This guy is the ethernet driver guru.
And the co-founder of the Beowulf project, without which we would've never had the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" comments that we soooo love.
Replacing the instruments is the easiest part of the mission, since it's just a matter of pulling out one refrigerator-sized box and replacing it with another one.
You make it sound easy. It's not. The tolerances are very tight. Things tend to stick. There are hoses and wires everywhere, and that was before the NICMOS Cryocooler was literally wedged into some empty space in the aft shroud (I mention this since I work for the company that made the NICMOS Cryocooler). Having sat and watched the entirety of the EVAs for Service Mission 3B multiple times, this is definitely *not* a simple task. Spacesuited astronauts found the Hubble EVAs to be extremely challenging, so I expect robotic repair to be very, very difficult as well.
Seriously---go to Spacecraftfilms.com, get a DVD of one of the service missions, and *then* come back and try and tell me "it's just a matter of pulling out one box and replacing it".
If it was that easy, we would've done it that way.
they probably looked inside the bag, got pissed off and threw it back in the car!!!
Indeed, I had a similar thing happen once. A guy broke into my apartment, apparently with the goal of stealing my CD collection (a common theft item in that area, since they were so easily liquidated). He quickly found my CD rack in the living room (with >400 jewel cases in it), and quickly discovered that almost all of the cases were empty, the CD's were in my two CD changers, which were virtually inextractable from the metal equipment rack I was using as an entertainment center. He quickly got frustrated, decided it was time to leave, grabbed the fews CD's that were out in the open, broke a bunch of stuff out of spite, and left.
The cops caught the guy, too, since I could tell them *exactly* which CDs were missing, and the guy that had turned in those exact three CD's at the local used CD store showed up on their store video camera, and they linked him to the apartment with fingerprints (he also had a long rap sheet of B&Es, too).
Alas, it probably would've been easier for me if he had just stolen the CD's (hey, I had insurance), since cleaning up the mess he made and getting the stuff he broke fixed was a hassle.
DO NOT FORGET that RAID is no substitute for regular backups. RAID will not help if your data loss is caused by FS corruption, a cracker, accidentally typing "rm -rf/", etc.
Indeed, since in addition to drive failure you also have to consider the risks of the RAID itself failure (software drivers for software RAID, or the RAID controller itself for hardware RAID).
I say this since I used to work in a shop where in my 6 years there we easily had more RAID controller failures than failures of the drive in the RAID array itself. Luckily, we had good backup strategy and could restore with minimal effort.
WHen will broadband companies truly serve the populace by providing broadband capability to all, not just the city folk?
When they find a cheaper way of installing the infrastructure?
Laying cable isn't cheap, especially when you don't have a lot of costumers per mile of cable. Heck, out my way Adelphia will gladly install cable to most anyone, but they charge between $17,000 and $21,000 per mile of cable to install it (hey, they are inflating this value, badly, but even if they charged reasonable rates it isn't cheap). It's bad enough that at one coworker's place (with 100's of acres) we finally got the cable company to run cable to a corner of his property, built a little enclosure for their cable modem, and use a 65 dB antenna to beam up to his house more than a mile away.
Meanwhile, the phone company already has decent copper going to most homes in my area, we just can't get them to put a DSLAM in so we can get DSL.
So I wouldn't go holding your breath for cable, DSL and/or wireless are probably the bandwidth solutions for the near future.
It has to do with the way the milage per gallon is calculated. It's not the same as really driving.
While I admit that the EPA tests aren't perfect, for regular cars are they that bad? I've found them to be within a few MPG of reality for a car in good working order. For example, my 2002 Subaru Outback Sport was listed as 22 mpg city and 27 mpg highway, and it averages 26.2 mpg (seeing that my driving is >90% freeway, that's reasonable).
Going back to the article, if he's getting only 31.2 mpg, and if Civic Hybrid owners in general are only getting 26 mpg, that seems to be a mediocre improvement over gas powered vehicles of a similar weight/size.
The DoD will fund a lot of different things. Many different scientific areas. Not just bombs and missles. They fund so many different areas because most of the Military isn't guns and missles. It's logistics.
Indeed. Currently I work as an R+D engineer. Slightly over half of my work is on government sponsored research, primarily DoD. Most of the research they sponsor isn't in weapons, but in systems support and soldier support.
