The way the problem was solved in France was to set spending limits for political campaigns, with penalties for trespassers including the cancellation of the election and the prohibition from running for public office for a while.
This may sound like a restriction to free speech... Yet if you think of it, the only way those people could have that much money was not from contributions from citizens,but using slush funds and corporate donations. Corporations have no right to free speech!
(Interesting note: membership fees for political parties are partly tax-deductible, but the receipts don't bear the name of the party so that the tax service doesn't see who you vote for. Of course, it is pretty useless since the membership fees for all major parties are known, it's just a matter of looking the price up!)
France has a very simple system: voters isolate themselves to put a printed bulletin carrying the name of their candidate in an envelope, then go to the desk; their id is checked with respect to the electoral roll, they sign in front of their name and case the vote into the ballot box.
The box is made of clear plastic and before voting begins witnesses can assert it is empty.
After voting ends, counting begins on the spot; neither the ballot box or the ballots are moved out of the room. Volunteers come to count and witness the counting. Counting proceeds by table of four people (at least in Paris): one opens the envelopes and keeps track of them, two count the votes on forms, another reads the ballot. Discounted ballots (handwritten messages etc...) are witnessed and signed by all at the table.
Volunteers from political parties and other people circulate around the tables to check for irregularities.
The process is actually fairly quick (it takes maybe one hour). The system scales up with the number of voters (the number of voting precincts is linear in the number of voters). What the system does not scale up with is the number of simultaneous elections (France seldom holds two elections at once).
They could also say that women are tidier than me, so that will take care of the "desktop clutter" so typical of Windows users.
French were to bomb Russia with no return possible
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember reading that in the early days of the French nuclear forces, French pilots were to fly on to Moscow and other major cities and drop their bombs, but they did not have enough fuel to come back. They had to parachute over Finland at the extreme limit of their fuel. It was most likely a suicide mission.
(Interestingly, those forces were developed partly because the French government thought that in case of a Soviet attack over Western Europe backed with a nuclear threat over the US, the US government would not react for fear of retaliation.)
I am not surprised. The same kind of phenomenon goes here (France), and I suspect everywhere in the developed world.
Yet there seems to be an urge to keep things manageable here:
* Some saving accounts with moderate interest rates, under a fixed ceiling, are tax-free.
* You can choose between declaring real professional expenses or say nothing, in which case you get a flat 10% rebate. For most people, this is more than their professional expenses, so few people declare real expenses.
* Sometimes, cruft is cleaned out of the tax code. For instance, there used to be deductions from income tax if you had some work done on your main domicile; they are now gone.
Generally speaking, the system is designed so that most people just have to copy a single number.
My case was more complex (several employers with salaries; consulting fees; deductible pension plans), but it just amounted to downloading another form and filling two numbers, following the instruction the tax people gave me by email.
I stand corrected. Note that I think that last time I tried to look for this information, such warnings and links were not present. I suppose that so many people protested that Google felt they should add this warning.
In any case, kudos to Google.
I think the problem is the DMCA, and the concern is the similar legislation that lobbies are trying to push through the EU.
I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams.
The DMCA fits exactly the picture: this law allows large corporations with large legal teams to target companies such as Google and coerce them to remove material, basing themselves on alleged copyright infringement.
The article was removed because it was detrimental to the propaganda of the Church of Scientology. The Church used the legal argument that the material was copyrighted, of course. Hey, how are you supposed to discuss the policies and teachings of a church or other sect if you are not allowed to quote them? If you reproduce their documents, they sue you. If you don't, they claim you don't know what you are talking about.
I'm talking of base users there, those who have trouble cutting'n'pasting. An even better solution for them is to install the Google search bar in Internet Explorer and tell them "just type keywords there".
A troubling fact about Google is that Google can exerce de facto censorship by quietly removing sites from its index. Since Google is what many people use to look for information on the WWW (I myself don't use so-called portals, and I know many people who use Google as their startup page), this may effectively prevent them from finding those sites.
Think that I'm paranoid? I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams.
For instance, the Church of Scientology has had Google remove links to sites discussing the Church's teachings.
This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored. We can therefore rightly fear that fear of litigation may force Google to take more and more controversial sites off.
The clients run on Linux PCs and Solaris SparcStations.
We have our share of problems with terminal server. Apparently, it counts currently used licenses in a weird way (perhaps that's related to what you said: sessions are not actually closed).
We don't use it that much; just to fill forms in Word or Acrobat.
I must say I gave up mostly on the alleged compatibility of open-source software with MS Word. There was always something not right in the presentation. Most of the MS Word stuff that I receive is forms from management and outside partners; those people apparently don't know how to make PDF forms.
We have a solution: we use rdesktop to access a single Windows 2000 machine from our Unix desktops, and we run MS Office and Acrobat on them.
