Please don't advocate that I have to pay property tax on my imaginary property. None of it in any way brings in revinue, and one of the two works I've registered is on a software program for a computer that has been obsolete for a quarter century.
I saw a good suggestion about this problem. The person who owns the copyright sets the value. If someone violates their copyright they can sue for the they set amount when they register it originally. However, they must pay a tax on that declared amount.
So if you want to pay less copyright tax, then either declare your value at $0 which means you cannot sue someone for violation, or make a smaller reasonable amount you can afford if you make a living off your work.
Well thats the thing. To me Obama feels like a Manchurian candidate. He has no background... He was pretty much out of the blue. Its almost if he could just finish taking the oath for office and then pull off his mask and its Jeb Bush for all we know.
I know the Clinton's skeletons and it really doesn't bother me because life was pretty much good during Clinton's time after the recession under the first Bush. I could put up with it again.
Obama has a vision, but I have never seen him actually state what the vision is. And I still don't know what that entails in resolving the white Elephant in the room (AKA recession, inflation, and the mortgage fiasco). Mccain on the other hand will probaly will do what Bush has done so that won't work either.
And the hundreds of non-US and non-Western individuals involved on the flotilla of vessels needed for undersea cable repair -- which are constantly roving the world repairing cables -- don't notice this, and/or have all kept it a secret?
If they wanted a splice, they could have done it a hundred miles away and no one would have noticed before the breach was fixed at the other end. Especially, if they used a submarine team.
Though, there are more efficient ways of doing things so I doubt it, but they could do it without noticing if they wanted to spend a few billion or two.
Identity theft, which is usually the fault of the person for improperly disposing of information is also viewed as a PERSONAL problem, and people believe all banks to be the same.
I've had to write nasty letters to employers, brokers, and banks because they constantly put SSN on statements. Mail theft isn't that uncommon in larger cities (happened to my room mate once and sometimes I get important mail that appears to have been opened) so even though one could shred everything you cannot prevent someone from getting into your mail.
It also appeared that someone at the USPS was actually the one doing since the mailboxes are locked. How can you protect yourself against that?
Why? Windows is modular - what are you supposed to do if a program updates a component that's already in use?
Well that is why windows has the most viruses! It needs to stop being modular and if programs need to update something in the OS then too bad. Work around it!
how can an OS fix a fundamental problem of the security of the user.
Easy. Take away their admin rights.
But mores seriously, the Windows OS model sees it as ok to modify the OS in order to the applications to run on it. If the OS was impossible to change by the user or a 3rd party program we wouldn't see 95% percent of the viruses out there.
Programs should be adapted to the OS and not the other way around. I'm always leary about programs that ask you to reboot the system in order to run even if they are legit.
I think OS X has gotten this mostly right, but it could be better.
Anyway, the point is that "Children of Men" wasn't about low birth rate. It is about being forced to confront your civilization having no future, and your life having no meaning.
Arguably that premise is horribly flawed. If one takes a view as an atheist, when you die you don't exist so it doesn't really matter if humanity survives one year without you or a billion because having children does not give you immortality as far as existing goes. If one takes a religious view on life, humanity surviving is a moot point because your all in heaven or hell or reincarnated as animals regardless if humanity survives.
And if you really want to get argumentative about lack of children equaling no future, I would like to point out that the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program and not because of low birthrates. So if you really thought about it, being said and in despair about no more kids is very short sighted because one day we'll be hit by another rock the size of Texas and if not, the sun will someday burn out and the fact we can or cannot reproduce will be a very moot point.
And even if we survive to colonize the galaxy we will still have to face cosmicological exterminations like "heat death", "big crunch", or the "big rip".
So unless the humans that come after us (or their AI machines) can figure out a way to work around the laws of physics, I'm pretty sure we are doomed in the long run as it is.
Now that is truly depressing to think that the universe will be a lifeless someday in the far future. So people boo hooing about not having kids seems kind of pointless when it was highly probable that we would die in some other way in an actual more painful fashion.
And that is why I could not get into "Children of Men"
This type of statement is frequently used to explain this is why Western society doesn't embrace robots.
It also might explain why western robots in development usually have guns on them. I mean iRobot is the most popular robotics company in the USA but most of their money comes from military contracts and not consumer sales.
But if you have an ID, it will be easier for you to prove you are alive - even if its canceled by mistake in a database.
How? If the database says you are dead, when someone scans the barcode it still says you are dead. Even if a government employee sees you appear to be alive and look like th eperson on the card, its going to take paper work and procedure to get that changed because often the people that you talk with (especially at the IRS) are not empowered to do anything of real value in this situation other than fill out a form.