As an example, projects on which I am currently working or recently worked include:
Inflight systems for producing nitrogen gas for inerting fuel tanks (to prevent TWA-800 style accidents)
Hearing protection (primarily for carrier deck crews)
Preserving blood for delivery in remote unpowered locations
Detecting and preventing spatial disorientation in pilots
Higher-accuracy methods of aerial delivery of supplies to units in the field
The great thing is, all of these have use in non-military settings (and in fact, probably have more non-military applications than military ones). Moreover, to get most of these grants you have to show non-military commercialization potential.
As an electrical engineering major, I can tell that at least half the people that graduate aren't worth having in a company. They just don't retain knowledge and apply it well.
I remember when I was graduating with my BS in ME, one day I looked around at my classmates and thought to myself, "These bozos are going to be building the cars of tomorrow?" (I went to Michigan State University, most of my classmates got jobs in the auto industry, or Dow Chemical).
Since then, I worked for a few years (some as an engineer, and a lot as a sysadmin and programmer), as well as getting both an MS and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Along the way, I discovered a few things, like (1) I like engineering more than programming or sysadmin work (2) Mechanical engineering pays better than most programming or sysadmin work... this was even true during the dot.com years, and is more true now, and (3) while the knowledge gained while earning those advanced degrees was indeed priceless, they don't directly convert into a better salary---the money I make now is slightly *less* than it would've been if I had been working as an engineer since I graduated. On the flip side, while the pay isn't any better, the *selection* of jobs was way more desirable and varied with a PhD, and that satisfaction is often more valuable than cash on the table, and now I have both a very good salary and a job I actually enjoy doing.
I had more than one opportunity to go into programming, often at decent salaries. I'm glad I didn't, but everyone finds their own way.
The biggest problem with all of these is that there are 51 different issing bodies, one in every state plus one for Washington, D.C. Within each state, there are at least two formats to make non-drivers distinct from drivers, most states also have special "funny formats" for those under 21 so that they're more easily rejected when they try to purchase alcohol.
It's even worse than this. In recent history, I've had Arizona, Michigan, Tennessee, Minnesota, and New Hampshire Drivers' Licenses. I still have all of these, although all but the Michigan one are punched to void them. But if I hadn't moved (and necessitated the punching), all of these but the Arizona one would still appear perfectly valid (they haven't expired yet). I know Michigan has had at least two redesigns since I got that license, Minnesota one, and Tennessee one, and I'm assuming that New Hampshire had one in recent history. The problem is that expiration times on the licenses are so long that at any given time there can be a *lot* of valid state-issue ID's in circulation, of the "under 21", "over 21", "Identification", and similar designations.
Heck, I've even been travelling and had bartenders be skeptical w.r.t. my identity (I've greyed a *lot* in the last few years and seldom wear my glasses, so my license photos don't usually look much like me), and even if my ID doesn't look like the the one in their book, I can usually (umm, always) talk my way past them (with confidence, since I know I'm presenting legit ID).
Heck, I could probably get fairly far with a legit looking ID from a non-state like "Dakota" if it looked spiffy enough.
Common standards would be a good step, for many reasons.
Workers get paid 6.50 an hour, 10 cent raise after a year - if you're lucky. Managers get paid around 9 dollars an hour. Projectionists about 8.
That blows, seeing that I cleared $7.50/hr back when I moonlighted as a projectionist...
...in 1992.
That said, if you don't like the price, don't buy the product. If you're willing to wait a few months, you can rent or buy the movie for less than the tickets cost, and watch them in your own home, drinking your own beer, and not having to worry about the people behind you talking...
1. Get all your credit card info. When was the last time when you used cash (money order, etc) for your Internet purchases? Do not kid yourself, the banks would happily submit your finincial transactions to IRS for audit at the first request...
Indeed, I've known two colleagues in VT that have been audited by the state, and this was exactly the approach they used. It's particularly easy, since there are a lot of brick-and-mortar stores that don't have any presence in VT at all (since they border on a no-sales-tax state which sucks the businesses over the border). So buying something at, say, Burlington Coat Factory (just to pick one out of thin air), they pretty much assume you're using in-state unless you gave to to someone as a gift.
