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
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
...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.
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.
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
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!"
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
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.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
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
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.
My Web Page
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.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
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!
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.
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.
In your own message, you both contradict yourself and admit ignorance.
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!
So you don't know whether it reduced smoking or not? I'll tell you then: It did.
The drop in revenue from cigarette taxes cannot be intrepreted as a "failure" of the program- it's a mark of success. Such a drop should be the final, victorious stage of any tax that was intended as a behavioral modifier, not a revenue enhancer.
That Cato & some Swedish politicians used revenue gain as their success criteria shows just how wrong their starting perspective was. The tax dollars you collect is not supposed to be the point!
Often governments will subvert the intent of "sin-tax" programs to boost revenue, rather than protect the public. That puts them in the dubious position of depending on continuation and growth in bad actions for their own profit.
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
A biased group like Cato does not ever "conclude" anything. They predetermined the results before doing the research- they will ALWAYS say that taxes are bad, no matter what.
If you'd like a more scientific view of the issues, read any journal like Nicotine and Tobacco or the Journal of Public Health. You'll have to use a library's password to read the articles, but I can summarize in four words: "Cigarette taxes reduce smoking"