I've often wondered whether gravity is really exactly a one-over-r-squared phenomenon. I would think that between the curvature of space, strange hidden dimensions, dark matter and dark energy, that things would not be exactly Euclidean and that the exponent on the equation for gravity wouldn't be an integer.
IANAP, but as an engineer I've learned that so-called "constants" seldom are.
I'm surprised they don't create a tennis racket-like device with a low-RPM multibladed fan and an accordian fine-mesh screen. Sweeping that slowly through the air would draw any floating particulates into the screen and the fan would provide just enough suction to hold them there. A smaller higher-rpm "dust buster" could clean the filter.
The problem was obvious to anyone watching the markets. A trace of the Dow versus the S&P showed that the Dow's drop was NOT keeping pace with the drop in the S&P (they are normally tightly correlated, especially when big moves occur). It was clear that the NYSE's computers were woefully behind on reporting a much more orderly and steady drop. When that backup server cut in, the Dow data suddenly reflected the true state of affairs that was obvious from people watching the S&P and the broader market.
The Dow did NOT drop 200 points in minutes, the data simply caught up with the drop that had already occurred.
A cross comparison of the MS' patents (which are in the public record) with Linux code should be sufficient to find potential infringements.
One of the advantages of the current patent system is that it forces the patent holder to publicly disclose the invention with sufficient detail so that a person versed in the art can copy the invention. That disclosure also lets anyone innovate around the patent if they want.
If the Linux community is worried, then they can proactively start changing Linux to avoid MS IP. Why not use the open source ethos of freedon-to-modify to create a Linux that goes beyond anything MS can dream up as defined by those public documents.
Maybe, although that doesn't include the costs of new distribution infrastructure. My (very limited) understanding is that the U.S. power grid is near its limits. Even if we build the added power generation capacity, we'd have no way of getting the power to the cars (especially since the solar power plant would be in some sunny sparsely populated area such as Arizona and the demand would be in cloudy populated areas such as New York).
Its all very doable -- your analysis of the slow turn-over in the vehicle fleet is 100% correct. We don't need 450 new power plants tomorrow, we need them slowly added over the next 20 or more years. It's just a matter of a lot of money and a lot of political will to prevent NIMBYs from obstructing construction of power plants and high tension lines.
P.S. We would need at least 160 solar power plants per year ($122 billion per year in capital expenditures + distribution) to supply 19 GW because the power requirements represent the 24-hour-per-day power consumption figures and I'd imagine that solar plants average 100% output for only about 6 hours per day.
Two issues back my argument. First, gasoline is very energy dense. A single gallon of gas stores about 44 kWHr (of which a car engine maybe extracts 12-15 kWhr).
Second, we already have the gas delivery infrastructure - all those filling stations, refineries, and tanker trucks. You may be correct that aluminum electron pipes may be cheaper than big-rig tankers, but we don't have the aluminum pipes or the power plants to supply them yet.
The U.S. used 390 million gallons of gas per day in 2006. This means that to replace gas with electricity we need on the order of 5.4 billion kWHr per day. This comes to at least 225,000 MW of new generating capacity or about 450 more of those 500 MW chunks. It would require about a 36% increase in total U.S. generating capacity.
Fast charging sounds great until you look at the power levels.
Based on some of the numbers floating about it looks like a 100 mile charge requires on the order of 30-50 kWhr (depending on vehicle size, efficiencies, driving patterns, etc.). Delivering this level of charge in 5 minutes means delivering between 360,000 to 600,000 watts to each "pump" at the station -- that's 600 to 1000 amps at 600 V. Delivering enough electricity to service station (a single road-side recharging station might need 3 to 6 MW of peak power to cover 5 to 10 "pumps") will probably tax the local distribution network and require construction of a lot of new power generation and distribution capacity.
As long as electric cars are an oddity, they won't tax the power grid, but any serious level of adoption could make things interesting.
