You're certainly ok to refer to the EIC as a poorer people's deduction or whatever. I usually assume that it's simply shorthand for not spelling out all the details. That's how you seemed to be using it.
It's just that, in this thread, I've already seen a couple of remarks about taxation above the 50% level that sound like somebody is simultaneously in one of the highest two brackets for the income tax, and still paying a full 15.3% as self employment tax. Since the Social Security tax tops out at about $90,000 income and stops being taken out on anything above, it's very unlikely for this to actually happen. I've also seen a post with the SEP counted as part of income tax, and apparently that poster thinks it goes into the general fund. It doesn't - the IRS just passes it on straight to the Social Security Administration, and it gives the payer credit for quarters worked just like regular social security taxes - if the whole social security system doesn't collapse, these people will get to draw on it when they retire or become disabled, just like employees. I've seen a claim that there are no tax advantages for S corporations, etc. Ive seen a reference to whole groups of states considering adopting a state income tax - most US states already have one, and none of the ones that don't actually have any legislation at present. There have been a few people discussing the bailout that have said if the recession deepens they think their state will need to adopt an income tax, but that's far from any official movements.
There's a lot of really bad tax advice being given out here (I've counted at least 30 posts with wildly incorrect claims), and a lot of political rants based on pseudofacts, so I'm in really critical mode. You certainly don't need to appologize for anything you've said.
One very, very rarely makes an income of more than a quarter of a million dollars in a year solely through one's own hard work. One usually makes it by leaching, to some degree, off the hard work of others.
One very rarely makes an income solely through ones hard work - any income what-so-ever.
It's not a matter of who is leeching from whom either.
Let's take a farmer. She does all the work of raising her crop of tomatoes and getting it to market. No leeching there, she doesn't get government farm subsidies, she just works. But, whatever she makes for selling her crop, it depends in large part on having roads to transport it. It's not that she's a leech, nor lazy, but if she had to transport those tomatoes over a dirt path, in a little hand cart hewn from wood on her own land, and repair that cart within her own little toolshed every time it breaks, she would make a whole lot less, trading with only her immediate neighbors.
She could buy her truck from a private business, and get it worked on by a private garage, and she could drive on privately owned (toll) roads. Or she could drive on state roads, and at least in theory, get her truck serviced at a state owned facility. She could rent space from a for-profit farmer's market, or create a non-profit co-op with fellow farmers to buy land to establish a farmer's market at a good spot, or for that matter, be taxed by the state for the privilege of setting up at any wide spot along the state's roads. Which is more efficient, which benefits her and/or other people the most, varies widely. It's not a one size fits all solution, where private alternatives are always more efficient.
I do taxes for a number of small S corps, and I have never heard the IRS complain about some business being founded as a C corp or starting as a Sole Proprietorship or Partnership and becoming a C corp instead of an S, LLC, or whatever. If anything, they may have an issue with switching the other way, and there are more limits on doing just that.
An S corp is a pass through entity - it pays no taxes of its own, so if you are the person who takes both salary and profits from it, yes, you will be taxed at that rate. Yet with enough income, you can often still come out ahead by being part of an S corp. (For example, by using the corporate structure to pay a share of employee benefits, and making your own contributions as an employee, you can sometimes contribute much more towards your medical care plan, retirement, or other deductable programs, than you could either just as an employee or a self employed person.). The bracket, as you put it, may not change, but the actual taxes owed can and do, and in fact, that's one of the biggest reasons anyone would bother with becoming part of an S corp.
The Earned Income Credit goes directly to some poor people. Ones who do work, and so have some earned income. Ones who report that income rather than working under the table. Most of it goes to ones with kids (This year, the maximum amount for single filers without any kids was $408.). It's also capped at two kids, having three or more won't add anything to it.
Middle class taxpayers get the benefits of claiming all their kids, well after the point where the child tax credit has stopped mattering for lower income payers. They get to use a variety of education credits or straight deductions for those kids, many of which have formulas that make them of little or no use to lower income taxpayers.
Upper class taxpayers will find that many of those credits phase out, at least in part, plus they are the ones who may have to declare their child's income from interest on savings if that exceeds about 800$, etc.
I can see your point about equating the EIC to a negative tax bracket, but if you phase out the poor's tax breaks for having kids, you pretty much have to phase out the middle class versions too, for fairness sake.
I held a military intelligence slot for a year or so, and one thing that was incredibly basic, is MI is about capabilities, not intentions. The whole reason Military Intelligence is not really an oxymoron is summed up in this rule. It's the job of Intelligence to be a staff, not command position, and to report capabilities to commanders. At highest levels, it's Intelligence's job to report capabilities to civilian oversight. Commanders or civil governments are the people who decide if somebody is likely to use a particular capability in a particular way. And all the biggest decisions are reserved to the civilian government.
A good military intelligence report to congress might list all the countries with H-bombs, how many they have, what Megatonnages they go to, how reliable their trigger mechanisms are thought to be, and so on. It won't say anything about whether Great Britain is less likely to use them against the US than, say, Pakistan. It's up to the US Congress to decide whether there is a real risk from some countries or not. That way, the military carefully avoids telling the government when to go to war, and it stays the civilian government's decision.
If some guy in MI does his or her job right, he or she notices that twitter works at faster speeds in some real world case or other than some of the other communications methods. He or she reports that up the chain because it's a capability. The command chain and civilians are the people who need to decide if there's anybody intending to misuse this technology, and what should be done about it. Congress might go "ZOMG, Osama haz Twitterz! W3R3 D00MED!" and screw everyone's rights. But the MI guy did his or her job correctly.
