Are you saying that if your accountant came to you and said "I found a legal way to save you $1,000 on your personal taxes next year" you wouldn't take it? That's all Microsoft is doing.
And then what if a couple of years later someone comes along and notices that No, the tax tactic he came up with doesn't actually work legally. People are wandering off on tangent subjects, but that is the issue raised by the link in the story. It makes a case that the stuff Microsoft has done does not successfully dodge their Washington State tax liabilities. If he's right (and I've seen no one here making any sort of case refuting his legal argument), them Microsoft is still liable for those back taxes. Just because a company comes up with a tax avoidance scheme does not mean it is legally valid, and just because the government has not yet gone after them does not entitle the company to continue using an invalid tax dodge, and does not exempt them from paying those back taxes.
If someone gave you an invalid way to "save $1000 on your personal taxes", and you haven't paid that money for the past five years, then you are merely an uncaught tax evader, and you are still liable for $5000+interest+penalties.
Who do you think will get a better education: Someone like me who was kid number 32 in a room with 35 kids or my children who are currently being home schooled where they are 2-5 kids with one teacher.
With high probability, kid number 32 in a room with 35 kids.
While it is certainly possible for home schooling to produce exceptional results - it is just that - exceptional. The vast majority of people, the vast majority of parents, are grossly unqualified and grossly incompentent to provide a quality modern education.We have professional trained teachers for the same reason we have professional trained doctors. If your kid has an appendicitis and needs surgery, any parent engaging in "home medicaling" surgery on their kids would not merely be ridiculed, they would almost certainly be thrown in prison. Where do people get the notion that random untrained parents trying to play teacher is somehow any better an idea than random untrained parents trying to play doctor?
And it's even worse than that. We're not just talking about average parents. Even a half-ass effort at home schooling is a fairly herculean task for a parent to take on. It pretty much amounts to an additional full time job. It takes an extremely "motivated" parent to yank their kid out of the public school system and try to educated the kids themselves. While such parents certainly have many good and beneficial motivations, someone yanking their kid out of public school is highly likely to have been pushed to that point by some "unhealthy" motivation in the mix. There are plenty of valid reasons to be disappointed with the quality of the public school education system, there are plenty of failings of the pubic school system, but it generally takes a rather "unconventional worldview" for a parent to consider the public school system to be some evil threat they have to protect their children from. It generally takes a parent with a pretty extremist ideology to consider mainstream society and mainstream schools to be some sort of evil threat to their children. There are a number of "unhealthy motivations" that might drive a parent to homeschool, but lets take religion as perhaps the most common one. Imagine some cultist, or some Scientologist, or even some "non-mainstream" Christian with intense religious beliefs, who wants to shield their child from the "evil" and "corrupting" ideas of normal mainstream society. A parent motivated to keep their kid UN-educated and UN-exposed to normal mainstream ideas and normal mainstream society.
A parent highly motivated to indoctrinate their kid into whatever unconventional and extreme ideology motivated them to yank the kid out of the public school system.
Yes, in exceptional circumstances it is possible to provide a child with an education superior to that offered in
Not only do that all sound like sci-fi movies, but those titles all sound a thousand times better than 'Mansquito' and the rest of the crap the Sci-Fi Channel has been producing.
Oh, I'm sorry.... I mean the crap 'Syfy' has been shitting out. Their rebranding attempt is so bad I pronounce it Sif-ee.
Why the heck is this modded +5 insightful? Did you even bother to RTFA?
Microsoft doesn't owe Washington jack crap
If you click the article link, it presents a legal argument that Microsoft does owe Washington State for unpaid back taxes. I'm not a lawyer, but I am more familiar with the law than most. He does appear to have backed up his argument and statements in reasonable rational and plausible manner.
It's certainly possible he's wrong, but you did not present the slightest reason, argument, or indication that he's wrong. Your entire post amounted to saying "Nuh Uh!". That is hardly Insightful, it is definitely not Informative, and not exactly Interesting.
because what's it's doing with this Nevada thing is entirely legal
No one disputes that Microsoft's actions were legal, he presents a reasonable and plausible case that those actions do not successfully exempt Microsoft from paying those taxes.
If Washington wants a piece of the pie then they need to change their state law to prohibit this practice by entities incorporated in Washington.
According to the legal argument he presented, there is absolutely no need to change Washington law. If he is correct, then under existing Washington law Microsoft does (and always did) have a legal obligation to pay those taxes. You presented "jack crap" to suggest he isn't correct.
Lets say I buy a post office box in the Bahamas, and I claim that as my residence in some tax avoidance scheme, and I don't bother paying my taxes for five years. Just because the government has not (yet) gone after me to collect those taxes does not mean that my tax avoidance scheme is legally valid. It does not mean I do not actually owe those taxes. If my contrived "Bahama residence" tax tactic doesn't legally work, then I am merely a tax evader who has not yet been prosecuted for those unpaid taxes.
That is the case he's presenting. A case that Microsoft's tax tactic of attempting to arbitrarily assign a select part of their revenues to a different state may not work under the law to avoid their Washington tax liabilities.
Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but your post on the subject was completely vacuous.
Brilliant! You're like a Brain Scientists and a Rocket Surgeon all rolled into one!
Amazing! Nobody pays taxes!
Corporations don't pay taxes, they are merely passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Employees don't pay taxes, they are merely passed on to employers in the form of higher salaries. People on social security, welfare, or unemployment don't have to pay sales tax or any other tax, as the social security and other checks are scaled to cover that extra cost of living. The government never pays any sort of tax on anything, because all government costs are merely passed on to everyone else in the form of higher taxes... which nobody ever has to pay.
I will buy this Disney Keychest technology the day them allow me to have the key to my own goddamn chest.
It's the exact same thing I've been saying about Trusted Computing for ages. It works pretty much the exact same way. Each device comes with a unique locking key, and the number one design priority is that you are forbidden to to know your own master key controlling and locking down the "security" for your own property.
