Hong Kong max income tax rate is 16% but there are deductions which bring the median to around 10% only.
No other taxes at all, only stamp duty on real estate sales and duties on some very few items, like HK Customs and Excise Department puts it: HKSAR is a free port. There is no tariff on general imports. However, there is duty on liquors, tobacco, hydrocarbon oil and methyl alcohol. See more here http://www.customs.gov.hk/eng/major_dutiable_freep ort_e.html
Western societies as a whole are way too heavily taxed. Even the US is practically a socialist nation by taxation amount.
My theory of this is simply that with PC's the price is right. There have been many good technologies which have been overtaken by the PC simply because they are cheap and ubiquitous.
Sun is selling the entry level T1 with Niagara CPU at very reasonable $2995. However this is exceptionally cheap for a real server and the price for hardware only climbs very soon if you want more than the cheapest entry option. But for PC's this has been a very general price range for ever.
Things will happen if the price is right. Shift a new technology to a completely lower price level, not just entry price point, and see them take over.
Unix mainframes and minis were great but at tens to hundreds of $k they were out of reach for many. PC is technically a pitiful platform and programming it at low level is pure pain, but the price is right.
It's not only cheap but retarded when you compare it to possible competition: a 40 foot shipping container costs ~2000 USD as new. Add 6 inches of polyurethane insulation, interior paneling, a little electric wiring and basic ventilation for another ~2000 USD.
Will last forever and be as good in extreme cold as in extreme heat. Truckable, shippable.
Clearspeed http://www.clearspeed.com/ is just coming to market with their CSX600 'application accelerator' processor.
It has 96 execution elements, 96 ops simultaneously for your data. Sounds like ideal for graphics processing. Power consumption 5 watts, 50 GFlops of computing power.
And they make PCI-X cards for PC systems. You can have several cards in one system for compounded processing power. Now, all this monster would need is the graphics output parts and drivers. They even have a full development kit for both Windows and Linux. The card's programmed in C.
Perhaps the PC's of the future would have two CPU's, one linear general purpose CPU (current x86 based) for program code and system management and one massively parallel CPU for tasks better suited for it. If there's no one true road to happiness, make it two then.
PCI Express could possibly bring out some new interesting developments from Matrox. The 256 MB Parhelia is nice, but somewhat limited 3D performance, and the 3-head desktop is limited to 1280x1024 panels, not exactly hi-res anymore.
But think about a Matrox card with more 3D horsepower and DVI support for three 1600x1200 panels to realize a 4800x1200 desktop, now that would really be something.
With Viewsonic's slim edge 20" panels you'd have a very high res 60" wide monitor view. Nothing short of astounding would that be. Even the thought turned me all Yoda.
You can get a CT scan in Malaysia for 150 ringgit, that's 40 dollars, in a modern private hospital (Gleneagles, full of specialists) in Kuala Lumpur (this is 3 years old information so the prices might have changed slightly). Modern Siemens machine, you even get to keep the pictures yourself.
Similar prices in many hospitals in Thailand, afaik. There's absolutely no reason to go to India for medical tourism when there are Thailand and Malaysia. Malaysia's ringgit is even pegged to the US dollar so the prices will not fluctuate.
Much less risks with hygiene in Thailand and Malaysia than in India. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
You can remove the earwax very easily yourself, either with a special pump or just using a large plastic syringe (without needle;-). With body temperature water you don't even necessarily need any chemical to soften the ear wax. Paying somebody money to do this is like paying somebody to wipe your ass.
Similarly, if your toenail is not extremely, hideously badly ingrown, you can cut it or file it yourself. Just avoid using shoes afterwards to avoid infection stemming from poor ventilation. Calamine lotion works wonders with toes, and actually any small cuts and bruises, especially in difficult humid places (only for external use).
It's not magic what doctors do to your body in small procedures like these, so sometimes a little hacking spirit goes a long way, both for your dollars and your knowledge.
But, if you fck it up, remember that fixing your work can cost more than have a professional to do it in the first place..just use some common sense and caution and you'll be fine (and no, you can't sue me if you fck up anyway).
