It's also on Netflix as well as on Hulu. Well worth watching; it's one of those that, like Firefly, got cancelled too early. They also did a movie later (made for TV, I think) that was pretty good.
Surely concerns with larger projects which could not be split could be nationalised instead?
What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
I'm not sure the GP realized there are such a limited number of these but they do exist. I can't speak as to the service the AC mentioned but it's within the realm of possibility, I suppose.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is a legal principle relating to one's liability for an action that violates a criminal offense. It has nothing to do with entering a contract with another. Even then it's not absolute. There are explicit exceptions for willfulness in many statutes and there was one case back in the 60s, I believe it was that made it to the SCotUS which held that you have to have a likelihood of knowing an offense is a crime in order to be held liable. I'm too lazy to look it up but it's probably on Wikipedia.
The FDIC covers individual depositors, not the banks themselves. I won't get into why we "had to" bail out the banks as that's kind of a losing argument all around, IMO.
You're forgetting the real power of a database such as Facebook has: the ability to sell it to others directly. Most Facebook users see ads and think that's all their data is used for. That doesn't mean it's the only source of revenue.
Computers can give you a reasonable idea since they are unsubsidized.
Horse hockey! Haven't you ever had to clean extra "value added" crap off a computer? I certainly have; that shit subsidizes PCs all the time. No PC manufacturer I am aware of operates without this stuff. If they did it'd be great to be able to compare their pricing with, say, Dell's.
I was speaking to a real vulcanologist that works at Mt St Helens a while ago. The current thinking is it's not so much the heat energy alone as gas buildup that causes these massive eruptions. The heat is apparently a small part of it but the amount of gases dissolved in the material is what tends to make eruptions happen. When there's not enough gas in the material, it stops erupting, they now think.
It sounds to me as though major eruptions are kind of like what happens when you shake a soda then pop the lid while the constant bubbling ones such as we see at St Helens lately is more like what happens when the carbonation just bubbles and your straw slowly climbs out of the glass. The conversation was one of those "well, duh!" moments to me that once you're told about it the whole thing makes so much more sense than before. When I said so, he laughed and said much the same thing happened to him when his colleague came up with it.
Parents can do almost anything to their kids within the law and even in the criminal situations they rarely get caught and when they do I bet the majority of them do not get a proper response.
There is nothing wrong with keyloging YOUR kid. The other issues are just that-- OTHER ISSUES. It may prove useful to have a log of the kids messages if something goes wrong later. The only real big related issue is the privacy rights of the child, including the use of such info by police to nail your child for something... we are not intelligently handling children in the legal system anymore.
The GP is correct you have th be careful but you can do pretty much anything you wish to a computer you own. Since minors have no property rights, their computers are yours to do as you wish with. I agree there's nothing wrong with keylogging your kid, although there are better ways to deal with most kids. I think keylogging is a last resort, though. My children have been told they have no expectation of privacy; at any time I can and will look at anything and everything on their computers or cell phones. While I rarely do, the fact that they don't ever expect privacy makes them think twice before doing risky things.
No, this is more about protecting from reprisal those we've asked (OK, or blackmailed into or paid) to provide us intelligence. This protection is standard practice amongst all nations and has been for centuries. Think of it as a confidential informant in a criminal investigation if you must but these people are often killed when outed so let's not fuck around with this one, OK?
That being said, I support Wikileaks in general. I just don't think publishing names such as these should ever be allowed or even considered. It's naive in the extreme.
I find it interesting that they are using 'black hat' and 'white hat' to distinguish between different actions and motives in search engine optimization, when the same terms cannot seem to catch on in public discussions of hacking, cracking and computer security. Makes me jealous.
The terms have been pretty much universally adopted by the SEO "community".
I have a friend that is constantly trying to get his blog up in the rankings. A site he refers to is http://www.warriorforum.com/ and the black hat/white hat distinction is pretty constantly discussed. I think the real trouble is when amateurs think a black hat SEO campaign is actually a white hat one.
