Dangerous game we are playing, calling their bluff. The stakes are pretty damned high.
Indeed. Keep in mind that Microsoft would presumably sue in the USA. In the USA, as someone once said, juries are made up of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. Juries are a real cross-section of society. In other words, most or all of the people on the jury will be AOL (l)users, not Linux admins. Juries in the USA have typically found in favor of the patent holder. And finally, keep in mind that Microsoft has very deep pockets and even if they lose, they can tie you up in appeals, which will cost even more money for you and your lawyers and they may yet win on appeal even if they somehow lose in the first round in a jury trial. Is it really wise to have 12 people who don't understand technology at all and may, in fact, have a pro-Microsoft bias decide this kind of case? To most of the people in the USA, Microsoft is great because they enabled the common man to use PCs. That's just how John Q. Public sees it.
Meanwhile, Joel Wiseman bought a Mac MINI and wonders why Sixbit and Sixpack spent all the time and money on systems dedicated to trying to grab content from a stream, when they could spend less of both just buying songs individually on demand.
Maybe Sixbit and Sixpack don't want to buy songs but want to watch TV. Suppose their 2 favorite TV shows are _The Office_ on NBC and _The Simpsons_ on Fox. Um, where exactly can they buy them? (Sound of crickets chirping in the background...) There are very good reasons why people want to "grab content from a stream" than your apples to oranges comparison allows for.
You can always buy higher-quality DVDs on Ebay from sellers in Malaysia. These DVDs are better than the store-bought versions since they don't have commercials, and can play on any region player.
This is not good advice for people who live in the USA. If you live elsewhere, as we say "Your mileage may vary". If you live in the USA, you should be aware that if you order a large number of DVDs from a foreign country, US Customs may become "interested" in your package. You do not want US Customs to become interested in your package. Once they have opened it, they may decide that it is pirated material and confiscate it. To get it back, you have to prove to them that it's not pirated goods. The burden of proof is on you. This is not an "innocent until guilty" thing but a "guilty until proven innocent" thing. You may not get fined, but you will lose your merchandise. I've never heard of a single person who was able to successfully prove to US Customs that their seizure was wrong and then get their stuff returned to them. My advice to any US citizen is to never order more than 3 or so DVDs at a time. Any order larger than that may attract unwanted attention. US Customs has been known to declare merchandise as "pirated" and seize it even though it is legally produced. Keep in mind too that the people working at US Customs are mostly typical people who aren't smart enough to work anywhere else except for Uncle Sam and who have no idea how to tell the difference between pirated and legitimate goods. They just decide that it looks pirated to them and therefore it must be pirated. Imagine how difficult it will be to prove to such a person that what you bought is not pirated. It's kind of like trying to reason with a 2 year old - you can make a bunch of sane arguments that prove your point, but the kid is unlikely to understand anything you told him.
They only have shown that it is not statistically certain that all bullet fragments were of similar make-up of to those of Oswald's.
That is not at all what the article says. What it says is that the previous investigation concluded that all bullet fragments came from only 2 bullets. This new study shows that it is possible that the fragments came from three or more bullets . So assuming that now people think that 3 or more bullets were fired, the question is - How many of those bullets could Oswald have fired? My understanding is that some people think he could have gotten off 3 shots within the time allowed. Others say that it would be almost impossible to fire more than 2. So until we seem to come to a conclusion that Oswald could only have fired 2 bullets and not 3, we haven't seen anyone rule out that Oswald could have fired 3 bullets himself.
The summary doesn't mention that the attacks started after Estonia began excavating graves of Soviet troops killed during the World War II and vandalized the memorial devoted to them. Estonia is seen as a neo-fascist regime by Russia, and in my opinion, rightly so: you can't deny over 30% of your population [estimate of Russian population in Estonia] the most basic rights, including citizenship and education for children, based on their nationality, and be seen otherwise. Of course, Europe and the United States ignore this issue.
Let me give you another perspective on this. You can decide whether or not you want to stick to your guns here. Are you by any chance married to a Russian woman? Because if you are, that will certainly inhibit your ability to see the other side.
Estonia was under Russian control until 1918. It remained an independent nation until 1940, when the USSR invaded it. Germany occupied it from 1941 to 1944. During the 1 year or so of Soviet occupation prior to the Nazi invation, the Soviets did such nice things as kill the intellectuals and forcibly conscript Estonians into the Red Army. I can't say it's any wonder that as in Ukraine (where Stalin and his henchmen had killed and starved to death millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s), the locals viewed the Nazis as liberators and then found out that they were just as bad if not worse as the Soviets. Do note that the USA never recognized the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NEVER. It's important to know that for over 50 years, official US policy was that the occupation of these 3 countries was illegal.
After WWII ended, Estonia was screwed. They were part of the Soviet Union. The Soviets moved hundreds of thousands of Russian speaking immigrants into Estonia in an attempt to "Russify" it and to dilute Estonian nationalism. Estonian freedom fighters fought a small scale guerilla war against the USSR into the early 1950s when they finally gave up and realized it was hopeless.
During the USSR period, Russian was the official language in education. It was possible to have education in whatever the local language was (Krushchev made some changes that allowed this), but there was a catch - if you wanted to get a good job, you absolutely had to speak Russian well. Given that Russian and Estonian are about as closely related as English is to Polish, you might understand that Estonian parents had no choice but to send their kids to Russian language schools so as to give them the best chance to prosper in the USSR.
Cut to 1991 when Estonia gets its independence. They now have a rather large Russian speaking population who they were forced to accept by a government that no longer exist. These people have never assimilated into Estonian society. In fact, they were encouraged immigrate there specifically to dilute Estonia's sense of national identity and to turn them into "good little Soviet subjects". These immigrants have never bothered to learn the Estonian language since Russian was the official language of the government prior to 1991. Now you have all these people who say "Screw you! We want to speak Russian!" in a country where the majority of citizens speak the local language, Estonian. They demand that everything be done in Russian so they can understand it. The Estonians never wanted to speak Russian to begin with, so they are promoting the use of their national language. Now you have about 26% of the population who refuses to "get with the program", demands that their language be given equal footing with the national tongue and even worse, feels that things were a lot better back when they were in charge and the stupid locals were taking orders from them. So given that Estonia never wanted the Soviets/Russians there to begin with and the Soviets weren't exactly enlightened when they ran the show, can you really blame them for not being real happy with Russia today? By the way, ethnic Russians can become Estonian citizens, but they have to take
I personally have had much more fulfilling relationships with women born outside of the US. The ones from within the US all tended to be far too materialistic and wanting to either change me personally or to want to dictate how the relationship progressed on their own.
