Exactly. And what's worse, taxing the number of miles travels provides a disincentive to getting a fuel-efficient car. I live in Oregon, and bike 6 miles to work in the sunny half of the year, and I was disgusted when this was proposed last year.
Also, good luck getting people to comply with installation of GPS in their cars. Oregon may be a democratic state, but we have a fair share of anarchists and other people who value their privacy. Remember, Oregonians are the same ones who champion Right to Die and Medical Marijuana; that sort of mentality doesn't lend itself to 24/7 government monitoring via GPS.
the thing about AC is that it's very easy to adjust it's voltage with a transformer. It's also safer than DC of the same voltage, so unless you really want to run heavy lines, we're better off with AC for the moment.
Say what? I remember reading about the battle between Edison (DC proponent) and Tesla (AC proponent), and how Edison would stage gruesome electrocutions of animals to demonstrate how unsafe alternating current is. I know the lethal dosage of current is very low (0.1 Amps?) but that DC generally doesn't have the voltage to push the electrons through a human body. 100 milliamps is not a lot of current; I'm pretty sure car batteries use a lot more.
Also, I thought that the biggest advantage of AC was the ability to deliver electricity over longer power lines without so much signal loss, since a rectifier turns it easily into DC. But as far as I know, transforming the voltage works well with both AC and DC. Ironically, those same characteristics that allow AC to be propagated over such long distance without huge energy loss are also responsible for the lethality of AC.
And yeah, 24% of our coastline is a huge area. But, to be fair, they did say "available wave energy," and many places are ill-suited to that use, so maybe they're only talking about locations with big differences between high and low tide.
you are almost right...AZT actually terminates the synthesis of DNA, not RNA.
Thanks for the correction. I am now working full time in biology, but that is NOT what I studied in school. It's been a crash course in biotech, only without the cohesiveness and compehensiveness of an actual class. So there are big gaps in my biology knowledge.
Your remark about AZT's other uses reminded me that thalidomide is back in use again, to fight cancer this time. Of course, it's now contraindicated for use in pregnant women.
My mistake. It is perfectly fine to use luciferase / luciferan for live-animal imaging. The company Xenogen seems to specialize in the field. I guess they do inject the mice with luciferin, and I guess the photons are able to get outside of the mouse tissue. At least some of the photons.
This article was too dumbed-down to be useful to me. The author couldn't seem to get all the details straight. For example:
The scientists also inserted a glowing firefly protein into the virus to track its progress. They used a light-detection "cooled charged-coupled device," or CCCD, camera to look at the glowing protein inside live mice. Because the protein was attached to the gene therapy, the researchers could see that the treatment had hit its mark.
First, what freaking protein are they talking about? Luciferase (a non-fluorescent enzyme) does come from fireflies, but you can't visualize it without luciferin, and it doesn't seem reasonable to pump a mouse full of luciferin for visualization. I'm thinking it was more likely Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which comes from a jellyfish, not a firefly. And it really makes no sense at all to say that a protein is attached to a gene therapy.
Here is a paper about using luciferase, but I don't see any mention of using it in vivo in mice.
Also, both luciferase and GFP produce green light, which is readily absorbed by tissue. If it were infrared, it would be more believable. Maybe they removed the tumors and put sections into dishes of luciferin? Hard to say with such scant information.
To answer your original question about whether the virus actually attacks cancer cells, well, cancer is a class of illnesses. Generally one of the important regulatory proteins is screwed up by DNA damage, so the cells become immortal. Depending on the mechanism by which the cancer became immortal, the treatment will vary. Cancer cells are totally screwed up. They have indeterminate numbers of chromosomes, they overexpress certain proteins by the truckload, and some of them (such as the HeLa cell line, named after the dead woman from whom they were taken, Henrietta Lacks) can be easily cultured in vitro. The article specifically mentioned metastisized melanoma, which I guess overexpressed this p-glycoprotein. You'd have to change the target to be appropriate for the type of cancer.
That seems pretty unlikely, because AZT is pretty damn toxic. You wouldn't want to take it just as a precaution. It is true that health care workers who've been exposed (e.g. needle prick from an HIV patient) go on a short-term drug cocktail intended to weaken the virus enough for their immune systems to handle it before it gains a foothold.
