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Since a lot of commenters on my blog misunderstand Wa. State Tax Law, I've posted text of the statue there under Notes for commenters at the bottom. http://blog.reifman.org/2009/09/road-balanced-budget-leads-to-microsoft.html * The law does not distinguish between license sales intrastate, interstate or international * By transferring it's software to Reno for sale from Nevada, Microsoft is accomplishing a "sleight of hand" which probably would not pass muster in Washington State court. I also addressed a lot of common arguments people make against Microsoft paying its taxes here - back in 2008: Top Reader Excuses for Microsoft's Tax Avoidance (Idealog) http://www.idealog.us/2008/02/top-reader-excu.html

I don't think the guy who writes this article really understands tax law. Neither do I really, but atleast I'll admit it. It seems to me that I remember Tax Avoidance being perfectly legal and accepted. I really think he misunderstands the idea that there's some existing tax law to be enforced that applies to Microsoft's actions. The software is licensed out of NV, hence, NV law applies. There are major jurisdictional issues inherent in taxation law and so far as I can tell as a layman, there's nothing afoul of any regulation going on here.

If there were, you can be sure Washington State would have their hands in Microsoft's pockets already.

That's kind of why most corporations are incorporated in Delaware, too. There's jurisdictional issues being blatantly ignored by this person in order to make a point and that is not justified.

That all said, I did some more reading and it looks like this guy has barked up this tree before.
http://crosscut.com/2008/02/02/microsoft/11167/
which was posted to Slashdot back then
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/1520219
and a followup with his anti-arguments to the posts from Slashdot back then.
http://www.idealog.us/2008/02/top-reader-excu.html

Oh and 2004 too:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/2137228&tid=109

You'll notice, a year ago, he supposedly already addressed all the issues everyone here could possibly present. Unfortunately, he's also completely ignored the one about the constitutionality of taxation and jurisdiction and focuses more on wishy washy sort of justification arguments made that appeal more to a sense of right or wrong, rather than the case law regarding jurisdictional tax issues.

Career campaigner on this issue, hey Jeff? Too bad you've wasted 5 YEARS on this subject and you're never going to get anywhere because Microsoft is DOING NOTHING WRONG.

http://www.idealog.us/2009/06/kindle-dx-now-shipping-amazon-launches-larger-kindle-fu.html

Stories submitted by user NewsCloud:
  Spotlight on Facebook Groups Affects Microsoft http://jeff.newscloud.com/2007/09/06/microsoft-digital-advertising-placing-ads-on-facebook-hate-groups/
  Facebook Exposes Advertisers To Hate Speech
http://jeff.newscloud.com/2007/09/03/facebook-brand-left-to-mercy-of-hate-groups/
  Facebook Apps Facing Delays and Uncertainties
http://www.idealog.us/2007/06/thanks_for_deve.html

idealog = personal spamblog, newscloud = spam blog, whom Google undoubtedly denied AdSense API access

actually image, which was taken http://www.idealog.us/2007/08/is-this-what-th.html

That's not a close-up of the propeller -- THIS is a close-up!

K changed my original post but I put a close up of the liveearth propeller image here. I agree the U.S. govt doesn't care about it at this point or MSFT would have blurred it.

iFilm doesn't have RSS feeds for Daily Show episodes or Colbert Report. I've put together these two feeds using Dapper and Feedburner: Daily Show Clips on iFilm (http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyShowiFilm) Colbert Report Clips on iFilm (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ColbertReportiFilm) Link to blog entry on this

The stories you told of people who are suffering touched us all. But it is naive to suggest that an individual stockholder can stop that suffering. Changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues. While shareholder activism has worthwhile goals, we believe a much more direct way to help people is by making grants and working with other donors to improve health, reduce poverty and strengthen education.

In case the ad changes, I've posted an archive visual here. Pretty funny that Microsoft is paying to show ads to Slashdot readers reading about hating Microsoft.

Citizen Microsoft details how Microsoft has dodged taxes by operating out of Reno, Nv. and abused its clout in Washington state in many of the same ways other corporations do in their hometowns.

This fall, I released free source code for people to use a PHP Class to generate SiteMaps for Google - and it seems like the standards group adapted Google's format. The code is perfect for dynamic database driven sites that can't readily use perl-scripts that sometimes perform this task. http://www.idealog.us/2006/09/google_sitemap_.html

There was another bigger purge last night: 78% of Daily Show Clips Missing from YouTube I wrote a script to analyze this ... Of 897 Daily Show videos on YouTube sampled, 699 were missing or broken. That's nearly 78% of Daily Show videos now taken down for alleged copyright infringement without any regard for fair use from what I can tell. More commentary on the week's events here: Truthiness is scarce at Viacom and YouTube this week

Let him know on his blog.

