its even worse than that. In Utah there are over 200 different tax rates, because each MUNICIPALITY has its own tax rate, in the sales tax there is the state portion, the county portion, and the city portion. Each county, and each municipality within that county have projects that they fund through sales taxes, and every municipality has a different rate. The utah state sales tax return is 3 pages long, and you have to detail sales by county and city, and they have different rates for different types of goods as well. Recently they passed a new law which places sales taxes on services (IE, lawyers, programmers, accountants, it services) now must charge sales tax on all sales. These are all taxed at different rates than say selling a computer.
It didn't specifically say it was his team members that came in early and left at 3:30... But it did state that ALL NEW EMPLOYEES received the SAME EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK which laid down the "core hours" rule. So regardless of the "team" they might be on the article certainly leads one to believe that those leaving at 3:30 are just as much in violation as someone showing up at 9:30.
Why does Susan have to cover for these early birds from 3:30-4:30?!? Where are their managers yelling at them for slacking when the SLA is in effect? They still have to return calls within 15 minutes during the afternoon hours. After all Core hours are Core hours and they cannot be violated, not even by 5 minutes!
Yeah, after reading the initial article I was slightly on Spiegel's side, not knowing the other side of the story.
Having read the linked article, I think Mr. Spiegel may be one of the worst managers I've read about. I have quit 2 jobs for similar stickiness on rules. I am a developer, and a night owl, and granted customer support is a little different... But in his very article he contradicts himself. He says that core hours are 9-4:30, he then says if people come in at 7:30 they are allowed to leave at 3:30. So morning people/early risers are rewarded, and the fact that Susan may get there at 9:30 and stay til 6 isn't recognized or rewarded. Obviously "core hours" are not strictly enforced if anyone arriving early can leave before 4:30. The fact that he wrote a whole article based on the premise of the inviolate nature of "core hours" and in that very article stated quite openly that the policy discriminates against night owls... well.. he is a moron, and I'd never work for him.
I am above the norm, and I am getting very far ahead. However I second the GP. If one of my ventures made it possible, I would quit working, but I will never stop programming. I have a life, a family, a child, I volunteer for my community and church. I go on vacations. But I read/study/tinker late at night, I work crazy hours when necessary. Normally I only work 40-50 hours for "the company" but I program side projects constantly, pick up additional contracting hours often, and always am teaching myself new platforms/languages/tech.
If I get lucky and the sale of one of the many ventures I'm working on gave me 5-10 million dollars, I would invest it in fixed income, and live off the 250k/yr for the rest of my life. But the first thing I would buy would be a rack full of servers and a long term contract at the local Tier 1 DC a few miles from here, and develop cool services/ideas/etc or help host open source projects. I won't stop programming when I stop working, programming isn't work to me, the "work" part of my job is dealing with the politics, dealing with all the business process garbage, etc.
I don't know where you are hosting where "electricity bills" don't matter.
I have systems hosted in 3 different DCs, 3 different companies. All of them raised their rates in the last year by 20-30% in one way or another. One DC includes the electricity in your flat monthly bill, the only incremental charge in that DC is bandwidth (IE you get 100GB of transfer, if you go over its some dollars per GB), they raised their flat rate 20%, citing higher electricity costs.
The other 2 DCs provide metered electricity to the cage, some amount is included in the cage rental, overages are billed incrementally. These 2 data centers have both increased their incremental charges by 100% in the last year, and increased their cage rental rates by 10-15% citing increased electricity costs. Now you can say "they're just increasing their margins" but I live within 25 miles of 2 of the facilities, I know my electric costs at my home have more than doubled in the last year, up almost 250% in the last 5, so no they aren't just marking things up unnecessarily, its all the same electric co.
All in all, this means an additional $5-600/mo in cost for our hosting. from $2000/mo to $2500-2600/mo depending on electricity and bandwidth usage (and a hint, we've only gone over on our bandwidth 1 time for a total charge of $12). I can only imagine if we were grown out (we plan in 3-5 years to have multiple racks in these three DCs and have budgeted in our plan ~75k/mo for hosting costs (based on the prices from a year ago). Well, a 20-30% increase in that turns into real money like 15-25k/mo increase. Being able to save that money would mean being able to hire 3-5 full time engineers at 60k/yr each. I'd much rather have the engineers than give that money to the electric company.
That is not my understanding. In my experience UAC does not ask for a password at all. It is simply a "cancel or allow" dialog. You don't enter a password or in any other way "grant" higher permissions, it isn't like the "run as..." command that has been around since windows 2000.
At least that has been my experience/understanding of UAC.
Not in any state I do business in (Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Idaho, Wyoming).