I can't say I'm surprised, but I've seen different problems with American women that the ones you listed, notably: 1) Unrealistic expectations - that 200+ lb fat girl in your office really does think that Brad Pitt would fall in love with her if he met her. That 45 year old woman who looks every bit of 45 years old really does think that she can get a 24 year old husband like Demi Moore, even though on her best day and Demi Moore's worst day Demi Moore looked a lot more attractive than her. Even though this woman has no dates who are 24 years old, she still thinks she can get young men to date her. 2) The job is number one. Everything else, including you, the relationship and any kids you have together are less important than the job. 3) The feeling that "I don't need a man" thanks to various American movies and TV shows and the consequent feeling that "I'm not unhappy being by myself." Non-US women generally feel that it's not fun to be alone. 4) The belief that every person has one and only one "soul mate" and any other relationship will be unfulfilling and pointless if it's not with that one soul mate. This is related to #1 but even worse. 5) Tendency of many US women to now care only about how attractive the man is, which is again related to unrealistic expectations.
Foreign women are not all great either. My experience is that all women have problems, you just get a different set of problems with foreign women than US women. It's up to you to decide if you'd rather deal with those problems than the ones that US women have. My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and I broke up with her because of various problems that I blame on her upbringing and Ukrainian society. Problems that I've never seen with American women but I had with her included a complete and utter lack of respect for all men (interestingly enough, her parents were still married and she loved her father, but she had no respect for any men) and a complete unwillingness to ever compromise about anything because she viewed any compromise as the actions of a loser and she didn't want to be a loser. You may come second to the job to an American woman, but she will probably treat you with respect and she might be willing to compromise on some things. With my ex-fiancee, I was certainly more important to her than her job, but I had no respect from her and I had to give in every time in the relationship to keep her happy.
There are good American women, but after you get past 30, the good ones are pretty much all married or in stable relationships and it's really hard to find the ones who aren't.
we lose more life waiting in the airport security line every year than was lost on 9/11.
How exactly does this apples to oranges comparison work?
Waiting in security line = time alive unless maybe you have a heart attack and die in line. How many of those per year are there any way?
Time dead = time dead
How exactly does one equate the two? And have you corrected the time spent waiting in line by subtracting the time spent waiting in line prior to 9/11?
You also forgot to mention this. Number of terrorist incidents involving planes in the USA since 9/11 = 0 Amazing how that number never gets mentioned by people like you.
According to Wikipedia, you had a 1 in 10,000 chance of having perfect pitch, so you beat some serious odds. Good for you. However, I think 1 in 10,000 odds does make it a little "far fetched". You are the exception, not the rule. The Wikipedia article does have a citation for this number, so it's not a case of someone writing an article and pulling a number of the air. People without perfect pitch can have successful musical careers, but your gift did make you unusually suited for this.
As far as public domain goes, you are correct. I don't think anything else will ever enter the public domain. When 2040 or so comes around, Disney will panic again that "Steamboat Willie" is about to enter public domain and Congress will just extend copyright lengths, again. When the US Supreme Court ruled on the extension of copyright, they very carefully stated that while they were not convinced that this was a good thing to do, Congress did, according to the Constitution, have the authority to extend copyright.
So there's no need to worry. Nothing gets coarse. Nothing loses fidelity. Nothing loses audible quality. This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works.
Thank you for this informative post. I am amazed at how many people honestly think that "vinyl is better". I've always viewed vinylphiles are having more money than sense. I know of an online retailer here in the USA (I won't give their website address so they don't get slashbombed) that I sometimes buy CDs from because they sell a lot of classical CDs that are difficult to find. Once a week they send me an email with news about new releases and specials and a significant part of that email is devoted to very expensive equipment for suckers (cough! cough!), um, I mean "vinyl afficionados". The current email I have from them has a record cleaner that lists for only $1994.99. What a bargain! They also sell some sort of clamp device that supposedly improves tracking on turntables for about $400. So you can spend a few hundred dollars and be able to play CDs reasonably well, or you can spend several thousands of dollars to play records as well as possible and have the bonus benefit of having to deal with surface noise, a smaller dynamic range than CD (they always forget to mention that one, don't they?), and the fact that an LP degrades every time you play it. A fool and his money are soon parted.
The outcome means nothing to the jurors at the end of the day, most will want to get out of jury duty and just get back to normal life duties.
This is complete and utter hogwash
No, it's complete and utter truth. Consider yourself lucky that you were on a jury with a different experience. Consider yourself lucky that the judge let you get by with a hung jury. I know of a case where a jury deliberated for over 1 month because the judge refused to allow a hung jury and after 1 month the lone holdout finally gave in. Jury duty is often about who can outlast or outstubborn (if that's even a word) the others.
Jury duty isn't about right and wrong. It's about trying to get 12 people to agree on a verdict, whatever that might be. I have unfortunately served twice on a jury and neither was a great experience, although I'm grateful they only took a few days. It's also not about "a decision based on the law" as you state, but how the jury interprets the law, which is a gigantic distinction. Judges cannot under any circumstances tell juries what the law means. They can read the applicable law statues to the jury but it's up to the jury to decide what they think it means. What a jury thinks a law means and what judges and lawyers think a law means are 2 different things.
At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine;)
Well, Ukrainians aren't Russkies, although there are some similarities. As someone who has spent significant amounts of time in Ukraine and not too long ago had a Ukrainian fiancee, I will warn you that while they seem great at first, the truth is that almost none of the women over there want to leave and there are only 3 cities in Ukraine that are even worth considering living in - Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa. I've known women in some really crappy Ukrainian towns that could best be desribed with the word "hellhole" and they fully expected any foreign man interested in them to move over there. Few of the women respect men either, so be prepared to be treated like a child. However, the odds are great that you'll never actually go over there to meet whoever you are chatting with, so you'll most likely never know the real story about how these women really are. They certainly have gigantic flaws, they're just not the same as the ones you'll see with American, Canadian or UK women. I broke up with my fiancee because although she cared about me, she had no respect for me at all. To her, all men were children to be ordered about. When faced with a choice to either change her behavior towards me or see our relationship end, she chose to do nothing, so I ended the relationship. Too many of the women over there, like my ex-fiancee, view relationships as a zero sum game. That means in a relationship somebody wins and the other person loses. They have no concept of compromise - to them if you compromise, you lose. Either you get everything you want and win or you are a loser. They have no concept at all of an "everybody wins" scenario. One American guy who married a Ukrainian woman was really proud of the fact that his wife would every few weeks ask him for something she didn't even want, like a really expensive outfit, and he had somehow managed to figure out when she was testing him and he would just say "No" to her. She was happy as a clam that he was a "real man" because by some miracle he had figured out how to read her and could almost always tell when she was serious and when she was testing him and when he said "No" during her tests, she loved it. My idea of a healthy relationship doesn't include that kind of insanity, but yours may differ. Should you seriously persue this, just understand that these women aren't anything like the local gals you have dated and its up to you to decide if the differences are good or bad. If you're not incredibly laid back and easy going, these women are a poor choice.
