Most states DO (i.e. the ones with sales tax) require that any purchase made by mail order be reported when you file your taxes. Since states can't force organizations outside of their jurisdiction to collect sales tax for them, YOU are supposed to make sure you send your sales tax in. This includes mail order sales placed via the internet
Enforcement has been a huge problem on these self-reported taxes, and i know that a number of states are not happy about it. I did my taxes online this past year, and there were questions specifically about whether i had purchased more than 100$ worth of goods via the net this past year.
I'd argue that WorldNetDaily's political orientation is relevant to the story. Just the same way you complain that mods at slashdot are modding down content they don't like, and that youtube users flag content they don't like, WND is bitching and whining UNFAIRLY about something they don't like.
Why is it unfair? Because it's not youtube or slashdot's fault, this is action taken by users. So i do think it's reasonable to qualify the rather over the top claim of censorship, by explaining that WND is biased and has a stake in the dispute they are reporting about. Thus, their political orientation is an important think to keep in mind when assessing their claim, as it is the source of their bias.
Can't you just apple ` through your browser windows? Or, use witch? That still doesn't get you to a particular tab in a tabbed browser, but at least will get you to the window you want. Maybe there's a quicksilver widget out there to bring focus to a particular tab in a browser (or if there isn't one, maybe someone will write one!)
Being the best at what you do does not constitute a monopoly. Effectively being the only one doing what you do is a monopoly. And since search is a huge field comprised of a number of companies large enough that you can't count them on your digits, i'd have to say, parent hasn't a clue what it's talking about. Comments like parent aren't funny because they're not true and they don't make sense, regardless of the facetious intent. Please, either try harder, or just don't bother posting.
It's true that interesting writing needs a bit more cooking, but you should be able to write coherently, succinctly and properly "in a timed setting from a random prompt." If you cannot do this, then you are not a talented writer.
I would like to first submit that the only places where you'd ever require a skill such as this are standardized tests such as the SAT, media punditry, and messageboards (blogging being somewhere in between the latter two). I'd go so far as to say that it's even dissimilar enough from oral debating that a comparison is unwarrented. This is a really bizarre and unnatural metric to measure the competance of an author. It may be that some writers would be able to do this well, but i'm going to bet that there are a lot of good writers who would be left out by using this as a judgement. The SAT isn't looking for brilliance, it's looking for adequacy.
This is stupid on the face of it. Is the best writing produced in a timed setting from a random prompt?
Come on. Good writing isn't produced like this, and it's not reasonable for the population of a single SAT trial to produce good writing. # of SAT writers infinite monkeys, and SAT examination time infinite. So big deal.
I have heard of Chicago. The land where even the dead can vote. Nevertheless, how could anything taking place in a single city compare to the massive, overwhelmingly wide-spread corruption machine the republicans have built? The issue of corruption is both an issue of principle and an issue of scope. Corruption is terrible in all cases, and should be weeded out zealously and without regard for personality, partisanship or politics, but greater corruption is definitely orders of magnitudes worse than lesser corruption.
I don't mean this as a troll or a snark, but i am honestly puzzled at how one could approve of Democratic tactics or corruption less than the Republicans? I really don't think that anyone could disagree that the Rove/Abramoff/DeLay triangle is really the most systematically unfair, corrupt, and underhanded political machine to exist in the past 25 years. Rove has been responsible for push polling (even against Republicans), phone bank DDoSing, money laundering, and swift-boating; Abramoff for more wide-spread graft (golf-outings to scotland, parties at his now-defunct resturant, cash gifts, scamming Native American tribes) than i think anyone can possibly account for; and DeLay for abusing House proceedural control so badly that he was single-handedly holding back legislation that had a MAJORITY of all representatives in the House as SPONSORS, not to mention the K-Street Project.
Honestly, i'm not trying to bait, i'd love a sincere and measured response, what could the Democrats could have done that was or could be worse?
I'm not claiming the Democrats aren't corrupt. Politics in America are corrupt. The nature of American politics will not change until there is serious reform regarding how candidates recieve money. But the depth, breadth, and malevolence of neo-conservative corruption has been dumbfounding to me. They've abused the campaign finance system (see Jack Abramoff and Tom Noe of Ohio, who stole millions of dollars from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, and contributed much of it to Bush's relection campaign), they've abused the wheels of government (see Tom DeLay), and the news media (Swift-boat, push-polls, news media leaks). I don't know of any similar systematic mechanism employed by anybody else.
p.s. i can dig up links to the stuff i've mentioned for the genuinely curious.
Unfortunately i don't have time to properly research this at the moment, so i'm going to be irresponsible and simply quote the first thing i have come across that looks definitive:
What is a record?
