>> Who, outside of crazy, Nazi scientists and ralieans thinks its a good idea to voluntarily put a chip in a persons body for no good reason. >>
Lets say I have a condition requiring a medic alert bracelet. I don't know, lethal allergy to eggs, perhaps (causes complications with all kinds of medicines cultured on egg yolk these days). I could quite rationally say "Chip me, doc" on Feb 14th, 2007 so that I don't have to take the risk that on April 18th, 2027 I leave my medic alert bracelet (or ID card, or other Protection Against Lethal Error Security Token) on the nightstand just in time to get on the morning commute, be hit and moderately injured by a drunk driver, and be killed by a well-meaning ER nurse who checked me for bracelet and chip before dosing me with something accidentally lethal.
Personally, if I had a condition that was serious, I'd go to the chip before body jewelry, purely on aesthetic grounds. I'm sure the doctors who put it in could take it out if for some reason it needed to come out. If they can pry out a liver and put in a new one they can probably grab a wee bit of metal from a place chosen because it was easily accessible with a surgical instrument.
Similarly, in the vein of making choices today to avoid making them tomorrow, I could decide now to have my paycheck autodeducted in December to fund my retirement account. Could I decide that in December without any loss of effectiveness? Yes, but the February me might not trust the December me sufficiently to spend on the retirement account instead of extra Christmas presents. Thus, I put it out of the December me's hands unless he leaps over unreasonably high barriers to overrule the February me's decisions.
... unfortunately, from the married 40 year old, not the cute single 24 year old ("giri choco" = chocolate given out of social obligation, not from an expression of personal interest). I'm now socially obligated to get her something white about a month from now.
Because someone decided that the key way to improve on Guitar Hero was to slash the price, which neither introduces nor fixes any problems, and then eliminate the guitar, which introduces ONE REALLY BIG PROBLEM. People do not fantasize about getting up in front of a roaring crowd and whipping out their Dell keyboard. Guitar Hero sells fantasy first, music second, and software a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeery distant third.
If you're going to slavishly imitate at least copy the fun parts correctly!
>> who can't afford a 100-200$ computer ? what are you going to sell them ? >>
Based on a quick survey of any block of inner city America, that would probably be liquor, cigarettes, payday loans, and basic necessities. I'd hate to live in that sort of neighborhood, but giving the choice between living there with a computer and living there without, hey, I already have to pass liquor advertising on the way to work. If I see a little more in the privacy of my own home while studying to find a job to Get The Heck Outta Here that won't kill me.
>> simply forbid advertising of any kind that is directly targeted at a minor >>
Why not just take away kid's right to buy things. Its much simpler to enforce than figuring whether that advertising is directly targeted or not (c.f. Joe Camel, WWF-anything, or Cartoon Network -- the intersection of things which interest adults and kids alike is pretty wide), accomplishes the same objective, and could also be enforced with 9mm help. Of course, we'd think you were a crazy Communist nutball if you suggested it, but thats only because commerce is a perfectly legitimate thing and that children, have real (if qualified) rights to engage in commerce in the same manner that they have real (if qualified) rights to engage in speech. Oh noes, someone might try to influence the opinions they speak or influence what products they purchase! Well, great news, we have these things called "parents", who have vastly more influence and can deprive the child of this thing called "money" without which advertising is pretty much impotent.
Rather than retraining them to OpenOffice, whose single best feature is "We tried to be a slavish clone of software you already use", you can download PDFCreator (http://pdfcreator.sf.net) and just print straight from Office. I love pdf creator, and it makes a lot of sense to me to separate physical (or close-to-physical) document preparation from document layout/content editing software. This way I can continue exporting to pdfs without having to wait on OO to catch up with Office2007 in the interface or interop departments.
Free markets lead to development and while development might temporarily harm *aspects* of the environment it is an immediate win for health. So the landscape gets a little less pretty in the interim while you're wealthy enough to have factories but not quite wealthy enough to have a class of people who have so much free time that they can do little else but attend Greenpeace meetings and post on their $2,000 laptop on Slashdot about how terrible capitalism is. Take a look at life expectancy and, well, any QOL measure you want in a pre-industrialization and post-industrialization society. Innovations like pharmaceuticals (eww, petroleum derivatives! Make them stop, Gaia! I want to live my life the natural way and die by age thirty!), modern water filtration systems (Pop quiz: when is the last time the US, or any other developed nation, had a cholera or typhoid epidemic?), etc.
Take a look at China, a country which is making fits and starts in the direction of the free market, and which no one would accuse of being overly environmentally conscious. The average life expectancy has gone from 41 years (1950) to 71 years (2002). Even Africa, that perpetual basket case of a continent, has gone from 38 years to 50. Africa's health problem isn't that they have free markets, its that they don't have nearly enough of them (for example, governments there cause famines with some regularity by seizing all the farms to reward political supporters -- many nations in Europe haven't seen a non-war famine in *centuries*). All the whining about GMOs, "Don't make us slaves to Monsanto", etc, ignores the facts that people who most certainly ARE dependent on Monsanto and the other green revolution companies (like, oh, the US) aren't exactly doing that badly for themselves in the whole "feeding the population" thing.