I want my key. No key, no sale.
If I ever did wind up owning one of these devices, it's my goddamn property and I'll take a screwdriver or a motherfucking chainsaw if I need to, and open my property and read out my own goddamn motherfucking key if I want to, and then of course, if someone does know their own key that was locking down their own device, then their entire stupid scheme falls apart. If you know your key, then none of the Trusted Computing anti-owner lockdown works against you. If you know your own key, then none of Disney's idiotic Keychest anti-owner locks work either.
Oh my God - someone who bought a movie could use the key he knows to unlock the chest and transfer his movie to his PC or iPod, or burn it to CD-R, or watch it on Linux, or use it with absolutely any program at will. E-gads! Gadzooks! But people must be denied that ability, because the ability to view or use the movie with any software because "any software" happens to include things like BitTorrent. Ohhhhh noes!
The laws of physics are not open to compromise. You can't haggle with mother nature. Reality doesn't give a shit how much you *want* or *wish* to fly, if you jump off a roof then you can delude yourself for a few seconds that you've won, but physics and cold reality don't give a shit how wishful or self deluded you are, cold hard reality will still smash your bones and smash your deluded schemes into teeny tiny painful bits.
Whether it's Disney's Keychest or Trusted Computing, they can hid your key inside the plastic box before they give it to you, but there's no getting around that fact. If you buy a computer or buy Disney's new Keychest product, it's your property and your key and you have every right - and more importantly the ability to slice it open and see your key. They can certainly make it a hassle to do so, you might need some tools to properly cut open and read your own property, you might even need to pay someone a few bucks to do the cutting and reading for you, but the ultimate unalterable fact of physics is that you can cut open and look at your own property, and that you have every right to do so. And all of the anti-owner "security" in Trusted Computing completely vanishes if the owner can ever get a hold of his own key. And all of the anti-owner "security" in Disney's Keychest completely vanishes if the owner can ever get a hold of his own key.
Dear Hollywood Executives, RIAA Executives, and other advocates of this crap, quit trying to fight reality. Quit trying to shove Defective By Design crap down consumer's throats. Wake up to fucking reality, no matter how much you would wish that some aspects of reality would go away. You don't get "it". You know that you're not getting "it". Well, this is the "it" you haven't been getting. Quit imagining that all your problems would go away if you could just find the right DRM magic to sprinkle on products. People are not interested in your stupid schemes to castrate technology. People are not interested in your stupid schemes to deliberately cripple products. People don't like deliberately crippled deliberately defective crap. If you try to foist this sort of crap on consumers, they react in one of two ways. They either refuse to buy your the deliberately defective shit, or people will sit down and figure out how to FIX it so it is no longer defective, no longer crippled, and defeating the purpose of trying to limit and cripple the device's function in the first place. Hell, the RIAA has finally begun to partially "get it" and sell friking MP
They want that to be true, they wish it to be true, they believe it *should* be true, to some extent they may have deluded themselves that it *is* true, and everything they say in public paints the image that it is true and often convinces people that it's true, but no. They have not (yet) managed to change copyright law to actually say that or actually work like that.
Copyright law in most countries is closely parallel, but I will speak specifically to US copyright law. US copyright law specifically distinguishes between the ownership of a copyright and ownership in particular copies. If you buy a book or a CD ow whatever, you in fact become the legal owner of the particular copy of the content on that paper or recorded in that plastic. You are in fact the legal owner of those particular "bits". The copyright owner sold that particular copy of "bits" to you, and his ownership rights in that particular copy of "bits" terminated. He retains ownership of the copy rights. He owns the right to create (or authorize) new copies made from those bits, and the right to public performances made from those bits, period. Copyright law also grants the copyright holder ownership of distribution rights, but copyright law specifically terminates the copyright holder's distribution right in a particular copy of bits when he sells that particular copy - the legal term for that is the First Sale Doctrine.
The publishing industry's public statements and product labeling go far beyond what the law actually says. For example the annoying FBI/copyright warnings that they spam onto every movie they sell are substantially bogus. NO, they are not in fact "licensing the movie for home viewing only". claim is an outright lie. They are not licensing the movie to you at all. When you buy a book, you receive no license because you don't need any license. You bought the copy, under copyright law you own that copy and you have the right to read it, no license needed. When you buy a video tape, you receive no license because you don't need any license. You bought the copy, under copyright law you own that copy and you have the right to view it, no license needed.
Copyright law grants the copyright holder essentially three rights (the law technically phrases it as 6 rights, but they really only amount to three different rights). The right to create new copies, the right to distribution, and the right to public display. Those rights are subject to many exception and limitations, which are far too numerous to address here. But the important thing here is that those are the only three exclusive rights the copyright holder owns, they are the only thing the copyright holder owns to license out. If you are not doing one of those three things, then you need no license. If the copyright holder is not licensing you one of those three things, then he is in fact not licensing you anything.
When you make a common consumer purchase of a book or a CD or a video tape, does that purchase include a copyright grant to create new copies? Does it include a copyright grant to distribute new copies? Does it include a copyright grant to public performance? No. They have not given you any copyright license at all. You simply made a physical purchase, and under US copyright law you are the physical and legal owner of the particular copy stored on that medium. You just (mostly) can't create/distribute new copies nor publicly preform it.
The creationists will blindly and steadfastly cling to their mysticism-based pseudoscience until two chimps mate and produce a homo sapiens offspring. Which of course is not how evolution works.
Oh come now, there is always a remote statistical chance that two Creationists could mate and produce fully evolved homo sapiens offspring.
Oh, and for classic fantasy you can't do much better than pre-monotheistic mythology.
