Relying on a freely available service where you have no contract, no SLA, and no bargaining power is a bad idea.
If you rely on a service, you need a contract to guarantee that service will be available, and that your service provider has a financial interest in making that service available.
So exclude the first $x0,000 of income, as most flat tax proposals do. Or have several brackets of increasing tax rates; 0-15k 0%, 16k-30k 5%, 30k-100k 10%, 100k+ 15% for example but no deductions.
Eliminate the elaborate tax system and you not only make it easier to comply with, but enforcement becomes simple and direct, meaning we don't have to waste millions on the IRS.
Wisdom is knowledge plus experience, which is something that you don't have the first time you do a job regardless of how good the manual is.
You can pick up individual facts and procedures from a manual, but practical experience is very valuable. An expert knows what often goes wrong, what gotchas to look for even if they're uncommon, and how to relate theory with reality. It's rare that something works exactly like the book says it should.
That's more or less what the current Constitution tried to do. In particular, the 10th amendment says the feds can't do anything not explicitly spelled out in the document, but the interstate commerce clause was judged to include anything that would possibly affect interstate commerce - which is basically everything. "Natural person" was somehow judged to mean not just humans but also corporations. Right were defined to be inviolable except in certain cases, but they have not been.
No doubt any replacement constitution would be vulnerable to having its language twisted as well, no matter how you wrote it.
If employees switch to telecommuting the company's rent won't just magically shrink, nor will there be a substantial change in utility bills because there's one less computer on at the office;
Many companies lease office space. If you're leasing the 15th, 16th, and 17th floor, and you move 1/3 of your employees to telecommute, you can stop leasing the 17th floor and cut your rent by 1/3.
As for utilities, removing your humans from a section of the building allows you to turn off the lights, heating, and A/C in that area. Humans generate a fair amount of heat, which is fine when it's cold but drives up the A/C bills in the summer. Less humans = less A/C, especially in warmer climates. Oh, and the water bill goes down since they're not using your toilets or sinks.
For growing companies, letting some employees telecommute will allow you to grow without expanding your office space. If you have 200 people in a 200 person office and you expect to hire 10 people next year, do you get more office space or let 10 people telecommute? Same with 20 people in a 20 person office that needs to hire 2 more people. (Of course the PHB answer is "cram them in by reducing everyone's space" but even that doesn't work forever)
You just demonstrated the Anon's point perfectly. mirix gave a reason for users to want to NAT IPv6 - to avoid per-IP billing. You then say a lot of hoopla without addressing the point that IPv6 NAT would be useful in a per-IP billing situation.
Is per-IP billing stupid and unwarranted with IPv6? Yep. Will it exist? Almost certainly.
* UPSes and lightning arrestors * unmetered internet (or is willing to foot the bill for your extra usage) * 24/7 reliable internet with sufficient bandwidth to accept your backups without compromising their own activities ("my Netflix is slow, I'm disabling the backup") * technical competency to maintain the backup service * no children, dogs, or spouses that will accidentally destroy all your data (accidental format, grape jelly, or simple clumsiness) * sufficient virus and malware protection that your backups won't be affected
If you just want offline backup (store a disk/tape at their house), that means you need to see them every day to drop off incrementals. Of course if you are in physical contact range, that means you'll both by hit by disasters at the same time - electrical grid spikes, earthquakes, etc.
You should have a backup solution in place anyways, so adding your digital music to your backup of your photos, email, spreadsheets, and other documents isn't any more complex. Alternatively, if you don't currently back up your CD collection (by copying the CD), then not backing up your digital music collection is no different.
Moreover you're likely relying on CDDB or similar to get the track names and times. What happens when the CD isn't on there? You have to type it yourself, which again is something tedious that could be done once at the source instead of everyone trying to replicate it.
The real point is that the customer wants this - why isn't anyone selling it to him (at any price)? Even if it's a physical CD full of.flac files, if you want to avoid the bandwidth argument.
