Greetings and Salutations... Kind of an interesting mix of comments to this topic, ranging from uneducated prejudice to some fairly knowledgeable and thoughtful analysis. Now, for what it is worth, just after the events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant started, a geologist by the name of Evelyn Mervine, who was annoyed and frustrated by the lousy reporting of the events there got the idea to interview her father, who is a Nuclear Engineer, discussing the situation as it evolved. Of course, the originally planned three or four interviews extended to 20 or so, including a short but excellent overview of the various modern types of reactor designs covering both strengths and weaknesses. She has the interviews posted on her blog: http://georneys.blogspot.com While Ms. Mervine is a bit awkward in her role as a broadcast interviewer at times, it is a quite well done discussion and analysis of the ongoing crisis in Japan, and includes some discussion about steps that need to be taken to minimize the danger, as well as an overview of more current designs. I will say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I did transcribe several of the interviews, so I have some interest in them, but, I only volunteered to do this because I found it a fairly valuable thing. I recommend checking out all the interviews, as there is a lot of good information there.
Greetings and Salutations.
I have a nearby Panera's where I will go, with my laptop, and, hang out at a table. The fact of the matter is that I will end up buying more of their pastries, etc, than I would have if I had just walked in and had a lunch or a snack, because I am there for a longer period. Granted, Knoxville is much smaller than cities like LA/Frisco/NY, so, perhaps it is a worse problem there. However, I have observed that folks who use their computers are, generally, fairly polite about it. For example, I have seen several examples where folks that have been working at a table have packed up their computer and paperwork and such and headed out when the lunchtime crowd starts to show up.
As for the Wireless access, Panera's deals with that problem by limiting access to the Net to half an hour per computer between the hours of 11:00 and 14:00.
so, as long as folks are polite, I do not see this as a problem.
Ostrich meat is delicious and also healthier for you then cow. Unfortunately its hard to find here in America.
Yea....I used to have a favorite restaurant of mine here in Knoxpatch that served Ostrich burgers...and they were GOOD. Alas, it augered in a few years ago when the economy kind of crashed, and, I am not sure there is any place in town that serves the meat any more.
Not, of course, that I can afford to go out to eat that much these days either....
Sigh
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
Then you are looking at a partial crop of the entire graphic. In the entire image, there is a list below the image of the USA, and, for every cross-hair on a state there is a line, with another cross-hair image, and the name of a congress-critter that opposes Palin's point of view.
Violence is AN answer, it is just not necessarily the BEST answer.
Pleasant dreams
Dave Mundt
P.S. Oh yea...want to bet that there will be a big push by some percentage of the citizens and representatives now for increasingly draconian gun control/registration laws?
greetings and salutations.
that issue of testing code has been a point of discussion for decades...It has been my experience that generally code is written to pass the tests, and, in most applications these days, the data flow is so complicated it is almost impossible to write a test suite that will adequately exercise all the possible paths.
It is my feeling that the better course of action is to create a good data flow plan, then, write the code to make it happen. If the design is good, then, the probability of disaster drops by quite a bit.
For an existing system, like this one, it is likely that the best option is to start from scratch, create the data flow diagrams, and, remake the code to match. At this point in time, the code base is likely a scary mish-mash of programming styles and methods, so, a re-write with some consistency is better than just testing the existing code.
Having said this, though, I will say that there are some basic rules for that code that need to be hard walls that have to be done. Simple things, like sanity checks on the input data, checks for buffer/array over-runs and that sort of thing are very cost effective and go a long way towards keeping the bugs out.
So...on the down side, I cannot hop on the "test suite" ideal without a lot more info on how effective it might be. On the up side, re-writing the code "from scratch" will ensure job security for quite a while, and, will create a more consistent and usable code base.
Greetings and Salutations...
yea...wordperfect 5.1 was good, but, I found that I liked 6.x better. It seemed to be quicker, and just worked well for me. I continued to use Wordperfect though version 8, before moving on to Open Office, etc...
It is a shame that Wordperfect faded away. It was one heck of a great wordprocessor. If it had not drowned in the flood of computers with a free version of Word installed, it might still be around.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
This is amazingly optimistic, at least in the USA and anyone who really believes they are avoiding taxes by working as a temp is smoking some pure stuff. I suspect that the fact of the matter is that they are being presented to the employer as an independent contractor, which means that the employer has no obligation to pay any of the SSA taxes, etc, on that person. If the temp agency has them set up as an independent contractor, and the agency is just a broker...again...no obligation for federal taxes.
However, what that really means is that the employee is directly responsible not for the 7.5% SSA tax that we usually see, but, that amount PLUS the 7.5% contribution that the employer normally makes...so I, for example, as an independent contractor, pay 15% SSA tax...on top of the income taxes (if I had enough income to really PAY much of those).
What is likely to happen is that down the road, the employee who is NOT paying taxes is likely to become one of those folks negotiating with the IRS to cut down a $100,000+ unpaid tax and penalty assessment that we see in late-night ads for law firms that specialize in arguing these cases. Even when the economy is good, the IRS is like a bulldog in tracking down those debts, and, they seem to never forget. Now that the economy is bad, and tax revenues are down, the IRS is really chasing after every penny.
