My understanding is that if you are in PA, you are subject to regular state sales tax. That the transaction is consumated over the internet is irrelevant.
Interstate sales tax is unconstitutional, so if your business is not located in PA you don't owe any PA sales tax.
States, counties and municipalities have gotten around this by passing "use" taxes. These are levied on the purchase of goods outside the jurisdiction. Basicly, a sales tax in all senses but name. Use taxes have been upheld by the Supreme Court in cases where the vendor either has a presence in the juristiction (store outlet, resident sales rep) or even sends mailorder catalogs (the rationale is that the state or city has to deliver and dispose of the paper & etc.). 45 or so states have use taxes and some counties, towns, cities also have use taxes. I think that there are a few thousand entities in the US levying taxes on out-of-jurisdiction sales.
The use taxes are owed by the purchaser to his or her local taxing entity(ies). It is not the responsibility of the vendor to collect these taxes. Most people aren't aware that the taxes exist or that it is their legal obligation to report and pay them. Consequently, the use taxes are almost never payed or collected. There have been attempts to get vendors to collect the taxes on the behalf of the state/city/etc, but these are not practical (too many taxing entities with no centralized listing of taxing schemes) or, I think (check with a lawyer if you really care), enforcable.
Hiding complexity is not always a good thing. Sometimes it is a problem, not a feature. Ever have one of your programs broken because somebody installs a new package with a quirky new version of a dll that your app is linked to?
Within certain limits you can have a variety different versions of the same library around to accomodate old programs.
" Here's question I would like to ask of all the Developer's Studio users...how can you take an existing MFC SDI (single-window) project and convert it to an MDI (multi-window in a single pane) project? If it doesn't involve creating a new project from scratch, I'd be highly surprised. "
What happens if you want to develop an app that doesn't use a window? One to the thing that bugged me about Windows (3.1, I don't write for Windows any more) is that everthing had to have instances of Windows to work. It was impossible to write a small, lightweight application to do a simple, single task.
Re:It doesn't look like this will happen but..
on
Akopia Buys Minivend
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· Score: 1
Isn't that what MS is trying to do with kerberos? Only they won't even purchase it. THeir plan is a subversion, not a purchase, of the open source code which hopes to give MS the defacto control of the other people's product.
In order for any software to be widely successful it has to run on Windows. By adding a proprietary, closed-source component to the kerberose package, MS hopes gain de facto control of the whole project. A kerberos that can't deal with MS Kerberos is a moribund kerberos, and the only kerberos that will work on native Windows platforms will be MS Kerberos. Basicly they seem to hope to acquire the entire intellecual property embodied in kerberos via assimilation.
An interesting busines model. Time will tell if they succeed.
That is one of the things that impressed me about the site... these people are soooo stupid!
My god, they were spamming for stock-scammer and A: they lost mony on the pump&dump even though they were 'in the know,' and B: the scammer's check bounced!
Just dumb white trash hitching on the information superhighway.
I tend to agree. Innovation hasn't died, its moved elsewhere.
This scenario is familiar to any biologist. Its similar to evolution. The basic body plans of multi-celled animals hasn't changed since the Cambrian, 600+ MYA. Still, there has been a lot of innovation within that constrained set of body plans. Qualitative differences are nothting to sneeze at. Indeed, some of the things he is slaming as hackneyed, refried beans, are potentially great innovations. Yeah, C++ is still a major development tool, but today's C++ isn't the same as C++ in 1990. And those standards he talks about as impediments to innovation are, IMHO, one of the biggest innovations of the recent past.
By way of analogy, the first animals to move onto land from the water were only slightly different from their aquatic ancestors, the differences were small, quantitative and clearly derivative. But the world of possibilities that those small differences opened up have led to huge innovations that would not have been possible if evolution had only led to more varied and weirder body plans. With computers the next spate of important innovations will be like the invasion of land by animals. The body plans will remain mostly intact, but rich and truely new ecosystems of interacting derivative forms will dominate the future.
What he is complaining about, the lack of apparent innovation, is an inevitable consequence of the complexification of the field. Using biological evolution as a metaphor, its typical to see a number of independent mutations coalesce into an interdependent complex. Two small, non-essential adaptations (innovations) come to depend on one another. Eventually things come to depend on the once-optional innovation and other innovations cluster around it. This 'trapping' of basic structures will make the core innovation fairly stable, it changes little over time (no innovation) but, by combining with other complexes eventually achieve superior performance and eventually exhibit qualitatively new and different behavior.
