Quite simply, the conjoining of incomes for tax purposes and the assignment of benefits should be an automatic, simple, and painless event.
The real question is, why should the state allow anyone to conjoin their incomes for tax purposes or assignment of benefits? Wouldn't it be simpler to just keep everyone separate?
The answer is yes, it would be. But the state recognized a long time ago that there are certain family structures that are beneficial to society (for example, they tend to produce future productive citizens) and that changing the tax code, benefits plans, etc to support those family structures would thus be beneficial to society as a whole.
The question becomes, is the family structure of two men or two women or five men and woman beneficial enough to society that it deserves the same special exception that one man and one woman receive? There are a lot of different ways of answering that question. If family structure doesn't matter, and well-adjusted productive citizens are raised regardless, then maybe any number and gender combination should be allowed in a marriage. If children raised in same-sex marriages turn out screwed up, then maybe same-sex marriages shouldn't be allowed. If a pair of people are most beneficial to society when one is working outside of the home and one is not, then maybe any two-person pairing should be allowed so that it is easier for one person to support another. If you really think that the only benefit to society is the raising of productive citizens, then maybe the benefits should be based on child-rearing rather than marital status.
Obviously, I don't have an answer (or, rather, have far too many answers and no way to choose between them), but I think you're starting from the wrong question.
I got a GameCube last Christmas (I'd been coasting on my SNES for a decade). This year I got a DS (used red one, not a Lite). I'm currently thinking PS2 next year, Wii in 2008. Although I don't know if I can wait that long for a Wii... But it would be so unlike me to pay more than $100 for a console. I'm torn.
Btw, I realize that this is not a brand-new camera. But it is no older than any of the computers in question (all were owned by my family at the time I got the camera). So you would think they would be able to talk to cameras that are no more outdated than themselves.
I have a Fuji Finepix 2600. I've never had an issue hooking it up to a Mac - it just appears as an external drive on the desktop. Or, if I want, iPhoto opens up and takes care of it for me (but I don't like iPhoto much).
This Christmas, I tried to hook it up to either my mom's Dell laptop or my brother's HP desktop. Neither one had drivers for it, neither one could find any drivers for it when I let it do whatever wizard-thing it tried to do. I finally had to find them online myself, download them, run the program to install them *twice*, and then it would finally recognize my camera.
The odd thing is, I think I've hooked my camera up to my mom's laptop before with no problems. But since then it's had a couple viruses and a couple reformats, so I guess whatever drivers it had got lost along the way. That's also not an issue on my Mac.
I'm sure a lot of people start out with Macs because they're shiny. Like my sister. She thought my eMac was shiny and pretty and nice, and got one herself. Three years later, though, my mom's Dell laptop and my brother's HP desktop have each gone through a couple viruses and several complete reformat/reinstalls. The eMac has never had an issue. Now she's a Mac fan because of that, and my mom is planning to get one too once her laptop bites the dust.
(I know, my sig says I like Macs because they're cute & cuddly. But it's not the ONLY reason I like them. I started using them at work around OS 8, and really liked them. I was using Linux at home at that point, though, so I didn't own one til 10.2.)
I've honestly never seen an honest-to-god HP spoiler. Where do you find them? There's always tons of speculation, but the only real info is whatever JKR releases on her site - which is rarely to never anything really useful. There were some supposed "spoilers" of Dumbledore's death, but there were just as many sites saying it was going to be Hagrid (or one of several other characters).
You... *are* being sarcastic, right? On that first paragraph? I've known people who made major career changes around the age of 40 and went on to be quite prominent in their fields. I mean, they did have a bachelor's, but didn't get a PhD until that late, which is ancient for academia. But now in their 60s they are high-ranked professors at major universities and well-known in their areas of study. If they can reach that level, someone getting their bachelor's at that age could at least get a halfway decent new job.
If you're not learning anything in college, you're at the wrong college. Find someplace that will let you test out of the intro classes if you truly know the material. Or find someplace with harder intro classes.
a) $25 per additional line would still be $70, which is $20 more than I'm paying T-Mobile.
b) It's only $25 per line if you don't want long distance. With long distance, is $30 per line, plus $3 for the voice mail. Now we're up to $33 more than I pay T-Mobile.
Face it, they're an okay deal if you're single and don't need long distance. Otherwise, you can do just as well or better elsewhere.
Age of majority/consent laws are such a mess. 19-year-olds are mature enough to vote and risk their lives defending our country, but not mature enough to drink a beer? And people who apparently *aren't* mature enough to cast a vote yet, are legally allowed to engage in activity that could result in their being completely responsible for the life of another human being.
