Rapidshare has been around in its present form for at least 3 years, and AFAICT hasn't been sued yet by the xAA. Yes, it's a single point of failure, but take a look at any recent movie release which has been spread out to rapidshare: you'll notice the movie will be uploaded in chunks, mirrored to several different hosting providers.
Here's a good example of a recent movie. Notice the spreading of identical chunks to multiple hosts, and the availability of two direct links to.avi halves from megashares.com -- you could start watching right away with a halfway decent connection.
I actually like Rapidshare and cousins for movies much more than bittorrent: you're not forced to share, so you're not uploading to god-knows-whom, potentially including xAA bots. And some providers (megashares.com, megaftp.com) even let you download files up to 1GB for free, at full speed. Not a whole lot unlike Usenet, actually, if you think about it -- just replace your Usenet provider(s) with these free hosting providers.
Yes, Rapidshare could be subpoenaed and forced to reveal IPs of downloaders, but that would probably take weeks or months (assuming these hosting providers even keep logs -- some of them explicitly claim not to), and then your ISP would still have to be subpoenaed as well for the xAA to get your info, by which time the ISP may very well have purged its logs. Plus, the xAA is usually interested in uploaders only anyways. (You don't have to register for accounts to use rapidshare or its brethren. It could happen, but I've never heard of such a thing, and it's far more hassle for the xAA than simply going after IPs on bittorrent.
Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
If you're wondering whether you'd get arrested for reporting illegal income, yes you certainly would. If you're wondering whether the IRS's taxing of illegal income and forcing you to report it violates the 5th amendment, yes it does, but no judge is brave enough to fight it.
I was briefly intrigued, until I looked around for these mythical "borderless monitors". I merely found a bunch of marketing drivel. Quoting:
The firm unwrapped the range in Berlin yesterday, but - as journalists debated the benefits of a TV able to display images right to the very edge of the device - Register Hardware discovered that LGâ(TM)s sets don't do what the name suggests.
'Borderless' is more about freedom, according to LG, because the range apparently gives owners the freedom to, say, transfer images over Bluetooth.
link. So, not borderless at all. Shame, this would actually be a cool feature.
The problem's only gotten worse. I have a ~month-old 13" MacBook Pro. The thing gets ~8 hours (seriously) with my normal use (light PDF reading and web site browsing) under OS X. I actually hate OS X, so I installed Ubuntu. Gave up after the majority of the hardware (trackpad, sound,... ) didn't work. Yes, I spent a fair amount of time testing workarounds and commenting on bug reports and finally gave up.
It'll be some time before I try Ubuntu again on my MBP, but if any Ubuntu devs out there want to save frustration for other MBP users, your expertise is sorely needed in this area.
Man, you're telling me. I have all sorts of problems with my cat messing with electronics when I'm not around. Even had news stories and sheriffs get all riled up over this. People seem not to believe me:/
it's still mail fraud even if you don't use a money order.
You're correct, assuming you ship USPS -- hadn't thought of that. And the USPS does provide a mail fraud complaint form online which includes both "Failure to Pay" and "Failure to Provide". Has anyone actually successfully had the USPS investigate cases of eBay fraud (e.g. buyer falsely claiming non-receipt) for non-gigantic dollar amounts, though? I googled for a bit and found people who contacted the USPS about eBay fraud, but no indications of whether USPS actually followed up.
Besides the fact that "decimal expansion" is a number's representation in base-10 only, pi need not have an infinite representation in all bases -- it's perfectly valid to have a number system with base pi, for example.
The simple fact is that PayPal has no way of knowing which side is in the right.
I partly agree with what you're saying, but a big problem here is that eBay has effectively shut out all other forms of payments to further their Paypal monopoly. To quote from them: "Checks, money orders, and bank wire transfers arenâ(TM)t allowed for most eBay purchases. "
If eBay still allowed USPS money orders as payment, in addition to avoiding the 2-3% Paypal fees, unscrupulous buyers would have a strong disincentive to lie about not receiving their items; the USPS can and does investigate cases of mail fraud, and mail fraud is a felony. Paypal, on the other hand, could give a rat's ass whether the buyer is lying about not receiving the item...
I don't see anything insulting about Eastern Europe in the GP's post. Quite the contrary, he's suggesting moving there to escape the bloated corporatocracy that the US has become. Where you get sued into bankruptcy for downloading a few songs.
once you get somewhere, all your technology goes away eventually, unless you transport a population large enough to build the most complex part on a ship (for us a microprocessor)
The only absolutely vital thing to transport is information (since it can't easily be reconstructed from scratch). And hard drives are small these days. There's absolutely no fundamental reason why the technology to build, say, a chip fab needs to take up a lot of room. It's certainly conceivable that you could send a few nanobots which are capable of constructing other nanobots from scrap material on the destination planet, and that these nanobots would be collectively capable of building your chip fab, or anything else you might need.
