> The especially amusing part about your rant is describing the top 1% as being productive. Considering that large segments of the wealth of that top 1% comes from trust funds and investments set up by the parents/grandparents of those currently benefitting, it's always amusing to see them described as useful/productive.
So tell me - who founded the company that signs your paycheck? Someone in the top 1%, or someone in the bottom 50%?
Can we get the turnkey single-channel Linux PVR first?:-)
Word to developers - what you've done so far is great, but if you want to unseat MSFT, you've gotta make it so that Grandma can install it.
If we were talking about a new version of GCC or the latest kernel, with Visual Studio.NET and Windows Longhorn as the competition, it'd be fine to moderate this comment as (-1, Lazy n00b), but you're talking about a glorified VCR, and you're going up against TiVO.
For this kind of product, User Interfaces matter. Saying "RTFSource", and "It's skinnable", won't cut it.
Likewise, dependency trees can be a formidable barrier to adoption. Saying "Well, of course it compiles fine for me, I mean, who doesn't rebuild XFree86 from the CVS source tree on a weekly basis?" isn't gonna cut it either.
PCs are cheap enough these days, especially since folks in the DIY segment might want to dedicate one as a PVR. Given the appliance-like nature of such a device, I'd say a (set of, for each supported motherboard-chipset/video-chipset combo) binaries ought to be a design goal, and I might even go so far as to say that distribution as an ISO wouldn't be out of the question.
> In your experience as a convention exhibitor, what is the most effective giveaway item you've ever used to draw people to your booth long enough to make a pitch? What will people wait in line for, sit through demos for, fill out long questionaires for, let you swipe their card for, jostle others to get?
I'm a techie, not a marketroid.
If you're in marketing, STOP READING THIS POST NOW.
I've sat through, and ignored Intel demos (because I already knew as much about Itanic^Hium as the salesdrone did) for some very cool blue-LED-illuminated pens. But at least I remembered the name of the company that gave 'em to me. Thanks, Intel!
Things with lights are popular. I have a couple of yo-yos with spring-activated switches that turn on LEDs. I also have a couple of bouncing super-balls with embedded LEDs that flash. I have some flashing LED modules on my desk, removed from various buttons and stickers. Couldn't tell you the names of the companies I got 'em from if you paid me, though.
My first-aid/emergency kit contains a few chemoluminiscent (aka glow-stick stuff ) sticker/patches from NVidia and XBox. These are great - they're about the size of the palm of your hand, stick to anything, and when activated, last for a good 4-6 hours. If there's a major disaster, they'll be able to find my body in the dark, and they'll know I was m4d g33k to the end.
My most pleasant memory was laughing throughout a sales pitch for some Linux distro vendor whose name I forgot within minutes of the presentation. He had the largest crowd I've ever seen at a trade show. The crowd was large the pitch-man was peeling off $20s and $100s and throwing them into the crowd as part of his act. (Yes, this was before the Crash, why do you ask?:-)
Other things that people will sit through demos for are stuffed penguins. One 2-foot-tall Tux can keep about 20 people glued to a chair in a stupor, eyes always on the hands of the pitch-man, for about 15 minutes in the hopes that said penguin will be thrown their way.
Like I said, I'm a techie, not a marketer. If you're a marketer, there's a lesson to be learned here, namely "Geeks like cool swag, and we hope you marketing people stopped reading this post in the first paragraph, because the cooler your swag, the more likely it is that we're only feigning interest in your product to get our hands on it."
> Geeks pride themselves on their attention to technical excellence to the exclusion of such base
tricks as free junk and hot booth babes.
You are either:
a) Trolling,
b) Have never been to LinuxWorld,
c) And if I'm wrong on that, you've certainly never been within 50 feet of the FreeBSD booth at LinuxWorld.
I mean, getting card-swiped in exchange for a keychain/neckchain photo of themselves, wearing pointy-red-horns with LEDs in 'em, surrounded by pointy-red-horned, red-pantsuited and/or red-latexed FreeBSD succubi with the big FreeBSD daemon in the background? Could there be anything more quintessentially geeky?
(And do I still have mine from LinuxWorld 1999? You bet your ass I do! I also have pictures of myself standing between a life-sized incarnation of Tux the Penguin, and UserFriendly's Dust Puppy. What any of this means about geek sexuality is a mystery left for future forensic anthropologists to determine.)
