Amazon started litigation to fight the New York tax that is ongoing. By refusing to do business there, they would lose the legal case because they would be admitting the tax is legal.
They are taking the position they have in other States, partly because the States are smaller, and partly because they would be forced into more litigation over the same issues they are fighting in New York. I would bet their lawyers believe they will eventually win in SCOTUS and then they will restore their old practices.
But, in March of this year, SCOTUS refused to hear a case from New Mexico involving Dell. The New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled in that case that Dell's use of contractors to provide Warranty Support was enough of a nexus to require Dell to collect New Mexico Sales Tax.
US Supreme Court decision that said company that do not have a physical presence in the State can not be obligated to collect Sales tax. Economic presence is not enough. A RICO charge would get thrown out of court because Amazon is operating within the law.
This latest flurry of cases is because of a New Mexico Court of Appeals decision against Dell. New Mexico argued that because Dell had contractors in New Mexico to offer in-home warranty service, Dell now had a physical presence and was required to pay Sales Tax. When the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in March of this year, that opened the floodgates against all of these other companies by other States.
Frankly, I think the Supreme Court will eventually hear one of these cases. I personally don't think contractors to provide these kinds of services will be enough to make a physical presence, but we will see when it happens.
In the meantime, watch out. We will be hearing a lot more about this.
Our machinists are skilled technicians. It isn't as easy as punching a number into a computer and watching the machine make the part.
The numbers have to be right for the units you are working in. Telling the machine to move to make a G2 Z1 move results in a tremendously different move if you have the machine in metric and you are used to working in imperial.
Although we use a CAM system to generate 95% of the G-code for our parts, our machinists still do manual programming for certain features. To prevent scrap, most machine shops stick with either imperial or metric for running the machines. It is asking for trouble to do it any other way. They base their decision on what units the majority of their customers are using. Inspections are always done to the customers specifications. It is easier for the QA folks to handle that part of the process.
Most of our machines are built in Japan. They are built to SI standards, but run Imperial just fine. They are accurate to.0002" +/-.0001". That is.005mm +/-.0025 mm for the SI folks
I live in Rural Idaho, Cow tipping is a lot like snipe hunting.
We would take gullible kids out to a farm in the middle of the night. They would try to sneak up on a cow and tip it. It would either move or not tip, and then move. We would convince them that their shoes were making too much noise.
After they gave up their shoes, we would hop in the car and leave them in the middle of a pasture, barefoot, in the middle of the night, miles from home.
I work in a machine shop.
We work with the Aerospace Industry and the Medical industry for 60% of our business.
In our part of the country (Pacific Northwest) everything we do, we do in Imperial units. Prints come in Imperial, material comes in Imperial
Our machines are capable of running in either mode. But because 90% of our work is Imperial, that is what we stick with. The occasional metric job, we convert and run it in Imperial. We inspect it in metric though. It is hard for a machinist reading G-Code to switch between units in his head. A.001 Z move is a lot different between the two systems.
Vendors have told us that most machine shops in the country run opposite, SI all the time, only occasional jobs in Imperial units. The vendors guess, Boeing. Boeing is still Imperial.
I went to a public school system that from Grade 1 thru 6 would split kids into different classes for Math and Reading. There were 4 teachers for each grade, so it was pretty easy. The top 25% of the readers would go to one classroom, the middle 50% would go to two classrooms, the bottom 25% would go to another room. (The percentages might vary from year to year, they weren't hard and fast). My mom was teacher in the school system and she explained it well a few years ago. Yes, the kids in the "slow classes" were known to everyone, but we didn't know HOW slow they were. It was much easier for a slow reader to summon up the courage to read aloud to the group when everyone else was having the same problems. It is much harder to summon up that courage when all the smart kids in the room giggle every time you open your mouth. The people who really worked were the teachers struggling to keep up with the advanced kids
I remember my sister coming home crying from 1st grade because "they stuck me in the lowest reading group". My mother inquired about what was going on. She assumed she was in the lowest reading group because they were using the reader that she used in November of her kindergarten year. Sure enough, she was in the advanced class, she was just really advanced. She ended up going to 3rd grade classes for reading and math. She socialized well with her peers because, although they knew she was smart, they didn't know how smart. She ended up double majoring in college, EE and Math.