AZT is pretty toxic, because it's a modified thymidine (the T in ATGC), so your body uses that instead of real thymidine when replicating DNA, I believe. But in RNA, the nucleosides at AUGC (uracil replacing thymidine), so I may be a bit mixed up. So your cells don't crank out working viral RNA, but the same mechanism prevents your body from making working RNA.
I don't know how much of a role the patient's immune system plays in preventing infection.
Also, I've debated this with one of my coworkers numerous times: whether a virus can be considered "alive" is questionable, so you might want to say that the virus is inactivated quickly when exposed to air, rather than "killed," which implies it was once alive. Or maybe you'd rather insist virii are lifeforms.
Thanks. It makes more sense now. I kept coming back to the case sensitivity issue screwing up compilation on HFS+ (not UFS, of course), but I didn't realize BSDs were more limited regarding which filesystems you can install.
So far, I've noticed two incompatibilities between BSD and Linux while trying to compile a few apps (still got a lot to learn): ps -ef doesn't work (have to use ps-aux) and ldd doesn't work (use otool -L instead).
Yeah, I would have been pretty surprised if NetBSD didn't run. I can totally see why Linux would be better from the filesystem point of view, but doesn't the microkernel convey some added stability, even if it isn't as fast as the latest Linux kernel? Isn't it a bit mutually exclusive to have your server be as fast as possible and also as reliable as possible? Just asking--I've got an account on a shared host, but I don't run any servers of my own. The shared host runs RedHat, btw, not *BSD.
If you're familiar with linux, it's a hell of a lot better for most server things than OS X. And it's free.
I've heard apt-get is nice, but if you want a solid server, wouldn't it be fine to use Darwin? No need to use the Aqua GUI if you really don't like it, and no need to use the HFS+ filesystem if you don't like it. Use UFS filesystem, open up X11 if you want a non-Aqua GUI, and voila! A capable BSD box. So really, what does linux have that BSD doesn't have, as far as server capabilities? And please do enlighten me if I'm missing something beyond the easy installation of apt-get or emerge or whatever.
Oh, and if you really don't want to use the Mach-like microkernel, doesn't FreeBSD or NetBSD run on PPC?
This seems to be as good a place as any to try to clear up some misunderstandings. The company where I work is trying to hire a bunch of experts in Quantum Dots, and I've seen probably a dozen presentations from different researchers applying for jobs in the past six months.
First, I know the terms Q-dots is a trademark, and I think "Quantum Dots" might be trademarked by the same company. So don't give them so much mindshare, since that company isn't really even on the "forefront" of the technology. Call them fluorescent semiconductor nanocrystals, because it actually describes what they are, so people won't think they're being used in quantum computing (not yet, at least).
Second, these nanocrystals blink. Every researcher I've seen speak about these things mentions the blinking, but only recently did I hear someone give an explanation: poor surface coating allows electrons to leak out of the the crystal.
Third, Semiconductor nanocrystals are made of several layers. The central layer is usually Cadmium Selenide (CdSe), coated by Zinc Selenide. The second coating has a higher band gap energy, so electrons get "stuck" inside the nanocrystal and then emit photons when they drop back to the ground state. Unfortunately, these nanocrystals are very sticky without more coatings. Often a PEG (polyethylene glycol) linker is stuck on the outside of the ZnSe surface to inhibit these non-specific binding events.
Last, semiconductor nanocrystals are cool because you can excite them at many wavelengths, but the emitted photon's wavelength (color) depends on the size of the crystal being illuminated. The bigger the crystal, the redder the emission. That makes them size tunable, and easily multiplexible. Eventually, that could be really useful for quantum computing (or digital video, possibly).
Eight Caviars in one year? Are you joking or do you work for Seagate?
I was slightly exaggerating. I can honestly say I know someone who went through three WD Caviars in one year (~1998) and then gave up replacing them. The loss of data was more expensive than getting WD to send a replacement.
You said your Caviar was still working almost 8 years after purchase. That puts your purchase at right about 1998, the nadir of WD Caviars. I stand by what I say. WD may have vastly improved, warranting an award in 2004, but the drive that you purchased was most definitely an anomaly for lasting over a year.