A record is the product(s) of data compilation, such as all books, papers, maps, and
photographs, machine readable materials, inclusive of those in electronic form or
format, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteris-
tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal
law in connection with the transaction of public business and in Department of
Defense possession and control at the time the FOIA request is made.
From the passage above, it would seem that citizens can request any existing data output or document from a federal agency (including the DoD). Given that fact, i would not assume that the programs that produced that data output would be subject to the same output. I am curious whether you could request software manuals however (which would be true for open or closed source software).
Even if they alter, extend, or otherwise change a piece of GPL software, the source is only open if they're distributing the software. If they're only using it in-house, or only distributing to trusted recipients, then there's no issue. As far as i know, you can't file freedom of information act requests for pieces of software:P Just cause you can't sell a piece of software, doesn't mean that they have to give it away to whomever asks (although from the discussions of GPL 3, it sounds like this would be more of an issue, since it covers hosted software too).
yes, and you can reduce your risk of car accidents by moving into the middle of the sahara desert. The statement may be true, but it's not very useful. As for grandparent, so you develop w/.NET, that's great for you too. I believe that VS is in the WINE list of apps. You've picked your platform, but that doesn't mean that you've got rock-solid justification for it. Ultimately the platform you pick is about your laziness, and what you want to be lazy about.
I say this as someone who both loathes myspace, and has an account (granted w/o any information filled in), but how is signing up for a myspace account resistance? The problem with moshi conceptually, is that people don't care whether their code or their CSS is kosher, they just care that it looks the way they want it to. I guess i just fail to see how moshi encourages people to be better. Even if you give a proof of concept, that doesn't mean that anybody is going to jump on the bandwagon.
grand parent should have added "unnecessary", and "irrelevant" to "unhelpful and inaccurate". Race is really a meaningless fiction, that tends to blend together things about genetics and culture together in a misunderstood ill-concieved mish-mash. If you're going to talk about something cultural, just talk about culture. if you're going to talk about genetic endowment, talk about genetic endowment. Race is a red herring, an anachronistic concept without any use in the modern day.
I agree to a point. I totally sympathize with this guy, particularly since i have to run the US/Canadian customs gauntlet semi-regularly (often enough for it to be annoying, but not so often that it's worth it for me to get a commuter pass). They can be, and often are, assholes for no particular reason. In this particular case, i think the bomb squad's actions were justified. They were called in in response to a supposed terrorist threat. Now, assuredly the classification of this event perhaps could have been handled better, but on the off chance this was a bomb, the bomb squad interrogator was right, he had 5 guys on that plane that could die.
Wow, what a stupidly unqualified statement. "Often" where? Are Muslims often terrorists in Ireland? How about in Peru? What about Sri Lanka? Or Nepal? Is the KKK often a muslim terrorist group?
Get real. Terrorists come out of all ethnicities and creeds. Terrorism relies on a fossilization of the mind, and a sociopathic dissociation from other people. It's got nothing inherent to do with Islam. And it's certainly stupid to say that terrorists are "often" muslims, as opposed to "often" being anything else.
Okay, but this just illustrates the naiveté of the original grandparent i was commenting on. Undesireable means neagatively impacting a species' ability to survive in a given context. But there is no catagorical "undesirability", since you have to have some sort of selection pressure in order to evaluate whether or not a particular gene is useful.
I much prefer describing evolution as "survival of the good-enough". Evolution is all about whether a particular species has genes that are sufficent for them to survive in a particular environment. But that's entirely dependent on the environment. Every thing on earth is undesireable, if you're talking about trying to surivive on earth when the sun starts to expand and engulfs the inner planets. On the other hand, most things can survive in mild temperate climates, and i guess would thus have desirable genes. Likewise, if you're talking about a species with 2 members, in a bountiful environment where they can reproduce and live without threat, the presumed "desirability" of their genes is dramatically different if you were to take the same 2 members of the species and suddenly populate their environment with 100 million slightly bigger members of their species.
More over, life span is not inherently a beneficial genetic trait. One can imagine a species which lives for 100 years, but loses the ability to reproduce after they're 20 for instance. Then you've got 80 more years of these creatures taking up space, consuming resources and compromising the species' ability to pass on its genes. Life span is only something that humans consider when it comes to the quality of individual human lives. Evolution is not scoped to discuss individual creatures (be they insect, tree or human).
25 and 40 are both artificial cutoffs. This isn't a case of exaggeration, it's a use of inherently flawed statistics. If you take care of your hearing, and are genetically well endowed, it may be the case you can here these things your whole life. The ability to hear these things are a function of aural capability, not age.
