Rather than going after use taxes, all of the participating states plan to entice online merchants to collect sales taxes voluntarily by sharing with them a portion of the tax revenues that they remit. Currently, one-third of all states share sales tax revenues with online retailers, with reimbursement rates ranging from a half percent to 1.75 percent of the total taxes collected.
Hmmm...If online retailers want to levy a 10% fee for me, I'll gladly give them 9% back.
See sites like Dell.com - Enter your shipping address as Los Angeles, CA and you'll see they charge 7% sales tax. Enter your address as Portland, OR and there'll be no sales tax (Since Oregon has none...).
Note that Dell is based in Texas...(So it's not a matter of collecting sales tax from the originating state)
This is exactly what we did at our company. We created an NFS/CIFS share, and gave all of our users a home directory. In there home directory is a ~/web folder. Anything they save in that folder will appear on "username.ourcompany.com".
The folder is protected by an htaccess, which by default will only authenticate internal users off of our LDAP directory. But we also provide a web-based interface for employees to create/remove users.
As part of our user-creation scripts, we create ~/web, a Virtual Host entry in Apache, and a DNS entry.
This system has worked quite well. Our employees love being able to publish things to the web so easily (Literally, they can save from MS Word to the web).
It's easy enough to stop a person from signing up for multiple accounts, though. Just keep a record of all IP's that signed up for accounts in the past 3 hours. If the IP is on the list, don't let them create an account. Dial-up users get screwed, but they can always come back in 3 hours to sign-up.
Or you could demand an email address, and verify it's authenticity (Send an email, follow a link).
All of this can be subverted, but it'd make it much harder, much slower, and probably not very much fun. It would certainly stop any massive DOS attacks or cheating from taking place.
Actually the project has generated many many "Interesting things here" WU's. They didn't translate into green men, but it was interesting enough for people to spend time looking at:)
How do you check that the client really did anything at all? Like I said, I'm not versed on what the client is actually doing - But I'm sure it's doing lots of specific equations.
So you just randomly pick 5 equations that it did, and say "I did these 5 equations on this WU, and here are the results I got". Then another client could get a "cheksum WU" instead of a full fledged WU, do the 5 same equations and say either "Works for me" or "This is bogus".
I don't know how SETI@Home currently works - perhaps all it does is send "Interesting" or "Not Interesting" replies. But no matter what it currently does, it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
The client could send a "No interesting date here, becase" message. And the 'because' gets checked by other users periodically. DOS isn't a problem...Just check 1 out of 100 WUs. If that WU is bogus, check another. If that one's bogus, release them all back into the keyspace.
I think that's PayPal's business model - fuck people out of their money, and make damn sure they can't find a phone number.
They do exist though.
# Their toll free number is (888) 221-1161 # Another toll free number is (800) 836-1859 # Yet another toll free number is (877)672-9725 # Their NEW regular telephone number is: (650) 864-8000 # Their regular phone number is: (650) 251-1100 # Their fax number is: (650) 251-1101 # Their mailing address is:
PayPal P.O. Box 45950 Omaha, NE 68145
# Their corporate offices are at:
1840 Embarcadero Rd. Palo Alto, CA 94303 US
# The Nebraska office is at:
Paypal 11128 John Galt Boulevard Omaha, NE 68137 (402) 935-2000 (402) 935-7733
If you're one of the legions who've been fucked, there's a class action lawsuit you might be eligible to join.
Once I finally got through to someone at PayPal, they were pretty good about getting me my money. But it was a royal pain in the ass.
I was careful to quantify what I was saying, by limiting my response to global warming. As I said, pollution is yucky and I am very much against it. I don't want my fish having a hint of coal tar either, and if it did I'd be out looking for the fuckers ruining my Sunday dinner.
However, I simply don't believe that coal tar, nor the exhaust from my car's tail pipe are going to somehow cause the temperature of the PLANET EARTH to change in any significant way. And in the event that I'm wrong, and it does impact the Earth's temperature (as if) I still don't believe it will have any significant impact on anyone (Any more so than normal fluctuations in temperature anyway).