> If the subpoena is particularly broad and the ISP is large, a subpoena can mean keeping gigabytes of data that the ISP would normally send to/dev/null.
If I were the ISP, I'd comply with any request RIAA gave me for customer logs. I'd send 'em every byte every customer transmitted or received.
I mean, what else am I gonna do with the half-dozen old line printers I found in the basement?:-)
> Stop keeping logs of users. Just issue DHCP at random and be done with it.
Won't work, at least not without one hell of a tradeoff. If you still wanna be able to LART Joe Luzer for running the open SOCKS proxy through which you got spammed or DDoSed, RIAA has to be able to LART Joe Musicfan for running the Gnutella note through which they downloaded HilaryRosenIsABigFatBitch.mp3
If ISPs could blocked outbound port 25 traffic from residential cablemodem and DSL users, that'd greatly cut down the amount of spam the rest of the 'net has to deal with, but logs would still have to be kept with regards to DDoS issues.
> My ISP cannot just call them up and take me off. There has to be a way to avoid this, and eliminating spam at a higher level would be a good start.
Eliminating spam at a higher level requires that your ISP be part of the solution.
Being listed on SPEWS is an indication that your ISP is part of the problem.
Instead of asking your ISP to call SPEWS (which it can't) to get your block unlisted, why not ask your ISP to call the spammer (which it can!) and terminate service to the spammer.
SPEWS is eliminating spam at the higher level -- by forcing ISPs that harbor spammers to choose between servicing their spammers or legitimate customers.
If your ISP refuses to boot the spammer, they've made it clear to you who they'd rather do business with. Perhaps you should make your preference just as clear to your ISP.
(I am not SPEWS. But if I knew who SPEWS was, I'd buy them a beer.)
> It may also had something to do with the new breed of tax inspector - did you see them on tv practicing their jumping and rolling with their balaclavas while carrying assault rifles? That is a rather different image from the UKs "Hector the Inspector".
...but not much difference from the image of the IRS in most Americans' eyes. *g*
Is this a luck or a fuck?
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Lucky Fucky! Pud gets his book mentioned on Slashdot with an Amazon referral link! That oughta bring in enough money to keep the FC trolls happy for another month!
When: 1/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 20
Points: 120
(25 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)
F'd Servers PK Interactive files Chapter 7. Last month, Pud got his book promoted on Slashdot's front page on the advice of his salesweasel who told told him bandwith was gonna be too cheap to meter. His salesnozzle didn't tell him when bandwidth would be too cheap to meter. Evidently, not yet. The bill arrived today.
When: 2/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 220
(69 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)
> Most entrepenuers would say that anyone that would let taxes (or the paperwork entailed therein) to prevent them from starting a business was not cut out to start a business anyway.
*grin* - good point:)
As for the guy who mentioned 1040-C - it, like 1040 - is deceptively simple. The forms are all two pages, but each line typically involves multiple questions about putting things into slots, just like the "is it a toy or is it a doll" question.
Quickly now, can you tell me whether that new alternator's a valid car and truck expense (II-10, 1040-C)? How about whether or not it was a Section 179 expense deduction? Quickly now, are you renting or leasing your office space and equipment, and what effect does that have on your after-tax income? What percentage of your home were you using for your business? Is it more tax-efficient to use LIFO or FIFO accounting for your inventory? (What does "inventory" mean if part of what you sell is software?:-)
It ain't the math - it's basic arithmetic. It's figuring out which of the myriad rules apply to one's situation or not.
> Consider also that the taxes you pay helps to construct a legal and infrastructural framework under which businesses can operate quite safely and easily. Last I heard, the Soviet Union did not have any sort of effective tax law (or government either).
Last I heard, Russia instituted a flat tax and tax revenues skyrocketed because people were actually able to comply.
But I digress - my rant wasn't principally about the amount paid, but of the ludicrous complexity involved in figuring out how much is owed.
