Do they provide transportation to and from the office where you need to apply for such an ID?

What about people that are citizens, but lack the documents required to get a state ID? Not everyone is born in a hospital, and not all parents of home births are responsible enough to file the birth certificate -- especially for older births when such things weren't as important as they are today.

Adding barriers of any sort is going to depress legitimate turnout, so it had better be stopping enough fraud to be worth it. If you suppress more legitimate votes than illegitimate, you have failed in making the vote outcome better reflect the desires of those eligible to participate.

Such suppression disproportionately affects the fringes of society -- and we know who *they* vote for, so guess which party pushes voter ID laws...

I'm not sure that running a natural gas generator is going to be sticking it to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

http://www.xkcd.com/834/

I need an investor to write software? Even if I have one, I need to burn valuable startup capital patenting every little aspect of my product that someone might want to patent?

Does "first to file" only make a difference with prior inventors that did not disclose, or does it interfere with prior art that has been made public by way other than patenting?

Personally, if there are multiple independent inventors within a short period of time (disclosed or otherwise, as long as you have evidence that it happened, and was independent), I think that should invalidate the patent altogether as being an obvious progression from the current state of the art. Or at least give joint rights to the patent to everyone involved.

How is that US widget manufacturer contributing an invention to the sum of human knowledge? Why do they deserve a monopoly on the US market for those widgets?

So, they're operating with no good guidelines in a system that makes it hard for S corporations with highly variable income to avoid burdening themselves with fixed salary costs -- and they like it that way, since they opposed the proper fix, which is to recognize that this is all ordinary income, and should be treated as such -- just as the profits of an unincorporated business would be.

Tax liability for profit in an S corporation is distributed to the shareholders, so his income tax return had much more than $24,000 on it. This is about payroll tax, which doesn't have deductions.

What about time spent unable to work because of a restrictive IT environment? Time spent dealing with an out-of-date OS on which I cannot install newer application software that I need (no, I'm not talking about "time wasters")? Waiting for builds on slow hardware? Not being able to effectively work from home (include here the time I wasted trying, in vain, to get some sort of usable VNC setup on top of the old, IT-managed, company-owned Windows laptop that I'm allowed to VPN with, so I could get to my Linux desktop in the office? I eventually got it working, mostly, but it wasn't usable.)?

You can't treat all employees and all jobs the same.

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

There's a difference between "let's have IT support everyone's personal equipment" and "let's not prohibit people from connecting their own computers to the network". Limit it to people considered technically competent, and feel free to reject support requests where the problem appears to not be on your end -- though don't be too quick to dismiss the idea that the problem might be on your end, particularly when dealing with developers and others who ought to have a clue.

To say nothing of when their own personal laptop that they used to surf horse porn last night brings some nasty viruses to work to test the corporate network.

If someone causes a problem due to carelessness, then maybe they lose the privilege of connecting their own stuff. But don't use the firewall as an excuse for crappy internal security.

And finally, what happens when I tell them "Sorry, you're going to need to downgrade your os/office suite/creativity suite/whatever to be compatable with the tools we've already paid thousands of dollars for and aren't going to get a new license just for your special snowflake hardware there".

Accommodating such differences is a separate question from restrictive policies, though I don't see why it's IT's business if some department wants to pay extra for a special license, or for extra IT manpower. If you're asked to pay for it out of your existing budget, that's another matter.

No thanks. I'm happy with standardized hardware.

I'm glad you're happy. Your users -- who may also be highly valued employees that the company wants to be happy -- may not be.

if you keep facebook and yahoo messenger off it (thank god for corporate virus protection that can prevent unauthorized installers/msi files), it'll run nice and quick.

"Runs nice and quick" is not something anyone would ever say about a Windows computer after IT loads their crap on it where I work. Their Linux boxes aren't slowed down quite as much, but they run old software with lots of weird local IT changes (e.g. they override the already old distribution's version of sed with an even older version. They said it was because they thought someone at some point might have depended on that old version, but they didn't seem to have a clue who or why).

We're not limited in the software we can install. We can, in some instances, wipe the OS and install whatever we want and manage it ourselves. But corporate policy prohibits us from connecting a piece of hardware not *owned* by the company to the network, not even to connect from home over the VPN, not even on a virtual machine dedicated to the task.

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007.

My job doesn't involve running "office 2003 or 2007". Or Windows, for that matter. It does involve compiling large codebases, with compilers that grow ever slower in their efforts to make the generated code faster. It also involves a variety of development and communication tasks that benefit from running up-to-date software.

This is work. Do work.

So, does "Fri Jan 14, '11 03:31 PM CST" translate into work hours in your time zone?

Seriously, it's not IT's job to determine the extent to which employees should be allowed to take a break, or what constitutes "work".

Oil consumption will at some point be self-regulating by insufficient supply -- but simply letting that happen on its own schedule would be more disruptive than gradually weaning ourselves off of it, using the revenue raised to accelerate development of alternatives and mitigations, saving more of it for the most important uses later on. Who are you to tell future generations (or the less wasteful members of the current generation, for that matter) that it's our right to suck the oil out as fast as we can?

