Corporations don't pay tax. Not really. They pass on that tax to their customers. Ultimately, it is the consumer that pays the tax.
That is like saying that people do not pay tax, they pass the tax onto their employers by demanding higher wages.
While it may be true in some cases it all depends on whether you are able to charge your customers a higher price without them switching to another product or deciding they do not need whatever you are selling.
True, but you also have weaker gravity, which will allow pressure from a rocket motor to have a greater effect than on earth
Pressure? I thought we were talking about a vacuum.
Also, debris will fly farther.
What debris?
The only debris is actually the crap coming out of the back of the rocket in gaseous form. I know you could try and make argument that this constituted pressure but since these are occasional particles wandering about in a complete vacuum you might as well model them as such since there are few enough to deal with.
As to whether they would disturb enough dust when the hit the moon surface to erase someones footprint that is any bodies guess as:
1) The module would have to get to certain height before the exhaust gasses could have a clear path to the ground due to the base section of the lander left in situ.
2) I have no idea as to how deep and well formed Neil's footprints were. The dust up there had not been touched so may have allowed his boot to sink quite deeply into the surface.
3) I have no idea of the relative mass of the exhaust gasses to the particulate dust that makes up the moons surface.
Basically, the only way to know for sure is go back and see. Unfortunately this may well result in discovering that the human races first footprint on the moon was perfectly preserved until we trashed it finding out if it was there. Why risk this outcome when the moon is plenty big enough for us to land somewhere else until we have the ability to build a museum around the area without disturbing it.
Disclaimer - Sorry, for being so nitpicky, but several years of Physics with Space Technology will do that to you.
Well of course not. The television "press" is basically the BBC.....
So the contents of the bill was publicised extensively by Sky News and ITN News the other 2 major news networks? I think not. Also note that none of the British printed press covered this in any depth either. To blame it all on the BBC is clearly delusionary since the majority of TV news in Britain is actually produced by ITN.
I know the BBC have been pretty pants since they were chastised over the WMD affair at the start of the Iraq war but there are plenty of other places people obtain information on current affairs from in this country.
Since they paid you for it, they don't feel the need to be careful with it.
Good point, maybe a deposit would be a good idea too.
As for taking it back before the agreed period they borrowed it for they would probably object to that anyway. Even if they have not paid, if you turn up in the middle of a presentation or while they were finishing a piece of work they are going to strongly object to giving it back anyway.
What happened was that out current Labour government jumped on board with the war on terror then got this bill through parliament without any real public debate about the contents under the guise of fighting terror. The vast majority of the British public have no idea this shite is on the books as the press all agreed not to cover the law in any depth before it was passed.
Maybe the bill was D-noticed but we will never know since the press are not allowed to mention what is D-noticed and what is not.
A laptop costs almost nothing compared to most art supplies, if they complain they don't have the cash... ask them how much they paid for their last photo enlargements?
Or even better, ask them how much they spent on booze last term.
In fact, the best solution to this is not to tell them they cannot use your PC, the best solution is to start charging a fair hourly rate for laptop rent. This will probably cover the cost of a new laptop just to rent out in next to no time.
This is perfectly fair as your time in providing a working laptop is probably far more valuable than the laptop itself and they are putting ware and tear on your laptop anyway. If you are going to put in a load of additional time in order to secure it so it can be a shared resource, then you certainly deserve monetary compensation for your time.
That is how the capitalist world we live in works. It makes sense for your fellow students to learn this as soon as possible since they will all have to join the real world sooner or later unless they plan on trying to find a country that still works on a gift economy.
This is one of the most insightful comments I have read in this discussion but the mods have done their usual thing.
This is really a reply to the people who moderated this comment down. One day you will all get a job and will start to realise that sometimes commercial pressures (ie - your company paying your wages at the end of the month instead of going under) dictate that software has to be released before it is perfect.
Nobody likes having to rush things out the door before they are ready, but sometimes it is forced on you. Sometimes the management team set a ridiculous deadline. Sometimes the technical leads misjudge how complicated a job will be. Everybody makes mistakes and sometimes they backfire. Sometimes what is supposed to be a short term, short lived project (ie - MS-DOS and the first IBM PC) takes off in a big way and far outlives its expectations. As a company you can hardly then go to the market and say you released a lemon to get some desperately needed cash in, not if you want to stay in business.
Personally I am more worried that a pure open source DB would be subverted by the Richard Stallman worshipers and end up restricting commercial use of the database in closed source projects through some future revision of the GNU licence.