Excellent point! The key is not "how much energy is item X using?" but how wisely is that energy being used? Moving bits is greener than moving atoms. YouTube or Bit Torrent is thousands of times "greener" than driving to Blockbuster. Using online banking is greener than driving to the ATM or mailing a check.
Why does this alarm anyone and is it even really true? Several factors conspire to make this statistic both bogus and unalarming.
1. More computers are classed as "servers." I'd bet that before many of the workgroup and corporate IT computers and mainframes weren't classed as "servers." It's the trend toward hosted services, web farms, ASPs, etc. that is moving more computers from dispersed offices to concentrated server farms.
2. More of the economy runs on servers - this would be like issuing a report during the industrial revolution that power consumption by factories increased at an "alarming" rate. Moreover, I'd wager that a good chunk of that server power is paid for by exporting internet and IT-related services.
3. Electricity is only a small fraction of U.S. energy consumption. Most of the energy (about 2/3) goes into transportation (of atoms, not bits).
It's only natural and proper that server power consumption should rise with the increasing use of the internet in global commerce. This report should be cause for celebration, not cause for alarm. (but then celebration does sell news, does it.)
I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a nice way to stuff the server logs of websites that insist on only supporting noncompliant proprietary browsers. If a just 1000 Safari users visited Wal-Mart's site and reloaded the page once every 30 seconds, they'd generate nearly 3 million page views per day. And with a little app to help, one could even erase cookies between reloads or use of proxies to look more like 3 million unique visitors.
What would a company think if the majority of logged visits came from unsupported browsers?
It would appear that the police tagged the suspect's car, not the suspect's person. Leaving aside the issue that people equate themselves with their car, tracking a publicly registered vehicle on a public street seems less like a violation of privacy.
After all, is it that much different (other than cost to the police) from tailing a person in an unmarked police vehicle?
The tin-foil hatted criminal could always borrow a friend's car, walk, or take the bus to escape tagged-vehicle tracking.
I wonder how many companies, in an attempt to defuse "the enemy at the water-cooler", have treated employees with such contempt that they have created even more and more aggressive internal enemies. The more companies treat their employees as adversaries, the more adversaries they create.
Yes, companies should take prudent steps to oversee the security of their networks and systems. But I suspect they need to do more to enlist the aid of the allies at the water-cooler and in creating a positive work environment than in draconian control measures.
I see five factors that make the user-space side of security so hard.
1. Incentives: Most people, especially employees, don't face personal consequences when their PC is infected or the company database gets pwned. 2. Rarity: Most people see security problems as something that happens to someone else. That so few breaches are publicized only enhances the belief in the low likelihood of problems. 3. Hubris: Most people believe they know what they are doing. 4. Boredom: Ask a person to be careful too many times in the face of a relatively low-probability event and they become trained to click "Yes, Install." 5. Sociality: Most people are nice and assume that other people are nice too. They hold the door open for the social engineering intruder, they click on the "cool link", they open email that looks like it might be from someone important. Malware creators prey on our desire to "do the right thing."
Some of these five are easier to address but some reflect deeper realities about being human.
If bandwidth is scarce, how should an ISP allocate it?
1. For pay -- the more the customer pays, the faster the service 2. For cost -- the more costly the customer, the slower the service 3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service 4. "Fairness" -- equal bandwidth to everyone (throttle the hogs)
I suspect that Torrents lose with all four strategies.
Wouldn't the U.S. (and just about every country in the world) also end up on this list of internet restricting countries. Between pending regulations on political/lobbying activities on the internet, CAN-SPAM, hate speech, civil penalties for NSFW images in the workplace, filtering for libraries, kiddie porn laws, online gambling laws, USA Patriot law, DMCA, etc., one could argue that the U.S. heavily restricts activities on the internet too.
