Friday Morning Tech News
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on September 9, 2005 at 4:11:54 PM
Internet tax resuming.
Google hires Vint Cerf.
There are differences in people's brains.
We're all dead in the future anyway.
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Technically, those who live in states with sales taxes--there are 45 of them, plus the District of Columbia--are already supposed to pay fees on their out-of-state purchases, even if they were seemingly "tax-free." That's because all of those states have a use tax, typically levied at the same rate as the sales tax, on out-of-state items their residents have bought tax-free. If the item was bought out of state but taxed at a lower tax rate, some states, such as California, ask their residents to pay their home state the difference upon their return.
Google hires Vint Cerf.
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In one of the tech industry's most prestigious hires in recent years, Google announced Thursday that Cerf, 62, would help the company develop new architectures, systems and standards for a next generation of applications that would likely run across the Internet. Cerf, who was the vice president of technology strategy at MCI and a visiting scientist with NASA, will start his new job as Google's chief Internet evangelist on Oct. 3.
There are differences in people's brains.
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There are two new genetic studies that suggest the brain may still be evolving. Geneticist Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago in Illinois, US, and colleagues analysed the sequences of two genes active in the brain – Microcephalin and ASPM. Both regulate brain size - people carrying a non-functioning mutant copy of these genes suffer microcephaly, where they have a normally structured brain that is much smaller than usual.
We're all dead in the future anyway.
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And it may not be a rare process. If excess metals are a sign of dust accretion, "it would mean that metal-rich white dwarfs – and this is fully 25% of all white dwarfs – may have debris discs, and therefore planetary systems, around them", says Mukremin Kilic, a graduate student at the University of Texas, US, who led the IRTF observing team. "Planetary systems may be more numerous than we thought." "We now have a window into how planetary systems like our own might behave billions of years from now," Says Ben Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA. "The parallel to our own solar system’s eventual demise is chilling," Becklin adds.