I'm actually for abolishing the corporate profit taxes. If you're going to tax corporations, there are better ways to do it.
A tiny percentage of gross revenues could work, although it hurts companies with small margins and large volumes more than higher-margin companies.
Taxing the consumables the corporation uses rather than exempting those then taxing the profits would be simpler in the tax code (they'd pay sales taxes just like consumers, collected by the sellers). It would also be another reason to use resources more efficiently and be less wasteful.
Many people in the US don't realize it, but the employer actually pays as much for the employee's payroll taxes as they withhold from the employee. This hurts employees in a number of ways. For one, it is one of the factors in the "self employment tax burden" many people run into when they start freelancing or open a proprietorship. They suddenly pay both parts of the tax and are mistakenly told more often than not that the tax is just double if you work for yourself. The other part of the tax had previously just been hidden from the employees. So people who might otherwise become entrepreneurs tend to stay as employees longer or maybe indefinitely. Another way it hurts employees is that every time an employer goes to raise wages or salaries, they actually pay a good percentage more in increases than what the employee sees. This encourages wages and salaries to go up more slowly. Then there's the fact that ten to twenty percent more employees could be on payrolls if only the employees were paying payroll taxes. It seems like even more than that at first glance, but you have to consider untaxed benefits, work space, administrative costs, facilities and utilities costs, and increased management costs. If the employers' payroll taxes were removed from the federal tax code, you'd see more people working for more money, more spending in consumer markets, more liquidity in the overall US economy, and eventually a larger tax revenue for the government as overall payrolls rose between higher average pay and more paychecks being taxed to meet or exceed the previous total.
I'm also all for simplifying the income tax on individuals. I like Steve Forbes' idea of a flat 17% (or a little higher or lower) on all income over some minimum floor of untaxed income (say, $20,000 per year or $25,000). If you earned $26k with a $25k "income floor" you'd pay 17% of $1000, or $170. If you made $2,025,000 with the same floor, you'd pay 17% of $2 million ($340,000). No loopholes and no deductions would be allowed. Maybe the occasional emergency policy credit that expires like the one-time home buyer's credit could be worked in some years, but that sort of policy is still better handled by some other agency. The IRS being a clearinghouse for policy promotion that cuts across the missions of other agencies argues for either trimming those other agencies or putting them in charge of their own grants to citizens and businesses.
I'm talking about the Irish offices only existing, no matter their size, in order to do this with the taxes. Meanwhile, the Google shareholders whose shares are traded on an American stock market report huge profits for the company as a whole in US dollars when driving up their stock price, because the money is theoretically under the direct control of the US headquarters. Yet they only pay taxes on what actually comes to the US on the books.
Either they are making the money as a company or not. If their rightful profit center for this money is in Ireland, then maybe that subsidiary should be traded on an Irish market. If it's not profit according to the IRS because the profits are sitting in Ireland then maybe they shouldn't shouldn't be reported as profits at the company HQ under the SEC rules.
How is a decimeter any less practical or less intuitive than a centimeter? A decimeter is closer to the length of a pen than a centimeter. It's closer to the width of a soup bowl or sandwich plate.
"30 centimeters" sounds much more precise than "3 decimeters", so if your estimate is off a couple of centimeters, your error vs. your basis of measurement is ten times as high. When giving estimates, it's much better to use a unit that loses precision than to miscommunicate how much precision you're using. Of course you can get as precise as you want (or at least as your equipment allows) if you're measuring, but an awful lot of informal communication about lengths, weights, and volumes is estimated by sight. I'd favor "0.3 meters" over "30 centimeters" if I hadn't actually measured to within a few millimeters of 30 centimeters.
ADHD doesn't make people "a bit slow". ADHD makes people poorly focused. People with ADHD daydream, fidget, and sometimes fail to pay attention at important moments. Typically, someone with ADHD has an average to very high IQ. Someone who is "a bit slow" likely has mild mental retardation or just happens to be on the wrong slope of the bell curve. Plenty of people with ADHD learn and remember concepts and facts very quickly and test well over those facts, but forget to do busywork or are caught daydreaming in class by the teacher.
Maybe I benefit from limited socialization and being picky about my associations in the first place, but I'm not sure I know any adults who forgot the definition of "year".
They could leave a shell in the EU and report most of the income in Singapore once the EU shell pays its support fees or whatever to the other subsidiary. This is the sort of trick they're in Ireland for in the first place.
ITYM the US should slap Google with a huge tax bill for running a bunch of business through Ireland's 12.5% tax rate rather than the Us 35% corporate tax rate in the first place. They are based in the US, after all. Google shelters itself from US taxes using Ireland and shelters itself from Irish taxes in Bermuda. It's not speculation on my part. It's all very well documented. The sad part is that right now it's all perfectly legal to move money around internationally for the express purpose of lowering the taxes paid.
http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-being-evil-google-pays-24-tax-rate.html">Tax Justice Network (which cites the Bloomberg article but discusses it further)
These arrangements allow Google, a US company, to put its sales of ads for everywhere outside the US into a wholly owned Irish subsidiary and lower the tax rate on all of those non-domestic sales to 2.4% when their domestic tax rate on profits is 35% and their Irish tax rate would normally be 12.5%. They screw the US with Ireland and then screw Ireland with Bermuda. Lots of other companies do the same, sometimes with the Caymans replacing or supplementing Bermuda. Sometimes they move money through The Netherlands or somewhere else for even more benefits.
