Slashdot Mirror

Off the top of my head:

Zillow.com only works with IE or FireFox.

My employer's online time card system: IE only

My bank's on line bill paying system: IE only

Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) online registration site: "In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register."

The nations #1 news source: "The new AP Online Video Network is powered by Microsoft's MSN Video, meaning you must use the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer (IE), to view it online."

Microsoft's Windows Update page only works in IE.

Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) does not show all content unless IE6 is used. It doesn't even work completely with IE7.

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=2683

http://www.fedworld.gov/

Applying this to the current case makes a specious argument. He has not been charged with a crime. Where exists a threat to my inalienable right to life or any other right?

Correct, a good example of this is the Smith Act as deemed constitutional in Dennis v. US. However, there exists the case of the US District Court v. the United States in which the Court ruled that Judicial warrants were still required despite the need for national security. In the Hawash case, warrants were issued, but the 5th (and 14th) Ammendment was bypassed for reasons of national security. I think the SCOTUS would strike this law down if it had a chance to review it.

Applying this to the current case makes a specious argument. He has not been charged with a crime. Where exists a threat to my inalienable right to life or any other right?

Correct, a good example of this is the Smith Act as deemed constitutional in Dennis v. US. However, there exists the case of the US District Court v. the United States in which the Court ruled that Judicial warrants were still required despite the need for national security. In the Hawash case, warrants were issued, but the 5th (and 14th) Ammendment was bypassed for reasons of national security. I think the SCOTUS would strike this law down if it had a chance to review it.

Anyone care to guess which useful databases are about to be locked off to anyone who can't cough up the required dough?

The argriculture database is defintely Agricola

The legal one is harder to guess. There are really no good legal database hosted by federal government. FLITE is mostly useless. GPO Acess and THOMAS are both potential targets, but those are so important to general public, as oppose to relativly small number to researchers for DOE's PubScience.

IF they do shutdown those two. Then it's time to re-read declaration of Independence:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

On the first of those pages, I found a link to their progress report on e-filing. Their stated intermediate goal by next year is for 100% of returns prepared electronically to be submitted electronically; overriding goal is that by 2007 80% of all returns (taken as 80% each of individual, commercial, and informational returns) to be filed electronically. Personally, I don't see how they can get to the 80% for individual returns without getting to "If you didn't pay to prepare the return, you don't need to pay to E-file."

Corps get taxed on profits not on revenue. Employee wages and salaries are expenses which get subtracted off of the revenues. So you only get taxed once.

See http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1120.pdf

Note lines 11, 13 and 30. So your statement is true to some extent. If you charged a rate of $100/hour two taxes occur:

1. You are taxed once on your personal income ($75/hour)
2. Your corp is taxed on any profits of the remaining $25/hour minus further expenses (rent, insurance, etc.)

Typically, if you are a corp doing business with another corp, you will be able to charge more money than if you were an independant contractor. Plus it is less complicated for the hiring company to hire a corp to do the work.

While I suffer no illusions of Democrats always telling the truth, they did get it right with this issue.

You see, it's not that much of a cut and dry issue. My knowledge of it is not "absolutely wrong". In fact, it wasn't wrong at all.
Federal Tax Revenue did indeed double in the 1980-1990 period. I would be afraid if it hadn't! The US was just coming off the Arab Oil Embargo, which helped to pop the US annual inflation rate upto 12%. While it didn't stay that high for long, it did hover at an average of about 5% for that entire period. if A1=100, A2=105...Then in 1990, what was worth 100$ in 1980 was now only worth only 45$. So if tax revenues didn't double in that 10 year period, we would actually be taking in less in real terms than we were 10 years earlier. As it was, we just barely took in the same ammount. Indeed, in the initial period after the tax cut, tax revenue declined. Not until 1994 did we take in more money, in real terms, than we did in 1980.

All of this information is available at the IRS website. Here's an Excel spreadsheet with tax collections for the period 1970-1999.

So you see, I was not wrong. The Government did burden itself with over a /trillion dollars/ in debt during that period. Tax revenues did /not/ increase in real terms as a result of that tax cut. There /was/ a reason people laughed at Reagonomics. And no, I /don't/ need to "reexamine some of my other beliefs, which are most likely erroneous as well."
However, maybe you should heed your own advice. You seem to have very strong opinions, and expect people to believe them simply by insulting others, and being generally mean spirited:P I for one don't buy it, and I suspect others in your life don't either.