Pleasant dreams
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
A couple of points.
1) you (and several other posters here) seem to be confusing rape with sex. Rape has nothing to do with sex...it has to do with domination and having absolute power over another person. A locked door will keep out an honest person, but only slows down someone who wants in for a little bit. A rapist will do what is necessary to gain that domination and power no matter what.
2) I have had the owners of companies request a complete list of passwords for the systems I administer. I have always handed them over, but, with a cover letter that reminds the person that use of some of the passwords (Root, for example) can allow massive damage on the system, and, as such, their using those passwords, or letting others use those passwords would mean that I was not responsible or liable for any data or program issues that might arise. I would also point out that according to the statistics, about 75% of the companies that suffer catastrophic data loss went out of business. So far, no problems...The owners are re-assured that if I get hit by a truck, they can still get into their systems, and, I have covered my ass enough that if someone logs in and starts deleting files because they do not know what they are for, it is their problem.
Oh yea...I tend to keep good backups, so, as a part of this, I can usually do a restore back to a point when life was good. I have found that after a person has to type back in a few days of transactions again, because someone stupidly went in a wiped out a data file, the use of root password and such drops dramatically.
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
Having skimmed through the comments, I will say that it is a good feeling to know that there are so many of us highly competent artists who are massively under-appreciated and under paid. No...I am NOT being sarcastic here. Just the other day, I had a lengthy meeting with three very nice folks that wanted me to set up and administer a website pushing their brand of Zeolite. They had a reasonably cautious business plan, and, had thought about many expenses and such that could arise. Two of them are fairly successful business people, and, I say that because, while they may not be accumulating huge amounts of wealth, they are keeping their heads above water even in TODAY's nasty and fragile economy. In any case, we talked about the content of the site, and, while they had SOME information for it, it quickly became clear to me that they had the idea that I could come in, pop up a few pages for a couple hundred dollars, and, they could then forget the site while the orders and cash rolled in. They had no idea about search engine optimization (such as it is), or, adding content to keep folks interested in coming back to the site, or any of a half a dozen OTHER things that help generate interest in the site and, perhaps the product they were pushing.
Alas, it ALSO became clear as I spoke with them that they wanted me to create this website, including an e-commerce shopping cart, and, maintain it, either for free (Promises of great rewards to come when the company took off) or for small money (something on that $10/hour figure that has been tossed around already). Well, as an independent consultant, my hourly rate is just a tad larger than that, and, I just walked away from a client who spent a lot of time blowing smoke up my "dress" about how I was going to get these great rewards for my efforts on their behalf, as soon as the economy picked up. Being somewhat slow to learn, it took a while for me to look at them, driving their expensive BMWs, Lexi, and Hummers, and living in their million dollar houses, to realize that the only pocket the money was going to go into was theirs...not mine. So...to get back to my point....I thought about doing this online shop and website for these fine folks for a bit, and ended up writing them a proposal that, essentially, cut my hourly rate by about 25%, but, with a guaranteed monthly payment, and strict limits on how many hours per month they would get from me FOR that retainer. I also made it very clear that any time I spent over and above the allocated time would be charged at my regular rates, and, that I DID charge for time spent in meetings. My general rule there is that the client gets the first meeting free...after that...it gets billed.
So...it has been a few months now, and, oddly enough, I have not heard anything back from them. I suspect that, since it was mentioned in our original meeting, that they have gone ahead and talked the nephew of one of the folks into putting the site together. Should I have taken the job? At the time it was the only sign of work out there. However, since then, I have picked up several smaller clients, who call me on an as-needed basis, and, pay COD...so since I do not do this as a hobby, and, so far, the utility company has yet to give me free electricity, I think I made the correct decision.
Just to prove I am not totally wandering away from the topic at hand with this rant, the zeolite folks that I talked to were pretty much of the mindset that they had done all the hard work - coming up with the idea for the website and all they needed was a hack to go in and change some URLs or a bit of text to talk about THEM and THEIR product, and make it pretty. It has been my experience over the years that folks like this are not really downplaying the role of the programmer so much as they are running on that autopilot program th
Greetings and Salutations....
This has been going on for some time. I think it was late last year that I noticed that when I would do searches for reviews of items (software, hardware, businesses, etc), I would find a LOT of positive reviews but nothing negative. Since, up to that time, my experience with the Net was that the only people that really posted serious reviews were the ones who had a bad experience with the thing.
I cannot say enough about how annoying I find this sort of censorship. It ranks up with the fact that google has, for years, limited one's search results to the first 1000 or so hits. As I emailed to them at the time that they implemented this policy, it is not in the commonly traveled paths that I find the real treasures, but, in the dusty and ignored corners.
Dont worry about it...not only was it more interesting, it actually looked like a pretty good car-based analogy for what is being discussed here.
