AFAIK theres nothing illegal about putting a false amount on your W4 as long as you don't fudge it on your 1040.
There is, however, a substantial tax penalty if your withheld amount isn't at least a certain percentage (80%, IIRC, but IANACPA) of your actual tax liability. IOW, withholding (or pre-paying or its equivalent) is mandatory, and they'll fine you 'til you're dizzy if you duck it.
You're seriously telling me that sometimes you wake up, look at your alarm clock, and think "CRAP!!! It's 7 in the evening already! MAN did I oversleep... Oh wait - 7 a.m. Phew!".
I have actually done this. Or rather, I've done the reverse.
Back in the dorm days, a friend bangs on my door. "You aren't up yet?!"
Me, slurring: "Wha? Ish seven o'clock on a Saturday! Are you nuts?"
Friend: "You better hurry up if you want dinner, the caf's about to close.
Yes, it was seven p.m. The sad thing was, I owned a 24-hour clock back then. Never underestimate the ability of a sleeping brain to find ways to continue sleeping.
what I just don't understand is why did these OEMs agree to this? Collectively couldn't they have had some leverage against Microsoft in a business sense?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? I suspect it was partly a sense of "everybody else is doing it," i.e., going along with the herd, and partly simple reluctance to get into an ugly battle with what was, even then, an extremely powerful company. I suspect that MS could have outlasted any collective attempt to thwart them; MS's profit margin would have taken a hit, but several of the OEMs would have gone out of business long before MS would have been forced to cave.
Just in case you actually are new to this issue, and not trolling....
[oversimplification] Back in the day, Windows was a popular operating system. Not the only popular one, but popular enough that an OEM who didn't offer Windows pre-installed was going to lose a lot of business. MS basically said that the OEM would pay them $fee for every processor sold, regardless of the OS installed, or else the OEM would not be allowed to sell Windows machines at all. Most OEMs recognized that they couldn't afford the hit they'd take if they couldn't sell Windows, so they agreed to this devil's deal. And then, since they were paying for the darned thing anyway, they installed Windows on all of their machines. [/oversimplification]
This is how to turn a merely successful product into a monopoly, while making a lot of enemies as a free bonus!
It's on the "Troughton Years" tape (VHS only, as far as I know) along with assorted single episodes of otherwise-lost stories. Given the tech and budget available at the time, it's pretty cool.
Not my area of expertise, but I don't think you'd get much reflection. Planets and whatnot (especially if they have atmosphere) tend to absorb as much as reflect.
Even if you did get rebound, the signal degradation would be appalling. Remember the days of broadcast TV, when if you were more than ten miles from the station the picture got static-y? Multiply that by a few hundred light-years.
Think about it, what other business would do this? If you walked into a store and they started accusing you of stealing [...] and treated you like shit all around, who would come back?
Unfortunately, lots of businesses do this. Ever walked into a store and been told to leave your backpack at the desk? The store is effectively saying you're a shoplifter. Bought gas at a station that makes you pre-pay? They're assuming you'll drive off without paying otherwise.
It's a fairly common practice for businesses to assume you're a thief. Not only are you guilty until proven innocent in their eyes, but they generally work it so you don't even get the chance to prove it. You'd think this would offend enough of their customers that they'd have to stop it, but in fact, these businesses are doing just fine.
and would only sell you things in such a way where you were oblivious to most of what it contained
It's a rare store that will let you open a package and inspect the contents before you buy. It's a rare package that lets you get a good look at the contents without opening it.
Don't get me wrong -- I agree with your main point, as do most here, that the RIAA & co. are treating their customers like garbage instead of gold. For what it's worth, they've lost my business. But the average person not only eats this kind of shit on a regular basis, they keep coming back for more. And if you confront them about it, they'll probably tell you they like the taste.
It's so rare for a patient to pay attention to costs, that it's almost impossible to even find out what the costs are before you get the bill (or what the charges are *for* after you get the bill). The idea that a patient might want to know up front what a procedure will cost is just baffling to most medical staff. And of course, the costs even for minor treatments are scaled up as high as the big insurance companies will pay, rather than being limited to what ordinary individuals would pay.
