Seriously... the phone monopoly in dorms was a huge cash cow at the University I worked at. Kids at school are away from home so they call home and they call their friends at home. The U charged crazy rates, like $0.25/minute.
There were always huge lines out the telecom door at the end of the term when kids had to settle up their several hundred dollar phone bills.
Cellphones took that all away (and phone cards before cellphones became prolific). I remember discussions among the IT staff and management about how they could block cellphones in the dorms just to keep that sacred cash cow.
Disturbing the roommates? As long as the kids were talking on the phone, they were making money for the school. That it impacted that kid's roommate didn't matter.
If the school could reduce these "extras", it could easily cut the tuition fee substantially (OK, only a hypothesis).
1) no school reduces tuition - at least voluntarily 2) the cost of providing a service does not dictate the price of a product (other than to set a minimum sustainable floor) - the market sets the price.
I don't understand why the school needs to provide you absolutely every convenience you desire. 1) there's lots of money to be made by providing all those services. For example, schools hate cell phones because it breaks their monopoly on phones in dorms. 2) Students have lots of choices in the marketplace of universities. A university's prime business is making itself attractive to students so they will attend. The education is secondary to that goal of getting students to attend (and pay).
What student will want to attend a school that limits access to the internet when they can choose one that doesn't?
watching 8mm films requires a projector to display them, meaning you have to keep a projector in good working condition while parts and service-workers for the projector vanish as new technology comes.
To play devil's advocate, it wouldn't take much of a future scientist to look at 8mm film and figure out how to see the information in it. Hold it up to the light and you see "something" that resembles the images on the film. It probably wouldn't take much to determine that with a bright light and some lenses that they'd be able to project the contents onto the wall.
The problem with these disks of plastic and metal is that you can't tell in any way what it is without knowing the technology. Even if you know that the ancients put tiny holes in the metal film, you'd have to come up with a device that uses the right frequency of laser to detect the holes to get some kind of bitstream. Once you have a bitstream, you have to figure out a filesystem, data format (UTF, ASCII, EBCDIC), and codecs, and compression schemes.
Of course it all depends on what you're trying to archive for and what assumptions you're making. * will human technology progress (and that civilization will not suffer a huge setback) * will the archives refreshed periodically (and into newer formats) * who do you expect to actually use the archives * what should be archived...
The European invasion of North America hardly constitutes a genocide.
That's a pretty fine hair to split between genocide and ethnic cleansing. What is the real difference between successful ethnic cleansing and unsuccessful genocide?
I do believe I have friends that have some native american ancestry... All this means is that the genocide was not complete.
The Nazis attempted a genocide against the Jews but did not complete the job. If they had started out simply with a mission of ethnic cleansing and achieved the same result would it have been a better thing?
Like DeBeers has with diamonds, they have near complete control over the production and distribution of their product. This allows them to manipulate both supply and demand,
I definitely agree that their control over production and distribution allows them to manipulate supply. But I'm not sure I see it on the demand side. Sure, they can make ads to try and get people interested in diamonds, but I don't see how they have any more control over demand than a non-cartel.
My boss faces the same bureaucracy I do. And our VP IS the IT VP...
Our clients are internal and if we don't keep this project going, we're still expected to deliver our normal results. The project simply enables us to do it accurately and in a timely manner while reducing impact on other people in the company.
There's already a process in place to get large projects approved and rejected. We're not a large project, so we are ignored. That's simply the fact of it.
What we basically have is: Our IT pretends to provide us the service we need, and we pretend to follow their rules.
Getting the job done is my top priority. Following IT rules is a lower priority. If someone gets their knickers in a wad then I'll just start Fedexing CDs back and forth - I'll just make sure to use their department's account.
The only ones who suffer directly without this project are people in my office and my counterparts around the globe. We are low-level people and would otherwise just be stuck with working extra long hours. Being on salary, there's no overtime to cause concern.
Just because the bureaucracy is stupid doesn't mean I have to blindly follow along.
I know all along people say that playing video games does not affect the behavior of the participants, and that's probably true - having to do with the player's ability to separate the game from reality.
However, I remember hearing recently about parts of the brain that are activated by either doing a particular activity, or watching someone else do that same activity. So, for at least part of the brain, watching someone hit a tennis serve has the same effect as actually hitting a tennis serve yourself. The belief is this is one key way our brains learn to do things - through some kind of mimickery.
With that in mind, it makes me wonder if playing video games does have some kind of feedback mechanism in affecting the way the brain of the player is wired. Too bad I can't use something about that for my thesis...
The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off.
That only makes sense if the atmosphere has a uniform distribution of every kind of particle. Clearly this is not true. If the distribution is uniform then the dogs would have no differential to determine direction with.
Drug dogs are trained to seek out areas with higher concentrations of drugs. How else do you think they are able to determine direction and location?
Try walking around your neighborhood around dinner time. You eventually start to smell a good steak being grilled (or maybe a stir-fry, bread, or whatever). Walk around, turning your head from side to side and just using your nose, you'll be able to figure out what house that smell is coming from. You'll only be able to do this because there is not a uniform distribution of steak-grilling-smell in your neighborhood.
Now imagine your house has a couple dead fish in it. Your entire house reeks of the smell. Because your house is closed and the fish have been there a while, you might have a fairly uniform distribution. Likewise, you would have a difficult time finding the dead fish with just your sense of smell. Nearly every place in your house smells equally bad.
Is there a chance that dogs could get addicted or cancer from their activities? Maybe. As they zero in on their targets (in real life and in training), they're going to be inhaling air with higher concentrations of the particles than the atmosphere in general. So they're getting more particles than they normally would.
The question is - do such substances emit ENOUGH particles to pose a health risk? Or do the substances need to be consumed?
I agree with you on almost everything you said. I'd even say our front-line tech support people are top-notch.
Unless your IT need has a multi-$100K budget (to be dedicated to IT, of course), it simply won't get addressed because it's considered by IT to be low priority. There is a huge committee of people who get to review these projects.
In my case, however, since my project is less than $30k, my needs are totally ignored. In fact, the reason we're doing this with an outside vendor is because our internal IT wanted it to be a $250K project - and that would be with an end product that is missing vital features. We're doing it on the outside for much much less - and our version 1 of the project has been a huge success. It's saving 100's of man-hours every month around the globe.
But again, because it's not a quarter of a million dollar project, my desire to share files with my contractor is being ignored. And by the time I could try to push through one of these committees, the time-frame of the project would have passed and we could have been done sooner by snail-mailing the files.
I'd love to be able to scp the files around (you're right, e-mail is not the best way to handle this). But, I'm just too low priority to be bothered with. The problem is there are countless small issues like this that our IT people should be handling - there would be huge savings across the company. But they only want to be focused on huge-dollar projects that require years to finish. I hope we survive it.
Simply have a policy that states "email services outside of the control of this company are not to be used for business correspondence". Seems simple enough.
Except some people may NEED to do just that because of the stupid rules set up on the company mail servers.
For my work, I deal with a developer in another state and we have to exchange large files. From inside our network, I have way to ftp/ssh into his company servers to transfer the files. So, e-mailing is the only option. Our e-mail servers won't allow attachments that large.
So, we use gmail. It's not elegant, but we can easily send the files we need back and forth and actually get our work done.
Oh yes... our IT people are the same totalitarians you find everywhere (I used to be an admin, and back then, we actually tried to help our people do their jobs, not inhibit their work). So, they won't adjust the rules of our mail servers, or provide a way for me to connect to the other company's computers and transfer the files.
So there it is... IT's motto is "IT at the speed of business", but the reality is "business crawling at the bureaucratic speed of IT". It's like they believe that they are the revenue generating portion of the company and that the rest of the company exists to serve IT.
To quote Don Hirschberg, "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
Then Asimov had some nice ideas:
* I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.
* If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
* There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
Why is it, I wonder, that people who believe in God, and particularly Christians, insist that anyone who does not is still religious? Are they so insecure in their beliefs that they must force some kind of belief system onto other people - even if only in their own minds? Why is it they insist that asking, "where is the proof?" formulates a religious belief?
And it doesn't take "faith" to guess that technology and knowledge will progress. One just has to look back to see the trend and project into the future. It's all a gamble anyway.