And if insurance companies could get the expectations exactly right, then no one would buy insurance.
This is laughably incorrect. Imagine that the probability of your house burning down in a given year is 0.5%. If it burns down, and you don't have insurance, you'll be bankrupt, homeless, lose your job, and go through significant hardships. Your house has a market value of $100k. The insurance company offers you a year's worth of insurance for 0.005 * $100k = $500 plus, say $100 profit for themselves. Do you take it, or do you go without insurance? Guess what, most people would take the insurance.
You would hack into the brain of the really HOT chick, and make her want to fsck you!
I already have something which does this, of course. It's called Sex Panther by Odeon. It's illegal in nine countries. Yep, it's made with bits of real panther, so you know it's good.
They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works, every time.
Preposterous. I for one trust my husband completely. When he says he's out on a hiking trip, I know he's out hiking the Appalachian trail, not up to mischief. Perhaps you should be more trustful of your spouse instead of worrying about contracting AIDS.
He advocated paying CEOs on actual performance - net profit, health of the company(IE capital asset level), rather than paying them based on stock price level - it's too easy for a CEO to generate at least a short boost in stock prices
Good point, but it's also incredibly easy to juice the net profit and/or revenue of one quarter at the expense of profit in a later quarter. An example of this creative bookkeeping we're all familiar with is the despised Mail In Rebate. Why do you think the "processing time" on those things is 8-10 weeks?
It's a hidden 'tax' by the government that will impact lower income people far more than higher income people.
Any first-year economics textbook will directly address this concern. The classical way to deal with your problem is like so:
Let's say the gas tax is for $1/gallon, and a decent amount of consumption pre-tax would be, say, 300 gallons per year. The government would simply cut a check(1) for $300 directly to every person under a certain income threshhold. The overjoyed poor people would then use their ingenuity to figure out how to keep part of that $300 instead of seeing it all go into their gas budget. Or, if they absolutely had to use 300 gallons per year, they'd at least be no worse off post-tax than pre-tax.
(1) The government's $300 would come out of its future gas-tax earnings.
Remember folks, we all have to do our parts to fight global warming. If you live in a dense southern urban environment, you know that the cities can get very hot from absorbed sunlight and industrial machinery, so make sure you keep your A/C running full blast to absorb the waste heat around you. I estimate that if every person in Atlanta cools down the city by using 25% more A/C during just the month of June, the city's mean temperature will decrease by 1-2 degrees Celsius per year!
Your commodity hedges will be taxed (potentially at 50%)
Efficient tax allocation, my friend. The Roth IRA you alluded to and a traditional IRA are powerful vehicles indeed. Stick all of your least tax-efficient bets (especially options) inside these accounts, and if you have investment money left over buy munis or other more tax-efficient investments in taxable accounts.
Tips are based on CPI and the govt is manipulating and perhaps even outright lying about CPI since Clinton.
True enough. Excluding energy costs from CPI is ridiculous, but there are negating factors in the other direction as well.
First of all, if you want to know what the markets "expect" inflation to be 10 years down the line, take a look at e.g. the spreads between 10 year fixed rates Treasuries and inflation-protected TIPS (source). The link from the parent only shows *current* and *past* inflation information, which doesn't help you get a feel for the future one bit. (2)
Second of all, if you're convinced that inflation is going to get out of hand down the road thanks to the Fed's printing presses, there are more elegant ways of making that bet than installing your own solar panels. Some ideas:
Buying commodities denominated in dollars, such as oil, gold, silver, or baskets of commodities. When the dollar's purchasing power goes down (i.e. inflation), the value of your holdings will go up(1).
Invest directly in TIPS. ETFs again offer an attractive way to do this (e.g. ticker TIP) .
A variety of more exotic ways to bet against the value of US treasuries, and hence bet on inflation, are discussed here.
(1) Be careful buying e.g. shares of USO due to persistent contango in the oil markets, and the inherent problems in using futures contract rolling to attempt to mimic the spot price of oil. GLD does an admirable job of tracking the spot price of gold since it's holding physical gold in its vault, but the gold market is full of gold bugs, doomsdayers, etc. driving up the price and contributing to volatility.
