I wrote "See License" on the back of my credit card. I'm still amazed by the number of vendors who don't look, so I make sure to thank the ones that do, and chide the ones that don't.
You should probably write "See License" after your signature, since many places refuse to process credit cards that are unsigned. Visa, for example, considers an unsigned card invalid (Page 29, "Unsigned Cards"), and the merchant may be liable for charges they place on it. So thank those merchants extra, for being willing to violate their merchant agreement for you and take on that extra liability to get your business. And as for the ones that don't, best to thank them for not invalidating the transaction as they are made aware that the card they just sold to may be invalid.
Incidentally, on that same page, Visa provides a simplified explanation for why "See ID" is not a substitute for a signature, and explains its stance on asking for ID's.
You get the prize! In most places in the US, the local municipality has handed one of the cable companies a monopoly over running cable lines, and therefore the cable company can pretty much charge whatever they want for cable internet. In most of these places, there's also a monopoly over the phone lines too, and the phone company is even slower at installing upgrades so most of these places have no fiber, and often no dsl. Therefore, one and only one company has a decent broadband offering.
If the telco ever got off its ass and installed fiber, the cable company would lose its broadband monopoly and actually have to compete, but there's no danger of that happening for 10 or 20 years in most of the small towns across america.
Really, they own that patent? Well then why in the last 15 years didn't they bother to enforce it?
Because the patent was only applied for Oct 3, 2001, in the US at least, and issued in 2006.
For reference, google images, which specifically shows images as a result of a search that link back to the site they came from, was announced in Dec of 2001.
Of course, the patent is obviously garbage, because there were innumerable websites, such as ecommerce sites, at the time that allowed a customer to search products and displayed the results in image and text form, allowing the user to navigate to the product page by clicking on the image, which is specifically the net effect of one of the claims of the patent.
The south facing roof of a 35'x40' house (1400 square feet per floor) with a 7:12 slope is roughly 800 square feet, or about 76 square meters.
An example of a currently available solar panel intended for roofing application is 136 watts, and about 30 would fit on that sample roof, for a total possible 4,080 watts at any given point. Where I am, I can expect an average of 4.5 hours of full production per day, or 18 kwh/day, or 540 kwh/month. That's possible, but would require avoiding high load items like electric cooking, dryers, heating, and cooling. Oh, and the total cost would be $775*30 or $23k, plus installation, charge controller, inverter and storage (batteries).
A much more efficient solar panel, not designed to be applied directly to the roof but which would require a frame mounted on the roof and fit in a 7x7 grid, or 49 panels, could generate 9,800 watts max, or 44kwh/day, or 1,323kwh/month. That's a much more useful number, and might even handle an electric dryer, cooktop, and cooling. Still doubt it could handle heating (excepting heat pump or geothermal). And it would cost $53,900, plus installation, charge controller, inverter, and storage. Amortized over 20 years of service, that's $225/month, which is probably cheaper than your electric bill. Though if you had to take a loan, it would cost $414/month for those 20 years, which is probably more than today's electric bill for that amount of power.
And none of that includes the cost of storage and storage maintenance, which is currently usually battery power.
Both the cost of the panels and the cost of the storage need to come down for the solution to be viable for the average person.
Yes, that's the point. Bill them, tell them they can pay it in installments every 3 months for 2 years. Or they can confirm that 1/8th of the work has been done every 3 months. If they fail to do either, they start losing licenses.
Don't get depressed, get even.
If you are screwed-over by the corporations-and-courts system, wouldn't it make more sense to direct your angst away from yourself and towards the source ?
That's right, they should get together and figure out a way to cost these companies millions in lost revenues. That'll show them.
State your source. I have never before heard of a state that levies tariffs on imported goods.
I did, review up a couple of parents and you'll find my post.
In my original post I was citing only the NY tax handbook, but I checked two other states and both of them have a similar policy. You might need to look for 'use tax' instead of 'sales tax', as sales tax is charged when you purchase and use tax is charged when you begin use, unless you paid sales tax.
In most cases, if you paid the same or greater than the local sales tax rate, you're required to pay the difference on your state taxes. In the case of an amazon purchase, for purchasers in most states, you paid 0% tax at the time of the sale because sellers are only required to collect tax for customers in a state in which they have a physical presence.
You'll have to forgive me if this sounds like a dumb question, I'm not an american, but... if you bought something out of state, say in New Jersey, wouldn't the retailer automatically charge you tax at the time of purchase? And then you're supposed to claim it and pay New York tax when you go back home?
Not a dumb question at all, and the answer is rooted in the fact that the United States are a union of 50 semi-autonomous states and the federal government controls interstate trade among them. (Among other functions.)