My "I'd have started a business" was a straw man -- but do you really thing we need seven definitions of "dependent child" (families), to draw a distinction between the taxation of a stock held for 359 days and 360 days (long-term vs short-term gains, and the host of "straddle/spread" rules required to preserve this distinction in the face of hedging strategies made possible through the use of exchange-traded options), to draw a distinction between "Section 1250 contracts" and normal securities (trading the S&P 500 is not the same as trading an S&P-500-based mutual fund - it's treated as 60% long-term-gain and 40% short-term-gain), so make sure you've checked off Form 4952 if you invested on margin, and Forms 4797, 2439, 6252, 4684, 6781, and 8824, (Line 11, 1040-D) whose purposes I've forgotten about, and don't even get me started on the Alternative Minimum Tax - in which you get to do it all over again? Those aren't strawmen - those are picked from just a casual glance at 1040C and 1040D.
At no points on this thread have I whined about the dollar amounts taken by the government, only ludicrous volume of paperwork involved in complying with the legal requirements of the taking.
In Soviet Russia... at least the damn tax system is comprehensible. And whether they're digging up the copper or not, that puts them light-years ahead of us.
To indulge in a little bit of traditional/. anti-corporatespeak: when only multibillion-dollar corporations can afford to hire the army of lawyers and CPAs required to comply with the tax laws, the only legal businesses will be multibillion-dollar corporations.
> It seems like if you pay for lobbyists you better had made campaign contributions first!!! How fucked up is that?
In Gov. Gray Davis' California, it's not fucked up, it's the only way business gets done. Remember the Oracle Contract?
CA's state budget is $38B in the hole this year - we're jacking up income taxes and slashing transfers to municipialities, but we've got plenty of money for the Prison Guards, whose union was one of Davis' biggest contributors in the recent gubernatorial campaign.
Bottom line - the Segway d00dz will go out of business because they had a dumb business plan that relied on a gullible public swallowing promises that they were gonna change the world with a frickin' scooter. Their failure to recognize the basic need to bri^H^H^Hbuy^H^H^Hcontribute generously to those noble souls working hard to make the state a better place is yet another symptom of pie-in-the-sky naievete.
> The law is no longer in effect, so you've already gotten your wish without having to huff at your elected official (at least this time -- and might I suggest that a threatened vote to his/her major party opponent might be taken more seriously?).
No, I haven't gotten my wish. Calling the elimination of the differential tariff on toys-vs-dolls "getting my wish" is like tossing a hanful of sand into the Grand Canyon and claiming you've "filled" it.
Another symptom - the IRS has seven defintions for "dependent child". I don't have kids, nor do I want 'em, but that doesn't stop me from thinking that that's a crock of shit, and an unfair burden of extra paperwork on those who do, even if understanding those multiple contradictionary definitions results in a tax break for 'em.
Likewise, there have been times when I've wanted to start my own business. One glance at the tax forms for the self-employed, and I'm disabused of that fucking notion with a quickness. I'll never start a business because any enjoyment (and even the huge list of possible tax deductions!) I'd get from spending some free time producing things of value would be sucked dry by my having to fill out hundreds of pages of forms every year. (Or worse, paying thousands to a CPA to fill the hundreds of pages of forms out for me, and then have to sign under penalty of perjury that something I don't even comprehend (or I wouldn't have hired the fucking CPA in the first place!) is a true and faithful representation.
With compliance costs being approximatly 50% of tax collected (1999 - $650B in income tax collected, and $300B in compliance costs), I really do think an overhaul of the ludicrous monstrosity called the Internal Revenue Code is important. And not next time, but this time.
As for threatening to vote for his opposition - tax rates may rise under Democrats and fall under Republicans, but the Internal Revenue Code grows in complexity no matter which major party is in power. I therefore have no reason to believe that either major party has any intention of reforming the Code, and the only way I can see the Code being changed is for third parties to gain enough votes to be a threat to the majors. (In closely-run Democratic races, I'd advise voters interested in third parties to threaten to vote Green, and in closely-run Republican races, I'd likewise advise such voters to threaten to vote Libertarian.)
> This is one of those articles that really raises the question "As an American, am I morally required to kill the people and politicians who make such brain numbingly stupid things possible?"
I can't speak for your moral obligations, but what burns me up is that as an American, you're not legally obliged not to kill them, you're also legally obliged to pay them for the privilege. Talk about insult to injury.
"Them", being "accountants and lawyers", to figure out which of the 7 million words of the Internal Revenue Code (and no doubt similarly-massive Customs regs in this case) apply to you.