That said, there is an easy out in a lot of "Use Tax" states---in the above Vermont example, if you didn't buy anything over $1000, then they have a handy table that estimates how much Use Tax you should pay based on your AGI. Granted, the formula is a ridiculous underestimate (seeing that most everyone mail- or internet-orders stuff, and most anyone within 20 minutes drive of the NH border does virtually all of their non-grocery shopping across the border, while the estimate claims that someone with an AGI of 60,000 only bought $480 total in out-of-state items), but that just goes to show how stupid a Use Tax can be.
The worst job I had didn't start out all that bad, but even after I was done with the job it had all sorts of ugly loose ends to tie up.
It started innocently enough, I had been doing a variety of Linux contract programming jobs, and got hired by one company to help port their flagship product to Linux. Usually not too bad a job, and the product itself was something of a spiffy concept, and worked decently on some other Unix platforms.
First problem is that it turned out that this was, essentially, abandoned code, and the original programmer had quit under unpleasant circumstances and moved back to (some random country across the pacific), and wasn't on speaking terms. It was poorly documented, *very* platform specific, and relied a lot on undocumented behavior by the OS. Needless to say, it took quite some time to figure out how everything worked, a lot more time to get a decent Linux prototype running, and even more time to work around a lot of niggling Linux issues. Ugly, and the company already had customers lining up out the door to buy what didn't exist yet (and certainly wasn't tested).
Then, once all the niggling little details were mostly worked out, they shifted the platform from Red Hat Linux on x86 to a custom Linux running on Netwinder BMs running StrongARM 110's, which, unfortunately, required a lot of entirely different low-level coding to get working. By this point I was working many late-night hours, and my bosses were doing near-hourly status requests.
What's worse, I got called for jury duty in the middle of this, and despite some good attempts to get jury duty delayed, I had to show up---and immediately got myself sequestered as part of a many-week long trial. I essentially had to take a 90%-finished product, and with almost no warning, pack it up hardware and all and dump it on another contractor. And I had my contract summarily canceled (i.e. I was fired). At least it was behind me...
...until 6 months later, as I am packing up to move out of state, I find myself walking out the front door into a process server, and faster than you can spell "subpoena" find out that I'm now a witness in a civil case in which my previous employer was suing the contractor I had handed everything off to. I spent much of the next several months spending many unpaid hours giving depositions and statements, only slightly relieved that I wasn't on the recieving end of a lawsuit.
Oh well, they must've gotten it worked out, the product is still for sale for Linux, but I know better than to even try to ask about how things turned out.
Someone tell me what the holes in this scheme are:
You vote. Out pops a slip of paper with a random unique number on it and your vote and a URL http:/e-votingsomething.gov
The problem is that, in some areas, people can be intimitated, assaulted, or even killed for how they voted (or even for voting in the first place). Yes, even here in the US. It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but still does, and, more importantly, could.
Human-readable paper reciepts, or anything that can easily be converted to tell someone's vote, enable this sort of voter intimidation.
The Massachusetts Non-Resident form is a godawful mess of nested, interlocking schedules, forms, and mini-worksheets.
We, like plenty of other folks, live in Rhode Island, while receiving income from Mass sources (my wife works still there and I used to work in Boston). Every year, TaxCut Deluxe is reduced to sucking on its fingers and quietly crying while I grimly clench my teeth and enter the data for the Mass state forms manually.
Indeed. I had one year in which I lived in Michigan, Tennessee, Arizona, and Minnesota. I also recieved income in each of these states, and, swimmingly, my employment dates weren't necessarily the same as my residence dates. Add a bunch of 1099's and self-employment. I didn't even try tax software (it was 1995, tax software wasn't as good then), and even my accountant spent some time "sucking on his fingers and quietly crying" before sorting the whole mess out.
I much prefer life now, with one employer, and no state income[1] or use tax since I live in NH.
[1] Although any year now I'll become subject to NH's interest and dividends tax...
Internet Cafe's are relativity popular in Australia, least in dense backpacker-esque areas (Sydney, Gold Coast, Whitsunday's, etc). I've only used Internet Cafe's in these locations because I was unable to connect with my laptop. So I guess what I'm saying is unless you expect to get allot of foot traffic from travellers, I haven't seen a market for them (again, least in Australia though I'd believe the same would go for the US).
This matches with my observations. As a frequent travel to destinations both popular and obscure, I'm frequently surprised that, outside of major cities, the US is often one of the worst places to get decent internet access. Europe, Africe, and the Caribbean have all had plentiful internet cafes in the places I've been... while meanwhile I can be in downtown Pittsburgh (to use one example I remember) and have to hunt around for quite a while just to find a workable 802.11b connection.
