No, no...clearly you can see that the system that came into place after 1917 fell on its face and is no more.
However, a call for a 1917-ish revolution is by no means an advocation for an authoritarian/totalitarian establishment.
There's a really good Pulp song that mentions 1933, but I'll be darned if I know what happened in 1933...please fill me in.
Overall, I think if 1984 does come, it will be because of the system that had its origins in 1776. This isn't meant to take anything away from the Spirit of 76, which was a Good Thing (tm).
Someone posted a newspaper clipping on the fridge at work. It was an ad from the state police (the same ones who got into trouble recently for race profiling). In the middle of the ad there was a drawing of a marijuana leaf and atop the ad it said something like "report people growing marijuana." There were also little sketches of pot being grown indoors and outdoors.
I was instantly reminded of the Red Dwarf episode, "Back to Reality," were the boys find themselves in a virtual-reality fascist world. They saw a poster on a wall. I fired up powerpoint and recreated the text of the sign...shrank it with the photocopier and taped it under the pot ad. Here is what it read:
BECOME A GOVERNMENT INFORMANT!
* Turn in your friends, neighbors and family!
* Fabulous prizes to be won!
Speaking of italians, did anyone see the Simpsons Halloween special a couple nights ago? In one sketch, the dolphins were taking over the world and they forced the TV news to change the lead story from intelligent dolphins taking over the world to intelligent italians. Homer was watching TV and said to himself, "intelligent italians? (shudders) something is wrong here!"
Later on, in the town hall, Homer starts beating up the dolphins and calls them a bunch of "tuna munchers." Now, I know he was addressing the dolphins and I've been known to have a dirty mind, but I found his choice of words very interesting.
I was at my dad's house helping him download the system update for BeOS. By default, all downloads get saved in ~/Downloads. So, 8.4 megs later I opened up the download directory and what did I see....5 or 6 copies of dialer.exe. I just played ignorant so as not to embarass my dad too much, who was standing next to the computer.
He knows that windows programs won't work on his computer, so I don't think he intentionally downloaded the dialers. Those are the web sites probably most scrutinized by the FTC, the ones that subversively install the dialer into your computer and dial out w/o your knowledge.
Well, needless to say, I washed my hands very soon after updating his system.
"When I think of all the old games that I used to love on my 8 bit atari, well all are copyrighted, and so I cannot legally copy them anymore."
Uhm, have you heard of your right to fair use? If you purchased a copyrighted work, you can make a reasonable amount of copies for your own personal purposes. Copyright laws do not prevent you from making copies; they prevent you from redistributing any copies you make.
>>If I have a couple million dollars in the bank, >>I can afford lawyers and accountants. In fact, >>I can afford lawyers and accountants in >>multiple countries. See where I am going with >>this? If the US starts to tax people's assets >>at death, the rich will simply displace the >>assets into non-taxables.
Personal disclosure: I make a living by helping rich people lower their estate taxes.
Here is my little exposé on how the rich avoid paying the full estate tax. The rich already displace their assets and as a result, pay less in estate taxes. The estate tax is largely an "avoidable tax." With proper estate planning, you can avoid getting taxed up the wazoo after you pass away. If you were rich, what would you rather do...spend a few grand in legal and professional fees to preserve most of your estate or pay the full estate tax? This can be done with various types of trusts and charitable donations.
Another *very* popular form of estate planning is the family limited partnership, or FLP. The IRS and the tax courts have "blessed" the use of FLPs for many years. An FLP is a legal entity, in the same sense that a corporation or limited liability company is. To reduce your estate/gift tax liability, you transfer the legal ownership of your assets (stock portfolio, real estate, etc.) to the FLP. In exchange for your capital contribution, you receive a limited partnership interest. You can almost think of it as a private mutual fund...but unlike a mutual fund, the number of ownership units are finite. Instead of gifting your assets outright to your family members, or dying with full, direct ownership of your assets, you are now gifting/dying with interests in a privately-held partnership. Let me emphasize this...with an FLP, you do not own the underlying assets...you own an ownership interest in the FLP...it's just like owning stock.