An important part of evolution is the ability to explore large sections of solution space without surrendering previously acquired solutions, the good side of stable-ish form. One of the things I like about Linux and other open source projects is that they alow and sometimes encourage such exploration. This is where Pike is correct, Linux's main innovation or claim to uniqueness is this openess. And I expect great things from it. This is also where MS fails, in my opinion.
Re:This is proof that Linux is not immune
on
Gnutella VBS Worm
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· Score: 1
I've heard that Corel will be using VB script in its office suite. Not yet, but soon. So at least there will be some sort of VB interpreter on Linux when that happens. I don't know if it will be accessible outside of the Corel suite.
I believe O' Reilly began its publishing career by printing and binding documents available for free from software sources. Things like the X11 manuals. It wasn't until later that they started printing original material. Even now a lot of their material is available for free on the internet for anyone who wants to read it.
The fact is, a printed and bound version of a book that you use a lot is cheaper than downloading a digital version and printing it on your own printer.
And don't forget the vanity thing. An author can do a book tour and autograph copies of the book for his or her fans. But you can't autograph a laptop. Whitout doesn't work well either. And for swatting flies, forget it.
If people like the book they will buy a printed copy.
Aren't there still laws against transporting certain key technologies across borders? I sort of doubt that much of Windows is considered restriction-grade quality, but I expect it would hinder their development of security and obfuscation paraphenalia for the stuff they sell to the military, other government agencies and Big Business.
Maybe Bill & Steve will go on the lam to Canada and leave Windows behind.... Nah. I don't think so.
Yeah, but how do they know the photo is a photo of the buyer? I could use the boss's picture so if the card triggers any alarms it'll be his mug on the post office wall, not mine.
Its either really dumb, or really nasty. I can't imagine a legitimate use, let alone need, for a photo from the buyer.
Sounds suspicious to me. I've never had anyone request a photo of me or my credit card over the network before. I'm suspicious that they wanted the pictures for nefarious purposes.
Besides, it doesn't offer any additional security; it won't work. There is no way to know that the picture I sent was of me or, if it was me, that the name on the CC belongs to me.
Beware of people demanding irrelevant information.
What site was this, anyway? I'd like to pay them a virtual visit.
I didn't start programing as a kid. My first language was APL. My second was BASIC on a PDP-8. The interpreter took up most ot the 8k memory so I had to learn assembler to get anything done.
By far the most instructive experience was with pdp-8 assembler. The 8 only had 5 commands plus a few 'micro' commands. What I liked about the experience in retrospect is that it taught me what computing is, in the sense of a logic machine, as opposed to a 'number cruncher.' At the machine level there are no numbers. Memory was so scarce that I had to look through the compiled code to find 'code' that had the bit pattern I needed to use a 'numerical' constant since there was no room to store a constant as such.
As much as I loved the old 8, and miss its simplicity and purity of essence, I'd never suggest anyone teach their kids to program on one. Still, I do think that it is better in some ways than things like VB, especially Wizard-driven app-generators. I just don't think kids can learn much from such experiences. Dragging, dropping and filling in some blanks doesn't build understanding or creativity. And its so distracting, bright colored buttons, beeps, boops and inscrutible error messages dialogs poping up from nowhere all of the time.
I suppose it boils down to what you want your kids to take away from the experience. My intuition is that they would be best served by learning programing in as abstract a way as possible. They don't need to know much arithemitic anymore, that is all done by calculators and spreadsheets now. The interesting, difficult and creative skills instead concern how to express your understanding of some situation in a logical manner (a good computer language) in order to acheive some purpose. Such a lesson would be worthwhile even if computer programming becomes obsolete and your kids never ever have to program anything in their later lives.
So, what language? I haven't seen it mentioned here yet so I'll suggest Perl. Of the languages I've known and used, Perl is the one I feel most creative with. It has the advantages of BASIC in that its interpreted, but its a much richer language that comes much, much closer to behaving like people think than any language I know, complete with depth, ambiguity and astonishing power. You can even write poetry in it that does something. Also, the Camel Book is one of the best-written computer books I know of. The glossary is a hoot and a half all on its own. I think a kid could learn to love Perl. Perl also has graphical hooks (Tk/Tcl, gtk), if they want that route (controlling Gimp via a perl script is a show stopper). There are tons of Modules to play with too. Something else here too, each module, and Perl itself, are attached to real, human personalities, not some anonymous marketing droid in Redmond, so there is a sense of community you'll never see in VB.
