Though I shouldn't expect the typical/. crowd to believe that some huge corporation might actually TEST their software because it is in their own best interest.
It seems that people aren't so much disputing that the software is tested, but rather maintaining that...
1) The job of testing the stuff is much more difficult than it should be, due to poor design.
2) MS's priorities wrt testing interaction with 3rd party apps are not necessarily written based on what will best benefit users.
3) Whatever problems there are in the process of testing, identifying bugs, and getting fixes are internal issues that MS needs to address, and are no excuse for the largest software company in the market.
Sure, they test. Yes, testing (to some degree) is in their best interest. But that doesn't mean that everything that needs testing gets testing, or that bugs get fixed in anything like a timely manner. And these problems are *not* the responsibility of the end user to put up with... they're internal issues Microsoft would do well to address.
A business that likes money. As everyone knows, time is money, and if MS thinks it has put enough time into testing, it will release the patch, perhaps a bit prematurely.
Your entire argument about why they take so long to come out with a patch would be a lot more convincing in a universe where MS had actually said they plan to patch this bug *at all*....
There are lots of companies that are not market leaders that don't make crap products. If Real can only make good product by being a market leader, then they deserve to whither away. The government is not here to protect every company who makes a product and at one time was an early innovator.
What post are you responding to? This is totally irrelevant to what I said about MS dominating the OS market. The point there is *not* about Real's market position or quality; the point is that MS's OS market position gives them unfair leverage in all other software markets, should they choose to use it.
When Sprint and MCI started trying to sell long-distance service, and found themselves locked out by Ma Bell, they didn't have a leg to stand on in being "better," and certainly were not early innovators. They had barely entered the market. But they found themselves locked out of that market by anticompetitive practices. Regardless of how much RealPlayer sucks, MS has the ability to lock them and anyone else it wants to out of the media player market, and if they use that ability, they break the law.
It's "Open Source" in the sense that the source is distributed with the executable. It's not using any of the most popular OS licenses, but... what's your point?
Suppose MS came out with a 3 meg "patch" to Linux claiming to fix all the bugs in the kernal programmed in LISP (or some other language you have zero clue about). Would you install it as is? Would you sit down, learn a new language and go through the huge listing of source code?
Would I? Would you? No. Would someone? Probably several people, actually.
First, you can recompile the source code and determine that the downloadable binary is from the same code. Then you can go through the code and trace what the program does. "You" in this case means a geek with sufficient time, experience, and knowledge to do this.
Not very many people have to do this to find out if there's something fishy. More importantly, people who release their source code *know* that there will be people who will do this, so they have incentive to do things right. (Who among us really wore clean underwear in case we got in a car accident? On the other hand, wearing clean underwear because you have a hot date... well, then you think someone might actually *see* it...)
Well, it's happened in California. But I can't for the life of me find a link for it.
Apparently, under new consumer protection laws, companies that knowingly divulge your personal information to a third party without informing you are liable. A California woman has sued MS, saying that it's various OS and browser vulnerabilities amount to divulging information to third parties without her knowledge, and that they have to aggressively notify all their customers of any potential problems to protect their personal information.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
No... actually, you'll only get a quick dismissal if the judge has used RealPlayer. Juries don't dismiss cases.
However, if the judge has used their software, the case will be kicked out on it's ass.
Strange, how times can change. And yet, if you asked me my general opinion of AOL, I'd still say they suck - But I suppose I have to thank them for sponsoring two pretty nice programs.
I was working for a small fragment of Turner Broadcasting (owned by Time Warner) when the AOLTW merger happened. And I have to say from that experience, and from what else I've seen of AOL, they're not really evil. Chaotic Neutral, maybe.
Here's the thing... their main product sucks. It's dumped tons of people onto the internet that maybe we'd rather not have there. They've done their best to be the biggest, but mostly by littering our mailboxes, magazines, point-of-purchase displays, and what-have-you with coasters-I-mean-CDs.... which costs them money as much as it's a hassle for us.
They treat their employees fairly well, and have a basically honest and moral business philosophy. Their dealings with Time Warner, which were overly optimistic and misguided on both sides, were still up-front and didn't give me any ooky feeling. When we were directed to install AOL on every single computer in our office (bad, bad idea, and one they finally gave up on), their techs commiserated with ours over the difficulties of installing AOL in a network environment (the 6.0 install would hang if there was a network card installed. Always. Unless you installed 5.0 first.)
