I would like to see all formats widely used on the Internet to be open with readily available published specifications.
Doing so would help level the playing field since anyone could write software reading and writing the specifications without having to get permission from someone else.
Go for a job interview, get a bit of a tour
on
Lucas's New HQ
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· Score: 1
I've always thought it would be fun to go on job interviews to some places just to get a chance to look around. It's not like you'd actually take a job if offered. And, then again, you might.
The definitions have certainly changed over the years.
The liberals of today are not the liberals of the 19th century. Probably the closest thing to the liberals of the 19th century are the libertarians of today.
The Republican Party really didn't move to the right. That implies they became more conservative.
They moved, but in a very radical direction, not a conservative direction.
The Republican Party is much more radical than anything else. They only thing that makes the Republicans palatable is the only other major alternative, the Democrats.
On-time and to spec is not enough. The buggiest code I've ever seen was done on-time and to spec. It worked fine as long as you did everything according to the spec. But just as soon as you did something else, it broke badly.
Of course, you could attribute that to bad specs. Even if the specs had been better, I don't believe that code would have been any less rotten.
But you're right about those advanced features that are not portable. It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that if portability is a concern, you write portable code.
To me, the real concern about advanced features is whether or not the poor slob who ends up maintaining the code fully understands everything the original programmer did and why. That's why God invented the comment.
But I think that it's a whole lot easier to teach someone to add meaningful comments and to stay away from non-portable features than to write really solid and resilient code.
Say one of them writes 200 lines of intricate technical detail, taking advantage of advanced features offered by the programming language, while the other writes 20 lines using nothing but the most basic language constructs. Which of these is the smart programmer?
That depends. Does the 200 lines of code take care of all the possible errors that can occur and the 20 lines handle no errors or maybe only the most common?
I've long felt that you can really tell how good a programmer someone really is by how they handle potential errors in their production code.
The really bad programmers don't really handle any errors. If there is a problem, the whole program comes crashing down.
The average programmers handle the most likely errors. When the program encounters an error, they may or may not print a rather cryptic error message, but in either case, it is meaningless to the everyone but themselves.
The really great programmers handle just about every possible error. When their program encounters something that can't be handled, it shuts down gracefully and provides useful error messages that provides the user with information that is succinct but useful and guides in the right direction to help fix the program or notify the programmer.
As far as I'm concerned, just about any other measure of quality of code is decidedly secondary to this.
Of course, for a quick personal hack, one would normally just handle the probable errors.
There are at least three or four different sales tax rates in Texas. In some cases, different sales taxes may apply to customers who are next door neighbors of each other if, for example, the city limits runs between their houses.
Also, can it take care of the fact that some items may be taxable in some states and not in others?
It seems to me that for every item in the on-line store, you would have to identify whether or not it is taxable in each state.
For example, regular grocery items are often sales tax free. But some states do charge sales taxes on regular grocery items.
if I buy something from Border's, reguardless of their physical location I am supposed to pay taxes on that for my state.
There is also the fact that some items may be taxable in some states but not in other states.
If I understand it correctly, regular grocery items, a five pound sack of flour for example, are taxable in Oklahoma and not taxable in Texas.
Suppose you have an on-line store in California and have a physical presence in Oklahoma and in Texas. If you sell a sack of flour to a customer in Oklahoma and a sack of flour to a customer in Texas, you would be required to collect sales taxes on the sack of flour from the Oklahoma customer but not from the Texas customer.
The ruling deals with state sales taxes, NOT local taxes.
The discussion had, by this point, morphed a bit away from the ruling. Clearly, any discussion of Texas or any other state but California is not about the ruling.
Thus no matter where you live in Texas you all pay the same ammount of sales tax to the state, the other taxes that you list are for local governments, counties, cities, whatever. Thus there are only really 50 different possible taxes and it is very easy to determine what tax should be paid for the given item.
If you are required to collect sales taxes in Texas, you are required by law to collect any applicable local sales taxes as well. I suppose that a company with no physical presence in Texas might be able to get by with charging the state tax rate of 6.25% and remitting that to the state. But most such companies would just avoid the heacaches anyway.
All of this is just a load of BS though since WHATEVER you buy you are supposed to pay the state taxes on;
There are exceptions. If you buy something for resale, you don't pay sales taxes. The sales taxes are instead collected on the final sale of the item.
All of these laws are just so that companies can help people NOT pay taxes they should be paying.
No.
They are about the fact that a business that has no physical location in a state cannot, at this time, be required to collect sales taxes on behalf of that state.