I would rather go to Thailand simply because of better hygiene, and prices for medical procedures are similar.
I have used medical facilities in both countries, both expensive and inexpensive ones, and would never ever go to surgery in India. There's simply a total hygiene gap between India and Thailand, to the advantage of the latter.
It starts with the food, in India it is very easy to get serious health problems from food and water, whereas both food and water are very safe in Thailand, and ends with wiping your ass, with many Indians still using their hand, whereas Thais use a bidet shower.
There are many hospitals in Bangkok alone catering for foreigners. Most telling is that these hospitals do booming business with Indians, too. No Thai would ever even dream of going to India for health care!
Lack of hygiene in outpatient care can be an annoyment at best, but can kill you at worst, with surgery the risks are thousand-fold.
Corporations are not for absolutely free trade. They're only for free trade of raw materials and produce, unmarked uncopyrighted bulk foods that whose sales cannot be legally limited.
But when it comes to products that are produced by these corporations, trademarked and copyrighted goods, they are stricly against free trade!
You are not free to trade these products as you wish. You cannot import trademarked or copyrighted goods and sell them at the lowest cost you ever wish. The trademark and copyright holders can dictate their own terms for selling these goods inside a market area.
What this means in practice is that people are being milked for the absotely highest prices they are deemed to be able to pay. You must buy your jeans, razor blades, shampoo etc from the official importing company designated by the manufacturer/trademark holder/copyright holder at a price set by them.
There is no free trade in this. Absolute monopoly. But the companies have made sure that they are free to manufacture these goods where it suits them the best, where it is cheapest. This guarantees them maximum profits, manufacturing everything for less than a dollar and selling it to US and EU consumers for tens, hundreds of dollars, and there is no competition as competition has been made illegal.
Consumers are still free to bring or order products to themselves from other market areas, expect this to change in the future.
We're all being milked.
Now the beef is, how the hell did this happen? Corporations do not have voting rights, yet the laws are tailored to their needs, not the needs of voting consumers.
Alienware is a poor lap-top because it has air vents on the bottom. This means you actually cannot use it on your lap, because the vents will get blocked. Or put it on a soft surface like sofa seat, bed, carpet - many places where you actually could use a real laptop because of fun/comfort factor. I love the specs of Alienware/Sager, but not the way it has been executed.
I've got a Dell laptop with 3 year warranty and on-site service. I've had some minor trouble with it 2 times, and it's been corrected less than 24 hours later by a guy who came into my home to fix it.
I can appreciate good service and am willing to pay for it. I don't think you will get service like this from Alienware/Sager. Ultimately this is what will limit my purchasing options in the future, because I love Dell's service so much I am not willing to settle for anything less.
Then again, some people are willing to wait for weeks or even months for service in order to save a couple hundred bucks. If I remember correctly the extended on-site warranty cost less than 200 dollars for my machine, and it has paid itself back in speed and comfort already, and I still have almost 2 years left. Each to their own.
Aliens might have different concepts of numbers because of differing concepts of "whole".
Worlds within worlds, quarks withing atoms etc. So who says "7" cannot be evenly divided? What if "7", these 7 pebbles here o o o o o o o, actually consist of 2 smaller particles each, like.............., and each of.'s is a whole, then you could divide it into....... and......., 7 smaller pebbles each.
The only thing that changed is that instead of 7 wholes they turned out to be "almost whole". Perhaps the....... and....... will actually, left alone, form into O and O, like pools of quicksilver. You have just evenly divided 7.
So by alien logic, o o o o o o o divided into two halves will produce O and O. This could be the arithmetic of an amoeba-like lifeform. Perhaps they would find our concept of "whole" as fundamentally flawed.
On an alien planet, things could be based on a different concept of whole, producing a completely different kind of environment and life. Existance would be more like ideas, they would be in a constant state of flux, going through unlimited changes, divisions and mergings through their "life".
There would be no strict concept of "self", but more groupings of things similarly opinionated, which themselves would not stay that way for long, but would change, evolve and devolve.
Think of amoebas, dust and gas. What if, when you meet a person who has interesting ideas, parts of your body dust would flow over to this other person to join his ideas? Would the remaining you be less of you, because there is less dust remaining, or more of you, because the rest of the dust is more uniformly opinionated?