One of my favorite professors to work with was a CS professor. He's doing a lot of work (research & publishing) in quantum computing and hangs out a lot with a priest-mathematician (it's a Catholic school).
While he certainly teaches classes that involve learning how to program, that's certainly not the focus of his classes. He also does a lot to encourage students to get involved with research projects and get published themselves.
When I think of the science part of computer science, he's who I think of. Someone who's researching and discovering new things.
YouTube, by comparison, seems to be mostly original work, created and posted by the copyright holders to those works, they publish. As a tool, it's clearly aimed at legitimate uses, and Viacom's one legitimate complaint might be (MIGHT be) that Google just didn't police it well enough.
The problem is that while there's a lot of original stuff on there, a lot of that original work uses bits of other people's work as well.
For one, it uses the name Prius, which is definitely trade-marked. And it has little bits of well-known songs. Is it a derivative work that needs copyright release for those songs? Or are the segments short enough that they're covered under fair use? Can it use the name Prius in the game it's talking about?
It's pretty typical of stuff on youtube. Is it legal? And if not, is there enough entirely legal/original content that YouTube can survive?
IANAL, so I have no idea on the legal questions. And IANA-Market Analyst, so I can't help with that either...
However all you "man is the prime source of global warming" can take heart, I have already seen a few articles where they are ignoring the claim that the change will save energy to focus on saying that it will save lives on the road, it is better for outdoor recreation, and it just makes people feel good because of the extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day.
Then why don't we just friggin' leave it in DST all-year round? It's the stupid changing back and forth that causes so many problems. There are DOT studies showing more crashes and fatalities right after changes in time - probably because people are sleepier because their sleep rhythms haven't caught up.
I don't see why we can't just split the difference and change it 30 minutes and leave it alone.
I don't make a great deal of money, and it is a kind of a game to play with my withholding. But it's a game that makes me a little money, which is nice.
Yeah... laughing is kind of hard. Really.. I feel bad for people who either can't see what they're doing makes no sense or they stick to their guns just to be stubborn.
I can be stubborn too, so I know I'm not the only irrational actor here...
If you can calculate what your EIC and other credits will be then adjust your withholding so that you owe that much.
You can kind of do that with existing tax software. The tax rates me be a bit different next year, but just plug into the software the salary you expect to earn next year. Then just lower the amount withheld on the virtual-W2 until you end up owing $20 or something like that. Figure out what the amount of withheld tax is is spread over all your paychecks and lower your withholding so that you end up paying just enough so your that your EIC and other credits leaves you with a small amount due. If your employer won't let you specify an exact withholding then use your W4 to claim a high number. Get a paycheck and see where that puts you and then amend your W4 so that it you take out "extra" (there's a line for this ) above what they take with your stated exemptions.
THEN, there is no return to garnish.
To do otherwise is to put money into the system that they will just take away. Why do that? Put in less than you will owe, even after your credits, and there will be nothing for them to take at the end of the year. The bonus is that not only are you "keeping" your credits, you're getting them in increments throughout the year.
I'm not sure where you get the economy collapsing out of my post.
I'm just saying it's financially illiterate to claim you're saving money on your taxes while to get that savings you have to pay nearly 3 times what you're "saving" in interest to someone else.
Now, it's generally a sound idea use a mortgage to buy a house so you can build equity and have the house appreciate (and also to lock in a fixed payment level for your housing over a long period of time).
But it's a pretty dumb strategy to take out a 2nd mortgage at a higher and probably variable rate to finance your European vacation and and your new jet skis while claiming it's "okay" because you get to write off the interest from your taxes. You're paying 1000 to save 300. You're still net -700. Sure you have your vacation memories and some depreciated jet skis but it's not sound thinking.
The same financial illiteracy leads many to think they're winning some great coup against the government when they get a fat refund check every year. You then try to explain that that money was theirs all along and isn't a gift from the government - and that they've been loaning it to the government for free. Then you suggest they reduce their withholding so they get the money all year long instead of in a huge lump. The typical answer is: "Well, if I do that, I'll spend it all. I like getting a big lump all at once."
