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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
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
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.
OK, I'm stoopid and all but what part of
/dev/null'ing viruses are trivial.
/dev/nell comment alone was one hell of a hint that he's *probably* on a *nix box.
don't run any windows computers, and
led you to believe that he runs Outlook? Hell the
Please be patient, I'm a work in progress! --Alan Jackson
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.
. Microsoft Outlook 2002 has an inferior interface to Mozilla Messenger.
No, it doesn't. Also, Messenger doesn't have a calendar.
2. Microsoft Outlook is riddled with security holes that are never patched because Microshaft would rather threaten so-called "hackers" under the DCMA.
No, it isn't. If you believe it is, post references.
3. Microsoft Outlook has no spam filter.
Wrong again. It has one built in. It's called a "junkmail filter" though.
4. Microsoft Outlook insists on using HTML and displays all images including web bugs.
No, it doesn't. You can tell it whether to use RTF, HTML or plain text for emails.
5. Microsoft Outlook is closed-source.
Big whoop.
6. Microsoft Outlook requires you to install Microsoft Exchange server, which costs $20,000 per license and is also closed-source. It also runs exclusively under Windows "Server," which is just Windows NT Workstation 2000 (or whatever it's called) with a different registry entry.
No, it's not. And no, it doesn't. Outlook works happily with POP3 and IMAP as well as Exchange. What you get from Exchange is centralized email, centralized contacts handling, and centralized calendaring/scheduling.
7. Microsoft Outlook costs $100 per seat. Netscape Messenger costs $0 per seat.
Ok, you go that right. Kind of. IFF you buy it in a store, it will cost you $109/seat. If you get it elsewhere, it's cheaper. Especially in volume.
In short, I predict that Microsoft Outlook will be dead within 3 months.
Will you be willing to jump up and down and say "I'm an idiot" if you're wrong? Or are you going to be like every other psychic and fraud?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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
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?
"6. Microsoft Outlook requires you to install Microsoft Exchange server, which costs $20,000 per license and is also closed-source. It also runs exclusively under Windows "Server," which is just Windows NT Workstation 2000 (or whatever it's called) with a different registry entry."
Why do the uninformed have the loudest voice?
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?
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.
Altruism? To increase our cultural influence? To encourage other countries to do this?
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
we ought to only tax things we want less of
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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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