Actually, there something else the EU could do. And it's already been happening for years. When selling actual stuff (e.g. furniture) you can charge the company's country's VAT up to 100kEUR (sometimes 35k) yearly revenue in a specific EU country, at that point you'll have the register with that specific country and charge that country's tax next year. Works quite well, avoids both a LOT of paperwork and big companies moving to low VAT countries and it could have been done exactly like this with electronic goods.
Thanks for referring to CouchSurfing. For many years the people in charge of CouchSurfing pretended the project could never be sold out [0]. And that's exactly what happened. It became a B corporation, but actually a C corporation.
A Benefit corporation means a little bit more than the B corporation label, but the website Ello is linking to is actually also ran by the same B Labs that gives out "B corporation". I'm sure there's lots of confusion about the whole B/Benefit thing but if Ello really wanted to be for the public good they would have become a 501(c)(3) with an "irrevocably dedicated to charity" clause in their by-laws.
[0] http://wiki.csexport.org/en/No...
I was gonna ask why Republic, Lost wasn't available under a Creative Commons license but I see that it has in fact become available under a CC license since the last time I checked a while ago. I suggest all US citizens go to http://republic.lessig.org/ and start reading.
Cory Doctorow is quite successful and he's thus far refused to jump on the DRM band wagon. On the contrary, all his books are available under a Creative Commons license, and I think part of his success is due to this. Personally I'm much more likely to support an author who believes in freedom of information and I have happily bought some of his books to give away to friends, a while after I had read freely available versions on some electronic device.
I've used both WordPress and Drupal for a good number of years. I hate PHP and Drupal is definitely not as much fun to work with as say Meteor.com with CoffeeScript. But there are still quite a few sites I would build in Drupal any day. And well, I'm okay with people tearing down Drupal, but I chuckled when reading "I dread to think what would happen if security professionals looked carefully" and then "look at Wordpress for example".
WordPress probably has the worst track record out there in terms of the number of hacked websites. The number of noobs using WP probably has something to do with it. But when comparing the two ecosystems it seems that the Drupal community is also way nicer and more aware of licensing issues (GPL is actually enforced), people actually care about their code working properly and safely. WordPress plugins often seem merely to be written for a quick buck (even with obfuscated code at times).
Patents were good for human progress until the end of the 20th century. But 20 years has become a whole lot of time for one silly idea to be locked in or monetized by one entity. For a while already patents have been blocking progress in quite a few fields, especially software, but I expect 3D printing will be a big one this decade. Can we please ditch them and move on as a species capable and allowed to invent and share ideas freely?
I'm no fan of JS but last year I decided to give it a try anyway, first because of Node.js, phonegap and later Meteor.com. I tried CoffeeScript several times and slowly I've become a big fan and all our new code is written in CoffeeScript. Much less typing, very readable (nothing like Perl) and if you add underscorejs to the mix you get a very nice and concise language that looks and writes a bit like something between Ruby and Python - which you can use both on the server and the client!
I travel a lot, including a lot of hitchhiking, not like your average business trip. Consequently I've had to deal with several broken hard drives. Since I switched to SSD this hasn't happened anymore. That means I've likely saved some money by not having to buy a new hard drive and a lot of time from having to deal with a broken hard drive.
"A manned mission to Mars will attract attention from hundreds of millions of people around the world. The three week period surrounding the launch, and the three week period surrounding the landing on Mars, will attract global media attention comparable to (or more likely, significantly exceeding that of) the Olympic Games."
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/23-faq-feasability/257-what-is-the-business-model
Around 2005 there was a struggle against software patents in the EU. The only democratically elected EU institution, the European Parliament, said "no, we don't want it" and the Commission (a group of 27 or so people) says "yes, you have to want it". And unfortunately this is a very common pattern.
Gucht: "But for me there is no moral difference between taking something that is not yours in the physical world and doing so in the virtual world."
For me there is a huge difference! And if the most powerful person in the EU dealing with this matter doesn't see that it's time for him to move on. We live in a world where theoretically anyone could have access to all music, movies and books ever created. I feel we're morally obliged to make this happen. If that breaks a couple of business models, so be it, time for new business models. And time for new politicians. #votepirate.
I couldn't believe it when I was in the US last year, checking the bread section, not a single bread without high-fructose corn syrup!
I don't think taxing sodas will fix the this deeper issue.
Maybe it's easier to preach for some good old free market solution to fix this issue?
"Factors for this include governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of U.S. corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar; all of which combine to raise the price of sucrose to levels above those of the rest of the world, making HFCS less costly for many sweetener applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
'When Paul Hales started writing about IT, DOS was state of the art, Microsoft had competition, a laptop was called a luggable and Amstrad was yet to source a dodgy hard disk. "In those days,"...'
people had to wank watching ASCII (warning explicit imagery - for those of you still running DOS).
