That's probably why most of the audio loops I've heard recently have been along the lines of "I'm sorry, it appears our staff have forgotten to remove the tags from your merchandise. Please return to the customer service desk for assistance" or words to that effect. Very non-accusing.
Yes, they do. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche-Telekom. AT&T (now Cingular) is partially owned by Vodaphone I believe.
Europe has had GSM for longer, has better coverage (understandable, given higher population densities and longer use of GSM) and supports more GSM features. For example, Orange (UK GSM provider) supports two-line phones... something no US GSM provider has. (Nextel does this, but they're not GSM).
And they passed up the Dresden Files for this pablum?
Critical Failure!
Re:The morality of the story:
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
$999 is the most you can owe without having to pay penalties and interest for underpayment.
That is incorrect. The underpayment penalties are based on your prior year's return and a percent value - For example, you pay penalties if the tax you owe is greater than 10% of your total tax bill this year and if the tax you owe is greater than the tax you paid last year.
For example, if last year I paid $10,000 in taxes, and this year my withholdings were $8,000, but I actually still owed $10,000, then I would face a penalty as my tax owed would be $2,000 - greater than 10% of my total tax bill this year.
If I paid $12,000 last year and withheld $8,000 this year on a bill of $10,000, I would *not* owe penalties, as my *total* tax bill is less than the prior year's bill.
So basically, if the total tax owed is less than the tax you paid last year, there's no underpayment penalty. If the total tax owed is greater than you withheld this year *and* greater than the total you paid last year, then you better pray you've already paid 90% of the tax due, otherwise you get a penalty.
The passports must be easily readable by scanners in foreign countries, under local control.
Given that the scanners will be widely distributed, it seems pointless to encrypt the data. All it will do is slow down processing while the hash is validated.
Wow. I was thinking about a system like this a few weeks ago, and it looks like the ZyAIR does exactly what I'd want it to do. And for around $500, which is a pretty good investment for a coffee shop.
(no, I don't work for ZyAIR.:) I'm just interested in captive portals )
Short version: starts strong, fades towards the end.
It's very pretty. It has some wonderful set-pieces and amusing character ideas (Stephenson-sama, for example. And Scarlett.) but boy does the Grand Finale go on for far too long.
It's not *quite* "TETSUO!" "KANEDA!", but it's close. Ah, well. At least the steamball doesn't turn out to be a Dragonball with Supa-Seijin powers.
if you currently have a single, POTS line from your local telco then you'll need one of them modem cards. And that's it. Plug the phone into the card, tell Asterisx about it, and you're done - you have a 1 line PBX. Good for call screening and voicemail.
You don't need to tell your telco anything - this isn't the same as getting a block of DID numbers and a T1.:)
You fill out a form, they send you (via snail mail) *another* form, you fill that in and send it back, then wait 4 - 8 weeks for your free report.
Almost as if, at every step of the way, the credit bureaus wanted to make it hard and inconvenient for you to get this info for free, rather than paying $30 to do it online.
Some editing changes were made to the UK version. The obvious one that sprang to mind was in '33' in the Ready Room where Starbuck is addressing the pilots with Boxy as straightman - the UK version had Starbuck's masturbation references removed.
1. The cable companies are rolling their own DVRs. TiVo failed to get traction here, and it will kill them.
2. TiVo has hobbled itself. There were features out there that could have helped them (essentially value adds above and beyond the cable company DVRs), but they were too slow to market, and too restrictive in their implementation. Examples: TiVo to Go. Network-able TiVos. Commercial skip. Good features, but TiVo hobbled them (or implemented them late) either through proprietary standards or by not officially advertising them to Joe Sixpack.
First, this is Sony we're talking about. Second, the UMD format is touted by Sony for it's encryption *and* it's regionalisation. Third, the units themselves are regionalised.
So you won't be able to play import games on a US handheld.
Ask them how they're doing repaying their student loans- and what they would have required for salary just a few years before.
One of them didn't have any - pure scholarship play. Another went to UMass, and had about $20K - apparently perfectly managable. I don't know about the third. But what's your point: people should be paid more if they have student loans? I think not. It's a choice. And if you're really good, you don't need loans at all.
