Florida sticks it to tourists with a "transient tax". Taxes on property rented less than 7 consecutive months. Tennessee has the highest State sales tax in the nation. Washington has crippling business taxes.
If taxes really bother you, you can head to the Alaska bush. No sales tax outside the big cities; no property tax outside the big cities; no income tax. Of course, you're then in the Alaska bush...
Remind them that use tax has to be reported, then record the license plate and/or driver's license number and make sure the Washington State Revenue Dept. "double checks" at the end of the year. At least, that is the impression they give.
Mmmmmmmmm....I don't agree, though I'm open to seeing data otherwise, if there is any.
There are a hell of a lot more options open to wealthy people than to the likes of you and me. Many of those that maintain homes in the high-tax cities have their *residence* elsewhere. One example is Ted Turner. His main business is based out of Atlanta, and he has a house or condo there. But his declared residence is the ranch in Montana, where taxes are cheaper.
Several movie stars and sports figures (John Travolta and Shaquille O'Neil come to mind) have their *residence* in income tax free Florida. Many celebrities have homes in Idaho, Washington or Florida where taxes are low, or non-existent. Texas is another haven, with no personal income tax.
Leona Helmsley once said "only little people pay taxes", and she was more correct than most people realize. The system is devised that if you have a lot of money, and know what you're doing, you don't pay a lot of taxes.
There seem to be an awfully high number of people who commute from New Hampshire to work in Massachusetts because of the lack of personal income and sales taxes in NH. There are also a number going the other way to shop because of the lack of sales tax.
Washington keeps an eye on its borders because neither Oregon nor Montana have sales taxes. I've seen roving police patrols stopping motorists coming in who have what looks to be a vehicle full of new consumer goodies. Idaho, at that point, is more of a speed bump than a State. The panhandle is only about 85 miles across on I-90.
How many California companies actually incorporate in Nevada? How many companies from almost every other State incorporate in Nevada for just this purpose?
Lots of people cross the borders from Florida and Tennessee into Georgia to buy gasoline or cigarettes because of the drastic difference in taxes.
Taxes are a big factor when you start making decent money. It is the reason the various States have differing levels of property, sales, corporate and income taxes.
I actually had an 8th grade metal shop class where we had a forge and were taught how to make hammers, horseshoes and various blades. It was a blast. A very popular class back in...mmmmm...about the early 1980s.
Like the animal kingdom, if it looks interesting and has lots of bright colors, it is probably deadly. Stay away.
Don't post anything online that you wouldn't want your grandmother, pastor and organized criminals to see. Or, don't post anything that shows anything you wouldn't want your pre-teen daughter to be doing.
Terms of service change on a whim. There is no such thing as online privacy. The internet never forgets. Don't trust the delete key. Don't say in e-mail what you wouldn't be willing to say to someone's face -- in public.
Learn what BCC is in e-mail. Never use multiple TO or CC to anyone outside the company, as it can expose a great deal of internal e-mail addresses.
We do understand there is demand for a Bluetooth API, and it is a top priority for the Android Bluetooth team.
And the Android Bluetooth team consists of who, exactly? Sergei's dog? A team of wombats?
It could be that Google is avoiding the entire "we don't allow tethering" firestore by simply taking it one step back and not providing bluetooth, so making tethering technically infeasible.
And my point was that in a real-world situation, this is mostly meaningless.
1. How does this protect from someone compromising Apache to read the.php files on my server without them being parsed; extracting database login information; and pillaging my database?
2. How does this protect from someone compromising Apache to read all the files in a shared web host?
The whole "prevent them from getting root" mentality is like operating with blinders on. Great! They didn't get root or compromise the core OS. How does that help us explain to our clients how the database was sucked dry?
If I have a web front-end to a database that 1,000 users interface to, I don't have 1,000 database logins with 1,000 views. Code on the web server usually handles the actual authentication, meaning the Apache process is going to be able to get a LOT of places in the database.
All that is like saying "we have fire-hardened the bicycle chain and used a super-strong alloy so NOTHING can break the chain" when the lock is made of paper mache. The whole "weakest link" bit, etc.
