I don't think turbo tax *would* help a whole lot, especially since a major part of her job is reading and rereading all the IRS documents to find out their new rules this year
That's why I've always used the Home & Business edition in the past. It usually picked up on those little nuances, included explanations of important rules that had changed in the last year. However, I'm still not sure what I'm going to do this year -- Intuit has pretty much lost my trust forever.
I dial the number, feed it some fields from my W-2, and it tells me how much I owe (or the govt. owes me).
And, as you said, if your taxes are this simple, that's the way to go. There's also an EZ form for simple taxes which takes about 5 minutes to complete. However, once you start itemizing, things get much more complicated -- especially when you do the State income taxes. Many times, deductions allowed at the federal level are not allowed by the State.
12) Have bill returned with letter expaining politely that it's not their problem.
The sad thing is that I think the EULA allows them to make this statement, as I believe it explicitly states that they are not responsible for damage done to your machine or software as a result of using their product. Warranty only guarantees you what you paid for their product.... I'd love to see how well it would stand up in court in a case like this, where their product did something known to be destructive in some cases without bothering to inform you of it ahead of time.
It was trying to hint that perhaps you should look into buying a house instead. Your rent is nearly twice what I pay for my mortgage. You must live in one of the large cities...
Glad I did, TaxCut works just as well, costs half as much, and has no DRM or other installation games. As a bonus, it imports TurboTax data flawlessly.
Has anybody tried TaxCut for small business needs? Last year, I had to use a tax preparation service because I'd spent half of 2001 living in Germany. Because of this, I'll pretty much have to enter all of my information in by hand rather than importing. I'm kind of on the fence between using Tax Cut and doing the H&R Block think or whatever. If Tax Cut works well, I'd prefer to do it myself.
Dolly died of a "lung infection" so I don't think her chromosomes were directly to blame.
I get your drift, but you must admit that as the body ages, it's ability to prevent and fight disease diminishes rapidly. Many elderly humans don't die just because their body stops working. They frequently die of something like pneumonia or some other disease because their body was unable to fight it. But you're right -- if they had put Dolly into a sterile bubble, this might not have happened.
Re:Telomeres and their relation to mitosis
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
So instead of replacing the nucleus of a fertilized egg, why don't we take advantage of the process of meosis and with artifical insemination techinics, cause the subject to produce multiple eggs.
First off, the only cells that undergo meiosis in the human body are the sperm cells and ova. [Again, biology expert correct me if I'm wrong] What you are advocating is just a variation of insemination, except that I think you're proposing to either use two ova or two sperm cells to generate the viable offspring. The most important thing to note is that this isn't cloning. Cloning aims at making a genetic duplicate of the original. The process of meiosis, by design, produces haploid chromosome sets that are *not* identical, neither to each other, nor to the diploid chromosomes of the origin-cells. By using the technique you describe, you might end up with a product that was closer to the original, but definitely not identical. As I read your text more closely, it looks like you're attempting to compensate for this by choosing two of the products of meiosis such that a recombined product would have the same genetic makeup of the original. I'm not sure if this would work because I'm not sure if meiosis actually yields "parts" that could be combined in this manner. To further complicate things, the meiosis process in ova does not actually complete the final division until the egg is penetrated by a sperm, so your technique would be difficult. Perhaps something could be done to the egg that would convince it that it has been penetrated by sperm so that it completes meiosis. This is an interesting thread, though. I'd like to see what others have to say.
Your telomere explanation was pretty good, except that telomeres aren't just any substance. They're DNA.
Thanks! Yeah, I knew that telomeres were the end pairs found in DNA. I just kept it at a higher level.:-)
If you want to make a great fundamental discovery in one of the hard sciences, then become a biologist
Unfortunately, I'm already halfway through to retirement. However, I've always really enjoyed biology and biochemistry, so if you can find for me a job that pays six figures while letting me pursue a graduate-level education in biology and biochemistry, I'd strongly consider changing my career.:-)
Of course, I haven't seen any flying pigs yet either, but what with genetic manipulation, you never know.
Anti-cloning zealots are going to have a ball with this.