Magnetic deflection is used quite regularly on very small things (electron beams in a CRT for instance, or protons in the massive Van Allen radiation belts around Earth). Anything with a charge, though, is a magnet. Any conductor can have a current and therefore an electric field induced in it by a magnet. If you have a strong enough magnet positioned just right and time the movements just right, you can induce a current into a metal and then repel the metal rather than attract it.
There are then the diamagnetic solids, of which lead is one. In a diamagnetic object, the induced magnetic fields actually repel the object from the magnet rather than attract it. All materials are to some extent diamagnetic, but most are also to some extent ferromagnetic or paramagnetic, and are classified by their net overall effect. The velocity of a bullet fired from a pistol or rifle would be much higher than you could readily produce via diamagnetism, since diamagnetism is a pretty weak force. Given a powerful enough magnet, though, you could theoretically repel lead, copper, or a few other materials in their solid state. Good luck overcoming chemical explosives for velocity, though.
As I said, the SI (and non-SI metric) units are logical for using mathematically,which makes sense because that's why they were invented that way. The Imperial measurements, though, make sense in their own sizes compared to everyday things you actually measure. The math is harder, though, because you have to keep all these archaic and somewhat arbitrary conversions in your head or handy on a reference of some sort.
The hand is pretty disused these days. That's true. It's still just as easy to say "2 hands" as to say "eight inches", and there's not as much false precision when estimating. I'd be more likely with most people I guess to say "about 2/3 of a foot" than "two hands" or "eight inches".
3/4 of a pint is 3/8 of a quart is 3/32 of a gallon. It makes sense immediately to me that it's a little less than a tenth of a gallon, because I know from memory that 128 ounces is a gallon. That memory is useful once you have it, but gaining it in the first place is no doubt a pain.
Overloading the word "ounce" causes much less trouble than most people would guess. Even when cooking, which is when both are most likely to be used, it's a good rule of thumb that if "fluid ounce" and "dry ounce" aren't mentioned that anything you'd cut is measured in weight and anything bulk that you'd pour (whether dry like flour or fluid) is in fluid ounces. Never mind that you buy flour or sugar in dry pounds and ounces and use it in volume measurements.;-)
I'm not sure "most" people have problems with basic ratios and fractions, though.
I know that 100 kph is about 62 mph (62.12 IIRC), so 42 kph is about 26 mph. It turns out it's actually 26.1 or so. Even to estimate I have to do the math, but I have a starting point of reference memorized. It's pretty convenient since it's 100 on one of the scales.
My references for temperature are a little more fuzzy. There's an easy pair of formulas to convert between them (c = (f-32) * 5/9 and f = c * 9/5 + 32), but I always find it easier to remember for some reason several reference points. -40 is about the same in both. 0 C is 32 F of course, 10 C is 50 F, 20 C is 68 F, 30 C is 86 F, 40 C is 104 F. I tend to remember those as "about 50, about 70, about 90, and about 105", even though 10 degrees C is right on 50 F. I guess one could remember that right around 10 is right around 50 F and that every 10 C is about 18 F. It'd get you by for most ambient temperatures.
The reason we in the US are so accustomed to liters is that soda and bottled water are often sold that way. Half a liter is about an ounce more than a pint, a liter is close to a quart, and 750 ml is close to a fifth of a gallon (which is useful for hard liquor, since that's a traditional size in the US). The liter itself is a pretty handy size, which is probably why it is used pretty much everywhere. I don't see anyone filling their gas tank in cubic meters or anything like that.
Five feet is equal to 60 inches, and a meter is about 39.4 inches. So that'd be about 1.5 meters. (It's actually 1.524 to be a little more precise, but I didn't estimate that conversion.) I'm aware that not being exposed to the units makes things quite a bit more difficult. I was also previously aware of the idea of fractions of a meter, but the decimeter still seems like a more useful measurement for everyday things (even though it is, by definition, itself a particular fraction of a meter).
You may already be aware of this, but the Imperial system as used in the US is now defined in terms of the metric system. Also, our food packaging is generally labelled both ways. Many industrial manufacturing plants use millimeters and micrometers rather than fractions of an inch and grams rather than grains or pounds. Scientific work may include Imperial measurements but always includes the metric. It's too bad some poor science reporting from magazines doesn't follow suit.
One place Imperial measurements make a whole lot of sense, though, is in the kitchen. It may be annoying that three teaspoons is a tablespoon, that eight fluid ounces is a cup, and that sixteen dry ounces is a pound, but those are ratios that actually work out pretty well for ingredients an awful lot of the time. Grams and milliliters are more precise units, but they are overly precise for most recipes.
