The real pisser with the IRS taxing barter is that labor doesn't apply as a charitiable donation.
So, if I trade computer repairs for car repairs, I'm supposed to get dinged for the fair market value of the trade. However, if i donate 10 hours of billable time to the Red Cross, I can't deduct that as a donation.
The company I work for right now is rolling out OpenVPN. Our 2 main offices are connected via the shared static key method, our employees and vendors are issues certificates to log into another server. It works really well and is *much* faster than the MPD solution we used before.
I love how you can customize each client connection's routes and stuff, but this only works if you use the certificate method. Our vendors are allowed only to the 2 subnets they need, while us employees and admins get full run of the internal network.
I don't know what your problem was w/ the certificates. I got it running the first try, as the online HOWTO is *excellent*. The scripts in the easy-rsa/2.0 directory do all the work for you. All you need to do is copy the key to the servers and clients.
We use FreeBSD the servers, and the excellent OpenVPN GUI for our Windows clients. I use FreeBSD from home to connect. And since some other VPN solutions apparently don't play well behind NAT devices, I'll say that multiple OpenVPN clients can connect just fine from behind a single NAT device.
Buying a rural fixer-upper home for $40k was the latest step -- can't beat a $275/month house payment. Getting out of debt and learning to live frugally was another.
I was commuting 65 miles each way to get to work, and that cost $400/month alone. Throw in $5/day for lunches, on average. It all adds up. I've telecommuted before, and after trying a normal job for a few months, I decided it was time to go back.
No, I took a less stressful job, with fewer hours because I could. Going from $45,000/yr to $17,500/yr, which is $27,500 less/yr. The government handouts are just icing on the cake.:) The real motivation is being able to work from home and be with my wife and kids full-time. The job's only 20 hrs/week, and the rest is free time.
A lot of people in this country refuse to find jobs because...why should they when the gov't sends them money for no reason.
I agree. But ever wonder why so many people try to scam the system like this?
Um, I dunno... maybe a feeling of disenfranchisement? The thought that they've been fleeced their entire lives by excess taxes to fund worthless pork?
Yeah, I know. The US dosn't have the most-taxed population in the world, but that still doesn't make it any more correct.
One year I got very bored and very curious, and for 6 months, I tracked every single cent that I spent, and all forms of taxes extracted from it. That included breaking out the state/federal taxes for every gallon of gas, sales taxes, income taxes withheld from my paychecks, vehicle registration/taxes, property taxes, and all those damned taxes and "fees" on utility and telecom bills. The grand total was about 50% of my gross pay -- and I was making just over $50k/yr at that time. Given how regressive (I think I have that right), lower income working would get shafted a lot harder. WTF?
So in some sense, I can't blame some people for trying to fleece a system that has fleeced them for so long.
I just changed jobs -- cut my salary to about 1/3 of what I was making. This was intentional. It so happens that my new annual earnings will be just a hair over the yearly income for a family of 4 to receive the maximum of the earned income credit, which is about $4400. See IRS Publication 596" for details, including the income/benefit tables.
Our family's self-imposed low cost of living will result in the gub'ment giving us a $4k gift next year, and our standard of living is pretty comfortable as it is. Is this playing the system? Perhaps. But as Lazlo once said, "Well they set up the rules. Lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs."
You wanna cut EIC? Go ahead -- so long as you cut industry subsidies (farm, energy, etc.) and corporate welfare (tax-paid sports venues, no-bid contracts, etc.). I'm very libertarian, but I'll take any breaks within this corrupt tax structure that we have.
Back in my day it was D&D, before then it was comic books and Mad Magazine, and now it's Video Games.
I would bet my next paycheck that a good, solid study could find a correlation that watching daytime soaps and prime-time drama leads people in their 20's and 30's to getting the idea that infidelity is normal and then proceeding to emulate their TV drama stars and be unfaithful themselves. Gee -- there's a shocker.
Yet, do you see the Family Values people lobbying daytime television producers to clean up their shows? It probably would help imrpove the state of the American family if we weren't bombarded by perfectly beautiful, young, cheating couples on 95% of the programs being shown. But mo, they'd never attack an entrenched mainstream form of entertainmens. Ditto movies (except if it's wildly successful and has gay cowboys, then they'll attack it). Or how about the violence of professional sports? Isn't Superbowl Sunday reportedly one of the worst days of the year when it comes to wife abuse?
