow manure.
There is no such broad license to completely ignore copyright in the US either. In this story, the school is 100% liable - they put the photo on their web site without any license to do so. (Though the fact that is *is* a school could come into play with the recent changes to German copyright law, making it closer to US law regarding educational use.)
What the US has is a safe harbor for *service providers* who follow the procedure when *someone else* puts infringing material on their network or servers. There are several distinct types of service providers listed in the law. Slashdot is included in one type - *users* have conversations here using the Slashdot server. Slashdot is not responsible for infringement by the users, if they follow proper procedure. Slashdot has no such protection for things Slashdot puts on their site.
BTW what a lot of people don't know is that there is another very important step beyond "take it down when you receive notice". They must also put it back up if they receive a counter-notice, an email saying "nope, my post isn't infringing" (or it's fair use). To have safe harbor, they would take it down if and only if they receive a notice that it is infringing and DON'T receive another notice saying it's not.
If the respondent says it's not infringing, the complainant can either drop it, or file suit in federal court. Filing suit is expensive for the complainant.
The millions of duplicative spams sent in opposition came primarily from Demand Progress, an organization co-founded by Aaron Swartz orginally to protest seizure of domains like MegaUpload which exist primarily to engage in commerical criminal copyright infringement for profit.
Is it your assertion that Aaron Swartz and his associates were trying to "make it look like those who opposed net neutrality were trying to game the system", apparently in collaboration with the Russians? Because that's who submitted most of them.
The comment period for the NN rules was a shit show all around, and utterly failed to fulfill it's purpose because people on both sides faked and spammed millions of times. By far, most of the fakes / spams were opposing the rule. Roughly 87% of the crap was opposed, probably because those who were in favor (isps) were more likely to understand that spamming shit comments would be absolutely pointless, as opposed to the Facebook reactionaries who had until then never heard of a "comment period".
It's helpful to understand what the comment process is all about. The agency publishes a draft of the rule and then people interested can comment on the wording, structure, and details of the draft. The agency then looks at each comment and adjusts the wording where appropriate, where they agree adjustments are needed, in order to produce the final draft. Occasionally, there is a second round of comments, with an interim draft.
It is NOT American Idol, not "press 2 to vote for Ajit Pai". It's not anything like a vote, in any way. It's a process to refine the wording and details, turning a proposed draft into the final rule.
Useful / proper comments which can effect this process point to specific words in specific sections, such as:
In section 2, subsection c, the proposed list does not indicate whether those requirements are "or" or "and". The word "or" should be inserted like so: ISPs may block traffic that is: 1. Spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act 2. A ddos attack as defined in 3(b)y OR 3. Authorized to be blocked by the commission
I've had success with very minor policy "adjustments" as well, saying the list should also include and item #4 foobar because while it is similar to a ddos, it doesn't exactly fit the definition in 3(b)y because whatever. I've never seen a policy reversal, or anything remotely resembling a reversal, take place during the comment period. Rather, it's minor adjustments to the details.
That's the type of comment that gets a change made. The FCC isn't asking what their policy should be, they are looking for bugs in the way they have written the rules.
Of the top fake / spam comments, six of the top seven bogus comments, the ones bulk-submitted the most times, were OPPOSING the policy:
> That balance point is different for different people
It is indeed different for different people. Most people probably don't realize the extent to which you CHOOSE that point.
If you're making over about $25,000, you are in the top 2% highest income in the world - you're rich. Above that, you're deciding "I'm going to give up X in order to be even more rich". If you're reading this, you probably already have a very high income. Income-wise, you're among the richest people in the world. You may still be living paycheck to paycheck by blowing $6.50 on a latte every day, and $180/ month for 650 TV channels, but that's a choice too. You *could* have $100,000 in the bank at your income level.
Regardless of the ACs very poor communication skills, he or she is right that both are good, especially combined well. In a proper blend they compliment each other.
My four year old daughter is really into planetary astronomy right now. Saturn is her favorite planet, and she's really into the dwarf planets - Pluto, Makemake, etc.
We can go outside and see Saturn as a point of light in the sky. She enjoys that and learns something. Through our $400 telescope, she can just see the rings, which look like one big ring in that scope. She has fun and learns from that, but she really wants to see more. To see the distinct rings, we a screen. We load up Cassini images on her iPad so she can see detail of Saturn, it's moons and rings. The video tells her the names of Saturn's largest moons, and what they are made of.