Another posibility is Logo. I think this was designed especially for teaching. Turtle graphics were meant to teach recursive algorithmic structure. I played with it for a while and its quite nice in some respects. Drawing trees and Sieiepinski(sp?) triangles was fun, even for a jaded old crank like me. What I liked about it was was that while I was using it really changed the way I looked at problems and sought solutions. A good dose of logo can change the way you think. Look at the book "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" sometime, this could help connect their learning with the usual appreciation of nature kids have (How does an acorn compute an oak?) I know a friend of mine's kid started on turtle graphics in logo in second grade and he liked it. There are implementation of logo for unix, windows and the Mac, along with pretty good manuals and tutorials.
I was recently on a jury for 2.5 months in a civil contract dispute. Both sides talked like lawyers and guess what, one of them lost anyway. Our decision was based on the facts of the case as best as we could discern them. And that was determined in turn by what sense we could make out of the legal lingo. Our decision was based on what we felt confident about, and what we felt confident about was what was discussed in more-or-less normal English. The lengthy discourse on quantum meruit during summation and in the 60+ instructions given us by the judge, were passed over in almost total silence during deliberations.
Everyone says that the strength of MS products are their deep integration. So here it is, exactly what they are asking for.
The next step is virus/worms that use MS Wallet to send money to Swiss bank accounts.... Followed soon afterward by e-postcards from the Carribean saying 'thanks for the vacation!'
This problem in these sorts of situations is revenue. Businesses dealing with free software just don't have enough cash to afford to buy persons of Congress or Senators. MS does.
There is an article in this month's Brill's Content about slash fiction. The title of the article is "X-Rated Files". It discusses several of these issues too. The article discusses slash fiction from the perspective of its being a grass-roots effort to for interactive involvement with media, mainly video, that is otherwise one-way. IT doesn't deal with shows incorporating elements of fan fiction.
In general the studios don't try too hard to supress slash fiction. The article mentions Lucas in particular. According to Brill's, Lucas said he would take action against erotic or lewd literature, but not otherwise.
Why was it discovered now? Maybe the recent release of Win 2000 has something to do with it. If I ran a business with NT or '98 this would sure be an incentive for me to buy their new backdoor-free software! Yessire Bob!
What I find odd is that the article says the perpetrator is as yet unknown. Does MS allow anonymous submissions to its core products? That is truely astonishing.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this is their first vapor language?
It [c#] provides operating system independence (which Java provides), but it also provides language independence, which Java can't provide."
WTF is a language independent language?
Interstate sales tax is unconstitutional, so if your business is not located in PA you don't owe any PA sales tax.
States, counties and municipalities have gotten around this by passing "use" taxes. These are levied on the purchase of goods outside the jurisdiction. Basicly, a sales tax in all senses but name. Use taxes have been upheld by the Supreme Court in cases where the vendor either has a presence in the juristiction (store outlet, resident sales rep) or even sends mailorder catalogs (the rationale is that the state or city has to deliver and dispose of the paper & etc.). 45 or so states have use taxes and some counties, towns, cities also have use taxes. I think that there are a few thousand entities in the US levying taxes on out-of-jurisdiction sales.
The use taxes are owed by the purchaser to his or her local taxing entity(ies). It is not the responsibility of the vendor to collect these taxes. Most people aren't aware that the taxes exist or that it is their legal obligation to report and pay them. Consequently, the use taxes are almost never payed or collected. There have been attempts to get vendors to collect the taxes on the behalf of the state/city/etc, but these are not practical (too many taxing entities with no centralized listing of taxing schemes) or, I think (check with a lawyer if you really care), enforcable.
Hiding complexity is not always a good thing. Sometimes it is a problem, not a feature. Ever have one of your programs broken because somebody installs a new package with a quirky new version of a dll that your app is linked to?
Within certain limits you can have a variety different versions of the same library around to accomodate old programs.
What happens if you want to develop an app that doesn't use a window? One to the thing that bugged me about Windows (3.1, I don't write for Windows any more) is that everthing had to have instances of Windows to work. It was impossible to write a small, lightweight application to do a simple, single task.
In order for any software to be widely successful it has to run on Windows. By adding a proprietary, closed-source component to the kerberose package, MS hopes gain de facto control of the whole project. A kerberos that can't deal with MS Kerberos is a moribund kerberos, and the only kerberos that will work on native Windows platforms will be MS Kerberos. Basicly they seem to hope to acquire the entire intellecual property embodied in kerberos via assimilation.
