Yes, I read the article. Saw the pics. Pretty cool, I guess.
But I'm failing to see the interest in taking little Johnny to the aquarium to see "robot fish", in the same way I'd be a bit torqued off if I took my kids to the zoo and we saw robotic giraffes. Cool, yes. Unexpected, yes. What I'm there for, no.
If I took my kids to a "robotozoo" or whatever it might be, that's neat. But this sort of thing belongs in...maybe one of those hands-on sort of museums, or a kids science museum, or some place where you go to see cool robotics stuff.
I'm not knocking the technology here, or the software...but you put a pile of robotic trout in a nice little place a guy can toss a dry fly in and get a hit and get the sort of reactions you might with some real fish, NOW you have a robot that is really entertaining.
catch and release only, of course...at MY robot fish 'aquarium' you can't take your fish home. We weigh it, take your picture, and send it back with a new AI adjustment so it is SMARTER than your flesh-fish and you gotta do better next time to catch him
I guess while this is kinda cool, it's not an aquarium exhibit. The cool thing about a real aquarium is the fact it has REAL fish, with REAL behaviors, and the real variety that exists in nature. Don't you kinda think robot fish here are sort of like having a Sony (tm) pet dog in a zoo?
After watching further videos...I see that Ghost Rider is not just a 2-wheeled device. It has arms it can lower to right itself, and presumably for very slow movement or holding itself upright when stationary.
Cool videos on that site. As I was watching some of them, it occured to me that another huge flaw with the 2-wheeled vehicle is it's inability to go very slowly. Or inch up to something. Seems like some pretty big limitations to overcome.
True...if you lose it, or get hit with a mongo flood, or have some giant EM radiation issue, or blah blah, you may still have a problem. But the guys saying "paper" aren't all wrong, and if you're like me, you have your docs in a fireproof safe in your house, you may have a safety deposit box, etc, etc.
But hauling around a bulk of your info on a key chain isn't that bad an option. 99% of the people who find it couldn't get thru the basic PW access that most flash drives provide.
And having the info you need would still be a pretty darn handy thing, when you needed it. I'm not sure it's any worse than having your insurance card, 3 or 4 credit cards, your bank card, or anything else you may carry around in your wallet.
It's just a different media than paper. One that holds more. No harm there, any worse than carrying around a ream of printed material.
I'm talking about locally owned businesses that make up the "main street" of many communities in my state. Not Walmart.
However, you have an interesting point. The e-bay seller part of it. How many e-Bay sellers do you know that have a sales tax license? If they're truly a business, they should. Why should they get off not having to collect sales tax (assuming their state requires it)?
I'm not talking about the casual, occasional personal sale here. I'm talking about professional e-bayers. Each state might have their own laws on this, but in my state you can have a "lemonade stand" or a "garage sale" without getting a sales tax license, and collecting and remitting the tax to the state. But if you meet some level of criteria, at some point you must.
As more sales move from brick-and-mortar to pick-and-click stores, this will affect the tax base.
I agrere the out-of-state company doesn't put any demand on the infrastructure. What they do is redirect tax revenues away from people who do put putting those people who do have to charge the tax at a disadvantage. The issue is that for those states who rely heavily on sales tax (and have no income taxes) this narrows their tax base dramatically. Eventually, it will render it unworkable, and force an income or some other tax to be levied.
No, shipping is an expense, paid by the consumer to the shipper.
Sales tax is a revenue for governments (hate'em or not) that is required to provide certain basic services to the citizenry. If you remove or reduce that revenue stream, either be prepared to have other taxes raised(perhaps not as fairly based on consumption or spread across the populace).
The only other alternative is the reduction of basic services. I'm here to tell you, we're facing it right now in my state. I work in the state budget office, and we can clearly see the shift in revenues as internet purchasing grows.
Untrue. Mail order items are subject to sales tax, only you have to voluntarily claim them and remit the tax to your state department of revenue. The problem is, it's widely ignored and pretty much unenforceable. So...now...we have some states (like mine) which gather the vast majority of their revenue via sales tax (no personal or corporate income tax). As more and more of comsumer sales shifts to the internet, less and less revenue is generated. Essentially, the tax base shrinks. This puts more of a tax burden on other taxes (like, for instance, property taxes). Eventually, these other taxes are bearing an unfair proportion of the burden.
One other point: It puts local mom-and-pop operations at a disadvantage. Why should I purchase locally, even if it's the same price, when I can just "buy it over the internet, tax free". It puts all the retailers on the same level.
