As long as I've known him, he's taken maybe $100 out of the till, pretty much every day, for over 20 years.
He earns more than me just on his "$100 a day tax-free bonus". I run a business too and support my wife and kid. I'd love to not pay any national insurance or income tax and reduce my company tax bill to boot, but my ethics don't let me. I left my previous job partly because it was about helping richer people screw-over poorer people. I'm also sure I'd end up completely screwed by the Revenue (UK).
Don't be torn. Morality isn't about overall financial outcomes. If I'm a perfectly respectable citizen in every way except I go shoplifting at the weekend, that doesn't make the immorality of shoplifting any different.
If he can't feed his family (a situation I've faced) then there are moral routes, second job, close the business and take welfare allowances, &c..
Scarily I can well imagine Google could finance landing on and claiming sovereignty of the moon (Moon-gle perhaps?). But I'm guessing this would be illegal under some local law up-holding some international treaty... but Google ads on the moon might even pay-off!
So you're saying that people who refuse to pay taxes for services will pay, voluntarily pay, 40% of earnings every month in perpetuity without winning anything in return?
What do all those millionaires want with entering a lottery, or have I misunderstood and it's only the poor which will provide state funding?
Currently, according to Wikipedia, state lotteries partially fund education. So what of healthcare, communications (roads, waterways), emergency services, defence, welfare,...
Many vendors would issue rebate checks in the business name if you purchased certain quantities of food and supplies. These rebates never appeared on the invoices.
You mean they never appeared in your accounts. But they appear in the vendors accounts. I think you've been lucky. It's surely easy for the IRS to say your monthly takings were X from customers as invoiced; but in fact the banked amount of cash from customers was X - Y because amount Y of cheques was included. There's a clear deficit of Y cash, where is it? Even if your own accounts don't show the amount Y of cheques, your vendors accounts show it.
One could of course then use zapper (or similar) to get rid of the "till record" for the amount Y, but then you could have done that anyway without bothering with the quick switch of cheques for cash.
"I don't cheat on my taxes, and I have to pay more because of the people who do."
That assumes tax rates have a direct relationship to anything other than what those imposing the taxes decide upon.
So you think your government is hoarding your cash and not using it to pay for public services? Tax rates relate to how many pay because government decides not what percentage of peoples wages it wants but how much money they want [to spend on services, etc.].
[oversimplified] All the departments submit their budgets, add it up, get an astronomical sum, go back and tell them to cut it by X%, new sum is Y Trillion. Look at the shortfall versus last years gross tax income, add on a couple of percentage points to fuel, tobacco, low-rate income tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty... "Bob's your Uncle"... Y Trillion.
This year, 6% don't pay 50% of their taxes. You borrow and then next year bump all those percentages some more to pay for the 3% shortfall, +loan and maintenance.
The government must act quickly to stop this reprehensive tax evasion.
Tax evasion by multi-million pound businesses is reprehensible isn't it? It's illegal at least.
The article:
A 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years, federal prosecutors say.
So, we're not talking mom'n'pop businesses here. In a way it's a double taking - the people who're up 20 million dollars haven't paid business (VAT, NIC) OR personal taxes.
In a second dialogue box, the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till. The program then calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Then it suggests how much cash to take, and it erases the entries from the books and a corresponding amount in orders, so the register balances.
Restaurants can do this, presumably, because they can account for the extra stock purchased by claiming it as wastage. But that should be easy to spot for anything more than a small percentage of greed.
Other businesses I guess could use breakages or other disposals but stock needs to be accounted for too. Unless they're just services I suppose.
Why bother with dead-tree versions? There are thousands of FREE online tutorials/guides/how-to/wikis that these kids can learn from. For any of them that don't have 'net access at home, use the schools copiers/printers to give them something to bring home.
Because it's far better to mash together a load of disparate resources and infringe peoples copyright(*) spending [unpaid] hours copyrighting/editing/publishing/printing your own booklets than it is to get a consistent well rounded resource?
