- Shred all bills that are not accounts (gas, phone, etc.) - Keep all records that are accounts or income (credit cards, savings, mutual funds, checking, pay stubs). - I keep selected receipts for big purchases, and other tax-deductible things (mostly medical expenses) - Put all paper in a big pile after the accounts are reconciled (I use quicken). Ignore pile as it grows. - At the end of the year, put the big pile of paper on a table, and sort them in to little piles by account. Sort each stack by date, but this will happen most automatically since you are sticking the most recent stuff on top during the year, and you reverse it when exploding out the big pile. I wind up with 20 or so stacks of paper. - Put all the stacks into ONE folder, marked with the year name. - Next year, you stick your taxes in that folder.
Digital scales are quite handy for cooking. I use them more and more often, the more I cook. First, it's really great for things like flour or other loose/granular things where the volume varies wildly, and you want a consistent result. All you have to do is weigh out a few cups of flour, and compare it against the box weight, to see how inaccurate volume can be at times. Cakes and breads dramatically improve with a scale.
Once you figure out the weight of something, you can reuse it, since we tend to the same make recipes a lot. I annotate my most-used recipes with weight. Using a scale also saves dirty measuring cups and spoons, since you can tare the scale, add the new ingredient, and repeat indefinitely.
Netflix works very well over a 1.5M line. I brought my Wii over a friend's house who has a much faster cable modem, and couldn't see any difference in quality. The difference would be trying to stream multiple things at once, I suppose.
Lots of "somebodies" have thought of this, but we have thousands of years of inertia to overcome. Diabetes was realized and diagnosed in ancient times, long before we ever discovered the difference between type 1 and type 2. As a father of type 1 son, I would like nothing better for type 1 to be renamed something without the word "diabetes" in it, but I know it's hopeless. The term diabetes today means "type 2" to the vast majority of people.
As such, we have to deal with the myth that if my 4 year old son, who is skinny as a toothpick and barely has any body fat to put a syringe into, only dieted and exercised more, he wouldn't need insulin, where the reality is that he will die with out it, no matter what his weight it.
Even "type 1" and "type 2" are new terms, and the old ones have not disappeared. It used to be "juvenile" and "adult onset", which was even worse, because in reality adults can get type 1, and children can get type 2. Today, children are getting type 2 due to lifestyle factors, and there is a lot of awareness of this. Still, people are getting confused and think "juvenile diabetes" means "getting type 2 at a young age". I never say my child has "juvenile diabetes" because most people will think that I'm feeding him a steady diet of Hershey bars, instead of thinking that he was just unlucky like a kid with multiple sclerosis. Type 1's face relentless assumption from everyone that the disease is their fault, which is totally untrue.
Actually, less than zero. He paid zero federal and state income taxes, and got something $20,000 back from state/federal due to carrying over paper losses via various paperwork tricks. Yes, he pays other forms of taxes like gasoline and property tax, but that the amount of cash he gets back outweighed all the tax he pays in since he lives in a cheap state with low expenses. Of course he could be lying to me, but I'm not sure why he'd want to. I think his words were "we don't have to pay tax, we get paid to run the business".
Perhaps they are referring to people who get out more than they put in? I'm glad to get a little bit back, just like I'm glad to get my car fixed when I pay insurance. It's called risk management.
However, I know people who pay NO TAX at all, and get back many thousands of dollars in refundable credits.
We have the same set up in our town. Free recycling, $2 garbage stickers.
Last year the price went up to $2.50 a sticker. Why? They said that people recycled too much. The trash load went down significantly, and so they sold a lot less stickers. The tipping fees to the town were apparently a fixed price for some fixed limit, but the reduced trash load did not qualify for a cheaper contract or whatever. As the sticker count went down, the funding account didn't fill up as fast enough. So, the price had to go up!
Not all needles are created equal. Insulin syringes are tiny because it's subcutaneous, not muscular or vascular. Mosquito bites hurt more than an insulin shot. If my 4-year could handle it, you can too.
This isn't hundreds of threads that can run arbitrary code paths like a CPU, you have to totally redesign your code, or already have implemented parallel code so that you already run a number of threads that all do the same thing at the same time, just on different data.
The threads all run in lockstep, as in, all the threads better be at the same PC at the same time. If you run into a branch in the code, then you lose your parallelism, as the divergent threads are frozen until they come back together.
I'm not a big thread programmer, but I do work on threading tools. Most of the problems with threads seems to come with threads doing totally different code paths, and the unpredictable scheduling interactions that arise between them. GPU coding a lot more tightly controlled.
I preordered the Wii disc, and got it the first day. The quality is excellent. Not as good as a EDTV DVD, but damn good, and they correctly send anarmorphic widescreen versions, so I haven't had to screw around with view mode settings. Our Wii is set in widescreen mode and it all Just Works. Our DSL is quite slow (1.5 mbit, tops) and there is absolutely no stuttering or tearing. Much better than using our PC with Silverlight.
