why do computer scientists say 1KB=1024 bytes?!!

That is why man invented peripheral devices.

/BAH

You don't understand the probate system.

Then there was no property to distribute. The lawyer had to have generated a report that the estate had an evaluation below the magic number for both state and federal (I don't know about cities--I'm sure certain ones feed off the dead. Note that this was the tax situation 10 years ago. Congress is trying to bring it back. You need a signoff from probate courts to transfer titles. If there isn't any estate taxes to be paid, the transfer involves a judge to sign a piece of paper. If there are estate taxes to be paid, no transfers are allowed until both the state and federal accountants sign off. My state ensures this happens by attaching a lien to all property which prevents all property transfers. If it weren't for the lawyer, JMF's testosterone producing vehicle would have become a very expensive boat anchor in my garage.

And then there was the little Democrat technique of squeezing the last drop of blood from the dead by insisting that all property be reevaluated four years after the death date which would have increased the property valuations by 50% because the real estate prices had almost doubled. If this had been allowed, the probate period would have taken another 4 years and the estate taxes would have acquired most of the assets. The lawyer definitely earned his money.

/BAH

And on some deeds, isn't she also an et ux? I think that's how it is spelled.

/BAH

How is this an urban legend, or am I missing some kind of joke here? This is a fairly well known movie that came out a few years ago, and it's on cable every couple of weeks it seems.

Dave L. Renfro

There are no rounding errors when converting from binary, if everything is an integer. ;-) With a 32-bit word, you can do integer arithmetic up to whatever 2^31 - 1 is in decimal, divided by 100, since it'll be in pennies.

Computing interest on a bank account can be interesting - I heard a UL about some programmer for the bank's system which, every time there was a roundoff of 0.00 < R < 0.01, he just transferred that amount to his own account, and truncated the customer's account amount. Who's going to notice less than a penny? ;-)

Out of every customer's account(s).

I heard that in just a few months, he withdrew several millions and left the country. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I heard an urban legend that there was a really funny movie once called "Office Space" where something like this was done. In the UL, the programmer responsible f***ed up and xferred some ridiculous amount of money into his account.

It's a joke. Relax.

"Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" wrote in message news:439ec7de$11$fuzhry+tra$ snipped-for-privacy@news.patriot.net...

So, how many bits in a kilobyte in your funny world?

Hi Rich_Grise, David_Tribble, Rex_Ballard and Peter,

Grise wrote: ...he withdrew several millions and left the country. ;-)

You can commit much more interesting crimes if you're willing to sully your name like that, a disposable identity is very powerful... hence urban crime.

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Rich Grise

wrote >

You haven't memorized 2147483647 yet? :-) In any event, $21.5M, give or take, would be 2^31 - 1 pennies.

I remember at least one film having that as a subplot. (IIRC the actor was Richard Pryor.)

Title transfers aren't a federal issue. Taxes are, but that's a matter of filing out the tax forms. ...pretty easy for a simple estate. IIRC she didn't even owe income tax, but there could have been a small tax bill due (don't remember). As far as the estate tax, that was an easy one. There wasn't anything close to the federal trip point and IL law makes it pretty painless for estates below a certain threshold.

IIRC we simply filed the tax forms showing that nothing was owed. I didn't do it (my wife even does our taxes), so I don't know the details.

My wife, with the advice of a lawyer.

Yep, the nursing home tried to play a bunch of games. We told them to FO and they eventually went away. Double-billing was a game everyone seemed to play.

Sheesh. I thought Clinton's tax increase (retroactive to the beginning of the year) was bad enough.

I know that. I was also talking about federal which is not different.

How did you prove that you didn't owe estate taxes to the IRS? There had to be some form with an approval form coming back.

You had to have submitted a form will all the evaluations to prove that the estate was below tax cap. Who did that?

Yup. In my case it was the nursing home and somebody else who I never figured out. I also received a bill for the Newsweek magazine which JMF wouldn't have been caught dead with.

You want to hear the one they tried this month? The f****ng idiots tried to increase the taxes for 2002 and expected to collect them. Yes, this is not a typo, the tax year two thousand and two.

/BAH

"They" did, but the politicians didn't listen.

"stopping diminishing tax rates on capital gains based on length of ownership"? I always thought long/short term (investment/speculation) differences were reasonable.

But nobody bitched about that, did they? You should thank us, taxpayers of Massachusetts, for stopping this f****ng nonsense. We seem to be the first guinea pigs for politicians' new methods of extracting money from pockets. You may also thank us for stopping diminishing tax rates on capital gains based on length of ownership. This one had me calling up our DoR weeping every year. Those blessed ladies who manned the phones were wonderful; "ignore the instructions and do what comes naturally" was the bottom line answer.

Caveat: I'm pretty sure it wasn't our pain that changed their minds; I'm pretty sure that a politician discovered that he couldn't use the >6-year losses against

You live in a different world than I. It even made the major (s)nooz networks. Many were royally PO'd. ...and it didn't take three years to notice. The next paycheck showed the difference.

I see your point, but losses are something I prefer to not carry.

