I'm working on a payroll globalization project for Very Large Company. One reason employees want the option of cheques is to receive bonus/special payouts that they don't have to disclose to their significant other.

Cheques will be around for some years to come. Many of us will live to see their eventual elimination on 'security' grounds, though.

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.

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.

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.

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