Yes, I realize it's almost heresy to say these days, but I firmly believe it:P
You should note that I never said anything about a 'liberal media conspiracy.' I simply said the 'liberal media' - meaning news media outlets with liberal leanings.
But you dragged it out of me. If you honestly believe American politics is not riddled with conspiracies (Richard Mellon Scaife anyone?), I have some nice land for cheap on the Big Island of Hawaii you might be interested in:P
Wake up and smell the cash:P Why exactly do you think there are so many overlapping 'think tanks' and 'independent newspapers' in Washington DC? What possible purpose does The Heritage Foundation serve, other than a big umbrella organization that divvies up money from conservative billionaires and delegates it to other 'think tanks' to further their self-serving causes. How is it that the American Spectator, which consistently loses millions of dollars, is able to keep the presses going? Thanks to cash infusions from the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife.
Don't you find it odd that a shadowy man, from Old Money Philadelphia, who never gives interviews and you rarely hear of is largely responsible for the current conservative control of the US Congress, and the election (ahem, appointment) of our current President? Newt Gingrich himself has said as much.
I've always been extremely skeptical of global warming and most all evidence produced to 'prove' its existence.
Why? A simple matter of common sense. You constantly see headlines in the liberal-news media similar to "2001 Average Global Temperature Highest Since 1670" which, of course, begs the question "Who/what was producing all the green house gases in 1670 that caused the Earth's temperature to rise so dramatically?"
The answer is noone/nothing. There was no above average volcanic activity. There was certainly no man-made greenhouse gases. There was extraordinarily little man-made pollution. It was, in fact, a normal cycle in the Earth's temperature. We know that the Earth's temperature goes up and down over the course of hundreds and thousands of years.
Not to mention of course the fact that 30 years ago we were heading into an iceage, and all advised to buy warm clothes. Won't this new global warming simply offset the predicted ice age of 30 years ago?
The fact is these enviro-nuts don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. There has been good scientific data produced, of course, but the media constantly reports tbe findings of liberal-financed propoganda from neo-hippy enviromental nutsos that will do/say anything to get their point across - that man is bad, and nature is good. It's a typical rage-against-the-machine type attitude.
Anyway, in my ramblings I lost track of my point: If we take the plankton data at face value and accept it as true (Ha-ha) and we further stipulate that global warming is a reality - Maybe 'global warming' is directly attributable to the "dramatic drop" in phytoplankton in the N. Hemisphere. Why does the reverse have to be true? If memory serves, something like 80% of all oxygen is produced from cyanobacteria. I don't have exact figures (I never do:P) but thats a whole fuck-ton of carbom dioxide absorbtion.
Don't get me wrong - pollution is bad. It obviously affects wild life populations (Prince William Sound, anyone:P) It's stinky, it's yucky and I don't want it in my back yard. But this idea that it's going to cause the flooding the world, that it will unleach monster hurricanes upon Oklahoma is rediculous.
"fair use" is a feature of copyright law, and refers to specific kinds of usage (not just "anything I feel like"). Trademark law doesn't have that; you can use the trademarked thing only to refer to the trademarked product.
Ummm...You wish? Actually, I take it from your post that you don't wish - You're just misinformed. Trademark law does, and always has had, the concept of 'Fair Use'. I would refer you to the Lanham Act which covers the topic.
Further, it has been made clear in innumerable court cases in the US that anyone is free to use any trademark for any purpose, so long as the consumer would not normally be confused by the use. To wit, in Soeco, Inc v. Shell Oil Co: "[A]nyone is free to use the term in its primary, descriptive sense so long as such use does not lead to customer confusion as to the source of the goods or services."
Your "Boyardee" argument is valid, but I believe my original point is still valid, because Davezilla is not making movies (Or action figures, comic books, or otherwise trying to trade on the Godzilla character)
Come on, lets be serious davezilla and mozilla were inspired by Godzilla (little dragon guy). While I think that the trademark owners are being totally stupid about this its their right.