The bill is supported by the White House as well, but has not yet gone to the floor for a vote.
but has not yet gone to the floor for a vote...??????
I'm sure this has already been beaten to death, but fer gosh sakes. We don't need more nerds crying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". Jeez, I know I'll get hammered for this but this is NOT A FLAMEBATE, it's a response to a moronic post that has been vastly, VASTLY overly moderated up.
Mod the parent down, take a chill pill, readjust your tinfoil hat and seriously sit back and look at the situation. Jeez. Hell...people like you should go "ask Jeez". That's really, really a bad post. Really some bad moderations. And if I had a little red flag to throw, the on-screen TV boys would be calling you some, um, er, bad names for making a stupid call.
I'm not calling you those names, I'm just pointing out you got a +5 for being a mouthbreather. I'm not even calling you a mouthbreather. Just saying...hey...you are whacked. Readjust your silver hat.
Let the hammering begin. I could care less when this type of unsubstantiated bull gets that type of moderation. Time for me to meta-moderate, I guess...let the Gods be good to me today and feed me some moron posts.
Man, that brings back memories.
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Does anybody recall the old Windows 95 "Dongle" theory? That MS was going to crackdown on piracy of its new operating system by issuing a dongle with each copy. Robert X. Cringely stoked this rumor.
And I happen to know that Cringe A) got the info from a vaguely anonymous email; B) published it with no confirmation; and C) received the email below:
>To: bob@cringely.com
>Date: 5 Jul 95 09:28:27 -0700
>From: yusufm
>X-Exchange-Message-Id: C=US;A=
>;P=MICROSOFT;l=RED-10-MSG950705092827FIX00A501
>Subject: 7/3 Notes From Field
>
>The dongle thingamajig you wrote up is of course not correct. No such
> thing required or in the box to use Windows 95. One of your more
>whacky rumours...did you really believe it?
>
>Yusuf Mehdi
>Product Manager, Windows 95
>Microsoft
How do I know this?;-) I still have the original emails filed away from 10 years ago.
I once knew a guy who tried to drive his bike (at night time ) in between , what he thought were two other approaching bikes from the opposite direction.
turns out , they were headlights of a 18 wheeler, who would have thunk ? Now there's an example of a catastrophically badly designed headlight system for a 18 wheeler
I think that's definately "user error", not necessarily any proof of design error. Possibly on the part of the truck driver, but certainly on the part of the bike rider.
Bison look like hairy cows with dreadlocks. They are slow moving, typically boring, and will eat hay out of your hand if you stick it through the fence. Not much fun for tourists.
Well, your first sentence is correct. But every year people are gored and occasionally killed when they wander too close to free ranging bison.
http://www.bhcycling.com/2ndtouristgored.html
They run 40 MPH, turn on a dime, and certainly seem to be fun for the hordes of tourists in Custer State Park, Wind Cave, and Yellowstone.
And the parent is right...I drive every weekend across the western half of the state...and there's vast amounts of room available for more buffalo (bison) herds. In fact, more and more ranchers seem to be getting into the bison business instead of cattle.
Arikira, Nakota, Dakota, just to name a few. Don't know what they called bison (although the Nakota and Dakota names were probably very similar to the Lakota's).
European explorers gave the American bison the name of buffalo. They thought they looked like cattle. The French called them les boeufs. English explorers mispronounced that as "labuff" or "buffle." Eventually, everyone's just calling them Buffalo.
Where I live (South Dakota) there are at least 4 major herds in the relatively near vicinity. (2 public herds, two private) Everybody and their dog knows the "official" name is bison, but everyone calls them buffalo.
Damn dude, that's fucking nasty. Seriously.
Why not just walk up to a cow and take a bite out of their shoulder? It amounts to the same thing.
Man invented fire for a reason.
No. Man did not invent fire. Man invented Space Meat. That's what the article is about.
Mmmmmm. Medium rare Space Meat.
Did you not see the movie?
on
19 million Amps
·
· Score: 0, Troll
It was one louder. 11 is one louder than 10. Even Nigel understood that.
I think that things like building roads, administering various aid-to-needy-people programs, and limiting and controling access to various public resources (hunting licenses, fishing, park usage, timber usage, etc) might be in some way considered to be contributing the the way society is "engineered".
Now! That's the government. Financial analyses of NASA have shown that under 10% of its budget is typically put towards expenses directly related to spaceflight, and the rest is research, bidding, bureaucracy, and government waste. That suggests that the cost for private industry to pull this off is $50 billion. On a side note, the Artemis project has a figure less than a third of this value for a private industry moon base.