With Wi-Fi it has been getting a lot better recently, especially if you're willing to shill out for T-mobile HotSpot access.
What people miss is that, if the store does not collect tax (no tax) then the buy still needs to pay the tax.
Usually this is the case, and it's called a "Use Tax" levied by the state where the items are going.
The biggest problem with Use Taxes is that they are hard to enforce. For example in my area (VT/NH border area), a substantial fraction (well over 80%) of the retail businesses in the border area are all on the NH side, so much of Vermont shops over here to avoid the VT sales tax (we don't mind much, it brings in business). Of course, in reality, everything they buy over here that they drag back over the border is subject to the Vermont Use tax (which is the same value as the sales tax), so if they are being completely legal there is no price advantage at all. The problem is that Use Tax is so hard to track, that all the state of Vermont does is have a line on your taxes to report all this stuff, and they rely on your honesty to report it all. Of course, a simple polling of the Vermonters I know show that, unsurprisingly, nobody reports any realistic values, so the tax goes mostly uncollected.
This situation is similar in many other border areas, although usually the tax rate differential is even lower, meaning there is less motivation for the state to enforce it.
The ideal solution is to either (a) figure out a way to enforce it (which is what many states are trying to do with online retailers), or (b) give up on it and find a way to tax that is halfway enforceable.
Having had to give up coffee (even decaf) completely for medical reasons, I discovered that even for the 4 cup-a-day drinker I had been, going cold turkey wasn't all that bad. After two weeks of headaches and difficulty waking up, I had pretty much recovered and only had occasional cravings. It sucked, but compared to a lot of other things, two weeks of headaches ain't all that bad.
The plus side is that in the long run it actually *helped* me get going in the morning (I can get up and go without needing to stop for coffee now), and now that I'm allowed the occasional cup of coffee by my docs, on the rare occasion that I really need a pick-me-up (like boring business meetings in the afternoon in a warm, dark room), coffee has a lot more kick than it used to...
Best of luck for you, you'll be better off for it...
not in the top 100 markets, we can't do the whole switch your home number to the cell number thing until may of 2004. Oh well, I didn't want those telemarketers anyways.
Similar thing here... Living in rural NH, this whole number portability thing is currently nothing but a nice academic thought exercise, since portability doesn't really buy you anything if there is nobody to switch to... Well, I guess you could, but moving my number from a perfectly good land line to a cell phone that will just sit there saying "No Coverage" (we have no cell phone signals at my joint) isn't really worth doing...
Kinda like having a "mobile" home that never goes anywhere...
Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.
Strangely, I didn't thin this was a farce, since I've lived through exactly this nonsense once before.
The year was 1993, and I was working as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in their High Flux Isotope Reactor. While I was there we got visited by the Secretary of Energy (Hazel O'Leary) and her "Science Advisor" Jim Hall (who later went on to chair the NTSB). The tour was
notable for two reasons:
Jim Hall made a comment about how he was surprised that spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactor looked almost exactly like the new ones (aside from the inner and outer assemblies fresh out of the reactor, which were still glowing), since he thought "they'd look all black, like burnt wood."
A week later we got an official memo from Jim Hall, mentioning that during the visit "Hazel was disturbed by the use of the phrase 'Master/Slave Manipulator'" and suggested that "we shouldn't use that phrase anymore." I've still got a copy of this memo somewhere (along with the "radioactive frog" memo of some notoriety), if I find it I'll post a link to a scan as a followup.
Much lunchtime discussion over the next week resulted in a variety of alternative terminologies, including "master/bitch", "pimp/hoe", and "indentured servant." The last of these actually made it into some drawings, and the Powers That Be were not amused.
I don't know where you're living, but that's been the top issue everywhere I've lived in the US. Price is always secondary to coverage (does it work indoors, does it work in the next state, etc).
Indeed... where I live (rural NH) this is a serious issue, since the real-life coverage (as opposed to thier coverage maps) is a spotty patchwork quilt of carriers. For example, nobody has coverage at all in my town (we have a tower, but they've been dickering with the landower over leases for years), Sprint and Verizon cover the SE part of the state well, US Cellular covers much of the rural parts of the state, and various other providers make random cameos as you drive around. But whether a service works at all for you usually involves getting the phone (or borrowing a freinds with that service) and testing it out for a few days.