The first part of that is an admission of lack of any self control - a much bigger problem, really. They also don't understand that if they reduce their withholding and put the extra cash in a savings account or some other investment that they not only have access to the money all year long, they will get MORE money - and they can STILL get it in a lump sum if they want it - and MORE of it! Or for an even better return they can use the extra to pay down their credit cards. Or even their mortgage... but then they complain that they'll lose some of their mortgage interest deduction.?! Okay... that's true for this year, but they don't seem to understand or care that doing so means they can chop years off their mortgage that way.
I realize it's a systems kind of thing where people get the reward of bad decisions now but due to delays inherent in the system, they don't have to pay the consequences until later. At which point, too much time has passed and they don't truly associate the bad choices in the past with the bad consequences of the future.
So, a simple thing like adjusting your withholding can help quite a bit. I actually take it to the extreme. My salary is pretty much fixed over the course of a year. $1.00 that I earn in January is worth more, due to inflation, than $1.00 in the next December. So, at the beginning of the year, I claim 10 deductions and have virtually no tax money taken out. At the same time, I max out the money going into my 401K. Every couple of months, I adjust the numbers so that more goes into taxes and less goes into the 401K. Over the course of the year, I end up paying the same amount of money into my 401K and Taxes as if I had left them level. BUT, the extra money going into the 401K is earning money for me right away - and for more of the year. There's no penalty (interest paid or interest lost) by pushing the tax payments to the end of the year. I also end up nearly even on my taxes... I paid $70 to federal this year and got back $120 on my state - but money was in my 401K for a longer period of time.
Now if I were willing to accept more risk (of losing my job, mostly), I'd actually balance it so I owed $1000 on each of my taxes. Below that threshold, there is no penalty or interest. So essentially I would get a free loan of that $2000 from the point I accumulate that much tax-due until April 15th the next year.
Anyway, I've resorted to laughing at people who will refinance to have spending money and to "keep" their interest deduction or who prefer to let the government keep huge "lump sums" of money because they seem impossible to educate and get defensive about their poor decisions. Spitting would be going too far.
Well, I can handle a lot of complication on my own.
If my tax situation is so complicated I can't figure it out, then I'm not going to trust some $40 piece of software to figure it out. At that point, I want someone who is an expert in handling such complications - and someone I can get to know personally. I figure at that point, the $500 will be well spent.
But that will probably be quite some time. Until then, I do it myself. It doesn't take long and it's not that complicated.
I've only used the software when they're cheap - like Taxcut for $10. Any more than that, it's easier/cheaper to just do it by hand. I have a spreadsheet that emulates a 1040, and I just plug in my numbers and copy them down on the printed form the IRS already sent me. (In fact, I use this spreadsheet to adjust my withholding throughout the year to try and make my federal and state refunds add up to 0. I was off by $30 this year).
I'd rather do that than spend $40.
If my taxes are so complicated that I think I need fancy software, I'd rather pay an accountant I trust (not HR Block) to do my taxes for me.
Okay, so you write-off $40 against your income. Suppose your marginal tax rate is 30%, you're only saving $12. So, you pay $40 to get $12.
That's the same idiot logic that people use when they decide to take out a home equity loan to get a bigger tax refund. They say, "hey, I'm getting $300 more back on my taxes!", and I say, "Good job, but you had to pay someone else $1000 to get that $300".
If you REALLY want a refund, just have your employer withhold more money out of your paychecks.
I always laugh at people who boast with pride about the large refunds they're getting. They just don't get it when I try to tell them that it was always their money all along and they simply let the government have it all year without paying interest. Then there's the people who boast about the tax savings they get from the interest on their 2nd & 3rd mortgages. Try explaining to them that they're losing money because in order to get the 20 or 30% of the interest paid back in a tax refund, they are having to pay 100% in interest to someone else.
Anyway, if you want a refund, have the hold out more.
Of course, if your refunds are being garnished that you're screwed and should have lawyered up better. And if THAT's your problem, then set your withholding low so there is no refund to garnish.
that when articles are posted that include obscure software titles and ambiguous acronyms that the editors can't insert a quick phrase explaining what the hell the whole thing is about?
Slashdot Mirror
If they knew about big-O, they would have girlfriends, and by definition, could not be programmers.