This is a problem with adult porn too. Ted Bundy was excited by a lot of Sears style catalogs showing models in bras or nightgowns, and particularly by some catalogs of cheerleading supplies. To him, they counted as porn. There's something really strange about the whole idea of asking people who are, at least statistically, deviant, to define what is and isn't normal.
There is some real evidence the placebo effect doesn't work the way everyone believes it does. Tests were done with giving people an injectable opiate for pain or giving them a placebo injection. This had pretty much the effect most people would expect, that is many people got pain relief from the placebo. This went on for about a week to establish a regular pattern. Then an opiate blocker was added to block the injection's effects, and surprise surprise, it also turned out to block the placebo's pain killing effects. This is one of those oddities medicine really has no good explanation for. It does seem to fit somehow with what you mention as well.
Various experiments where the persons giving medication were aware or not aware it was a placebo seem to give odd results as well, where people administering the drugs seem to give away indicators to the patients that they themselves presumably don't know. This has been a good area for designing double-blind tests, where researchers have come up with elaborate methods to deprive people of information, i.e. giving the nurses written instructions in advance, and having them enter an area to find the doses pre-laid out but no doctor present, so there was no human contact that would seem to be capable of passing on any non-verbal or body language clues from somebody who knew which ones were placebos and which real. Unfortunately, it is not considered good practice of late to leave opiates just laying around, so it would be very difficult to introduce these methods to a new round of the original opiate experiments that led to this line of research,
I'm running in Kubuntu 8.04 - I just added what KDE4 files I could using adept literally yesterday, and rebooted to it to try it out, then went back to 3.5. Biggest issues I saw: 1. When you say there aren't many plasmoids yet, its an understatement. A lot of the useful desktop applets, i.e. local weather, haven't been added yet. There's just about nothing in the way of marginally useful but neat applets such as moon phase converted to plasmoids. You could use a third party applet program until more stuff gets integrated in KDE, but you can do that with 3.5, and there's already at least 2 good ones to choose from. 2. Dual desktop support is limited - I couldn't extend the taskbar across both monitors. Having more applets/plasmoids might drive this feature, and having more space available in the taskbar might drive the plasmoids feature. (Although as I understand it, the real point of plasmoids is to be able to put these tiny programs anywhere and not just in the bar, so maybe not). Not having either just yet makes me think it might be quite some time before there's progress. 3. A lot of the fine tweaks are disabled. If you like being able to do things such as independently set the width of your taskbar hiding buttons and whether there is one at each end of the bar or not, again you'll have to wait and hope somebody gets to that, or bone up on your coding. I don't see all of the fine tweaks making it into the next 6 monthly release, or even a year out.
The above post looks like somebody forgot to take their meds, but just in case, check out "Gaussian fermentation". Googling it will give you upwards of 39,000 hits, but the most prominent are all for biology. It's a real term in papers on yeast or bacterial growth. So yes, once the yeast has fermented it, more of us than ever would like some kool-aid. Please strain it a little and let it age for a few hours.
While I'm pretty sure that the word uncooperative is being used in a technical sense here, I'm also damned sure that a lot of military, law enforcement and government types don't understand that at all. You can use uncooperative to mean 'not making it easier for the robots to pass the testing phase' while development is going on, but once deployed, a lot of the decision makers are gonna think it means 'not making it easier for me/us to get whatever I/we want', and they will act accordingly.
When Jack Williamson wrote "With Folded Hands", his 'humanoids' took away all freedom to do anything risky. supposedly for people's own good. Try to go mountain climbing, and they make you stay inside, but offer a nice game of chess. A little observation of what the humanoids say shows they were trying to implement Asimov's laws, and the whole story is about just the point you raise. It's a pity that not nearly as many people have read Williamson as Asimov.
Asimov would have written a short story where a Positronic Robot series had just been developed to the point where it could decide imprisonment counted as harm, and a human had directed it that it was acceptable as it offered a chance for the human to reform and become a better person. Susan would get involved over something, like the robot breaking the prisoner out when it became apparent the prisoner wasn't going to reform, or that he already had so the rest of his sentence was superfluous and so counted as harm.
Either way, putting someone in jail only automatically counts as harm at some particular level of mentation. Below that, the robot would assume that if the human got three squares and a cot, and better medical care than being on the run, there was no harm. Above that level, the robot would have to balance issues of human freedom with the harm a human might do to others exercising it. At still higher levels of understanding, the robot would have to consider how the human might harm himself exercising freedom. It's only an automatic violation of law 1 to a robot between the really dumb and the moderately smart levels, not to other robots.
Returning to the thread, the robots described are in the real world = really, really dumb category, too dumb to even apply the first law at all. That means a human would actually be fully responsible for any mistakes the robots made, but tools such as this let that human pretend not to be responsible for mistakes - that's what's really a 'bad thing' (tm) here.
Let me add one: I just ran across an anecdote by Niel Gaiman, where he wrote about what was involved in writing Sandman for DC comics. He had to change a character and bit of dialog because DC's lawyers were afraid of violating someone's copyright, but when Gaiman checked into it, that 'someone' had died back in 1905 and the work in question was even older. How is this 'promoting progress in the useful arts' again?