I had this discussion -- and yes, it was civil -- on deadly.org a while ago. Pointing out that web servers were like the circus coming to town. Setting up Linux was like using strong wooden poles to hold the tent, and using OpenBSD was like using steel poles.
Neither really mattered because people who wanted to cause trouble would simply be slitting the fabric (the apps) or cutting the ropes. Thus, a lot of the nit picky little stuff that OpenBSD fanboys focus on vs Linux doesn't really matter. The issue isn't Linux or OpenBSD or Windows, it is now mostly.ASP,.PHP and other homebrew web code where people didn't sanitize input, do bounds checking, etc.
This is one of THE major complaints about AOL. Easy to get data in, impossible to get out.
Just last month I was asked to assist someone to get all their contacts (1,500 or so) out of AOL's mail system. There is no export feature, nor any third-party tool to do it. AOL's official answer is to print it out for a backup.
I called AOL's support, and after several rounds of phone-tree hell, got a tech who told me flat out "We don't do that. Good luck!"
I ended up writing a script that parsed the XML-like output of their "print" function. Print to screen, save to file, parse with Perl. It hoses up the contact lists, which are included and just end up creating duplicates. They don't output as lists at all.
Still, it was marginally better than hiring someone to retype it all by hand.
Soon after Apple activates 802.11n compliant mode, with a future firmware update, I predict a specialized iPod/iPhone botnet. It'll hook up with the recently discovered Linux webserver botnet, which has already hooked with the Windows PC botnet and woe unto the human race!
Yeah, but the problem is they change the color of the screen from Blue to Black. Had they changed it to red or some other color that doesn't start with the letter b, then it would be gone by now. Why is it the engineers never listen to the marketing department? This one was a no-brainer! Goodbye BSOD, hello RSOD. How simple is that?
Boyden warns that a very clever AI without a sense of purpose might very well 'realize the impermanence of everything, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence.
FINALLY, some serious research into developing decent bots. As long as it doesn't have the personality (and voice...oh, God the voice) of a 12-year old, I welcome this development and look forward to some decent, one-player gaming.
It isn't an ebook reader if it has a microphone, webcam and the ability to make Skype calls. It is a flat computer.
I can see the justification for speakers, possibly helping with ADA compliance and reading text to the sight impaired. The rest is loss-of-focus, lets add features to disguise the shitty battery life, crap.
Give me extended battery life in an ebook reader over all that crap any day.
Meanwhile, this guy agreed to remove BASIC but either deliberately or negligently left it in.
You can't *remove* BASIC from the C-64 because it was used to bootstrap the loading process of everything else. No BASIC, no way to load the games. Something has to interpret LOAD "*",8,1. You can lock it out once it bootstraps the other programs, which is what it looks like he tried -- and failed -- to completely do.
You had possibilities until the phrase "...to finish the series." No true WoT acolyte would ever utter those words. I believe the only reason it was called "Wheel of Time" is because "The Neverending Story" was already taken.
Now, if you change the phrase to "...to continue the series" then you might be on to something.
Tolkien told a story at his own pace. David Eddings did as well. Ditto for Terry Brooks. I have plenty of patience for a good story. Jordan just gives the feeling of milking it by inserting all the minutia in the middle. Or as a prequel, written in the middle of one story and sold as a separate book. Don't forget the prequel!
Enjoy away. As I said, I'll be buying the remaining books myself if for nothing else, closure. It'll be a bonus if they're more enjoyable than laborious.
Because the first three books were damn good. The problem was, what should have been by all rights a 5-6 book series has turned into, what...12? The remaining books sort of meandered around, filling in niggling details and sub-plots that every other author on the planet saves until the second series set in the same locale. Jordan, however, crammed it in the middle. He admitted he had only outlined it to about 5 or 6 books.
Hell, I'm sure there are four WHOLE BOOKS of material in there that can be summed up as repetitions of "the men and women in this series can't communicate with each other worth a damn, and have egos the size of elephants".
Jordan was verbose. He made Tolstoy look parsimonious. A word used a couple times in WoT novels, by the way. The man probably bought thesauruses by the case.