I've thought a lot about this, myself. Since you want reasonable anonymnity, it's doable. For starters, it would help to have a blog hosted on a friend's server. If you register your own domain, you legally have to use your real name. But if you piggyback on a friend's domain, a "whois" search won't find you.
The biggest problem I know of is future employers looking you up after you've submitted your resume. That happened to one of my former roommates. He basically ceased to write, because he didn't want his conservative family to know exactly what he was up to. Such as not attending church regularly, or participating in other morally questionable activities (questionable from the point of view of his family).
If you're concerned about privacy, it's always a good idea to make sure you're in charge of the server. Blogger and such may protect your free speech to a point, but I went out of my way to have my website hosted in another country (i.e., Canada) so Barney Fife law enforcement officers might have a bit more trouble abusing the Patriot Act if they wanted server logs.
Consider also that a corporation owning the money is kind of useless... eventually for the money to be of use it is going to have to be paid to a person who is then going to be taxed on it.
Agreed--for the most part. Corporations can and do use their money for lobbying, ensuring that legislators pass laws favorable to corporations. It's the same people within corporations that dream up these tax evasion schemes who are also among the highest paid employees. If corporations' profit was more evenly distributed, and everyone who received compensation paid taxes on that, I wouldn't have anything to complain about. But I believe any money a corporation uses to line the pockets of a lobbyist could be spent better, to actually get something useful done.
I agree the whole situation is not simple, but right now corporations have managed to almost completely avoid paying ANY taxes.
It only took me a second to find
this:
Corporations will pay about $136 billion in federal taxes this fiscal year. But, according to a study by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), a Washington research group, tax loopholes will save them $171 billion.
Now why, exactly, are corporations allowed to be subsidized by the peons who do pay taxes?
I'm not sure you want corporations to be taxed based on gross income as opposed to profit.
I never said that's what I wanted--just that there is a huge discrepancy between the wage tax that ordinary people have to pay (no deductions for life expenses, including food, medicine, rent) and the profit tax that corporations pay. What would be more fair would be similar deductions for wage earners, NOT gross income tax for corporations.
If you're waiting, that means you don't have enough money to just buy a new computer every year or so. Personally, I get at least four years out every computer. Four years from now, your computer is going to be four years old.
That about describes the way I buy computers. I did about a year's worth of research, compared prices of the top contenders (IBM Thinkpad, Sony Vaio, Apple Powerbook G4) and the Powerbook was actually the best deal. I got the AppleCare Protection Plan, and it's been more than worth the money. Not because of the phone help (not usually too useful for a knowledgable user, but I did need some help resetting my P-RAM in Open Firmware) but because of hardware repair. After about 2.5 years of reliable service, my laptop started freaking out, freezing a la Windows. That was very disturbing, since I've come to expect smooth sailing with OS X.
I sent my laptop to the shop (free shipping) and they replaced the hard drive. Stupid, because I had mentioned to an Apple rep. that this freezing problem occurred even when booting off an external hard drive. Anyway, I sent it back again, and when it was returned they had replaced the mainboard, CPU, the part around the edges where all the paint chips, and a couple other parts. It feels like I have a new laptop.
That was not the first time I used AppleCare. Previous, the insulation on the power cord cracked, and Apple sent me a new one promptly. I just stuck the old one in the same box and sent it back (again, free shipping!)
Anyway, in spite of getting my laptop back to normal, it was time for a new machine. Got a dual 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5, since it has to last for the next four years.
But mostly because you wrote that you have no use for an iPod. You do realize you could always use it as a FireWire hard drive without ever playing an mp3, right? Given its size and storage capabilities, it's not such a bad deal. If you think it's out of the reasonable price range, that's your opinion. But if you use computers, you have a use for portable storage.
Just for the record here, if this is truly a U.S. headquartered corporation, then they can only avoid taxes on that Caribbean subsidiary as long as the money stays outside the U.S. Once it's moved into the U.S., it's taxable.
And yes, I know that Wikipedia is not the standard-bearer of journalistic accuracy.
Regardless, see this
stub article about shell corporations. I had to look at the google cached version because of Wikipedia latency problems. Apparently, another name for a shell company is a Specified Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).
