There are people out there who say that there is no legal requirement to pay income tax to the federal government. I read last night about a guy that used to work for the IRS who resigned after doing his own research and coming to the conclusion that these people actually have a case. He hasn't filed a return since 1999.
How these people propose to fund the building of the roads that they will march on in protest is unclear, but it's an interesting case they put forward from a legal point of view.
Well in Ireland they use Single Transferable Voting where you vote for multiple candidates. It's all done on pencil and paper. It's simple for the voter, but damned complicated for the number crunchers who have to count the votes. Counting can take days and it can take nearly a week to find out which parties are going to form a government.
The big advantage is that it's totally secure. Sure it's a bit more complicated than marking X in the box for a single candidate like in the British system, but it should remain a manual process regardless of the cost. Democracy is too important to be left to companies who are 'determined to deliver the next election to George Bush.'
Hah! Tom Cruise has a far more compact looking pair of camera-glasses than that, I saw him wearing them in Mission Impossible!
Seriously though, this is a classic case of a problem in search of a solution. I wouldn't be too hard on researchers who go down strange alleys like this, you never know where it could lead. I'd say the military would find good use for it.
Correctamundo! Also, I was reading in the Economist a few weeks ago that the impact of outsourcing on the US economy is often overstated, usually by certain politicians (can't imagine who) who are trying to impress the voters at this time. Far more jobs are lost in the 'churn' of regular labour turnover than are lost to India. That paper also had a good survey of Globalisation a few years ago. They produced stats that showed how investment in the developing world had the effect of driving local wages up, not down. The comparison of Western wages to those in India are a fallacy.
Now in the UK... muggings are much more common than in the USA.
I nearly choked when I saw this. Looks like we need some figures...
Home Office figures showed the murder rate in the US in 1998 was 6.3 per 100,000 people compared with 1.4 per 100,000 in England and Wales.
The murder rate in London is 2.9 per 100,000 compared with 8.6 per 100,000 in New York and 49.15 per 100,000 in Washington DC.
A report produced by the US Department of Justice in 1998 would appear to support the Home Office's claims.
Source: BBC
Firearms kill more children in the United States than any other cause except motor-vehicle crashes and cancer. Over the period studied, 1988-97, nearly 7,000 children aged between five and 14 were killed with firearms. Before an American child reaches 15, he or she is 12 times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than a child anywhere else in the industrialised world.
Source: The Economist, February 2002
Figures for gun-related deaths speak for themselves:
Guns make society safer? I don't think so. If the incident mentioned in the article had taken place in the USA, there's a higher liklihood that at least one person would have been shot dead. As violent and troubling as it is, nobody was injured in this incident because it took place in a society where people aren't given a right to shoot first and ask questions later. In the UK you are less likely to meet a hostile person with a gun, therefore less likely to become a victim of gun-related crime.
The BBC is pretty good value for money. GBP 121 ($63) per year payable by every owner of a colour TV in the country, (GBP 40.50 or $21.30 for black & white) and you get top quality public broadcasting that appeals to the mainstream without having to fill the airwaves up with advertisements. They also produce a few digital TV channels that you can subscribe to.
Sigh, I cling to the hope that one day slashdot will recognise pound signs.
Hey now, Dreamweaver is pretty close to being good as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and the code editor is second to none, it inherits a lot of code from Allaire Homesite after Macromedia bought them. I use this stuff day in day out, and I'm telling you, it's good stuff.
You could always lobby your congressman to bring in a law requiring every TV owner to pay an annual license fee to fund public broadcasting. He'd laugh at you, of course, but it'd be funny just to see the look on his face. "Quality public broadcasting?" he'd say, "The market doesn't want it, therefore it shouldn't exist!"
Books aren't a waste of time. Well, unless they're vitriolic political commentaries about the evils of the left or the evils of the right.
TV doesn't encourage you to think, it's just sitting there in front of you, a lot of it full of mind-numbing reality TV garbage. Now if PBS was winning the ratings war, I wouldn't be worried.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they have an exit strategy? I thought it was 'Mission accomplished,' but still there's no sign of those Little Green Men (LGMs).
I would have thought that the word Sapphire was already taken. What's it gonna be next? A superconducting coolant called 'Gold?'
There are people out there who say that there is no legal requirement to pay income tax to the federal government. I read last night about a guy that used to work for the IRS who resigned after doing his own research and coming to the conclusion that these people actually have a case. He hasn't filed a return since 1999.
How these people propose to fund the building of the roads that they will march on in protest is unclear, but it's an interesting case they put forward from a legal point of view.
The big advantage is that it's totally secure. Sure it's a bit more complicated than marking X in the box for a single candidate like in the British system, but it should remain a manual process regardless of the cost. Democracy is too important to be left to companies who are 'determined to deliver the next election to George Bush.'
Isn't first class seperated from standard class by the buffet coach? Or is that just on Virgin Trains?
That should say 'solution in search of a problem.'
Seriously though, this is a classic case of a problem in search of a solution. I wouldn't be too hard on researchers who go down strange alleys like this, you never know where it could lead. I'd say the military would find good use for it.
Correctamundo! Also, I was reading in the Economist a few weeks ago that the impact of outsourcing on the US economy is often overstated, usually by certain politicians (can't imagine who) who are trying to impress the voters at this time. Far more jobs are lost in the 'churn' of regular labour turnover than are lost to India. That paper also had a good survey of Globalisation a few years ago. They produced stats that showed how investment in the developing world had the effect of driving local wages up, not down. The comparison of Western wages to those in India are a fallacy.
Building a high-speed rail link is as useless as breaking a window?! How you got modded 'insightful' I do not know!
Here it is, but I think paid subscription to the Economist is required.
The BBC is pretty good value for money. GBP 121 ($63) per year payable by every owner of a colour TV in the country, (GBP 40.50 or $21.30 for black & white) and you get top quality public broadcasting that appeals to the mainstream without having to fill the airwaves up with advertisements. They also produce a few digital TV channels that you can subscribe to. Sigh, I cling to the hope that one day slashdot will recognise pound signs.
Hey now, Dreamweaver is pretty close to being good as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and the code editor is second to none, it inherits a lot of code from Allaire Homesite after Macromedia bought them. I use this stuff day in day out, and I'm telling you, it's good stuff.
Yeah. Today the local council decides to provide a vital service. Tomorrow you wake up with a horse's head in your bed. A perfect analogy.
I disagree. The government's purpose is whatever the people deem its purpose to be.
Quite right. A private monopoly is better than a state monopoly any day. Right?
You could always lobby your congressman to bring in a law requiring every TV owner to pay an annual license fee to fund public broadcasting. He'd laugh at you, of course, but it'd be funny just to see the look on his face. "Quality public broadcasting?" he'd say, "The market doesn't want it, therefore it shouldn't exist!"
Books aren't a waste of time. Well, unless they're vitriolic political commentaries about the evils of the left or the evils of the right.
TV doesn't encourage you to think, it's just sitting there in front of you, a lot of it full of mind-numbing reality TV garbage. Now if PBS was winning the ratings war, I wouldn't be worried.
Nobody's stopping you from writing a Flash player for your favourite platform.
For 'enable' I meant to say 'disable.'
I hope you enable JavaScript while you're at it. Look at all those annoying popup windows! JavaScript must be evil if people abuse it like that.