Yes, but if the rumors of premature aging are true, they may actually have some science to base their argument on. You see there's this very important substance called telomeres attached to the end of chromosomes. As cells divide, the telomere caps become shorter, and eventually the cells stop dividing and either malfunction or die. It stands to reason that, if you start off with an adult cell, you already have shortened telomeres and will therefore have a reduced lifespan. [Any biology experts should feel free to correct me.]
Rather than terminate Dolly, I'd rather they have experimented with telomerase to see if they could rejuvinate her. Although, I guess that's a little on the unethical and cruel side.
Accounting for timezone differences between EST and PST, would this not make the two times much closer to each other?
I'd say so. It also makes the folks at Symantec look like idiots. It sounds like their big customers only received a few extra minutes notice for their money. It also conjures up images of a little girl with Symantec across her shirt sticking out her tongue and saying. Nah nah nah nah nah nah. I found it 30 seconds before you did....
Great, thats just what I want- sites to be able to popup spam, or override my page to visit goatse or equally evil things whenever I hit the back button.
Of course you'd want to be able to turn this off, just like you can popup windows in Mozilla.
Here's a real idea- make your website so that if you resubmit a state, it overwrites the old data and regresses the state
When I can, this is exactly what I do. Unfortunately, there are many times when this kind of action is not possible.
Or better yet- don't use HTTP for this kind of work, because it wasn't designed to do it- HTTP doesn't handle state correctly because its stateless.
Well, duh, if I had a choice, I wouldn't use the browser at all. Unfortunately, that's not my choice.
Write a custom app that uses a stateful protocol.
I already have a custom app that uses a stateful protocol. The web front end is almost always an addon after the fact.
Perhaps you can step into the real world a bit and realize than many web applications are addons to legacy technology. If a legacy application already handles things statefully, you have to provide some clever mechanism to make a browser function within that environment. Sure, it would be better to use a stateful technology, but customers want to be able to do "everything" through their browser these days with the smallest client install possible.
Of course then it could also be twisted to nefarious purposes as well : (
I think it would be safest to just provide some very simple functionality. I'd be perfectly happy if I could use Javascript to override the event handler for the BACK button. That way, I could make the back button call any Javascript function I want. I don't imagine that this would be any less safe than defining a button with a Javascript action. To make things as safe as possible, the override would have to be deactivated with each page refresh. I honestly can't figure out why nobody has implemented this already. Heck, you could even allow similar functionality for the FORWARD button. For the ultra-paranoid, the browser could change the look of the button when it's been reprogrammed in this manner.
so even with the new legislation we can still expect to receive calls from newspapers and non-profit organizations.
I wonder how long it will be before some telemarketing company spins off a non-profit arm that can be used to "legally" make those unwanted calls. I hope the legislation takes this into account by targeting the company on behalf of which the call is made.
I have never had a page that could disable the back button, so I assume this is what he means.
The funny thing is, this report doesn't address at all what I see as the biggest problem with the "back" button. Since I develop online web scenarios that interact with backend systems in a stateful manner, I'm constantly having to deal with the fact that the back button sends little or no information to the online system when used. This is, of course, because browsers are stateless. It would be nice if the back button could be programmed to work like an html form submit that sent the contents of the current form along with some control code. This would make synchronizing with the online system much much easier, rather than having to "guess" which state the program should be in from the next form submit following use of the back button.
One option we've used is to deploy browsers with the back button disabled, but this really annoys users who would like to just browse the internet. We discontinued this practice almost before we started it.
Nah, it was cool. I just couldn't resist. He just took the Roman concept and applied it to "modern" building materials and provided a design with optimal or semi-optimal measurements. Besides, I think I read somewhere that much of the progress made by the Romans in road construction was actually lost for something like a 1000 years following the collapse of the empire. With that, you could argue that he "reinvented" what was lost.:-)
Why doesn't somebody approach Sun regarding mirroring so people can download from an alternate site (not tying up Sun's network) at no charge? If they say no, then it isn't free.
I could either goto Toys R Us and get the product I want today, or go online, have to wait a couple extra days and pay shipping plus tax.
It's even worse for me. I can just drive into Delaware for all the stores they listed and pay no sales tax at all.
News report: Since agreeing to collect taxes over the internet, numerous online retailers have noticed a dramatic decline in online sales to customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia.....