(2) And the grandparent's post is even worse -- needless fearmongering with no substance to back it up.
A yield of 5% on a 10-year tax-exempt municipal bond would be very generous indeed, especially if you're in a high tax bracket. California 10-year notes are currently yielding a bit under 5% -- and I'd be pretty darn cautious about buying California's debt at this point.
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Rapidshare has been around in its present form for at least 3 years, and AFAICT hasn't been sued yet by the xAA. Yes, it's a single point of failure, but take a look at any recent movie release which has been spread out to rapidshare: you'll notice the movie will be uploaded in chunks, mirrored to several different hosting providers.
Here's a good example of a recent movie. Notice the spreading of identical chunks to multiple hosts, and the availability of two direct links to .avi halves from megashares.com -- you could start watching right away with a halfway decent connection.
I actually like Rapidshare and cousins for movies much more than bittorrent: you're not forced to share, so you're not uploading to god-knows-whom, potentially including xAA bots. And some providers (megashares.com, megaftp.com) even let you download files up to 1GB for free, at full speed. Not a whole lot unlike Usenet, actually, if you think about it -- just replace your Usenet provider(s) with these free hosting providers.
Yes, Rapidshare could be subpoenaed and forced to reveal IPs of downloaders, but that would probably take weeks or months (assuming these hosting providers even keep logs -- some of them explicitly claim not to), and then your ISP would still have to be subpoenaed as well for the xAA to get your info, by which time the ISP may very well have purged its logs. Plus, the xAA is usually interested in uploaders only anyways. (You don't have to register for accounts to use rapidshare or its brethren. It could happen, but I've never heard of such a thing, and it's far more hassle for the xAA than simply going after IPs on bittorrent.
Aren't bribes like illegal in the US?? on the other hand could be a typo - perhaps they meant brides?
Not a typo. See e.g. Publication 525
If you're wondering whether you'd get arrested for reporting illegal income, yes you certainly would. If you're wondering whether the IRS's taxing of illegal income and forcing you to report it violates the 5th amendment, yes it does, but no judge is brave enough to fight it.
I was briefly intrigued, until I looked around for these mythical "borderless monitors". I merely found a bunch of marketing drivel. Quoting:
link. So, not borderless at all. Shame, this would actually be a cool feature.
Solution: pbzip2. With 4+ cores it should be comparable to gzip.
His name is Robert Paulson.
His name is Robert Paulson.
His name is Robert Paulson.
The problem's only gotten worse. I have a ~month-old 13" MacBook Pro. The thing gets ~8 hours (seriously) with my normal use (light PDF reading and web site browsing) under OS X. I actually hate OS X, so I installed Ubuntu. Gave up after the majority of the hardware (trackpad, sound, ... ) didn't work. Yes, I spent a fair amount of time testing workarounds and commenting on bug reports and finally gave up.
It'll be some time before I try Ubuntu again on my MBP, but if any Ubuntu devs out there want to save frustration for other MBP users, your expertise is sorely needed in this area.
It's actually only $10 to upgrade to Snow Leopard
Man, you're telling me. I have all sorts of problems with my cat messing with electronics when I'm not around. Even had news stories and sheriffs get all riled up over this. People seem not to believe me :/
- Keith Griffin
it's still mail fraud even if you don't use a money order.
You're correct, assuming you ship USPS -- hadn't thought of that. And the USPS does provide a mail fraud complaint form online which includes both "Failure to Pay" and "Failure to Provide". Has anyone actually successfully had the USPS investigate cases of eBay fraud (e.g. buyer falsely claiming non-receipt) for non-gigantic dollar amounts, though? I googled for a bit and found people who contacted the USPS about eBay fraud, but no indications of whether USPS actually followed up.
decimal expansion is infinite in all bases
Besides the fact that "decimal expansion" is a number's representation in base-10 only, pi need not have an infinite representation in all bases -- it's perfectly valid to have a number system with base pi, for example.
I partly agree with what you're saying, but a big problem here is that eBay has effectively shut out all other forms of payments to further their Paypal monopoly. To quote from them: "Checks, money orders, and bank wire transfers arenâ(TM)t allowed for most eBay purchases. "
If eBay still allowed USPS money orders as payment, in addition to avoiding the 2-3% Paypal fees, unscrupulous buyers would have a strong disincentive to lie about not receiving their items; the USPS can and does investigate cases of mail fraud, and mail fraud is a felony. Paypal, on the other hand, could give a rat's ass whether the buyer is lying about not receiving the item...