It's interesting to look at veterinary care vs. human health care. A cat is no less biologically complex than a human, but since most cats don't have health insurance, even serious procedures cost only a tiny fraction of what the same operation would on a human.
every group of 4 or 5 teachers should have an admin assistant to handle this kind of stuff
As the descendent of three generations of teachers, I have to say this is a great idea. There's a tremendous amount of administrative work (a.k.a. bureaucratic BS) that distracts even the really good teachers from actually educating their students.
If you work less than 40 hours a week you still get paid for 40/week.
I suspect that's rather rare in practice. Certainly I've never worked anywhere that did that. Most places, if you work less than 40 hours, it comes out of your paycheck just as if you were an hourly employee. It's only overtime that's "free".
If salaried-exempt worked that way more often, I'd be a lot less insistent about only working hourly. As it is, if they don't value my (over)time enough to pay me for it, they don't really need it.
There's one simple reason why small arms are useful in a civil revolt: Corpses don't pay taxes. It's one thing for a government to bomb another country's people out of existence -- the goal in that situation is to get OtherCountry to stop doing something that the gov't doesn't like. (Whether this is justified is saved for another discussion.) When a gov't is dealing with its own people, the goal is control. They'll happily shoot some of the more obvious troublemakers, but widescale bombing takes out too many taxpayers, not to mention infrastructure that the gov't itself owns, etc.
Well, what do theatres do about people who talk loudly during the movie?
Not a damn thing, unfortunately.
The last time I left a movie to find a theater employee, it took nearly ten minutes to locate a live human. (And that was to get them to turn the film's sound on!) The choice is generally (a) don't enjoy the film because of some jerk talking, or (b) don't enjoy the film because you missed so much of it trying to find an usher.
If you really want to get into it, stop the movie, turn on the house lights, and crank up the PA: "You! Yes, you! Look at your neighbor! Is he using a phone? Stand up and point to him!"
Oh, I love this idea. More than words can express.
problems of this nature are best corrected by - you guessed it - good parenting.
You're still going to need technology -- to build the time machine. Most of the conversations I've had to listen to in theatres (phone or no) have belonged to people middle-aged or older. It seems like almost nobody can shut up for two hours anymore.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about pure capitalism. If the RIAA's howls of agony are to be believed, they can't sell enough of the item at the current prices. Capitalism dictates that they must therefore lower the price. So what are they doing? Trying to buy legislation that (they claim) will prop up their profits.
Hmm... if more people offered to buy congressmen, would the government expand to meet the demand?
You gotta trust somebody; just make sure it's somebody worthy of trust.
That's the only real solution: Hire the right people. Audits, oversight, and so on require technically competent people, and very few companies are both able and willing to spend the money to get them. But treating every employee like a crime wave waiting to happen isn't, in the long run, going to do much good either. It may just encourage them to live down to the company's expectations.
At my last job, I was overworked, underpaid, got my performance reviews from a person who literaly didn't know the difference between a server OS and MS Word... all the usual crap that makes techs go postal. When the last straw finally came, I gave them four weeks notice, which I spent documenting every procedure I was involved with and completing as many outstanding tasks as possible. My last act was to send my passwords to the guy at the sister office who'd be filling in until they hired my replacement.
I could have screwed them. I was the only technically competent person in the building. I held the backups. I could have ordered myself a new computer on the company account several times over without any chance of getting caught. But I didn't, and not because anyone was escorting me around the building.
Of course, if you hire the right people and treat them decently, they not only won't screw you when they leave, they won't leave. Sadly, that's a more advanced lesson than most companies can handle.
Hardly typical, but I work 40 hours a week. Period. That includes a paid lunch break. There is no overtime. If an emergency requires me to put in extra hours, I take the equivalent time off later in the week. This is standard procedure at the tiny little company I work at.
I used to do the 50-60-70 hour thing, for the same money I'm making now plus a whole lot more grief.
It's not easy to find a computer job with sane hours and bosses who grasp that you have a life outside of the office, but it is possible. Ultimately, you will work as many hours as you are willing to let "them" make you work
The important thing to remember is that the theatre industry should be thinking about what distinguishes them from the TV-become-Home-Theatre.
