I second this one. Do not go to franchised accounting firms which focus primarily on doing simple personal income taxes such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt (its actually possible none of the people there are trained accountants (with, say, a college degree or experience in the field)). What you want is to talk to a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). A CPA is required to stay up to date on tax law and other accounting information by participating in a minimum number of continuing professional educational hours per year. The certification process is on a state-by-state basis (generally) and requires a lot of knowledge both of accounting practices for businesses AND individuals, but also ethics and law. You could compare it to the bar exam for lawyers.
They should be able to advise you on the tax implications of reporting your income as personal hobby income (which is allowed, and doesn't require you to call yourself a business) versus different incorporation schemes. They will be able to tell you what will be involved and what your liabilities will be. They can advise you, based on your income and situation, which possibility might be best for you. They can prepare all your paperwork for you, if necessary, although some may not be comfortable with filing the legal forms and will ask you to get a lawyer (and they will probably be able to provide references). And, like the parent mentioned, accounting services are a deduction. They should be able to provide you an estimate of cost or a description of how they bill their services when you call them.
A lot of CPAs will provide a short consultation for free or nearly free. You don't have much to lose by getting professional advice in this case. I might be biased, my dad is a retired CPA:) To get started, CPAs have a professional association - the AICPA. It's like the ADA (dental association) of public accountants. You may want to ask your possible accountant if he or she is a member of the AICPA. You definitely want to ask them if they are certified and up to date with their certification responsibilities. Do check the Better Business Bureau in your area. Be prepared for your consultation by bringing along a copy of your last personal tax return, pertinent financial information for 2005 including your employment income and your ad revenue, and any documents you have made projecting your revenue in 2006. If you're married, you'll want your spouse's information as well.
If you're not in the US, well, I doubt any of this is useful information!
How do these devices get explained at school then?
Poorly created diagrams. Sad but true! There's also a heavy handed amount of 'here is what is going on at the microscopic level' jumping directly to 'here is the system level', often with complete handwaving at the intermediate steps.
I guess a 'stable' of Sci-Fi space travel would include, say, ion drives, fusion drives, warp drives, mass drives...
It's a silly typo at any rate. I'm trying to decide how 'stable' OR 'rediculous' are phonetic spellings, perhaps they first require someone to have clogged sinuses.
As a female engineer (a computer engineer, at that!) I find these sorts of programs humiliating. I was asked to participate in one while I was still a student, and agreed to attend the conference without knowing too much about it. It ended up being a giant handholding session for elementary and middle school girls, where they told them plenty of things that weren't true. The 'panelists' (I was one) were expected to give happy answers to all the questions. When asked if I had ever had to deal with someone treating me poorly because I was female, I gave the honest answer and was immediately shushed (I once interned at a facility full of old white guys who pretty much just wanted me to make their coffee, not help them with their code). A large part of the conference focused on all the 'cool free stuff' women can get for entering as an engineering major. The whole thing was pretty terrible, especially since most of the girls attending didn't know what computer engineering was, but the conf spent more time talking about stuff they could get instead of about what it was about.
ANY sort of discrimination (whether in someone's favor or against) only serves to perpetuate any gaps that might be involved. I can't see anyone feeling good about themselves and their degree if they achieved it by switching out classes for 'easier' or 'softer' classes. There is nothing inherently different, intelligence-wise, between an intelligent female and an intelligent male - the only difference is in preference.
I'm probably biased, though. I'm one of those raving lunatics that gets pissed off when they come out with pink versions of otherwise gender-neutral equipment, "for girls".
While it is desirable to have autorun disabled, its even more desirable to have it disabled by disabling it yourself, rather than as a side effect of other software crunching around on your machine.
Hmmm. I am also 23, and pondering where I'll go after I save up enough money doing this software engineering thing. And teaching is definitely on the list!
While I wasn't quite old enough to enjoy RUN, I do fondly remember getting BASIC programs to write in my 3-2-1 Contact mag.. they'd even serialize them sometimes, or have tie-ins to one of the other stories. I wonder if they even make such fine children's magazines anymore.
That was great! But seriously, just pay the kids to do it for you. Duh! That's what that many kids are for! I swear my parents had me for the sole purpose of doing house and yardwork. Blargh.