After all, it is a complicated mechanism, with pseudo-sexual movements that may or may not work.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
I would not say "TOO unstabile", but, I have switched over to firefox after using opera for years specifically because of the memory leak issue. I have a fairly vanilla OpenSuSE 11.3 installation, and, have been running OpenSuSE for quite some time. On EVERY version of the OS and Opera, over a period of time (say, several hours of browsing), the memory used by Opera will go from a fairly reasonable amount to 90% or more of total system memory. When it gets up above 80%, it starts dragging quite a bit, and, with time will suck so many resources that it will bring the system to a screeching halt. If I am lucky, I can force a close. Most of the time, I have to power down the machine, and bring it back up.
I REALLY like Opera's look and feel, but, that memory leak and dragging the system down has become so annoying that it is no longer possible for me to stick with it.
It is a real shame, too.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
While taxation is a touchy subject, and it is tempting to call for businesses to provide a majority of the taxes collected, remember that businesses do NOT pay those taxes. We, the consumers, do. When a tax is imposed on a business, the bean counters simply calculate how much more they will have to charge for their product to cover the cost of that tax, and, it gets passed along to the consumer.
Now, when an individual gets taxed, they are pretty much the end of the rope, so those taxes are a direct deduction of the amount of money in that person's pocket. Few, if any, of us can go to the business that employs us and say "the Feds have raised my income tax 10%, you have to bump up my compensation to ensure that I am getting the same amount of money I was before".
I am, in general, against taxes, because I see to many cases reported where the government takes my hard-earned money, and spends it with wild abandon on projects and such that seem utter foolishness to me, or, it ends up enriching the evildoers of the world (see the billions of dollars shipped to Iraq and lost, and, America's long history of supporting corrupt regimes that siphon off aid money sent for their people into their own pockets) However, if taxes MUST exist (and I recognize that the government needs SOME money to do what it has to do for the common good) I remain against taxes on businesses and for taxes on individuals.
Regards
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
1) in the dictionary of the government, the word "progressive" does not mean forward-thinking or making an effort to be the most modern on the block. Rather it means that the more money a citizen makes, the more money the government collects from them in taxes.
2) I really, really dislike HOAs. While some folks think they are a good thing, in my experience, they are more like the nosy little old lady who lives down the hall, and, seems to think it is her job to decide what is the best way to live YOUR life. They also promote mediocrity because they, more often than not, have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that the homeowner does to their property that is not white-bread ordinary.
3) Why complain about the mortgage/rent amounts? After all, it is capitalism in action, and a simple example of supply and demand. Of course, my opinion is that a lot of the folks that feel they "have" to live in the high-priced districts have too much of their personalities tied up in where they live. Also, conspicuous consumption has always been a favorite hobby of Americans.
4) As for the dollar figure quoted...Since a majority of Americans live in areas that are far less pricy than NYC, LA, San Francisco, etc, having a steady income of $75,000 would ensure that the citizen would be able to keep all their bills paid, and have a bit of a pad in case of emergencies. Also, with care, it should be possible to put a bit aside, build some savings and so have the ability to save money by paying cash for more major purchases. Eliminate those finance charges, and, life gets a lot more affordable.
One thing that was skipped over in the article, though, was whether this figure was post or pre-income tax. That would make a big difference, since taking out income taxes from that total would drop down the net quite a bit.
Greetings and Salutations...
Yea, but, Discovery also has a ton of interesting, science programs, including the new one called "Bad Universe". It is, as one might guess, about Astronomy, and his hosted by Phil Plait, who has had a great blog, called "Bad Astronomy" for some years...Well worth watching. regards dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
I have to say that the phrase "Friendly Fire" has bothered me for decades. Frankly, if someone is shooting at me, I do not care if it is my brother...it is NOT friendly! I realize there is a need to differentiate bullets from allies from bullets from the enemy, but would suggest that something more like "misdirected allied fire" or "FURBAR fire" would be more accurate and descriptive.
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
I have always enjoyed traveling by train, and, would be on it like a duck on a June Bug if it were available. However, there are three things that will have to happen before it will become successful.
1) Whoever takes on this project (and I suspect it will have to be the Federal Government), will have to lay out a growth plan that will continue to add lines to areas in the USA where access does not exist. One of the massive fails of Amtrak was that the company built a few lines...then stopped, apparently expecting that this would be enough. For a model, look at the light rail systems in larger cities, such as Washington D.C., New York, or Atlanta. In all three cases the lines are laid out to minimize the distance that a passenger has to travel to get to a station.
2) Arrange for auto transport cars to be part of the long-distance lines. This would allow the passenger to drive up to the station, get their vehicle loaded, and, enjoy a pleasant and comfortable ride across country. Upon arriving, they would have their own transport immediately available, which would go a long way towards making the trip more enjoyable.
3) Ensure that the cost of a train ticket is no more than that of an airplane ticket. A few years ago, I was going to travel to Washington D.C. for an event. The cost of a round-trip train ticket was close to $400.00, and, in order to GET to Amtrak I would have had to drive to Atlanta. The airplane ticket (also round trip) was $175, and, I could fly out of Knoxville. Prices may be more at a parity now, but, there is still that long drive to get to a station.
I would love to see train travel come back, as it is a great way to see the countryside, especially if one is not in a huge hurry.
