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Sunday, June 2, 2013

Facebook's Plan For The Network Market - Business Insider

Najam Ahmad

Facebook Director, Technical Operations Najam Ahmad

Hands down, one of the most important tech projects Facebook has ever created is the Open Compute Project (OCP).

Business Insider recently spoke with two of Facebook's OCP leaders to get the skinny on their latest, ambitious plan.

To recap: OCP launched two years ago to create "open source" data center hardware. That means hardware vendors like HP, Dell and Cisco don't control the product designs. Instead, customers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs do.

OCP's designs call for fewer materials and minimal cost, but require faster performance than what vendors typically offer.

More importantly, OCP gives the designs away to everyone for free. Any enterprise can take them, modify them, and send them out to contract manufacturers, who are standing by to build them.

The project has also grown far beyond Facebook, although Facebook VP of Supply Chain Operations Frank Frankovsky is still its leader. The OCP board also includes executives from Intel, Rackspace, Arista Networks, and Goldman Sachs.

Earlier this month, OCP announced plans?to push into the $23 billion Ethernet switch market, a?project led by Facebook Director of Technical Operations Najam Ahmad.

Its goal is to create an "open source" network switch. A network switch connects the Ethernet cables within a building or across a campus. It also performs lots of other functions, from security to making the network run faster.

OCP's project?could compete with switches from Cisco, HP and Dell. Alternatively, these vendors could join the group and participate. Dell and HP, for example, have been involved in the server project.

Cisco, however, owns ~60% of the network switch market and it's unclear, so far, if Cisco will play nice or play dirty with OCP.?

OCP is not the only group working on such things. A group called the Open Network Foundation (ONF) is creating standards, or blueprints, for software-defined networking gear. There's also another group called OpenDaylight, led by Cisco and IBM, working on open source SDN software.

Here's what Ahmad and Frankovsky told us about OCP's plans in a lightly edited transcript:

Business Insider: OCP has moved from servers to

Facebook

Facebook open source hardware guru Frank Frankovsky

storage to motherboards and other hardware equipment. Why has it grown so much?

Frank Frankovsky: Over the last two years we've seen a ton of progress made around the server hardware and the storage hardware and the data centers. People are making really cool and meaningful technology contributions with a lot of derivative work. Some of those are interesting things that no one at Facebook ever thought about.

When you give one thing to the community, you tend to get 10 things back. And you just don't know what those 10 things are.

BI: What's the goal for your network project and how is it different from what other groups are doing?

Najam Ahmad: ONF actually reached out to OCP and asked us if we can tackle this.

Today, if you wanted to buy a switch, it's a package that has hundreds of applications and features. OCP will create a [design for] a [switch] box that when it boots up, it looks for an operating system of your choice. We're trying to separate the hardware and the software and give you choices.

BI: Wow, that's ambitious. A box that will work with all SDN software. Is Cisco participating? This is Cisco's big fear, that a commodity box will come along and hurt their business.

Ahmad: We had our first engineering summit for OCP at MIT [two weeks ago] and we held a whole day workshop on networking. Cisco was at that meeting. They definitely know what's going on and they are participating in the conversations.

So it's either a threat or an opportunity on how they respond from here. They are open to submit proposals and [see] if the user community selects them.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-plan-for-the-network-market-2013-5

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Court says Egypt legislature illegally elected

FILE - In this file photo taken on Tuesday, April 23, 2013, Egyptian Shura Council members meet to discuss the government's 2013-2014 budget at the Shura Council, Parliament's upper house. When voters went to the polls more than a year ago to vote for Egypt's upper house of parliament, most presumed the legislature would be the powerless talk shop that it had been for 30 years. Few candidates were known outside their families, parties or neighborhoods. Only seven percent of the electorate bothered to cast a ballot. Thanks to the twists and turns of the rocky transition that followed Egypt's 2011 uprising, the Shura Council finds itself the sole law-making body in the land. This accidental legislature is now back in the spotlight ahead of an expected court ruling on its disputed legal status _ a move that could see it dissolved. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)

Hamdy El-Fakharany, an opposition leader and former member of the now-dissolved Parliament, center, and other activists flash victory signs in front of the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 2, 2013. An Egyptian court ruled on Sunday that the nation's Islamist-dominated legislature and constitutional panel were illegally elected and that the legislature's upper house, the only one currently sitting, must be dissolved when parliament's lower chamber is elected later this year or early in 2014. (AP Photo/ Amr Nabil)

An Egyptian traffic policeman manages the traffic in front of the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 2, 2013. An Egyptian court ruled on Sunday that the nation's Islamist-dominated legislature and constitutional panel were illegally elected and that the legislature's upper house, the only one currently sitting, must be dissolved when parliament's lower chamber is elected later this year or early in 2014.(AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

CAIRO (AP) ? Egypt's highest court ruled on Sunday that the nation's interim parliament was illegally elected, though it stopped short of dissolving the chamber immediately, in a decision likely to fuel the tensions between the ruling Islamists and the judiciary.