So...you're saying that in private industry there's no expenses related to research, bidding, bureaucracy or industrial/commercial waste?
Perhaps. All old technology is ultimately replaced with new technology. But we all probably have notepads around to scribble things on instead of typing every last little note to ourselves on the computer.
Besides the places where it may still be useful to be able to tell at a glance where a point or rocky shoreline is, without looking at a screen or GPS, you've got the obvious "tradition" and historical value of most of these light houses.
Where I live, we have all these fancy satellite things and infrared imaging to keep watch on forest fires. But they still man a few old fire towers during the height of the fire season. And the ones that aren't manned are generally still preserved.
Most places probably have a Historical Society or something similar that would prevent the destruction of the lighthouses, even if the economics of the situation dictated that the light was "turned off". I have a summer home that they won't even let me put a metal roof on because it would change the nature of a "historical building".
I submit that GPSr will only serve to modernize that type of navigation. I'm not seeing that GPSr mounted in vehicles will ever do away with street signs...seems like kind of the same thing to me.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm failing to see the interest in taking little Johnny to the aquarium to see "robot fish", in the same way I'd be a bit torqued off if I took my kids to the zoo and we saw robotic giraffes. Cool, yes. Unexpected, yes. What I'm there for, no.
If I took my kids to a "robotozoo" or whatever it might be, that's neat. But this sort of thing belongs in...maybe one of those hands-on sort of museums, or a kids science museum, or some place where you go to see cool robotics stuff.
I'm not knocking the technology here, or the software...but you put a pile of robotic trout in a nice little place a guy can toss a dry fly in and get a hit and get the sort of reactions you might with some real fish, NOW you have a robot that is really entertaining.
catch and release only, of course...at MY robot fish 'aquarium' you can't take your fish home. We weigh it, take your picture, and send it back with a new AI adjustment so it is SMARTER than your flesh-fish and you gotta do better next time to catch him
I guess while this is kinda cool, it's not an aquarium exhibit. The cool thing about a real aquarium is the fact it has REAL fish, with REAL behaviors, and the real variety that exists in nature. Don't you kinda think robot fish here are sort of like having a Sony (tm) pet dog in a zoo?
After watching further videos...I see that Ghost Rider is not just a 2-wheeled device. It has arms it can lower to right itself, and presumably for very slow movement or holding itself upright when stationary.
Cool videos on that site. As I was watching some of them, it occured to me that another huge flaw with the 2-wheeled vehicle is it's inability to go very slowly. Or inch up to something. Seems like some pretty big limitations to overcome.
But hauling around a bulk of your info on a key chain isn't that bad an option. 99% of the people who find it couldn't get thru the basic PW access that most flash drives provide.
And having the info you need would still be a pretty darn handy thing, when you needed it. I'm not sure it's any worse than having your insurance card, 3 or 4 credit cards, your bank card, or anything else you may carry around in your wallet.
It's just a different media than paper. One that holds more. No harm there, any worse than carrying around a ream of printed material.
That's a dandy, short explaination. It likely is spot on, too.
Why Yahoo?
However, you have an interesting point. The e-bay seller part of it. How many e-Bay sellers do you know that have a sales tax license? If they're truly a business, they should. Why should they get off not having to collect sales tax (assuming their state requires it)?
I'm not talking about the casual, occasional personal sale here. I'm talking about professional e-bayers. Each state might have their own laws on this, but in my state you can have a "lemonade stand" or a "garage sale" without getting a sales tax license, and collecting and remitting the tax to the state. But if you meet some level of criteria, at some point you must.
As more sales move from brick-and-mortar to pick-and-click stores, this will affect the tax base.
I agrere the out-of-state company doesn't put any demand on the infrastructure. What they do is redirect tax revenues away from people who do put putting those people who do have to charge the tax at a disadvantage. The issue is that for those states who rely heavily on sales tax (and have no income taxes) this narrows their tax base dramatically. Eventually, it will render it unworkable, and force an income or some other tax to be levied.
No, shipping is an expense, paid by the consumer to the shipper. Sales tax is a revenue for governments (hate'em or not) that is required to provide certain basic services to the citizenry. If you remove or reduce that revenue stream, either be prepared to have other taxes raised(perhaps not as fairly based on consumption or spread across the populace). The only other alternative is the reduction of basic services. I'm here to tell you, we're facing it right now in my state. I work in the state budget office, and we can clearly see the shift in revenues as internet purchasing grows.