Regards
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
It seems to me that the interlock is a bandaid on a hemorrhage. Perhaps instead of simply giving a persistent DUI offender a stiff prison sentence, and/or outfitting their care with some spiffy and expensive technology that SOMEONE is going to make a lot of money off of, it would be wiser to remember that alcoholism is a disease, not a choice. Instead of making it a profit center for some one, why do we not include the option of continuing therapy to get at the roots of the problem, and FIX it? Beyond that, there is a drug (Anti-buse, I think it is called) that makes one violently ill when quantities of alcohol are ingested. While not pretty, aversion therapy does work.
Of course, I suspect that these solutions probably would not be nearly as profitable as the technology answer....
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
This is true. The fact of the matter is that ONE of the ways government officials determine what the public wants is that the official (ok...his interns) put all the correspondence that has come in about a particular bill or topic into three stacks - pro and con and neutral. (Which includes the rambling rants that cannot be figured out). They then measure the heights of the stacks of paper, and, the tallest one wins!.
So...if you want to make an impact, you really need to sit down, print off a letter; put it in envelope and send it to the representative you want to influence. While petitions are a feel-good thing, that facebook petition, if printed off, would produce, perhaps, 50 pages (if it really had 10,000 folks signing it, at 200 names per page and a ream of paper is about 2" thick). That is, at most, a quarter inch of paper. Now, a stack of only 1000 individual letters is going to be close to five inches high... Guess which will give more impact? A stack of 10,000 letters is over 3' tall.....and has that much more impact.
Of course, the other thing that undercuts the impact of the letters is if they are all obviously printed from the same source. So...yes...you actually have to type a short note in your own words and send it along. It should not take longer than one of these/. rants, though, and may be worth it. Simply printing a petition page from a website, signing it, and sending it in is not going to do squat. That is the moral equivalent of the single petition with many signatures....Not much impact.
Finally....for elected folks, adding a large contribution to their campaign fund never hurts (*smile*). This is, after all, America!
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Oh yea...and another thing....about half way down the road, it appears that there is a public school on the North side of the street...so no WONDER the LEOs were interested in nailing this kid.
Greetings and Salutations.
I pulled up that area in google maps (would have preferred openstreetmap.org, but, the blasted search still is too limited). It is a densely populated area, so I suspect it was hardly an hour's work for a couple of officers to canvass the street and find witnesses to the speeding car. It would be interesting to find out how many times there had been complaints from the area about dangerous driving.
My bottom line here is that the kid is getting off easy, as there easily could have been a pedestrian stepping out into the road just in time to get smashed by his foolish act. If he wanted to put the pedal to the metal, perhaps he should have picked the Canadian equivalent of an Interstate highway to open it up.
Greetings and Salutations.
I have read a number of the opinions posted here, and, my first reaction is "Have any of these people actually even LOOKED at the documents posted on Wikileaks?" I have read quite a number of the documents available on line, and there are a few things that have popped out at me.
1) the only names that I have run across in the documents have been known taliban, insurgents and supporters of the insurgency.
2) A huge percentage of the reports are recording general suspicious activity picked up by routine patrols both on the ground and in the air.
3) There have been some interesting notes about aerial vehicles being shot at with missiles positively identified as stingers ( a little fact that has been, shall we say, downplayed, by the official military sources).
4) On the other hand, there are quite a number of reports of Afghan nationals (so far, all un-named) with war-related injuries being flown out for medical attention. Pretty much all the ones I have read have apparently been civilians caught up by accident.
Now, there may be some military usage in the times and dates and such listed with each event, but, I suspect that any decent intelligence service will already HAVE the time and location details listed in the reports.
I was also interested to see the number of times when fairly suspicious behavior, or serious weapons of war were observed, yet, no action was taken to kill the enemy, or, destroy the weapons (tanks, howitzers, etc).
Overall, it seems to me that the biggest issue with Wikileaks is that they have dumped out a bunch of information, concealed by our government, that shows that some of the positive spin put on the situation in Afghanistan is a bit thinner than they would have us believe.
Greetings and Salutations...
Reminds me of a great wargame from the late 70s/early 80s called "Car Wars". Basic idea was that you COULD have that gatlin gun mounted on your vehicle, and, blow away the other idiots on the road. There was also a crossover with AD&D where, among other fun things (can you say Fireball Spell?) you could invoke a mechanic demon who was outside time so could rebuild your entire car while it was traveling down the road at 120 MPH.
Be careful what you wish for, though. Remember that no matter how good a shot you think you are...there are at least a dozen people around you that are better.
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
Hum...this sounds as if it could be applied to almost ANY industry, not just the gaming industry. Think back to the days when Dave and Bill were running HP and it was rated "the best company to work for". For every ONE HP there were thousands of companies that treated their employees like slaves, and were rampant with the sort of evil doings listed here. That remains true today, alas, and may be MORE true with the stresses of the economy being what they are.
It has been my experience that MOST companies are run by greedy, thieving bastards, and the best the employee can hope for is to not get screwed too badly as the company is drained into the pockets of upper level management.
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Slashdot Mirror
Greetings and Salutations...