Many of the people I know are, like myself, well-paid professionals for whom a reliable cell phone connection (or for that matter, a decent broadband connection) is worth paying a hefty premium.
Hopefully some increased competition will mean more competition for coverage, as well as price...
I had to suffer with navtech maps for my autopc nav system. their maps are low quality, very limited in the amount of data and they ask a major premium for them.
And I've had to suffer from more than a few friends and relatives deciding that they don't need directions to get to my place, instead relying on their trusty automotive GPS with a map database.
The promise is that I live in a fairly rural part of New Hampshire (Grantham, NH), and unless you've chosen to come to my place via I-89, then you're usually screwed because the map data is crap. Roads are shown that don't exist. My guest is routed down mere paths in the woods that are shown as actual roadways on the map. Roadnames, while possibily having some basic in someone's reality, bear no resemblence to what the signs on that road say. Roads connect on the map that don't in real life. So, they get hopelessly lost, since while it does tell them where they are to a fine degree of precision, no matter what, they still have faith in the damn GPS's horrible maps to try and guide them here...
And, this happens out in the sticks, where cell phone coverage is about nil as well. So I usually have to silently wait for a few extra hours for them to either show up or sheepishly call me from some remote general store in some town 20 miles away, and go get them. And hope that next time they just ask for directions...
Election officials know exactly how many people are registered to vote in a given precinct. Therefore, they have the ability to determine the amount of memory they'd need on the machines.
While I don't know the specifics of Cambridge, MA, it is useful to note that in some states election day registration is allowed (you show up on election day and register on the spot, and then vote). For example, when I lived in Minneapolis, this is how I registered the first time (about a month beforehand I asked how to register and they told me to wait until election day and just go to my polling place).
While it's doubtful that enough people could register this way to "overfill" the voting system, it's obvious that a certain amount of extra capacity is always warranted.
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This guy is the ethernet driver guru. And the co-founder of the Beowulf project, without which we would've never had the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" comments that we soooo love.
You make it sound easy. It's not. The tolerances are very tight. Things tend to stick. There are hoses and wires everywhere, and that was before the NICMOS Cryocooler was literally wedged into some empty space in the aft shroud (I mention this since I work for the company that made the NICMOS Cryocooler). Having sat and watched the entirety of the EVAs for Service Mission 3B multiple times, this is definitely *not* a simple task. Spacesuited astronauts found the Hubble EVAs to be extremely challenging, so I expect robotic repair to be very, very difficult as well.
Seriously---go to Spacecraftfilms.com, get a DVD of one of the service missions, and *then* come back and try and tell me "it's just a matter of pulling out one box and replacing it".
If it was that easy, we would've done it that way.
"Boldy going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse!"
Indeed, I had a similar thing happen once. A guy broke into my apartment, apparently with the goal of stealing my CD collection (a common theft item in that area, since they were so easily liquidated). He quickly found my CD rack in the living room (with >400 jewel cases in it), and quickly discovered that almost all of the cases were empty, the CD's were in my two CD changers, which were virtually inextractable from the metal equipment rack I was using as an entertainment center. He quickly got frustrated, decided it was time to leave, grabbed the fews CD's that were out in the open, broke a bunch of stuff out of spite, and left.
The cops caught the guy, too, since I could tell them *exactly* which CDs were missing, and the guy that had turned in those exact three CD's at the local used CD store showed up on their store video camera, and they linked him to the apartment with fingerprints (he also had a long rap sheet of B&Es, too).
Alas, it probably would've been easier for me if he had just stolen the CD's (hey, I had insurance), since cleaning up the mess he made and getting the stuff he broke fixed was a hassle.
Indeed, since in addition to drive failure you also have to consider the risks of the RAID itself failure (software drivers for software RAID, or the RAID controller itself for hardware RAID).
I say this since I used to work in a shop where in my 6 years there we easily had more RAID controller failures than failures of the drive in the RAID array itself. Luckily, we had good backup strategy and could restore with minimal effort.
When they find a cheaper way of installing the infrastructure?
Laying cable isn't cheap, especially when you don't have a lot of costumers per mile of cable. Heck, out my way Adelphia will gladly install cable to most anyone, but they charge between $17,000 and $21,000 per mile of cable to install it (hey, they are inflating this value, badly, but even if they charged reasonable rates it isn't cheap). It's bad enough that at one coworker's place (with 100's of acres) we finally got the cable company to run cable to a corner of his property, built a little enclosure for their cable modem, and use a 65 dB antenna to beam up to his house more than a mile away.
