I heard a piece on NPR a week or two ago about whether the selling of in-game items for real-world money creates tax consequences for everyone playing the game.
The IRS doesn't distinguish between "income" due to hobby and "income" due to work. If you make quilts for fun, but you sell them because you don't have room for any more quilts in the house, the money you get for the quilts is still considered income.
If you do something, and someone gives you an item with value (for example, a plumber fixes a painter's toilet, and is given a painting) the value of that painting at the time of the exchange is considered income.
If you play a game and get in-game "e-gold", and that e-gold has value outside the game (as it does in this case) then the IRS may well consider the e-gold taxable income in the amount it could be sold for in real world money - whether you actually ever sell it or not.
The NPR correspondent made a number of phone calls to the IRS, and the consensus was that the e-gold was likely taxable income. They suggested he file as if it were, and see what happens. He ended the piece saying that it wasn't going to be him who brought this issue to the IRS's attention in writing, and left it at that.
You have more faith than I do in a theater (not necessarily a movie theater) keeping a piece of technology, which is NOT critical to the show, functioning in the long run. Do I think they can maintain the projector, surround sound, lights, microphones, etc? Sure - and if one breaks they (and everyone in the theater) probably knows it, and they fix it immediately.
I do have a job where I can't be out of contact for 2 hours. I know how to set my pager and cell phone on vibrate, and my leaving to deal with a call is no more disruptive than someone leaving to buy popcorn, go to the restroom, or take out their crying child (not that anyone ever does THAT.)
To allow certain frequencies in they must have some sort of repeater. Do you want to depend on the theater keeping its technology up?
Also, there are a lot of people who are on call in non-life-threatening professions - but it sure is job-threatening if you miss the call. When the system is down, you are expected to respond immediately, not when the Harry Potter movie ends. When there's a "store down" you are expected to get back to the next level down in the support food chain immediately, not after the Return of the King is over.
Like some/many of you, I carry a pager for support of our systems. We pass it back and forth between two of us.
Unlike many of you, it almost never goes off.
But if it does and I miss it, all hell breaks loose. I mostly just live my life with a plastic box hanging off my waist poking me in the belly but otherwise not bothering me, because I have pager service pretty much everywhere I go.
If blocking of radio signal in public places becomes common place, my life goes to heck.
Absolutely. As soon as I saw this topic I thought of my old CoCo. As far as I know, the entire setup is in a box in my mom's basement (and no, I don't live in her basement, ha ha ha.) Wonder if I can find a photo of it. Yes, here it is: Color Computer joystick [8bit-micro.com] To be oriented properly that red button would be on the side facing away from the user.
Mine started at 4K though before we upgraded it to 64K Extended. I got a pair of floppy drives as a grade school graduation present - how tech times have changed.
The company is a mess, this is no more than a convenient excuse to get rid of him. I mean, come on, he lied about degrees in psychology and philosophy, how is that relevent to running Radio Shack anyhow?
It'll be interesting to see how Claire Babrowski, the interim CEO, works out; she was at McDonald's for many years (I saw somewhere starting when she was 16 as crew.) She has history in McDonald's technology and equipment groups as well as being the "chief restaurant operations officer." I've heard that she's very sharp. She left McDonald's when Mike Roberts was promoted to President/COO - she was arguably better qualified.
Semi-serious, semi-not. DOS runs a lot of embedded systems, because it gives some really basic hardware support (file systems and booting, really) but still lets you get direct to the hardware.
My employer has somewhere around 65,000 MS-DOS systems in the field.
You are the one "talking out of your ass." The gas tank has purposely been repositioned to be forward of the rear axle on most vehicles as a SAFETY FEATURE in case of impact from the rear.
I see this is modded as funny, but I can't honestly tell if it was intended as a joke or not.
In case it wasn't, I'd just like to point out that this would NOT work in a typical election where I live (Illinois) because I have neverseen an election with only one question.
It also assumes a lot more technical savy and attention being paid to the movement of each voter than I typically see from the retirees that are acting as judges at the polling places I have used.
The method here works pretty well - get a paper ballot, mark it with a magic marker, and run it thru a scan-tron machine before the voter leaves to validate.
I can't even tell what you believe. You list three things where you and company management don't "see eye to eye" but you never make it clear which you believe. If you can't even communicate that to a bunch of fellow geeks, you are a sys admin with no management capabilities, and you should just keep doing your best to keep the boat floating.
... but it depends what you're willing to pay and what your project is. For example, I used to work for a small company that did primarily but not exclusively embedded work, providing whatever level of management the customer wanted. Some customers wanted rent-a-coder, some customers really wanted the whole thing just done for them. (The difference was the in-house technical competence of the customer.)
The post-9-11 bust hit this company pretty hard (hit a lot of them I would think) but they survived it and are still doing work.
Let me know if you want their contact info. They're in the Chicago area.
I don't know what the radio and/or cell phone infrastructure is like in Iraq at the moment (whether military or civilian) but it seems to me that it would get better transations if you just had a call center full of translators, perhaps sitting in the US somewhere, and a mechanism for people in the field to call for translations. Then you just have to issue each unit a comparatively cheap device (essentially a rugged cell phone with speaker phone.)