They're sort of like Electronic Arts... nice company to work for (in some ways), but I wouldn't want to do business with them. Though with AOL it seems to be general ineptitude balanced by blind luck, rather than anything malicious.
Netscape was able to hold 50% of the marketshare for quite a while despite Internet Explorer. If they had continued to innovate, they could have beaten MS.
If they had continued to have a revenue stream, they could have continued to pay programmers to continue to innovate. That's what the "air supply" was.
Notice Mozilla is making in-roads today.
Yes, now that a giant company that *still* has cash bought Netscape, and did the only smart thing of their life in making the Mozilla project open-source. But I doubt Netscape is making AOL any money. It's an advertising means, and that's all.
Micorosft didn't give it away gratis. It was part of the cost of Windows. It was no more "free" than, say, "WIN.EXE" is, or 'COMMAND.EXE', and so on. It's an app that is part of the OS's suite of standard Apps you can't entirely do without. It's not free - it's just that the cost is carried inside another product.
So by the same token, Real is screwed because WMP is part of the OS?
If MS puts Money into the OS, then Quicken is out of luck? What about if they start bundling their own PDF writer... Adobe has no recourse? Where does adding a product to the operating system *start* being anti-competitive?
Besides, you could download IE for Windows for free from their website. So all that's really true about what you're saying is that you can't run it without having Windows, which (theoretically) you have to pay MS for. But plenty of people got Windows before IE, and still got IE for free. How is that not giving it away? (not to mention that you could also download the Mac version for free...)
In other words, Media Player has an unfair advantage because it ships with Windows. Well, duh. But now the government should protect RealPlayer because it is not installed with Windows?
Well, um, yes.
This wouldn't be an issue if Windows wasn't such a huge percentage of the market. But what anti-trust consists of is using market leverage against competitors in a manner that they can't compete with.
Fact is, MS would be able to happily carry on with behavior like this if Linux and MacOS grabbed a bunch of market share. Give them each, say, 20%, and bundling non-OS-related products with Windows is no longer an antitrust issue. But as long as the market is such that you have a hard time getting around having Windows, then it is unfair competition for MS to bundle other products with it.
And you're right, that Real needs to improve their quality, or winning the suit still won't improve their sales... but back when Netscape was still better than IE, I knew a lot of people who liked NS better but "didn't bother" because they already had IE. Then Netscape couldn't sell anything anymore, and then they started to suck.
Hm, maybe Real can convince a judge that *they* didn't suck until MS did this to them. It's conceivable... a long time ago I used RealPlayer without making a mess of my computer...
I'm pretty sure bringing a new miracle drug to market costs a hell of a lot more than financing a movie or producing a TV show, yet they somehow manage to turn a profit with only 17 years.
Well....
Often, companies get their patents extended by the courts, usually by the amount of time it took to get FDA approval (sometimes years, even a decade). So don't bet on the clock starting on this patent just yet. 17 years after the drug starts commercial production, maybe.
Only the sufficiently wealthy may receive access, then.
Not necessarily...
Cancer isn't terribly demographically aligned. It may be that the company which produces this medicine (there's one that already has a license for it) will find that they can improve their total revenue stream by making this treatment (slightly) cheaper than traditional cancer treatment, which is covered by most health insurance (private and government-subsidized). This will lower the profits per treatment, but dramatically increase their client base, probably yielding quite a bit more total profit, and saving a lot more lives to boot.
If it also lowers the incidence of recurrence, that will be another selling point vs. traditional treatments.
In many economically deficient portions of the world, relatively benign diseases have remained impressively lethal.
Of course they have... but don't take this out of context. In those same parts of the world, grade-school education has remained a luxury, along with electricity and running water. Cancer in particular is a disease which is far more likely to hit older people*, and in areas where the life span is a couple decades shorter due to a much lower overall standard of living, cancer is the least of their worries. The amount that we could improve the standard of living just by ensuring that everyone learns to read and do arithmetic often outweighs the contributions we could make with advanced medical technology... and in fact, is a prerequisite for proper implementation of such technology.
* With the obvious exception of places where we've left depleted uranium shells all over the landscape, and children's leukemia dominates hospitals... see post-Gulf War Iraq.
