IANAL, but AFAIK you cannot trademark common English words.
Hmm... How about these:
word
mail
outlook
office
access
works
windows
All are common English words; all are trademarked. Now, you could say that "Windows" is not actually a trademark, and that "Microsoft Windows" is what is trademarked. But it seems quite clear from this document that "Windows" by itself is a trademark and will be defended as such.
A fedora is a fedora, just like an orange is an orange. You can't trademark it.
This is not true. There is no requirement that trademarks cannot be common words; they only have to be sufficiently distinctive from products in the same industry. For example, I could legally trademark my new TV dinner as "Windows", but I could not call my new operating system "Windows". It is unlikely anyone would confuse the Windows OS with a Windows meal, but if I were to sell an OS called "Windows", then Microsoft could claim that their advertising dollars were helping my business (their competitor), which is clearly unfair.
Because the Fedora Project from Red Hat and the Fedora Project from the Virginia/Cornell are both open-source software projects, I think there is a high likelihood of confusion and that Virginia/Cornell certainly has a case.
If there are two slots, one 3.5" and the other 5.25", and you have a 3.5" disk, the slot that it logically goes in is the 3.5" slot.
That's logical when you have one disk. What about two? I've often wanted a second 3.5" drive to avoid swapping between two disks all the time. And if I didn't know otherwise, I might logically guess that the extra drive in my computer, which takes 5.25" disks, might also be backward compatible with the 3.5" disk for exactly that reason. Of course, I wouldn't want to just stuff the disk inside and hope that it works; I'd check with someone who knows.
Anyway, I agree that many users just don't think intelligently sometimes, but often if you look at it from their perspective, their thought process isn't all that stupid.
You assume that 'printing' always has to mean 'send data to printer'?
For new computer users, yes, asbsolutely. In everyday English, "print" always refers to making some sort of hard copy. It is only in the computer world that it means something different.
It is actually a bad thing for GUI developers to overload the meaning of "print" and start talking about "printing to memory". They are introducing an advanced concept that I would never expect a new computer user to know. After all, selecting File|Print prints the screen to paper by default, so naturally one would expect the Print Screen key to do the same thing. Remember: Just because something is obvious to you does not mean it's obvious to everyone else.
True, but my comment was more in response to the various other anecdotes that have appeared in this thread -- such as the user wondering if a 3.5" disk will work in a 5.25" drive.
Still, the "any key" story shows that the user interface could be the problem. Even the choice of capitals in the interface ("Press any key" vs. "Press Any Key") might sometimes confuse people whose first language is not English.
It's really not so very hard to believe. I can see how someone could think the "Any" key is just another one of those confusingly-named keys like "SysRq". Even experienced computer users don't have a clue what that's for. And how about the Print Screen key? Who would ever guess that pressing it will never, ever, print the screen? It's as if the IBM-PC keyboard was designed to be confusing.
Yes, we've all had a few chuckles about the mistakes of new computer users. But remember that every one of us was a newbie at some point. Never forget:
Nobody is born knowing this stuff.
You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.
A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping
probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.
Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can
do and see -- when I do this, it does that. They
need to develop a deeper understanding, of course, but this can
only happen slowly, and not through abstract theory but through
the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.
By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried
several different things. As a result, their computer might be
in a strange state. That's not their fault.
Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes
it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how
many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You've forgotten
how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able
to do for you.
Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer
user who's not part of a community of computer users is going to
have a harder time of it than one who is.
After several months of using the Treo 180, I always get annoyed when I have to launch new programs. That's because the Treo makes me hold down the Control key before pressing the Home key. With all of the design skills and experience of the Handspring team, I couldn't believe that they made such a common function -- switching to the application launcher -- require two hands.
Despite its fancy new features, I wasn't even considering upgrading to a Treo 600 until I noticed the dedicated Home key on the keyboard. This feature alone, believe it or not, might be the one reason I need to upgrade.
When I was an undergrad, our fraternity held a marathon basketball game to raise money for charity. We asked sponsors to pledge X dollars to the charity for each hour that we played. In the end, we had earned several thousand dollars for a good cause and had a great time doing it.
