For personal/small-business accounting, there's GnuCash, although I don't know how easy it would be for a Quicken users to adopt.
Taxes (in the US, at least) are a little tricky because you have to file paperwork with the IRS for permission to submit tax returns electronically; an end-user can't just upload their return directly to the IRS. So an open-source tax package all by itself couldn't substitute for TurboTax.
In general, does Canada claim jurisdiction over crimes committed against its citizens outside Canadian borders? Say Alice is a US citizen and Bob is Canadian. If Alice kills Bob in some country where Canada has no extradition treaty, and the local authorities decline to prosecute the case, and then Alice crosses the border into Canada, can she be arrested for murder? Can the Mounties go into that other country, snatch Alice, and drag her into Canada for prosecution? (Cf. US v. Noriega.)
In the land of American cut-throat capitalism, it's not illegal termination or blackmail, it's, umm, renegotiation of a business deal.
There are only a few cases where it's actually illegal in the US to fire someone (e.g., racial discrimination). And of course some employees (I think it's about 25% nationwide at this point) belong to labor unions and they may have special rules for termination written into their employment contracts. (But a bankrupt company isn't bound by collective-bargaining agreements that it made before declaring bankruptcy.) Aside from that, it's "employment at will"--you can quit whenever you want and the bosses can fire you whenever they want.
Every state has a fund for unemployment insurance that employers pay into, so if you lose your job you can get some fraction of your former wage for six months out of that fund while you look for work. However, if the employer can convince the unemployment office that you were fired "for cause", then you don't get the unemployment benefits (and the employer's insurance premium doesn't go up).
IIRC, in the US, if the corporation that employs you doesn't have the assets to pay your paycheck, then the corporate officers are personally liable for it. My boss once worked for a startup that was getting low on funds, so they asked all the employees to sign a waiver agreeing not to be paid for the most recent month (or whatever). The people who didn't sign got their pay--and got laid off.
If a plaintiff refuses a defendant's offer of judgement and ends up losing at trial, does the plantiff also have to cover the defendant's legal bills? Or is the plaintiff only on the hook for court costs?
Proposal: Put a separate line item on the tax form for income from the sale or licensure of copyrights. All the money raised from that line item goes into a separate government trust fund, where it earns interest. When your copyright expires or is put into the public domain, you get back the principal that you put into the trust fund. The interest goes to support the National Endowment for the Arts.
Result: Regardless of the length of copyright, there's an incentive to put work into the public domain once it stops being commercially valuable.
Under US law, truth is an absolute defense against libel claims (whereas, in the UK, it's an absolute defence:-). If I announce that Jane Doe has herpes and she does, in fact, have herpes (or if I can convince the court that I had good reason to believe she had herpes), then my statement is not libel.
If Jane Doe is openly promiscuous but disease-free, I can probably say "Jane Doe's behavior puts her at risk for herpes", but I still can't say "Jane Doe has herpes". Promiscuous women have legal rights, too.
Sexual morals have changed a bit over the past century or so; if I were sued for saying "Jane Doe had sex with her boyfriend after their third date" and that statement was false, I could probably argue that such a statement cannot be presumed to damage Jane's reputation. (All that means is that Jane would have to convince the court that her reputation was in fact damaged.) But the statements at issue in the AutoAdmit case go far, far beyond that.
I don't understand what herpes being easily testable has to do with the libel question. There are a variety of defenses that a defendant can bring against a libel accusation, but I've never heard of testability being one of them.
I think it's a safe bet that a most if not all of the defendants in this lawsuit have had off-board contacts with one another and know each other's true identities. So the plaintiff's lawyer can approach the defendants that he has identified and say: "If you don't roll over on your buddies, then two things are going to happen. First, all the damages we win in this case are going to come out of your pockets, while they get off scot-free. Second, you are going to be scrounging to find someone sleazy enough to hire you, while they can apply to top-50 law firms with their reputations unharmed. Are they worth standing up for?"
Also, note paragraph 13 of the complaint: "...Posters can adopt multiple user names and, if they so desire, attempt to maintain several identities simultaneously on the AutoAdmit website." The plaintiffs might be preparing to subpoena AutoAdmit's ISP and then subpoena the computer of every male student at Yale Law School (the defendants' school) who has used the site.
