That being said, I would like the IRS to come out with some basic tax forms which do the calculations and look up by itself. i.e., you would still need input the numbers, but the simple “multiple by 28%” and “Look up income in tax table” would be automated.
I think the IRS has something like that, but not many people use it because it's only setup for just basic taxes (and didn't handle state taxes).
A lot of it comes down to time and trust. Doing it by hand is time consuming; time that could be spent on more valuable things. Also, non-e-filed returns take longer to get their refunds (I e-filed and got one of my refunds a week after filing).
I get about what I expected from my wife's 2005 Hybrid Civic. Only negative really is the lifetime of the batteries. We lucked out that they failed just before the warranty ended.
All of the owners of high-mileage Prius's I've talked to haven't had to replace their batteries yet. Maybe you had bad luck or the Civic one is inferior?
To some degree, but the first prius went on sale in the US in 2001, which was 11 years ago. Lots of people replace their cars far more often than every 11 years.
It took until 2004 or 2005 for the Prius to rise to prominence and sell in higher numbers. I've ridden in one with around 250,000 miles on them (complete with the original battery), so yeah I think there are many who are simply holding on to a good thing.
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
Excess workforce can lead to:
Extra barriers to getting stuff one such as more bureaucracy or empire building
Money being spent on employees who skill set doesn't match what you need (which is extremely common in the software industry), which leads to...
Lack of money available to spend on new business direction, employees (with the right skill set), training (for existing employees), contractors, capital (e.g. servers), acquisitions, or advertising
Third hand anecdotes are not very convincing arguments. The whole thing sounds entirely made up. Having a STEAM account wiped of legitimate games because it was hacked? Very doubtful.
Yeah, I bet the friend's nephew had faked some SKUs, Steam caught on, and then suddenly he was out of his 8 games. Then he made up this story for mom and dad so they would buy him his games back.
I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
While very cool, some problems require more communication between threads and might not scale well on more distributed VMs. Still, very cool.
...the usual method of execution is a bullet into the back of the head.
Better to declare the condemned executed, maintaining the body as long as possible until (and as) organs are needed and harvested. The donor would be unconscious for humanitarian reasons:-D
Morbid thought: what happens if/when they wake up?
Weather balloons are blown around by the wind, which tends to be pretty fast (and consistent) high up where there are no trees or mountains to slow it down, so they wouldn't stay where TPB wants them (over international waters) for very long.
I could see Russia, China or North Korea shooting these down if they float over their territory (assuming they are spy devices).
In Russia, they will reverse-engineer the device and float them over the West.
In China, they will treat it as a breach of the great firewall and launch a hack-counter-attack on the West.
In North Korea, a child will find it, hook it up, and suddenly learn about the.. movies... the West has.
Wargasm pr0n aside, I can't see the expense of such ordinance being wasted on some kids downloading rips of Avatar.
The MAFIAA has managed to commandeer foreign policy and the entire justice system, who says they won't succeed with the military? All they have to do is drop a "credible" tip that the TPB is supporting t*****rists and the job's as good as done.
They'll point out that the one drone is costing the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars a month and that a $1 million missile would be cheap by comparison.
Maybe TPB could use dirty tricks? Put a pet on the drone and when it gets shot down PETA will go crazy?
You forgot to mention in your list of cons that union salaries tend to be more based on seniority rather than skill or talent. I'm a high performer. I want to be recognized as such. Sure there are imperfections for titles or pay, but a union would mean I'd be making the same as the guy who can't keep his dev environment working because we joined the same year.
Unlikely. The British empire combined with the SU would have defeated Germany and Italy.
I think that's a bit of a stretch considering that half of why Britain survived was because the US was "lend-leasing" ships and planes before officially joining the war (the other half being creativity and determination). And we were sending tanks and stuff to Russia too. Without American supply, Britain wouldn't have had control of the Atlantic or Med and would have been kicked out of Africa by Rommel.
I'm not saying the rest of your points aren't valid, but this one is a bit of a stretch.
They can take a 97% decrease in price and still remain profitable? What other industry can possibly have that level of markup and keep customers? It is only possible because of patent restrictions, and a "captive market" where people die or have horrible illnesses when they don't take your product.
That hasn't been proven here. What has happened is that a generic brand drug is being sold with (most-likely) less quality control at 3% of the name-brand price while contributing only 0.18% of the original price back to R&D. It is unreasonable to think that Bayer could make the same price move in all markets.
Considering the number of deaths on the road (30k in 2009, down from 43k in 2005), you can hardly blame them for taking an active role in trying to reduce deaths.