And who allows those technical workers to answer the survey? Who pays for their time to do so? And who are these "technical workers" anyway, when nobody bothered to ask at any company I've ever worked for (and in fact, most of those companies had rules about discussing salary at all, in hopes of keeping us from organizing the workers).
It's called the Internet. You should try it sometime. Visit SAGE here. If you truly believe they are in the pockets of big business, and you can't see how employees could possibly answer their surveys, then I have a fine line of tinfoil headwear to sell you.
What really happened with Homegrocer and it's rivals isn't that their business model was unprofitable- it was in fact very profitable, as their quick expansion showed. What happened was that the 600,000 customers in this new and not very stable yet industry, all lost their jobs at once. Thus they became a loss leader in the more traditional grocery business- a side luxury for the few left who could pay. And since their customers could no longer afford them, people like you and I now have to waste our time when we could be inventing stuff- shopping instead.
No. Their cashflow was out of whack. They were spending more in expansion than they were taking in from revenue, because they expected to fix it all come the IPO and the massive influx of cash from the market. When that didn't happen, their VCs folded them. I know that that's *exactly* what happened with Homeruns because a member of my family is a partner with one the Homeruns VCs. Yes, I am related to a Venture Capitalist. I'm not proud.;-)
Worse than that, because we were thrown out of work, so were the delivery drivers- and the ripple effect was far more enourmous than most people understand. Those 800,000 jobs lost to H-1b- along with the 50,000 jobs lost to L-1- along with the 500,000 jobs lost to business process outsourcing- had a ripple effect in the US economy that cost 8 million jobs when the totals were all done.
You realise you've just described classical money supply theory? I thought you thought that was all crap?
Oh, I'm sure that your company *claimed* to have tried to recruit Americans first and failed- but then again, given the depression in wages in comparison to the cost of the education, no American would have taken the job at that price.
Explain that, please, to my three American co-workers who did accept jobs at that price at my company.
So basically- you repalced a $70k/year American for a job that any high school diploma could be trained for.
I'm sorry, but I've worked with folks who just have high school diplomas, and none of them could have been trained to do my job. They were a bit thick. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but watch out for those sweeping generalisations, chief - it reveals you to be overly fond of polemic, less so of the supporting data.
You really didn't think that an industry group bought and paid for by the corps could be trusted to achieve an unbiased report, did you?
You realize, of course, that the SAG Annual Salary Report is compiled from contributions from technical workers, not management or some shadowy quasi-government control group? The sample size is quite extensive, and reflects the price the market is willing to pay for someone of my skills.
And you forget- you were paid 95% of the prevailing wage JUDGED ON AN ENTRY LEVEL POSITION, even if you were taking the position of a worker higher on the wage scale. Otherwise it wouldn't have been cost effective to hire you.
I'm sorry - I didn't know you knew the particulars of my case.;-p You're wrong, by the way - I was paid *exactly* what the DoL said I should have been paid for my job description and experience, based on the prevailing wages established by, amongst others, SAG.
In short, when I was working as a Student under EAD, I was paid $44K/yr. The *second* my H1-B came through, my salary was raised to $65K a year, which was exactly what the average wage was then for a Systems Administrator in Boston.
Depends on what you see as *profitable*. If you mean making millions for the owners, then very few business models are actually profitable. If you mean employing more people and keeping the movement of money going, this sort of thing is very profitable.
I disagree. There are many, many privately held companies that are very profitable for their owners - a very public example would be the Virgin Group, which is privately held and makes the chief shareholder very rich. There are many more smaller companies that neither of us have ever heard of that do that for their owners. Public companies also are profitable for their owners - the shareholders. That's what shareholders *are*. If you don't believe me, look at all the companies on the Public Exchanges that are reporting millions of dollars of net income for their shareholders. Even tech companies manage this!
In the context of our discussion, HomeGrocer et al failed because they could not turn a profit with the resources available to them. I don't know exactly what happened to HomeGrocer, but I do know what happened to HomeRuns - they had initial 'Angel' funding, followed by two rounds of VC funding, which they spent expanding their distribution network, buying mindshare (marketing) and building out websites (and, of course, paying for the stuff needed to deliver groceries).