They are agents of their various state and local governments. They are specifically not employed by or empowered by the federal government ("the US government"), unless they happen to work on a military base or in Guam or Washington, D.C. or something.
The school acts in loco parentis (as a substitute parent) during the school day, and as a parent, has greater rights and responsibilities than a normal person, just as your own biological parent can search your room without a warrant. These greater rights and responsibilities are not absolute; they are restricted to maintaining the welfare of the students and the continuing operation of the school (for example, preventing disruption). Most of the time (as in this article), the arguments are that the school is trying to prevent disruption of the school, while the affected children argue that their behavior did not disrupt the school. Unfortunately it's not clear-cut what constitutes "disruption", so we have these fights every so often.
Right, but a database of "city-state-salestax" would be feasible, and wouldn't be much more painful to maintain than a zip-code database of tax rates.
Nope. Some people live outside city boundaries in unincorporated areas, but their mailing address is the nearest city. So your address might be "123 Happy St, Podunkville, TX" even though you don't live inside Podunkville's boundaries (and thus aren't subject to its sales tax). Even better, some streets are partially inside a city and partially out - so 123 Happy Street would be outside Podunkville, but 122 Happy Street might be inside it.
You need a full database of every address in the country, and its applicable taxable jurisdictions (city, county, state). Such databases do exist, but they're not free, easy to use, or always up to date. For example I bought something last week and had it shipped where it incurred sales tax, but to a relatively recently built neighborhood. The shipping system couldn't figure out where the destination was, exactly, so it popped up an additional dialog which was something like:
* County A (inside city X) * County A (outside city X) * County B * County C (inside city Y) * County C (inside city Z) * County C (outside city Y or Z)
if shipto.state = ourstate then salestax = yup and salestaxrate= ourstatetaxrate.
Most (all?) states don't have a single statewide sales tax rate (except the states that have 0%). Sales tax can vary by city and county within a state. You can't rely on ZIP codes either, since they span city and county borders.
This is why people [...] imbibe corporate jam. [...] Indie Jam, OTOH, is often about creating a tension
I can't think of a definition of jam that makes sense in this context. Are you talking about sugared fruit preserves in a jar? How does a jar of jam create tension?
Any application which cares about the issue is already NAT-aware and deals with it just fine (Skype, Ventrilo, Transmission, every online game ever). There are already RFC1918-only ISPs that only hand out 10.x or 192.168.x or 172.16.x addresses. There are protocols to help even - NAT-PMP for example.
Telling people that their internet will suck when they only get an RFC1918 address isn't very convincing, since to the vast majority of people that can't figure out port forwarding, they're already in that situation; you're just moving the NAT from their router to the ISP. To the people with RFC1918-only ISPs, they're already in that situation.
You've heard of telemedicine, right? What do you think is the logical end of this technology?
a) expensive doctors in the US being used to treat dirt poor people in other countries b) low cost doctors abroad being used to treat patients in the US
you lose the constitutional right to privacy when you are arrested.
When convicted. Being arrested does not mean you are a criminal; it means the cop supposedly has a good reason to suspect you of a crime. Many people are arrested and then never convicted. They are not criminals and should not be treated as such until convicted.
I stayed home on Halloween one year, for some reason thinking it was a holiday. My boss called me up around noon and asked where the hell I was, and I told him it was Halloween. For some reason he thought this was so ridiculous that it was hilarious. From then on, every October I got playful reminders to come in on October 31.
But he never counted it as time off, so: I got Halloween as a paid holiday. Once.
Slashdot Mirror
Relying on a freely available service where you have no contract, no SLA, and no bargaining power is a bad idea.
If you rely on a service, you need a contract to guarantee that service will be available, and that your service provider has a financial interest in making that service available.
So exclude the first $x0,000 of income, as most flat tax proposals do. Or have several brackets of increasing tax rates; 0-15k 0%, 16k-30k 5%, 30k-100k 10%, 100k+ 15% for example but no deductions.
Eliminate the elaborate tax system and you not only make it easier to comply with, but enforcement becomes simple and direct, meaning we don't have to waste millions on the IRS.