I bought Advance Wars: Dual Strike last october, and it is by far the game that i have played the most on my DS. 93 some hours, and it's still a blast to play. And even better when you have other people to play against.
See, the problem with debates like these, is that people polarize and jump to odd conclusions.
While parent is right, there is variability of who just has some fundamental base level of interest in computers and geekery, there is still a vastly disproportionate number of men in computer science. The reason for this is cultural. And actually this thread is a fantastic demonstration of the problem. What's the first post? A request for pics. And then the remainder of the thread is littered with comments, labeled as 'funny', talking about female software developers as potential girlfriends.
There is something deeply wrong with how geeks think about women, even if they acknowledge that women are every bit as average as men are. I don't think this is particularly surprising given the patriarchal views that western society presents to its children, but i think denying that it exists is a little much.
I've seen a majority of my female friends who are every bit as qualfied as i am to code, give up because they think guy geeks are jerks. And i don't blame them (hell i agree that a lot of guy geeks are jerks). If you don't like the people who you're going to work with, i'd say it's pretty reasonable to change jobs, or even professions. (and really this is an issue that is amplified in education. If you have to sit through 4 years of people who make you uncomfortable on a daily basis, then wouldn't you think about choosing a different program to do a degree in, if there are other things that you would be just as happy doing? Once you're trained and have already chosen a path it can be harder to get out of, or easier to rationalize why you're in it, but while you're in college, there are a lot of options, and if one looks like it's going to be crap, most people will switch out of that program.)
I'm not entirely sure what the novel component of this is. I think it might be the duration of time it takes to process the bodies of text (i should RTF papers to find out i suppose). Latent Semantic Analysis is really computationally expensive.
You've just asked my major question. I can get from Columbus, Ohio to London, Ontario on a single tank of gas, although i usually stop once for fuel (at the duty free), and refueling my car will take me less time than it will to get across the border. But if i had a car with a range of 250 miles, then i would have to stop on my trip, and it had better not make a 5 hour trip 12 hrs longer, due to recharging time.
That said, i've got two different energizer battery chargers, one of which takes 8 hrs, and the other which takes 15 to charge the same batteries for comparable use. I'm curious what sort of possibilities there are for rapid charging, and what the potential hazards are of moving large amounts of energy very quickly are.
Slashdot Mirror
This is simply not true.
Most states DO (i.e. the ones with sales tax) require that any purchase made by mail order be reported when you file your taxes. Since states can't force organizations outside of their jurisdiction to collect sales tax for them, YOU are supposed to make sure you send your sales tax in. This includes mail order sales placed via the internet
Enforcement has been a huge problem on these self-reported taxes, and i know that a number of states are not happy about it. I did my taxes online this past year, and there were questions specifically about whether i had purchased more than 100$ worth of goods via the net this past year.
I'd argue that WorldNetDaily's political orientation is relevant to the story. Just the same way you complain that mods at slashdot are modding down content they don't like, and that youtube users flag content they don't like, WND is bitching and whining UNFAIRLY about something they don't like.
Why is it unfair? Because it's not youtube or slashdot's fault, this is action taken by users. So i do think it's reasonable to qualify the rather over the top claim of censorship, by explaining that WND is biased and has a stake in the dispute they are reporting about. Thus, their political orientation is an important think to keep in mind when assessing their claim, as it is the source of their bias.
Can't you just apple ` through your browser windows? Or, use witch? That still doesn't get you to a particular tab in a tabbed browser, but at least will get you to the window you want. Maybe there's a quicksilver widget out there to bring focus to a particular tab in a browser (or if there isn't one, maybe someone will write one!)
Do doctors who use information gleaned through Nazi human tolerance testing (i.e. most of them) support Nazis?
Being the best at what you do does not constitute a monopoly. Effectively being the only one doing what you do is a monopoly. And since search is a huge field comprised of a number of companies large enough that you can't count them on your digits, i'd have to say, parent hasn't a clue what it's talking about. Comments like parent aren't funny because they're not true and they don't make sense, regardless of the facetious intent. Please, either try harder, or just don't bother posting.
Crap, shouldn't have posted that as HTML.
# of SAT test takers < infinite monkeys
# of hrs in SAT trial < infinite time
please, don't expect shakespeare.
This is stupid on the face of it. Is the best writing produced in a timed setting from a random prompt?
Come on. Good writing isn't produced like this, and it's not reasonable for the population of a single SAT trial to produce good writing. # of SAT writers infinite monkeys, and SAT examination time infinite. So big deal.
