If a small mom and pop restaurant or a minor retailer is forced to collect taxes internet companies should be asked to collect taxes too. The idea of multiple jurisdictions, exempted products etc are lame excuses. All these people coming out of the wood work cheering on this multi billion dollar corporation shafting tiny jurisdictions out of their meager sources of revenue go suddenly silent when there is a media frenzy urging the government to do something. Some wild fire in the prairie, Govt should airlift water using helicopters to douse it. Oil gushing from a well in the gulf, the govt is expected to boom thousands of miles of coast line. But the moment the crisis is over well funded anti-tax shills shout about govt inefficiency govt stupidity and cheer mega multi-billion multinational corporations
tax evasion.
Whatever is the tax rate, we can not have one rule for one set of businesses and another for another set. Govt should not be biasing the field, it should not be picking winners and losers. By forcing off-line merchants to collect sales tax while exempting on-line retailers government is creating a non-level playing field. That is reason enough to be force the on-line guys to play by the same rules.
You need to brush up on summation of geometric series. More people are alive today than all humans who have ever died. 75000 years ago we were down to 5000 people, just 1000-1500 breeding pairs. The growth was very slow, not that many people died in the prehistory.
World population passed the 4, 5, 6 and now 7 billion mark in our lifetime. Population of India was just 300 milliom in 1920s (Poem by Barathi referring to Mother India with 300 million faces comes to my mind). Population of USA was just 85 million during WWII.
Yes more people are alive today than all the dead combined. Seven eighths of scientists are still alive. Dont feel bad. Human mind is not evolved to comprehend exponential growth and geometric series well.
You imagine a large blank space where suddenly big bang happens and matter gets created. But Big Bang is when the space itself gets created. It is difficult to imagine, very difficult to describe using plain ascii text, and would be whoosh over my head even if the best presentation media is used. Best thing to do would be to ignore these speculation by the physicists. If they eventually come up with something that is accepted by large number of other physicists and come up with experiments or astronomical observations to back it up, that is when we laypeople should pay attention. Else we will be wasting our time following them barking up the wrong tree, er, spurious solutions.
I just posted that AAPL has appreciated 87 times since 1980. Since this four years before Apple went public, and early investment on successful companies is worth 10 times on IPO day, 666$ in 1976 = 6660$ on 1980. That would be worth 579,000$ today. Yes, the investment would have appreciated even more. And it has. The founders are billionaires.
The split adjusted price for a share of AAPL on Dec 12 1980 is $3.60. Current closing price is around $314. or 87 times. Given this info the 425x price for the original apple computer does not seem to be totally unreasonable/surprising. The antique comes with a letter signed by Steve "le God" Jobs himself.
Definitely that is how the domestication started. Domestication of the wolf happened over tens of thousands of years and no human would/could have actively planned it. Some wolf packs got too close to humans and got eaten. Some human bands disliked/feared wolves and chased them away. But among all the hundreds of thousands of human band/wolf pack interaction, a few would have been at the right distance, right level of tolerance to each other, right level of mutual benefit (trash to wolves and warnings to humans). Those bands+packs had better survival than other bands or packs. Over the centuries this combination won over. With better warnings the bands moved less and less and eventually became settled.
So one does not have to choose between development of sedentism and fixed human settlements and then the domestication of wolves on one hand and complete domestication wolves first before the development of sedentism. These co-evolved.
Thanks for the tip. I will find it and read/see it. Domestication of dogs and their impact on human evolution is a very common topic in anthropology. Many books and articles talk about it.
Sadly, you rise, live and sleep under the blanket of technology we scientists provide but have no clue about what we do. But it does not matter to me. When I feed my dog few crumbs fall on the floor and a whole colony of ants benefit by it. I don't begrudge those ants for living off the crumbs, nor you for being so clueless and still benefit by our scientific endevors.
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade is a good start. The two books by Jared Diamond The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs and Steel talk about the grand sweep of history and prehistory. These books cover much wider topics and the domestication of dogs is just one part.
Dogs were the first species to be domesticated by man. There is reason to believe domestication of the dog is as important as the invention of tool making and taming the fire, invention of language in the (pre)history of Homo sapiens.