You might want to think about hosting a similar event. For instance, a gamer could get a friend to donate ten cents to charity for each minute that he plays Quake Arena in one continuous stretch.
Another idea: Get sponsors to put up prize money for an Unreal tournament. The winner gets to choose which charity receives the money.
There is lots of stuff 80,000 miles up with a ground speed of zero that has me worried now. Why isn't it falling back down?
Because of inertia. The gravity of planets Earth and Jupiter, for instance, are constantly pulling on each other, but they don't crash into one another because at that distance, gravity is so weak that it can't overcome the tendency of each planet to continue on its current path.
There seems to be a common theme in response to my article: These countries need food and water, not computers and software. It is important to note that in most countries of West Africa, people are neither starving nor thirsty. Aid agencies have helped drill so many boreholes (a type of well) in Africa that there are few villages without access to potable water. Food is also widely available (at least, when there's no drought or war going on). Likewise, the image of Africans living in mud huts dying of AIDS is purely a steretype, and yet it seems to persist in the comments I've seen here.
Even though malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy are enormous problems in Africa, nobody is suggesting that we ignore them. The goal of the DFI is not to put a computer in every rural village but to enable the larger, more urban communities to experience the benefits of computer technology. (Remember, "Every city is a village.") These communities have relatively high literacy and low poverty and are the point of focus for the DFI.
When I say "cheaper for the IRS" I mean "costs the IRS less money." As in "costs less taxpayer money."
I'm not too sure about that. As I understand it, the IRS loses a fair amount of money through e-filing because of the higher incidence of fraud. They're actually pretty strict about who can e-file -- only if you have a simple return, don't have any foreign income, don't live abroad, etc. And I doubt processing paper returns is that expensive. It all ends up on a computer anyway, so they just hire minimum-wage data entry people to key in the forms.
Without the Free File Alliance, the IRS would have gone ahead and offered free online filing, which it wanted to do because it would save the IRS a lot of money.
I'd be surprised if cost was the main reason why the IRS was interested in online filing. I think the idea was simply to provide more convenience for taxpayers and more accuracy in each return. (Most government agencies aren't too concerned with their bottom line or with being "in the black".)
So the IRS loses money (handling the extra paper returns, which is expensive) and private companies make money. This is a subsidy, whether or not you understand why.
You keep coming back to the premise that the IRS e-file program, whatever it would have been, would save the IRS money. I do not believe this is necessarily true. For example, I am one of about a hundred tech support agents at a tax preparation company that offers online tax-preparation software. We take hundreds of calls and emails each day from users who need help using our software -- how to print, where to enter certain data, what to do if a password is forgotten, etc. And we are just one company. Imagine what would happen if the IRS had put our program, and others like it, out to pasture. They'd probably have to hire just as many agents to assist customers with their own online software. So, instead of saving the IRS money by getting rid of their paper handlers, their software probably would have raised their operating costs because of all those extra people they'd need to support it. So I just don't think your basic assumption is correct.
Basically this program, as structured, moves money out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the coffers of the tax software people. It is bad policy and a typical case of corporate welfare.
I think we're getting into the thorny area of deciding where public services should end and private services should begin. The issue kind of reminds me of the government's possible role in the Internet. For instance, one could argue that the government should start its own national ISP for the benefit of its citizens. You might say the government should do this because otherwise private companies would be making a profit on Internet service, thus moving money away from the government and into the private sector. But private companies can be so much more efficient than the government in providing ISP service and, through competition, they can provide lower prices and better service than the government could ever provide with a single national ISP. For the same reasons, I don't think the IRS should be in the tax preparation software business. They should let private companies duke it out and provide the best software for the lowest price that the market will bear. A one-size-fits-all, government-funded online filing program would hurt taxpayers in the long run, IMO.
"Are you still beating your wife?" is not an insult, it's the classical example of false alternatives.