The Supreme Constitutional Court also ruled that a 100-member panel that drafted the new constitution was illegally elected.

The immediate impact of the ruling is limited. The Islamist-dominated upper house of parliament, called the Shura Council, will remain in place until elections are held for a lower house, likely early next year. The constitution, which was ratified in a nationwide referendum in December with a relatively low turnout of around 35 percent, will also remain in effect.

Still, the opposition said the verdict shows how Islamists' victories at the ballot box are tainted. They argued that the ruling further challenges the legitimacy of the disputed constitution, which was pushed through the panel by Islamists allied to President Mohammed Morsi.

The two sides are squaring off for what may be a major confrontation on the streets by the end of this month.

An activist campaign claims to have collected millions of signatures on a petition demanding Morsi leave office. The organizers plan a massive rally outside the presidential palace on June 30 to mark a year since his inauguration as Egypt's first freely elected president.

"We are paying dearly for the legislative and constitutional absurdity of the Muslim Brotherhood," said prominent commentator and Brotherhood critic Abdullah el-Sinawy. "It is a situation that threatens political problems and dilemmas on the road ahead."

Morsi's backers in the Muslim Brotherhood saw Sunday's ruling as a victory, saying that it implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of the Shura Council and the constitution because it stopped short of trying to outright abrogate either.

"The ruling turns the page of media controversy over the Shura Council and the constitution," said Brotherhood spokesman Ahmed Aref. "We hope that we never see that page again."

The ruling, according to another Brotherhood figure, senior leader Essam el-Aryan, amounted to "an admission that the constitution came with the will of the people and through a free and clean referendum."

The Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the Islamist-majority lower house of parliament in June last year, saying the law governing its election was invalid. The court was widely expected to issue a similar ruling dissolving the Shura Council late last year, but Islamist protesters prevented the judges from reaching their chambers when they laid siege to the court's headquarters.

By the time they lifted the siege, the constitutional panel had already adopted the charter in an all-night session, handed Morsi a copy and a referendum was called for its ratification. The new constitution gave legislative power to the normally toothless Shura Council until a new lower house is elected. It also barred the dissolving of the Shura Council.

In both rulings ? the one in June and Sunday's ? the court ruled that the law governing the election of each house of parliament breached principles of fairness because it allowed political parties to run for the third of seats set aside for independent candidaites.

The Shura Council normally does not have lawmaking powers and has long been dismissed as nothing more than a talk shop. Only 7 percent of voters bothered to cast ballots in the elections fort the house, and many of the newborn political parties rooted in the protest movement that toppled Mubarak did not bother to field candidates. The 270-seat chamber is 70 percent Islamist.

Raafat Fouda, a constitutional law professor at Cairo University, pointed to the contradictions at the heart of the ruling, that the Shura Council was illegitimate but will continue to legislate.

"This is one of the wonders of our time that we have been witnessing lately in Egypt," he said. "It is certainly the result of the pressures and the terrorism the Constitutional court has been subjected to."

However, law lecturer and former legislator Ehab Ramzy said the ruling was expected since the new constitution shielded the Shura Council from dissolution.

But, he added, it could be a prelude to future, unfavorable rulings against the chamber.

The Shura Council's critics say it is ill-equipped to be the nation's sole law-making body, and complain that it's considering legislation that will have a far reach into the future rather than pass only what is absolutely necessary during the transition period.

The ruling on the legitimacy of the constitutional panel may not have any impact on the charter itself. But it could raise future questions on its legal foundations. Critics say the charter restricts freedoms and gives clerics a say in legislation. The Islamists who drafted it hail the document as the best one Egypt has ever had.

The verdict continues the political confusion that has reigned in Egypt since the 2011 ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

The ruling came as Islamist lawmakers and the judiciary have for weeks been publicly bickering over a draft legislation that lowers to 60 the retirement age of judges, thus pensioning off about 3,000 of them if adopted.