... with solar panels, and still not have enough capacity to power Chicago. Much of the world does not live in Southern California! We have strange weather phenomena, like clouds! And this isn't a once in a while problem, its EVERY FREAKING DAY! In the spring, at least. In the winter, we have clouds and snow and ABSCENCE OF SUN for weeks at a time. Perhaps we could put Lake Michigan on stilts and use it as a battery. (Seriously, most pumped water storage is like hydroelectric power, heavily constrained by having local geography which is conducive to it. If you don't happen to have two bodies of water at vastly different elevations nearby then you get to build one or both of them yourself, and it AIN'T CHEAP -- per MW capital investment is similar to building a nuclear plant, and that is on top of the cost of the solar/whatever you need to actually fill the battery. It also isn't ecologically neutral -- ask the million folks China displaced to get their Three Gorges facility working. You need an awful lot of water falling from a relatively high place to a relatively low place, and that does not just spontaneously happen frequently in nature.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- greens need to get over their dogmatic, irrational reluctance to use nukes.
Three times my little slice of commercial software development has made it onto Slashdot. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com -- It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers.) Three times folks have said its trivial (true as it goes -- it took me a man-week to write.) Three times folks have said its disgusting to charge $24.95 for it (good thing I don't sell to Slashdot readers.) Three times folks have said OSS is going to put me out of business. Three times folks have actually offered to donate labor to put me out of business....
Three years my OSS competitor has gone without a patch. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards) It lacks a few key features, like actually printing the cards it makes. This makes it more active than 80% of the projects on Sourceforge.
Is bingo-cards a success? Well, it probably accomplished what the author wanted it to, and good for him. Is it going to put me out of business? No. Is OSS ever going to supplant commercial software in bingo card creation or a whole lot of other human endeavors? No.
... as one of more than one ways to do things. Unfortunately, every Perl program I have seen (with the merciful exception of POPFile) picks one of the other ways. TMTOWTDI, don't you know.
The problem with Perl isn't the language. OK, let me amend that: s/ (t)/just $1/. Its that the culture which surrounds the language encourages practices which are at odds with maintainability. You can't seperate Perl code from Perl coders, and Perl coders are, to a disturbing degree, prone to creating unmaintainable cruft with copious use of syntatic sugar which is actually disguised cyanide. Perl would be better off if some things which are syntactically allowable were banned forever. Here's a couple:
* copious use of default parameters (a wonderful way to introduce bugs into the program by accidentally overwriting one when inserting a new line of code between two sections of code which do not look obviously related)
* $_.=$& Code this obtuse needs to be discouraged, not encouraged. Its powerful, but totally obtuse, and programmer brain time is more important than finger time, which unfortunately Perl has decided to optimize for. (Incidentally: it appends the last regular expression match to whatever string you were operating on. I think.)
* Multiple methods of passing arguments to functions. (I have come across code which uses more than three in a single source file.) Function prototypes are like seatbelts. I know you think you're smart enough to not cause an accident. Statistically speaking, you're not. Buckle the heck up.
... of course, since the hardware is subsidized by the monthly fee (its the razors and blades model -- or, more aptly, the cellphone and contract model), you'll end up paying up more upfront. "Extortion" is a funny word choice here -- is the machine threatening to burn down your house if you don't shell out your $14?
So Sony's game division isn't doing so hot this year. Maybe it will get hit by a meteor and be a total loss year. Sony would continue onward with more of a damage to confidence than to their underlying financial fundamentals, because the games division is merely a portion of their total business (just like XBox is about prestige and positioning for Microsoft, not for making them a large portion of their sales in any given year). Did you know Sony sells *life insurance*, for crying out loud? In addition to home electronics, video games, movies, music, banking services, other insurance products, and being an ISP.
Take a look at their annual report for 2005: the games division (hardware + software) contributes an earthshattering TEN PERCENT of their sales in the year. By comparison, 66.5% is home electronics (TVs, PCs, walkmans, rice cookers, etc etc).
If I could buy stock in just the PS3 I'd short the heck out of it, but Sony as a whole is doing pretty well recently, and I haven't seen a great argument on why that will reverse course anytime soon.
Is there a single day when hundreds of brave Brits have not died in, I don't know, pick a conflict? WWII works as a good canonical example in the US, lets try for Britain. "Its March 8th... uh oh, Hitler dropped some bombs on us a couple of decades ago, not a good day to release a new novel." "Yeah, the bugger bombed us... we bombed back. Guess who won. Sod off if you think I'm going to let that wanker get in the way of me enjoying Harry Potter." (Stiff upper lip, football fan style.)
I'm an American and once got asked by my Japanese bosses on December 7th whether I felt anything special about the day. "Well, we have a saying in English: 'time heals all wounds'". I did not add that we have a saying in America: it is very easy to become friends with your enemies after you have beaten the stuffing out of them.
For PS2/Wii games, I go to my local game shop because that is the only way to get them. For PC games, I get it from whatever online retailer has the lowest price/shipping combo or Direct2Drive if its an option. My heart bleeds for you, video game stores, but the high schooler behind the counter trying to upsell me into a strategy guide provides no value to me, and since I only go to the store when I have a specific game in mind I don't need his advice (and if I did need advice, I could get better informed advice online -- sorry, kid).