Technically speaking, if you bought a $100 item in Paramus, New Jersey (7.00% sales tax rate) you'll pay $7 in local sales taxes. If you do not use it and then import it to Newburgh, New York (8.125% sales tax rate) and use it there, then you are required to list it on your annual taxes and pay New York $8.13 in sales tax. Also, the tax handbook indicates that there's a form you can fill out and file with New Jersey to get your $7 back.
If you do use it in NJ before importing it to NY, then the tax handbook seems to imply that you still need to pay the NY sales tax, but you might not be able to get your NJ sales tax back.
Yep, and the same is true of just about every state that has a sales tax. Most people never bother to declare these things, and with the rise in internet sales popularity the states are dreaming of this huge pile of money that people should be giving them but which is, realistically, impossible to prosecute for. It simply isn't worth running an audit for every person in the state who should've declared and paid an extra $3 in sales tax on their taxes, so they try and hit the sellers for it.
I don't see any indication that the phone number is in the user agent string, it looks like the phone number needs to be entered to "log in". Looking for iphone HTTP_USER_AGENT strings elsewhere I don't see any examples with an embedded phone number.
You don't have to keep track of what you bought and claim that at the end of the year, unless you're a non-profit or buying things for business use.
Yes, you do have to keep track of all purchases you made that you didn't pay sales tax on, in particular because the transaction occurred outside the state.
When do you owe New York State and local sales or
use tax?
When you make a purchase of taxable property or services
from a seller (vendor) located in New York State and take
delivery in New York State, the vendor should collect state
and local sales or use tax due and forward it to the Tax
Department. However, you are responsible for paying the
tax directly to the Tax Department under the following three
circumstances:
Deliveries into New York State -- You owe state and local
sales or use tax if you:
purchase property or a service that is delivered to you in
New York State without payment of New York State and
local tax to the seller, such as through the Internet, by
catalog, from television shopping channels, or on an Indian
reservation.
Purchases outside New York State with subsequent use in
New York State -- You may also owe state and local sales or
use tax if you are a resident of New York State at the time you
purchase any of the following outside New York State:
property you bring into New York State for use in New York
State;
a service performed on property outside New York State,
and you bring that property into New York State for use
here; or
a service (such as an information service) you bring into
New York State for use here.
(You may be eligible for a credit for sales or use tax paid to
another state. See Instructions for Worksheets 1, 2, and 3,
Column D, on page 70.)
However, you are not required to pay state or local sales or
use tax on any property or service that you bring into New York
State which you purchased outside of the state before you
became a resident of New York State.
Unfortunately the terms of service for some services specifically prohibits transfer of the account. Yahoo is particularly egregious, if they discover an account holder has died, the first thing they do is basically disable the account and set it to delete all its contents.
Yahoo Terms of Service
No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.
So if there is doubt regarding the circumstances of the death, asking for a formal police investigation may be the only way to proceed, in order that the evidence not be tainted and external accounts not be deleted before evidence is gathered.
Unless there's a huge public backlash before then, I predict that Customs will roll these out to every major airport within the year.
I hope so, because then the first slashdotter that has to go through customs can have his laptop automatically dd the entire contents of whatever usb drive gets attached to it, before they even realize it can't figure out what his laptop is running.
If there was the local equivalent of a judicially approved warrant provided to them, then I don't think the slippery slope argument would be particularly relevant. However, the article makes no mention of any such warrant or equivalent.
Since we're talking about accessing past and current records with future technology I think a comparison to reading cd's with some future technology instead of how we do today is entirely reasonable.
I'm into historical recreation, but lets keep proper perspective. We're not discussing observing the contents of the media with the full experience of the original access, we're discussing accessing the data itself in a comprehensible format at some point in the future. For this the contemporary tools of the future are quite adequate.
It didn't work out well for them in part because some of the rights they wanted were not theirs to take (interstate commerce) or ended up later as the items enshrined in the constitution (prohibition on slavery). It doesn't mean the concept of States Rights itself is a bad one.
Yes, I'm referring to States Rights. Though I don't know what the Civil War has to do with that, exactly. That war was largely fought over interstate trade, intrastate trade and ostensibly slavery, one of which was already enshrined in constitutional law, one was handled with an amendment so that the states could still retain those States Rights, and one was sort of ignored and slowly brought under the purview of interstate trade for most cases, where it doesn't belong.
IANAL, but if I have certain Rights under my State Constitution, the fact that the same Rights are not specifically elaborated in the U.S. Constitution shouldn't mean that agents of the Federal government are free to trample on them.
That's a problem that's existed since the time the Constitution was written. The Bill of Rights was a compromise because the Constitution is supposed to be a document saying very specifically what the government can do. By adding in a list of citizens rights they can't infringe upon the result is the implication that everything else is fair game, even though the Constitution specifically says, basically, "If it doesn't say you can do it, then you can't."