Yes - exactly. It was/inspired/ by Godzilla. But it's/not/ Godzilla. It's Davezilla. Can you honestly say that you could ever possibly confuse the two? That anyone could ever confuse the two? No? Well then there's no trademark infringement, since that is the benchmark.
Excuse me? It's a clear case of fair use. Have corporations really been so successful in pulling the blinds over our collective eyes that people do not take issue with a company claiming ownership of the formative 'zilla' and any remote likeness of a "reptile-like creature?"
This would be roughly equivalent to the owners of the Chef Boyardee trademark claiming ownership of "Chef" when used in conjunction with any food product:P
Trademarks are NOT ownership of a word. It is ownership of a brand. Hence, I can call my product "Kleenex" if I'm selling candy. If I'm selling tissue, however, you can bet Kimberly-Clark would come knocking.
It's actually a bit of a complicated problem though. For instance:
How do you know how long someone has been online? What stops the client from simply reporting they've been online since January 1st, 1970? You can't really trust the peers to whom they're directly connected to know either, because in a P2P network people constantly drop on and off.
How do you stop Overpeer and like-minded companies from lying about the moderation points? Why can't they give it +100, CD Quality?
The only solution I have thought of is rather slow and clumsy. Basically everyone gets unlimited moderation points...instead of incrementing the count, you simply say "This file is good" or "This file is bad". When the file is downloaded, the P2P client creates a small hash of the file and stores that hash, along with the filename and moderation of the file. Then during the search process, you do 2 searches. First you search for a filename. Instead of all the clients returning "Yes, I have that file" they return "Yes, I have that file, with a hash of: 34232SFDSFSDSDSD2323DSD". Then a search is done for all the hashcodes returned by the first search asking for everyone's moderation on that hashcode.
Then you give that file a percentage-score (i.e., 95% of users say this file, with this hashcode is bad) or 92% of users say this file, with this hashcode is bad.
But the solution won't really work, because it exponentially increases the amount of bandwidth/cpu time required to do a file search.
I would steer you towards Eclipse. It's the basis for WebSphere's IDE, was written by IBM (Supposedly at a cost of 40million or something) and has been donated to the open source community under the GPL.
Version 2.0 will be available in a week or two. One of the wonderful things about Eclipse, is how extensible it is. There are many plugin's available for EJB development.
Eclipse ships with plugins builtin for integration with Ant, JUnit, etc. If you're using Tomcat or JBoss, WebSphere (Or pretty much any mainstream J2EE App Server) there are plugins to integrate with them too.
Unfortunately, you're smoking crack. This is due for the most part to you're narrow-minded view that a high-traffic enterprise app needs to run on one, gigantic server.
The JVM itself does not scale adequately to serve high-traffic enterprise apps. The locking issues are not w/ Linux - they're with the JVM itself. You'll get nearly linear scaling w/ Sun's JRE going from one to 2 processors. A fair amount less making the jump to 4. After that, you're screwed. The JVM will hang on internal locks, and you'd be lucky to get much performance gain at all. It's certainly true that Sun's JRE implementation runs best on Solaris - imagine that. But if you run under IBM's JRE (Which is already a good bit faster than Sun's), you'll see very little difference.
Web-applications are perfectly suited to load-balancing. Throw a couple hot/hot $1000 LVS 1u servers in front of your application servers, and you can scale to millions of hits/day.
While not exactly the same as this, I noticed recently that at around 2:30am, my Tivo asked if it could change the channel to record "data which was part of the Tivo service".
Curious, I agreed. TiVo tuned in to the Discovery channel, where a rapidly-changing full-screen barcode was being broadcast with a small text box in the center that said the broadcast was part of the TiVo service.
After Tivo was done a few minutes later, I noticed Sheryl Crow's new music video was prominently displayed in "Now Showing".
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...How much data can the tag store?
Why not put the data on the chip encrypted?
Who cares what Japan does or doesn't do? They don't use UPC codes outside of the United States and Canada either.