The kids are going nuts streaming tons of Scooby Doo (even my 3-year old can pick cartoons to watch), I'm catching up on 30 Rock, the wife is geeking out to Farscape.
To compete with the people who are doing it for profit. I have some small amount of control over my own information. If I "opt out", then plenty of other companies will do it for me.
Unlocking the platinum (expert) guitar icon at the end of the ESL2 requires playing 84(ish) tunes in a row, including Panic Attack, which is 8 minutes of fast, relentless guitar. That's more than enough endurance for me.
Where does he say he's using wildcards? You have manually make new addresses without a wildcard address. I've been doing the above for years with no wildcard addresses.
I agree, since houses in good communities are free and good paying jobs easy to come by, it's really a wonder that everyone doesn't just live 1 minute away from their job. Each time you a change job, all you have to do is simply find a new house you like, kill the person who lives there and steal his deed. Then find a moving company, kidnap their children until they move your stuff there. Unlike the house owner, you have to kidnap the kids instead of just killing them, because if they're dead they obviously can't move your stuff for you.
Or maybe, just maybe, the economics are different for other people in different places.
The zero'th big reason is if you withhold too little during the year, you will get fined. For people whose income varies from season to season or month to month, withholding more than expected amount is insurance against fines when they have some unexpectedly good times.
Yes, LOW. Stop it using these stupid "X% of total tax" things make it look like the wealthy are unfairly taxed. All it does is show that 1% of people have 25% of the total assets. Income inequality is fine, but don't piss on the poor and tell them it's raining. If people pay the same share regardless of their income or assets then it's regressive and hurts people who make less.
This isn't splitting a restaurant bill, where you only consume the portion you pay for.
If you're going camping with your kids, you don't make them carry 1/4th of the total load and break their backs while you whistle Dixie, you give them a load proportional to their ability to carry it. That's because you are sharing a burden together that benefits everyone.
It's not even a technical reason, like a data format change. They openly discontinue Quicken's online services after 3 years, just for Mo Money. Years ago, they changed the protocol from directly downloading from your bank, to proxying through Intuit. And, they keep moving features from Basic into Deluxe. Gone are the days of buying Basic and using it for a few years. Now you have to get the latest and greatest, and oops, now you have upgrade your old computer too! Isn't that nice?
You don't even have to click the freakin' widget! I scroll my screen with the keyboard. As soon as a Flash object scrolls *under* the mouse (which are basically everywhere), it proceeds to eat the keystrokes, and I can scroll no more. It cannot tell the difference between a mouse that moves over the area to decide I am going to interact, it's merely sufficient for something to scroll underneath it. This should be a two-second fix.
So many things do this now, that I have to carefully "park" the mouse over the damn scrollbar in order to scroll normally!
Right on, but it's even worse than that. About a month ago, FB changed all the default privacy settings again. It means most albums are now open to the world, unless you go through and check every single album. I've been able to look through albums of friends-of-friends, even without the tagged-friend loophole.
Have I told anyone yet? Nah. People who post embarrassing photos online should learn the hard way.
Sigh. Either you haven't thought very deeply about human factors, or you're young enough that you've never had to experience any sort of back, neck, or eye pain.
I don't know about you, but when I sit and read a book for a few hours, I don't put it at arm's length on a coffee table or desk. Instead, I sit on the couch and drop it into my lap, resting my it arms. I'll switch positions around (everyone does it unconsciously) to keep from getting stiff in one position. Bring it up close to my eyes for some time, so your eyes focus at different length and don't get so tired. Handing a laptop to your friend sitting next to you, to say "Hey, check this out" is geeky and awkward. And so on.
I'll say it again, a clamshell design is a total fail for this sort of informal use. My old body starts hurting after a short time trying to use a laptop in such a way.
A phone is valuable because it's always on you, but it doesn't make a very good multitasking computer or book reader. A laptop is valuable because it's powerful, stores a lot of energy, and can multitask, but it doesn't make for a very good computer in the living room. There is an unmet need for something like that, something I really didn't notice until I had a laptop and cell phone -- which was only until very recently. For people like my sister, who don't use a land line or desktop, and multitask their computer use with everything else, it's going to be a hit. She _never_ sits at a desk to use her computer, ever. The laptop is there on the couch, 24/7.
If it's fashionable enough, Apple is going to cry all the way to the bank on this.
Slashdot Mirror
I do a fairly low-tech approach:
- Shred all bills that are not accounts (gas, phone, etc.)
- Keep all records that are accounts or income (credit cards, savings, mutual funds, checking, pay stubs).
- I keep selected receipts for big purchases, and other tax-deductible things (mostly medical expenses)
- Put all paper in a big pile after the accounts are reconciled (I use quicken). Ignore pile as it grows.