Such double standards.
I think regulation of expression is a last-resort option. People are free to take their own actions, for better or for worse. I however think that we should address all forms of entertainment with a similar statndard. Well, except for porn -- that's a slightly different can of worms.
That's easy. Just research up on the top 2 or three brands of what you want to buy. For many classes of products, you just won't find them.
Take De Walt power tools (you know, those construction yellow and black tools with a good , solid feel to them) -- you don't see those at Wal Mart. Ditto Husqvarna chainsaws. Both damned good tools. Much more pricey then the piece-o-crap Black and Decker and Weed Eater branded tools you find at Wally World.
Of course, some good manufacturers still sell via Wal Mart, and, as far as I can tell,their quality is still good. Take the Ruger 10/22 rifle. Sure, it's accuracy is somewhat limited, but damn do those things are built like tanks and are rifles you can count on your grandkids using, if you don't pawn it for beer money.
So, some companies, like Snapper, just don't do business because it will hurt their perceived image of quality or they know Wal Mart will force them to actually lower their quality. Others, like Ruger, don't care because Walmart is the single largest distributor of their products.
Seeing as how I run FreeBSD amd64, I'd bitch if they didn't have a format that wasn't supported by 64-bit clean open source codecs. I don't run 32-bit or linux binary compatability, which rules out quite a bit for me. No Sun Java (which is stupid -- they support PPC, UltraSparc, and Win64), no OpenOffice, no Flash (which I refused to install when I ran 32-bit anyway), and no win32 codecs for mplayer.:) At least I can play the AVI's from Google's video site.
Buy why so many sites don't default to mpeg or mpeg2 is totally beyond me. Standards, people -- standards! Open formats, like Theora, would be even better.
Any decent company doing transactions on the kind of scale you mention would likely use Solaris or AIX as their platforms of choice. Sure, there are contrary examples, but even most diehard Linux admins (and fans) know when to throw in the towel and cede to the big boys. I doubt you'd see much Linux on Wall Street or in the banking industry.
It's the pain and suffering endured when trying to add an app to an RPM-based system that isn't part of the distribution or the few 3rd party places that support your platform (freshrpms, dag, etc.).
I often find it easier to compile and install from the raw tarball than fight with RPMs that aren't in the mainline distro.
My latest foray w/ FC5, for example, had me frustrated with my inability to get pine installed via RPM, either binary or source RPM. I'm sure I missed some obscure "rpmbuild" flag or repository option in the yum conf file, but I just couldn't get the damn thing installed. I don't care *what* anybody else says, if it's a src.rpm file, it should "just work" with an RPM-based system.
Granted, ports and portage aren't perfect. Sometimes ports aren't well maintained (or not at all -- but not everything is rolled into RPMs, either), and I must resort to a tarball installation. I just don't like dealing with RPMs anymore. I worked with them for 5 year at my last job, and after using freebsd/ports, I avoid them whenever possible.
Funny you should mention Oracle. My current employer paid for an Oracle installation a few years ago (they opted for Suse, btw, rather then Redhat), and have regretted it ever since. I wasn't at the company yet, and from what I hear the poor deployment is likely due to incompetant Oracle consultants, not necessarily Oracle itself.
However, we push Postgresql whenever we get the chance, as it gets the job done for most of our needs. In fact, the primary reason we haven't totally ditched Oracle is more for political face-saving of the managers who wrote the huge check for Oracle ("You paid *how* much?!? We could have deployed a *dozen* beefier servers running Postgres for the cost of the 2 Oracle boxes you bought."). Our apps are mostly coded in-house, so there's not much to gain by going with a commercial DB.
As far as the "time sponge" qualities of emerge, I can't argue the point too much. The FreeBSD ports collection can suffer the same thing (especially for the desktop -- KDE and OpenOffice being the two big offenders for long compile times). I like to look for the silver lining, and consider the source builds a good burn-in for new systems (in addition to bonnie++ and memtest86).