One other point: It puts local mom-and-pop operations at a disadvantage. Why should I purchase locally, even if it's the same price, when I can just "buy it over the internet, tax free". It puts all the retailers on the same level.
but has not yet gone to the floor for a vote...??????
I'm sure this has already been beaten to death, but fer gosh sakes. We don't need more nerds crying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". Jeez, I know I'll get hammered for this but this is NOT A FLAMEBATE, it's a response to a moronic post that has been vastly, VASTLY overly moderated up.
Mod the parent down, take a chill pill, readjust your tinfoil hat and seriously sit back and look at the situation. Jeez. Hell...people like you should go "ask Jeez". That's really, really a bad post. Really some bad moderations. And if I had a little red flag to throw, the on-screen TV boys would be calling you some, um, er, bad names for making a stupid call.
I'm not calling you those names, I'm just pointing out you got a +5 for being a mouthbreather. I'm not even calling you a mouthbreather. Just saying...hey...you are whacked. Readjust your silver hat.
Let the hammering begin. I could care less when this type of unsubstantiated bull gets that type of moderation. Time for me to meta-moderate, I guess...let the Gods be good to me today and feed me some moron posts.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/ 08/54817.aspx
And I happen to know that Cringe A) got the info from a vaguely anonymous email; B) published it with no confirmation; and C) received the email below:
>To: bob@cringely.com
>Date: 5 Jul 95 09:28:27 -0700
>From: yusufm
>X-Exchange-Message-Id: C=US;A=
>;P=MICROSOFT;l=RED-10-MSG950705092827FIX00A501
>Subject: 7/3 Notes From Field
>
>The dongle thingamajig you wrote up is of course not correct. No such
> thing required or in the box to use Windows 95. One of your more
>whacky rumours...did you really believe it?
>
>Yusuf Mehdi
>Product Manager, Windows 95
>Microsoft
How do I know this? ;-) I still have the original emails filed away from 10 years ago.
Well, your first sentence is correct. But every year people are gored and occasionally killed when they wander too close to free ranging bison.
http://www.bhcycling.com/2ndtouristgored.html
They run 40 MPH, turn on a dime, and certainly seem to be fun for the hordes of tourists in Custer State Park, Wind Cave, and Yellowstone.
http://www.sd4history.com/Unit3/southdakotaherds.h tm
And the parent is right...I drive every weekend across the western half of the state...and there's vast amounts of room available for more buffalo (bison) herds. In fact, more and more ranchers seem to be getting into the bison business instead of cattle.
European explorers gave the American bison the name of buffalo. They thought they looked like cattle. The French called them les boeufs. English explorers mispronounced that as "labuff" or "buffle." Eventually, everyone's just calling them Buffalo.
Where I live (South Dakota) there are at least 4 major herds in the relatively near vicinity. (2 public herds, two private) Everybody and their dog knows the "official" name is bison, but everyone calls them buffalo.
No. Man did not invent fire. Man invented Space Meat. That's what the article is about.
Mmmmmm. Medium rare Space Meat.
It was one louder. 11 is one louder than 10. Even Nigel understood that.
Alaska
Arkansas
Iowa
Kansas
Montana
North Dakota
South Dakota
In many rurual states, kids have a need to drive at a younger age due to the lack of mass transit (or just to work on the farm).
I think that things like building roads, administering various aid-to-needy-people programs, and limiting and controling access to various public resources (hunting licenses, fishing, park usage, timber usage, etc) might be in some way considered to be contributing the the way society is "engineered".
It's on topic. It's ABOUT the topic, dumbass.
So...you're saying that in private industry there's no expenses related to research, bidding, bureaucracy or industrial/commercial waste?
I think that's an unfair assessment.
Read the article to the end. I'm already ordering.
Besides the places where it may still be useful to be able to tell at a glance where a point or rocky shoreline is, without looking at a screen or GPS, you've got the obvious "tradition" and historical value of most of these light houses.
Where I live, we have all these fancy satellite things and infrared imaging to keep watch on forest fires. But they still man a few old fire towers during the height of the fire season. And the ones that aren't manned are generally still preserved.
Most places probably have a Historical Society or something similar that would prevent the destruction of the lighthouses, even if the economics of the situation dictated that the light was "turned off". I have a summer home that they won't even let me put a metal roof on because it would change the nature of a "historical building".
I submit that GPSr will only serve to modernize that type of navigation. I'm not seeing that GPSr mounted in vehicles will ever do away with street signs...seems like kind of the same thing to me.
And I could explain about Tommy losing, but clearly it would be lost on most folks here.