You're forgetting every county and municipal sales tax there might be.

And let's not forget that each state classifies items differently, and sometimes in really ambiguous ways. Is bottled water considered 'food'? (and thus not taxed in some areas) What food items are considered 'ready to eat' and thus subjected to various 'snack' taxes?

When this came up years ago, there was a push for there to be one body per state responsible for sorting out all of the sales taxes (and to be the point of payment), so that it'd be closer to the problem you describe (although, you forgot DC and territories).

About 9 years ago, I applied for a job at a community college -- I even got a haircut, as it was a management type position. My reason -- the position would have some say over curriculum development.

Just like there's no structured job training for 'software tester' there's also none for 'system admin'. Yes, there are certificate courses, but how do you know if someone breezed through it, or just managed to pass it after taking it 12 times? Some of the best sysadmins I know had degrees that had nothing to do with IT. Some were problem solving (engineering, sciences), others were drop outs (one worked construction for years).

The only ones I know who have certifications are either (1) completely useless; (2) do consulting work or (3) did it because their job required it or promised them a promotion for it. For Oracle DBAs, class #1 wins.

Some of the best sysadmins I know worked progressively more difficult jobs, more like you'd expect in the trades than in university education, but don't have some piece of paper from some institution claiming they actually know anything.

My hope was to pull those taking comp.sci courses, recruit those that had the right personalities for the work, and build up an internal pool of candidates, have 'em work various jobs maintaining the local systems, then place 'em in the various businesses / government agencies in the area (DC metro).

But I never called back for that interview ... oh well ... maybe it's for the best. I still think that community colleges and the like are better for this sort of thing -- 2 years to completion vs. 4 means that you can better respond to the needs of the prospective employers. And some of these tasks are just better taught on the job rather than than sitting in a class reading books about the perfect implementation (that will take forever to build or be too expensive).

There might be a valid reason to explain the plumbing, and that's if what's being proposed might have problems. Then you'll want to explain just enough to them so they can understand what the issue are, so that they can decide if it's an acceptable problem, or something that needs to be dealt with.

Of course, if they've already decided on the ERM software, and all you're doing is criticizing their choice, this might not be useful.

This is *not* a time for proselytizing about open source software ... that's just going to make you look like a nutter and might ruin your credibility. Establish yourself as an expert first, and sometime down the road you can casually mention those sorts of things.

I was at a meeting a year or two ago, and I think it was someone from NIST who gave a report on the status of 'smart meters'. I want to say it was a meeting to discuss how a community of practice should self-organize, and we had some reports on how different groups negotiated standards (IETF, W3C, etc.)

If I remember correctly, there were two or more different protocols for smart meters that had been proposed, and in the process of negotiating the differences made some sort of requirement that the meters had to be able to be upgraded by flashing 'em.

So ... in theory, they'll be upgradable, and won't need to be replaced. Unfortunately, odds are, there will be a limited amount of storage to upgrade 'em, so they probably can't be flashed forever. And they never discussed security protocols, so if someone hack their meter (or someone else's).

My take-away from the article was that training people about security issues worked, relying on application firewalls & automatic code review made things worse.

People: 1 ; Programs : -2. (or people 3, programs 0, depending on how you want to count)

I admit, I haven't read the full thing, but as soon as I made it 1/2 a page in, I had to respond ...

First off, this doesn't seem to be about the federal FOIA, it's about a state's act. And the limit here is that states don't have to respond to people who aren't citizens of their states. The 2006 Lee v. Minner decision (458 F.3d 194) found that Delaware wasn't allowed to have such a clause in their FOIA, so this isn't even going to affect all states.

That being said, I'm an elected municipal official in Maryland (which falls under the Lee vs. Minner ruling, as I understand it) ... and it's possible that we'd get sued under the equivalent Maryland law, as someone recently tried to demand from us *EVERY* *LAST* business transaction that we made for the last 7 years. (I can't remember the exact wording; it's possible that we claim that the report requested was a 'new record' and thus something that didn't exist) Mind you, we have 8 employees, 3 of whom are police officers, and 3 of whom are public works. So that'd mean that we'd have to tie up our accountant or town clerk for weeks to go through all of the records, properly sanitize everything to keep from leaking restricted information (like PII, as we're so small that we have a single system that also handles payroll), which would mean that we couldn't actually serve our citizens in the process.

Why did the person want this it? Because they were starting a website to charge businesses for access to this information.

If a person has a legitimate need for the information, they should be able to get a citizen of the state to file the request on their behalf. How much time has been wasted in Hawaii by responding to birth certificate requests over the last few years?

(note; I have a full time job and don't participate in the day-to-day operations of our town; I have no idea how the request ended up playing out (or if it's finished playing out yet); I believe it was sent to our attorney to deal with)

I'm sure it'll come up sooner or later if you follow Poynter -- they cover journalism / misdeeds of journalists / etc.

They've got a pretty good roundup of criticisms, mostly in regard to some news channels refusing to apologize for their errors.

Both Firefly and Jericho put out comics after the shows were prematurely canceled to help tie up some of the dangling plot elements. Are there any chances of Jeremiah ever being continued in some other form, such as novels or comics?