When you buy something at a store, the store is essentially acting on behalf of the state or as an agent of the state by collecting the sales tax. If they do not collect sales taxes when they should, the state will go after them for failing to collect the sales tax. If the store collected the sales tax but didn't turn them over to the state, the state will also go after them.
A company can, at least in Texas, take care of their own sales taxes. In that case, vendors don't charge sales taxes. It doesn't matter if it is local, mail order, internet order, or what. The company itself calculates the sales taxes and pays them.
I don't really understand why. I think it is probably that it makes it easier to pay the correct taxes and not overpay them. If the company is a manufacturer, whoever places the order wouldn't have to be knowledgeable about what is taxable (for example, tools) and what is not taxable (for example, items consumed in the manufacturing process). Instead, that determination is made by accounting who are usually considerably more knowledgeable about the applicable laws.
In Texas, many companies handle their own sales taxes. That is, no taxes are charged on any purchase by the vendor whether the vendor is in state or out of state.
The company itself determines what all they purchased and remits the proper taxes to the proper local and state taxing jurisdictions.
In a previous job, I used to carry a stack of sales tax exempt forms with me in my car. When I bought something on behalf of the company, I would have to determine whether or not a sales tax was due on it. If no sales tax was due on one or more items, I'd give them a copy of the tax exemption form for their files.
Just about everything I bought was used in manufacturing our product. The determination of what was exempt and what was not exempt was based on whether or not it was consumed in the building of a product. For example, we had to pay sales taxes on the tools used in building the product but not on the materials used in building the product.
I must have been doing it correctly since we were audited by the Texas Comptroller's Office and they found no problems with any of my procedures and purchases.
Believe it or not, there's software specifically for that purpose.
The only way it can do so accurately is to get input from the user.
I've noticed that a few busineses ask for the zip code and then, if there is more than one applicable sales tax within the zip code, provide another prompt to ask precisely where you live in order to determine the exact sales tax and to which jurisdiction it is to be paid.
Either that, or be able to determine from the whole address, not just the zip code, which sales tax to charge and to whom it is to be paid.
In Texas, for example, the sales tax rates in my zip code are 8.25% in the city limits and 6.25% outside the city limits. There are some zip codes that have three different sales tax rates depending on the location within that zip code.
Even if the sales tax is 8.25% in the zip code, the 2% local sales tax may be due to different local taxing authorities depending on the address. For example, you could have a city sales tax and a county sales tax for sales outside the city. So the company would have to be able to determine which taxing jurisdiction in order to properly remit the local sales taxes collected.
Here are, to the best of my knowledge, the Texas sales tax rules:
case 1: If the order is placed to a company in Texas, the sales tax to use is the sales tax where the company is located.
case 2: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has no business presence in Texas of any kind, they are not required to collect sales taxes. However, if they wish to collect sales taxes, they may, as long as they remit whatever is collected to the state of Texas.
case 3: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has a single business presence in Texas, the applicable sales tax is that of the location of that business. For example, if they have a store in Dallas and no other presence at all, you pay the 6.25% state sales tax and the 2% local sales tax which goes to Dallas.
case 4: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has two or more business presences in Texas, the applicable sales tax is that of the destination address. So if the sales tax rate of every store by the company is 8.25% but the destination is in a 6.25% area, the applicable sales tax is 6.25%.
One surprising thing that was explained to me by someone at the Texas Comptroller's Office when I called up to get some clarification of the rules about three years ago is that it is okay if the company charges too much sales tax as long as all the sales tax collected is properly remitted.
Also, in the case of a delivery by UPS or Fed Ex, it goes by the address on the shipping label even if they end up delivering it to another address. Around here, the UPS and Fed Ex drivers rarely deliver anything out to my house. Indeed, most have no idea how to find the place. Instead, they drop it off at my office in town.
I was concerned that the fact that they drop it off at my office instead of my residence would create a problem since anything delivered to my office has a 2% local sales tax rate while anything delivered to my home has no applicable local sales tax. The guy from the Comptroller's Office said that the applicable sales tax was that of the shipping address whether or not it was ultimately delivered elsewhere.
About 15 years ago, I lived in the Nasa area south of Houston for a few years.
One day I was in a computer store near NASA looking for a software package, but they were all sold out. When I asked why, the salesman said that every time any of the local NASA contractors had a software audit, everyone would rush out to buy legal copies of everything on their machines.
Fortunately most of us don't get out enough or exercise enough for those to be problems.