I don't think the distinction is so much between analog and digital as between synchronous and asynchronous. The brain doesn't have a quartz crystal or a cesium atom telling it when a thought is over. It settles on a result, then sets a flag letting you know it's ready to read another input. In the mean time, some tasks take longer than others. Think of it as a CISC machine with no clock pulse and some bus contention maybe rather than a tightly clocked synchronous RISC machine.
Also, it's pretty clear that certain parts of the brain tend to act as special coprocessors or at least NUMA general purpose processors. Your data is moving from one place to another with different locality.
Add to that the fact that to get precision you must let the data circuits settle before relying on them (the purpose of latches and a clock in most traditional computer processors) but that most of our lives are lead in approximations, and it's easy to see why we're poorly constructed to do precise calculations as quickly as approximations.
We can build computers to be much faster at rough approximations and with good accuracy but poor precision than at precise answers, too. We usually don't, except for Non-P and NP problems, because having exact answers quickly is often the main advantage to using a computer.
Getting approximate answers even faster from the computer is only useful in certain situations. Oddly enough, many (but not all by any means) of these situations are things humans are already really good at on our own. The facial recognition used as an example in TFA is one. Maneuvering over rough ground, identifying close to optimal paths for the Traveling Salesman problem for a small number of inputs, or translating speech into text are all things most humans do pretty easily any time. They happen to be really difficult to do quickly with precision whether using a computer or not.
Luckily, we don't have to calculate the force of every footfall when we walk. Getting a close to optimal travelling route is much better than getting one of the worst options. For larger numbers of stops, a computer will do better faster than most humans on this problem, but that's because we know how to make the computer estimate, too. We tend to work with phonemes and with local context when working out the meaning of a sentence, and the best computer dictation and language translation systems (which are still lacking) do a lot of guessing and inferring based on context, too.
We live in a sloppy world. We get mostly sloppy inputs and produce mostly sloppy outputs. Things work out fine most of the time that way, but we need precision for some of our own non-natural projects. Getting precise answers when you don't need them is wasteful of resources. It's no wonder that to survive we're very good at getting sloppy answers quickly. It's no use to wait and figure out which exact angle you need to run away from danger. Close to 180 degrees is pretty good.
I don't recall a proper citation, but I seem to remember that even identifying quantities at a glance goes something like "none, one, two, three, four, five or six, some, a dozen, a score, a few score, oh my that's a lot". The specific levels at which those change over can vary, of course. Some people probably would say "about ten" before they'd say "about a dozen", too.
One thing I've always liked about the Imperial measurement system, in fact, is that although the math is a little harder the units and their ratios really seem to be more relevant. An inch, a hand, a foot, and a yard seem to be more reasonably compared to one another than a millimeter, a centimeter, and a meter. There's the decimeter which seems it would be a very reasonable length for measuring everyday things, but the meter is too long for many things and the centimeter is too short. I'm not sure why the decimeter is almost never used. The cubed decimeter is even the definition of the (surprisingly non-SI) liter. The official SI unit of volume is the cubic meter. Who the hell drinks a cubic meter of anything at one go? I'd drink a liter or a quart, or maybe a cup or a pint. Maybe even a half gallon or two liters Maybe several pints if you'd kindly agree to drive me home.;-)
We also haven't been worried so much about exact numbers of things for much of that time, and matching faces against memories isn't that exact of an example.
You're likely to recognize someone who grew a mustache or cut their hair, or to ask someone familiar to you where they got a fresh scar rather than walking right past them.
You are also not likely to care exactly how many bushels of barley you raised until you start selling the grain for currency or protecting it from known thieves. So long as your granary doesn't run out before the next harvest, you have enough grain. Even when bartering or selling for currency, unless you do a lot of it you can estimate your reserves of unsold stock. Once you move to a mercantile economy rather than being your own producer of sustenance, though, knowing how much of something you have and what you can get in exchange becomes more important.
Building things takes a similar route to economics. If you're building small houses with a central hearth, the construction skills are much more important than anything numeric. Once you're building grand temples and fortifications, engineering kicks in.
Now for the car analogy. I'll hit both engineering and economics. Once you have the materials and power sources to make automobiles and airplanes, engineering and trial-and-error still play a role. If you build custom buggies or roadsters on the weekends, you can utilize hard engineering but you probably don't need to. If you're meeting specific crash safety, fuel economy, and profit margin goals for the design of a car model and its highly automated production process for a big mass-market car manufacturer, your numbers had better be right.
If you don't call coming up with the plan, sending it for approval, rewriting parts of it in case of rejection, implementing it, doing increased internal audits not just to your security standards but to make sure you don't get fined, and bumping up staffing just so the government audits don't take your staff's productivity to zero during the audit a cost then either you're just absolutely clueless about network management, you're being very short-sighted, or you're just trying to pick a fight. When have you ever known of any "bog-standard regulatory bill" that didn't cost a business money in order to prove their compliance? In fact, if you actually searched for "certify" you must have been sloppy to miss the entire paragraph:
‘‘(i) ENFORCEMENT CERTIFICATIONS, AUDITS AND
INSPECTIONS.—The sector-specific agency or first-party
regulatory agency, in enforcing the requirements under
subsection (c), shall require an entity with a cybersecurity
plan approved under subsection (g) to certify that the cy-
bersecurity plan has been implemented, and may conduct
announced or unannounced audits and inspections of any
such entity to determine compliance.