Meanwhile, the phone company already has decent copper going to most homes in my area, we just can't get them to put a DSLAM in so we can get DSL.
So I wouldn't go holding your breath for cable, DSL and/or wireless are probably the bandwidth solutions for the near future.
While I admit that the EPA tests aren't perfect, for regular cars are they that bad? I've found them to be within a few MPG of reality for a car in good working order. For example, my 2002 Subaru Outback Sport was listed as 22 mpg city and 27 mpg highway, and it averages 26.2 mpg (seeing that my driving is >90% freeway, that's reasonable).
Going back to the article, if he's getting only 31.2 mpg, and if Civic Hybrid owners in general are only getting 26 mpg, that seems to be a mediocre improvement over gas powered vehicles of a similar weight/size.
Indeed. Currently I work as an R+D engineer. Slightly over half of my work is on government sponsored research, primarily DoD. Most of the research they sponsor isn't in weapons, but in systems support and soldier support.
As an example, projects on which I am currently working or recently worked include:
The great thing is, all of these have use in non-military settings (and in fact, probably have more non-military applications than military ones). Moreover, to get most of these grants you have to show non-military commercialization potential.
I remember when I was graduating with my BS in ME, one day I looked around at my classmates and thought to myself, "These bozos are going to be building the cars of tomorrow?" (I went to Michigan State University, most of my classmates got jobs in the auto industry, or Dow Chemical).
Since then, I worked for a few years (some as an engineer, and a lot as a sysadmin and programmer), as well as getting both an MS and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Along the way, I discovered a few things, like (1) I like engineering more than programming or sysadmin work (2) Mechanical engineering pays better than most programming or sysadmin work... this was even true during the dot.com years, and is more true now, and (3) while the knowledge gained while earning those advanced degrees was indeed priceless, they don't directly convert into a better salary---the money I make now is slightly *less* than it would've been if I had been working as an engineer since I graduated. On the flip side, while the pay isn't any better, the *selection* of jobs was way more desirable and varied with a PhD, and that satisfaction is often more valuable than cash on the table, and now I have both a very good salary and a job I actually enjoy doing.
I had more than one opportunity to go into programming, often at decent salaries. I'm glad I didn't, but everyone finds their own way.
It's even worse than this. In recent history, I've had Arizona, Michigan, Tennessee, Minnesota, and New Hampshire Drivers' Licenses. I still have all of these, although all but the Michigan one are punched to void them. But if I hadn't moved (and necessitated the punching), all of these but the Arizona one would still appear perfectly valid (they haven't expired yet). I know Michigan has had at least two redesigns since I got that license, Minnesota one, and Tennessee one, and I'm assuming that New Hampshire had one in recent history. The problem is that expiration times on the licenses are so long that at any given time there can be a *lot* of valid state-issue ID's in circulation, of the "under 21", "over 21", "Identification", and similar designations.
Heck, I've even been travelling and had bartenders be skeptical w.r.t. my identity (I've greyed a *lot* in the last few years and seldom wear my glasses, so my license photos don't usually look much like me), and even if my ID doesn't look like the the one in their book, I can usually (umm, always) talk my way past them (with confidence, since I know I'm presenting legit ID). Heck, I could probably get fairly far with a legit looking ID from a non-state like "Dakota" if it looked spiffy enough.
Common standards would be a good step, for many reasons.
That blows, seeing that I cleared $7.50/hr back when I moonlighted as a projectionist...
...in 1992.
That said, if you don't like the price, don't buy the product. If you're willing to wait a few months, you can rent or buy the movie for less than the tickets cost, and watch them in your own home, drinking your own beer, and not having to worry about the people behind you talking...
Indeed, I've known two colleagues in VT that have been audited by the state, and this was exactly the approach they used. It's particularly easy, since there are a lot of brick-and-mortar stores that don't have any presence in VT at all (since they border on a no-sales-tax state which sucks the businesses over the border). So buying something at, say, Burlington Coat Factory (just to pick one out of thin air), they pretty much assume you're using in-state unless you gave to to someone as a gift.