Seriously... the phone monopoly in dorms was a huge cash cow at the University I worked at. Kids at school are away from home so they call home and they call their friends at home. The U charged crazy rates, like $0.25/minute.
There were always huge lines out the telecom door at the end of the term when kids had to settle up their several hundred dollar phone bills.
Cellphones took that all away (and phone cards before cellphones became prolific). I remember discussions among the IT staff and management about how they could block cellphones in the dorms just to keep that sacred cash cow.
Disturbing the roommates? As long as the kids were talking on the phone, they were making money for the school. That it impacted that kid's roommate didn't matter.
If the school could reduce these "extras", it could easily cut the tuition fee substantially (OK, only a hypothesis).
1) no school reduces tuition - at least voluntarily
2) the cost of providing a service does not dictate the price of a product (other than to set a minimum sustainable floor) - the market sets the price.
I don't understand why the school needs to provide you absolutely every convenience you desire.
1) there's lots of money to be made by providing all those services. For example, schools hate cell phones because it breaks their monopoly on phones in dorms.
2) Students have lots of choices in the marketplace of universities. A university's prime business is making itself attractive to students so they will attend. The education is secondary to that goal of getting students to attend (and pay).
What student will want to attend a school that limits access to the internet when they can choose one that doesn't?
watching 8mm films requires a projector to display them, meaning you have to keep a projector in good working condition while parts and service-workers for the projector vanish as new technology comes.
To play devil's advocate, it wouldn't take much of a future scientist to look at 8mm film and figure out how to see the information in it. Hold it up to the light and you see "something" that resembles the images on the film. It probably wouldn't take much to determine that with a bright light and some lenses that they'd be able to project the contents onto the wall.
The problem with these disks of plastic and metal is that you can't tell in any way what it is without knowing the technology. Even if you know that the ancients put tiny holes in the metal film, you'd have to come up with a device that uses the right frequency of laser to detect the holes to get some kind of bitstream. Once you have a bitstream, you have to figure out a filesystem, data format (UTF, ASCII, EBCDIC), and codecs, and compression schemes.
Of course it all depends on what you're trying to archive for and what assumptions you're making.
* will human technology progress (and that civilization will not suffer a huge setback)
* will the archives refreshed periodically (and into newer formats)
* who do you expect to actually use the archives
* what should be archived...
The European invasion of North America hardly constitutes a genocide.
That's a pretty fine hair to split between genocide and ethnic cleansing. What is the real difference between successful ethnic cleansing and unsuccessful genocide?
I do believe I have friends that have some native american ancestry...
All this means is that the genocide was not complete.
The Nazis attempted a genocide against the Jews but did not complete the job. If they had started out simply with a mission of ethnic cleansing and achieved the same result would it have been a better thing?
Like DeBeers has with diamonds, they have near complete control over the production and distribution of their product. This allows them to manipulate both supply and demand,
I definitely agree that their control over production and distribution allows them to manipulate supply. But I'm not sure I see it on the demand side. Sure, they can make ads to try and get people interested in diamonds, but I don't see how they have any more control over demand than a non-cartel.
Am I missing something?
My boss faces the same bureaucracy I do. And our VP IS the IT VP...
Our clients are internal and if we don't keep this project going, we're still expected to deliver our normal results. The project simply enables us to do it accurately and in a timely manner while reducing impact on other people in the company.
There's already a process in place to get large projects approved and rejected. We're not a large project, so we are ignored. That's simply the fact of it.
What we basically have is: Our IT pretends to provide us the service we need, and we pretend to follow their rules.
Getting the job done is my top priority. Following IT rules is a lower priority. If someone gets their knickers in a wad then I'll just start Fedexing CDs back and forth - I'll just make sure to use their department's account.
The only ones who suffer directly without this project are people in my office and my counterparts around the globe. We are low-level people and would otherwise just be stuck with working extra long hours. Being on salary, there's no overtime to cause concern.
Just because the bureaucracy is stupid doesn't mean I have to blindly follow along.
I know all along people say that playing video games does not affect the behavior of the participants, and that's probably true - having to do with the player's ability to separate the game from reality.
However, I remember hearing recently about parts of the brain that are activated by either doing a particular activity, or watching someone else do that same activity. So, for at least part of the brain, watching someone hit a tennis serve has the same effect as actually hitting a tennis serve yourself. The belief is this is one key way our brains learn to do things - through some kind of mimickery.