An interesting busines model. Time will tell if they succeed.
The spammer was forging the victim's domain in the email text. I would guess the domain is 'on' 24x7.
at least one of her machines was NT. It was in some of the icq logs.
My god, they were spamming for stock-scammer and A: they lost mony on the pump&dump even though they were 'in the know,' and B: the scammer's check bounced!
Just dumb white trash hitching on the information superhighway.
I tend to agree. Innovation hasn't died, its moved elsewhere.
This scenario is familiar to any biologist. Its similar to evolution. The basic body plans of multi-celled animals hasn't changed since the Cambrian, 600+ MYA. Still, there has been a lot of innovation within that constrained set of body plans. Qualitative differences are nothting to sneeze at. Indeed, some of the things he is slaming as hackneyed, refried beans, are potentially great innovations. Yeah, C++ is still a major development tool, but today's C++ isn't the same as C++ in 1990. And those standards he talks about as impediments to innovation are, IMHO, one of the biggest innovations of the recent past.
By way of analogy, the first animals to move onto land from the water were only slightly different from their aquatic ancestors, the differences were small, quantitative and clearly derivative. But the world of possibilities that those small differences opened up have led to huge innovations that would not have been possible if evolution had only led to more varied and weirder body plans. With computers the next spate of important innovations will be like the invasion of land by animals. The body plans will remain mostly intact, but rich and truely new ecosystems of interacting derivative forms will dominate the future.
What he is complaining about, the lack of apparent innovation, is an inevitable consequence of the complexification of the field. Using biological evolution as a metaphor, its typical to see a number of independent mutations coalesce into an interdependent complex. Two small, non-essential adaptations (innovations) come to depend on one another. Eventually things come to depend on the once-optional innovation and other innovations cluster around it. This 'trapping' of basic structures will make the core innovation fairly stable, it changes little over time (no innovation) but, by combining with other complexes eventually achieve superior performance and eventually exhibit qualitatively new and different behavior.
An important part of evolution is the ability to explore large sections of solution space without surrendering previously acquired solutions, the good side of stable-ish form. One of the things I like about Linux and other open source projects is that they alow and sometimes encourage such exploration. This is where Pike is correct, Linux's main innovation or claim to uniqueness is this openess. And I expect great things from it. This is also where MS fails, in my opinion.
I've heard that Corel will be using VB script in its office suite. Not yet, but soon. So at least there will be some sort of VB interpreter on Linux when that happens. I don't know if it will be accessible outside of the Corel suite.
The fact is, a printed and bound version of a book that you use a lot is cheaper than downloading a digital version and printing it on your own printer.
And don't forget the vanity thing. An author can do a book tour and autograph copies of the book for his or her fans. But you can't autograph a laptop. Whitout doesn't work well either. And for swatting flies, forget it.
If people like the book they will buy a printed copy.
Maybe Bill & Steve will go on the lam to Canada and leave Windows behind. ... Nah. I don't think so.
Its either really dumb, or really nasty. I can't imagine a legitimate use, let alone need, for a photo from the buyer.
Sounds suspicious to me. I've never had anyone request a photo of me or my credit card over the network before. I'm suspicious that they wanted the pictures for nefarious purposes.
Besides, it doesn't offer any additional security; it won't work. There is no way to know that the picture I sent was of me or, if it was me, that the name on the CC belongs to me.
Beware of people demanding irrelevant information.
What site was this, anyway? I'd like to pay them a virtual visit.
I didn't start programing as a kid. My first language was APL. My second was BASIC on a PDP-8. The interpreter took up most ot the 8k memory so I had to learn assembler to get anything done.
By far the most instructive experience was with pdp-8 assembler. The 8 only had 5 commands plus a few 'micro' commands. What I liked about the experience in retrospect is that it taught me what computing is, in the sense of a logic machine, as opposed to a 'number cruncher.' At the machine level there are no numbers. Memory was so scarce that I had to look through the compiled code to find 'code' that had the bit pattern I needed to use a 'numerical' constant since there was no room to store a constant as such.
As much as I loved the old 8, and miss its simplicity and purity of essence, I'd never suggest anyone teach their kids to program on one. Still, I do think that it is better in some ways than things like VB, especially Wizard-driven app-generators. I just don't think kids can learn much from such experiences. Dragging, dropping and filling in some blanks doesn't build understanding or creativity. And its so distracting, bright colored buttons, beeps, boops and inscrutible error messages dialogs poping up from nowhere all of the time.