In 1999, tax compliance costs in the US were $300 billion per year. The goddamn income tax collected only $650 billion that year.
Think about that for a minute. For every $1000 in tax collected by the Federal Government, CPAs and lawyers raked in $500.
I'll argue for lower taxes every chance I get - but I want the whole package lowered. End phaseouts. End special exemptions. Bring in a flat tax, or scrap the income tax in favor of a consumption tax. If that means my sacred ox gets gored, and I have pay $1250 to the government every year, versus $1000 to the government and $500 to a CPA, I'm still $250 ahead of the game.
By reforming the Internal Revenue Code and eliminating this overhead, even the goddamn government would be ahead of the game. (At worst, they'd break even, considering they currently take half - $250 - of the $500 spent on compliance costs for every $1000 in taxes paid:-)
OK kids. A 32-page ruling on whether or not the X-Men are human or non-human, due to a 6.8% vs 12% import duty differential charged seven years ago, a duty that isn't even in effect anymore.
How many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars got spent on lawyers - both from Marvel's shareholders for their lawyers and our tax dollars being spent on the Government's lawyers - in the case leading up to this ruling - a ruling that took seven years after the initial dispute hit the courts?
In the world of the X-Men, something would have broken by now, but the real world has no superheroes to save us.
Isn't it time we called our Congressmen/women and demanded, on pain of our voting for third parties, that they put the tax law genie back in the bottle?
> What is the password to my PayPal account? I forgot it a while back.
ROFLMAO.
A half-serious question: "If the statute of limitations has expired, and/or your lawyers think you're safe from double jeopardy... What was the passphrase to all those files the DoJ couldn't (or wouldn't admit to being able to) decrypt after all these years?"
> From what I've heard about the sharks in Disney's legal department, I would not count on this. Even if they could not legally stop you, they would certainly try their best to make your life miserable in the meantime.
What you've heard is true. I worked at a software company that used Disney characters as machine names in a documentation example. (e.g. huey, duey, and louie as workstations, with donald as an NFS server). The company had to change anthe example because it received a C&D (Cease And Desist) from some Ubergruppenlawyer on the bowels of Mauschwitz. That was years ago. I can only imagine they've gotten worse over time.
> Or with the saturation factor, i.e. after years of replacing vinyl and tapes everyone now has their favourite music on CD's and only need to buy new releases.
And whatever favorite music didn't get re-released on CDs... well, everyone's got those on MP3.
They have MP3z because the artist's label never re-released it. And nobody else, (including the artists themselves) could re-release the out-of-print stuff due to the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension, so nobody could have bought it on CD even if they might otherwise have wanted to.
Hey, Hilary! Try this out for a business plan!
1) Don't release any more from the backcatalog,
2) Act surprised when the backcatalog brings in no more revenue.
3) [... ]
4) Don't profit!
Re:Finland Finland Finland.....
on
SAUNAAB
·
· Score: 1
> old Finnish custom - turn the sauna up to about 105 (that's C), and stay in until you can't stand it any more. Then run outside and flop in the snow until you can't stand
it any more. Then return to the sauna. Repeat as necessary.
"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."
> There are no preference settings in RealOne Player to disable this, so I thought I'd post this here, since I'm sure this thread will be filled with people who hate RealOne as much as I do.
Sweeeeeeet! I'm trying to get a network-access-less (and/or firewall-friendly) install going for Real for some relative-types, but to date have met with limited success. I think that's because there are now several dozen Real codecs, not all of which are bundled in the default player download. (I assume the encoder defaults to the codecs that don't come with the player, thereby forcing player users to download whenever the encoder is lazy:-)
As such, the troj^H^H^H^Hplayer often has to phone home in order to "download updates" - that is, extra.DLLs to add to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Codecs, Plugins, etc. to play the stream or file.
Anyone have a complete list of codecs and their associated.DLLs as of late 2002?
I've tried the RealAtLast approach with some success (once upon a time, I did something similar to get RealG2 playback on RealPlayer 5), but that was a couple of years ago, and I've long since lost track of all the crappy DLLs it wants today. I've downloaded some recently-encoded Futurama and SouthPark episodes for use as guinea pigs with the RealAtLast bundle, but Real still wants to phone home to get at least one missing codec. *grumble*.