Is the author of the article actually suggesting that some companies rush to test the new Winblows patches all through the night on Tuesday so that the patches are ready to deploy on Wednesday ? This sounds like a fresh steaming load of bullshit...
You may be right. My previous job was with a company that did a lot of VAR stuff, including various email systems. It didn't matter to us what you wanted - Notes, Exchange, Unix, anti-virus, anti-spam - we could sell you whatever combinations you wanted. I didn't work with Exchange, but the Exchange guys told me that in the past they used to rush out and patch systems with every "critical" Microsoft patch release and then they applied some patch that totally broke Exchange. The patch had nothing to do with Exchange, but it broke it. It took hours to fix the broken servers. After that fiasco, we regarded all Microsoft patches as suspect and we had a group in another state that one of their jobs was to test new patches on Exchange servers and see if Exchange still worked. It didn't matter to us how "critical" Microsoft considered a patch. We didn't patch any of Exchange servers until our test group gave the OK, which was usually a month later.
The typical $400K American home can be replaced with an equal if not nicer $100K home in a lot of these countries.
While this is not bad advice, it's worth pointing out that most of us in the USA do not have $400,000 homes. I live in a metro area that's one of the 10 largest in the USA and none of my friends have a $400,000 home. California and NY prices don't apply everywhere, so if you don't have this "typical $400,000" home but an apparently untypical $200,000 home, would your advice still stand?
How about T-Mobile? I've been a customer for 3 years and I have no complaints. They even unlocked my phone at no charge after I had been a paying customer for 3 months.
Yeah, being a "foreign dog" myself, I never really got that about your (american, that is) elections.. Is there any historical reason for you NOT to hold them during the weekend (Sunday to be more exact -- as most countries do)?
Yes, there is a historical reason. Keep in mind that the USA is a really big country and not densely populated. In the early days of our country, many people did not live in cities but in rural areas. They might have to travel one or two days to reach the place where they could vote. Since the USA has always had a strong Christian tradition, Sunday voting was taboo as it would interfere with church services and some would view it as "breaking the sabbath" and be opposed to it. Elections were set up on Tuesday so that people could travel by horse and buggy on Monday and arrive at the polling place on Tuesday with no "sabbath breaking" involved. They would also then have time to return home before the next Sunday. For better or worse Tuesday voting is what we are used to and I have no doubt that many Christians would object to voting on Sunday. Saturday won't work either because you risk offending the 7th Day Adventists and orthodox Jews. Muslims might object to voting on Friday, so that leaves Monday-Thursday as the best days to vote with the fewest objections, so we might as well leave things as they are and vote on Tuesday. The election for President is set by law as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Primary elections are always on a Tuesday, but the exact dates depend on the various states. Presidental elections and general elections are always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. We have general elections every 2 years and Presidential elections every 4 years, so every 2 years you have a November election for something.
Seriously America needs to put a stop to software patents, it's damaging your software industry as Knuth puts very well in his letter to the PTO
It will never happen and I will explain why. I worked for the US government some years ago in my first job after college, so I know how the US government works and how government workers think. You need to understand the following: 1) US government workers have "skills", and I use the term very loosely, that often have no practical application outside of the US government. In other words, many US government workers can't get equivalent jobs in private industry because equivalent jobs don't exist. 2) US government workers don't want to lose their jobs any more than anyone else does. 3) US government workers are very difficult to fire, leading to conditions of essential lifetime employment with very few exceptions. There are exceptions, but they are rare.
Your typical US government employee stays with Uncle Sam because there are a few decent benefits (vacation and retirement benefits are superior to many companies in private industry) and the jobs are often low stress. Pay does lag behind private industry in many cases and because of #1 that I mentioned earlier, you have a lot of people who are screwed if they lose their government jobs because they don't have any useful skills for private industry. Where I worked, most younger employees with any motivation and useful skills (I work in IT) left after 3-7 years for better pay in private industry and better jobs. Government work is pretty boring, if safe.
What has happened with the patent office is that now that they approve everything they can, they get more money coming in. More money coming in means that they are more important to the federal government because they bring in the bucks. They don't exist to consume tax dollars, they bring in revenue. To Uncle Sam, it's a win-win. He gets more money and businesses get "the tools they need" to protect their "valuable intellectual capital". More money to the Patent Office means they need more employees, which means they need more managers, which means pay goes up for managers. Now you have a bloated government office that has every incentive there is to protect itself and protecting itself can only be done if they bring in the bucks. Fewer patents means fewer examiners, which means fewer managers, which means people who have no useful skills for the outside world might be forced to find jobs in that outside world. Government employees are masters at protecting their own interests, so they just tell Congress and the President that they are doing a "vital service" to business. Business = money. Money = tax revenue. Tax revenue = good. Don't expect the President or anyone in Congress to ever think that patents = bad. Why on earth would reducing the size of a government agency that makes money instead of consuming money ever be good? I certainly respect Knuth, but the Patent Office guys will just paint him as an idealist in the academic world and ignore him. Remember, if patent reform ever happens, a lot of pissed off government employees, including managers, will lose their jobs because we'll need fewer of them and they will do everything they can to prevent that day from happening. Surely you all understand the idea of self-preservation.
There's absolutely no reason that in the US we must have valid contact information in that database.
Dude, do you not know about GoDaddy's private registration service? I think in the past 3 years I've had exactly 2 emails sent to me through my domains' private registration service. It keeps your personal information from showing up in a WhoIs query.
Actually, they already have added it to VCDs. For those of you who don't know what VCD is, just look it up in Wikipedia. Basically it's an old video format that's burnable to CDs and has lower quality video than DVD. Various video forums have questions posted from India asking why they can't copy the VCDs they just bought. It appears that many Indian companies have imposed DRM on VCDs. If they try to play a VCD on a PC, the VCD secretly loads a program on the PC that interferes with the PCs ability to read the disc. The disc looks empty to the PC. I'm talking about Windows PCs here. The VCD will play correctly on a DVD or VCD player but won't play at all on a PC. There may be some messing with sectors too as part of the copy protection mechanism, but I don't remember. Such copy protection violates VCD standards, by the way. Bollywood may not copy protect DVDs any more than any other country, but they certainly are adding copy protection to VCDs right now.
But we don't know the whole essay. Most police officers are rather down to earth, they KNOW the world. For them to make an arrest and for it not to be all settled easily alarms me.