Even if they can't prove that the remarks played a part in their not-being-hired, some of the accusations, like "X has herpes", are pro se libel--meaning that they are so obviously defamatory that the plaintiffs don't have to prove to the court that they caused damage.
But what if his intent was only to give himself access to his data from any location on campus?
In general, if you have copyrighted material on one computer that you own, and then copy it to another computer that you own, you need the copyright holder's permission, even though you own both computers. The important thing from a copyright-law POV is the act of copying, not the people who have access to the copy. (IANAL, but I was involved in an IP audit of some data that is used to build one of my employer's products, and this was one thing we were told by our own lawyer. If you remember that "you", the holder of a copy of a copyrighted work, might be a corporation with thousands of employees, you can see how this rule might make more sense.)
So one could argue that if a student puts a copyrighted MP3 on a school's server and then streams it to his or her dorm room, copyright infringement has taken place. But this is all tangential to Doe's argument, because the plaintiffs in this case have not shown any evidence that the defendants have even streamed the copyrighted music to their dorms.
The rumor I heard (probably on an earlier Slashdot article:-) is that Microsoft told NASDAQ that if they don't use Microsoft products, then Microsoft will start trading on the NYSE instead; the NYSE, which is the only exchange allowed to use ticker symbols with fewer than four letters, has set aside "M", just in case that happens.
Once upon a time, just about everyone lived in small communities. You would expect to live, work, and die in the same little town where your parents and your close relatives lived. Once you got a reputation in such a community, deserved or undeserved, it would probably follow you for life.
Then we had the Industrial Revolution, big cities, relatively cheap transatlantic travel, etc., and all of a sudden it was possible--difficult, but possible--to make a clean break with your past and forge a new life. Many of the life-affecting judgements that were previously made by busybody neighbors were instead made by impersonal bureaucrats.
Now, all sorts of personal information about us online and searchable, and folks who grew up with the Net are less inhibited than their elders about putting more personal stuff online. It looks like the Internet is putting us all in the same virtual small town. I don't think that's an entirely good thing, but I don't see how it can be prevented.
know when to hold 'em; know when to fold 'em
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
When my then-employer was bought by Lucent, and they passed out an intellectual property assignment and NDA for us all to sign, I crossed out a line that was particularly outrageous, initialed the change, signed the contract, and turned it in. Nobody complained. I wonder if anyone even noticed.
There is no ban against using DDT for disease control. It's still used to fight malaria--in countries where widespread agricultural use of DDT has not made the local mosquitoes evolve DDT resistance. If it weren't for Silent Spring, there'd be a lot more DDT-resistant mosquitoes out there.
IIRC, according to Standard Macroeconomic Theory(TM), a country's employment rate primarily depends on the national savings rate and the interest rates set by the central bank. If savings are high and interest rates are low, then it's easy for businesses to get capital and hire people, and you have low unemployment.
But the US has an extremely low national savings rate. The Treasury has to print up all these bonds to finance the Federal budget deficit, and American investors aren't interested in buying them all up. So we rely on foreign investors, especially the central bank of China, to provide that financing. The foreigners, of course, have to buy the Treasury bonds with US dollars. How do they get those dollars? By selling cheap stuff to Americans.
So offshoring is not a cause of US unemployment; it is one effect of bad political decisions here in the US, and unemployment is another effect of those decisions. There are things that the US government can do to encourage employment in the IT sector, and things the US government can do to soften the damage that people get when they lose their jobs (for whatever reason), and people can have all sorts of arguments about which of these things would be good policy. But "Blame India" is just bad economics.
If foreigners weren't interested in buying up our debt, then the Treasury would have to hike interest rates to make its bonds more attractive to American investors, which would seriously raise the US unemployment rate--investors would move their money from low-ROI private-sector investments to bonds, and the companies that had depended on those investments would have to fold. So in a sense, we should be grateful that all these Third World countries are itching to sell us cheap DVD players and cheap Java programmers.
(There are second-order effects that aren't captured by the above Macroeconomics 101 analysis: for example, both China and India have currency restrictions that make American exports to those countries more expensive for their own citizens. But the US budget deficit and national debt are so huge that I don't think these effects have a significant impact on US unemployment.)
The Congress shall have power... To declare war,... make rules concerning captures on land and water;... raise and support armies,... provide and maintain a navy;... make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;...