Secondly, I know people who look like nothing like license card. They gained weight, dyed their, had surgery, are sick, etc etc and have grief going into a bar much less deal with the government.
Maybe the subject is a bit rude, but I cannot like D&D any more. It is getting more and more cumbersome and unrealistic, it more of a math problem than a simple canvas on which to build with your fantasy.
I was thinking the same thing about the new rules. I remember at times as a kid in which we would just throw out the rules for simplicity and have a six sided die scale with 1 being you failed horribly at the task and 6 mean you succeeded brilliantly with varying modifiers for success or failure on occasion. It wasn't about playing a game as it was story telling and role playing. Now it seems they just want to take WoW's success and bring it to PnP which is not that great of an idea.
I was hoping that someday we would see PnP actually go online, but I'm having my doubts.
If someone came and build a chemical plant had an accident and forced you to leave your home for good that you had not only owned but had been in the family that your father had lived in and his father and his father before him wouldn't you be pissed too?
Bonuses are taxed at the same rate as the rest of your income...perhaps you mean that because the bonus is "on top of" your normal income, it is taxed at your marginal rate?
Eh. Currently if they give your bonus in stock options, you only have to pay capital gains when you exercise them which is a different rate their your normal income tax (its quite less if you're a big roller). Now this changes after 2010 if the next administration doesn't push for renewal of the current method.
If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars?
If shipping and handling of a physical product were involved, I would say no. However, we are talking about ROMs that are a fraction of the size of songs that you would find on iTunes that apparently make Apple and others money at being sold at $.99 a pop.
When you loose it makes you the underdog, so your final victory will just be that much more glorius when fate smiles on you once again.
Actually, the really good games make it feel good to loose or at least you made the opposing team pay for every inch of ground. There is a popular mod turned retail called "Red Orchestra" in which some maps are impossible to win, but very difficult to win.
Moltke Bridge is a good example in which the Germans are defending Berlin from the Russians in where the Russians have superiority in fire power (they have tanks and the Germans don't). However, the map is so well done that there are so many ambush spots for panzerfaust ambushes and PakGuns will usually make the Soviets go through at least 100 or more tanks per round. Invariable on the larger 50+ player server the Germans will loose capture points (they are not recapable) and get low in reinforcements and will fall back to the last point called the Moltke bridge in which its basically a machine gun fest against the infantry trying to cross the bridge with the Soviet tanks with the cover.
Invariably its hard for the Germans to win by time running out (its a 70 minute map) at that point (though I've played a game in which we held the Soviets for 30 minutes on the last cap point) but you can really take joing at the other side howling in rage as you ambush them as they try to send HE shells through all the windows in hopes to take out the MG42 snipers.
In that sense... You feel like if you held them down til the last 5 minutes that you've accomplished something. There are plenty of other maps like that in which are defense and offense maps were one side never wins but make the other side pay dearly (almost like the real war).
There will always be offline applications and the need for them. There are so many situations where access to the Internet is not available.
True, but we are getting to the point where offline information is becoming useless in a world where information always changes. Lets take a stock broker for example. Saving last year history of a particular mutual fund in a local file is needed for long term study, but when he needs to know the current offering price during the active trading day he is going to be a very useless broker without an internet connection.
Not only that but if needs to email 10 of his clients with time critical information, its going to be far quicker to email them than to call them one at a time. This is why so many companies now require employees to carry blackberries 24/7.
Suffice to say, if you aren't online all the time these days, you are going to be at a disadvantage in terms of competing. Rather than focusing on systems that work fine off line, it would make much more sense to minimize any issues that would take you offline in the first place.
Not only that, but if you host your apps and data locally and loose internet connectivity your remote employees are no longer able to access those apps as well. Even if they come into the office, its not like they can receive email and information from clients outside the company at that point.
The reality of the situation is to have backups at all time if it just means having a cable modem just in case your T1 goes down.
Now air travel, remote areas, subways, and tunnels are still problematic but even those are being worked on for traveling workers.
Pragmatism isn't a bad thing. It usually means you compromise rather than being an ideologist who won't budge on the issue. Being open to compromising on your ideals to reach midway points with your opposing viewpoint is sometimes the best way to deal with a situation where both sides disagree.
Simply beating people over the head with your version of what is right until they give in is probaly worse than pragmatism.
That depends on if the Microsoft Negotiator doesn't hang up on the Sony Rep when hears a maniacal laughter and "100 BILLION DOLLARS!" on discussing terms of the BluRay license.
Study after study has found no significant health benefits sufficient enough to warrant circumcision.