The data being flawed is very different than the code being flawed. In fact, what Greenspan is talking about has almost no connection to what Cox is talking about, and there's no real reason to put them both in the same article. Starting with bad data will abundantly suffice to explain the meltdown before any problems with the algorithms used have to be assumed. Most of the bias that did the real damage is political. For example, the most recent figures on the economy show that in the months before the mortgage crash began, 68% of all spending was driven by individual consumers buying retail. If the last tax rebate had been aimed at 68% of the total going back to individual consumers, or the '700 billion bailout' had put 68% of the 200+ Billion actually committed so far into reducing the impact to non-institutional borrowers, those would be appropriately neutral positions - but in the current climate, those would both be classified as terribly liberal.
But that figure wasn't trumpeted about until after the bailout was passed. The same goes for the corrected inflation rates, which are still not accurate but are a bit better, and which again weren't corrected in releases to the general public until after the bailout was final.
You don't charge others to receive a show flyer (which could take a few hours to design, plus hours to print and many hours to distribute), so why charge for music?
I'm sure you'll get responders who tell you that's simplistic, but I want to explore that idea further. Nobody gets to profit from everything forever without operating costs. Corporation or individual, you have to put in time, effort or money somewhere to get more money out. If you want a profit, you don't charge for the show flier because it's advertising, aimed at making you money from something else. Maybe you sell the music, maybe the music is another part of the give-aways, and you sell ads, or controlled concessions, live tickets, or whatever, but if you want to sell anything, there will be investment costs associated. You can't even sell your work to an employer without committing to be there on time, a dress code, or simply eating breakfast to suit the employer's schedule.
For all the people who are pro the existing copyright laws, and especially the ones who love to throw around the violation=stealing line, what about the people on your side who seem bound up in the illusion of unlimited profit with no investment? Take a company which is making a profit selling tee-shirts with its logo and advertising on them, and is actually getting paid by people to let them become walking billboards - Is that a sustainable long term model, or will fashion doubtless change? Can anyone really afford to enforce copyright against people distributing movie trailers? If someone uses the law to control negative reviews, how can they avoid reducing free word-of-mouth advertising by the very same act? How can they file hundreds of cases in court and avoid people thinking they are sue happy? You've got organizations on the pro-IP side that seem to think the law will stretch to let them do all that, and more.
Even if you care deeply about creator's rights and feel the people doing illegal downloading are all thieves, how are you going to satisfy the IP holders who want unlimited profit with no investment, and think tougher man made laws are a way to somehow bend what are really laws of nature that stand in their way. IP law can't protect a creator from all risks associated with seeking a profit, it can't squeeze blood from a stone to actually get $250,000 settlements from violators who barely make minimum wage, it can't keep them from having to advertise if they want to reach a broad audience, it can't let them slavishly imitate a true leader in marketing and get all the benefits of coming up with something for the first time.
They were thinking that a lot of businesses had bought the machines, and weren't using the game ports for gaming, so they would welcome devices that put those ports to use. If you've ever seen pics of a C-64SX, the 23 pound 'portable' computer that was shown in the ads being carried by a guy in a gray suit getting off a learjet, you'll understand just what they thought was the market.
I've got something like this at home, and because it is a Frankenkludge device, it doesn't really fit what the original poster asked for - he or she wanted compact. But as to why it's at home... I'm converting old analog formats to digital. Once you have a bulky analog source such as a single VHS tape deck connected to a video card, you've already ruled out compact, elegant, and such adjectives. Wanting to output to a DVD or similarly modern format means you can't go back to a really old machine either, Being able to convert analog video to digital means a pretty decent TV tuner type card and software that also rules out anything under about a 500 Mhz processor (unless you can wait a week for a conversion), but you could go back about that far. Wanting to mix together lots of old peripherals strongly suggests having several of both PCI and ISA slots, which pretty well means a small tower or bigger desktop model.
When I got to that stage, putting in other stuff seemed sensible - as in, might as well use all the old parts you can - might as well cover the rest of the table, etc. So next in went a 5.25 floppy. Tower meant I could put in an old Zip drive, instead of an external that would hog a serial port I might need elsewhere... Those internal analog audio tape drives for PCs are getting cheap... Hey, I have a tape back-up that uses that unused serial port... 120 Mg 'superfloppy'...
In the end, I can convert some really odd analog formats, such as 8 tracks, or copying 8mm or 16mm film. I can at least read from a lot of old digital devices, such as a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. But it takes up a long, skinny steel table and most of the space underneath.
Why? I'm in my 50's, and actually built up a lot of media pre PC era. All my old analog video and audio collection is now digitized. That's a collection that was bigger than the Frankenkludge and its table when I started. My current PC doesn't even have a floppy drive, but the whole old record, cassette, etc. collection fits on one SATA drive. My parents, bless em, are still alive, and their old slides, videotapes of family gatherings, and so on, are in the process of being digitized too. Some recordings of my dad performing with the local symphony from 30 years ago are right now going to CD. My favorite local church has tapes featuring a few genuinely world class altos and sopranos that performed there from time to time, and digital copies of very old birth records, but the digital device was an Amiga 500 with 3.5 floppys. That's soon on the to-do list. After that, a local 2 year college has some music in their library that's supposedly only playable on this gadjet made in Chekloslovakia about 1980. I don't charge most of these people, but I could probably charge a few bucks to some, the college is definitely paying, and I would definitely charge any small businesses that need similar services. It's a hobby, but will probably pay itself off in a couple of years.
The above is fundamentally accurate. In fact, if you really found yourself regularly getting only 3 hours of sleep a night, your brain would start cycling into rem sleep very quickly, and skipping intermediate stages, just to squeeze more dreaming in. In severe cases, the body will fight to dream even if it has to neglect physical fatigue product cleanup and minor injury repair.