With that in mind, it makes me wonder if playing video games does have some kind of feedback mechanism in affecting the way the brain of the player is wired. Too bad I can't use something about that for my thesis...
The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off.
That only makes sense if the atmosphere has a uniform distribution of every kind of particle. Clearly this is not true. If the distribution is uniform then the dogs would have no differential to determine direction with.
Drug dogs are trained to seek out areas with higher concentrations of drugs. How else do you think they are able to determine direction and location?
Try walking around your neighborhood around dinner time. You eventually start to smell a good steak being grilled (or maybe a stir-fry, bread, or whatever). Walk around, turning your head from side to side and just using your nose, you'll be able to figure out what house that smell is coming from. You'll only be able to do this because there is not a uniform distribution of steak-grilling-smell in your neighborhood.
Now imagine your house has a couple dead fish in it. Your entire house reeks of the smell. Because your house is closed and the fish have been there a while, you might have a fairly uniform distribution. Likewise, you would have a difficult time finding the dead fish with just your sense of smell. Nearly every place in your house smells equally bad.
Is there a chance that dogs could get addicted or cancer from their activities? Maybe. As they zero in on their targets (in real life and in training), they're going to be inhaling air with higher concentrations of the particles than the atmosphere in general. So they're getting more particles than they normally would.
The question is - do such substances emit ENOUGH particles to pose a health risk? Or do the substances need to be consumed?
I agree with you on almost everything you said. I'd even say our front-line tech support people are top-notch.
Unless your IT need has a multi-$100K budget (to be dedicated to IT, of course), it simply won't get addressed because it's considered by IT to be low priority. There is a huge committee of people who get to review these projects.
In my case, however, since my project is less than $30k, my needs are totally ignored. In fact, the reason we're doing this with an outside vendor is because our internal IT wanted it to be a $250K project - and that would be with an end product that is missing vital features. We're doing it on the outside for much much less - and our version 1 of the project has been a huge success. It's saving 100's of man-hours every month around the globe.
But again, because it's not a quarter of a million dollar project, my desire to share files with my contractor is being ignored. And by the time I could try to push through one of these committees, the time-frame of the project would have passed and we could have been done sooner by snail-mailing the files.
I'd love to be able to scp the files around (you're right, e-mail is not the best way to handle this). But, I'm just too low priority to be bothered with. The problem is there are countless small issues like this that our IT people should be handling - there would be huge savings across the company. But they only want to be focused on huge-dollar projects that require years to finish. I hope we survive it.
Simply have a policy that states "email services outside of the control of this company are not to be used for business correspondence". Seems simple enough.
Except some people may NEED to do just that because of the stupid rules set up on the company mail servers.
For my work, I deal with a developer in another state and we have to exchange large files. From inside our network, I have way to ftp/ssh into his company servers to transfer the files. So, e-mailing is the only option. Our e-mail servers won't allow attachments that large.
So, we use gmail. It's not elegant, but we can easily send the files we need back and forth and actually get our work done.
Oh yes... our IT people are the same totalitarians you find everywhere (I used to be an admin, and back then, we actually tried to help our people do their jobs, not inhibit their work). So, they won't adjust the rules of our mail servers, or provide a way for me to connect to the other company's computers and transfer the files.
So there it is... IT's motto is "IT at the speed of business", but the reality is "business crawling at the bureaucratic speed of IT". It's like they believe that they are the revenue generating portion of the company and that the rest of the company exists to serve IT.
Sadly, that view is all too common.
I thought the whole point of wine and beer was to get women OUT of their clothes, not into them.
To quote Don Hirschberg, "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
Then Asimov had some nice ideas:
* I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.
* If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
* There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
Why is it, I wonder, that people who believe in God, and particularly Christians, insist that anyone who does not is still religious? Are they so insecure in their beliefs that they must force some kind of belief system onto other people - even if only in their own minds? Why is it they insist that asking, "where is the proof?" formulates a religious belief?
Who said anything about humans doing it?
And it doesn't take "faith" to guess that technology and knowledge will progress. One just has to look back to see the trend and project into the future. It's all a gamble anyway.