I don't think that an "average tax % rate" makes much sense. What is often advertised in the US newspapers as a horrible tax rate is the marginal rate, which almost nobody pays (you have to have a really enormous income, and there are rebates and such that make it unlikely).
I personally pay about 10%. Of course there's also VAT (the sales tax), which is between 0% and 18.6% depending on the product bought.
Yet, I don't quite see your point. Whether you tax people a lot or not doesn't change the fact that filing taxes shouldn't require a professional unless the situation is really complex.
I must say I've never been able to understand how the American public can put up with the convoluted US tax system. I'm not talking of people with small businesses on the side, but of ordinary folks who have a salary, some investments, maybe rent a room from their house, and have to pay a professional tax account to fill in their tax return!
Also, doesn't the IRS provide information on how to fill the forms? (For instance, the French tax services have email addresses you can send tax queries to, and they do answer.)
Ok, if you hide your file server in your attic, it will be found with difficulty. Still, if the cops really want to find it, they'll just come with radio tracking equipment! 802.11 transmitters should be easily located.
Silly question: can you put encrypted partition into files (à la Linux loopback)? A colleague of mine wants to create encrypted directories without repartitioning.
I'm not anti-American; I've got numerous American friends and colleagues, I've worked in the US for a while, I was in New York last January and will come back to the US for business purposes at least once more this year.
Of course, my message was alluding partly to the American media. My opinion on these is that even alleged serious newspapers such as the New-York Times have degraded standards when it comes to international news. All too often, the international news articles would be more appropriately moved to a "commentary" or "opinion" section.
One troubling fact, for instance, is that all too often these articles dwell on alleged motivations, often implying that actions by foreign people or leaders are motivated by anti-Americanism or envy.
Let me given you an example: in a
recent article commenting on the opposition from several judicial bodies to a proposal to change French criminal procedure to include plea bargain, the journalist commented:
"In France, perceived concessions to English-American forms of law, no matter how slight, have run into strong resistance.".
Now, of course, this implies this resistance is motivated by anti-Americanism, ignoring real concerns about constitutional rights such as the right to a fair trial. In short, the journalist attributes motivations to people who cannot defend themselves. Is that reporting, or partisan comment?
I won't even mention the moral judgments routinely doled out as facts. The point is that such so-called reporting is bound to shape the impressions of the reader in a certain direction, in this case to believe that any opposition to the policies of the United States government is motivated by dubious issues.
Now you can understand better what happens in countries such as Saudi Arabia. In those countries, the media and the education system are even more biased. People are taught from their infancy that, say, the Jews are cunning liars. They are taught about the moral superiority of their religion compared to the "immoral" West.
The parallel is striking. Self-righteous biased reporting replacing facts and objective analysis. Of course, the situation in Saudi Arabia is far worse than in any Western countries, but still one should always pay attention to the agendas of the media outlets.
The link to violence? Why do all these people sponsors terrorist groups through so-called "charities"? Where do they find the terrorists? Part of the explanation seems to be that prejudice ingrained from infancy breeds violence.
Actually, you ask an interesting question: what is the influence of news reporting when it comes to violence?
I see two kinds of influence:
* News reports may create copycats out of weak minds. Let's say you catch some cretins throwing rocks on cars from bridges over freeways. If you make too much publicity of the case, you'll have imbeciles doing the same thing all over.
* More importantly, news reporting may alter the way people perceive the world and human interactions.
Let us take international relations. If you're brought up in the idea that your country is the best in every domain and the rest of the world is just made of jealous jerks, you obviously have a different outlook on violence - specifically, you may not be reluctant to approve the use of violence by your government.
I know heat, listed in this article, is a major concern for overclocking, but how about parasitic capacitances?
(For those who have forgotten physics 101: when you have two conductors separated by an insulation layer, you have a capacitor, the capacity of which depends on the surface and the thickness of the layer. In current microprocessors, the distances are so small that bad etching may produce parasitic capacitances. Those limit the speed.)
I'm not terribly interested in videoconferencing (unless it's really well integrated, with comfortable high-definition whiteboard functionalities as well as document scanning/faxing).
On the other hand, I'd be interested in a simple-to-use encrypted phone, even with low quality voice, for business purposes. Maybe inside a GSM phone.
Are there any such things being sold?
(Yes, I know of things like the STU-III, but I'm talking of cheap, easy-to-use gizmos, not cold war-designed US government hardware.)
Oh, come on. And if you have just *any* problem that needs accessing the BIOS, you're stuck, because most BIOSes don't know how to talk to text terminals on serial lines.
Slashdot Mirror
The way the problem was solved in France was to set spending limits for political campaigns, with penalties for trespassers including the cancellation of the election and the prohibition from running for public office for a while.
