If a person is deemed a suspected terrorist, they don't even have a guarantee of going to a constitutionally-bound court.
If you are refering to military tribunals you are incorrect. The UCMJ is in fact suborbinate to the the US Constitution. If you are refering to something else, please educate me.
So, what does a person do when they come home to find the FBI broke into their home and stole their belongings while they were away?
Anyone who has had their belongings stolen by FBI agents should certainly file criminal breaking and entering/burglary/theft charges against those agents. If the act was done under the color of authority, it's probably a federal civil rights
violation as well.
What should a person do when checking out a controversial book at the library puts them on an FBI watch list? Be thankful their First Amendment rights are unscathed?
You are understandably confused. That isn't how it works. If you are under surveilance the FBI can now request from the library your book history (previously they couldn't). There is no watch list. The library will not call the FBI if you check out the "Anarchist's Cookbook." The information is only available on a per-person, demand basis.
What should a person do when their employers and neighbors effectively become agents of the police behind their backs?
If you are refering to TIPS, you can rest easy because it was killed.
Still waiting to find out what it is you find objectionable in USAPA.
I was attempting to point you to much more information than I could ever give in a Slashdot post. It should be at least interesting to you that groups of a variety of political biases, such as the Greens and the Libertarians, all question the real value of this act.
Are you begging the question? Have you not formed an opinion for yourself apart from the propaganda you've absorbed from both sides?
Okay, what about the PATRIOT Act do you think is doing genuine good towards protecting The Land of the Free?
Fine, I'll start. The main effect of the USAPA is to remove silly encumberances like allowing a judge to OK and investigation and surevilance of someone instead of requiring a court order for each and every wiretap on the same individual. It allows the FBI to use publicly available (ie. anyone else could already get it) information like credit reports on individuals. It allows interdepartmental cooperation and sharing of information on individuals who may be targets of investigations by more than one agency.
Since the USAPA did not ammend the Constitution anything prohibited by the 4th, 5th, or 6th Ammendments is still prohibited, and any evidence gathered in violation of those Ammendments is still inadmissable in court.
Q: Have you read the Patriot Act or are you just repeating something you read on slashdot? If so, what exactly about the Patriot Act do you object to?
A: There is a pretty strong consensus among many US citizens that the PATRIOT Act was a power grab by the government during a time when the populace was vulnerable.
Your dilemma seems to be based on the faulty premiss that welfare is a good system. Give a man a fish and he'll eat tonight, teach a man to fish and he'll never be hungry. Which is more "Christian?"
Please don't tell me you don't know that amongst their senior membership are Cheney, Wolfowitz, Dick Perle, Jeb Bush. Umm, I know that and I'm not even an American.
You KNOW this? How? According to their website the directors and staff are:
William Kristol, Chairman Robert Kagan Bruce P. Jackson Lewis E. Lehrman Mark Gerson Randy Scheunemann
Project Staff: Gary Schmitt, Executive Director Daniel McKivergan, Deputy Director Ellen Bork, Deputy Director Thomas Donnelly, Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow, Director of the Middle East Initiative Christopher Maletz
If you have a link with more information, then by all means, please share! I don't doubt that at some point in history some of the folks you named had some affiliation with the folks on that list, but so what? They might even agree with some of the principles of the organization. That's hardly surprising since it's a conservative think-tank and all of the people you named consider themselves as conservatives. If I agree with them does that make me a part of the vast right wing conspiracy? Robert Byrd was once a member of the KKK, does that mean that the KKK is the real brains behind the Democratic party?
Look at the people involved in it. Now look at the current administration.
I think you will find that since the list of members overlap at the highest levels of our government that they do, in fact, run our government.
What the hell are you talking about? None of the individuals listed on the About PNAC page hold any position in our government, elected or appointed. It's a conservative thinktank, there are plenty of them. There are plenty of progressive thinktanks too, and they don't run the government either even though most of the crap that comes out of the Dem. ledership sounds plagerized off one of their brochures. Whether you agree with them or not, our nation is run by the people we elected to do so. You might prefer that we let Kofi Anon decide our foreign policy, but fortunatly our elected leaders think that's not a good idea. There is no Illuminati or Pentaverite or T.H.E.Y. or any other secret club pulling the strings.
I think your tin-foil hat is cutting off the blood to your brain.
One of the problems I see is that this can be taken as being almost a 'policy' decision and would be used as ammunition.
How could this be the case? It's a private organization run by some fanatical nutjobs, not a department of our government. Who would confuse their ravings with official policy except and anti-administration propagandist? I'm sure there were similar in the UK before they were crushed out by the constant government surveilance.
It isn't proof of anything unless you specify exactly which works have been infringed. If one of the smaller labels sues you could just claim that you only infringed on RIAA covered works, and they have to prove otherwise. This is a contract between you and the RIAA not to engage in CIVIL litigation. You could still be held CRIMINALLY liable, but the complaintant, RIAA or otherwise, still has to prove that you infringed on specific works.
But it isn't, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." It's "Thou shalt not commit murder." Killing is not always murder. Leagally sanctioned execution is by definition not murder.
This section exempts the, "Owner of a copy of a computer program" from infringement for making copies of the computer program if the copy is an, "Essential step in the utilization of the computer program." This copying includes instaling the program onto a harddrive, or copying it into RAM to run.
The fact that this exemption is written in the law clearly implies that if there was no exemption the action would be infringing. If you are not the owner of the program the exemption doesn't apply to you. So, if a court found that you were not a legal owner of that copy of Linux (since you didn't have a license from SCO) the court could enjoin you from making any further copies. That would include installing Linux onto a new machine, or rebooting one where it is already running.
The lawn mowing is analgous to the donated services, not the software.
Once more for the cheap seats. MS can deduct the cost to produce the software (the "cost of goods sold") on the software they donate. According to you this is small so their deduction is small. They could also deduct the cost of the employees if those employees are doing work for a charitable org. Neither of these items can be an expense AND a deduction, one or the other.
Who gives a flip why they are doing it, it's a good thing to educate kids. I'd wager the vast majority of the Linux zealots here didn't start out on Red Hat, but rather a MS OS and it didn't stand in their way of learning a "real" OS.
Of course paying those workers is an expense. In this case it is an expense from which Microsoft derives no direct benefit since the work is being done for someone else. Sure, MS will get some "goodwill" benefit, but that's really irrelevant to your point that this is somehow a tax dodge. Expenses are generally considered "bad" and companies try to minimize them as much as possible. This is a real expense that not only affects MS's profits for the sake of taxes, but also their "real" profits.
Inventory. If you contribute inventory (property that you sell in the course of your business), the amount you can claim as a contribution deduction is the smaller of its fair market value on the day you contributed it or its basis. The basis of donated inventory is any cost incurred for the inventory in an earlier year that you would otherwise include in your opening inventory for the year of the contribution.
You must remove the amount of your contribution deduction from your opening inventory. It is not part of the cost of goods sold.
I could not find a publication specically detailing the rules for corporations claiming charitable contributions, and the instructions for Form 1120 (Corporate income tax) refers to form 526 so I have no reason to believe they would be different.
But Microsoft, being a corporation, will be able to skirt this by having these people on their payroll, which is a corporate expense, effectively reducing their net profit, which is a primary input into the amount of tax they owe.
You act as if this is some type of dodge, but it isn't. MS can only deduct any amount they actually pay these people to work at the school. It can either be an expense or a charitable contribution, but it can't be both just like the inventory they donate. You could do the same thing as an individual. If you pay someone to mow the lawn at your local church you can claim it as a contribution on your taxes.
If you want to be able to make this same kind of contribution personally, you can set up an S Corp with yourself as an employee. Then your company can donate your (the employee's) services.
But Gates Foundation or no, the linked article is very clear on MS' involvement (and it's non-monetary-- so it works is they give stuff to the school which costs them very little incrementally to produce, then they write off the full retail value on their taxes, essentially making a profit on their tax return).
You forgot to say IANACPA. I'm not either, but I do know that according to the IRS your basis for charitable contributions of inventory (that is property you sell in the course of your business) is the SMALLER of the fair market value or your cost.