Schedule A shouldn't exist.
Because absorption coolers don't perform well, especially for heavy loads?
Wisdom is knowledge plus experience, which is something that you don't have the first time you do a job regardless of how good the manual is.
You can pick up individual facts and procedures from a manual, but practical experience is very valuable. An expert knows what often goes wrong, what gotchas to look for even if they're uncommon, and how to relate theory with reality. It's rare that something works exactly like the book says it should.
That's more or less what the current Constitution tried to do. In particular, the 10th amendment says the feds can't do anything not explicitly spelled out in the document, but the interstate commerce clause was judged to include anything that would possibly affect interstate commerce - which is basically everything. "Natural person" was somehow judged to mean not just humans but also corporations. Right were defined to be inviolable except in certain cases, but they have not been.
No doubt any replacement constitution would be vulnerable to having its language twisted as well, no matter how you wrote it.
"live near Chicago"
"live just outside of Chicago"
"live in a Chicago suburb called Buffalo Grove"
If employees switch to telecommuting the company's rent won't just magically shrink, nor will there be a substantial change in utility bills because there's one less computer on at the office;
Many companies lease office space. If you're leasing the 15th, 16th, and 17th floor, and you move 1/3 of your employees to telecommute, you can stop leasing the 17th floor and cut your rent by 1/3.
As for utilities, removing your humans from a section of the building allows you to turn off the lights, heating, and A/C in that area. Humans generate a fair amount of heat, which is fine when it's cold but drives up the A/C bills in the summer. Less humans = less A/C, especially in warmer climates. Oh, and the water bill goes down since they're not using your toilets or sinks.
For growing companies, letting some employees telecommute will allow you to grow without expanding your office space. If you have 200 people in a 200 person office and you expect to hire 10 people next year, do you get more office space or let 10 people telecommute? Same with 20 people in a 20 person office that needs to hire 2 more people. (Of course the PHB answer is "cram them in by reducing everyone's space" but even that doesn't work forever)
Right. As usual in cases like this, they're both jerks.
>I run two monitors at 48Hz and 30Hz respectively
Um, why?
It's fairly easy to tamper with an odometer.
They may modify the numbers, but they'll never abolish federal income tax and institute a VAT, for example.
You just demonstrated the Anon's point perfectly. mirix gave a reason for users to want to NAT IPv6 - to avoid per-IP billing. You then say a lot of hoopla without addressing the point that IPv6 NAT would be useful in a per-IP billing situation.
Is per-IP billing stupid and unwarranted with IPv6? Yep. Will it exist? Almost certainly.
Sure, if your friend has:
* UPSes and lightning arrestors
* unmetered internet (or is willing to foot the bill for your extra usage)
* 24/7 reliable internet with sufficient bandwidth to accept your backups without compromising their own activities ("my Netflix is slow, I'm disabling the backup")
* technical competency to maintain the backup service
* no children, dogs, or spouses that will accidentally destroy all your data (accidental format, grape jelly, or simple clumsiness)
* sufficient virus and malware protection that your backups won't be affected
If you just want offline backup (store a disk/tape at their house), that means you need to see them every day to drop off incrementals. Of course if you are in physical contact range, that means you'll both by hit by disasters at the same time - electrical grid spikes, earthquakes, etc.
You should have a backup solution in place anyways, so adding your digital music to your backup of your photos, email, spreadsheets, and other documents isn't any more complex. Alternatively, if you don't currently back up your CD collection (by copying the CD), then not backing up your digital music collection is no different.
Moreover you're likely relying on CDDB or similar to get the track names and times. What happens when the CD isn't on there? You have to type it yourself, which again is something tedious that could be done once at the source instead of everyone trying to replicate it.
The real point is that the customer wants this - why isn't anyone selling it to him (at any price)? Even if it's a physical CD full of .flac files, if you want to avoid the bandwidth argument.
They are agents of their various state and local governments. They are specifically not employed by or empowered by the federal government ("the US government"), unless they happen to work on a military base or in Guam or Washington, D.C. or something.