I'd suggest some post-monotheistic classic fantasy, but the radical biased Slashdot crowd would undoubtedly persecute me for even suggesting that the Bible be taught in public schools.;)
You have me scratching my head a bit. Maybe you're just trying to "play the part of the prude", but you claim you are one in Real Life, but you're complaints and defensiveness don't really make sense to me. It doesn't seem you are the sort of person he's talking about. I think I pretty much see the key point here:
if you are reading these authors for their sex scenes then you missed the boat.
Well yeah, of course. But my point is that YOU are apparently recognizing that making it "about the sex scenes" is to miss the boat. HIS point, in relation to your comment there, is that the prudes are missing the boat. Prudes make it all about sex. They see one page with a few naughty words and they have a meltdown - or even worse and more typically - they hear some fourth-hand report that there are naughty words in there, and they have a meltdown.
I don't know how you would react if one of these typical "Christian Conservative problem books" came up in your child's school, but you do seem to recognize that there is important content in books and that just focusing on some sex scene is "missing the boat". Someone mentioned A Clockwork Orange. I haven't read that book, but based on the movie I can well imagine some scenes of the book are even more graphic and disturbing. But the story as a whole says many important and powerful things about morality and society and free will and people's rights and humanity and human nature and who we are and who do we want to be and how do we want to treat people, and ultimately the dilemma of how do we treat criminals? The dilemma, the paradox, can we do we should we as a society respect the humanity of a depraved individual who violates the humanity of others? At what point do we as individuals and as a society become just as depraved and inhuman?
It is a story and morality play that cannot be told without graphic and disturbing scenes of sex and violence.
my vantage point prudes do get worked up over class room material I complained about my high school daughter watching Scrubs and Casino Royal in school
Huh????? I'm not objecting to your complaint there... I might well make the same gripe to school officials if some teacher blew classtime on fluff comedy TV. Teachers are not BABY SITTERS, and they damn well shouldn't be treating students as a baby sitting job.
My confusion is how or why you connect that with "prudism".
I'm sure I'll go down in the school history as just another local religious nut job though.
I don't know what anyone at the school things or said about it, but I have seen absolutely no indication of that here from you or by anyone here against you.
Lets take a more specific example of what I believe the other poster was talking about. The one book that has been been at the center of the largest number of Christian Conservative nut job melt downs in US schools is Catcher in the Rye. It contains the word "fuck" and the phrase "goddamn". The main character has a conversation with a prostitute - not even a sex scene he just talks to her and pays her for her time. At one point another character pats the main character on the head, and the main character wonders if it might have been a homosexual advance. There is no sexuality in the scene, we have no indication that the head pat was intended to be sexual, but the main character wonders about the possibility and becomes uncomfortable and leaves.
Would you storm into a public highschool demanding that Catcher in the Rye be banned and teachers reprimanded or fire over it?
If not, then please don't legitimize those sorts of people by identifying with them and buying into their Christian Persecution Complex whines. If I criticize or insult or mock THEM, that is not Christian persecution and it's not an attack on you.
On the other hand if you *are* the sort of person who storms into schools screaming about Catcher in the Rye and other "objectionable" books (which at the moment I have no indication to be the case), then ok in that
it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
Forests are about the worst place on earth for fossils. Predators and scavengers voraciously go after any corpse, acidic soils ruthlessly dissolve bones, African forests are not exactly known for widespread volcanoes burying stuff, and we are talking about a species population of what? Maybe a few tens of thousands of individuals?
If anything it is amazing that we DO have the excellent human-line fossil record that we've got.
There is a fairly significant gap in the fossil record
It's very odd the way denialists seem to define gap. Once upon a time we had NO human-line fossils, and it was "the gap". Then we found one intermediate fossil, and then there were TWO gaps. And then we find two and three and four intermediate forms all lining up in sequence, and that just meant there were three gaps then four gaps then five gaps. And then we found however many more I've lost count of how many samples we have in the sequence now, but apparently the MORE evidence there is in the lineup it just means MORE gap to denialists.
I could dig up my dead grandfather, and denialists would just whine that there's a gap because my father is missing. And I could shoot my father and hand you his skeleton, and the denialists would STILL whine that there's a "gap" between my father and me.
I'm probably wasting my breath, but in counterpoint to my comment about the virtual zero rate for being able to get fossils of large forest animals, we do have an absolutely perfect absolutely complete absolutely continuous absolutely gap-free fossil record absolutely proving evolution. Tiny sea animals called forams. They live in the oceans by the trillion. Every single day billions and billions of them die. By the billions they die and continuously rain down on the sea floor. Continuously rain down on the deep dark, cold inert sea floor. Where they leave ideal fossils in the slowly accumulating sediment of dust and dirt on the sea floor.
In the 1970's we developed advanced deep sea drilling technology for oil exploration. Sea floor oil exploration that brought up lots of long seabed drill cores. A supply of sediment cores incidentally loaded with tiny foram fossils by the tens of thousands. An effectively limitless supply of perfectly layered perfectly continuous record of foram fossils spanning about a hundred million years.
A record continuously tracing diverse species of modern forams back to their common ancestor tens of millions of years ago. A prefect complete record not merely of all transitional species, but a hyper-fine hyper-continuous record of transitional forms ALONG individual speciation events. A record showing not just that evolution happened and exactly how it happened, but recording exactly how entire populations evolve AS it split into two child species, and scientists measuring it at about 150,000 years for a foram species to complete a population split into a pair of child species.
Biologists closed the case on evolution more than a hundred years ago. It is ludicrous that there are people running a public relations campaign today against it, spreading all sorts of confusion and misinformation to the public.
It SHOULD be possible to terminate all the arguments and controversy with just two lousy words:
Feathered Dinosaurs.
Feathered friking dinosaurs. Evolutionists said that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and the denialists said that was false and crazy. And then years later we started finding fossils of feathered friking dinosaurs. We've got an entire PLANET of evidence proving evolution, but just those two words... anyone who can ignore the discovery of feathered dinosaurs without even batting an eye.... that strikes me as a pretty serious case of denial.