Better string me up, then!

Our apologies to all of our viewers, those responsible have been sacked...

Perhaps Bill is having problems with a guilty conscience...

After demanding millions in license fees, etc. from poor African nations, millions more from uncounted hospitals and schools around the world, we are now supposed to say: "Oh, look. Bill is giving to charity. How nice."

Want to know what is REALLY going on?
http://www.africanhiphop.com/index.php?module=subj ects&func=viewpage&pageid=253

Here's an interesting opinion:
http://www.idealog.us/2004/10/follow_up_to_ci.html

Or how about this gem? (Article link follows)
The government of Zambia, as one example, was given stern warning to crack down on piracy by Microsoft. We're talking about the nation of Zambia in Africa. One of the world's poor nations and Microsoft is asking them to cough up money for software licenses.
http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/linuxclassroom.sht ml

Yeah, Bill Gates, what a guy. All that money he's giving away. Perhaps one should consider where it came from first? Robbing the poor, then giving some back for PR. Well, at least now I know TIME magazine is just a rag not worth reading anymore

"Altruism was rarely the motivating factor in establishing the large independent foundations - ones like Pew, Ford, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson that every NPR listener can name. The Ford Foundation was established to help keep the company in the family without paying estate taxes. John D. MacArthur, founder of Bankers Life and Casualty Company, never made any significant charitable contributions during his lifetime, but left his estate of nearly $1 billion to a foundation rather than to his estranged children. One of the trusts founded by the Sun Oil heirs, the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, was established to "acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy... and with the values of a free market...to point out the false promises of Socialism...." In one cozy office the staff of the Pew Charitable Trusts now give out $21 million a year of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust both to right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the National Right to Work gang - and to crunchy groups like the Tides Foundation and the Pesticide Action Network, under terms of a different Pew heir's will."

Yeah, but you have to crack it for it to behave that way.

Virtually every disc image of WinXP I've seen floating around are either the corporate versions that don't require activation or are pre-cracked. And it's not like cracking is such a chore. It involves running one freely available executable exactly once.

Illegal but not immoral, in my opinion.

Nor do I think it's immoral to pirate WinXP since MS obviously gouges on pricing. But I'd argue that they are really no worse than Apple in this regard. Frankly, I think Windows should be free for non-commercial use. This would be the kiss of death for desktop Linux.

Not in my experience. Obviously you need to have CC info on file to use the iTunes music store, but simply to organize your music, registration is completely optional. It's FREE software, why should it require registration?

iTunes has to "call home" to verify protected content and that verification is NOT permanent, so if you leave your Mac disconnected from the Internet for a couple months all your music is unplayable because the licenses can't be verified. And you can't transfer music to another system without Internet access. And if your firewall doesn't like iTunes DRM (for example, it's stateful inspection) you can't verify your content. And what happens if Apple decides to stop supporting iTunes? You're SOL.

DRM is anti-consumer, period. If you buy music through iTunes eventually you WILL be burned by the DRM. And when the DRM breaks, which is quite easy if security in OSX gets messed up somehow, Apple acts like it's the customer's fault:
http://www.idealog.us/2005/08/what_apple_supp.html

And no, I don't consider burning to CD and then re-ripping to MP3, OGG, etc. as a REASONABLE solution because it's a major pain in the ASS. Fuck DRM music and fuck Apple for promoting it.

It's worth noting that Protected Windows Media has pretty much exactly the same problems and is ALMOST as evil. It's just that if you know where to look you can find tools to easily strip off the DRM if you're having problems. MS tech support will even point you towards these tools if you're having problems (since they have no vested interest in music companies fucking you, unlike Apple).

Surely there is a reason for using XP beyond being a cheapskate.

That was my primary reason for adopting PCs over Macs way back in the early 90's. Macs were about three times the cost of PCs, I simply couldn't afford one. When Win95 was released much of the usability gap between Macs and WinTel disappeared, and it was still way cheaper.

This is still basically true today. Macs are still terribly overpriced. I seriously considered buying a Mac mini but when I actually USED one and saw how slow it was without expensive upgrades I felt cheated. In practice, Apple doesn't sell a computer for less than about $850 and for $250 I could buy a Brand X Athlon box that was roughly twice as fast as the Mac and could do absoultely everything that the Mac could do except run a handful of apps that I don't use anyway. I like Aqua, but I don't like it that much.

And lastly, I play computer games. Steve hasn't been willing to bribe Microsoft for DirectX, so MacOS sucks as a gaming platform. I want to be able to play games like Half-Life 2 and Battlefield 2. That means a Windows PC, and things are likely to stay that way for the forseeable future.

The scrabble at the UK site PixiePit is fantastic and is actually hosted in a European country out of the reach of Hasbro's lawyers.