You don't have to own something to control it. I'm not talking about a GM-style forced buyout. One way in which this control could be (although this particular would depend on requirements put forth and possibly the operator's answer) asserted is for the accepted plan to require a government response team in the event of a breach, attack, or heightened risk profile. Yeah, that's speculation, but the Obama administration has a history already of stepping in to tell businesses how to operate in a crisis even when terrorism and warfare have nothing to do with their issues. The sub-department proposed has a wide latitude as the bill is stated for making recommendations and accepting or rejecting plans. Yes, this is speculation, but it's informed speculation.
Currently, the bill provides for the US CERT to respond to a reported incident at the invitation of the operator of the private network. That wording would be quick and easy to change by the time it was passed, for one. During such a response they are supposed to, according to the act, coordinate with the private operator and recommend a response. There's nothing in the bill that limits the response to the private operator shoring up some aspect of security on the network. Having CERT, intelligence, or military network folks proactively respond with a counterattack is spelled out in the Federal network portion of the bill, and it is not barred by the private networks portion of the bill. The CERT running the network or some other agency taking it over for a period of time being the recommended action in response to an attack is also not barred. All it makes clear is that it (under current wording, which of course as a bill is subject to change) requires that the CERT be invited by the network operator. Yet it doesn't bar that invitation being a standard part of the accepted and recommended security plan.
The bill says the government agency in charge of enforcement designates exactly which companies are covered, puts forth the requirements for security for that company, approves or disapproves the specific security plan the company submits to meet those criteria, can audit the implementation of the plan, and can fine the business $100,000 per day per incident of noncompliance. That's what the word "guidelines" means here.
Under the bill, the DHS would have the authority to tell you how to operate your network and the authority to issue you a sizable civil fine for failing to meet their criteria without a finding against you in court. What's more is that the they get to decide who is under their own control.
The standards won't be in the legislation, which you can be sure most of the Congress hasn't read anyway. The law will just assign some agency (most likely DHS itself) with setting the guidelines. Those guidelines will give some office of the agency or the President the authority over when to switch from an everyday set of guidelines to a stricter set for "national emergencies".
Why don't you follow your own advice to read the bill? Then you'd see that if it's passed:
the agency sets the standards (section 224, subsection c)
the director of the agency determines which private networks are covered (section 224, subsection e)
the agency approves up the specific plan for each private network (sec. 224 f)
the operator of the private network must pay to certify that they meet the criteria
the operator must submit to government audits (224 i)
the private network operator could be fined up to $100,000 per day for each instance of noncompliance (224 m)
So, what type of government exactly puts a private company under such close regulation of day-to-day business to assure the company reinforces the stability of the regime?
I'm sure "federal cybersecurity guidelines" for a network include having Federal employees shutting down general non-critical access and putting control of the network under FEMA control whenever there's a disaster. That's great for a network owned by the Federal government. It's an abomination against the rights of the people and private companies to do those things to a commercial network on which millions of people rely for their own uses.
It's called "socialism" when the government takes over industry for the people. It's called "facism" when the government takes over industry to enhance the power of the government. Somehow I just can't see the government taking over control of networks the citizens use as benefiting the people more than the government.
That's really funny. Britney Spears wasn't alive when I was in grade school and we kept hearing about how Young Astronauts and such similar programs were to help shore up the US's slipping position in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Well, not all bullets are made of lead, and those that contain lead are not always completely lead. have you ever heard of a jacketed bullet, as in "full metal jacket" (a term which was chosen as an inspired title for a pretty damn good film)? A jacketed round uses a potentially lighter but higher-strength metal like a steel alloy to allow the projectile to leave the chamber at higher velocities.
Also, every type of atom and molecule from hydrogen on up reacts to a magnetic field of high enough strength. Did you think the magnets in particle accelerators were just to hold the screwdrivers in place for the maintenance crews?
I'm glad to see someone mentioned "Connections". The only show I've seen lately that comes close to the kind of cross-borders and cross-discipline thinking of that show is "The History of Money". Despite the name and major theme, there's a lot more to it than people might think until they see a couple of episodes.
We've made great advances in sensor and video technology since then, and we have drones piloted remotely all over the military and also in part of the border patrol now. The technology to make it happen is more readily available than in the 1960s and the payoff with the better sensors would e higher. Whether it's enough progress to move from nonstarter to actual project is questionable, but it has to be closer than fifty years ago.
HTTP and FTP are just protocols, yes, but they are typically used with distinct client and server software. A peer-to-peer connection is one in which neither system is set up to serve clients yet the systems connect directly, usually using information provided by a server at some point. If you're using protocols without using software, you're a damn bit faster at typing than I am.
Actually, copyright infringement can be a criminal matter. It's just that you need to make money from it for it for it to be criminal.
What is criminal is using the university's network against their authorization. They don't authorize anyone to access their network using P2P file transfer software. That's probably going to be a tricky legal situation, but they do have the right to set the terms of use for their own network.