Health reasons aside there other benefits.
That said most girls that I have questioned on the topic with don't like the idea giving oral sex to men who are uncircumcised due to the fact most men are lazy and which they don't bother to clean the area wheras a circumsized person can be lazy and still not have as a big of a cleanliness issue down there.
Hence... If you date a girl and pull your pants down and expect oral sex they may go "Ewwwww!" when they see that you are not regardless of if you shower and scrub 3 times a day down there.
Of course this being Slashdot, talking about oral sex with girls maybe a moot point for most of everyone here.
[quote]I think if we can focus on user education about phishing, and how banks will NEVER ask you for your username and password and account information via an e-mail, the number of fraudulent transactions would go down significantly.[/quote]
What are the banks going to do? Send thousands if not millions of their customers to security education classes? That might cost more than then phishing attacks themselves.
It would be more prudent if banks got more hostile with large transactions and who does what with it. Obviously someone has to withdraw the money somewhere or it stays in a bank account somewhere. If a notices (like the article says) a $5,000 or more transaction that is unusual then there needs to be some safety checks to simply prevent that from happening and demand the money be returned or the bank holding the money or let a phisher withdraw it get punitive damages in the form of the money lost.
I personally wouldn't mind going into a bank to verify large transactions. I have never written a single check over $5,000 in my life except ones involving mortgages and I had to go to the bank for that anyways. Now, I'm sure there are people out there that do deal with that situation, but perhaps they can get special options flagged on their account so that the vast majority of persons simply have limits to direct withdraws can happen (even those initiated by the user through their own online account).
Just think of it as taking away admin rights of the bank's customers by default and if they really want to make damn sure they are who they say they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't advocate that I have to pay property tax on my imaginary property. None of it in any way brings in revinue, and one of the two works I've registered is on a software program for a computer that has been obsolete for a quarter century.
I saw a good suggestion about this problem. The person who owns the copyright sets the value. If someone violates their copyright they can sue for the they set amount when they register it originally. However, they must pay a tax on that declared amount.
So if you want to pay less copyright tax, then either declare your value at $0 which means you cannot sue someone for violation, or make a smaller reasonable amount you can afford if you make a living off your work.
Obama published an award-winning 384 page book of his vision
So is he giving away those books or is he making money off them at my expense?
Has he released his vision on his website at least? Maybe a PDF download?
Otherwise, since you have read the book what does he plan to do to solve the current problem of the economy? Just having hope is a bad idea.
The nifty thing for Obama,
Well thats the thing. To me Obama feels like a Manchurian candidate. He has no background... He was pretty much out of the blue. Its almost if he could just finish taking the oath for office and then pull off his mask and its Jeb Bush for all we know.
I know the Clinton's skeletons and it really doesn't bother me because life was pretty much good during Clinton's time after the recession under the first Bush. I could put up with it again.
Obama has a vision, but I have never seen him actually state what the vision is. And I still don't know what that entails in resolving the white Elephant in the room (AKA recession, inflation, and the mortgage fiasco). Mccain on the other hand will probaly will do what Bush has done so that won't work either.
So obscure.
But it was funny as hell.
If you happen to be bonking someone on the street just at that moment, and don't want your face (or whatever) on camera, tough.
Actually, Google Street View has a "report" option that lets users report obscene happenings or persons faces that don't want to be on the site.
And the hundreds of non-US and non-Western individuals involved on the flotilla of vessels needed for undersea cable repair -- which are constantly roving the world repairing cables -- don't notice this, and/or have all kept it a secret?
If they wanted a splice, they could have done it a hundred miles away and no one would have noticed before the breach was fixed at the other end. Especially, if they used a submarine team.
Though, there are more efficient ways of doing things so I doubt it, but they could do it without noticing if they wanted to spend a few billion or two.
Identity theft, which is usually the fault of the person for improperly disposing of information is also viewed as a PERSONAL problem, and people believe all banks to be the same.
I've had to write nasty letters to employers, brokers, and banks because they constantly put SSN on statements. Mail theft isn't that uncommon in larger cities (happened to my room mate once and sometimes I get important mail that appears to have been opened) so even though one could shred everything you cannot prevent someone from getting into your mail.
It also appeared that someone at the USPS was actually the one doing since the mailboxes are locked. How can you protect yourself against that?
Why? Windows is modular - what are you supposed to do if a program updates a component that's already in use?
Well that is why windows has the most viruses! It needs to stop being modular and if programs need to update something in the OS then too bad. Work around it!
how can an OS fix a fundamental problem of the security of the user.
Easy. Take away their admin rights.