Anatomically modern human beings appeared on the scene 250,000 years ago. But their skulls were the "robust" type. But starting from 75,000 years ago, it started becoming "gracile" or thinner and less robust. It is an indication of reduction of violence and warfare among the various bands of hunter gatherers. Humans were developing the social skills to get along with extended families. But still they were extremely hostile to strangers. All the remnant hunter gatherer societies are marked by incessant warfare with their neighbors and extreme hostility. The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
But 25,000 years ago in central Asia, near Mongolia, Man finally found a night watchman. The dogs. They got the sentry duty. Once the dogs developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, we were able to settle down and live in one place. That is how we observed the connection between dropped seeds and the plants growing out of it. Just 15000 years later we had domesticated the einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent. Dog is the species that co-evolved with humans, and they are probably the only species that can follow the eye-movement of human beings and pointing by index finger by human beings and "understand" they need to look there. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are orders of magnitude more sociable. Shows how much they have evolved in such a short period of 25000 years.
If only $something was possible we would have averted $tragedy is a very elastic standard. We can not use that statement alone to justify anything. OK, if people were able to get to the emergency responders via text message and show them their mobile camera we might have saved a few lives. But if we force every person in the USA to drive M1A1 Abrams battle tank for commuting we would save a few lives in auto collisions too. (But lot more pedestrian causalities but that is a different story.)
If people are saying, "hey texting is cheap, mobile video camera are ubiquitous, let us see if we can take advantage of this to improve the emergency response" it is a valid statement/claim. But dredging up some vague anecdotal evidence where such a thing might have helped should not be the basis for an argument.
The tragedy is vast majority of the public and most of the journalists go for the anecdotes and miss the forest for the trees.
BTW, all those people crying hoarse "We want smaller government, less taxes, we want the government off our backs" to jump in argue why this level of expectation from the government is a bad idea. If you do nothing to reduce the public expectation of the government services, you will never ever reduce spending. Starving the beast wont work. Deficits will not shrink.
If you define benefit as the evil kind of benefit by which you abuse the control you have over a platform to lock the competition out and the customers in, create walled gardens, etc then Google won't benefit under this scenario. On the other hand if yu define benefit as denying your competition the evil kind of benefit, then Google will benefit immensely even if Bing and Baidu and Facebook choose android as their preferred platform.
The innocents who were sued by these lawyers, could counter sue them for extortion. But the copyright owners, the alleged clients of the lawyers, could sue their own lawyers for malpractice.
I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic.
Why not? The Immigration and Naturalization service considers many people in the United States of America to be aliens! Heck, they called me an alien first, then a resident alien before finally succumbing to my relentless pursuit of citizenship and agreed to call me a naturalized citizen, as though I was somehow not natural before Sep 21, 1999.
Albert Einstein married his first cousin. Charles Darwin married his first cousin. There could be many reasons to look down on SC/VA people, but practicing accepting weddings at a genetic distance of 1/8 is not one of them.
Alcatel-Lucent will use the GPS chip in smart phones and estimate the speed at which these phones are traveling and also the text typing patterns and pauses and correlate it with the zigs and zags of the GPS trace. Once it determines it is the case of texting-while-driving it will automatically call 9-1-1 and have an ambul^H^H^H^H^H mortuary van following the car to scrape the remains of the driver off the road.
... in no time the terrorists will use children to smuggle the bombs aboard. The terrorists have absolutely no moral qualms. So what should we do?
We should not start frisking children, we should accept that once in a while a terrorist would get a bomb aboard and kill a lot of people. We should state up front, "we know it is easy to kill unarmed civilians. There is no fight, no glory in killing innocent people. But if you do kill a few of us, we can take the loss, and we will take our revenge. Living well is the best revenge, that is what we will do mostly. Also we will show how much we value our lives by the strong support and sympathy we show to every last one of us killed by you. Then we will spend as much money and effort it takes to hunt you down and bring you to justice."
Instead if we go down the path of, "we will not let you kill even one of us", their definition of success has been changed. All they have to do is to kill one American and claim victory. We should not allow them to define victory and success that way. Surest way to lose the war on terror is define success as, "not a single American could be killed by Terrorists".
