The reason terrorists don't blow people up a) either because there aren't enough of them, which only works if they don't have a single US operative, or b) they don't want to blow people up.
Bing, bing, bing, We have a winner.
Anyone who flies regularly has stories about what has inadvertantly slipped through security. I have had pocket knives slide through twice in the last year, knives that make your little box cutters look like the toys they are. Potential terrorists -must- know this, and could exploit this if they so desired. Since the security is demonstrably porous, and yet we have had no serious attempts to exploit this security weakness, one of two things must be true:
1) the authorities are catching everyone attempting attacks, and are suppressing them without the other passengers, crew, or media catching on, and keeping it a secret from all of us, or
2) there is a very low incidence rate of attack attempts.
Do you think the TSA is competent to keep secrets? I don't.
"Writing off" an expense is only a relevant concept if you are a tax paying institution, which public schools are not. The extra electricity for this is a pure out of pocket expense for the school, however minor.
On my computer, which idles at 130 watts, running seti@home increases power draw to ~180 watts, according to the lil kill-a-watt meter I got from Think Geek. I have a quad core intel 9450 ( i think). I can't imagine the school computers are going to be any worse than that. So, 50 watts an hour, say 20 hours a day, =~ 1 kW/day. I don't know what arizona power rates are, lets assume 12 cents/kWh. That means this would cost around $43/year. If he installed to a couple of thousand computers, that's real money.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of the power bill we are discussing here. This could be a rounding error in comparison to the AC bills.
The systems aren't put in help the doctors. (...). But that's not what the systems are. They should start working now to have all records be electronic, X-rays, MRIs, personal history, etc. should be in formats that can be directly shared between doctors.
I'm going to argue just a bit. My wife just went through breast cancer this summer. The records, MRIs and actions that took place -were- electronic, and at more than one point -were- used to facilitate actions between a group of physicians that were part of her care. Meds were ordered electronically, and the new records generated from the process are all electronic. She had MRI's taken across town, and the pics were sent in electronic form to her surgeon and oncologist, who conferred via something like Net Meeting on them (don't know if it was net meeting or what, just that they had a con call and viewed the films together). One of the challenges that was presented was that she had old records from a prior incidence of cancer ten years ago, which are all still on paper/fiche. These had to get pulled and sent via courier. Overall, the experience that we had was highly electronic, and by and large was pretty efficient.
I won't dispute that a large amount of the systems are oriented towards capturing billing information. This is necessary because of the US's insistence on individual insurance plans, so for every action, someone has to get billed, which means a record has to be made of the actions. I think these systems still arguably help patient care, because they do still aid the physician and nurses in capturing the information, which would likely be slower if they had to use paper. I think it's a flaw to criticize hospital administrators for designing/using these systems, though. The hospitals are just following the mandate of the compensation system that they work under in the US.
Is this appropriate for a one off, one time use application? How about one that will be used by two users once a month until a conversion is completed. And so on
And Scala would be the same. The Odersky book describes it as a hybrid, but the force of the language is functional in nature. I'm not intimate with Erlang, but I think most knowledgeable commentators would use almost identical words for Scala as you use for Erlang. It does allow mutables, but de-emphasizes them. It treats functions as first class objects. Recursion is the preferred approach to repetition. There may be some higher canonical definition that it violates, but it looks pretty functional to me. And if you haven't tried it yet, it's pretty cool. It achieves some of the conciseness of Python, gives you java byte code as output, so it integrates into existing work easily, and lets you leverage any java libraries you have.
Yup. If you want to make your dollar go further, strongly consider these guys. I have foudn there gear to be as good as Dell's, and their techs more knowledgable. For an office solution, possibly one or two of these would be a great way to start.
The vast majority of companies with nightly builds to NOT give those nightly builds to customers.
I know of one, who does so, apparently quite successfully. I played golf this summer with their director of Q/A. I'm struggling to remember their name and what they do, but it was some web based SaaS offering with 300-ish employees in downtown Seattle (we were playing golf at Willows Run, which is just down the street from Microsoft Intergalactic in Redmond). We got to talking agile, and releases, and he said their architecture -assumes- a nightly build and rollout. He described the purest "write the test first" implementation I have ever heard credibly described, and they were using it straight to production through what sounded like a pretty tightly run promotion to production cycle.
Interestingly, they had just been purchased by Microsoft.
