France Retracts Computer Tax Proposal

ovidus naso writes " Minister Tasca decided not to go forward with her computer tax project. My impression is that this was just political play (her strongest enemies are fellow socialists, naturally!). The Liberation is carrying the story with the retracation. " As always with non-fluent speakers, the fish is your friend. Remember: You get a twofold benefit with Babelfish: The translation to the story to get the main gist of the story, and the actual translation has so many laughable areas, you have an entry to a bad poetry competition.

Comments

The guest book of the ministere de la culture hav

[f5426]

The Guest Book of the 'Ministere de la Culture' (www.culture.fr) have been spammed a lot yesterday. People discovered that HTML tags were not parsed from the names, and started putting javascript in their names that opened various browser window to anti-tax sites. Was pretty funny while it lasted. Then someone made a syntax error in its name and the page stopped loading.

So the webmaster decided to put it offline (or, more likely, was just waiting for something like that so they could put it offline).

Cheers,

--fred

Re:Not a bad idea if taken to its extreme

[squiggleslash]

1. goverments tend to do everything less efficiently than private organisations - I guess much of the money would be eaten by the goverment

This is often true but not always. Assuming you're defining government as any taxation funded system, and therefore would include the BBC as part of it, this issue came up during the 1990 ITV franchising round.

From what I recall, one of the arguments used to justify the auction system that was used was that the BBC, in total, earned about 50% more in revenues (from the licence fee and from overseas sales) than the ITV network. However, the ITV network put on one TV station (per locality.) By contrast, the BBC put on two TV stations, one of which contained a significant amount of regional content (at least as much as ITV.) It also funded 4 national radio stations, and a network of local radio stations. And a world reknowned symphony orchestra to boot.

It doesn't always work that way of course, but it certainly is possible for an institution answerable to government and funded by a government scheme to be more efficient than equivalent private enterprises.

Health services tend to be another example, though it's often difficult to tell whether private systems tend to spend more and get less in return because overall they have more funding and so a willingless to spend money on vanity schemes. The US spends twice as much as Canada per capita, but the health system in Canada is generally regarded as as adequate as the US except in a relatively small number of areas.

2. I can not image a right way to divide the tax between all the artist

Agreed.
--

CD-R(W) Tax

[Matthias Saou]

Well, this not happening is a *really* good thing. But since last week, we (french) already have something like 3FF (about 50 cents) tax per blank CD... for me who only burns Linux & BSD distros, this almost doubles the price of my CDs :-( and all that extra money goes mainly to music companies and producers...

Aaaahhh french laws... did I mention we're still not supposed to even *use* openssh?