However, if you get less than 5 or maybe 6 complete dream cycles in, your memories of dreams will be very fragmented, and it appears, from experimenters asking people to write down their dreams while waking them just after the cycle ends and letting the subject get through a variable number of cycles, that the actual dreams start out very fragmented and illogical, and as the sleep cycles go on, get longer, more cohesive, maybe more like real experiences, even while retaining many of their fantastic elements.
I think it's interesting, that most of the people in western society don't get nearly enough regular, uninterrupted sleep to fully use the function of dreaming. Maybe all our theories about dreaming are as skewed as if we were theorizing about healthy diets and everyone had a mild case of vitamin deficiencies. How do we do real research if our average baseline group isn't skewed from our species biological norm?
I frequently have dreams where I'm reading some modern work, but the book is a huge leather bound volume with clasps and hinges, and the text is in archaic black letter, or hand scribed with illuminated portions. I guess, by the study, this is because of my formative years in the 1540's.
As a (sort of) Christian, I am bugged more by my own group's intolerance and fanaticism too. I think Carl Sagan got a real bee in his bonnet towards the end of his career, but I still appreciate his books, even when I simultaneously wince at some parts of 'Candle in the Dark'. I hope that the way people such as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson behave is because they genuinely think 'saving' you matters to your happiness in the longest run, but I'm far from confident that's true.
Yeah, maybe. Right now, there's some evidence from autopsies of early 20th century deaths in Zaire and related African nations, that put the first human HIV related death in 1924 if these results hold up. This case isn't an index patient, as the historical record for that victim strongly suggests he didn't pass it on to anyone else. The best guess for continuous presence is still less than this number of years. So, given that it looks like we have about 84 years old for an isolated case, I'd say the odds are, say, 30% for less than 100 years total, maybe 50-60% for right around 100, and maybe 10-20% that there's some undiscovered case back there significantly more than 100 years ago. That's just back of the envelope guessing mind you.
(The reason that particular case was selected for autopsy was a frequent diet of monkey brains, combined with recorded symptoms near time of death. There are almost no records in that region and era on homosexual conduct, and none at all on IV drug use going back that far, to steer researchers towards possible cases or, particularly, case clusters. Symptom records are incredibly spotty, but they are all anyone has. Except that, when somebody was bitten by a monkey of some kind, hunted monkeys of various types, or whatever monkey business ensued, it seems to have been recorded quite often.).
Still, I really want to emphasize that mutation rates measured in years is just not the way to do it. There are some real points being raised by some of the Intelligent Design gang, and they become much easier to explain if people are familiar with talking about genetics in terms of generations, % chance of a given organism being a mutant in each generation and other such concepts. Given that all professional biologists work in just such terms, defending an ID concept to people who don't, but who really, fervently believe in evolution, is like explaining the Libertarian party to a person who thinks everybody either registers for life as a Republican or a Democrat, and has no terms for any other choices, or even for not registering at all, or for switching parties.
For example, any professional biologist would agree that the time for, for example, 1 human generation, is around 18 to 20 years, but they would also agree with a much more precise definition: a generation is the average time for one female, with some assistance from one or more males, to bear and raise two offspring to the point where the offspring themselves successfully reproduce. Since we are a sexual species, it is simply illogical from a biologist's trained viewpoint to talk about the time it takes to reproduce 1/2 a pair like that was a basic unit. So you count the average time for a given mother to reproduce twice, taking only a little account of multiple births, as twins and above are rare in humans. Then you factor in infant mortality and other things and figure what the average time is over the course of multiple reproductive cycles, and eventually, you have a pretty accurate number that you feel comfortable calling a generation. If you want to make real progress in understanding the truth, clarity in the basics is the only way.
So that's why I objected to the GP assuming anything in such terms. You'll note that you, too, assumed he was probably talking in terms of years, and I'd have to assume it too, because a number like 20% makes no sense either as the chance of an individual HIV virus offspring being a mutant, nor as the % of each generation that are mutants. If he did mean years, it's awfully damned inaccurate, just closer than any of the other possibilities which I've thought of, all of which would be wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude.
The very choice of terms means nobody equipped to rationally debate him can, until a lot of other stuff gets clarified, so much stuff that nobody in their right mind would try to do it all in Slashdot's format. It's all stuff that the GP's 'side
HIV is actually a very bad example. A majority of HIV researchers now agree that HIV is a Stochastic mutator - that is, it does genuinely random mutation, in this case between at least 4 subtypes (This theory isn't accepted universally among HIV researchers yet, but it seems to be surviving any challenges quite well, and the people who are becoming supporters are well established researchers, solid main-stream PhD Biologists and even the Nobel winners in the field.).
For a Stochastic Mutator, the chance for type A to 'evolve' into type B stays the same as the chance for type B to 'evolve' back into type A, and so on, so there is no net evolutionary direction to this process (hence the word stochastic). A stochastic mutator may also mutate in non-stochastic ways, indeed the Theory of Evolution says it must, just as every other species does. Figuring out HIV's actual evolutionary mutation rate, and what part of the total rate is subject to selection pressure, takes separating this stochastic part from the total data.
Your use of "20% from the original strain" is meaningless. 20% in how many years just might be a meaningful number, but what the hell does 20% standing by itself mean? Even better, talk about the mutation rates per individual offspring and per generation, instead of per fixed time. If you can't talk meaningfully about these, then you have nothing to contribute.
Let's see - you don't have the actual facts, just your made up ones, and you descended to calling lots of names. Yep, he's the religious fanatic and you're the rational individual. You've convinced me.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the tip - it might speed up my going to KDE4.
