presto8

Last year, I flew United San Francisco to Seoul on a 747. None of the seats in economy class had a monitor in the seat. But they did have Wi-Fi service for the movies.

How can they offer 2x margin? This seems afoul of federal regulations.

From http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/minimummargin.asp:

"When you buy on margin, there are key levels - as governed by the Federal Reserve Board's Regulation T - that must be maintained throughout the life of a trade. The minimum margin, which states that a broker can't extend any credit to accounts with less than $2,000 in cash (or securities) is the first requirement. Second, an initial margin of 50% is required for a trade to be entered. Third, the maintenance margin says that you must maintain equity of at least 25% or be hit with a margin call."

Interest rates are almost always annualized and cited in terms of APR or Annual Percentage Rate. If the APR is not cited, then it is implied.

This makes it easier to compare loans even if they have different terms. The fine print will usually provide the daily interest rate, for example 2.00% APR is 2/365 = 0.005479% per day interest.

Often interest is compounded continuously in which case calculus can be used to compute the exact interest, but it ends up as a famous formula in investing, FV = PV * e^(R*T). In practice, it ends up being very close to daily compounding, but it allows banks to advertise an ever-so-slightly higher APY (annual percentage yield) which is why everybody does it this way for interest paid on deposit accounts.

I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of others: the money from being involuntarily denied boarding (in this case, the $1350 maximum) is cold hard cash. The money they offer to voluntarily give up your seat is vouchers which are only redeemable for travel on the airline and expire after some period (usually 1 year).

The airlines really hate giving up the cold hard cash since it hits their bottom line immediately, whereas the voucher is essentially "free" money.

My understanding is, yes, you can deduct the IRS per-mile (54 cents per mile driven) as a business expense, which will reduce the amount of taxes paid. At least one Uber driver I rode with told me he did this. In fact, not doing it would be missing out on a huge tax benefit!

Example 10-mile trip: 1.25 base fare + (10 miles * 1.15 per mile) = 12.75 * 80% (driver's share) = $10.20 revenue - 5.40 deduction for mileage = $4.80 revenue reported. For somebody in 20% tax bracket, this could yield $1.08 in savings.

Although using the per-mile deduction negates the ability to deduct line item expenses, such as gas, car washes, etc.

Maybe federally, but in Oregon, where I live, restaurant workers make at least state minimum wage ($9.75), and in Portland, the wage is going up to $15.

I feel a good first start would be to get rid of the tipped-job-exception from the Federal minimum wage law and set it a fixed minimum regardless of job classification.

According to C99 spec, the maximum number of bits for the smallest object that is not a bit-field is 8 bits. See "CHAR_BIT" in the C99 spec.

[1] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf

Don't forget things like short-term disability insurance, which is mandatory in California and can be up to $800/year.

The top federal rate on long term capital gains is 15%.

You couldn't pay 0% in taxes, at least not solely from charitable deductions. Your charitable deductions allowed in a single tax year can't exceed 50% of adjusted gross income.

I have found that my homemade water-soap mixtures will eventually cause the foam soap dispenser to jam up and stop working. Adding in a small amount of glycerin seems to help keep the dispenser lubricated.

Interesting that the status page marks this as a 'service disruption' versus 'service outage'. The page doesn't have any definitions of these terms anyway, so it's hard to know what the difference is.

I was completely unable to access the service. It seems like a 'service outage' to me!

"Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing" (by Margolis & Fisher) is an excellent book on this topic.

MIT Press page: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Pr...

The Oregon system started out with good intentions but ended up being devilishly complicated to understand and unfair to many people. It's probably a great case study in the long-term unintended consequences of laws intended to control real estate taxes.

The Deschutes (Oregon) County Tax Assessor's office made a really good video explaining how three almost identical houses in the same location can have completely different tax bills:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo_hSySAC2A

In addition to what the video says, I wanted to point out that the 3% hard annual cap you mention is only on the property's Maximum Assessed Value, which is only one of the many inputs into the computation for a property's tax bill. For example, one thing that can cause taxes to go up more than 3% are general bonds approved by voter measure.

Portland Commissioner Steve Novick also wrote a really good article about all of the problems with Oregon's tax system and made some recommendations:

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/novick/article/428020

Instead of "worth", perhaps "purchasing power" would be more accurate. The purchasing power of cash is generally reduced over time due to inflation.

Looks interesting!

A long time ago, I had wondered if Lisp would be a better introduction to programming for beginners. Now we can see some practical experiences from this attempt to use Haskell.

I looked at the code samples provided; from a cursory review, the fourth class code looks to be purely functional, although fairly simple.

The fifth second class code is more advanced code, but a lot of it is procedural. I wonder if Haskell experts might weigh in here -- is it worth doing Haskell with so much procedural code?

I am a novice in Haskell, but I have tried to embrace its functional nature entirely. I think I would advocate learning Go or Python rather than Haskell if the code is going to be procedural anyway.

A confusing situation - do I have the facts right?

Amazon is ok with publishing public domain works. However, this is not a public domain work so it doesn't matter.

GNU Free Doc License, just like GPL, doesn't care if you charge money or not; only that you pass along the content when you distribute and that you don't add restrictions on what people can do with the content.

Amazon states in their rules that they won't accept freely redistributable content unless the submitting author is also the copyright owner.

