It's obvious how we got to this situation. The tax system is extremely complex and has been added to and patch up endlessly over the years to deal with specific issues.
Perhaps when the government wants to give money to a special interest, instead of changing the tax code from something simple to something extremely complex, they should leave the tax code simple, and make an explicit grant of funds.
So if you wanted to, say, encourage Twitter to locate its offices in San Francisco, instead of giving them a tax break in law, they'd have to pay exactly the same taxes as everyone else, and then there's have to be a separate "Thank yo for locating in San Francisco" grant to offset the taxes they are being charged for being in San Francisco.
Of course, that would clearly expose the nature of the relationship: "We recognize our taxes are too onerous to attract the kind of businesses which we want to attract, so we are willing to pay you off for a number of years to put up with it".
Other than Apple in one country all of these bastards are actually obeying the letter (but not the spirit) of the taxation laws.
If that were the actual spirit of the tax laws... the letter would be different.
Because the letter of the law is what it is, one has to expect that the letter is an accurate embodiment of the *actual* "spirit", as opposed to the "spirit" that everyone pays lip service to.
If this were not the case, the people making the laws would have to be pretty critically stupid.
And if that were the case... what does this say about the intelligence of the people who elected them? They don't even have the disadvantage of an electoral college causing a two party system as an emergent property to blame in the U.K., only the intelligence of the electorate.
They're either not doing a particularly good job of evading taxes, or they're doing a really good job of evading taxes.
Most likely, they are doing this because if realized income on auctions for AdWords counts as a payment negotiation taking place in the UK when the auction goes to a winner for a particular AdWords auction, even though such things as bid amount and so on are automated "negotiations".
If I were cynical, I'd say they were making agreements like this in order to act as a market barrier to entry for competitors: pay a small enough amount that it doesn't hurt Google, but a large enough amount that matching it would bankrupt a potential competitor. I suppose we won't know whether this cynical view is in any way correct, until Microsoft (Bing), Facebook, or other sites complain about, or support, the outcome.
How many people have assaulted any shooting range in the history of America? None. So why are you going to find an attacker in a shooting range?
All shooting ranges have targets; not all targets are located on shooting ranges. If you engage only in target shooting, who is to say it all takes place on a range?
Is this why the Proserpina dam, built by the Romans in the first century AD, is still in use today?
Yes, it's why it's still in use today. Because it's been maintained
Amortized over its entire working lifetime, what is its overall maintenance loading, per year, in terms of a percentage of cost of initial construction, compared to similar public works in the U.S.?
Thought so.
Yes, things have to be maintained.
No, shovel-monkeys do not all need continuous full-time employment, merely because they are not qualified to perform other tasks. That is what the idea of Universal Basic Income is designed to deal with.
If they try and require smart guns, but the unlock mechanism is faulty and causes me to be unable to use my weapon, I don't want it and I don't want that law.
That won't be a problem. GM is designing them. They have tons of experience with locks, and they never cover up problems with their locks.
QFT. Flint, MI says hi. Public works and infrastructure require a lot of maintenance, and they're not always getting what they need. Over time things end up neglected and you see the inevitable result.
Is this why the Proserpina dam, built by the Romans in the first century AD, is still in use today?
Or do people who work on public works intentionally do a crappy job so that they will have continued work in the future in the form of maintenance?
Software is not one of these. It's not like bridge building. If a software program collapses, people don't end up dead.
I hope people making making pacemaker firmware or car brake-by-wire systems doesn't share your attitude about importance of software reliability
Most people who are calling for certifications for life support systems software (which is the technical term for what you are talking about here) are not sufficiently qualified as software engineers to be able to judge the quality of other software engineers.
They are certainly not going to be able to identify those people who are (or are not) qualified to be working on life support systems.
Generally, there are a small number of us who are at the top of our game, and then there's everyone else who should not be touching the console software on the GE Medical Systems MRI machines, and shouldn't be touching the software in the cell counter, and shouldn't be touching the software in the blood gas monitor.