The remaining books hit the best seller list by fans hoping he would finish the damn story before he died. And yes, that was the joke going around YEARS before he was sick, much less actually dead.
When I finally read Knife of Dreams my first thought was "Damn! He really is picking up the pace. I wonder what got into him?" I later learned it was cardiac amyloidosis is what got into him. A year and a half later he was dead. My first thoughts being "Wow. He DIDN'T finish the story before dying. Who'd a thunk it?" followed by "There are gonna be a lot of people online who now feel like assholes for jokes from years past!"
Thus, the commentary here Slashdot. There was a lot of sentiment expressed that Jordan was milking the series for all it was worth. The George Lucas of epic fantasy novels, if you will. I'm not convinced he wasn't, which is why I didn't get Knife of Dreams right away. I waited for the reviews before I decided it probably wasn't yet another string-em-along filler book.
That being said, I'll probably buy the final three novels in ebook form and acquire the others -- which I currently have in hardback -- as ebooks.
You're confusing two different meanings of "driver". The actual printer driver (the thing that ferries bits to the hardware) is in the kernel on Linux; it's usually a generic USB driver for printer class devices. There is another "driver" there--the renderer--but that is irrelevant to this discussion because it's a completely different kind of software that just happens to be called a "driver" as well.
I didn't confuse the meaning. You confused my post. I pointed out that the webcams should operate exactly this way, with the V4L or V4L2 drivers being in the kernel but the actual model drivers being userland, just like the printers. You essentially reiterated my position.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know. New Hampshire is the same way.
Florida sticks it to tourists with a "transient tax". Taxes on property rented less than 7 consecutive months. Tennessee has the highest State sales tax in the nation. Washington has crippling business taxes.
If taxes really bother you, you can head to the Alaska bush. No sales tax outside the big cities; no property tax outside the big cities; no income tax. Of course, you're then in the Alaska bush...
Remind them that use tax has to be reported, then record the license plate and/or driver's license number and make sure the Washington State Revenue Dept. "double checks" at the end of the year. At least, that is the impression they give.
Mmmmmmmmm....I don't agree, though I'm open to seeing data otherwise, if there is any.
There are a hell of a lot more options open to wealthy people than to the likes of you and me. Many of those that maintain homes in the high-tax cities have their *residence* elsewhere. One example is Ted Turner. His main business is based out of Atlanta, and he has a house or condo there. But his declared residence is the ranch in Montana, where taxes are cheaper.
Several movie stars and sports figures (John Travolta and Shaquille O'Neil come to mind) have their *residence* in income tax free Florida. Many celebrities have homes in Idaho, Washington or Florida where taxes are low, or non-existent. Texas is another haven, with no personal income tax.
Leona Helmsley once said "only little people pay taxes", and she was more correct than most people realize. The system is devised that if you have a lot of money, and know what you're doing, you don't pay a lot of taxes.
There seem to be an awfully high number of people who commute from New Hampshire to work in Massachusetts because of the lack of personal income and sales taxes in NH. There are also a number going the other way to shop because of the lack of sales tax.
Washington keeps an eye on its borders because neither Oregon nor Montana have sales taxes. I've seen roving police patrols stopping motorists coming in who have what looks to be a vehicle full of new consumer goodies. Idaho, at that point, is more of a speed bump than a State. The panhandle is only about 85 miles across on I-90.
How many California companies actually incorporate in Nevada? How many companies from almost every other State incorporate in Nevada for just this purpose?
Lots of people cross the borders from Florida and Tennessee into Georgia to buy gasoline or cigarettes because of the drastic difference in taxes.
Taxes are a big factor when you start making decent money. It is the reason the various States have differing levels of property, sales, corporate and income taxes.
I reminds me of an episode of Northern Exposure. Maurice had a fit when Chris, the DJ, told the story of the city's founding by a pair of Lesbians.
I actually had an 8th grade metal shop class where we had a forge and were taught how to make hammers, horseshoes and various blades. It was a blast. A very popular class back in...mmmmm...about the early 1980s.