They make no provision for covering the cost of collection. It is 100% up to me to cover the costs of collecting, calculating, filing, and remitting the sales taxes, and I am not allowed in any of these states to increase the "sales tax" line item on my sales to cover my cost. My only option is to increase the cost of the goods themselves, which makes me less competitive with other businesses that operate in less states.
If this actually happens, and online retailers have to compete when they have 50 times the admin overhead for sales tax as the regular brick and mortar retailer... well all the small ones will be out of business in about a week
Except of course, there will be a huge administrative cost associated with this inside the business. Sure they can pass on the 7.5% tax to the customer, but they can't pass on the thousands of accountant hours it takes to calculate, verify, file, and pay the taxes to the states. Well they can, but it will be in the form of higher prices on all goods sold online.
This will of course cause most online retailers to be unable to compete, and most will fold. If the cost of doing business online has to include filing state sales tax with all 50 states, every month (which is generally the timeframe on state sales tax) then no one will be able to open online businesses. The administrative burden will be 50 times greater than the administrative burden on a small retail shop that only sells goods locally.
I used to sell computers retail locally. The administrative cost of filing taxes (I outsourced my accounting) was ~$500/mo. If I had to file in all 50 states, it would cost $25,000/mo. If you have to be able to afford $25k/mo in accounting fees from day one (and you would, because you'd have to file for a state tax ID in all 50 states day one, and once you have the tax id you have to file state sales tax returns every month regardless if you have a sale in that state or not), well... that is an impossible proposition for starting a business.
You are so unbelievably wrong on this as to be labelled naive. Something like this 100% favors the big internet retailers at the expense of small local businesses and small internet retailers.
Think of it like this.
Amazon already has billions in sales and hundreds of millions in profits. They can afford to hire an army of accountants to file state sales tax returns in all fifty states. If you've ever run a business you would know that state sales taxes are some of the most complicated, most time consuming, and most expensive to file. Most states charge different rates not only within the state, but within counties and even within cities the tax rates vary. I ran a business in Utah for 4 years. Just for utah there are more than 200 different tax rates depending on county, municipality, types of goods sold, etc. You have to file sales taxes every month, itemized by good sold, county and city the good was sold into, and each month it cost me > $1000 in accountant fees to go through my receipts and calculate the sales taxes I owed to the state.
For a small internet merchant, they have no chance to comply with any of this. Even for a modest sized company with 10-50 million in revenue a proliferation of laws like this will spell instant doom. I would estimate the cost of compliance with this if all 50 states do the same thing as NY would run into the 10's of millions/yr. And the cost will be the same whether you are selling 10 million in goods or 10 billion, because you still have to calculate hundreds and hundreds of tax rates, and categorize all of your sales, and then submit all of the forms properly to all 50 states. This will put basically all small online retailers out of business instantly.
For a small local business this will instantly kill any thoughts of opening an online store to grow their business. When the cost of just opening an online store includes registering for 50 state tax IDs and filling out all the paperwork, and then beginning to file tax returns in all 50 states (you have to remember as well, once you have a state tax ID, you are required to file sales tax returns every month, even if you don't have a single sale in the state in question, and the fines for filing late are very high ($2-300/mo/state).) If this really is "inevitable" as you state, then the US is doomed.
I don't know of any state that does sales tax that way on cars.
I have purchased/moved cars between 5 different states and I've never seen it done as you speak. When you purchase a car they ask you which state you are going to register it in, if you are registering it in the state in which you purchase it, you pay sales tax at the dealership (if it is a private purchase, you always pay sales tax when you go to register the car, regardless of which state you bought the car in). If you are moving it to a different state, they don't charge you sales tax at the dealership, and you pay the full sales tax at the time you register it in the destination state.
I have purchased cars in California and registered them in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. I have purchased cars in Nevada and registered them in Idaho, Utah, and California. I have purchased cars in Utah and registered them in Idaho and Wyoming. Maybe its just the tax crazy east coast that does things differently?
Every car purchase I have ever made that is going to cross state lines is handled this way, paying the sales tax when you first register the car and request a title. Once the car is titled, you are not charged sales tax again, even if you move from state to state. If some states actually do things the way you say, then I would sue the state because "import taxes" are unconstitutional.
Unfortunately for your argument this is outlawed in the constitution.
The states are forbidden from inhibiting in any way interstate commerce by the constitution. If company A is in Nebraska, and sells something to Customer B in NY and NY levies a tax against Company A (exactly what is happening with sales tax) then NY is inhibiting interstate commerce. They are violating the constitution. NY is not allowed to levy taxes against a company which is not in the state of NY. They can levy taxes against their residents (the customer) and businesses that reside in the state, but a sales tax is levied against the company, not the customer, so it should be ruled unconstitutional to levy a tax on a company that has only customers in the state and no physical presence, employees, or anything else. Luckily the SCOTUS is heavily right leaning right now, so they should strictly interpret the constitution and rule in favor of business and against this power grab by NY.
