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Slashback: Bouncing, Taxing, Releasing
"The layout of our Web page doesn't do a great job of showing that the story continues on a second page. That's where I explain what is up for taxing.He also provides this link to the full, uninterrupted text.Quoting the story now:
'...That brings them under the purview of the proposed rule, which includes computer networks as 'substitute communications systems' -- subject to a 9.17 percent state tax, plus local option taxes.
In Orange County, the local tax typically runs between 5.5 percent and 6.5 percent. That would bring the total tax to between 14-15 percent.
[end of first page, you hafta click to get to the rest of the story]
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.'"
Willie Sutton has met his betters.
Syphtor writes "DE Tech has responded to a reporters inquiries as to their patent claims (DE Tech refuses to say why NZ firms were targeted first)
DE Tech appeared previously in the /. article, Australian Gov't Moves To Block E-commerce Patent. Latest: the patent has been just granted in Virginia 'after five years of making changes in the application.'
Legitimate protection of IP or a 'fishing expedition worthy of a Sicilian Mafia protection racket.'?"
Well, not releasing everything, No, not as such, that is, you see ...
An anonymous reader writes "According to this press release from the BBC, the 'BBC creative archive' (earlier on slashdot) will not be as full as previously assumed. As the page says, 'The BBC Creative Archive would make selected BBC material universally available for private not commercial use in the UK.' (my emphasis) Looks like we won't be able to get the Hitchhiker's Guide and complete works of Monty Python after all, folks."
Who, really, is Peter Lynds, and how old is he? evil_one666 writes "You may remember that Slashdot reported a few weeks ago on ground-breaking work in the understanding of time. Well, it appears that it was all a hoax. While the Guardian is running a story that suggests several interesting conspiracy theories (although they seem to think that Peter Lynds is in fact legitimate), Museumofhoaxes.com present some convincing evidence that he is in fact a 17-year-old student at the same radio college at which he claimed to be a 27-year old-lecturer. Astute Slashdot readers rightly pointed out some big red flags, the first time the topic was aired, and Cesar Sirvent, a researcher in the field, has a list of links related to the controversy here."
Outlook Express not yet left out to rot. dr. electron writes "As stated previously on Slashdot, Outlook was to be slaughtered. Now MS says, in a article on Internet Magazine, it won't be, but developed further. They blame communication problem inside the company about the previous press release. Maybe the ongoing development of Outlook Express isn't the biggest news here, I find the reason 'communication problem' a bit odd (It's not a small decision to kill a product)."
Speaking of Outlook and anguish: caseywest, among others, has had enough blame redirected into his email box. He writes "This is my plea, my Public Service Announcement. Please, please stop bouncing email viruses! I don't run any windows computers, and /dev/null'ing viruses are trivial. I cannot, however, say that this problem is only a Windows-only menace. My email address is plastered all over the internet. As a result, I'm receiving thousands of bounced messages claiming I sent a virus. This is costly, let alone wrong! I didn't send you that virus! If you admin an email server, please answer chromatic's one question test. If you're bouncing email viruses, please reconfigure your filters to send viruses to /dev/null, and save us all money on bandwidth, hard disk space, and general anguish. Thank you."
It's likely not going to be posted so here goes my contribution for Slashnack news...
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is now in full swing with a "Biodefense project" that seems to be a mixture of Star Trek meets Private Ryan. In an article featured at Guerrilla News, author Cheryl Seal criticizes the program which seems to have terms like 'Brain Interface Program' and 'Engineered Tissue', and there is an extensive write up on the ethics of this sort of testing on animals titled 'Roborat Ethics'. Browsing over DARPA's site I found BIODYNOTICS aka Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robots. According to DARPA the BIODYNOTICS Program represents a new thrust area for DSO that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multi-pronged approach with far reaching impact on robotic capabilities for national security applications. Borgs anyone?
MoFscker
How did a tax on LANs ever even get floated? That is a sure way to drive computer using businesses out of the state. This law will have a corrosive effect on tax compliance in general. Of course people will cheat on this tax; so that will open the moral door to cheating elsewhere. I predict that if this tax is passed Florida's tax revenue will decline as some businesses move to other states and the one's that stay start to cheat on their taxes that they once payed in full.
Free cell phone tracking
"That brings them under the purview of the proposed rule, which includes computer networks as 'substitute communications systems' -- subject to a 9.17 percent state tax, plus local option taxes" Does that mean my hand gesture just cost me 9.17%???
Automatics are for old men
Speaking of Outlook and anguish: caseywest.. How does sobig relate too outlook? Its doesn't use outlook, nor does it exploit it. Its trojan horse and it first spread via usenet. It has its own built in smtp server and scans your harddrive for email addresses.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Lan Taxation Tan Laxation
My e-mail address is plastered all over the internet too, and I got 500 Spams this evening. The difference? I don't use crappy software like Outlook. I use Mozilla Messenger, and it ate those Spams and spit them out. All 500 went straight to the junk folder -- including the bounces (which, oddly enough, seem to come primarily from french-speaking countries for me).
So stop your whining, and "invest" in some quality software. If your e-mail system can't handle cruft, you have no-one but yourself to blame.
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.
...
Hey Florida engineers : I have a whole lot of 2BaseT networking equipment for sale, so you can get a tax break! Man, I never thought I'd be able to do something with that crap.
Florida sure knows how to promote the concept of *old*
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It was the fact that they have been treated by Microsoft not as they had expected over the years.
[Seibt]
I think it's why Microsoft has so much to lose. Before, they could treat their clients how they want. But now the clients can go check the alternative, see how they can be better, and decide to switch.
If Microsoft decides to treat better their clients, it will involve many expenses (they can afford them anyway), but I don't think they will really appreciate it.
So... any creative ideas as to what can be done about this? I am now getting as many bounced emails as I am copies of the sobig virus. Used to be a 1:3 ratio.
And it's not just bounced emails. I get personal responses. Someone actually took the time to write me: "You sent me a virus, you fag."
I thought about making an autoresponder for virus notification bounce-headlines (I'm on a Mac--I'm pretty sure it's not me), but wouldn't sending emails back just add to the net-congestion?
Alex.
...all writing utensils and paper too.
I'm sure the airlines, hotels, and amusement parks (ie Disney/MGM, Universal, etc.), all of whom use extensive computer networks in their operations, are going to be hopping mad about getting slapped with another tax. Ultimately though, that tax WILL be passed to the end users, just as those airport, taxi, and room taxes are charged on visitors in many jurisdictions.
And what exactly was the point of charging this tax in the first place? Is Florida a little too prosperous for their politicans? Do they feel the need to drive some of their economy to adjoining states?
I'm not responsible for the administration of my mail server. I'm too lazy to pay for DSL/etc., eh? ;)
:p Really sad when you point out to someone that they've been infected, and they immediate insist that you're h4x0r1ng their box. :P
:P Virus spam is bad enough, and they want to deal with 'OMG STOP H4X0R1NGZ m3!!!' mail from idiots who can't read, yet?
But I have, on occasion, upon verifying headers (Important part, eh?), sent notice to people who were sending me SirCam/etc.
After being screamed at for infecting people, I stopped. I figure, if some stupid user doesn't know and doesn't care enough to run anti-virus software, hell on them.