You're certainly ok to refer to the EIC as a poorer people's deduction or whatever. I usually assume that it's simply shorthand for not spelling out all the details. That's how you seemed to be using it.
It's just that, in this thread, I've already seen a couple of remarks about taxation above the 50% level that sound like somebody is simultaneously in one of the highest two brackets for the income tax, and still paying a full 15.3% as self employment tax. Since the Social Security tax tops out at about $90,000 income and stops being taken out on anything above, it's very unlikely for this to actually happen. I've also seen a post with the SEP counted as part of income tax, and apparently that poster thinks it goes into the general fund. It doesn't - the IRS just passes it on straight to the Social Security Administration, and it gives the payer credit for quarters worked just like regular social security taxes - if the whole social security system doesn't collapse, these people will get to draw on it when they retire or become disabled, just like employees. I've seen a claim that there are no tax advantages for S corporations, etc. Ive seen a reference to whole groups of states considering adopting a state income tax - most US states already have one, and none of the ones that don't actually have any legislation at present. There have been a few people discussing the bailout that have said if the recession deepens they think their state will need to adopt an income tax, but that's far from any official movements.
There's a lot of really bad tax advice being given out here (I've counted at least 30 posts with wildly incorrect claims), and a lot of political rants based on pseudofacts, so I'm in really critical mode. You certainly don't need to appologize for anything you've said.
One very, very rarely makes an income of more than a quarter of a million dollars in a year solely through one's own hard work. One usually makes it by leaching, to some degree, off the hard work of others.
One very rarely makes an income solely through ones hard work - any income what-so-ever.
It's not a matter of who is leeching from whom either.
Let's take a farmer. She does all the work of raising her crop of tomatoes and getting it to market. No leeching there, she doesn't get government farm subsidies, she just works. But, whatever she makes for selling her crop, it depends in large part on having roads to transport it. It's not that she's a leech, nor lazy, but if she had to transport those tomatoes over a dirt path, in a little hand cart hewn from wood on her own land, and repair that cart within her own little toolshed every time it breaks, she would make a whole lot less, trading with only her immediate neighbors.
She could buy her truck from a private business, and get it worked on by a private garage, and she could drive on privately owned (toll) roads. Or she could drive on state roads, and at least in theory, get her truck serviced at a state owned facility. She could rent space from a for-profit farmer's market, or create a non-profit co-op with fellow farmers to buy land to establish a farmer's market at a good spot, or for that matter, be taxed by the state for the privilege of setting up at any wide spot along the state's roads. Which is more efficient, which benefits her and/or other people the most, varies widely. It's not a one size fits all solution, where private alternatives are always more efficient.
I do taxes for a number of small S corps, and I have never heard the IRS complain about some business being founded as a C corp or starting as a Sole Proprietorship or Partnership and becoming a C corp instead of an S, LLC, or whatever. If anything, they may have an issue with switching the other way, and there are more limits on doing just that.
An S corp is a pass through entity - it pays no taxes of its own, so if you are the person who takes both salary and profits from it, yes, you will be taxed at that rate. Yet with enough income, you can often still come out ahead by being part of an S corp. (For example, by using the corporate structure to pay a share of employee benefits, and making your own contributions as an employee, you can sometimes contribute much more towards your medical care plan, retirement, or other deductable programs, than you could either just as an employee or a self employed person.). The bracket, as you put it, may not change, but the actual taxes owed can and do, and in fact, that's one of the biggest reasons anyone would bother with becoming part of an S corp.
The Earned Income Credit goes directly to some poor people. Ones who do work, and so have some earned income. Ones who report that income rather than working under the table. Most of it goes to ones with kids (This year, the maximum amount for single filers without any kids was $408.). It's also capped at two kids, having three or more won't add anything to it.
Middle class taxpayers get the benefits of claiming all their kids, well after the point where the child tax credit has stopped mattering for lower income payers. They get to use a variety of education credits or straight deductions for those kids, many of which have formulas that make them of little or no use to lower income taxpayers.
Upper class taxpayers will find that many of those credits phase out, at least in part, plus they are the ones who may have to declare their child's income from interest on savings if that exceeds about 800$, etc.
I can see your point about equating the EIC to a negative tax bracket, but if you phase out the poor's tax breaks for having kids, you pretty much have to phase out the middle class versions too, for fairness sake.
I held a military intelligence slot for a year or so, and one thing that was incredibly basic, is MI is about capabilities, not intentions. The whole reason Military Intelligence is not really an oxymoron is summed up in this rule. It's the job of Intelligence to be a staff, not command position, and to report capabilities to commanders. At highest levels, it's Intelligence's job to report capabilities to civilian oversight. Commanders or civil governments are the people who decide if somebody is likely to use a particular capability in a particular way. And all the biggest decisions are reserved to the civilian government.
A good military intelligence report to congress might list all the countries with H-bombs, how many they have, what Megatonnages they go to, how reliable their trigger mechanisms are thought to be, and so on. It won't say anything about whether Great Britain is less likely to use them against the US than, say, Pakistan. It's up to the US Congress to decide whether there is a real risk from some countries or not. That way, the military carefully avoids telling the government when to go to war, and it stays the civilian government's decision.
If some guy in MI does his or her job right, he or she notices that twitter works at faster speeds in some real world case or other than some of the other communications methods. He or she reports that up the chain because it's a capability. The command chain and civilians are the people who need to decide if there's anybody intending to misuse this technology, and what should be done about it. Congress might go "ZOMG, Osama haz Twitterz! W3R3 D00MED!" and screw everyone's rights. But the MI guy did his or her job correctly.