Dude, you just need to get checked out to see if you've got gills.
Don't pay anybody to check you out. Just stick your head under water for like 15 minutes and see if you're still alive.:-)
Disclaimer: I'm only joking, so please, please please don't try this. If you ignore this disclaimer, I will accept no responsibility for your death. However, if you find that you can breathe under water, I will require 20% of any revenue that you earn due to your new-found gift.:-)
Falling asleep and/or coughing is a dangerous activity with predators around. So when one person coughs and gives the game away it would be prudent to get your coughing over and done with now rather than when it goes quiet again.
I think it's more likely that when you hear somebody else cough, you concentrate on your own throat and force it to feel itchy so that you need to cough. It's the same process as when you have a broken limb with a cast on it. Everything is just fine until somebody mentions the word 'itch', and all of the sudden you're running for the wire coat hanger. Speaking of coughing, ever notice that when somebody with a scratchy voice talks you constantly have to resist the urge to clear your own throat?
With yawning maybe it's a trigger to take an oxygen blast before it's necessary.
Or maybe you psychologically feel like whoever yawned has sucked up a large portion of the oxygen in the air and that perhaps you should hoard some of it before anybody else does the same.:-)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I only get hiccups when I have air trapped in my stomach. I've found there are two ways to get rid of them (for me). Both involve burping. The first is to swallow more air by closing off the windpipe and sucking air into the stomach, which almost immediately causes me to burp and usually takes both the trapped air and the new air I swallowed with it. This is what I've always assumed that my hiccups were trying to make me do, so bully on the article that was posted. The second, which I prefer, is to tense my stomach muscles in such a way that at the next hiccup, the air is forced out of my stomach. Using these techniques, I rarely hiccup more than three times. In fact, the last time I couldn't get rid of them was right after I had my wisdom teeth removed (years ago) and I was still recovering from the effects of whatever valium derivative they used.
I tried calling customer service to see if I could step down to a more economical package (maybe with the 10-15 channels I actually watch) but they told me I was already at the lowest level (which has seemingly hundreds of channels).
Didn't somebody post something not too long ago indicating that cable and Satellite companies have to provide you with the ability to choose which channels you want, and only pay for those? Is that true? If so, it would solve your problem.
Yeah, but this isn't really going to apply to you. There'll be some other technology that your children think you will have trouble coping with.
Look at the history. My Dad had no trouble whatsoever mastering the TV and remote control. That's because he grew up with the technology (maybe not the remote). But when VCRs came out, I was the only one in the family that could set the clock. (Dad learned when I left for College). He can use a computer as long as nothing goes wrong. As soon as there's a problem with it, he's at a loss. I, on the other hand, have no problem using and fixing computers. It's just a necessary evil. I fully expect that there will be some other new technology that I just can't grasp, which will seem simple to my children. I'll just have to have my son come over everytime the fusion generator needs to be reset or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I've always used the Home & Business edition in the past. It usually picked up on those little nuances, included explanations of important rules that had changed in the last year. However, I'm still not sure what I'm going to do this year -- Intuit has pretty much lost my trust forever.
And, as you said, if your taxes are this simple, that's the way to go. There's also an EZ form for simple taxes which takes about 5 minutes to complete. However, once you start itemizing, things get much more complicated -- especially when you do the State income taxes. Many times, deductions allowed at the federal level are not allowed by the State.
The sad thing is that I think the EULA allows them to make this statement, as I believe it explicitly states that they are not responsible for damage done to your machine or software as a result of using their product. Warranty only guarantees you what you paid for their product.... I'd love to see how well it would stand up in court in a case like this, where their product did something known to be destructive in some cases without bothering to inform you of it ahead of time.
It was trying to hint that perhaps you should look into buying a house instead. Your rent is nearly twice what I pay for my mortgage. You must live in one of the large cities...
Has anybody tried TaxCut for small business needs? Last year, I had to use a tax preparation service because I'd spent half of 2001 living in Germany. Because of this, I'll pretty much have to enter all of my information in by hand rather than importing. I'm kind of on the fence between using Tax Cut and doing the H&R Block think or whatever. If Tax Cut works well, I'd prefer to do it myself.