But mores seriously, the Windows OS model sees it as ok to modify the OS in order to the applications to run on it. If the OS was impossible to change by the user or a 3rd party program we wouldn't see 95% percent of the viruses out there.
Programs should be adapted to the OS and not the other way around. I'm always leary about programs that ask you to reboot the system in order to run even if they are legit.
I think OS X has gotten this mostly right, but it could be better.
Anyway, the point is that "Children of Men" wasn't about low birth rate. It is about being forced to confront your civilization having no future, and your life having no meaning.
Arguably that premise is horribly flawed. If one takes a view as an atheist, when you die you don't exist so it doesn't really matter if humanity survives one year without you or a billion because having children does not give you immortality as far as existing goes. If one takes a religious view on life, humanity surviving is a moot point because your all in heaven or hell or reincarnated as animals regardless if humanity survives.
And if you really want to get argumentative about lack of children equaling no future, I would like to point out that the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program and not because of low birthrates. So if you really thought about it, being said and in despair about no more kids is very short sighted because one day we'll be hit by another rock the size of Texas and if not, the sun will someday burn out and the fact we can or cannot reproduce will be a very moot point.
And even if we survive to colonize the galaxy we will still have to face cosmicological exterminations like "heat death", "big crunch", or the "big rip".
So unless the humans that come after us (or their AI machines) can figure out a way to work around the laws of physics, I'm pretty sure we are doomed in the long run as it is.
Now that is truly depressing to think that the universe will be a lifeless someday in the far future. So people boo hooing about not having kids seems kind of pointless when it was highly probable that we would die in some other way in an actual more painful fashion.
And that is why I could not get into "Children of Men"
This type of statement is frequently used to explain this is why Western society doesn't embrace robots.
It also might explain why western robots in development usually have guns on them. I mean iRobot is the most popular robotics company in the USA but most of their money comes from military contracts and not consumer sales.
But if you have an ID, it will be easier for you to prove you are alive - even if its canceled by mistake in a database.
How? If the database says you are dead, when someone scans the barcode it still says you are dead. Even if a government employee sees you appear to be alive and look like th eperson on the card, its going to take paper work and procedure to get that changed because often the people that you talk with (especially at the IRS) are not empowered to do anything of real value in this situation other than fill out a form.
Secondly, I know people who look like nothing like license card. They gained weight, dyed their, had surgery, are sick, etc etc and have grief going into a bar much less deal with the government.
Not true. Without prior art, it made it easier apply a trademark for "ptential" lawsuits
Maybe the subject is a bit rude, but I cannot like D&D any more. It is getting more and more cumbersome and unrealistic, it more of a math problem than a simple canvas on which to build with your fantasy.
I was thinking the same thing about the new rules. I remember at times as a kid in which we would just throw out the rules for simplicity and have a six sided die scale with 1 being you failed horribly at the task and 6 mean you succeeded brilliantly with varying modifiers for success or failure on occasion. It wasn't about playing a game as it was story telling and role playing. Now it seems they just want to take WoW's success and bring it to PnP which is not that great of an idea.
I was hoping that someday we would see PnP actually go online, but I'm having my doubts.
A million bucks each and they'll go away happy.
If someone came and build a chemical plant had an accident and forced you to leave your home for good that you had not only owned but had been in the family that your father had lived in and his father and his father before him wouldn't you be pissed too?
Bonuses are taxed at the same rate as the rest of your income...perhaps you mean that because the bonus is "on top of" your normal income, it is taxed at your marginal rate?
Eh. Currently if they give your bonus in stock options, you only have to pay capital gains when you exercise them which is a different rate their your normal income tax (its quite less if you're a big roller). Now this changes after 2010 if the next administration doesn't push for renewal of the current method.
When has Microsoft ever opted to follow a industry standard rather than use their own?
Well... Besides TCP/IP... Though if it were up to them we'd be using NetBEUI for internet today.
If 7 dollars is too much for an unenhanced SNES game, what do you think a fair price is, 6 dollars?
If shipping and handling of a physical product were involved, I would say no. However, we are talking about ROMs that are a fraction of the size of songs that you would find on iTunes that apparently make Apple and others money at being sold at $.99 a pop.
Obviously, bandwidth isn't the issue here.
When you loose it makes you the underdog, so your final victory will just be that much more glorius when fate smiles on you once again.
Actually, the really good games make it feel good to loose or at least you made the opposing team pay for every inch of ground. There is a popular mod turned retail called "Red Orchestra" in which some maps are impossible to win, but very difficult to win.