Actually, you are giving police way too much credit. My hometown, which I don't want to name, is a small town of 50,000 people. I will say only from personal experience that the police in my hometown are some of the stupidest people in town. They became policemen because they couldn't do anything else. They are always looking for the easy answers. Some of my brothers friends got caught in a night of minor vandalism over 20 years ago and I remember them telling me afterward that the cops were trying to pin all kinds of unsolved vandalism acts for the past 2 or so years on them and trying to get to confess to things they never did. Just because the DA and the cops concluded that this was a misdemeanor doesn't mean that a court will agree. I hate to say it, but I have a bad feeling that the kid being Asian played a big role in the decision to arrest him and charge him. My advice to his lawyers would be to have a judge decide this. Too many variables in a jury trial. Too many "Hang them all!" nuts get on juries. Too many people who get hung up on the idea that they have to convinct whether they want to or not if they think that what the kid did meets the law's criteria. I was on a jury 2 years ago and we had to decide in part whether or not a guy made terroristic statements to his wife that were clearly said in anger and he never acted on. We had quite a few people who got real hung up on the idea of "I don't think he meant it, but what can I do? The law's the law." Plus the judges can't explain what the law means or give you examples. If the kid gets a jury trial, I won't be surprised if he goes to jail as 12 people regret that they "had no choice" but to convict even though they didn't want to.
4) Firefox informs me that wierd is not the correct spelling of "weird".
I before e, except after c, except in weigh?
I think the correct rhyme is something like "I before e, except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh". Weird is an exception (there always seem to be exceptions in English) that the rhyme doesn't cover. Maybe we could add "and I'll pluck out your beard if you don't think of weird".
Reminds of when I went shopping for cars with my uncle in Odessa, Ukraine. This guy was selling used cars. At the end of the lot he had a car covered under a sheet. My uncle asks, what's model you have there. He said "That's not for sale." He then proceeded to tell us how that was a special model blah blah blah. Then my uncle talked him into selling it, payed extra for the 'special' features. Then as we drove away it, the salesman took the sheet and put it on the car right next to it. Seems like HP is doing the same thing here...
Can't say I'm surprised. I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine because I was engaged once to a girl who lived there, but we broke up before getting married. Anyway, I've been to Odessa and of all the places I've been to in Ukraine, probably the most dishonest, greediest people I ever met in Ukraine lived there.
What's to stop me whipping out DVD Decrypter and just stripping this copy protection?
The fact that DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated in well over 1 year if not 2 years (I don't remember which it is) would stop you. The last release of DVD Decrypter, if you can find it, doesn't understand anything but the very earliest release of ARCCOS. Whip it out if you must, but you will get nothing but errors when it hits the bad disc sectors and doesn't know what to do.
Let us know how DVD Decrypter works for you with these discs. We won't be holding our breath on that one.
Not a US taxpayer so excuse the question. I'm assuming the tax year ends December 31st and filing deadline is April 18th? DO you get any special dispensation if you have your taxes done on your behalf by an accountant/tax agent?
The tax year ends on December 31, with the odd exception that you can, in theory, still make IRA contributions for the previous tax year from January 1 until the filing deadline, if you characterize them as such. For example, you can make an IRA contribution in February for the previous tax year, assuming that you haven't reached the limit for contributions for that tax year. Once you turn in your tax return, you shouldn't make any more IRA contributions for the previous tax year as the amount you contribute can affect your taxes. The filing deadline is actually April 15, but because the US Postal Service isn't open on Sundays, the government decided to give us 2 extra days instead of 1 to file our taxes.
Accountants have the ability to get special dispensation in terms of getting approved delays in filing taxes. In theory, the general public can directly apply for extensions themselves, but accountants usually do it on behalf of clients because they know the proper procedure for doing so. I have a friend who works as a court reporter and she always amazes me because her taxes are rarely done by the "No more extensions - period!" date, which is sometime in October. She is self-employed and has to keep tons of receipts for everything related to her job, so she always has an accountant do her taxes and because of pure laziness on her part, she always has her accountant file for an extension and does the taxes at the last minute.
It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.
I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.
More than a decade ago, I a had a friend at a former job who did this kind of thing. He was the cheapest guy I ever met in my life. He had no home telephone because it cost money. He worked for the US government as an engineer in a small town and was making good money, better than most of us other employess as Uncle Sam paid engineers on a higher scale than us "mere programmers", but he refused to pay for a telephone. He lived in a dumpy, cheap, one bedroom apartment in a small complex and his mom would either call his work phone or the apartment business office if she needed to talk to him. I couldn't believe it, but the apartment business office would actually walk over to his nearby apartment to get him if his mom called. This was a small town, like I said. Our state used to have this crazy system for renewing automobile tags where everybody had to renew by the end of April every year. They randomly assigned you to one of the first 4 months of the year and you had until the end of your month to renew. I forgot which month he had to renew his tag in, but every year he would take leave from work and go down to the tag office and wait in line for 2-3 hours to renew his tag on the very last day you could do it. He wouldn't do it through the mail, which was an option, because that would cost money for postage AND the state charged you 1 dollar extra for renewing it by mail. Nope, it made far better sense for him to take vacation time and just wait in line for 2-3 hours so he could hold on to his money until the last possible moment rather than to pay the cost of one stamp and one extra dollar to mail it in. Now that is cheap!
Needless to say, he was unmarried and had no girlfriend. I lost contact with him years ago because he had no home phone, hence no home internet, so that left work email as the only way to stay in touch with him and he expressed some reservations about using work email for personal correspondence, so that was the end of that friendship. He has a younger brother who's also unmarried, so I figure one day when he dies he'll leave a fortune to some distant cousins he barely knows and he won't have spent any of the money he saved on anything to give himself any happiness.
Russia has to defend itself from China nearby, as it is still growing. And they need land and resources. NATO is squeezing russia from each side, NATO fighters placed in Estonia, always taunt russian forces. In general West is still very unfriendly toward russia, and thats why you see rennovation of nuclear stock pile.
Let's see... Considering that the Soviet Union stole Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as the result of WWII and killed supporters of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, can you blame these countries for not trusting Mother Russia? My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and her great grandparents were killed by Stalin's henchmen while her grandfather, a child at the time, was forced to watch them die, because they were Ukrainian nationalists. Mother Russia's "love" comes with a terrible price that many don't want to pay. So that is why the Baltic States and the Warsaw Pact countries rushed to join NATO - it's the only way to insure that Mother Russia won't invade them again. Russia may feel "squeezed", but it is only because of its past actions.
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Dangerous game we are playing, calling their bluff. The stakes are pretty damned high.