* a lot of stuff that is "free" online is just paid for with advertising (like non-member Slashdot); because it's freely available online doesn't mean you can print it out for free. A school teacher will likely have to get a specific note of the copyright holders approval.
Teach them dammit, don't just hand out a book and hope they figure it out. Earn the right to be called a teacher. Perhaps then when the smart ones ask "Why..?" you can really answer.
You need to teach them, but whilst doing it you're teaching the most able to teach themselves. The ultimate goal being that they can just pick up a text book, match with other resources (in which I include the teacher/lecturer) and learn by themselves. Not using a textbook is like not using code libraries, IMO.
I don't ever recall (since high school, from 11 years #) having a teacher/professor/lecturer that didn't use a textbook. Some of those wrote the textbooks they used, but they all used them. Using a textbook, doesn't mean you teach from it, incidentally, often it means "read chapters 13-14 in Nelkon before the next lesson" or "if you're struggling with this work through the problems in Reed&Wright at the end of chapter 4 and see me next time", etc..
# I've done a B.Sc(Hons) and a graduate level Diploma.
Why limit the media used. Request an online (local or internet) version of the textbook too. Even if it's only the [paginated] text it will fill in for indexing failures and would (depending on rights) allow excerpts to be added to experiment notes, used on the projector/white-board, and I'm sure used for lots of other things.
Me, on bad phone line: My email address is z;45-r_0oisdgf*yihh@hotmail.com Person: Wtf??? Can I read that back. Person: zcolonfortea5... Me, interrupting: No, hang on it's z;, as in the symbol, 4 5 - r _... Person, repeating as we go: z ; 4 5 dash r underscore....
Result — I never get ham because noone can ever transcribe my address.
It turns out religious people have a special term for people who challenge established notions. They're called heretics. Special prizes for that? Excommunication, exile, burning, torture, and death.
Notice any difference here?
Turns out that one of those branded a heretic was this guy called Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe you've heard of him?
Voltaire (a favourite of Nobel I gather): "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."
I find myself close to Voltaires position in that my belief in God is empirical. My faith has as strong a foundation as my faith in the world existing or the existence of "other minds". It would be entirely illogical, inasmuch as anything follows from my sense-data, for me to believe that God does not exist.
Just because someone has a crazy idea doesn't mean that it has any merit.
FWIW, it doesn't mean it doesn't have merit either.
Otherwise you must also support teaching Stork Theory in Sex Education or alchemy in chemistry class. And that God doesn't exist should be preached in church.
"Stork Theory" [lol] is rather readily falsified. Alchemy is the study of creation of gold from base metals, so it's probably more usefully placed in a [nuclear] physics class - but it is "taught" in chemistry as the starting point for modern chemical understanding, which it was.
"And that God doesn't exist should be preached in church" - you're making a slight error in the comparison. Creationists generally wish it to be mentioned that a deistic creation is not contrary to observation; or at least that there is a large body of people who believe that. This IMO would be a great way to start a cosmology class: what do you believe, what's the basis of that belief, how could we falsify it, what observations could we make, why wasn't Hubble ridiculed for blatantly fabricating his results [lol],... .
Every Christian church mentions that people exist who don't [yet] believe in God.
The third is --- how can we allow them to be disposed of in an incinerator if we won't permit research?
Many people choose for themselves to be disposed of in an incinerator and not to be used for medical research. So that means we'd be treating aborted early embryos as we treat sentient humans.
2nd - those opposed to ESCR are presumably opposed to creating excess embryos. Personally I'm opposed to fertility treatment period, does the world really need more humans that much.
1st - it is abortion but those in research presumably don't like to call it that for "marketing" reasons.
I don't think any of those are the point, but I'm not sure exactly what the point is either.
But embryonic stem cell research does not depend on material from abortions.