Any good programmer (hacker) is not going to recreate the wheel every time he does something, so if you were to set out to make several species, you would cut and paste some basic things at the DNA level
its no wonder humans, apes and even pigs and frogs are similar in some of their DNA structures to humans
But that is NOT what the DNA evidence shows!
Imagine you are in a courtroom on the jury for a murder case and you are presented with DNA evidence proving that Jack and Jill are brother and sister, that Bob is their father, Ralph is their grandfather, Alice is their aunt, and Billy is their cousin.
Then the defense lawyer stands up and makes a statement that is so wildly oversimplified as to be effectively false - he says that the DNA of these people are merely "similar". He then says that the "mere similarities" can't establish who is parent to who, or who is brother or cousin to who.
The evidence does NOT show "mere copying". The evidence shows a strict PATTERN of copying. The evidence shows a strict family tree inheritance pattern of copying.
Evolution denialists try to dismiss the DNA evidence as "mere copying" by a "common author", but that is not what the evidence shows. The DNA evidence of species shows that there is an absolutely strict family tree pattern relationship between the DNA of all species. There is a strict family tree rule for what DNA is copied and for what DNA is NEVER copied.
If there is a "common author", then this DNA evidence tells us some very powerful and very strict things about HOW that "common author" did his work and how he did (and did not) do his copying. If there was a "common author" then he ONLY did his copying according to a strict family tree of inheritance pattern of copying. If there was a "common author", then he did his work in a manner that generated the EXACT same the same tree as evolution's tree of common descent.
The evidence proves that if there is a "common author" that he either did his work and did his copying by means of evolution, or he did his work and did his copying by some means that is indistinguishable and effectively identical to evolution.
The evidence proves that either evolution is true, or something indistinguishable and effectively identical to evolution is true.
The DNA evidence proves the evolutionary tree relationships between species with the "beyond any reasonable doubt" standard of proof as DNA evidence can and does prove the family tree relationships between people in a courtroom.
The "similarity" isn't the evidence. The "copying" isn't the evidence. The evidence is the evolutionary tree of common descent strict STRUCTURE that is established in what is and is not copied.
It's like finding a book, and someone says "bah, there's nothing there, just some letters copied". That entirely misses the strict pattern of the repeated letters, that misses that they are structured into words and sentences, and that completely misses all of the information recorded in the structure and pattern of copied letters. the letters are not copied randomly or arbitrarily. Species DNA is not copied randomly nor arbitrarily. It is copied strictly according to evolution.
And there is a lot of information written in the family tree pattern that exists in the DNA between species. You can actually trace backwards through the tree and substantially reconstruct the "parent nodes" in the tree. In an evolutionary model this means substantially reconstructing the DNA of a common ancestor. In a "common author" model, this means reconstructing either a real or emulated "common ancestor" that the author DID write in there either by using evolution as his method, or that he wrote in there using some work-method indistinguishable from evolution.
This tree structure in the DNA across species is a mathematically extractable pattern - you can feed the data into a structure analysis program and it will say "yes there is a tree in the data, and here it is". The structure of real or virtual
Cease fire cease fire! Friendly fire incident! (chuckle)
jd (1658) probably should have been more careful and clear about his post, but I'm pretty sure he's no denialist. In some alternate universe where we never suffered the anti-evolution-crackpottery problem, somebody expressing a desire to see the peer review on an initial scientific report would be considered pro-science prudence. That is doubly true considering the frankly lousy and fragmentary quality of the reconstructed skeleton in the NYT photo. We've already got far better proof of evolution than this. We don't need to over hype every new report, and we seriously don't need the black-eye when some small percentage of initial reports are revised or retracted on peer review.
I was going to chastise you for being unfair and pointing out how the page also lists new themes for Windows 7, but then I came across this line and I totally lost it: The Windows Taskbar has seen its most significant revision since its introduction in Windows 95. The taskbar is 10 pixels taller than in Windows Vista
I was going to make a joke confusing Slashdot with Wikipedia and pretending to think your post was a disambiguation page (wheres teh edit buton?), but apparently your post *is* the Vista_(disambiguation)#Vehicles page.
There are three images. One, a pinky inserted partway into a penis. Second, Saint Thomas inserting his finger into spear-wound in Jesus's chest. Three, a halfway-to-the-elbow anal fisting. That final photo was pretty much as "tame tasteful and artistic" as an explicit fisting photo can reasonably be.
By the way, there is a warning at the top of the page: *FOR CLASSROOM USE ONLY*
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
I disagree. Sure, God is pretty much king of the hill when it comes to the stuff listed there, but Westley Crusher was still a far more unpleasant character in fiction.
While some atheists might describe some mainstream religious texts as "nonsense", the vast majority of people, regardless of their belief, would not.
I hope you don't mind, but my preferred word is "silly". As in "Stories about talking snakes and magic apples are silly".
I take it that you are a person of belief. I further assume that you subscribe to one of the "big three" religions which do include stories about talking snakes and magic apples. Go ahead, I would love to hear you disagree with me. Go ahead, I would love to hear you explain how you think talking snakes and magic apples are not "silly".
Scientology and Christianity are equally "silly". While Christianity's current behavior is generally far better than Scientology's current behavior, Christianity has behaved far far worse in it's youth than Scientology has ever done. Go ahead, I'd love to hear you deny that one. If you give Scientology the same time that Christianity has had to mature and clean up its act, Scientology will soften up their rough edges exactly as Christianity has done itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that if your accountant came to you and said "I found a legal way to save you $1,000 on your personal taxes next year" you wouldn't take it? That's all Microsoft is doing.