I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Exactly! I can remember when I was a kid, the height of parental control was.. the keyboard lock. Anyone remember those? Funky little cylindrical key which switched between allowing the keyboard to be recognized and not? That one had me foiled for maybe a few days, until I decided to take the computer apart and see how it worked.. and realized it was quite simple to just disconnect the wire - the default state was recognizing the keyboard.
Of course, then they started just taking the keyboard away. That was a little more tough to get around.
Applescript is your friend, and most of your cron job stuff should move over to OS X just fine, just read the man page;)
On a related note, and perhaps you are not looking for opinions on this, but if your children are doing their homework, eating their vegetables, finishing their chores, etc. then limiting their computer usage will probably feel like more of a punishment than a guideline. You might have better experience monitoring them in person, rather than scripting something. This is, of course, unless you're doing this because of a scarce resource. Depending on how determined your children are, and their skills, you might find them circumventing you within a short period of time (fostering problem solving skills and self reliance, but at the expense of your authority).
Okay, let's do it. Let's call people to their highest and best, not accommodate them at their lowest and least. The first thing I want to bring up is that the complaint generator is like a magician who produces a dove in one hand, while the other hand is busy trying to manipulate public understanding of academicism. Did the complaint generator get dropped on its head when it was young, or did it take massive doses of drugs to believe that all it takes to solve our social woes are shotgun marriages, heavy-handed divorce laws, and a return to some mythical 1950s Shangri-la? The only clear answer to emerge from the conflicting, contradictory stances that it and its underlings take is that its orations are the opiate of the vitriolic. Ignorance is bliss. This may be why the complaint generator's surrogates are generally all smiles. And there you have it. The complaint generator's canards are bottomlessly bad.
ROFL. Excellent point, mate. Don't forget, spelling will be completely voluntary, as well. Maybe we'll devolve language back into pictures, because we all know a picture is worth 1000 words!
Three titles in particular stand out for creativity, for fun, for addictiveness, and for their lack of 360ness.
How about "Three titles in particular stand out for creativity, fun, addictiveness, and lack of 360ness." ?
Did anyone else stumble over this (and other) weird sentence structure in this review? At least it was still in a parallel format (technically speaking).
It's less a lack of our vocal chord structure as a lack of brain structure; regardless, I'm still trying to puzzle out how genetic engineering leads to grafting, unless you think we'll grow spare vocal chords in a petri dish and then slap them on there.. Also, if I recall correctly, chimp brains have less communication between the two hemispheres of their brains than we do, and the activity in their brains when processing auditory input is different. Don't forget, more goes into our speech, physically, than just the chords - the tongue and soft palette are also important.
In any case, I, too, wait for the day when we can communicate more effectively with other species which are obviously intelligent. I think this will have more to do with either working with their existing facilities (and perhaps creating an electronic 'translator') or by genetically engineering their stock directly. The second path will take much, much more time, and would be highly controversial in today's current political climate.
You might be interested in the writings of David Brin, specifically his Uplift series (Sundiver, Startide Rising, Uplift War, et al.) which deals directly with these ideas.
1. understand how what they are doing impacts things
5. have them interact w/ people outside of dev. If your developers interact with customers they understand how what they're doing impacts things and they get to see the rewards of people being satisfied by their good work.
These two items go hand-in-hand. And they are very, very important for a lot of developers, especially younger ones. Personally speaking, I would be much, much, MUCH more satisfied with my work experience if I knew anything about the people who would be using the software, or whether it would even BE used. Besides, perhaps its un-geeky to say, but sometimes I get tired of being stuck in a room full of people who do exactly what I do, with the only relief being meetings with management. It makes it feel a little bit like working in a sweatshop, or a factory. Right now I'm just a cog...
As has been true since the start, iPod owners mostly fill up their players from their own CD collections
I'm not sure why they are surprised with this? Did they honestly think people would only put newly-purchased music on their iPods (apparently so)? Why wouldn't I want to put all the music I already listen to on it? When the iPods first came out, it seemed like the biggest buyers were people with too much money on their hands that bought every CD that ever appealed to them, and were tired of shopping for n-disc changers for their cars and jukebox systems for their homes. The whole POINT is that they can hold albums and albums and albums of music without carrying around all the accompanying cruft (CD organizers, anyone?). iTMS was just icing on the cake, a way to explore new music and purchase a track or two without buying the whole album. If I had to make a guess, I'd say iTMS completely revitalized the 'singles' market.