Even in wartime, if Congress passes a law saying that the President needs a warrant to conduct a wiretap, or saying that torturing prisoners is not allowed, or saying that every Master Sargeant in the army needs to wear a hat with a flashing blue light on top, the President has to suck it up and deal.
you think CIA is not torturing, well, they taught Latin America dictators the joys of the interrogation tactics in the Escuela de las americas, and they used it gladly against the average joe when they got ride of all dissidents
As an American, I'm starting to feel like those were the good old days--when US officials were sufficiently embarrassed by torture that they tried not to get the blood directly on their hands.
And I thank God that Bush is not as smart as, say, Pinochet or Stroessner....
A co-worker of mine, an Eastern European emigre, observed that many of the articles in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were untrustworthy, but everyone who hadn't swallowed the Party line could tell which articles to distrust. Slashdot draws its commenters from a certain slice of the nerd population, and if you disagree with the technical/political biases of that slice, well, you should read Slashdot with the appropriate skepticism. With Wikipedia, because the people trying to influence the process are all over the political map, there's no way to apply a similar correction factor.
A reputation system that treats all user accounts as equal is going to provide yet another route for motivated people to game the system. And as long as Wikipedia has such a high profile, there will be no shortage of motivated people on all sides of every controversial issue.
Sign me up as "scared", too. From what I've read of his work, Robinson is at his worst when he is trying to imitate Heinlein. (Case in point: the last few chapters of Night of Power....)
I also strongly, strongly recommend A Random Walk Down Wall Street. If you want a one-Web-page summary of why most other sources of investment advice are not to be trusted, see Greenspun.
I recently switched my mail/Web server from a G4 running in my basement to a virtual machine at OpenHosting. Previously, I was paying $70/month for DSL with a static IP address; now I pay $20/month for OpenHosting and $15/month for DSL without static IP. And I have someplace off-site to back things up to, and I don't have to worry about the UPS battery running out or the disk drive going kablooey.
The only downside is that my basement server runs Debian and OpenHosting runs Fedora. But nobody's perfect.:-)
I can imagine the necklace-phone being a real hit with eleven-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They could compete for status based on how many beads they had on their necklaces, who they had distributed their own beads to, having the beads from the popular kids, not having beads from unpopular kids, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
For personal/small-business accounting, there's GnuCash, although I don't know how easy it would be for a Quicken users to adopt.
Taxes (in the US, at least) are a little tricky because you have to file paperwork with the IRS for permission to submit tax returns electronically; an end-user can't just upload their return directly to the IRS. So an open-source tax package all by itself couldn't substitute for TurboTax.
"Black hole sucks, blows"
In general, does Canada claim jurisdiction over crimes committed against its citizens outside Canadian borders? Say Alice is a US citizen and Bob is Canadian. If Alice kills Bob in some country where Canada has no extradition treaty, and the local authorities decline to prosecute the case, and then Alice crosses the border into Canada, can she be arrested for murder? Can the Mounties go into that other country, snatch Alice, and drag her into Canada for prosecution? (Cf. US v. Noriega.)
In the land of American cut-throat capitalism, it's not illegal termination or blackmail, it's, umm, renegotiation of a business deal.
There are only a few cases where it's actually illegal in the US to fire someone (e.g., racial discrimination). And of course some employees (I think it's about 25% nationwide at this point) belong to labor unions and they may have special rules for termination written into their employment contracts. (But a bankrupt company isn't bound by collective-bargaining agreements that it made before declaring bankruptcy.) Aside from that, it's "employment at will"--you can quit whenever you want and the bosses can fire you whenever they want.
Every state has a fund for unemployment insurance that employers pay into, so if you lose your job you can get some fraction of your former wage for six months out of that fund while you look for work. However, if the employer can convince the unemployment office that you were fired "for cause", then you don't get the unemployment benefits (and the employer's insurance premium doesn't go up).
IIRC, in the US, if the corporation that employs you doesn't have the assets to pay your paycheck, then the corporate officers are personally liable for it. My boss once worked for a startup that was getting low on funds, so they asked all the employees to sign a waiver agreeing not to be paid for the most recent month (or whatever). The people who didn't sign got their pay--and got laid off.
If a plaintiff refuses a defendant's offer of judgement and ends up losing at trial, does the plantiff also have to cover the defendant's legal bills? Or is the plaintiff only on the hook for court costs?