The only thing you are going to get by certifying many of those people is non-functioning software, at best, and a gamma knife that over-irradiates people because some idiot operator hit return instead of entering a specific value, because they didn't know the difference between "view" and "controller", and that just because there was a value displayed in the UI didn't mean that that was the value that would have been used if you "just hit return".
In other words: the people you want making the certification decisions have to be competent to write the software themselves, only they are too busy certifying people to actually write the code.
The only ones who win in that situation are the people putting up bonds for the software which accidentally works, and the people receiving payments from the bonds that were put up, for software that doesn't actually work.
Congrats: you've discovered another way to employ actuaries, and keep insurance companies in business, without actually improving the quality of software at all.
On the plus side, I suppose you can require citizenship or a green card as a precondition of licensing someone to do that sort of work, which of course, *also* won't improve the code quality, but at lest you'll be able to charge a lot for your services, since there will be a smaller supply of certified people than the demand for certified people, so you'll be able to write your own ticket.
So in other words: "A Continuing Education Unit is... worthless as shit for a software engineer or electrical engineer, since neither of these are licensed professions".
Huh, software and electrical engineers aren't licensed? Does that mean it is possible to pay some online school a bunch of money to send you a bunch of emails and then you become an engineer? or does license refer to something else?
No. Licenses derive from professional or governmental organizations which grant licenses to allow you to practice in the profession. These professional organizations (for example: The New York Bar Association has to admit you to the bar in order to practice law in New York) have the right to regulate your participation in an industry, because they were granted that right by other members already participating in the industry.
In other words, it's like a trade union that exists to prevent "too many" practitioners of a given trade, in order to artificially inflate the per hour pay of the remaining people who are actually permitted to practice the trade. Mostly because the "know the right people" or have come up with enough money to "bribe the right people".
When a license is granted by a governmental organization -- such as a drivers license, or a massage therapists license -- it's generally either because there are minimal acceptable standards for the purposes of public safety, or because there are illegal activities going on under the name of the profession, and it's to encourage those illegal practitioners to just be honestly illegal, rather than trying to hide un a professional name. This is accomplished by charging huge fees to those people who are legitimately involved in the profession (yeah, it seems stupid to me, too).
I'm asking because I'm not in America and has never been there. Here engineer is classified as "protected title", which mean you are only allowed to call yourself that if you graduate from a university licensed to educate engineers and the university in question approved of you being an engineer (that is, studying an engineering line. You can't be an engineer with a major in history).
This is different. For some industries, you require a license to practice (as previously noted: said industries generally impact public safety).
Software is not one of these. It's not like bridge building. If a software program collapses, people don't end up dead.
Keeping people from writing software for a living just because they haven't paid extortionate tuitions to for profit companies... er... sorry... universities, who, according to accreditation agencies, are permitted to graduate software engineers is [...]
About as stupid as permitting an accreditation agency the authority to grant universities these monopolies merely because the accreditation agency claims that it's somehow qualified to do so merely because it says it's qualified, and we can trust them (nudge nudge, wink wink).
---
In any case, you haven't demonstrated any value for a CEU from MIT as opposed to a CEU from Reverend Ike's Late Night Television Ministry.
How do you know that? I don't see methodology mentioned in the article, but it certainly seem like a good situation for FB to provide Nielsen with some sort of service.
Because I know how the Facebook "feed" system works compared to, for example, Twitter.
I also know that Facebook's monetization model absolutely *depends* the on the idea of "sponsored posts", and I've seen a lot of marketing company probes of the "Share this post or the kitten dies!" variety, with hosting URL track back to the image hosting sites log files, in a vain attempt to game the Facebook monetization model in order to get the free marketing that you used to be able to get on Facebook, when your friends used to see *all* your posts.
While it's conceivable that Facebook might offer an "aggregate of all posts" service to Nielsen, Inc., I think it's more likely that if Nielsen was sell to company A, B, and C, and charging $X each, and Facebook was selling the data to Nielsen at some price point of $Y, where $Y (3 * $X)...