One of my favorite professors to work with was a CS professor. He's doing a lot of work (research & publishing) in quantum computing and hangs out a lot with a priest-mathematician (it's a Catholic school).
While he certainly teaches classes that involve learning how to program, that's certainly not the focus of his classes. He also does a lot to encourage students to get involved with research projects and get published themselves.
When I think of the science part of computer science, he's who I think of. Someone who's researching and discovering new things.
YouTube, by comparison, seems to be mostly original work, created and posted by the copyright holders to those works, they publish. As a tool, it's clearly aimed at legitimate uses, and Viacom's one legitimate complaint might be (MIGHT be) that Google just didn't police it well enough.
The problem is that while there's a lot of original stuff on there, a lot of that original work uses bits of other people's work as well.
As an example, take this little video that showed up in my inbox about a slug-bug like game called Prius Punch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4R99pAnKWI.
For one, it uses the name Prius, which is definitely trade-marked. And it has little bits of well-known songs. Is it a derivative work that needs copyright release for those songs? Or are the segments short enough that they're covered under fair use? Can it use the name Prius in the game it's talking about?
It's pretty typical of stuff on youtube. Is it legal? And if not, is there enough entirely legal/original content that YouTube can survive?
IANAL, so I have no idea on the legal questions. And IANA-Market Analyst, so I can't help with that either...
However all you "man is the prime source of global warming" can take heart, I have already seen a few articles where they are ignoring the claim that the change will save energy to focus on saying that it will save lives on the road, it is better for outdoor recreation, and it just makes people feel good because of the extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day.
Then why don't we just friggin' leave it in DST all-year round? It's the stupid changing back and forth that causes so many problems. There are DOT studies showing more crashes and fatalities right after changes in time - probably because people are sleepier because their sleep rhythms haven't caught up.
I don't see why we can't just split the difference and change it 30 minutes and leave it alone.
I don't make a great deal of money, and it is a kind of a game to play with my withholding. But it's a game that makes me a little money, which is nice.
Yeah... laughing is kind of hard. Really.. I feel bad for people who either can't see what they're doing makes no sense or they stick to their guns just to be stubborn.
I can be stubborn too, so I know I'm not the only irrational actor here...
If you can calculate what your EIC and other credits will be then adjust your withholding so that you owe that much.
You can kind of do that with existing tax software. The tax rates me be a bit different next year, but just plug into the software the salary you expect to earn next year. Then just lower the amount withheld on the virtual-W2 until you end up owing $20 or something like that. Figure out what the amount of withheld tax is is spread over all your paychecks and lower your withholding so that you end up paying just enough so your that your EIC and other credits leaves you with a small amount due. If your employer won't let you specify an exact withholding then use your W4 to claim a high number. Get a paycheck and see where that puts you and then amend your W4 so that it you take out "extra" (there's a line for this ) above what they take with your stated exemptions.
THEN, there is no return to garnish.
To do otherwise is to put money into the system that they will just take away. Why do that? Put in less than you will owe, even after your credits, and there will be nothing for them to take at the end of the year. The bonus is that not only are you "keeping" your credits, you're getting them in increments throughout the year.
I'm not sure where you get the economy collapsing out of my post.
I'm just saying it's financially illiterate to claim you're saving money on your taxes while to get that savings you have to pay nearly 3 times what you're "saving" in interest to someone else.
Now, it's generally a sound idea use a mortgage to buy a house so you can build equity and have the house appreciate (and also to lock in a fixed payment level for your housing over a long period of time).
But it's a pretty dumb strategy to take out a 2nd mortgage at a higher and probably variable rate to finance your European vacation and and your new jet skis while claiming it's "okay" because you get to write off the interest from your taxes. You're paying 1000 to save 300. You're still net -700. Sure you have your vacation memories and some depreciated jet skis but it's not sound thinking.
The same financial illiteracy leads many to think they're winning some great coup against the government when they get a fat refund check every year. You then try to explain that that money was theirs all along and isn't a gift from the government - and that they've been loaning it to the government for free. Then you suggest they reduce their withholding so they get the money all year long instead of in a huge lump. The typical answer is: "Well, if I do that, I'll spend it all. I like getting a big lump all at once."