I recognize that one of the problems I had in College was that I had such an easy time in high school that I rarely did homework to learn the material. It was okay because back then so few of my teachers placed any emphasis on daily work.
Fast forward, my son started 6th grade last fall. Smart as a whip, but his first quarter grades didn't reflect that. His school places as much emphasis on daily assignments as on test scores. I have always paid him $5 for every "A" he brings home on his report card. So I continued the offer in 2nd quarter, but offered bonus of doubling the money if he got straight A's.
2nd quarter ends, 4 A's, 2 B's again. checked with the teachers, homework again was his downfall. 3rd Quarter, I offer $5 per A, $20 per A for straight A's. This time he makes it. $120 paid the day I had the report card in hand. Halfway through 4th quarter, he told me he was going to be late one day. I asked why, and he said he was meeting with 3 of his teachers. Okay, why are you meeting with 3 of your teachers? I want the money so I am finding out what assignments I am missing so I can fix my grades. Bingo, we have a winner.
The money isn't making him any smarter, but it is rewarding him for work. He is learning to be proactive about his own grades and learning.
I registered a.US domain name to use as an email domain for family. The name is the same as the name of a joint family reunion we have every year. I've had it 8 years, only have about 10 email accounts on it. Just family.
Last year the company using the.com version of it tried to bully me into giving them my.US version. Claimed I was cybersquattting and tried to point at the lack of a webpage as evidence of the squatting. I had to present evidence of its use as email for the past several years.
The article is talking about things like open-source and wikipedia being examples of on-line communism
I never mentioned capitalism, and I wasn't talking about capitalism.
I was talking about these on-line communities(like Wikipedia) coming together voluntarily to work towards a common goal.
This isn't communism. Communism was built around planned economies with central figures at the government level deciding what projects were important and what weren't. The free form Open Source movement is the opposite of that.
Excellent post.
People voluntarily sharing and collaborating forming online communities is not the same as Communism or socialism.
Communism is all about Government power being used to force people to behave in the "appropriate" ways. With government power brokers determining what is appropriate and what isn't.
The cooperation being seen between individuals is the exact opposite. People voluntarily working towards a common good that they choose for themselves.
Or, how about the "space dive", where they leaped out of a shuttlecraft and suddenly lost all their inertia? How about re-entering the atmosphere in a space-suit without any worries about friction or heat?
The loss of inertia thing was a little distracting, but the basic concept was still workable.
USAF proved the basic concept over 40 years about when a guy jumped from a balloon from the edge of space.
I would postulate that the basic problem with reentry heat is from slowing down from 18,000 mph to a reasonable speed for landing, the kinetic energy gets turned into heat. Now if Star Trek had someway to remove the inertia from the jumpers so that they were entering the atmosphere with little to no forward velocity, I can easily imagine that heat wouldn't be a serious problem. I can even imagine a system that launches the jumpers in the opposite direction of the orbit to kill their velocity.
But this is not the first Star Trek episode that seemed to ignore the basic rules of orbital mechanics.
All that said, how cool would that free fall be....
I get a kick out of people who think the ocean will quit circulating because of salinity changes.
Warm water will still rise, cold water will still sink, As long as warm water flows from the tropics north, water will still flow south to replace it. It actually makes more sense that the southern flow is more diffuse than people thought. Picture a river flowing into the ocean, as it reaches the ocean it diffuses and spreads out, eventually you can't see it anymore. As the Gulf stream loses energy on its trip north, it will become more diffuse and spread out and eventually disappear. Its the thermal energy in the Gulf Stream that makes it flow so fast and in such a contained manner.
Salinity may change some of the flow patterns but I never thought it would be enough to stop this process.
It brings another question I have always had though, Won't increased global temperatures have a tendency to increase overall precipitation levels worldwide? Warmer Oceans would evaporate more, producing more clouds and rain. I don't get a chance to talk to climate scientists a lot, but most of the lay people I talk to seem to think that increasing global temperatures will automatically result in bigger deserts and more drought. I can see weather changes happening, but to me, it makes more sense that there will be more moisture in the atmosphere not less.
It all depends on what kind of career you want to have.