"I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "money laundering" in a dictionary". - Peter Gibbons
I don't see anything insulting about Eastern Europe in the GP's post. Quite the contrary, he's suggesting moving there to escape the bloated corporatocracy that the US has become. Where you get sued into bankruptcy for downloading a few songs.
The only absolutely vital thing to transport is information (since it can't easily be reconstructed from scratch). And hard drives are small these days. There's absolutely no fundamental reason why the technology to build, say, a chip fab needs to take up a lot of room. It's certainly conceivable that you could send a few nanobots which are capable of constructing other nanobots from scrap material on the destination planet, and that these nanobots would be collectively capable of building your chip fab, or anything else you might need.
This is laughably incorrect. Imagine that the probability of your house burning down in a given year is 0.5%. If it burns down, and you don't have insurance, you'll be bankrupt, homeless, lose your job, and go through significant hardships. Your house has a market value of $100k. The insurance company offers you a year's worth of insurance for 0.005 * $100k = $500 plus, say $100 profit for themselves. Do you take it, or do you go without insurance? Guess what, most people would take the insurance.
That's preposterous libel. Slashdot has the most advanced antispam technology devised. Feel free to email me for further details.
Sincerely,
CmdrTaco ( malda@slashdot.org )
You would hack into the brain of the really HOT chick, and make her want to fsck you!
I already have something which does this, of course. It's called Sex Panther by Odeon. It's illegal in nine countries. Yep, it's made with bits of real panther, so you know it's good.
They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works, every time.
So your single-core cpu is only ever capable of running a single process?
I run MS-DOS, you insensitive clod!
Preposterous. I for one trust my husband completely. When he says he's out on a hiking trip, I know he's out hiking the Appalachian trail, not up to mischief. Perhaps you should be more trustful of your spouse instead of worrying about contracting AIDS.
Sincerely,
Jenny Sanford
Good point, but it's also incredibly easy to juice the net profit and/or revenue of one quarter at the expense of profit in a later quarter. An example of this creative bookkeeping we're all familiar with is the despised Mail In Rebate. Why do you think the "processing time" on those things is 8-10 weeks?
Any first-year economics textbook will directly address this concern. The classical way to deal with your problem is like so:
Let's say the gas tax is for $1/gallon, and a decent amount of consumption pre-tax would be, say, 300 gallons per year. The government would simply cut a check(1) for $300 directly to every person under a certain income threshhold. The overjoyed poor people would then use their ingenuity to figure out how to keep part of that $300 instead of seeing it all go into their gas budget. Or, if they absolutely had to use 300 gallons per year, they'd at least be no worse off post-tax than pre-tax.
(1) The government's $300 would come out of its future gas-tax earnings.
Remember folks, we all have to do our parts to fight global warming. If you live in a dense southern urban environment, you know that the cities can get very hot from absorbed sunlight and industrial machinery, so make sure you keep your A/C running full blast to absorb the waste heat around you. I estimate that if every person in Atlanta cools down the city by using 25% more A/C during just the month of June, the city's mean temperature will decrease by 1-2 degrees Celsius per year!
Efficient tax allocation, my friend. The Roth IRA you alluded to and a traditional IRA are powerful vehicles indeed. Stick all of your least tax-efficient bets (especially options) inside these accounts, and if you have investment money left over buy munis or other more tax-efficient investments in taxable accounts.
True enough. Excluding energy costs from CPI is ridiculous, but there are negating factors in the other direction as well.
A little more about predicting inflation:
First of all, if you want to know what the markets "expect" inflation to be 10 years down the line, take a look at e.g. the spreads between 10 year fixed rates Treasuries and inflation-protected TIPS (source). The link from the parent only shows *current* and *past* inflation information, which doesn't help you get a feel for the future one bit. (2)
Second of all, if you're convinced that inflation is going to get out of hand down the road thanks to the Fed's printing presses, there are more elegant ways of making that bet than installing your own solar panels. Some ideas:
(1) Be careful buying e.g. shares of USO due to persistent contango in the oil markets, and the inherent problems in using futures contract rolling to attempt to mimic the spot price of oil. GLD does an admirable job of tracking the spot price of gold since it's holding physical gold in its vault, but the gold market is full of gold bugs, doomsdayers, etc. driving up the price and contributing to volatility.
(2) And the grandparent's post is even worse -- needless fearmongering with no substance to back it up.
A yield of 5% on a 10-year tax-exempt municipal bond would be very generous indeed, especially if you're in a high tax bracket. California 10-year notes are currently yielding a bit under 5% -- and I'd be pretty darn cautious about buying California's debt at this point.