The first part of that is an admission of lack of any self control - a much bigger problem, really. They also don't understand that if they reduce their withholding and put the extra cash in a savings account or some other investment that they not only have access to the money all year long, they will get MORE money - and they can STILL get it in a lump sum if they want it - and MORE of it! Or for an even better return they can use the extra to pay down their credit cards. Or even their mortgage... but then they complain that they'll lose some of their mortgage interest deduction.?! Okay... that's true for this year, but they don't seem to understand or care that doing so means they can chop years off their mortgage that way.
I realize it's a systems kind of thing where people get the reward of bad decisions now but due to delays inherent in the system, they don't have to pay the consequences until later. At which point, too much time has passed and they don't truly associate the bad choices in the past with the bad consequences of the future.
So, a simple thing like adjusting your withholding can help quite a bit. I actually take it to the extreme. My salary is pretty much fixed over the course of a year. $1.00 that I earn in January is worth more, due to inflation, than $1.00 in the next December. So, at the beginning of the year, I claim 10 deductions and have virtually no tax money taken out. At the same time, I max out the money going into my 401K. Every couple of months, I adjust the numbers so that more goes into taxes and less goes into the 401K. Over the course of the year, I end up paying the same amount of money into my 401K and Taxes as if I had left them level. BUT, the extra money going into the 401K is earning money for me right away - and for more of the year. There's no penalty (interest paid or interest lost) by pushing the tax payments to the end of the year. I also end up nearly even on my taxes... I paid $70 to federal this year and got back $120 on my state - but money was in my 401K for a longer period of time.
Now if I were willing to accept more risk (of losing my job, mostly), I'd actually balance it so I owed $1000 on each of my taxes. Below that threshold, there is no penalty or interest. So essentially I would get a free loan of that $2000 from the point I accumulate that much tax-due until April 15th the next year.
Anyway, I've resorted to laughing at people who will refinance to have spending money and to "keep" their interest deduction or who prefer to let the government keep huge "lump sums" of money because they seem impossible to educate and get defensive about their poor decisions. Spitting would be going too far.
Well, I can handle a lot of complication on my own.
If my tax situation is so complicated I can't figure it out, then I'm not going to trust some $40 piece of software to figure it out. At that point, I want someone who is an expert in handling such complications - and someone I can get to know personally. I figure at that point, the $500 will be well spent.
But that will probably be quite some time. Until then, I do it myself. It doesn't take long and it's not that complicated.
I've only used the software when they're cheap - like Taxcut for $10. Any more than that, it's easier/cheaper to just do it by hand. I have a spreadsheet that emulates a 1040, and I just plug in my numbers and copy them down on the printed form the IRS already sent me. (In fact, I use this spreadsheet to adjust my withholding throughout the year to try and make my federal and state refunds add up to 0. I was off by $30 this year).
I'd rather do that than spend $40.
If my taxes are so complicated that I think I need fancy software, I'd rather pay an accountant I trust (not HR Block) to do my taxes for me.
Okay, so you write-off $40 against your income. Suppose your marginal tax rate is 30%, you're only saving $12. So, you pay $40 to get $12.
That's the same idiot logic that people use when they decide to take out a home equity loan to get a bigger tax refund. They say, "hey, I'm getting $300 more back on my taxes!", and I say, "Good job, but you had to pay someone else $1000 to get that $300".
If you REALLY want a refund, just have your employer withhold more money out of your paychecks.
I always laugh at people who boast with pride about the large refunds they're getting. They just don't get it when I try to tell them that it was always their money all along and they simply let the government have it all year without paying interest. Then there's the people who boast about the tax savings they get from the interest on their 2nd & 3rd mortgages. Try explaining to them that they're losing money because in order to get the 20 or 30% of the interest paid back in a tax refund, they are having to pay 100% in interest to someone else.
Anyway, if you want a refund, have the hold out more.
Of course, if your refunds are being garnished that you're screwed and should have lawyered up better. And if THAT's your problem, then set your withholding low so there is no refund to garnish.
that when articles are posted that include obscure software titles and ambiguous acronyms that the editors can't insert a quick phrase explaining what the hell the whole thing is about?