At least my friend asks questions of me before doing some of this stuff; it's like Amway and spammers rolled into one. Crazy stuff.
Imagine if your employer didn't withhold federal income tax from your paycheck. Now it's tax time, and you owe all that tax plus penalties because you didn't pay your income tax throughout the year. Is the federal government "looking for a handout?" No. You have unpaid tax liability, plain and simple.
Yeah, but it's you that pays the tax, not your employer.
It is not a loophole. It is a provision of the US Constitution that Amazon does not have to pay these taxes.
Just to point out a matter of terminology: paying taxes and remitting taxes are different things. These aren't taxes that Amazon really owes; their customers who are citizens of Texas do. This cannot really be disputed from a legal standpoint; Use Tax or Sales Tax is mandatory... you have to pay one or the other. According to Texas, Amazon was supposed to collect the sales tax on behalf of the state then remit them to the state on behalf of the customer. Amazon disputes that they had an obligation to do so.
Sorry to be nit-picky but this is kind of an important distinction. This is not in any way tax evasion on Amazon's part. The thing I want to know is if Amazon settled and paid the taxes how could they recover this money from the customers who were supposed to pay it?
Here's an article about the issue. This is a bit dated now but it's not likely you'll find much more; this has been kept pretty quiet overall.
Essentially the dispute centers on Amazon having the distribution center held by a subsidiary which "just services orders from another company, nudge nudge, wink wink". This, however, isn't the entire issue as Texas billed for taxes as far back as 2005 but the distribution center opened in 2006, as I understand it. I'm not a lawyer so perhaps there's a fine shading of case law that affects this.
Amazon's filed suit demanding an audit of the tax bill but this sort of crap is something they play hardball over pretty regularly. Remember that the law works quite differently when you have enough money to fight it. Friggin' corrupt system, I say. I'm all for collecting sales tax on all orders but, as others have said, this is expensive for smaller online retailers to manage so it's a non-starter.
Folks need to remember that businesses are not compensated for collecting, accounting for, banking and then remitting these taxes. This is something that's not without cost yet we're obligated to do it for no benefit to ourselves. Before saying there's benefit from paying taxes, keep in mind these are taxes owed by customers, not the businesses themselves. We business owners typically pay taxes on top of this for ourselves; handling those shouldn't be compensated.
Also, Apple is more than happy to have one of their products kill off another. They had no problem letting the iPhone kill the iPod. It is better for your own products to do that then your competitor's.
They traded the iPods with some level of lock-in (iTunes purchases only and then only for those who didn't want to bother moving them to CDs) for a device with more functionality that's locked in via a contract with AT&T. That's the key here; they got all the benefits of an upgrade path with the added perks of new market share added also.
Not to mention that it certainly didn't kill the iPod at all. Apple is run by marketing gods; it's fascinating and sickening at the same time.
Apparently bloggers aren't considered journalists in Kuwait, which is how the company is getting away with this. The shortsightedness of this is appalling from a business standpoint. For those who are unaware, Kuwait overall is about the size of New Jersey but something along the lines of 90% of the population live in and around Kuwait City. Nothing like alienating a large segment of your potential customer base, eh?
No, you have to buy SB (Slashdot Bucks) in chunks of $10. You may then use 1.99 SB for this feature. At some point, you'll have too little SB to actually use and then either Slashdot gets more of your money or you have to deal with the fact that you essentially gave them some for free.
Next we'd have Chinese SB farmers somehow making money off this. *laughs*
PCs don't break. I have never retired a PC because it broke down. I have piles of old PCs that work just fine. (And yes some of them are 20 years old.)
Fascinating anecdote but PCs do break. Just in the last month I've seen dead RAM, dead CPUs, dead hard drives and a motherboard that went seemingly for no reason whatsoever. Granted, I see far computer problems than most considering it's my job to deal with problems but as a self employed geek equivalent to a doctor in private practice I see far fewer than many in corporate IT and such.