Interesting that you think this practice would "dry up pretty quickly" if the US didn't impose taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries. That would just legitimize shell companies, which would soon be earning 100% of the corporation's income, seeing as it would all be tax-free. How are you going to otherwise quantify exactly how much of a multinational corporation's income came from sales in the US? Did I say income? Because I meant profit. Although private citizens' incomes are taxed, a corporation only has to pay taxes on its profit. That will only be fair once I can deduct living expenses (rent, groceries, non-luxury utilities) from my personal income.
But again, why is the practice you describe bad? Why do you feel that companies trying to minimize their costs in taxes is wrong? Do you, when filling out your own taxes, refuse legitimate deductions and/or exemptions? Do you pay more than you have to? Why is it a virtue for you, but a vice for a company?
The key word there is legitimate because the triangle trading scheme is not. You make it sound like it's easy to catch people using these schemes, but it is not. By their very nature, multinational corporations exploit (that's right, I said it) the laws (or lack of laws) in the countries in which they operate. If a company sells a product in the US, then the profit from that product should be taxed. But these companies manipulate their incomes so that the US subsidiary makes no money on paper, but the tax-free Caribbean branch does.
So who is that last corporate bigwig you heard of that went to jail for these practices? The CEOs of Worldcom, Tyco, and Enron are in hot water now, but for entirely different types of scams--more like the ones I mentioned to inflate the stock value, rather than avoid taxes. The Worldcom CEO had used his stock as collateral on a $400 million loan, so forced his accountants to cook the books and inflate profits (of course, he blames it on the accountants). The only reason someone caught on was that Worldcom was in big financial trouble (likewise Enron, Tyco) and couldn't play that game forever. But if a company is already in good financial standing, doesn't really need its stock to increase, then the triangle trading scheme just makes the US subsidiary look like it's doing poorly--on paper. No one is going to investigate.
Believe me, if I had the resources, I'd gladly set up a scheme to avoid paying taxes, because I know that a) the government wastes over 90% of the money I pay them, and b) why should I bear the brunt of the tax burden while these corporations are making out like bandits?
I would be much more willing to pay taxes if I saw my money was being used wisely, and that it wasn't just the poor folks who pay taxes.
but modding with something other than C or a hex editor is pretty new. At the high school I attended, a couple of guys did a special project to mod Doom using our school as the layout. The bosses were different school authorities. It was a damn good job for 1995, considering they used a near-prototypical digital camera for wall textures and such.
In case you're wondering, this school was not your average
public school.
I hate using anything besides pine, in general, although I'm warming to gmail. If I access my mail from a different computer at different times, I certainly don't want POP mail downloaded to my work machine and then deleted from the server. But I also don't want to leave all messages on the server, then RE-download them when I get home. Webmail and something like pine are the only solutions I can think of, and I generally don't like the webmail interface. If I'm typing in a text box, hitting tab should enter a tab, not switch from the text box to the "submit" button.
Archiving webmail is a rather annoying problem, though--especially with yahoo, since they cut off POP access for all free accounts. I'd really like a webmail application with well-behaved tabs that allowed me to select multiple messages and download them to my home computer, in a neat folder with each message a text file named according to sender and date. How hard would that be, really?
But, predominantly, Multi-nationals are in the business of reducing wages, labour and environmental standards, and exploitation.
Gee. And here I thought they were in the business of actually producing products. It's amazing that Coca-Cola can actually produce soda, what with all the time they spend figuring out how to screw their employees, despoil the environment and generally bring about armageddon.
I don't think multinational corporations really intend to destroy organized labor or the environment, but they do intend to make money. And sometimes pesky environmental and labor laws of one country get in the way, so they just set up in a country without all those restrictions. And unless someone blows the whistle on them, they will gladly sell you products made by slave labor.
That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is triangle trading schemes that let corporations sell products to themselves at a "loss" so they can claim they made no money. Almost all multinational corporations do this; it's no secret.
In case you aren't familiar with the scheme, the multinational company has subsidiary X in the US, its main headquarters. In some third world country, they have subsidiary Y, which produces, say, tennis shoes. Then they have subsidiary Z, a tiny, unofficial office in the Virgin Islands. Subsidiary Y sells the shoes to subsidiary Z for $3 a pair. Then subsidiary Z sells those same shoes to subsidiary X for $50 a pair. But since subsidiary Y is not officially part of the multinational, so it appears the company is LOSING $47 on each pair of shoes. They sell them in the US for $97 a pair, and the net balance is zero. No taxes to pay. Or in some cases, when there is a negative net balance, they ask for bailout money from the government (and that money sure didn't come from taxes the corporation paid).