As long as the series converges... ;-)

;-). Our state income tax is much simpler, at least for me (multiply the Fed by .24 and send it in). Amazingly, for those making less, the forms are much more difficult (property tax munged into the income tax). In fact, it's almost impossible for a low-middle wage earner to do his own.

No, "they" did not. There wasn't a whimper in the collective. I always thought that this was due to the fact that payments were spread out over the next three years so nobody noticed when writing the checks.

There were six classes of long term capital gains plus short term capitals gains. If you held the capital for longer than six years you would not have to pay taxes on the gains. Now before you react with "that's a wonderful idea", this also applies to capital sold at a loss so you cannot apply those losses against long nor short term capital gains nor, in the case of this state, some interest income.

The instructions of which gains offset which losses were at 10 pages long...and wrong. This was further complicated by the fact that before one item on the long form could be calculated, you had to fill out Schedule B, but..before you could finish Sched. B, you had to fill out Sched D, but... before you could finish Sched. D you had to have a figure from Sched. B which occurs later than the number that got you in the middle of Sched. D in the first place.

Whenever I do this state income tax, I am always reminded of physics' multi-body problem. By the time I'm done, I feel like I've whacked a million moles and never hit one head.

/BAH

So? That isn't the collective.

I'm talking about that. I'm talking about the retroactive. I don't see how back taxes owed could have been taken out of paychecks spread across three years.

You are confusing grumbling about tax increase and then acceptance with honest outrage of the many. Since this increase had been advertised by those same news reports as a tax on the rich, the middle class didn't peep.

Story time: Around here, when Reagan's tax increase was about to be implemented, the banks ran seminars about the increase. I went to one. The enthusiastic gal who gave the presentation asked me, as I was walking out, about my views of the subject. I told her that I only came to find out how much my taxes were going to increase. She was appalled and tried to tell me that it was a decrease. I told her to do her last year's taxes with the new laws and she'll see her taxes were going to increase. I told her that any time a politician says that a tax increase is only going to apply to the "rich", she can be sure that it will be her paycheck affected.

Another thing I don't understand about these PC people is their insistence that screwing the rich is a winner because it is the middle class who pays these bills.

You don't have a choice a lot of times. With a cash buy-out, the price and date of sale is set for you. If you've been reinvested dividends, all those little purchases over the years have to be split up into all seven categories. It was actually 7 for the state and two for the Federal because end points of each category didn't quite match. When these idiots started it, there was also a before-date period and an after-date period.

Now I could have cheated successfully and lumped all of these into fewer categories, assuming that a purchase of .12387 shares wouldn't be traceable w.r.t. long/short-term holding periods. But I was pissed off so I listed each category and the data enterers had to do the same. If you want to change policy, you show the data entry people and/or secretaries why the change is a good idea.

A miracle happens. I have yet to figure out how this miracle works. Note that I enjoyed doing taxes because it was a simpler exercise of sketching a flow chart than I did at work. Each "event" block also gave hints of what the politicians intended in the future so I could extrapolate and plan. I can still do this with the US Federal forms with the exception of all those f****ng worksheets. Those are beginning to look like a clone of Mass. tax forms.

The best way I can describe the flow chart of a Mass. income tax form is a PUSHJ to a co-routine which calls itself, then JRSTs out of a DO loop at location x. Eventually, one of the instructions in the coroutine (which you havent' exited yet and you're still in the PUSHJ call) jumps back to the line at location x-1/2. Yes, that is an x minus one-half. When you've finished with the form, you still have a dangling call on the stack that hasn't been POPed.

Of course. That is intentional. Think about the work flows (that's what I call them). It creates more work, and costs more, to collect payroll taxes that will be refunded if only the taxpayer submits a form. Most won't or they will have somebody else do the work for a price. All of these laws are passed under the banner of "getting the rich to pay more taxes". The goal, my hypothesis, is to remove monetary control from the "poor" and have "The Governement" do it for them. Gradually, the "poor" threshold will creep up until the threshold is middle class, perhaps a little higher.

Another tax-soaking technique is to pass a tax law that supposedly is for the high-income people. However, this threshold is placed such that, after a couple of years, the people who are paying the tax are the middle to upper- middle- class. Example is the AMT. The people who do have a lot of money, have enough to hire full time accountants to avoid this tax. The only ones who don't have this kind of money and are not trained to be bosses, are the people who are in the middle class range. They don't know how to be a boss nor how to hire nor supervise accountants, lawyers, and all the infrastructure needed to support their work.

/BAH

No. Eric has told you the actual correct explanation. The lying mercantilist advertisers have redefined 100 GB drives to store (sans file system overhead) to store 100,000,000,000 bytes, instead of 100*2^30 bytes. As a direct result the drive capacities (before file system overhead) are about 6% overstated for immature computer professionals expectations. File system overhead takes an additional 2% to 5%.

That's a pretty small number if you're programming for a financial institution.

IEEE double-precision floating point numbers give you 52 bits of precision, but they are binary, so they suffer from rounding errors when converted into decimal. Unless you scale it by 2^52 to be an integer, but it's a lot of trouble to go through to do it correctly.

COBOL and PL/1 give you 64-bit binary or 18-digit decimal (BCD) fixed-point numbers to work with, which is very convenient for money calculations.