That said, I do see far more computers with software issues than hardware issues.
Everything I know about Oracle makes this absolutely unsurprising. It looks to me as though they're trying to cut out all the "competition" in order to ride out the recession.
Here's a great article on the almost baffling admission by Washington state's governor that "she "has no path forward". This statement was in direct response to the voters' No Tax Hike message this year. Washington State's so-called leadership has failed to lead. Hopefully the voters will remember this next election cycle.
So clothing isn't an essential of living now? Honestly, I realize some truly aren't but there's got to be some mechanism for allowing the poor to afford decent clothing without being taxed on them.
I live in Seattle (which is in Washington state, of course) and am often flabbergasted at how few people here have any clue how much they pay in sales taxes each year. They pay it on toilet paper, personal grooming supplies and so on. It's amazing how it adds up even on basic needs.
That's a darned good point; even those "properly" trained will still lock up in their first emergency. The real issue is you never know just who's going to freeze and who won't.
The other side of those signs, I suspect, is an attempt to limit the building owner's perceived liability in case of injuries.
I realize the "wing house" is not really just an intact airplane but as others have posted, folks apparently have been known to use them intact as well. Since these need to get up to a rather high altitude, I assume they're fairly well insulated already. I do wonder, though, how much insulation would be left and if it's truly suitable as a home (aside form the oddball nature of it) without major remodeling aside from putting up walls for rooms.
I also wonder if the $50,000 included transportation costs. Sheesh, for that matter, will all the new young urbanites end up essentially living in the modern equivalent of expensive trailer parks?
Slashdot Mirror
It's also on Netflix as well as on Hulu. Well worth watching; it's one of those that, like Firefly, got cancelled too early. They also did a movie later (made for TV, I think) that was pretty good.
Surely concerns with larger projects which could not be split could be nationalised instead?
What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Store
I'm not sure the GP realized there are such a limited number of these but they do exist. I can't speak as to the service the AC mentioned but it's within the realm of possibility, I suppose.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is a legal principle relating to one's liability for an action that violates a criminal offense. It has nothing to do with entering a contract with another. Even then it's not absolute. There are explicit exceptions for willfulness in many statutes and there was one case back in the 60s, I believe it was that made it to the SCotUS which held that you have to have a likelihood of knowing an offense is a crime in order to be held liable. I'm too lazy to look it up but it's probably on Wikipedia.
The FDIC covers individual depositors, not the banks themselves. I won't get into why we "had to" bail out the banks as that's kind of a losing argument all around, IMO.
I'm sure that'd be doable if we had infinite resources with which to do it. Of course, this is kind of the same issue with basic resupply: COST.
You're forgetting the real power of a database such as Facebook has: the ability to sell it to others directly. Most Facebook users see ads and think that's all their data is used for. That doesn't mean it's the only source of revenue.
Computers can give you a reasonable idea since they are unsubsidized.
Horse hockey! Haven't you ever had to clean extra "value added" crap off a computer? I certainly have; that shit subsidizes PCs all the time. No PC manufacturer I am aware of operates without this stuff. If they did it'd be great to be able to compare their pricing with, say, Dell's.
I was speaking to a real vulcanologist that works at Mt St Helens a while ago. The current thinking is it's not so much the heat energy alone as gas buildup that causes these massive eruptions. The heat is apparently a small part of it but the amount of gases dissolved in the material is what tends to make eruptions happen. When there's not enough gas in the material, it stops erupting, they now think.
It sounds to me as though major eruptions are kind of like what happens when you shake a soda then pop the lid while the constant bubbling ones such as we see at St Helens lately is more like what happens when the carbonation just bubbles and your straw slowly climbs out of the glass. The conversation was one of those "well, duh!" moments to me that once you're told about it the whole thing makes so much more sense than before. When I said so, he laughed and said much the same thing happened to him when his colleague came up with it.