And then what if a couple of years later someone comes along and notices that No, the tax tactic he came up with doesn't actually work legally. People are wandering off on tangent subjects, but that is the issue raised by the link in the story. It makes a case that the stuff Microsoft has done does not successfully dodge their Washington State tax liabilities. If he's right (and I've seen no one here making any sort of case refuting his legal argument), them Microsoft is still liable for those back taxes. Just because a company comes up with a tax avoidance scheme does not mean it is legally valid, and just because the government has not yet gone after them does not entitle the company to continue using an invalid tax dodge, and does not exempt them from paying those back taxes.
If someone gave you an invalid way to "save $1000 on your personal taxes", and you haven't paid that money for the past five years, then you are merely an uncaught tax evader, and you are still liable for $5000+interest+penalties.
Who do you think will get a better education: Someone like me who was kid number 32 in a room with 35 kids or my children who are currently being home schooled where they are 2-5 kids with one teacher.
With high probability, kid number 32 in a room with 35 kids.
While it is certainly possible for home schooling to produce exceptional results - it is just that - exceptional. The vast majority of people, the vast majority of parents, are grossly unqualified and grossly incompentent to provide a quality modern education.We have professional trained teachers for the same reason we have professional trained doctors. If your kid has an appendicitis and needs surgery, any parent engaging in "home medicaling" surgery on their kids would not merely be ridiculed, they would almost certainly be thrown in prison. Where do people get the notion that random untrained parents trying to play teacher is somehow any better an idea than random untrained parents trying to play doctor?
And it's even worse than that. We're not just talking about average parents. Even a half-ass effort at home schooling is a fairly herculean task for a parent to take on. It pretty much amounts to an additional full time job. It takes an extremely "motivated" parent to yank their kid out of the public school system and try to educated the kids themselves. While such parents certainly have many good and beneficial motivations, someone yanking their kid out of public school is highly likely to have been pushed to that point by some "unhealthy" motivation in the mix. There are plenty of valid reasons to be disappointed with the quality of the public school education system, there are plenty of failings of the pubic school system, but it generally takes a rather "unconventional worldview" for a parent to consider the public school system to be some evil threat they have to protect their children from. It generally takes a parent with a pretty extremist ideology to consider mainstream society and mainstream schools to be some sort of evil threat to their children. There are a number of "unhealthy motivations" that might drive a parent to homeschool, but lets take religion as perhaps the most common one. Imagine some cultist, or some Scientologist, or even some "non-mainstream" Christian with intense religious beliefs, who wants to shield their child from the "evil" and "corrupting" ideas of normal mainstream society. A parent motivated to keep their kid UN-educated and UN-exposed to normal mainstream ideas and normal mainstream society.
A parent highly motivated to indoctrinate their kid into whatever unconventional and extreme ideology motivated them to yank the kid out of the public school system.
Yes, in exceptional circumstances it is possible to provide a child with an education superior to that offered in
Not only do that all sound like sci-fi movies, but those titles all sound a thousand times better than 'Mansquito' and the rest of the crap the Sci-Fi Channel has been producing.
Oh, I'm sorry.... I mean the crap 'Syfy' has been shitting out. Their rebranding attempt is so bad I pronounce it Sif-ee.
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Why the heck is this modded +5 insightful? Did you even bother to RTFA?
Microsoft doesn't owe Washington jack crap
If you click the article link, it presents a legal argument that Microsoft does owe Washington State for unpaid back taxes. I'm not a lawyer, but I am more familiar with the law than most. He does appear to have backed up his argument and statements in reasonable rational and plausible manner.
It's certainly possible he's wrong, but you did not present the slightest reason, argument, or indication that he's wrong. Your entire post amounted to saying "Nuh Uh!". That is hardly Insightful, it is definitely not Informative, and not exactly Interesting.
because what's it's doing with this Nevada thing is entirely legal
No one disputes that Microsoft's actions were legal, he presents a reasonable and plausible case that those actions do not successfully exempt Microsoft from paying those taxes.
If Washington wants a piece of the pie then they need to change their state law to prohibit this practice by entities incorporated in Washington.
According to the legal argument he presented, there is absolutely no need to change Washington law. If he is correct, then under existing Washington law Microsoft does (and always did) have a legal obligation to pay those taxes. You presented "jack crap" to suggest he isn't correct.
Lets say I buy a post office box in the Bahamas, and I claim that as my residence in some tax avoidance scheme, and I don't bother paying my taxes for five years. Just because the government has not (yet) gone after me to collect those taxes does not mean that my tax avoidance scheme is legally valid. It does not mean I do not actually owe those taxes. If my contrived "Bahama residence" tax tactic doesn't legally work, then I am merely a tax evader who has not yet been prosecuted for those unpaid taxes.
That is the case he's presenting. A case that Microsoft's tax tactic of attempting to arbitrarily assign a select part of their revenues to a different state may not work under the law to avoid their Washington tax liabilities.
Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but your post on the subject was completely vacuous.
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Brilliant! You're like a Brain Scientists and a Rocket Surgeon all rolled into one!
Amazing! Nobody pays taxes!
Corporations don't pay taxes, they are merely passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Employees don't pay taxes, they are merely passed on to employers in the form of higher salaries.
People on social security, welfare, or unemployment don't have to pay sales tax or any other tax, as the social security and other checks are scaled to cover that extra cost of living.
The government never pays any sort of tax on anything, because all government costs are merely passed on to everyone else in the form of higher taxes... which nobody ever has to pay.
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I will buy this Disney Keychest technology the day them allow me to have the key to my own goddamn chest.
It's the exact same thing I've been saying about Trusted Computing for ages. It works pretty much the exact same way. Each device comes with a unique locking key, and the number one design priority is that you are forbidden to to know your own master key controlling and locking down the "security" for your own property.
I want my key. No key, no sale.
If I ever did wind up owning one of these devices, it's my goddamn property and I'll take a screwdriver or a motherfucking chainsaw if I need to, and open my property and read out my own goddamn motherfucking key if I want to, and then of course, if someone does know their own key that was locking down their own device, then their entire stupid scheme falls apart. If you know your key, then none of the Trusted Computing anti-owner lockdown works against you. If you know your own key, then none of Disney's idiotic Keychest anti-owner locks work either.