What if you were in the companionship of several very interesting individuals who were opinionated similarly along your thoughtlines, and your dust body would completely dissolve itself to join the others. Would there still be "you"? A countable whole? If there were 7 persons plus you previously, are there now only 7 remaining, or still 8, because the corporal 7 have been fortified in spirit and have the power of 8? Are there actually more than 8, because one strong hits harder than 2 weak ones? So if the remaining 7 also joined together, would they actually be 14 or 1? Or more? What would you be counting, or wanting to count?
I guess it's time for me to lay off the coffee now.
There's a new version of MASM (8?) which fully supports all pentium instructions. It's far from obsolete, a great tool which great macro capabilities. The great macros are one reason why Randall Hyde based his HLA on MASM. See www.masmforum.com for more.
For something new, fresh and interesting, see Tomasz Grysztar's Flat Assembler (Fasm) at flatassembler.net . Available for DOS, Linux, Windows, Menuet (www.menuetos.org) and for anything you care to port in to.
board.win32asmcommunity.net is a great resource too, I think Randall Hyde still calls this home for HLA discussion, although masm and fasm have since spawned their own forums.
What is remarkable is that the asm community is getting more active all the time, there's a significant revival going on.
The purpose of the fiber washer is to prevent damage to the motherboard by the turning motion of the screw.
Otherwise an enterprising fellow can actually twist the contacts off the surface of the motherboard by turning the screw way too tight (screw catches on to the soft tinning and starts to twist the tin and the contact beneath), I've seen this happen once.
Guy tried to claim 'warranty repair' because obviously the mb is faulty when things just peel off like that! Dear mister, you don't treat your computer like you treat your truck or your motorbike.
Slashdot Mirror
Hong Kong max income tax rate is 16% but there are deductions which bring the median to around 10% only.
p ort_e.html
No other taxes at all, only stamp duty on real estate sales and duties on some very few items, like HK Customs and Excise Department puts it: HKSAR is a free port. There is no tariff on general imports. However, there is duty on liquors, tobacco, hydrocarbon oil and methyl alcohol. See more here http://www.customs.gov.hk/eng/major_dutiable_free
Western societies as a whole are way too heavily taxed. Even the US is practically a socialist nation by taxation amount.
The original copyright was in the context of a world with a horseman as the fastest information spreading method.
In today's world the copyright should be 14+14 days and heading towards 14+14 hours.
My theory of this is simply that with PC's the price is right. There have been many good technologies which have been overtaken by the PC simply because they are cheap and ubiquitous.
Sun is selling the entry level T1 with Niagara CPU at very reasonable $2995. However this is exceptionally cheap for a real server and the price for hardware only climbs very soon if you want more than the cheapest entry option. But for PC's this has been a very general price range for ever.
Things will happen if the price is right. Shift a new technology to a completely lower price level, not just entry price point, and see them take over.
Unix mainframes and minis were great but at tens to hundreds of $k they were out of reach for many. PC is technically a pitiful platform and programming it at low level is pure pain, but the price is right.
It's not only cheap but retarded when you compare it to possible competition: a 40 foot shipping container costs ~2000 USD as new. Add 6 inches of polyurethane insulation, interior paneling, a little electric wiring and basic ventilation for another ~2000 USD.
Will last forever and be as good in extreme cold as in extreme heat. Truckable, shippable.
Start surfing from http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/shippin
Clearspeed http://www.clearspeed.com/ is just coming to market with their CSX600 'application accelerator' processor.
It has 96 execution elements, 96 ops simultaneously for your data. Sounds like ideal for graphics processing. Power consumption 5 watts, 50 GFlops of computing power.
And they make PCI-X cards for PC systems. You can have several cards in one system for compounded processing power. Now, all this monster would need is the graphics output parts and drivers. They even have a full development kit for both Windows and Linux. The card's programmed in C.
Perhaps the PC's of the future would have two CPU's, one linear general purpose CPU (current x86 based) for program code and system management and one massively parallel CPU for tasks better suited for it. If there's no one true road to happiness, make it two then.