It's a blend that's best. Similarly, we weren't made with five sense so that we could choose just one. We continously blend input from all five of senses for the best experience and learning. The internet is like a sixth sense to be blended with the other five. My daughter has looked in the telescope and seen a door of light near Jupiter. "That's Titan, the biggest moon", she said "no wait, Titan is Saturn's biggest moon", she corrects herself. Again, she just turned four.
She can't see the Keiper belt objects, but she can tell you about them because she enjoys learning about them on her iPad.
That's definitely not to say she should stare at a screen all day and never see or touch anything in real life, and also models. She enjoyed when I pointed a flashlight at her globe so she can really understand how day and night happen. She was excited when I put the flashlight behind the plastic drain pipe under the sink so she could see the water flowing down through the pipe.
She enjoys see a butterfly in the yard - and then studying super close-up pictures of butterflies on her iPad. That's the blended learning that works best, according to the studies I've seen and the obvious learning my four year old is doing.
> How the machine resolves DNS requests I think should be outside the scope of the browser. Its the job of the OS network stack.
I'd mostly agree with that. A page may contain 20 thumbnail images from nerdporn.com, on a page loaded from nerporn.com. It would be silly for the browser to load that one page by asking the OS to look up nerdporn.com 21 times in one second. Better for the browser to remember the answer for a few seconds. Heck, if it changes while the page is loading that's probably a DNS rebinding attack.
So I'd say the browser should generally ask the system to resolve names, and the browser shouldn't be stupid about it. The browser uses a lot of names; it should be a little bit smart about how it does so.
Suppose the browser caches the answer for 30 seconds. After 40 seconds it asks for the fresh IP for Google.com to Slashdot.org and the OS says the DNS server is down. When the OS can't give an answer, should the browser go ahead and use the answer that the OS provided 40 seconds ago? Maybe so.
> For instance if you thought Trump had no chance of winning the last presidential election, then your model of the universe was grossly wrong.
That's an interesting comment. What if, last year, you said that a growth rate of 3% was impossible, asserting that we'd have "annual average of about 1.9% well into the next decade."? How wrong would your model of reality have to be, to say that for at least the next five to tend years that can't happen, just months before it hits 4%?
Slashdot Mirror
https://xkcd.com/2030/
> Think about where you store price for line item (if your a 3rd normal form purist). Can't be on lineitem, redundant to pricing, so has to link to pricing data with full history.
PricePaid / PriceCharged is part of the invoice. It has nothing whatever to do with what is on sale today, or the price of tea in China today. The price you're currently offering on your web site has nothing to do with how much you charged the church three years ago. Different different prices today, which may depend on whether they bought 3 for $5 or 1 for $2.
Very often, you wouldn't store line items for invoices, as the invoice is a thing unto itself - you might give your brother half off, so you can very well have an invoice table which has information about the invoice - including the grand total.
What would be a violation would be to have both, where they may contradict:
Item1 paid: $5
Item2 paid: $4
Item3 paid: $11
Grand total: $7
The length of a passphrase is most important. Using punctuation or not doesn't make as much difference. That's true of passphrases generally.
For WPA2 specifically, it ends up being turned into a 128-bit key, which is 22 random keyboard characters. You can easily get the same 128 bits by using a few words, especially non-dictionary words such as Greystone or Jamerican.
>> I started my cost comparison based on a three-person company renting a quarter rack (11U) duplicated in two data centers. ... 32 hard drives
> you had a non redundancy
Let me guess, with your keen eye for detail, you're a Bernie Sanders supporter?
What exactly is confusing to you about "DUPLICATED in TWO data centers"? How do you think 32 drives per unit would be configured? Perhaps as a RAID, aka Redundant Array of Independent Drives?
That may be a different thread since this article is about whether to put it on one cloud or two.
I suppose putting classified info on two public clouds is twice as dumb as putting it on one public cloud.
Amazon builds warehouses all the time. As in literally they are constantly building new warehouses. That's not national news.
This isn't a warehouse.
I started my cost comparison based on a three-person company renting a quarter rack (11U) duplicatds in two data centers. 6U was 32 hard drives, 3U was CPU, and the remaining 2U was the network switch and IP KVM.