Oh my God - someone who bought a movie could use the key he knows to unlock the chest and transfer his movie to his PC or iPod, or burn it to CD-R, or watch it on Linux, or use it with absolutely any program at will. E-gads! Gadzooks! But people must be denied that ability, because the ability to view or use the movie with any software because "any software" happens to include things like BitTorrent. Ohhhhh noes!
The laws of physics are not open to compromise. You can't haggle with mother nature. Reality doesn't give a shit how much you *want* or *wish* to fly, if you jump off a roof then you can delude yourself for a few seconds that you've won, but physics and cold reality don't give a shit how wishful or self deluded you are, cold hard reality will still smash your bones and smash your deluded schemes into teeny tiny painful bits.
Whether it's Disney's Keychest or Trusted Computing, they can hid your key inside the plastic box before they give it to you, but there's no getting around that fact. If you buy a computer or buy Disney's new Keychest product, it's your property and your key and you have every right - and more importantly the ability to slice it open and see your key. They can certainly make it a hassle to do so, you might need some tools to properly cut open and read your own property, you might even need to pay someone a few bucks to do the cutting and reading for you, but the ultimate unalterable fact of physics is that you can cut open and look at your own property, and that you have every right to do so. And all of the anti-owner "security" in Trusted Computing completely vanishes if the owner can ever get a hold of his own key. And all of the anti-owner "security" in Disney's Keychest completely vanishes if the owner can ever get a hold of his own key.
Dear Hollywood Executives, RIAA Executives, and other advocates of this crap, quit trying to fight reality. Quit trying to shove Defective By Design crap down consumer's throats. Wake up to fucking reality, no matter how much you would wish that some aspects of reality would go away. You don't get "it". You know that you're not getting "it". Well, this is the "it" you haven't been getting. Quit imagining that all your problems would go away if you could just find the right DRM magic to sprinkle on products. People are not interested in your stupid schemes to castrate technology. People are not interested in your stupid schemes to deliberately cripple products. People don't like deliberately crippled deliberately defective crap. If you try to foist this sort of crap on consumers, they react in one of two ways. They either refuse to buy your the deliberately defective shit, or people will sit down and figure out how to FIX it so it is no longer defective, no longer crippled, and defeating the purpose of trying to limit and cripple the device's function in the first place. Hell, the RIAA has finally begun to partially "get it" and sell friking MP
The last truly original thing they did involved a cute, but very elderly by now, mouse, and a duck with a speech problem.
Apparently a speech impediment is not the duck's only "problem". "donald duck" ride fail [images.google.com]
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They want that to be true, they wish it to be true, they believe it *should* be true, to some extent they may have deluded themselves that it *is* true, and everything they say in public paints the image that it is true and often convinces people that it's true, but no. They have not (yet) managed to change copyright law to actually say that or actually work like that.
Copyright law in most countries is closely parallel, but I will speak specifically to US copyright law. US copyright law specifically distinguishes between the ownership of a copyright and ownership in particular copies. If you buy a book or a CD ow whatever, you in fact become the legal owner of the particular copy of the content on that paper or recorded in that plastic. You are in fact the legal owner of those particular "bits". The copyright owner sold that particular copy of "bits" to you, and his ownership rights in that particular copy of "bits" terminated. He retains ownership of the copy rights. He owns the right to create (or authorize) new copies made from those bits, and the right to public performances made from those bits, period. Copyright law also grants the copyright holder ownership of distribution rights, but copyright law specifically terminates the copyright holder's distribution right in a particular copy of bits when he sells that particular copy - the legal term for that is the First Sale Doctrine.
The publishing industry's public statements and product labeling go far beyond what the law actually says. For example the annoying FBI/copyright warnings that they spam onto every movie they sell are substantially bogus. NO, they are not in fact "licensing the movie for home viewing only". claim is an outright lie. They are not licensing the movie to you at all. When you buy a book, you receive no license because you don't need any license. You bought the copy, under copyright law you own that copy and you have the right to read it, no license needed. When you buy a video tape, you receive no license because you don't need any license. You bought the copy, under copyright law you own that copy and you have the right to view it, no license needed.
Copyright law grants the copyright holder essentially three rights (the law technically phrases it as 6 rights, but they really only amount to three different rights). The right to create new copies, the right to distribution, and the right to public display. Those rights are subject to many exception and limitations, which are far too numerous to address here. But the important thing here is that those are the only three exclusive rights the copyright holder owns, they are the only thing the copyright holder owns to license out. If you are not doing one of those three things, then you need no license. If the copyright holder is not licensing you one of those three things, then he is in fact not licensing you anything.
When you make a common consumer purchase of a book or a CD or a video tape, does that purchase include a copyright grant to create new copies? Does it include a copyright grant to distribute new copies? Does it include a copyright grant to public performance? No. They have not given you any copyright license at all. You simply made a physical purchase, and under US copyright law you are the physical and legal owner of the particular copy stored on that medium. You just (mostly) can't create/distribute new copies nor publicly preform it.
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The creationists will blindly and steadfastly cling to their mysticism-based pseudoscience until two chimps mate and produce a homo sapiens offspring. Which of course is not how evolution works.
Oh come now, there is always a remote statistical chance that two Creationists could mate and produce fully evolved homo sapiens offspring.
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Oh, and for classic fantasy you can't do much better than pre-monotheistic mythology.
I'd suggest some post-monotheistic classic fantasy, but the radical biased Slashdot crowd would undoubtedly persecute me for even suggesting that the Bible be taught in public schools. ;)
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[aliens that] eat cellulose and literly shit cars with idiot-proof antigravity.
I'm not a big fan of fantasy, especially really really bad fantasy.
Ghosts, goblins, technology capable of utterly defeating idiots.