At this point, you may be thinking..."hey, this FLP is just a shell." However, all FLPs that are used in estate/gift tax planning have serious restrictions placed upon them. The FLP agreement places restrictions upon the owners of interests in FLPs. Specifically, a minority interest (non-controlling) owner has no ability whatsoever to control the underlying assets...they cannot determine how the assets are to be invested and they may not receive a return of or withdraw their capital. The only thing they usually receive is a cash distribution from any income that the FLP may generate. In addition, it is very difficult to sell your interest. Usually, the FLP agreement states that you can only sell your interest with the sole consent of the general (managing) partner, or you may only sell your interest to other family members, who may not want to buy your share.
For all of the above purposes, an ownership position in an FLP is worth less to an investor than owning the assets directly. With an FLP, you have lack of control of the underlying assets and sometimes lack of marketability. It is my job to determine the value of FLPs. Not surprisingly, the value of the total FLP itself is worth less than the value of its individual underlying assets. Look at it this way...what has more value to you...100 shares of Andover.net that you own directly, or a noncontrolling interest in a partnership that owns 100 shares of Andover.net. Common sense would dictate that you would demand a discount from the net asset value of the partnership interest due to lack of control concerns. In the public marketplace, the exact same thing happens with closed-end investment funds...If you look at the prices of closed-end funds in Baron's, you will see the net asset value per share column and the market price column. The net asset value is the total value of the underlying assets and the market price is what people actually pay for a share of the closed-end fund. In every case, the market price is less than the net asset value.
So, in the case of an FLP, the gift/estate tax liability is lowered because you're starting with a lower value to base the tax on. IE, Instead of being taxed on $100, you're being taxed on, say, $60 - $75. And it's not really a dirty, underhanded trick...if I had a large estate, I'd want to protect some of it, too.
Also, I would like to note that the estate tax is only payable by people with assets greater than ~$1e6. However, it affects us all...the estate tax is one of the fastest growing revenue streams in the US today. The government is receiving that money and is getting used to *spending* it. If the estate tax was eliminated (almost happened if Clinton didn't veto it), that tax burden would get pushed down to the middle and lower economic classes. Let me put it to you in a/.'esque kind of way...what would you rather see...Bill Gates paying estate taxes or the rest of the public paying them?
Pico has improved my productivity at work. I'm no longer staring at all the pretty widgets in Word wondering what they do. Now I've just got a *text* screen in front of me, with a black background and white letters. It's very peaceful and calming.
I like to do text editing in pico. Luckily, pico has been ported to DOS so that I can use it at work, too, under NT. For my job, all I'm concerned with creating the text content. I let the support staff deal with the hassles of Word to do the layout and printing.
For spreadsheets, IMO, Excel is the best. I took an Excel (97) spreadsheet home to try out under Gnumeric. It's a fairly sophisticated spreadsheet, but it doesn't have any macros or VB in it. Gnumeric choked on it and couldn't recognize some of the table lookup functions. So I'd be really happy to get Excel working at home.
Now that Office 2000 is out, I bet you can get copies of Office 97 for relatively cheap. We use both versions in the office and there's no practical difference other than some window dressings.
I know a couple people who don't get cable/satellite TV because they don't want a lot of crap being broadcast into their homes. However, they do keep a TV around with rabbit ears. But what does that leave you with...the big four/five neworks with drivel like Friends, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Oprah. Without cable the only quality programming available is from PBS.
Here's what I'd do if I wasn't living with my family (who like to watch all of the above crap)...Dish Network lets you pick 15 channels for 15 bucks. Just pick out things like Discovery Channel, PBS, TLC, History Channel and A&E and you'll just have all documentaries, all the time. Yes, they have commercials (mostly geared towards the wealthy), but that's what the mute button is for.