*smack*
You owe me a clean screen and keyboard. I'd JUST taken a drink of coffee. You have any idea how much my nasal passages hurt now?
Parents can do almost anything to their kids within the law and even in the criminal situations they rarely get caught and when they do I bet the majority of them do not get a proper response.
There is nothing wrong with keyloging YOUR kid. The other issues are just that-- OTHER ISSUES. It may prove useful to have a log of the kids messages if something goes wrong later. The only real big related issue is the privacy rights of the child, including the use of such info by police to nail your child for something... we are not intelligently handling children in the legal system anymore.
The GP is correct you have th be careful but you can do pretty much anything you wish to a computer you own. Since minors have no property rights, their computers are yours to do as you wish with. I agree there's nothing wrong with keylogging your kid, although there are better ways to deal with most kids. I think keylogging is a last resort, though. My children have been told they have no expectation of privacy; at any time I can and will look at anything and everything on their computers or cell phones. While I rarely do, the fact that they don't ever expect privacy makes them think twice before doing risky things.
No, this is more about protecting from reprisal those we've asked (OK, or blackmailed into or paid) to provide us intelligence. This protection is standard practice amongst all nations and has been for centuries. Think of it as a confidential informant in a criminal investigation if you must but these people are often killed when outed so let's not fuck around with this one, OK?
That being said, I support Wikileaks in general. I just don't think publishing names such as these should ever be allowed or even considered. It's naive in the extreme.
I find it interesting that they are using 'black hat' and 'white hat' to distinguish between different actions and motives in search engine optimization, when the same terms cannot seem to catch on in public discussions of hacking, cracking and computer security. Makes me jealous.
The terms have been pretty much universally adopted by the SEO "community".
I have a friend that is constantly trying to get his blog up in the rankings. A site he refers to is http://www.warriorforum.com/ and the black hat/white hat distinction is pretty constantly discussed. I think the real trouble is when amateurs think a black hat SEO campaign is actually a white hat one.
At least my friend asks questions of me before doing some of this stuff; it's like Amway and spammers rolled into one. Crazy stuff.
Imagine if your employer didn't withhold federal income tax from your paycheck. Now it's tax time, and you owe all that tax plus penalties because you didn't pay your income tax throughout the year. Is the federal government "looking for a handout?" No. You have unpaid tax liability, plain and simple.
Yeah, but it's you that pays the tax, not your employer.
It is not a loophole. It is a provision of the US Constitution that Amazon does not have to pay these taxes.
Just to point out a matter of terminology: paying taxes and remitting taxes are different things. These aren't taxes that Amazon really owes; their customers who are citizens of Texas do. This cannot really be disputed from a legal standpoint; Use Tax or Sales Tax is mandatory ... you have to pay one or the other. According to Texas, Amazon was supposed to collect the sales tax on behalf of the state then remit them to the state on behalf of the customer. Amazon disputes that they had an obligation to do so.
Sorry to be nit-picky but this is kind of an important distinction. This is not in any way tax evasion on Amazon's part. The thing I want to know is if Amazon settled and paid the taxes how could they recover this money from the customers who were supposed to pay it?
Here's an article about the issue. This is a bit dated now but it's not likely you'll find much more; this has been kept pretty quiet overall.
Essentially the dispute centers on Amazon having the distribution center held by a subsidiary which "just services orders from another company, nudge nudge, wink wink". This, however, isn't the entire issue as Texas billed for taxes as far back as 2005 but the distribution center opened in 2006, as I understand it. I'm not a lawyer so perhaps there's a fine shading of case law that affects this.
Amazon's filed suit demanding an audit of the tax bill but this sort of crap is something they play hardball over pretty regularly. Remember that the law works quite differently when you have enough money to fight it. Friggin' corrupt system, I say. I'm all for collecting sales tax on all orders but, as others have said, this is expensive for smaller online retailers to manage so it's a non-starter.