I can't even begin to fathom the blood pressure rises in admins who bounce virus-infested mails back to the people who sent them, legitimate or not.
Man, and I was really hoping to get vids of "The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin"
sloth jr
If Florida's tax authorities are as good at math as its election officials, I don't think it matters much - there's already ample opportunity for cheating.
An "Amen" goes out to Caseywest...
This little school system I work for has been beaten to death by these virus notifications lately due primarily to Sobig.F. I'm proud to be one of the people who saw this problem coming up back in June and went and disabled the automatic reply feature...even though I still get an alert myself. What annoys me even more are these virus scanners that "remove" the virus (still may have an executable attached), but go ahead and pass on the email to the "lucky" user.
Moral of the story... The virus writers have gotten "smarter". PLEASE, disable those $#%@ notifications, for they do more harm now than good.
Thanks.
when Florida as a State can actaully manage to accurately count votes
Then and only then will I believe they might be able to tell the difference between a LAN and a WAN...
apppollogies to the number one Band to come from Florida--Lynard Skynard..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Considering slashdot readers don't do a great job of reading the actual sites that are posted here, I don't see what the problem is.
Please help metamoderate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FLs Constitution forbids an income tax, and thus the state has to get revenue somehow. Most of it comes in the form of sales taxes, but this unfairly taxes consumers over business, so there are also a host of other business-oriented use taxes, such as fixture tax (a tax on things used to display merchandise), telephone tax, and now a LAN tax. Businesses in FL are used to this sort of thing, and still would probably prefer the no-income tax benefit of FL over relocating to a different state.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
It's too early for a dollar figure, but its members are not pleased to see more tax on their plates, says Simon. Should the rule go into effect, he adds, the state Legislature could step in.
So the Florida Dept. of Revenue cooked this up, for reasons that can only make sense to career bureaucrats. The Florida Legislature will smack it down in the unlikely event that the DoR actually tries to implement it.
What should scare people is the degree to which legislatures have deferred tax-writing power to unelected bureaucrats. They are shirking their constitutional responsibilities. It gives the state a way to raise revenue and the legislature a way to pass the buck. "Shucks, it wasn't *our* idea! Honest! We feel your pain..."
Uhh... so by your logic, the gov. must want to me to stop working and earning money.
yeah. =)
Email needs to be reliable communication medium. If a message can not be delivered, it has to be returned to the sender. It is absolutely unacceptable to simply discard a message.
Want a better idea? Try _blocking_ the message. When I see any executable attachment in a message, my server does not accept the message. It returns a 5xx series message and tells the person to resend it without the attachment. I do the same thing for common virus Subject: lines. The message is rejected with a 5xx error and the user is told to change the subject line.
Although I agree that bouncing a message with a virus sucks, entirely too many legitimate messages are already bounced for various reasons. If a sender can not be sure an email was received or rejected, then email will become as useless as usenet.
One thing that should never happen is notifying the postmaster of a domain that a message contained a virus. I get this all the time. Some anti-virus gateway receives a message claiming to be from someone at a domain that I administer. Instead of just bouncing the message, their software also notifies postmaster@mydomain.com to let _ME_ know that my user has a virus.
The only problem being that the original message was a forgery and has nothing to do with me or my domains. These people take a bad problem, (a virus) and make it worse by DOUBLING the number of messages sent. How idiotic is that? Anytime I see one of those messages, I put that persons entire domain in my blacklist and I will not remove it until I am notified that they have stopped such a stupid practice.
-sirket
...isn't this double taxation? Florida appears to be taxing the sale price, and if I'm reading this properly, taxing again at this same percentage whether you lease or own, based on the lease price or the value of the equipment anually? There are state and local taxes for using telephone services, but what they're proposing is taxing on the value of the equipment used. If I'm not mistaken and this isn't double taxation, this would be as ass-backwards as taxing annually on the value of the phone you're using. Two people could be using the same phone service, but one would be paying more in taxes because they got a nice 2.4GHz cordless as opposed to the other who got theirs at a dollar store. Perhaps something more like phone tax system would be better.
----- I want my LART.
So, Hitchikers and Python are unlikely to be released? Series with the potential to be the biggest drain in terms of bandwidth? Surely not!
Seriously, sarcasm aside - until bandwidth is free (or as close to free as possible) why should we expect an unexpurgated feed? Not only that, but why should US citizens (for example) expect to be able to freely download programme archives paid for by the British taxpayer at no cost to themselves?
Whilst I hope and pray this project comes to fruition (don't vote tory!), there are a lot of questions that need to be answered before such a service might be considered practical...
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
> Please, please stop bouncing email viruses!
Hrm, could this have been one of the hidden advantages we lost when we switched from bang-path
addressing to DNS based ?
Under the old "route it took to get here" method,
were addresses forgeable? Sure, you could pretend
you were only a relay rather than the originator,
but you'd still get the bounces.
- MugginsM
He states: /dev/null'ing viruses are trivial.
/dev/null, his bandwidth is still being eaten up (you can't scan what you haven't yet recieved). People pay for bandwidth, especially people who have dedicated servers or colo - and just because someone else's server bounced the message to yours, doesn't mean that you don't get 'digned' at bill time for the bandwidth.
I don't run any windows computers, and
And then at the end he states:
save us all money on bandwidth, hard disk space, and general anguish.
Your 'email system' is a CLIENT - he is talking about email servers. He never mentions using outlook, the term 'Outlook' was used to describe his opinion/request, as-in 'his outlook on the subject'.
Even if his server is configured to stop the spam and viruses by piping them to
In addition to the extra cost, and it can add up if you run a server that has many email users (all of whom may be being sent the virus, and whom may be recieving bounces from forged virus emails), not only can the virus eat up a lot of bandwidth over time, it can Slow You Down. 100k a virus email or bounce... 200 users... 1 bounce or attempted deliver to one of those users every 40 seconds or so... your pipe is full. Qmail is busy. Its an email slashdot effect. It can slow everything down.
Now, do you still think he's whining?
Get a brain.
man is machine
Of course, what's stopping them from moving to a state with comperable weather, and yet no Income Tax .. like Texas, that doesn't resort to B.S. taxation practices in order to generate revenue?
Not to mention the tech centers already in place (Austin, Dallas)
Governments should tax things ONLY to raise revenue.
Where did this idea that Governments should use taxes as tools of social engineering ever get started?
The taxes on businesses just get passed to the consumers anyways.
It says it wants feet.
...802.11b/g ad-hoc network? (Isn't that a LAN?) ...two old Macs connected by a localtalk cable?
How the hell will they enforce this?
What about home networking?
Why not just add a tax on routers? Or better yet, maybe they could just raise their sales tax rate.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They can't ONLY do one thing. When we tax something we discourage that behavour, so we ought to only tax things we want less of
Free cell phone tracking
After all it's UK citizens who pay for the BBC through our license fee. We paid for the programmes to be made initially.
Why should we foot the (substantial) bill to serve up our programming to other countries in the world?
If they want to see the programmes they should subscribe to BBC World or BBC Prime.