- At the end of the year, put the big pile of paper on a table, and sort them in to little piles by account. Sort each stack by date, but this will happen most automatically since you are sticking the most recent stuff on top during the year, and you reverse it when exploding out the big pile. I wind up with 20 or so stacks of paper.
- Put all the stacks into ONE folder, marked with the year name.
- Next year, you stick your taxes in that folder.
Digital scales are quite handy for cooking. I use them more and more often, the more I cook. First, it's really great for things like flour or other loose/granular things where the volume varies wildly, and you want a consistent result. All you have to do is weigh out a few cups of flour, and compare it against the box weight, to see how inaccurate volume can be at times. Cakes and breads dramatically improve with a scale.
Once you figure out the weight of something, you can reuse it, since we tend to the same make recipes a lot. I annotate my most-used recipes with weight. Using a scale also saves dirty measuring cups and spoons, since you can tare the scale, add the new ingredient, and repeat indefinitely.
My smartphone was $80 used on ebay, and is $55/month unlimited data/text -- I'm not sure where you get your low-end smartphone plans from.
Netflix works very well over a 1.5M line. I brought my Wii over a friend's house who has a much faster cable modem, and couldn't see any difference in quality. The difference would be trying to stream multiple things at once, I suppose.
Lots of "somebodies" have thought of this, but we have thousands of years of inertia to overcome. Diabetes was realized and diagnosed in ancient times, long before we ever discovered the difference between type 1 and type 2. As a father of type 1 son, I would like nothing better for type 1 to be renamed something without the word "diabetes" in it, but I know it's hopeless. The term diabetes today means "type 2" to the vast majority of people.
As such, we have to deal with the myth that if my 4 year old son, who is skinny as a toothpick and barely has any body fat to put a syringe into, only dieted and exercised more, he wouldn't need insulin, where the reality is that he will die with out it, no matter what his weight it.
Even "type 1" and "type 2" are new terms, and the old ones have not disappeared. It used to be "juvenile" and "adult onset", which was even worse, because in reality adults can get type 1, and children can get type 2. Today, children are getting type 2 due to lifestyle factors, and there is a lot of awareness of this. Still, people are getting confused and think "juvenile diabetes" means "getting type 2 at a young age". I never say my child has "juvenile diabetes" because most people will think that I'm feeding him a steady diet of Hershey bars, instead of thinking that he was just unlucky like a kid with multiple sclerosis. Type 1's face relentless assumption from everyone that the disease is their fault, which is totally untrue.
Actually, less than zero. He paid zero federal and state income taxes, and got something $20,000 back from state/federal due to carrying over paper losses via various paperwork tricks. Yes, he pays other forms of taxes like gasoline and property tax, but that the amount of cash he gets back outweighed all the tax he pays in since he lives in a cheap state with low expenses. Of course he could be lying to me, but I'm not sure why he'd want to. I think his words were "we don't have to pay tax, we get paid to run the business".
Perhaps they are referring to people who get out more than they put in? I'm glad to get a little bit back, just like I'm glad to get my car fixed when I pay insurance. It's called risk management.
However, I know people who pay NO TAX at all, and get back many thousands of dollars in refundable credits.
They can always find someone that they desire.
There is a huge difference between "having any man they desire" versus "having some man that they desire, anytime".
ConnectBot lets you ssh anywhere without rooting. As for root, it's not as useful as it seems once you have CyanogenMod installed.
We have the same set up in our town. Free recycling, $2 garbage stickers.
Last year the price went up to $2.50 a sticker. Why? They said that people recycled too much. The trash load went down significantly, and so they sold a lot less stickers. The tipping fees to the town were apparently a fixed price for some fixed limit, but the reduced trash load did not qualify for a cheaper contract or whatever. As the sticker count went down, the funding account didn't fill up as fast enough. So, the price had to go up!
Not all needles are created equal. Insulin syringes are tiny because it's subcutaneous, not muscular or vascular. Mosquito bites hurt more than an insulin shot. If my 4-year could handle it, you can too.
This isn't hundreds of threads that can run arbitrary code paths like a CPU, you have to totally redesign your code, or already have implemented parallel code so that you already run a number of threads that all do the same thing at the same time, just on different data.
The threads all run in lockstep, as in, all the threads better be at the same PC at the same time. If you run into a branch in the code, then you lose your parallelism, as the divergent threads are frozen until they come back together.
I'm not a big thread programmer, but I do work on threading tools. Most of the problems with threads seems to come with threads doing totally different code paths, and the unpredictable scheduling interactions that arise between them. GPU coding a lot more tightly controlled.