Take my brother-in-law for example. He got his Mechanical Engineering BS and started interviewing. Most of his job offers were for Production Engineering type jobs. When I was working on an Engineering degree, I found the same thing. 80% of the Engineering jobs in manufacturing are Production Engineering.
But he didn't want to do production engineering. So he stayed and got his Masters. Instead of doing a bunch of classes he did research. He designed tested and wrote a thesis on a pollution control system for diesel engines.
When he interviewed after that, he was interviewing for R&D jobs. No one wanted him for a production position, They wanted him to design solutions for them.
Your mileage may vary. A Master's Degree opens doors you may not have even known existed.
Incendiary Weapons are Protocol III of V of the 1980 Geneva Conventions. The United States is a signatory to Protocols I and II. Protocol I is no x-ray invisible fragments and Protocol II is certain types of Landmines and Booby-Traps. The US does not consider itself bound by Protocol III so WP is not an illegal weapon for the US.
This is an example of the problem with International Treaties, like the Geneva Conventions.
They only apply to countries who voluntarily agree to have them apply.
This is usually regulated by State law, rather than Federal.
Some States require both parties be aware of the recording, some States only require one party be aware.
Find out the rules for where you live. Where I live, if I am aware I am making a recording, I can record all my conversations with anyone. I can not make a recording of conversations between other people.
add in that not only did they hire you to control access to the storage unit, but they asked you to make a key.
Now really complicate the situation, people had access. People walked in and out all day every day. The information they wanted was always available.
Then one day they noticed that while they had access to the light switch, you had locked the circuit breaker panel. To improve security, you had designed some guarded panels that would seal the room from anyone gaining access for any reason, and the controls for those panels were in the circuit breaker panel that you had the keys for.
Without asking for training, firing me, or any other normal action, an employee of yours asked me for copies of keys to the circuit breaker panel. Oh, not just for me, but for these 7 or 8 random people in this room, but some random people at the other end of the phone too.
I am currently an admin for a small company, but I have been an admin at a bank, and I am a CCNP.
I maintain a drop dead book of essential network information including root passwords for all servers and routers. My company never asked me to make it, I volunteered to make it, and we keep it in a safe that the CEO has the combination to. When I need to update something in it (rarely), He opens the safe, gives me the book, I update it, return it to him and he locks the safe.
Voluntarily doing this little thing strengthened the trust the Company has in me. They know that I place a priority on doing what is in the Company's best interest. This was demonstrated a couple years ago, the employees took out a loan and bought the company from the previous owner, making us a 100% employee owned company. I was asked to be the Chairman of the ESOP committee that oversees the Trust that holds all the company stock for the employees.
The recent Myspace case in California resulted in misdemeanor computer trespass charges against someone for violating the MySpace EULA.
The prosecution theory was violation of the EULA resulted in her exceeding her authority to access the Myspace servers and was therefore a crime.
It is being appealed, but once 1 prosecutor succeeds with a theory, others will copy them.
Now can you be charged with Computer Trespass for accessing your own equipment and logs in violation of an EULA written by a 3rd party? I would think it was an overreach, but 20 years from now? Possible that overzealous privacy advocates could get the question framed in the form of when you agreed to the EULA, you agreed to turn off all of that kind of logging, by keeping the logs, you illegally intercepted the communications.
I work with a small network now. Used to work for a major bank and they had the Location-OS-Service-sequence number type scheme. It was boring, but useful.
Current network is even more boring, the servers are named based on the order they were purchased. Example, pretend the name of the name of the company is Pine Storage (Its not, neither of those words is in our name). The first server purchased was named Pine. The next server was Pine2. The next Pine3, and so on. It makes it easy to tell how old the network is based on the server names, but doesn't help the users understand the purpose of the server.
I broke the mold when I put up a virtual server for testing. I named it "Casper".
Yep. QOS isn't the same thing as throttling. Giving priority to high-priority traffic is a basic network management function in a world of streaming video and VOIP
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon started litigation to fight the New York tax that is ongoing. By refusing to do business there, they would lose the legal case because they would be admitting the tax is legal.
They are taking the position they have in other States, partly because the States are smaller, and partly because they would be forced into more litigation over the same issues they are fighting in New York. I would bet their lawyers believe they will eventually win in SCOTUS and then they will restore their old practices.