Dunno about Pennsylvania, but there is discussion of this topic in Washington and Oregon state right now. While the public school systems are fond of enacting such rules, it is not clear that they have the legal right to enforce them, since they are bodies of the government. The second amendment doesn't have a clause, "...except when a mindless asshole bureaucrat decides otherwise."
Second in a truly FREE country you should be able to do whatever you want *outside of work*, and not be fired for it. Just last week we read a story about a guy who was fired *on mere suspicion* of downloading child porn (and later proved to be innocent). That's just not right. Companies should not be able to fire people for non-work-related things.
In a truly free country, people shouldn't be forced to associate with other people that they disagree with, no? So shouldn't an employer be free to dismiss an employee who he finds disagreeable? Or do these rights you want to establish only pertain to the people who receive paychecks, and not those who issue them?
Regardless of the should's and ought's, in most places in the US, employees can be fired at the whim of the employer, except for certain, narrowly prescribed circumstances (such as refusing to fuck your boss or refusing to perform an illegal act). Rationality and fairness have little to do with it. I'm generally OK with this, as it's better than the alternative, where employers can't get rid of malingerers and deadwood.
Sadly, they can, and do act in their own interests, often quite brazenly. The details are usually, but not always, disclosed in the 10-K. Whether this self dealing is fraud in many people's eyes is almost irrelevant, what matters is if it is fraud in the eyes of the SEC and the courts.
You are quite correct that this explains the golden parachute and overall executive enrichening that goes on in American corporations. The boards of the major companies are populated almost exclusively by the denizens of other major companies. It's an inbred club, and many of them benefit from the establishment of the thieving culture that has arisen.
Directors -are- required to act in the fiduciary interest of the shareholders, but there is worlds of latitude in defining what that interest is. The primary mechanism for protest is the shareholders voting the board members out if they act too egregiously.
I also don't see how you can argue that local governments deserve the tax revenue when the company doesn't operate in that local vicinity. They don't operate a store front so they don't need police, fire, (new)roads, etc.
The taxes aren't on the company, or for the benefit of the company. It is levied on the residents who use the services you describe. If the residents bought the goods locally, the government would have gotten the money, so this seems fair enough to me.
Dunno about the state tax boards, but the IRS definitely uses predictive models to select returns to audit. Over 55, income over some threshold, certain zip code, I wouldn't even need to work the numbers. I work in a building with some of the guys who do this, ( our division does credit scorish predictive modeling as well), and have discussed it in some detail.
US law requires no such thing. The law only requires that the company's board and management not lie to, defraud,, or steal from the investors. They have no legal duty to pursue every nickel. There is no legal requirement that they be competent. A board of directors is free to run the company any legal way they choose. Shareholders may vote the board out if it doesn't sufficiently pursue profit. Or they may elect not to, and choose to own a company that runs itself ethically, even if that means a slightly lower profit and therefore dividend or stock price. It's ultimately the shareholders, who are largely represented by the various mutual funds in your 401k, who pressure the management to be aggressive in their pursuit of profit.
I have a degree in accounting, and a fair amount of experience in tax matters, though I don't practice, and am not current. You -do- know that your accountant can be wrong, don't you? And you do know that an accountant can (and should) be asking you about your risk tolerance in the event of an unfavorable audit, right? And that auditors can be wrong, aggressive, and abusive? And that the IRS runs data mining models that evaluate your return for likelihood to yield a penalty (they work downstairs from me, I smoke with one of the analysts).
It has been easy these past ten years taking an aggressive interpretive strategy on tax postures like you describe. That's because the Bushies and Clinton before them defunded the IRS's ability to aggressively pursue tax evaders.
I think in any court of law, and in any audit, if you are essentially a sole proprietor, with no significant capital involved in your work, and your primary income stream is calculated by the number of hours you work, you're going to have a hard time maintaining the validity of this stance in an audit. But best of luck to you.
If you want proof that accountants aren't magic, look back about 10 years when the tax shelters were found to be invalid, resulting in massive payements and penalties, and fines and prosecution for the big 6(4,2) firms that were promoting them. They, too had read and interpreted the code, and assured their clients that this aggressive strategy was legal.
If it is shaky enough to cause this much debate, you can manage your risk by proactively asking the IRS for a ruling. Your accountant should know how to do this. If he doesn't, you might want to find one that does, and ask that one what he thinks of your tax plan.
Thanks, that looks like it might be the one. The story my sister told differs in some significant respects, which could just be the usual game of Telephone.