The entire argument is somewhat pointless I think, though, seeing as how we actually agree with each other. I believe the US Government would be completely right to invade Afghanistan with massive and overwhelming force. I don't buy the argument that the Taliban would draw us into a war similar to that fought by the Russians. After all, in that war they were supported by the US. In this war, they won't even have fuel to fight us, as 80% of their fuel comes from Pakistan, and Pakistan has now agreed to stop supplying them with food, aid, fuel and weapons. I think they would most likely run at the sight of us.

Anyway, that's my whole rant.

$19.95 list, about $10-12 to the retailer, so $14US is a common discount price. In the Vinyl days, the "standard" royalty was 10% of suggested retail, less holdbacks (10% for breakage, etc.) record club stock (the artist doesn't get payed for sales through "record clubs") promotional copies, etc. The standard royalty for CD's is 5%. Britney, of course, gets a higher percentage. The IRS (of all people) has a good quicky overview of the money side here in evil pdf format

While that is certainly interesting as well, I would think a situation where the copyright was transferred to a non-profit as a charitable gift might be a clearer case. Anyone know?

An organization that specialized in such a thing might be able to provide industry analysts and consultants that could help value the properties and provide third-party testimony during audits.

I suspect the most common use of this sort of software is to monitor foreign broadcasts - something the CIA/OSS has been doing for more than 50 years. Traditionally, this has been done through a group (mentioned in the article) called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). FBIS monitors newspapers/broadcasts of many, many non-US media sources and makes this information available to US Government agencies.

For many years, FBIS made available to the public a daily paper copy product via the US Dept of Commerce's National Technical Information Service (NTIS) that was fedex'ed daily to hundreds of subscribers around the country/world. There were several issues, broken down by regions. For many years, it was one of the best public ways to track what was happening in the Soviet space program.

It's widely known that FBIS/CIA as been developing and using technology to aid the translation process for many years.

A few years ago, they dropped the paper product and moved to an electronic version.

The FBIS server to distribute the information to US Government users can be seen at http://199.221.15.211/ and can be found via a simple Google search on "FBIS".

The public can access this information via NTIS's World News Connection system (http://wnc.fedworld.gov). Yes, there is a charge to use WNC, because NTIS has to pay copyright (gasp!!!!!) to the foriegn sources (just because you steal the data stream doesn't mean you own it!) as well as operate the system. It's pretty well known that foriegn sources who complain loud enough also get paid by the Govt for the US govt use of the data.

Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them.

I happen to be taking a law class right now, focusing on (among other things) consitutional law. Last time I looked at the Consitution (amazing how many people invoke the Constitution of the United States in normal discourse when they haven't read it, or read it well), which was about three hours ago, there are no stipulations as to age in any of the amendments that are commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights.

As an example in which it is explicitly stated that minors, and further minors as students, still have full and equal access to the BoR, see the US Supreme Court case TINKER V. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503. (the text can be read here among other places). (As a historical sidenote, my mother was friends with the kids in question, back in Des Moines in the mid 60's.)

So in short if a 1st grader wishes to say he thinks the school's administration is wrongheaded, and does so in a manner that is not inciting to riot, constitutionally he is completely free to do so. If the administration doesn't like that, tough titty.

I work in a software company, and our product takes up no less than 300 MB of code. Even in the most well-organized non-OOP code, our software would be impossible to debug or even build, because we would need to go through hundreds of lines of code. In addition, reusability would be hurt, since even though the functions would be there, minor changes in the arguments might make the entire function worthless.

The author's example using People and Taxes is particularly striking. He suggests that an object oriented approach would create a person object and a tax object, set their attributes, and run the T.CalcTax method on Person P, while a procedural approach would just feed the relevant parameters to a function. I wonder if the author has ever actually filled out the 1040 Personal Income Tax Return Form. The easy version has 70 entries, and while some are calculations, others are references to other, much bigger, forms! Keeping track of all these variables without some structure to hold them all is just stupid. Object orientation is necessary when code hits a level of complexity where several people, or several hundred, are simultaneously working on a project. The "black box" approach allows for greater flexibility and optimization, since a code change will be transparent to the objects around it.

Another thing to consider, although I know CmdrTaco would berate me for even mentioning it, is the expansion of OOP provided by Java. The Interface in Java allows you to specify several functions, abstractly, that are required for a class to implement the Interface. The implementation of these functions is class-specific: for example, all clothes implement the Wearable interface, but you would not want underwear and shoes to have the same implementation of Wear(). However, in Java, you may specify a function to take a Wearable object, and not need to specify any further. This abstraction level is why OOP does, in fact, better model the real world.

