Actually, you don't understand how the tax brackets work. In your example, income is taxed at 10% up to $20,000. The 20% would only apply to the income over $20,000. So tax on $21,000 would be $2,200.
I think you missed the point. So, let me try to explain. Suppose you are willing to donate $100 of your PRE-TAX earnings to charity. If your donation is tax-deductable, you are able to donate $100. If your donation is not tax deducatble, then taxes are taken out of the $100. If you're in a 25% tax bracket, $25 goes to the government, $75 goes to the charity. In other words, the charity gets less.
The myth of making a donation for a tax break is absurd. An individual never comes out ahead by making a charitable contribution. Sure, they may pay less taxes, but as long as taxes are less than 100%, they would have come out ahead by keeping the money minus taxes.
Good point, and the article made no mention of how fast you can go on one of these things.
My bet is 35-40 WPM max.
Why so expensive?
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The pricing seems a bit high for such a short-term rental. $40/hour might work for a test-drive, but won't allow people to use the Segways as anything more than a toy.
Renting Segways daily or weekly in cities would make a lot of sense. They would be perfect for tourists, etc, who want to explore "on foot".
Around $40-50/day should be profitable and still be affordable. The initial cost for a unit is under $10,000 and the electricity to charge them is negligable. Are maintenance costs and/or life expenctancy bad enough to prevent this from being practical?
You can opt-out of some emails by joining the Direct Marketers Association "Do Not Email" list. This is similar to the do not call list they maintain, and is used by many companies.
If you paid the sysadmins $1 million per year, there would be zero theft, zero funny business, and zero turnover.
Exactly... if people are paid enough, they will never do anything bad. Just look at how well most CEO's are paid - because they are paid so much, they never do anything in self interest at the company's expense.
Your idea is an interesting version of an idea that's been around for a long time... which is to associate a small cost to sending each email. According to your suggestion, this would be a computational cost, not a direct monetary cost. Although I'm sure Intel would like such a scheme, it does sound impractical. Grandma could still use her 486 and have her ISP's outgoing mail server do the legwork. But, even supposing you came up with a practical system, it probably wouldn't take long before someone found a way around it, and you'd be back where you started:-)
It seems that at some point ISPs/mailbox providers are going to wake up and see that they should filter out the junk mail for their users. But, since we're all still waiting for that to happen, I decided to try a little program called SpamNet that promised to block out junk email. After a few months of use I'm happy to say it works great.
The premise of SpamNet is that all users of the software can block spam. This works well, and works even better as more and more people use the software.
SpamNet sends it to a little folder called "Spam", in case you want to double-check and make sure nothing you wanted got blocked.
The good parts:
- Automatically blocks about 95% of spam
- Small, fast, simple, FREE
The bad:
- Not at all configurable (just does what it's supposed to do...)
- Occasionally it will block something from Amazon.com or another large mailing list which isn't really spam.
If you're tired getting spam give it a try for yourself, here is the link:
Be sure to look at the pictures too. The article is about an area in China where they "recycle" old computers and electronics. They have old electronics piled sky high next to the river. The water is so contaminated they have to truck in drinking water.
You don't have to be a "tree hugger" to see this is NOT RIGHT.
PURE lithium may be extremely reactive with water, but lithium ion batteries are ionized lithium (surprise surpise) in solution. I'd guess they are about as reactive as salt water (PURE sodium is very reactive with water also... burns right up).
"American Airlines spokesman Gus Whitcomb said that Luster and Comerford exaggerated the security risk because their companies provide security services. "
Yeah right.
The anthrax was thrust upon the postal workers, and the mail recipients, without their consent.
Actually, they ARE consenting, by continuing to work at the postal service, and even though anthrax is what's been in the news by now, I'd bet there are MANY greater job hazards. Out of the hundreds of thousands of postal workers, I'm sure more than 5 get killed in vehicle accidents every year, probably more than 5 get bitten to death by dogs.
If you are weighing the lives of 5 people against the blanking of a few memory cards and the people come up light, you need your scale calibrated.
How about weighing the lives of 5 postal workers killed by anthrax a year against 100 postal workers killed by irradiation every year. It's not just memory cards that are being affected by irradiation.
This seems like a situation where someone really needs to do a cost-benefit and see if this is the best use of our resources. Yes, we all want to save lives, and no, we can't save every life, so maybe we should waste millions on something ineffective if the money could be better spent elsewhere.
My father was a teacher in Maine for for four years before he moved to New Hampshire. At a starting pay of $18,000 a year, one of the school's biggest problems was attacting good teachers. Every year all kinds of people would leave, and we'd get the bottom of the barrel for teachers. Only the ones who couldn't get jobs anywhere else. When we did get a good teacher they would eventually leave for better jobs.