Even at that level AWS was much more expensive, mostly due to the man power of occasionally maintaining it. Economies of scale make your own hardware cheaper as you scale up.
Thanks for writing all that.
I suspect the benefit to splitting things up may be obvious enough that I don't need to state it. On the other hand, over the years I've put a lot of thought into why companies use these clouds, and particularly AWS.
Years ago I developed a small private cloud using a lot of technology I designed and architected myself, with coding help from my employees and a contractor for the UI. It was mostly about storage, and some really nifty ways of managing virtual machines, but the main cost was storage. Multiple people asked me why we didn't use AWS for storage, so even after I had already looked into AWS I double checked a couple more times. What I found was that their storage was MUCH more expensive than some very solid, very flexible storage built from standard open source Linux storage components (cLVM, etc) and some 16-bay Supermicro chassis. AWS was super expensive for storage, and for virtual machines. So why are so many companies using them so much? Years later, I think I have a couple of answers.
There are a few reasons, but one is the level of integration of advanced things like auto-scale groups. Even getting just a load balancer working PROPERLY and configuring a static cluster of web servers is tricky normally. More often than not, the server clusters I see people deploy aren't actually clusters at all. They are a screwed up hybrid of a true cluster and a bunch of independent mirrors, which breaks things. AWS gives you a solid cluster in a few clicks. You can the easily save your entire cluster setup to your git repo as a Cloud Formation template.
The big clouds aren't the best way to get storage, they aren't the best way to run virtual machines, they aren't the best way to run databases. The magic is the integration - with a few clicks you have all the right DNS entries pointed to your new cluster of web servers, which talk to your DB cluster through the Lamda functions, all backed by the magic storage in a seamless way. With a beautiful API for programming it all. That's where the value is, how Amazon brings all these different things together seamlessly.
Breaking your operations up across a bunch of cloud providers meana giving up this seamless integration, duplicating whole data centers to another physical location with a few clicks, and haing everything still work.
If you're not going to take advantage of how everything is put together, you may as well save a few bucks and have a rack full of Supermicro gear on premises.
What exactly are you proposing? Bring more small businesses to town by having proportionately greater incentives to move into your city? Should your city offer me a 10 year property tax deferral to get me to bring my three-person company to wherever you live? Do you think that would work to get me to move?
We probably both see how ridiculous this conversation is:
Fred: Trump shouldn't be recklessly tweeting whatever comes to his mind. What a US president says impact, in the US and around the world.
Bob: That's the argument. However Obama shouldn't have claimed to unilaterally declare new laws, after he himself said it would be unconstitutional to do exactly what he ended up doing.
What Fred said is right, and while Bob says something else that's true, it in no way changes that Fred made a true statement.
I ran small businesses for many years. The tax and government related thing that would have helped my companies had to do with paperwork. I filled out quite a few tax forms showing that the company owed less than $10 for a particular tax. The government probably spent $20 of employee times processing the form and my $4 payment, so it was a waste of taxpayer resources and a waste of my time. What would help small businesses, and save the taxpayers money, would be to exempt them from the many taxes types of taxes designed for large companies, where preparing and processing the tax paperwork costs more than the tax due. I've literally had the state call me about a 17 cent tax bill. The state employee's time cost them more than the 17 cents they collected. A paid a yearly tax for owning my desk and chair, with paperwork I have to full out every year showing how much my desk is worth.
Large investments, billions of dollars bring brought into the city, are aided by deferring the property tax untill later year, rather than having to pay those the same year they just spent billions on a new headquarters.
It's not an either-or. How about both? How about the various governments, local, state, and federal, stop being a huge pain in the ass for small businesses AND encourage large businesses to invest in the community? Its very, very good for small businesses like gas stations, dry cleaners, and day cares when a company brings 50,000 high paying jobs to town. That's 50,000 customers with money to spend.
I understand where you are coming from.
Like it or not, other cities WILL encourage investment and jobs by waiting on the property taxes, so unless YOUR city does the same, or is otherwise very attractive, your city won't get the 50,000 jobs. Fortunately, it ends up working out well most of the time, which is good because there is no way to make it illegal. Congress shows us why.