We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players
"the... growth... we should"... hmmm.. I think its time to hire new analysts, right? Just because someone came up with some numbers doesn't mean its a bonafide, set in stone, destined fact. If this commentary is referring just to the current quarter, then they should REALLY give themselves a kick in the pants - sure iPods and other MP3 players are flying off the shelves: people are buying them for christmas gifts. They aren't even being used yet! They're probably wrapped up and under a tree, or being shipped, etc.
PAH. I give up. Someone needs to get the music industry to grow up and stop whining that someone played with their toy: it's time for them to eat their vegetables and wear regular underwear instead of diapers. This should be accompanied by a talk about how life doesn't play by the rules you make up for yourself. Sheesh.
I suspect you are being sarcastic, what with your 'known fact' statement, but I feel like clarifying for some of the less astute around here. I wish arguing was truly like math, since coming up with one exception to your statement would completely disprove it. But anyway, try this one on for size:
1. Purchase songs from iTMS in dreaded DRM'd AAC format
2. Burn to music CD
3. Use in any CD player that can read your burned discs (I would say 'any CD player' except I've encountered a few in my days that didn't like this or that brand etc. etc. of CD-R's)
Thus, you are listening to 'songs for the iPod' on 'other hardware'.
If you're particularly technically inclined, you can even rip your music cd into a non-DRM'd format.. although it takes a little more effort.
I think what the person was trying to say was that a movement towards more product placement would be extremely detrimental to shows like Firefly. I think they make a very valid point - most any show that doesn't take place in a time period near current time would have an extremely difficult time with advertising. Bringing in advertising dollars is always a goal of network (and cable) executives. Your show can't support our newfangled 'in the show' ads? The axe for you, then!
The end result would be a dramatic reduction of enjoyable fantasy, science fiction, historical, western, etc. etc. shows, in favor of sitcoms and 'reality' tv.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this one. Do not go to franchised accounting firms which focus primarily on doing simple personal income taxes such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt (its actually possible none of the people there are trained accountants (with, say, a college degree or experience in the field)). What you want is to talk to a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). A CPA is required to stay up to date on tax law and other accounting information by participating in a minimum number of continuing professional educational hours per year. The certification process is on a state-by-state basis (generally) and requires a lot of knowledge both of accounting practices for businesses AND individuals, but also ethics and law. You could compare it to the bar exam for lawyers.
:) To get started, CPAs have a professional association - the AICPA. It's like the ADA (dental association) of public accountants. You may want to ask your possible accountant if he or she is a member of the AICPA. You definitely want to ask them if they are certified and up to date with their certification responsibilities. Do check the Better Business Bureau in your area. Be prepared for your consultation by bringing along a copy of your last personal tax return, pertinent financial information for 2005 including your employment income and your ad revenue, and any documents you have made projecting your revenue in 2006. If you're married, you'll want your spouse's information as well.
They should be able to advise you on the tax implications of reporting your income as personal hobby income (which is allowed, and doesn't require you to call yourself a business) versus different incorporation schemes. They will be able to tell you what will be involved and what your liabilities will be. They can advise you, based on your income and situation, which possibility might be best for you. They can prepare all your paperwork for you, if necessary, although some may not be comfortable with filing the legal forms and will ask you to get a lawyer (and they will probably be able to provide references). And, like the parent mentioned, accounting services are a deduction. They should be able to provide you an estimate of cost or a description of how they bill their services when you call them.
A lot of CPAs will provide a short consultation for free or nearly free. You don't have much to lose by getting professional advice in this case. I might be biased, my dad is a retired CPA
If you're not in the US, well, I doubt any of this is useful information!
If this ever really launched, I give the advertising industry one month to catch up and start spamming the players with lots and lots and lots of ads.
How do these devices get explained at school then?
Poorly created diagrams. Sad but true! There's also a heavy handed amount of 'here is what is going on at the microscopic level' jumping directly to 'here is the system level', often with complete handwaving at the intermediate steps.
I guess a 'stable' of Sci-Fi space travel would include, say, ion drives, fusion drives, warp drives, mass drives...
It's a silly typo at any rate. I'm trying to decide how 'stable' OR 'rediculous' are phonetic spellings, perhaps they first require someone to have clogged sinuses.
Yes, oddly enough I blogged about this back on December 14th, when the name was announced. Seems like slashdot is behind on its game.
* They also rejected my submission about the service at that time. Their loss! We could have all been sniggering about this for weeks now!