I suppose it boils down to what you want your kids to take away from the experience. My intuition is that they would be best served by learning programing in as abstract a way as possible. They don't need to know much arithemitic anymore, that is all done by calculators and spreadsheets now. The interesting, difficult and creative skills instead concern how to express your understanding of some situation in a logical manner (a good computer language) in order to acheive some purpose. Such a lesson would be worthwhile even if computer programming becomes obsolete and your kids never ever have to program anything in their later lives.
So, what language? I haven't seen it mentioned here yet so I'll suggest Perl. Of the languages I've known and used, Perl is the one I feel most creative with. It has the advantages of BASIC in that its interpreted, but its a much richer language that comes much, much closer to behaving like people think than any language I know, complete with depth, ambiguity and astonishing power. You can even write poetry in it that does something. Also, the Camel Book is one of the best-written computer books I know of. The glossary is a hoot and a half all on its own. I think a kid could learn to love Perl. Perl also has graphical hooks (Tk/Tcl, gtk), if they want that route (controlling Gimp via a perl script is a show stopper). There are tons of Modules to play with too. Something else here too, each module, and Perl itself, are attached to real, human personalities, not some anonymous marketing droid in Redmond, so there is a sense of community you'll never see in VB.
Another posibility is Logo. I think this was designed especially for teaching. Turtle graphics were meant to teach recursive algorithmic structure. I played with it for a while and its quite nice in some respects. Drawing trees and Sieiepinski(sp?) triangles was fun, even for a jaded old crank like me. What I liked about it was was that while I was using it really changed the way I looked at problems and sought solutions. A good dose of logo can change the way you think. Look at the book "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" sometime, this could help connect their learning with the usual appreciation of nature kids have (How does an acorn compute an oak?) I know a friend of mine's kid started on turtle graphics in logo in second grade and he liked it. There are implementation of logo for unix, windows and the Mac, along with pretty good manuals and tutorials.
I was recently on a jury for 2.5 months in a civil contract dispute. Both sides talked like lawyers and guess what, one of them lost anyway. Our decision was based on the facts of the case as best as we could discern them. And that was determined in turn by what sense we could make out of the legal lingo. Our decision was based on what we felt confident about, and what we felt confident about was what was discussed in more-or-less normal English. The lengthy discourse on quantum meruit during summation and in the 60+ instructions given us by the judge, were passed over in almost total silence during deliberations.
Wrong story thread. MS is Ferengi, not Wookee. Bill "Grand Nagus" Gates is ruled by the most the Rules of Acquisition, not US Law.
Rule 42: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine too.
Say it ain't so! Dear little Clippy is a mole? What's next, Santa Clause is Communist?
This is a feature, not a bug.
Everyone says that the strength of MS products are their deep integration. So here it is, exactly what they are asking for.
The next step is virus/worms that use MS Wallet to send money to Swiss bank accounts. ... Followed soon afterward by e-postcards from the Carribean saying 'thanks for the vacation!'
I believe Word Perfect 2000 will be adopting VBScript as its macro language. So then we can have mail viruses on Linux too.
Not many industry standards come from Redmond. I guess virus-capable mail and ODBC will be the two big ones they'll be remembered for.
This problem in these sorts of situations is revenue. Businesses dealing with free software just don't have enough cash to afford to buy persons of Congress or Senators. MS does.
There is an article in this month's Brill's Content about slash fiction. The title of the article is "X-Rated Files". It discusses several of these issues too. The article discusses slash fiction from the perspective of its being a grass-roots effort to for interactive involvement with media, mainly video, that is otherwise one-way. IT doesn't deal with shows incorporating elements of fan fiction.
In general the studios don't try too hard to supress slash fiction. The article mentions Lucas in particular. According to Brill's, Lucas said he would take action against erotic or lewd literature, but not otherwise.
MS does quality assurance checks? Wow, that is news! But MS is an innovative company and industry leader.
Why was it discovered now? Maybe the recent release of Win 2000 has something to do with it. If I ran a business with NT or '98 this would sure be an incentive for me to buy their new backdoor-free software! Yessire Bob!
What I find odd is that the article says the perpetrator is as yet unknown. Does MS allow anonymous submissions to its core products? That is truely astonishing.