To Redhat's credit, I do miss kickstart installations. That is a nice feature. (Yes, I know they bit this feature from Sun's jumpstart.) I understand that FreeBSD's "sysinstall" can be automated, but I haven't seriously dug into it yet.
Notice that I said "people" and not "all people". Many of my current peers have few good things to say about Redhat (some of them never did to begin with). I'm sure my admitedly anecdotal evidence is not unique in this regard. Redhat may be a good choice for the "suits" but many of us with autonomy in the trenches do not care for it and don't use it when we aren't required to.
I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0, Enterprise Server 2.x, and Fedora 4. I was mostly happy with them, and was willing to give them a chance after they split off Fedora from mainline Redhat. I then switched jobs to a FreeBSD shop, and I've been a convert ever since, from my workstation at the office to my home machines. The base system is a high performer and stable, and the ports tree is well maintained and much better than RPMs ever were.
After recently trying Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo due to the need to run the new free VMWare server product, I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I can't say that Redhat has necessarily "sold out" but they're not the company I cheer for anymore. Granted, they *are* pushing good technologies, like Xen, but aside from the fringe benefits of their clout, I don't like them much these days.
Honestly, pro se lawsuits tend to be disasters. If you can't find a lawyer willing to represent you, it usually means you don't have a case.
Funny. I always thought that pro se was a good option for people who felt that justice shouldn't have an obscene cover charge. At least for those with the skills to represent themselves well.
Gotta love our justice system: by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
I send most junk mail solicitations back to the sender in their own return envelope. If they send those neat colorful stickers, I stick a few of those on the envelope's outside border for good measure. So you have an over-stuffed envelope with stickers to gum up the machines.
My wife did a few months on graveyard shift at a First Security payment processing center (before Wells Fargo assimilated them). She said those machines are *really* cool, really fast, and jam up so easily that they have dedicated staff on-hand to fix particularly nasty jams.
So if you want to put a (albeit small) dent in the productivity of the Evil Credit Card Sharks, send back those handy self addressed envelopes stuffed with their own junk mail. Be sure to fold, spindle, and mutilate the envelope, too.:)
If Verizon (and all the other telcos) want to give up those federal surcharges we must all endure, then they *may* have a case. Otherwise... quit yer whining!
hey pay something like 4.28% which is the highest paying money market fund available right now.
I'll take the 0.03% hit for a company that's not evil. At EmigrantDirect.com, you can't go wrong with 4.25%.
(Disclaimer: my only affiliation w/ EmigrantDirect.com is that of a happy customer. I think banks are evil, but you can't argue with the rate from this one.)
I just took a reasonably-paying job ($45k/yr), with a half-decent health plan. After working for 8 years at other jobs, dutifully paying the health premiums, and hardly using them at all, we opted to not sign up this time. And that's w/ 2 kids.
Take care of yourself, treat yourself when you can (we recently used -- with much success -- livestock meds to take care of a family illness), and hope for the best. Even many of those who *are* insured, a catastrophic event will ruin your lives.
Don'y buy into the shitty health system of the US. It's a sham and a waste of money. I'm just thankful that the health insurance industry isn't guaranteed my business by force of law (yet -- you wait), unlike auto insurance. What a racket!
Sorry I don't have time to cite the URL, but I recall (while browsing the Utah State Code) that in Utah it is a crime to wear a mask or custume in public with the purpose to obfuscate your identity. (obviously there are exceptions)
Furthermore, I recall someone across the pond in Europe's most surveiled state (the UK) documenting on a web page how they had walked around at night in a costume (gorilla suit, maybe?), were obviously observed by the cameras, and were harassed by the police.
So, while maybe not a crime (in many places), trying to anonymize onesself *will* grab The Man's attention.
Back in the early 90's, when I was new to the 'net, I remember uncovering all these programs and concepts that gave me hope that people would be able to wander the internet truly anonymously. I discovered PGP, anon.penet.fi, the whole cypherpunk movement (crypto, remailers, etc.), anonymoizer.com, Chaum's eCash. Things were rough around the edges, and tough to use for a internet newbie, but progressing along fast enough that I thought we'd actually see Joe Sixpack able to easily utilize these tools. Someday.