The money from a video game sale has to get split three ways: developer, publisher, point-of-sale. Everybody thinks the other two get too much money. Publishers need developers, they can't make games without them. Developers sometimes need publishers, because AAA games cost $$$ to make and you don't want to have to self-insure against not getting a hit. Who needs retailers? Um, nobody, if there is an alternative distribution model which can move the same number of units. For products targetting the core demographic (which is perfectly capable of downloading games already... TOO capable, to hear many tell the tale), distribution via download works now and will only get better as bandwidth increases. In the next couple of years, we'll hear of a name game being distributed as an Internet exclusive. After one publisher proves that they can make mad, mad bank doing that (not on the scale of GalCiv2, on the scale of WoW), and keep it all, you'll see a stampede of PC games out of the current retail channel.
For being in the middle of a freaking desert, Israel doesn't do too bad for itself -- 70% of the way to self sufficiency on food, with the remainder being a mix of luxury (coffee, spices), fish (hard to plant the suckers), and bulk grains that its cheaper to just buy from the US than to use valuable growing space on. It would be higher if it weren't for the nigh-constant state of armed conflict they find themselves in. If we could bring Africa up to the Israeli standard, we'd be pretty much done on the whole hunger problem in a stroke.
>> It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans. >>
When Lincoln was fighting a war to free the slaves Japan was a medieval country populated by what were essentially fractious tribes under the sporadic and largely ineffectual rule of a central monarch. Visiting Europeans described them as shiftless and absolutely incapable of basic civilizational norms such as punctuality. I wonder what those visiting Europeans would say if you said "By the way, you won't live to see it, but your great-great-grandkids will get all many of their toys from Japan, their economy will be bigger than any European country's, and they'll be widely considered to be fanatical workaholic clones." I wonder what our great-great-grandkids will get from Africa.
>> And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help? >>
All of the above and then some. Having property rights encourages you to invest in your farm, because you know that if you're good at it it will make you money some day... and NOT get taken by the guy who happens to have more guns than you at the moment. Rule of law means that you can plant crops today and have a reasonable expectation of living long enough to see the harvest, too.
Malthusians have been wrong for several hundred years now on the relationship between arable land, population, and well-fed people. The key conceit is that food production is directly proportional to arable land and that arable land increases linearly while population increases geometrically. There are a couple of problems here, and the most salient one is that food production also increases with technological and social progress.
Our food production on a *per acre* basis beats the hell out of any reasonable expectation of human population growth. Human population going to be 100 billion by 2100? Thats a big *yawn* from the perspective of our untapped agricultural capacity -- yields per acre in the US from 1900 to 2000 increased by over a factor of about 6 to 8 (depends on crop), due to improved agricultural practices, improved agricultural business models (sorry, family farm, agribusiness grinds you into dust on the efficiency scale), the Green revolution, etc etc. The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt. Take modern technology plus modern societal organization, mix in some cruddy desert land that had been impoverished for millenia, and you get Israel (which is an agricultural powerhouse, especially compared to anybody in the neighborhood).
Over the same 1900 to 2000 time period, Japan had an even better relative increase in productivity, mostly because (like much of present-day Africa) they were starting from pretty darn close to the bottom of the curve.
Even assuming that technological progress in agriculture stops today (unlikely -- we're just getting the party started when it comes to GMO crops, and "640k should be enough for everybody"-type "All progress has already been accomplished" thinking is always a loser), all we'd have to do to feed 10, 15, 20 billion people is take the technological and organizational know-how of the leading edge of First World farmers and get that know-how to land which is already used for agricultural purposes. Sure, we could claim extra land too, but its hardly necessary.
So why, with this abundance of technology, do people still starve? Bad government, in every single case in the modern world. Governments practically evolved to combat famine and some countries in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands) haven't seen a non-war one in a couple hundred years. Many nations in Africa, North Korea, the Ukraine under the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have a government which either uses famine as a weapon to commit democide against their opponents (Sudan), or is just maliciously incompetent (North Korea, "Hey I've got an idea lets take all the land from the white farmers and give it to our black powerbase who have no experience managing farms, no possible downside there" in Africa).
Give your stock poor African nation 20 years of stable economic growth (i.e. capitalism and democracy, pretty much) and I'll guarantee you their main food-related health problem will be obesity, like it is for "poor" people in the United States. (Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)
Now, as it regards bio-anything for a power source, I'm skeptical that we can increase agricultural efficiency faster than our energy needs, so I agree with you. Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes. (Solar, geothermal, and hydropower are all heavily dependent on you living somewhere they actually work, but you can split the atom pretty much anywhere.)
... that a Tolkien dwarf is a WoW dwarf is a Games Workshop dwarf, you've got another thing coming. Sure, they're all little people. Tolkien dwarfs are a dying race who happen to be custodians of powerful, ancient magics. WoW dwarfs are booze-soaked, mostly eschew magic, and are highly technologically oriented. Games Workshop dwarfs (I think they're picky about the spelling) have a form of magic they invented, and are, to my understanding, more likely to be motivated by PURE DRIVING HATRED than by the prospect of a brewskie at the end of the journey.
Take something like a Slayer out of the Games Workshop universe and pop it into Tolkien or WoW and there would be bloodshed. A Slayer is basically a suicide bomber without the bomb. Thorin would think the Slayer was a vicious savage. The WoW dwarves would wonder what this whole notion of "dying to avenge a previous loss" was, considering that the dwarves (and the rest of the Alliance) pretty much invariably win the wars they get caught up in and if they don't, hey, death is a very temporary state of affairs in the WoW universe.