Then Facebook would just tell Nielsen to F-off, and take the additional (3 * $X) - $Y money, and put it in their own pocket, and screw Nielsen's business model, because Facebook could care less if Nielsel stays in business, if they can add one Sheckel to their own bottom line.
This will have about as much chance of sticking as the "non-California vehicle emissions fees" they used to charge people for bringing in cars from outside California (i.e. want a phone with strong encryption? Take a trip and buy it outside California.).
(1) The car emissions fee was declared unconstitutional (it violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, just like trying to restrict bringing phones with strong encryption would violate the ICC).
(2) If you bought a phone with strong encryption outside California because California made them illegal, California would have a hell of a time trying to charge a "use tax" on the thing, since it would be (effectively) a sales tax on an illegal product. Ask the State of Utah how successful its Marijuana Tax Stamp Program was in combatting either marijuana, or the purchase of marijuana without paying the cigarette tax on it.
Both of the bills -- the New York one and the California one -- are pretty much sponsored by grandstanding morons who apparently feel they are not getting enough press, so they have to try and get something in front of the news organizations in the hopes that it will be picked up on the next slow news day.
"A Continuing Education Unit is a measure used in continuing education programs, particularly those required in a licensed profession. A CEU is not an academic credit; however, it is a nationally recognized method of quantifying the time spent in the classroom during professional development and training activities."
So in other words: "A Continuing Education Unit is... worthless as shit for a software engineer or electrical engineer, since neither of these are licensed professions".
Good to know. Thanks for 1.2 of them, MIT, especially at the low, low price of $495.00!!!
Given that they don't have access to raw feeds... I don't see how they will get useful data out of this. Their bots aren't going to see everything someone posts, any more than you get to see all of your friends posts (unless you friends pay for the posts to be sponsored content). At best, they're going to get a partial snapshot of the currently trending issues, with no way to validate the statistical significance past a rather large margin of error.
Circa 2000, The editors of the Washington Post, and the New York Time stated that it was no longer possible for their respective newspaper to publish anything similar to those documents.
DRM in the printing presses? Like the stuff in photocopiers, to keep them from producing realistic looking money?
Or were they just afraid of having their dicks smacked with a ruler, since the ruler would obviously miss their non-existant balls?
The file is named "how_not_to_build_a_news_site.zip"
I'm guessing the university email address requirement is because they don't want someone using the data for commercial purposes, and ending up becoming as successful as Yahoo currently is...
Interesting to note that the wings on the Dream Chaser are folding so it can fit inside a launch fairing. Is this the normal launch profile? Does it never launch "naked" with wings unfolded?
It can launch on a smaller rocket with the fairing, or on an Atlas V without the fairing. I expect manned launches will be without the fairing. Assuming they every fly the thing, rather than doing nothing but aerodynamic testing on the lifting body.
A lot of the engineering pace at which these things proceed seems rather absurd, to me. It's like the scaled down hyperloop test track: why build small, when it costs the same to build at deployment size, with the benefit that you don't have to retool or reengineer for large scale manufacture. For the Dreamchaser, build a real vehicle, and then when you verify the lifting body, replace whatever dummy weight components you had in the thing, and load it onto a rocket. They appear to be building engineering mocks instead of the real vehicle for testing, which means that they are basically going to have to second-system the thing to get a flight-worthy vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how politics work. There are simply too many incentives towards complexity and obfuscation, fuzziness and discretion.
They're not actually fooling anyone, you know.
It's obvious how we got to this situation. The tax system is extremely complex and has been added to and patch up endlessly over the years to deal with specific issues.
Perhaps when the government wants to give money to a special interest, instead of changing the tax code from something simple to something extremely complex, they should leave the tax code simple, and make an explicit grant of funds.
So if you wanted to, say, encourage Twitter to locate its offices in San Francisco, instead of giving them a tax break in law, they'd have to pay exactly the same taxes as everyone else, and then there's have to be a separate "Thank yo for locating in San Francisco" grant to offset the taxes they are being charged for being in San Francisco.
Of course, that would clearly expose the nature of the relationship: "We recognize our taxes are too onerous to attract the kind of businesses which we want to attract, so we are willing to pay you off for a number of years to put up with it".
