Great innovators are the ones who do what everyone said can’t be done. Columbus. Orville and Wilbur. Einstein. Edison.
Great idiots are the ones who attempt to do what everyone said can’t be done. Since they are so much more common, their names are less famous, though a good historian could name a few (shame on Click Here to continue reading.
Chris Fowler’s latest video has a lot of technical juggling on it. Technical juggling is what Chris does best, so this video is definitely a keeper. He’s been working on his spins quite a bit, and it shows. That 5 ball 3 high 1080 degree spin was incredible.
I was working on some new Acer PC’s at work, when I noticed something that struck me as rather suspicious. The default profile is named “Acer User” as you might suspect, but in the Windows Directory structure, it is named “Lenovo User”. As you might already know, Acer and Lenovo are fierce competitors in the Click Here to continue reading.
This week’s poem of the week is Andrew’s poem on the envy of the blind by those who can see.
I have been told that I am a fool for not investing in stocks while I am still young. They say “stocks always deliver positive real returns over any 20 year period.” They say” This hold true even if you buy right before the stock market crashes.”
I wish I could force those people to read this rant.
This is what the speculators are like. Even the best of them tend to build fortunes that don’t last.
The US mint still puts out gold coins that are legal tender. They are mostly sold to collectors but they are still legal tender. Got that?
In fact, if you try to pass of a forged coin as legal tender the full weight of the law can come down on you regardless of whether the gold content is the same as this case proves.
So what happens if you try to pay your employees with legal tender gold coins and report their income based on the face value of the coins (i.e. the amount that the coin is legal tender for)? The full weight of the government comes down on you for tax evasion because the coins are worth more then the amount they are legal tender for. Thankfully, we still have jury system in this country so the company in question did not get convicted.
Still, I think that it is disturbing that they only got off because of a hung jury. In my opinion, it should have been a straight acquittal. How can you make something legal tender and then demand that they value it according to some other standard for tax purposes?
Granted, the construction company that was doing this was trying to help its workers avoid taxes on their wages. But lots of companies use more dubious methods then this to avoid paying taxes and get away with because it is legal. The way that most companies account for stock options would be just one example. Why pick on the blue collar companies?
If you don’t want them reporting their wages according to the face value, don’t make it legal tender. How hard of a fix is that?
Comparing the capabilities of historical figures is always a little ridicules. There are so many variables involved that who is to say that this person is better then that person. But even allowing for that, I think that it is fairly safe to say that Masud was far better commander then Musharraf is.
After all, Masud had the Taliban fought to a standstill for years. And all during this time, Pakistan and radical Arabs were providing heavy support for the Taliban. There are even reliable reports of Pakistani military officers directing artillery fire on Masud positions for the Taliban. And all during this time, Masud received next to nothing from outside sources. It was for being such a pain that they brought guys all the way from Algeria just to assassinate Masud.
Contrast this with Musharraf. He is in command of a massive army that has all kinds of modern weapons. He has received billions of dollars in aid from the US. Presumably the Taliban are not receiving nearly as much aid from outside sources as they use to get. And yet, the Taliban are overrunning Musharraf’s military bases.
It would be one thing if Musharraf was having trouble chasing the Taliban out of the mountains. Every major military in the world has had trouble with guerrillas. America in Vietnam, Russia in Afghanistan, and France in Algeria just to name a few. But it was almost unheard of for the military forces of those nations to lose a fortified military out posts to a guerrilla force. In other words, they were driven out by attrition. Not by losing ground.
By contrast, The Pakistani military is losing ground to Taliban.
I use to think the relatively poor performance of the Pakistani military was because Musharraf did not want to push too hard for domestic reasons. But the latest battle resulted in hundreds of dead Pakistani solders, scores of Pakistani solders held captive, and overrun Pakistani military outposts being used by Taliban. Now the Pakistani government is begging for peace.
Maybe Musharraf has been trying all along to defeat the Taliban and has just been getting his but kicked.
If you don’t already know about Storm, you should educate yourself by reading this blog post. Between the information contained in the post and all the links that it has you should have a pretty good idea of why “Storm” worries people.
We are talking about a virus that is so scary some people are talking about it being the creation of some government or other. I don’t buy that theory at all. Lately, who ever controls Storm has been using it to attack anti-fraud sites. That seems like a pretty petty occupation for a government.
But the fact that Strom was not cooked up by some government should scare people more then any conspiracy theory. Cyber gangs are staring to get sophisticated enough that they are becoming truly dangerous.
These links are pretty serious and they have a lot of eye candy. So don’t bother looking at them unless you have some time to blow.
We will start you off easy with a post from Andrew Cusack’s excellent blog on the rebuilding of a historical church in Maryland. Being the committed and historically minded Click Here to continue reading.