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You have me scratching my head a bit. Maybe you're just trying to "play the part of the prude", but you claim you are one in Real Life, but you're complaints and defensiveness don't really make sense to me. It doesn't seem you are the sort of person he's talking about. I think I pretty much see the key point here:
if you are reading these authors for their sex scenes then you missed the boat.
Well yeah, of course. But my point is that YOU are apparently recognizing that making it "about the sex scenes" is to miss the boat. HIS point, in relation to your comment there, is that the prudes are missing the boat. Prudes make it all about sex. They see one page with a few naughty words and they have a meltdown - or even worse and more typically - they hear some fourth-hand report that there are naughty words in there, and they have a meltdown.
I don't know how you would react if one of these typical "Christian Conservative problem books" came up in your child's school, but you do seem to recognize that there is important content in books and that just focusing on some sex scene is "missing the boat". Someone mentioned A Clockwork Orange. I haven't read that book, but based on the movie I can well imagine some scenes of the book are even more graphic and disturbing. But the story as a whole says many important and powerful things about morality and society and free will and people's rights and humanity and human nature and who we are and who do we want to be and how do we want to treat people, and ultimately the dilemma of how do we treat criminals? The dilemma, the paradox, can we do we should we as a society respect the humanity of a depraved individual who violates the humanity of others? At what point do we as individuals and as a society become just as depraved and inhuman?
It is a story and morality play that cannot be told without graphic and disturbing scenes of sex and violence.
my vantage point
prudes do get worked up over class room material
I complained about my high school daughter watching Scrubs and Casino Royal in school
Huh?????
I'm not objecting to your complaint there... I might well make the same gripe to school officials if some teacher blew classtime on fluff comedy TV. Teachers are not BABY SITTERS, and they damn well shouldn't be treating students as a baby sitting job.
My confusion is how or why you connect that with "prudism".
I'm sure I'll go down in the school history as just another local religious nut job though.
I don't know what anyone at the school things or said about it, but I have seen absolutely no indication of that here from you or by anyone here against you.
Lets take a more specific example of what I believe the other poster was talking about. The one book that has been been at the center of the largest number of Christian Conservative nut job melt downs in US schools is Catcher in the Rye. It contains the word "fuck" and the phrase "goddamn". The main character has a conversation with a prostitute - not even a sex scene he just talks to her and pays her for her time. At one point another character pats the main character on the head, and the main character wonders if it might have been a homosexual advance. There is no sexuality in the scene, we have no indication that the head pat was intended to be sexual, but the main character wonders about the possibility and becomes uncomfortable and leaves.
Would you storm into a public highschool demanding that Catcher in the Rye be banned and teachers reprimanded or fire over it?
If not, then please don't legitimize those sorts of people by identifying with them and buying into their Christian Persecution Complex whines. If I criticize or insult or mock THEM, that is not Christian persecution and it's not an attack on you.
On the other hand if you *are* the sort of person who storms into schools screaming about Catcher in the Rye and other "objectionable" books (which at the moment I have no indication to be the case), then ok in that
it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
Forests are about the worst place on earth for fossils. Predators and scavengers voraciously go after any corpse, acidic soils ruthlessly dissolve bones, African forests are not exactly known for widespread volcanoes burying stuff, and we are talking about a species population of what? Maybe a few tens of thousands of individuals?
If anything it is amazing that we DO have the excellent human-line fossil record that we've got.
There is a fairly significant gap in the fossil record
It's very odd the way denialists seem to define gap. Once upon a time we had NO human-line fossils, and it was "the gap". Then we found one intermediate fossil, and then there were TWO gaps. And then we find two and three and four intermediate forms all lining up in sequence, and that just meant there were three gaps then four gaps then five gaps. And then we found however many more I've lost count of how many samples we have in the sequence now, but apparently the MORE evidence there is in the lineup it just means MORE gap to denialists.
I could dig up my dead grandfather, and denialists would just whine that there's a gap because my father is missing. And I could shoot my father and hand you his skeleton, and the denialists would STILL whine that there's a "gap" between my father and me.
I'm probably wasting my breath, but in counterpoint to my comment about the virtual zero rate for being able to get fossils of large forest animals, we do have an absolutely perfect absolutely complete absolutely continuous absolutely gap-free fossil record absolutely proving evolution. Tiny sea animals called forams. They live in the oceans by the trillion. Every single day billions and billions of them die. By the billions they die and continuously rain down on the sea floor. Continuously rain down on the deep dark, cold inert sea floor. Where they leave ideal fossils in the slowly accumulating sediment of dust and dirt on the sea floor.
In the 1970's we developed advanced deep sea drilling technology for oil exploration. Sea floor oil exploration that brought up lots of long seabed drill cores. A supply of sediment cores incidentally loaded with tiny foram fossils by the tens of thousands. An effectively limitless supply of perfectly layered perfectly continuous record of foram fossils spanning about a hundred million years.
A record continuously tracing diverse species of modern forams back to their common ancestor tens of millions of years ago. A prefect complete record not merely of all transitional species, but a hyper-fine hyper-continuous record of transitional forms ALONG individual speciation events. A record showing not just that evolution happened and exactly how it happened, but recording exactly how entire populations evolve AS it split into two child species, and scientists measuring it at about 150,000 years for a foram species to complete a population split into a pair of child species.
Biologists closed the case on evolution more than a hundred years ago. It is ludicrous that there are people running a public relations campaign today against it, spreading all sorts of confusion and misinformation to the public.
It SHOULD be possible to terminate all the arguments and controversy with just two lousy words:
Feathered
Dinosaurs.
Feathered friking dinosaurs. Evolutionists said that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and the denialists said that was false and crazy. And then years later we started finding fossils of feathered friking dinosaurs. We've got an entire PLANET of evidence proving evolution, but just those two words... anyone who can ignore the discovery of feathered dinosaurs without even batting an eye.... that strikes me as a pretty serious case of denial.