Congress of course passes thousands of pages of tax law. Taxes vary based on hundreds, if not thousands, of factors. The government can of course set different tax rebates and such for base load power plants than for companies who talk about one day making solar panels. Without a Constitutional amendment, it's legal to say solar power companies get a 250% tax credit. Unwise maybe, but perfectly legal. They can institute a tax on building new buildings, or a tax credit for building new facilities. Perhaps building a new factory over 100,000 square feet gets you a $500,000 tax credit.
Following that line of thought, if they can give solar panel companies a negative tax, and they can hand out a tax credit for new construction, they can of course write a tax credit for "solar panel companies who build new factories" (no actual production of solar panels required).
One could intelligently argue that it should be a flat, equal tax for everyone. That would mean deleting 99.99% of the tax code. One could also intelligently argue that the government may make the tax laws arbitrarily complex. What doesn't make sense is to say "it should be illegal for them to write various different rules, for different situations, except for all the ones I like. It should be legal to give billions to companies who have "green" or "solar" in their name, but illegal to allow natural gas companies to deduct their expenses just like every other business in the country". Make sense? Either they can make complex tax law, favoring some groups, or they can't.
Congress passed a law with special treatment for "recycling companies founded in 1913 in Kenosha, Wisconsin". Of course, there was approximately one family owning company which met those conditions. Shockingly, that family had donated a bunch of money to the Congressman who wrote the clause.
If the government can make different tax laws for different *groups* of people or companies, if they can favor any group or industry, they can combine those to favor arbitrarily small groups, down to single individuals or companies.
Either you have a flat tax where everyone pays the same rate, or you let the politicians decide who pays what. They're clever enough (or their donors lawyers are clever enough) to write the rules to benefit the particular donor if you let them write the rules at all.
Typically, yes, the contracts would have such clauses.
Where those can fall through is when a small city brings in a upstart, relatively small company and they end up going bankrupt within the three years or so that it would be painful.
Amazon isn't likely to go bankrupt any time soon, so not much to worry about there. They can afford to pay taxes due and any penalties if their plans change.
I mentioned small companies. Once on a while a somewhat larger company can be a fad too. A company whose stock sells for $64 billion can certainly fail if they are losing hundreds of millions per month and have little to no cash to cover their huge losses. A charismatic CEO touting big dreams only provides cover for a few years before arithmetic takes over.
We'll give you the exact same deal.
You spend $5 billion developing local real estate and provide 50,000 high paying jobs here in Dallas, we'll make it easier for you to bring $5 billion here by deferring the property taxes for a few years.
> primary reason for that difference is the cost of housing in California. It has nothing to do with government programs and everything to do with the tech sector driving up the cost of housing to bats**t crazy levels
You seem to have momentarily forgotten how prices are determined - by supply vs demand. If people want more homes like the did here in Dallas, builders build more homes, like they did here in Dallas. If the wood and other materials to build the condo costs $30K and the labor costs $12K, the builder can make a nice profit selling it for $55K. That's what they've done in Dallas.
I bought my house in Dallas two years ago. I paid $240K for 3,500 square feet. There was demand, and builders supplied.
Prices go sky high when supply isn't allowed to meet demand - when someone makes it very difficult or impossible to build new housing. In California, that includes things like proposition 13 and CEQA.
Under prop 13, cities and counties aren't allowed to get much property tax revenue if they allow land to be used for housing; they have to zone it commercial or office so they get much more property tax revenue from a given parcel of land. So each city is very strongly incentived to approve a shopping center being built on a particular piece of land rather than an apartment complex.
CEQA is another California law that adds an average of 2 1/2 years to each construction project, and sometimes five years, according to the California government's own Legistlative Analysts' Office.
The costs of both labor and materials is also higher in California. With the largest number of immigrants of any state, you'd think construction labor would be inexpensive on California. Government mandates make it one of the most expensive places to hire people. Materials such as wood and dryall also cost more. With such a large percentage of the nation's timber being produced right there in California and Oregon, lumber should be inexpensive in California, but it's actually cheaper for California's lumber producers to send it half way across the country than to deal with the bureacracy required to sell it in California.
If the supply of housing matched the demand, you wouldn't have sky high prices. Builders can't suppy the needed housing affordably because of the tens of thousands of pages of red tape BS, and many years of bureaucracy required to even hope that maybe the project will eventaully be allowed to be built.
This isn't theory. The population of Texas has been growing quickly, including a lot of refugees from California getting tech jobs here, and my 3,500 square foot house actually cost $240,000. It's not maybe getting rid of the nanny state could work; it does work. We're doing it and we've been doing it.