I deploy China's censorship as much as the next guy, and would strongly argue that it is very bad for the Chinese economy. But wonder if I have the knowledge or the right, much less the obligation, to hassle them about it. Perhaps we must realize that we don't have a monopoly on how to regulate the internet in the context of a cultural-dependent definition of the relative rights of societies versus individuals versus commercial enterprises versus select groups of citizens (e.g., kids, minorities, etc.).
Back when YouTube provided no profits to submitters, the original creators/sources/subjects of a video probably did not care if some fan/bystander copied and posted a video. As long as credit was given where credit was due, the original creator didn't care how it got posted. With pay-for-submissions, the original creator will care very much and object if someone posts their stuff and make money of their images. (We'll also see lawsuits over model releases -- selling a person's image for profit has its own legal complications)
And I'm sure there will be people of both malign and innocent intentions that will mine the web for videos, do some minimal mashup, intro, or clever titling and then submit them for fun-and-profit. In the time it takes one person to create, from scratch, a "good" video, someone else can copy, tweak, and flood YouTube with dozens or hundreds of copies of other peoples' videos.
I think its great and proper that YouTube should share the wealth with the creators of quality content. But I expect more than a few disputes over who created what.
Although I can certainly see the point of privacy, it would seem to have costs beyond administrative inefficiencies in healthcare. Better aggregation, analysis, and utilization of patient data would save lives through:
1. Evidence-Based Medicine: As much a medicine does know, it's also ignorant of the true outcomes of many practices and true cost/benefits of many so-called best practices. Different regions, different hospitals, and different doctors all have their preferred practices based on beliefs that lack a basis in evidence. By pooling all data on all patients on all conditions, treatments, and outcomes, then medical science could learn what really works. This would save lives.
2. Detecting Dangerous Drugs/Interactions: How many centuries did it take to recognize that aspirin (=willow bark) sometimes killed children? How many other drugs are killing people at too low a rate for any local doctor to notice? Every new drug, and every old drug for that matter, is still in its testing phase. Until millions of people take a drug with millions of other treatments/foods/living conditions, and those millions of patient records are analyzed, science doesn't know what will happen. A drug that kills 1 in 100,000 per year won't create a statistically significant rate of death in pre-approval clinical trials, but will kill 10,000 per year when a billion people take it. Using all the data from every patient would help doctors detect patterns of death or disease induced by pharmaceuticals new and old.
3. Detecting Bad Practitioners: Analysis of the data would also reveal patterns in practitioner competence. Variations in practitioners abilities to detect and appropriately treat patients would help identify the best and the worst of doctors and facilities.
4. Treatment Across Boundaries: Finally, privacy creates costs when people seek treatment outside their normal sphere of local healthcare providers. Having an accident on a vacation or even during a commute to a different city means suffering with the initial ignorance of first responders and hospitals that don't have ready access to your medical records
Perhaps a middle ground can be found with anonymized data approaches -- scrambling medically-irrelevant identifiers. Yet even this would create some ignorance -- without the patients' exact address, the system would be blind to studying environmental toxins (e.g., study children that grew up next to a highway or play downstream from the landfill etc.).
Inaccessible and non-interoperable patient records do kill people and if people value there privacy that much, then that's fine. But people need to understand that the true costs of absolute privacy of medical records is ignorance and that that does lead to deaths.
The security of a given hash/encryption would seem to be a function of how much effort has gone into breaking it. Lots of algorithms can look good on paper, but until people really tear into the math and code, it's true level of unbreakability is undecidable. A 3 year competition is not likely to bring enough IQ, theorems, malevolence, or brute CPU cycles to bear against any candidate.
The point is that any attempt to quickly create a new algorithm is likely to create an insecure one. Shouldn't we be trying to create candidate algorithms for the year 2050 to give the algorithms time to withstand attack? Or do we plan to keep creating new algorithms as a serial security-by-obscurity strategy.