Sometimes I dream about the spreadsheets and reports that I write. If I wake up either naturally or because of my alarm and I'm delerious enough, I'll actually try to fall back to sleep to finish what I was working on.
Go to a place where a lot of people aggregate, such as a beach. Notice all those people with towels there? *That's* how much the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has influenced our society.
I think Be has realised that the entry barrier into the desktop environment is very large. Over the last year they have refocused their focus (?!) and are pushing BeOS as the ideal OS for internet and multimedia appliances.
BeOS would have made a great OS X. It was designed from the ground up to be incredibly quick and robust. Although it is not a *nix technically, it runs very much like one underneath (has 90 some percent POSIX compatability). The UI is very clean; it lets you forget about the OS and concentrate on using your apps and getting your work done.
The two things that BeOS lacks right now that would bring its guts up to *nix quality are a multiuser environment and better networking support. The filesystem is geared for muliuser support (*nix file permissions settings are all in place) and it's been rumored that the OS would go multiuser in R6, but who knows. In the next month or two, the networking software will be completely replaced with a BSD-type networking structure. Oh, and OpenGL is coming up RSN.
I'm sure if Apple picked up BeOS back in 1996, everything I described above would have been in place by now.
If you can hack your cuecat so that it isn't squirting out XOR'd bar codes and serial numbers, you can use it for all sorts of fun things. Think your own little library checkout system, think scripts that are launched by swiping a card in your pocket, think swiping a jewel case and playing the album. I use mine for two things right now...
1. Using it in conjunction with the barcode on a book as the root password to my router.
2. (In conjunction with the database-like Be filesystem, Be OS, mp3flashlight and cl-amp) I can store the scan output from the back of CD jewel cases in the "comment" attribute of an MP3 file. If I have ripped the CD previously I can swipe the barcode on the jewel case and have the query output (the album tracks) piped into my mp3 player.
Right now, with my unhacked cuecat, I am stuck with storing barcode output into my mp3's that is scrambled and has the serial number...as a result I can only do my album swipes with one particular scanner. If I had the know-how (or if I have any volunteers (-: ) I could hack my cuecat and have it put out only standard bar codes. Plus, if I give the mp3 to someone who also owns the jewel case, standard bar code output lets them do album swipes with their own scanners.
Hmmm...there's an idea for a nice little cottage industry....selling modded cuecats. The materials are free, except for the additional wire, so you're mostly paying for a little labor! hehe
Re:No moving parts... no truly "magic" b
on
3D Printers
·
· Score: 1
I saw that same TV special just a couple months ago...the skull was actually formed while the liquid was down in the chamber. There were two lasers that fired into the chamber. At points where the lasers met, the plastic would harden. *Then* the hardened object would be raised up from the liquid.
I've had nothing but frustration with the fox.mit.edu link. I've done two separate downloads at separate times over my 56k (one overnight and one while at work) and in both instances I'm only a few K off from getting the full iso. When I burn what I have, I can't read the disc. The most I've gotten from the download is 95,907,556 bytes (out of a total 95,911,936). Am I doing something wrong (just clicking on the link)? Has anyone else had this problem with the same link?
According to their support page, the smartcard reader plugs into a serial port and uses a keyboard passthrough for power. Hmmm...I hope this won't affect my cuecat scanner's operation in any way...I am using the scanner in conjunction with the barcode on an old win 95 instruction manual as the password for my FREESCO router. So when people ask me if it's secure, I say "secure? hell, not even *I* know the root password!"
Some guy made a smartcard reader driver for BeOS a while back, so I am hopping to get that reader in the mail and try it out! I sure hope Netcity doesn't act like dicks and sue him.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what they would do if they found out that someone was a gay software pirate?
No, no...clearly you can see that the system that came into place after 1917 fell on its face and is no more.
However, a call for a 1917-ish revolution is by no means an advocation for an authoritarian/totalitarian establishment.
There's a really good Pulp song that mentions 1933, but I'll be darned if I know what happened in 1933...please fill me in.