This is a problem with adult porn too. Ted Bundy was excited by a lot of Sears style catalogs showing models in bras or nightgowns, and particularly by some catalogs of cheerleading supplies. To him, they counted as porn. There's something really strange about the whole idea of asking people who are, at least statistically, deviant, to define what is and isn't normal.
There is some real evidence the placebo effect doesn't work the way everyone believes it does.
Tests were done with giving people an injectable opiate for pain or giving them a placebo injection. This had pretty much the effect most people would expect, that is many people got pain relief from the placebo. This went on for about a week to establish a regular pattern. Then an opiate blocker was added to block the injection's effects, and surprise surprise, it also turned out to block the placebo's pain killing effects. This is one of those oddities medicine really has no good explanation for. It does seem to fit somehow with what you mention as well.
Various experiments where the persons giving medication were aware or not aware it was a placebo seem to give odd results as well, where people administering the drugs seem to give away indicators to the patients that they themselves presumably don't know. This has been a good area for designing double-blind tests, where researchers have come up with elaborate methods to deprive people of information, i.e. giving the nurses written instructions in advance, and having them enter an area to find the doses pre-laid out but no doctor present, so there was no human contact that would seem to be capable of passing on any non-verbal or body language clues from somebody who knew which ones were placebos and which real. Unfortunately, it is not considered good practice of late to leave opiates just laying around, so it would be very difficult to introduce these methods to a new round of the original opiate experiments that led to this line of research,
I'm running in Kubuntu 8.04 - I just added what KDE4 files I could using adept literally yesterday, and rebooted to it to try it out, then went back to 3.5.
Biggest issues I saw:
1. When you say there aren't many plasmoids yet, its an understatement. A lot of the useful desktop applets, i.e. local weather, haven't been added yet. There's just about nothing in the way of marginally useful but neat applets such as moon phase converted to plasmoids. You could use a third party applet program until more stuff gets integrated in KDE, but you can do that with 3.5, and there's already at least 2 good ones to choose from.
2. Dual desktop support is limited - I couldn't extend the taskbar across both monitors. Having more applets/plasmoids might drive this feature, and having more space available in the taskbar might drive the plasmoids feature. (Although as I understand it, the real point of plasmoids is to be able to put these tiny programs anywhere and not just in the bar, so maybe not). Not having either just yet makes me think it might be quite some time before there's progress.
3. A lot of the fine tweaks are disabled. If you like being able to do things such as independently set the width of your taskbar hiding buttons and whether there is one at each end of the bar or not, again you'll have to wait and hope somebody gets to that, or bone up on your coding. I don't see all of the fine tweaks making it into the next 6 monthly release, or even a year out.
The above post looks like somebody forgot to take their meds, but just in case, check out "Gaussian fermentation". Googling it will give you upwards of 39,000 hits, but the most prominent are all for biology. It's a real term in papers on yeast or bacterial growth. So yes, once the yeast has fermented it, more of us than ever would like some kool-aid. Please strain it a little and let it age for a few hours.
While I'm pretty sure that the word uncooperative is being used in a technical sense here, I'm also damned sure that a lot of military, law enforcement and government types don't understand that at all. You can use uncooperative to mean 'not making it easier for the robots to pass the testing phase' while development is going on, but once deployed, a lot of the decision makers are gonna think it means 'not making it easier for me/us to get whatever I/we want', and they will act accordingly.
When Jack Williamson wrote "With Folded Hands", his 'humanoids' took away all freedom to do anything risky. supposedly for people's own good. Try to go mountain climbing, and they make you stay inside, but offer a nice game of chess. A little observation of what the humanoids say shows they were trying to implement Asimov's laws, and the whole story is about just the point you raise. It's a pity that not nearly as many people have read Williamson as Asimov.
Asimov would have written a short story where a Positronic Robot series had just been developed to the point where it could decide imprisonment counted as harm, and a human had directed it that it was acceptable as it offered a chance for the human to reform and become a better person. Susan would get involved over something, like the robot breaking the prisoner out when it became apparent the prisoner wasn't going to reform, or that he already had so the rest of his sentence was superfluous and so counted as harm.
Either way, putting someone in jail only automatically counts as harm at some particular level of mentation. Below that, the robot would assume that if the human got three squares and a cot, and better medical care than being on the run, there was no harm. Above that level, the robot would have to balance issues of human freedom with the harm a human might do to others exercising it. At still higher levels of understanding, the robot would have to consider how the human might harm himself exercising freedom. It's only an automatic violation of law 1 to a robot between the really dumb and the moderately smart levels, not to other robots.
Returning to the thread, the robots described are in the real world = really, really dumb category, too dumb to even apply the first law at all. That means a human would actually be fully responsible for any mistakes the robots made, but tools such as this let that human pretend not to be responsible for mistakes - that's what's really a 'bad thing' (tm) here.
Let me add one: I just ran across an anecdote by Niel Gaiman, where he wrote about what was involved in writing Sandman for DC comics. He had to change a character and bit of dialog because DC's lawyers were afraid of violating someone's copyright, but when Gaiman checked into it, that 'someone' had died back in 1905 and the work in question was even older. How is this 'promoting progress in the useful arts' again?
The data being flawed is very different than the code being flawed. In fact, what Greenspan is talking about has almost no connection to what Cox is talking about, and there's no real reason to put them both in the same article. Starting with bad data will abundantly suffice to explain the meltdown before any problems with the algorithms used have to be assumed.