Asking for deletion will probably only increase the amount of your information stored by the company and increase the chance of ID theft. Not only will the request not result in the removal of existing information, but it will add more information and instances of your information. If you contact the company, you will be both in the old customer DB and in recent copies of the customer service contact DB. Second, if the company outsources customer contact, then that 3rd party service provide will probably end up with a cached (= potentially permanent) copy of your records. And third, every contact you make increases the chance that you will touch a corrupt customer service person that is siphoning data for criminal purposes.
Its like a hornets nest. You may not like them, but disturbing them will only make things worse.
This year, I'm considering using an online place called Taxsoftware.com for our partnership and personal returns (I've gotten tired of paying a professional for this stuff). Taxsoftware seems to offer a relatively complete set of forms for both personal and business (e.g. 1065, 1120, etc.), including both U.S. federal and most states, JAVA-based platform-independent online system, and reasonable prices.
But I haven't found reviews that give me a warm-fuzzy about trusting my data (and time) to the place nor any obvious horror stories.
When I got my BSME, they had a great program called the Engineering Coop program (a quick Google suggests that its alive and well and available at various schools) that alternated semesters of school with semesters of work. I heartily recommend engineering students look into it. It does delay graduation, but the experience is great and the pay can be very good.
Getting some type of engineering-related job while going to school really helps balance the book learning.
This type of anonymous whistle-blower system is mandated by U.S. Sarbanes Oxley Act, but is illegal under European privacy laws. SarBox says thou shalt support anonymous informants as a means of preventing fraud, corruption, etc. The EU says thou shalt NOT permit anonymous tipsters because that's how the Nazi's found so many Jews.
It's a real conundrum for multinational companies.
It's not the words that the spam filter can't recognize that lets spam get through, its the increasing use of image spam. OCR and existing filters would do more to solve spam than would wiki-AI intelligent filters.
Of course, the minute anti-spam software/services use OCR is the minute that spam images start looking like captchas.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often wondered whether gravity is really exactly a one-over-r-squared phenomenon. I would think that between the curvature of space, strange hidden dimensions, dark matter and dark energy, that things would not be exactly Euclidean and that the exponent on the equation for gravity wouldn't be an integer.
IANAP, but as an engineer I've learned that so-called "constants" seldom are.
I'm surprised they don't create a tennis racket-like device with a low-RPM multibladed fan and an accordian fine-mesh screen. Sweeping that slowly through the air would draw any floating particulates into the screen and the fan would provide just enough suction to hold them there. A smaller higher-rpm "dust buster" could clean the filter.
The problem was obvious to anyone watching the markets. A trace of the Dow versus the S&P showed that the Dow's drop was NOT keeping pace with the drop in the S&P (they are normally tightly correlated, especially when big moves occur). It was clear that the NYSE's computers were woefully behind on reporting a much more orderly and steady drop. When that backup server cut in, the Dow data suddenly reflected the true state of affairs that was obvious from people watching the S&P and the broader market.
The Dow did NOT drop 200 points in minutes, the data simply caught up with the drop that had already occurred.
A cross comparison of the MS' patents (which are in the public record) with Linux code should be sufficient to find potential infringements. One of the advantages of the current patent system is that it forces the patent holder to publicly disclose the invention with sufficient detail so that a person versed in the art can copy the invention. That disclosure also lets anyone innovate around the patent if they want. If the Linux community is worried, then they can proactively start changing Linux to avoid MS IP. Why not use the open source ethos of freedon-to-modify to create a Linux that goes beyond anything MS can dream up as defined by those public documents.
Maybe, although that doesn't include the costs of new distribution infrastructure. My (very limited) understanding is that the U.S. power grid is near its limits. Even if we build the added power generation capacity, we'd have no way of getting the power to the cars (especially since the solar power plant would be in some sunny sparsely populated area such as Arizona and the demand would be in cloudy populated areas such as New York).
Its all very doable -- your analysis of the slow turn-over in the vehicle fleet is 100% correct. We don't need 450 new power plants tomorrow, we need them slowly added over the next 20 or more years. It's just a matter of a lot of money and a lot of political will to prevent NIMBYs from obstructing construction of power plants and high tension lines.