That said, there is an easy out in a lot of "Use Tax" states---in the above Vermont example, if you didn't buy anything over $1000, then they have a handy table that estimates how much Use Tax you should pay based on your AGI. Granted, the formula is a ridiculous underestimate (seeing that most everyone mail- or internet-orders stuff, and most anyone within 20 minutes drive of the NH border does virtually all of their non-grocery shopping across the border, while the estimate claims that someone with an AGI of 60,000 only bought $480 total in out-of-state items), but that just goes to show how stupid a Use Tax can be.
It started innocently enough, I had been doing a variety of Linux contract programming jobs, and got hired by one company to help port their flagship product to Linux. Usually not too bad a job, and the product itself was something of a spiffy concept, and worked decently on some other Unix platforms.
First problem is that it turned out that this was, essentially, abandoned code, and the original programmer had quit under unpleasant circumstances and moved back to (some random country across the pacific), and wasn't on speaking terms. It was poorly documented, *very* platform specific, and relied a lot on undocumented behavior by the OS. Needless to say, it took quite some time to figure out how everything worked, a lot more time to get a decent Linux prototype running, and even more time to work around a lot of niggling Linux issues. Ugly, and the company already had customers lining up out the door to buy what didn't exist yet (and certainly wasn't tested).
Then, once all the niggling little details were mostly worked out, they shifted the platform from Red Hat Linux on x86 to a custom Linux running on Netwinder BMs running StrongARM 110's, which, unfortunately, required a lot of entirely different low-level coding to get working. By this point I was working many late-night hours, and my bosses were doing near-hourly status requests.
What's worse, I got called for jury duty in the middle of this, and despite some good attempts to get jury duty delayed, I had to show up---and immediately got myself sequestered as part of a many-week long trial. I essentially had to take a 90%-finished product, and with almost no warning, pack it up hardware and all and dump it on another contractor. And I had my contract summarily canceled (i.e. I was fired). At least it was behind me...
...until 6 months later, as I am packing up to move out of state, I find myself walking out the front door into a process server, and faster than you can spell "subpoena" find out that I'm now a witness in a civil case in which my previous employer was suing the contractor I had handed everything off to. I spent much of the next several months spending many unpaid hours giving depositions and statements, only slightly relieved that I wasn't on the recieving end of a lawsuit.
Oh well, they must've gotten it worked out, the product is still for sale for Linux, but I know better than to even try to ask about how things turned out.
You vote. Out pops a slip of paper with a random unique number on it and your vote and a URL http:/e-votingsomething.gov
The problem is that, in some areas, people can be intimitated, assaulted, or even killed for how they voted (or even for voting in the first place). Yes, even here in the US. It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but still does, and, more importantly, could.
Human-readable paper reciepts, or anything that can easily be converted to tell someone's vote, enable this sort of voter intimidation.
We, like plenty of other folks, live in Rhode Island, while receiving income from Mass sources (my wife works still there and I used to work in Boston). Every year, TaxCut Deluxe is reduced to sucking on its fingers and quietly crying while I grimly clench my teeth and enter the data for the Mass state forms manually.
Indeed. I had one year in which I lived in Michigan, Tennessee, Arizona, and Minnesota. I also recieved income in each of these states, and, swimmingly, my employment dates weren't necessarily the same as my residence dates. Add a bunch of 1099's and self-employment. I didn't even try tax software (it was 1995, tax software wasn't as good then), and even my accountant spent some time "sucking on his fingers and quietly crying" before sorting the whole mess out.
I much prefer life now, with one employer, and no state income[1] or use tax since I live in NH.
[1] Although any year now I'll become subject to NH's interest and dividends tax...
This matches with my observations. As a frequent travel to destinations both popular and obscure, I'm frequently surprised that, outside of major cities, the US is often one of the worst places to get decent internet access. Europe, Africe, and the Caribbean have all had plentiful internet cafes in the places I've been... while meanwhile I can be in downtown Pittsburgh (to use one example I remember) and have to hunt around for quite a while just to find a workable 802.11b connection.
With Wi-Fi it has been getting a lot better recently, especially if you're willing to shill out for T-mobile HotSpot access.
Well, it's already been done. In epsiode DABF22 ("How I Spent My Strummer Vacation") the "couch gag" was Homer waterskiing and jumping over a shark.
Usually this is the case, and it's called a "Use Tax" levied by the state where the items are going.