Ah, yes, I realize what you were trying to say now. I've actually heard that expression before, but it just didn't click. Probably because I was reading your message at the end of a long, tiring workday doing tech support, and I had been getting quite a lot of calls from frustrated, desperate customers. The approaching April 15 deadline makes them even more obnoxious than usual as you might expect, so I was on the defensive and took your statement the wrong way. If you ever try to make the same point again, you might want to phrase it a little differently for people like me who sometimes have a brain fart. Anyway, my comment wasn't a false alternative; I was just asking a rhetorical question to get you to explain what you meant.
Processing an electronically-filed return is cheaper for the IRS than a paper return. So it makes more sense for them to offer electronic filing for free and charge for paper filing.
Both are free. The IRS does not charge for paper filing.
They're not doing that because of pressure from the tax software industry.
No, of course not, and I think I made that clear in my original message.
This amounts to a subsidy to the software vendors at the expense of taxpayers.
There are two options: Without the free file alliance, the IRS would have created its own e-file software and taken business away from the tax preparation companies. That's not their concern, of course, but I think this would actually be worse for us taxpayers. That's because with the free file program, the IRS can save money by not developing and maintaining its own e-file software; it can let private companies do that and compete against each other for customers. That drives down prices and increases the quality of the software. In order to be fair to taxpayers, the IRS has made sure that nobody gets left behind by having companies offer their services for free to low-income taxpayers. I do not see a subsidy here.
So they want to minimize the number of people who will take them up on their offer. They do that by figuring out who isn't likely to use online computerized tax prep (i.e., people who aren't likely to have computers or be computer-literate) and offer it to them.
These people who have no computers and are not computer-literate would not be e-filing at all, not with the IRS or anyone else. So I don't think this point is logical.
You seem to be stuck in the fallacy of false alternatives. Are you still beating your wife?
There's no need to be insulting. I'm just trying to figure out you are suggesting as an alternative. You seem to be saying that the companies should have made the top 40%, rather than the bottom 60%, pay for e-filing. I don't agree with that at all.
So each tax software company looks over its data to determine the 60% of people who are least likely to use their services and then offers it to them, thereby fulfilling their obligation at minimum cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by "least likely". Everybody has to pay taxes, and I don't think somebody who's making $100,000 a year should get tax preparation for free. It makes sense that they provide free services only to those on the lower end of the economic scale. After all, these companies aren't charities, so people who can afford to pay should pay.
The bottom line is, They're providing their services for free to 60% of taxpayers. That's 78 million people who would otherwise have to pay. Would you rather they go back to where everyone has to pay?
I mean, how many companies give their services away for free to 60% of their customers? Can you imagine Microsoft giving away free copies of Windows to 60% of computer users? I'm surprised that you can still be so cynical about the idea.
A couple of years ago, the IRS was going to create its own online tax program allowing anyone to file their taxes electronically at irs.gov for free. That caused a panic among companies like Intuit and H&R Block who were already trying to make a profit from their online tax preparation software. These companies quickly offered a compromise: In exchange for the IRS dropping its plan, the companies would provide their online software for free to 60% of American taxpayers -- about 78 million people.
The result came to be known as the IRS Free File Alliance and went live just this year. It lets you choose from about a dozen different online tax preparation products that normally cost about $20-$30 each.
Note that not everyone qualifies for the Free File Alliance because each company sets its own eligibility requirements. H&R Block's program, for instance, is free only if you earned less than $28,000 last year. Also, beware of hidden charges: Many of these companies offer the federal return preparation for free, but the state return costs extra.
Because my gradebook, like many teachers' gradebooks, is a work in progress. I might be behind in my grading, so the grade displayed might not be accurate.
Just because your grades are delayed doesn't mean they're not accurate. Even if you're a week behind on posting grades, parents will still be able to see how their kids were doing up until last week. That doesn't make the system a failure.
I might decide to drop a grade, but just haven't done so yet.
Dropping grades on a regular basis is a sign that your homework and quizzes are too difficult. Rather than fighting the Pinnacle system, you should think about revising your teaching methods. Obviously, there is always the possibility of adjustments to grades that need to be made at the end of the semester, but that doesn't mean the system is useless. Parents just need to be made aware that the scores are not permanent and should be used only as a general indicator of a student's performance.