But, in March of this year, SCOTUS refused to hear a case from New Mexico involving Dell. The New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled in that case that Dell's use of contractors to provide Warranty Support was enough of a nexus to require Dell to collect New Mexico Sales Tax.
And on a quarterly basis, send a report to each of these taxing agencies with a check for the amount of tax owed to each place.
If you didn't do business that quarter in that particular taxing district, they will still want their report.
Read Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 5/26/92
US Supreme Court decision that said company that do not have a physical presence in the State can not be obligated to collect Sales tax. Economic presence is not enough. A RICO charge would get thrown out of court because Amazon is operating within the law.
This latest flurry of cases is because of a New Mexico Court of Appeals decision against Dell. New Mexico argued that because Dell had contractors in New Mexico to offer in-home warranty service, Dell now had a physical presence and was required to pay Sales Tax. When the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in March of this year, that opened the floodgates against all of these other companies by other States.
Frankly, I think the Supreme Court will eventually hear one of these cases. I personally don't think contractors to provide these kinds of services will be enough to make a physical presence, but we will see when it happens.
In the meantime, watch out. We will be hearing a lot more about this.
Boeing, and therefore most of the US Aerospace industry, has traditionally used US units. That is why NASA used it.
Our machinists are skilled technicians. It isn't as easy as punching a number into a computer and watching the machine make the part.
.0002" +/- .0001". That is .005mm +/- .0025 mm for the SI folks
The numbers have to be right for the units you are working in. Telling the machine to move to make a G2 Z1 move results in a tremendously different move if you have the machine in metric and you are used to working in imperial.
Although we use a CAM system to generate 95% of the G-code for our parts, our machinists still do manual programming for certain features. To prevent scrap, most machine shops stick with either imperial or metric for running the machines. It is asking for trouble to do it any other way. They base their decision on what units the majority of their customers are using. Inspections are always done to the customers specifications. It is easier for the QA folks to handle that part of the process.
Most of our machines are built in Japan. They are built to SI standards, but run Imperial just fine. They are accurate to
All of the calipers in my machine shop are digital. It is dead easy to press the mm/in button and switch between modes. We do it all the time.
ummm,
I live in Rural Idaho, Cow tipping is a lot like snipe hunting.
We would take gullible kids out to a farm in the middle of the night. They would try to sneak up on a cow and tip it. It would either move or not tip, and then move. We would convince them that their shoes were making too much noise.
After they gave up their shoes, we would hop in the car and leave them in the middle of a pasture, barefoot, in the middle of the night, miles from home.
That is what cow tipping is really about.
I work in a machine shop. We work with the Aerospace Industry and the Medical industry for 60% of our business. In our part of the country (Pacific Northwest) everything we do, we do in Imperial units. Prints come in Imperial, material comes in Imperial Our machines are capable of running in either mode. But because 90% of our work is Imperial, that is what we stick with. The occasional metric job, we convert and run it in Imperial. We inspect it in metric though. It is hard for a machinist reading G-Code to switch between units in his head. A .001 Z move is a lot different between the two systems.
Vendors have told us that most machine shops in the country run opposite, SI all the time, only occasional jobs in Imperial units. The vendors guess, Boeing. Boeing is still Imperial.
I went to a public school system that from Grade 1 thru 6 would split kids into different classes for Math and Reading. There were 4 teachers for each grade, so it was pretty easy. The top 25% of the readers would go to one classroom, the middle 50% would go to two classrooms, the bottom 25% would go to another room. (The percentages might vary from year to year, they weren't hard and fast). My mom was teacher in the school system and she explained it well a few years ago. Yes, the kids in the "slow classes" were known to everyone, but we didn't know HOW slow they were. It was much easier for a slow reader to summon up the courage to read aloud to the group when everyone else was having the same problems. It is much harder to summon up that courage when all the smart kids in the room giggle every time you open your mouth. The people who really worked were the teachers struggling to keep up with the advanced kids
I remember my sister coming home crying from 1st grade because "they stuck me in the lowest reading group". My mother inquired about what was going on. She assumed she was in the lowest reading group because they were using the reader that she used in November of her kindergarten year. Sure enough, she was in the advanced class, she was just really advanced. She ended up going to 3rd grade classes for reading and math. She socialized well with her peers because, although they knew she was smart, they didn't know how smart. She ended up double majoring in college, EE and Math.