IANAL, but the Affero GPL might offer interesting solutions to this issue. It could be interesting to build on software available under the Affero GPL and run the software you're developing as a service from the beginning. That way a third party might have the right to get a copy of the software and the source code, or not, IANAL.
They're missing the point. Most of the ads only get them money if people click on them. From my experience people who run adblock software are also people who refuse to click on ads in general. So instead of calling people to be annoyed by ads they should call people to turn off their adblock for a second, click on an ad and turn it back on. But well, that's not gonna make the advertisers happy.
The authors of Adblock Plus came up with a better proposal http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking - I wonder if Ars Technica has looked into that.
I'd be more than happy to be forced to learn that stuff
Would you also pay for this?
If there are more people like you it could be fun and profitable to set up an enforced free software training camp for Windows users. Daily wake-up call at 5 in the morning followed by 4 hours of Stallman videos.
LeGuin wrote some very interesting books. Unfortunately her stance on copyright is a bit too 20th centure to my taste.
Doctorow: "I did this with the understanding that reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.
Ms Le Guin disagrees, and though I haven't heard from her personally, my understanding is that she disagrees on the basis that taking the whole story can't be fair use. I have taken the piece down. The last thing I wanted to do was quote Ms Le Guin against her wishes, and had I known sooner that she objected to being quoted, I would have removed it sooner. " http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/an-apology-to-ursula.html
Damn. I just finished rereading Doctorow's after the siege: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html
"That much she knew and that much they all knew: without the zombies, the revolution would never have come. Zombiism and the need to cure it had outweighed every other priority. Three governments had promised that they'd negotiate better prices for zombiism drugs and three governments had failed, and in the end the Cabinet had been overrun by zombies who'd torn three MPs to bits and infected seven more, and the crowd had carried the PM out of her office and put her in a barrel and driven nails through it and rolled it down the river-bank into the river, something so horrible and delicious that Valentine often thought about it, like you poke a sore tooth with your tongue."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there something else the EU could do. And it's already been happening for years. When selling actual stuff (e.g. furniture) you can charge the company's country's VAT up to 100kEUR (sometimes 35k) yearly revenue in a specific EU country, at that point you'll have the register with that specific country and charge that country's tax next year. Works quite well, avoids both a LOT of paperwork and big companies moving to low VAT countries and it could have been done exactly like this with electronic goods.
Thanks for referring to CouchSurfing. For many years the people in charge of CouchSurfing pretended the project could never be sold out [0]. And that's exactly what happened. It became a B corporation, but actually a C corporation. A Benefit corporation means a little bit more than the B corporation label, but the website Ello is linking to is actually also ran by the same B Labs that gives out "B corporation". I'm sure there's lots of confusion about the whole B/Benefit thing but if Ello really wanted to be for the public good they would have become a 501(c)(3) with an "irrevocably dedicated to charity" clause in their by-laws. [0] http://wiki.csexport.org/en/No...
I was gonna ask why Republic, Lost wasn't available under a Creative Commons license but I see that it has in fact become available under a CC license since the last time I checked a while ago. I suggest all US citizens go to http://republic.lessig.org/ and start reading.
Unfortunately the website looks like it hasn't been changed in 20 years either.
Cory Doctorow is quite successful and he's thus far refused to jump on the DRM band wagon. On the contrary, all his books are available under a Creative Commons license, and I think part of his success is due to this. Personally I'm much more likely to support an author who believes in freedom of information and I have happily bought some of his books to give away to friends, a while after I had read freely available versions on some electronic device.
"Is it true that there are rabbits around the bunker?" It totally looks like an early April 1st joke to me.
I've used both WordPress and Drupal for a good number of years. I hate PHP and Drupal is definitely not as much fun to work with as say Meteor.com with CoffeeScript. But there are still quite a few sites I would build in Drupal any day. And well, I'm okay with people tearing down Drupal, but I chuckled when reading "I dread to think what would happen if security professionals looked carefully" and then "look at Wordpress for example".
WordPress probably has the worst track record out there in terms of the number of hacked websites. The number of noobs using WP probably has something to do with it. But when comparing the two ecosystems it seems that the Drupal community is also way nicer and more aware of licensing issues (GPL is actually enforced), people actually care about their code working properly and safely. WordPress plugins often seem merely to be written for a quick buck (even with obfuscated code at times).
Patents were good for human progress until the end of the 20th century. But 20 years has become a whole lot of time for one silly idea to be locked in or monetized by one entity. For a while already patents have been blocking progress in quite a few fields, especially software, but I expect 3D printing will be a big one this decade. Can we please ditch them and move on as a species capable and allowed to invent and share ideas freely?
I'm no fan of JS but last year I decided to give it a try anyway, first because of Node.js, phonegap and later Meteor.com. I tried CoffeeScript several times and slowly I've become a big fan and all our new code is written in CoffeeScript. Much less typing, very readable (nothing like Perl) and if you add underscorejs to the mix you get a very nice and concise language that looks and writes a bit like something between Ruby and Python - which you can use both on the server and the client!