In terms of game mechanics, anyone who could say that Vanguard and WoW were the same game has clearly never played either and should probably keep it that way. I'm not trying to be elitist, its just that they're two very, very different beasts. For every structural similarity ("Hey, tank/healer/DPS with emphasis on loot collection!") you'd come up with many more differences that are almost fundamental in nature (WoW: Crafting should be open to everyone and not get in the way of gameplay. Vanguard: Crafting is gameplay, if you're HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. WoW: Dungeons should be open to everyone. Vanguard: Dungeons should be open to you if you're HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. WoW: Fast travel should be open to everyone. You should be able to teleport immediately, fly within 2 hours, and have essentially permanently increased non-combat movement speed by the mid-levels. Vanguard: Travel should be slow so that you will quit if you're not HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. etc)
Disclosure: Yeah, I'm more of a WoW person than a Vanguard person. What can I say, I'm not hard core enough to handle it.
Or you want to apply for credit (credit cards, private student loans, car loans, mortgages, etc) in the next 7 years. They'll be reported to all 3 credit reporting agencies as a Public Record, and you can watch your credit score sink as if you had been previously bankrupt.
The kid had nothing to do with the legal arguments -- the reporting is just following the convention that your lawyer speaks with your voice and your authority. Its probably the same set of lawyers who worked when his mother was sued and, inexplicably, were not called in when his sister got issued a default judgement for $20k. (Yikes! People, when the process server gives you papers, READ and ACT ON THEM. Default judgements are 64,000 flavors of nothing good!)
When is the last time you saw midnight madness over the launch of what is essentially a mass-market business, home office, and consumer product? Vista isn't aimed at the hard core gamers who love midnight launches as part of their culture. Its not designed to generate massive amounts of passion. Its aimed at EVERYBODY, and lets face it, EVERYBODY includes a large number of people who not only do not care about their computers, they actively dislike using them. But they have to use them, because email, the Internet, and MS Word are three things which are indispensable to modern life for a lot of people. These folks will buy Vista, by the hundreds of millions, and they will get significant value out of it -- their machines will probably be less likely to turn into zombies or unusably infested spyware boxes than they were before. But they'll never throw a party to celebrate an object which for them is just a really expensive toaster. Do you have a relationship with your toaster? No, you use your toaster, it makes toast. Maybe it makes toast really well, but its still just a toaster, a tool for you to quickly get your toast and get on with life.
I sell a software product to an audience which is the polar opposite of Slashdot in terms of technical skills (it makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers). There were no launch parties for it, either, but it has pleasantly exceeded my expectations for popularity. Most people here would probably be askance that I can even ask $25 for it. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ (Speaking of which, I suppose one of these days I should make the installer program Vista compatible. I'm probably not going to have any early adopter customers but once the new Dells come out who knows.)
Against my expectations, you appear to be correct. *eats requisite serving of crow* I maintain that I still have the correct answer in the instant case, however, as it is extraordinarily unlikely that the transaction at issue would be classified as a gift. It would be more clear cut if it were me giving my brother a ride into space, although I'd still owe gift tax after it busted the caps for both yearly and lifetime giving.
Those exclusions, if they applied (VEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY doubtful), would allow the prize giver to not pay gift taxes but they wouldn't make the receipt of the gift anything other than taxable income.
Here is why its very doubtful: for the educational exclusion to apply you need to be enrolled at, quoting the IRS, "[an institution] that normally maintains a regular faculty and curriculum and normally has a regularly enrolled body of pupils or students". That will almost certainly exclude the classes you'd take pre-flight. It also only covers tuition, not expenses. Since they aren't charging you tuition its not applicable.
Similarly, it is unlikely that your pre-flight testing counts as "medical care" as the IRS defines it. You could make an argument that the pre-flight testing is "diagnostic" for a disease but its not one I'd like to have to face down an audit with.
... seems to describe the marketing staff's relationship to controlled substances. "G'zOne" is not an electronic device, it is a name for a freaking Klingon. Come back when you have given up the faux hipsterism. Even *authentic* hipsterism isn't an endearing trait.
That would be considered income, because no "arms-length" transaction would have resulted in a sale of a trip into space for $1. Accordingly, the difference between the fair market value and the $1 was a gift to you. Gifts are income. You can even give someone money by not taking money away from them! Observe: I extend my neighbor Bob a loan this year for $5,000. Next year, I say "You know, forget about that loan". BLAM. He has to declare an extra $5,000 (plus fair interest!) in income, and I have to fill out a Form 1099-C attesting to that amount (which, naturally, tips the IRS off to the fact that if Bob doesn't disclose the value of the loan was forgiven to go after him).
All sorts of things are income, although many aren't routinely claimed as such. Ever won a soda at McDs during that Monopoly promotion? Income. Found a $10 bill on the sidewalk? Income. Taken a pen home from work? Income, unless you returned it. The difference between these and the space trip is that if you had somehow neglected pay $25,000 worth of taxes because of your income, as opposed to a few cents, the IRS *will* hit you like a ton of bricks.
Slashdot Mirror
>>
Who, outside of crazy, Nazi scientists and ralieans thinks its a good idea to voluntarily put a chip in a persons body for no good reason.