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Any good programmer (hacker) is not going to recreate the wheel every time he does something, so if you were to set out to make several species, you would cut and paste some basic things at the DNA level
its no wonder humans, apes and even pigs and frogs are similar in some of their DNA structures to humans
But that is NOT what the DNA evidence shows!
Imagine you are in a courtroom on the jury for a murder case and you are presented with DNA evidence proving that Jack and Jill are brother and sister, that Bob is their father, Ralph is their grandfather, Alice is their aunt, and Billy is their cousin.
Then the defense lawyer stands up and makes a statement that is so wildly oversimplified as to be effectively false - he says that the DNA of these people are merely "similar". He then says that the "mere similarities" can't establish who is parent to who, or who is brother or cousin to who.
The evidence does NOT show "mere copying". The evidence shows a strict PATTERN of copying. The evidence shows a strict family tree inheritance pattern of copying.
Evolution denialists try to dismiss the DNA evidence as "mere copying" by a "common author", but that is not what the evidence shows. The DNA evidence of species shows that there is an absolutely strict family tree pattern relationship between the DNA of all species. There is a strict family tree rule for what DNA is copied and for what DNA is NEVER copied.
If there is a "common author", then this DNA evidence tells us some very powerful and very strict things about HOW that "common author" did his work and how he did (and did not) do his copying. If there was a "common author" then he ONLY did his copying according to a strict family tree of inheritance pattern of copying. If there was a "common author", then he did his work in a manner that generated the EXACT same the same tree as evolution's tree of common descent.
The evidence proves that if there is a "common author" that he either did his work and did his copying by means of evolution, or he did his work and did his copying by some means that is indistinguishable and effectively identical to evolution.
The evidence proves that either evolution is true, or something indistinguishable and effectively identical to evolution is true.
The DNA evidence proves the evolutionary tree relationships between species with the "beyond any reasonable doubt" standard of proof as DNA evidence can and does prove the family tree relationships between people in a courtroom.
The "similarity" isn't the evidence. The "copying" isn't the evidence. The evidence is the evolutionary tree of common descent strict STRUCTURE that is established in what is and is not copied.
It's like finding a book, and someone says "bah, there's nothing there, just some letters copied". That entirely misses the strict pattern of the repeated letters, that misses that they are structured into words and sentences, and that completely misses all of the information recorded in the structure and pattern of copied letters. the letters are not copied randomly or arbitrarily. Species DNA is not copied randomly nor arbitrarily. It is copied strictly according to evolution.
And there is a lot of information written in the family tree pattern that exists in the DNA between species. You can actually trace backwards through the tree and substantially reconstruct the "parent nodes" in the tree. In an evolutionary model this means substantially reconstructing the DNA of a common ancestor. In a "common author" model, this means reconstructing either a real or emulated "common ancestor" that the author DID write in there either by using evolution as his method, or that he wrote in there using some work-method indistinguishable from evolution.
This tree structure in the DNA across species is a mathematically extractable pattern - you can feed the data into a structure analysis program and it will say "yes there is a tree in the data, and here it is". The structure of real or virtual
Cease fire cease fire! Friendly fire incident! (chuckle)
jd (1658) probably should have been more careful and clear about his post, but I'm pretty sure he's no denialist. In some alternate universe where we never suffered the anti-evolution-crackpottery problem, somebody expressing a desire to see the peer review on an initial scientific report would be considered pro-science prudence. That is doubly true considering the frankly lousy and fragmentary quality of the reconstructed skeleton in the NYT photo. We've already got far better proof of evolution than this. We don't need to over hype every new report, and we seriously don't need the black-eye when some small percentage of initial reports are revised or retracted on peer review.
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Sorry for being a typo-nazi, but I think you mean Skiinett.
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@thepiratebay.org ?
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oblig: And vacuum cleaners, their first product that don't suck.
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I was going to chastise you for being unfair and pointing out how the page also lists new themes for Windows 7, but then I came across this line and I totally lost it:
The Windows Taskbar has seen its most significant revision since its introduction in Windows 95. The taskbar is 10 pixels taller than in Windows Vista
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I was going to make a joke confusing Slashdot with Wikipedia and pretending to think your post was a disambiguation page (wheres teh edit buton?), but apparently your post *is* the Vista_(disambiguation)#Vehicles page.
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Oh, goddammit!
Now how am I going to pay for all the beer they drink if I have to give them the porn for free?
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It wasn't actually goatse.
There are three images. One, a pinky inserted partway into a penis. Second, Saint Thomas inserting his finger into spear-wound in Jesus's chest. Three, a halfway-to-the-elbow anal fisting. That final photo was pretty much as "tame tasteful and artistic" as an explicit fisting photo can reasonably be.
By the way, there is a warning at the top of the page:
*FOR CLASSROOM USE ONLY*
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But what did you do with the other 9" of the PVC tubing?
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The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
I disagree. Sure, God is pretty much king of the hill when it comes to the stuff listed there, but Westley Crusher was still a far more unpleasant character in fiction.
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I like the way Ghandi phrased it:
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
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While some atheists might describe some mainstream religious texts as "nonsense", the vast majority of people, regardless of their belief, would not.
I hope you don't mind, but my preferred word is "silly". As in "Stories about talking snakes and magic apples are silly".
I take it that you are a person of belief. I further assume that you subscribe to one of the "big three" religions which do include stories about talking snakes and magic apples. Go ahead, I would love to hear you disagree with me. Go ahead, I would love to hear you explain how you think talking snakes and magic apples are not "silly".
Scientology and Christianity are equally "silly". While Christianity's current behavior is generally far better than Scientology's current behavior, Christianity has behaved far far worse in it's youth than Scientology has ever done. Go ahead, I'd love to hear you deny that one. If you give Scientology the same time that Christianity has had to mature and clean up its act, Scientology will soften up their rough edges exactly as Christianity has done itself.
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