> As always, if you have relatives who use RealPlayer, or you maintain it in an office setting, it may be best to perform that procedure on every computer.
Amen. It's a hell of a lot easier to fix it once, and then never have to deal with it again. At least, until the bastards at Real decide to make another codec that has no improvement in video/audio quality, but requires another client-side upgrade. *retch*
> Despite what Trust-E has to say, Real has a history of ignoring privacy matters.
s/Despite/Because of/g
Any time I see the Trust-E logo, I know someone's doing something evil. If they weren't in the spyware business, they wouldn't need to use a front group like Trust-E to feign legitimacy.
Trust-E is to privacy, what Saddam Hussein is to baby milk factories.
> Here's my economic lesson for today: No one is "making" money. Money isn't "made", it is only transferred. The only way to 'make' money is to have someone else give you some of their's. If that person doesn't have any money, you can't make any money from them.
/me munches on popcorn and giggles as Alan Greenspan and the rest of the Federal Reserve Board of Governers whacks you across the head with a big thick book of bank charters:)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> May god have mercy on their souls.
Rosenkids, if you're reading this, start wiping the hard drives NOW, before Mom gets home!
(P.S. Your Mom's still a big fat bitch!)
In fact, I think I'm gonna sing a song about it...
(Don't do it, Cartman! Don't do it!)
So tell me - who founded the company that signs your paycheck? Someone in the top 1%, or someone in the bottom 50%?
Word to developers - what you've done so far is great, but if you want to unseat MSFT, you've gotta make it so that Grandma can install it.
If we were talking about a new version of GCC or the latest kernel, with Visual Studio.NET and Windows Longhorn as the competition, it'd be fine to moderate this comment as (-1, Lazy n00b), but you're talking about a glorified VCR, and you're going up against TiVO.
For this kind of product, User Interfaces matter. Saying "RTFSource", and "It's skinnable", won't cut it.
Likewise, dependency trees can be a formidable barrier to adoption. Saying "Well, of course it compiles fine for me, I mean, who doesn't rebuild XFree86 from the CVS source tree on a weekly basis?" isn't gonna cut it either.
PCs are cheap enough these days, especially since folks in the DIY segment might want to dedicate one as a PVR. Given the appliance-like nature of such a device, I'd say a (set of, for each supported motherboard-chipset/video-chipset combo) binaries ought to be a design goal, and I might even go so far as to say that distribution as an ISO wouldn't be out of the question.
I'm a techie, not a marketroid.
If you're in marketing, STOP READING THIS POST NOW.
I've sat through, and ignored Intel demos (because I already knew as much about Itanic^Hium as the salesdrone did) for some very cool blue-LED-illuminated pens. But at least I remembered the name of the company that gave 'em to me. Thanks, Intel!
Things with lights are popular. I have a couple of yo-yos with spring-activated switches that turn on LEDs. I also have a couple of bouncing super-balls with embedded LEDs that flash. I have some flashing LED modules on my desk, removed from various buttons and stickers. Couldn't tell you the names of the companies I got 'em from if you paid me, though.
My first-aid/emergency kit contains a few chemoluminiscent (aka glow-stick stuff ) sticker/patches from NVidia and XBox. These are great - they're about the size of the palm of your hand, stick to anything, and when activated, last for a good 4-6 hours. If there's a major disaster, they'll be able to find my body in the dark, and they'll know I was m4d g33k to the end.
My most pleasant memory was laughing throughout a sales pitch for some Linux distro vendor whose name I forgot within minutes of the presentation. He had the largest crowd I've ever seen at a trade show. The crowd was large the pitch-man was peeling off $20s and $100s and throwing them into the crowd as part of his act. (Yes, this was before the Crash, why do you ask? :-)
Other things that people will sit through demos for are stuffed penguins. One 2-foot-tall Tux can keep about 20 people glued to a chair in a stupor, eyes always on the hands of the pitch-man, for about 15 minutes in the hopes that said penguin will be thrown their way.
Like I said, I'm a techie, not a marketer. If you're a marketer, there's a lesson to be learned here, namely "Geeks like cool swag, and we hope you marketing people stopped reading this post in the first paragraph, because the cooler your swag, the more likely it is that we're only feigning interest in your product to get our hands on it."
