Nice try, white devil. If you were really Chinese, the paraphrase would have read "you", not "your". ESL Chinese rarely say otherwise.

About durn time

At least for a state gas tax. You can't read the odometer and determine what percent of your driving day was in Oregon versus Washington state. Therefore a mileage tax wouldn't work.

They've been pushing for this in Oregon for a while now. As I understand it, the GPS unit isn't a black box, and a lot of time has been put into privacy concerns. I think one solution had it being read at the pump, and then immediately deleting its contents after being read. Very limited range transmission, it only recorded miles/location, and the location was just 'oregon' or 'not oregon'.

However, for a Federal gas tax, I have no idea why'd they'd want to implement GPS. Odometer reading would work just fine. Just have a tax applied to your tag renewal each year based on miles driven.

Either way, I hope they still have some differences in tax amounts based on vehicle size and weight. I shouldn't have to pay as much as a Semi Truck.

If all they want is the tax money, they only need to increase taxes on fuel.

But that would mean SUVs would pay more per unit distance than small cars or hybrids. This would promote energy efficiency, which would make the oil companies mad.

at first i read your post as "assuming Chrysler lasts 10 years" which is also in question.

This is what we do for sales tax, and it seems to work just fine -- there are many cases where sales tax might not apply, and it's up to the purchaser to have the appropriate paperwork to avoid being charged. There are methods both to certify and exemption in an attempt to avoid being charged, and to obtain a refund in the case that tax was improperly collected.

It's also more or less the same system we have for income tax; the IRS assumes that all of your income is subject to taxation unless you provide specific evidence to the contrary.

I'm not saying it would be fun, but it's a pretty standard way to collect taxes -- assume everything is taxable and let individual taxpayers try to justify the reason that some of their activities should not be taxable.

Here in NorCal, temps get a bit milder, less sun (good for sun-sensitive me), hills turn green, air quality is better.

Not to complain in any case; as a Mass. native, every day out here is a joy, weatherwise.

I believe what they are asking for would be equivalent to Draft mode in Word 2007. I think it used to be called something else in previous versions. It's basically a text editor view instead of the simulated page view which shows margins and whatnot.

I can hardly imagine why the lack of such a feature is a "deal breaker."

Of course you are right to caution against the evils of the marketing literature. That's a good thing to remind people of. God knows I never tire of hearing it. Clearly your goal here is to prevent people from believing things about this technology that are not true, and that is laudable.

That is my goal too. My only skin in this game was to make sure that nobody assumed that the Apple C blocks extension was a necessary part of GCD and its use. A naive reader might have read your emphatic claim that "GCD from the programmers point of view within their application IS BLOCKS!", and left the thread not knowing that GCD can also be useful without these smalltalkish additions to C.

Sure, a lot of the real power of GCD rests on these closures, but not all applications need that sort of thing. Sometimes one is blessed with not having to share state among concurrent operations.

Whatever point you were trying to make didn't matter to me, because your whole rant seemed to be based upon a straw-man argument: wherein you would have us believe that someone claimed that apple invented the thread pool or closures or something.

I couldn't find where anyone actually made such claims, so I was tuning out everything except for those things that might misinform people about the system that was open sourced yesterday.

Apple wants you to buy an iPhone to get a (crappy) camera. Despite all the rumors, I don't see an iPod touch with a camera in the near future.

They mention Freerealms, which basically just uses the browser as a character/server selection lobby and executable launcher.

The Cartoon Network's FusionFall MMO is more accurately browser-based, since it uses a Flash-like rich-media plugin.

They don't restore the annotations. The annotations are still on the Kindle, except they're not tied to a book anymore. By restoring the book, the annotations are just linked back by the device. See the lawsuit about the guy who had taken notes on his kindle for a paper on 1984. He still has his notes, he just doesn't know what they are referring to without the book.

As I said before, all I was looking for was a simple 20-second description to show that the interviewee had some idea of how to program in C++, what OO is, etc. Not, "I don't know". Something along the lines of, "uh... it's a thing that has functions and data, which can be private or public so other classes can see them, ..." Is that really that hard?

So if you're such an expert with "template magic", could you say what a template is in 20 seconds? Or would you just say "I don't know"?

If you buy a stolen stereo on the street, it can be confiscated by the government. Same for a stolen car, that's why we have chop shops that launder parts from stolen cars back out into the market. So, granted IP rights may be different than real world stuff (did anybody suffer harm because unauthorized copies were distributed? was anybody deprived of anything? don't quote anything in parentheses, or this sentence, this isn't what i'm here to discuss), if you are in possession of a stolen item, it can be confiscated. It looks like amazon was just trying to jump the gun and possibly assumed that the copies would equate to 'stolen'.

Other side of the coin, let's say that these were just counterfeit copies. I.E. unauthorized copies of a protected item. I feel that this is closer to the truth. Current law says that it is NOT within the government's rights to seize a single counterfeit item if that is the only copy in your possession and you do not intend to sell it. That's why you never hear about a non-seller's collection of bootleg dvd's or fake-gucci purses being siezed. So had amazon realized that, it would have classified the re-seller as a digital counterfeiter and possibly resolved the matter by shutting off transfer rights (to another account, not another device within the account.)