It's probably easier to get English - Arabic translators if there's no chance of them getting killed....
Just don't offshore it, nobody needs an Arabic translator with an Indian accent. (joke, folks.)
In Computer Management, go to Disk management, right-click on the d:\ drive, lick Drive Letter and Paths..., click on Add, type c:\mnt\d into the edit box, click on OK.
This issue, however, has nothing to do with real estate. In the law, there are two types of property, where I mean property in the sense of "things you own." There's real property, aka real estate or land. And there's chattel, which is everything else.
The summary specifically talks about chattel, not real property.
I work for a multi-BILLION dollar company. I guarantee that you've heard of them; everyone on the planet has heard of them. We have roughly 13,000 locations in the US, and 35,000 in the world.
EVERYONE has a cube except for the very top of the company. Senior directors, vice presidents, all of them. The directors and VP's have cubes with 6-foot walls along the outside of the building (so they have a window), but it's still a cube.
I have roughly 4-foot tall walls. It isn't great, but it's OK, and I'm surrounded by people I work with anyhow, so the low walls can be handy for collaboration and quick questions.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have an office with a door. But a cube is the least of my problems with working for this company. It the conflicting goals from management and the insane schedules (3 - 4 releases between now and the end of the year.)
If the "drive thru display" is the one out by the speaker where it displays what you just ordered, that is really much more of a peripheral than an integrated part of the POS system; they're probably sending commands to it via a serial line, so what OS the box running the screen runs is fairly irrelevent.
McDonald's USA mostly uses DOS based POS systems, probably all but a few hundred of the restaurants at this point.
I find it fascinating that you ask to speak to a manager when a clerk follows the policies of your card issuer, which must, therefore, also be the policies of the merchant.
The point of the signature on the card is to endorse a legal agreement between you and the card issuer. It has little to nothing to do with your identification.
As later posts explain, Visa requires that unsigned cards be signed.
As far as I am concerned, any writing in the signature box should be assumed to be your signature, and, if your signature does not match that, then the manager should be called.
If you don't sign your sales slip "SEE ID" then the manager should be consulted.
That is McDonald's model - if you buy a value meal at a WiFi restaurant, you can get a scratch-off card with a code that gives you some amount of time for free.
I think that yes, President Bush will leave when it is his turn to leave the White House.
That doesn't mean that we won't have another Republican president, and it doesn't mean that we won't still have a Republican Congress.
It just means that we will follow the rule of law in such matters, as we have always done.
President Bush and the Republicans don't need martial law. I have no reason to believe that the country won't elect another Republican (maybe Jeb) or that they will kick out the Republicans running Congress. Let's face it, the Democrats come off like a bunch of whiney babies, not leaders.
The math on this is fine. The intention is to allow someone who was elected as vice president, and served two years or less as president due to his running mate's death, to have an additional two full terms in office.
This is, in fact, something the floral industry does routinely with respect to funeral arrangements. Someone calls with an order "for the John Smith of Benson, IL funeral" and the florist starts calling around trying to figure out what funeral home has John on ice.
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I heard a piece on NPR a week or two ago about whether the selling of in-game items for real-world money creates tax consequences for everyone playing the game.
The IRS doesn't distinguish between "income" due to hobby and "income" due to work. If you make quilts for fun, but you sell them because you don't have room for any more quilts in the house, the money you get for the quilts is still considered income.
If you do something, and someone gives you an item with value (for example, a plumber fixes a painter's toilet, and is given a painting) the value of that painting at the time of the exchange is considered income.
If you play a game and get in-game "e-gold", and that e-gold has value outside the game (as it does in this case) then the IRS may well consider the e-gold taxable income in the amount it could be sold for in real world money - whether you actually ever sell it or not.
The NPR correspondent made a number of phone calls to the IRS, and the consensus was that the e-gold was likely taxable income. They suggested he file as if it were, and see what happens. He ended the piece saying that it wasn't going to be him who brought this issue to the IRS's attention in writing, and left it at that.
I do have a job where I can't be out of contact for 2 hours. I know how to set my pager and cell phone on vibrate, and my leaving to deal with a call is no more disruptive than someone leaving to buy popcorn, go to the restroom, or take out their crying child (not that anyone ever does THAT.)
Also, there are a lot of people who are on call in non-life-threatening professions - but it sure is job-threatening if you miss the call. When the system is down, you are expected to respond immediately, not when the Harry Potter movie ends. When there's a "store down" you are expected to get back to the next level down in the support food chain immediately, not after the Return of the King is over.
Unlike many of you, it almost never goes off.
But if it does and I miss it, all hell breaks loose. I mostly just live my life with a plastic box hanging off my waist poking me in the belly but otherwise not bothering me, because I have pager service pretty much everywhere I go.
If blocking of radio signal in public places becomes common place, my life goes to heck.
Mine started at 4K though before we upgraded it to 64K Extended. I got a pair of floppy drives as a grade school graduation present - how tech times have changed.