As far as computer technology in the classroom, the computers were rarely used for important schoolwork, mostly the boys play networked games and the girls go online and chat. If they were all given their own laptops, I'd guess that about half of them would be broken or stolen within a year. Besides, there is no need for laptop computers, as the schools are already filled with computers everywhere.
In a well-run school, things would be a lot different. But realistically, there are very few well run schools in Maine, and most of them are in rich communities that don't need state funding for technology anyway. Governer King has done a lot of good things as governer and I give him credit for trying to promote technology, but I think he has Maine's priorities wrong on this one.
If there was a program to detect Magic Lantern, then the FBI probably wouldn't use it much. Installing Magic Lantern would be an immediate tip-off to the suspect that the FBI was watching!
Damnnnnnnnnnnnnn it would be nice to be able to read the article. Anyway, given that the XBox is really a very inexpensive Microsoft computer, who thinks Microsoft is going to come out with different XBox flavors aimed at people besides gamers?
Maine is actually doing very well for broadband technology. We've had RoadRunner here in Portland for years now (one of the best run systems, too, no bandwidth throttling or overloaded nodes), and they wired the northern part of the state for it last year.
The tower system Midcoast has is very interesting, probably the best way to get fast access onto the islands. A client of mine had a relay station put on top of one of his buildings and got a free access point out of it.
I've seen availability of internet in Maine, and more recently broadband in Maine have a large impact on deurbanization. Many people in NY and Massachusetts would love to move to a more rural, less hectic, lower taxed area. However, unless they are retired, the only thing that allows them to is being able to work remotely. People such as book editors and web developers move up here all the time for that purpose.
Connection to the internet also makes a big difference to the people who live in rural communities. My neighbor owns a gift shop (West Quoddy Gifts) that started selling to people all over the country after putting up a basic web site. In a place where business opportunities are limited, the internet is wide open. My own business (OnlineOutboards.com) is set up so that I could be anywhere with a computer, a telephone, and a fax machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon 4G phones use SIM cards.
A sensible installation would accompany the floating platforms with a large reservoir to act as a buffer and prevent such interruptions.
Um, how about a passenger using it while the car is in motion? How about re-routing around traffic or accidents?
If I pay an extra $2000 for an in-dash navigational system, I'm going to use it whenever I damned please.
Actually, you don't understand how the tax brackets work. In your example, income is taxed at 10% up to $20,000. The 20% would only apply to the income over $20,000. So tax on $21,000 would be $2,200.
I think you missed the point. So, let me try to explain. Suppose you are willing to donate $100 of your PRE-TAX earnings to charity. If your donation is tax-deductable, you are able to donate $100. If your donation is not tax deducatble, then taxes are taken out of the $100. If you're in a 25% tax bracket, $25 goes to the government, $75 goes to the charity. In other words, the charity gets less.
The myth of making a donation for a tax break is absurd. An individual never comes out ahead by making a charitable contribution. Sure, they may pay less taxes, but as long as taxes are less than 100%, they would have come out ahead by keeping the money minus taxes.
Good point, and the article made no mention of how fast you can go on one of these things.
My bet is 35-40 WPM max.
The pricing seems a bit high for such a short-term rental. $40/hour might work for a test-drive, but won't allow people to use the Segways as anything more than a toy. Renting Segways daily or weekly in cities would make a lot of sense. They would be perfect for tourists, etc, who want to explore "on foot". Around $40-50/day should be profitable and still be affordable. The initial cost for a unit is under $10,000 and the electricity to charge them is negligable. Are maintenance costs and/or life expenctancy bad enough to prevent this from being practical?
You can opt-out of some emails by joining the Direct Marketers Association "Do Not Email" list. This is similar to the do not call list they maintain, and is used by many companies.
DMA Email Opt-Out
... is my bet on how long it will take for someone to post the link. Anyone want to bet how much jail time they'll get?
If you paid the sysadmins $1 million per year, there would be zero theft, zero funny business, and zero turnover.
Exactly... if people are paid enough, they will never do anything bad. Just look at how well most CEO's are paid - because they are paid so much, they never do anything in self interest at the company's expense.
Oh, wait... nevermind
Your idea is an interesting version of an idea that's been around for a long time... which is to associate a small cost to sending each email. According to your suggestion, this would be a computational cost, not a direct monetary cost. Although I'm sure Intel would like such a scheme, it does sound impractical. Grandma could still use her 486 and have her ISP's outgoing mail server do the legwork. But, even supposing you came up with a practical system, it probably wouldn't take long before someone found a way around it, and you'd be back where you started :-)
It seems that at some point ISPs/mailbox providers are going to wake up and see that they should filter out the junk mail for their users. But, since we're all still waiting for that to happen, I decided to try a little program called SpamNet that promised to block out junk email. After a few months of use I'm happy to say it works great. The premise of SpamNet is that all users of the software can block spam. This works well, and works even better as more and more people use the software.