I preordered the Wii disc, and got it the first day. The quality is excellent. Not as good as a EDTV DVD, but damn good, and they correctly send anarmorphic widescreen versions, so I haven't had to screw around with view mode settings. Our Wii is set in widescreen mode and it all Just Works. Our DSL is quite slow (1.5 mbit, tops) and there is absolutely no stuttering or tearing. Much better than using our PC with Silverlight.
The kids are going nuts streaming tons of Scooby Doo (even my 3-year old can pick cartoons to watch), I'm catching up on 30 Rock, the wife is geeking out to Farscape.
To compete with the people who are doing it for profit. I have some small amount of control over my own information. If I "opt out", then plenty of other companies will do it for me.
Unlocking the platinum (expert) guitar icon at the end of the ESL2 requires playing 84(ish) tunes in a row, including Panic Attack, which is 8 minutes of fast, relentless guitar. That's more than enough endurance for me.
I love this 2-Wally story, but it sounds familiar. If that was you posting it before here on /, bravo, submit it to the daily WTF!
In UK English, companies are often considered as plural ("Google are"), while in the US we think of them as singular ("Google is").
Where does he say he's using wildcards? You have manually make new addresses without a wildcard address. I've been doing the above for years with no wildcard addresses.
I agree, since houses in good communities are free and good paying jobs easy to come by, it's really a wonder that everyone doesn't just live 1 minute away from their job. Each time you a change job, all you have to do is simply find a new house you like, kill the person who lives there and steal his deed. Then find a moving company, kidnap their children until they move your stuff there. Unlike the house owner, you have to kidnap the kids instead of just killing them, because if they're dead they obviously can't move your stuff for you.
Or maybe, just maybe, the economics are different for other people in different places.
The zero'th big reason is if you withhold too little during the year, you will get fined. For people whose income varies from season to season or month to month, withholding more than expected amount is insurance against fines when they have some unexpectedly good times.
Yes, LOW. Stop it using these stupid "X% of total tax" things make it look like the wealthy are unfairly taxed. All it does is show that 1% of people have 25% of the total assets. Income inequality is fine, but don't piss on the poor and tell them it's raining. If people pay the same share regardless of their income or assets then it's regressive and hurts people who make less.
This isn't splitting a restaurant bill, where you only consume the portion you pay for.
If you're going camping with your kids, you don't make them carry 1/4th of the total load and break their backs while you whistle Dixie, you give them a load proportional to their ability to carry it. That's because you are sharing a burden together that benefits everyone.
It's not even a technical reason, like a data format change. They openly discontinue Quicken's online services after 3 years, just for Mo Money. Years ago, they changed the protocol from directly downloading from your bank, to proxying through Intuit. And, they keep moving features from Basic into Deluxe. Gone are the days of buying Basic and using it for a few years. Now you have to get the latest and greatest, and oops, now you have upgrade your old computer too! Isn't that nice?
You don't even have to click the freakin' widget! I scroll my screen with the keyboard. As soon as a Flash object scrolls *under* the mouse (which are basically everywhere), it proceeds to eat the keystrokes, and I can scroll no more. It cannot tell the difference between a mouse that moves over the area to decide I am going to interact, it's merely sufficient for something to scroll underneath it. This should be a two-second fix.
So many things do this now, that I have to carefully "park" the mouse over the damn scrollbar in order to scroll normally!
Right on, but it's even worse than that. About a month ago, FB changed all the default privacy settings again. It means most albums are now open to the world, unless you go through and check every single album. I've been able to look through albums of friends-of-friends, even without the tagged-friend loophole.
Have I told anyone yet? Nah. People who post embarrassing photos online should learn the hard way.
Sigh. Either you haven't thought very deeply about human factors, or you're young enough that you've never had to experience any sort of back, neck, or eye pain.
I don't know about you, but when I sit and read a book for a few hours, I don't put it at arm's length on a coffee table or desk. Instead, I sit on the couch and drop it into my lap, resting my it arms. I'll switch positions around (everyone does it unconsciously) to keep from getting stiff in one position. Bring it up close to my eyes for some time, so your eyes focus at different length and don't get so tired. Handing a laptop to your friend sitting next to you, to say "Hey, check this out" is geeky and awkward. And so on.
I'll say it again, a clamshell design is a total fail for this sort of informal use. My old body starts hurting after a short time trying to use a laptop in such a way.
A phone is valuable because it's always on you, but it doesn't make a very good multitasking computer or book reader. A laptop is valuable because it's powerful, stores a lot of energy, and can multitask, but it doesn't make for a very good computer in the living room. There is an unmet need for something like that, something I really didn't notice until I had a laptop and cell phone -- which was only until very recently. For people like my sister, who don't use a land line or desktop, and multitask their computer use with everything else, it's going to be a hit. She _never_ sits at a desk to use her computer, ever. The laptop is there on the couch, 24/7.
If it's fashionable enough, Apple is going to cry all the way to the bank on this.