Like the animal kingdom, if it looks interesting and has lots of bright colors, it is probably deadly. Stay away.
Don't post anything online that you wouldn't want your grandmother, pastor and organized criminals to see. Or, don't post anything that shows anything you wouldn't want your pre-teen daughter to be doing.
Terms of service change on a whim. There is no such thing as online privacy. The internet never forgets. Don't trust the delete key. Don't say in e-mail what you wouldn't be willing to say to someone's face -- in public.
Learn what BCC is in e-mail. Never use multiple TO or CC to anyone outside the company, as it can expose a great deal of internal e-mail addresses.
And anchovies. Don't forget anchovies are the secret behind Mom's Old-Fashion Robot Oil, and they willon goion extinct around 2200.
http://theinfosphere.org/A_Fishful_of_Dollars
Still, it needs a cable. Not as simple as the BT that everyone thinks of when tethering.
You have me almost convinced, but I'm still partial to the development wombat theory.
We do understand there is demand for a Bluetooth API, and it is a top priority for the Android Bluetooth team.
And the Android Bluetooth team consists of who, exactly? Sergei's dog? A team of wombats?
It could be that Google is avoiding the entire "we don't allow tethering" firestore by simply taking it one step back and not providing bluetooth, so making tethering technically infeasible.
And my point was that in a real-world situation, this is mostly meaningless.
1. How does this protect from someone compromising Apache to read the .php files on my server without them being parsed; extracting database login information; and pillaging my database?
2. How does this protect from someone compromising Apache to read all the files in a shared web host?
The whole "prevent them from getting root" mentality is like operating with blinders on. Great! They didn't get root or compromise the core OS. How does that help us explain to our clients how the database was sucked dry?
If I have a web front-end to a database that 1,000 users interface to, I don't have 1,000 database logins with 1,000 views. Code on the web server usually handles the actual authentication, meaning the Apache process is going to be able to get a LOT of places in the database.
All that is like saying "we have fire-hardened the bicycle chain and used a super-strong alloy so NOTHING can break the chain" when the lock is made of paper mache. The whole "weakest link" bit, etc.
It looks like a significant experiment, but the summary is quite wrong as to what is being shown.
Dude, this is Slashdot and the discussion is on elementary particle physics. What exactly did you expect?
I had this discussion -- and yes, it was civil -- on deadly.org a while ago. Pointing out that web servers were like the circus coming to town. Setting up Linux was like using strong wooden poles to hold the tent, and using OpenBSD was like using steel poles.
Neither really mattered because people who wanted to cause trouble would simply be slitting the fabric (the apps) or cutting the ropes. Thus, a lot of the nit picky little stuff that OpenBSD fanboys focus on vs Linux doesn't really matter. The issue isn't Linux or OpenBSD or Windows, it is now mostly .ASP, .PHP and other homebrew web code where people didn't sanitize input, do bounds checking, etc.
This is one of THE major complaints about AOL. Easy to get data in, impossible to get out.
Just last month I was asked to assist someone to get all their contacts (1,500 or so) out of AOL's mail system. There is no export feature, nor any third-party tool to do it. AOL's official answer is to print it out for a backup.
I called AOL's support, and after several rounds of phone-tree hell, got a tech who told me flat out "We don't do that. Good luck!"
I ended up writing a script that parsed the XML-like output of their "print" function. Print to screen, save to file, parse with Perl. It hoses up the contact lists, which are included and just end up creating duplicates. They don't output as lists at all.
Still, it was marginally better than hiring someone to retype it all by hand.
Soon after Apple activates 802.11n compliant mode, with a future firmware update, I predict a specialized iPod/iPhone botnet. It'll hook up with the recently discovered Linux webserver botnet, which has already hooked with the Windows PC botnet and woe unto the human race!
20+ comments in and no Tron references. Sad.
Maybe they can time this to coincide with the TR2N release?
Yeah, but the problem is they change the color of the screen from Blue to Black. Had they changed it to red or some other color that doesn't start with the letter b, then it would be gone by now. Why is it the engineers never listen to the marketing department? This one was a no-brainer! Goodbye BSOD, hello RSOD. How simple is that?