And we couldn't have that, right?
The GOP leadership allowed Florida's Mark Foley to chase Capital teenage Male Pages. They did NOTHING about it.
The Democrats also allowed him to, and they did NOTHING about it.
The Green Party people also allowed him to, and they did NOTHING about it.
The independents also allowed him to, and they did NOTHING about it.
In other words, people, regardless of party, allowed him to, and they did NOTHING about it.
It was the f'ing compiler!
I swear, it keeps insisting on emitting all these conditional and unconditional branch instructions in assembly!
It's as if you couldn't write functional code in assembly without GOTO's or something!?!?!?
Other than Apple in one country all of these bastards are actually obeying the letter (but not the spirit) of the taxation laws.
If that were the actual spirit of the tax laws... the letter would be different.
Because the letter of the law is what it is, one has to expect that the letter is an accurate embodiment of the *actual* "spirit", as opposed to the "spirit" that everyone pays lip service to.
If this were not the case, the people making the laws would have to be pretty critically stupid.
And if that were the case... what does this say about the intelligence of the people who elected them? They don't even have the disadvantage of an electoral college causing a two party system as an emergent property to blame in the U.K., only the intelligence of the electorate.
They're either not doing a particularly good job of evading taxes, or they're doing a really good job of evading taxes.
Most likely, they are doing this because if realized income on auctions for AdWords counts as a payment negotiation taking place in the UK when the auction goes to a winner for a particular AdWords auction, even though such things as bid amount and so on are automated "negotiations".
If I were cynical, I'd say they were making agreements like this in order to act as a market barrier to entry for competitors: pay a small enough amount that it doesn't hurt Google, but a large enough amount that matching it would bankrupt a potential competitor. I suppose we won't know whether this cynical view is in any way correct, until Microsoft (Bing), Facebook, or other sites complain about, or support, the outcome.
And obviously, Ireland will rebate on the taxes... since the income is being realized in the UK instead of Ireland, retroactively.
Right?
Right?
How many people have assaulted any shooting range in the history of America? None. So why are you going to find an attacker in a shooting range?
All shooting ranges have targets; not all targets are located on shooting ranges. If you engage only in target shooting, who is to say it all takes place on a range?
Is this why the Proserpina dam, built by the Romans in the first century AD, is still in use today?
Yes, it's why it's still in use today. Because it's been maintained
Amortized over its entire working lifetime, what is its overall maintenance loading, per year, in terms of a percentage of cost of initial construction, compared to similar public works in the U.S.?
Thought so.
Yes, things have to be maintained.
No, shovel-monkeys do not all need continuous full-time employment, merely because they are not qualified to perform other tasks. That is what the idea of Universal Basic Income is designed to deal with.
If they try and require smart guns, but the unlock mechanism is faulty and causes me to be unable to use my weapon, I don't want it and I don't want that law.
That won't be a problem. GM is designing them. They have tons of experience with locks, and they never cover up problems with their locks.
If you use it for target shooting instead of self defense (I do), then I'm pretty sure it'll function when I "need" it to.
Someone who is attacking you is called "a target"...
Numbers lower than 10 are spelled out as words, whereas larger numbers are noted numerically.
What about numbers that are exactly ten/10/X, such that they are neither lower nor numerically larger?
QFT. Flint, MI says hi. Public works and infrastructure require a lot of maintenance, and they're not always getting what they need. Over time things end up neglected and you see the inevitable result.
Is this why the Proserpina dam, built by the Romans in the first century AD, is still in use today?
Or do people who work on public works intentionally do a crappy job so that they will have continued work in the future in the form of maintenance?
Software is not one of these. It's not like bridge building. If a software program collapses, people don't end up dead.
I hope people making making pacemaker firmware or car brake-by-wire systems doesn't share your attitude about importance of software reliability
Most people who are calling for certifications for life support systems software (which is the technical term for what you are talking about here) are not sufficiently qualified as software engineers to be able to judge the quality of other software engineers.