P.S. We would need at least 160 solar power plants per year ($122 billion per year in capital expenditures + distribution) to supply 19 GW because the power requirements represent the 24-hour-per-day power consumption figures and I'd imagine that solar plants average 100% output for only about 6 hours per day.
Two issues back my argument. First, gasoline is very energy dense. A single gallon of gas stores about 44 kWHr (of which a car engine maybe extracts 12-15 kWhr).
Second, we already have the gas delivery infrastructure - all those filling stations, refineries, and tanker trucks. You may be correct that aluminum electron pipes may be cheaper than big-rig tankers, but we don't have the aluminum pipes or the power plants to supply them yet.
The U.S. used 390 million gallons of gas per day in 2006. This means that to replace gas with electricity we need on the order of 5.4 billion kWHr per day. This comes to at least 225,000 MW of new generating capacity or about 450 more of those 500 MW chunks. It would require about a 36% increase in total U.S. generating capacity.
It can be done, but it won't be easy or cheap.
Fast charging sounds great until you look at the power levels.
Based on some of the numbers floating about it looks like a 100 mile charge requires on the order of 30-50 kWhr (depending on vehicle size, efficiencies, driving patterns, etc.). Delivering this level of charge in 5 minutes means delivering between 360,000 to 600,000 watts to each "pump" at the station -- that's 600 to 1000 amps at 600 V. Delivering enough electricity to service station (a single road-side recharging station might need 3 to 6 MW of peak power to cover 5 to 10 "pumps") will probably tax the local distribution network and require construction of a lot of new power generation and distribution capacity.
As long as electric cars are an oddity, they won't tax the power grid, but any serious level of adoption could make things interesting.
Excellent point! The key is not "how much energy is item X using?" but how wisely is that energy being used? Moving bits is greener than moving atoms. YouTube or Bit Torrent is thousands of times "greener" than driving to Blockbuster. Using online banking is greener than driving to the ATM or mailing a check.
Why does this alarm anyone and is it even really true? Several factors conspire to make this statistic both bogus and unalarming.
1. More computers are classed as "servers." I'd bet that before many of the workgroup and corporate IT computers and mainframes weren't classed as "servers." It's the trend toward hosted services, web farms, ASPs, etc. that is moving more computers from dispersed offices to concentrated server farms.
2. More of the economy runs on servers - this would be like issuing a report during the industrial revolution that power consumption by factories increased at an "alarming" rate. Moreover, I'd wager that a good chunk of that server power is paid for by exporting internet and IT-related services.
3. Electricity is only a small fraction of U.S. energy consumption. Most of the energy (about 2/3) goes into transportation (of atoms, not bits).
It's only natural and proper that server power consumption should rise with the increasing use of the internet in global commerce. This report should be cause for celebration, not cause for alarm. (but then celebration does sell news, does it.)
I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a nice way to stuff the server logs of websites that insist on only supporting noncompliant proprietary browsers. If a just 1000 Safari users visited Wal-Mart's site and reloaded the page once every 30 seconds, they'd generate nearly 3 million page views per day. And with a little app to help, one could even erase cookies between reloads or use of proxies to look more like 3 million unique visitors.
What would a company think if the majority of logged visits came from unsupported browsers?
It would appear that the police tagged the suspect's car, not the suspect's person. Leaving aside the issue that people equate themselves with their car, tracking a publicly registered vehicle on a public street seems less like a violation of privacy. After all, is it that much different (other than cost to the police) from tailing a person in an unmarked police vehicle? The tin-foil hatted criminal could always borrow a friend's car, walk, or take the bus to escape tagged-vehicle tracking.
I wonder how many companies, in an attempt to defuse "the enemy at the water-cooler", have treated employees with such contempt that they have created even more and more aggressive internal enemies. The more companies treat their employees as adversaries, the more adversaries they create.