As a female engineer (a computer engineer, at that!) I find these sorts of programs humiliating. I was asked to participate in one while I was still a student, and agreed to attend the conference without knowing too much about it. It ended up being a giant handholding session for elementary and middle school girls, where they told them plenty of things that weren't true. The 'panelists' (I was one) were expected to give happy answers to all the questions. When asked if I had ever had to deal with someone treating me poorly because I was female, I gave the honest answer and was immediately shushed (I once interned at a facility full of old white guys who pretty much just wanted me to make their coffee, not help them with their code). A large part of the conference focused on all the 'cool free stuff' women can get for entering as an engineering major. The whole thing was pretty terrible, especially since most of the girls attending didn't know what computer engineering was, but the conf spent more time talking about stuff they could get instead of about what it was about.
ANY sort of discrimination (whether in someone's favor or against) only serves to perpetuate any gaps that might be involved. I can't see anyone feeling good about themselves and their degree if they achieved it by switching out classes for 'easier' or 'softer' classes. There is nothing inherently different, intelligence-wise, between an intelligent female and an intelligent male - the only difference is in preference.
I'm probably biased, though. I'm one of those raving lunatics that gets pissed off when they come out with pink versions of otherwise gender-neutral equipment, "for girls".
Just FYI, mailing a letter will cost 0.39 after Jan 8.
It hasn't been covered much, so I've been just telling everyone who makes any reference to the postal rates..
While it is desirable to have autorun disabled, its even more desirable to have it disabled by disabling it yourself, rather than as a side effect of other software crunching around on your machine.
Hmmm. I am also 23, and pondering where I'll go after I save up enough money doing this software engineering thing. And teaching is definitely on the list!
Odd.
Man, that totally let the air out of my "I love McCain!" balloon.
While I wasn't quite old enough to enjoy RUN, I do fondly remember getting BASIC programs to write in my 3-2-1 Contact mag.. they'd even serialize them sometimes, or have tie-ins to one of the other stories. I wonder if they even make such fine children's magazines anymore.
That was great! But seriously, just pay the kids to do it for you. Duh! That's what that many kids are for! I swear my parents had me for the sole purpose of doing house and yardwork. Blargh.
I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Exactly! I can remember when I was a kid, the height of parental control was.. the keyboard lock. Anyone remember those? Funky little cylindrical key which switched between allowing the keyboard to be recognized and not? That one had me foiled for maybe a few days, until I decided to take the computer apart and see how it worked.. and realized it was quite simple to just disconnect the wire - the default state was recognizing the keyboard.
Of course, then they started just taking the keyboard away. That was a little more tough to get around.
Applescript is your friend, and most of your cron job stuff should move over to OS X just fine, just read the man page ;)
On a related note, and perhaps you are not looking for opinions on this, but if your children are doing their homework, eating their vegetables, finishing their chores, etc. then limiting their computer usage will probably feel like more of a punishment than a guideline. You might have better experience monitoring them in person, rather than scripting something. This is, of course, unless you're doing this because of a scarce resource. Depending on how determined your children are, and their skills, you might find them circumventing you within a short period of time (fostering problem solving skills and self reliance, but at the expense of your authority).
Wow. That thing is fantastic! I am cracking up.
Okay, let's do it. Let's call people to their highest and best, not accommodate them at their lowest and least. The first thing I want to bring up is that the complaint generator is like a magician who produces a dove in one hand, while the other hand is busy trying to manipulate public understanding of academicism. Did the complaint generator get dropped on its head when it was young, or did it take massive doses of drugs to believe that all it takes to solve our social woes are shotgun marriages, heavy-handed divorce laws, and a return to some mythical 1950s Shangri-la? The only clear answer to emerge from the conflicting, contradictory stances that it and its underlings take is that its orations are the opiate of the vitriolic. Ignorance is bliss. This may be why the complaint generator's surrogates are generally all smiles. And there you have it. The complaint generator's canards are bottomlessly bad.
This is very true! However, I also like having the backup copy on the CD, and they play well in my car.
ROFL. Excellent point, mate. Don't forget, spelling will be completely voluntary, as well. Maybe we'll devolve language back into pictures, because we all know a picture is worth 1000 words!
Three titles in particular stand out for creativity, for fun, for addictiveness, and for their lack of 360ness.
How about "Three titles in particular stand out for creativity, fun, addictiveness, and lack of 360ness." ? Did anyone else stumble over this (and other) weird sentence structure in this review? At least it was still in a parallel format (technically speaking).