You can easily imagine a company using subsidiary Y in the opposite way, to artificially inflate corporation income if necessary to meet Wall Street's expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, good luck getting people to comply with installation of GPS in their cars. Oregon may be a democratic state, but we have a fair share of anarchists and other people who value their privacy. Remember, Oregonians are the same ones who champion Right to Die and Medical Marijuana; that sort of mentality doesn't lend itself to 24/7 government monitoring via GPS.
What someone really ought to do is use ROT-7.5 twice to decrypt ROT-13.
Also, I thought that the biggest advantage of AC was the ability to deliver electricity over longer power lines without so much signal loss, since a rectifier turns it easily into DC. But as far as I know, transforming the voltage works well with both AC and DC. Ironically, those same characteristics that allow AC to be propagated over such long distance without huge energy loss are also responsible for the lethality of AC.
And yeah, 24% of our coastline is a huge area. But, to be fair, they did say "available wave energy," and many places are ill-suited to that use, so maybe they're only talking about locations with big differences between high and low tide.
Thanks for the correction. I am now working full time in biology, but that is NOT what I studied in school. It's been a crash course in biotech, only without the cohesiveness and compehensiveness of an actual class. So there are big gaps in my biology knowledge.
Your remark about AZT's other uses reminded me that thalidomide is back in use again, to fight cancer this time. Of course, it's now contraindicated for use in pregnant women.
My mistake. It is perfectly fine to use luciferase / luciferan for live-animal imaging. The company Xenogen seems to specialize in the field. I guess they do inject the mice with luciferin, and I guess the photons are able to get outside of the mouse tissue. At least some of the photons.
The scientists also inserted a glowing firefly protein into the virus to track its progress. They used a light-detection "cooled charged-coupled device," or CCCD, camera to look at the glowing protein inside live mice. Because the protein was attached to the gene therapy, the researchers could see that the treatment had hit its mark.
First, what freaking protein are they talking about? Luciferase (a non-fluorescent enzyme) does come from fireflies, but you can't visualize it without luciferin, and it doesn't seem reasonable to pump a mouse full of luciferin for visualization. I'm thinking it was more likely Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which comes from a jellyfish, not a firefly. And it really makes no sense at all to say that a protein is attached to a gene therapy. Here is a paper about using luciferase, but I don't see any mention of using it in vivo in mice.
Also, both luciferase and GFP produce green light, which is readily absorbed by tissue. If it were infrared, it would be more believable. Maybe they removed the tumors and put sections into dishes of luciferin? Hard to say with such scant information.
To answer your original question about whether the virus actually attacks cancer cells, well, cancer is a class of illnesses. Generally one of the important regulatory proteins is screwed up by DNA damage, so the cells become immortal. Depending on the mechanism by which the cancer became immortal, the treatment will vary. Cancer cells are totally screwed up. They have indeterminate numbers of chromosomes, they overexpress certain proteins by the truckload, and some of them (such as the HeLa cell line, named after the dead woman from whom they were taken, Henrietta Lacks) can be easily cultured in vitro. The article specifically mentioned metastisized melanoma, which I guess overexpressed this p-glycoprotein. You'd have to change the target to be appropriate for the type of cancer.
I don't know how much of a role the patient's immune system plays in preventing infection.
Also, I've debated this with one of my coworkers numerous times: whether a virus can be considered "alive" is questionable, so you might want to say that the virus is inactivated quickly when exposed to air, rather than "killed," which implies it was once alive. Or maybe you'd rather insist virii are lifeforms.
So far, I've noticed two incompatibilities between BSD and Linux while trying to compile a few apps (still got a lot to learn): ps -ef doesn't work (have to use ps-aux) and ldd doesn't work (use otool -L instead).
Yeah, I would have been pretty surprised if NetBSD didn't run. I can totally see why Linux would be better from the filesystem point of view, but doesn't the microkernel convey some added stability, even if it isn't as fast as the latest Linux kernel? Isn't it a bit mutually exclusive to have your server be as fast as possible and also as reliable as possible? Just asking--I've got an account on a shared host, but I don't run any servers of my own. The shared host runs RedHat, btw, not *BSD.