Proposal: Put a separate line item on the tax form for income from the sale or licensure of copyrights. All the money raised from that line item goes into a separate government trust fund, where it earns interest. When your copyright expires or is put into the public domain, you get back the principal that you put into the trust fund. The interest goes to support the National Endowment for the Arts.
Result: Regardless of the length of copyright, there's an incentive to put work into the public domain once it stops being commercially valuable.
Under US law, truth is an absolute defense against libel claims (whereas, in the UK, it's an absolute defence :-). If I announce that Jane Doe has herpes and she does, in fact, have herpes (or if I can convince the court that I had good reason to believe she had herpes), then my statement is not libel.
If Jane Doe is openly promiscuous but disease-free, I can probably say "Jane Doe's behavior puts her at risk for herpes", but I still can't say "Jane Doe has herpes". Promiscuous women have legal rights, too.
Sexual morals have changed a bit over the past century or so; if I were sued for saying "Jane Doe had sex with her boyfriend after their third date" and that statement was false, I could probably argue that such a statement cannot be presumed to damage Jane's reputation. (All that means is that Jane would have to convince the court that her reputation was in fact damaged.) But the statements at issue in the AutoAdmit case go far, far beyond that.
I don't understand what herpes being easily testable has to do with the libel question. There are a variety of defenses that a defendant can bring against a libel accusation, but I've never heard of testability being one of them.
Whoops. I meant per se libel.
People sleep around and are happy to admit it. So getting herpes is no longer such a stigmatised position to be in.
Maybe among your friends...
The speed of light varies, depending on the medium that the light is passing through.
c, otherwise known as "the speed of light in a vacuum", is a constant.
I think it's a safe bet that a most if not all of the defendants in this lawsuit have had off-board contacts with one another and know each other's true identities. So the plaintiff's lawyer can approach the defendants that he has identified and say: "If you don't roll over on your buddies, then two things are going to happen. First, all the damages we win in this case are going to come out of your pockets, while they get off scot-free. Second, you are going to be scrounging to find someone sleazy enough to hire you, while they can apply to top-50 law firms with their reputations unharmed. Are they worth standing up for?"
Also, note paragraph 13 of the complaint: "...Posters can adopt multiple user names and, if they so desire, attempt to maintain several identities simultaneously on the AutoAdmit website." The plaintiffs might be preparing to subpoena AutoAdmit's ISP and then subpoena the computer of every male student at Yale Law School (the defendants' school) who has used the site.
Even if they can't prove that the remarks played a part in their not-being-hired, some of the accusations, like "X has herpes", are pro se libel--meaning that they are so obviously defamatory that the plaintiffs don't have to prove to the court that they caused damage.
But what if his intent was only to give himself access to his data from any location on campus?
In general, if you have copyrighted material on one computer that you own, and then copy it to another computer that you own, you need the copyright holder's permission, even though you own both computers. The important thing from a copyright-law POV is the act of copying, not the people who have access to the copy. (IANAL, but I was involved in an IP audit of some data that is used to build one of my employer's products, and this was one thing we were told by our own lawyer. If you remember that "you", the holder of a copy of a copyrighted work, might be a corporation with thousands of employees, you can see how this rule might make more sense.)
So one could argue that if a student puts a copyrighted MP3 on a school's server and then streams it to his or her dorm room, copyright infringement has taken place. But this is all tangential to Doe's argument, because the plaintiffs in this case have not shown any evidence that the defendants have even streamed the copyrighted music to their dorms.
The rumor I heard (probably on an earlier Slashdot article :-) is that Microsoft told NASDAQ that if they don't use Microsoft products, then Microsoft will start trading on the NYSE instead; the NYSE, which is the only exchange allowed to use ticker symbols with fewer than four letters, has set aside "M", just in case that happens.
Once upon a time, just about everyone lived in small communities. You would expect to live, work, and die in the same little town where your parents and your close relatives lived. Once you got a reputation in such a community, deserved or undeserved, it would probably follow you for life.
Then we had the Industrial Revolution, big cities, relatively cheap transatlantic travel, etc., and all of a sudden it was possible--difficult, but possible--to make a clean break with your past and forge a new life. Many of the life-affecting judgements that were previously made by busybody neighbors were instead made by impersonal bureaucrats.
Now, all sorts of personal information about us online and searchable, and folks who grew up with the Net are less inhibited than their elders about putting more personal stuff online. It looks like the Internet is putting us all in the same virtual small town. I don't think that's an entirely good thing, but I don't see how it can be prevented.