This may sound like a restriction to free speech... Yet if you think of it, the only way those people could have that much money was not from contributions from citizens,but using slush funds and corporate donations. Corporations have no right to free speech!
(Interesting note: membership fees for political parties are partly tax-deductible, but the receipts don't bear the name of the party so that the tax service doesn't see who you vote for. Of course, it is pretty useless since the membership fees for all major parties are known, it's just a matter of looking the price up!)
France has a very simple system: voters isolate themselves to put a printed bulletin carrying the name of their candidate in an envelope, then go to the desk; their id is checked with respect to the electoral roll, they sign in front of their name and case the vote into the ballot box.
The box is made of clear plastic and before voting begins witnesses can assert it is empty.
After voting ends, counting begins on the spot; neither the ballot box or the ballots are moved out of the room. Volunteers come to count and witness the counting. Counting proceeds by table of four people (at least in Paris): one opens the envelopes and keeps track of them, two count the votes on forms, another reads the ballot. Discounted ballots (handwritten messages etc...) are witnessed and signed by all at the table.
Volunteers from political parties and other people circulate around the tables to check for irregularities.
The process is actually fairly quick (it takes maybe one hour). The system scales up with the number of voters (the number of voting precincts is linear in the number of voters). What the system does not scale up with is the number of simultaneous elections (France seldom holds two elections at once).
They could also say that women are tidier than me, so that will take care of the "desktop clutter" so typical of Windows users.
I remember reading that in the early days of the French nuclear forces, French pilots were to fly on to Moscow and other major cities and drop their bombs, but they did not have enough fuel to come back. They had to parachute over Finland at the extreme limit of their fuel. It was most likely a suicide mission.
(Interestingly, those forces were developed partly because the French government thought that in case of a Soviet attack over Western Europe backed with a nuclear threat over the US, the US government would not react for fear of retaliation.)
Is it possible to file taxes online in the US, free of charge? I saw some sites doing e-filing, but apparently they charge for it.
(I didn't use it, but the French state income taxes can now be filed online.)
I am not surprised. The same kind of phenomenon goes here (France), and I suspect everywhere in the developed world.
Yet there seems to be an urge to keep things manageable here:
* Some saving accounts with moderate interest rates, under a fixed ceiling, are tax-free.
* You can choose between declaring real professional expenses or say nothing, in which case you get a flat 10% rebate. For most people, this is more than their professional expenses, so few people declare real expenses.
* Sometimes, cruft is cleaned out of the tax code. For instance, there used to be deductions from income tax if you had some work done on your main domicile; they are now gone.
Generally speaking, the system is designed so that most people just have to copy a single number.
My case was more complex (several employers with salaries; consulting fees; deductible pension plans), but it just amounted to downloading another form and filling two numbers, following the instruction the tax people gave me by email.
I stand corrected. Note that I think that last time I tried to look for this information, such warnings and links were not present. I suppose that so many people protested that Google felt they should add this warning.
In any case, kudos to Google.
I think the problem is the DMCA, and the concern is the similar legislation that lobbies are trying to push through the EU.
I said:
The DMCA fits exactly the picture: this law allows large corporations with large legal teams to target companies such as Google and coerce them to remove material, basing themselves on alleged copyright infringement.The article was removed because it was detrimental to the propaganda of the Church of Scientology. The Church used the legal argument that the material was copyrighted, of course. Hey, how are you supposed to discuss the policies and teachings of a church or other sect if you are not allowed to quote them? If you reproduce their documents, they sue you. If you don't, they claim you don't know what you are talking about.
I'm talking of base users there, those who have trouble cutting'n'pasting. An even better solution for them is to install the Google search bar in Internet Explorer and tell them "just type keywords there".
A troubling fact about Google is that Google can exerce de facto censorship by quietly removing sites from its index. Since Google is what many people use to look for information on the WWW (I myself don't use so-called portals, and I know many people who use Google as their startup page), this may effectively prevent them from finding those sites.
Think that I'm paranoid? I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams. For instance, the Church of Scientology has had Google remove links to sites discussing the Church's teachings.
This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored. We can therefore rightly fear that fear of litigation may force Google to take more and more controversial sites off.
The clients run on Linux PCs and Solaris SparcStations.
We have our share of problems with terminal server. Apparently, it counts currently used licenses in a weird way (perhaps that's related to what you said: sessions are not actually closed).
We don't use it that much; just to fill forms in Word or Acrobat.
I must say I gave up mostly on the alleged compatibility of open-source software with MS Word. There was always something not right in the presentation. Most of the MS Word stuff that I receive is forms from management and outside partners; those people apparently don't know how to make PDF forms.
We have a solution: we use rdesktop to access a single Windows 2000 machine from our Unix desktops, and we run MS Office and Acrobat on them.