The draft, which could cost the job of more than half the Constitutional Court's 11 judges, has triggered an uproar among judges who see it as a prelude to filling their ranks with Morsi loyalists from the Brotherhood.

Morsi's backers say the judiciary is packed with Mubarak loyalists who are determined to derail the country's shift to democratic rule and force the president out. They have also spoken out against the Supreme Constitutional Court, saying its rulings hinder the nation's progress.

The new constitution restructured the court, reducing its members from 19 to 11, with the most recent join the first to go. The move removed one of Morsi's harshest critics, judge Tehany el-Gibaly.

The turmoil adds to a long list of woes that Egypt's 90 million people have to cope with in the meantime, from increasingly frequent power cuts and fuel shortages to rising prices and unemployment. News that Ethiopia began construction of a massive dam on the Nile, raising worries over Egypt's share of the river's water, reinforced a sense of siege felt by many Egyptians.

___

Associated Press reporter Tony G. Gabriel contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-06-02-Egypt/id-964afe7c76db4a98a271c25384d48f5e

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The Sheer Trend Continues In This Week's Dangerous Outfits (PHOTOS)

STUMBLE: Isla Fisher

Fisher is usually a pro on the red carpet, and she almost aced it this time. But a super sheer top with an exposed bra isn't the best look. Fisher's far-too-revealing see-through top clashed with her conservative blazer.

SUCCESS: Nicole Trunfio

This look is so polished it's hard to call it "dangerous." Even though Trunfio is sporting a pretty intense cut-out, it gets balanced out wonderfully with the illusion of classy high-waisted pants.

STUMBLE: Ke$ha

Ke$ha wore a sheer top well with a proper underlay. But she made the mistake of wearing shorts that are too short. At a quick glance, it looks like Ke$ha is just wearing a extra short dress.

SUCCESS/STUMBLE: Lovelyn Enebechi, Maike van Grieken and Luise Will

We decided to highlight the first three girls in this picture. The contestants of "Germany's Next Top Model" need to get used to wearing daring outfits if they want to walk the runways, but van Grieken and Will took sheer too far with theirs. Will is basically just wearing a sheer overlay on top of her bra and underwear. At least van Griken's bottom is covered. Enebechi mastered the sheer look with a subdued see-through fabric and a solid bottom that covers everything up.

STUMBLE: Kylie Jenner

While we do like Jenner's structured crop top, pairing it with a cut-up skirt ruins the look. If only Jenner wore the top with solid pants or a full skirt, this look would have been greatly improved.

STUMBLE: Emmanuelle Seigner

First things first, kudos to Seigner for being daring enough to walk out in such a plunging neckline and such a high slit. But we're getting nervous just thinking about how revealing that neckline is. Balance is always key -- it's best to not over-do it with a high slit and a deep top.

STUMBLE: Eliza Doolittle

Cut-out overload! This whole side-butt trend is really just getting out of control. It's revealing enough when stars show off their breasts and their stomachs, but when you start revealing your hips, you leave nothing to the imagination. Doolittle's jumpsuit looks costume-y, and instead of being sexy, it looks like fabric is missing.

STUMBLE: Tallulah Adeyemi

We want so badly to like this outfit, because there is something about it that seems polished -- maybe it's the professional white slacks Adeyemi is wearing. But the rest of her look is mismatched. She is all business on the bottom with the pants and the heels, and then a casual studded crop top takes the outfit to a more risque place.

SUCCESS: Kylie Minogue

The petite singer wowed this week at the amFAR Cinema Against AIDS Gala in this Roberto Cavalli gown. It has all the components of a dangerous choice: a high, thigh-baring slit, cut-outs and a plunging neckline. But the gold detailing on the cut-outs gives the dress a more formal and polished look, and Minogue looks truly glam.

STUMBLE: Ke$ha

Can this even be considered a slit? The racily-dressed singer must have spent the past week mercilessly doing squats in the gym in order to make sure her rear was in tip-top shape for this number. It's hard to believe this is a Givenchy dress... but it's not hard to believe that the famously wild Ke$ha would wear it.

SUCCESS: Milla Jovovich

Cannes has become a place where stars make risky fashion choices, and Jovovich joined the club with this side-bearing dress. While we were really nervous her top was going to reveal a little too much, the bottom half of her dress is so breathtakingly beautiful, it's mesmerizing.