I've heard apt-get is nice, but if you want a solid server, wouldn't it be fine to use Darwin? No need to use the Aqua GUI if you really don't like it, and no need to use the HFS+ filesystem if you don't like it. Use UFS filesystem, open up X11 if you want a non-Aqua GUI, and voila! A capable BSD box. So really, what does linux have that BSD doesn't have, as far as server capabilities? And please do enlighten me if I'm missing something beyond the easy installation of apt-get or emerge or whatever.
Oh, and if you really don't want to use the Mach-like microkernel, doesn't FreeBSD or NetBSD run on PPC?
First, I know the terms Q-dots is a trademark, and I think "Quantum Dots" might be trademarked by the same company. So don't give them so much mindshare, since that company isn't really even on the "forefront" of the technology. Call them fluorescent semiconductor nanocrystals, because it actually describes what they are, so people won't think they're being used in quantum computing (not yet, at least).
Second, these nanocrystals blink. Every researcher I've seen speak about these things mentions the blinking, but only recently did I hear someone give an explanation: poor surface coating allows electrons to leak out of the the crystal.
Third, Semiconductor nanocrystals are made of several layers. The central layer is usually Cadmium Selenide (CdSe), coated by Zinc Selenide. The second coating has a higher band gap energy, so electrons get "stuck" inside the nanocrystal and then emit photons when they drop back to the ground state. Unfortunately, these nanocrystals are very sticky without more coatings. Often a PEG (polyethylene glycol) linker is stuck on the outside of the ZnSe surface to inhibit these non-specific binding events.
Last, semiconductor nanocrystals are cool because you can excite them at many wavelengths, but the emitted photon's wavelength (color) depends on the size of the crystal being illuminated. The bigger the crystal, the redder the emission. That makes them size tunable, and easily multiplexible. Eventually, that could be really useful for quantum computing (or digital video, possibly).
I was slightly exaggerating. I can honestly say I know someone who went through three WD Caviars in one year (~1998) and then gave up replacing them. The loss of data was more expensive than getting WD to send a replacement.
You said your Caviar was still working almost 8 years after purchase. That puts your purchase at right about 1998, the nadir of WD Caviars. I stand by what I say. WD may have vastly improved, warranting an award in 2004, but the drive that you purchased was most definitely an anomaly for lasting over a year.
You must be the only person to have one of those. Most people tended to go through eight Caviars in one year. Go figure.
Example usage:
"I don't know why Microsoft keeps touting Digital Rights Management--everyone knows obsecurity is no security at all."
Anyone second the motion?
The biggest problem I know of is future employers looking you up after you've submitted your resume. That happened to one of my former roommates. He basically ceased to write, because he didn't want his conservative family to know exactly what he was up to. Such as not attending church regularly, or participating in other morally questionable activities (questionable from the point of view of his family).
If you're concerned about privacy, it's always a good idea to make sure you're in charge of the server. Blogger and such may protect your free speech to a point, but I went out of my way to have my website hosted in another country (i.e., Canada) so Barney Fife law enforcement officers might have a bit more trouble abusing the Patriot Act if they wanted server logs.
Agreed--for the most part. Corporations can and do use their money for lobbying, ensuring that legislators pass laws favorable to corporations. It's the same people within corporations that dream up these tax evasion schemes who are also among the highest paid employees. If corporations' profit was more evenly distributed, and everyone who received compensation paid taxes on that, I wouldn't have anything to complain about. But I believe any money a corporation uses to line the pockets of a lobbyist could be spent better, to actually get something useful done.
I agree the whole situation is not simple, but right now corporations have managed to almost completely avoid paying ANY taxes. It only took me a second to find this:
Now why, exactly, are corporations allowed to be subsidized by the peons who do pay taxes?I'm not sure you want corporations to be taxed based on gross income as opposed to profit.
I never said that's what I wanted--just that there is a huge discrepancy between the wage tax that ordinary people have to pay (no deductions for life expenses, including food, medicine, rent) and the profit tax that corporations pay. What would be more fair would be similar deductions for wage earners, NOT gross income tax for corporations.
