Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: End of traffic jams? (Score 1, Interesting) 648

by Joiseybill (#39969041) Attached to: How Would Driver-less Cars Change Motoring?

How anyone thinks this will be the end of traffic is beyond me.
and +1 insightful for first 2 or 3 that if this happens, it will be the end of personally-owned vehicles.

Traffic is a result of ( volume of cars) > (capacity of road).
Unless these driverless cars can also change work schedules, the majority of people will still be hitting the roads at the same time.
Heck, we can see this now. In any larger city, we all know how internet performance degrades after 4PM when the tweens & teens get home from school, and on weekends when the rest of us are fragging those little buggers online. Wait for next Sunday (Mother's Day, at least in US) when all the Skype, oovoo, and other voip calls are getting placed. If the algorithms that govern ethernet collisions have not eliminated "traffic" delays, how is Google going to eliminate traffic with reality-based steel& rubber boxes that cannot be resent if the 'packet' doesn't reach a destination address?

Besides, I take my "it will happen in the future" clues from the Sci-Fi of today.
I haven't seen anything with (plentiful cars) && (no traffic)
  - Blade Runner, Futurama, The Fifth Element, Dr.Who" gridlock", Total Recall, and probably many more.
Traffic may be more organized, but it will still be dense traffic.

Comment: Re:Costco (Score 1) 350

by Joiseybill (#39930433) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Printing Digital Photos?

echo all the "Costco " posts; several other chains are adequate too.

However, as parent points out, you can request a photobook, canvas, etc.
    (mod parent +1 informative)

My biggest issue with hard-copy photos & other data is storage & retrieval.
If you want to have a hard-copy around in 20 years to hand to your son, immediately put the photos into a book or other format designed for long-er term storage, and for occasional handling. Plastic covers or sleeves are nice, but nearly all I have seen eventually change chemically; the ink gets stuck to resins in the plastic, the plastic cracks from light or oxidization, or they just alter the color of the photo, requiring the photo to be touched repeatedly and replaced in the holder.
    Consider your options, and at least separate pages with acid-free paper or tissue paper.

Books are easier to keep organized and more easily put somewhere & retrieved when you want it.
-- unless your world isn't like mine, with envelopes & small boxes of developed 35mm film, photos, 2nd copies of photos, half-finished photo albums, even Dad's old Kodak slide projector hidden somewhere in the eaves of the garage.

Comment: Re:Calling B.S. on this one... (Score 3, Insightful) 301

Echo: Bravo - Sierra
Publicity / maybe a local story "with legs"

BN sells books on Metaspolit, wardriving, and even "Steal magazines.

    Idea: maybe if one or two complaints causes this kind of reaction, imagine if their phones were to experience the /. phenomenon and just 0.05% of us complained, say about the sadism and child abuse in "The Hunger Games", or the mediocrity of the last Moby album?

Can we use the power of /. for the good of society? !

Nah.. nevermind.. no profit involved. Bask to work.

Comment: Re:For this you want a professional product (Score 5, Insightful) 387

by Joiseybill (#39634091) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Open Source Tax Software?


BS. I have a 9-to-5, have a mortgage, play in the stock market, do contracting on the side, and do my own taxes. And I'd say I've just described more than what 90% of US taxpayers need to file. And seriously? Mind-numbingly easy. Painfully easy. Embarrassing-that-professionals-do-that-for-a-living easy. ...
Doing ones own taxes involves nothing harder than "add up all the box 2s on your W2s and box 4s on your 1099s and enter that total on line 62 of your 1040". Totally mechanical crap that doesn't require the least bit of thought or familiarity with tax law. ... ...
For the rest of us, don't try to make this sound harder than the reality. Plug and frickin' chug, baby!

@pla: +1 because you are a 1%-er. ( intended as a wake up; I can't afford the 1% moniker, maybe I'm in the top 10)
    Sure, for the /. audience, the "algorithm" of following the instructions, including branches.. plugging & chugging when we fill in variables, and making an informed decision on deductibles - is all likely within our grasp.

However, look around at the rest of the country.
Most Americans cannot balance a checkbook [1], [2].

The basic tax guide "Publication 17" is over 300 pages long. [3]
The instructions for the basic 1040 form is at 100 pages [4].

Just answering the questions "What's New?", "Do I have to file", and "Where do I file" ( [4] pages 6-7) incorporate 4 more pages of tables and worksheets referenced in the text ( pp 8-11), and suggest the taxpayer review 10 separate publications for clarifications, outside the 'core' paperwork of Pub 17 and 1040 instructions.
  point: it is complex, even to "just follow the instructions". Not everyone is the sort who just jumps in, presses ON, and only looks for manuals after it doesn't work. ( I am.. but not everyone is.)