The Democratic party wants to take money from the rich and/or old and use it to protect the poor and/or young from the rich and/or old. They espouse a belief that the children are more important than anything else, and try every possible tactic, regardless of how invasive or absurd, to, ostensibly, protect them. They seem to think that the constitutional amendment protecting gun ownership is just a guideline, and it means that the National Guard should have guns but normal citizens shouldn't, and spend lots of time trying to get rid of them.
The Republican party wants to take out a loan that will be paid for by the poor and/or young later (because they can't afford it now) and use it to protect the rich and/or old from the poor and/or young. They don't want to hear naughty words or see any sort of sexual content occur in public at all, both because they think their grandchildren might learn something bad from them and because they seem to offend easily.
Both sides share two common issues. They think the children need protection from everything, and seek to protect their interests from the other side 's interests at the other side's expense.
Incidentally, since libertarians get up a lot here I'll include them. The Libertarian party wants the government to get just enough money to carry out the most basic of functions such as protecting everyone in the country from nothing less than invaders and egregious crimes. They rely on each person's intelligent nature to recognize that it is in their own self-interest to stop trying to get someone else to pay for what that person wants. As evidenced by the two parties that are the the powerhouses of the nation, this is unlikely to ever get anywhere.
Right, Republicans hate taxes, so they lower them and spend like crazy anyway, and just wait for a Democrat to get into office and have to fix their mess. The Democrat gets unpopular because taxes must be raised to pay for the mess, and then the Republicans can win again next time and start with a budget that's all nice and balanced for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, on that same page, Visa provides a simplified explanation for why "See ID" is not a substitute for a signature, and explains its stance on asking for ID's.
If the telco ever got off its ass and installed fiber, the cable company would lose its broadband monopoly and actually have to compete, but there's no danger of that happening for 10 or 20 years in most of the small towns across america.
For reference, google images, which specifically shows images as a result of a search that link back to the site they came from, was announced in Dec of 2001.
Of course, the patent is obviously garbage, because there were innumerable websites, such as ecommerce sites, at the time that allowed a customer to search products and displayed the results in image and text form, allowing the user to navigate to the product page by clicking on the image, which is specifically the net effect of one of the claims of the patent.
Also, read the second paragraph too, where I cover a higher efficiency 200 watt panel that requires a frame on the roof.
An example of a currently available solar panel intended for roofing application is 136 watts, and about 30 would fit on that sample roof, for a total possible 4,080 watts at any given point. Where I am, I can expect an average of 4.5 hours of full production per day, or 18 kwh/day, or 540 kwh/month. That's possible, but would require avoiding high load items like electric cooking, dryers, heating, and cooling. Oh, and the total cost would be $775*30 or $23k, plus installation, charge controller, inverter and storage (batteries).
A much more efficient solar panel, not designed to be applied directly to the roof but which would require a frame mounted on the roof and fit in a 7x7 grid, or 49 panels, could generate 9,800 watts max, or 44kwh/day, or 1,323kwh/month. That's a much more useful number, and might even handle an electric dryer, cooktop, and cooling. Still doubt it could handle heating (excepting heat pump or geothermal). And it would cost $53,900, plus installation, charge controller, inverter, and storage. Amortized over 20 years of service, that's $225/month, which is probably cheaper than your electric bill. Though if you had to take a loan, it would cost $414/month for those 20 years, which is probably more than today's electric bill for that amount of power.
And none of that includes the cost of storage and storage maintenance, which is currently usually battery power.
Both the cost of the panels and the cost of the storage need to come down for the solution to be viable for the average person.
Have you been to a little league softball game lately?
Yes, that's the point. Bill them, tell them they can pay it in installments every 3 months for 2 years. Or they can confirm that 1/8th of the work has been done every 3 months. If they fail to do either, they start losing licenses.
A child begging for their lives? You don't have kids, do you? Ours scream, wail, and beg for their lives when we tell them its time to set the table.
In my original post I was citing only the NY tax handbook, but I checked two other states and both of them have a similar policy. You might need to look for 'use tax' instead of 'sales tax', as sales tax is charged when you purchase and use tax is charged when you begin use, unless you paid sales tax.
In most cases, if you paid the same or greater than the local sales tax rate, you're required to pay the difference on your state taxes. In the case of an amazon purchase, for purchasers in most states, you paid 0% tax at the time of the sale because sellers are only required to collect tax for customers in a state in which they have a physical presence.
Not a dumb question at all, and the answer is rooted in the fact that the United States are a union of 50 semi-autonomous states and the federal government controls interstate trade among them. (Among other functions.)