Kind of an interesting mix of comments to this topic, ranging from uneducated prejudice to some fairly knowledgeable and thoughtful analysis. Now, for what it is worth, just after the events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant started, a geologist by the name of Evelyn Mervine, who was annoyed and frustrated by the lousy reporting of the events there got the idea to interview her father, who is a Nuclear Engineer, discussing the situation as it evolved. Of course, the originally planned three or four interviews extended to 20 or so, including a short but excellent overview of the various modern types of reactor designs covering both strengths and weaknesses. She has the interviews posted on her blog: http://georneys.blogspot.com While Ms. Mervine is a bit awkward in her role as a broadcast interviewer at times, it is a quite well done discussion and analysis of the ongoing crisis in Japan, and includes some discussion about steps that need to be taken to minimize the danger, as well as an overview of more current designs. I will say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I did transcribe several of the interviews, so I have some interest in them, but, I only volunteered to do this because I found it a fairly valuable thing. I recommend checking out all the interviews, as there is a lot of good information there.
Greetings and Salutations.
I have a nearby Panera's where I will go, with my laptop, and, hang out at a table. The fact of the matter is that I will end up buying more of their pastries, etc, than I would have if I had just walked in and had a lunch or a snack, because I am there for a longer period. Granted, Knoxville is much smaller than cities like LA/Frisco/NY, so, perhaps it is a worse problem there. However, I have observed that folks who use their computers are, generally, fairly polite about it. For example, I have seen several examples where folks that have been working at a table have packed up their computer and paperwork and such and headed out when the lunchtime crowd starts to show up.
As for the Wireless access, Panera's deals with that problem by limiting access to the Net to half an hour per computer between the hours of 11:00 and 14:00.
so, as long as folks are polite, I do not see this as a problem.
Ostrich meat is delicious and also healthier for you then cow. Unfortunately its hard to find here in America.
Yea....I used to have a favorite restaurant of mine here in Knoxpatch that
served Ostrich burgers...and they were GOOD. Alas, it augered in
a few years ago when the economy kind of crashed, and, I am not sure
there is any place in town that serves the meat any more.
Not, of course, that I can afford to go out to eat that much
these days either....
Sigh
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
Then you are looking at a partial crop of the entire graphic. In the entire image,
there is a list below the image of the USA, and, for every cross-hair on a state
there is a line, with another cross-hair image, and the name of a congress-critter
that opposes Palin's point of view.
Violence is AN answer, it is just not necessarily the BEST answer.
Pleasant dreams
Dave Mundt
P.S. Oh yea...want to bet that there will be a big push by some percentage of the citizens and representatives now for
increasingly draconian gun control/registration laws?
Greetings and salutations...
Here at the University of Tennessee, the president of the university gets paid about $300K/year.
The head football coach gets paid over $1million.
where does THAT say the priorities lie?
pleasant dreams
ddave mundt
greetings and salutations.
that issue of testing code has been a point of discussion for decades...It has been my experience
that generally code is written to pass the tests, and, in most applications these days, the data
flow is so complicated it is almost impossible to write a test suite that will adequately exercise
all the possible paths.
It is my feeling that the better course of action is to create a good data flow plan, then, write
the code to make it happen. If the design is good, then, the probability of disaster drops
by quite a bit.
For an existing system, like this one, it is likely that the best option is to start from scratch,
create the data flow diagrams, and, remake the code to match. At this point in time, the
code base is likely a scary mish-mash of programming styles and methods, so, a re-write
with some consistency is better than just testing the existing code.
Having said this, though, I will say that there are some basic rules for that code that
need to be hard walls that have to be done. Simple things, like sanity checks on the input
data, checks for buffer/array over-runs and that sort of thing are very cost effective and go
a long way towards keeping the bugs out.
So...on the down side, I cannot hop on the "test suite" ideal without a lot more info
on how effective it might be. On the up side, re-writing the code "from scratch" will
ensure job security for quite a while, and, will create a more consistent and usable
code base.
Greetings and Salutations...
yea...wordperfect 5.1 was good, but, I found that I liked 6.x better. It seemed to
be quicker, and just worked well for me. I continued to use Wordperfect though
version 8, before moving on to Open Office, etc...
It is a shame that Wordperfect faded away. It was one heck of a great
wordprocessor. If it had not drowned in the flood of computers with a
free version of Word installed, it might still be around.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
This is amazingly optimistic, at least in the USA and anyone who really believes they are avoiding taxes by working as a temp is smoking some pure stuff. I suspect that the fact of the matter is that they are being presented to the employer as an independent contractor, which means that the employer has no obligation to pay any of the SSA taxes, etc, on that person. If the temp agency has them set up as an independent contractor, and the agency is just a broker...again...no obligation for federal taxes.
However, what that really means is that the employee is directly responsible not for the 7.5% SSA tax that we usually see, but, that amount PLUS the 7.5% contribution that the employer normally makes...so I, for example, as an independent contractor, pay 15% SSA tax...on top of the income taxes (if I had enough income to really PAY much of those).
What is likely to happen is that down the road, the employee who is NOT paying taxes is likely to become one of those folks negotiating with the IRS to cut down a $100,000+ unpaid tax and penalty assessment that we see in late-night ads for law firms that specialize in arguing these cases. Even when the economy is good, the IRS is like a bulldog in tracking down those debts, and, they seem to never forget. Now that the economy is bad, and tax revenues are down, the IRS is really chasing after every penny.