The biggest problem with Use Taxes is that they are hard to enforce. For example in my area (VT/NH border area), a substantial fraction (well over 80%) of the retail businesses in the border area are all on the NH side, so much of Vermont shops over here to avoid the VT sales tax (we don't mind much, it brings in business). Of course, in reality, everything they buy over here that they drag back over the border is subject to the Vermont Use tax (which is the same value as the sales tax), so if they are being completely legal there is no price advantage at all. The problem is that Use Tax is so hard to track, that all the state of Vermont does is have a line on your taxes to report all this stuff, and they rely on your honesty to report it all. Of course, a simple polling of the Vermonters I know show that, unsurprisingly, nobody reports any realistic values, so the tax goes mostly uncollected.
This situation is similar in many other border areas, although usually the tax rate differential is even lower, meaning there is less motivation for the state to enforce it.
The ideal solution is to either (a) figure out a way to enforce it (which is what many states are trying to do with online retailers), or (b) give up on it and find a way to tax that is halfway enforceable.
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...
The plus side is that in the long run it actually *helped* me get going in the morning (I can get up and go without needing to stop for coffee now), and now that I'm allowed the occasional cup of coffee by my docs, on the rare occasion that I really need a pick-me-up (like boring business meetings in the afternoon in a warm, dark room), coffee has a lot more kick than it used to...
Best of luck for you, you'll be better off for it...
Similar thing here... Living in rural NH, this whole number portability thing is currently nothing but a nice academic thought exercise, since portability doesn't really buy you anything if there is nobody to switch to... Well, I guess you could, but moving my number from a perfectly good land line to a cell phone that will just sit there saying "No Coverage" (we have no cell phone signals at my joint) isn't really worth doing...
Kinda like having a "mobile" home that never goes anywhere...
Strangely, I didn't thin this was a farce, since I've lived through exactly this nonsense once before.
The year was 1993, and I was working as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in their High Flux Isotope Reactor. While I was there we got visited by the Secretary of Energy (Hazel O'Leary) and her "Science Advisor" Jim Hall (who later went on to chair the NTSB). The tour was notable for two reasons:
Much lunchtime discussion over the next week resulted in a variety of alternative terminologies, including "master/bitch", "pimp/hoe", and "indentured servant." The last of these actually made it into some drawings, and the Powers That Be were not amused.
So no, I'm not surprised. Not one bit.
Indeed... where I live (rural NH) this is a serious issue, since the real-life coverage (as opposed to thier coverage maps) is a spotty patchwork quilt of carriers. For example, nobody has coverage at all in my town (we have a tower, but they've been dickering with the landower over leases for years), Sprint and Verizon cover the SE part of the state well, US Cellular covers much of the rural parts of the state, and various other providers make random cameos as you drive around. But whether a service works at all for you usually involves getting the phone (or borrowing a freinds with that service) and testing it out for a few days.
Many of the people I know are, like myself, well-paid professionals for whom a reliable cell phone connection (or for that matter, a decent broadband connection) is worth paying a hefty premium.
Hopefully some increased competition will mean more competition for coverage, as well as price...
And I've had to suffer from more than a few friends and relatives deciding that they don't need directions to get to my place, instead relying on their trusty automotive GPS with a map database.
The promise is that I live in a fairly rural part of New Hampshire (Grantham, NH), and unless you've chosen to come to my place via I-89, then you're usually screwed because the map data is crap. Roads are shown that don't exist. My guest is routed down mere paths in the woods that are shown as actual roadways on the map. Roadnames, while possibily having some basic in someone's reality, bear no resemblence to what the signs on that road say. Roads connect on the map that don't in real life. So, they get hopelessly lost, since while it does tell them where they are to a fine degree of precision, no matter what, they still have faith in the damn GPS's horrible maps to try and guide them here...
And, this happens out in the sticks, where cell phone coverage is about nil as well. So I usually have to silently wait for a few extra hours for them to either show up or sheepishly call me from some remote general store in some town 20 miles away, and go get them. And hope that next time they just ask for directions...
While I don't know the specifics of Cambridge, MA, it is useful to note that in some states election day registration is allowed (you show up on election day and register on the spot, and then vote). For example, when I lived in Minneapolis, this is how I registered the first time (about a month beforehand I asked how to register and they told me to wait until election day and just go to my polling place).
While it's doubtful that enough people could register this way to "overfill" the voting system, it's obvious that a certain amount of extra capacity is always warranted.