I'm sad to hear that. This was the most logical explanation of UAC's existence I have heard. If you are correct that means MS actually had a different object/goal in mind for UAC, that they actually thought it would improve security, that they actually thought that it WASN'T annoying, that this thing got passed off on multiple levels throughout the dev process as being a) useful, b) a desirable feature, c) accomplished a purpose.
UAC does none of those things in the real world. It is a horrible security mechanism, it slows down every day usage of most PCs, it causes endless annoyance to users. If this feature was designed solely for the purpose of alerting 3rd party devs to the numerous unnecessary privilege escalations they are using, it almost would be worth it/make sense. If not, it is proof that MS has absolutely no clue what users want, need, or what is a good feature.
well... I guess my point would be, I bet you could run a dictionary of 10-20k common names against just about any mail server in a reasonable amount of time even if the server is throttling to 10 invalid requests per host, and if the mail server is going to reject the "invalid" ones you would probably get thousands if not millions of valid email addresses very quickly (obviously not from a single server, but across the net). Just like the ssh dictionary attacks that are so common these days where a host will come in and try to log in a few hundred times.
If you have 400k hosts at your disposal, even under your parameters, you could easily dedicate 1k of those hosts to harvest your valid email addresses using a 10k entry dictionary, sure it might not get very many, or it might not get any if you have some crazy naming scheme for your accounts, but most people have firstname last initial or first initial last name or firstname.lastname schemes. Given that, it is trivial to make a solid dictionary of common names. rinse and repeat scanning across the net for smtp servers. If it became a common practice to reject in the smtp session, it would take spammers about a week to determine a large chunk of valid addresses.
I'll second this. As a serial startup worker (now in managment) I really agree with this post. Startups offer a number of benefits 1) they are relatively cheap generally, so they are willing to take on entry level people, pay them not so well, but if you excel, it will show and they'll quickly give you raises and more responsibility 2) you get to learn a lot quickly. And about a lot more than just programming. You'll learn business stuff, probably get management experience quickly (at the very least you'll probably be put in charge of "your" project, so you'll get project management experience). You will learn a lot about how businesses are actually run, and you can get experience in everything from IT, programming, DBA, and maybe even accounting, depending on how small the company is. 3) Again if you are good, you can quickly become a very important member of the team, be given a lot of responsibility and forge relationships that can help you a lot in the future.
I never took an internship in college and am on a wonderful career path, in management, and moving higher (just got promoted to VP last week). Yes I'm working for a small company, but it is profitable, has excellent benefits and is growing at about 150-200%/year.
I have a couple friends who did internships at the big companies (IBM, Yahoo, Accenture, Ernst and Young) and took jobs there after school, all of them are still on the bottom rung of the ladder, "just hacking code" 8 years later. The traditional college/intern track in my view leads almost invariably to 5-10 years of overwork/burnout, with just 1-5% gaining advancement. Most people just burn out and quit coding and go back to school to get a business or law degree... which hilariously leads to another 5-10 year ultra competitive low promotion rate job.
The whole idea of the first 10 years out of college is to ruin your social life, get as much work out of you as they can for as little as they can pay you because if you won't put up with the shit, then there are 1000 new graduates this year who are willing to.
If you don't like your job, find a new one. If you are any good you can and will find a small company that really needs your help that you can really make a difference at, and you will rise to the top quickly. If you're not that good, then you won't, but that is the same regardless of whether you intern or not, and regardless of whether you're writing code, legal briefs, business plans, or prescriptions.
well there are other ways to generate revenue with music as well. The point is this is being crammed down our throats because of piracy. If you don't think books, movies, tv shows, and basically every other form of media can make the same piracy claim as the music industry you are deluded. All of these industries would love to grab a solid recurring revenue stream that they don't have now.
Sure Google, Slashdot and others would be a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn't put it past any of the big news sites to try this.
The big difference between an "internet content tax" and the television taxes you guys have over across the pond is that there are hundreds of types of media that are accessible through the internet.
If this were put in place, it would be less than a week before the ISP bill had hundreds of additional charges: Music Fee $5 Movie Fee $10.50 TV Fee $7 News Fee $12.32 Voice Transmission Fee $3 Software Fee $15 Slashdot Fee $3 Google Fee $6 Photo Fee $5 Book Fee $8
etc, etc, etc, every single industry that has piracy exposure, or distributes anything online would get in on this racket ASAP, and it would suddenly cost $500/mo to get a simple internet connection. Whether you used any of the above services or not.