When sobig went off, we were getting hammered. Apparently a bunch of dumb ass spammers had harvested my slashdot spamtrap addy, and then got infected with sobig, so my spamtrap addy was getting thousands of bounces. I tried larting the various email servers (almost all of whom were in europe), but after most of them blew me off, i start agressively firewalling the offending ip ranges. I plan to leave them in the firewall for a few weeks or so until sobig is truely dead, then i'll unblock em.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Uhh... so by your logic, the gov. must want to me to stop working and earning money.
Uhh... so by your logic, the gov. always does what it should do?
I have no problem with other countries using GPS, and that was paid for by American taxpayers.
Is this case really any different?
The replacement for an exchange server is simply an IMAP server with messages that contain trivial messages that are used to contain the new spec for Contact and Calendar information as a MIME attachment.
What's necessary is for more e-mail / calendar / address book programs to make that paradigm available so that it can become the standard for doing such things.
At the very worst, it will end up in the hands of an ISP that now knows that they have to deal with an open relay on their network.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
why should US citizens (for example) expect to be able to freely download programme archives paid for by the British taxpayer at no cost to themselves?
Americans are entitled to d/l this content for free because if you don't let us download, we're going to fly over there and bomb the crap out of you!
taxes are taxes. there is no such concept as "double taxation".
the only important thing about taxation is to realize it can be also used as a policy tool. As a rule one should seek to minimize its influence on societal decisions, and secondarily to only encourage changes that are universally agreed as good ideas, and finally it should avoid singling out minority groups. For example, smoker taxes are good in the sense that they can act decrease health care costs and lower costs to hotels and others where smoke causes problems, but they are bad in the sense that it singles out a small group.
the best policy to achieve socially neutral taxation is to spread taxes around so make a basket of consumption, luxury, production taxes, property and resource usage taxes. Also its better to have a tax system biased towards being progressive than regressive since there is a dimnishing marginal utility for money.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's a poor example
GPS was paid for by the US for use by the US military. The US military still gets primary use from it, at a level not available to civilians. Furthermore, the system is passive, so it doesn't cost the US government anything to have civilians use the cut down version. In essence, US taxpayers aren't paying anything for the use of GPS by foreign nations.
For the BBC, there will be a direct cost - the cost of the bandwidth to serve the programming out to foreign nations, combined with the cost of potential future licensing. Why should UK taxpayers pay for that?
The world's largest nuclear arsenal is controlled by a man who is functionally illiterate. Doesn't that bother you?
"Functionally" illiterate? What the hell does that mean? Is that the opposite of decoratively illiterate? Or disfunctionally illiterate? How is Harvard one of the most respected universities in the country if they are giving graduate degrees to illiterate people?
Take your Bush-hating, salon.com glasses off for a minute to see how dumb you look, moron.
Everybody is all for "sin taxes" until their sacred cow is queued up for the slaughter line. That's my thinking on this topic.
[n/t]
First of all, you have the Two Armies Problem. Two armies are on opposite sides of a common enemy. If they attack that common enemy on their own, they will lose, so they must attack at the same time. How do you send messages to each other with knowledge of receipt? You can't. If I send the "Go" and you send the "OK", how do you know that I got the "OK"? I send an ACK. How do I know you got the "ACK"? You send me another ACK... and so on.
The Second problem with EMail is that a good number of routers that use the leaky bucket protocol will see that it's only port 25, not something important like port 21, and drop the packet. Tannenbaum talks about this in his networking book.
Beware TPB
I'm not at all sure that US citizens have any special right to access here (as opposed to say the citizens of France or Afghanistan), but it's possible they do. Lendlease and other WW2 programs sank some US money into the British entertainment industry - at the very least this included recording some music and prooducing some film footage such as used for the Victory at Sea series. How much, if any, went towards TV programming, building or upgrading studios, and so on is something on which I have never seen a straight answer from either the British government or the US GAO. It looks at least possible US citizens have some special status in re access to these files, and it would be nice to get that point cleared up.
Who is John Cabal?
The definition of functionally illiterate:o nary/function ally+illiterate
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dicti
Definition: [adj] having reading and writing skills insufficient for ordinary practical needs
Synonyms: illiterate
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The taxes on consumers just get passed to the employers anyways.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If the consumer is out of state Florida never receives the tax revenue.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
I think you will find that governments will generally tax those things society cannot get along without - if they tax undesirable behaviours, to the extent the undesirable behaviour stops happening, then their income stream dries up. Hence they tax the things they know we will not, or cannot, give up ie fuel, alchohol, tobacco, financial transactions, income, sales transactions etc so they will have a continuing revenue source.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
- Fair Tax Act -
We lose 20-30% of our buying power due to taxes.
This is the only bill I have seen in 10 years that can fix all of this.
Write your rep a real letter and ask them to co-sign it. Lets get it on the floor. Its time to for a change.
...can they determine whether the downloader is a British citizen? "Click here if you are, and here if you're not"?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Instead of buying networking equipment from a retail store order it online and you don't get the tax.
For the benefit of less SMTP-savy, here are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.
Unless you want to open yourself to the rumplestiltskin attack, you must accept every message for delivery, and THEN decide on the action.
In fact, returning a 5XX is a bounce. It's not blocking them from sending it. You have still received the data, and nothing is going to undo that.
Beware TPB
Florida has alot of defense industry, which doesn't move much. Tourism, which isn't going anywhere. Military bases, which while they might close, Florida's are pretty safe (Eglin - SOG/Armaments Testing, Tyndall - F/A-22 Training, Jacksonville/Mayport - Carriers, Sub support, surface warfare, Tampa - CentCom, Pensacola - Naval Aviation Training, Blue Angels, Key West - Coasties, Drug Interdiction). Agriculture and Sugar production.
So I don't think Florida is in danger of industry moving because of a LAN Tax.
the irony, oh the irony...
/. effect on e-mail addresses is delayed by several days, unlike with websites... not 10 minutes after posting about how I had not recieved a single spam in any of me email accounts, I got my first spam... lol
I guess the
Error 666 - Satanic SCO code found in your Linux kernel.
I'm from Canada. We loose (in most provinces) 65% of our buying power to taxes, you insensitive clod!
~50% income tax if you make any amount of money (ie upper middle class) + 15% sales tax.
I am not familiar with that. What is it?
BBC evil?
What about President Bush makes you think he doesn't have reading or writing skills? I have never seen him write anything but his signature, but given Harvard's academic reputation, I think its safe to say that they wouldn't have given him an MBA if he couldn't write. I have seen him read, and he reads his speeches very well. I would say that smoothly delivering a speech on international TV in front of hundreds of millions of people qualifies as an "ordinary practical need".
The Republicans?
Actually I get a ton of email, a lot of which is spam or a virus (or a virus bounce). I have actually stopped all of these messages from getting through by blocking SMTP connections that fail to follow the protocols. Postfix does this quite happily and prevents 95% of spam and all of the current virus/trojans from getting through.
-sirket
Yeah, and it's a coincidence that the companies most in debt to their pension plans are the ones handing out the biggest pay raises.
No, the costs of those raises are timeshifted and passed back to the employees. I'm not all about that worker's paradise shit, but let's at least try to be a little bit honest about where the money is really going.
Outlook 2000, at least, has a dramatically inferior IMAP interface. Inferior to the point that it just didn't work with at least one server.