Overall, I think if 1984 does come, it will be because of the system that had its origins in 1776. This isn't meant to take anything away from the Spirit of 76, which was a Good Thing (tm).
Someone posted a newspaper clipping on the fridge at work. It was an ad from the state police (the same ones who got into trouble recently for race profiling). In the middle of the ad there was a drawing of a marijuana leaf and atop the ad it said something like "report people growing marijuana." There were also little sketches of pot being grown indoors and outdoors.
:)
I was instantly reminded of the Red Dwarf episode, "Back to Reality," were the boys find themselves in a virtual-reality fascist world. They saw a poster on a wall. I fired up powerpoint and recreated the text of the sign...shrank it with the photocopier and taped it under the pot ad. Here is what it read:
BECOME A GOVERNMENT INFORMANT!
* Turn in your friends, neighbors and family!
* Fabulous prizes to be won!
I was so proud of myself for being reactionary
I would understand if this got moderated down...
Speaking of italians, did anyone see the Simpsons Halloween special a couple nights ago? In one sketch, the dolphins were taking over the world and they forced the TV news to change the lead story from intelligent dolphins taking over the world to intelligent italians. Homer was watching TV and said to himself, "intelligent italians? (shudders) something is wrong here!"
Later on, in the town hall, Homer starts beating up the dolphins and calls them a bunch of "tuna munchers." Now, I know he was addressing the dolphins and I've been known to have a dirty mind, but I found his choice of words very interesting.
If Bush gets elected (god forbid), I propose a major campaign to call him "the Shrub," just as Clinton was known as "Slick Willy" in some circles.
I was at my dad's house helping him download the system update for BeOS. By default, all downloads get saved in ~/Downloads. So, 8.4 megs later I opened up the download directory and what did I see....5 or 6 copies of dialer.exe. I just played ignorant so as not to embarass my dad too much, who was standing next to the computer.
He knows that windows programs won't work on his computer, so I don't think he intentionally downloaded the dialers. Those are the web sites probably most scrutinized by the FTC, the ones that subversively install the dialer into your computer and dial out w/o your knowledge.
Well, needless to say, I washed my hands very soon after updating his system.
If you took a spare computer w/nothing but a power supply and motherboard, how many cuecats could you daisychain together through the keyboard port?
Here it is:
Let's make Ricky Martin the referee who gets the crap beaten out of him, just like they do in WWF.
"When I think of all the old games that I used to love on my 8 bit atari, well all are copyrighted, and so I cannot legally copy them anymore."
Uhm, have you heard of your right to fair use? If you purchased a copyrighted work, you can make a reasonable amount of copies for your own personal purposes. Copyright laws do not prevent you from making copies; they prevent you from redistributing any copies you make.
>>If I have a couple million dollars in the bank, >>I can afford lawyers and accountants. In fact, >>I can afford lawyers and accountants in >>multiple countries. See where I am going with >>this? If the US starts to tax people's assets >>at death, the rich will simply displace the >>assets into non-taxables.
/.'esque kind of way...what would you rather see...Bill Gates paying estate taxes or the rest of the public paying them?
Personal disclosure: I make a living by helping rich people lower their estate taxes.
Here is my little exposé on how the rich avoid paying the full estate tax. The rich already displace their assets and as a result, pay less in estate taxes. The estate tax is largely an "avoidable tax." With proper estate planning, you can avoid getting taxed up the wazoo after you pass away. If you were rich, what would you rather do...spend a few grand in legal and professional fees to preserve most of your estate or pay the full estate tax? This can be done with various types of trusts and charitable donations.
Another *very* popular form of estate planning is the family limited partnership, or FLP. The IRS and the tax courts have "blessed" the use of FLPs for many years. An FLP is a legal entity, in the same sense that a corporation or limited liability company is. To reduce your estate/gift tax liability, you transfer the legal ownership of your assets (stock portfolio, real estate, etc.) to the FLP. In exchange for your capital contribution, you receive a limited partnership interest. You can almost think of it as a private mutual fund...but unlike a mutual fund, the number of ownership units are finite. Instead of gifting your assets outright to your family members, or dying with full, direct ownership of your assets, you are now gifting/dying with interests in a privately-held partnership. Let me emphasize this...with an FLP, you do not own the underlying assets...you own an ownership interest in the FLP...it's just like owning stock.