Personally, I do not download music, I do not listen to any music except for the music I purchased on CDs. I haven't purchased a new CD in nearly 8 years as nothing that has come out has made me the least bit interested. I detest the music industry, and I refuse to give them a dime. If they manage to push this through, I would be forced against my will to give these evil bastards my hard earned money.
It depends on the original EULA that they obtained the hardware/software under. Under the original license under which they obtained the hardware there was no "you cannot hack this" clause, now if the original EULA has a clause about "we can update this EULA at any time and the changes will be applied retroactively", and a court buys that that is a legally binding term (I can't believe it would, because what is to stop any proprietary company from getting a huge installed base by giving something away, and then changing the EULA and saying "oh, to continue using this software, you now owe us $1000"). If those 2 things are true (the original EULA has that clause, and a court allows them to retroactively apply additional restrictions), then it is not illegal. If either of those is false, then it is. They purchased the hardware under the original EULA which permitted changing firmware. The company cannot retroactively apply a new EULA with more restrictive terms to hardware that has already been purchased I don't think, unless a court can be convinced that you can change a contract mid stream. Again if they can, it would allow all sorts of shenanigans by proprietary vendors, heck even open source developers could apply this to GPL'd software and retroactively "revoke" the license.
I agree with you there. I am an apple user, but I'm not really much of a fanatic. I enjoy the mac cause it gives me a full terminal, built in unix utilities and a pretty GUI without the headache of trying to get wireless drivers, sound, and every other piece of hardware to work flawlessly in linux. I've done it, I know its possible, I just don't find that to be a particularly enjoyable or productive way to spend my days.
I've used and recommended windows many times when it is the right tool for the job (and yes it is the right tool for the job for some things you linux zealots). I've programmed using MS technologies, I've programmed on and for Linux, Solaris, and Macs. I've never been turned down for a unix/linux/mac job for having used windows. But I know of 2 jobs where the reason for not hiring me was and I quote "We would never hire someone who has worked with these technologies" (meaning linux/solaris/mac). These places are so committed to Windows that they won't even interview people who have worked with competing technologies. Talk about zealotry.
If your parents make "far less" than 100k then I'm sure you got a big chunk of finaid. The original question states that his parents are upper middle class (I'd say probably 75-150k/year earners). This is the situation I was in when I graduated high school. Because my parents made more than 100k (only slightly more ~115) I couldn't qualify for a) Any federal grants/assistance b) any financial aid from the university. My parents have 5 kids, so they couldn't afford to give me 30-40k/yr although that is what the institutions think parents should be willing to do if they make more than 100k. This left me in a situation of financing the entire education with student loans + the 5-7k/yr my parents were willing to pay.
In short although I was accepted to MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, I could not reasonably afford to attend any of those as I would have graduated with somewhere around 150k in student loans. Education is important, but not a second mortgage payment important. As it is, I went to a state university for 2 years, got offered a 75k/yr job at the age of 21, and haven't looked back. I'm now a lead engineer of the company's main product, manage a team of 8 people, and make > 100k. I'm 28. School is not the only way to succeed.
while I don't have any scientific test data, I question your claim that CFLs lose half their life by being used in "common" household situations. I have had a CFL in my laundry room since I purchased this home, it is on and off often, but still works great after 5 years. In contrast our light above the stairs has gone through at least 10-15 incandecents in the same time frame. Well... that is until we changed it to a CFL about a year ago... We have had all CFLs in all light sockets for the last 12 months, we used to burn out at least 1 light a month, now we haven't changed a bulb in a year, and as I said, we haven't changed the light in the laundry room for 5 years.
I guess my question would be, I thought CFLs and regular flourescents worked on the same technology. Our kitchen light is a standard tube flourescent (as are most kitchen lights). Are tube flourescents not susceptible to the on/off problem? We also haven't changed this light in 5 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is still the same light as when the house was built 10 years ago... If the CFLs last even half that long on average (5 years) they will make me happy just not having to drag out the ladder and change light bulbs.
I don't use anti virus software anywhere, and I haven't had a virus on a desktop machine in... wait I've never had one. Now you may ask "how do I know"? I regularly install AV software on my windows boxes, scan, and then uninstall. AV software is so horrible for performance, I absolutely hate it.
I've even begun doing the same with spybot since it runs an agent in the background now which causes a considerable performance hit.
I've seen AV software cause many more problems than I've ever seen it solve or prevent.
wrong, customer's don't really want hundreds of features, they want an app that runs well and quickly. However, because you can't "try out" most proprietary software you can't make a decision based on quality or speed, so consumers are relegated to making their decisions based on a feature list on a box.... which is not optimal.