Several years back, an acquaintance of my sister was sea kayaking off of Northern California with her boy friend. They came up missing. They found one of them, I forget which, drifting, dead of blood loss, in the two kayaks which were lashed together. The one they found was missing large chunks of body. The other person was never found. While the sharks seem to mind their own business most of the time, the few exceptions are killers.
As a long time dog owner, I'll add that variability within a breed is pretty significant. The book, Art of Raising a Puppy, by the Monks of New Skete, speaks in detail of how to assess the level of innate aggression in puppies. This variation in aggression can be assessed when the puppies are 8 weeks old.
In my state, I can, and sometimes do, carry a gun, precisely to mitigate this type of risk. Of course, that is going to make someone else quail at the societal risk I now represent.
Add to this the fact that the US government, the Australian government, and the German government have done studies on the effects of driving while stoned. All of these studies found relatively little incremental danger of accident due to pot smoking. The australian study found that if you're drunk, you are -less- likely to get into an accident if you also get stoned. The US NHTSA study, performed in 1992, was suppressed because it didn't find an incremental danger. It found that drivers under the influence of pot a) weren't that impaired, and b) effectively managed their impairment by slowing down as needed to navigate the course. These can be found at www.druglibrary.org.
In the whole debate of driving and pot, we color the debate with our theory that since driving while under the influence of alcohol is extremely dangerous,m driving while under the influence of anything else must also be extremely dangerous. The evidence is that alcohol is relatively unique among commonly used recreational drugs in it's combination of damaging coordination and reduction of inhibition.
Except that you're advocating restricting the actions of others because of a theory about the possibility of future harm to you. You have every right to ask for restrictions on people attacking you with dogs. I'm not so sure that it's reasonable for you to restrict my owning a dog because some dog, somewhere else, was vicious and not controlled by it's owner. Under that theory, I could ask that you be enjoined from owning a computer, because someone, somewhere else, used a computer to steal money.
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The reason terrorists don't blow people up a) either because there aren't enough of them, which only works if they don't have a single US operative, or b) they don't want to blow people up.
Bing, bing, bing, We have a winner.
Anyone who flies regularly has stories about what has inadvertantly slipped through security. I have had pocket knives slide through twice in the last year, knives that make your little box cutters look like the toys they are. Potential terrorists -must- know this, and could exploit this if they so desired. Since the security is demonstrably porous, and yet we have had no serious attempts to exploit this security weakness, one of two things must be true:
1) the authorities are catching everyone attempting attacks, and are suppressing them without the other passengers, crew, or media catching on, and keeping it a secret from all of us, or
2) there is a very low incidence rate of attack attempts.
Do you think the TSA is competent to keep secrets? I don't.
"Writing off" an expense is only a relevant concept if you are a tax paying institution, which public schools are not. The extra electricity for this is a pure out of pocket expense for the school, however minor.
On my computer, which idles at 130 watts, running seti@home increases power draw to ~180 watts, according to the lil kill-a-watt meter I got from Think Geek. I have a quad core intel 9450 ( i think). I can't imagine the school computers are going to be any worse than that. So, 50 watts an hour, say 20 hours a day, =~ 1 kW/day. I don't know what arizona power rates are, lets assume 12 cents/kWh. That means this would cost around $43/year. If he installed to a couple of thousand computers, that's real money.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of the power bill we are discussing here. This could be a rounding error in comparison to the AC bills.
The systems aren't put in help the doctors. (...). But that's not what the systems are. They should start working now to have all records be electronic, X-rays, MRIs, personal history, etc. should be in formats that can be directly shared between doctors.
I'm going to argue just a bit. My wife just went through breast cancer this summer. The records, MRIs and actions that took place -were- electronic, and at more than one point -were- used to facilitate actions between a group of physicians that were part of her care. Meds were ordered electronically, and the new records generated from the process are all electronic. She had MRI's taken across town, and the pics were sent in electronic form to her surgeon and oncologist, who conferred via something like Net Meeting on them (don't know if it was net meeting or what, just that they had a con call and viewed the films together). One of the challenges that was presented was that she had old records from a prior incidence of cancer ten years ago, which are all still on paper/fiche. These had to get pulled and sent via courier. Overall, the experience that we had was highly electronic, and by and large was pretty efficient.