Then the market bubble burst. Their next stage *had* been a planned IPO, which they (using Bubble numbers) predicted would get them *billions* of dollars to make them the next WalMart.
Without a pre-Bubble IPO to get them cash, things went bad very fast. They could no longer secure VC funding (no Third Round for them) and they'd over-expanded : their board took one look at the (new, revised) numbers and decided to pull out and salvage what remained of the assets. They closed down and sold up. I don't think any of the second round investors got anything back - only the Angel and a few Board members got back pennies on the dollar. The rest went to creditors.
Actually, had the government stepped in
Immaterial to the discussion. Had Giant Pink Squid descended from the sky, we'd all be living in the belly of the Great Squid living on krill and plankton. But it didn't happen, did it? So my point stands. Remember, we were talking about what happened and why it happened, not what could have happened if something else had occured.
Exactly the thing that the expansion of the H-1b visa program made sure of- that fewer people would earn enough money to support the higher standard of living.
Huh? Is this Vodoo Economics again? At the time the bubble burst, there was approx 800,000 H1-b holders in the US, out of a workforce of 110 *million*. less than one percent of the workforce. I think you are dramatically over-estimating the impact of H1 holders on the entire US economy. And despite the presence of some H1-B sweatshops, the *majority* of H1-b workers *were* paid 'prevailing wage' as required by the Department of Labor. I certainly was. And that money I earned? It all stayed in the US. All of it. So whether or not I earned it or the person born in the US who lived next door to me earned it was immaterial to the US economy.
People value their time when their time is valueable- which stopped when companies suddenly had access to a lot of cheap labor.
Again, I think you're dramatically over-estimating the impact of the tech sector on the average American. The median wage in the US in 2000 was around $28,000. The average American lived in a town of less than 50,000 people, and commuted few than 15 minutes to work. San Jose, Boston, the tech triangle - all these places are abnormal locations. High density, high salaries, higher cost of living, younger population, etc.
So 2/3rds of your complaints are ACTUALLY about labor surplus- and the third is about government investment in infrastructure. One would think that the labor surplus would have enabled the government to
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you encountered a first-level phone person who was a professional at anything other than reading from scripts?
That's probably why most of the audio loops I've heard recently have been along the lines of "I'm sorry, it appears our staff have forgotten to remove the tags from your merchandise. Please return to the customer service desk for assistance" or words to that effect. Very non-accusing.
Which really tells you everything you need to know about Microcenter and their attitude towards their customers.
Yes, they do.
T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche-Telekom.
AT&T (now Cingular) is partially owned by Vodaphone I believe.
Europe has had GSM for longer, has better coverage (understandable, given higher population densities and longer use of GSM) and supports more GSM features. For example, Orange (UK GSM provider) supports two-line phones... something no US GSM provider has. (Nextel does this, but they're not GSM).
And they passed up the Dresden Files for this pablum? Critical Failure!
$999 is the most you can owe without having to pay penalties and interest for underpayment.
That is incorrect. The underpayment penalties are based on your prior year's return and a percent value - For example, you pay penalties if the tax you owe is greater than 10% of your total tax bill this year and if the tax you owe is greater than the tax you paid last year.
For example, if last year I paid $10,000 in taxes, and this year my withholdings were $8,000, but I actually still owed $10,000, then I would face a penalty as my tax owed would be $2,000 - greater than 10% of my total tax bill this year.
If I paid $12,000 last year and withheld $8,000 this year on a bill of $10,000, I would *not* owe penalties, as my *total* tax bill is less than the prior year's bill.
So basically, if the total tax owed is less than the tax you paid last year, there's no underpayment penalty. If the total tax owed is greater than you withheld this year *and* greater than the total you paid last year, then you better pray you've already paid 90% of the tax due, otherwise you get a penalty.
The passports must be easily readable by scanners in foreign countries, under local control.
Given that the scanners will be widely distributed, it seems pointless to encrypt the data. All it will do is slow down processing while the hash is validated.
Wow. I was thinking about a system like this a few weeks ago, and it looks like the ZyAIR does exactly what I'd want it to do. And for around $500, which is a pretty good investment for a coffee shop.