You are either:
a) Trolling,
b) Have never been to LinuxWorld,
c) And if I'm wrong on that, you've certainly never been within 50 feet of the FreeBSD booth at LinuxWorld.
I mean, getting card-swiped in exchange for a keychain/neckchain photo of themselves, wearing pointy-red-horns with LEDs in 'em, surrounded by pointy-red-horned, red-pantsuited and/or red-latexed FreeBSD succubi with the big FreeBSD daemon in the background? Could there be anything more quintessentially geeky?
(And do I still have mine from LinuxWorld 1999? You bet your ass I do! I also have pictures of myself standing between a life-sized incarnation of Tux the Penguin, and UserFriendly's Dust Puppy. What any of this means about geek sexuality is a mystery left for future forensic anthropologists to determine.)
If I were the ISP, I'd comply with any request RIAA gave me for customer logs. I'd send 'em every byte every customer transmitted or received.
I mean, what else am I gonna do with the half-dozen old line printers I found in the basement? :-)
Won't work, at least not without one hell of a tradeoff. If you still wanna be able to LART Joe Luzer for running the open SOCKS proxy through which you got spammed or DDoSed, RIAA has to be able to LART Joe Musicfan for running the Gnutella note through which they downloaded HilaryRosenIsABigFatBitch.mp3
If ISPs could blocked outbound port 25 traffic from residential cablemodem and DSL users, that'd greatly cut down the amount of spam the rest of the 'net has to deal with, but logs would still have to be kept with regards to DDoS issues.
Eliminating spam at a higher level requires that your ISP be part of the solution.
Being listed on SPEWS is an indication that your ISP is part of the problem.
Instead of asking your ISP to call SPEWS (which it can't) to get your block unlisted, why not ask your ISP to call the spammer (which it can!) and terminate service to the spammer.
SPEWS is eliminating spam at the higher level -- by forcing ISPs that harbor spammers to choose between servicing their spammers or legitimate customers.
If your ISP refuses to boot the spammer, they've made it clear to you who they'd rather do business with. Perhaps you should make your preference just as clear to your ISP.
(I am not SPEWS. But if I knew who SPEWS was, I'd buy them a beer.)
>Stupidity Surcharge: $10,000,000
>
> Total: $10,000,001
"Stupidity Surcharge"? Sorry, but I think you misspelled "Consulting/Agency Fees".
Pud gets his book mentioned on Slashdot with an Amazon referral link! That oughta bring in enough money to keep the FC trolls happy for another month!
When: 1/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 20
Points: 120
(25 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)
F'd Servers
PK Interactive files Chapter 7. Last month, Pud got his book promoted on Slashdot's front page on the advice of his salesweasel who told told him bandwith was gonna be too cheap to meter. His salesnozzle didn't tell him when bandwidth would be too cheap to meter. Evidently, not yet. The bill arrived today.
When: 2/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 220
(69 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)
*grin* - good point :)
As for the guy who mentioned 1040-C - it, like 1040 - is deceptively simple. The forms are all two pages, but each line typically involves multiple questions about putting things into slots, just like the "is it a toy or is it a doll" question.
Quickly now, can you tell me whether that new alternator's a valid car and truck expense (II-10, 1040-C)? How about whether or not it was a Section 179 expense deduction? Quickly now, are you renting or leasing your office space and equipment, and what effect does that have on your after-tax income? What percentage of your home were you using for your business? Is it more tax-efficient to use LIFO or FIFO accounting for your inventory? (What does "inventory" mean if part of what you sell is software? :-)
It ain't the math - it's basic arithmetic. It's figuring out which of the myriad rules apply to one's situation or not.
> Consider also that the taxes you pay helps to construct a legal and infrastructural framework under which businesses can operate quite safely and easily. Last I heard, the Soviet Union did not have any sort of effective tax law (or government either).
Last I heard, Russia instituted a flat tax and tax revenues skyrocketed because people were actually able to comply.
But I digress - my rant wasn't principally about the amount paid, but of the ludicrous complexity involved in figuring out how much is owed.