It is a fact Islamic terrorists kill more muslims than non-muslims. We should repeatedly draw the contrast showing how we never say, "if we kill one terrorist it is worth 100 or 1000 American lives". But the terrorists repeatedly say, "killing one American is worth sacrificing XX or YY number of muslims".
The surest way to win the war on terror is, simply refuse to be terrorized.
And most of the employees coming in would be solid middle class democrats, who would not tolerate local rural schools boards being too creationism friendly or glossing over the history of slavery and civil rights movement. Rural NC politicians are going to be shocked when they get beaten by gay friendly, neutral-on-gun-rights candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever is the tax rate, we can not have one rule for one set of businesses and another for another set. Govt should not be biasing the field, it should not be picking winners and losers. By forcing off-line merchants to collect sales tax while exempting on-line retailers government is creating a non-level playing field. That is reason enough to be force the on-line guys to play by the same rules.
Thanks for the correction. Looks like I was wrong.
World population passed the 4, 5, 6 and now 7 billion mark in our lifetime. Population of India was just 300 milliom in 1920s (Poem by Barathi referring to Mother India with 300 million faces comes to my mind). Population of USA was just 85 million during WWII.
Yes more people are alive today than all the dead combined. Seven eighths of scientists are still alive. Dont feel bad. Human mind is not evolved to comprehend exponential growth and geometric series well.
You imagine a large blank space where suddenly big bang happens and matter gets created. But Big Bang is when the space itself gets created. It is difficult to imagine, very difficult to describe using plain ascii text, and would be whoosh over my head even if the best presentation media is used. Best thing to do would be to ignore these speculation by the physicists. If they eventually come up with something that is accepted by large number of other physicists and come up with experiments or astronomical observations to back it up, that is when we laypeople should pay attention. Else we will be wasting our time following them barking up the wrong tree, er, spurious solutions.
Thanks. Neither English nor French is my first language. So I appreciate such tips. I misplaced a comma yesterday and got some grief for it.
I just posted that AAPL has appreciated 87 times since 1980. Since this four years before Apple went public, and early investment on successful companies is worth 10 times on IPO day, 666$ in 1976 = 6660$ on 1980. That would be worth 579,000$ today. Yes, the investment would have appreciated even more. And it has. The founders are billionaires.
The split adjusted price for a share of AAPL on Dec 12 1980 is $3.60. Current closing price is around $314. or 87 times. Given this info the 425x price for the original apple computer does not seem to be totally unreasonable/surprising. The antique comes with a letter signed by Steve "le God" Jobs himself.
So one does not have to choose between development of sedentism and fixed human settlements and then the domestication of wolves on one hand and complete domestication wolves first before the development of sedentism. These co-evolved.
Thanks for the tip. I will find it and read/see it. Domestication of dogs and their impact on human evolution is a very common topic in anthropology. Many books and articles talk about it.
Sadly, you rise, live and sleep under the blanket of technology we scientists provide but have no clue about what we do. But it does not matter to me. When I feed my dog few crumbs fall on the floor and a whole colony of ants benefit by it. I don't begrudge those ants for living off the crumbs, nor you for being so clueless and still benefit by our scientific endevors.
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade is a good start. The two books by Jared Diamond The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs and Steel talk about the grand sweep of history and prehistory. These books cover much wider topics and the domestication of dogs is just one part.
Anatomically modern human beings appeared on the scene 250,000 years ago. But their skulls were the "robust" type. But starting from 75,000 years ago, it started becoming "gracile" or thinner and less robust. It is an indication of reduction of violence and warfare among the various bands of hunter gatherers. Humans were developing the social skills to get along with extended families. But still they were extremely hostile to strangers. All the remnant hunter gatherer societies are marked by incessant warfare with their neighbors and extreme hostility. The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
But 25,000 years ago in central Asia, near Mongolia, Man finally found a night watchman. The dogs. They got the sentry duty. Once the dogs developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, we were able to settle down and live in one place. That is how we observed the connection between dropped seeds and the plants growing out of it. Just 15000 years later we had domesticated the einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent. Dog is the species that co-evolved with humans, and they are probably the only species that can follow the eye-movement of human beings and pointing by index finger by human beings and "understand" they need to look there. Compared to their wolf ancestors, dogs are orders of magnitude more sociable. Shows how much they have evolved in such a short period of 25000 years.