At this point, you may be thinking..."hey, this FLP is just a shell." However, all FLPs that are used in estate/gift tax planning have serious restrictions placed upon them. The FLP agreement places restrictions upon the owners of interests in FLPs. Specifically, a minority interest (non-controlling) owner has no ability whatsoever to control the underlying assets...they cannot determine how the assets are to be invested and they may not receive a return of or withdraw their capital. The only thing they usually receive is a cash distribution from any income that the FLP may generate. In addition, it is very difficult to sell your interest. Usually, the FLP agreement states that you can only sell your interest with the sole consent of the general (managing) partner, or you may only sell your interest to other family members, who may not want to buy your share.
For all of the above purposes, an ownership position in an FLP is worth less to an investor than owning the assets directly. With an FLP, you have lack of control of the underlying assets and sometimes lack of marketability. It is my job to determine the value of FLPs. Not surprisingly, the value of the total FLP itself is worth less than the value of its individual underlying assets. Look at it this way...what has more value to you...100 shares of Andover.net that you own directly, or a noncontrolling interest in a partnership that owns 100 shares of Andover.net. Common sense would dictate that you would demand a discount from the net asset value of the partnership interest due to lack of control concerns. In the public marketplace, the exact same thing happens with closed-end investment funds...If you look at the prices of closed-end funds in Baron's, you will see the net asset value per share column and the market price column. The net asset value is the total value of the underlying assets and the market price is what people actually pay for a share of the closed-end fund. In every case, the market price is less than the net asset value.
So, in the case of an FLP, the gift/estate tax liability is lowered because you're starting with a lower value to base the tax on. IE, Instead of being taxed on $100, you're being taxed on, say, $60 - $75. And it's not really a dirty, underhanded trick...if I had a large estate, I'd want to protect some of it, too.
Also, I would like to note that the estate tax is only payable by people with assets greater than ~$1e6. However, it affects us all...the estate tax is one of the fastest growing revenue streams in the US today. The government is receiving that money and is getting used to *spending* it. If the estate tax was eliminated (almost happened if Clinton didn't veto it), that tax burden would get pushed down to the middle and lower economic classes. Let me put it to you in a
Pico has improved my productivity at work. I'm no longer staring at all the pretty widgets in Word wondering what they do. Now I've just got a *text* screen in front of me, with a black background and white letters. It's very peaceful and calming.
I like to do text editing in pico. Luckily, pico has been ported to DOS so that I can use it at work, too, under NT. For my job, all I'm concerned with creating the text content. I let the support staff deal with the hassles of Word to do the layout and printing.
For spreadsheets, IMO, Excel is the best. I took an Excel (97) spreadsheet home to try out under Gnumeric. It's a fairly sophisticated spreadsheet, but it doesn't have any macros or VB in it. Gnumeric choked on it and couldn't recognize some of the table lookup functions. So I'd be really happy to get Excel working at home.
Now that Office 2000 is out, I bet you can get copies of Office 97 for relatively cheap. We use both versions in the office and there's no practical difference other than some window dressings.
>> I'm a concious cable-TV-not-customer.
I know a couple people who don't get cable/satellite TV because they don't want a lot of crap being broadcast into their homes. However, they do keep a TV around with rabbit ears. But what does that leave you with...the big four/five neworks with drivel like Friends, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Oprah. Without cable the only quality programming available is from PBS.
Here's what I'd do if I wasn't living with my family (who like to watch all of the above crap)...Dish Network lets you pick 15 channels for 15 bucks. Just pick out things like Discovery Channel, PBS, TLC, History Channel and A&E and you'll just have all documentaries, all the time. Yes, they have commercials (mostly geared towards the wealthy), but that's what the mute button is for.