I don't think that an "average tax % rate" makes much sense. What is often advertised in the US newspapers as a horrible tax rate is the marginal rate, which almost nobody pays (you have to have a really enormous income, and there are rebates and such that make it unlikely).
I personally pay about 10%. Of course there's also VAT (the sales tax), which is between 0% and 18.6% depending on the product bought.
Yet, I don't quite see your point. Whether you tax people a lot or not doesn't change the fact that filing taxes shouldn't require a professional unless the situation is really complex.
How about MacOS X? (I do use cryptoapi under Linux, but my colleague uses OS X)
I must say I've never been able to understand how the American public can put up with the convoluted US tax system. I'm not talking of people with small businesses on the side, but of ordinary folks who have a salary, some investments, maybe rent a room from their house, and have to pay a professional tax account to fill in their tax return!
Also, doesn't the IRS provide information on how to fill the forms? (For instance, the French tax services have email addresses you can send tax queries to, and they do answer.)
Ok, if you hide your file server in your attic, it will be found with difficulty. Still, if the cops really want to find it, they'll just come with radio tracking equipment! 802.11 transmitters should be easily located.
Silly question: can you put encrypted partition into files (à la Linux loopback)? A colleague of mine wants to create encrypted directories without repartitioning.
Interesting remark. Do you fancy yourself in vitrified radioactive waste? ;-)
I'm not anti-American; I've got numerous American friends and colleagues, I've worked in the US for a while, I was in New York last January and will come back to the US for business purposes at least once more this year.
Of course, my message was alluding partly to the American media. My opinion on these is that even alleged serious newspapers such as the New-York Times have degraded standards when it comes to international news. All too often, the international news articles would be more appropriately moved to a "commentary" or "opinion" section.
One troubling fact, for instance, is that all too often these articles dwell on alleged motivations, often implying that actions by foreign people or leaders are motivated by anti-Americanism or envy. Let me given you an example: in a recent article commenting on the opposition from several judicial bodies to a proposal to change French criminal procedure to include plea bargain, the journalist commented: "In France, perceived concessions to English-American forms of law, no matter how slight, have run into strong resistance.". Now, of course, this implies this resistance is motivated by anti-Americanism, ignoring real concerns about constitutional rights such as the right to a fair trial. In short, the journalist attributes motivations to people who cannot defend themselves. Is that reporting, or partisan comment?
I won't even mention the moral judgments routinely doled out as facts. The point is that such so-called reporting is bound to shape the impressions of the reader in a certain direction, in this case to believe that any opposition to the policies of the United States government is motivated by dubious issues.
Now you can understand better what happens in countries such as Saudi Arabia. In those countries, the media and the education system are even more biased. People are taught from their infancy that, say, the Jews are cunning liars. They are taught about the moral superiority of their religion compared to the "immoral" West.
The parallel is striking. Self-righteous biased reporting replacing facts and objective analysis. Of course, the situation in Saudi Arabia is far worse than in any Western countries, but still one should always pay attention to the agendas of the media outlets.
The link to violence? Why do all these people sponsors terrorist groups through so-called "charities"? Where do they find the terrorists? Part of the explanation seems to be that prejudice ingrained from infancy breeds violence.
Actually, you ask an interesting question: what is the influence of news reporting when it comes to violence?
I see two kinds of influence:
* News reports may create copycats out of weak minds. Let's say you catch some cretins throwing rocks on cars from bridges over freeways. If you make too much publicity of the case, you'll have imbeciles doing the same thing all over.
* More importantly, news reporting may alter the way people perceive the world and human interactions.
Let us take international relations. If you're brought up in the idea that your country is the best in every domain and the rest of the world is just made of jealous jerks, you obviously have a different outlook on violence - specifically, you may not be reluctant to approve the use of violence by your government.
Do the phrases "trade secrets" and "economic espionage" ring a bell?
I know heat, listed in this article, is a major concern for overclocking, but how about parasitic capacitances?
(For those who have forgotten physics 101: when you have two conductors separated by an insulation layer, you have a capacitor, the capacity of which depends on the surface and the thickness of the layer. In current microprocessors, the distances are so small that bad etching may produce parasitic capacitances. Those limit the speed.)
I'm not terribly interested in videoconferencing (unless it's really well integrated, with comfortable high-definition whiteboard functionalities as well as document scanning/faxing).
On the other hand, I'd be interested in a simple-to-use encrypted phone, even with low quality voice, for business purposes. Maybe inside a GSM phone.
Are there any such things being sold?
(Yes, I know of things like the STU-III, but I'm talking of cheap, easy-to-use gizmos, not cold war-designed US government hardware.)
Hey... But how about those SUVs I saw in Silicon Valley, with shiny paint that obviously hasn't seen any rugged road?
Oh, come on. And if you have just *any* problem that needs accessing the BIOS, you're stuck, because most BIOSes don't know how to talk to text terminals on serial lines.