My "I'd have started a business" was a straw man -- but do you really thing we need seven definitions of "dependent child" (families), to draw a distinction between the taxation of a stock held for 359 days and 360 days (long-term vs short-term gains, and the host of "straddle/spread" rules required to preserve this distinction in the face of hedging strategies made possible through the use of exchange-traded options), to draw a distinction between "Section 1250 contracts" and normal securities (trading the S&P 500 is not the same as trading an S&P-500-based mutual fund - it's treated as 60% long-term-gain and 40% short-term-gain), so make sure you've checked off Form 4952 if you invested on margin, and Forms 4797, 2439, 6252, 4684, 6781, and 8824, (Line 11, 1040-D) whose purposes I've forgotten about, and don't even get me started on the Alternative Minimum Tax - in which you get to do it all over again? Those aren't strawmen - those are picked from just a casual glance at 1040C and 1040D.
At no points on this thread have I whined about the dollar amounts taken by the government, only ludicrous volume of paperwork involved in complying with the legal requirements of the taking.
In Soviet Russia... at least the damn tax system is comprehensible. And whether they're digging up the copper or not, that puts them light-years ahead of us.
To indulge in a little bit of traditional /. anti-corporatespeak: when only multibillion-dollar corporations can afford to hire the army of lawyers and CPAs required to comply with the tax laws, the only legal businesses will be multibillion-dollar corporations.
In Gov. Gray Davis' California, it's not fucked up, it's the only way business gets done. Remember the Oracle Contract?
CA's state budget is $38B in the hole this year - we're jacking up income taxes and slashing transfers to municipialities, but we've got plenty of money for the Prison Guards, whose union was one of Davis' biggest contributors in the recent gubernatorial campaign.
Bottom line - the Segway d00dz will go out of business because they had a dumb business plan that relied on a gullible public swallowing promises that they were gonna change the world with a frickin' scooter. Their failure to recognize the basic need to bri^H^H^Hbuy^H^H^Hcontribute generously to those noble souls working hard to make the state a better place is yet another symptom of pie-in-the-sky naievete.
No, I haven't gotten my wish. Calling the elimination of the differential tariff on toys-vs-dolls "getting my wish" is like tossing a hanful of sand into the Grand Canyon and claiming you've "filled" it.
Another symptom - the IRS has seven defintions for "dependent child". I don't have kids, nor do I want 'em, but that doesn't stop me from thinking that that's a crock of shit, and an unfair burden of extra paperwork on those who do, even if understanding those multiple contradictionary definitions results in a tax break for 'em.
Likewise, there have been times when I've wanted to start my own business. One glance at the tax forms for the self-employed, and I'm disabused of that fucking notion with a quickness. I'll never start a business because any enjoyment (and even the huge list of possible tax deductions!) I'd get from spending some free time producing things of value would be sucked dry by my having to fill out hundreds of pages of forms every year. (Or worse, paying thousands to a CPA to fill the hundreds of pages of forms out for me, and then have to sign under penalty of perjury that something I don't even comprehend (or I wouldn't have hired the fucking CPA in the first place!) is a true and faithful representation.
With compliance costs being approximatly 50% of tax collected (1999 - $650B in income tax collected, and $300B in compliance costs), I really do think an overhaul of the ludicrous monstrosity called the Internal Revenue Code is important. And not next time, but this time.
As for threatening to vote for his opposition - tax rates may rise under Democrats and fall under Republicans, but the Internal Revenue Code grows in complexity no matter which major party is in power. I therefore have no reason to believe that either major party has any intention of reforming the Code, and the only way I can see the Code being changed is for third parties to gain enough votes to be a threat to the majors. (In closely-run Democratic races, I'd advise voters interested in third parties to threaten to vote Green, and in closely-run Republican races, I'd likewise advise such voters to threaten to vote Libertarian.)
I can't speak for your moral obligations, but what burns me up is that as an American, you're not legally obliged not to kill them, you're also legally obliged to pay them for the privilege. Talk about insult to injury.
"Them", being "accountants and lawyers", to figure out which of the 7 million words of the Internal Revenue Code (and no doubt similarly-massive Customs regs in this case) apply to you.
In 1999, tax compliance costs in the US were $300 billion per year. The goddamn income tax collected only $650 billion that year.
Think about that for a minute. For every $1000 in tax collected by the Federal Government, CPAs and lawyers raked in $500.