Anecdote from my own experiance
I recognize that one of the problems I had in College was that I had such an easy time in high school that I rarely did homework to learn the material. It was okay because back then so few of my teachers placed any emphasis on daily work.
Fast forward, my son started 6th grade last fall. Smart as a whip, but his first quarter grades didn't reflect that. His school places as much emphasis on daily assignments as on test scores. I have always paid him $5 for every "A" he brings home on his report card. So I continued the offer in 2nd quarter, but offered bonus of doubling the money if he got straight A's.
2nd quarter ends, 4 A's, 2 B's again. checked with the teachers, homework again was his downfall. 3rd Quarter, I offer $5 per A, $20 per A for straight A's. This time he makes it. $120 paid the day I had the report card in hand. Halfway through 4th quarter, he told me he was going to be late one day. I asked why, and he said he was meeting with 3 of his teachers. Okay, why are you meeting with 3 of your teachers? I want the money so I am finding out what assignments I am missing so I can fix my grades. Bingo, we have a winner.
The money isn't making him any smarter, but it is rewarding him for work. He is learning to be proactive about his own grades and learning.
YMMV
I had a similar event.
.US domain name to use as an email domain for family. The name is the same as the name of a joint family reunion we have every year. I've had it 8 years, only have about 10 email accounts on it. Just family.
.com version of it tried to bully me into giving them my .US version. Claimed I was cybersquattting and tried to point at the lack of a webpage as evidence of the squatting. I had to present evidence of its use as email for the past several years.
I registered a
Last year the company using the
I got to keep my domain, but it was annoying.
The article is talking about things like open-source and wikipedia being examples of on-line communism
I never mentioned capitalism, and I wasn't talking about capitalism.
I was talking about these on-line communities(like Wikipedia) coming together voluntarily to work towards a common goal.
This isn't communism. Communism was built around planned economies with central figures at the government level deciding what projects were important and what weren't. The free form Open Source movement is the opposite of that.
Excellent post.
People voluntarily sharing and collaborating forming online communities is not the same as Communism or socialism.
Communism is all about Government power being used to force people to behave in the "appropriate" ways. With government power brokers determining what is appropriate and what isn't.
The cooperation being seen between individuals is the exact opposite. People voluntarily working towards a common good that they choose for themselves.
Or, how about the "space dive", where they leaped out of a shuttlecraft and suddenly lost all their inertia? How about re-entering the atmosphere in a space-suit without any worries about friction or heat?
The loss of inertia thing was a little distracting, but the basic concept was still workable.
USAF proved the basic concept over 40 years about when a guy jumped from a balloon from the edge of space.
I would postulate that the basic problem with reentry heat is from slowing down from 18,000 mph to a reasonable speed for landing, the kinetic energy gets turned into heat. Now if Star Trek had someway to remove the inertia from the jumpers so that they were entering the atmosphere with little to no forward velocity, I can easily imagine that heat wouldn't be a serious problem. I can even imagine a system that launches the jumpers in the opposite direction of the orbit to kill their velocity.
But this is not the first Star Trek episode that seemed to ignore the basic rules of orbital mechanics.
All that said, how cool would that free fall be....
I get a kick out of people who think the ocean will quit circulating because of salinity changes.
Warm water will still rise, cold water will still sink, As long as warm water flows from the tropics north, water will still flow south to replace it. It actually makes more sense that the southern flow is more diffuse than people thought. Picture a river flowing into the ocean, as it reaches the ocean it diffuses and spreads out, eventually you can't see it anymore. As the Gulf stream loses energy on its trip north, it will become more diffuse and spread out and eventually disappear. Its the thermal energy in the Gulf Stream that makes it flow so fast and in such a contained manner.
Salinity may change some of the flow patterns but I never thought it would be enough to stop this process.
It brings another question I have always had though, Won't increased global temperatures have a tendency to increase overall precipitation levels worldwide? Warmer Oceans would evaporate more, producing more clouds and rain. I don't get a chance to talk to climate scientists a lot, but most of the lay people I talk to seem to think that increasing global temperatures will automatically result in bigger deserts and more drought. I can see weather changes happening, but to me, it makes more sense that there will be more moisture in the atmosphere not less.