I would love everything to be open source, but sometimes that is simply not applicable in a capitalist world where the side with the most to spend on lawyers frequently wins. I would strongly object to someone taking my code and selling a service based on my hard work just because I could not prove I was copied by them and not vice versa. Maybe although I could prove it was my hard work I could not prove it to the necessary legal standard in a court of law.
I have seen enough miscarriages of justice to know that no legal system is perfect, especially when one side is rich and the other poor.
I know it is poor form to reply to your own posts but I have just read the full article above and discovered that us in the UK seemed to be ok. Also not affected was the West coast apparently.
Maybe someone told Google I was on holiday tomorrow and needed a nice quiet day to clear my desk:)
The problem wasn't just mail. Any site that used Google for web statistics, mapping, or other services that Google offers was affected. For example, certain online banking systems use Google Analytics. These were affected.
Strange, I am responsible for several sites that use Google analytics and I had a nice quiet day. They are fairly intensively monitored so if this had affected us I would have heard horrible alarms going off and clients ringing us.
Maybe the issue was more localised than people making it sound.
The majority of it get paid out to farmers subsidies. The US does something very similar.
If we did not pay our farmers vast sums of money then they could not hope to compete with farmers from areas like the third world where the cost of living is much lower. They would then be driven out of business in the same way that globalisation has decimated manufacturing in most developed societies.
The difference is that in the case of manufacturing we can at least modernise and try and costs down that way. With agriculture that is much harder as many crops are just too labour intensive even with modern machinery.
By the way, I am from the UK. If this fine means I have to contribute one penny less next year in taxes to Europe then I am all for it.
I am not a lawyer at all, and certainly not a Swedish lawyer but you may find that many other European countries have similar laws. When talking about what is legal and what is illegal I would suggest you do so with a little less certainty if you merely a layman like the rest of us. Notice I posted a link to a relevant site and still said maybe in this post as this could still be argued both ways in court even in my country.
I got offered the choice of blocking slashdot ads today due to my contributions to the site. I had to think long and hard about whether to accept since I knew I was denying a site I value a source of revenue.
I have decided yes at the moment but I will probably change my mind since I have realised that the adverts never really bothered me anyway. I was always very good at ignoring adverts anyway so they made no difference to me. We live in a capitalist work and advertising is a part of that.
Experience is certainly more valuable than a masters when it comes to getting most techie jobs. However with the current state of the job market I would certainly recommend putting off joining it for a year. It is also worth studying your masters in order to keep the door open to being an academic even if you do not know that is what you want to do.
I would also recommend doing a masters with a business and management studies component as techies with business skills generally earn more than those without and will be considered first for management positions all other things being equal. Remember, IT is one of the most ageist careers to chose from so you need to think about an exit strategy into IT management from as early as possible. You might not need it but planning for the worst is always a good idea in all walks of life.
I always find Americans talking about climate change hilarious.
In my country we are taught the ins and outs of climate change in science lessons. This way you learn the theory behind it in the same way and with the same scepticism that you learn to study all scientific theories. Since this has been this way for decades even people in their 30's like myself gained some exposure to climate change ideas in this way.
This is very important since if you just relied on soundbites like "Global Warming" you can dismiss climate change as not happening as your part of the world just had unusually cold weather. I have lost track of home many times I have heard this argument. Unfortunately it is based on an over simplification of climate change: that the temperature is getting hotter everywhere. The truth is the the average global temperature is going up, but that might result in your neck of the woods getting colder.
Like it or not, understanding Climate Change involves understanding some science. In particular it involves an amount of Atmospheric Physics, not one of the friendliest topics to the layman. So with this in mind you can either study the subject for years (or maybe decades) and figure out what is going on or get someone else to study it for you.
If Greenpeace commission an independent study that they have no editorial control over the Oil companies listed above are still going to dismiss it as propaganda if it suggests things like using less of their products. If the Oil companies commission a study that they have no editorial control over people in the Greenpeace camp still will not believe that they had no editorial control.
The idea behind this latest government sponsored group being set up is simple: Try and get a group to come out with some findings that are not immediately rubbished by the side that the disagree with.
This approach has worked in Europe but unfortunately as the studies were all done abroad they are still treated with scepticism in the US. Hopefully this will result in a Government funded, truly impartial report that can be used is impartial evidence in public debate about climate change in the US.
The problem is that the Oil companies have seen the scientific evidence from a previous impartial studies like this and have come to the conclusion that they would rather this report does not come out until they can realign their core business away from Oil. They will therefore mobilise their considerable influence on Capitol Hill in order to keep government out of research into Climate Change.