Outlook Express that came with Win2k on the other hand, worked fine. Same settings.
Possibly they fixed this in 2002.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Basic economics: the burden of a tax will be distributed between buyers and sellers in proportion to their willingness to bear it. It's not correct to say that a tax on business is automatically pushed on the consumer, just as it's not correct to say that a tax on the consumer is not at least partially borne by business.
The email system is considered reliable. Why?
In short, if a server is not sure that the message has been passed along to another server, it assumes it has not been, and will try again / return to sender / etc.
There are a few misleading facts people are throwing around here.
1 - The traditional method of rejecting email is to return a message to the sender if the user cannot be found. Exactly how this is done depends on the mail servers involved.
2 - The article is referring to messages blocked because they contain viruses. This is a sticky issue... if we just drop the message, we have sort of violated the system stated above. We also agree that returning the virus attachment itself is wrong. The problem is these emails like with Sobig.F that are ONLY viruses, and have no actual value, where all headers are forged. It would be fair for an antivirus scanner to drop these messages into the void and not respond.. but as long as it knows they are such an email with no real content.
How does the two armies problem play into this?
You're right, an ivy league school would never award an MBA to a rich student with a rich influential father, especially if both of them were members of a shadowy campus secret society. Think of the conflict of interest.
Email is NOT a reliable form of communication.
I _completely_ agree. Now just convince the corporate world of that and we are set. Seriously though, the corporate world believes email to be reliable. Until that attitude changes, we are stuck with doing whatever it takes to ensure that a message gets through.
First of all, you have the Two Armies Problem. Two armies are on opposite sides of a common enemy. If they attack that common enemy on their own, they will lose, so they must attack at the same time. How do you send messages to each other with knowledge of receipt? You can't. If I send the "Go" and you send the "OK", how do you know that I got the "OK"? I send an ACK. How do I know you got the "ACK"? You send me another ACK... and so on.
TCP/IP seems to handle this just fine. This is why you have timeouts and sequence numbers and so on.
The Second problem with EMail is that a good number of routers that use the leaky bucket protocol will see that it's only port 25, not something important like port 21, and drop the packet.
But don't you see? That is ok! The server that has accepted responsibility for the message will be unable to deliver it (it will not get the 250 it needs) and it will generate a bounce. People will know the email did not get through. The problem is when people take responsibility for a message (with a 250) and _then_ drop it. That is just not acceptable.
-sirket
Because Texas sucks. And the Cubans like their little Havanah.
Probably from them spending revenue on it; taxes have *always* been a vehicle for social engineering.
-- AC
He makes a good point. If I had mod points, I'd use em...
Yeah. The website is Seth Fink-el-stein. That troll's Seth Fink-le-stein.
Unless the people who are sending you emails make the same spelling mistake, your strategy won't work very well:
Repeat after me:
"i" before "e" except after "c"!
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
OK, here's what's got me confused:
What is so special about LANs?
Why is a router prone to extra taxation, but a chair isn't? Is there some form of government licensing required for the router? Does the government have to do more work when you buy a router? Does LAN equipment require infrastructure that's maintained by the government?
If they're gonna tax it, fine - but how about they tax equal things equally?
he reads his speeches very well
No, he's just looks down to make it look like he's reading those speeches, what's really happening is someone in a black van is reading his speech and it's being communicated. I mean come on why else you would park a black van by the president.
If hosting straight downloads of the video for all their archived shows is too much of a drain (and of course it would be - video is huge) perhaps they ought to make use of something like BitTorrent instead - then they'd just have to host the torrent files and maybe keep a seed or two going for the less popular shows.
--- Bwah?
My frank opinion of GWB is that he's stupid like a fox.
There are subtleties in the way in which he handles certain issues which smack of a strong understanding of "the body politic", specifically Hegelian synthesis. I remember that leading up to the Iraq war I noticed certain decisions made in what to say when, and who to pick from the cabinet to say it which belied some very cunning thought. It's a matter of setting up the dominoes and knocking them down so that what happened is exactly what he wanted, but nobody realized that it was all according to plan.
Now, I agree with very few of his policies, and am frankly scared by his born-again crusader persona and military doctrine, but I think to simply call GWB stupid or illiterate based on his diction is to underestimate him vastly. I believe that Karl Rove is the largest part of his general PR success, but I don't believe (as some do) that Rove is stage managing the presidency.
I agree that server-based virus scanners need to get more intelligent with what they do with infected e-mail messages. With some viruses like SoBig there is no use in disinfecting a message and then passing on the cleaned messages to the intended recipient. There are some viruses where this might be useful, especially if only one of many attachments was infected, or if the virus scanner was able to clean the infected file. With most of the recent viruses I can think of, though, the message is automated trash that should be thrown away.
Individuals who have a computer network or LAN installed at their homes, and incur costs to operate and maintain it, might be subject to State Communication Taxes as well.
Hmm, call me naive, but how would one go about taxing a home lan?
How about..Imposing a sales tax that only applies to switching and networking equipment?
Or..$100 Switch (Retail) + 9% Tax = $109
$90 Switch (Same Switch Online From Another State) + $5 SH = $95
What about taxing existing LANs? How would one go about doing that?
Also..Since it's a LAN you can't impose the tax at the ISP end (although this would probably work okay for taxing a WAN), or would it only be considered a LAN if it was connected to the internet?
Thanks, I'm interesting in seeing if anyone had and clever ideas.Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher.
Okay, I'm not up on the details of these paradoxes, but would anyone really still be stumped by them without this astonishing new theory? I wouldn't have thought so.
Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived.
This statement sounded incorrect to me from the start. The Achilles/Tortise paradox is simple enough to resolve so I hardly think it's something that needs some amazing new theory to deal with. To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal. The tortise starts out 10 meters ahead and runs 1/10 as fast as Achilles. If Achilles runs 10 meters per second, for example, he'll catch up with the tortise in 10/9 seconds. The only way you'd have difficulty calculating the exact time and place where Achilles catches up is if you can't use fractions (10/9 seconds is 1.111111...etc. seconds--impossible to express precisely with a decimal number). Basically this "paradox" just says "if Achilles runs to where the tortise was when he started running, but the tortise moves too, he won't catch up to the tortise no matter how many times they repeat that". Seems kinda obvious when you say it that way.
He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
This was the comment that really seemed ridiculous to me. An "instant" is not an infinitely small slice of time, it is a dimensionless position in time. Just as a point has no dimension at all (not just infinitely small dimensions), a line has no width nor height, and a plane has no height, an instant in space-time has no time in it, not infinitely little time. That there is no motion within an instant is obvious because motion is a space-time concept, and an instant only contains space, not time. And just as you can't stack a bunch of planes and make 3 dimensions, you can't stack a bunch of instants and make space time. When we speak of an instant, we throw out all aspects of reality that have to do with quantities of time, but we can still speak of the position in time where the instant is located.
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sometimes taxes and tariffs are not just a way to encourage or discourage buying habits/behaviors, but just pure and simple a way to raise money.
this inks of both. with telecommunication infrastructure rapidly being taken over by packet networks, why let packet data be even cheaper? and why not make another couple bucks to help fuxor the next florida election?
