Interesting Links for 13-11-2012

• When it comes to DRM, Amazon is a bottom feeding Hell Beast | Attendly
  (tags: drm amazon books )
• JJ Abrams and Jon Favreau chime in on whether they would direct Star Wars VII.
  (tags: starwars )
• Fresh data from the Large Hadron Collider makes Supersymmetry ever-less-likely.
  (tags: physics )
• 007 Legends is a hilariously awful game.
  (tags: JamesBond games review )
• Burn them! Burn the funny-looking, the strange, the loners! They might be paedos! All of them!
  (tags: viaJennieRigg society aieeee! uk paedophilia )
• Academia is about to be Napsterized
  (tags: academia )
• New York Museum Boasts 2,000-Year-Old Ancient Egyptian d20
  (tags: history egypt gaming dice viaJohnBobShaun )
• A brilliant redesign of the umbrella. Want!
  (tags: viaBuddleia rain design )
• It's official: Being a princess is not a profession (nobody tell Kate Middletot Sesame Street said so)n tha
  (tags: princess SesameStreet usa law )
• The Infinite Jukebox - Infinite Gangnam Style extended to other songs.
  (tags: music viaFanf )
• Why does Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ have only passive black characters?
  (tags: Steven_Spielberg movies history usa race )

Let me tell you about my disease.

On Thursday evening I had an itchy left shoulder-blade, and I asked Julie to scratch it, which was quite nice.

On Friday morning I woke up with a very tender left shoulder-blade, and a sore left armpit. Which was much less nice.

Julie worried that she'd had something on her hands, I worried that I had done something nasty to it. But I figured if I left it for a day or so it would go away.

When, come Monday afternoon it was _still_ sore, showing no signs of getting better, and suspiciously, there was no rash or bruising, I started to worry a lot. The whole area felt like it was bruised just under the skin, but with no outward signs I was beginning to think that the real problem was deeper, and who knew what House-esque nastiness it could be?

So this morning at 8am I booked an emergency appointment with my doctor, got one for 10:40, and wandered along to be told I'd done exactly the right thing by coming in. Because I have Shingles. Which is what happens when latent chickenpox viruses hide in the nerve cells in your spine and then come out to play decades later. They work their way up the nerve endings to the skin and then explode into blisters, which are then contagious. In my case they haven't reached the surface yet (and they seem to be working their way up the nerve cluster associated with the T2 dermatome, and now that I've been prescribed Aciclovir they hopefully won't.

I'm not contagious (as it hasn't reached the surface) and both my GP and Occupational Health have told me that as the blisters would be underneath clothes I shouldn't worry about it anyway. So unless it becomes too painful for me to concentrate, or knocks me out in some other way, I get to carry on with life as usual.

This is not how you make omelettes

via JWZ.

A question for any accountants in the audience

At the moment we tax companies on their profits, and leave a variety of ways of legitimately avoiding tax if the company spends some of their money on things that the government views as good (training, various Green initiatives, etc.) This complicates things, and makes it harder to tell if companies are doing them for their own good, or simply to avoid tax.

Now, some people would say that we don't care why companies do things, and if we're getting them to do more socially good things through tax bribery then that's great. But others clearly feel that companies shouldn't be avoiding paying their fair share.

So, my question is this - would there be more overhead, or less, in shifting all of the positive stuff out of taxes entirely, and doing them separately? In saying "You all pay all of your tax. But the government subsidises you in doing various things that they'd like you to do."

Assuming, that this resulted in companies getting the same money and doing the same things (to make it simpler), would the resulting system be easier for companies, their accountants and the government? Or would it require even more work to administer?