CO2 is not self-regulating in this manner. We can take explicit action to reduce emissions, hope it magically falls on its own, or endure the consequences. Who are you to tell the rest of us to twiddle our thumbs while you crank out as much CO2 into our atmosphere as you want?

If you live in Aliso Viejo, I'm sorry that you have (or had) idiots in your local government (if you don't live there, then congratulations on the cherry picking), but we are not going to abandon the notion of trying to find collective solutions to collective problems just because someone makes a mistake now and then, or because a few people make grandiose claims of self-sovereignty.

I didn't say that cars are evil -- I was just complaining about an environment where one is dependent on them for most or all mobility.

The rhetorical tone was calibrated by the parent post comparing all dense cities to Indian slums.

Yes, access to a wider variety of shops/services/jobs is nice. That's why people clustered into cities in the first place. You've got a much more energy-intensive way of achieving that.

Are there some things that need to be done out in the country? Yes. Are most of the people that live out in the country or in suburbs (the latter in the larger problem, in terms of cumulative effect) today doing that? No. For those that have a real need to be out there, higher fuel costs are just a cost of that line of work, which you can pass on to your urban customers. Somehow I don't think turning farmland into suburban subdivisions is going to help keep the agricultural system going.

It's not about wanting to interfere with anyone's life -- it's a recognition that we're burning more fossil fuel than we can sustain, and needing to bring down that consumption level. Increasing the cost of burning fossil fuel is an extremely powerful tool for achieving that. Government has already been interfering in our lives by discouraging cities in favor of suburbs through various policy decisions.

Before you complain about the tax money spent on cities, check where that tax money mostly comes from -- and don't forget to count people that live in the country or a suburb but commute into the city.

Carbon footprint/fossil fuel consumption is not the only reason I prefer the city (yes, there's waste there too -- the price of dirty, unsustainable energy needs to increase to motivate reduction in *all* sources of waste to manageable levels), and not all cities are the way you describe. There is a middle ground to be had between Levittown and Manhattan.

How does needing to drive for miles at 80 MPH just to get groceries or go to work make my life better? How do the suburbs magically make driving in snow easier? If I live in the city and don't need to keep a car around permanently, I can rent one for occasional trips to the suburbs/country.

I used to live in a duplex in Pittsburgh. I could walk to the grocery store and other local retail attractions -- or I could drive, it wasn't a problem. Parking was a minor nuisance compared to suburbia, but not that bad, and if the snow was bad I could take the bus or walk. I could walk or take the bus to/from the pub.

There was a large park with lots of wooded trails within walking distance, and if I lived elsewhere I could have arrived by bus or car (plenty of street parking in the area), or of course gone to another of the city's several parks. If I just wanted to see trees and squirrels and such, they were right outside my window. It doesn't have to be all concrete.

Schools don't magically turn to crap because of high floor-to-area ratios or the lack of a large parking lot out front. Urban schools suffer mainly because the tax base has fled to the suburbs, and because of the large percentage of students that don't come from a supportive environment at home (again because the middle class fled). Don't confuse the problems of cities with the problems of poverty. If you reverse the demographic migration (which appears to be happening, at least a little bit), things should improve.

As for buliding equity, you can buy a house or condo in the city, and you can rent in the suburbs.

Is the city -- be it a high-density one like New York or Chicago or a moderate-density one like Pittsburgh -- right for everyone? No. Are there some inconveniences (as well as some conveniences)? Sure, but "savagery" is a bit much unless you're talking about some very specific locations. And small towns can, if done right, can be walkable too. I never said suburbia was uncivilized, just that accessing the civilization that is there requires more energy.

Choices are good, as long as you pay your fair share for claiming luxuries that we don't have the resources to extend to everyone. But for a while now (it's starting to get a bit better lately, but not tremendously so), public policy has been pushing suburbanization through zoning, parking regulations, highway funding, tax policy, energy policy, etc. -- rather than letting development patterns respond to market demand.

I work near Parmer and Anderson Mill, so I'm stuck with the car no matter where I live. I live in the Arboretum area as a compromise between some level of local walkability and bus service, not-too-expensive and not-too-crappy apartments, and being not too far of a drive from work.

It's good to hear about some affordable central options -- Austin does seem to be making an effort to get away from its older zoning practices, though I think there's more that they could do (eliminate McMansion, allow duplexes and garage apartments on smaller lots across the entire central city, upzone transit corridors, relax minimum parking requirements, etc). The neighborhoods (a.k.a. people that already own central houses and want prices to be high and nothing to change) seem to have a pretty strong veto over such things (e.g. all the opt-outs on vertical mixed-use).

I bet there was a lot more activity (percentage-wise) in the core before the age of cheap driving (assuming a sufficiently old town). If (when) driving gets expensive again, you may see a renewed interest in that part of town, as well as in putting in more sidewalks.