Patching the human DNA is not something you want to do just like that.
Nor is it the aim of this project... rather than using a retrovirus to change human DNA in healthy cells, they're using the cold virus to *destroy* unhealthy cells. A successful result won't cause the human's DNA to change (since all the cells attacked by the virus will die).
The main thing companies seem to want is for people to pay for 'unlimited' services/food/etc... and then not use them.
Bingo.
TANSTAAFL*. If someone overuses, someone else has to underuse to pay for that person's usage. All-you-can-eat and other unmetered goods and services depend on this. If not enought people underuse, they can't afford to keep providing the good or service under those conditions.
Gym memberships are a classic case. They tend to be cheap... $10-20 per month. But they count on only a very small percentage of the membership using the services each day. If suddenly 75% of their members started working out regularly, they wouldn't be able to afford to stay in business.
We all subsidize each other. Someone's mom down the street who feels very tech-savvy when she downloads the photos of her grandkids is paying for much more service than she's using, because her neighbor's 13-year-old is busy downloading the latest warez from his friends. When the demographics start shifting, such that more people are on the high end of usage, this business model starts to fall apart.
* "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." See Heinlein.
You ever stop to think that unlimited could mean we don't restrict the time of day you connect? Maybe unlimited means we don't limit your access to certain areas of the net? You make the assumption that unlimited applies to your connection time or to your bandwidth usage.
It's a matter of context.
There are many ISPs out there in the US market. Some limit the amount of time you can be connected, or charge a fee per minute after a certain amount of time. Others limit the download and/or upload bandwidth to a certain instantaneous or cumulative max (most have an instantaneous max, if only because of hardware limitations).
Very few, if any, US ISPs actually limit the time of day or the areas of the internet you can connect to. (AOL's software may try to keep you in a certain part of the net that AOL/TW owns, but the connection actually allows you the same access as pretty much any other ISP).
It is unreasonable to assume that the phrase "unlimited internet access" is referring to limits that aren't typically imposed on internet access in this market. Therefore, unlimited in this case may mean no bandwidth cap, or no time limit, or both. Given that they didn't specify or otherwise qualify the statement, the consumer can assume they mean both. And can sue when they don't get that.
You write a paper or book you want to copyright, perhaps some analysis of software design. And part of the paper uses a small example cut from a GPL program, maybe to contrast it with another piece of code that cannot be put under the GPL because it is copyrighted by the original author.
My opinion is that this is allowed under fair use.
It probably isn't, if the book you're writing is a commercial work. If it's a news article, or an obvious critique, then it may be.
But it's irrelevant as far as the GPL'd code is concerned, since you're releasing *the code*, so you're complying with the GPL. You are not redistributing GPL software without the source code, which would then be a violation of the GPL.
You better make sure you have permission from the author of the other code snippet, though, because as I said earlier, this probably isn't covered under fair use.
I didn't name them, she brought them up. If there are no lawyers to contradict, why write the piece?
Hm... yes, there is one law firm she cited as advising their clients that the GPL is viral and could cause them to lose their code.
The quote from the link she included is "Your employee could grab a piece of open-source code off the Internet and you no longer have a proprietary product. Your $50,000 software package is now worth zero."
Does that sound remotely accurate? You download something and it makes your product automatically OS?
Are you really going to fault someone for contradicting this assertion?
Even lawyers can be wrong. The firm's clients, however, should either follow their attorney's advice, or they should find a new attorney if they think they're being mis-served. Of course, without an article like this one, how would they ever have an inkling that what this attorney said is hogwash?
Slashdot Mirror
But we all know that they ARE patching IE,
I don't... last I saw they're still not sure if they're going to fix this bug. Do you have a link?
Though I shouldn't expect the typical /. crowd to believe that some huge corporation might actually TEST their software because it is in their own best interest.
It seems that people aren't so much disputing that the software is tested, but rather maintaining that...
1) The job of testing the stuff is much more difficult than it should be, due to poor design.
2) MS's priorities wrt testing interaction with 3rd party apps are not necessarily written based on what will best benefit users.
3) Whatever problems there are in the process of testing, identifying bugs, and getting fixes are internal issues that MS needs to address, and are no excuse for the largest software company in the market.