I'd check on these projects every few years, until finally, I sorta gave up on following them. They seemed to stagnate, never getting beyond the fringe.
A year or so ago, I wanted to the utilize mixmaster remailers, and I *still* wasn't able to find an up-to-date, lucid HOWTO or a client that didn't require a *lot* of work to use.
I haven't actively sought these tools in a while, so maybe they've caught up. But I keep my ear to the wall, and I have yet to hear any murmers of good anonymizing technologies, nor do I ever see any passing references to people using them.
I have assumed that the movement is either dead (nobody cares anymore) or ubiquitous (it's common knowledge and no big deal). Somehow, I kinda doubt it's the latter.
I've been toying with an idea for a site/system in the spirit of the Mixmaster remailers, but I want to be able to evaluate the current technologies before I totally re-invent the proverbial wheel. (Plus, I wish to be as anonymous in the registration and publication of the site as possible). I'd *love* some pointers.
Slashdot Mirror
How I'd love to see this guy bump that asshat Orrin Hatch out of office!
So, if I trade computer repairs for car repairs, I'm supposed to get dinged for the fair market value of the trade. However, if i donate 10 hours of billable time to the Red Cross, I can't deduct that as a donation.
What a racket.
I love how you can customize each client connection's routes and stuff, but this only works if you use the certificate method. Our vendors are allowed only to the 2 subnets they need, while us employees and admins get full run of the internal network.
I don't know what your problem was w/ the certificates. I got it running the first try, as the online HOWTO is *excellent*. The scripts in the easy-rsa/2.0 directory do all the work for you. All you need to do is copy the key to the servers and clients.
We use FreeBSD the servers, and the excellent OpenVPN GUI for our Windows clients. I use FreeBSD from home to connect. And since some other VPN solutions apparently don't play well behind NAT devices, I'll say that multiple OpenVPN clients can connect just fine from behind a single NAT device.
OpenVPN is a really great product.
I was commuting 65 miles each way to get to work, and that cost $400/month alone. Throw in $5/day for lunches, on average. It all adds up. I've telecommuted before, and after trying a normal job for a few months, I decided it was time to go back.
No, I took a less stressful job, with fewer hours because I could. Going from $45,000/yr to $17,500/yr, which is $27,500 less/yr. The government handouts are just icing on the cake. :) The real motivation is being able to work from home and be with my wife and kids full-time. The job's only 20 hrs/week, and the rest is free time.
No, that would be all the state-funded, "certified flaggers" who shepherd orange cones along our nation's interstates. $15/hr, man -- tough work.
I agree. But ever wonder why so many people try to scam the system like this?
Um, I dunno... maybe a feeling of disenfranchisement? The thought that they've been fleeced their entire lives by excess taxes to fund worthless pork?
Yeah, I know. The US dosn't have the most-taxed population in the world, but that still doesn't make it any more correct.
One year I got very bored and very curious, and for 6 months, I tracked every single cent that I spent, and all forms of taxes extracted from it. That included breaking out the state/federal taxes for every gallon of gas, sales taxes, income taxes withheld from my paychecks, vehicle registration/taxes, property taxes, and all those damned taxes and "fees" on utility and telecom bills. The grand total was about 50% of my gross pay -- and I was making just over $50k/yr at that time. Given how regressive (I think I have that right), lower income working would get shafted a lot harder. WTF?
So in some sense, I can't blame some people for trying to fleece a system that has fleeced them for so long.
I just changed jobs -- cut my salary to about 1/3 of what I was making. This was intentional. It so happens that my new annual earnings will be just a hair over the yearly income for a family of 4 to receive the maximum of the earned income credit, which is about $4400. See IRS Publication 596" for details, including the income/benefit tables.
Our family's self-imposed low cost of living will result in the gub'ment giving us a $4k gift next year, and our standard of living is pretty comfortable as it is. Is this playing the system? Perhaps. But as Lazlo once said, "Well they set up the rules. Lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs."