Blastocytes [never heard them called blastocyst before, sp?] are still living and human and so I contend that it is abortion, you terminate the life of the blactocyte. Just because it's a smaller collection of cells, that doesn't make it not termination. It does change peoples opinion as to the moral gravity of the act, but attempting to hide behind jargon is rather objectionable IMO. You abort a mass of living human cells.
These are quite literally cells that can't develop into babies without considerable further medical intervention.
That argument is not specific to blastocytes and early fetuses though. You could argue that for a child at 24 weeks gestation is just a mass of cells and couldn't survive without medical intervention - you'd be right. You could argue that for anyone on life support.
That's that.
What interests me (as this, the number of cells, is clearly not the logical premise) is what is the point at which someone who supports abortion believes that abortion is no longer justified and what change has occurred to mark that point? Recent events in the UK show it is not viability as there is now a marginal overlap between legal abortion limits and viability.
The stem cells don't come from abortions, they come from the embryos grown in test tubes in fertility clinics.
And how do they make those human embryos, by combining sperm and egg. They are potential human forms which are terminated, they are aborted. Whether you think that's right or not (I'm guessing most here couldn't care less). Calling it "expiring" is a little stupid IMO.
I guess this is flamebait, but it's still factual. What AC means is that the stems cells come from very early abortions (preimplantation) and so in his opinion they don't count.
If you're still stuck in the 70's development methodologies, good luck with that.
Ha ha ha. Except "iterative development models" whether agile/extreme/whatever aren't then producing beta releases and you need to use another term. Waterfall dev models have always had feedback loops, make those loops tighter (or actually using them) isn't that great a paradigm shift.
Oh and I'm not a programmer (other than basic web apps) but I learnt my programming in the late 1990's.
Poor analogy: It's like you're selling fried eggs, except you give them out half raw and just say they're fried. It may be the same constituents but it's still not fried then, even if you go back and fry it eventually.
Why would you WANT people to browse the web with anything other than the most up to date version?
I wouldn't. We're talking about businesses needing an obsolete rendering for their old business apps. That apparently is stopping the IE team from implementing a fully standards compliant browser. If you cut these guys off and say "just use the old IE for your internal app, or upgrade it for standards compliance, if you want to use it more securely [with FF/Op/Konq/Saf]" then you can properly implement the most recent IE as a web browser/web app platform.
IE9 could then be as standards compliant as any other browser (no CSS/JS hacks, yay!).
My take on compat mode is that it means web apps don't get upgraded and so folks are still locked to IE and hence locked to MS.
Prove me wrong, MS. I'll hold my breath; I look great in blue.
Lolz.
I always assume that programmers know what Beta means and use it properly. There are all sorts of other terms to use for the other things. "Proof of concept code", "Developer release", "Alpha",...
If a baker tells me he's made a loaf of bread I don't assume he doesn't know what a loaf is. But you're right, oft misused.
I'm a web developer. I'll be holding a grudge against Microsoft for years to come. But even I can recognise that there has been actual progress. You don't have to invent reasons to criticise them, their actions are appalling enough without having to resort to making things up.
Yes!
Is there a i-developed-a-website-that-had-to-support-IE support group?
Couldn't those who wish to keep obsolete web apps going use the obsolete browser apps to "execute" them and leave the new tech for those that want to use properly written web apps?
If you've got a program written for IE4, noone is stopping you from not upgrading.
Someone remind me why we care about IE8 agian? [sic]
Because corporations use it. Because "we" are web designers and web programmers that waste a significant amount of time on IE (yes even IE7 needs a bit extra) for no extra features.
Uptake of IE7 suggest about 40% market share in 6 months once MS decide to push it. You can't choose not to support that.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as I've known him, he's taken maybe $100 out of the till, pretty much every day, for over 20 years.
He earns more than me just on his "$100 a day tax-free bonus". I run a business too and support my wife and kid. I'd love to not pay any national insurance or income tax and reduce my company tax bill to boot, but my ethics don't let me. I left my previous job partly because it was about helping richer people screw-over poorer people. I'm also sure I'd end up completely screwed by the Revenue (UK).
