Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
> 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.
The Seattle Times has conducted an interesting interview with Microsoft Vice President and CIO Rick Devenuti, in which he comments on the company's internal testing procedure called dogfooding and explains why he has a PC running Red Hat Linux in his office. Devenuti's comments about ATMs needing "five nines" uptime is especially ironic given this incident. Picture here
> 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
The taxes on businesses just get passed to the consumers anyways.
...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
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!
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.
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.
Governments should tax things in proportion to their social cost. That, if done properly, this results in social engineering is a by-product.
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.
No it is not a bounce. It is a rejection of the email by my server. By returning a 5xx error, I have refused to accept responsibility for the message. If I were to actually accept the message (250) then I would be responsible for either delivering it or generating a bounce.
When I return a 5xx error I have told the server on the other side of the connection that they either have to find another way to deliver the message or they need to generate a bounce.
I never said that this would prevent me from receiving the data, just that I refuse to accept it. If you do not understand the difference then perhaps you should read the RFC's a little more carefully. (That is not intended as a flame, just meant to clarify a misunderstanding.)
-sirket
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
consider the effects of:
1. inflation
Ok. Under Reagan, inflation recovered from the Jimmy Carter mess very quickly, and remained very low for the rest of the 80's bottoming out at 1.86% in 1986, so inflation didn't play a very big roll in that (source).
2. a growing worldwide economy
I contend that the Reagan supply side economics helped the economy grow.
3. emergence/growth of industries like hi-tech
Yes- that helped a lot. See #5.
4. deficit spending (it generates some tax revenue)
Actually, public debt as a % of the GDP was higher under Clinton than under Reagan (source).
5. shifts is gov't spending (i.e. major increases in defense).
The defense spending invested heavily in technology, and that helped the hi tech industries grow.
Also note from the Cato article I linked above, all income groups saw an increase in real income under Reagan, but minorities and the poorest quintile saw the biggest increase.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
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.
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.