>>
Lets say I have a condition requiring a medic alert bracelet. I don't know, lethal allergy to eggs, perhaps (causes complications with all kinds of medicines cultured on egg yolk these days). I could quite rationally say "Chip me, doc" on Feb 14th, 2007 so that I don't have to take the risk that on April 18th, 2027 I leave my medic alert bracelet (or ID card, or other Protection Against Lethal Error Security Token) on the nightstand just in time to get on the morning commute, be hit and moderately injured by a drunk driver, and be killed by a well-meaning ER nurse who checked me for bracelet and chip before dosing me with something accidentally lethal.
Personally, if I had a condition that was serious, I'd go to the chip before body jewelry, purely on aesthetic grounds. I'm sure the doctors who put it in could take it out if for some reason it needed to come out. If they can pry out a liver and put in a new one they can probably grab a wee bit of metal from a place chosen because it was easily accessible with a surgical instrument.
Similarly, in the vein of making choices today to avoid making them tomorrow, I could decide now to have my paycheck autodeducted in December to fund my retirement account. Could I decide that in December without any loss of effectiveness? Yes, but the February me might not trust the December me sufficiently to spend on the retirement account instead of extra Christmas presents. Thus, I put it out of the December me's hands unless he leaps over unreasonably high barriers to overrule the February me's decisions.
... unfortunately, from the married 40 year old, not the cute single 24 year old ("giri choco" = chocolate given out of social obligation, not from an expression of personal interest). I'm now socially obligated to get her something white about a month from now.
Because someone decided that the key way to improve on Guitar Hero was to slash the price, which neither introduces nor fixes any problems, and then eliminate the guitar, which introduces ONE REALLY BIG PROBLEM. People do not fantasize about getting up in front of a roaring crowd and whipping out their Dell keyboard. Guitar Hero sells fantasy first, music second, and software a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeery distant third.
If you're going to slavishly imitate at least copy the fun parts correctly!
>>
who can't afford a 100-200$ computer ? what are you going to sell them ?
>>
Based on a quick survey of any block of inner city America, that would probably be liquor, cigarettes, payday loans, and basic necessities. I'd hate to live in that sort of neighborhood, but giving the choice between living there with a computer and living there without, hey, I already have to pass liquor advertising on the way to work. If I see a little more in the privacy of my own home while studying to find a job to Get The Heck Outta Here that won't kill me.
>>
simply forbid advertising of any kind that is directly targeted at a minor
>>
Why not just take away kid's right to buy things. Its much simpler to enforce than figuring whether that advertising is directly targeted or not (c.f. Joe Camel, WWF-anything, or Cartoon Network -- the intersection of things which interest adults and kids alike is pretty wide), accomplishes the same objective, and could also be enforced with 9mm help. Of course, we'd think you were a crazy Communist nutball if you suggested it, but thats only because commerce is a perfectly legitimate thing and that children, have real (if qualified) rights to engage in commerce in the same manner that they have real (if qualified) rights to engage in speech. Oh noes, someone might try to influence the opinions they speak or influence what products they purchase! Well, great news, we have these things called "parents", who have vastly more influence and can deprive the child of this thing called "money" without which advertising is pretty much impotent.
Rather than retraining them to OpenOffice, whose single best feature is "We tried to be a slavish clone of software you already use", you can download PDFCreator (http://pdfcreator.sf.net) and just print straight from Office. I love pdf creator, and it makes a lot of sense to me to separate physical (or close-to-physical) document preparation from document layout/content editing software. This way I can continue exporting to pdfs without having to wait on OO to catch up with Office2007 in the interface or interop departments.
Free markets lead to development and while development might temporarily harm *aspects* of the environment it is an immediate win for health. So the landscape gets a little less pretty in the interim while you're wealthy enough to have factories but not quite wealthy enough to have a class of people who have so much free time that they can do little else but attend Greenpeace meetings and post on their $2,000 laptop on Slashdot about how terrible capitalism is. Take a look at life expectancy and, well, any QOL measure you want in a pre-industrialization and post-industrialization society. Innovations like pharmaceuticals (eww, petroleum derivatives! Make them stop, Gaia! I want to live my life the natural way and die by age thirty!), modern water filtration systems (Pop quiz: when is the last time the US, or any other developed nation, had a cholera or typhoid epidemic?), etc.
Take a look at China, a country which is making fits and starts in the direction of the free market, and which no one would accuse of being overly environmentally conscious. The average life expectancy has gone from 41 years (1950) to 71 years (2002). Even Africa, that perpetual basket case of a continent, has gone from 38 years to 50. Africa's health problem isn't that they have free markets, its that they don't have nearly enough of them (for example, governments there cause famines with some regularity by seizing all the farms to reward political supporters -- many nations in Europe haven't seen a non-war famine in *centuries*). All the whining about GMOs, "Don't make us slaves to Monsanto", etc, ignores the facts that people who most certainly ARE dependent on Monsanto and the other green revolution companies (like, oh, the US) aren't exactly doing that badly for themselves in the whole "feeding the population" thing.