What's really funny, though, is that P2P swarm-style file sharing software isn't the only software that connects peer computers. To really ban peer-to-peer communications would block some games, communications software like VoIP and IM, IRC's DCC sessions (which can be used to transfer a file or just to chat), Windows workgroup networking, and probably a dozen other things not coming to mind at the moment. They need to be really clear in what peer-to-peer computer communications they allow and don't in their wording, and make sure they detection software enforces exactly what they say it does in their policy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually for abolishing the corporate profit taxes. If you're going to tax corporations, there are better ways to do it.
A tiny percentage of gross revenues could work, although it hurts companies with small margins and large volumes more than higher-margin companies.
Taxing the consumables the corporation uses rather than exempting those then taxing the profits would be simpler in the tax code (they'd pay sales taxes just like consumers, collected by the sellers). It would also be another reason to use resources more efficiently and be less wasteful.
Many people in the US don't realize it, but the employer actually pays as much for the employee's payroll taxes as they withhold from the employee. This hurts employees in a number of ways. For one, it is one of the factors in the "self employment tax burden" many people run into when they start freelancing or open a proprietorship. They suddenly pay both parts of the tax and are mistakenly told more often than not that the tax is just double if you work for yourself. The other part of the tax had previously just been hidden from the employees. So people who might otherwise become entrepreneurs tend to stay as employees longer or maybe indefinitely. Another way it hurts employees is that every time an employer goes to raise wages or salaries, they actually pay a good percentage more in increases than what the employee sees. This encourages wages and salaries to go up more slowly. Then there's the fact that ten to twenty percent more employees could be on payrolls if only the employees were paying payroll taxes. It seems like even more than that at first glance, but you have to consider untaxed benefits, work space, administrative costs, facilities and utilities costs, and increased management costs. If the employers' payroll taxes were removed from the federal tax code, you'd see more people working for more money, more spending in consumer markets, more liquidity in the overall US economy, and eventually a larger tax revenue for the government as overall payrolls rose between higher average pay and more paychecks being taxed to meet or exceed the previous total.
I'm also all for simplifying the income tax on individuals. I like Steve Forbes' idea of a flat 17% (or a little higher or lower) on all income over some minimum floor of untaxed income (say, $20,000 per year or $25,000). If you earned $26k with a $25k "income floor" you'd pay 17% of $1000, or $170. If you made $2,025,000 with the same floor, you'd pay 17% of $2 million ($340,000). No loopholes and no deductions would be allowed. Maybe the occasional emergency policy credit that expires like the one-time home buyer's credit could be worked in some years, but that sort of policy is still better handled by some other agency. The IRS being a clearinghouse for policy promotion that cuts across the missions of other agencies argues for either trimming those other agencies or putting them in charge of their own grants to citizens and businesses.
I'm talking about the Irish offices only existing, no matter their size, in order to do this with the taxes. Meanwhile, the Google shareholders whose shares are traded on an American stock market report huge profits for the company as a whole in US dollars when driving up their stock price, because the money is theoretically under the direct control of the US headquarters. Yet they only pay taxes on what actually comes to the US on the books.
Either they are making the money as a company or not. If their rightful profit center for this money is in Ireland, then maybe that subsidiary should be traded on an Irish market. If it's not profit according to the IRS because the profits are sitting in Ireland then maybe they shouldn't shouldn't be reported as profits at the company HQ under the SEC rules.
How is a decimeter any less practical or less intuitive than a centimeter? A decimeter is closer to the length of a pen than a centimeter. It's closer to the width of a soup bowl or sandwich plate.
"30 centimeters" sounds much more precise than "3 decimeters", so if your estimate is off a couple of centimeters, your error vs. your basis of measurement is ten times as high. When giving estimates, it's much better to use a unit that loses precision than to miscommunicate how much precision you're using. Of course you can get as precise as you want (or at least as your equipment allows) if you're measuring, but an awful lot of informal communication about lengths, weights, and volumes is estimated by sight. I'd favor "0.3 meters" over "30 centimeters" if I hadn't actually measured to within a few millimeters of 30 centimeters.
ADHD doesn't make people "a bit slow". ADHD makes people poorly focused. People with ADHD daydream, fidget, and sometimes fail to pay attention at important moments. Typically, someone with ADHD has an average to very high IQ. Someone who is "a bit slow" likely has mild mental retardation or just happens to be on the wrong slope of the bell curve. Plenty of people with ADHD learn and remember concepts and facts very quickly and test well over those facts, but forget to do busywork or are caught daydreaming in class by the teacher.
Maybe I benefit from limited socialization and being picky about my associations in the first place, but I'm not sure I know any adults who forgot the definition of "year".
They could leave a shell in the EU and report most of the income in Singapore once the EU shell pays its support fees or whatever to the other subsidiary. This is the sort of trick they're in Ireland for in the first place.
ITYM the US should slap Google with a huge tax bill for running a bunch of business through Ireland's 12.5% tax rate rather than the Us 35% corporate tax rate in the first place. They are based in the US, after all. Google shelters itself from US taxes using Ireland and shelters itself from Irish taxes in Bermuda. It's not speculation on my part. It's all very well documented. The sad part is that right now it's all perfectly legal to move money around internationally for the express purpose of lowering the taxes paid.