In short, dogs made man, what he is today.
Apparently Omar Mohammad al-Talibani al-Q`aidi of Yemen just placed an order for one million of this new fangled thing.
Quite sad you are responding to the subject line not the posting.
If people are saying, "hey texting is cheap, mobile video camera are ubiquitous, let us see if we can take advantage of this to improve the emergency response" it is a valid statement/claim. But dredging up some vague anecdotal evidence where such a thing might have helped should not be the basis for an argument.
The tragedy is vast majority of the public and most of the journalists go for the anecdotes and miss the forest for the trees.
BTW, all those people crying hoarse "We want smaller government, less taxes, we want the government off our backs" to jump in argue why this level of expectation from the government is a bad idea. If you do nothing to reduce the public expectation of the government services, you will never ever reduce spending. Starving the beast wont work. Deficits will not shrink.
If you define benefit as the evil kind of benefit by which you abuse the control you have over a platform to lock the competition out and the customers in, create walled gardens, etc then Google won't benefit under this scenario. On the other hand if yu define benefit as denying your competition the evil kind of benefit, then Google will benefit immensely even if Bing and Baidu and Facebook choose android as their preferred platform.
The innocents who were sued by these lawyers, could counter sue them for extortion. But the copyright owners, the alleged clients of the lawyers, could sue their own lawyers for malpractice.
May be they should be sued for malpractice and made to pay triple damages. A taste of their own medicine might do a whole lot of good in this case.
I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic.
Why not? The Immigration and Naturalization service considers many people in the United States of America to be aliens! Heck, they called me an alien first, then a resident alien before finally succumbing to my relentless pursuit of citizenship and agreed to call me a naturalized citizen, as though I was somehow not natural before Sep 21, 1999.
Albert Einstein married his first cousin. Charles Darwin married his first cousin. There could be many reasons to look down on SC/VA people, but practicing accepting weddings at a genetic distance of 1/8 is not one of them.
bool IsGoogleEvil(){
if ( facebook.com has mysterious bugs and compatibility issues in some future upgrade of Android) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
no problem, I have a list of politicians we can scan. Also, my boss should be scanned.
It wont work. The politicians don't have a brain.
Alcatel-Lucent will use the GPS chip in smart phones and estimate the speed at which these phones are traveling and also the text typing patterns and pauses and correlate it with the zigs and zags of the GPS trace. Once it determines it is the case of texting-while-driving it will automatically call 9-1-1 and have an ambul^H^H^H^H^H mortuary van following the car to scrape the remains of the driver off the road.
We should not start frisking children, we should accept that once in a while a terrorist would get a bomb aboard and kill a lot of people. We should state up front, "we know it is easy to kill unarmed civilians. There is no fight, no glory in killing innocent people. But if you do kill a few of us, we can take the loss, and we will take our revenge. Living well is the best revenge, that is what we will do mostly. Also we will show how much we value our lives by the strong support and sympathy we show to every last one of us killed by you. Then we will spend as much money and effort it takes to hunt you down and bring you to justice."
Instead if we go down the path of, "we will not let you kill even one of us", their definition of success has been changed. All they have to do is to kill one American and claim victory. We should not allow them to define victory and success that way. Surest way to lose the war on terror is define success as, "not a single American could be killed by Terrorists".
It is a fact Islamic terrorists kill more muslims than non-muslims. We should repeatedly draw the contrast showing how we never say, "if we kill one terrorist it is worth 100 or 1000 American lives". But the terrorists repeatedly say, "killing one American is worth sacrificing XX or YY number of muslims".
The surest way to win the war on terror is, simply refuse to be terrorized.
And most of the employees coming in would be solid middle class democrats, who would not tolerate local rural schools boards being too creationism friendly or glossing over the history of slavery and civil rights movement. Rural NC politicians are going to be shocked when they get beaten by gay friendly, neutral-on-gun-rights candidates.