Pleasant dreams
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
A couple of points.
1) you (and several other posters here) seem to be confusing rape with sex. Rape has nothing to do with sex...it has to do with domination and having absolute power over another person. A locked door will keep out an honest person, but only slows down someone who wants in for a little bit. A rapist will do what is necessary to gain that domination and power no matter what.
2) I have had the owners of companies request a complete list of passwords for the systems I administer. I have always handed them over, but, with a cover letter that reminds the person that use of some of the passwords (Root, for example) can allow massive damage on the system, and, as such, their using those passwords, or letting others use those passwords would mean that I was not responsible or liable for any data or program issues that might arise. I would also point out that according to the statistics, about 75% of the companies that suffer catastrophic data loss went out of business. So far, no problems...The owners are re-assured that if I get hit by a truck, they can still get into their systems, and, I have covered my ass enough that if someone logs in and starts deleting files because they do not know what they are for, it is their problem.
Oh yea...I tend to keep good backups, so, as a part of this, I can usually do a restore back to a point when life was good. I have found that after a person has to type back in a few days of transactions again, because someone stupidly went in a wiped out a data file, the use of root password and such drops dramatically.
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
Having skimmed through the comments, I will say that it is a good feeling to know that there are so many of us highly competent artists who are massively under-appreciated and under paid. No...I am NOT being sarcastic here. Just the other day, I had a lengthy meeting with three very nice folks that wanted me to set up and administer a website pushing their brand of Zeolite. They had a reasonably cautious business plan, and, had thought about many expenses and such that could arise. Two of them are fairly successful business people, and, I say that because, while they may not be accumulating huge amounts of wealth, they are keeping their heads above water even in TODAY's nasty and fragile economy. In any case, we talked about the content of the site, and, while they had SOME information for it, it quickly became clear to me that they had the idea that I could come in, pop up a few pages for a couple hundred dollars, and, they could then forget the site while the orders and cash rolled in. They had no idea about search engine optimization (such as it is), or, adding content to keep folks interested in coming back to the site, or any of a half a dozen OTHER things that help generate interest in the site and, perhaps the product they were pushing.
Alas, it ALSO became clear as I spoke with them that they wanted me to create this website, including an e-commerce shopping cart, and, maintain it, either for free (Promises of great rewards to come when the company took off) or for small money (something on that $10/hour figure that has been tossed around already). Well, as an independent consultant, my hourly rate is just a tad larger than that, and, I just walked away from a client who spent a lot of time blowing smoke up my "dress" about how I was going to get these great rewards for my efforts on their behalf, as soon as the economy picked up. Being somewhat slow to learn, it took a while for me to look at them, driving their expensive BMWs, Lexi, and Hummers, and living in their million dollar houses, to realize that the only pocket the money was going to go into was theirs...not mine. So...to get back to my point....I thought about doing this online shop and website for these fine folks for a bit, and ended up writing them a proposal that, essentially, cut my hourly rate by about 25%, but, with a guaranteed monthly payment, and strict limits on how many hours per month they would get from me FOR that retainer. I also made it very clear that any time I spent over and above the allocated time would be charged at my regular rates, and, that I DID charge for time spent in meetings. My general rule there is that the client gets the first meeting free...after that...it gets billed.
So...it has been a few months now, and, oddly enough, I have not heard anything back from them. I suspect that, since it was mentioned in our original meeting, that they have gone ahead and talked the nephew of one of the folks into putting the site together. Should I have taken the job? At the time it was the only sign of work out there. However, since then, I have picked up several smaller clients, who call me on an as-needed basis, and, pay COD...so since I do not do this as a hobby, and, so far, the utility company has yet to give me free electricity, I think I made the correct decision.
Just to prove I am not totally wandering away from the topic at hand with this rant, the zeolite folks that I talked to were pretty much of the mindset that they had done all the hard work - coming up with the idea for the website and all they needed was a hack to go in and change some URLs or a bit of text to talk about THEM and THEIR product, and make it pretty. It has been my experience over the years that folks like this are not really downplaying the role of the programmer so much as they are running on that autopilot program th
Greetings and Salutations....
This has been going on for some time. I think it was late last year that I noticed that when I would
do searches for reviews of items (software, hardware, businesses, etc), I would find a LOT of positive
reviews but nothing negative. Since, up to that time, my experience with the Net was that the
only people that really posted serious reviews were the ones who had a bad experience with the
thing.
I cannot say enough about how annoying I find this sort of censorship. It ranks up with the
fact that google has, for years, limited one's search results to the first 1000 or so hits. As I emailed
to them at the time that they implemented this policy, it is not in the commonly traveled paths that
I find the real treasures, but, in the dusty and ignored corners.
visit my blog at http://blog.beemandave.com/
Dont worry about it...not only was it more interesting,
it actually looked like a pretty good car-based analogy
for what is being discussed here.