Slashdot Mirror
its even worse than that. In Utah there are over 200 different tax rates, because each MUNICIPALITY has its own tax rate, in the sales tax there is the state portion, the county portion, and the city portion. Each county, and each municipality within that county have projects that they fund through sales taxes, and every municipality has a different rate. The utah state sales tax return is 3 pages long, and you have to detail sales by county and city, and they have different rates for different types of goods as well. Recently they passed a new law which places sales taxes on services (IE, lawyers, programmers, accountants, it services) now must charge sales tax on all sales. These are all taxed at different rates than say selling a computer.
It didn't specifically say it was his team members that came in early and left at 3:30... But it did state that ALL NEW EMPLOYEES received the SAME EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK which laid down the "core hours" rule. So regardless of the "team" they might be on the article certainly leads one to believe that those leaving at 3:30 are just as much in violation as someone showing up at 9:30.
Why does Susan have to cover for these early birds from 3:30-4:30?!? Where are their managers yelling at them for slacking when the SLA is in effect? They still have to return calls within 15 minutes during the afternoon hours. After all Core hours are Core hours and they cannot be violated, not even by 5 minutes!
Yeah, after reading the initial article I was slightly on Spiegel's side, not knowing the other side of the story.
Having read the linked article, I think Mr. Spiegel may be one of the worst managers I've read about. I have quit 2 jobs for similar stickiness on rules. I am a developer, and a night owl, and granted customer support is a little different... But in his very article he contradicts himself. He says that core hours are 9-4:30, he then says if people come in at 7:30 they are allowed to leave at 3:30. So morning people/early risers are rewarded, and the fact that Susan may get there at 9:30 and stay til 6 isn't recognized or rewarded. Obviously "core hours" are not strictly enforced if anyone arriving early can leave before 4:30. The fact that he wrote a whole article based on the premise of the inviolate nature of "core hours" and in that very article stated quite openly that the policy discriminates against night owls... well.. he is a moron, and I'd never work for him.
I am above the norm, and I am getting very far ahead. However I second the GP. If one of my ventures made it possible, I would quit working, but I will never stop programming. I have a life, a family, a child, I volunteer for my community and church. I go on vacations. But I read/study/tinker late at night, I work crazy hours when necessary. Normally I only work 40-50 hours for "the company" but I program side projects constantly, pick up additional contracting hours often, and always am teaching myself new platforms/languages/tech.
If I get lucky and the sale of one of the many ventures I'm working on gave me 5-10 million dollars, I would invest it in fixed income, and live off the 250k/yr for the rest of my life. But the first thing I would buy would be a rack full of servers and a long term contract at the local Tier 1 DC a few miles from here, and develop cool services/ideas/etc or help host open source projects. I won't stop programming when I stop working, programming isn't work to me, the "work" part of my job is dealing with the politics, dealing with all the business process garbage, etc.
I don't know where you are hosting where "electricity bills" don't matter.
I have systems hosted in 3 different DCs, 3 different companies. All of them raised their rates in the last year by 20-30% in one way or another. One DC includes the electricity in your flat monthly bill, the only incremental charge in that DC is bandwidth (IE you get 100GB of transfer, if you go over its some dollars per GB), they raised their flat rate 20%, citing higher electricity costs.
The other 2 DCs provide metered electricity to the cage, some amount is included in the cage rental, overages are billed incrementally. These 2 data centers have both increased their incremental charges by 100% in the last year, and increased their cage rental rates by 10-15% citing increased electricity costs. Now you can say "they're just increasing their margins" but I live within 25 miles of 2 of the facilities, I know my electric costs at my home have more than doubled in the last year, up almost 250% in the last 5, so no they aren't just marking things up unnecessarily, its all the same electric co.
All in all, this means an additional $5-600/mo in cost for our hosting. from $2000/mo to $2500-2600/mo depending on electricity and bandwidth usage (and a hint, we've only gone over on our bandwidth 1 time for a total charge of $12). I can only imagine if we were grown out (we plan in 3-5 years to have multiple racks in these three DCs and have budgeted in our plan ~75k/mo for hosting costs (based on the prices from a year ago). Well, a 20-30% increase in that turns into real money like 15-25k/mo increase. Being able to save that money would mean being able to hire 3-5 full time engineers at 60k/yr each. I'd much rather have the engineers than give that money to the electric company.
That is not my understanding. In my experience UAC does not ask for a password at all. It is simply a "cancel or allow" dialog. You don't enter a password or in any other way "grant" higher permissions, it isn't like the "run as..." command that has been around since windows 2000.
At least that has been my experience/understanding of UAC.
Not in any state I do business in (Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Idaho, Wyoming).
They make no provision for covering the cost of collection. It is 100% up to me to cover the costs of collecting, calculating, filing, and remitting the sales taxes, and I am not allowed in any of these states to increase the "sales tax" line item on my sales to cover my cost. My only option is to increase the cost of the goods themselves, which makes me less competitive with other businesses that operate in less states.
