Catherine

Please note, I copied/pasted (and linked) Karl Denninger's article on this. My daughter first brought the proposal to my attention. I might think using parking lots as solar electricity generation plants -- at least in areas without significant snow, like the southern portions of the country -- possibly could be useful. However, solar really is NOT "ready for prime time" and as an industry cannot exist without significant subsidies BECAUSE IT IS NOT ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE. At least at this time, and possibly not for a long time. That said, those who can afford it (individuals, towns, companies) and who choose to participate help - by their purchases - to drive the innovation that makes the industry less inefficient. Today's panels are less than 20% efficient -- but a decade or so ago, they were just under 10% efficient. Some (very expensive, hard to produce) test panels today are in the mid-30's for efficiency. For the same reason that Lasik became better and more affordable ($20K/eye down to $1.5K/eye, with better outcomes), those willing to pay drive the innovation that benefits others in later years. That's how a free market operates.

Then there was the case of the little boy who called the fire department when his mommy burned the gingerbread men. She didn't know (dealing with burned cookies), and they showed up at the door.... Apparently, they agreed to take some of the slightly-burned cookies as "evidence" (as thank you for their trouble).

I *love* Medlin payroll -- and at about $60/year, you cannot beat the price.

Sounds like you need Jack on this one...

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3355872 My Ghod, The Stupid... Just shoot me now..... Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign. The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs. This sort of "crowdfunding" needs to lead to indictments. Seriously. Let's just look at the basics. The sun falling on a black road surface will convert nearly all of the energy that falls into heat. Why? Because the road is a "black body", and highly efficient at converting the energy into heat energy for this reason. That is, very little of that energy is lost to something other than heating. A solar cell, on the other hand, is typically 15% efficient at turning the energy into electricity. A resistance heater is nearly 100% efficient (call it 95% with switching and wiring losses) at turning electricity into heat but less than 20% of the energy makes it to electricity in the first place. So the path of solar->electric->heat is one fifth as efficient at heating the road surface as just allowing the sun to heat the road directly. In other words, it won't work. At all. Rather than paving streets and driveways with asphalt, the Solar Roadways panels would theoretically be able to decrease our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of clean energy. Baloney. Not only will it not work to heat the roads you have to store the energy if you want to use LED lights because nobody wants to light the road while the sun is shining -- you want to do that at night, yes? Where is that going to happen and who's going to buy the batteries? Never mind their replacement cycles; about three years worth if you get 1,000 cycles out of them, which might be a bit ambitious (but is not entirely ridiculous.) In short this is utter and complete crap. It won't work from a technological perspective and from a cost-replacement perspective it's entirely impractical and cost-prohibitive. The laws of thermodynamics forbid obtaining a "free lunch." Sorry.

Priceless! No, really -- who would pay for this? (ba dum CHA...)

just amazing. http://blog.petflow.com/these-japanese-girls/#gkWuTJrlFFCB30rm.01

I have found it good practice to make this assumption about durned near everything (present forum excepted!!). That way I get happily surprised. At least occasionally.

I got one; bet most of you did, too -- since most of us have ebay accounts even if we rarely use them. Link first; text below. For those who don't know, the author ran an ISP for many years, so he knows his internet and internet security stuff. I did remove a couple of images from the article as Eric doesn't allow the image extensions. http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229037 About Those Password Reset Emails... Grrr..... To help ensure customers' trust and security on eBay, I am asking all eBay users to change their passwords. Here's why: Recently, our company discovered a cyberattack on our corporate information network. This attack compromised a database containing eBay user passwords. What's important for you to know: We have no evidence that your financial information was accessed or compromised. And your password was encrypted. Uh huh. Encrypted eh? Wrong word kemosabe. Or maybe it's the right word and if it is, eBay (and anyone else doing that) needs to be shot (corporately, of course, not physically.) Let me explain. A password has several ideals it tries to achieve: Only you know it. If someone else does, then obviously they can pretend to be you. It's hard to guess. "Hard" means within practical limits impossible. This means it needs lots of entropy, a fancy word for randomness. This means that two words together are bad, because words are anything but random. A single word is (much) worse. Words with numbers and symbols between them are much better, because numbers and symbols tend not to have patterns about them. All random characters is best, provided they're truly random. You can get close to "best" by using an acronym made up of characters, numbers and symbols that means something to you but nothing to a machine. For example, a sentence in which one letter (perhaps advancing one letter, rotating back through) of each word is used, separated with the reversed digits of a social security number or something of a similar type. This is extremely hard to guess unless I happen to know the source material from which you made the acronym. It's impossible for the party that asks for it to get it from what they store, but that you keyed the right thing can be verified and the odds of a "false positive" are effectively zero. In other words, the password is never stored, encrypted or not. Instead what is stored is a cryptographic hash that comes out to a value for a given input. Ideally that hash is the same length each and every time no matter how many characters are given it as an input, and it appears to be entirely random. It also has to be long enough (in terms of bits) so that the maximum password length (entropy) you can use can be contained in it without material risk of duplication; that is, if someone provides a wrong password it won't give a correct response. Note that if you design this right then it doesn't matter (much) if someone steals the list of hashed passwords. There is no way to get correct passwords from the hash. You could test a dictionary against all the hashes, and from there you might manage to get very weak passwords, but that's the best you can do. If the password is weak this isn't the primary concern. Now I don't know what eBay was storing. I do know how to do this correctly. If you steal a password hash it should, if done correctly, mean essentially nothing. To put my credibility where my mouth is here is a password hash to an account that I bet you can't break into on Tickerforum. I'm sure you can figure out which account it is too. If I'm wrong you "win" by logging into it using the password you figure out and posting a response to this message in the comment section. Feel free to be as nasty as you'd like in the comment; I won't censor it.... provided you really got it (and yes, I'll know with certainty if you did since the system keeps IP logs....) $2a$06$5dZMYXjIlDpR8Zv8yx.wqu0nbxqzPxO7H59PkHO/pOoJKbAANx54q You are free to deduce from all of these emails you get from time to time whether the people running those sites implemented their password systems correctly or not. If I'm willing to expose a password hash in a way that challenges you to sign in and prove that you can decode the password from it, believing you can't, well..... how about those guys and their claim that you can't recover passwords from their "encrypted" data and thus you should change your password "just to be safe"?