After all, it is a complicated mechanism, with pseudo-sexual
movements that may or may not work.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
I would not say "TOO unstabile", but, I have switched over to firefox after using opera for years specifically because of the memory leak issue. I have a fairly vanilla OpenSuSE 11.3 installation, and, have been running OpenSuSE for quite some time. On EVERY version of the OS and Opera, over a period of time (say, several hours of browsing), the memory used by Opera will go from a fairly reasonable amount to 90% or more of total system memory. When it gets up above 80%, it starts dragging quite a bit, and, with time will suck so many resources that it will bring the system to a screeching halt. If I am lucky, I can force a close. Most of the time, I have to power down the machine, and bring it back up.
I REALLY like Opera's look and feel, but, that memory leak and dragging the system down has become so annoying that it is no longer possible for me to stick with it.
It is a real shame, too.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
While taxation is a touchy subject, and it is tempting to call for businesses to provide a majority of the taxes collected, remember that businesses do NOT pay those taxes. We, the consumers, do. When a tax is imposed on a business, the bean counters simply calculate how much more they will have to charge for their product to cover the cost of that tax, and, it gets passed along to the consumer.
Now, when an individual gets taxed, they are pretty much the end of the rope, so those taxes are a direct deduction of the amount of money in that person's pocket. Few, if any, of us can go to the business that employs us and say "the Feds have raised my income tax 10%, you have to bump up my compensation to ensure that I am getting the same amount of money I was before".
I am, in general, against taxes, because I see to many cases reported where the government takes my hard-earned money, and spends it with wild abandon on projects and such that seem utter foolishness to me, or, it ends up enriching the evildoers of the world (see the billions of dollars shipped to Iraq and lost, and, America's long history of supporting corrupt regimes that siphon off aid money sent for their people into their own pockets) However, if taxes MUST exist (and I recognize that the government needs SOME money to do what it has to do for the common good) I remain against taxes on businesses and for taxes on individuals.
Regards
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
1) in the dictionary of the government, the word "progressive" does not mean forward-thinking or making an effort to be the most modern on the block. Rather it means that the more money a citizen makes, the more money the government collects from them in taxes.
2) I really, really dislike HOAs. While some folks think they are a good thing, in my experience, they are more like the nosy little old lady who lives down the hall, and, seems to think it is her job to decide what is the best way to live YOUR life. They also promote mediocrity because they, more often than not, have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that the homeowner does to their property that is not white-bread ordinary.
3) Why complain about the mortgage/rent amounts? After all, it is capitalism in action, and a simple example of supply and demand. Of course, my opinion is that a lot of the folks that feel they "have" to live in the high-priced districts have too much of their personalities tied up in where they live. Also, conspicuous consumption has always been a favorite hobby of Americans.
4) As for the dollar figure quoted...Since a majority of Americans live in areas that are far less pricy than NYC, LA, San Francisco, etc, having a steady income of $75,000 would ensure that the citizen would be able to keep all their bills paid, and have a bit of a pad in case of emergencies. Also, with care, it should be possible to put a bit aside, build some savings and so have the ability to save money by paying cash for more major purchases. Eliminate those finance charges, and, life gets a lot more affordable.
One thing that was skipped over in the article, though, was whether this figure was post or pre-income tax. That would make a big difference, since taking out income taxes from that total would drop down the net quite a bit.
Greetings and Salutations...
Yea, but, Discovery also has a ton of interesting, science programs, including the new one called "Bad Universe". It is, as one might guess, about Astronomy, and his hosted by Phil Plait, who has had a great blog, called "Bad Astronomy" for some years...Well worth watching.
regards
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
I have to say that the phrase "Friendly Fire" has bothered me for decades. Frankly, if someone is shooting at me, I do not care if it is my brother...it is NOT friendly! I realize there is a need to differentiate bullets from allies from bullets from the enemy, but would suggest that something more like "misdirected allied fire" or "FURBAR fire" would be more accurate and descriptive.
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
I have always enjoyed traveling by train, and, would be on it like a duck on a June Bug if it were available. However, there are three things that will have to happen before it will become successful.
1) Whoever takes on this project (and I suspect it will have to be the Federal Government), will have to lay out a growth plan that will continue to add lines to areas in the USA where access does not exist. One of the massive fails of Amtrak was that the company built a few lines...then stopped, apparently expecting that this would be enough. For a model, look at the light rail systems in larger cities, such as Washington D.C., New York, or Atlanta. In all three cases the lines are laid out to minimize the distance that a passenger has to travel to get to a station.
2) Arrange for auto transport cars to be part of the long-distance lines. This would allow the passenger to drive up to the station, get their vehicle loaded, and, enjoy a pleasant and comfortable ride across country. Upon arriving, they would have their own transport immediately available, which would go a long way towards making the trip more enjoyable.
3) Ensure that the cost of a train ticket is no more than that of an airplane ticket. A few years ago, I was going to travel to Washington D.C. for an event. The cost of a round-trip train ticket was close to $400.00, and, in order to GET to Amtrak I would have had to drive to Atlanta. The airplane ticket (also round trip) was $175, and, I could fly out of Knoxville. Prices may be more at a parity now, but, there is still that long drive to get to a station.
I would love to see train travel come back, as it is a great way to see the countryside, especially if one is not in a huge hurry.