SpamNet sends it to a little folder called "Spam", in case you want to double-check and make sure nothing you wanted got blocked.
The good parts:
- Automatically blocks about 95% of spam
- Small, fast, simple, FREE
The bad:
- Not at all configurable (just does what it's supposed to do...)
- Occasionally it will block something from Amazon.com or another large mailing list which isn't really spam.
If you're tired getting spam give it a try for yourself, here is the link:
SpamNet
System Requirements:
Outlook 2000/2002/XP
Windows 98/2000/XP
Agreed. Surprising how quickly all the spammers jumped on the Windows Messaging bandwagon after a couple of stories were published on it.
He must be using speech recognition...
They chose a VW Beetle because it's also air-cooled!
For the record, the VW Beetle they chose is a new Beetle, which is water cooled. The old beetle is air cooled. So is the old VW bus..
AFAIK, you can create Adobe PDF files where the image is visible and the OCRed text is "underneath" for search capability.
Be sure to look at the pictures too. The article is about an area in China where they "recycle" old computers and electronics. They have old electronics piled sky high next to the river. The water is so contaminated they have to truck in drinking water. You don't have to be a "tree hugger" to see this is NOT RIGHT.
If you have any doubt why this is a good idea, read this story on MSNBC.
PURE lithium may be extremely reactive with water, but lithium ion batteries are ionized lithium (surprise surpise) in solution. I'd guess they are about as reactive as salt water (PURE sodium is very reactive with water also... burns right up).
"American Airlines spokesman Gus Whitcomb said that Luster and Comerford exaggerated the security risk because their companies provide security services. " Yeah right.
The anthrax was thrust upon the postal workers, and the mail recipients, without their consent.
Actually, they ARE consenting, by continuing to work at the postal service, and even though anthrax is what's been in the news by now, I'd bet there are MANY greater job hazards. Out of the hundreds of thousands of postal workers, I'm sure more than 5 get killed in vehicle accidents every year, probably more than 5 get bitten to death by dogs.
If you are weighing the lives of 5 people against the blanking of a few memory cards and the people come up light, you need your scale calibrated.
How about weighing the lives of 5 postal workers killed by anthrax a year against 100 postal workers killed by irradiation every year. It's not just memory cards that are being affected by irradiation.
This seems like a situation where someone really needs to do a cost-benefit and see if this is the best use of our resources. Yes, we all want to save lives, and no, we can't save every life, so maybe we should waste millions on something ineffective if the money could be better spent elsewhere.
My father was a teacher in Maine for for four years before he moved to New Hampshire. At a starting pay of $18,000 a year, one of the school's biggest problems was attacting good teachers. Every year all kinds of people would leave, and we'd get the bottom of the barrel for teachers. Only the ones who couldn't get jobs anywhere else. When we did get a good teacher they would eventually leave for better jobs.
As far as computer technology in the classroom, the computers were rarely used for important schoolwork, mostly the boys play networked games and the girls go online and chat. If they were all given their own laptops, I'd guess that about half of them would be broken or stolen within a year. Besides, there is no need for laptop computers, as the schools are already filled with computers everywhere.
In a well-run school, things would be a lot different. But realistically, there are very few well run schools in Maine, and most of them are in rich communities that don't need state funding for technology anyway. Governer King has done a lot of good things as governer and I give him credit for trying to promote technology, but I think he has Maine's priorities wrong on this one.
If there was a program to detect Magic Lantern, then the FBI probably wouldn't use it much. Installing Magic Lantern would be an immediate tip-off to the suspect that the FBI was watching!
Damnnnnnnnnnnnnn it would be nice to be able to read the article. Anyway, given that the XBox is really a very inexpensive Microsoft computer, who thinks Microsoft is going to come out with different XBox flavors aimed at people besides gamers?
Maine is actually doing very well for broadband technology. We've had RoadRunner here in Portland for years now (one of the best run systems, too, no bandwidth throttling or overloaded nodes), and they wired the northern part of the state for it last year.
The tower system Midcoast has is very interesting, probably the best way to get fast access onto the islands. A client of mine had a relay station put on top of one of his buildings and got a free access point out of it. I've seen availability of internet in Maine, and more recently broadband in Maine have a large impact on deurbanization. Many people in NY and Massachusetts would love to move to a more rural, less hectic, lower taxed area. However, unless they are retired, the only thing that allows them to is being able to work remotely. People such as book editors and web developers move up here all the time for that purpose.
Connection to the internet also makes a big difference to the people who live in rural communities. My neighbor owns a gift shop (West Quoddy Gifts) that started selling to people all over the country after putting up a basic web site. In a place where business opportunities are limited, the internet is wide open. My own business (OnlineOutboards.com) is set up so that I could be anywhere with a computer, a telephone, and a fax machine.
~turbosaab~