"No longer cool?" I've been on Slashdot and it sure seems to me that most people I've talked to here never read past the second sentence of the summary, much less the article.
Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's fun when we have this exchange:
MD Solar: Fucking Trump screwing everything up again.
Me: The first sentence of the summary is "In 2015, the TSA stripped searched 4,800 people". Can you read the first two words? I didn't know Trump was running the TSA in 2015.
> one of the largest economies
Right up there with Mexico and India. A very large pile of shit actually isn't something to brag about. That's what the silliest of the liberals always say when people point put the economic problems in California, as of having 8 million people living in poverty is the goal.
What matters are the *rates*. For example, what *percentage* of residents are living in poverty. California has the #1 highest poverty rate in the country, according to the US Census Bureau.
https://www.census.gov/content...
That's mostly because all of Californias government programs and edicts cost a lot of money. For example, groceries cost 26% more in Los Angeles than they do in Dallas, because all the extra government red tape and PC bullshit costs the stores a lot more money. Nominal incomes in California aren't bad, but when the government takes $266 billion out of the economy every year (twice as much as Texas) in order to spend $100 billion and ten years failing to build a railroad track, while also burdening everyone with the most expensive pile of ridiculous regulations in the country, including the law regulating cow farts (SB 1383).
Big isn't good when it's a big pile of shit. With the highest supplemental poverty rate in the nation, California's economy is a very large pile of cow manure.
There is no such broad license to completely ignore copyright in the US either. In this story, the school is 100% liable - they put the photo on their web site without any license to do so. (Though the fact that is *is* a school could come into play with the recent changes to German copyright law, making it closer to US law regarding educational use.)
What the US has is a safe harbor for *service providers* who follow the procedure when *someone else* puts infringing material on their network or servers. There are several distinct types of service providers listed in the law. Slashdot is included in one type - *users* have conversations here using the Slashdot server. Slashdot is not responsible for infringement by the users, if they follow proper procedure. Slashdot has no such protection for things Slashdot puts on their site.
BTW what a lot of people don't know is that there is another very important step beyond "take it down when you receive notice". They must also put it back up if they receive a counter-notice, an email saying "nope, my post isn't infringing" (or it's fair use). To have safe harbor, they would take it down if and only if they receive a notice that it is infringing and DON'T receive another notice saying it's not.
If the respondent says it's not infringing, the complainant can either drop it, or file suit in federal court. Filing suit is expensive for the complainant.
The millions of duplicative spams sent in opposition came primarily from Demand Progress, an organization co-founded by Aaron Swartz orginally to protest seizure of domains like MegaUpload which exist primarily to engage in commerical criminal copyright infringement for profit.
Is it your assertion that Aaron Swartz and his associates were trying to "make it look like those who opposed net neutrality were trying to game the system", apparently in collaboration with the Russians? Because that's who submitted most of them.
The comment period for the NN rules was a shit show all around, and utterly failed to fulfill it's purpose because people on both sides faked and spammed millions of times. By far, most of the fakes / spams were opposing the rule. Roughly 87% of the crap was opposed, probably because those who were in favor (isps) were more likely to understand that spamming shit comments would be absolutely pointless, as opposed to the Facebook reactionaries who had until then never heard of a "comment period".
It's helpful to understand what the comment process is all about. The agency publishes a draft of the rule and then people interested can comment on the wording, structure, and details of the draft. The agency then looks at each comment and adjusts the wording where appropriate, where they agree adjustments are needed, in order to produce the final draft. Occasionally, there is a second round of comments, with an interim draft.
It is NOT American Idol, not "press 2 to vote for Ajit Pai". It's not anything like a vote, in any way. It's a process to refine the wording and details, turning a proposed draft into the final rule.
Useful / proper comments which can effect this process point to specific words in specific sections, such as:
In section 2, subsection c, the proposed list does not indicate whether those requirements are "or" or "and". The word "or" should be inserted like so:
ISPs may block traffic that is:
1. Spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act
2. A ddos attack as defined in 3(b)y
OR
3. Authorized to be blocked by the commission
I've had success with very minor policy "adjustments" as well, saying the list should also include and item #4 foobar because while it is similar to a ddos, it doesn't exactly fit the definition in 3(b)y because whatever. I've never seen a policy reversal, or anything remotely resembling a reversal, take place during the comment period. Rather, it's minor adjustments to the details.