Indeed. Keep in mind that Microsoft would presumably sue in the USA. In the USA, as someone once said, juries are made up of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. Juries are a real cross-section of society. In other words, most or all of the people on the jury will be AOL (l)users, not Linux admins. Juries in the USA have typically found in favor of the patent holder. And finally, keep in mind that Microsoft has very deep pockets and even if they lose, they can tie you up in appeals, which will cost even more money for you and your lawyers and they may yet win on appeal even if they somehow lose in the first round in a jury trial. Is it really wise to have 12 people who don't understand technology at all and may, in fact, have a pro-Microsoft bias decide this kind of case? To most of the people in the USA, Microsoft is great because they enabled the common man to use PCs. That's just how John Q. Public sees it.
Meanwhile, Joel Wiseman bought a Mac MINI and wonders why Sixbit and Sixpack spent all the time and money on systems dedicated to trying to grab content from a stream, when they could spend less of both just buying songs individually on demand.
Maybe Sixbit and Sixpack don't want to buy songs but want to watch TV. Suppose their 2 favorite TV shows are _The Office_ on NBC and _The Simpsons_ on Fox. Um, where exactly can they buy them? (Sound of crickets chirping in the background...) There are very good reasons why people want to "grab content from a stream" than your apples to oranges comparison allows for.
You can always buy higher-quality DVDs on Ebay from sellers in Malaysia. These DVDs are better than the store-bought versions since they don't have commercials, and can play on any region player.
This is not good advice for people who live in the USA. If you live elsewhere, as we say "Your mileage may vary". If you live in the USA, you should be aware that if you order a large number of DVDs from a foreign country, US Customs may become "interested" in your package. You do not want US Customs to become interested in your package. Once they have opened it, they may decide that it is pirated material and confiscate it. To get it back, you have to prove to them that it's not pirated goods. The burden of proof is on you. This is not an "innocent until guilty" thing but a "guilty until proven innocent" thing. You may not get fined, but you will lose your merchandise. I've never heard of a single person who was able to successfully prove to US Customs that their seizure was wrong and then get their stuff returned to them. My advice to any US citizen is to never order more than 3 or so DVDs at a time. Any order larger than that may attract unwanted attention. US Customs has been known to declare merchandise as "pirated" and seize it even though it is legally produced. Keep in mind too that the people working at US Customs are mostly typical people who aren't smart enough to work anywhere else except for Uncle Sam and who have no idea how to tell the difference between pirated and legitimate goods. They just decide that it looks pirated to them and therefore it must be pirated. Imagine how difficult it will be to prove to such a person that what you bought is not pirated. It's kind of like trying to reason with a 2 year old - you can make a bunch of sane arguments that prove your point, but the kid is unlikely to understand anything you told him.
They only have shown that it is not statistically certain that all bullet fragments were of similar make-up of to those of Oswald's.
That is not at all what the article says. What it says is that the previous investigation concluded that all bullet fragments came from only 2 bullets. This new study shows that it is possible that the fragments came from three or more bullets . So assuming that now people think that 3 or more bullets were fired, the question is - How many of those bullets could Oswald have fired? My understanding is that some people think he could have gotten off 3 shots within the time allowed. Others say that it would be almost impossible to fire more than 2. So until we seem to come to a conclusion that Oswald could only have fired 2 bullets and not 3, we haven't seen anyone rule out that Oswald could have fired 3 bullets himself.
The summary doesn't mention that the attacks started after Estonia began excavating graves of Soviet troops killed during the World War II and vandalized the memorial devoted to them. Estonia is seen as a neo-fascist regime by Russia, and in my opinion, rightly so: you can't deny over 30% of your population [estimate of Russian population in Estonia] the most basic rights, including citizenship and education for children, based on their nationality, and be seen otherwise. Of course, Europe and the United States ignore this issue.
Let me give you another perspective on this. You can decide whether or not you want to stick to your guns here. Are you by any chance married to a Russian woman? Because if you are, that will certainly inhibit your ability to see the other side.
Estonia was under Russian control until 1918. It remained an independent nation until 1940, when the USSR invaded it. Germany occupied it from 1941 to 1944. During the 1 year or so of Soviet occupation prior to the Nazi invation, the Soviets did such nice things as kill the intellectuals and forcibly conscript Estonians into the Red Army. I can't say it's any wonder that as in Ukraine (where Stalin and his henchmen had killed and starved to death millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s), the locals viewed the Nazis as liberators and then found out that they were just as bad if not worse as the Soviets. Do note that the USA never recognized the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NEVER. It's important to know that for over 50 years, official US policy was that the occupation of these 3 countries was illegal.
After WWII ended, Estonia was screwed. They were part of the Soviet Union. The Soviets moved hundreds of thousands of Russian speaking immigrants into Estonia in an attempt to "Russify" it and to dilute Estonian nationalism. Estonian freedom fighters fought a small scale guerilla war against the USSR into the early 1950s when they finally gave up and realized it was hopeless.
During the USSR period, Russian was the official language in education. It was possible to have education in whatever the local language was (Krushchev made some changes that allowed this), but there was a catch - if you wanted to get a good job, you absolutely had to speak Russian well. Given that Russian and Estonian are about as closely related as English is to Polish, you might understand that Estonian parents had no choice but to send their kids to Russian language schools so as to give them the best chance to prosper in the USSR.
Cut to 1991 when Estonia gets its independence. They now have a rather large Russian speaking population who they were forced to accept by a government that no longer exist. These people have never assimilated into Estonian society. In fact, they were encouraged immigrate there specifically to dilute Estonia's sense of national identity and to turn them into "good little Soviet subjects". These immigrants have never bothered to learn the Estonian language since Russian was the official language of the government prior to 1991. Now you have all these people who say "Screw you! We want to speak Russian!" in a country where the majority of citizens speak the local language, Estonian. They demand that everything be done in Russian so they can understand it. The Estonians never wanted to speak Russian to begin with, so they are promoting the use of their national language. Now you have about 26% of the population who refuses to "get with the program", demands that their language be given equal footing with the national tongue and even worse, feels that things were a lot better back when they were in charge and the stupid locals were taking orders from them. So given that Estonia never wanted the Soviets/Russians there to begin with and the Soviets weren't exactly enlightened when they ran the show, can you really blame them for not being real happy with Russia today? By the way, ethnic Russians can become Estonian citizens, but they have to take
I personally have had much more fulfilling relationships with women born outside of the US. The ones from within the US all tended to be far too materialistic and wanting to either change me personally or to want to dictate how the relationship progressed on their own.
I can't say I'm surprised, but I've seen different problems with American women that the ones you listed, notably:
1) Unrealistic expectations - that 200+ lb fat girl in your office really does think that Brad Pitt would fall in love with her if he met her. That 45 year old woman who looks every bit of 45 years old really does think that she can get a 24 year old husband like Demi Moore, even though on her best day and Demi Moore's worst day Demi Moore looked a lot more attractive than her. Even though this woman has no dates who are 24 years old, she still thinks she can get young men to date her.