That's fine for corporations where people are paid to configure systems. However, Joe Consumer who doesn't know anything about enabling components or disabling services will find such a system completely unusable. It no longer will "Just Work".
Maybe Joe / Joan should just learn rather than expecting everything to just work. Or they should pay for the privilege of remaining ignorant and get someone else maintain all the computers they need to use. At least if you disable everything by default it forces them to make this choice rather than currently where they get to just blame everyone else when their identity gets stolen.
I personally do not think that you have to agree with someone point of view in order to recognise their contribution to society as a positive one. There have been many people who I disagree with but think that their tenaciousness at presenting an argument is valuable to society. I personally disagree with most republican politicians but I would hate to see an America where there was only one party.
I also believe that sometimes humour is the most effective way to press home a point. Sometimes it is clearly inappropriate but at other times it is a perfect fit. I am certainly not saying that Colbert has always got it right but sometimes he has and that alone makes him a positive influence.
Political Satire has a long and rich history in most western political systems and has certainly been a positive influence overall.
Actually, its not. The original swine flu was not able to jump from human to human, you could only catch it from being in close contact with pigs. This flu is actually two parts swine flu, one part bird flu and one part human flu. Although this is mostly swine, the other elements are what has enabled to it spread through the human population as it never has before.
They are whining about the fact that when Canadian customs officers do find goods that breach Canadian copyright law thay have to follow that pesky due process of going via a court of law rather than just impounding it and sorting it out later. This pesky legal oversight and due process thing gets in the way too much.
It is like that whole innocent until proven guilty thing.
Oops, should have used preview. You get my point though I presume.
An explanation as to why it would be bad for Intel if they had no competition would be useful as I can see no reason why it would. I wish my business had no competition as you can be damn sure we would be raising prices pretty quickly. Not by much, but we would not have to be so aggressive when competing for tenders if we knew we were the only company that could put in a bid.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations don't pay tax. Not really. They pass on that tax to their customers. Ultimately, it is the consumer that pays the tax.
That is like saying that people do not pay tax, they pass the tax onto their employers by demanding higher wages.
While it may be true in some cases it all depends on whether you are able to charge your customers a higher price without them switching to another product or deciding they do not need whatever you are selling.
True, but you also have weaker gravity, which will allow pressure from a rocket motor to have a greater effect than on earth
Pressure? I thought we were talking about a vacuum.
Also, debris will fly farther.
What debris?
The only debris is actually the crap coming out of the back of the rocket in gaseous form. I know you could try and make argument that this constituted pressure but since these are occasional particles wandering about in a complete vacuum you might as well model them as such since there are few enough to deal with.
As to whether they would disturb enough dust when the hit the moon surface to erase someones footprint that is any bodies guess as:
1) The module would have to get to certain height before the exhaust gasses could have a clear path to the ground due to the base section of the lander left in situ.
2) I have no idea as to how deep and well formed Neil's footprints were. The dust up there had not been touched so may have allowed his boot to sink quite deeply into the surface.
3) I have no idea of the relative mass of the exhaust gasses to the particulate dust that makes up the moons surface.
Basically, the only way to know for sure is go back and see. Unfortunately this may well result in discovering that the human races first footprint on the moon was perfectly preserved until we trashed it finding out if it was there. Why risk this outcome when the moon is plenty big enough for us to land somewhere else until we have the ability to build a museum around the area without disturbing it.
Disclaimer - Sorry, for being so nitpicky, but several years of Physics with Space Technology will do that to you.
Well of course not. The television "press" is basically the BBC.....
So the contents of the bill was publicised extensively by Sky News and ITN News the other 2 major news networks? I think not. Also note that none of the British printed press covered this in any depth either. To blame it all on the BBC is clearly delusionary since the majority of TV news in Britain is actually produced by ITN.
http://corporate.itn.co.uk/itn-news.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITN
I know the BBC have been pretty pants since they were chastised over the WMD affair at the start of the Iraq war but there are plenty of other places people obtain information on current affairs from in this country.
Since they paid you for it, they don't feel the need to be careful with it.
Good point, maybe a deposit would be a good idea too.
As for taking it back before the agreed period they borrowed it for they would probably object to that anyway. Even if they have not paid, if you turn up in the middle of a presentation or while they were finishing a piece of work they are going to strongly object to giving it back anyway.
What happened was that out current Labour government jumped on board with the war on terror then got this bill through parliament without any real public debate about the contents under the guise of fighting terror. The vast majority of the British public have no idea this shite is on the books as the press all agreed not to cover the law in any depth before it was passed.