These arrangements allow Google, a US company, to put its sales of ads for everywhere outside the US into a wholly owned Irish subsidiary and lower the tax rate on all of those non-domestic sales to 2.4% when their domestic tax rate on profits is 35% and their Irish tax rate would normally be 12.5%. They screw the US with Ireland and then screw Ireland with Bermuda. Lots of other companies do the same, sometimes with the Caymans replacing or supplementing Bermuda. Sometimes they move money through The Netherlands or somewhere else for even more benefits.
Not exactly.
magnetic fields basics
short answer about deflecting both electrons and protons in a magnetic field
Magnetic deflection is used quite regularly on very small things (electron beams in a CRT for instance, or protons in the massive Van Allen radiation belts around Earth). Anything with a charge, though, is a magnet. Any conductor can have a current and therefore an electric field induced in it by a magnet. If you have a strong enough magnet positioned just right and time the movements just right, you can induce a current into a metal and then repel the metal rather than attract it.
There are then the diamagnetic solids, of which lead is one. In a diamagnetic object, the induced magnetic fields actually repel the object from the magnet rather than attract it. All materials are to some extent diamagnetic, but most are also to some extent ferromagnetic or paramagnetic, and are classified by their net overall effect. The velocity of a bullet fired from a pistol or rifle would be much higher than you could readily produce via diamagnetism, since diamagnetism is a pretty weak force. Given a powerful enough magnet, though, you could theoretically repel lead, copper, or a few other materials in their solid state. Good luck overcoming chemical explosives for velocity, though.
As I said, the SI (and non-SI metric) units are logical for using mathematically,which makes sense because that's why they were invented that way. The Imperial measurements, though, make sense in their own sizes compared to everyday things you actually measure. The math is harder, though, because you have to keep all these archaic and somewhat arbitrary conversions in your head or handy on a reference of some sort.
The hand is pretty disused these days. That's true. It's still just as easy to say "2 hands" as to say "eight inches", and there's not as much false precision when estimating. I'd be more likely with most people I guess to say "about 2/3 of a foot" than "two hands" or "eight inches".
3/4 of a pint is 3/8 of a quart is 3/32 of a gallon. It makes sense immediately to me that it's a little less than a tenth of a gallon, because I know from memory that 128 ounces is a gallon. That memory is useful once you have it, but gaining it in the first place is no doubt a pain.
Overloading the word "ounce" causes much less trouble than most people would guess. Even when cooking, which is when both are most likely to be used, it's a good rule of thumb that if "fluid ounce" and "dry ounce" aren't mentioned that anything you'd cut is measured in weight and anything bulk that you'd pour (whether dry like flour or fluid) is in fluid ounces. Never mind that you buy flour or sugar in dry pounds and ounces and use it in volume measurements. ;-)
I'm not sure "most" people have problems with basic ratios and fractions, though.
I'm in the US, too.
I know that 100 kph is about 62 mph (62.12 IIRC), so 42 kph is about 26 mph. It turns out it's actually 26.1 or so. Even to estimate I have to do the math, but I have a starting point of reference memorized. It's pretty convenient since it's 100 on one of the scales.
My references for temperature are a little more fuzzy. There's an easy pair of formulas to convert between them (c = (f-32) * 5/9 and f = c * 9/5 + 32), but I always find it easier to remember for some reason several reference points. -40 is about the same in both. 0 C is 32 F of course, 10 C is 50 F, 20 C is 68 F, 30 C is 86 F, 40 C is 104 F. I tend to remember those as "about 50, about 70, about 90, and about 105", even though 10 degrees C is right on 50 F. I guess one could remember that right around 10 is right around 50 F and that every 10 C is about 18 F. It'd get you by for most ambient temperatures.
The reason we in the US are so accustomed to liters is that soda and bottled water are often sold that way. Half a liter is about an ounce more than a pint, a liter is close to a quart, and 750 ml is close to a fifth of a gallon (which is useful for hard liquor, since that's a traditional size in the US). The liter itself is a pretty handy size, which is probably why it is used pretty much everywhere. I don't see anyone filling their gas tank in cubic meters or anything like that.
Five feet is equal to 60 inches, and a meter is about 39.4 inches. So that'd be about 1.5 meters. (It's actually 1.524 to be a little more precise, but I didn't estimate that conversion.) I'm aware that not being exposed to the units makes things quite a bit more difficult. I was also previously aware of the idea of fractions of a meter, but the decimeter still seems like a more useful measurement for everyday things (even though it is, by definition, itself a particular fraction of a meter).
You may already be aware of this, but the Imperial system as used in the US is now defined in terms of the metric system. Also, our food packaging is generally labelled both ways. Many industrial manufacturing plants use millimeters and micrometers rather than fractions of an inch and grams rather than grains or pounds. Scientific work may include Imperial measurements but always includes the metric. It's too bad some poor science reporting from magazines doesn't follow suit.