Oh, whatever. Show me a single parent that doesn't sneek a look in their kid's diary now and then to make sure the words "pot" and "sex" don't show up. I'm not for parents constantly monitoring everything their kid does, but I'm quite sure that when I have kids I'll be glancing through their IM logs occasionally. The trick is not letting on that you know about anything that's not life-or-health-threatening, so as not to embarrass the hell out of them.
I agree with the other poster on the RAM. I've had my eMac for almost five years, and I've only had it actually crash twice, both times pretty spectacularly. The first time was bad RAM. Apple replaced the bad stick for free (it was only a couple months after I bought it) and all was well. The second time I'm still not sure what happened, but DiskWarrior fixed it. Other than those two times, I've never had to reboot my computer for anything other than software updates and the like.
And considering that my husband and I each have a phone, and they have no family plans, that would be $90/month. Their plans are decent (but not amazing) deals for single people. But even if I were single, I don't want or use text messaging or picture messaging, but I do need long distance and voice mail. So that would be $43/month, when I can get the same with plenty of minutes for me from T-Mobile for $30 (and was until I got married).
Do you work for them or something? It would cost me $86/month with them to get what I get for $50/month with T-Mobile. Who the hell charges an extra $3/month for voice mail and caller ID on a cel phone?? It's not like you can hook your cel up to an answering machine.
I agree. I see those Cingular ads bragging about the fewest dropped calls, and I have to wonder - is it, like, two a year to everyone else's three a year? I've never had an issue with dropped calls with T-Mobile. In a couple locations the sound goes in and out, but it's in very limited and predictable places, not widespread. (Unfortunately, one of those is where my husband often calls me from, c'est la vie.) But the calls almost never drop entirely.
I like being able to see exactly how much of what I'm paying is taxes. I've come across a few gas stations that actually do this - although the posted price is with tax, just like everywhere else, there's a sticker on the pump that says "$X of the price of this gas is state and local taxes". The consumer *should* be informed of what taxes they're paying, and not have to look it up somewhere every time they travel to different city or state. Otherwise, just like with gas, you get so used to seeing the number that you tend to forget there's any tax figured in at all, let alone how much. The more aware people are, the more critically they'll think about tax issues at election time.
The Toy & Game Inventor's Handbook. I don't yet know how useful it really is, since I have yet to try and pitch any of my ideas, but it seems pretty good in my totally unqualified opinion.
There's also The Toy & Game Inventor's Guide, but it's rather old. It's pre-internet, which means the whole world has changed. However, it still has some really good stuff on the legal side of things, so you might see if a local library has it anyhow.
If you haven't already, I would definitely say make a few prototypes and get people to play them. Get honest comments, don't be offended by constructive criticism, and improve it based on the comments.
but it should get you through any non-engineering/hard science degree at a 4 year school.
My husband's a mathematician, and he still uses the 83 he got in high school over a decade ago. Sure, he uses mathematica etc for real stuff, but when he wants to use an actual handheld calculator that's it.
FAWM is about actually writing quality material, much like NaNoWriMo.org
Lolz. You've obviously never done wrimo, or even hung out on their boards. Sure, there's some "quality material" but there's a whole lot more desperation to make it to 50K by any means necessary.:)
Well, of course it is. But it's a lot easier to do that if you live in a place where you can walk to work or the grocery store in 15 min, as opposed to living in a place where you have to drive an hour to work and an hour back every day - not only do you lose that half hour of walking you would have gotten in the city, that's also two hours less you have available for cooking a healthy meal and exercising. It's a lot easier to get enough exercise if you can do it *on the way* to other things you have to do, rather than having to put time aside for it.
So, yes, eating less and exercising more is how you lose weight. It's just that that's often a lot easier in the city than the suburbs.
Some areas don't even have sidewalks. I've seen this starting to change, though - in the past three years, I've seen a residential area in Durham, NC finally put in sidewalks where there were none for several miles. And then in my mom's neighborhood in Kansas City, MO, a jogging path was made alongside a state highway to connect two areas with subdivisions and shopping centers. These suburban areas seem to be slowly realizing that people *want* somewhere to walk to. But it's so slow.
This is why I bought a condo in the city rather than a real house in the suburbs - I get to work with 15 min on the bus + 15 min walking, rather than 1.5 hours in the car. (When it's not 20 degrees out) I can walk + bus to grocery stores, drug stores, a mall, Target, almost everything I need. I *hate* being bound to a car to get anywhere, but I know that in a few years when it's time to have kids, I'm probably going to want to move to some suburbs somewhere where we can get a bigger place, a real yard, better schools and lower crime. I just hope that the anti-sprawl movement has made it to whatever city we're in then, so I can find someplace where I can have all that *and* walk places. I would love my kids to grow up walking to school, the grocery store, the mall, etc.