Yes, companies should take prudent steps to oversee the security of their networks and systems. But I suspect they need to do more to enlist the aid of the allies at the water-cooler and in creating a positive work environment than in draconian control measures.
I see five factors that make the user-space side of security so hard.
1. Incentives: Most people, especially employees, don't face personal consequences when their PC is infected or the company database gets pwned.
2. Rarity: Most people see security problems as something that happens to someone else. That so few breaches are publicized only enhances the belief in the low likelihood of problems.
3. Hubris: Most people believe they know what they are doing.
4. Boredom: Ask a person to be careful too many times in the face of a relatively low-probability event and they become trained to click "Yes, Install."
5. Sociality: Most people are nice and assume that other people are nice too. They hold the door open for the social engineering intruder, they click on the "cool link", they open email that looks like it might be from someone important. Malware creators prey on our desire to "do the right thing."
Some of these five are easier to address but some reflect deeper realities about being human.
If bandwidth is scarce, how should an ISP allocate it?
1. For pay -- the more the customer pays, the faster the service
2. For cost -- the more costly the customer, the slower the service
3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service
4. "Fairness" -- equal bandwidth to everyone (throttle the hogs)
I suspect that Torrents lose with all four strategies.
Wouldn't the U.S. (and just about every country in the world) also end up on this list of internet restricting countries. Between pending regulations on political/lobbying activities on the internet, CAN-SPAM, hate speech, civil penalties for NSFW images in the workplace, filtering for libraries, kiddie porn laws, online gambling laws, USA Patriot law, DMCA, etc., one could argue that the U.S. heavily restricts activities on the internet too.
I deploy China's censorship as much as the next guy, and would strongly argue that it is very bad for the Chinese economy. But wonder if I have the knowledge or the right, much less the obligation, to hassle them about it. Perhaps we must realize that we don't have a monopoly on how to regulate the internet in the context of a cultural-dependent definition of the relative rights of societies versus individuals versus commercial enterprises versus select groups of citizens (e.g., kids, minorities, etc.).
2 miles of walking is about half an hour each way. So the Stonehenge workers spent a hour-a-day getting to and from work.
Some things never change.
Back when YouTube provided no profits to submitters, the original creators/sources/subjects of a video probably did not care if some fan/bystander copied and posted a video. As long as credit was given where credit was due, the original creator didn't care how it got posted. With pay-for-submissions, the original creator will care very much and object if someone posts their stuff and make money of their images. (We'll also see lawsuits over model releases -- selling a person's image for profit has its own legal complications)
And I'm sure there will be people of both malign and innocent intentions that will mine the web for videos, do some minimal mashup, intro, or clever titling and then submit them for fun-and-profit. In the time it takes one person to create, from scratch, a "good" video, someone else can copy, tweak, and flood YouTube with dozens or hundreds of copies of other peoples' videos.
I think its great and proper that YouTube should share the wealth with the creators of quality content. But I expect more than a few disputes over who created what.
Although I can certainly see the point of privacy, it would seem to have costs beyond administrative inefficiencies in healthcare. Better aggregation, analysis, and utilization of patient data would save lives through:
1. Evidence-Based Medicine: As much a medicine does know, it's also ignorant of the true outcomes of many practices and true cost/benefits of many so-called best practices. Different regions, different hospitals, and different doctors all have their preferred practices based on beliefs that lack a basis in evidence. By pooling all data on all patients on all conditions, treatments, and outcomes, then medical science could learn what really works. This would save lives.
2. Detecting Dangerous Drugs/Interactions: How many centuries did it take to recognize that aspirin (=willow bark) sometimes killed children? How many other drugs are killing people at too low a rate for any local doctor to notice? Every new drug, and every old drug for that matter, is still in its testing phase. Until millions of people take a drug with millions of other treatments/foods/living conditions, and those millions of patient records are analyzed, science doesn't know what will happen. A drug that kills 1 in 100,000 per year won't create a statistically significant rate of death in pre-approval clinical trials, but will kill 10,000 per year when a billion people take it. Using all the data from every patient would help doctors detect patterns of death or disease induced by pharmaceuticals new and old.