One place Imperial measurements make a whole lot of sense, though, is in the kitchen. It may be annoying that three teaspoons is a tablespoon, that eight fluid ounces is a cup, and that sixteen dry ounces is a pound, but those are ratios that actually work out pretty well for ingredients an awful lot of the time. Grams and milliliters are more precise units, but they are overly precise for most recipes.
I don't think the distinction is so much between analog and digital as between synchronous and asynchronous. The brain doesn't have a quartz crystal or a cesium atom telling it when a thought is over. It settles on a result, then sets a flag letting you know it's ready to read another input. In the mean time, some tasks take longer than others. Think of it as a CISC machine with no clock pulse and some bus contention maybe rather than a tightly clocked synchronous RISC machine.
Also, it's pretty clear that certain parts of the brain tend to act as special coprocessors or at least NUMA general purpose processors. Your data is moving from one place to another with different locality.
Add to that the fact that to get precision you must let the data circuits settle before relying on them (the purpose of latches and a clock in most traditional computer processors) but that most of our lives are lead in approximations, and it's easy to see why we're poorly constructed to do precise calculations as quickly as approximations.
We can build computers to be much faster at rough approximations and with good accuracy but poor precision than at precise answers, too. We usually don't, except for Non-P and NP problems, because having exact answers quickly is often the main advantage to using a computer.
Getting approximate answers even faster from the computer is only useful in certain situations. Oddly enough, many (but not all by any means) of these situations are things humans are already really good at on our own. The facial recognition used as an example in TFA is one. Maneuvering over rough ground, identifying close to optimal paths for the Traveling Salesman problem for a small number of inputs, or translating speech into text are all things most humans do pretty easily any time. They happen to be really difficult to do quickly with precision whether using a computer or not.
Luckily, we don't have to calculate the force of every footfall when we walk. Getting a close to optimal travelling route is much better than getting one of the worst options. For larger numbers of stops, a computer will do better faster than most humans on this problem, but that's because we know how to make the computer estimate, too. We tend to work with phonemes and with local context when working out the meaning of a sentence, and the best computer dictation and language translation systems (which are still lacking) do a lot of guessing and inferring based on context, too.
We live in a sloppy world. We get mostly sloppy inputs and produce mostly sloppy outputs. Things work out fine most of the time that way, but we need precision for some of our own non-natural projects. Getting precise answers when you don't need them is wasteful of resources. It's no wonder that to survive we're very good at getting sloppy answers quickly. It's no use to wait and figure out which exact angle you need to run away from danger. Close to 180 degrees is pretty good.
I don't recall a proper citation, but I seem to remember that even identifying quantities at a glance goes something like "none, one, two, three, four, five or six, some, a dozen, a score, a few score, oh my that's a lot". The specific levels at which those change over can vary, of course. Some people probably would say "about ten" before they'd say "about a dozen", too.
One thing I've always liked about the Imperial measurement system, in fact, is that although the math is a little harder the units and their ratios really seem to be more relevant. An inch, a hand, a foot, and a yard seem to be more reasonably compared to one another than a millimeter, a centimeter, and a meter. There's the decimeter which seems it would be a very reasonable length for measuring everyday things, but the meter is too long for many things and the centimeter is too short. I'm not sure why the decimeter is almost never used. The cubed decimeter is even the definition of the (surprisingly non-SI) liter. The official SI unit of volume is the cubic meter. Who the hell drinks a cubic meter of anything at one go? I'd drink a liter or a quart, or maybe a cup or a pint. Maybe even a half gallon or two liters Maybe several pints if you'd kindly agree to drive me home. ;-)
We also haven't been worried so much about exact numbers of things for much of that time, and matching faces against memories isn't that exact of an example.
You're likely to recognize someone who grew a mustache or cut their hair, or to ask someone familiar to you where they got a fresh scar rather than walking right past them.
You are also not likely to care exactly how many bushels of barley you raised until you start selling the grain for currency or protecting it from known thieves. So long as your granary doesn't run out before the next harvest, you have enough grain. Even when bartering or selling for currency, unless you do a lot of it you can estimate your reserves of unsold stock. Once you move to a mercantile economy rather than being your own producer of sustenance, though, knowing how much of something you have and what you can get in exchange becomes more important.
Building things takes a similar route to economics. If you're building small houses with a central hearth, the construction skills are much more important than anything numeric. Once you're building grand temples and fortifications, engineering kicks in.
Now for the car analogy. I'll hit both engineering and economics. Once you have the materials and power sources to make automobiles and airplanes, engineering and trial-and-error still play a role. If you build custom buggies or roadsters on the weekends, you can utilize hard engineering but you probably don't need to. If you're meeting specific crash safety, fuel economy, and profit margin goals for the design of a car model and its highly automated production process for a big mass-market car manufacturer, your numbers had better be right.