STUMBLE: Rosario Dawson

A high slit can be very sexy -- until it's too high. Why bother wearing a long skirt when it's going to be cut in half?

SUCCESS: Naya Rivera

This has to be the best example of a glorified bandeau bra we have seen so far. It's daring to wear a tube bra to a red carpet event, but Rivera's outfit is sophisticated due to the long, high-waisted skirt. Its crystal embellishments help make the look more formal.

STUMBLE: Jenny McCarthy

And this is not the best way to wear a cropped top. McCarthy paired her casual-looking tank top with a ripped up long skirt, which came off more disheveled than sexy.

STUMBLE: Irina Shayk

This dress might just reveal too much. The cut-outs on the top already bare enough; the dress didn't need a very sheer bottom.

STUMBLE: Irina Shayk

Like we said, sheer.

SUCCESS: Karolina Kurkova

Here's another case of correctly placed cut-outs. We're starting to have a hunch that supermodels know how to wear these kinds of dresses perfectly. Kurkova looks stunning, low cut-outs and all.

STUMBLE: Nayer

This is a confusing red (or should we say blue?) carpet scene. First of all, there's a dog in the picture. Second, elbow length gloves and a hood do not cancel out Nayer's bare torso.

STUMBLE: Yasmine Petty

Miss Petty, we are not entirely sure what you are famous for, but we sure know it's not for being the next Marilyn Monroe. This dress was a bit too flowy for a classy Marilyn Moment. And while we appreciate Petty matching her undergarments to the red carpet, there are some things we're better off not knowing

SUCCESS: Cara Delevingne and Naomie Harris

This daring model and bold actress make the perfect pair. We can always count on Delevingne to try something risky, and she did not disappoint here. At the Cannes Film Fest, she wore a very plunging open blazer with nothing underneath it... and she killed it! She paired the jacket with sheer pants, but somehow was just covered-up enough. This tricky look was a success. Harris went with cut-outs. As we have said before, a lot of attention needs to be given to the location of cut-outs, and Harris' are placed perfectly. The dress is sexy and revealing without showing too much.

STUMBLE: Laury Thilleman

It's a difficult feat to look both sexy and tasteful at Cannes. Unfortunately, Thilleman's plunging neckline veered into the "too sexy" realm. We can't keep our eyes off her top half (and not in a good way).

SUCCESS: Paz Vega

This winner was the best sheer look of the week. Vega took embroidery to whole new levels at Cannes, wearing a Roberto Cavalli dress so ornate that we barely noticed her see-through slip underneath. It's actually a great tactic: making sure your dress is so complicated on top that people hardly notice it's translucent underneath.

STUMBLE: Lianne La

Perhaps she was<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/gwyneth-paltrow-sheer-dress-iron-man-3_n_3153520.html" target="_blank"> influenced by Gwyneth's side-butt dress</a>? Unfortunately we're not necessarily sold on this new trend. It's just too revealing -- we can almost see her butt!

SUCCESS: Clotilde Courau

This is probably one of the most beautiful sheer numbers we've seen. She could have benefitted from a longer slip, making the dress even classier. But we can overlook Courau's leotard-like slip because of the wonderful detailing on the sheer overlay.

STUMBLE: Heidi Klum

Klum is usually a pro at rocking risky dresses, but she stumbled here. The solid black sections of her dress aren't as solid as they should be, especially on her top half.

SUCCESS: Diane Kruger

While we're not too keen on such a casual outfit for a nighttime event, we do think Kruger mastered the crop top well. That shirt is daringly short, but she balances it out properly with loose-fitting parachute pants.

STUMBLE: Liza Forero

Wow! Forero is pretty brave to walk out on the red carpet with two loose panels covering her breasts. We find it hard to believe that nothing slipped out that night. Hopefully she was wearing pasties.

SUCCESS: Solange Knowles

That is quite a v-neck on Knowles' sexy suit-dress. While her breasts are very close to falling out, we applaud Knowles for keeping it together and rocking an outfit that manages to be both classy and sexy.

STUMBLE: Courtney Stodden

All we want to say is, "WHAT?" But let's break it down: the sheer aspect on Stodden's... leotard? costume?... is so wrongly placed. Wearing a black bra underneath the sheer only makes it more obvious. And did part of her outfit fall off? Because Stodden isn't wearing any bottoms whatsoever.