I won't dispute that a large amount of the systems are oriented towards capturing billing information. This is necessary because of the US's insistence on individual insurance plans, so for every action, someone has to get billed, which means a record has to be made of the actions. I think these systems still arguably help patient care, because they do still aid the physician and nurses in capturing the information, which would likely be slower if they had to use paper. I think it's a flaw to criticize hospital administrators for designing/using these systems, though. The hospitals are just following the mandate of the compensation system that they work under in the US.
Is this appropriate for a one off, one time use application? How about one that will be used by two users once a month until a conversion is completed. And so on
And Scala would be the same. The Odersky book describes it as a hybrid, but the force of the language is functional in nature. I'm not intimate with Erlang, but I think most knowledgeable commentators would use almost identical words for Scala as you use for Erlang. It does allow mutables, but de-emphasizes them. It treats functions as first class objects. Recursion is the preferred approach to repetition. There may be some higher canonical definition that it violates, but it looks pretty functional to me. And if you haven't tried it yet, it's pretty cool. It achieves some of the conciseness of Python, gives you java byte code as output, so it integrates into existing work easily, and lets you leverage any java libraries you have.
Yup. If you want to make your dollar go further, strongly consider these guys. I have foudn there gear to be as good as Dell's, and their techs more knowledgable. For an office solution, possibly one or two of these would be a great way to start.
The vast majority of companies with nightly builds to NOT give those nightly builds to customers.
I know of one, who does so, apparently quite successfully. I played golf this summer with their director of Q/A. I'm struggling to remember their name and what they do, but it was some web based SaaS offering with 300-ish employees in downtown Seattle (we were playing golf at Willows Run, which is just down the street from Microsoft Intergalactic in Redmond). We got to talking agile, and releases, and he said their architecture -assumes- a nightly build and rollout. He described the purest "write the test first" implementation I have ever heard credibly described, and they were using it straight to production through what sounded like a pretty tightly run promotion to production cycle.
Interestingly, they had just been purchased by Microsoft.
Wow. Can you pass that? It must be some good shit.
Wow, can you say lawsuit/settlement time?
Dunno about Pennsylvania, but there is discussion of this topic in Washington and Oregon state right now. While the public school systems are fond of enacting such rules, it is not clear that they have the legal right to enforce them, since they are bodies of the government. The second amendment doesn't have a clause, "...except when a mindless asshole bureaucrat decides otherwise."
If he had a personal laptop there with his own cell wireless or used a personal cell phone, no problem.
And if he had used this approach, he probably wouldn't have been discovered as a school employee.
Second in a truly FREE country you should be able to do whatever you want *outside of work*, and not be fired for it. Just last week we read a story about a guy who was fired *on mere suspicion* of downloading child porn (and later proved to be innocent). That's just not right. Companies should not be able to fire people for non-work-related things.
In a truly free country, people shouldn't be forced to associate with other people that they disagree with, no? So shouldn't an employer be free to dismiss an employee who he finds disagreeable? Or do these rights you want to establish only pertain to the people who receive paychecks, and not those who issue them?
Regardless of the should's and ought's, in most places in the US, employees can be fired at the whim of the employer, except for certain, narrowly prescribed circumstances (such as refusing to fuck your boss or refusing to perform an illegal act). Rationality and fairness have little to do with it. I'm generally OK with this, as it's better than the alternative, where employers can't get rid of malingerers and deadwood.
Some say math is discovered. Others say it is invented. You are one of the latter.
And then there's the one about there being two kinds of people: those that divide things into two groups and those that don't. :P
Maybe it's a bit of both. Non-euclidian geometry seems inventive, pi, seems discoverable.
Sadly, they can, and do act in their own interests, often quite brazenly. The details are usually, but not always, disclosed in the 10-K. Whether this self dealing is fraud in many people's eyes is almost irrelevant, what matters is if it is fraud in the eyes of the SEC and the courts.
You are quite correct that this explains the golden parachute and overall executive enrichening that goes on in American corporations. The boards of the major companies are populated almost exclusively by the denizens of other major companies. It's an inbred club, and many of them benefit from the establishment of the thieving culture that has arisen.
Directors -are- required to act in the fiduciary interest of the shareholders, but there is worlds of latitude in defining what that interest is. The primary mechanism for protest is the shareholders voting the board members out if they act too egregiously.
I also don't see how you can argue that local governments deserve the tax revenue when the company doesn't operate in that local vicinity. They don't operate a store front so they don't need police, fire, (new)roads, etc.
The taxes aren't on the company, or for the benefit of the company. It is levied on the residents who use the services you describe. If the residents bought the goods locally, the government would have gotten the money, so this seems fair enough to me.