In conclusion, the rantings of a PASCAL junkie should not constitute a Slashdot article. Anyone who has coded in procedural and OO languages should see the extreme idiocy of the article within milliseconds. On the other hand, Perl powers Slashdot, so I guess this is the place for the procedural approach to have its message heard. In fact, Slashdot totally vindicates the article: its non-OOP approach is fast, effective, efficient, and easy-to-understand. Highly scalable and expandable as well. I especially like Slash.pm (aka THE BEAST) and the my_conf{shit} variable. I'm sure the non-OOP approach will really take off once everyone switches over from C++/Java to Perl.

Guess where the surplus came from? Thats right! Capital gains taxation.

Want proof? Look at the IRS stats on individual income. Check out href=http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/ irs -soi/98inprel.exe. Look at just the individual income figures (note, this does not include corporate income, excise or severance taxes, or any other source of Federal tax revenue). Capital gains accounts for all of 8% of all individual income, and an even lower proportion of total taxes. We could eliminate the capital-gains tax and still have a surplus.

I think we should. Getting rid of the capital gains tax would get rid of a lot of accountants and tax bureaucrats. It would eliminate any incentive for people to keep their money locked up in poorly-performing investments just to avoid having to pay the taxes required to get into better ones. And it would make mutual-fund investing an even better deal for the little guy (none of this crap about having to pay capital-gains taxes because the fund sold some stuff at a profit in order to buy some other stuff).

Getting rid of the capital gains tax would eliminate a bunch of obstacles and disincentives in the economy. It would probably help; it doesn't yield enough tax revenue to really hurt.
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Whether it's a raw deal is open to interpretation, but it's indisputably true that high-income people *do* pay the lion's share of federal income taxes:

From IRS figures for 1998 (watch out, it's a self-extracting XLS for Windows, sheesh):

• Adjusted gross income under $25,000:
  Percent of total returns filed = 49.71%
  Percent of total tax paid = 4.06%
• AGI $25-50K:
  % filers: 25.10%
  % total tax: 13.04%
• AGI $50-$100K:
  % filers: 18.53%
  % total tax: 24.79%
• AGI $100-$200K:
  % filers: 5.00%
  % total tax: 18.27%
• AGI $200K+
  % filers: 1.65%
  % total tax: 39.85%

Actually, this isn't entirely new.

The website http://www.fedworld.gov/ offers a single search site for hundreds of federal websites. Originally started as a central BBS that let you look at other government BBS systems, it expanded into offerings via FTP and gopher before there was really a web.

Somebody also mentioned http://www.google.com/unclesam [no trailing slash: bad server config!]. (and get a load of the old glory colors on the Google logo: bet you see something similar on the home page by next weekend ...)

Also, http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Services/ has been around for a long time.

It sounds like http://www.firstgov.gov/ (which IS live, just a placeholder) will be much more citizen-oriented, that is, getting the services to the people (like Social Security or VA records), rather than being a spreadsheets and reports searching site. I just don't think it's a very good name. help.gov? helpdesk.gov? services.gov? something "nineties" like my.gov? (Somebody else said) first.gov? The repeated G-O-V is silly.
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By yiminy, that's expensive gas. Don't forget though that gas sells at different prices in different regions/countries. Right now gas here is about $1.75/USG, which includes all taxes. If I drive twenty miles in any direction, the price changes dramatically. Other counties/states charge different amounts of tax, and here in Cincinnati we're funding the new baseball stadium. :(
The less well off in the US pay a negative amount of taxes--they get money back from the IRS, even if they put nothing in. There is a sweet spot in income. Check out http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/irs-pdf /i1040ez.pdf. The Earned Income Credit on page 19 and the tax table on the last 5 pages. The long and short of it is that the middle class pay the large majority of taxes, they can't afford the accountants to manipulate the tax laws. The rich class, of course, have accountants to do this. The poor class get money back from the government without having paid any to the goverment.
Anyhow, a system of indirect taxation does not preclude people from getting tax refunds, I certainly beleive that veterans, elderly, physically disabled, etc. people should get breaks, and for temporary problems (such as not having a job) perhaps for a while, but not forever. Here in Hamilton County, Ohio, they are finally placing limits on how long a family/person can be on welfare depending on why they are on it. But I won't get started on the corruption in that system.

Nearly 70 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to take advantage of the radio to connect directly and instantly with millions of American citizens across the country.

In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy was the first president to effectively employ the power of television as a visual communications medium.

Today, candidates and elected officials of every political persuasion are tapping the power of the Internet to interact with citizens in ways that one day may rival the impact of radio and television combined.