Sure, when you were 10 meeting strangers seemed like an absurd thing to do. What about if you were a horny 14-year-old, and met (what seemed to be) a hot 14-year-old hot girl online? Teenage hormones can get in the way of that whole "logic" thing, you should remember, it wasn't that long ago. No matter how well-raised you are, it might not seem unreasonable to meet said girl in the mall parking lot this weekend, you'll be there with your friends anyhow, you can just slip away from them for a few minutes. Then the 14-year-old turns out to be more like 30, and suddenly you're in trouble.
No, there's no school of IST... The people who run networking at MIT used to just be called Information Services (I/S), but are now called Information Services and Technology (IST). It's not an academic department, it's the same as the IT dept at most schools.
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The real question is, why should the state allow anyone to conjoin their incomes for tax purposes or assignment of benefits? Wouldn't it be simpler to just keep everyone separate?
The answer is yes, it would be. But the state recognized a long time ago that there are certain family structures that are beneficial to society (for example, they tend to produce future productive citizens) and that changing the tax code, benefits plans, etc to support those family structures would thus be beneficial to society as a whole.
The question becomes, is the family structure of two men or two women or five men and woman beneficial enough to society that it deserves the same special exception that one man and one woman receive? There are a lot of different ways of answering that question. If family structure doesn't matter, and well-adjusted productive citizens are raised regardless, then maybe any number and gender combination should be allowed in a marriage. If children raised in same-sex marriages turn out screwed up, then maybe same-sex marriages shouldn't be allowed. If a pair of people are most beneficial to society when one is working outside of the home and one is not, then maybe any two-person pairing should be allowed so that it is easier for one person to support another. If you really think that the only benefit to society is the raising of productive citizens, then maybe the benefits should be based on child-rearing rather than marital status.
Obviously, I don't have an answer (or, rather, have far too many answers and no way to choose between them), but I think you're starting from the wrong question.
I got a GameCube last Christmas (I'd been coasting on my SNES for a decade). This year I got a DS (used red one, not a Lite). I'm currently thinking PS2 next year, Wii in 2008. Although I don't know if I can wait that long for a Wii... But it would be so unlike me to pay more than $100 for a console. I'm torn.
Btw, I realize that this is not a brand-new camera. But it is no older than any of the computers in question (all were owned by my family at the time I got the camera). So you would think they would be able to talk to cameras that are no more outdated than themselves.
This Christmas, I tried to hook it up to either my mom's Dell laptop or my brother's HP desktop. Neither one had drivers for it, neither one could find any drivers for it when I let it do whatever wizard-thing it tried to do. I finally had to find them online myself, download them, run the program to install them *twice*, and then it would finally recognize my camera.
The odd thing is, I think I've hooked my camera up to my mom's laptop before with no problems. But since then it's had a couple viruses and a couple reformats, so I guess whatever drivers it had got lost along the way. That's also not an issue on my Mac.
(I know, my sig says I like Macs because they're cute & cuddly. But it's not the ONLY reason I like them. I started using them at work around OS 8, and really liked them. I was using Linux at home at that point, though, so I didn't own one til 10.2.)
They just have different covers, so you're not reading something with a cartoon on the cover on the bus.
I've honestly never seen an honest-to-god HP spoiler. Where do you find them? There's always tons of speculation, but the only real info is whatever JKR releases on her site - which is rarely to never anything really useful. There were some supposed "spoilers" of Dumbledore's death, but there were just as many sites saying it was going to be Hagrid (or one of several other characters).
You... *are* being sarcastic, right? On that first paragraph? I've known people who made major career changes around the age of 40 and went on to be quite prominent in their fields. I mean, they did have a bachelor's, but didn't get a PhD until that late, which is ancient for academia. But now in their 60s they are high-ranked professors at major universities and well-known in their areas of study. If they can reach that level, someone getting their bachelor's at that age could at least get a halfway decent new job.
If you're not learning anything in college, you're at the wrong college. Find someplace that will let you test out of the intro classes if you truly know the material. Or find someplace with harder intro classes.
b) It's only $25 per line if you don't want long distance. With long distance, is $30 per line, plus $3 for the voice mail. Now we're up to $33 more than I pay T-Mobile.
Face it, they're an okay deal if you're single and don't need long distance. Otherwise, you can do just as well or better elsewhere.
Age of majority/consent laws are such a mess. 19-year-olds are mature enough to vote and risk their lives defending our country, but not mature enough to drink a beer? And people who apparently *aren't* mature enough to cast a vote yet, are legally allowed to engage in activity that could result in their being completely responsible for the life of another human being.