I have *no* idea what you're landfill remark is about...we're talking about a 10-micron across piece of silicon here.
And they can't Bluetooth it. The chip has no power source.
Hmmm...If online retailers want to levy a 10% fee for me, I'll gladly give them 9% back.
See sites like Dell.com - Enter your shipping address as Los Angeles, CA and you'll see they charge 7% sales tax. Enter your address as Portland, OR and there'll be no sales tax (Since Oregon has none...).
Note that Dell is based in Texas...(So it's not a matter of collecting sales tax from the originating state)
This is exactly what we did at our company. We created an NFS/CIFS share, and gave all of our users a home directory. In there home directory is a ~/web folder. Anything they save in that folder will appear on "username.ourcompany.com".
The folder is protected by an htaccess, which by default will only authenticate internal users off of our LDAP directory. But we also provide a web-based interface for employees to create/remove users.
As part of our user-creation scripts, we create ~/web, a Virtual Host entry in Apache, and a DNS entry.
This system has worked quite well. Our employees love being able to publish things to the web so easily (Literally, they can save from MS Word to the web).
It's easy enough to stop a person from signing up for multiple accounts, though. Just keep a record of all IP's that signed up for accounts in the past 3 hours. If the IP is on the list, don't let them create an account. Dial-up users get screwed, but they can always come back in 3 hours to sign-up.
Or you could demand an email address, and verify it's authenticity (Send an email, follow a link).
All of this can be subverted, but it'd make it much harder, much slower, and probably not very much fun. It would certainly stop any massive DOS attacks or cheating from taking place.
Actually the project has generated many many "Interesting things here" WU's. They didn't translate into green men, but it was interesting enough for people to spend time looking at:)
How do you check that the client really did anything at all? Like I said, I'm not versed on what the client is actually doing - But I'm sure it's doing lots of specific equations.
So you just randomly pick 5 equations that it did, and say "I did these 5 equations on this WU, and here are the results I got". Then another client could get a "cheksum WU" instead of a full fledged WU, do the 5 same equations and say either "Works for me" or "This is bogus".
I don't know how SETI@Home currently works - perhaps all it does is send "Interesting" or "Not Interesting" replies. But no matter what it currently does, it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
The client could send a "No interesting date here, becase" message. And the 'because' gets checked by other users periodically. DOS isn't a problem...Just check 1 out of 100 WUs. If that WU is bogus, check another. If that one's bogus, release them all back into the keyspace.
Exactly - FDIC insurance covers only the collapse of the bank. It certainly does not cover fradulent withdrawls.
I think that's PayPal's business model - fuck people out of their money, and make damn sure they can't find a phone number.
They do exist though.
# Their toll free number is (888) 221-1161
# Another toll free number is (800) 836-1859
# Yet another toll free number is (877)672-9725
# Their NEW regular telephone number is: (650) 864-8000
# Their regular phone number is: (650) 251-1100
# Their fax number is: (650) 251-1101
# Their mailing address is:
PayPal
P.O. Box 45950
Omaha, NE 68145
# Their corporate offices are at:
1840 Embarcadero Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94303
US
# The Nebraska office is at:
Paypal
11128 John Galt Boulevard
Omaha, NE 68137
(402) 935-2000
(402) 935-7733
If you're one of the legions who've been fucked, there's a class action lawsuit you might be eligible to join.
Once I finally got through to someone at PayPal, they were pretty good about getting me my money. But it was a royal pain in the ass.
Better pictures, more info
Ummm...Most people? If you're concerned about it, chmod 700...But I would be very annoyed without GCC on my web servers:P
I was careful to quantify what I was saying, by limiting my response to global warming. As I said, pollution is yucky and I am very much against it. I don't want my fish having a hint of coal tar either, and if it did I'd be out looking for the fuckers ruining my Sunday dinner.
However, I simply don't believe that coal tar, nor the exhaust from my car's tail pipe are going to somehow cause the temperature of the PLANET EARTH to change in any significant way. And in the event that I'm wrong, and it does impact the Earth's temperature (as if) I still don't believe it will have any significant impact on anyone (Any more so than normal fluctuations in temperature anyway).