I get your drift, but you must admit that as the body ages, it's ability to prevent and fight disease diminishes rapidly. Many elderly humans don't die just because their body stops working. They frequently die of something like pneumonia or some other disease because their body was unable to fight it. But you're right -- if they had put Dolly into a sterile bubble, this might not have happened.
First off, the only cells that undergo meiosis in the human body are the sperm cells and ova. [Again, biology expert correct me if I'm wrong] What you are advocating is just a variation of insemination, except that I think you're proposing to either use two ova or two sperm cells to generate the viable offspring. The most important thing to note is that this isn't cloning. Cloning aims at making a genetic duplicate of the original. The process of meiosis, by design, produces haploid chromosome sets that are *not* identical, neither to each other, nor to the diploid chromosomes of the origin-cells. By using the technique you describe, you might end up with a product that was closer to the original, but definitely not identical. As I read your text more closely, it looks like you're attempting to compensate for this by choosing two of the products of meiosis such that a recombined product would have the same genetic makeup of the original. I'm not sure if this would work because I'm not sure if meiosis actually yields "parts" that could be combined in this manner. To further complicate things, the meiosis process in ova does not actually complete the final division until the egg is penetrated by a sperm, so your technique would be difficult. Perhaps something could be done to the egg that would convince it that it has been penetrated by sperm so that it completes meiosis. This is an interesting thread, though. I'd like to see what others have to say.
Thanks! Yeah, I knew that telomeres were the end pairs found in DNA. I just kept it at a higher level. :-)
If you want to make a great fundamental discovery in one of the hard sciences, then become a biologist
Unfortunately, I'm already halfway through to retirement. However, I've always really enjoyed biology and biochemistry, so if you can find for me a job that pays six figures while letting me pursue a graduate-level education in biology and biochemistry, I'd strongly consider changing my career. :-)
Of course, I haven't seen any flying pigs yet either, but what with genetic manipulation, you never know.
Yes, but if the rumors of premature aging are true, they may actually have some science to base their argument on. You see there's this very important substance called telomeres attached to the end of chromosomes. As cells divide, the telomere caps become shorter, and eventually the cells stop dividing and either malfunction or die. It stands to reason that, if you start off with an adult cell, you already have shortened telomeres and will therefore have a reduced lifespan. [Any biology experts should feel free to correct me.]
Rather than terminate Dolly, I'd rather they have experimented with telomerase to see if they could rejuvinate her. Although, I guess that's a little on the unethical and cruel side.
I'd say so. It also makes the folks at Symantec look like idiots. It sounds like their big customers only received a few extra minutes notice for their money. It also conjures up images of a little girl with Symantec across her shirt sticking out her tongue and saying. Nah nah nah nah nah nah. I found it 30 seconds before you did....
Of course you'd want to be able to turn this off, just like you can popup windows in Mozilla.
Here's a real idea- make your website so that if you resubmit a state, it overwrites the old data and regresses the state
When I can, this is exactly what I do. Unfortunately, there are many times when this kind of action is not possible.
Or better yet- don't use HTTP for this kind of work, because it wasn't designed to do it- HTTP doesn't handle state correctly because its stateless.
Well, duh, if I had a choice, I wouldn't use the browser at all. Unfortunately, that's not my choice.
Write a custom app that uses a stateful protocol.
I already have a custom app that uses a stateful protocol. The web front end is almost always an addon after the fact.
Perhaps you can step into the real world a bit and realize than many web applications are addons to legacy technology. If a legacy application already handles things statefully, you have to provide some clever mechanism to make a browser function within that environment. Sure, it would be better to use a stateful technology, but customers want to be able to do "everything" through their browser these days with the smallest client install possible.
I think it would be safest to just provide some very simple functionality. I'd be perfectly happy if I could use Javascript to override the event handler for the BACK button. That way, I could make the back button call any Javascript function I want. I don't imagine that this would be any less safe than defining a button with a Javascript action. To make things as safe as possible, the override would have to be deactivated with each page refresh. I honestly can't figure out why nobody has implemented this already. Heck, you could even allow similar functionality for the FORWARD button. For the ultra-paranoid, the browser could change the look of the button when it's been reprogrammed in this manner.