They'll need to talk to me to find out the student's progress. During that discussion, we can talk about other things that might be affecting the student's grade that wouldn't show up in a simple on-line gradesheet (things like attitude, behavior, motivation, etc.).
But they should be doing that no matter what kind of grading system is in place. Pinnacle's system is not intended to be a replacement for that sort of personal interaction. It is only meant to let parents know whether their students are getting their homework done from week to week.
Surely you're not suggesting that parents come to you every week for an update on their kids' progress. You are only one of about seven teachers that a high school student has, so the parents would need to attend seven meetings each week. Obviously, that's just not possible, so Pinnacle's system is designed to fill in the gap and give parents some extra information that they wouldn't otherwise have.
Even if the meetings you describe take place only once per semester, then you are very lucky teacher. I taught high school math for two years, and I never met any parents who were interested enough in the performance of their kids to talk to me at the end of each semester. The parents either didn't care enough or, more likely, were just too busy. I believe Pinnacle's system will make tracking a student's performance easier, faster, and more convenient for these parents, so perhaps more of them will be encouraged to follow the progress of their kids. So, if you think the system has faults, please offer suggestions on how to improve it, rather than just subverting it.
if they sent a login via snail mail, kids are likely to intercept it.
Not sure how that would change anything. If a kid steals his parents' mail containing the username and password, then he still wouldn't be able to do anything with it, other than lock his parents out of the system temporarily. (It's a read-only database, so he wouldn't be able to change his grades or anything like that.) And if the parents get locked out, then obviously they'll know about it and will do something to fix it. The only way it might benefit the kid is if he steals ALL of the snail mail coming from the school and thus prevents his parents from ever finding out about the system in the first place. But that could happen no matter what kind of security system is used.
Of course, any kid who opens his parents' mail because he doesn't want them invading his privacy is a total hypocrite.
My problem is that, maybe they should call it gnomecash.
It's their software and they're giving it to you for free. They can call it whatever the heck they want.
Or make it dependent on libraries that I am going to have installed on any given Linux install.
All of the Linux distributions I'm aware of include the GNOME libs.
I do not want to have to clutter my hard drive with Gnome crap.
Like I was saying, it goes both ways. A GNOME user might prefer GNOME over KDE, and in that case the KDE libs would be excess "crap", as you say. But I don't understand how you can call GNOME libs crap just because you prefer KDE. I mean, even if they're inferior to KDE, they can't be crap if they're needed to run the software you want to run. What if gnucash only required the GTK+ libs? From what you're saying, GTK+ would still be "crap".
And the apps you mention are not windows manager specific.
Neither is gnucash. When you run it, the window will be managed by whatever window manager you've got running, whether that's KWin or whatever else.
I am running Java AND Mozilla on a KDE/Fluxbox system and I DIDN'T have to install any Gnome libs to do it.
No, but you DID have to install a huge Java runtime and several megabytes of extra libs required only for Mozilla. Why are those libs perfectly fine, but GNOME libs aren't? I'm just not understanding your point at all. You seem to think that because you don't like the GNOME desktop, then anything that is in any way associated with GNOME libs is crap. Fine, then just don't use GNOME software, or make your own version of gnucash that requires Qt and the KDE. Then all those GNOME users can complain that your free software is crap because it depends on a few extra libs.
KDE apps have the same problem: dependencies on a ton of KDE libs. That is, if a user runs GNOME for everything but wants to use a single KDE app, then he has to install a ton of KDE libs, as well. So it goes both ways. The important thing is, no matter what you choose for your desktop environment, you can still run both KDE and GNOME apps on the same system since they all go through XWindows. It's just a matter of installing a few libraries. If that's too much trouble for you, then I guess there's a ton of software you'll never be able to use: Java, Mozilla, and many other packages that require large libraries. Your loss, IMO.
The hooks just aren't in the kernel. And that's the point: the kernel is not designed as a set of software components that people can assemble into a system, it's a monolithic piece of software that often needs to be patched in order to support some new piece of hardware or functionality.
