Is it just me or is it ridiculous to jail people much less send them to the gulag for software piracy? Even agreeing that it's wrong, it shouldn't be something you do hard time for
Well, this is Russia, which had the infamous Section 58 law up until 30 years ago or so. One of the subsections punished "counterrevolutionary thoughts" with either death or a long prison sentence (25 years in the camps IIRC).
Ignorance is not an excuse; you can be done for receiving stolen goods in the UK and simply claiming you did not know they were stolen is not a valid defence.
Depends what crime. A lot of felonies in the US have language that states "... with malice aforthought...".
Yeah, not to mention minor stuff for which you can be sued like ADA compliance.
And you can blame *them* for non-compliance (if they're a contractor) and hope you yourself won't get sued!
-b.
Re:I say common knowledge killed the webmaster
on
Who Killed the Webmaster?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It just isn't cool to be a Webmaster anymore, pretty much anyone can do the job or knows a kid who can do the job.
Yeah, but not everyone wants to work on their own small-business website, get the layout right, make sure it's compatible with IE 5,6,7, FF, and Safari... It's easier to hire a kid/freelancer/jack-of-all-trades. It's just "site designer" or something now.
When your average 12 year old can churn out a Myspace page (albeit a blinding, noisy, tooth grinding affront to all that is holy) being a "Webmaster" just doesn't give you the street cred it did back in the 90s.
Meh, in the 90s there were AOHell profiles that were just as (if not more!) painful to look at and annoying. Filling out a questionnaire and uploading some pics and music does not a web page make, not if you want your organization or yourself to have some credibility online. The best-looking and cleanest web pages are still often old-school plain HTML and pictures with animation and active controls only added in where really necessary.
So true. A client set up a mailing list named "service@.com" going to all of the main players' addresses in the company. Spam volume to all of the list users increased several times before I ended up suggesting renaming the list to a less common name!
Managed hosting and the bunch of tools for a CMS, database access over the web, a control panel like PLESK, cpanel etc. Who needs a webmaster anymore when you can do much more sitting with a notebook on ur beanbag?
Businesses that do other things than web design still might want an employee/group/outside person to handle those things. Why? Because they have some idea of what the site should look like and what info it should contain, but they don't want to be bothered with the exact layout and workings. It's easier now, but there was still specialists that handle that stuff for all but the smallest and poorest of organizations.
Because it involved radiation which inherently causes anyone to shiver, and it caused a slow, painful, agonizing death, which sends about as big of a message as publicly drawing and quartering the guy.
Like the stories about Oleg Penskovsky who was a double-agent from Soviet military intelligence (GRU). After he got caught and found guilty of treason, he supposedly didn't get shot - instead, he got put into an incinerator while still alive. Supposedly, the movie of the execution was shown to new GRU recruits to discourage defection and espionage...
I for one like the way coffee tastes and smells. The bitter taste (I drink coffee w/o cream or sugar) is part of the thing that wakes me up in the morning!
And SBOs are also the biggest source of tax fraud. I'd find my references, but I gotta run and Google is always available.
Your point being? Actually, I suspect since small businesses don't have high-powered accounting firms and tax lawyers working for them (usually), a lot of them overpay or aren't as aggressive with deductions as they can be as well. I don't see how a workable system for "easy" small business taxation would work.
I'm a poor student, so my only goal is to get my refund back as fast as possible.
Don't get a refund. Adjust your allowances on your withholding forms so that you'll owe 10% of your total taxes or less than $1000 on April 15. Under either of those conditions, you don't pay penalties. To hell with giving the government an interest-free loan for 3 months (actually the best part of a year)...
California had a program called ReadyReturn. The state tax agency would prepare your return from the information on W-2s, 1099s, etc. and send the return to you.
The State has an interest in collecting as much money as possible. This represents a conflict of interest.
That's fine if you've only had one job that year, and you work as a wage-slave for someone else, and you don't have a lot of investments.
BTDT as a freelance 1099 consultant for the past 2 years. It's easier than you'd think. Sure, there's a lot of grunt work involved (addind up receipts, etc) but it's doable. And at least you understand what you're signing before you send it.
If you owe less than 10% of your total year's liability or less than $1000 on April 15, you don't get any penalties assessed for late payment. If you can make sure to adhere to those limits, it's better to underpay a bit during the year and send a final (small) payment on April 15 rather than getting a check back. Why give them an interest-free loan for 3 months?
They're cross platform, less error prone, and in many cases charge about the same price as popular tax prep software costs.
Not everyone uses tax prep software or needs to - I just spend some time every year and calculate my taxes by hand and using a spreadsheet. I keep all paper receipts for deductions and bank statements to prove earning in case of an audit. And signing off on something an accountant does for you without evaluating it carefully isn't a great option anyway since you might be liable for some fines later if there's an error.
Of course, all of it's a stupid curse. Uncle Sam knows exactly what you made and has the resources to present it to you over the web.
Not really, especially if you're a small business owner (like me) who accepts payment from clients. Some of the payments are income, others are reimbursements for expenses and purchases of equipment. Unless you're just working for wages and don't qualify for any credits and deductions, it isn't really that simple.
Did anyone read this and think WTF? So police don't fight crime if they don't have cell phone pics to solve it for them? Great.