Well, I think the solution here is obvious.
Sorry, couldn't resist. :-)
I wonder how long it will be before some telemarketing company spins off a non-profit arm that can be used to "legally" make those unwanted calls. I hope the legislation takes this into account by targeting the company on behalf of which the call is made.
The funny thing is, this report doesn't address at all what I see as the biggest problem with the "back" button. Since I develop online web scenarios that interact with backend systems in a stateful manner, I'm constantly having to deal with the fact that the back button sends little or no information to the online system when used. This is, of course, because browsers are stateless. It would be nice if the back button could be programmed to work like an html form submit that sent the contents of the current form along with some control code. This would make synchronizing with the online system much much easier, rather than having to "guess" which state the program should be in from the next form submit following use of the back button.
One option we've used is to deploy browsers with the back button disabled, but this really annoys users who would like to just browse the internet. We discontinued this practice almost before we started it.
Nah, it was cool. I just couldn't resist. He just took the Roman concept and applied it to "modern" building materials and provided a design with optimal or semi-optimal measurements. Besides, I think I read somewhere that much of the progress made by the Romans in road construction was actually lost for something like a 1000 years following the collapse of the empire. With that, you could argue that he "reinvented" what was lost. :-)
Funny that the Romans were using this "invention" more than 1700 years earlier. :-)
Why doesn't somebody approach Sun regarding mirroring so people can download from an alternate site (not tying up Sun's network) at no charge? If they say no, then it isn't free.
It's even worse for me. I can just drive into Delaware for all the stores they listed and pay no sales tax at all.
It kind of lends new meaning to running for the wire coat hanger, though, doesn't it. :-)
Don't pay anybody to check you out. Just stick your head under water for like 15 minutes and see if you're still alive. :-)
Disclaimer: I'm only joking, so please, please please don't try this. If you ignore this disclaimer, I will accept no responsibility for your death. However, if you find that you can breathe under water, I will require 20% of any revenue that you earn due to your new-found gift. :-)
I think it's more likely that when you hear somebody else cough, you concentrate on your own throat and force it to feel itchy so that you need to cough. It's the same process as when you have a broken limb with a cast on it. Everything is just fine until somebody mentions the word 'itch', and all of the sudden you're running for the wire coat hanger. Speaking of coughing, ever notice that when somebody with a scratchy voice talks you constantly have to resist the urge to clear your own throat?
With yawning maybe it's a trigger to take an oxygen blast before it's necessary.
Or maybe you psychologically feel like whoever yawned has sucked up a large portion of the oxygen in the air and that perhaps you should hoard some of it before anybody else does the same. :-)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I only get hiccups when I have air trapped in my stomach. I've found there are two ways to get rid of them (for me). Both involve burping. The first is to swallow more air by closing off the windpipe and sucking air into the stomach, which almost immediately causes me to burp and usually takes both the trapped air and the new air I swallowed with it. This is what I've always assumed that my hiccups were trying to make me do, so bully on the article that was posted. The second, which I prefer, is to tense my stomach muscles in such a way that at the next hiccup, the air is forced out of my stomach. Using these techniques, I rarely hiccup more than three times. In fact, the last time I couldn't get rid of them was right after I had my wisdom teeth removed (years ago) and I was still recovering from the effects of whatever valium derivative they used.
Didn't somebody post something not too long ago indicating that cable and Satellite companies have to provide you with the ability to choose which channels you want, and only pay for those? Is that true? If so, it would solve your problem.
Yeah, but this isn't really going to apply to you. There'll be some other technology that your children think you will have trouble coping with.
Look at the history. My Dad had no trouble whatsoever mastering the TV and remote control. That's because he grew up with the technology (maybe not the remote). But when VCRs came out, I was the only one in the family that could set the clock. (Dad learned when I left for College). He can use a computer as long as nothing goes wrong. As soon as there's a problem with it, he's at a loss. I, on the other hand, have no problem using and fixing computers. It's just a necessary evil. I fully expect that there will be some other new technology that I just can't grasp, which will seem simple to my children. I'll just have to have my son come over everytime the fusion generator needs to be reset or something like that.