I have heard of Chicago. The land where even the dead can vote. Nevertheless, how could anything taking place in a single city compare to the massive, overwhelmingly wide-spread corruption machine the republicans have built? The issue of corruption is both an issue of principle and an issue of scope. Corruption is terrible in all cases, and should be weeded out zealously and without regard for personality, partisanship or politics, but greater corruption is definitely orders of magnitudes worse than lesser corruption.
I saw this last night in the wee hours of the morning (EST), and still can not find a link to the contest on the netflix site for the life of me.
Anyone else have better luck?
I don't mean this as a troll or a snark, but i am honestly puzzled at how one could approve of Democratic tactics or corruption less than the Republicans? I really don't think that anyone could disagree that the Rove/Abramoff/DeLay triangle is really the most systematically unfair, corrupt, and underhanded political machine to exist in the past 25 years. Rove has been responsible for push polling (even against Republicans), phone bank DDoSing, money laundering, and swift-boating; Abramoff for more wide-spread graft (golf-outings to scotland, parties at his now-defunct resturant, cash gifts, scamming Native American tribes) than i think anyone can possibly account for; and DeLay for abusing House proceedural control so badly that he was single-handedly holding back legislation that had a MAJORITY of all representatives in the House as SPONSORS, not to mention the K-Street Project.
Honestly, i'm not trying to bait, i'd love a sincere and measured response, what could the Democrats could have done that was or could be worse?
I'm not claiming the Democrats aren't corrupt. Politics in America are corrupt. The nature of American politics will not change until there is serious reform regarding how candidates recieve money. But the depth, breadth, and malevolence of neo-conservative corruption has been dumbfounding to me. They've abused the campaign finance system (see Jack Abramoff and Tom Noe of Ohio, who stole millions of dollars from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, and contributed much of it to Bush's relection campaign), they've abused the wheels of government (see Tom DeLay), and the news media (Swift-boat, push-polls, news media leaks). I don't know of any similar systematic mechanism employed by anybody else.
p.s. i can dig up links to the stuff i've mentioned for the genuinely curious.
Unfortunately i don't have time to properly research this at the moment, so i'm going to be irresponsible and simply quote the first thing i have come across that looks definitive:
What is a record?
A record is the product(s) of data compilation, such as all books, papers, maps, and photographs, machine readable materials, inclusive of those in electronic form or format, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteris- tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law in connection with the transaction of public business and in Department of Defense possession and control at the time the FOIA request is made.
That's pulled from the DoD's Freedom of information Act Handbook, available through the DoD's FOIA office (down at the bottom of the page).
From the passage above, it would seem that citizens can request any existing data output or document from a federal agency (including the DoD). Given that fact, i would not assume that the programs that produced that data output would be subject to the same output. I am curious whether you could request software manuals however (which would be true for open or closed source software).
This isn't true.
:P Just cause you can't sell a piece of software, doesn't mean that they have to give it away to whomever asks (although from the discussions of GPL 3, it sounds like this would be more of an issue, since it covers hosted software too).
Even if they alter, extend, or otherwise change a piece of GPL software, the source is only open if they're distributing the software. If they're only using it in-house, or only distributing to trusted recipients, then there's no issue. As far as i know, you can't file freedom of information act requests for pieces of software
yes, and you can reduce your risk of car accidents by moving into the middle of the sahara desert. The statement may be true, but it's not very useful. As for grandparent, so you develop w/ .NET, that's great for you too. I believe that VS is in the WINE list of apps. You've picked your platform, but that doesn't mean that you've got rock-solid justification for it. Ultimately the platform you pick is about your laziness, and what you want to be lazy about.
are you trying to refer to 3d printers? or other proposed rapid prototyping devices?
I say this as someone who both loathes myspace, and has an account (granted w/o any information filled in), but how is signing up for a myspace account resistance? The problem with moshi conceptually, is that people don't care whether their code or their CSS is kosher, they just care that it looks the way they want it to. I guess i just fail to see how moshi encourages people to be better. Even if you give a proof of concept, that doesn't mean that anybody is going to jump on the bandwagon.
grand parent should have added "unnecessary", and "irrelevant" to "unhelpful and inaccurate". Race is really a meaningless fiction, that tends to blend together things about genetics and culture together in a misunderstood ill-concieved mish-mash. If you're going to talk about something cultural, just talk about culture. if you're going to talk about genetic endowment, talk about genetic endowment. Race is a red herring, an anachronistic concept without any use in the modern day.