It all depends on what kind of career you want to have.
Take my brother-in-law for example. He got his Mechanical Engineering BS and started interviewing. Most of his job offers were for Production Engineering type jobs. When I was working on an Engineering degree, I found the same thing. 80% of the Engineering jobs in manufacturing are Production Engineering.
But he didn't want to do production engineering. So he stayed and got his Masters. Instead of doing a bunch of classes he did research. He designed tested and wrote a thesis on a pollution control system for diesel engines.
When he interviewed after that, he was interviewing for R&D jobs. No one wanted him for a production position, They wanted him to design solutions for them.
Your mileage may vary. A Master's Degree opens doors you may not have even known existed.
Incendiary Weapons are Protocol III of V of the 1980 Geneva Conventions. The United States is a signatory to Protocols I and II. Protocol I is no x-ray invisible fragments and Protocol II is certain types of Landmines and Booby-Traps. The US does not consider itself bound by Protocol III so WP is not an illegal weapon for the US.
This is an example of the problem with International Treaties, like the Geneva Conventions.
They only apply to countries who voluntarily agree to have them apply.
This is usually regulated by State law, rather than Federal.
Some States require both parties be aware of the recording, some States only require one party be aware.
Find out the rules for where you live. Where I live, if I am aware I am making a recording, I can record all my conversations with anyone. I can not make a recording of conversations between other people.
add in that not only did they hire you to control access to the storage unit, but they asked you to make a key.
Now really complicate the situation, people had access. People walked in and out all day every day. The information they wanted was always available.
Then one day they noticed that while they had access to the light switch, you had locked the circuit breaker panel. To improve security, you had designed some guarded panels that would seal the room from anyone gaining access for any reason, and the controls for those panels were in the circuit breaker panel that you had the keys for.
Without asking for training, firing me, or any other normal action, an employee of yours asked me for copies of keys to the circuit breaker panel. Oh, not just for me, but for these 7 or 8 random people in this room, but some random people at the other end of the phone too.
It gets more complicated.
I am currently an admin for a small company, but I have been an admin at a bank, and I am a CCNP.
I maintain a drop dead book of essential network information including root passwords for all servers and routers. My company never asked me to make it, I volunteered to make it, and we keep it in a safe that the CEO has the combination to. When I need to update something in it (rarely), He opens the safe, gives me the book, I update it, return it to him and he locks the safe.
Voluntarily doing this little thing strengthened the trust the Company has in me. They know that I place a priority on doing what is in the Company's best interest. This was demonstrated a couple years ago, the employees took out a loan and bought the company from the previous owner, making us a 100% employee owned company. I was asked to be the Chairman of the ESOP committee that oversees the Trust that holds all the company stock for the employees.
The recent Myspace case in California resulted in misdemeanor computer trespass charges against someone for violating the MySpace EULA.
The prosecution theory was violation of the EULA resulted in her exceeding her authority to access the Myspace servers and was therefore a crime.
It is being appealed, but once 1 prosecutor succeeds with a theory, others will copy them.
Now can you be charged with Computer Trespass for accessing your own equipment and logs in violation of an EULA written by a 3rd party? I would think it was an overreach, but 20 years from now? Possible that overzealous privacy advocates could get the question framed in the form of when you agreed to the EULA, you agreed to turn off all of that kind of logging, by keeping the logs, you illegally intercepted the communications.
I work with a small network now. Used to work for a major bank and they had the Location-OS-Service-sequence number type scheme. It was boring, but useful.
Current network is even more boring, the servers are named based on the order they were purchased. Example, pretend the name of the name of the company is Pine Storage (Its not, neither of those words is in our name). The first server purchased was named Pine. The next server was Pine2. The next Pine3, and so on. It makes it easy to tell how old the network is based on the server names, but doesn't help the users understand the purpose of the server.
I broke the mold when I put up a virtual server for testing. I named it "Casper".
Yep. QOS isn't the same thing as throttling. Giving priority to high-priority traffic is a basic network management function in a world of streaming video and VOIP
My fear is that a movie adaptation of The Forever War will be a god-awful as the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers.
I would assume that all the perverts would switch from cell phones to pocket sized video camera, like the Flip Video camera