I used to ride bicycles about 3,000 to 5,000 miles a year. (I really need to start doing that again.)
One Friday night I was riding slowly around the neighborhood cooling off after about 30 miles of relatively intense effort when I suddenly felt very weak and my heart beat slowed way down.
On Monday morning, I went to the doctor about it. My doctor at the time was a former U.S. boxing team doctor and was easily the most fit doctor I've ever met. He couldn't find anything wrong at all.
Later, I was reading a book about vitamin and mineral deficiencies and recognized my symptoms when reading about hypokalemia (low potassium levels). These included bradycardia (my resting heartbeat dropped from about 80 beats per minute to about 35 beats per minute) and hypotension (blood pressure dropped from about 120/80 to something like 80/60, but I don't remember the exact numbers).
Assuming that was what it is, I now take a potassium supplement any time I'm getting much exercise.
The problem is with the electrolytic concentrations in the synaptic cleft. Too little and the transmission of nerve impulses between the axons of one neuron and the dendrites of another neuron becomes grossly inefficient or impossible.
This shouldn't be a problem with coke. I don't know of any athletes who drink cokes to replinish their necessary electrolytes.
The most important parts of the formula are obvious:
1) Caffeine, a diuretic, to make you get rid of the liquid faster.
2) Salt to keep you thirsty for more.
3) Sugar (or other sweetening) to cover up the taste of the first two.
One thing that immediately became obvious is that us older students were treated much nicer than the students who were in their teens and twenties.
For example, I received a parking ticket one night. They didn't see the permit because it was obscured by a permit from another college where I was teaching part time. It took no argument at all for it to be dismissed. All I did was tell them what had happened and they immediately dismissed the ticket without any argument at all. If I'd been an undergraduate, it probably would have required a hearing if what everyone else told me was any guide.
And I often ate in the dining halls on campus rather than head off campus to eat. In one dining hall, the cashier would say "Good Morning" to everyone. But when she saw me, it morphed into "Good Morning, Sir. How are you doing this morning?"
I loved it. That was college as it should be experienced.
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I would like to see all formats widely used on the Internet to be open with readily available published specifications.
Doing so would help level the playing field since anyone could write software reading and writing the specifications without having to get permission from someone else.
I've always thought it would be fun to go on job interviews to some places just to get a chance to look around. It's not like you'd actually take a job if offered. And, then again, you might.
This would easily fit within that category.
But which hand do they use to wash the left hand later?
I assume that they do eventually wash the left hand.
The definitions have certainly changed over the years.
The liberals of today are not the liberals of the 19th century. Probably the closest thing to the liberals of the 19th century are the libertarians of today.
The Republican Party really didn't move to the right. That implies they became more conservative.
They moved, but in a very radical direction, not a conservative direction.
The Republican Party is much more radical than anything else. They only thing that makes the Republicans palatable is the only other major alternative, the Democrats.
On-time and to spec is not enough. The buggiest code I've ever seen was done on-time and to spec. It worked fine as long as you did everything according to the spec. But just as soon as you did something else, it broke badly.
Of course, you could attribute that to bad specs. Even if the specs had been better, I don't believe that code would have been any less rotten.
But you're right about those advanced features that are not portable. It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that if portability is a concern, you write portable code.
To me, the real concern about advanced features is whether or not the poor slob who ends up maintaining the code fully understands everything the original programmer did and why. That's why God invented the comment.
But I think that it's a whole lot easier to teach someone to add meaningful comments and to stay away from non-portable features than to write really solid and resilient code.
That depends. Does the 200 lines of code take care of all the possible errors that can occur and the 20 lines handle no errors or maybe only the most common?
I've long felt that you can really tell how good a programmer someone really is by how they handle potential errors in their production code.
The really bad programmers don't really handle any errors. If there is a problem, the whole program comes crashing down.
The average programmers handle the most likely errors. When the program encounters an error, they may or may not print a rather cryptic error message, but in either case, it is meaningless to the everyone but themselves.
The really great programmers handle just about every possible error. When their program encounters something that can't be handled, it shuts down gracefully and provides useful error messages that provides the user with information that is succinct but useful and guides in the right direction to help fix the program or notify the programmer.
As far as I'm concerned, just about any other measure of quality of code is decidedly secondary to this.
Of course, for a quick personal hack, one would normally just handle the probable errors.
Doesn't Yahoo filter the chatrooms based on age?
I've never visited one. If I had known, I still wouldn't have bothered with them. I have joined several of Yahoo's mailing lists on groups.yahoo.com.