:) I'm just interested in captive portals )
(no, I don't work for ZyAIR.
...last November.
Short version: starts strong, fades towards the end.
It's very pretty. It has some wonderful set-pieces and amusing character ideas (Stephenson-sama, for example. And Scarlett.) but boy does the Grand Finale go on for far too long.
It's not *quite* "TETSUO!" "KANEDA!", but it's close. Ah, well. At least the steamball doesn't turn out to be a Dragonball with Supa-Seijin powers.
if you currently have a single, POTS line from your local telco then you'll need one of them modem cards. And that's it. Plug the phone into the card, tell Asterisx about it, and you're done - you have a 1 line PBX. Good for call screening and voicemail.
:)
You don't need to tell your telco anything - this isn't the same as getting a block of DID numbers and a T1.
Hm. Maybe it varies by state. I tried to do it online last year (MA) and was told I had to do the paper form method.
And the funny thing is, its not online!
You fill out a form, they send you (via snail mail) *another* form, you fill that in and send it back, then wait 4 - 8 weeks for your free report.
Almost as if, at every step of the way, the credit bureaus wanted to make it hard and inconvenient for you to get this info for free, rather than paying $30 to do it online.
Some editing changes were made to the UK version. The obvious one that sprang to mind was in '33' in the Ready Room where Starbuck is addressing the pilots with Boxy as straightman - the UK version had Starbuck's masturbation references removed.
The sad truth is this: TiVo will fail.
The reasons are simple:
1. The cable companies are rolling their own DVRs. TiVo failed to get traction here, and it will kill them.
2. TiVo has hobbled itself. There were features out there that could have helped them (essentially value adds above and beyond the cable company DVRs), but they were too slow to market, and too restrictive in their implementation. Examples: TiVo to Go. Network-able TiVos. Commercial skip. Good features, but TiVo hobbled them (or implemented them late) either through proprietary standards or by not officially advertising them to Joe Sixpack.
Region Encoding? Yes, 'fraid so.
First, this is Sony we're talking about.
Second, the UMD format is touted by Sony for it's encryption *and* it's regionalisation.
Third, the units themselves are regionalised.
So you won't be able to play import games on a US handheld.
No!
I. See. Four. Episodes!
Will someone please just take Rick Bermann out behind the production sheds and beat him like a redheaded stepchild?
Trek has had several good concepts - DS9, Voyager and Enterprise - but they've all suffered from Bermann's complete and utter lack of talent.
...so, they *do* like blocking stuff just to be difficult, even if it costs them money?
I think that may well have been Exodus in Waltham.
Ha!
I still think of IRC as a prettied-up version of talk over telnet...
multi-user system chat on old mainframes, baby. That's kickin' it old skool. Or something.
One of them didn't have any - pure scholarship play. Another went to UMass, and had about $20K - apparently perfectly managable. I don't know about the third. But what's your point: people should be paid more if they have student loans? I think not. It's a choice. And if you're really good, you don't need loans at all.
And who allows those technical workers to answer the survey? Who pays for their time to do so? And who are these "technical workers" anyway, when nobody bothered to ask at any company I've ever worked for (and in fact, most of those companies had rules about discussing salary at all, in hopes of keeping us from organizing the workers).
It's called the Internet. You should try it sometime. Visit SAGE here. If you truly believe they are in the pockets of big business, and you can't see how employees could possibly answer their surveys, then I have a fine line of tinfoil headwear to sell you.
No. Their cashflow was out of whack. They were spending more in expansion than they were taking in from revenue, because they expected to fix it all come the IPO and the massive influx of cash from the market. When that didn't happen, their VCs folded them. I know that that's *exactly* what happened with Homeruns because a member of my family is a partner with one the Homeruns VCs. Yes, I am related to a Venture Capitalist. I'm not proud. ;-)
Worse than that, because we were thrown out of work, so were the delivery drivers- and the ripple effect was far more enourmous than most people understand. Those 800,000 jobs lost to H-1b- along with the 50,000 jobs lost to L-1- along with the 500,000 jobs lost to business process outsourcing- had a ripple effect in the US economy that cost 8 million jobs when the totals were all done.