I travel a lot, including a lot of hitchhiking, not like your average business trip. Consequently I've had to deal with several broken hard drives. Since I switched to SSD this hasn't happened anymore. That means I've likely saved some money by not having to buy a new hard drive and a lot of time from having to deal with a broken hard drive.
"A manned mission to Mars will attract attention from hundreds of millions of people around the world. The three week period surrounding the launch, and the three week period surrounding the landing on Mars, will attract global media attention comparable to (or more likely, significantly exceeding that of) the Olympic Games." http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/23-faq-feasability/257-what-is-the-business-model
Around 2005 there was a struggle against software patents in the EU. The only democratically elected EU institution, the European Parliament, said "no, we don't want it" and the Commission (a group of 27 or so people) says "yes, you have to want it". And unfortunately this is a very common pattern.
The ACTA case is particularly striking now with one person who is quite incapable of grasping the nature of copying intangible goods has this much power.
Gucht: "But for me there is no moral difference between taking something that is not yours in the physical world and doing so in the virtual world."
For me there is a huge difference! And if the most powerful person in the EU dealing with this matter doesn't see that it's time for him to move on. We live in a world where theoretically anyone could have access to all music, movies and books ever created. I feel we're morally obliged to make this happen. If that breaks a couple of business models, so be it, time for new business models. And time for new politicians. #votepirate.
Real men use GNU Screen.
I couldn't believe it when I was in the US last year, checking the bread section, not a single bread without high-fructose corn syrup! I don't think taxing sodas will fix the this deeper issue. Maybe it's easier to preach for some good old free market solution to fix this issue? "Factors for this include governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of U.S. corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar; all of which combine to raise the price of sucrose to levels above those of the rest of the world, making HFCS less costly for many sweetener applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
"Instant access to this article: $32" I'd say were doomed.
Not that I read the article, but I think it's about time that Schmitt meets Stallman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
http://www.landmarkdigital.com/contact Leave your review here: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=Landmark+Digital+Services&fb=1&gl=be&hq=Landmark+Digital+Services&cid=4257745332164177429&dtab=2&action=open&ei=tLU2TOu-Bo6M0gTzq4nmAw&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=write-review&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQtwQwAA Send them an email how you feel about this case to info@landmarkdigital.com. Just two sentences will be fine. And do visit their website, I think it would be nice to slashdot[tm] their website (and not just redcode.nl).
'When Paul Hales started writing about IT, DOS was state of the art, Microsoft had competition, a laptop was called a luggable and Amstrad was yet to source a dodgy hard disk. "In those days," ...'
people had to wank watching ASCII (warning explicit imagery - for those of you still running DOS).
IANAL, but the Affero GPL might offer interesting solutions to this issue. It could be interesting to build on software available under the Affero GPL and run the software you're developing as a service from the beginning. That way a third party might have the right to get a copy of the software and the source code, or not, IANAL.
They're missing the point. Most of the ads only get them money if people click on them. From my experience people who run adblock software are also people who refuse to click on ads in general. So instead of calling people to be annoyed by ads they should call people to turn off their adblock for a second, click on an ad and turn it back on. But well, that's not gonna make the advertisers happy. The authors of Adblock Plus came up with a better proposal http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking - I wonder if Ars Technica has looked into that.
I'd be more than happy to be forced to learn that stuff
Would you also pay for this? If there are more people like you it could be fun and profitable to set up an enforced free software training camp for Windows users. Daily wake-up call at 5 in the morning followed by 4 hours of Stallman videos.
Great. I'm curious to know if they are cooperating with the IDF in this project, which was happily flying around UAV's in Gaza last year.
LeGuin wrote some very interesting books. Unfortunately her stance on copyright is a bit too 20th centure to my taste.
Doctorow: "I did this with the understanding that reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute. Ms Le Guin disagrees, and though I haven't heard from her personally, my understanding is that she disagrees on the basis that taking the whole story can't be fair use. I have taken the piece down. The last thing I wanted to do was quote Ms Le Guin against her wishes, and had I known sooner that she objected to being quoted, I would have removed it sooner. " http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/an-apology-to-ursula.html
Damn. I just finished rereading Doctorow's after the siege: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html "That much she knew and that much they all knew: without the zombies, the revolution would never have come. Zombiism and the need to cure it had outweighed every other priority. Three governments had promised that they'd negotiate better prices for zombiism drugs and three governments had failed, and in the end the Cabinet had been overrun by zombies who'd torn three MPs to bits and infected seven more, and the crowd had carried the PM out of her office and put her in a barrel and driven nails through it and rolled it down the river-bank into the river, something so horrible and delicious that Valentine often thought about it, like you poke a sore tooth with your tongue."