If you are lucky enough to have a job, and a mortgage, play in the stock market, and do contracting on the side.. you are a pretty smart and fairly motivated person. You can multitask. You can prioritize tasks, and see projects through to the finish.
Only 58% of the US population is employed.. or 42% is not. [5] - BLS report " population/employment ratio" .. when it comes to the word "unemployed", the US Govt needs to take a lesson from Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”

Never mind making educated decisions about deductions like work expenses and medical costs. I don't think the average American could fill out the typical medical insurance claim form, never mind read one and extract information for tax purposes.

How many Americans - picked "at random" - would you trust to balance your checkbook, or to fill out your tax forms?
Heck, I don't even trust a "jury of my peers" to render a sensible verdict.
Most folks I have met can't follow a 2 -page recipe in a cookbook, or remember the plot to a 200-page novel unless the movie and/or starred Heath Ledger or Megan Fox.

If every citizen was encouraged to do their own taxes, imagine how much WE taxpayers would be paying to clean that mess up?
Don't give people more credit than they deserve. Look at our last few elections.

Comment: Re:For this you want a professional product (Score 2) 387

by Joiseybill (#39632975) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Open Source Tax Software?

@sjhillman .. "freedom edition" +1 informative
@AC "FUD" -1 NOT
@Loughlia " ...can send you to jail" .. You do realize it is much more likely that you'll just get an interest-bearing permanent debt.
            The IRS and Student Loan providers will work backwards from your Social Security death benefit of $300-ish if they have to. Only in rare cases, where the headlines serve a purpose more than the recovery of the money, - or if there is malice or fraud, does someone actually get jailed on taxes.

and .. the IRS will help with your taxes, also for free.
    http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=202121,00.html .. and the IRS offers links to other "free" filing services, this one works for income up to $57k.

"free" = at no additional costs to the taxes you already presumed to be paying
---
If OP just wanted to fill in forms on a PDF manually - there are dozens of products, including tediously creating a text box in Open Office for each line and item. In fact, the IRS already makes the PDF forms fillable: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
  Actually doing the calculations is where the liability and problems come in.

In my limited experience, making a calculation error or omission on a return set off a chain of events;
first, they re-calculate your taxes and settle up on their terms; then you are a whole lot more likely to be audited for the next 3-4 years.

NHTSA to make in car GPS unusable-> 1

Submitted by
bricko
bricko writes "The recently issued National Highway Transportation Safety Agency guidelines for automakers to minimize distraction for in-vehicle electronics included proposal to freeze maps on navigation systems. No more scrolling maps...just static picture. Now they become non useable

Every current installed navigation system uses the car as a fixed point, and shows the map moving around it. NHTSA wants that changed so as to keep the map fixed. Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image. The recommendation seems to suggest that the position of the car could only be updated every couple of seconds. Likewise, the map could be refreshed once the car has left the currently displayed area.

This recommendation would essentially make navigation unusable. The system could still give an auditory warning for the next turn, but without being able to glance down at the map and see how close the next street is would likely lead to a lot of missed turns and resultant frustration."

Link to Original Source
Transportation

Born to Remain 4

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Americans are supposed to be mobile always pushing on to a new horizon in search of opportunity. In “The Grapes of Wrath,” young Tom Joad loads up his jalopy with pork snacks and relatives, and the family flees the Oklahoma dust bowl for sun-kissed California. But Todd and Victoria Buchholz write that sometime in the past 30 years, Americans — particularly young Americans — have become risk-averse and sedentary with the likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state dropping well over 40 percent since the 1980s. "For about $200, young Nevadans who face a statewide 13 percent jobless rate can hop a Greyhound bus to North Dakota, where they’ll find a welcome sign and a 3.3 percent rate," write the Buchholzs. "Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother." The most startling behavioral change among young people is that an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the DMV with newly minted licenses, but the number has now dropped to 65 percent. "In the mid-’70s, back when every high school kid longed for his driver’s license and a chance to hit the road and find freedom, Bruce Springsteen wrote his brilliant, exciting album 'Born to Run,'" write the Buchholzs adding that although it’s easy to blame the high cost of cars or gasoline, Comerica Bank’s Automobile Affordability Index shows that it takes fewer weeks of work income to buy a car today (PDF) than in the early 1980s, and inflation-adjusted gasoline prices didn’t get out of line until a few years ago. "Maybe it’s time to yank out the power cords, pump up the flat bicycle tires or even reopen Route 66 — whatever it takes to get our kids back on the road.""

... I don't like FRANK SINATRA or his CHILDREN.

Working...