2) The job is number one. Everything else, including you, the relationship and any kids you have together are less important than the job.
3) The feeling that "I don't need a man" thanks to various American movies and TV shows and the consequent feeling that "I'm not unhappy being by myself." Non-US women generally feel that it's not fun to be alone.
4) The belief that every person has one and only one "soul mate" and any other relationship will be unfulfilling and pointless if it's not with that one soul mate. This is related to #1 but even worse.
5) Tendency of many US women to now care only about how attractive the man is, which is again related to unrealistic expectations.
Foreign women are not all great either. My experience is that all women have problems, you just get a different set of problems with foreign women than US women. It's up to you to decide if you'd rather deal with those problems than the ones that US women have. My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and I broke up with her because of various problems that I blame on her upbringing and Ukrainian society. Problems that I've never seen with American women but I had with her included a complete and utter lack of respect for all men (interestingly enough, her parents were still married and she loved her father, but she had no respect for any men) and a complete unwillingness to ever compromise about anything because she viewed any compromise as the actions of a loser and she didn't want to be a loser. You may come second to the job to an American woman, but she will probably treat you with respect and she might be willing to compromise on some things. With my ex-fiancee, I was certainly more important to her than her job, but I had no respect from her and I had to give in every time in the relationship to keep her happy.
There are good American women, but after you get past 30, the good ones are pretty much all married or in stable relationships and it's really hard to find the ones who aren't.
we lose more life waiting in the airport security line every year than was lost on 9/11.
How exactly does this apples to oranges comparison work?
Waiting in security line = time alive
unless maybe you have a heart attack and die in line. How many of those per year are there any way?
Time dead = time dead
How exactly does one equate the two? And have you corrected the time spent waiting in line by subtracting the time spent waiting in line prior to 9/11?
You also forgot to mention this.
Number of terrorist incidents involving planes in the USA since 9/11 = 0
Amazing how that number never gets mentioned by people like you.
Not so far fetched, that's me.
According to Wikipedia, you had a 1 in 10,000 chance of having perfect pitch, so you beat some serious odds. Good for you. However, I think 1 in 10,000 odds does make it a little "far fetched". You are the exception, not the rule. The Wikipedia article does have a citation for this number, so it's not a case of someone writing an article and pulling a number of the air. People without perfect pitch can have successful musical careers, but your gift did make you unusually suited for this.
As far as public domain goes, you are correct. I don't think anything else will ever enter the public domain. When 2040 or so comes around, Disney will panic again that "Steamboat Willie" is about to enter public domain and Congress will just extend copyright lengths, again. When the US Supreme Court ruled on the extension of copyright, they very carefully stated that while they were not convinced that this was a good thing to do, Congress did, according to the Constitution, have the authority to extend copyright.
So there's no need to worry. Nothing gets coarse. Nothing loses fidelity. Nothing loses audible quality. This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works.
Thank you for this informative post. I am amazed at how many people honestly think that "vinyl is better". I've always viewed vinylphiles are having more money than sense. I know of an online retailer here in the USA (I won't give their website address so they don't get slashbombed) that I sometimes buy CDs from because they sell a lot of classical CDs that are difficult to find. Once a week they send me an email with news about new releases and specials and a significant part of that email is devoted to very expensive equipment for suckers (cough! cough!), um, I mean "vinyl afficionados". The current email I have from them has a record cleaner that lists for only $1994.99. What a bargain! They also sell some sort of clamp device that supposedly improves tracking on turntables for about $400. So you can spend a few hundred dollars and be able to play CDs reasonably well, or you can spend several thousands of dollars to play records as well as possible and have the bonus benefit of having to deal with surface noise, a smaller dynamic range than CD (they always forget to mention that one, don't they?), and the fact that an LP degrades every time you play it. A fool and his money are soon parted.
The outcome means nothing to the jurors at the end of the day, most will want to get out of jury duty and just get back to normal life duties.
This is complete and utter hogwash
No, it's complete and utter truth. Consider yourself lucky that you were on a jury with a different experience. Consider yourself lucky that the judge let you get by with a hung jury. I know of a case where a jury deliberated for over 1 month because the judge refused to allow a hung jury and after 1 month the lone holdout finally gave in. Jury duty is often about who can outlast or outstubborn (if that's even a word) the others.
Jury duty isn't about right and wrong. It's about trying to get 12 people to agree on a verdict, whatever that might be. I have unfortunately served twice on a jury and neither was a great experience, although I'm grateful they only took a few days. It's also not about "a decision based on the law" as you state, but how the jury interprets the law, which is a gigantic distinction. Judges cannot under any circumstances tell juries what the law means. They can read the applicable law statues to the jury but it's up to the jury to decide what they think it means. What a jury thinks a law means and what judges and lawyers think a law means are 2 different things.
At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine ;)
Well, Ukrainians aren't Russkies, although there are some similarities. As someone who has spent significant amounts of time in Ukraine and not too long ago had a Ukrainian fiancee, I will warn you that while they seem great at first, the truth is that almost none of the women over there want to leave and there are only 3 cities in Ukraine that are even worth considering living in - Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa. I've known women in some really crappy Ukrainian towns that could best be desribed with the word "hellhole" and they fully expected any foreign man interested in them to move over there. Few of the women respect men either, so be prepared to be treated like a child. However, the odds are great that you'll never actually go over there to meet whoever you are chatting with, so you'll most likely never know the real story about how these women really are. They certainly have gigantic flaws, they're just not the same as the ones you'll see with American, Canadian or UK women. I broke up with my fiancee because although she cared about me, she had no respect for me at all. To her, all men were children to be ordered about. When faced with a choice to either change her behavior towards me or see our relationship end, she chose to do nothing, so I ended the relationship. Too many of the women over there, like my ex-fiancee, view relationships as a zero sum game. That means in a relationship somebody wins and the other person loses. They have no concept of compromise - to them if you compromise, you lose. Either you get everything you want and win or you are a loser. They have no concept at all of an "everybody wins" scenario. One American guy who married a Ukrainian woman was really proud of the fact that his wife would every few weeks ask him for something she didn't even want, like a really expensive outfit, and he had somehow managed to figure out when she was testing him and he would just say "No" to her. She was happy as a clam that he was a "real man" because by some miracle he had figured out how to read her and could almost always tell when she was serious and when she was testing him and when he said "No" during her tests, she loved it. My idea of a healthy relationship doesn't include that kind of insanity, but yours may differ. Should you seriously persue this, just understand that these women aren't anything like the local gals you have dated and its up to you to decide if the differences are good or bad. If you're not incredibly laid back and easy going, these women are a poor choice.