Sure, they test. Yes, testing (to some degree) is in their best interest. But that doesn't mean that everything that needs testing gets testing, or that bugs get fixed in anything like a timely manner. And these problems are *not* the responsibility of the end user to put up with... they're internal issues Microsoft would do well to address.
A business that likes money. As everyone knows, time is money, and if MS thinks it has put enough time into testing, it will release the patch, perhaps a bit prematurely.
Your entire argument about why they take so long to come out with a patch would be a lot more convincing in a universe where MS had actually said they plan to patch this bug *at all*....
There are lots of companies that are not market leaders that don't make crap products. If Real can only make good product by being a market leader, then they deserve to whither away. The government is not here to protect every company who makes a product and at one time was an early innovator.
What post are you responding to? This is totally irrelevant to what I said about MS dominating the OS market. The point there is *not* about Real's market position or quality; the point is that MS's OS market position gives them unfair leverage in all other software markets, should they choose to use it.
When Sprint and MCI started trying to sell long-distance service, and found themselves locked out by Ma Bell, they didn't have a leg to stand on in being "better," and certainly were not early innovators. They had barely entered the market. But they found themselves locked out of that market by anticompetitive practices. Regardless of how much RealPlayer sucks, MS has the ability to lock them and anyone else it wants to out of the media player market, and if they use that ability, they break the law.
Using IE I see?
No, using Mozilla and Google, actually. But still couldn't find it. Fortunately, someone else did above.
Ummm....
It's "Open Source" in the sense that the source is distributed with the executable. It's not using any of the most popular OS licenses, but... what's your point?
Suppose MS came out with a 3 meg "patch" to Linux claiming to fix all the bugs in the kernal programmed in LISP (or some other language you have zero clue about). Would you install it as is? Would you sit down, learn a new language and go through the huge listing of source code?
Would I? Would you? No. Would someone? Probably several people, actually.
First, you can recompile the source code and determine that the downloadable binary is from the same code. Then you can go through the code and trace what the program does. "You" in this case means a geek with sufficient time, experience, and knowledge to do this.
Not very many people have to do this to find out if there's something fishy. More importantly, people who release their source code *know* that there will be people who will do this, so they have incentive to do things right. (Who among us really wore clean underwear in case we got in a car accident? On the other hand, wearing clean underwear because you have a hot date... well, then you think someone might actually *see* it...)
While it's a nice step, it's no replacement for an official Microsoft patch.
It's no replacement for... nothing, in other words?
Microsoft hasn't even said they're *going* to patch this yet, you may be waiting an awful long time.
Sued by... by customers bwahaha haha... not... 'nough...ha haha... air...got...to...breath...hahah sued.... customers....
Well, it's happened in California. But I can't for the life of me find a link for it.
Apparently, under new consumer protection laws, companies that knowingly divulge your personal information to a third party without informing you are liable. A California woman has sued MS, saying that it's various OS and browser vulnerabilities amount to divulging information to third parties without her knowledge, and that they have to aggressively notify all their customers of any potential problems to protect their personal information.
Microsoft lawyer gets up and asks, "ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have any of you actually used realplayer? If one of them has, chances are the jury will be a hung jury. If all of them have, you can count on a quick dismissal.
No... actually, you'll only get a quick dismissal if the judge has used RealPlayer. Juries don't dismiss cases.
However, if the judge has used their software, the case will be kicked out on it's ass.
does the "can't be prosecuted for the same crime more than once" rule apply here?
Anti-trust law is civil, not criminal. Double jeopardy applies only to criminal infractions.
Strange, how times can change. And yet, if you asked me my general opinion of AOL, I'd still say they suck - But I suppose I have to thank them for sponsoring two pretty nice programs.
I was working for a small fragment of Turner Broadcasting (owned by Time Warner) when the AOLTW merger happened. And I have to say from that experience, and from what else I've seen of AOL, they're not really evil. Chaotic Neutral, maybe.
Here's the thing... their main product sucks. It's dumped tons of people onto the internet that maybe we'd rather not have there. They've done their best to be the biggest, but mostly by littering our mailboxes, magazines, point-of-purchase displays, and what-have-you with coasters-I-mean-CDs.... which costs them money as much as it's a hassle for us.