Lion, I will tell my cousin of your comments when next I send him a note. Thank you.

http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/35829/JAMES-F-MURRAY http://virtualwall.org/dm/MurrayJF01a.htm http://virtualwall.org/js/profile.htm He was younger, when he died, than my younger daughter is now.

The others have pretty much said it all. My cousin Jim Brady runs the Holocaust Museum (thank you for your words, Lion; I'll pass them on to him!) so that's on my must-see list. Monticello. Mount Vernon is astounding, I am told by friends who saw it just a few months ago. Piece of trivia for you about the Washington Monument: ( 1 ) you'll see if you look carefully that the marble is in two colors -- this is due to an interruption in construction (and supply source) because of the Civil War (and a lack of funds) and ( 2 ) at the top, facing upwards, are the words "Laus Deo" (praise God), where no human can see them. Washington was a deeply religious man.

I use both Medlin Payroll and Drake for 941's (depending on whether they are after the fact (Drake) or a PR client (Medlin)). I do NOT e-file 941's; paper copies go to the client to sign & send in. Neither of them are as nice as the ATX payroll used to be - but I have gotten used to them. I also use CFS Tax Software for the instruction letters for those returns. CFS sells its own 941 software but since I already have two systems that will prepare them it seems more than a bit silly to purchase a 3rd as a standalone.

Thanks, KC and Lion. My first concern with this issue was how certain the reimbursement is -- most places, if you take a course for work, they reimburse right away. Any delay usually means they've come up with some obscure rule to weasel out of paying. But I will get hard figures on just how much help claiming this will (or will not) be, whether using LL or 2106. Catherine

Client took a grad-level course for work; paid for it herself, in 2013. Employer supposedly will reimburse for this course - but not until later in 2014. How does this affect how I can treat this course for tax purposes? I cannot find any clear guidance in The Tax Book or my other first reference point sources; they all deal with reimbursement the same year as the course, which is not the case here. TIA, Catherine

I have NO idea if this could be related to Heartbleed, but it could be something as "simple" as a permissions problem. Some of the permissions are buried layers deep in the anti virus software, and could be stopping the scanners from delivering the scans (writing them to disk): they may have "lost" the permission to write. After that gets checked, I'd be lost (and defer to Jack, Eric, etc).

On her way to CT where the Connecticut state courts will have jurisdiction. Here's hoping THEY do the right thing and get this girl back home where she belongs! Make no mistake, public pressure is the ONLY reason she is even getting this close to home! DCF just yesterday cancelled the family's "Mother's Day" visit -- what possible reason could they have had other then pettiness and a final assertion of power? http://rabidrepublicanblog.com/2014/05/12/justina-en-route-to-connecticut/

Mr. Greedy needs a lesson in sharing...

Happened to us -- snow avalanched off our solar panels. You would not believe the amount of noise it made! That snow was packed *solid* too -- my poor shrubs will spend this summer coming up recovering. Next fall I will have to build lean-to's to cover them.

And I will point out yet again that IF the DCF was correct, her physical condition would -- at the VERY least -- have stayed the same. Most likely, it would have improved substantially without the "excess treatment" they accuse her family of subjecting her to. Except the truth is that this girl was an ice-skating _competitor_ a mere two weeks before her hospitalization -- and is now confined to a wheelchair because she cannot walk. I also want to know how the BCH doctor who started this whole thing got in to see her in the first place, when she was sent to BCH to confer with one -specific- doctor (who had transferred there from Tufts). The whole thing stinks to high heavens from start to finish.

My best friend's dad was an auto mechanic who also never wore his ring at work, because (as he said) "I like my fingers!" He did take it out for special occasions.

How to get a ring off a swollen finger _without_ cutting the ring. By a doctor in the UK. http://www.wimp.com/removering/

Thanks for all the sympathy and kind words. Yes, it is really nice to do something completely unrelated to taxes. I also use practice (in the winter) as a way to warm up when I've been sitting at this desk freezing my patootie off; it does an amazing job at warming me up. Ten minutes and I'm toasty (ceiling fan in the practice room for summer!). Plus have had a brain break and can go back to whatever was driving me nuts when I'd left off. I actually have one more eligible year to compete in the novice category but Gwen (who is WAY better than I am) got arm-twisted by our instructor to compete in the "Open" (=adult non-beginner) category. She is terrified of coming in last (highly unlikely; she's good), so if I go for the Open, she is guaranteed _not_ to be dead last! What's a little public humiliation among friends, family, and a roomful of complete strangers, after all?

The NHHG info is here: http://www.nhscot.org/ Even if you don't see me, you would have a terrific time - there is always TONS of fun stuff to do! So far they only have the dance competition registration open. No fiddle yet.

Sigh. I have been working on a four-tune Scottish fiddle set for the New Hampshire Highland Games this September -- since last September. My instructor just added a whole slew of really excellent ornamentation and dynamics to the tunes. So now I've been working on adding those in. Thing is, my instructor broke her left (violin fingering!) wrist in *fourteen* places in February after falling on ice. She still made it sound easy and beautiful. With no broken wrist and no mobility problem I sound not *quite* bad enough to make the neighborhood cats howl. I don't think breaking my own wrist will improve my sound, though.