Let's see, in the theatre I can sit in a cramped chair and try to find somewhere on the popcorn-strewn floor to put my feet, and spend two hours trying to concentrate on the film while people around me have loud conversations and let their cell phones ring. At home, I can sit on a comfy couch and watch an entire movie all the way through without anyone talking over it or walking in front of the screen eight times to go to the bathroom. There's a difference all right, and it's not in the theatre's favor.
Seriously, if theatres are having trouble, they need to think about the quality of the overall movie-going experience. I used to love going to the movies; nothing compares to the big screen for letting you imerse yourself in the story. Lately, I usually walk out of a film more pissed off than pleased. What difference does digital vs. film make, if the screen gets blocked every few minutes and you can't hear half the soundtrack anyway?
The protogeek seems to be pretty much pissed off, huh?
Merely very irritated. The phrase "American freedoms" can be interpreted two ways: "freedoms which are innately American, nobody else has these freedoms" or "freedoms which happen to be enjoyed by Americans, whether other countries have these freedoms is not specified." I'm not telepathic, so I don't know which Bob(TM) actually intended. I'm just quite tired of many non-Americans assuming the first interpretation must be correct.
BTW, I have never heard anyone refer to "Canadian freedoms", "French freedoms", "British freedoms" or whatever.
So, freedom tends to be a big deal to Americans, at least in principle. Is that a bad thing?
Not really surprising, though. I can't tell you how often I have heard morons declare (on/. and elsewhere) that only in the US of A people have a) freedom of speech b) a constitution c) democrac d) whatever.
Or possibly, just possibly, the poster was refering to the freedoms of Americans. Skylarov notwithstanding, the DMCA applies primarily to Americans, as it is an American law. It is ironic (or pathetic, take your pick) that a Russian company is spearheading the challenge against a law that takes freedom away from American citizens.
IOW, I can't tell you how often I have heard morons declare that any statement by an American can only be interpreted in the most US-centric way possible.
>is the way back machine possible in any other medium? i don't think so.
The Wayback machine is, in essence, a way to see what people thought and knew at a certain point in time, what were the big issues of the day, etc. Historians have been doing this for as long as there have been historians. Letters, diaries, transcripts of public speaches, newspaper archives, and other primary source materials served this purpose long before the web existed. Things like the Wayback machine make this easier, faster, and arguably more complete, but the basic concept certainly is possible in other mediums.
This is a very good point. $10/hour is crap in Silicon Valley, because the cost of living is so high. Where I live, $10/hour is mid-grade temp pay. You can live on it -- not luxuriously, but if you manage your money sensibly it'll get the bills paid. (Grunt-level work like that in the article tends to be around $6.50/hour, which you can't live on without fairly extreme sacrifices.) If HP had their plant in a less insanely expensive area, they could pay the same wage (or even a little less -- $9/hour?) and have workers who weren't starving for the privelege. Betcha productivity would go up....
>Just use a buyers agent, they work for YOU not for the seller
No, they work for the commission, same as any other agent. The buyer-agent agreement means they can't also represent the seller, but it doesn't obligate them to put your interests above their own. If there's a problem, such as your realtor misrepresenting the property, lying to you about whether the listing is legally binding (it's not), or just plain not paying attention to what you want, the agreement mostly obligates you to stick with the idiot instead of getting another agent to handle the deal *competently*.
A good realtor can be a lot of help, a bad realtor can be a disaster. In either case, get a real estate lawyer to look over the deal before you sign anything, including a check! Sure, the lawyer's in it for the money too, but he gets paid whether you buy the house or not; the realtor only gets paid if she convinces you to buy.
The biggest consequence of unplugging at my ex-job was that, since I was the only tech, all the work would build up while I was gone and avalanche down on me when I came back. Bigger backlog + more irritated users = why bother taking time off, the net stress wasn't any less. Even so, however, I flat refused to carry a pager; if the 50+ hours/week (no OT pay, of course) I already spent at the office weren't enough, too bad. Didn't help that much of the time-sink was due to managerial stupidity; the workload would have been more reasonable with a little investment in facilities and a refusal to hold the tech responsible for the screw-ups of others.
The solution? I burned out and quit. I now work 40 hours or less per week, I'm payed for every minute of it (at a much higher rate), and the work itself is much less hectic. My new employers apparently have no problem with the fact that I have a life outside of work. Amusingly, I hear that my former bosses have given my replacement some of the concessions I wanted (like decent equipment). Perhaps if enough messages were pasted onto enough sledgehammers, more employers would realize that treating employees like indentured servants is ultimately unproductive.