Kind of makes Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorists attacks, the crack down in Syria, the violence in Mexico and almost anything else you can think of outside of Africa from the last decade look like nothing.
With the exception of the log cabin folks, most homosexuals tend to favor Democrats. So it's most likely that most people who *do* like santorum are Democrats (as that word is defined by google search).
Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.
Why hate the teachers unions so much? They aren't perfect, but most of the things they are asking for correlate to giving students a better education (smaller classrooms, more pay so they don't need a 2nd or 3rd job, etc).
All of the focus is on the teachers unions, but no one looks at the administrators who enjoy the same benefits (or more) while spending most of their career trying to not rock the boat.
And I think a Dutch company had a computerized version of that system, where you'd pull into a garage, park on a pallet thing, and the computers would store the car-pallet above and below grade. I think you could put in an expected ETA so the computer could store the car efficiently. It's a good solution for areas with high real estate costs, because you aren't wasting half your space on access ramps.
The Japanese have something like this throughout the country for over a decade. It's best described as a Ferris-wheel for cars (but inside a building and I'm sure there are variants).
Considering their weird zoning / building laws, if these work in Japan they would definitely work for San Francisco.
Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?
Worse than that. There are a lot of 60k/year engineers that might not ever deliver, much less require 3-5 times the head count.
From what I've seen, most entry-level software engineers are paid more than they are worth to the company at time of hire. Most will grow into their role quickly and the company will get a return on investment. These usually have a few of the 150k engineers around to mentor them.
That would require duplicate hardware at the new site. It's hard to convince people to shell out, even when their pockets are deep.
The real question is why you need DRM on a game (or anything else) that's been purchased outright. And a related question, why do you need an Internet connection to play a single player game?
They already shelled out a bunch of dev resources and hardware to ward against the pirate-boogie-man. Or put another way, they made their bed now they have to sleep in it.
I don't happen to play anything from Ubisoft right now, but I'd be hounding them if my game of choice was affected (so little game time, so precious).
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, I would like the IRS to come out with some basic tax forms which do the calculations and look up by itself. i.e., you would still need input the numbers, but the simple “multiple by 28%” and “Look up income in tax table” would be automated.
I think the IRS has something like that, but not many people use it because it's only setup for just basic taxes (and didn't handle state taxes).
A lot of it comes down to time and trust. Doing it by hand is time consuming; time that could be spent on more valuable things. Also, non-e-filed returns take longer to get their refunds (I e-filed and got one of my refunds a week after filing).
I get about what I expected from my wife's 2005 Hybrid Civic. Only negative really is the lifetime of the batteries. We lucked out that they failed just before the warranty ended.
All of the owners of high-mileage Prius's I've talked to haven't had to replace their batteries yet. Maybe you had bad luck or the Civic one is inferior?
To some degree, but the first prius went on sale in the US in 2001, which was 11 years ago. Lots of people replace their cars far more often than every 11 years.
It took until 2004 or 2005 for the Prius to rise to prominence and sell in higher numbers. I've ridden in one with around 250,000 miles on them (complete with the original battery), so yeah I think there are many who are simply holding on to a good thing.
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
Excess workforce can lead to:
Wouldn't blackmail be "pay up or I release this information"? She has already released the information, that is not what she is asking money for.
I think it has to be true (or half-true) and a secret for it to be blackmail. She's just making stuff up.
Third hand anecdotes are not very convincing arguments. The whole thing sounds entirely made up. Having a STEAM account wiped of legitimate games because it was hacked? Very doubtful.
Yeah, I bet the friend's nephew had faked some SKUs, Steam caught on, and then suddenly he was out of his 8 games. Then he made up this story for mom and dad so they would buy him his games back.
I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
While very cool, some problems require more communication between threads and might not scale well on more distributed VMs. Still, very cool.
...the usual method of execution is a bullet into the back of the head.
Better to declare the condemned executed, maintaining the body as long as possible until (and as) organs are needed and harvested. The donor would be unconscious for humanitarian reasons :-D
Morbid thought: what happens if/when they wake up?
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
Yup, high 50s and rain over here. Freakin' cold.
Weather balloons are blown around by the wind, which tends to be pretty fast (and consistent) high up where there are no trees or mountains to slow it down, so they wouldn't stay where TPB wants them (over international waters) for very long.
I could see Russia, China or North Korea shooting these down if they float over their territory (assuming they are spy devices).
In Russia, they will reverse-engineer the device and float them over the West.
In China, they will treat it as a breach of the great firewall and launch a hack-counter-attack on the West.
In North Korea, a child will find it, hook it up, and suddenly learn about the.. movies... the West has.