Folks need to remember that businesses are not compensated for collecting, accounting for, banking and then remitting these taxes. This is something that's not without cost yet we're obligated to do it for no benefit to ourselves. Before saying there's benefit from paying taxes, keep in mind these are taxes owed by customers, not the businesses themselves. We business owners typically pay taxes on top of this for ourselves; handling those shouldn't be compensated.
Also, Apple is more than happy to have one of their products kill off another. They had no problem letting the iPhone kill the iPod. It is better for your own products to do that then your competitor's.
They traded the iPods with some level of lock-in (iTunes purchases only and then only for those who didn't want to bother moving them to CDs) for a device with more functionality that's locked in via a contract with AT&T. That's the key here; they got all the benefits of an upgrade path with the added perks of new market share added also.
Not to mention that it certainly didn't kill the iPod at all. Apple is run by marketing gods; it's fascinating and sickening at the same time.
According to the complaint, it's basically the franchisee for Kuwait that's suing, not the Benihana Corporation.
Here's a somewhat prro English translation of what amounts to the complaint in Kuwaiti courts.
http://www.248am.com/files/courtorderenglish.pdf
Apparently bloggers aren't considered journalists in Kuwait, which is how the company is getting away with this. The shortsightedness of this is appalling from a business standpoint. For those who are unaware, Kuwait overall is about the size of New Jersey but something along the lines of 90% of the population live in and around Kuwait City. Nothing like alienating a large segment of your potential customer base, eh?
you have the buy that option for $1.99.
No, you have to buy SB (Slashdot Bucks) in chunks of $10. You may then use 1.99 SB for this feature. At some point, you'll have too little SB to actually use and then either Slashdot gets more of your money or you have to deal with the fact that you essentially gave them some for free.
Next we'd have Chinese SB farmers somehow making money off this. *laughs*
PCs don't break. I have never retired a PC because it broke down. I have piles of old PCs that work just fine. (And yes some of them are 20 years old.)
Fascinating anecdote but PCs do break. Just in the last month I've seen dead RAM, dead CPUs, dead hard drives and a motherboard that went seemingly for no reason whatsoever. Granted, I see far computer problems than most considering it's my job to deal with problems but as a self employed geek equivalent to a doctor in private practice I see far fewer than many in corporate IT and such.
That said, I do see far more computers with software issues than hardware issues.
Everything I know about Oracle makes this absolutely unsurprising. It looks to me as though they're trying to cut out all the "competition" in order to ride out the recession.
Here's a great article on the almost baffling admission by Washington state's governor that "she "has no path forward". This statement was in direct response to the voters' No Tax Hike message this year. Washington State's so-called leadership has failed to lead. Hopefully the voters will remember this next election cycle.
So clothing isn't an essential of living now? Honestly, I realize some truly aren't but there's got to be some mechanism for allowing the poor to afford decent clothing without being taxed on them.
I live in Seattle (which is in Washington state, of course) and am often flabbergasted at how few people here have any clue how much they pay in sales taxes each year. They pay it on toilet paper, personal grooming supplies and so on. It's amazing how it adds up even on basic needs.
That's a darned good point; even those "properly" trained will still lock up in their first emergency. The real issue is you never know just who's going to freeze and who won't.
The other side of those signs, I suspect, is an attempt to limit the building owner's perceived liability in case of injuries.
I realize the "wing house" is not really just an intact airplane but as others have posted, folks apparently have been known to use them intact as well. Since these need to get up to a rather high altitude, I assume they're fairly well insulated already. I do wonder, though, how much insulation would be left and if it's truly suitable as a home (aside form the oddball nature of it) without major remodeling aside from putting up walls for rooms.
I also wonder if the $50,000 included transportation costs. Sheesh, for that matter, will all the new young urbanites end up essentially living in the modern equivalent of expensive trailer parks?