Don't be torn. Morality isn't about overall financial outcomes. If I'm a perfectly respectable citizen in every way except I go shoplifting at the weekend, that doesn't make the immorality of shoplifting any different.
If he can't feed his family (a situation I've faced) then there are moral routes, second job, close the business and take welfare allowances, &c..
Google starts plans for Moon base ...
Scarily I can well imagine Google could finance landing on and claiming sovereignty of the moon (Moon-gle perhaps?). But I'm guessing this would be illegal under some local law up-holding some international treaty ... but Google ads on the moon might even pay-off!
How about: "I don't want to sell it but I could transfer it you free for a $200,000 admin fee"?
Or perhaps lease it to them?
But do you want an alien biting off your genitals just to say hello: "what do you mean you can't regrow genitals at will, uh sorry!"
So you're saying that people who refuse to pay taxes for services will pay, voluntarily pay, 40% of earnings every month in perpetuity without winning anything in return?
What do all those millionaires want with entering a lottery, or have I misunderstood and it's only the poor which will provide state funding?
Currently, according to Wikipedia, state lotteries partially fund education. So what of healthcare, communications (roads, waterways), emergency services, defence, welfare, ...
Many vendors would issue rebate checks in the business name if you purchased certain quantities of food and supplies. These rebates never appeared on the invoices.
You mean they never appeared in your accounts. But they appear in the vendors accounts. I think you've been lucky. It's surely easy for the IRS to say your monthly takings were X from customers as invoiced; but in fact the banked amount of cash from customers was X - Y because amount Y of cheques was included. There's a clear deficit of Y cash, where is it? Even if your own accounts don't show the amount Y of cheques, your vendors accounts show it.
One could of course then use zapper (or similar) to get rid of the "till record" for the amount Y, but then you could have done that anyway without bothering with the quick switch of cheques for cash.
"I don't cheat on my taxes, and I have to pay more because of the people who do."
That assumes tax rates have a direct relationship to anything other than what those imposing the taxes decide upon.
So you think your government is hoarding your cash and not using it to pay for public services? Tax rates relate to how many pay because government decides not what percentage of peoples wages it wants but how much money they want [to spend on services, etc.].
[oversimplified] All the departments submit their budgets, add it up, get an astronomical sum, go back and tell them to cut it by X%, new sum is Y Trillion. Look at the shortfall versus last years gross tax income, add on a couple of percentage points to fuel, tobacco, low-rate income tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty ... "Bob's your Uncle" ... Y Trillion.
This year, 6% don't pay 50% of their taxes. You borrow and then next year bump all those percentages some more to pay for the 3% shortfall, +loan and maintenance.
The government must act quickly to stop this reprehensive tax evasion.
Tax evasion by multi-million pound businesses is reprehensible isn't it? It's illegal at least.
The article:
A 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years, federal prosecutors say.
So, we're not talking mom'n'pop businesses here. In a way it's a double taking - the people who're up 20 million dollars haven't paid business (VAT, NIC) OR personal taxes.
In a second dialogue box, the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till. The program then calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Then it suggests how much cash to take, and it erases the entries from the books and a corresponding amount in orders, so the register balances.
Restaurants can do this, presumably, because they can account for the extra stock purchased by claiming it as wastage. But that should be easy to spot for anything more than a small percentage of greed.
Other businesses I guess could use breakages or other disposals but stock needs to be accounted for too. Unless they're just services I suppose.
Why bother with dead-tree versions? There are thousands of FREE online tutorials/guides/how-to/wikis that these kids can learn from. For any of them that don't have 'net access at home, use the schools copiers/printers to give them something to bring home.
Because it's far better to mash together a load of disparate resources and infringe peoples copyright(*) spending [unpaid] hours copyrighting/editing/publishing/printing your own booklets than it is to get a consistent well rounded resource?