... with solar panels, and still not have enough capacity to power Chicago. Much of the world does not live in Southern California! We have strange weather phenomena, like clouds! And this isn't a once in a while problem, its EVERY FREAKING DAY! In the spring, at least. In the winter, we have clouds and snow and ABSCENCE OF SUN for weeks at a time. Perhaps we could put Lake Michigan on stilts and use it as a battery. (Seriously, most pumped water storage is like hydroelectric power, heavily constrained by having local geography which is conducive to it. If you don't happen to have two bodies of water at vastly different elevations nearby then you get to build one or both of them yourself, and it AIN'T CHEAP -- per MW capital investment is similar to building a nuclear plant, and that is on top of the cost of the solar/whatever you need to actually fill the battery. It also isn't ecologically neutral -- ask the million folks China displaced to get their Three Gorges facility working. You need an awful lot of water falling from a relatively high place to a relatively low place, and that does not just spontaneously happen frequently in nature.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- greens need to get over their dogmatic, irrational reluctance to use nukes.
Three times my little slice of commercial software development has made it onto Slashdot. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com -- It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers.) ...
Three times folks have said its trivial (true as it goes -- it took me a man-week to write.)
Three times folks have said its disgusting to charge $24.95 for it (good thing I don't sell to Slashdot readers.)
Three times folks have said OSS is going to put me out of business.
Three times folks have actually offered to donate labor to put me out of business.
Three years my OSS competitor has gone without a patch. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards) It lacks a few key features, like actually printing the cards it makes. This makes it more active than 80% of the projects on Sourceforge.
Is bingo-cards a success? Well, it probably accomplished what the author wanted it to, and good for him. Is it going to put me out of business? No. Is OSS ever going to supplant commercial software in bingo card creation or a whole lot of other human endeavors? No.
... as one of more than one ways to do things. Unfortunately, every Perl program I have seen (with the merciful exception of POPFile) picks one of the other ways. TMTOWTDI, don't you know.
The problem with Perl isn't the language. OK, let me amend that: s/ (t)/just $1/. Its that the culture which surrounds the language encourages practices which are at odds with maintainability. You can't seperate Perl code from Perl coders, and Perl coders are, to a disturbing degree, prone to creating unmaintainable cruft with copious use of syntatic sugar which is actually disguised cyanide. Perl would be better off if some things which are syntactically allowable were banned forever. Here's a couple:
* copious use of default parameters (a wonderful way to introduce bugs into the program by accidentally overwriting one when inserting a new line of code between two sections of code which do not look obviously related)
* $_.=$& Code this obtuse needs to be discouraged, not encouraged. Its powerful, but totally obtuse, and programmer brain time is more important than finger time, which unfortunately Perl has decided to optimize for. (Incidentally: it appends the last regular expression match to whatever string you were operating on. I think.)
* Multiple methods of passing arguments to functions. (I have come across code which uses more than three in a single source file.) Function prototypes are like seatbelts. I know you think you're smart enough to not cause an accident. Statistically speaking, you're not. Buckle the heck up.
... of course, since the hardware is subsidized by the monthly fee (its the razors and blades model -- or, more aptly, the cellphone and contract model), you'll end up paying up more upfront. "Extortion" is a funny word choice here -- is the machine threatening to burn down your house if you don't shell out your $14?
So Sony's game division isn't doing so hot this year. Maybe it will get hit by a meteor and be a total loss year. Sony would continue onward with more of a damage to confidence than to their underlying financial fundamentals, because the games division is merely a portion of their total business (just like XBox is about prestige and positioning for Microsoft, not for making them a large portion of their sales in any given year). Did you know Sony sells *life insurance*, for crying out loud? In addition to home electronics, video games, movies, music, banking services, other insurance products, and being an ISP.
Take a look at their annual report for 2005: the games division (hardware + software) contributes an earthshattering TEN PERCENT of their sales in the year. By comparison, 66.5% is home electronics (TVs, PCs, walkmans, rice cookers, etc etc).
If I could buy stock in just the PS3 I'd short the heck out of it, but Sony as a whole is doing pretty well recently, and I haven't seen a great argument on why that will reverse course anytime soon.
Is there a single day when hundreds of brave Brits have not died in, I don't know, pick a conflict? WWII works as a good canonical example in the US, lets try for Britain. "Its March 8th... uh oh, Hitler dropped some bombs on us a couple of decades ago, not a good day to release a new novel." "Yeah, the bugger bombed us... we bombed back. Guess who won. Sod off if you think I'm going to let that wanker get in the way of me enjoying Harry Potter." (Stiff upper lip, football fan style.)
I'm an American and once got asked by my Japanese bosses on December 7th whether I felt anything special about the day. "Well, we have a saying in English: 'time heals all wounds'". I did not add that we have a saying in America: it is very easy to become friends with your enemies after you have beaten the stuffing out of them.
For PS2/Wii games, I go to my local game shop because that is the only way to get them. For PC games, I get it from whatever online retailer has the lowest price/shipping combo or Direct2Drive if its an option. My heart bleeds for you, video game stores, but the high schooler behind the counter trying to upsell me into a strategy guide provides no value to me, and since I only go to the store when I have a specific game in mind I don't need his advice (and if I did need advice, I could get better informed advice online -- sorry, kid).