They treat their employees fairly well, and have a basically honest and moral business philosophy. Their dealings with Time Warner, which were overly optimistic and misguided on both sides, were still up-front and didn't give me any ooky feeling. When we were directed to install AOL on every single computer in our office (bad, bad idea, and one they finally gave up on), their techs commiserated with ours over the difficulties of installing AOL in a network environment (the 6.0 install would hang if there was a network card installed. Always. Unless you installed 5.0 first.)
They're sort of like Electronic Arts... nice company to work for (in some ways), but I wouldn't want to do business with them. Though with AOL it seems to be general ineptitude balanced by blind luck, rather than anything malicious.
Netscape was able to hold 50% of the marketshare for quite a while despite Internet Explorer. If they had continued to innovate, they could have beaten MS.
If they had continued to have a revenue stream, they could have continued to pay programmers to continue to innovate. That's what the "air supply" was.
Notice Mozilla is making in-roads today.
Yes, now that a giant company that *still* has cash bought Netscape, and did the only smart thing of their life in making the Mozilla project open-source. But I doubt Netscape is making AOL any money. It's an advertising means, and that's all.
Micorosft didn't give it away gratis. It was part of the cost of Windows. It was no more "free" than, say, "WIN.EXE" is, or 'COMMAND.EXE', and so on. It's an app that is part of the OS's suite of standard Apps you can't entirely do without. It's not free - it's just that the cost is carried inside another product.
So by the same token, Real is screwed because WMP is part of the OS?
If MS puts Money into the OS, then Quicken is out of luck? What about if they start bundling their own PDF writer... Adobe has no recourse? Where does adding a product to the operating system *start* being anti-competitive?
Besides, you could download IE for Windows for free from their website. So all that's really true about what you're saying is that you can't run it without having Windows, which (theoretically) you have to pay MS for. But plenty of people got Windows before IE, and still got IE for free. How is that not giving it away? (not to mention that you could also download the Mac version for free...)
In other words, Media Player has an unfair advantage because it ships with Windows. Well, duh. But now the government should protect RealPlayer because it is not installed with Windows?
Well, um, yes.
This wouldn't be an issue if Windows wasn't such a huge percentage of the market. But what anti-trust consists of is using market leverage against competitors in a manner that they can't compete with.
Fact is, MS would be able to happily carry on with behavior like this if Linux and MacOS grabbed a bunch of market share. Give them each, say, 20%, and bundling non-OS-related products with Windows is no longer an antitrust issue. But as long as the market is such that you have a hard time getting around having Windows, then it is unfair competition for MS to bundle other products with it.
And you're right, that Real needs to improve their quality, or winning the suit still won't improve their sales... but back when Netscape was still better than IE, I knew a lot of people who liked NS better but "didn't bother" because they already had IE. Then Netscape couldn't sell anything anymore, and then they started to suck.
Hm, maybe Real can convince a judge that *they* didn't suck until MS did this to them. It's conceivable... a long time ago I used RealPlayer without making a mess of my computer...
I'm pretty sure bringing a new miracle drug to market costs a hell of a lot more than financing a movie or producing a TV show, yet they somehow manage to turn a profit with only 17 years.
Well....
Often, companies get their patents extended by the courts, usually by the amount of time it took to get FDA approval (sometimes years, even a decade). So don't bet on the clock starting on this patent just yet. 17 years after the drug starts commercial production, maybe.
Only the sufficiently wealthy may receive access, then.
Not necessarily...
Cancer isn't terribly demographically aligned. It may be that the company which produces this medicine (there's one that already has a license for it) will find that they can improve their total revenue stream by making this treatment (slightly) cheaper than traditional cancer treatment, which is covered by most health insurance (private and government-subsidized). This will lower the profits per treatment, but dramatically increase their client base, probably yielding quite a bit more total profit, and saving a lot more lives to boot.
If it also lowers the incidence of recurrence, that will be another selling point vs. traditional treatments.
In many economically deficient portions of the world, relatively benign diseases have remained impressively lethal.
Of course they have... but don't take this out of context. In those same parts of the world, grade-school education has remained a luxury, along with electricity and running water. Cancer in particular is a disease which is far more likely to hit older people*, and in areas where the life span is a couple decades shorter due to a much lower overall standard of living, cancer is the least of their worries. The amount that we could improve the standard of living just by ensuring that everyone learns to read and do arithmetic often outweighs the contributions we could make with advanced medical technology... and in fact, is a prerequisite for proper implementation of such technology.