When I signed up for the yahoo account, I put my age down as 2 years old.
The result is that I haven't seen any of the porn lists I've heard about.
They must think I'm about 6 or 7 by now.
It is quite possible for an ISP to be blacklisted in spite of the fact that no spam has ever come from their network.
There are at least three or four different sales tax rates in Texas. In some cases, different sales taxes may apply to customers who are next door neighbors of each other if, for example, the city limits runs between their houses.
Also, can it take care of the fact that some items may be taxable in some states and not in others?
It seems to me that for every item in the on-line store, you would have to identify whether or not it is taxable in each state.
For example, regular grocery items are often sales tax free. But some states do charge sales taxes on regular grocery items.
One other thing.
There is also the fact that some items may be taxable in some states but not in other states.
If I understand it correctly, regular grocery items, a five pound sack of flour for example, are taxable in Oklahoma and not taxable in Texas.
Suppose you have an on-line store in California and have a physical presence in Oklahoma and in Texas. If you sell a sack of flour to a customer in Oklahoma and a sack of flour to a customer in Texas, you would be required to collect sales taxes on the sack of flour from the Oklahoma customer but not from the Texas customer.
The discussion had, by this point, morphed a bit away from the ruling. Clearly, any discussion of Texas or any other state but California is not about the ruling.
If you are required to collect sales taxes in Texas, you are required by law to collect any applicable local sales taxes as well. I suppose that a company with no physical presence in Texas might be able to get by with charging the state tax rate of 6.25% and remitting that to the state. But most such companies would just avoid the heacaches anyway.
There are exceptions. If you buy something for resale, you don't pay sales taxes. The sales taxes are instead collected on the final sale of the item.No.
They are about the fact that a business that has no physical location in a state cannot, at this time, be required to collect sales taxes on behalf of that state.
When you buy something at a store, the store is essentially acting on behalf of the state or as an agent of the state by collecting the sales tax. If they do not collect sales taxes when they should, the state will go after them for failing to collect the sales tax. If the store collected the sales tax but didn't turn them over to the state, the state will also go after them.
A company can, at least in Texas, take care of their own sales taxes. In that case, vendors don't charge sales taxes. It doesn't matter if it is local, mail order, internet order, or what. The company itself calculates the sales taxes and pays them.
I don't really understand why. I think it is probably that it makes it easier to pay the correct taxes and not overpay them. If the company is a manufacturer, whoever places the order wouldn't have to be knowledgeable about what is taxable (for example, tools) and what is not taxable (for example, items consumed in the manufacturing process). Instead, that determination is made by accounting who are usually considerably more knowledgeable about the applicable laws.
Very good point.
In Texas, many companies handle their own sales taxes. That is, no taxes are charged on any purchase by the vendor whether the vendor is in state or out of state.
The company itself determines what all they purchased and remits the proper taxes to the proper local and state taxing jurisdictions.
In a previous job, I used to carry a stack of sales tax exempt forms with me in my car. When I bought something on behalf of the company, I would have to determine whether or not a sales tax was due on it. If no sales tax was due on one or more items, I'd give them a copy of the tax exemption form for their files.
Just about everything I bought was used in manufacturing our product. The determination of what was exempt and what was not exempt was based on whether or not it was consumed in the building of a product. For example, we had to pay sales taxes on the tools used in building the product but not on the materials used in building the product.
I must have been doing it correctly since we were audited by the Texas Comptroller's Office and they found no problems with any of my procedures and purchases.
Wrong.
Very Wrong.
Very, very Wrong.
The sales tax is levied against the customer for his purchase. The store is required to collect the sales tax and pass it on to the state.
In this case, Borders had to remit the taxes they were legally required to have collected, but didn't.
The only way it can do so accurately is to get input from the user.
I've noticed that a few busineses ask for the zip code and then, if there is more than one applicable sales tax within the zip code, provide another prompt to ask precisely where you live in order to determine the exact sales tax and to which jurisdiction it is to be paid.
Either that, or be able to determine from the whole address, not just the zip code, which sales tax to charge and to whom it is to be paid.
It's been a few years.
I used to live in a suburb with a Homeowner's Association and had to pay a fee that is really just another tax to that Homeowner's Association.
You can't even calculate sales taxes by zip code.
In Texas, for example, the sales tax rates in my zip code are 8.25% in the city limits and 6.25% outside the city limits. There are some zip codes that have three different sales tax rates depending on the location within that zip code.