Most of the bias that did the real damage is political. For example, the most recent figures on the economy show that in the months before the mortgage crash began, 68% of all spending was driven by individual consumers buying retail. If the last tax rebate had been aimed at 68% of the total going back to individual consumers, or the '700 billion bailout' had put 68% of the 200+ Billion actually committed so far into reducing the impact to non-institutional borrowers, those would be appropriately neutral positions - but in the current climate, those would both be classified as terribly liberal.
But that figure wasn't trumpeted about until after the bailout was passed. The same goes for the corrected inflation rates, which are still not accurate but are a bit better, and which again weren't corrected in releases to the general public until after the bailout was final.
I suggest we form a support group.
Best description of the Libertarian party Evah!
You don't charge others to receive a show flyer (which could take a few hours to design, plus hours to print and many hours to distribute), so why charge for music?
I'm sure you'll get responders who tell you that's simplistic, but I want to explore that idea further. Nobody gets to profit from everything forever without operating costs. Corporation or individual, you have to put in time, effort or money somewhere to get more money out. If you want a profit, you don't charge for the show flier because it's advertising, aimed at making you money from something else. Maybe you sell the music, maybe the music is another part of the give-aways, and you sell ads, or controlled concessions, live tickets, or whatever, but if you want to sell anything, there will be investment costs associated. You can't even sell your work to an employer without committing to be there on time, a dress code, or simply eating breakfast to suit the employer's schedule.
For all the people who are pro the existing copyright laws, and especially the ones who love to throw around the violation=stealing line, what about the people on your side who seem bound up in the illusion of unlimited profit with no investment? Take a company which is making a profit selling tee-shirts with its logo and advertising on them, and is actually getting paid by people to let them become walking billboards - Is that a sustainable long term model, or will fashion doubtless change? Can anyone really afford to enforce copyright against people distributing movie trailers? If someone uses the law to control negative reviews, how can they avoid reducing free word-of-mouth advertising by the very same act? How can they file hundreds of cases in court and avoid people thinking they are sue happy? You've got organizations on the pro-IP side that seem to think the law will stretch to let them do all that, and more.
Even if you care deeply about creator's rights and feel the people doing illegal downloading are all thieves, how are you going to satisfy the IP holders who want unlimited profit with no investment, and think tougher man made laws are a way to somehow bend what are really laws of nature that stand in their way. IP law can't protect a creator from all risks associated with seeking a profit, it can't squeeze blood from a stone to actually get $250,000 settlements from violators who barely make minimum wage, it can't keep them from having to advertise if they want to reach a broad audience, it can't let them slavishly imitate a true leader in marketing and get all the benefits of coming up with something for the first time.
Be careful, I understand that some of those are infected with Snowcrash.
They were thinking that a lot of businesses had bought the machines, and weren't using the game ports for gaming, so they would welcome devices that put those ports to use. If you've ever seen pics of a C-64SX, the 23 pound 'portable' computer that was shown in the ads being carried by a guy in a gray suit getting off a learjet, you'll understand just what they thought was the market.
I've got something like this at home, and because it is a Frankenkludge device, it doesn't really fit what the original poster asked for - he or she wanted compact.
But as to why it's at home...
I'm converting old analog formats to digital. Once you have a bulky analog source such as a single VHS tape deck connected to a video card, you've already ruled out compact, elegant, and such adjectives. Wanting to output to a DVD or similarly modern format means you can't go back to a really old machine either, Being able to convert analog video to digital means a pretty decent TV tuner type card and software that also rules out anything under about a 500 Mhz processor (unless you can wait a week for a conversion), but you could go back about that far. Wanting to mix together lots of old peripherals strongly suggests having several of both PCI and ISA slots, which pretty well means a small tower or bigger desktop model.
When I got to that stage, putting in other stuff seemed sensible - as in, might as well use all the old parts you can - might as well cover the rest of the table, etc. So next in went a 5.25 floppy. Tower meant I could put in an old Zip drive, instead of an external that would hog a serial port I might need elsewhere... Those internal analog audio tape drives for PCs are getting cheap... Hey, I have a tape back-up that uses that unused serial port... 120 Mg 'superfloppy'...
In the end, I can convert some really odd analog formats, such as 8 tracks, or copying 8mm or 16mm film. I can at least read from a lot of old digital devices, such as a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. But it takes up a long, skinny steel table and most of the space underneath.
Why? I'm in my 50's, and actually built up a lot of media pre PC era. All my old analog video and audio collection is now digitized. That's a collection that was bigger than the Frankenkludge and its table when I started. My current PC doesn't even have a floppy drive, but the whole old record, cassette, etc. collection fits on one SATA drive. My parents, bless em, are still alive, and their old slides, videotapes of family gatherings, and so on, are in the process of being digitized too. Some recordings of my dad performing with the local symphony from 30 years ago are right now going to CD. My favorite local church has tapes featuring a few genuinely world class altos and sopranos that performed there from time to time, and digital copies of very old birth records, but the digital device was an Amiga 500 with 3.5 floppys. That's soon on the to-do list. After that, a local 2 year college has some music in their library that's supposedly only playable on this gadjet made in Chekloslovakia about 1980. I don't charge most of these people, but I could probably charge a few bucks to some, the college is definitely paying, and I would definitely charge any small businesses that need similar services. It's a hobby, but will probably pay itself off in a couple of years.
The above is fundamentally accurate. In fact, if you really found yourself regularly getting only 3 hours of sleep a night, your brain would start cycling into rem sleep very quickly, and skipping intermediate stages, just to squeeze more dreaming in. In severe cases, the body will fight to dream even if it has to neglect physical fatigue product cleanup and minor injury repair.