Boyden warns that a very clever AI without a sense of purpose might very well 'realize the impermanence of everything, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence.
FINALLY, some serious research into developing decent bots. As long as it doesn't have the personality (and voice...oh, God the voice) of a 12-year old, I welcome this development and look forward to some decent, one-player gaming.
Or maybe someone could be held accountable.
You mean like when China executed several management types found "responsible" for these incidents? That type of accountable?
It isn't an ebook reader if it has a microphone, webcam and the ability to make Skype calls. It is a flat computer.
I can see the justification for speakers, possibly helping with ADA compliance and reading text to the sight impaired. The rest is loss-of-focus, lets add features to disguise the shitty battery life, crap.
Give me extended battery life in an ebook reader over all that crap any day.
Meanwhile, this guy agreed to remove BASIC but either deliberately or negligently left it in.
You can't *remove* BASIC from the C-64 because it was used to bootstrap the loading process of everything else. No BASIC, no way to load the games. Something has to interpret LOAD "*",8,1. You can lock it out once it bootstraps the other programs, which is what it looks like he tried -- and failed -- to completely do.
You had possibilities until the phrase "...to finish the series." No true WoT acolyte would ever utter those words. I believe the only reason it was called "Wheel of Time" is because "The Neverending Story" was already taken.
Now, if you change the phrase to "...to continue the series" then you might be on to something.
I normally don't, but you asked so I explained.
Tolkien told a story at his own pace. David Eddings did as well. Ditto for Terry Brooks. I have plenty of patience for a good story. Jordan just gives the feeling of milking it by inserting all the minutia in the middle. Or as a prequel, written in the middle of one story and sold as a separate book. Don't forget the prequel!
Enjoy away. As I said, I'll be buying the remaining books myself if for nothing else, closure. It'll be a bonus if they're more enjoyable than laborious.
Why? You really don't know? Okay...
Because the first three books were damn good. The problem was, what should have been by all rights a 5-6 book series has turned into, what...12? The remaining books sort of meandered around, filling in niggling details and sub-plots that every other author on the planet saves until the second series set in the same locale. Jordan, however, crammed it in the middle. He admitted he had only outlined it to about 5 or 6 books.
Hell, I'm sure there are four WHOLE BOOKS of material in there that can be summed up as repetitions of "the men and women in this series can't communicate with each other worth a damn, and have egos the size of elephants".
Jordan was verbose. He made Tolstoy look parsimonious. A word used a couple times in WoT novels, by the way. The man probably bought thesauruses by the case.
The remaining books hit the best seller list by fans hoping he would finish the damn story before he died. And yes, that was the joke going around YEARS before he was sick, much less actually dead.
When I finally read Knife of Dreams my first thought was "Damn! He really is picking up the pace. I wonder what got into him?" I later learned it was cardiac amyloidosis is what got into him. A year and a half later he was dead. My first thoughts being "Wow. He DIDN'T finish the story before dying. Who'd a thunk it?" followed by "There are gonna be a lot of people online who now feel like assholes for jokes from years past!"
Thus, the commentary here Slashdot. There was a lot of sentiment expressed that Jordan was milking the series for all it was worth. The George Lucas of epic fantasy novels, if you will. I'm not convinced he wasn't, which is why I didn't get Knife of Dreams right away. I waited for the reviews before I decided it probably wasn't yet another string-em-along filler book.
That being said, I'll probably buy the final three novels in ebook form and acquire the others -- which I currently have in hardback -- as ebooks.
You're confusing two different meanings of "driver". The actual printer driver (the thing that ferries bits to the hardware) is in the kernel on Linux; it's usually a generic USB driver for printer class devices. There is another "driver" there--the renderer--but that is irrelevant to this discussion because it's a completely different kind of software that just happens to be called a "driver" as well.
I didn't confuse the meaning. You confused my post. I pointed out that the webcams should operate exactly this way, with the V4L or V4L2 drivers being in the kernel but the actual model drivers being userland, just like the printers. You essentially reiterated my position.