Technically speaking, if you bought a $100 item in Paramus, New Jersey (7.00% sales tax rate) you'll pay $7 in local sales taxes. If you do not use it and then import it to Newburgh, New York (8.125% sales tax rate) and use it there, then you are required to list it on your annual taxes and pay New York $8.13 in sales tax. Also, the tax handbook indicates that there's a form you can fill out and file with New Jersey to get your $7 back.
If you do use it in NJ before importing it to NY, then the tax handbook seems to imply that you still need to pay the NY sales tax, but you might not be able to get your NJ sales tax back.
Yep, and the same is true of just about every state that has a sales tax. Most people never bother to declare these things, and with the rise in internet sales popularity the states are dreaming of this huge pile of money that people should be giving them but which is, realistically, impossible to prosecute for. It simply isn't worth running an audit for every person in the state who should've declared and paid an extra $3 in sales tax on their taxes, so they try and hit the sellers for it.
I don't see any indication that the phone number is in the user agent string, it looks like the phone number needs to be entered to "log in". Looking for iphone HTTP_USER_AGENT strings elsewhere I don't see any examples with an embedded phone number.
Yes, you do have to keep track of all purchases you made that you didn't pay sales tax on, in particular because the transaction occurred outside the state.
From New York State Resident Income Tax Return IT-150 & IT-201 Instructions (Page 66)
When do you owe New York State and local sales or use tax?
When you make a purchase of taxable property or services from a seller (vendor) located in New York State and take delivery in New York State, the vendor should collect state and local sales or use tax due and forward it to the Tax Department. However, you are responsible for paying the tax directly to the Tax Department under the following three circumstances: Deliveries into New York State -- You owe state and local sales or use tax if you:
Purchases outside New York State with subsequent use in New York State -- You may also owe state and local sales or use tax if you are a resident of New York State at the time you purchase any of the following outside New York State:
(You may be eligible for a credit for sales or use tax paid to another state. See Instructions for Worksheets 1, 2, and 3, Column D, on page 70.)
However, you are not required to pay state or local sales or use tax on any property or service that you bring into New York State which you purchased outside of the state before you became a resident of New York State.
Unfortunately the terms of service for some services specifically prohibits transfer of the account. Yahoo is particularly egregious, if they discover an account holder has died, the first thing they do is basically disable the account and set it to delete all its contents.
So if there is doubt regarding the circumstances of the death, asking for a formal police investigation may be the only way to proceed, in order that the evidence not be tainted and external accounts not be deleted before evidence is gathered.
You could sell them car insurance, instead...
If there was the local equivalent of a judicially approved warrant provided to them, then I don't think the slippery slope argument would be particularly relevant. However, the article makes no mention of any such warrant or equivalent.
I'm into historical recreation, but lets keep proper perspective. We're not discussing observing the contents of the media with the full experience of the original access, we're discussing accessing the data itself in a comprehensible format at some point in the future. For this the contemporary tools of the future are quite adequate.
It didn't work out well for them in part because some of the rights they wanted were not theirs to take (interstate commerce) or ended up later as the items enshrined in the constitution (prohibition on slavery). It doesn't mean the concept of States Rights itself is a bad one.
Yes, I'm referring to States Rights. Though I don't know what the Civil War has to do with that, exactly. That war was largely fought over interstate trade, intrastate trade and ostensibly slavery, one of which was already enshrined in constitutional law, one was handled with an amendment so that the states could still retain those States Rights, and one was sort of ignored and slowly brought under the purview of interstate trade for most cases, where it doesn't belong.
Not that we're using it anymore anyways.
The Republican party wants to take out a loan that will be paid for by the poor and/or young later (because they can't afford it now) and use it to protect the rich and/or old from the poor and/or young. They don't want to hear naughty words or see any sort of sexual content occur in public at all, both because they think their grandchildren might learn something bad from them and because they seem to offend easily.
Both sides share two common issues. They think the children need protection from everything, and seek to protect their interests from the other side 's interests at the other side's expense.
Incidentally, since libertarians get up a lot here I'll include them. The Libertarian party wants the government to get just enough money to carry out the most basic of functions such as protecting everyone in the country from nothing less than invaders and egregious crimes. They rely on each person's intelligent nature to recognize that it is in their own self-interest to stop trying to get someone else to pay for what that person wants. As evidenced by the two parties that are the the powerhouses of the nation, this is unlikely to ever get anywhere.
Right, Republicans hate taxes, so they lower them and spend like crazy anyway, and just wait for a Democrat to get into office and have to fix their mess. The Democrat gets unpopular because taxes must be raised to pay for the mess, and then the Republicans can win again next time and start with a budget that's all nice and balanced for them.