Erm, no. If the Hays code represented the societal standards of the day, then movies which violated those standards would have offended too many viewers and flopped at the box office, studios would have avoided similar films in the future, and the Hays code would never have been "necessary" in the first place.
Then, as now, restrictions on movie content were forced down the industry's and the public's throat by a small but vocal (and now, litigious) minority who feel entitled to tell the rest of us what we should watch.
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There is, however, a substantial tax penalty if your withheld amount isn't at least a certain percentage (80%, IIRC, but IANACPA) of your actual tax liability. IOW, withholding (or pre-paying or its equivalent) is mandatory, and they'll fine you 'til you're dizzy if you duck it.
I have actually done this. Or rather, I've done the reverse.
Yes, it was seven p.m. The sad thing was, I owned a 24-hour clock back then. Never underestimate the ability of a sleeping brain to find ways to continue sleeping.
You're quite welcome.
what I just don't understand is why did these OEMs agree to this? Collectively couldn't they have had some leverage against Microsoft in a business sense?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? I suspect it was partly a sense of "everybody else is doing it," i.e., going along with the herd, and partly simple reluctance to get into an ugly battle with what was, even then, an extremely powerful company. I suspect that MS could have outlasted any collective attempt to thwart them; MS's profit margin would have taken a hit, but several of the OEMs would have gone out of business long before MS would have been forced to cave.
[oversimplification] Back in the day, Windows was a popular operating system. Not the only popular one, but popular enough that an OEM who didn't offer Windows pre-installed was going to lose a lot of business. MS basically said that the OEM would pay them $fee for every processor sold, regardless of the OS installed, or else the OEM would not be allowed to sell Windows machines at all. Most OEMs recognized that they couldn't afford the hit they'd take if they couldn't sell Windows, so they agreed to this devil's deal. And then, since they were paying for the darned thing anyway, they installed Windows on all of their machines. [/oversimplification]
This is how to turn a merely successful product into a monopoly, while making a lot of enemies as a free bonus!
It's on the "Troughton Years" tape (VHS only, as far as I know) along with assorted single episodes of otherwise-lost stories. Given the tech and budget available at the time, it's pretty cool.
Even if you did get rebound, the signal degradation would be appalling. Remember the days of broadcast TV, when if you were more than ten miles from the station the picture got static-y? Multiply that by a few hundred light-years.
Incorrect. Some Michigan ballots are Scantron-style, some (including my own district's) are punch cards.
Unfortunately, lots of businesses do this. Ever walked into a store and been told to leave your backpack at the desk? The store is effectively saying you're a shoplifter. Bought gas at a station that makes you pre-pay? They're assuming you'll drive off without paying otherwise.
It's a fairly common practice for businesses to assume you're a thief. Not only are you guilty until proven innocent in their eyes, but they generally work it so you don't even get the chance to prove it. You'd think this would offend enough of their customers that they'd have to stop it, but in fact, these businesses are doing just fine.
and would only sell you things in such a way where you were oblivious to most of what it containedIt's a rare store that will let you open a package and inspect the contents before you buy. It's a rare package that lets you get a good look at the contents without opening it.
Don't get me wrong -- I agree with your main point, as do most here, that the RIAA & co. are treating their customers like garbage instead of gold. For what it's worth, they've lost my business. But the average person not only eats this kind of shit on a regular basis, they keep coming back for more. And if you confront them about it, they'll probably tell you they like the taste.
It's so rare for a patient to pay attention to costs, that it's almost impossible to even find out what the costs are before you get the bill (or what the charges are *for* after you get the bill). The idea that a patient might want to know up front what a procedure will cost is just baffling to most medical staff. And of course, the costs even for minor treatments are scaled up as high as the big insurance companies will pay, rather than being limited to what ordinary individuals would pay.
It's interesting to look at veterinary care vs. human health care. A cat is no less biologically complex than a human, but since most cats don't have health insurance, even serious procedures cost only a tiny fraction of what the same operation would on a human.