I'll argue for lower taxes every chance I get - but I want the whole package lowered. End phaseouts. End special exemptions. Bring in a flat tax, or scrap the income tax in favor of a consumption tax. If that means my sacred ox gets gored, and I have pay $1250 to the government every year, versus $1000 to the government and $500 to a CPA, I'm still $250 ahead of the game.
By reforming the Internal Revenue Code and eliminating this overhead, even the goddamn government would be ahead of the game. (At worst, they'd break even, considering they currently take half - $250 - of the $500 spent on compliance costs for every $1000 in taxes paid :-)
OK kids. A 32-page ruling on whether or not the X-Men are human or non-human, due to a 6.8% vs 12% import duty differential charged seven years ago, a duty that isn't even in effect anymore.
How many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars got spent on lawyers - both from Marvel's shareholders for their lawyers and our tax dollars being spent on the Government's lawyers - in the case leading up to this ruling - a ruling that took seven years after the initial dispute hit the courts?
In the world of the X-Men, something would have broken by now, but the real world has no superheroes to save us.
Isn't it time we called our Congressmen/women and demanded, on pain of our voting for third parties, that they put the tax law genie back in the bottle?
Anyone? Bueller?
ROFLMAO.
A half-serious question: "If the statute of limitations has expired, and/or your lawyers think you're safe from double jeopardy... What was the passphrase to all those files the DoJ couldn't (or wouldn't admit to being able to) decrypt after all these years?"
What you've heard is true. I worked at a software company that used Disney characters as machine names in a documentation example. (e.g. huey, duey, and louie as workstations, with donald as an NFS server). The company had to change anthe example because it received a C&D (Cease And Desist) from some Ubergruppenlawyer on the bowels of Mauschwitz. That was years ago. I can only imagine they've gotten worse over time.
NetHack with a mouse?!
How the hell are we supposed to get n00bz to use h, j, k, and l to move the cursor, the way God intended?
This is all the work of some EMACS d00dz, I tell ya.
Next thing you know, they'll release Omega 1.00 with a graphical interface and call it Duke Nukem Forever.
And whatever favorite music didn't get re-released on CDs... well, everyone's got those on MP3.
They have MP3z because the artist's label never re-released it. And nobody else, (including the artists themselves) could re-release the out-of-print stuff due to the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension, so nobody could have bought it on CD even if they might otherwise have wanted to.
Hey, Hilary! Try this out for a business plan!
1) Don't release any more from the backcatalog, ... ]
2) Act surprised when the backcatalog brings in no more revenue.
3) [
4) Don't profit!
This explains a lot, really.
Screw that! S-100 bus 4ever, d00dz!
Sweeeeeeet! I'm trying to get a network-access-less (and/or firewall-friendly) install going for Real for some relative-types, but to date have met with limited success. I think that's because there are now several dozen Real codecs, not all of which are bundled in the default player download. (I assume the encoder defaults to the codecs that don't come with the player, thereby forcing player users to download whenever the encoder is lazy :-)
As such, the troj^H^H^H^Hplayer often has to phone home in order to "download updates" - that is, extra .DLLs to add to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Codecs, Plugins, etc. to play the stream or file.
Anyone have a complete list of codecs and their associated .DLLs as of late 2002?
I've tried the RealAtLast approach with some success (once upon a time, I did something similar to get RealG2 playback on RealPlayer 5), but that was a couple of years ago, and I've long since lost track of all the crappy DLLs it wants today. I've downloaded some recently-encoded Futurama and SouthPark episodes for use as guinea pigs with the RealAtLast bundle, but Real still wants to phone home to get at least one missing codec. *grumble*.
> As always, if you have relatives who use RealPlayer, or you maintain it in an office setting, it may be best to perform that procedure on every computer.
Amen. It's a hell of a lot easier to fix it once, and then never have to deal with it again. At least, until the bastards at Real decide to make another codec that has no improvement in video/audio quality, but requires another client-side upgrade. *retch*
s/Despite/Because of/g
Any time I see the Trust-E logo, I know someone's doing something evil. If they weren't in the spyware business, they wouldn't need to use a front group like Trust-E to feign legitimacy.
Trust-E is to privacy, what Saddam Hussein is to baby milk factories.