SUCCESS: Gal Gadot

Another very deep v-neck, and another success. Gadot looks stunning in this iridescent dress and the long length makes the v-neck seem less severe.

STUMBLE: Allison Williams

This just has too much sheer. The bottom is beautiful, without showing off any of Williams' secrets. But the sheer top is a little overkill.

SUCCESS: Miranda Kerr

This Michael Kors dress is so risky, we are still scratching our heads wondering how Kerr made it look so tasteful. The dramatic cut-outs worked because Kerr's body fit them so well.

STUMBLE: Lisa Maria Falcone

This dress is pretty confusing, not to mention a little tacky. We don't really understand why Falcone would wear a tube dress with a black plastic bra. Something about this ensemble doesn't seem right for the fancy Met Gala.

SUCCESS: Anne Hathaway

We probably wouldn't have liked this too much if the Met Gala hasn't been punk-themed. But since it was, we think Hathaway expertly mastered this tricky sheer number. Also, that is an amazing use of pasties (or a stick-on bra, or a strapless situation, or whatever she's got going on under there).

STUMBLE: Angela Simmons

Maybe she thought she was creating a new fashion statement, but we don't think we will ever be able to jump on the "show your red bra through your see-through outfit" trend.

SUCCESS: Alexis Farmer

From the front, this dress doesn't look too bad. The cut-outs are aplenty, but everything seems to be covered up adequately, and it still seems like a dress. However... (head to the next slide)

STUMBLE: Alexis Farmer

We think the cut-outs should have stopped at the front. The dramatic back of this dress turns it from a red carpet gown to a skimpy cover-up more suited for the beach.

SUCCESS: Kelly Osbourne

This dress could have been too risky, given that Osbourne's bra is blatantly visible. But she makes the cut: There's just something really pretty about the way the sheer overlay includes that intricate flower detailing, and we think she accessorized it nicely with simple black shiny sling-back pumps and a chic updo. We also love how the dress accentuates her purple hair.

STUMBLE: April O'Neil

Where do we begin here? Is this even a dress or did she rip up a piece of fabric and put it on her body? Why would she wear nerd-chic glasses with one of the most ridiculous dresses we have ever seen? We are so confused, and it looks like O'Neil is, too. So many questions we will never have the answers to...

SUCCESS: Alice Eve

This is how you pull off a "under-the-boob cut-out" -- yes, we just made up that term. Eve's cut-out adds a little something extra to this otherwise simple dress.

STUMBLE: Laura Dundovic

There's an overabundance of risky choices here. Dundovic should only have picked one: a slit or a crop top. Wearing both reminds us that she isn't wearing enough clothing.

SUCCESS: Zoe Saldena

This outfit is so different, and that's why we love it. Paired with a high-waisted midi skirt, Saldana proved that you can wear a risky crop top and make it sophisticated and professional.

STUMBLE: Carly Baker

We get that one would want to dress sexy for the FHM 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2013 party, and sheer is always a go-to to try to achieve that effect. But Baker "forgot" to wear a slip, showing off those panties and bra to everyone in sight.

SUCCESS: Taylor Kraemer

Kraemer has mastered the tricky -- yet beautiful -- sheer trend. Every aspect of this sheer number is wonderfully placed, and Kraemer understands that you need a solid underlay if you're going to rock a sheer bottom. Bravo!

STUMBLE: Vera Wang

Sometimes we do like when stars show a hint of their bra, but Wang just let the world see the whole thing. Plus, the silk dress clashes with the more casual cotton bandeau.

SUCCESS: Nicole Trunfio

This is how you wear a crop top. Trunfio takes a cute on top and makes it more serious with a long skirt and classy, understated summer heels. A wonderful early summer outfit.

STUMBLE: Sonja Morgan

Morgan has always been one of the more flashy housewives from the New York extension, but just because her personality is showy, doesn't mean she should literally show us her derri?re. She seriously needs a slip!

SUCCESS: Zoe Marshall

The plunging neckline on this simple lavender dress is nicely offset by a long -- and hence super safe -- hemline. Marshall also added simple accessories to keep the attention on her deep neckline.

STUMBLE: Helen Flanagan

A plunging neckline and a very high slit? We're afraid there might have been some accidental reveals going on that night, either up top or down low. Eek.

SUCCESS: Gemma Merna

All the ladies at the FHM 100 Sexiest Women In The World party this week obviously tried to dress to accomodate the fete's moniker, and many took it too far. But Merna kept it classy -- well, as classy as a cleavage-baring pantsuit can be.

