Posts by Steve Mann

New York lawmakers approve 'Amazon Tax'

Sales Tax and the Outta State Blues

Aaaactually, it's a bit more complex than "You gotta pay sales tax", at least in New York.

On *any* out of state purchase, be it by internet, mail order or nipping over the state line in the old Caddy Coup De Grace for a weekend in Atlantic City, you are expected to pay the difference in sales tax 'twix what you ponied up in local taxes on your tchochkes and what you would have paid if you had bought the same thing in New York.

Observant Register readers (are there any other kind?) will note the inbuilt assumption that you would be paying less tax anywhere else than in NY.

This is because the NY politicos have had an agenda for decades to make NY the most tax-intensive place in the Land of the Free (after tax). Only by doing this can they afford 4300 bux a legover for totty (the actual amount reportedly involved) or half a mill a throw for outside law firms to investigate each other. It's only (other people's) money, after all.

People wonder about the litigious nature of New Yorkers. I hope that it in light of my posting here that behaviour can be seen as the lawful and understandable desire to obtain a rebate by any means possible.

After all, "by any means possible" appears to be the motto of the NY IRS.

Jolly Roger because I just paid my taxes to the Robbin' Bastards.

Dump IE 6 campaign runs afoul of dump IE 6 campaign

Hmm.

I love this thread. Every politically correct web designer will parrot back "don't force the client to yaddayaddayadda" as The Ideal, then a good portion of them turn round and indulge in frothing rants on how best to force people to change their browser.

30-40 percent? That's a powerful amount of potential customers to be telling to piss off. I hope you're selling air when you do it. I doubt anything else is important enough for anyone to spend more than a second or two before goggle-ing for another place to get whatever it is you're selling.

Of course, if you were to include some frame-based button-disabling design and some javascript/hidden field "stay where you are" code, the would-be customer would <i>have</i> to listen. Better add a non-squelchable wav file yelling at them to change browsers too.

Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

He Blinded Me With Science

When I was told by my professor of inorganic chemistry that using stereoisomers we could, for example, make indigestible sugar for dieters (this was 1974 and such stuff was still years away from the supermarket shelves) it was not news. I'd already got the primer on the importance of stereoisomerism in the human body years before from a short story by Arthur C Clarke in which the food was normal but the human being had become mirror-imaged.

It was a killer story.

You can read it for yourself. It's in The Collected Stories Of Arthur C Clarke.

ISBN 0312878605.

Damn.

Disintegrating wind turbine caught on camera

Explosive Bolts on Rotors

This probably came from someone who saw a documentary in the late 70s in which an experimental upward seat ejection escape system for helicopters was shown. I recall the test rig had four blades that let go in two opposed pairs to facilitate pilot ejection sans Cuisinart Effect.

When it worked.

Such a mechanism would never be used where a rotating Blade of Death would be loosed on the voting public, at least, not since the NYC Pan Am Heliport fiasco, so I doubt it would be used on a wind turbine where a loose blade would almost certainly cause a lawsuit.

As it happens the system was never deployed on helicopters either. Getting both opposed blades to detach simultaneously (or at all) was a problem that could result in either a diced pilot or the helicopter thrashing itself to pieces. Another correspondent has ponted out the problem of having pyrotechnics sharing space with lightning. Nothing worse than your helicopter shedding a pefectly good rotor in a storm, I imagine. Then, of course, many helicopters do not have symetrically opposed rotor blades - the Sikorsky Sea King and its brethren spring to mind.

What this has to do with wind turbines escapes me, so I'll stamp it with Paris.

Some firm named Unisys does something

Unisys - Run by Smiffy of The Bash St Kids

Unisys have many great products, a gazillion processor cycles in the business and abso-bloody-lootly no idea how to market what they've got in any way, shape or form. They also have some clunky wince-inducing stuff they put on the front page of their brochures. Go figure. Now, it seems, in a brilliant marketing move, they've hired Vogon poets to write their press releases. Typical.

Their 2200-family series ran to what passes for my mind as the bestest recovery environment I've come across before or since, but do you think the company could sell it at a time when the IT world was begging for that very thing? Could it buggery.

Let's face it, the only reason they became widely used in the UK was that ICL were even worse at customer relations and drove vast numbers of would-be 2900 purchasers into the arms of (then) Sperry Univac with their attitude in print over the future of George.

Unisys could invent perpetual motion tomorrow and their stock would fall in the following month after the marketing campaign for it was launched. If ever a company needed rescuing from itself, it's Unisys.

I blame the move from valves to those new-fangled transblister things.

Space-bubble Bigelow looking to buy fifty Atlas Vs

The Big Question

I rather thought The Big Question concerned the inconveniently local unshielded fusion reactor a mere eight light minutes away and how not to have one's 'nads singed off. Not much shielding value in your average sheet of poly, or even your extremely unaverage, special space poly come to that. Maybe the Mythbusters can adapt their recently demonstrated Lead Balloon technology to the cause.

I for one put little credence in the stories that these inflatable structures will actually form a network of bouncy orbital DeathSats, but would like to welcome our future despotic world ruler anyway on the offchance.

US may shoot down spy sat to safeguard tech secrets

Killer DeathSat Aimed at Own Poplace!

So, reading between the lines of the article, the DeathSat will not only kill someone in the domestic US by crashing into their house at warp 7, but will then kill the rest of the family with a Plume of Doom.

And, if I read aright, the only plausible defense is for the military to hurl an intercontinental ballistic piano at it.

Somehow I just know this will end up being Hillary Clinton's fault.

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells