Maybe the answer is for the PO to provide an API to allow the people to query the "official" database in real time over the net. Fat chance of that ever happening.
At best taxing internet/mail order transactions subsidizes local brick and mortar stores that do need state services in order to do business, at worst it slows the growth of internet commerce and takes away the competitive advantage of online businesses.
There you've hit the nail on the head. The lack of sales taxes gives the Internet business a competitive advantage over businesses that reside in the state.
Not that this is new. Most states try to get people to pay sales tax on mail order sales. I've seen such forms in the Income Tax packages of 2 of the 3 states that I've lived in. (The third, Delaware, dosn't have a sales tax)
The only difference is that now they're explicitly listing online businesses with other mail order operations.
There's a big loophole there in the "required functionalty" clause, but Free Software is rapidly approaching the functionality of commercial packages. In some cases (Apache) it already exceeds the functionality of many commercial packages.
The cynic in me says that the reason is to help the balance of trade, but I don't even casr if that's the reason. It's just good to see governments supporting Freedom over commercial interests.
Re:A better take on the Internet and the Church
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 1
I looked for but was unable to locate a copy of the press release that accompanied the release of the tract. It was intended as a response to that document, but it certainly stands on it's own.
Regardless of the forum it provides the Church and its followers, as it stands it looks more like a private club than an organization for providing a charitable service.
It is my understanding that progress on 501(C)3 status has been made in recent months. The Society operates entirely with volunteers and given the effort that goes into updating the Anglicans Online site weekly, quite a lot does gt accomplished. I myself have a small role in the maintenance of a web site hosted by the Society. They are certainly providing a service to the Church with their expenses being provided entirely by the founders. The additional expences of the legal help necessary to secure tax-exempt status only take away from the services they are providing.
I have a few (very pertinent) meta-tags on the information page for a mailing list that I run. The tags are designed to get hits from people looking for my list. But, it seems that the meta tags don't work in some of the major search engines. Perhaps the engines have caught on to the practice of embedding surperfluous tags in order to get hits on engines. I think I'll have to rework my page to make sure that the key phrases that I'm trying to get hits on actually appear in the text.
A better take on the Internet and the Church
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 3
This book has been rightfully lambasted as being long on cyberjargon and short on content. A response to this book was prepared by Dr. Brian Reid, one of the designers of Altavista and long a presence behind the scenes of the Internet. He is one of the founders of The Society of Archbishop Justus a non-profit organization which maintains the anglican.org domain in trust for the world's Anglicans. Their excellent site, Anglicans Online is a weekly must read for Anglicans.
His response to Cybernauts Awake!, The Church and the Internet, while written for a non-technical audience, is definately worth a read.
After having personally participated in a large, worldwide Anglican mailing list for several years and running my own list for Clergy Spouses, I know that the Anglican Church is alive and well on the Internet.
An adquate understanding of the genes will allow you to program it to replicate 10 times, and then die - just like your cells die.
This sentence illustrates your fundamental misunderstanding of biology. You can attempt to build an organism that reproduces 10 times and then fails to reproduce. But there will be mutations that mean that some of the decentants will not die.
Biology is not engineering and can never be engineering because life is inherently messy. Engineering is about understanding how a system with interact with its environment and designing with well understood margins of tolerance.
We know enough about biology to know that we can't completely predict how organisms will interact with one another and their environment and what will eventually result when things are released into the wild. Unanticipated things happen. If you think that we can, then you have deluded yourself.
It's hardly enough of a coincidence to be noticed.
I *never* use Emacs. I have wrist pain. What these people have in common is that they do a whole lot of typing.
The funny thing, my wrist pain has only startd in the last two weeks since I cleaned my desk and got rid of all the piles of paper encroaching on my keyboard. Perhaps I shoild go back to the clutter.
i write a piece of code. Under US copyright law, I have TOTAL control over it. Even if I grant you the right to copy, compile, and distribute my code, you have zero right to modify my code or write new code based on my code. The GPL does not infringe on your right to modify my code or use my code in your code, because you have NO right to do this unless I say so.
Not entirely true, but close enough. Under the Fair Use doctrine, I may create derivative works of your code for my own personal use. If I buy a photograph from you, I may deface the picture with magic marker and hang it in my bedroom for private late night yuks. I may similarly patch the heck out of your code without your permission. I may even be able to distribute my patch or the instructions to accomplish it so that people can do the same to their legally owned copies.
But your point about distribution is entirely correct. I'm pretty confident (in my own non-lawyerly way) that the GPL is enforceable.
One potential problem is who has the right (i.e. who has standing in the court) to enforce the license. Only the original author(s) and their legal heirs and assignees.
Re:oral sex angers the christian god!
on
Dumb Laws
·
· Score: 2
Read about Onan. Tell me what that says, at least with regards to spilling your seed outside of the vagina. Seems pretty clear to me what it's saying.
The modern interpretation of the story of Onan is that after his brother's death, Onan had obligations to his brother's widow to help her have children. Those children would help her live a modestly comfortable life in that time and those children would inherit his brother's estate. But Onan wanted it for himself and refused to impregnate the woman.
The story is not about masturbation. It is about failing to live up to the obligations that society puts upon you.
My company has a large number of business units, each with their own web site, and we've worked to setup a shared profile system so that, once you've told us something once, you don't have to tell us again. Wouldn't it be good if this extended to multiple businesses?
No.
Don't you think it's a pain in the ass to have to continually identify yourself and set up preferences on every site you want?
Yes. I don't want to identify myself to every website that I visit. Frankly, moist sites I visit once and never return. Neither do I want prefeences set at every website that I visit. Most sites aren't as configurable as/.
My point is that, with a self contained smart card, you can have a level of control over the information that you provide. It's the card that has the brains.
My point is that I have the brains. I don't want a smart card giving out any information on me. I don't need the card. If I want to lie to a site and tell them that I am a 75 year old lesbian mother of three, I will do so. I don't need your smart card and I don't want it.
more your ~/.netscape/cookies file and see what is in there.
Hmmmm. Let's see. Three cookies for the NYTimes site. One for Slashdot. One for Gist (an online TV guide)
That's it.
If all developers ever cared about were state, then cookies that do not persist when the browser was closed or ones with short termination dates would be necessary. Why can't I be the one to determine how long cookies are kept? As it is, I decline cookies unless *I* have a reason to keep it. Any sight that presents me with too many cookies dialogs does not get revisited.
Because a hack at its finest is something worthy of admiration. Something that is ingenious but injurious to others is no longer worthy of admiration, ergo the need to qualify.
Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
The desirable MTBF is a function of the cost of the failure relative to the marginal cost of further improvements in reliability. For machine tools, a single failue is very costly involving damage to persons and/or other tools plus downtime for the line. MTBF rates in machine tools could probably be extended further by the use of exotic materials, but wold they be worth the additional costs?
In end user software, the costs of a single failure are much lower -- the user restarts the software (or in the case of Windows, reboots the PC). An excessive failure rate will cause irritation in the users, so your failure rate has to be low enough so that users don't want to switch to other products. Average MTBF rates in the tens of hours may be acceptable for some end user software (but not for OSes).
You're comparing you anecdotal experience to a statistic calculated from actual observations reported back to Mozilla? Have you no concept of stastics?
It's been done. Here is a FAQ on cryptography using elliptic curves dated Dec. 1997. The FAQ indicates that keys can be shorter than RSA keys for the same level of cryptographic difficulty.
Fradulent in terms of "company was actually self insured, and just trying to be sneaky and pretend they weren't?"
There was a direct writer which was licensed to write the insurance. That company (National Union Fire Insurance, a co-defendant in the suit) was the insurer. They chose to reinsure the business back to an insurer owned and controlled by UPS. They are perfectly within their rights to do so.
I understand that the general public dosn't understand the difference between insurance companies and reinsurers. If you have insurance, that changes are very great that some company that you never heard of holds part of the risk. Reinsurance is commonly used in insurance to spread the risk of too many claims around a larger group of companies.
That company (the reinsurer) does not need to be licensed in the state where you bought the insurance -- this is one of the bogus claims of the suit. You have no relationship with or claim against the reinsurer in the event of a loss. If the reinsurer becomes insolvent and can't pay its claims, you aren't out a penny. The direct writer, with whom you have a contract, is out. They still owe you for the claim.
Yes; the courts have already decided that. This suit is a result of that decision, not a speculation hoping to achieve that decision.
Personally, when I say my money is going to insure a package, then I expect it to go insure a package.
Didn't you get the insurance? You've got the coverage, you saw the premium before you chose to send the package. You must have thought the premium reasonable or else you wouldn't have paid for it.
You've never been overcharged for insurance? I guess you don't buy much insurance. Have you ever bought an extended warranty? Have you ever bought credit insurance? Have you ever bought insurance in connection with a rental car?
Whenever you are in a situation where you don't have a choice of insurer, you *will be* overcharged. It's just like walking up to a random pay phone and making a credit card call by dialing 0.
In a free market, you have the choice to take or decline the insurance or to use a different carrier.
I wonder where all of/.'s radical capitalists are when a story like this comes on.
There is nothing phony about Bermudan Insurance companies. Many corporations form Bermudan reinsurance companies because the minimum capital necessary to form an Insurance company there is less than that required in the US.
The Bermudan company was not the direct writer of the insurance. A company, licensed to do business in each of the states, was the direct writer. They reinsured the business to the Bermudan captive. The arrangement is perfectly legal.
It does appear that they also used this offshore corporation to avoid US taxes. That is illegal, but it dosn't make the entire arrangement fradulent.
Generally speaking, the Internet is built on distributed protocols. The one protocol where everything eventually funnels down to one place, the DNS root servers, is an endless cause of headache because of the actions of the people who administer it.
A distributed IM protocol, with individual ISPs running messaging servers for their customers, or even the irc protocol is a much better thing for the network as a whole.
Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon...
Thomas Jefferson did it. He extractd the moral teachings from the various Gospels and discarded what he thought were the supernatural bits. His version never really caught on, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Make that 1/4 of the world's population and you are much closer to the truth.
Maybe the answer is for the PO to provide an API to allow the people to query the "official" database in real time over the net. Fat chance of that ever happening.
Gee! What a great idea.
At best taxing internet/mail order transactions subsidizes local brick and mortar stores that do need state services in order to do business, at worst it slows the growth of internet commerce and takes away the competitive advantage of online businesses.
There you've hit the nail on the head. The lack of sales taxes gives the Internet business a competitive advantage over businesses that reside in the state.
Not that this is new. Most states try to get people to pay sales tax on mail order sales. I've seen such forms in the Income Tax packages of 2 of the 3 states that I've lived in. (The third, Delaware, dosn't have a sales tax)
The only difference is that now they're explicitly listing online businesses with other mail order operations.
There's a big loophole there in the "required functionalty" clause, but Free Software is rapidly approaching the functionality of commercial packages. In some cases (Apache) it already exceeds the functionality of many commercial packages.
The cynic in me says that the reason is to help the balance of trade, but I don't even casr if that's the reason. It's just good to see governments supporting Freedom over commercial interests.
I looked for but was unable to locate a copy of the press release that accompanied the release of the tract. It was intended as a response to that document, but it certainly stands on it's own.
Regardless of the forum it provides the Church and its followers, as it stands it looks more like a private club than an organization for providing a charitable service.
It is my understanding that progress on 501(C)3 status has been made in recent months. The Society operates entirely with volunteers and given the effort that goes into updating the Anglicans Online site weekly, quite a lot does gt accomplished. I myself have a small role in the maintenance of a web site hosted by the Society. They are certainly providing a service to the Church with their expenses being provided entirely by the founders. The additional expences of the legal help necessary to secure tax-exempt status only take away from the services they are providing.
I have a few (very pertinent) meta-tags on the information page for a mailing list that I run. The tags are designed to get hits from people looking for my list. But, it seems that the meta tags don't work in some of the major search engines. Perhaps the engines have caught on to the practice of embedding surperfluous tags in order to get hits on engines. I think I'll have to rework my page to make sure that the key phrases that I'm trying to get hits on actually appear in the text.
This book has been rightfully lambasted as being long on cyberjargon and short on content. A response to this book was prepared by Dr. Brian Reid, one of the designers of Altavista and long a presence behind the scenes of the Internet. He is one of the founders of The Society of Archbishop Justus a non-profit organization which maintains the anglican.org domain in trust for the world's Anglicans. Their excellent site, Anglicans Online is a weekly must read for Anglicans.
His response to Cybernauts Awake!, The Church and the Internet, while written for a non-technical audience, is definately worth a read.
After having personally participated in a large, worldwide Anglican mailing list for several years and running my own list for Clergy Spouses, I know that the Anglican Church is alive and well on the Internet.
An adquate understanding of the genes will allow you to program it to replicate 10 times, and then die - just like your cells die.
This sentence illustrates your fundamental misunderstanding of biology. You can attempt to build an organism that reproduces 10 times and then fails to reproduce. But there will be mutations that mean that some of the decentants will not die.
Biology is not engineering and can never be engineering because life is inherently messy. Engineering is about understanding how a system with interact with its environment and designing with well understood margins of tolerance.
We know enough about biology to know that we can't completely predict how organisms will interact with one another and their environment and what will eventually result when things are released into the wild. Unanticipated things happen. If you think that we can, then you have deluded yourself.
It's hardly enough of a coincidence to be noticed.
I *never* use Emacs. I have wrist pain. What these people have in common is that they do a whole lot of typing.
The funny thing, my wrist pain has only startd in the last two weeks since I cleaned my desk and got rid of all the piles of paper encroaching on my keyboard. Perhaps I shoild go back to the clutter.
i write a piece of code. Under US copyright law, I have TOTAL control over it. Even if I grant you the right to copy, compile, and distribute my code, you have zero right to modify my code or write new code based on my code. The GPL does not infringe on your right to modify my code or use my code in your code, because you have NO right to do this unless I say so.
Not entirely true, but close enough. Under the Fair Use doctrine, I may create derivative works of your code for my own personal use. If I buy a photograph from you, I may deface the picture with magic marker and hang it in my bedroom for private late night yuks. I may similarly patch the heck out of your code without your permission. I may even be able to distribute my patch or the instructions to accomplish it so that people can do the same to their legally owned copies.
But your point about distribution is entirely correct. I'm pretty confident (in my own non-lawyerly way) that the GPL is enforceable.
One potential problem is who has the right (i.e. who has standing in the court) to enforce the license. Only the original author(s) and their legal heirs and assignees.
Read about Onan. Tell me what that says, at least with regards to spilling your seed outside of the vagina. Seems pretty clear to me what it's saying.
The modern interpretation of the story of Onan is that after his brother's death, Onan had obligations to his brother's widow to help her have children. Those children would help her live a modestly comfortable life in that time and those children would inherit his brother's estate. But Onan wanted it for himself and refused to impregnate the woman.
The story is not about masturbation. It is about failing to live up to the obligations that society puts upon you.
You or he should have submitted it as a story.
Wouldn't this be nice?
/.
No, not really.
My company has a large number of business units, each with their own web site, and we've worked to setup a shared profile system so that, once you've told us something once, you don't have to tell us again. Wouldn't it be good if this extended to multiple businesses?
No.
Don't you think it's a pain in the ass to have to continually identify yourself and set up preferences on every site you want?
Yes. I don't want to identify myself to every website that I visit. Frankly, moist sites I visit once and never return. Neither do I want prefeences set at every website that I visit. Most sites aren't as configurable as
My point is that, with a self contained smart card, you can have a level of control over the information that you provide. It's the card that has the brains.
My point is that I have the brains. I don't want a smart card giving out any information on me. I don't need the card. If I want to lie to a site and tell them that I am a 75 year old lesbian mother of three, I will do so. I don't need your smart card and I don't want it.
more your ~/.netscape/cookies file and see what is in there.
Hmmmm. Let's see. Three cookies for the NYTimes site. One for Slashdot. One for Gist (an online TV guide)
That's it.
If all developers ever cared about were state, then cookies that do not persist when the browser was closed or ones with short termination dates would be necessary. Why can't I be the one to determine how long cookies are kept? As it is, I decline cookies unless *I* have a reason to keep it. Any sight that presents me with too many cookies dialogs does not get revisited.
From the Jargon file:
The desirable MTBF is a function of the cost of the failure relative to the marginal cost of further improvements in reliability. For machine tools, a single failue is very costly involving damage to persons and/or other tools plus downtime for the line. MTBF rates in machine tools could probably be extended further by the use of exotic materials, but wold they be worth the additional costs?
In end user software, the costs of a single failure are much lower -- the user restarts the software (or in the case of Windows, reboots the PC). An excessive failure rate will cause irritation in the users, so your failure rate has to be low enough so that users don't want to switch to other products. Average MTBF rates in the tens of hours may be acceptable for some end user software (but not for OSes).
You're comparing you anecdotal experience to a statistic calculated from actual observations reported back to Mozilla? Have you no concept of stastics?
Thank you for that datum.
It's been done. Here is a FAQ on cryptography using elliptic curves dated Dec. 1997. The FAQ indicates that keys can be shorter than RSA keys for the same level of cryptographic difficulty.
Fradulent in terms of "company was actually self insured, and just trying to be sneaky and pretend they weren't?"
There was a direct writer which was licensed to write the insurance. That company (National Union Fire Insurance, a co-defendant in the suit) was the insurer. They chose to reinsure the business back to an insurer owned and controlled by UPS. They are perfectly within their rights to do so.
I understand that the general public dosn't understand the difference between insurance companies and reinsurers. If you have insurance, that changes are very great that some company that you never heard of holds part of the risk. Reinsurance is commonly used in insurance to spread the risk of too many claims around a larger group of companies.
That company (the reinsurer) does not need to be licensed in the state where you bought the insurance -- this is one of the bogus claims of the suit. You have no relationship with or claim against the reinsurer in the event of a loss. If the reinsurer becomes insolvent and can't pay its claims, you aren't out a penny. The direct writer, with whom you have a contract, is out. They still owe you for the claim.
Yes; the courts have already decided that. This suit is a result of that decision, not a speculation hoping to achieve that decision.
No. Please reread the article. The company was convicted of tax fraud because of the way that they structured the overseas reinsurer. They apparently attempted to avoid paying Federal Income Tax on the underwriting profits. The court decision does not prove fraudulent dealings with insureds.
Frankly, this is a nuisance suit which has no basis in law. I would be very surprised to see the plaintiffs prevail.
Personally, when I say my money is going to
/.'s radical capitalists are when a story like this comes on.
insure a package, then I expect it to go insure a package.
Didn't you get the insurance? You've got the coverage, you saw the premium before you chose to send the package. You must have thought the premium reasonable or else you wouldn't have paid for it.
You've never been overcharged for insurance? I guess you don't buy much insurance. Have you ever bought an extended warranty? Have you ever bought credit insurance? Have you ever bought insurance in connection with a rental car?
Whenever you are in a situation where you don't have a choice of insurer, you *will be* overcharged. It's just like walking up to a random pay phone and making a credit card call by dialing 0.
In a free market, you have the choice to take or decline the insurance or to use a different carrier.
I wonder where all of
There is nothing phony about Bermudan Insurance companies. Many corporations form Bermudan reinsurance companies because the minimum capital necessary to form an Insurance company there is less than that required in the US.
The Bermudan company was not the direct writer of the insurance. A company, licensed to do business in each of the states, was the direct writer. They reinsured the business to the Bermudan captive. The arrangement is perfectly legal.
It does appear that they also used this offshore corporation to avoid US taxes. That is illegal, but it dosn't make the entire arrangement fradulent.
Generally speaking, the Internet is built on distributed protocols. The one protocol where everything eventually funnels down to one place, the DNS root servers, is an endless cause of headache because of the actions of the people who administer it.
A distributed IM protocol, with individual ISPs running messaging servers for their customers, or even the irc protocol is a much better thing for the network as a whole.
Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon...
Thomas Jefferson did it. He extractd the moral teachings from the various Gospels and discarded what he thought were the supernatural bits. His version never really caught on, though.