They are certainly not going to be able to identify those people who are (or are not) qualified to be working on life support systems.
Generally, there are a small number of us who are at the top of our game, and then there's everyone else who should not be touching the console software on the GE Medical Systems MRI machines, and shouldn't be touching the software in the cell counter, and shouldn't be touching the software in the blood gas monitor.
The only thing you are going to get by certifying many of those people is non-functioning software, at best, and a gamma knife that over-irradiates people because some idiot operator hit return instead of entering a specific value, because they didn't know the difference between "view" and "controller", and that just because there was a value displayed in the UI didn't mean that that was the value that would have been used if you "just hit return".
In other words: the people you want making the certification decisions have to be competent to write the software themselves, only they are too busy certifying people to actually write the code.
The only ones who win in that situation are the people putting up bonds for the software which accidentally works, and the people receiving payments from the bonds that were put up, for software that doesn't actually work.
Congrats: you've discovered another way to employ actuaries, and keep insurance companies in business, without actually improving the quality of software at all.
On the plus side, I suppose you can require citizenship or a green card as a precondition of licensing someone to do that sort of work, which of course, *also* won't improve the code quality, but at lest you'll be able to charge a lot for your services, since there will be a smaller supply of certified people than the demand for certified people, so you'll be able to write your own ticket.
Now all you need to do is build a union hall...
So in other words: "A Continuing Education Unit is ... worthless as shit for a software engineer or electrical engineer, since neither of these are licensed professions".
Huh, software and electrical engineers aren't licensed? Does that mean it is possible to pay some online school a bunch of money to send you a bunch of emails and then you become an engineer? or does license refer to something else?
No. Licenses derive from professional or governmental organizations which grant licenses to allow you to practice in the profession. These professional organizations (for example: The New York Bar Association has to admit you to the bar in order to practice law in New York) have the right to regulate your participation in an industry, because they were granted that right by other members already participating in the industry.
In other words, it's like a trade union that exists to prevent "too many" practitioners of a given trade, in order to artificially inflate the per hour pay of the remaining people who are actually permitted to practice the trade. Mostly because the "know the right people" or have come up with enough money to "bribe the right people".
When a license is granted by a governmental organization -- such as a drivers license, or a massage therapists license -- it's generally either because there are minimal acceptable standards for the purposes of public safety, or because there are illegal activities going on under the name of the profession, and it's to encourage those illegal practitioners to just be honestly illegal, rather than trying to hide un a professional name. This is accomplished by charging huge fees to those people who are legitimately involved in the profession (yeah, it seems stupid to me, too).
I'm asking because I'm not in America and has never been there. Here engineer is classified as "protected title", which mean you are only allowed to call yourself that if you graduate from a university licensed to educate engineers and the university in question approved of you being an engineer (that is, studying an engineering line. You can't be an engineer with a major in history).
This is different. For some industries, you require a license to practice (as previously noted: said industries generally impact public safety).
Software is not one of these. It's not like bridge building. If a software program collapses, people don't end up dead.
Keeping people from writing software for a living just because they haven't paid extortionate tuitions to for profit companies ... er ... sorry ... universities, who, according to accreditation agencies, are permitted to graduate software engineers is [...]
About as stupid as permitting an accreditation agency the authority to grant universities these monopolies merely because the accreditation agency claims that it's somehow qualified to do so merely because it says it's qualified, and we can trust them (nudge nudge, wink wink).
---
In any case, you haven't demonstrated any value for a CEU from MIT as opposed to a CEU from Reverend Ike's Late Night Television Ministry.
How do you know that? I don't see methodology mentioned in the article, but it certainly seem like a good situation for FB to provide Nielsen with some sort of service.
Because I know how the Facebook "feed" system works compared to, for example, Twitter.
I also know that Facebook's monetization model absolutely *depends* the on the idea of "sponsored posts", and I've seen a lot of marketing company probes of the "Share this post or the kitten dies!" variety, with hosting URL track back to the image hosting sites log files, in a vain attempt to game the Facebook monetization model in order to get the free marketing that you used to be able to get on Facebook, when your friends used to see *all* your posts.