As the descendent of three generations of teachers, I have to say this is a great idea. There's a tremendous amount of administrative work (a.k.a. bureaucratic BS) that distracts even the really good teachers from actually educating their students.
If you work less than 40 hours a week you still get paid for 40/week.
I suspect that's rather rare in practice. Certainly I've never worked anywhere that did that. Most places, if you work less than 40 hours, it comes out of your paycheck just as if you were an hourly employee. It's only overtime that's "free".
If salaried-exempt worked that way more often, I'd be a lot less insistent about only working hourly. As it is, if they don't value my (over)time enough to pay me for it, they don't really need it.
There's one simple reason why small arms are useful in a civil revolt: Corpses don't pay taxes. It's one thing for a government to bomb another country's people out of existence -- the goal in that situation is to get OtherCountry to stop doing something that the gov't doesn't like. (Whether this is justified is saved for another discussion.) When a gov't is dealing with its own people, the goal is control. They'll happily shoot some of the more obvious troublemakers, but widescale bombing takes out too many taxpayers, not to mention infrastructure that the gov't itself owns, etc.
Well, what do theatres do about people who talk loudly during the movie?
Not a damn thing, unfortunately.
The last time I left a movie to find a theater employee, it took nearly ten minutes to locate a live human. (And that was to get them to turn the film's sound on!) The choice is generally (a) don't enjoy the film because of some jerk talking, or (b) don't enjoy the film because you missed so much of it trying to find an usher.
If you really want to get into it, stop the movie, turn on the house lights, and crank up the PA: "You! Yes, you! Look at your neighbor! Is he using a phone? Stand up and point to him!"
Oh, I love this idea. More than words can express.
problems of this nature are best corrected by - you guessed it - good parenting.
You're still going to need technology -- to build the time machine. Most of the conversations I've had to listen to in theatres (phone or no) have belonged to people middle-aged or older. It seems like almost nobody can shut up for two hours anymore.
Hmm... if more people offered to buy congressmen, would the government expand to meet the demand?
That's the only real solution: Hire the right people. Audits, oversight, and so on require technically competent people, and very few companies are both able and willing to spend the money to get them. But treating every employee like a crime wave waiting to happen isn't, in the long run, going to do much good either. It may just encourage them to live down to the company's expectations.
At my last job, I was overworked, underpaid, got my performance reviews from a person who literaly didn't know the difference between a server OS and MS Word... all the usual crap that makes techs go postal. When the last straw finally came, I gave them four weeks notice, which I spent documenting every procedure I was involved with and completing as many outstanding tasks as possible. My last act was to send my passwords to the guy at the sister office who'd be filling in until they hired my replacement.
I could have screwed them. I was the only technically competent person in the building. I held the backups. I could have ordered myself a new computer on the company account several times over without any chance of getting caught. But I didn't, and not because anyone was escorting me around the building.
Of course, if you hire the right people and treat them decently, they not only won't screw you when they leave, they won't leave. Sadly, that's a more advanced lesson than most companies can handle.
Hardly typical, but I work 40 hours a week. Period. That includes a paid lunch break. There is no overtime. If an emergency requires me to put in extra hours, I take the equivalent time off later in the week. This is standard procedure at the tiny little company I work at.
I used to do the 50-60-70 hour thing, for the same money I'm making now plus a whole lot more grief.
It's not easy to find a computer job with sane hours and bosses who grasp that you have a life outside of the office, but it is possible. Ultimately, you will work as many hours as you are willing to let "them" make you work
The important thing to remember is that the theatre industry should be thinking about what distinguishes them from the TV-become-Home-Theatre.
Let's see, in the theatre I can sit in a cramped chair and try to find somewhere on the popcorn-strewn floor to put my feet, and spend two hours trying to concentrate on the film while people around me have loud conversations and let their cell phones ring. At home, I can sit on a comfy couch and watch an entire movie all the way through without anyone talking over it or walking in front of the screen eight times to go to the bathroom. There's a difference all right, and it's not in the theatre's favor.
Seriously, if theatres are having trouble, they need to think about the quality of the overall movie-going experience. I used to love going to the movies; nothing compares to the big screen for letting you imerse yourself in the story. Lately, I usually walk out of a film more pissed off than pleased. What difference does digital vs. film make, if the screen gets blocked every few minutes and you can't hear half the soundtrack anyway?