PCI Express could possibly bring out some new interesting developments from Matrox. The 256 MB Parhelia is nice, but somewhat limited 3D performance, and the 3-head desktop is limited to 1280x1024 panels, not exactly hi-res anymore.
But think about a Matrox card with more 3D horsepower and DVI support for three 1600x1200 panels to realize a 4800x1200 desktop, now that would really be something.
With Viewsonic's slim edge 20" panels you'd have a very high res 60" wide monitor view. Nothing short of astounding would that be. Even the thought turned me all Yoda.
You can get a CT scan in Malaysia for 150 ringgit, that's 40 dollars, in a modern private hospital (Gleneagles, full of specialists) in Kuala Lumpur (this is 3 years old information so the prices might have changed slightly). Modern Siemens machine, you even get to keep the pictures yourself.
Similar prices in many hospitals in Thailand, afaik. There's absolutely no reason to go to India for medical tourism when there are Thailand and Malaysia. Malaysia's ringgit is even pegged to the US dollar so the prices will not fluctuate.
Much less risks with hygiene in Thailand and Malaysia than in India. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
You can remove the earwax very easily yourself, either with a special pump or just using a large plastic syringe (without needle ;-). With body temperature water you don't even necessarily need any chemical to soften the ear wax. Paying somebody money to do this is like paying somebody to wipe your ass.
Similarly, if your toenail is not extremely, hideously badly ingrown, you can cut it or file it yourself. Just avoid using shoes afterwards to avoid infection stemming from poor ventilation. Calamine lotion works wonders with toes, and actually any small cuts and bruises, especially in difficult humid places (only for external use).
It's not magic what doctors do to your body in small procedures like these, so sometimes a little hacking spirit goes a long way, both for your dollars and your knowledge.
But, if you fck it up, remember that fixing your work can cost more than have a professional to do it in the first place..just use some common sense and caution and you'll be fine (and no, you can't sue me if you fck up anyway).
I would rather go to Thailand simply because of better hygiene, and prices for medical procedures are similar.
I have used medical facilities in both countries, both expensive and inexpensive ones, and would never ever go to surgery in India. There's simply a total hygiene gap between India and Thailand, to the advantage of the latter.
It starts with the food, in India it is very easy to get serious health problems from food and water, whereas both food and water are very safe in Thailand, and ends with wiping your ass, with many Indians still using their hand, whereas Thais use a bidet shower.
There are many hospitals in Bangkok alone catering for foreigners. Most telling is that these hospitals do booming business with Indians, too. No Thai would ever even dream of going to India for health care!
Lack of hygiene in outpatient care can be an annoyment at best, but can kill you at worst, with surgery the risks are thousand-fold.
bulk foods = bulk goods, dammit
Corporations are not for absolutely free trade. They're only for free trade of raw materials and produce, unmarked uncopyrighted bulk foods that whose sales cannot be legally limited.
But when it comes to products that are produced by these corporations, trademarked and copyrighted goods, they are stricly against free trade!
You are not free to trade these products as you wish. You cannot import trademarked or copyrighted goods and sell them at the lowest cost you ever wish. The trademark and copyright holders can dictate their own terms for selling these goods inside a market area.
What this means in practice is that people are being milked for the absotely highest prices they are deemed to be able to pay. You must buy your jeans, razor blades, shampoo etc from the official importing company designated by the manufacturer/trademark holder/copyright holder at a price set by them.
There is no free trade in this. Absolute monopoly. But the companies have made sure that they are free to manufacture these goods where it suits them the best, where it is cheapest. This guarantees them maximum profits, manufacturing everything for less than a dollar and selling it to US and EU consumers for tens, hundreds of dollars, and there is no competition as competition has been made illegal.
Consumers are still free to bring or order products to themselves from other market areas, expect this to change in the future.
We're all being milked.
Now the beef is, how the hell did this happen? Corporations do not have voting rights, yet the laws are tailored to their needs, not the needs of voting consumers.