If this actually happens, and online retailers have to compete when they have 50 times the admin overhead for sales tax as the regular brick and mortar retailer... well all the small ones will be out of business in about a week
Except of course, there will be a huge administrative cost associated with this inside the business. Sure they can pass on the 7.5% tax to the customer, but they can't pass on the thousands of accountant hours it takes to calculate, verify, file, and pay the taxes to the states. Well they can, but it will be in the form of higher prices on all goods sold online.
This will of course cause most online retailers to be unable to compete, and most will fold. If the cost of doing business online has to include filing state sales tax with all 50 states, every month (which is generally the timeframe on state sales tax) then no one will be able to open online businesses. The administrative burden will be 50 times greater than the administrative burden on a small retail shop that only sells goods locally.
I used to sell computers retail locally. The administrative cost of filing taxes (I outsourced my accounting) was ~$500/mo. If I had to file in all 50 states, it would cost $25,000/mo. If you have to be able to afford $25k/mo in accounting fees from day one (and you would, because you'd have to file for a state tax ID in all 50 states day one, and once you have the tax id you have to file state sales tax returns every month regardless if you have a sale in that state or not), well... that is an impossible proposition for starting a business.
You are so unbelievably wrong on this as to be labelled naive. Something like this 100% favors the big internet retailers at the expense of small local businesses and small internet retailers.
Think of it like this.
Amazon already has billions in sales and hundreds of millions in profits. They can afford to hire an army of accountants to file state sales tax returns in all fifty states. If you've ever run a business you would know that state sales taxes are some of the most complicated, most time consuming, and most expensive to file. Most states charge different rates not only within the state, but within counties and even within cities the tax rates vary. I ran a business in Utah for 4 years. Just for utah there are more than 200 different tax rates depending on county, municipality, types of goods sold, etc. You have to file sales taxes every month, itemized by good sold, county and city the good was sold into, and each month it cost me > $1000 in accountant fees to go through my receipts and calculate the sales taxes I owed to the state.
For a small internet merchant, they have no chance to comply with any of this. Even for a modest sized company with 10-50 million in revenue a proliferation of laws like this will spell instant doom. I would estimate the cost of compliance with this if all 50 states do the same thing as NY would run into the 10's of millions/yr. And the cost will be the same whether you are selling 10 million in goods or 10 billion, because you still have to calculate hundreds and hundreds of tax rates, and categorize all of your sales, and then submit all of the forms properly to all 50 states. This will put basically all small online retailers out of business instantly.
For a small local business this will instantly kill any thoughts of opening an online store to grow their business. When the cost of just opening an online store includes registering for 50 state tax IDs and filling out all the paperwork, and then beginning to file tax returns in all 50 states (you have to remember as well, once you have a state tax ID, you are required to file sales tax returns every month, even if you don't have a single sale in the state in question, and the fines for filing late are very high ($2-300/mo/state).) If this really is "inevitable" as you state, then the US is doomed.
I don't know of any state that does sales tax that way on cars.
I have purchased/moved cars between 5 different states and I've never seen it done as you speak. When you purchase a car they ask you which state you are going to register it in, if you are registering it in the state in which you purchase it, you pay sales tax at the dealership (if it is a private purchase, you always pay sales tax when you go to register the car, regardless of which state you bought the car in). If you are moving it to a different state, they don't charge you sales tax at the dealership, and you pay the full sales tax at the time you register it in the destination state.
I have purchased cars in California and registered them in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. I have purchased cars in Nevada and registered them in Idaho, Utah, and California. I have purchased cars in Utah and registered them in Idaho and Wyoming. Maybe its just the tax crazy east coast that does things differently?
Every car purchase I have ever made that is going to cross state lines is handled this way, paying the sales tax when you first register the car and request a title. Once the car is titled, you are not charged sales tax again, even if you move from state to state. If some states actually do things the way you say, then I would sue the state because "import taxes" are unconstitutional.
Unfortunately for your argument this is outlawed in the constitution.
The states are forbidden from inhibiting in any way interstate commerce by the constitution. If company A is in Nebraska, and sells something to Customer B in NY and NY levies a tax against Company A (exactly what is happening with sales tax) then NY is inhibiting interstate commerce. They are violating the constitution. NY is not allowed to levy taxes against a company which is not in the state of NY. They can levy taxes against their residents (the customer) and businesses that reside in the state, but a sales tax is levied against the company, not the customer, so it should be ruled unconstitutional to levy a tax on a company that has only customers in the state and no physical presence, employees, or anything else. Luckily the SCOTUS is heavily right leaning right now, so they should strictly interpret the constitution and rule in favor of business and against this power grab by NY.