While it's conceivable that Facebook might offer an "aggregate of all posts" service to Nielsen, Inc., I think it's more likely that if Nielsen was sell to company A, B, and C, and charging $X each, and Facebook was selling the data to Nielsen at some price point of $Y, where $Y (3 * $X)...
Then Facebook would just tell Nielsen to F-off, and take the additional (3 * $X) - $Y money, and put it in their own pocket, and screw Nielsen's business model, because Facebook could care less if Nielsel stays in business, if they can add one Sheckel to their own bottom line.
Because, well... Facebook.
This will have about as much chance of sticking as the "non-California vehicle emissions fees" they used to charge people for bringing in cars from outside California (i.e. want a phone with strong encryption? Take a trip and buy it outside California.).
(1) The car emissions fee was declared unconstitutional (it violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, just like trying to restrict bringing phones with strong encryption would violate the ICC).
(2) If you bought a phone with strong encryption outside California because California made them illegal, California would have a hell of a time trying to charge a "use tax" on the thing, since it would be (effectively) a sales tax on an illegal product. Ask the State of Utah how successful its Marijuana Tax Stamp Program was in combatting either marijuana, or the purchase of marijuana without paying the cigarette tax on it.
Both of the bills -- the New York one and the California one -- are pretty much sponsored by grandstanding morons who apparently feel they are not getting enough press, so they have to try and get something in front of the news organizations in the hopes that it will be picked up on the next slow news day.
"A Continuing Education Unit is a measure used in continuing education programs, particularly those required in a licensed profession. A CEU is not an academic credit; however, it is a nationally recognized method of quantifying the time spent in the classroom during professional development and training activities."
So in other words: "A Continuing Education Unit is ... worthless as shit for a software engineer or electrical engineer, since neither of these are licensed professions".
Good to know. Thanks for 1.2 of them, MIT, especially at the low, low price of $495.00!!!
Given that they don't have access to raw feeds... I don't see how they will get useful data out of this. Their bots aren't going to see everything someone posts, any more than you get to see all of your friends posts (unless you friends pay for the posts to be sponsored content). At best, they're going to get a partial snapshot of the currently trending issues, with no way to validate the statistical significance past a rather large margin of error.
"Are Some Things About the Universe Fundamentally Unknowable?"
No.
Thanks for playing.
Good luck in the next PowerBall.
What a quality Gawker article! ...Which I didn't have to pay to read.
Nor would I have.
Circa 2000, The editors of the Washington Post, and the New York Time stated that it was no longer possible for their respective newspaper to publish anything similar to those documents.
DRM in the printing presses? Like the stuff in photocopiers, to keep them from producing realistic looking money?
Or were they just afraid of having their dicks smacked with a ruler, since the ruler would obviously miss their non-existant balls?
The process works. In 15 years, I've never had anyone leave (except to retire), and I've never had to let anyone go.
Is this because they are all buried in the building basement?
The file is named "how_not_to_build_a_news_site.zip"
I'm guessing the university email address requirement is because they don't want someone using the data for commercial purposes, and ending up becoming as successful as Yahoo currently is...
It's nice of them to look out for us like that.
Interesting to note that the wings on the Dream Chaser are folding so it can fit inside a launch fairing. Is this the normal launch profile? Does it never launch "naked" with wings unfolded?
It can launch on a smaller rocket with the fairing, or on an Atlas V without the fairing. I expect manned launches will be without the fairing. Assuming they every fly the thing, rather than doing nothing but aerodynamic testing on the lifting body.
A lot of the engineering pace at which these things proceed seems rather absurd, to me. It's like the scaled down hyperloop test track: why build small, when it costs the same to build at deployment size, with the benefit that you don't have to retool or reengineer for large scale manufacture. For the Dreamchaser, build a real vehicle, and then when you verify the lifting body, replace whatever dummy weight components you had in the thing, and load it onto a rocket. They appear to be building engineering mocks instead of the real vehicle for testing, which means that they are basically going to have to second-system the thing to get a flight-worthy vehicle.