That seems like a terrible idea. As a Linux user, I wouldn't want to wait for a new release of the kernel just to use a certain piece of hardware. And I think just about any computer scientist would say that hardware abstraction and highly modular interfaces are good things. (But don't listen to me; I'm a bad computer scientist.) Besides, I don't think what you said is true, anyway. Linux has had a modules sub-system since version 2.0.
this is about as good a pattern as saying "Humans, earthworms, jellyfish and pine trees are all living things that do not have gills, so let's put them in the same category."
I don't see how you can say this is the same thing. I was pointing out a "sounds-like" and "is-spelled-like" pattern, which is not what your example illustrates. And even if they didn't sound alike or were spelled alike, they're all either pronouns or possessive pronouns -- the most common words in the English language. So they should be easy to memorize and write correctly.
Rote memorization of how to spell stuff is easy for them
Exactly! Rote memorization is easy for us, too, yet so many people get it wrong so often. That's why it's my pet peeve.
Oops. That pattern should be "my", "your", "his", "her", "its", "our", "their". So maybe it's not so consistent. But that still doesn't forgive us for not learning how to write a three-letter word correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... How about these:
- word
- mail
- outlook
- office
- access
- works
- windows
All are common English words; all are trademarked. Now, you could say that "Windows" is not actually a trademark, and that "Microsoft Windows" is what is trademarked. But it seems quite clear from this document that "Windows" by itself is a trademark and will be defended as such.A fedora is a fedora, just like an orange is an orange. You can't trademark it.
This is not true. There is no requirement that trademarks cannot be common words; they only have to be sufficiently distinctive from products in the same industry. For example, I could legally trademark my new TV dinner as "Windows", but I could not call my new operating system "Windows". It is unlikely anyone would confuse the Windows OS with a Windows meal, but if I were to sell an OS called "Windows", then Microsoft could claim that their advertising dollars were helping my business (their competitor), which is clearly unfair.
Because the Fedora Project from Red Hat and the Fedora Project from the Virginia/Cornell are both open-source software projects, I think there is a high likelihood of confusion and that Virginia/Cornell certainly has a case.
That's logical when you have one disk. What about two? I've often wanted a second 3.5" drive to avoid swapping between two disks all the time. And if I didn't know otherwise, I might logically guess that the extra drive in my computer, which takes 5.25" disks, might also be backward compatible with the 3.5" disk for exactly that reason. Of course, I wouldn't want to just stuff the disk inside and hope that it works; I'd check with someone who knows.
Anyway, I agree that many users just don't think intelligently sometimes, but often if you look at it from their perspective, their thought process isn't all that stupid.
For new computer users, yes, asbsolutely. In everyday English, "print" always refers to making some sort of hard copy. It is only in the computer world that it means something different.
It is actually a bad thing for GUI developers to overload the meaning of "print" and start talking about "printing to memory". They are introducing an advanced concept that I would never expect a new computer user to know. After all, selecting File|Print prints the screen to paper by default, so naturally one would expect the Print Screen key to do the same thing. Remember: Just because something is obvious to you does not mean it's obvious to everyone else.
True, but my comment was more in response to the various other anecdotes that have appeared in this thread -- such as the user wondering if a 3.5" disk will work in a 5.25" drive.
Still, the "any key" story shows that the user interface could be the problem. Even the choice of capitals in the interface ("Press any key" vs. "Press Any Key") might sometimes confuse people whose first language is not English.
It's really not so very hard to believe. I can see how someone could think the "Any" key is just another one of those confusingly-named keys like "SysRq". Even experienced computer users don't have a clue what that's for. And how about the Print Screen key? Who would ever guess that pressing it will never, ever, print the screen? It's as if the IBM-PC keyboard was designed to be confusing.
Trevor
- Nobody is born knowing this stuff.
- You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
- If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.
- A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping
probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.
- Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can
do and see -- when I do this, it does that. They
need to develop a deeper understanding, of course, but this can
only happen slowly, and not through abstract theory but through
the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.
- By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried
several different things. As a result, their computer might be
in a strange state. That's not their fault.
- Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes
it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how
many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You've forgotten
how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able
to do for you.
- Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer
user who's not part of a community of computer users is going to
have a harder time of it than one who is.
Adapted from How to Help Someone Use a ComputerDespite its fancy new features, I wasn't even considering upgrading to a Treo 600 until I noticed the dedicated Home key on the keyboard. This feature alone, believe it or not, might be the one reason I need to upgrade.
Posted June 11, 2003
Modified June 10, 2003
Kevin's not only an electrician; he's a time traveller, too.
When I was an undergrad, our fraternity held a marathon basketball game to raise money for charity. We asked sponsors to pledge X dollars to the charity for each hour that we played. In the end, we had earned several thousand dollars for a good cause and had a great time doing it.
You might want to think about hosting a similar event. For instance, a gamer could get a friend to donate ten cents to charity for each minute that he plays Quake Arena in one continuous stretch.
Another idea: Get sponsors to put up prize money for an Unreal tournament. The winner gets to choose which charity receives the money.
You just described my typical Saturday night.
Did they have a visa? "Papers, please..."
Because of inertia. The gravity of planets Earth and Jupiter, for instance, are constantly pulling on each other, but they don't crash into one another because at that distance, gravity is so weak that it can't overcome the tendency of each planet to continue on its current path.
So you put your calendar and datebook contacts into permanent storage... Not much of a social life, huh?
Even though malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy are enormous problems in Africa, nobody is suggesting that we ignore them. The goal of the DFI is not to put a computer in every rural village but to enable the larger, more urban communities to experience the benefits of computer technology. (Remember, "Every city is a village.") These communities have relatively high literacy and low poverty and are the point of focus for the DFI.
Trevor
I'm not too sure about that. As I understand it, the IRS loses a fair amount of money through e-filing because of the higher incidence of fraud. They're actually pretty strict about who can e-file -- only if you have a simple return, don't have any foreign income, don't live abroad, etc. And I doubt processing paper returns is that expensive. It all ends up on a computer anyway, so they just hire minimum-wage data entry people to key in the forms.
Without the Free File Alliance, the IRS would have gone ahead and offered free online filing, which it wanted to do because it would save the IRS a lot of money.
I'd be surprised if cost was the main reason why the IRS was interested in online filing. I think the idea was simply to provide more convenience for taxpayers and more accuracy in each return. (Most government agencies aren't too concerned with their bottom line or with being "in the black".)
So the IRS loses money (handling the extra paper returns, which is expensive) and private companies make money. This is a subsidy, whether or not you understand why.
You keep coming back to the premise that the IRS e-file program, whatever it would have been, would save the IRS money. I do not believe this is necessarily true. For example, I am one of about a hundred tech support agents at a tax preparation company that offers online tax-preparation software. We take hundreds of calls and emails each day from users who need help using our software -- how to print, where to enter certain data, what to do if a password is forgotten, etc. And we are just one company. Imagine what would happen if the IRS had put our program, and others like it, out to pasture. They'd probably have to hire just as many agents to assist customers with their own online software. So, instead of saving the IRS money by getting rid of their paper handlers, their software probably would have raised their operating costs because of all those extra people they'd need to support it. So I just don't think your basic assumption is correct.
Basically this program, as structured, moves money out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the coffers of the tax software people. It is bad policy and a typical case of corporate welfare.
I think we're getting into the thorny area of deciding where public services should end and private services should begin. The issue kind of reminds me of the government's possible role in the Internet. For instance, one could argue that the government should start its own national ISP for the benefit of its citizens. You might say the government should do this because otherwise private companies would be making a profit on Internet service, thus moving money away from the government and into the private sector. But private companies can be so much more efficient than the government in providing ISP service and, through competition, they can provide lower prices and better service than the government could ever provide with a single national ISP. For the same reasons, I don't think the IRS should be in the tax preparation software business. They should let private companies duke it out and provide the best software for the lowest price that the market will bear. A one-size-fits-all, government-funded online filing program would hurt taxpayers in the long run, IMO.
"Are you still beating your wife?" is not an insult, it's the classical example of false alternatives.