Yes, I realize it's almost heresy to say these days, but I firmly believe it:P
You should note that I never said anything about a 'liberal media conspiracy.' I simply said the 'liberal media' - meaning news media outlets with liberal leanings.
But you dragged it out of me. If you honestly believe American politics is not riddled with conspiracies (Richard Mellon Scaife anyone?), I have some nice land for cheap on the Big Island of Hawaii you might be interested in:P
Wake up and smell the cash:P Why exactly do you think there are so many overlapping 'think tanks' and 'independent newspapers' in Washington DC? What possible purpose does The Heritage Foundation serve, other than a big umbrella organization that divvies up money from conservative billionaires and delegates it to other 'think tanks' to further their self-serving causes. How is it that the American Spectator, which consistently loses millions of dollars, is able to keep the presses going? Thanks to cash infusions from the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife.
Don't you find it odd that a shadowy man, from Old Money Philadelphia, who never gives interviews and you rarely hear of is largely responsible for the current conservative control of the US Congress, and the election (ahem, appointment) of our current President? Newt Gingrich himself has said as much.
I've always been extremely skeptical of global warming and most all evidence produced to 'prove' its existence.
Why? A simple matter of common sense. You constantly see headlines in the liberal-news media similar to "2001 Average Global Temperature Highest Since 1670" which, of course, begs the question "Who/what was producing all the green house gases in 1670 that caused the Earth's temperature to rise so dramatically?"
The answer is noone/nothing. There was no above average volcanic activity. There was certainly no man-made greenhouse gases. There was extraordinarily little man-made pollution. It was, in fact, a normal cycle in the Earth's temperature. We know that the Earth's temperature goes up and down over the course of hundreds and thousands of years.
Not to mention of course the fact that 30 years ago we were heading into an iceage, and all advised to buy warm clothes. Won't this new global warming simply offset the predicted ice age of 30 years ago?
The fact is these enviro-nuts don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. There has been good scientific data produced, of course, but the media constantly reports tbe findings of liberal-financed propoganda from neo-hippy enviromental nutsos that will do/say anything to get their point across - that man is bad, and nature is good. It's a typical rage-against-the-machine type attitude.
Anyway, in my ramblings I lost track of my point: If we take the plankton data at face value and accept it as true (Ha-ha) and we further stipulate that global warming is a reality - Maybe 'global warming' is directly attributable to the "dramatic drop" in phytoplankton in the N. Hemisphere. Why does the reverse have to be true? If memory serves, something like 80% of all oxygen is produced from cyanobacteria. I don't have exact figures (I never do:P) but thats a whole fuck-ton of carbom dioxide absorbtion.
Don't get me wrong - pollution is bad. It obviously affects wild life populations (Prince William Sound, anyone:P) It's stinky, it's yucky and I don't want it in my back yard. But this idea that it's going to cause the flooding the world, that it will unleach monster hurricanes upon Oklahoma is rediculous.
Ummm...You wish? Actually, I take it from your post that you don't wish - You're just misinformed. Trademark law does, and always has had, the concept of 'Fair Use'. I would refer you to the Lanham Act which covers the topic.
Further, it has been made clear in innumerable court cases in the US that anyone is free to use any trademark for any purpose, so long as the consumer would not normally be confused by the use. To wit, in Soeco, Inc v. Shell Oil Co: "[A]nyone is free to use the term in its primary, descriptive sense so long as such use does not lead to customer confusion as to the source of the goods or services."
Your "Boyardee" argument is valid, but I believe my original point is still valid, because Davezilla is not making movies (Or action figures, comic books, or otherwise trying to trade on the Godzilla character)
Come on, lets be serious davezilla and mozilla were inspired by Godzilla (little dragon guy). While I think that the trademark owners are being totally stupid about this its their right.
/inspired/ by Godzilla. But it's /not/ Godzilla. It's Davezilla. Can you honestly say that you could ever possibly confuse the two? That anyone could ever confuse the two? No? Well then there's no trademark infringement, since that is the benchmark.