You've heard of P2P right? And local caching? It makes absolutely no sense (except from an old authoritarian C&C viewpoint) to directly serve this content broadcast style. BitTorrent is ideal in this case, as would be FreeNet if it didn't blow chunks so hard.
combined with the cost of potential future licensing.
Is it standard BBC practice to repackage and resell what the public already paid for? And does allowing something to be viewed for free exclude it from ALSO being sold (*cough**linux*).
Why should UK taxpayers pay for that?
Share and share alike; PBS may follow across the pond. Besides, just think of it as british cultural imperialism to counter the US's. :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Boss: Your late
Peter Lynds: Sorry but time doesn't correlate to an exact physical set of circumstances, if I was here at 9:00 A.M. as you suggested I should, then I would not be able to be anywhere else at a later time since everything depends on its unbindedness to time as bound to a physical set of circumstances.
Boss: Hmmm, I see, your right. You have just proved that time has no correlation to your previous employment here.
I'm from Canada. We loose (in most provinces) 65% of our buying power to taxes, you insensitive clod!
How did you think the government paid for all that "free" medical services?
That certainly wasn't true for a while, although I haven't been keeping up.
Originally, at least, the military used certain GPS frequencies, and the civilians others. The civilians were scrambled to reduce effectiveness, so the military ones were substantially better.
But this was preDMCA, so they unscrambled it. After a year or so, the high end civvie GPSs were actually MORE accurate than the military ones, because it turns out the frequency was actually slightly better.
That said, GPS is MUCH more repeatable than it is accurate, so the military might have some advantages there. (If you make a map USING GPS it's damn accurate at placing new GPS devices in the same spot - but it's not necessarily a geometrically true map to the actual dimensions of the space.) You can calibrate a GPS using either historical measurements nearby or a known differential GPS transciever. While both techniques are available to civilians, I'd guess hte military is more likely to spend money on them.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Suppose the government wants to reduce smoking, so it imposes a high tax on cigarettes. This is a small disincentive for smokers to stop smoking. However, the government has just INCREASED its own incentive to INCREASE smoking. In the government's eyes, smokers = tax revenue. If every smoker quit, then the goverment would be very sad. The government is the bigger addict (of tax revenue).
I'm sure my example sounds silly, but these are very real consequences of the nanny state's "good intentions". If the government really doesn't want something, it should outlaw it, not tax it. Of course, I don't think personal choices like smoking are the government business.
cpeterso
Businesses in FL are used to this sort of thing, and still would probably prefer the no-income tax benefit of FL over relocating to a different state.
While I agree that businesses in Florida may be used to it, I'm not so sure about the conclusion.
States without income tax often have to resort to "nuisance" taxes on random shiat, as noted above. There's quite a lot of red tape and bureaucracy involved, for both businesses and government, in enforcing tax compliance.
Not saying that the income tax does not introduce red tape and bureaucracy (but, generally, state (personal) income taxes are vastly simplified in comparison to federal, and the collection of which is a very minor paperwork issue for businesses. Furthermore, it is possible to design a corporate income tax that's simple (though states like to fark that up.)
Having said that, Florida would not make a good income tax state. A good percentage of the population lives there only a few months of the year, and another good percentage of the population is retired and therefore has no yearly income anyway.
Are you positive that your virus scanning software only blocks mail that your users don't want?
Chromatic's suggestion works great if we assume that all virus email is from worms that forge from addresses. After that, it starts to fall apart.
Let's say that your boss or a large consulting client gets their computer infected with an MS Word macro virus, then sends you an important new project to start working on right away as a Word document. Whoops, we discarded that message, and the sender will never know that it was discarded. More importantly, they won't know why it was discarded, and when they find out you didn't receive it will likely send the same document again.
It also fails if you receive an important message which your virus software misidentifies as a virus. This doesn't happen often in practice, but it's a possibility that should be taken into account.
That's why RFC 2821, which defines SMTP, requires that, after receiving the message, the MTA either deliver it or generate a bounce:
In another thread, somebody suggested that virus scanning software have a special flag for viruses which spread by sending mail themselves using a false sender, in which case the MTA should make a special exception and discard the mail, since all other options are useless. This is a good idea.
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For those with this problem, there is a wiki with a set of helpful SpamAssassin rules to filter out the worst offenders. Culley Harrelson was kind enough to point me at the rules.
That would be a great argument if only if it were true. Unfortunately, it makes no sense. Is that a trickly up theory? If you were trying to be funny, I'm sorry, there, too.
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Consider moving to Alberta.
Random and weird software I've written.
No... when consumers have LESS to buy goods and services with (ie, they get taxed more on things), then they will buy less (obviously)... thus businesses will earn less. Of course, that is well and true, but the fact is, will this loss in earnings reach the sights of the employers or just fall onto the backs of the lower level employees? That's the crux of the problem in that statement. If they do feel it, then taxes on consumers will be felt by employers.
.unsigged
50% + 15% != 65% .15 * 50,000 = $7,500 of your money went to taxes, and $42,500 actually bought stuff. So let's put it back into the original equation.. $42,500 of your $100,000 paycheck actually went to buy stuff. 42,500/100,000 = .425, or 42.5% Therefore, you actually lose 57.5% of your buying power to taxes. Thankya.
Let's say you make $100,000... you're taxed at 50%, that leaves you with $50,000.. Then you go blow all the rest of your money, which is taxed at 15%.. soo
They should tax behavours they want less of? Like food tax.. income tax.. gas tax.. the money taken out of my paycheck.. fees on my student loans. The government will tax anything that will make them money, and try to be within reason.
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The solution to your Two Armies problem is not difficult in the real world. You know your communications medium, how much loss it has, how much latency it has. You don't send "Go", you send "Go at time X" where time X is a point in the future with a comfortable margin to allow for the latency and packet loss in your medium. If you don't get an ACK within a certain amount of time (about twice the latency of the channel), send it again. Repeat until you get an ACK.
If the packet loss and latency of your channel are known (or at least a maximum for both are known), then you can make the probability that the other guy doesn't get the message, or that he gets it but you never got the ACK, as low as you wish.
Note that duplicate messages do not imply the system is unreliable.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Microsoft has an internal communication problem, right about the same time the whole friggin' Internet has a communication problem which they are mostly responsible for.
Way to go Microsoft! Now if we could just get you to accidentally disband, the world would be a better place to use a computer.
Share and share alike; PBS may follow across the pond.
Look, they're already looking at not giving people in the US access. Don't go and threaten them, it'll only make it worse!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That is precisely what they want. By driving away economic sources, one of the two major parties in this country, succeeds in creating a larger base of poor, unhappy, citizens who then turn around and vote for the party that "cares". An uneducated, poor, and unhappy population typically vote for those who pull the emotional levers, as opposed to actual common sense. Same thing is happenning in California. The state senate and assembly are furiously trying to get as many laws passed as possible before the governer is tossed out on his backside.
Its the nature of prosperity and success to attract parasites which feed off the needs and compulsions of an underclass. It is the desire of those parasites to make that underclass as large as possible.
The various governments around the coutry got fat and happy when the times were good, but like any flatworm, are now on the prowl for another meal, even if it means killing the host.