Maybe the bill was D-noticed but we will never know since the press are not allowed to mention what is D-noticed and what is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Notice
A laptop costs almost nothing compared to most art supplies, if they complain they don't have the cash... ask them how much they paid for their last photo enlargements?
Or even better, ask them how much they spent on booze last term.
In fact, the best solution to this is not to tell them they cannot use your PC, the best solution is to start charging a fair hourly rate for laptop rent. This will probably cover the cost of a new laptop just to rent out in next to no time.
This is perfectly fair as your time in providing a working laptop is probably far more valuable than the laptop itself and they are putting ware and tear on your laptop anyway. If you are going to put in a load of additional time in order to secure it so it can be a shared resource, then you certainly deserve monetary compensation for your time.
That is how the capitalist world we live in works. It makes sense for your fellow students to learn this as soon as possible since they will all have to join the real world sooner or later unless they plan on trying to find a country that still works on a gift economy.
This is one of the most insightful comments I have read in this discussion but the mods have done their usual thing.
This is really a reply to the people who moderated this comment down. One day you will all get a job and will start to realise that sometimes commercial pressures (ie - your company paying your wages at the end of the month instead of going under) dictate that software has to be released before it is perfect.
Nobody likes having to rush things out the door before they are ready, but sometimes it is forced on you. Sometimes the management team set a ridiculous deadline. Sometimes the technical leads misjudge how complicated a job will be. Everybody makes mistakes and sometimes they backfire. Sometimes what is supposed to be a short term, short lived project (ie - MS-DOS and the first IBM PC) takes off in a big way and far outlives its expectations. As a company you can hardly then go to the market and say you released a lemon to get some desperately needed cash in, not if you want to stay in business.
In my day most people got thrown out of university accommodation for having wild parties and trashing the joint or for dealing drugs.
How things have changed.
Personally I am more worried that a pure open source DB would be subverted by the Richard Stallman worshipers and end up restricting commercial use of the database in closed source projects through some future revision of the GNU licence.
I would love everything to be open source, but sometimes that is simply not applicable in a capitalist world where the side with the most to spend on lawyers frequently wins. I would strongly object to someone taking my code and selling a service based on my hard work just because I could not prove I was copied by them and not vice versa. Maybe although I could prove it was my hard work I could not prove it to the necessary legal standard in a court of law.
I have seen enough miscarriages of justice to know that no legal system is perfect, especially when one side is rich and the other poor.
I know it is poor form to reply to your own posts but I have just read the full article above and discovered that us in the UK seemed to be ok. Also not affected was the West coast apparently.
Maybe someone told Google I was on holiday tomorrow and needed a nice quiet day to clear my desk :)
The problem wasn't just mail. Any site that used Google for web statistics, mapping, or other services that Google offers was affected. For example, certain online banking systems use Google Analytics. These were affected.
Strange, I am responsible for several sites that use Google analytics and I had a nice quiet day. They are fairly intensively monitored so if this had affected us I would have heard horrible alarms going off and clients ringing us.
Maybe the issue was more localised than people making it sound.
The majority of it get paid out to farmers subsidies. The US does something very similar.
If we did not pay our farmers vast sums of money then they could not hope to compete with farmers from areas like the third world where the cost of living is much lower. They would then be driven out of business in the same way that globalisation has decimated manufacturing in most developed societies.
The difference is that in the case of manufacturing we can at least modernise and try and costs down that way. With agriculture that is much harder as many crops are just too labour intensive even with modern machinery.
By the way, I am from the UK. If this fine means I have to contribute one penny less next year in taxes to Europe then I am all for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_the_European_Union
How long have you been studying law and in what country?
In my country (UK) this may be perfectly legal and above board due to the 30 day cooling off period on most internet financial transactions.
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESOURCES&itemId=1073792577
I am not a lawyer at all, and certainly not a Swedish lawyer but you may find that many other European countries have similar laws. When talking about what is legal and what is illegal I would suggest you do so with a little less certainty if you merely a layman like the rest of us. Notice I posted a link to a relevant site and still said maybe in this post as this could still be argued both ways in court even in my country.
And Apple will just settle out of court for the value of your Iphone and cover your losses.
I meant capitalist world but that was my best Freudian slip in a long while :)
I got offered the choice of blocking slashdot ads today due to my contributions to the site. I had to think long and hard about whether to accept since I knew I was denying a site I value a source of revenue.
I have decided yes at the moment but I will probably change my mind since I have realised that the adverts never really bothered me anyway. I was always very good at ignoring adverts anyway so they made no difference to me. We live in a capitalist work and advertising is a part of that.