I agree to a point. I totally sympathize with this guy, particularly since i have to run the US/Canadian customs gauntlet semi-regularly (often enough for it to be annoying, but not so often that it's worth it for me to get a commuter pass). They can be, and often are, assholes for no particular reason. In this particular case, i think the bomb squad's actions were justified. They were called in in response to a supposed terrorist threat. Now, assuredly the classification of this event perhaps could have been handled better, but on the off chance this was a bomb, the bomb squad interrogator was right, he had 5 guys on that plane that could die.
Wow, what a stupidly unqualified statement. "Often" where? Are Muslims often terrorists in Ireland? How about in Peru? What about Sri Lanka? Or Nepal? Is the KKK often a muslim terrorist group?
Get real. Terrorists come out of all ethnicities and creeds. Terrorism relies on a fossilization of the mind, and a sociopathic dissociation from other people. It's got nothing inherent to do with Islam. And it's certainly stupid to say that terrorists are "often" muslims, as opposed to "often" being anything else.
Okay, but this just illustrates the naiveté of the original grandparent i was commenting on. Undesireable means neagatively impacting a species' ability to survive in a given context. But there is no catagorical "undesirability", since you have to have some sort of selection pressure in order to evaluate whether or not a particular gene is useful.
I much prefer describing evolution as "survival of the good-enough". Evolution is all about whether a particular species has genes that are sufficent for them to survive in a particular environment. But that's entirely dependent on the environment. Every thing on earth is undesireable, if you're talking about trying to surivive on earth when the sun starts to expand and engulfs the inner planets. On the other hand, most things can survive in mild temperate climates, and i guess would thus have desirable genes. Likewise, if you're talking about a species with 2 members, in a bountiful environment where they can reproduce and live without threat, the presumed "desirability" of their genes is dramatically different if you were to take the same 2 members of the species and suddenly populate their environment with 100 million slightly bigger members of their species.
More over, life span is not inherently a beneficial genetic trait. One can imagine a species which lives for 100 years, but loses the ability to reproduce after they're 20 for instance. Then you've got 80 more years of these creatures taking up space, consuming resources and compromising the species' ability to pass on its genes. Life span is only something that humans consider when it comes to the quality of individual human lives. Evolution is not scoped to discuss individual creatures (be they insect, tree or human).
25 and 40 are both artificial cutoffs. This isn't a case of exaggeration, it's a use of inherently flawed statistics. If you take care of your hearing, and are genetically well endowed, it may be the case you can here these things your whole life. The ability to hear these things are a function of aural capability, not age.
I bought Advance Wars: Dual Strike last october, and it is by far the game that i have played the most on my DS. 93 some hours, and it's still a blast to play. And even better when you have other people to play against.
See, the problem with debates like these, is that people polarize and jump to odd conclusions.
While parent is right, there is variability of who just has some fundamental base level of interest in computers and geekery, there is still a vastly disproportionate number of men in computer science. The reason for this is cultural. And actually this thread is a fantastic demonstration of the problem. What's the first post? A request for pics. And then the remainder of the thread is littered with comments, labeled as 'funny', talking about female software developers as potential girlfriends.
There is something deeply wrong with how geeks think about women, even if they acknowledge that women are every bit as average as men are. I don't think this is particularly surprising given the patriarchal views that western society presents to its children, but i think denying that it exists is a little much.
I've seen a majority of my female friends who are every bit as qualfied as i am to code, give up because they think guy geeks are jerks. And i don't blame them (hell i agree that a lot of guy geeks are jerks). If you don't like the people who you're going to work with, i'd say it's pretty reasonable to change jobs, or even professions. (and really this is an issue that is amplified in education. If you have to sit through 4 years of people who make you uncomfortable on a daily basis, then wouldn't you think about choosing a different program to do a degree in, if there are other things that you would be just as happy doing? Once you're trained and have already chosen a path it can be harder to get out of, or easier to rationalize why you're in it, but while you're in college, there are a lot of options, and if one looks like it's going to be crap, most people will switch out of that program.)
I don't know about that, but this looks like it does something akin to Latent Semantic Analysis
I'm not entirely sure what the novel component of this is. I think it might be the duration of time it takes to process the bodies of text (i should RTF papers to find out i suppose). Latent Semantic Analysis is really computationally expensive.
You've just asked my major question. I can get from Columbus, Ohio to London, Ontario on a single tank of gas, although i usually stop once for fuel (at the duty free), and refueling my car will take me less time than it will to get across the border. But if i had a car with a range of 250 miles, then i would have to stop on my trip, and it had better not make a 5 hour trip 12 hrs longer, due to recharging time.
That said, i've got two different energizer battery chargers, one of which takes 8 hrs, and the other which takes 15 to charge the same batteries for comparable use. I'm curious what sort of possibilities there are for rapid charging, and what the potential hazards are of moving large amounts of energy very quickly are.