The protogeek seems to be pretty much pissed off, huh?
Merely very irritated. The phrase "American freedoms" can be interpreted two ways: "freedoms which are innately American, nobody else has these freedoms" or "freedoms which happen to be enjoyed by Americans, whether other countries have these freedoms is not specified." I'm not telepathic, so I don't know which Bob(TM) actually intended. I'm just quite tired of many non-Americans assuming the first interpretation must be correct.
BTW, I have never heard anyone refer to "Canadian freedoms", "French freedoms", "British freedoms" or whatever.
So, freedom tends to be a big deal to Americans, at least in principle. Is that a bad thing?
Not really surprising, though. I can't tell you how often I have heard morons declare (on /. and elsewhere) that only in the US of A people have a) freedom of speech b) a constitution c) democrac d) whatever.
Or possibly, just possibly, the poster was refering to the freedoms of Americans. Skylarov notwithstanding, the DMCA applies primarily to Americans, as it is an American law. It is ironic (or pathetic, take your pick) that a Russian company is spearheading the challenge against a law that takes freedom away from American citizens.
IOW, I can't tell you how often I have heard morons declare that any statement by an American can only be interpreted in the most US-centric way possible.
>is the way back machine possible in any other medium? i don't think so.
The Wayback machine is, in essence, a way to see what people thought and knew at a certain point in time, what were the big issues of the day, etc. Historians have been doing this for as long as there have been historians. Letters, diaries, transcripts of public speaches, newspaper archives, and other primary source materials served this purpose long before the web existed. Things like the Wayback machine make this easier, faster, and arguably more complete, but the basic concept certainly is possible in other mediums.
This is a very good point. $10/hour is crap in Silicon Valley, because the cost of living is so high. Where I live, $10/hour is mid-grade temp pay. You can live on it -- not luxuriously, but if you manage your money sensibly it'll get the bills paid. (Grunt-level work like that in the article tends to be around $6.50/hour, which you can't live on without fairly extreme sacrifices.) If HP had their plant in a less insanely expensive area, they could pay the same wage (or even a little less -- $9/hour?) and have workers who weren't starving for the privelege. Betcha productivity would go up....
>Just use a buyers agent, they work for YOU not for the seller
No, they work for the commission, same as any other agent. The buyer-agent agreement means they can't also represent the seller, but it doesn't obligate them to put your interests above their own. If there's a problem, such as your realtor misrepresenting the property, lying to you about whether the listing is legally binding (it's not), or just plain not paying attention to what you want, the agreement mostly obligates you to stick with the idiot instead of getting another agent to handle the deal *competently*.
A good realtor can be a lot of help, a bad realtor can be a disaster. In either case, get a real estate lawyer to look over the deal before you sign anything, including a check! Sure, the lawyer's in it for the money too, but he gets paid whether you buy the house or not; the realtor only gets paid if she convinces you to buy.
The biggest consequence of unplugging at my ex-job was that, since I was the only tech, all the work would build up while I was gone and avalanche down on me when I came back. Bigger backlog + more irritated users = why bother taking time off, the net stress wasn't any less. Even so, however, I flat refused to carry a pager; if the 50+ hours/week (no OT pay, of course) I already spent at the office weren't enough, too bad. Didn't help that much of the time-sink was due to managerial stupidity; the workload would have been more reasonable with a little investment in facilities and a refusal to hold the tech responsible for the screw-ups of others.
The solution? I burned out and quit. I now work 40 hours or less per week, I'm payed for every minute of it (at a much higher rate), and the work itself is much less hectic. My new employers apparently have no problem with the fact that I have a life outside of work. Amusingly, I hear that my former bosses have given my replacement some of the concessions I wanted (like decent equipment). Perhaps if enough messages were pasted onto enough sledgehammers, more employers would realize that treating employees like indentured servants is ultimately unproductive.
Erm, no. If the Hays code represented the societal standards of the day, then movies which violated those standards would have offended too many viewers and flopped at the box office, studios would have avoided similar films in the future, and the Hays code would never have been "necessary" in the first place.
Then, as now, restrictions on movie content were forced down the industry's and the public's throat by a small but vocal (and now, litigious) minority who feel entitled to tell the rest of us what we should watch.