You wanna cut EIC? Go ahead -- so long as you cut industry subsidies (farm, energy, etc.) and corporate welfare (tax-paid sports venues, no-bid contracts, etc.). I'm very libertarian, but I'll take any breaks within this corrupt tax structure that we have.
I would bet my next paycheck that a good, solid study could find a correlation that watching daytime soaps and prime-time drama leads people in their 20's and 30's to getting the idea that infidelity is normal and then proceeding to emulate their TV drama stars and be unfaithful themselves. Gee -- there's a shocker.
Yet, do you see the Family Values people lobbying daytime television producers to clean up their shows? It probably would help imrpove the state of the American family if we weren't bombarded by perfectly beautiful, young, cheating couples on 95% of the programs being shown. But mo, they'd never attack an entrenched mainstream form of entertainmens. Ditto movies (except if it's wildly successful and has gay cowboys, then they'll attack it). Or how about the violence of professional sports? Isn't Superbowl Sunday reportedly one of the worst days of the year when it comes to wife abuse?
Such double standards.
I think regulation of expression is a last-resort option. People are free to take their own actions, for better or for worse. I however think that we should address all forms of entertainment with a similar statndard. Well, except for porn -- that's a slightly different can of worms.
Take De Walt power tools (you know, those construction yellow and black tools with a good , solid feel to them) -- you don't see those at Wal Mart. Ditto Husqvarna chainsaws. Both damned good tools. Much more pricey then the piece-o-crap Black and Decker and Weed Eater branded tools you find at Wally World.
Of course, some good manufacturers still sell via Wal Mart, and, as far as I can tell,their quality is still good. Take the Ruger 10/22 rifle. Sure, it's accuracy is somewhat limited, but damn do those things are built like tanks and are rifles you can count on your grandkids using, if you don't pawn it for beer money.
So, some companies, like Snapper, just don't do business because it will hurt their perceived image of quality or they know Wal Mart will force them to actually lower their quality. Others, like Ruger, don't care because Walmart is the single largest distributor of their products.
Buy why so many sites don't default to mpeg or mpeg2 is totally beyond me. Standards, people -- standards! Open formats, like Theora, would be even better.
"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player, click here to get the latest flash player."
How lame is that? I'll be damned if I'm istalling flash. Why the hell do so many sites use that piece of shit?
Any decent company doing transactions on the kind of scale you mention would likely use Solaris or AIX as their platforms of choice. Sure, there are contrary examples, but even most diehard Linux admins (and fans) know when to throw in the towel and cede to the big boys. I doubt you'd see much Linux on Wall Street or in the banking industry.
It's the pain and suffering endured when trying to add an app to an RPM-based system that isn't part of the distribution or the few 3rd party places that support your platform (freshrpms, dag, etc.).
I often find it easier to compile and install from the raw tarball than fight with RPMs that aren't in the mainline distro.
My latest foray w/ FC5, for example, had me frustrated with my inability to get pine installed via RPM, either binary or source RPM. I'm sure I missed some obscure "rpmbuild" flag or repository option in the yum conf file, but I just couldn't get the damn thing installed. I don't care *what* anybody else says, if it's a src.rpm file, it should "just work" with an RPM-based system.
Granted, ports and portage aren't perfect. Sometimes ports aren't well maintained (or not at all -- but not everything is rolled into RPMs, either), and I must resort to a tarball installation. I just don't like dealing with RPMs anymore. I worked with them for 5 year at my last job, and after using freebsd/ports, I avoid them whenever possible.
However, we push Postgresql whenever we get the chance, as it gets the job done for most of our needs. In fact, the primary reason we haven't totally ditched Oracle is more for political face-saving of the managers who wrote the huge check for Oracle ("You paid *how* much?!? We could have deployed a *dozen* beefier servers running Postgres for the cost of the 2 Oracle boxes you bought."). Our apps are mostly coded in-house, so there's not much to gain by going with a commercial DB.
As far as the "time sponge" qualities of emerge, I can't argue the point too much. The FreeBSD ports collection can suffer the same thing (especially for the desktop -- KDE and OpenOffice being the two big offenders for long compile times). I like to look for the silver lining, and consider the source builds a good burn-in for new systems (in addition to bonnie++ and memtest86).