It's less a lack of our vocal chord structure as a lack of brain structure; regardless, I'm still trying to puzzle out how genetic engineering leads to grafting, unless you think we'll grow spare vocal chords in a petri dish and then slap them on there.. Also, if I recall correctly, chimp brains have less communication between the two hemispheres of their brains than we do, and the activity in their brains when processing auditory input is different. Don't forget, more goes into our speech, physically, than just the chords - the tongue and soft palette are also important.
In any case, I, too, wait for the day when we can communicate more effectively with other species which are obviously intelligent. I think this will have more to do with either working with their existing facilities (and perhaps creating an electronic 'translator') or by genetically engineering their stock directly. The second path will take much, much more time, and would be highly controversial in today's current political climate.
You might be interested in the writings of David Brin, specifically his Uplift series (Sundiver, Startide Rising, Uplift War, et al.) which deals directly with these ideas.
1. understand how what they are doing impacts things
5. have them interact w/ people outside of dev. If your developers interact with customers they understand how what they're doing impacts things and they get to see the rewards of people being satisfied by their good work.
These two items go hand-in-hand. And they are very, very important for a lot of developers, especially younger ones. Personally speaking, I would be much, much, MUCH more satisfied with my work experience if I knew anything about the people who would be using the software, or whether it would even BE used. Besides, perhaps its un-geeky to say, but sometimes I get tired of being stuck in a room full of people who do exactly what I do, with the only relief being meetings with management. It makes it feel a little bit like working in a sweatshop, or a factory. Right now I'm just a cog...
This will work fine for the older version of fairplay. I've had a few issues with the newer one, though.
As has been true since the start, iPod owners mostly fill up their players from their own CD collections
... growth ... we should"... hmmm.. I think its time to hire new analysts, right? Just because someone came up with some numbers doesn't mean its a bonafide, set in stone, destined fact. If this commentary is referring just to the current quarter, then they should REALLY give themselves a kick in the pants - sure iPods and other MP3 players are flying off the shelves: people are buying them for christmas gifts. They aren't even being used yet! They're probably wrapped up and under a tree, or being shipped, etc.
I'm not sure why they are surprised with this? Did they honestly think people would only put newly-purchased music on their iPods (apparently so)? Why wouldn't I want to put all the music I already listen to on it? When the iPods first came out, it seemed like the biggest buyers were people with too much money on their hands that bought every CD that ever appealed to them, and were tired of shopping for n-disc changers for their cars and jukebox systems for their homes. The whole POINT is that they can hold albums and albums and albums of music without carrying around all the accompanying cruft (CD organizers, anyone?). iTMS was just icing on the cake, a way to explore new music and purchase a track or two without buying the whole album. If I had to make a guess, I'd say iTMS completely revitalized the 'singles' market.
We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players
"the
PAH. I give up. Someone needs to get the music industry to grow up and stop whining that someone played with their toy: it's time for them to eat their vegetables and wear regular underwear instead of diapers. This should be accompanied by a talk about how life doesn't play by the rules you make up for yourself. Sheesh.
I suspect you are being sarcastic, what with your 'known fact' statement, but I feel like clarifying for some of the less astute around here. I wish arguing was truly like math, since coming up with one exception to your statement would completely disprove it. But anyway, try this one on for size:
1. Purchase songs from iTMS in dreaded DRM'd AAC format
2. Burn to music CD
3. Use in any CD player that can read your burned discs (I would say 'any CD player' except I've encountered a few in my days that didn't like this or that brand etc. etc. of CD-R's)
Thus, you are listening to 'songs for the iPod' on 'other hardware'.
If you're particularly technically inclined, you can even rip your music cd into a non-DRM'd format.. although it takes a little more effort.
Perhaps now we get an inkling of what Google is doing, buying up all that dark fiber.
I think what the person was trying to say was that a movement towards more product placement would be extremely detrimental to shows like Firefly. I think they make a very valid point - most any show that doesn't take place in a time period near current time would have an extremely difficult time with advertising. Bringing in advertising dollars is always a goal of network (and cable) executives. Your show can't support our newfangled 'in the show' ads? The axe for you, then!
The end result would be a dramatic reduction of enjoyable fantasy, science fiction, historical, western, etc. etc. shows, in favor of sitcoms and 'reality' tv.