Wargasm pr0n aside, I can't see the expense of such ordinance being wasted on some kids downloading rips of Avatar.
The MAFIAA has managed to commandeer foreign policy and the entire justice system, who says they won't succeed with the military? All they have to do is drop a "credible" tip that the TPB is supporting t*****rists and the job's as good as done.
They'll point out that the one drone is costing the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars a month and that a $1 million missile would be cheap by comparison.
Maybe TPB could use dirty tricks? Put a pet on the drone and when it gets shot down PETA will go crazy?
You forgot to mention in your list of cons that union salaries tend to be more based on seniority rather than skill or talent. I'm a high performer. I want to be recognized as such. Sure there are imperfections for titles or pay, but a union would mean I'd be making the same as the guy who can't keep his dev environment working because we joined the same year.
Unlikely. The British empire combined with the SU would have defeated Germany and Italy.
I think that's a bit of a stretch considering that half of why Britain survived was because the US was "lend-leasing" ships and planes before officially joining the war (the other half being creativity and determination). And we were sending tanks and stuff to Russia too. Without American supply, Britain wouldn't have had control of the Atlantic or Med and would have been kicked out of Africa by Rommel.
I'm not saying the rest of your points aren't valid, but this one is a bit of a stretch.
They can take a 97% decrease in price and still remain profitable? What other industry can possibly have that level of markup and keep customers? It is only possible because of patent restrictions, and a "captive market" where people die or have horrible illnesses when they don't take your product.
That hasn't been proven here. What has happened is that a generic brand drug is being sold with (most-likely) less quality control at 3% of the name-brand price while contributing only 0.18% of the original price back to R&D. It is unreasonable to think that Bayer could make the same price move in all markets.
Expertise? Amateur? (Oxy)moron.
I think they are looking for a virgin prostitute.
Considering the number of deaths on the road (30k in 2009, down from 43k in 2005), you can hardly blame them for taking an active role in trying to reduce deaths.
Kind of makes Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorists attacks, the crack down in Syria, the violence in Mexico and almost anything else you can think of outside of Africa from the last decade look like nothing.
With the exception of the log cabin folks, most homosexuals tend to favor Democrats. So it's most likely that most people who *do* like santorum are Democrats (as that word is defined by google search).
FTFY
i can only imagine that this is due to some drug war-stigma against pills.
Because inhaling something has never been mixed with the drug war.
I'd hardly call a 5 year average net profit margin of 8,81% particularly fat.
For an established company delivering a commoditized product, that's a pretty big margin.
Honestly, I thought it would have been higher.
Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.
Why hate the teachers unions so much? They aren't perfect, but most of the things they are asking for correlate to giving students a better education (smaller classrooms, more pay so they don't need a 2nd or 3rd job, etc).
All of the focus is on the teachers unions, but no one looks at the administrators who enjoy the same benefits (or more) while spending most of their career trying to not rock the boat.
And I think a Dutch company had a computerized version of that system, where you'd pull into a garage, park on a pallet thing, and the computers would store the car-pallet above and below grade. I think you could put in an expected ETA so the computer could store the car efficiently. It's a good solution for areas with high real estate costs, because you aren't wasting half your space on access ramps.
The Japanese have something like this throughout the country for over a decade. It's best described as a Ferris-wheel for cars (but inside a building and I'm sure there are variants).
Considering their weird zoning / building laws, if these work in Japan they would definitely work for San Francisco.
Not necessarily.
If an IPO goes out and the stock stays near flat or slumps, it gives it bad momentum. Example: Pandora
Depends. Is it the difference between a product up to spec as per contract and an emergency fix that costs 90k to implement or a schedule slip with a 90k lateness penalty?
Worse than that. There are a lot of 60k/year engineers that might not ever deliver, much less require 3-5 times the head count.
From what I've seen, most entry-level software engineers are paid more than they are worth to the company at time of hire. Most will grow into their role quickly and the company will get a return on investment. These usually have a few of the 150k engineers around to mentor them.
That would require duplicate hardware at the new site. It's hard to convince people to shell out, even when their pockets are deep. The real question is why you need DRM on a game (or anything else) that's been purchased outright. And a related question, why do you need an Internet connection to play a single player game?
They already shelled out a bunch of dev resources and hardware to ward against the pirate-boogie-man. Or put another way, they made their bed now they have to sleep in it.
I don't happen to play anything from Ubisoft right now, but I'd be hounding them if my game of choice was affected (so little game time, so precious).
For $46, you could drop a million of them. Now imagine having enough boots on the ground to *remove every single one of them.*
Or more realistically, the enemy will just relocate.