* a lot of stuff that is "free" online is just paid for with advertising (like non-member Slashdot); because it's freely available online doesn't mean you can print it out for free. A school teacher will likely have to get a specific note of the copyright holders approval.
Teach them dammit, don't just hand out a book and hope they figure it out. Earn the right to be called a teacher. Perhaps then when the smart ones ask "Why..?" you can really answer.
You need to teach them, but whilst doing it you're teaching the most able to teach themselves. The ultimate goal being that they can just pick up a text book, match with other resources (in which I include the teacher/lecturer) and learn by themselves. Not using a textbook is like not using code libraries, IMO.
I don't ever recall (since high school, from 11 years #) having a teacher/professor/lecturer that didn't use a textbook. Some of those wrote the textbooks they used, but they all used them. Using a textbook, doesn't mean you teach from it, incidentally, often it means "read chapters 13-14 in Nelkon before the next lesson" or "if you're struggling with this work through the problems in Reed&Wright at the end of chapter 4 and see me next time", etc..
# I've done a B.Sc(Hons) and a graduate level Diploma.
Why limit the media used. Request an online (local or internet) version of the textbook too. Even if it's only the [paginated] text it will fill in for indexing failures and would (depending on rights) allow excerpts to be added to experiment notes, used on the projector/white-board, and I'm sure used for lots of other things.
The second question is: will Google Chrome run natively under GNU/Linux, and if so, using which GUI toolkit?
Maybe QT4?
It's good enough for Konqueror which is also using WebKit.
Me, on bad phone line: My email address is z;45-r_0oisdgf*yihh@hotmail.com ... ;, as in the symbol, 4 5 - r _ ... ....
Person: Wtf??? Can I read that back.
Person: zcolonfortea5
Me, interrupting: No, hang on it's z
Person, repeating as we go: z ; 4 5 dash r underscore
Result — I never get ham because noone can ever transcribe my address.
It turns out religious people have a special term for people who challenge established notions. They're called heretics. Special prizes for that? Excommunication, exile, burning, torture, and death.
Notice any difference here?
Turns out that one of those branded a heretic was this guy called Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe you've heard of him?
Voltaire (a favourite of Nobel I gather): "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."
I find myself close to Voltaires position in that my belief in God is empirical. My faith has as strong a foundation as my faith in the world existing or the existence of "other minds". It would be entirely illogical, inasmuch as anything follows from my sense-data, for me to believe that God does not exist.
Just because someone has a crazy idea doesn't mean that it has any merit.
FWIW, it doesn't mean it doesn't have merit either.
Otherwise you must also support teaching Stork Theory in Sex Education or alchemy in chemistry class. And that God doesn't exist should be preached in church.
"Stork Theory" [lol] is rather readily falsified. Alchemy is the study of creation of gold from base metals, so it's probably more usefully placed in a [nuclear] physics class - but it is "taught" in chemistry as the starting point for modern chemical understanding, which it was.
"And that God doesn't exist should be preached in church" - you're making a slight error in the comparison. Creationists generally wish it to be mentioned that a deistic creation is not contrary to observation; or at least that there is a large body of people who believe that. This IMO would be a great way to start a cosmology class: what do you believe, what's the basis of that belief, how could we falsify it, what observations could we make, why wasn't Hubble ridiculed for blatantly fabricating his results [lol], ... .
Every Christian church mentions that people exist who don't [yet] believe in God.
Cause they're all equally valid -- none of them more or less than the others.
You believe all explanation for an event to be equally valid? What's that, like, many-worlds under time-reversal??
Personally I believe there is one true explanation for any particular event.
The third is --- how can we allow them to be disposed of in an incinerator if we won't permit research?
Many people choose for themselves to be disposed of in an incinerator and not to be used for medical research. So that means we'd be treating aborted early embryos as we treat sentient humans.
2nd - those opposed to ESCR are presumably opposed to creating excess embryos. Personally I'm opposed to fertility treatment period, does the world really need more humans that much.
1st - it is abortion but those in research presumably don't like to call it that for "marketing" reasons.