STUMBLE: Sharon Carpenter

This is one of our biggest pet peeves: not testing out a black shirt under bright lights to see if it's too sheer. This outfit would have been acceptable if Carpenter didn't have photographers' flashes shooting at her. But alas, she did, and they all saw her bra.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/01/sheer-trend-photos_n_3366961.html

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Saturday, June 1, 2013

The IRS -- its glory days and its checkered past

WASHINGTON (AP) ? For a time, the Internal Revenue Service inspired awe and admiration in Americans, not just trepidation and lame jokes about death and taxes.

Everyone loved the revenue agents when they put away Al Capone, the Chicago underworld's master of brutality and bribes, in a coup so spectacular it scared other gangsters straight.

In the year after, federal coffers swelled as delinquent taxpayers stepped forward to make good on their debts. Criminals came out of the woodwork to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains. Authorities in what was then the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue nailed the slippery Public Enemy No. 1 when no one else could, scooped up New York City racketeers by the dozen and stood tall in the popular imagination as incorruptible, fearless stewards of the treasury and the law.

Fine, but that was the 1930s. What have they done for us lately?

Or to us?

The essential mission hasn't changed. The IRS still collects the money that goes back out to build roads, help look after people in their old age, fight menaces from Nazism to terrorism, and operate the vast levers of government. It still locks up a few thousand delinquents a year, among them drug kingpins who wouldn't be caught any other way.

But no one loves the IRS anymore, not for ages. It's our culture's king-sized pain that makes you do hard math, issues nonsensical directions, takes your money and gives it to politicians to waste even as they borrow unspeakable sums from China to waste even more.

On top of that overdrawn caricature, the agency now is saddled with its episode of tea party tumult, exposing IRS behavior that is memorably bumbling at best and criminal at worst.

___

"Taxes grow without rain." Proverb.

More than 97,000 people work for the IRS, more than double the workforce of that other deeply inquisitive and all-seeing institution, Google.

That includes 13,000 revenue agents and more than 1,500 lawyers, about as many attorneys as practice statewide in North Dakota. It's bigger than some Cabinet departments ? Transportation for one. Employment has dropped by about 10,000 since 2010.

The perception of the "taxman" probably should give way to tax woman because more than six in 10 employees are female, a substantially higher share than in both the civil service and U.S. labor force at large.

The IRS is something of a hybrid in its relationship with political masters, not the "independent agency" claimed by President Barack Obama when he dissociated himself from its discriminatory audits of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status during the 2012 campaign.

It is partially independent, which is not at all like being a bit pregnant. On one hand, the president and his people at the White House are barred by law from pressing the IRS to start or stop a tax audit. This is to prevent the president from putting the heat on a political foe or going easy on a political friend, both tactics of the past.

The commissioner serves five-year terms, ensuring that leadership is out of synch with four-year election cycles. The commissioner and chief lawyer are the only political appointees and must be confirmed by the Senate.

But the commissioner reports to the treasury secretary through the department's deputy and can be fired at will by the president, which is not the case in more hands-off federal bodies. Indeed, the acting chief, Steven Miller, was ousted within days of the report coming to light showing the misbegotten actions of lower level employees; he was one of three senior officials to be sidelined in the continuing investigation.

___

"This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher." Nobel Prize physicist Albert Einstein on preparing his taxes.

The income tax was unloved from its inception.

Pushing for it in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens declared, "It is unpleasant to send the tax gatherer to the door of the farmers, the mechanics, and the capitalists ... but these things must come or this government must soon be buried in its grave."

President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a 3 percent tax on income over $800, a sum few people made. A progressive income tax followed a year later in a law establishing an enforcement arm, the office of commissioner of internal revenue in the Treasury Department. The wealthiest Americans paid 5 percent.

Before the end of the 1800s, the income tax was repealed, revived and struck down as unconstitutional, only to return in 1913 with the enactment of a constitutional amendment.

The tax form of 100 years ago ? three pages long, with another page of instructions ? loosely resembles the short form of today, except for its provisions for deducting uninsured shipwrecks and its guidance to a still-agricultural nation about claiming income from the wool and hides of slaughtered animals.

The basic tax rate was 1 percent on personal income over $3,000, and there was a 6 percent surtax on astronomical incomes over $500,000.