You realise you've just described classical money supply theory? I thought you thought that was all crap?
Explain that, please, to my three American co-workers who did accept jobs at that price at my company. So basically- you repalced a $70k/year American for a job that any high school diploma could be trained for.
I'm sorry, but I've worked with folks who just have high school diplomas, and none of them could have been trained to do my job. They were a bit thick. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but watch out for those sweeping generalisations, chief - it reveals you to be overly fond of polemic, less so of the supporting data. You really didn't think that an industry group bought and paid for by the corps could be trusted to achieve an unbiased report, did you?
You realize, of course, that the SAG Annual Salary Report is compiled from contributions from technical workers, not management or some shadowy quasi-government control group? The sample size is quite extensive, and reflects the price the market is willing to pay for someone of my skills.
I'm sorry - I didn't know you knew the particulars of my case. ;-p You're wrong, by the way - I was paid *exactly* what the DoL said I should have been paid for my job description and experience, based on the prevailing wages established by, amongst others, SAG.
In short, when I was working as a Student under EAD, I was paid $44K/yr. The *second* my H1-B came through, my salary was raised to $65K a year, which was exactly what the average wage was then for a Systems Administrator in Boston.
I disagree. There are many, many privately held companies that are very profitable for their owners - a very public example would be the Virgin Group, which is privately held and makes the chief shareholder very rich. There are many more smaller companies that neither of us have ever heard of that do that for their owners. Public companies also are profitable for their owners - the shareholders. That's what shareholders *are*. If you don't believe me, look at all the companies on the Public Exchanges that are reporting millions of dollars of net income for their shareholders. Even tech companies manage this!
In the context of our discussion, HomeGrocer et al failed because they could not turn a profit with the resources available to them. I don't know exactly what happened to HomeGrocer, but I do know what happened to HomeRuns - they had initial 'Angel' funding, followed by two rounds of VC funding, which they spent expanding their distribution network, buying mindshare (marketing) and building out websites (and, of course, paying for the stuff needed to deliver groceries).
Then the market bubble burst. Their next stage *had* been a planned IPO, which they (using Bubble numbers) predicted would get them *billions* of dollars to make them the next WalMart.
Without a pre-Bubble IPO to get them cash, things went bad very fast. They could no longer secure VC funding (no Third Round for them) and they'd over-expanded : their board took one look at the (new, revised) numbers and decided to pull out and salvage what remained of the assets. They closed down and sold up. I don't think any of the second round investors got anything back - only the Angel and a few Board members got back pennies on the dollar. The rest went to creditors.
Actually, had the government stepped in
Immaterial to the discussion. Had Giant Pink Squid descended from the sky, we'd all be living in the belly of the Great Squid living on krill and plankton. But it didn't happen, did it? So my point stands. Remember, we were talking about what happened and why it happened, not what could have happened if something else had occured.
Exactly the thing that the expansion of the H-1b visa program made sure of- that fewer people would earn enough money to support the higher standard of living.
Huh? Is this Vodoo Economics again? At the time the bubble burst, there was approx 800,000 H1-b holders in the US, out of a workforce of 110 *million*. less than one percent of the workforce. I think you are dramatically over-estimating the impact of H1 holders on the entire US economy. And despite the presence of some H1-B sweatshops, the *majority* of H1-b workers *were* paid 'prevailing wage' as required by the Department of Labor. I certainly was. And that money I earned? It all stayed in the US. All of it. So whether or not I earned it or the person born in the US who lived next door to me earned it was immaterial to the US economy.
People value their time when their time is valueable- which stopped when companies suddenly had access to a lot of cheap labor.
Again, I think you're dramatically over-estimating the impact of the tech sector on the average American. The median wage in the US in 2000 was around $28,000. The average American lived in a town of less than 50,000 people, and commuted few than 15 minutes to work. San Jose, Boston, the tech triangle - all these places are abnormal locations. High density, high salaries, higher cost of living, younger population, etc.
So 2/3rds of your complaints are ACTUALLY about labor surplus- and the third is about government investment in infrastructure. One would think that the labor surplus would have enabled the government to