* With the obvious exception of places where we've left depleted uranium shells all over the landscape, and children's leukemia dominates hospitals... see post-Gulf War Iraq.
I'm getting from this that cancer cells result from mutation, but not that cancer cells continually mutate within an active tumor.
Are these articles online? Is it possible to see these quotes in context?
Patching the human DNA is not something you want to do just like that.
Nor is it the aim of this project... rather than using a retrovirus to change human DNA in healthy cells, they're using the cold virus to *destroy* unhealthy cells. A successful result won't cause the human's DNA to change (since all the cells attacked by the virus will die).
The main thing companies seem to want is for people to pay for 'unlimited' services/food/etc... and then not use them.
Bingo.
TANSTAAFL*. If someone overuses, someone else has to underuse to pay for that person's usage. All-you-can-eat and other unmetered goods and services depend on this. If not enought people underuse, they can't afford to keep providing the good or service under those conditions.
Gym memberships are a classic case. They tend to be cheap... $10-20 per month. But they count on only a very small percentage of the membership using the services each day. If suddenly 75% of their members started working out regularly, they wouldn't be able to afford to stay in business.
We all subsidize each other. Someone's mom down the street who feels very tech-savvy when she downloads the photos of her grandkids is paying for much more service than she's using, because her neighbor's 13-year-old is busy downloading the latest warez from his friends. When the demographics start shifting, such that more people are on the high end of usage, this business model starts to fall apart.
* "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." See Heinlein.
You ever stop to think that unlimited could mean we don't restrict the time of day you connect? Maybe unlimited means we don't limit your access to certain areas of the net? You make the assumption that unlimited applies to your connection time or to your bandwidth usage.
It's a matter of context.
There are many ISPs out there in the US market. Some limit the amount of time you can be connected, or charge a fee per minute after a certain amount of time. Others limit the download and/or upload bandwidth to a certain instantaneous or cumulative max (most have an instantaneous max, if only because of hardware limitations).
Very few, if any, US ISPs actually limit the time of day or the areas of the internet you can connect to. (AOL's software may try to keep you in a certain part of the net that AOL/TW owns, but the connection actually allows you the same access as pretty much any other ISP).
It is unreasonable to assume that the phrase "unlimited internet access" is referring to limits that aren't typically imposed on internet access in this market. Therefore, unlimited in this case may mean no bandwidth cap, or no time limit, or both. Given that they didn't specify or otherwise qualify the statement, the consumer can assume they mean both. And can sue when they don't get that.
You write a paper or book you want to copyright, perhaps some analysis of software design. And part of the paper uses a small example cut from a GPL program, maybe to contrast it with another piece of code that cannot be put under the GPL because it is copyrighted by the original author.
My opinion is that this is allowed under fair use.
It probably isn't, if the book you're writing is a commercial work. If it's a news article, or an obvious critique, then it may be.
But it's irrelevant as far as the GPL'd code is concerned, since you're releasing *the code*, so you're complying with the GPL. You are not redistributing GPL software without the source code, which would then be a violation of the GPL.
You better make sure you have permission from the author of the other code snippet, though, because as I said earlier, this probably isn't covered under fair use.
I didn't name them, she brought them up. If there are no lawyers to contradict, why write the piece?
Hm... yes, there is one law firm she cited as advising their clients that the GPL is viral and could cause them to lose their code.
The quote from the link she included is "Your employee could grab a piece of open-source code off the Internet and you no longer have a proprietary product. Your $50,000 software package is now worth zero."
Does that sound remotely accurate? You download something and it makes your product automatically OS?
Are you really going to fault someone for contradicting this assertion?
Even lawyers can be wrong. The firm's clients, however, should either follow their attorney's advice, or they should find a new attorney if they think they're being mis-served. Of course, without an article like this one, how would they ever have an inkling that what this attorney said is hogwash?
Again, the advice is from someone admitting to not be a lawyer and seeking to contradict actual lawyers.
Which actual lawyers is the article seeking to contradict?
Well, I don't pay income taxes, but I'm not in jail. So I guess I'm not forced to pay taxes.
Well, I didn't pay taxes, and they took it out of my paycheck before I ever got the money, so I've been forced to pay taxes.
Count yourself lucky, not exempt.