That's the type of comment that gets a change made. The FCC isn't asking what their policy should be, they are looking for bugs in the way they have written the rules.
Of the top fake / spam comments, six of the top seven bogus comments, the ones bulk-submitted the most times, were OPPOSING the policy:
http://www.pewinternet.org/201...
Such spam is utterly pointless since the comment process is not a vote. It's more like proofreading.
> That balance point is different for different people
It is indeed different for different people. Most people probably don't realize the extent to which you CHOOSE that point.
If you're making over about $25,000, you are in the top 2% highest income in the world - you're rich. Above that, you're deciding "I'm going to give up X in order to be even more rich". If you're reading this, you probably already have a very high income. Income-wise, you're among the richest people in the world. You may still be living paycheck to paycheck by blowing $6.50 on a latte every day, and $180/ month for 650 TV channels, but that's a choice too. You *could* have $100,000 in the bank at your income level.
Since you mentioned travel as one of the things that is important to you, I'll just refer you a couple posts up in the thread:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Regardless of the ACs very poor communication skills, he or she is right that both are good, especially combined well. In a proper blend they compliment each other.
My four year old daughter is really into planetary astronomy right now. Saturn is her favorite planet, and she's really into the dwarf planets - Pluto, Makemake, etc.
We can go outside and see Saturn as a point of light in the sky. She enjoys that and learns something. Through our $400 telescope, she can just see the rings, which look like one big ring in that scope. She has fun and learns from that, but she really wants to see more. To see the distinct rings, we a screen. We load up Cassini images on her iPad so she can see detail of Saturn, it's moons and rings. The video tells her the names of Saturn's largest moons, and what they are made of.
It's a blend that's best. Similarly, we weren't made with five sense so that we could choose just one. We continously blend input from all five of senses for the best experience and learning. The internet is like a sixth sense to be blended with the other five. My daughter has looked in the telescope and seen a door of light near Jupiter. "That's Titan, the biggest moon", she said "no wait, Titan is Saturn's biggest moon", she corrects herself. Again, she just turned four.
She can't see the Keiper belt objects, but she can tell you about them because she enjoys learning about them on her iPad.
That's definitely not to say she should stare at a screen all day and never see or touch anything in real life, and also models. She enjoyed when I pointed a flashlight at her globe so she can really understand how day and night happen. She was excited when I put the flashlight behind the plastic drain pipe under the sink so she could see the water flowing down through the pipe.
She enjoys see a butterfly in the yard - and then studying super close-up pictures of butterflies on her iPad. That's the blended learning that works best, according to the studies I've seen and the obvious learning my four year old is doing.
> How the machine resolves DNS requests I think should be outside the scope of the browser. Its the job of the OS network stack.
I'd mostly agree with that. A page may contain 20 thumbnail images from nerdporn.com, on a page loaded from nerporn.com. It would be silly for the browser to load that one page by asking the OS to look up nerdporn.com 21 times in one second. Better for the browser to remember the answer for a few seconds. Heck, if it changes while the page is loading that's probably a DNS rebinding attack.
So I'd say the browser should generally ask the system to resolve names, and the browser shouldn't be stupid about it. The browser uses a lot of names; it should be a little bit smart about how it does so.
Suppose the browser caches the answer for 30 seconds. After 40 seconds it asks for the fresh IP for Google.com to Slashdot.org and the OS says the DNS server is down. When the OS can't give an answer, should the browser go ahead and use the answer that the OS provided 40 seconds ago? Maybe so.
> What about the remaining 0.9% of people?
Those are the ones still using Internet Explorer. Probably also using AOL's DNS servers, to find Geocities.
> For instance if you thought Trump had no chance of winning the last presidential election, then your model of the universe was grossly wrong.
That's an interesting comment. What if, last year, you said that a growth rate of 3% was impossible, asserting that we'd have "annual average of about 1.9% well into the next decade."? How wrong would your model of reality have to be, to say that for at least the next five to tend years that can't happen, just months before it hits 4%?
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
https://www.bea.gov/newsreleas...
How about if one were President and said 6%-8% unemployment is the new normal, "jobs just aren't coming back." How wrong would you be?