When Heroes came out (ie, the first season) many of the plot elements reminded me of Rising Stars. The wikipedia page for your comic mentions that there were some issues to movie rights:

The comic itself came to an unexpected halt after issue 21 due to internal arguments between Straczynski and Top Cow. Straczynski claimed he was cut out of the loop on the potential Rising Stars movie

... but that would've been years ago. If this series with Netflix is successful, is there any chance that we might see a similar treatment with Rising Stars?

It's whatever your company gives you. Talk to your HR department.

Personally, I have an education benefit, that I can use for courses, if I have pre-approval from the company.

When I worked for a previous company, there was a fund that I could use for books, and they had the ame deal on courses, but did such a bad job of explaining it (telling me that I would only be reimbursed for college credit courses if I got a high enough grade, but neglected to mention that I had to get approval in advance before I even *started* the course, so I ended up getting shafted for my first two semesters).

When I wored for a university, I could take courses for a nominal fee, but due to sloppy paperwork, when the university sold off their certificate classes, they didn't have records of the fact that I was a staff member at the time, so I ended up with months of dealing with a collections agency that was sent after me.

Almost all of them had other limits on using the benefits -- for example, some companies require you to be an employee for 12 months before you can take classes; others will require you to pay back the benefit if you quit within some time frame after taking the class (12-18 months is typical, but I've heard of places that do 24 or 36 months) . One of the companies required me to explain how the course was relevant to my job.

You should also talk to your manager -- there are cases where some courses might make it more likely for you to get a promotion or a better raise when annual reviews come around. (and it'd be a good idea to get it in writing, if you're thinking about paying out of pocket for it).

As for the paying for time at the classes -- I've only had it when it was either a workshop attached to a conference, so only 1-2 days, or training that I was specifically sent to at the request of the company (typically 3-5 days, although there was one case where it was two weeks back-to-back, but it was 2 classes). I've also had them pay my time to take certification tests, when it was required as part of my job.

I have never had a company pay my time when I was taking college level classes that I elected to go to, even if it was related to my job. They did, however, let me take off in the middle of the day to go to classes at the local university, and were otherwise understanding when I shifted my schedule around.

Yeah, I've been noticing a decline in the writing skills of the /. editors as of late

Writing? It doesn't require writing ... it requires editing -- figuring out how to get the original submission into a form that people can easily consume so that they might be inclined to read the articles linked to and/or comment on it.

If this is blog spam, from a group rated as a 'journalism group', I would've expected copy to start with, or at least for them to have done sufficient research to determine what the norms are for summaries on the site they're submitting to.

I've given up on expecting slashdot editors to actually do any editing. Now that they show the text of the original submission, I'd actually be interested in which of the 'editors' on here actually make any edits to the submissions.

#1 is called an overlay journal (they don't actually host the content, they just review & link to stuff on other servers).

#2 is effectively part of what Priem and Hemminger suggested as a Decoupled Journal, in which you break up the various tasks and pay for them individually.

#3 is is just simple bibliometrics / scientometrics, which are easy so long as you have sufficient identifiers (DOI, bibcode, etc.), and can agree on what the proper thing to measure is.

He has no idea what he's talking about, as he only sees the problems at the surface.

But there are some folks who have given better suggestions that are actually involved in the publication process. Take for instance Jason Priem and Brad Hemminger's article last year, "Decoupling the Scholarly Journal" (note -- which actually *was* peer reviewed, unlike someone using Slashdot as editorial / soapbox.)

For those not familiar with the authors, Priem is one of the people behind the Altmetrics Manifesto, which argues for other way to measure the value of scientific articles other than h-index and impact factor. Unfortunately, a lot of tenure & promotion committees look at those as being their all important measure.

There *are* folks working on the issue ... I'm involved with it from the side of data citation. Some of the societies care ... I know AAS (one of the societies I'm a member of) published a statement that they open access to anything 12 months old automatically, and have for years.

But we've got it now where the publishers are paying the societies for the right to publish their journals ... and for societies who were losing members due to the recession, a few of 'em took the bait. It's going to take some time to figure out what the best models and infrastructure are for each discipline, who's going to pay for it, and for all of the existing contracts to run out.

What they now need to do is compare Wii games vs. other controllers, to see if that's a significant factor. And determine which games are best. (eg, Trauma Center: Second Opinion).

I'd also be interested if someone made some sort of simulator/trainer or the laproscopic tools, or if that would make things worse. (as they couldn't 100% recreate the controls in software alone).

Is it the spatial reasoning training (from the 2004 study's Super Monkey Ball), the controls (the recent Wii study), or just simply unwinding and relaxing playing video games the important factor? Or is it a combination?

Can we develop fun, engaging games that improve skills that are useful for other professions? (eg ... can Boom Blox help the demolition industry? can Order Up! help people with multitasking?)

One of my friends from high school lived in a house across the highway from the Beretta factory in Accokeek, Maryland:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Benelli+USA&hl=en&ll=38.649305,-77.036712&spn=0.013155,0.021586&cid=4117604210822074107&gl=US&t=m&z=16&iwloc=A

Google lists it as 'Benelli', which is owned by Beretta, but the road is 'Beretta Drive'