Ah, yes, I realize what you were trying to say now. I've actually heard that expression before, but it just didn't click. Probably because I was reading your message at the end of a long, tiring workday doing tech support, and I had been getting quite a lot of calls from frustrated, desperate customers. The approaching April 15 deadline makes them even more obnoxious than usual as you might expect, so I was on the defensive and took your statement the wrong way. If you ever try to make the same point again, you might want to phrase it a little differently for people like me who sometimes have a brain fart. Anyway, my comment wasn't a false alternative; I was just asking a rhetorical question to get you to explain what you meant.
Both are free. The IRS does not charge for paper filing.
They're not doing that because of pressure from the tax software industry.
No, of course not, and I think I made that clear in my original message.
This amounts to a subsidy to the software vendors at the expense of taxpayers.
There are two options: Without the free file alliance, the IRS would have created its own e-file software and taken business away from the tax preparation companies. That's not their concern, of course, but I think this would actually be worse for us taxpayers. That's because with the free file program, the IRS can save money by not developing and maintaining its own e-file software; it can let private companies do that and compete against each other for customers. That drives down prices and increases the quality of the software. In order to be fair to taxpayers, the IRS has made sure that nobody gets left behind by having companies offer their services for free to low-income taxpayers. I do not see a subsidy here.
So they want to minimize the number of people who will take them up on their offer. They do that by figuring out who isn't likely to use online computerized tax prep (i.e., people who aren't likely to have computers or be computer-literate) and offer it to them.
These people who have no computers and are not computer-literate would not be e-filing at all, not with the IRS or anyone else. So I don't think this point is logical.
You seem to be stuck in the fallacy of false alternatives. Are you still beating your wife?
There's no need to be insulting. I'm just trying to figure out you are suggesting as an alternative. You seem to be saying that the companies should have made the top 40%, rather than the bottom 60%, pay for e-filing. I don't agree with that at all.
I'm not sure what you mean by "least likely". Everybody has to pay taxes, and I don't think somebody who's making $100,000 a year should get tax preparation for free. It makes sense that they provide free services only to those on the lower end of the economic scale. After all, these companies aren't charities, so people who can afford to pay should pay.
The bottom line is, They're providing their services for free to 60% of taxpayers. That's 78 million people who would otherwise have to pay. Would you rather they go back to where everyone has to pay?
I mean, how many companies give their services away for free to 60% of their customers? Can you imagine Microsoft giving away free copies of Windows to 60% of computer users? I'm surprised that you can still be so cynical about the idea.
The result came to be known as the IRS Free File Alliance and went live just this year. It lets you choose from about a dozen different online tax preparation products that normally cost about $20-$30 each.
Note that not everyone qualifies for the Free File Alliance because each company sets its own eligibility requirements. H&R Block's program, for instance, is free only if you earned less than $28,000 last year. Also, beware of hidden charges: Many of these companies offer the federal return preparation for free, but the state return costs extra.
Just because your grades are delayed doesn't mean they're not accurate. Even if you're a week behind on posting grades, parents will still be able to see how their kids were doing up until last week. That doesn't make the system a failure.
I might decide to drop a grade, but just haven't done so yet.
Dropping grades on a regular basis is a sign that your homework and quizzes are too difficult. Rather than fighting the Pinnacle system, you should think about revising your teaching methods. Obviously, there is always the possibility of adjustments to grades that need to be made at the end of the semester, but that doesn't mean the system is useless. Parents just need to be made aware that the scores are not permanent and should be used only as a general indicator of a student's performance.
They'll need to talk to me to find out the student's progress. During that discussion, we can talk about other things that might be affecting the student's grade that wouldn't show up in a simple on-line gradesheet (things like attitude, behavior, motivation, etc.).
But they should be doing that no matter what kind of grading system is in place. Pinnacle's system is not intended to be a replacement for that sort of personal interaction. It is only meant to let parents know whether their students are getting their homework done from week to week.
Surely you're not suggesting that parents come to you every week for an update on their kids' progress. You are only one of about seven teachers that a high school student has, so the parents would need to attend seven meetings each week. Obviously, that's just not possible, so Pinnacle's system is designed to fill in the gap and give parents some extra information that they wouldn't otherwise have.