Experience is certainly more valuable than a masters when it comes to getting most techie jobs. However with the current state of the job market I would certainly recommend putting off joining it for a year. It is also worth studying your masters in order to keep the door open to being an academic even if you do not know that is what you want to do.
I would also recommend doing a masters with a business and management studies component as techies with business skills generally earn more than those without and will be considered first for management positions all other things being equal. Remember, IT is one of the most ageist careers to chose from so you need to think about an exit strategy into IT management from as early as possible. You might not need it but planning for the worst is always a good idea in all walks of life.
How does twitter work for collaboration?
Since those extra minutes would come out of the time I spend with my family, I would consider them stolen, not wasted.
Wait until your kids get a bit older, then you will consider that hour long commute to be welcome peace and quiet :)
I always find Americans talking about climate change hilarious.
In my country we are taught the ins and outs of climate change in science lessons. This way you learn the theory behind it in the same way and with the same scepticism that you learn to study all scientific theories. Since this has been this way for decades even people in their 30's like myself gained some exposure to climate change ideas in this way.
This is very important since if you just relied on soundbites like "Global Warming" you can dismiss climate change as not happening as your part of the world just had unusually cold weather. I have lost track of home many times I have heard this argument. Unfortunately it is based on an over simplification of climate change: that the temperature is getting hotter everywhere. The truth is the the average global temperature is going up, but that might result in your neck of the woods getting colder.
Like it or not, understanding Climate Change involves understanding some science. In particular it involves an amount of Atmospheric Physics, not one of the friendliest topics to the layman. So with this in mind you can either study the subject for years (or maybe decades) and figure out what is going on or get someone else to study it for you.
If Greenpeace commission an independent study that they have no editorial control over the Oil companies listed above are still going to dismiss it as propaganda if it suggests things like using less of their products. If the Oil companies commission a study that they have no editorial control over people in the Greenpeace camp still will not believe that they had no editorial control.
The idea behind this latest government sponsored group being set up is simple: Try and get a group to come out with some findings that are not immediately rubbished by the side that the disagree with.
This approach has worked in Europe but unfortunately as the studies were all done abroad they are still treated with scepticism in the US. Hopefully this will result in a Government funded, truly impartial report that can be used is impartial evidence in public debate about climate change in the US.
The problem is that the Oil companies have seen the scientific evidence from a previous impartial studies like this and have come to the conclusion that they would rather this report does not come out until they can realign their core business away from Oil. They will therefore mobilise their considerable influence on Capitol Hill in order to keep government out of research into Climate Change.
That's fine for corporations where people are paid to configure systems. However, Joe Consumer who doesn't know anything about enabling components or disabling services will find such a system completely unusable. It no longer will "Just Work".
Maybe Joe / Joan should just learn rather than expecting everything to just work. Or they should pay for the privilege of remaining ignorant and get someone else maintain all the computers they need to use. At least if you disable everything by default it forces them to make this choice rather than currently where they get to just blame everyone else when their identity gets stolen.
Only if you agree with his politics.
I personally do not think that you have to agree with someone point of view in order to recognise their contribution to society as a positive one. There have been many people who I disagree with but think that their tenaciousness at presenting an argument is valuable to society. I personally disagree with most republican politicians but I would hate to see an America where there was only one party.
I also believe that sometimes humour is the most effective way to press home a point. Sometimes it is clearly inappropriate but at other times it is a perfect fit. I am certainly not saying that Colbert has always got it right but sometimes he has and that alone makes him a positive influence.
Political Satire has a long and rich history in most western political systems and has certainly been a positive influence overall.
The thing is: it is swine flu.
Actually, its not. The original swine flu was not able to jump from human to human, you could only catch it from being in close contact with pigs. This flu is actually two parts swine flu, one part bird flu and one part human flu. Although this is mostly swine, the other elements are what has enabled to it spread through the human population as it never has before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza
If it was still just good old swine flu, it would not be romping through the human population with reckless abandon.
They are whining about the fact that when Canadian customs officers do find goods that breach Canadian copyright law thay have to follow that pesky due process of going via a court of law rather than just impounding it and sorting it out later. This pesky legal oversight and due process thing gets in the way too much.
It is like that whole innocent until proven guilty thing.
Oops, should have used preview. You get my point though I presume.
An explanation as to why it would be bad for Intel if they had no competition would be useful as I can see no reason why it would. I wish my business had no competition as you can be damn sure we would be raising prices pretty quickly. Not by much, but we would not have to be so aggressive when competing for tenders if we knew we were the only company that could put in a bid.