Rates would not remain so benign for long. In 1918, the top rate soared to 77 percent to help pay for World War I. During World War II, compliance leaped forward when Congress introduced payroll withholding and quarterly tax payments.

___

"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street. If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat. If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet." The Beatles, "Taxman."

Back to biblical times, revenue collection was often contracted out to independent "tax farmers" so as to insulate authorities from the howls of an aggrieved population, Atlanta accountant Jay Starkman says in his history of taxes, "The Sex of a Hippopotamus," so named because it's about as hard to divine whether a hippo is male or female as it is to comprehend the tax code.

A certain distance remains. No president visited the IRS headquarters until John Kennedy did so in 1961, embracing the tax collector as the underpinning of a nation locked in Cold War competition, a space race and monumental obligations at home and abroad. "We are strongly behind you," Kennedy told the agency. "We expect the best from you."

It was a historic, morale-building visit to the put-upon agency but JFK's record with the IRS is not entirely noble. Although the bureau was reorganized in the 1950s to replace patronage appointments with career professionals (and to rename it the Internal Revenue Service), Kennedy's administration used it to try to cower critics on the right.

Later, President Richard Nixon's IRS manipulations against those on his "enemies list" rose to the level of an impeachable offense in the eyes of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the 1990s, the IRS went through another overhaul, this time to introduce more accountability, more recourse for the taxpayer and a customer-service ethic.

"Some people believe that the IRS slogan is, 'We're not happy until you're not happy,'" Starkman writes in his book. Yet it's probably more responsive to the consumer than the annoying help lines for digital gadgets. "Although IRS is the largest paper-shuffling organization in the world," he says, "when I call, I still get a live American person fairly quickly."

To IRS haters, the overhaul was not much more than public relations gloss, lipstick on a fanged pig.

But it made some changes that are consequential to this day. Among them, it established the Office of the Inspector General for Tax Administration, a more autonomous organization than existed before to scrutinize the behavior of the tax collectors.

That's the outfit that investigated and exposed the audits slanted against conservatives in the 2012 campaign. It's why the IRS is in such a pickle now.

___

Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

___

Online:

The IRS and Al Capone: http://tinyurl.com/k39dhr7

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/irs-glory-days-checkered-past-131427658.html

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Toyota says 'good chance' of record Lexus sales this year

By Yoko Kubota

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp has a "good chance" of selling a record number of luxury Lexus vehicles this year, an executive said, as a weaker yen adds to the brand's allure globally and in its biggest market the United States.

The yen has lost about 20 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar since mid-November, providing a boon to Lexus, which manufactures more than 80 percent of its vehicles in Japan, and then exports nearly 90 percent of these cars.

Toyota sold a record 518,200 Lexus vehicles worldwide in 2007. Asked if the company can top that, Mark Templin, executive vice president of Lexus International, told Reuters on Friday: "There is a good chance of that this year."

"Lexus can be a vital contributor to TMC's overall profitability. We have a business plan to make it that," he said, referring to Toyota Motor Corp.

Lexus was the top selling luxury brand in the United States until 2011, when a huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan affected production. Globally, Lexus sales were hit by the 2008 financial crisis and the yen which until recently remained uncompetitively high for exporters.

Sales are now recovering, with Toyota selling 476,500 Lexus vehicles globally in 2012, almost 18 percent more than the previous year.

Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda took over the helm at Lexus in April, giving the brand more room to experiment with design and marketing. Lexus now sells a $10,000 roadbike and recently hosted a design competition.

Koichi Sugimoto, an autos analyst at BNP Paribas in Tokyo, said Lexus' operating margin could improve to around 20 percent this financial year from an estimated mid-single digit last year. Rival BMW posted a 10.8 percent margin in 2012.

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/toyota-says-good-chance-record-lexus-sales-080535402.html

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Intel to launch Celeron and Pentium chips based on Atom architecture

In recent years, Intel's Celeron and Pentium processors have been cut-down versions of more advanced counterparts. For the chips' next updates, Intel is taking an opposite tack -- it's bringing low-end Atom architecture into the big leagues. The company is confident enough in the speed and flexibility of the Bay Trail-based Atom platform that it's launching desktop and laptop versions (Bay Trail-D and Bay Trail-M) under the Celeron and Pentium badges. There isn't much more to share regarding the CPUs beyond their expected releases late in the year, although there's a good chance that we'll learn more at Computex next week.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Intel