Author does not explicitly state that he is the copyright owner in his response to Amazon, which explains the rejection.

Author does correctly state that GNU Doc License allows redistribution even if you are not the copyright owner. Thus he may have been trying to make a political point that it shouldn't matter if he is the copyright owner or not since he has the right to redistribute, for profit, from the license?

In any event, it doesn't matter since Amazon's stated policy is not to accept works in this precise scenario. Why, I don't know; but it is their right to do so.

I found the linked article almost impossible to read on a ThinkPad T420 running Ubuntu due to incredibly light-colored text. Luckily I have the Plain Clothes Chrome extension which allowed me to force the text to black on white.

I must be in the minority, since I see many sites with light grey text, but I find it very unusable.

Screen shot: http://www.diigo.com/item/image/yjhu/t4ix?size=o

Thanks for the thorough answer! I originally missed the part about using a real word as the base.

For my passwords, I use 8 character random strings so hopefully I am a little safer. Although, as I'm learning from all of these password leak debacles, you are only as secure as the systems using those passwords.

Do you know how they are calculating the approximate entropy score of the characters used in the passwords?

I entered the password from the xkcd comic in this web site: http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php

And got an entropy of 51.8 bits.

Long passwords are great (especially if one is using a password manager), but not many places accept them.

Trying blocking Flash by default. I leave my Chrome windows open for long periods of time. After a while, the memory consumption would get out of control. I finally realized that it was Flash that was causing the problem. There are many Flash blockers out there (you can right-click to enable it on-demand as you need it or use a whitelist) and newer builds of Chrome have built-in support for blocking.

I was at the airport last week and got randomly selected for the backscatter x-ray machine. I was told to remove everything from my pockets, including things that I would normally keep for going through a metal detector (passport, papers, wallet, etc.).

The scan went fine, but on the other side, the TSA agent noticed that due to the fold of my jeans, it looked like I had something in my pocket. He said he had to pat me down to make sure I didn't have anything in there.

Which made me seriously doubt the efficacy of the backscatter machines. What's the point of the machine if something could slip through that would still necessitate a physical body search?

I have an encrypted 5TB setup using LVM, dm-crypt, and XFS in two identical full-size ATX 8-bay chassis, with nightly rsyncs from the primary to the secondary (with a simple versioning script that I wrote). Every year, I buy the biggest hard drive I can for $100 and replace the oldest drive in each system. LVM makes it extremely easy to move all of the blocks off of a drive and remove it. I also run smartd on both systems and replace a drive at the first sign of a serious error.

I used to run RAID hardware cards but changed to software-only solutions after a hardware card crashed. Unless you are going to buy two of the exact same RAID card (one as a hotspare), or unless performance is a big deal (which it shouldn't be on a backup system I would think), software-only solutions are the way to go.

I complement this with off-site continous backups of irreplaceable data (about 200GB) to CrashPlan.

I really wanted to use ZFS, but the Linux support isn't that great, and also I don't think it's possible to remove drives from ZFS arrays. Both of those were deal killers for me. In any event, LVM+XFS has worked out great. XFS is a very stable file system and has given me no trouble.

I've often wondered how well an adaptive learning system using cameras at each floor would work. The cameras would record how many people are waiting for the elevator and tweak the algorithms accordingly. Historical data could be collected based on time of day, day of week, etc. Could be combined with the building's existing security cameras for cost savings.

The plane did have the air speed information, at least at the time it made the stall warnings. Starting at time 2h10m17s, the pitot tubes started working again, the air speed was available, and the Flight Director came back online [page 89 of BEA report]. That is why the plane was able to make the stall warning in the first place.

I also wonder if, once the FD was back online, could the pilots have just re-engaged the auto pilot and the plane would have fixed itself? This is just such a tragic accident when there was nothing at all wrong with the plane for most of the incident!

Thanks for the great summary. I also read the full BEA report which was very informative.

Is there ever a situation in a commercial plane where a stall would be a good thing? My non-pilot brain is trying to figure out why the plane would allow a stall even in alternate law mode.

I'm sure the Airbus user interface designers know what they are doing, but wouldn't it be possible to make stall protection always enabled, and then add a failsafe requiring both pilots to press a button to override stall protection? Then they would both have to consciously do a physical act to enter this dangerous state.

Bonin had to have known that the plane was in alternate law.

In the flight recorder log, at 2h10m05s, there was an audible "cavalry charge" alarm that indicated to everybody in the cockpit that the autopilot was disconnecting (plus message at the same time on the ECAM).

Then, on the ECAM message console 1 second later, the message "F/CTL ALTN LAW (PROT LOST)" was displayed: alternate law, protection lost. At the same time, Bonin said "I have the controls", which to me indicates that he knew that the autopilot was off and that alternate law was engaged.

References: [1] Page 45, http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601e3.en/pdf/f-cp0906... [2] Page 88, Ibid.

My apologies for being redundant, then!

I have a hunch that the penalties for check fraud are disproportionately severe compared with crimes of a similar social impact. I wonder if the same would be true with ACH transfers. My point is that governments take bank crimes seriously as prosecute them aggressively.

Just tried on mintty, doesn't work there either.

How is it any different than writing a check? All of the same information is there, namely ABA routing number and account number.