If you don't call coming up with the plan, sending it for approval, rewriting parts of it in case of rejection, implementing it, doing increased internal audits not just to your security standards but to make sure you don't get fined, and bumping up staffing just so the government audits don't take your staff's productivity to zero during the audit a cost then either you're just absolutely clueless about network management, you're being very short-sighted, or you're just trying to pick a fight. When have you ever known of any "bog-standard regulatory bill" that didn't cost a business money in order to prove their compliance? In fact, if you actually searched for "certify" you must have been sloppy to miss the entire paragraph:
You don't have to own something to control it. I'm not talking about a GM-style forced buyout. One way in which this control could be (although this particular would depend on requirements put forth and possibly the operator's answer) asserted is for the accepted plan to require a government response team in the event of a breach, attack, or heightened risk profile. Yeah, that's speculation, but the Obama administration has a history already of stepping in to tell businesses how to operate in a crisis even when terrorism and warfare have nothing to do with their issues. The sub-department proposed has a wide latitude as the bill is stated for making recommendations and accepting or rejecting plans. Yes, this is speculation, but it's informed speculation.
Currently, the bill provides for the US CERT to respond to a reported incident at the invitation of the operator of the private network. That wording would be quick and easy to change by the time it was passed, for one. During such a response they are supposed to, according to the act, coordinate with the private operator and recommend a response. There's nothing in the bill that limits the response to the private operator shoring up some aspect of security on the network. Having CERT, intelligence, or military network folks proactively respond with a counterattack is spelled out in the Federal network portion of the bill, and it is not barred by the private networks portion of the bill. The CERT running the network or some other agency taking it over for a period of time being the recommended action in response to an attack is also not barred. All it makes clear is that it (under current wording, which of course as a bill is subject to change) requires that the CERT be invited by the network operator. Yet it doesn't bar that invitation being a standard part of the accepted and recommended security plan.
The bill says the government agency in charge of enforcement designates exactly which companies are covered, puts forth the requirements for security for that company, approves or disapproves the specific security plan the company submits to meet those criteria, can audit the implementation of the plan, and can fine the business $100,000 per day per incident of noncompliance. That's what the word "guidelines" means here.
Under the bill, the DHS would have the authority to tell you how to operate your network and the authority to issue you a sizable civil fine for failing to meet their criteria without a finding against you in court. What's more is that the they get to decide who is under their own control.
The standards won't be in the legislation, which you can be sure most of the Congress hasn't read anyway. The law will just assign some agency (most likely DHS itself) with setting the guidelines. Those guidelines will give some office of the agency or the President the authority over when to switch from an everyday set of guidelines to a stricter set for "national emergencies".
Why don't you follow your own advice to read the bill? Then you'd see that if it's passed:
So, what type of government exactly puts a private company under such close regulation of day-to-day business to assure the company reinforces the stability of the regime?
I'm sure "federal cybersecurity guidelines" for a network include having Federal employees shutting down general non-critical access and putting control of the network under FEMA control whenever there's a disaster. That's great for a network owned by the Federal government. It's an abomination against the rights of the people and private companies to do those things to a commercial network on which millions of people rely for their own uses.
It's called "socialism" when the government takes over industry for the people. It's called "facism" when the government takes over industry to enhance the power of the government. Somehow I just can't see the government taking over control of networks the citizens use as benefiting the people more than the government.
That's really funny. Britney Spears wasn't alive when I was in grade school and we kept hearing about how Young Astronauts and such similar programs were to help shore up the US's slipping position in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Well, not all bullets are made of lead, and those that contain lead are not always completely lead. have you ever heard of a jacketed bullet, as in "full metal jacket" (a term which was chosen as an inspired title for a pretty damn good film)? A jacketed round uses a potentially lighter but higher-strength metal like a steel alloy to allow the projectile to leave the chamber at higher velocities.
Also, every type of atom and molecule from hydrogen on up reacts to a magnetic field of high enough strength. Did you think the magnets in particle accelerators were just to hold the screwdrivers in place for the maintenance crews?
I'm glad to see someone mentioned "Connections". The only show I've seen lately that comes close to the kind of cross-borders and cross-discipline thinking of that show is "The History of Money". Despite the name and major theme, there's a lot more to it than people might think until they see a couple of episodes.
We've made great advances in sensor and video technology since then, and we have drones piloted remotely all over the military and also in part of the border patrol now. The technology to make it happen is more readily available than in the 1960s and the payoff with the better sensors would e higher. Whether it's enough progress to move from nonstarter to actual project is questionable, but it has to be closer than fifty years ago.
HTTP and FTP are just protocols, yes, but they are typically used with distinct client and server software. A peer-to-peer connection is one in which neither system is set up to serve clients yet the systems connect directly, usually using information provided by a server at some point. If you're using protocols without using software, you're a damn bit faster at typing than I am.
Actually, copyright infringement can be a criminal matter. It's just that you need to make money from it for it for it to be criminal.
What is criminal is using the university's network against their authorization. They don't authorize anyone to access their network using P2P file transfer software. That's probably going to be a tricky legal situation, but they do have the right to set the terms of use for their own network.
What's really funny, though, is that P2P swarm-style file sharing software isn't the only software that connects peer computers. To really ban peer-to-peer communications would block some games, communications software like VoIP and IM, IRC's DCC sessions (which can be used to transfer a file or just to chat), Windows workgroup networking, and probably a dozen other things not coming to mind at the moment. They need to be really clear in what peer-to-peer computer communications they allow and don't in their wording, and make sure they detection software enforces exactly what they say it does in their policy.