Sometimes I dream about the spreadsheets and reports that I write. If I wake up either naturally or because of my alarm and I'm delerious enough, I'll actually try to fall back to sleep to finish what I was working on.
640K ought to be enough for anybody's brief.
Go to a place where a lot of people aggregate, such as a beach. Notice all those people with towels there? *That's* how much the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has influenced our society.
I think Be has realised that the entry barrier into the desktop environment is very large. Over the last year they have refocused their focus (?!) and are pushing BeOS as the ideal OS for internet and multimedia appliances.
BeOS would have made a great OS X. It was designed from the ground up to be incredibly quick and robust. Although it is not a *nix technically, it runs very much like one underneath (has 90 some percent POSIX compatability). The UI is very clean; it lets you forget about the OS and concentrate on using your apps and getting your work done.
The two things that BeOS lacks right now that would bring its guts up to *nix quality are a multiuser environment and better networking support. The filesystem is geared for muliuser support (*nix file permissions settings are all in place) and it's been rumored that the OS would go multiuser in R6, but who knows. In the next month or two, the networking software will be completely replaced with a BSD-type networking structure. Oh, and OpenGL is coming up RSN.
I'm sure if Apple picked up BeOS back in 1996, everything I described above would have been in place by now.
I've tried CueBe, but for my purposes, I don't need any special software at all, other than my regular mp3 tools.
If you can hack your cuecat so that it isn't squirting out XOR'd bar codes and serial numbers, you can use it for all sorts of fun things. Think your own little library checkout system, think scripts that are launched by swiping a card in your pocket, think swiping a jewel case and playing the album. I use mine for two things right now...
1. Using it in conjunction with the barcode on a book as the root password to my router.
2. (In conjunction with the database-like Be filesystem, Be OS, mp3flashlight and cl-amp) I can store the scan output from the back of CD jewel cases in the "comment" attribute of an MP3 file. If I have ripped the CD previously I can swipe the barcode on the jewel case and have the query output (the album tracks) piped into my mp3 player.
Right now, with my unhacked cuecat, I am stuck with storing barcode output into my mp3's that is scrambled and has the serial number...as a result I can only do my album swipes with one particular scanner. If I had the know-how (or if I have any volunteers (-: ) I could hack my cuecat and have it put out only standard bar codes. Plus, if I give the mp3 to someone who also owns the jewel case, standard bar code output lets them do album swipes with their own scanners.
Hmmm...there's an idea for a nice little cottage industry....selling modded cuecats. The materials are free, except for the additional wire, so you're mostly paying for a little labor! hehe
That's SEC www.sec.gov - click on EDGAR
I saw that same TV special just a couple months ago...the skull was actually formed while the liquid was down in the chamber. There were two lasers that fired into the chamber. At points where the lasers met, the plastic would harden. *Then* the hardened object would be raised up from the liquid.
I just did an FTP append of my broken download by hooking up to SlashMirror. All is well...hosah!
I've had nothing but frustration with the fox.mit.edu link. I've done two separate downloads at separate times over my 56k (one overnight and one while at work) and in both instances I'm only a few K off from getting the full iso. When I burn what I have, I can't read the disc. The most I've gotten from the download is 95,907,556 bytes (out of a total 95,911,936). Am I doing something wrong (just clicking on the link)? Has anyone else had this problem with the same link?
According to their support page, the smartcard reader plugs into a serial port and uses a keyboard passthrough for power. Hmmm...I hope this won't affect my cuecat scanner's operation in any way...I am using the scanner in conjunction with the barcode on an old win 95 instruction manual as the password for my FREESCO router. So when people ask me if it's secure, I say "secure? hell, not even *I* know the root password!"
Some guy made a smartcard reader driver for BeOS a while back, so I am hopping to get that reader in the mail and try it out! I sure hope Netcity doesn't act like dicks and sue him.