The local government in my region made some poor investments in the teacher's 401K plan, and lost money on the downturn. Did they draw in there belts and accept the risk? No, instead they doubled my property taxes, and forced me to sell devalued stock instead. It seems I'm responsible for paying the difference whenever teachers select a bad mixture of investments, who by the way have one of the highest failure rates in the country while receiving the highest total compensation.
Taxation is to an economy what friction is to an engine. Less is definately better. The effects of tax increases upon an economy may take several years to kick in, but when they do, they really do!
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Leaving the philiosophical issue on whether governments should actually try to social engineer via taxes aside for one moment, one can ask, somewhat more practically, whether taxes are at all appropriate for that purpose: i.e. do they work as social engineering tools?
Some 6-7 years ago, the Swedish government decided that it was a great idea to raise tax on cigarettes to sky-high levels (and that is sky-high as in Swedish sky-high levels, and those are sky-high indeed); the reasons given were higher revue for government and less smokers (who would quit for financial reasons). Did this happen? Not really. I never saw any statistics on the number on smokers, so cannot say whether the number ever dropped. However, the revenue from cigarette tax actually dropped! What happened was that the price of heroin/cocaine etc rose as everybody and his dog started to smuggle cigarettes instead: good supply, less of a risk, less of a punishment if caught, and better profit; a cost/benefit analysis would probably take about two seconds. In the end the Swedish government had to lower cigarette taxes again. (= Reverse engineering?)
And it would appear the Swedish government isn't alone in its folly: in this Cato paper Patrick Fleenor takes a look at cigarette taxes in New York, which are higher than they are in many of the nearby states. He concludes that higher taxes has meant neither that the number of smokers have dropped as a result of them nor that tax revenue has increased substantially. Instead, organized crime (not known for paying much taxes nor its attention to public health issues) now more or less dominate the New York cigarette trade and is making a handsome profit from it too. The people who have been really screwed by the high taxes are honest tobacconists/newspaper agents who have been forced out of the market in one way or another (unable to compete with no-tax prices; out-right coercion and threats; exposure to violent crimes).
So trying to social engineer smoking via taxes seems to result in the following: lower tax revenue; higher revenue for organized crime; possibly increased price on illegal drugs and possibly, as a corollary, increased crime rates to support drug habits (as those habits would now be more expensive to maintain); possibly no effect at all on numbers of smokers. Does this make sense from a practical point of view? From any point of view?
The liver is evil and must be punished.
one can argue if dividend taxes are unwise from a policy perspective (since they encourage earnings reinvestment in that same company rather than letting the market decide where best to reinvest earnings). On the otherhand one wants a small drag on the market to dissuade unproductive speculation.
but the overriding iissue is that at some point taxes should be collected, and to gain the same amount of money you would either have to double (roughly) the tax on the shareholders income or on the company. splitting this tax between them is eminently logical.
try reading a more intelligent discussion
uh sorry no that's not double taxation. but you did repeat rush limbaugh's argument quite well. bravo my little ditto head. Mean time read the post you replied to for insight.
Well, what else do you expect from America's wang?
You seem to have confused email with something reliable, time-bounded , verifiable, authenticatable, and non-repudiatable. It is none of these on it's own.
Also, the delivery or rejection of all emails may be required by your contracts, or some other contract requirement may supercede this.
Conceivably, an ISP may have a contractual obligation to either accept and hold for pickup or reject cleanly any email addressed to any of their clients. More likely, an ISP will have a contract (explicit or implicit) requiring them to take reasonably prudent measures to protect their clients from email worms. This includes rejecting, silently ignoring, or bouncing any bounced messages containing viruses.
In the case of a server other than an ISP such as one at a law office, there may be much more important considerations than letting someone on the outside know that their Virus was bounced. The obligation to take reasonably prudent measures to protect confidential information from unauthorized disclosure extends to preventing un-authenticated foreign code from being run on their systems. If someone needs to send an executable, they may discuss the matter with the recipient, and arrange some other means of transfer. So long as all users of the mail server are aware of the policy, there is little cause for concern.
In Australia they decided to allow the company to decide if it paid dividends taxed or untaxed. Ie the company could pay the tax up front (Franking), and pay whats left out to the shareholders, who wouldn't have to pay tax again on that money. There is a really fine distinction about the shareholders being the owners of the income generating asset. Eg if you had a house and rented it out, the house would be your income generating asset. Does the house have to pay tax on the rental income and then you have to pay tax on it again when it gets transferred to you?
The sneaky bit about being an individual shareholder (a person as opposed to another company) is that you are supposed to add the total amount including tax of the dividend to your income, and though you might receive a tax credit for it, the extra income may jump you into a higher tax bracket. We have income separated into "tax brackets", eg your first 20K pays at a low rate, your next 20K at a higher rate and over that at a super ridiculous rate (ie whats the point of working harder to earn more if the govt gets 2/3 of every dollar you earn?).
Yes I made up the brackets and the rates to save looking them up but the concept is there. It doesn't apply to companies here, because all their income is taxed at the same rate (one tax bracket).
I wonder if companies who own shares in the USA have to pay tax on the dividends received when the company that earned the income has already paid tax? I suppose it's like an earning tax and a distribution tax. After all you can't argue that both the company and the shareholder generated the income. Either that or the shareholder should be able to claim the share purchase price as a cost of earning.
I guess it just goes to show that tax rules are not written by logical thinkers, but by creative thinkers who make up their own rules as they go to suit themselves.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I'm really interested to know where you think all this money comes from.
To a business, taxes are like any other kind of overhead costs, like leases or salaries. All of the money to pay these costs comes from customers. If a business can't meet these costs, it has to change its pricing structure, change its overhead, or stop doing business. It's hard for a business to change the way it's taxed.
I just want to be clear - all taxes are taxes on consumers. The only reason a business would even consider selling a product below cost is if that sale drives other profitable sales. This is why the whole idea of a corporate income tax is such a gigantic scam - first I withhold money from your paycheck, then I hit you with sales taxes at the register (sometimes city, county, and state) and then finally I jack up the price of the goods with a second, hidden sales tax called the corporate income tax.
The only reason a business would prefer the CIT to a sales tax is that it allows them to decide on which products and to which customers they want to direct the burden of higher costs. This makes it more strategically fluid than a sales tax. But for most businesses that's a non-issue.
The worst thing of all about a corporate income tax is that it encourages corporations, who have the time and resources to lobby (either on their own or through trade associations) for exemptions, breaks, discounts, and other distortions of the tax code. If we just counted up all the money raised by this tax, abolished it, and raised sales taxes enough to cover the same amount, we would remove a tremendous amount of cruft and truly byzantine provisions from our tax code. We would also remove most of the reasons that most businesses have to lobby congress, and thus reduce the importance of the busines lobby. Finally, our legislators would have more time to occasionally read a bill before they vote on it since they aren't having to listen to the North Valley Rubber Mill Association ask for new tax credits for three hours.
Because you have already paid for it? Keep it to yourself if you want. Either way will cost you about the same. Someone already mentioned the benefits of sharing your culture. Can you name a benefit of limiting your culture's travel or extinguishing it?