I don't think any of those are the point, but I'm not sure exactly what the point is either.
But embryonic stem cell research does not depend on material from abortions.
Blastocytes [never heard them called blastocyst before, sp?] are still living and human and so I contend that it is abortion, you terminate the life of the blactocyte. Just because it's a smaller collection of cells, that doesn't make it not termination. It does change peoples opinion as to the moral gravity of the act, but attempting to hide behind jargon is rather objectionable IMO. You abort a mass of living human cells.
These are quite literally cells that can't develop into babies without considerable further medical intervention.
That argument is not specific to blastocytes and early fetuses though. You could argue that for a child at 24 weeks gestation is just a mass of cells and couldn't survive without medical intervention - you'd be right. You could argue that for anyone on life support.
That's that.
What interests me (as this, the number of cells, is clearly not the logical premise) is what is the point at which someone who supports abortion believes that abortion is no longer justified and what change has occurred to mark that point? Recent events in the UK show it is not viability as there is now a marginal overlap between legal abortion limits and viability.
The stem cells don't come from abortions, they come from the embryos grown in test tubes in fertility clinics.
And how do they make those human embryos, by combining sperm and egg. They are potential human forms which are terminated, they are aborted. Whether you think that's right or not (I'm guessing most here couldn't care less). Calling it "expiring" is a little stupid IMO.
I guess this is flamebait, but it's still factual. What AC means is that the stems cells come from very early abortions (preimplantation) and so in his opinion they don't count.
But then when the discoveries are made, who profits? The big pharma corps or the public purse?
It's great to have public funding provided the public then get the full profits.
If you're still stuck in the 70's development methodologies, good luck with that.
Ha ha ha. Except "iterative development models" whether agile/extreme/whatever aren't then producing beta releases and you need to use another term. Waterfall dev models have always had feedback loops, make those loops tighter (or actually using them) isn't that great a paradigm shift.
Oh and I'm not a programmer (other than basic web apps) but I learnt my programming in the late 1990's.
Poor analogy: It's like you're selling fried eggs, except you give them out half raw and just say they're fried. It may be the same constituents but it's still not fried then, even if you go back and fry it eventually.
Why would you WANT people to browse the web with anything other than the most up to date version?
I wouldn't. We're talking about businesses needing an obsolete rendering for their old business apps. That apparently is stopping the IE team from implementing a fully standards compliant browser. If you cut these guys off and say "just use the old IE for your internal app, or upgrade it for standards compliance, if you want to use it more securely [with FF/Op/Konq/Saf]" then you can properly implement the most recent IE as a web browser/web app platform.
IE9 could then be as standards compliant as any other browser (no CSS/JS hacks, yay!).
My take on compat mode is that it means web apps don't get upgraded and so folks are still locked to IE and hence locked to MS.
Prove me wrong, MS. I'll hold my breath; I look great in blue.
Lolz.
I always assume that programmers know what Beta means and use it properly. There are all sorts of other terms to use for the other things. "Proof of concept code", "Developer release", "Alpha", ...
If a baker tells me he's made a loaf of bread I don't assume he doesn't know what a loaf is. But you're right, oft misused.
I'm a web developer. I'll be holding a grudge against Microsoft for years to come. But even I can recognise that there has been actual progress. You don't have to invent reasons to criticise them, their actions are appalling enough without having to resort to making things up.
Yes!
Is there a i-developed-a-website-that-had-to-support-IE support group?
Couldn't those who wish to keep obsolete web apps going use the obsolete browser apps to "execute" them and leave the new tech for those that want to use properly written web apps?
If you've got a program written for IE4, noone is stopping you from not upgrading.
Someone remind me why we care about IE8 agian? [sic]
Because corporations use it. Because "we" are web designers and web programmers that waste a significant amount of time on IE (yes even IE7 needs a bit extra) for no extra features.
Uptake of IE7 suggest about 40% market share in 6 months once MS decide to push it. You can't choose not to support that.