Is the author of the article actually suggesting that some companies rush to test the new Winblows patches all through the night on Tuesday so that the patches are ready to deploy on Wednesday ? This sounds like a fresh steaming load of bullshit...
You may be right. My previous job was with a company that did a lot of VAR stuff, including various email systems. It didn't matter to us what you wanted - Notes, Exchange, Unix, anti-virus, anti-spam - we could sell you whatever combinations you wanted. I didn't work with Exchange, but the Exchange guys told me that in the past they used to rush out and patch systems with every "critical" Microsoft patch release and then they applied some patch that totally broke Exchange. The patch had nothing to do with Exchange, but it broke it. It took hours to fix the broken servers. After that fiasco, we regarded all Microsoft patches as suspect and we had a group in another state that one of their jobs was to test new patches on Exchange servers and see if Exchange still worked. It didn't matter to us how "critical" Microsoft considered a patch. We didn't patch any of Exchange servers until our test group gave the OK, which was usually a month later.
The typical $400K American home can be replaced with an equal if not nicer $100K home in a lot of these countries.
While this is not bad advice, it's worth pointing out that most of us in the USA do not have $400,000 homes. I live in a metro area that's one of the 10 largest in the USA and none of my friends have a $400,000 home. California and NY prices don't apply everywhere, so if you don't have this "typical $400,000" home but an apparently untypical $200,000 home, would your advice still stand?
How about T-Mobile? I've been a customer for 3 years and I have no complaints. They even unlocked my phone at no charge after I had been a paying customer for 3 months.
Yeah, being a "foreign dog" myself, I never really got that about your (american, that is) elections.. Is there any historical reason for you NOT to hold them during the weekend (Sunday to be more exact -- as most countries do)?
Yes, there is a historical reason. Keep in mind that the USA is a really big country and not densely populated. In the early days of our country, many people did not live in cities but in rural areas. They might have to travel one or two days to reach the place where they could vote. Since the USA has always had a strong Christian tradition, Sunday voting was taboo as it would interfere with church services and some would view it as "breaking the sabbath" and be opposed to it. Elections were set up on Tuesday so that people could travel by horse and buggy on Monday and arrive at the polling place on Tuesday with no "sabbath breaking" involved. They would also then have time to return home before the next Sunday. For better or worse Tuesday voting is what we are used to and I have no doubt that many Christians would object to voting on Sunday. Saturday won't work either because you risk offending the 7th Day Adventists and orthodox Jews. Muslims might object to voting on Friday, so that leaves Monday-Thursday as the best days to vote with the fewest objections, so we might as well leave things as they are and vote on Tuesday. The election for President is set by law as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Primary elections are always on a Tuesday, but the exact dates depend on the various states. Presidental elections and general elections are always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. We have general elections every 2 years and Presidential elections every 4 years, so every 2 years you have a November election for something.
Seriously America needs to put a stop to software patents, it's damaging your software industry as Knuth puts very well in his letter to the PTO
It will never happen and I will explain why. I worked for the US government some years ago in my first job after college, so I know how the US government works and how government workers think. You need to understand the following:
1) US government workers have "skills", and I use the term very loosely, that often have no practical application outside of the US government. In other words, many US government workers can't get equivalent jobs in private industry because equivalent jobs don't exist.
2) US government workers don't want to lose their jobs any more than anyone else does.
3) US government workers are very difficult to fire, leading to conditions of essential lifetime employment with very few exceptions. There are exceptions, but they are rare.
Your typical US government employee stays with Uncle Sam because there are a few decent benefits (vacation and retirement benefits are superior to many companies in private industry) and the jobs are often low stress. Pay does lag behind private industry in many cases and because of #1 that I mentioned earlier, you have a lot of people who are screwed if they lose their government jobs because they don't have any useful skills for private industry. Where I worked, most younger employees with any motivation and useful skills (I work in IT) left after 3-7 years for better pay in private industry and better jobs. Government work is pretty boring, if safe.
What has happened with the patent office is that now that they approve everything they can, they get more money coming in. More money coming in means that they are more important to the federal government because they bring in the bucks. They don't exist to consume tax dollars, they bring in revenue. To Uncle Sam, it's a win-win. He gets more money and businesses get "the tools they need" to protect their "valuable intellectual capital". More money to the Patent Office means they need more employees, which means they need more managers, which means pay goes up for managers. Now you have a bloated government office that has every incentive there is to protect itself and protecting itself can only be done if they bring in the bucks. Fewer patents means fewer examiners, which means fewer managers, which means people who have no useful skills for the outside world might be forced to find jobs in that outside world. Government employees are masters at protecting their own interests, so they just tell Congress and the President that they are doing a "vital service" to business. Business = money. Money = tax revenue. Tax revenue = good. Don't expect the President or anyone in Congress to ever think that patents = bad. Why on earth would reducing the size of a government agency that makes money instead of consuming money ever be good? I certainly respect Knuth, but the Patent Office guys will just paint him as an idealist in the academic world and ignore him. Remember, if patent reform ever happens, a lot of pissed off government employees, including managers, will lose their jobs because we'll need fewer of them and they will do everything they can to prevent that day from happening. Surely you all understand the idea of self-preservation.
There's absolutely no reason that in the US we must have valid contact information in that database.
Dude, do you not know about GoDaddy's private registration service? I think in the past 3 years I've had exactly 2 emails sent to me through my domains' private registration service. It keeps your personal information from showing up in a WhoIs query.
Bollywood et. al. will never add the DRM.
Actually, they already have added it to VCDs. For those of you who don't know what VCD is, just look it up in Wikipedia. Basically it's an old video format that's burnable to CDs and has lower quality video than DVD. Various video forums have questions posted from India asking why they can't copy the VCDs they just bought. It appears that many Indian companies have imposed DRM on VCDs. If they try to play a VCD on a PC, the VCD secretly loads a program on the PC that interferes with the PCs ability to read the disc. The disc looks empty to the PC. I'm talking about Windows PCs here. The VCD will play correctly on a DVD or VCD player but won't play at all on a PC. There may be some messing with sectors too as part of the copy protection mechanism, but I don't remember. Such copy protection violates VCD standards, by the way. Bollywood may not copy protect DVDs any more than any other country, but they certainly are adding copy protection to VCDs right now.
But we don't know the whole essay. Most police officers are rather down to earth, they KNOW the world. For them to make an arrest and for it not to be all settled easily alarms me.