I hope you decide that you should not share your thoughts by talking, but confuse talking and breathing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, Exchange Server doesn't work too well in non-Win-NT/2K/2K3 server environments. It doesn't run under Wine. It also needs a whole boat load of other MS services to work properly. I have one Win2K server with ES under an MSDN Universal license (it come to only about $4500, but this is for development, not production). It prefers not to operate with our normal DNS but needs to use the DNS server under Microsoft. For development, operating ES doesn't cost me to much for up to a handful of users. For production that is something else, i.e., client licenses, etc. Very quickly the package gets over the $10K mark.
See my journal, I write things there
I submitted this on the 23rd but the eds rejected it.
Guy's email is in the WinXP credits because they use his GPL'd code, so you may have gotten a virus that used his address. Like the 600k he's gotten.
Why I Hate Microsoft
Part 1: Worms and Viruses
Phil Karn, KA9Q
The latest Slashdot meme.
Hate to say it, but it's often a bad idea for governments to tax behaviors they want less of. Consider the "sin" taxes on alcohol and tobacco. If the government gets significant revenue from these sources then it give them an incentive to keep the "sin" healthy enough to pay for your kids school books. I know it sounds perverse, but that is exactly how the process works.
Put another way, if the government is taxing LANs, then at least you know they'll be making other LAN friendly laws to keep their revenue stream flowing.
I'm NOT suggesting taxing LAN's is a good idea, only that incentive is a bit stranger to track than most people think.
TW
You seem to imply that a Conservative government would prevent this online archive from becoming a reality.
The article you linked to included the quote from John Whittingdale MP, saying "If the BBC's digital services are replicating what is already available commercially, then I don't see that as something which the taxpayer or licence-fee payer should be financing."
However, the online archive would push BBCi above and beyond the services offered by other sites and would justify it's continuing funding through tv licences. This should be clear to any government, Conservative, Labour or otherwise. At the moment, while the BBC web site is good, it offers nothing important I can't find elsewhere.
anyone got any background on why the BBC will only release its library in the UK?
My guess: the way they sell non-UK rights to local broadcasters (e.g. PBS in the States) means that they don't have the right to release some of their catalogue outside the UK.
Perhaps the situation is so complicated they can't work out what they own and what they don't.
Perhaps they do know what they own, but it's technically or legally too complicated to create a system that restricts downloads based upon the rights position in the user's country. (Could such a system ever be legally acceptable, given the unreliability of matching location to IP address?)
I guess you haven't heard of this nifty new OS, OSX. It's based on a BSD/Mach core, so it has a /dev/null. Also, it runs Outlook.
+5 Insightful my ass.
Can we say "the common good"?
The BBC (leaving out any brand promotion issues) is providing content which may (or may not, depending upon your understanding of UK culture) improve the general availability of knowledge. This is in line with what MIT are doing by putting their curriculum on-line.
(BTW, someone explain to me why non-Brits find Benny Hill so funny.........)
This is not really suprising, Before Internet distribution was possible, many of the actors, writers etc were payed on a 'this program can be broardcast X times' basis. Now it may not be possible to contact them to renegociate netcast rights :-(
Saeger wrote: Is it standard BBC practice to repackage and resell what the public already paid for?
Yes.
And does allowing something to be viewed for free exclude it from ALSO being sold (*cough**linux*).
Doesn't exclude it, but does reduce its commercial value.
Honestly come on now, does anyone even really think they can pull the power to pass such a thing?
legally, they cant, its impossible, for one how will they regulate it? second, im sure everyone affected will tell them to blow them, hard.
it will never go through, they simply dont have such a power.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
"To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal."
Because *common sense* tells you its not true, but you can't disprove the paradox using classical physics.
The fact that you don't recognize the paradox marks you as one of those people who think they're smart, but are actually as dumb as a cinder block.
Actually, yours is not a very good example.
The government spends more in health costs and lost taxes due to lost productivity than they ever take in in taxes off cigarettes. The amount of health related costs due to smoking is staggering. The lost income tax revenues due to the 400,000 or so smoking related early deaths of people in their wage earning years is also huge. If everyone quit smoking, the savings in health costs would easily offset the lost tax revenue.
It's tied into an integral part of the operating system. If Microsoft got rid of it, it would break Windows!
Come on, where's your socialistic spirit?
One group pays, another benefits.
No, the government should not tax bad behavior. The government should tax evenly across the board. Sin taxes are a terrible idea because they are too subjective.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
That's not irony. That's just you being stupid.
Yea, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe we in the U.S. should set up a nice firewall to keep the damn brits out of our country's data too. Better yet, go to the EU and file a claim against the UK using the Internet, after all, WE paid to develope it.
That's what the world needs, lots of little I want to share your IP but keep mine additudes all over the Internet. Perhaps the Brits can start a new Internet Philosphy: "Your Information wants to be free."
1. British TV audiences pay for the BBC year on year. The US taxpayer isn't still paying for the development of the internet.
ARPANET was developed three decades ago and, although the internet as we know it is built upon its foundations, little of what we call the internet today was once part of ARPANET. In infrastructure terms, we're several generations beyond those earlier networks.
Making this library available online won't be totally free. Storage, bandwidth, support, etc all has a real-world cost. Doesn't it make sense to you that the people who pay for the content should have access to it and those that don't do not?
2. The world wide web was developed, and made free for everyone to use, by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee.
So today's internet is truly an international development.
Berners-Lee developed the WWW while working at CERN, a pan-European research facility and never put a price tag or any restrictions on his work. However, American academics that have made similar technological developments have been less eager to share their work freely.
Want proof? Look at Cisco, UNIX, Netscape, etc. So, when it comes to sharing IP, the British are demonstratably more generous than their American cousins.
3. The BBC has cross-licensing agreements with other broadcasters worldwide, and these agreements normally include territorial "ownership" of programming, broadcasting, rebroadcasting and licensing rights.
The BBC owns the rights to these works in the UK, it might not hold the rights to these works worldwide. An example of this is Band Of Brothers, which the BBC co-produced with HBO. HBO owns the exclusive rights in the US, the BBC owns the exclusive rights in the UK and (presumably) they share the other markets.
4. The BBC already shares more content than ABC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC and any other US news network or broadcaster that you care to mention.
As well as English and Welsh, the BBC's flagship news website, is available in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Russian. It has region specific news, and the unparalleled World Service, which provides news in 43 languages.
Care to mention any other broadcaster anywhere in the world that offers so much to those beyond its borders?
5. "Develope" isn't a word. "Develop", however, is.
I'm sorry but I couldn't resist. I could perhaps be facetious and say that someone who can't spell simple words without feeling the need to add an "e" on the end of them (are you by any chance related to Dan Quayle?) really shouldn't be commenting on intellectual property, but that would be less than charitable of me. Let's just say that I think you need better access to a decent education than better access to episodes of Jackanory or Brideshead Revisited.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
How is it untrue?
If I'm a business and I make something that costs me $50 in materials, and I need to make $5 in profit to stay afloat, pay wages, etc. then how much do I sell it for? $55. Now if the government comes in and says I have to pay 10% in taxes on the profit, how much do I have to charge now? $55.56. Because I still need that $5, regardless of whatever else. The only way I won't be able to raise prices is because of market competition, but if everyone is paying the tax and has similar needs then it's a wash. And the only person that pays the extra money is the buyer.