To Redhat's credit, I do miss kickstart installations. That is a nice feature. (Yes, I know they bit this feature from Sun's jumpstart.) I understand that FreeBSD's "sysinstall" can be automated, but I haven't seriously dug into it yet.
Notice that I said "people" and not "all people". Many of my current peers have few good things to say about Redhat (some of them never did to begin with). I'm sure my admitedly anecdotal evidence is not unique in this regard. Redhat may be a good choice for the "suits" but many of us with autonomy in the trenches do not care for it and don't use it when we aren't required to.
I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0, Enterprise Server 2.x, and Fedora 4. I was mostly happy with them, and was willing to give them a chance after they split off Fedora from mainline Redhat. I then switched jobs to a FreeBSD shop, and I've been a convert ever since, from my workstation at the office to my home machines. The base system is a high performer and stable, and the ports tree is well maintained and much better than RPMs ever were.
After recently trying Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo due to the need to run the new free VMWare server product, I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I can't say that Redhat has necessarily "sold out" but they're not the company I cheer for anymore. Granted, they *are* pushing good technologies, like Xen, but aside from the fringe benefits of their clout, I don't like them much these days.
Funny. I always thought that pro se was a good option for people who felt that justice shouldn't have an obscene cover charge. At least for those with the skills to represent themselves well.
Gotta love our justice system: by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
My wife did a few months on graveyard shift at a First Security payment processing center (before Wells Fargo assimilated them). She said those machines are *really* cool, really fast, and jam up so easily that they have dedicated staff on-hand to fix particularly nasty jams.
So if you want to put a (albeit small) dent in the productivity of the Evil Credit Card Sharks, send back those handy self addressed envelopes stuffed with their own junk mail. Be sure to fold, spindle, and mutilate the envelope, too. :)
If Verizon (and all the other telcos) want to give up those federal surcharges we must all endure, then they *may* have a case. Otherwise... quit yer whining!
I'll take the 0.03% hit for a company that's not evil. At EmigrantDirect.com, you can't go wrong with 4.25%.
(Disclaimer: my only affiliation w/ EmigrantDirect.com is that of a happy customer. I think banks are evil, but you can't argue with the rate from this one.)
I just took a reasonably-paying job ($45k/yr), with a half-decent health plan. After working for 8 years at other jobs, dutifully paying the health premiums, and hardly using them at all, we opted to not sign up this time. And that's w/ 2 kids.
Take care of yourself, treat yourself when you can (we recently used -- with much success -- livestock meds to take care of a family illness), and hope for the best. Even many of those who *are* insured, a catastrophic event will ruin your lives.
Don'y buy into the shitty health system of the US. It's a sham and a waste of money. I'm just thankful that the health insurance industry isn't guaranteed my business by force of law (yet -- you wait), unlike auto insurance. What a racket!
I heard his last film was stalled due to the dancing midget trade union being on strike.
Furthermore, I recall someone across the pond in Europe's most surveiled state (the UK) documenting on a web page how they had walked around at night in a costume (gorilla suit, maybe?), were obviously observed by the cameras, and were harassed by the police.
So, while maybe not a crime (in many places), trying to anonymize onesself *will* grab The Man's attention.
I'd check on these projects every few years, until finally, I sorta gave up on following them. They seemed to stagnate, never getting beyond the fringe.
A year or so ago, I wanted to the utilize mixmaster remailers, and I *still* wasn't able to find an up-to-date, lucid HOWTO or a client that didn't require a *lot* of work to use.
I haven't actively sought these tools in a while, so maybe they've caught up. But I keep my ear to the wall, and I have yet to hear any murmers of good anonymizing technologies, nor do I ever see any passing references to people using them.
I have assumed that the movement is either dead (nobody cares anymore) or ubiquitous (it's common knowledge and no big deal). Somehow, I kinda doubt it's the latter.
I've been toying with an idea for a site/system in the spirit of the Mixmaster remailers, but I want to be able to evaluate the current technologies before I totally re-invent the proverbial wheel. (Plus, I wish to be as anonymous in the registration and publication of the site as possible). I'd *love* some pointers.
Pity your opinion is held by such a large number of people.