Moltke Bridge is a good example in which the Germans are defending Berlin from the Russians in where the Russians have superiority in fire power (they have tanks and the Germans don't). However, the map is so well done that there are so many ambush spots for panzerfaust ambushes and PakGuns will usually make the Soviets go through at least 100 or more tanks per round. Invariable on the larger 50+ player server the Germans will loose capture points (they are not recapable) and get low in reinforcements and will fall back to the last point called the Moltke bridge in which its basically a machine gun fest against the infantry trying to cross the bridge with the Soviet tanks with the cover.
Invariably its hard for the Germans to win by time running out (its a 70 minute map) at that point (though I've played a game in which we held the Soviets for 30 minutes on the last cap point) but you can really take joing at the other side howling in rage as you ambush them as they try to send HE shells through all the windows in hopes to take out the MG42 snipers.
In that sense... You feel like if you held them down til the last 5 minutes that you've accomplished something. There are plenty of other maps like that in which are defense and offense maps were one side never wins but make the other side pay dearly (almost like the real war).
I thought it was pretty damn funny, even when I got 25 hours of detention for malicious use of the computer system :roll:
;)
Amaratures! When I learned the Novel "send" command in 10th grade I used it for a very funny system wide message and didn't get caught.
Of course I used someone else's workstation to do it
There will always be offline applications and the need for them. There are so many situations where access to the Internet is not available.
True, but we are getting to the point where offline information is becoming useless in a world where information always changes. Lets take a stock broker for example. Saving last year history of a particular mutual fund in a local file is needed for long term study, but when he needs to know the current offering price during the active trading day he is going to be a very useless broker without an internet connection.
Not only that but if needs to email 10 of his clients with time critical information, its going to be far quicker to email them than to call them one at a time. This is why so many companies now require employees to carry blackberries 24/7.
Suffice to say, if you aren't online all the time these days, you are going to be at a disadvantage in terms of competing. Rather than focusing on systems that work fine off line, it would make much more sense to minimize any issues that would take you offline in the first place.
Not only that, but if you host your apps and data locally and loose internet connectivity your remote employees are no longer able to access those apps as well. Even if they come into the office, its not like they can receive email and information from clients outside the company at that point.
The reality of the situation is to have backups at all time if it just means having a cable modem just in case your T1 goes down.
Now air travel, remote areas, subways, and tunnels are still problematic but even those are being worked on for traveling workers.
pragmatic
Pragmatism isn't a bad thing. It usually means you compromise rather than being an ideologist who won't budge on the issue. Being open to compromising on your ideals to reach midway points with your opposing viewpoint is sometimes the best way to deal with a situation where both sides disagree.
Simply beating people over the head with your version of what is right until they give in is probaly worse than pragmatism.
Will the new ones come with blueray?
That depends on if the Microsoft Negotiator doesn't hang up on the Sony Rep when hears a maniacal laughter and "100 BILLION DOLLARS!" on discussing terms of the BluRay license.
Study after study has found no significant health benefits sufficient enough to warrant circumcision.
Health reasons aside there other benefits.
That said most girls that I have questioned on the topic with don't like the idea giving oral sex to men who are uncircumcised due to the fact most men are lazy and which they don't bother to clean the area wheras a circumsized person can be lazy and still not have as a big of a cleanliness issue down there.
Hence... If you date a girl and pull your pants down and expect oral sex they may go "Ewwwww!" when they see that you are not regardless of if you shower and scrub 3 times a day down there.
Of course this being Slashdot, talking about oral sex with girls maybe a moot point for most of everyone here.
[quote]I think if we can focus on user education about phishing, and how banks will NEVER ask you for your username and password and account information via an e-mail, the number of fraudulent transactions would go down significantly.[/quote]
What are the banks going to do? Send thousands if not millions of their customers to security education classes? That might cost more than then phishing attacks themselves.
It would be more prudent if banks got more hostile with large transactions and who does what with it. Obviously someone has to withdraw the money somewhere or it stays in a bank account somewhere. If a notices (like the article says) a $5,000 or more transaction that is unusual then there needs to be some safety checks to simply prevent that from happening and demand the money be returned or the bank holding the money or let a phisher withdraw it get punitive damages in the form of the money lost.
I personally wouldn't mind going into a bank to verify large transactions. I have never written a single check over $5,000 in my life except ones involving mortgages and I had to go to the bank for that anyways. Now, I'm sure there are people out there that do deal with that situation, but perhaps they can get special options flagged on their account so that the vast majority of persons simply have limits to direct withdraws can happen (even those initiated by the user through their own online account).
Just think of it as taking away admin rights of the bank's customers by default and if they really want to make damn sure they are who they say they are.