That's the basic argument behind "companies don't pay taxes", and it's true in as far as it goes in the simple model. The real world is much more complex, and so is accounting. I think the assumption that if we removed corporate taxes that prices would magically fall is a falisy, but they would eventually edge back down toward similar profit levels as competitive pressures kicked in.
VAT is NOT a sales tax, its a tax on production and is a miserable alternative.
When you're talking about theories of time, who would you trust -- some old guy named Albert, or some 27-year-old who has made practical use of his theories and traveled back in time to become a 17 year old college student again?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Sorry to spoil your rationale -- but Florida taxes corporate income. It's simply individuals that don't pay income tax. (Self-Employed Florida resident who has chosen NOT to incorporate his company -- gee I wonder why?)
Point 1: your conclusion supports my statement.
Now, the reason I made my statement in a joking fashion regarding "trickle up" is that certain things work only in one way. For instance, tax law allows the seller to pass along sales tax to the consumer. There is no opposite analogy in this situation.. i.e. you sell it to me, I sell it right back to you, the gov't gets sales tax BOTH times. Trickle down theory works the same way... kinda of obvious by the verbage it is named for, water runs down hill.
If you, as a consumer, get taxed on something, can you pass along that cost to your employer? Hardly. You might use cost of living increases to justify asking for a raise, but that is in no way the same as passing costs along directly.
Point 2: You don't know what the hell you are talking about and your second paragraph has no bearing whatsoever. You need to read your own signature and blush.
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How do you send messages to each other with knowledge of receipt? You can't. If I send the "Go" and you send the "OK", how do you know that I got the "OK"? I send an ACK. How do I know you got the "ACK"? You send me another ACK... and so on.
The "Two Armies" problem is a useful analogy for explaining some aspects of networking theory, but it's not relevant to email.
The ACKs which indicate if an email message was recieved are not themselves email messages- they're just TCP data. So the implied infinitely repetitive ACKs don't happen.
"Two Armies" is useful for understanding why TCP was implemented as it is- it demonstrates why the concepts of NACKs and sequence numbers are important for implementing a reliable protocol on top of an unreliable one. But from the perspective of email reliablity, that particular problem has already been solved in a lower-level protocol.
You are trying to say that if I spend less money, it affects everyone, and that is simply way too vague a statement to apply the term "pass along" to.
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The US military still gets primary use from it, at a level not available to civilians.
Welcome to the 21st century. Military and civilian GPS have been 100% equivalent since the Clinton administration.
The military retains the option to degrade or even deactivate civilian signals if they decide an active enemy is using GPS against them, but it has never been invoked.
Point 1: your conclusion supports my statement.
Ye gods... could I have misread the great-grandparent comment any more?
My apologies. I'm going to go off and juxtapose some other things now...
How the FUCK did this get moderated OFFTOPIC?
I was answering the damn guys question.
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To put it a more casual way: The Columbo effect :D
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Kill off Outlook? Why would Microsoft kill off one of their most profitable products?
I think the talk was referring to Outlook Express, not Outlook.
The problem is that the retail price of an item is really based on supply and demand. Translation: The market has shown that a consumer will buy a good at $55.56. Remove that 10% tax and that equasion is unchanged: a consumer will, still pay $55.56 for that item.
And you don't think that some enterprising company will try to grab marketshare by price cutting?
Like I said, it wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen.
If you, as a consumer, get taxed on something, can you pass along that cost to your employer? Hardly.
Where do you live? Where I live, I am allowed to consider the wages offered by an employer when I decide whether I'll work for them. Naturally, I consider my income requirements, of which taxes are a factor. So do all the other consumers where I live. Taxes are, therefore, a factor in the cost of labor which is a cost that employers must bare. This is why wages in large metropolitan areas with high costs of living are considerably higher than less densely populated areas having lower living costs.
The original assertion that taxes on business are simply passed on to consumers is wildly over generalized drivel. It appears on the right the whole idea of taxes on business is being questioned, and it appears on the left when someone want's to claim some injury to... someone. The fact that both side appear to find it useful does not improve it's credibility. It only demonstrates that it's generalized beyond reality, much like fortune teller claiming that you'll have a bad day at some point in the future, and claiming supernatural abilities. I simply juxtaposed that statement with nearly opposite non-sense. While you seem quite capable of recognizing the failings of my assertion, you still appear to be bamboozled by the first.
We produce things. We means everything involved in the process, and produce means create value. If we're good at it we create more new value than we consume in the process. Taxes are a means of siphoning off some of that value. Eventually, the value siphoned off by taxes just represents more consumption in the process of creating value. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter where in the process the value gets taken. What matters is how much and, more importantly, why.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I used this example as a very specific case where the costs are "passed on" directly to the consumer. The consumer
2) What you are talking about is indirect costs. The fact that commerce is a closed system means that I can at any point stop and "prove" that whoever I am pointing at right now has to pay for those costs.
Take, for instance, a single sector, say advertising or IT, and look at the consumer's point of view: If the consumer chooses a firm from NYC, most likely they will pay more than a firm from St. Louis. By your logic, whoever employs that consumer must bear the brunt of that cost differential. Your little lecture about how wages are different in different locations is neither here nor there when talking about passing along costs. The day someone can get directly reimbursed by their employer for a tax is the day your argument is within context.
3) The consumer is NOT NECESSARILY an individual. In many cases the very use of the term "Employer" is moot.
Choose any of these three reasons for my original assertion that the statement that "costs are passed onto the employer" is untrue.
At no time have I have validated the assertion that all taxes/costs to a business are passed on to the consumer. I am simply using a specific case (sales tax) to demonstrate a valid use of the term "passed on". I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
Exactly. The (USA) government subsidizes tobacco growing while at the same time taxing cigarettes. So that means the government wants more tobacco use but less cigarettes?
This would be like the government giving huge tax breaks to gas guzzling SUVs and then taxing gasoline. Oh wait, they do that too.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Sean
This is no longer true. The "selective availability" feature, which used to degrade the accuracy of the GPS signal unless you had a military-issued decryption device, has long been turned off. This means civilians are getting the same quality of services as the military.
The remainder of your post seems reasonable, however.
Sean
Actualy they already do this. With the current tax level, most people on their own can't take minimun wage jobs. There isn't enought for transportation, housing and food. Unless you are subsidised by someone else in one of these areas (living in mom's basement for example) you have to select a job that will meet your income requirements. That's why mexican migrant farmers don't take american jobs. American workers simply don't have enough to live on. Many on some disability or other are included in those who can not afford a job. The income from a job would cut the benifit and the income would be taxable causing a reduction of real income for working. So unless you can make it over the income/tax hump into a livable bracket, it's better for many to not work and live off someone else.
I've met several people who don't work and are not looking for work because they have more free time and less stress not working. Working would take up most of the free time and provide minimum benifit. In most cases it would also cause a loss of healthcare as it would no longer be provided and would not be affordable in a minimum wage position.
The truth shall set you free!
It would not be worth overhauling the entire Internet email system to add a "Transmit-Path:" header that would provide no additional information beyond that available from "Received:" lines (which are already required in SMTP). Forged entries are just as much of a concern either way. So what would be the point? "Received:" lines aren't so difficult to parse as to justify such a drastic solution...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
GWB applied to and was accepted into Harvard without his fathers knowledge.