I'm sad to hear that. This was the most logical explanation of UAC's existence I have heard. If you are correct that means MS actually had a different object/goal in mind for UAC, that they actually thought it would improve security, that they actually thought that it WASN'T annoying, that this thing got passed off on multiple levels throughout the dev process as being a) useful, b) a desirable feature, c) accomplished a purpose.
UAC does none of those things in the real world. It is a horrible security mechanism, it slows down every day usage of most PCs, it causes endless annoyance to users. If this feature was designed solely for the purpose of alerting 3rd party devs to the numerous unnecessary privilege escalations they are using, it almost would be worth it/make sense. If not, it is proof that MS has absolutely no clue what users want, need, or what is a good feature.
well... I guess my point would be, I bet you could run a dictionary of 10-20k common names against just about any mail server in a reasonable amount of time even if the server is throttling to 10 invalid requests per host, and if the mail server is going to reject the "invalid" ones you would probably get thousands if not millions of valid email addresses very quickly (obviously not from a single server, but across the net). Just like the ssh dictionary attacks that are so common these days where a host will come in and try to log in a few hundred times.
If you have 400k hosts at your disposal, even under your parameters, you could easily dedicate 1k of those hosts to harvest your valid email addresses using a 10k entry dictionary, sure it might not get very many, or it might not get any if you have some crazy naming scheme for your accounts, but most people have firstname last initial or first initial last name or firstname.lastname schemes. Given that, it is trivial to make a solid dictionary of common names. rinse and repeat scanning across the net for smtp servers. If it became a common practice to reject in the smtp session, it would take spammers about a week to determine a large chunk of valid addresses.
Lots of hosts.... like storm or that latest one with 400k bots? Yeah, that's only enough hosts to test 4 million addresses every 24 hours...
I'll second this. As a serial startup worker (now in managment) I really agree with this post. Startups offer a number of benefits
1) they are relatively cheap generally, so they are willing to take on entry level people, pay them not so well, but if you excel, it will show and they'll quickly give you raises and more responsibility
2) you get to learn a lot quickly. And about a lot more than just programming. You'll learn business stuff, probably get management experience quickly (at the very least you'll probably be put in charge of "your" project, so you'll get project management experience). You will learn a lot about how businesses are actually run, and you can get experience in everything from IT, programming, DBA, and maybe even accounting, depending on how small the company is.
3) Again if you are good, you can quickly become a very important member of the team, be given a lot of responsibility and forge relationships that can help you a lot in the future.
I'll kindly disagree with your assessment.
I never took an internship in college and am on a wonderful career path, in management, and moving higher (just got promoted to VP last week). Yes I'm working for a small company, but it is profitable, has excellent benefits and is growing at about 150-200%/year.
I have a couple friends who did internships at the big companies (IBM, Yahoo, Accenture, Ernst and Young) and took jobs there after school, all of them are still on the bottom rung of the ladder, "just hacking code" 8 years later. The traditional college/intern track in my view leads almost invariably to 5-10 years of overwork/burnout, with just 1-5% gaining advancement. Most people just burn out and quit coding and go back to school to get a business or law degree... which hilariously leads to another 5-10 year ultra competitive low promotion rate job.
The whole idea of the first 10 years out of college is to ruin your social life, get as much work out of you as they can for as little as they can pay you because if you won't put up with the shit, then there are 1000 new graduates this year who are willing to.
If you don't like your job, find a new one. If you are any good you can and will find a small company that really needs your help that you can really make a difference at, and you will rise to the top quickly. If you're not that good, then you won't, but that is the same regardless of whether you intern or not, and regardless of whether you're writing code, legal briefs, business plans, or prescriptions.
wrong, the guys who cracked vista this year cracked OS X last year. They didn't crack the same platforms.
well there are other ways to generate revenue with music as well. The point is this is being crammed down our throats because of piracy. If you don't think books, movies, tv shows, and basically every other form of media can make the same piracy claim as the music industry you are deluded. All of these industries would love to grab a solid recurring revenue stream that they don't have now.
Sure Google, Slashdot and others would be a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn't put it past any of the big news sites to try this.
The big difference between an "internet content tax" and the television taxes you guys have over across the pond is that there are hundreds of types of media that are accessible through the internet.
If this were put in place, it would be less than a week before the ISP bill had hundreds of additional charges:
Music Fee $5
Movie Fee $10.50
TV Fee $7
News Fee $12.32
Voice Transmission Fee $3
Software Fee $15
Slashdot Fee $3
Google Fee $6
Photo Fee $5
Book Fee $8
etc, etc, etc, every single industry that has piracy exposure, or distributes anything online would get in on this racket ASAP, and it would suddenly cost $500/mo to get a simple internet connection. Whether you used any of the above services or not.