Even if the meetings you describe take place only once per semester, then you are very lucky teacher. I taught high school math for two years, and I never met any parents who were interested enough in the performance of their kids to talk to me at the end of each semester. The parents either didn't care enough or, more likely, were just too busy. I believe Pinnacle's system will make tracking a student's performance easier, faster, and more convenient for these parents, so perhaps more of them will be encouraged to follow the progress of their kids. So, if you think the system has faults, please offer suggestions on how to improve it, rather than just subverting it.
Not sure how that would change anything. If a kid steals his parents' mail containing the username and password, then he still wouldn't be able to do anything with it, other than lock his parents out of the system temporarily. (It's a read-only database, so he wouldn't be able to change his grades or anything like that.) And if the parents get locked out, then obviously they'll know about it and will do something to fix it. The only way it might benefit the kid is if he steals ALL of the snail mail coming from the school and thus prevents his parents from ever finding out about the system in the first place. But that could happen no matter what kind of security system is used.
Of course, any kid who opens his parents' mail because he doesn't want them invading his privacy is a total hypocrite.
It's their software and they're giving it to you for free. They can call it whatever the heck they want.
Or make it dependent on libraries that I am going to have installed on any given Linux install.
All of the Linux distributions I'm aware of include the GNOME libs.
I do not want to have to clutter my hard drive with Gnome crap.
Like I was saying, it goes both ways. A GNOME user might prefer GNOME over KDE, and in that case the KDE libs would be excess "crap", as you say. But I don't understand how you can call GNOME libs crap just because you prefer KDE. I mean, even if they're inferior to KDE, they can't be crap if they're needed to run the software you want to run. What if gnucash only required the GTK+ libs? From what you're saying, GTK+ would still be "crap".
And the apps you mention are not windows manager specific.
Neither is gnucash. When you run it, the window will be managed by whatever window manager you've got running, whether that's KWin or whatever else.
I am running Java AND Mozilla on a KDE/Fluxbox system and I DIDN'T have to install any Gnome libs to do it.
No, but you DID have to install a huge Java runtime and several megabytes of extra libs required only for Mozilla. Why are those libs perfectly fine, but GNOME libs aren't? I'm just not understanding your point at all. You seem to think that because you don't like the GNOME desktop, then anything that is in any way associated with GNOME libs is crap. Fine, then just don't use GNOME software, or make your own version of gnucash that requires Qt and the KDE. Then all those GNOME users can complain that your free software is crap because it depends on a few extra libs.
KDE apps have the same problem: dependencies on a ton of KDE libs. That is, if a user runs GNOME for everything but wants to use a single KDE app, then he has to install a ton of KDE libs, as well. So it goes both ways. The important thing is, no matter what you choose for your desktop environment, you can still run both KDE and GNOME apps on the same system since they all go through XWindows. It's just a matter of installing a few libraries. If that's too much trouble for you, then I guess there's a ton of software you'll never be able to use: Java, Mozilla, and many other packages that require large libraries. Your loss, IMO.
That seems like a terrible idea. As a Linux user, I wouldn't want to wait for a new release of the kernel just to use a certain piece of hardware. And I think just about any computer scientist would say that hardware abstraction and highly modular interfaces are good things. (But don't listen to me; I'm a bad computer scientist.) Besides, I don't think what you said is true, anyway. Linux has had a modules sub-system since version 2.0.
I don't see how you can say this is the same thing. I was pointing out a "sounds-like" and "is-spelled-like" pattern, which is not what your example illustrates. And even if they didn't sound alike or were spelled alike, they're all either pronouns or possessive pronouns -- the most common words in the English language. So they should be easy to memorize and write correctly.
Rote memorization of how to spell stuff is easy for them
Exactly! Rote memorization is easy for us, too, yet so many people get it wrong so often. That's why it's my pet peeve.
Gosh, your mother sure had a foul mouth. :)
Oops. That pattern should be "my", "your", "his", "her", "its", "our", "their". So maybe it's not so consistent. But that still doesn't forgive us for not learning how to write a three-letter word correctly.