3. Detecting Bad Practitioners: Analysis of the data would also reveal patterns in practitioner competence. Variations in practitioners abilities to detect and appropriately treat patients would help identify the best and the worst of doctors and facilities.
4. Treatment Across Boundaries: Finally, privacy creates costs when people seek treatment outside their normal sphere of local healthcare providers. Having an accident on a vacation or even during a commute to a different city means suffering with the initial ignorance of first responders and hospitals that don't have ready access to your medical records
Perhaps a middle ground can be found with anonymized data approaches -- scrambling medically-irrelevant identifiers. Yet even this would create some ignorance -- without the patients' exact address, the system would be blind to studying environmental toxins (e.g., study children that grew up next to a highway or play downstream from the landfill etc.).
Inaccessible and non-interoperable patient records do kill people and if people value there privacy that much, then that's fine. But people need to understand that the true costs of absolute privacy of medical records is ignorance and that that does lead to deaths.
The security of a given hash/encryption would seem to be a function of how much effort has gone into breaking it. Lots of algorithms can look good on paper, but until people really tear into the math and code, it's true level of unbreakability is undecidable. A 3 year competition is not likely to bring enough IQ, theorems, malevolence, or brute CPU cycles to bear against any candidate.
The point is that any attempt to quickly create a new algorithm is likely to create an insecure one. Shouldn't we be trying to create candidate algorithms for the year 2050 to give the algorithms time to withstand attack? Or do we plan to keep creating new algorithms as a serial security-by-obscurity strategy.
Asking for deletion will probably only increase the amount of your information stored by the company and increase the chance of ID theft. Not only will the request not result in the removal of existing information, but it will add more information and instances of your information. If you contact the company, you will be both in the old customer DB and in recent copies of the customer service contact DB. Second, if the company outsources customer contact, then that 3rd party service provide will probably end up with a cached (= potentially permanent) copy of your records. And third, every contact you make increases the chance that you will touch a corrupt customer service person that is siphoning data for criminal purposes.
Its like a hornets nest. You may not like them, but disturbing them will only make things worse.
This year, I'm considering using an online place called Taxsoftware.com for our partnership and personal returns (I've gotten tired of paying a professional for this stuff). Taxsoftware seems to offer a relatively complete set of forms for both personal and business (e.g. 1065, 1120, etc.), including both U.S. federal and most states, JAVA-based platform-independent online system, and reasonable prices.
But I haven't found reviews that give me a warm-fuzzy about trusting my data (and time) to the place nor any obvious horror stories.
Has anyone used these guys?
Sorry for the late reply. I heard this at a legal conference on data protection/IP issues.
1 52176726157 i stleblower+EU&btnG=Google+Search
You can find out more at:
http://www.law.com/jsp/ihc/PubArticleIHC.jsp?id=1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anonymous+wh
When I got my BSME, they had a great program called the Engineering Coop program (a quick Google suggests that its alive and well and available at various schools) that alternated semesters of school with semesters of work. I heartily recommend engineering students look into it. It does delay graduation, but the experience is great and the pay can be very good.
Getting some type of engineering-related job while going to school really helps balance the book learning.
This type of anonymous whistle-blower system is mandated by U.S. Sarbanes Oxley Act, but is illegal under European privacy laws. SarBox says thou shalt support anonymous informants as a means of preventing fraud, corruption, etc. The EU says thou shalt NOT permit anonymous tipsters because that's how the Nazi's found so many Jews.
It's a real conundrum for multinational companies.
It's not the words that the spam filter can't recognize that lets spam get through, its the increasing use of image spam. OCR and existing filters would do more to solve spam than would wiki-AI intelligent filters.
Of course, the minute anti-spam software/services use OCR is the minute that spam images start looking like captchas.