• In 1999, Steve Forbes became the first presidential candidate to announce his bid for office over the Internet.
• Since last April, more than 200,000 questions and comments have been submitted to Vice President Al Gore's "Interactive Town Hall," a location on his campaign's Web site, where he and his staff provide answers on a variety of subjects.
• In the 48 hours after winning the New Hampshire GOP primary earlier this month, Senator John McCain raised more than $1 million in contributions over the Internet.
• George W. Bush was the first presidential candidate to publish a complete list of his campaign contributors online.
• Bill Bradley, like many other candidates, has used the Web to detail his political agenda and substantive policy announcements.
• Jesse Ventura organized a long shot and ultimately successful independent bid for the Minnesota statehouse in 1998, with a campaign that demonstrated the grass- roots power and fundraising capabilities of the Net.

But it's not only candidates who are taking advantage of the power of the Web to reach out to citizens. In January, the President's State of the Union Address and the Republican response were the first to be broadcast live over Microsoft's Web TV, enabling thousands of viewers to learn more about Administration and GOP policies and initiatives instantly, simply by clicking on an Internet link.

Meanwhile, public agencies are making access to government resources more convenient. Today, in certain jurisdictions, you can download an application for a business license, search for a government job, track the status of a building permit, or file a tax return, all online.

Increasingly, the Internet also is being used as a vehicle for citizens to organize and express their views. When the City of Seattle recently considered a controversial ordinance to prohibit the display of exotic animals in circus performances, thousands of e-mails flew back and forth between voters and their elected officials.

Parents are using the Internet to organize Web sites where information about school meetings can be posted, and where vibrant forums exist to bat around ideas regarding new academic programs, school test results and grading standards.

Meanwhile, political Web "portals" like those hosted by USAdemocracy.com, vote-smart.org, Issues2000.org, grassroots.com, MSN.com and others are providing interested citizens with up-to-the-minute information that is fundamentally changing the way citizens learn about and get involved in important issues.

Technologies are emerging on Web sites like selectsmart.com that match a voter's views on issues with the positions of candidates. This kind of "comparison shopping" will empower voters by allowing them to obtain substantive and current information about candidates' positions, and to make informed decisions at election time.

In the near future, the Internet may also serve as a medium for voter registration and online voting. Several test projects to facilitate online voting are in progress. Ensuring equitable access, security, privacy and reliability are concerns that will need to be addressed before voters are able to cast their ballots from the convenience of their home or a nearby public facility.

The neighborhood polling booth won't go away, but with voter participation at historic lows - particularly among young people - online voting offers the potential to encourage easier and greater involvement in our electoral process.

At Microsoft, we're enthusiastic about the Internet for many reasons, not the least of which is the promise it holds to create a more informed electorate and to encourage the participation of more people - especially young people - in our democratic process.

This is one in a series of essays on technology and its impact on society. More information is available at www.microsoft.com .

Additonal Readings

• Federal Election Commission Web Site
  FedWorld Information Network Web Site
  MSN Politics Web Site
  

• Certain corporations which perform specific activities for the government, as specified by Congress, may also be classified as tax-exempt under 501(c)(3).

You're making this up as you go along, right?

The examples I gave were all 501(c)(3)s. As I said, it's not by my definition, each of these organizations applied and were granted this status by the IRS. As you say, see Publication 557 for details.

While the functions of 501(c)(3) organizations may not seem to be "charitable" in function, they are generally referred to as "a 501(c)(3) charity". Donations can generally be made to these organizations on a tax-exempt basis. As I said, charity is broadly defined. Both Mitre and CTC refer to themselves as 501(c)(3) charities. As this IRS page states:

• The organizations described in 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to under the general heading of "charitable organizations."

• The exempt purposes set forth in 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erection or maintenance of public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening of neighborhood tensions; elimination of prejudice and discrimination; defense of human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

Note also that as long as the corporation involves itself in it's original chartered function, it can keep it's tax exempt status:

• The articles of organization must limit the organization's purposes to one or more of the exempt purposes set forth in 501(c)(3) and must not expressly empower it to engage, other than as an insubstantial part of its activities, in activities that are not in furtherance of one or more of those purposes. This requirement may be met if the purposes stated in the articles of organization are limited in some way by reference to 501(c)(3). In addition, assets of an organization must be permanently dedicated to an exempt purpose.

You can contribute, tax-deductibly to Mitre, CTC or the FSF because of their "charitable" status.

The real issue is that you accused RMS of perpetrating a fraud by invalidly constituting a 501(c)(3) corporation. You went on to claim that such corporations were not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations. Both claims are bunk and any examination of the relevant tax code sections demonstrates this pretty clearly.

-Jordan Henderson