Dunno about the state tax boards, but the IRS definitely uses predictive models to select returns to audit. Over 55, income over some threshold, certain zip code, I wouldn't even need to work the numbers. I work in a building with some of the guys who do this, ( our division does credit scorish predictive modeling as well), and have discussed it in some detail.
. the law requires this of the company directors.
US law requires no such thing. The law only requires that the company's board and management not lie to, defraud,, or steal from the investors. They have no legal duty to pursue every nickel. There is no legal requirement that they be competent. A board of directors is free to run the company any legal way they choose. Shareholders may vote the board out if it doesn't sufficiently pursue profit. Or they may elect not to, and choose to own a company that runs itself ethically, even if that means a slightly lower profit and therefore dividend or stock price. It's ultimately the shareholders, who are largely represented by the various mutual funds in your 401k, who pressure the management to be aggressive in their pursuit of profit.
I have a degree in accounting, and a fair amount of experience in tax matters, though I don't practice, and am not current. You -do- know that your accountant can be wrong, don't you? And you do know that an accountant can (and should) be asking you about your risk tolerance in the event of an unfavorable audit, right? And that auditors can be wrong, aggressive, and abusive? And that the IRS runs data mining models that evaluate your return for likelihood to yield a penalty (they work downstairs from me, I smoke with one of the analysts).
It has been easy these past ten years taking an aggressive interpretive strategy on tax postures like you describe. That's because the Bushies and Clinton before them defunded the IRS's ability to aggressively pursue tax evaders.
I think in any court of law, and in any audit, if you are essentially a sole proprietor, with no significant capital involved in your work, and your primary income stream is calculated by the number of hours you work, you're going to have a hard time maintaining the validity of this stance in an audit. But best of luck to you.
If you want proof that accountants aren't magic, look back about 10 years when the tax shelters were found to be invalid, resulting in massive payements and penalties, and fines and prosecution for the big 6(4,2) firms that were promoting them. They, too had read and interpreted the code, and assured their clients that this aggressive strategy was legal.
If it is shaky enough to cause this much debate, you can manage your risk by proactively asking the IRS for a ruling. Your accountant should know how to do this. If he doesn't, you might want to find one that does, and ask that one what he thinks of your tax plan.
Thanks, that looks like it might be the one. The story my sister told differs in some significant respects, which could just be the usual game of Telephone.
I was just thinking about Australia's issue. If CA has a large number as well, I wonder Aussies are getting munch so much more?
More people in the water due to the water being warmer?
Several years back, an acquaintance of my sister was sea kayaking off of Northern California with her boy friend. They came up missing. They found one of them, I forget which, drifting, dead of blood loss, in the two kayaks which were lashed together. The one they found was missing large chunks of body. The other person was never found. While the sharks seem to mind their own business most of the time, the few exceptions are killers.
As a long time dog owner, I'll add that variability within a breed is pretty significant. The book, Art of Raising a Puppy, by the Monks of New Skete, speaks in detail of how to assess the level of innate aggression in puppies. This variation in aggression can be assessed when the puppies are 8 weeks old.
In my state, I can, and sometimes do, carry a gun, precisely to mitigate this type of risk. Of course, that is going to make someone else quail at the societal risk I now represent.
Add to this the fact that the US government, the Australian government, and the German government have done studies on the effects of driving while stoned. All of these studies found relatively little incremental danger of accident due to pot smoking. The australian study found that if you're drunk, you are -less- likely to get into an accident if you also get stoned. The US NHTSA study, performed in 1992, was suppressed because it didn't find an incremental danger. It found that drivers under the influence of pot a) weren't that impaired, and b) effectively managed their impairment by slowing down as needed to navigate the course. These can be found at www.druglibrary.org.
In the whole debate of driving and pot, we color the debate with our theory that since driving while under the influence of alcohol is extremely dangerous,m driving while under the influence of anything else must also be extremely dangerous. The evidence is that alcohol is relatively unique among commonly used recreational drugs in it's combination of damaging coordination and reduction of inhibition.
Except that you're advocating restricting the actions of others because of a theory about the possibility of future harm to you. You have every right to ask for restrictions on people attacking you with dogs. I'm not so sure that it's reasonable for you to restrict my owning a dog because some dog, somewhere else, was vicious and not controlled by it's owner. Under that theory, I could ask that you be enjoined from owning a computer, because someone, somewhere else, used a computer to steal money.