Oh, whatever. Show me a single parent that doesn't sneek a look in their kid's diary now and then to make sure the words "pot" and "sex" don't show up. I'm not for parents constantly monitoring everything their kid does, but I'm quite sure that when I have kids I'll be glancing through their IM logs occasionally. The trick is not letting on that you know about anything that's not life-or-health-threatening, so as not to embarrass the hell out of them.
I agree with the other poster on the RAM. I've had my eMac for almost five years, and I've only had it actually crash twice, both times pretty spectacularly. The first time was bad RAM. Apple replaced the bad stick for free (it was only a couple months after I bought it) and all was well. The second time I'm still not sure what happened, but DiskWarrior fixed it. Other than those two times, I've never had to reboot my computer for anything other than software updates and the like.
And considering that my husband and I each have a phone, and they have no family plans, that would be $90/month. Their plans are decent (but not amazing) deals for single people. But even if I were single, I don't want or use text messaging or picture messaging, but I do need long distance and voice mail. So that would be $43/month, when I can get the same with plenty of minutes for me from T-Mobile for $30 (and was until I got married).
Do you work for them or something? It would cost me $86/month with them to get what I get for $50/month with T-Mobile. Who the hell charges an extra $3/month for voice mail and caller ID on a cel phone?? It's not like you can hook your cel up to an answering machine.
I agree. I see those Cingular ads bragging about the fewest dropped calls, and I have to wonder - is it, like, two a year to everyone else's three a year? I've never had an issue with dropped calls with T-Mobile. In a couple locations the sound goes in and out, but it's in very limited and predictable places, not widespread. (Unfortunately, one of those is where my husband often calls me from, c'est la vie.) But the calls almost never drop entirely.
I like being able to see exactly how much of what I'm paying is taxes. I've come across a few gas stations that actually do this - although the posted price is with tax, just like everywhere else, there's a sticker on the pump that says "$X of the price of this gas is state and local taxes". The consumer *should* be informed of what taxes they're paying, and not have to look it up somewhere every time they travel to different city or state. Otherwise, just like with gas, you get so used to seeing the number that you tend to forget there's any tax figured in at all, let alone how much. The more aware people are, the more critically they'll think about tax issues at election time.
There's also The Toy & Game Inventor's Guide, but it's rather old. It's pre-internet, which means the whole world has changed. However, it still has some really good stuff on the legal side of things, so you might see if a local library has it anyhow.
If you haven't already, I would definitely say make a few prototypes and get people to play them. Get honest comments, don't be offended by constructive criticism, and improve it based on the comments.
Perhaps if you plan to continue teaching, you should look up the educational term "scaffolding." A calculator can act as a tool for this purpose.
My husband's a mathematician, and he still uses the 83 he got in high school over a decade ago. Sure, he uses mathematica etc for real stuff, but when he wants to use an actual handheld calculator that's it.
Lolz. You've obviously never done wrimo, or even hung out on their boards. Sure, there's some "quality material" but there's a whole lot more desperation to make it to 50K by any means necessary. :)
So, yes, eating less and exercising more is how you lose weight. It's just that that's often a lot easier in the city than the suburbs.
This is why I bought a condo in the city rather than a real house in the suburbs - I get to work with 15 min on the bus + 15 min walking, rather than 1.5 hours in the car. (When it's not 20 degrees out) I can walk + bus to grocery stores, drug stores, a mall, Target, almost everything I need. I *hate* being bound to a car to get anywhere, but I know that in a few years when it's time to have kids, I'm probably going to want to move to some suburbs somewhere where we can get a bigger place, a real yard, better schools and lower crime. I just hope that the anti-sprawl movement has made it to whatever city we're in then, so I can find someplace where I can have all that *and* walk places. I would love my kids to grow up walking to school, the grocery store, the mall, etc.
Sure, when you were 10 meeting strangers seemed like an absurd thing to do. What about if you were a horny 14-year-old, and met (what seemed to be) a hot 14-year-old hot girl online? Teenage hormones can get in the way of that whole "logic" thing, you should remember, it wasn't that long ago. No matter how well-raised you are, it might not seem unreasonable to meet said girl in the mall parking lot this weekend, you'll be there with your friends anyhow, you can just slip away from them for a few minutes. Then the 14-year-old turns out to be more like 30, and suddenly you're in trouble.
No, there's no school of IST... The people who run networking at MIT used to just be called Information Services (I/S), but are now called Information Services and Technology (IST). It's not an academic department, it's the same as the IT dept at most schools.