Regards
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
It seems to me that the interlock is a bandaid on a hemorrhage. Perhaps instead of simply giving a persistent DUI offender a stiff prison sentence, and/or outfitting their care with some spiffy and expensive technology that SOMEONE is going to make a lot of money off of, it would be wiser to remember that alcoholism is a disease, not a choice. Instead of making it a profit center for some one, why do we not include the option of continuing therapy to get at the roots of the problem, and FIX it? Beyond that, there is a drug (Anti-buse, I think it is called) that makes one violently ill when quantities of alcohol are ingested. While not pretty, aversion therapy does work.
Of course, I suspect that these solutions probably would not be nearly as profitable as the technology answer....
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations.... /. rants, though, and may be worth it. Simply printing a petition page from a website, signing it, and sending it in is not going to do squat. That is the moral equivalent of the single petition with many signatures....Not much impact.
This is true. The fact of the matter is that ONE of the ways government officials determine what the public wants is that the official (ok...his interns) put all the correspondence that has come in about a particular bill or topic into three stacks - pro and con and neutral. (Which includes the rambling rants that cannot be figured out). They then measure the heights of the stacks of paper, and, the tallest one wins!.
So...if you want to make an impact, you really need to sit down, print off a letter; put it in envelope and send it to the representative you want to influence. While petitions are a feel-good thing, that facebook petition, if printed off, would produce, perhaps, 50 pages (if it really had 10,000 folks signing it, at 200 names per page and a ream of paper is about 2" thick). That is, at most, a quarter inch of paper. Now, a stack of only 1000 individual letters is going to be close to five inches high... Guess which will give more impact? A stack of 10,000 letters is over 3' tall.....and has that much more impact.
Of course, the other thing that undercuts the impact of the letters is if they are all obviously printed from the same source. So...yes...you actually have to type a short note in your own words and send it along. It should not take longer than one of these
Finally....for elected folks, adding a large contribution to their campaign fund never hurts (*smile*). This is, after all, America!
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Oh yea...and another thing....about half way down the road, it appears that there is a public school on the North side of the street...so no WONDER the LEOs were interested in nailing this kid.
Greetings and Salutations.
I pulled up that area in google maps (would have preferred openstreetmap.org, but, the blasted search still is too limited). It is a densely populated area, so I suspect it was hardly an hour's work for a couple of officers to canvass the street and find witnesses to the speeding car. It would be interesting to find out how many times there had been complaints from the area about dangerous driving.
My bottom line here is that the kid is getting off easy, as there easily could have been a pedestrian stepping out into the road just in time to get smashed by his foolish act. If he wanted to put the pedal to the metal, perhaps he should have picked the Canadian equivalent of an Interstate highway to open it up.
Greetings and Salutations.
I have read a number of the opinions posted here, and, my first reaction is "Have any of these people actually even LOOKED at the documents posted on Wikileaks?"
I have read quite a number of the documents available on line, and there are a few things that have popped out at me.
1) the only names that I have run across in the documents have been known taliban, insurgents and supporters of the insurgency.
2) A huge percentage of the reports are recording general suspicious activity picked up by routine patrols both on the ground and in the air.
3) There have been some interesting notes about aerial vehicles being shot at with missiles positively identified as stingers ( a little fact that has been, shall we say, downplayed, by the official military sources).
4) On the other hand, there are quite a number of reports of Afghan nationals (so far, all un-named) with war-related injuries being flown out for medical attention. Pretty much all the ones I have read have apparently been civilians caught up by accident.
Now, there may be some military usage in the times and dates and such listed with each event, but, I suspect that any decent intelligence service will already
HAVE the time and location details listed in the reports.
I was also interested to see the number of times when fairly suspicious behavior, or serious weapons of war were observed, yet, no action was taken to kill the enemy, or, destroy the weapons (tanks, howitzers, etc).
Overall, it seems to me that the biggest issue with Wikileaks is that they have dumped out a bunch of information, concealed by our government, that shows that some of the positive spin put on the situation in Afghanistan is a bit thinner than they would have us believe.
Pleasant Dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations...
Reminds me of a great wargame from the late 70s/early 80s called "Car Wars". Basic idea was that you COULD have that gatlin gun mounted on your vehicle, and, blow away the other idiots on the road. There was also a crossover with AD&D where, among other fun things (can you say Fireball Spell?) you could invoke a mechanic demon who was outside time so could rebuild your entire car while it was traveling down the road at 120 MPH.
Be careful what you wish for, though. Remember that no matter how good a shot you think you are...there are at least a dozen people around you that are better.
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Greetings and Salutations....
Hum...this sounds as if it could be applied to almost ANY industry, not just the gaming industry. Think back to the days when Dave and Bill were running HP and it was rated "the best company to work for". For every ONE HP there were thousands of companies that treated their employees like slaves, and were rampant with the sort of evil doings listed here. That remains true today, alas, and may be MORE true with the stresses of the economy being what they are.
It has been my experience that MOST companies are run by greedy, thieving bastards, and the best the employee can hope for is to not get screwed too badly as the company is drained into the pockets of upper level management.
pleasant dreams
dave mundt