However, if you get less than 5 or maybe 6 complete dream cycles in, your memories of dreams will be very fragmented, and it appears, from experimenters asking people to write down their dreams while waking them just after the cycle ends and letting the subject get through a variable number of cycles, that the actual dreams start out very fragmented and illogical, and as the sleep cycles go on, get longer, more cohesive, maybe more like real experiences, even while retaining many of their fantastic elements.
I think it's interesting, that most of the people in western society don't get nearly enough regular, uninterrupted sleep to fully use the function of dreaming. Maybe all our theories about dreaming are as skewed as if we were theorizing about healthy diets and everyone had a mild case of vitamin deficiencies. How do we do real research if our average baseline group isn't skewed from our species biological norm?
I frequently have dreams where I'm reading some modern work, but the book is a huge leather bound volume with clasps and hinges, and the text is in archaic black letter, or hand scribed with illuminated portions. I guess, by the study, this is because of my formative years in the 1540's.
As a (sort of) Christian, I am bugged more by my own group's intolerance and fanaticism too. I think Carl Sagan got a real bee in his bonnet towards the end of his career, but I still appreciate his books, even when I simultaneously wince at some parts of 'Candle in the Dark'. I hope that the way people such as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson behave is because they genuinely think 'saving' you matters to your happiness in the longest run, but I'm far from confident that's true.
Yeah, maybe. Right now, there's some evidence from autopsies of early 20th century deaths in Zaire and related African nations, that put the first human HIV related death in 1924 if these results hold up. This case isn't an index patient, as the historical record for that victim strongly suggests he didn't pass it on to anyone else. The best guess for continuous presence is still less than this number of years. So, given that it looks like we have about 84 years old for an isolated case, I'd say the odds are, say, 30% for less than 100 years total, maybe 50-60% for right around 100, and maybe 10-20% that there's some undiscovered case back there significantly more than 100 years ago. That's just back of the envelope guessing mind you.
(The reason that particular case was selected for autopsy was a frequent diet of monkey brains, combined with recorded symptoms near time of death. There are almost no records in that region and era on homosexual conduct, and none at all on IV drug use going back that far, to steer researchers towards possible cases or, particularly, case clusters. Symptom records are incredibly spotty, but they are all anyone has. Except that, when somebody was bitten by a monkey of some kind, hunted monkeys of various types, or whatever monkey business ensued, it seems to have been recorded quite often.).
Still, I really want to emphasize that mutation rates measured in years is just not the way to do it. There are some real points being raised by some of the Intelligent Design gang, and they become much easier to explain if people are familiar with talking about genetics in terms of generations, % chance of a given organism being a mutant in each generation and other such concepts. Given that all professional biologists work in just such terms, defending an ID concept to people who don't, but who really, fervently believe in evolution, is like explaining the Libertarian party to a person who thinks everybody either registers for life as a Republican or a Democrat, and has no terms for any other choices, or even for not registering at all, or for switching parties.
For example, any professional biologist would agree that the time for, for example, 1 human generation, is around 18 to 20 years, but they would also agree with a much more precise definition: a generation is the average time for one female, with some assistance from one or more males, to bear and raise two offspring to the point where the offspring themselves successfully reproduce. Since we are a sexual species, it is simply illogical from a biologist's trained viewpoint to talk about the time it takes to reproduce 1/2 a pair like that was a basic unit. So you count the average time for a given mother to reproduce twice, taking only a little account of multiple births, as twins and above are rare in humans. Then you factor in infant mortality and other things and figure what the average time is over the course of multiple reproductive cycles, and eventually, you have a pretty accurate number that you feel comfortable calling a generation. If you want to make real progress in understanding the truth, clarity in the basics is the only way.
So that's why I objected to the GP assuming anything in such terms. You'll note that you, too, assumed he was probably talking in terms of years, and I'd have to assume it too, because a number like 20% makes no sense either as the chance of an individual HIV virus offspring being a mutant, nor as the % of each generation that are mutants. If he did mean years, it's awfully damned inaccurate, just closer than any of the other possibilities which I've thought of, all of which would be wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude.
The very choice of terms means nobody equipped to rationally debate him can, until a lot of other stuff gets clarified, so much stuff that nobody in their right mind would try to do it all in Slashdot's format. It's all stuff that the GP's 'side
HIV is actually a very bad example. A majority of HIV researchers now agree that HIV is a Stochastic mutator - that is, it does genuinely random mutation, in this case between at least 4 subtypes (This theory isn't accepted universally among HIV researchers yet, but it seems to be surviving any challenges quite well, and the people who are becoming supporters are well established researchers, solid main-stream PhD Biologists and even the Nobel winners in the field.).
For a Stochastic Mutator, the chance for type A to 'evolve' into type B stays the same as the chance for type B to 'evolve' back into type A, and so on, so there is no net evolutionary direction to this process (hence the word stochastic). A stochastic mutator may also mutate in non-stochastic ways, indeed the Theory of Evolution says it must, just as every other species does. Figuring out HIV's actual evolutionary mutation rate, and what part of the total rate is subject to selection pressure, takes separating this stochastic part from the total data.
Your use of "20% from the original strain" is meaningless. 20% in how many years just might be a meaningful number, but what the hell does 20% standing by itself mean? Even better, talk about the mutation rates per individual offspring and per generation, instead of per fixed time. If you can't talk meaningfully about these, then you have nothing to contribute.
Let's see - you don't have the actual facts, just your made up ones, and you descended to calling lots of names. Yep, he's the religious fanatic and you're the rational individual. You've convinced me.