The school acts in loco parentis (as a substitute parent) during the school day, and as a parent, has greater rights and responsibilities than a normal person, just as your own biological parent can search your room without a warrant. These greater rights and responsibilities are not absolute; they are restricted to maintaining the welfare of the students and the continuing operation of the school (for example, preventing disruption). Most of the time (as in this article), the arguments are that the school is trying to prevent disruption of the school, while the affected children argue that their behavior did not disrupt the school. Unfortunately it's not clear-cut what constitutes "disruption", so we have these fights every so often.
Right, but a database of "city-state-salestax" would be feasible, and wouldn't be much more painful to maintain than a zip-code database of tax rates.
Nope. Some people live outside city boundaries in unincorporated areas, but their mailing address is the nearest city. So your address might be "123 Happy St, Podunkville, TX" even though you don't live inside Podunkville's boundaries (and thus aren't subject to its sales tax). Even better, some streets are partially inside a city and partially out - so 123 Happy Street would be outside Podunkville, but 122 Happy Street might be inside it.
You need a full database of every address in the country, and its applicable taxable jurisdictions (city, county, state). Such databases do exist, but they're not free, easy to use, or always up to date. For example I bought something last week and had it shipped where it incurred sales tax, but to a relatively recently built neighborhood. The shipping system couldn't figure out where the destination was, exactly, so it popped up an additional dialog which was something like:
* County A (inside city X)
* County A (outside city X)
* County B
* County C (inside city Y)
* County C (inside city Z)
* County C (outside city Y or Z)
Ludicrous, ridiculous, etc - yes. Yes it is.
Actually Fedex/UPS/USPS used the state-maintained roads, and paid for it through fuel taxes and vehicle registration taxes.
For police and fire, Amazon's subsidiary paid via property taxes.
if shipto.state = ourstate then salestax = yup and salestaxrate= ourstatetaxrate.
Most (all?) states don't have a single statewide sales tax rate (except the states that have 0%). Sales tax can vary by city and county within a state. You can't rely on ZIP codes either, since they span city and county borders.
This is why people [...] imbibe corporate jam. [...] Indie Jam, OTOH, is often about creating a tension
I can't think of a definition of jam that makes sense in this context. Are you talking about sugared fruit preserves in a jar? How does a jar of jam create tension?
That's Chatroulette. Omegle is simply chat, no pictures, so you won't see any body parts unless they're ASCII drawings.
You convert your HTTP proxies to speak IPv6, and your thousands of desktops can stay IPv4.
Any application which cares about the issue is already NAT-aware and deals with it just fine (Skype, Ventrilo, Transmission, every online game ever). There are already RFC1918-only ISPs that only hand out 10.x or 192.168.x or 172.16.x addresses. There are protocols to help even - NAT-PMP for example.
Telling people that their internet will suck when they only get an RFC1918 address isn't very convincing, since to the vast majority of people that can't figure out port forwarding, they're already in that situation; you're just moving the NAT from their router to the ISP. To the people with RFC1918-only ISPs, they're already in that situation.
it'll never be outsourced.
You've heard of telemedicine, right? What do you think is the logical end of this technology?
a) expensive doctors in the US being used to treat dirt poor people in other countries
b) low cost doctors abroad being used to treat patients in the US
It will take a while, but it's coming.
you lose the constitutional right to privacy when you are arrested.
When convicted. Being arrested does not mean you are a criminal; it means the cop supposedly has a good reason to suspect you of a crime. Many people are arrested and then never convicted. They are not criminals and should not be treated as such until convicted.
>Who the hell gets Halloween as a paid holiday?
I stayed home on Halloween one year, for some reason thinking it was a holiday. My boss called me up around noon and asked where the hell I was, and I told him it was Halloween. For some reason he thought this was so ridiculous that it was hilarious. From then on, every October I got playful reminders to come in on October 31.
But he never counted it as time off, so: I got Halloween as a paid holiday. Once.