Personally, I do not download music, I do not listen to any music except for the music I purchased on CDs. I haven't purchased a new CD in nearly 8 years as nothing that has come out has made me the least bit interested. I detest the music industry, and I refuse to give them a dime. If they manage to push this through, I would be forced against my will to give these evil bastards my hard earned money.
It depends on the original EULA that they obtained the hardware/software under. Under the original license under which they obtained the hardware there was no "you cannot hack this" clause, now if the original EULA has a clause about "we can update this EULA at any time and the changes will be applied retroactively", and a court buys that that is a legally binding term (I can't believe it would, because what is to stop any proprietary company from getting a huge installed base by giving something away, and then changing the EULA and saying "oh, to continue using this software, you now owe us $1000"). If those 2 things are true (the original EULA has that clause, and a court allows them to retroactively apply additional restrictions), then it is not illegal. If either of those is false, then it is. They purchased the hardware under the original EULA which permitted changing firmware. The company cannot retroactively apply a new EULA with more restrictive terms to hardware that has already been purchased I don't think, unless a court can be convinced that you can change a contract mid stream. Again if they can, it would allow all sorts of shenanigans by proprietary vendors, heck even open source developers could apply this to GPL'd software and retroactively "revoke" the license.
I agree with you there. I am an apple user, but I'm not really much of a fanatic. I enjoy the mac cause it gives me a full terminal, built in unix utilities and a pretty GUI without the headache of trying to get wireless drivers, sound, and every other piece of hardware to work flawlessly in linux. I've done it, I know its possible, I just don't find that to be a particularly enjoyable or productive way to spend my days.
I've used and recommended windows many times when it is the right tool for the job (and yes it is the right tool for the job for some things you linux zealots). I've programmed using MS technologies, I've programmed on and for Linux, Solaris, and Macs. I've never been turned down for a unix/linux/mac job for having used windows. But I know of 2 jobs where the reason for not hiring me was and I quote "We would never hire someone who has worked with these technologies" (meaning linux/solaris/mac). These places are so committed to Windows that they won't even interview people who have worked with competing technologies. Talk about zealotry.
If your parents make "far less" than 100k then I'm sure you got a big chunk of finaid. The original question states that his parents are upper middle class (I'd say probably 75-150k/year earners). This is the situation I was in when I graduated high school. Because my parents made more than 100k (only slightly more ~115) I couldn't qualify for a) Any federal grants/assistance b) any financial aid from the university. My parents have 5 kids, so they couldn't afford to give me 30-40k/yr although that is what the institutions think parents should be willing to do if they make more than 100k. This left me in a situation of financing the entire education with student loans + the 5-7k/yr my parents were willing to pay.
In short although I was accepted to MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, I could not reasonably afford to attend any of those as I would have graduated with somewhere around 150k in student loans. Education is important, but not a second mortgage payment important. As it is, I went to a state university for 2 years, got offered a 75k/yr job at the age of 21, and haven't looked back. I'm now a lead engineer of the company's main product, manage a team of 8 people, and make > 100k. I'm 28. School is not the only way to succeed.
while I don't have any scientific test data, I question your claim that CFLs lose half their life by being used in "common" household situations. I have had a CFL in my laundry room since I purchased this home, it is on and off often, but still works great after 5 years. In contrast our light above the stairs has gone through at least 10-15 incandecents in the same time frame. Well... that is until we changed it to a CFL about a year ago... We have had all CFLs in all light sockets for the last 12 months, we used to burn out at least 1 light a month, now we haven't changed a bulb in a year, and as I said, we haven't changed the light in the laundry room for 5 years.
I guess my question would be, I thought CFLs and regular flourescents worked on the same technology. Our kitchen light is a standard tube flourescent (as are most kitchen lights). Are tube flourescents not susceptible to the on/off problem? We also haven't changed this light in 5 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is still the same light as when the house was built 10 years ago... If the CFLs last even half that long on average (5 years) they will make me happy just not having to drag out the ladder and change light bulbs.
I don't use anti virus software anywhere, and I haven't had a virus on a desktop machine in... wait I've never had one. Now you may ask "how do I know"? I regularly install AV software on my windows boxes, scan, and then uninstall. AV software is so horrible for performance, I absolutely hate it.
I've even begun doing the same with spybot since it runs an agent in the background now which causes a considerable performance hit.
I've seen AV software cause many more problems than I've ever seen it solve or prevent.
wrong, customer's don't really want hundreds of features, they want an app that runs well and quickly. However, because you can't "try out" most proprietary software you can't make a decision based on quality or speed, so consumers are relegated to making their decisions based on a feature list on a box.... which is not optimal.