When my then-employer was bought by Lucent, and they passed out an intellectual property assignment and NDA for us all to sign, I crossed out a line that was particularly outrageous, initialed the change, signed the contract, and turned it in. Nobody complained. I wonder if anyone even noticed.
There is no ban against using DDT for disease control. It's still used to fight malaria--in countries where widespread agricultural use of DDT has not made the local mosquitoes evolve DDT resistance. If it weren't for Silent Spring, there'd be a lot more DDT-resistant mosquitoes out there.
See here for details.
IIRC, according to Standard Macroeconomic Theory(TM), a country's employment rate primarily depends on the national savings rate and the interest rates set by the central bank. If savings are high and interest rates are low, then it's easy for businesses to get capital and hire people, and you have low unemployment.
But the US has an extremely low national savings rate. The Treasury has to print up all these bonds to finance the Federal budget deficit, and American investors aren't interested in buying them all up. So we rely on foreign investors, especially the central bank of China, to provide that financing. The foreigners, of course, have to buy the Treasury bonds with US dollars. How do they get those dollars? By selling cheap stuff to Americans.
So offshoring is not a cause of US unemployment; it is one effect of bad political decisions here in the US, and unemployment is another effect of those decisions. There are things that the US government can do to encourage employment in the IT sector, and things the US government can do to soften the damage that people get when they lose their jobs (for whatever reason), and people can have all sorts of arguments about which of these things would be good policy. But "Blame India" is just bad economics.
If foreigners weren't interested in buying up our debt, then the Treasury would have to hike interest rates to make its bonds more attractive to American investors, which would seriously raise the US unemployment rate--investors would move their money from low-ROI private-sector investments to bonds, and the companies that had depended on those investments would have to fold. So in a sense, we should be grateful that all these Third World countries are itching to sell us cheap DVD players and cheap Java programmers.
(There are second-order effects that aren't captured by the above Macroeconomics 101 analysis: for example, both China and India have currency restrictions that make American exports to those countries more expensive for their own citizens. But the US budget deficit and national debt are so huge that I don't think these effects have a significant impact on US unemployment.)
Bzzt! Thanks for playing.
Even in wartime, if Congress passes a law saying that the President needs a warrant to conduct a wiretap, or saying that torturing prisoners is not allowed, or saying that every Master Sargeant in the army needs to wear a hat with a flashing blue light on top, the President has to suck it up and deal.
As an American, I'm starting to feel like those were the good old days--when US officials were sufficiently embarrassed by torture that they tried not to get the blood directly on their hands.
And I thank God that Bush is not as smart as, say, Pinochet or Stroessner....
A co-worker of mine, an Eastern European emigre, observed that many of the articles in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were untrustworthy, but everyone who hadn't swallowed the Party line could tell which articles to distrust. Slashdot draws its commenters from a certain slice of the nerd population, and if you disagree with the technical/political biases of that slice, well, you should read Slashdot with the appropriate skepticism. With Wikipedia, because the people trying to influence the process are all over the political map, there's no way to apply a similar correction factor.
A reputation system that treats all user accounts as equal is going to provide yet another route for motivated people to game the system. And as long as Wikipedia has such a high profile, there will be no shortage of motivated people on all sides of every controversial issue.
Sign me up as "scared", too. From what I've read of his work, Robinson is at his worst when he is trying to imitate Heinlein. (Case in point: the last few chapters of Night of Power....)
I also strongly, strongly recommend A Random Walk Down Wall Street. If you want a one-Web-page summary of why most other sources of investment advice are not to be trusted, see Greenspun.
I recently switched my mail/Web server from a G4 running in my basement to a virtual machine at OpenHosting. Previously, I was paying $70/month for DSL with a static IP address; now I pay $20/month for OpenHosting and $15/month for DSL without static IP. And I have someplace off-site to back things up to, and I don't have to worry about the UPS battery running out or the disk drive going kablooey.
:-)
The only downside is that my basement server runs Debian and OpenHosting runs Fedora. But nobody's perfect.
I can imagine the necklace-phone being a real hit with eleven-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They could compete for status based on how many beads they had on their necklaces, who they had distributed their own beads to, having the beads from the popular kids, not having beads from unpopular kids, etc.