It'll be interesting to see how Claire Babrowski, the interim CEO, works out; she was at McDonald's for many years (I saw somewhere starting when she was 16 as crew.) She has history in McDonald's technology and equipment groups as well as being the "chief restaurant operations officer." I've heard that she's very sharp. She left McDonald's when Mike Roberts was promoted to President/COO - she was arguably better qualified.
Semi-serious, semi-not. DOS runs a lot of embedded systems, because it gives some really basic hardware support (file systems and booting, really) but still lets you get direct to the hardware. My employer has somewhere around 65,000 MS-DOS systems in the field.
Well, my mom still has a Beta VCR in her bedroom....
You are the one "talking out of your ass." The gas tank has purposely been repositioned to be forward of the rear axle on most vehicles as a SAFETY FEATURE in case of impact from the rear.
In case it wasn't, I'd just like to point out that this would NOT work in a typical election where I live (Illinois) because I have neverseen an election with only one question.
It also assumes a lot more technical savy and attention being paid to the movement of each voter than I typically see from the retirees that are acting as judges at the polling places I have used.
The method here works pretty well - get a paper ballot, mark it with a magic marker, and run it thru a scan-tron machine before the voter leaves to validate.
I can't even tell what you believe. You list three things where you and company management don't "see eye to eye" but you never make it clear which you believe.
If you can't even communicate that to a bunch of fellow geeks, you are a sys admin with no management capabilities, and you should just keep doing your best to keep the boat floating.
The post-9-11 bust hit this company pretty hard (hit a lot of them I would think) but they survived it and are still doing work.
Let me know if you want their contact info. They're in the Chicago area.
It's probably easier to get English - Arabic translators if there's no chance of them getting killed....
Just don't offshore it, nobody needs an Arabic translator with an Indian accent. (joke, folks.)
You can do this now.
For your example,
mkdir c:\mnt
mkdir c:\mnt\d
In Computer Management, go to Disk management, right-click on the d:\ drive, lick Drive Letter and Paths..., click on Add, type c:\mnt\d into the edit box, click on OK.
This issue, however, has nothing to do with real estate. In the law, there are two types of property, where I mean property in the sense of "things you own." There's real property, aka real estate or land. And there's chattel, which is everything else.
The summary specifically talks about chattel, not real property.
I work for a multi-BILLION dollar company. I guarantee that you've heard of them; everyone on the planet has heard of them. We have roughly 13,000 locations in the US, and 35,000 in the world.
EVERYONE has a cube except for the very top of the company. Senior directors, vice presidents, all of them. The directors and VP's have cubes with 6-foot walls along the outside of the building (so they have a window), but it's still a cube.
I have roughly 4-foot tall walls. It isn't great, but it's OK, and I'm surrounded by people I work with anyhow, so the low walls can be handy for collaboration and quick questions.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have an office with a door. But a cube is the least of my problems with working for this company. It the conflicting goals from management and the insane schedules (3 - 4 releases between now and the end of the year.)
If the "drive thru display" is the one out by the speaker where it displays what you just ordered, that is really much more of a peripheral than an integrated part of the POS system; they're probably sending commands to it via a serial line, so what OS the box running the screen runs is fairly irrelevent.
McDonald's USA mostly uses DOS based POS systems, probably all but a few hundred of the restaurants at this point.
Well unless I'm mistaken, major parts of your top three are included in the fourth. He did win two elections, you know.
Why does everything have to be political?
I find it fascinating that you ask to speak to a manager when a clerk follows the policies of your card issuer, which must, therefore, also be the policies of the merchant.
The point of the signature on the card is to endorse a legal agreement between you and the card issuer. It has little to nothing to do with your identification.
As later posts explain, Visa requires that unsigned cards be signed.
As far as I am concerned, any writing in the signature box should be assumed to be your signature, and, if your signature does not match that, then the manager should be called.
If you don't sign your sales slip "SEE ID" then the manager should be consulted.
That is McDonald's model - if you buy a value meal at a WiFi restaurant, you can get a scratch-off card with a code that gives you some amount of time for free.
I think that yes, President Bush will leave when it is his turn to leave the White House.
That doesn't mean that we won't have another Republican president, and it doesn't mean that we won't still have a Republican Congress.
It just means that we will follow the rule of law in such matters, as we have always done.
President Bush and the Republicans don't need martial law. I have no reason to believe that the country won't elect another Republican (maybe Jeb) or that they will kick out the Republicans running Congress. Let's face it, the Democrats come off like a bunch of whiney babies, not leaders.
The math on this is fine. The intention is to allow someone who was elected as vice president, and served two years or less as president due to his running mate's death, to have an additional two full terms in office.
This is, in fact, something the floral industry does routinely with respect to funeral arrangements. Someone calls with an order "for the John Smith of Benson, IL funeral" and the florist starts calling around trying to figure out what funeral home has John on ice.
Every employee in over 8,000 US McDonald's restaurants uses DOS every day.
The cash registers run DOS. Most stores use the time clocks built into the cash registers.
That's probably 50,000+ DOS systems.
About twice a month my laptop BSODs on me. XP (home edition), fully up to date according Update.