Even if the sales tax is 8.25% in the zip code, the 2% local sales tax may be due to different local taxing authorities depending on the address. For example, you could have a city sales tax and a county sales tax for sales outside the city. So the company would have to be able to determine which taxing jurisdiction in order to properly remit the local sales taxes collected.
Here are, to the best of my knowledge, the Texas sales tax rules:
case 1: If the order is placed to a company in Texas, the sales tax to use is the sales tax where the company is located.
case 2: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has no business presence in Texas of any kind, they are not required to collect sales taxes. However, if they wish to collect sales taxes, they may, as long as they remit whatever is collected to the state of Texas.
case 3: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has a single business presence in Texas, the applicable sales tax is that of the location of that business. For example, if they have a store in Dallas and no other presence at all, you pay the 6.25% state sales tax and the 2% local sales tax which goes to Dallas.
case 4: If the order is taken outside the state by a company who has two or more business presences in Texas, the applicable sales tax is that of the destination address. So if the sales tax rate of every store by the company is 8.25% but the destination is in a 6.25% area, the applicable sales tax is 6.25%.
One surprising thing that was explained to me by someone at the Texas Comptroller's Office when I called up to get some clarification of the rules about three years ago is that it is okay if the company charges too much sales tax as long as all the sales tax collected is properly remitted.
Also, in the case of a delivery by UPS or Fed Ex, it goes by the address on the shipping label even if they end up delivering it to another address. Around here, the UPS and Fed Ex drivers rarely deliver anything out to my house. Indeed, most have no idea how to find the place. Instead, they drop it off at my office in town.
I was concerned that the fact that they drop it off at my office instead of my residence would create a problem since anything delivered to my office has a 2% local sales tax rate while anything delivered to my home has no applicable local sales tax. The guy from the Comptroller's Office said that the applicable sales tax was that of the shipping address whether or not it was ultimately delivered elsewhere.
About 15 years ago, I lived in the Nasa area south of Houston for a few years.
One day I was in a computer store near NASA looking for a software package, but they were all sold out. When I asked why, the salesman said that every time any of the local NASA contractors had a software audit, everyone would rush out to buy legal copies of everything on their machines.
I used to ride bicycles about 3,000 to 5,000 miles a year. (I really need to start doing that again.)
One Friday night I was riding slowly around the neighborhood cooling off after about 30 miles of relatively intense effort when I suddenly felt very weak and my heart beat slowed way down.
On Monday morning, I went to the doctor about it. My doctor at the time was a former U.S. boxing team doctor and was easily the most fit doctor I've ever met. He couldn't find anything wrong at all.
Later, I was reading a book about vitamin and mineral deficiencies and recognized my symptoms when reading about hypokalemia (low potassium levels). These included bradycardia (my resting heartbeat dropped from about 80 beats per minute to about 35 beats per minute) and hypotension (blood pressure dropped from about 120/80 to something like 80/60, but I don't remember the exact numbers).
Assuming that was what it is, I now take a potassium supplement any time I'm getting much exercise.
The problem is with the electrolytic concentrations in the synaptic cleft. Too little and the transmission of nerve impulses between the axons of one neuron and the dendrites of another neuron becomes grossly inefficient or impossible.
This shouldn't be a problem with coke. I don't know of any athletes who drink cokes to replinish their necessary electrolytes.
The most important parts of the formula are obvious:
1) Caffeine, a diuretic, to make you get rid of the liquid faster.
2) Salt to keep you thirsty for more.
3) Sugar (or other sweetening) to cover up the taste of the first two.
After that, the other ingredients don't count.
It should be experienced in an environment where students have respect for the staff and the staff has respect for the students.
Too many regular students have little respect for the staff and treat them either as if they don't exist or as little more than vermin.
When staff is treated like that by the regular students, it isn't surprising when they think the regular students are largely just spoiled brats.
I went back to school in my 40s.
One thing that immediately became obvious is that us older students were treated much nicer than the students who were in their teens and twenties.
For example, I received a parking ticket one night. They didn't see the permit because it was obscured by a permit from another college where I was teaching part time. It took no argument at all for it to be dismissed. All I did was tell them what had happened and they immediately dismissed the ticket without any argument at all. If I'd been an undergraduate, it probably would have required a hearing if what everyone else told me was any guide.
And I often ate in the dining halls on campus rather than head off campus to eat. In one dining hall, the cashier would say "Good Morning" to everyone. But when she saw me, it morphed into "Good Morning, Sir. How are you doing this morning?"
I loved it. That was college as it should be experienced.
Microsoft is laughing at the court's ignorance and gullibility all the way to the bank.