Crime fighting is actually the least important of the applications. I see more applications for fire and rescue services. A patient or the size of a fire can be evaluated using the photos, so appropriate first aid can be recommended and an appropriate number of rescuers dispatched.
I'd be surprised if e.g. Nokia was stripping the feature out of the phones in the US
Actually, in quite a few offices, camera phones are not allowed since the owners don't want visitors to be able to easily take pictures of sensitive documents. So, if you consult and go out to clients' offices, you might need a phone without a camera - otherwise you might be asked to check it in with security all the time. The cell makers are just filling a market need by making phones without cameras as well as with them. Besides, I'd rather have a slightly smaller and lighter phone than a camera.
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Well, this is Russia, which had the infamous Section 58 law up until 30 years ago or so. One of the subsections punished "counterrevolutionary thoughts" with either death or a long prison sentence (25 years in the camps IIRC).
-b.
Or just collect to bribe the warden US$50k to allow the inmate to 'disappear'?
-b.
How good is Cyrillic/Russian support in those applications? Not just for fonts, but menus and help screens...
-b.
Depends what crime. A lot of felonies in the US have language that states "... with malice aforthought
-b.
It kills the host body eventually and thus destroys itself.
And you can blame *them* for non-compliance (if they're a contractor) and hope you yourself won't get sued!
-b.
Yeah, but not everyone wants to work on their own small-business website, get the layout right, make sure it's compatible with IE 5,6,7, FF, and Safari... It's easier to hire a kid/freelancer/jack-of-all-trades. It's just "site designer" or something now.
-b.
Meh, in the 90s there were AOHell profiles that were just as (if not more!) painful to look at and annoying. Filling out a questionnaire and uploading some pics and music does not a web page make, not if you want your organization or yourself to have some credibility online. The best-looking and cleanest web pages are still often old-school plain HTML and pictures with animation and active controls only added in where really necessary.
-b.
Not to mention a coil of stout rope to tie u^W^W form the web.
-b.
So true. A client set up a mailing list named "service@.com" going to all of the main players' addresses in the company. Spam volume to all of the list users increased several times before I ended up suggesting renaming the list to a less common name!
-b.
Businesses that do other things than web design still might want an employee/group/outside person to handle those things. Why? Because they have some idea of what the site should look like and what info it should contain, but they don't want to be bothered with the exact layout and workings. It's easier now, but there was still specialists that handle that stuff for all but the smallest and poorest of organizations.
-b.
Nuclear power plants often have cooling towers, which put out plumes of steam. So they're actually sort of self-obscuring :)
-b.
And NJ with Salem Creek Station. Not blurred though the plumes of steam coming from the cooling towers obscure some of it.
-b.
???
Coffee beans themselves have a bitter taste. It's good-bitter, IMHO, not nasty at all.
-b.
Like the stories about Oleg Penskovsky who was a double-agent from Soviet military intelligence (GRU). After he got caught and found guilty of treason, he supposedly didn't get shot - instead, he got put into an incinerator while still alive. Supposedly, the movie of the execution was shown to new GRU recruits to discourage defection and espionage...
-b.
-b.
Your point being? Actually, I suspect since small businesses don't have high-powered accounting firms and tax lawyers working for them (usually), a lot of them overpay or aren't as aggressive with deductions as they can be as well. I don't see how a workable system for "easy" small business taxation would work.
-b.
Don't get a refund. Adjust your allowances on your withholding forms so that you'll owe 10% of your total taxes or less than $1000 on April 15. Under either of those conditions, you don't pay penalties. To hell with giving the government an interest-free loan for 3 months (actually the best part of a year)...
-b.
The State has an interest in collecting as much money as possible. This represents a conflict of interest.
-b.
BTDT as a freelance 1099 consultant for the past 2 years. It's easier than you'd think. Sure, there's a lot of grunt work involved (addind up receipts, etc) but it's doable. And at least you understand what you're signing before you send it.
-b.
If you owe less than 10% of your total year's liability or less than $1000 on April 15, you don't get any penalties assessed for late payment. If you can make sure to adhere to those limits, it's better to underpay a bit during the year and send a final (small) payment on April 15 rather than getting a check back. Why give them an interest-free loan for 3 months?
-b.
Not everyone uses tax prep software or needs to - I just spend some time every year and calculate my taxes by hand and using a spreadsheet. I keep all paper receipts for deductions and bank statements to prove earning in case of an audit. And signing off on something an accountant does for you without evaluating it carefully isn't a great option anyway since you might be liable for some fines later if there's an error.
-b.
Not really, especially if you're a small business owner (like me) who accepts payment from clients. Some of the payments are income, others are reimbursements for expenses and purchases of equipment. Unless you're just working for wages and don't qualify for any credits and deductions, it isn't really that simple.
-b.
Crime fighting is actually the least important of the applications. I see more applications for fire and rescue services. A patient or the size of a fire can be evaluated using the photos, so appropriate first aid can be recommended and an appropriate number of rescuers dispatched.
-b.
Actually, in quite a few offices, camera phones are not allowed since the owners don't want visitors to be able to easily take pictures of sensitive documents. So, if you consult and go out to clients' offices, you might need a phone without a camera - otherwise you might be asked to check it in with security all the time. The cell makers are just filling a market need by making phones without cameras as well as with them. Besides, I'd rather have a slightly smaller and lighter phone than a camera.
-b.