Actually, you are giving police way too much credit. My hometown, which I don't want to name, is a small town of 50,000 people. I will say only from personal experience that the police in my hometown are some of the stupidest people in town. They became policemen because they couldn't do anything else. They are always looking for the easy answers. Some of my brothers friends got caught in a night of minor vandalism over 20 years ago and I remember them telling me afterward that the cops were trying to pin all kinds of unsolved vandalism acts for the past 2 or so years on them and trying to get to confess to things they never did. Just because the DA and the cops concluded that this was a misdemeanor doesn't mean that a court will agree. I hate to say it, but I have a bad feeling that the kid being Asian played a big role in the decision to arrest him and charge him. My advice to his lawyers would be to have a judge decide this. Too many variables in a jury trial. Too many "Hang them all!" nuts get on juries. Too many people who get hung up on the idea that they have to convinct whether they want to or not if they think that what the kid did meets the law's criteria. I was on a jury 2 years ago and we had to decide in part whether or not a guy made terroristic statements to his wife that were clearly said in anger and he never acted on. We had quite a few people who got real hung up on the idea of "I don't think he meant it, but what can I do? The law's the law." Plus the judges can't explain what the law means or give you examples. If the kid gets a jury trial, I won't be surprised if he goes to jail as 12 people regret that they "had no choice" but to convict even though they didn't want to.
4) Firefox informs me that wierd is not the correct spelling of "weird".
I before e, except after c, except in weigh?
I think the correct rhyme is something like "I before e, except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh". Weird is an exception (there always seem to be exceptions in English) that the rhyme doesn't cover. Maybe we could add "and I'll pluck out your beard if you don't think of weird".
Reminds of when I went shopping for cars with my uncle in Odessa, Ukraine. This guy was selling used cars. At the end of the lot he had a car covered under a sheet. My uncle asks, what's model you have there. He said "That's not for sale." He then proceeded to tell us how that was a special model blah blah blah. Then my uncle talked him into selling it, payed extra for the 'special' features. Then as we drove away it, the salesman took the sheet and put it on the car right next to it. Seems like HP is doing the same thing here...
Can't say I'm surprised. I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine because I was engaged once to a girl who lived there, but we broke up before getting married. Anyway, I've been to Odessa and of all the places I've been to in Ukraine, probably the most dishonest, greediest people I ever met in Ukraine lived there.
What's to stop me whipping out DVD Decrypter and just stripping this copy protection?
The fact that DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated in well over 1 year if not 2 years (I don't remember which it is) would stop you. The last release of DVD Decrypter, if you can find it, doesn't understand anything but the very earliest release of ARCCOS. Whip it out if you must, but you will get nothing but errors when it hits the bad disc sectors and doesn't know what to do.
Let us know how DVD Decrypter works for you with these discs. We won't be holding our breath on that one.
Not a US taxpayer so excuse the question.
I'm assuming the tax year ends December 31st and filing deadline is April 18th?
DO you get any special dispensation if you have your taxes done on your behalf by an accountant/tax agent?
The tax year ends on December 31, with the odd exception that you can, in theory, still make IRA contributions for the previous tax year from January 1 until the filing deadline, if you characterize them as such. For example, you can make an IRA contribution in February for the previous tax year, assuming that you haven't reached the limit for contributions for that tax year. Once you turn in your tax return, you shouldn't make any more IRA contributions for the previous tax year as the amount you contribute can affect your taxes. The filing deadline is actually April 15, but because the US Postal Service isn't open on Sundays, the government decided to give us 2 extra days instead of 1 to file our taxes.
Accountants have the ability to get special dispensation in terms of getting approved delays in filing taxes. In theory, the general public can directly apply for extensions themselves, but accountants usually do it on behalf of clients because they know the proper procedure for doing so. I have a friend who works as a court reporter and she always amazes me because her taxes are rarely done by the "No more extensions - period!" date, which is sometime in October. She is self-employed and has to keep tons of receipts for everything related to her job, so she always has an accountant do her taxes and because of pure laziness on her part, she always has her accountant file for an extension and does the taxes at the last minute.
It was basically a manual DNS attack. With so many waiting until the last minute, what do people expect? File at least a day before the deadline. What difference does a day's worth of interest make on the average IRS tax bill? And if people are so concerned about a day's worth of interest, print the damn return and mail it with a check. That way you get a few more days of interest.
I just don't understand the dorks that wait so long they have no options.
More than a decade ago, I a had a friend at a former job who did this kind of thing. He was the cheapest guy I ever met in my life. He had no home telephone because it cost money. He worked for the US government as an engineer in a small town and was making good money, better than most of us other employess as Uncle Sam paid engineers on a higher scale than us "mere programmers", but he refused to pay for a telephone. He lived in a dumpy, cheap, one bedroom apartment in a small complex and his mom would either call his work phone or the apartment business office if she needed to talk to him. I couldn't believe it, but the apartment business office would actually walk over to his nearby apartment to get him if his mom called. This was a small town, like I said. Our state used to have this crazy system for renewing automobile tags where everybody had to renew by the end of April every year. They randomly assigned you to one of the first 4 months of the year and you had until the end of your month to renew. I forgot which month he had to renew his tag in, but every year he would take leave from work and go down to the tag office and wait in line for 2-3 hours to renew his tag on the very last day you could do it. He wouldn't do it through the mail, which was an option, because that would cost money for postage AND the state charged you 1 dollar extra for renewing it by mail. Nope, it made far better sense for him to take vacation time and just wait in line for 2-3 hours so he could hold on to his money until the last possible moment rather than to pay the cost of one stamp and one extra dollar to mail it in. Now that is cheap!
Needless to say, he was unmarried and had no girlfriend. I lost contact with him years ago because he had no home phone, hence no home internet, so that left work email as the only way to stay in touch with him and he expressed some reservations about using work email for personal correspondence, so that was the end of that friendship. He has a younger brother who's also unmarried, so I figure one day when he dies he'll leave a fortune to some distant cousins he barely knows and he won't have spent any of the money he saved on anything to give himself any happiness.
Russia has to defend itself from China nearby, as it is still growing. And they need land and resources. NATO is squeezing russia from each side, NATO fighters placed in Estonia, always taunt russian forces. In general West is still very unfriendly toward russia, and thats why you see rennovation of nuclear stock pile.
Let's see...
Considering that the Soviet Union stole Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as the result of WWII and killed supporters of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, can you blame these countries for not trusting Mother Russia? My ex-fiancee was Ukrainian and her great grandparents were killed by Stalin's henchmen while her grandfather, a child at the time, was forced to watch them die, because they were Ukrainian nationalists. Mother Russia's "love" comes with a terrible price that many don't want to pay. So that is why the Baltic States and the Warsaw Pact countries rushed to join NATO - it's the only way to insure that Mother Russia won't invade them again. Russia may feel "squeezed", but it is only because of its past actions.