Alienware is a poor lap-top because it has air vents on the bottom. This means you actually cannot use it on your lap, because the vents will get blocked. Or put it on a soft surface like sofa seat, bed, carpet - many places where you actually could use a real laptop because of fun/comfort factor. I love the specs of Alienware/Sager, but not the way it has been executed.
I've got a Dell laptop with 3 year warranty and on-site service. I've had some minor trouble with it 2 times, and it's been corrected less than 24 hours later by a guy who came into my home to fix it.
I can appreciate good service and am willing to pay for it. I don't think you will get service like this from Alienware/Sager. Ultimately this is what will limit my purchasing options in the future, because I love Dell's service so much I am not willing to settle for anything less.
Then again, some people are willing to wait for weeks or even months for service in order to save a couple hundred bucks. If I remember correctly the extended on-site warranty cost less than 200 dollars for my machine, and it has paid itself back in speed and comfort already, and I still have almost 2 years left. Each to their own.
Aliens might have different concepts of numbers because of differing concepts of "whole".
.. .. .. .. .. .. .., and each of .'s is a whole, then you could divide it into ....... and ......., 7 smaller pebbles each.
....... and ....... will actually, left alone, form into O and O, like pools of quicksilver. You have just evenly divided 7.
Worlds within worlds, quarks withing atoms etc. So who says "7" cannot be evenly divided? What if "7", these 7 pebbles here o o o o o o o, actually consist of 2 smaller particles each, like
The only thing that changed is that instead of 7 wholes they turned out to be "almost whole". Perhaps the
So by alien logic, o o o o o o o divided into two halves will produce O and O. This could be the arithmetic of an amoeba-like lifeform. Perhaps they would find our concept of "whole" as fundamentally flawed.
On an alien planet, things could be based on a different concept of whole, producing a completely different kind of environment and life. Existance would be more like ideas, they would be in a constant state of flux, going through unlimited changes, divisions and mergings through their "life".
There would be no strict concept of "self", but more groupings of things similarly opinionated, which themselves would not stay that way for long, but would change, evolve and devolve.
Think of amoebas, dust and gas. What if, when you meet a person who has interesting ideas, parts of your body dust would flow over to this other person to join his ideas? Would the remaining you be less of you, because there is less dust remaining, or more of you, because the rest of the dust is more uniformly opinionated?
What if you were in the companionship of several very interesting individuals who were opinionated similarly along your thoughtlines, and your dust body would completely dissolve itself to join the others. Would there still be "you"? A countable whole? If there were 7 persons plus you previously, are there now only 7 remaining, or still 8, because the corporal 7 have been fortified in spirit and have the power of 8? Are there actually more than 8, because one strong hits harder than 2 weak ones? So if the remaining 7 also joined together, would they actually be 14 or 1? Or more? What would you be counting, or wanting to count?
I guess it's time for me to lay off the coffee now.
There's a new version of MASM (8?) which fully supports all pentium instructions. It's far from obsolete, a great tool which great macro capabilities. The great macros are one reason why Randall Hyde based his HLA on MASM. See www.masmforum.com for more.
For something new, fresh and interesting, see Tomasz Grysztar's Flat Assembler (Fasm) at flatassembler.net . Available for DOS, Linux, Windows, Menuet (www.menuetos.org) and for anything you care to port in to.
board.win32asmcommunity.net is a great resource too, I think Randall Hyde still calls this home for HLA discussion, although masm and fasm have since spawned their own forums.
What is remarkable is that the asm community is getting more active all the time, there's a significant revival going on.
The purpose of the fiber washer is to prevent damage to the motherboard by the turning motion of the screw.
Otherwise an enterprising fellow can actually twist the contacts off the surface of the motherboard by turning the screw way too tight (screw catches on to the soft tinning and starts to twist the tin and the contact beneath), I've seen this happen once.
Guy tried to claim 'warranty repair' because obviously the mb is faulty when things just peel off like that! Dear mister, you don't treat your computer like you treat your truck or your motorbike.
Has anyone else noticed that hard disk capacities have not increased for the past year?
300 GB is still tops, same as last xmas. A minuscule growth in laptop hard disks, 12 months ago 60 GB, now 80 GB.
I don't recall stagnation like this happening *ever* before.