Yes - exactly. It was
Excuse me? It's a clear case of fair use. Have corporations really been so successful in pulling the blinds over our collective eyes that people do not take issue with a company claiming ownership of the formative 'zilla' and any remote likeness of a "reptile-like creature?"
This would be roughly equivalent to the owners of the Chef Boyardee trademark claiming ownership of "Chef" when used in conjunction with any food product:P
Trademarks are NOT ownership of a word. It is ownership of a brand. Hence, I can call my product "Kleenex" if I'm selling candy. If I'm selling tissue, however, you can bet Kimberly-Clark would come knocking.
I can't believe I missed that! That's a fantastic idea!
It's actually a bit of a complicated problem though. For instance:
How do you know how long someone has been online? What stops the client from simply reporting they've been online since January 1st, 1970? You can't really trust the peers to whom they're directly connected to know either, because in a P2P network people constantly drop on and off.
How do you stop Overpeer and like-minded companies from lying about the moderation points? Why can't they give it +100, CD Quality?
The only solution I have thought of is rather slow and clumsy. Basically everyone gets unlimited moderation points...instead of incrementing the count, you simply say "This file is good" or "This file is bad". When the file is downloaded, the P2P client creates a small hash of the file and stores that hash, along with the filename and moderation of the file. Then during the search process, you do 2 searches. First you search for a filename. Instead of all the clients returning "Yes, I have that file" they return "Yes, I have that file, with a hash of: 34232SFDSFSDSDSD2323DSD". Then a search is done for all the hashcodes returned by the first search asking for everyone's moderation on that hashcode.
Then you give that file a percentage-score (i.e., 95% of users say this file, with this hashcode is bad) or 92% of users say this file, with this hashcode is bad.
But the solution won't really work, because it exponentially increases the amount of bandwidth/cpu time required to do a file search.
Anyone else have any ideas?
The 9110 supports Java, doesn't it? There are a couple open source SSH Java implementations floating around..
We give them the Corporate Death Sentence - revoke their charter.
I would steer you towards Eclipse. It's the basis for WebSphere's IDE, was written by IBM (Supposedly at a cost of 40million or something) and has been donated to the open source community under the GPL.
Version 2.0 will be available in a week or two. One of the wonderful things about Eclipse, is how extensible it is. There are many plugin's available for EJB development.
Eclipse ships with plugins builtin for integration with Ant, JUnit, etc. If you're using Tomcat or JBoss, WebSphere (Or pretty much any mainstream J2EE App Server) there are plugins to integrate with them too.
Unfortunately, you're smoking crack. This is due for the most part to you're narrow-minded view that a high-traffic enterprise app needs to run on one, gigantic server.
The JVM itself does not scale adequately to serve high-traffic enterprise apps. The locking issues are not w/ Linux - they're with the JVM itself. You'll get nearly linear scaling w/ Sun's JRE going from one to 2 processors. A fair amount less making the jump to 4. After that, you're screwed. The JVM will hang on internal locks, and you'd be lucky to get much performance gain at all. It's certainly true that Sun's JRE implementation runs best on Solaris - imagine that. But if you run under IBM's JRE (Which is already a good bit faster than Sun's), you'll see very little difference.
Web-applications are perfectly suited to load-balancing. Throw a couple hot/hot $1000 LVS 1u servers in front of your application servers, and you can scale to millions of hits/day.
Probably, but presumably it would be a whole lot easier to screen-scrape Yahoo, or some other TV-guide listing available for free on the Internet.
While not exactly the same as this, I noticed recently that at around 2:30am, my Tivo asked if it could change the channel to record "data which was part of the Tivo service".
Curious, I agreed. TiVo tuned in to the Discovery channel, where a rapidly-changing full-screen barcode was being broadcast with a small text box in the center that said the broadcast was part of the TiVo service.
After Tivo was done a few minutes later, I noticed Sheryl Crow's new music video was prominently displayed in "Now Showing".