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Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax"
An anonymous reader writes "As a proposal to avoid becoming the 'next Greece', a Portuguese opposition party has proposed a tax on storage. The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen and is mostly levied at business users, but internal storage on mobile phones means a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)."
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
**OLD** This law draft was already discarted like 2 moths ago.
As far i know ( i live in Portugal ) other than this being old news, it was rejected by all other parties other than the one attempting to get this passed and was rather laughed about because of it here.
A tax that increases at an exponential rate, what more could a government hope for!
It was not a proposal to avoid becoming 'the next Greece'. It was a proposal to "help" artists.
In reality it was just another levy (we have several) to benefit some corrupt goons on a local "rights" association. And as you might guess it, they don't help artists that much. Just their pockets.
It's old because the parliament shot it down after an active online campaign by internet activists and a couple of politicians with common sense.
That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB).
Since when do manufacturers of hard drives use Base 2 to describe the size of their hard drives?
They don't, so it should be 50 € (2.5 cent times 2000 GB).
It's Europe, so it will have to be a Metric Shitload, which is itself different from the Imperial Shitload, which is 1.125 American Shitloads
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BMO
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
John
Shit compression algorithms work only once, at the factory where it is forced into bags by magical and undocumented processes that happen at the quantum level. The factory is owned and operated by entities outside our Universe who have refused repeated inquiries about this process.
Shit is incompressible once out of the bag. You can never put it back in, hence one definition of a blivet which is "10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag" equating to a 2:1 compression ratio at the factory.
People have tried to put shit back in the bag once it has been let out. Einstein, and Bose thought they got close to a theoretical compression, which they called a Bose-Einstein-Shit condensate, but they failed to take into account dark energy, which is an opposing force that tends to spread shit everywhere.
When Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe through red shifts, he exclaimed "Holy Shit!" and "What is this shit?" not knowing at the time that shit is the actual source of the dark energy speeding the expansion.
Minkowski described "shit cones" describing the causality of shit.
Stephen Hawking, in his famous paper proved through Feynman-Shit diagrams that black holes evaporate because they "lose their shit."
At the macro level, sometimes this is also measured in worm cans. Worms eat shit, which is probably why they too are incompressible once out of the can.
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BMO