The money from a video game sale has to get split three ways: developer, publisher, point-of-sale. Everybody thinks the other two get too much money. Publishers need developers, they can't make games without them. Developers sometimes need publishers, because AAA games cost $$$ to make and you don't want to have to self-insure against not getting a hit. Who needs retailers? Um, nobody, if there is an alternative distribution model which can move the same number of units. For products targetting the core demographic (which is perfectly capable of downloading games already... TOO capable, to hear many tell the tale), distribution via download works now and will only get better as bandwidth increases. In the next couple of years, we'll hear of a name game being distributed as an Internet exclusive. After one publisher proves that they can make mad, mad bank doing that (not on the scale of GalCiv2, on the scale of WoW), and keep it all, you'll see a stampede of PC games out of the current retail channel.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/facts%20about%20israel/e conomy/focus%20on%20israel-%20israel-s%20agricultu re%20in%20the%2021st
For being in the middle of a freaking desert, Israel doesn't do too bad for itself -- 70% of the way to self sufficiency on food, with the remainder being a mix of luxury (coffee, spices), fish (hard to plant the suckers), and bulk grains that its cheaper to just buy from the US than to use valuable growing space on. It would be higher if it weren't for the nigh-constant state of armed conflict they find themselves in. If we could bring Africa up to the Israeli standard, we'd be pretty much done on the whole hunger problem in a stroke.
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It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans.
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When Lincoln was fighting a war to free the slaves Japan was a medieval country populated by what were essentially fractious tribes under the sporadic and largely ineffectual rule of a central monarch. Visiting Europeans described them as shiftless and absolutely incapable of basic civilizational norms such as punctuality. I wonder what those visiting Europeans would say if you said "By the way, you won't live to see it, but your great-great-grandkids will get all many of their toys from Japan, their economy will be bigger than any European country's, and they'll be widely considered to be fanatical workaholic clones." I wonder what our great-great-grandkids will get from Africa.
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And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help?
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All of the above and then some. Having property rights encourages you to invest in your farm, because you know that if you're good at it it will make you money some day... and NOT get taken by the guy who happens to have more guns than you at the moment. Rule of law means that you can plant crops today and have a reasonable expectation of living long enough to see the harvest, too.
Malthusians have been wrong for several hundred years now on the relationship between arable land, population, and well-fed people. The key conceit is that food production is directly proportional to arable land and that arable land increases linearly while population increases geometrically. There are a couple of problems here, and the most salient one is that food production also increases with technological and social progress.
Our food production on a *per acre* basis beats the hell out of any reasonable expectation of human population growth. Human population going to be 100 billion by 2100? Thats a big *yawn* from the perspective of our untapped agricultural capacity -- yields per acre in the US from 1900 to 2000 increased by over a factor of about 6 to 8 (depends on crop), due to improved agricultural practices, improved agricultural business models (sorry, family farm, agribusiness grinds you into dust on the efficiency scale), the Green revolution, etc etc. The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt. Take modern technology plus modern societal organization, mix in some cruddy desert land that had been impoverished for millenia, and you get Israel (which is an agricultural powerhouse, especially compared to anybody in the neighborhood).
Over the same 1900 to 2000 time period, Japan had an even better relative increase in productivity, mostly because (like much of present-day Africa) they were starting from pretty darn close to the bottom of the curve.
Even assuming that technological progress in agriculture stops today (unlikely -- we're just getting the party started when it comes to GMO crops, and "640k should be enough for everybody"-type "All progress has already been accomplished" thinking is always a loser), all we'd have to do to feed 10, 15, 20 billion people is take the technological and organizational know-how of the leading edge of First World farmers and get that know-how to land which is already used for agricultural purposes. Sure, we could claim extra land too, but its hardly necessary.
So why, with this abundance of technology, do people still starve? Bad government, in every single case in the modern world. Governments practically evolved to combat famine and some countries in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands) haven't seen a non-war one in a couple hundred years. Many nations in Africa, North Korea, the Ukraine under the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have a government which either uses famine as a weapon to commit democide against their opponents (Sudan), or is just maliciously incompetent (North Korea, "Hey I've got an idea lets take all the land from the white farmers and give it to our black powerbase who have no experience managing farms, no possible downside there" in Africa).
Give your stock poor African nation 20 years of stable economic growth (i.e. capitalism and democracy, pretty much) and I'll guarantee you their main food-related health problem will be obesity, like it is for "poor" people in the United States. (Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)
Now, as it regards bio-anything for a power source, I'm skeptical that we can increase agricultural efficiency faster than our energy needs, so I agree with you. Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes. (Solar, geothermal, and hydropower are all heavily dependent on you living somewhere they actually work, but you can split the atom pretty much anywhere.)
... that a Tolkien dwarf is a WoW dwarf is a Games Workshop dwarf, you've got another thing coming. Sure, they're all little people. Tolkien dwarfs are a dying race who happen to be custodians of powerful, ancient magics. WoW dwarfs are booze-soaked, mostly eschew magic, and are highly technologically oriented. Games Workshop dwarfs (I think they're picky about the spelling) have a form of magic they invented, and are, to my understanding, more likely to be motivated by PURE DRIVING HATRED than by the prospect of a brewskie at the end of the journey.
Take something like a Slayer out of the Games Workshop universe and pop it into Tolkien or WoW and there would be bloodshed. A Slayer is basically a suicide bomber without the bomb. Thorin would think the Slayer was a vicious savage. The WoW dwarves would wonder what this whole notion of "dying to avenge a previous loss" was, considering that the dwarves (and the rest of the Alliance) pretty much invariably win the wars they get caught up in and if they don't, hey, death is a very temporary state of affairs in the WoW universe.