That about describes the way I buy computers. I did about a year's worth of research, compared prices of the top contenders (IBM Thinkpad, Sony Vaio, Apple Powerbook G4) and the Powerbook was actually the best deal. I got the AppleCare Protection Plan, and it's been more than worth the money. Not because of the phone help (not usually too useful for a knowledgable user, but I did need some help resetting my P-RAM in Open Firmware) but because of hardware repair. After about 2.5 years of reliable service, my laptop started freaking out, freezing a la Windows. That was very disturbing, since I've come to expect smooth sailing with OS X.
I sent my laptop to the shop (free shipping) and they replaced the hard drive. Stupid, because I had mentioned to an Apple rep. that this freezing problem occurred even when booting off an external hard drive. Anyway, I sent it back again, and when it was returned they had replaced the mainboard, CPU, the part around the edges where all the paint chips, and a couple other parts. It feels like I have a new laptop.
That was not the first time I used AppleCare. Previous, the insulation on the power cord cracked, and Apple sent me a new one promptly. I just stuck the old one in the same box and sent it back (again, free shipping!)
Anyway, in spite of getting my laptop back to normal, it was time for a new machine. Got a dual 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5, since it has to last for the next four years.
Please clarify if I missed your point.
Interesting that you think this practice would "dry up pretty quickly" if the US didn't impose taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries. That would just legitimize shell companies, which would soon be earning 100% of the corporation's income, seeing as it would all be tax-free. How are you going to otherwise quantify exactly how much of a multinational corporation's income came from sales in the US? Did I say income? Because I meant profit. Although private citizens' incomes are taxed, a corporation only has to pay taxes on its profit. That will only be fair once I can deduct living expenses (rent, groceries, non-luxury utilities) from my personal income.
So who is that last corporate bigwig you heard of that went to jail for these practices? The CEOs of Worldcom, Tyco, and Enron are in hot water now, but for entirely different types of scams--more like the ones I mentioned to inflate the stock value, rather than avoid taxes. The Worldcom CEO had used his stock as collateral on a $400 million loan, so forced his accountants to cook the books and inflate profits (of course, he blames it on the accountants). The only reason someone caught on was that Worldcom was in big financial trouble (likewise Enron, Tyco) and couldn't play that game forever. But if a company is already in good financial standing, doesn't really need its stock to increase, then the triangle trading scheme just makes the US subsidiary look like it's doing poorly--on paper. No one is going to investigate.
Believe me, if I had the resources, I'd gladly set up a scheme to avoid paying taxes, because I know that a) the government wastes over 90% of the money I pay them, and b) why should I bear the brunt of the tax burden while these corporations are making out like bandits?
I would be much more willing to pay taxes if I saw my money was being used wisely, and that it wasn't just the poor folks who pay taxes.
In case you're wondering, this school was not your average public school.
Try this instead
Archiving webmail is a rather annoying problem, though--especially with yahoo, since they cut off POP access for all free accounts. I'd really like a webmail application with well-behaved tabs that allowed me to select multiple messages and download them to my home computer, in a neat folder with each message a text file named according to sender and date. How hard would that be, really?
That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is triangle trading schemes that let corporations sell products to themselves at a "loss" so they can claim they made no money. Almost all multinational corporations do this; it's no secret.
In case you aren't familiar with the scheme, the multinational company has subsidiary X in the US, its main headquarters. In some third world country, they have subsidiary Y, which produces, say, tennis shoes. Then they have subsidiary Z, a tiny, unofficial office in the Virgin Islands. Subsidiary Y sells the shoes to subsidiary Z for $3 a pair. Then subsidiary Z sells those same shoes to subsidiary X for $50 a pair. But since subsidiary Y is not officially part of the multinational, so it appears the company is LOSING $47 on each pair of shoes. They sell them in the US for $97 a pair, and the net balance is zero. No taxes to pay. Or in some cases, when there is a negative net balance, they ask for bailout money from the government (and that money sure didn't come from taxes the corporation paid).
You can easily imagine a company using subsidiary Y in the opposite way, to artificially inflate corporation income if necessary to meet Wall Street's expectations.
Well, that's good to know. What in the world did I download from RealNetworks?