In terms of game mechanics, anyone who could say that Vanguard and WoW were the same game has clearly never played either and should probably keep it that way. I'm not trying to be elitist, its just that they're two very, very different beasts. For every structural similarity ("Hey, tank/healer/DPS with emphasis on loot collection!") you'd come up with many more differences that are almost fundamental in nature (WoW: Crafting should be open to everyone and not get in the way of gameplay. Vanguard: Crafting is gameplay, if you're HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. WoW: Dungeons should be open to everyone. Vanguard: Dungeons should be open to you if you're HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. WoW: Fast travel should be open to everyone. You should be able to teleport immediately, fly within 2 hours, and have essentially permanently increased non-combat movement speed by the mid-levels. Vanguard: Travel should be slow so that you will quit if you're not HARD CORE ENOUGH TO HANDLE IT. etc)
Disclosure: Yeah, I'm more of a WoW person than a Vanguard person. What can I say, I'm not hard core enough to handle it.
Or you want to apply for credit (credit cards, private student loans, car loans, mortgages, etc) in the next 7 years. They'll be reported to all 3 credit reporting agencies as a Public Record, and you can watch your credit score sink as if you had been previously bankrupt.
Funny? Whats so strange about cocking a ballista then mounting the shaft and using it to penetrate the big guy? I must have missed the joke.
The kid had nothing to do with the legal arguments -- the reporting is just following the convention that your lawyer speaks with your voice and your authority. Its probably the same set of lawyers who worked when his mother was sued and, inexplicably, were not called in when his sister got issued a default judgement for $20k. (Yikes! People, when the process server gives you papers, READ and ACT ON THEM. Default judgements are 64,000 flavors of nothing good!)
When is the last time you saw midnight madness over the launch of what is essentially a mass-market business, home office, and consumer product? Vista isn't aimed at the hard core gamers who love midnight launches as part of their culture. Its not designed to generate massive amounts of passion. Its aimed at EVERYBODY, and lets face it, EVERYBODY includes a large number of people who not only do not care about their computers, they actively dislike using them. But they have to use them, because email, the Internet, and MS Word are three things which are indispensable to modern life for a lot of people. These folks will buy Vista, by the hundreds of millions, and they will get significant value out of it -- their machines will probably be less likely to turn into zombies or unusably infested spyware boxes than they were before. But they'll never throw a party to celebrate an object which for them is just a really expensive toaster. Do you have a relationship with your toaster? No, you use your toaster, it makes toast. Maybe it makes toast really well, but its still just a toaster, a tool for you to quickly get your toast and get on with life.
I sell a software product to an audience which is the polar opposite of Slashdot in terms of technical skills (it makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers). There were no launch parties for it, either, but it has pleasantly exceeded my expectations for popularity. Most people here would probably be askance that I can even ask $25 for it. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ (Speaking of which, I suppose one of these days I should make the installer program Vista compatible. I'm probably not going to have any early adopter customers but once the new Dells come out who knows.)
Against my expectations, you appear to be correct. *eats requisite serving of crow* I maintain that I still have the correct answer in the instant case, however, as it is extraordinarily unlikely that the transaction at issue would be classified as a gift. It would be more clear cut if it were me giving my brother a ride into space, although I'd still owe gift tax after it busted the caps for both yearly and lifetime giving.
Those exclusions, if they applied (VEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY doubtful), would allow the prize giver to not pay gift taxes but they wouldn't make the receipt of the gift anything other than taxable income.
Here is why its very doubtful: for the educational exclusion to apply you need to be enrolled at, quoting the IRS, "[an institution] that normally maintains a regular faculty and curriculum and normally has a regularly enrolled body of pupils or students". That will almost certainly exclude the classes you'd take pre-flight. It also only covers tuition, not expenses. Since they aren't charging you tuition its not applicable.
Similarly, it is unlikely that your pre-flight testing counts as "medical care" as the IRS defines it. You could make an argument that the pre-flight testing is "diagnostic" for a disease but its not one I'd like to have to face down an audit with.
... seems to describe the marketing staff's relationship to controlled substances. "G'zOne" is not an electronic device, it is a name for a freaking Klingon. Come back when you have given up the faux hipsterism. Even *authentic* hipsterism isn't an endearing trait.
That would be considered income, because no "arms-length" transaction would have resulted in a sale of a trip into space for $1. Accordingly, the difference between the fair market value and the $1 was a gift to you. Gifts are income. You can even give someone money by not taking money away from them! Observe: I extend my neighbor Bob a loan this year for $5,000. Next year, I say "You know, forget about that loan". BLAM. He has to declare an extra $5,000 (plus fair interest!) in income, and I have to fill out a Form 1099-C attesting to that amount (which, naturally, tips the IRS off to the fact that if Bob doesn't disclose the value of the loan was forgiven to go after him).
All sorts of things are income, although many aren't routinely claimed as such. Ever won a soda at McDs during that Monopoly promotion? Income. Found a $10 bill on the sidewalk? Income. Taken a pen home from work? Income, unless you returned it. The difference between these and the space trip is that if you had somehow neglected pay $25,000 worth of taxes because of your income, as opposed to a few cents, the IRS *will* hit you like a ton of bricks.
"They can keep it in their pocket."