If MS donates software that cost them very little to produce then they get very little tax deduction. If the software comes directly from MS then MS is donating millions of dollars worth of software that the school could probably never afford in exchange for very little tax benefit. If the software is coming from the Gates Foundation, then the foundation would have to buy the software from MS and donate it. Since the foundation is tax exempt the deduction wouldn't be an issue. If you like you can check out form Publication 526 from the IRS.
Even more interesting is that Diebold would MAKE MORE MONEY if they sold voting machines with add-on printers so you could deposit a paper record of your vote in a separate ballot box! However, Diebold - and the other voting machines companies that happen to be owned by Republicans - OPPOSE this!
What about the companies owned by Democrats? Do they support or oppose this? Why can't they be right or wrong independant of their political views? Is everything you do in your job clouded and retarded by the fact that you are a whiny progressive?
Why? It's perfectly reasonable for him to prefer one party over the other, and to vote and spend his money accordingly. He has opinions like everyone else, why does it bother you that he expresses them?
Can a case be made that posting DVD-copying code and directions on a website makes people more likely to copy DVDs, while there is no correlation to how many people are more likely to build a bomb or murder someone after reading the directions online?
Hrm.. Did you RTFA? ICSA found the flaw in their testing, why didn't Netgear find it?
From the article:
While searching the web for background information on Netgear products' acclaimed NTP support, I came across the following quote (from ICSA Labs Firewall Lab Report on the NETGEAR FR114P):
The Netgear FR114P relied on a separate NTP-based time source to set the current date and time, as it did not have an internal battery and clock. The product is hard-coded with specific NTP time sources that are accessible through the public Internet. Even after configuring the product to access a specific NTP server, the product still attempted to access its hard-coded NTP time sources, while simultaneously accessing the time source specified
Forgot to mention the most secure way is to let them VPN in, but only allow access to a terminal server on the inside network. Then they get the full experience of "being there" but you only have to allow then access to a single port in most cases.
Yep, it diminishes the experience. It's all about security boundaries. You've already proven to yourself that VPN users are not at the same trust level as internal users. The appropriate way to seperate different trust levels is with a clear security boundary. Depending on your VPN device the internal filtering might be enough. When security is concerned my preference is to use the right device for the job. That means the outside interface of the device terminating the VPN tunnels is in a DMZ, and the internal interface passes through a different DMZ. Obviously the rules here would be much less strict than public traffic, but this traffic needs to be filtered nonetheless. You can allow them access to a much wider range of ports, but still limit them only to ports and devices they need.
At the very least if you use this design you give yourself the ability to temporarily block problem traffic until you can make sure machines are clean and patched.
Texas also has the Permanent University Fund which is an endowment of over a million acres of land set aside starting in 1839. This endowment funds the UT and the A&M system. Most of the community colleges are funded by the county, (which would mean property taxes) but IIRC can also receive some money from the PUF. There are also several excellent private universities in Texas that do quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
Still begging the question....
Are you absolutely sure about this?
Absolutely. Positively.
If a person is deemed a suspected terrorist, they don't even have a guarantee of going to a constitutionally-bound court.
If you are refering to military tribunals you are incorrect. The UCMJ is in fact suborbinate to the the US Constitution. If you are refering to something else, please educate me.
So, what does a person do when they come home to find the FBI broke into their home and stole their belongings while they were away?
Anyone who has had their belongings stolen by FBI agents should certainly file criminal breaking and entering/burglary/theft charges against those agents. If the act was done under the color of authority, it's probably a federal civil rights
violation as well.
What should a person do when checking out a controversial book at the library puts them on an FBI watch list? Be thankful their First Amendment rights are unscathed?
You are understandably confused. That isn't how it works. If you are under surveilance the FBI can now request from the library your book history (previously they couldn't). There is no watch list. The library will not call the FBI if you check out the "Anarchist's Cookbook." The information is only available on a per-person, demand basis.
What should a person do when their employers and neighbors effectively become agents of the police behind their backs?
If you are refering to TIPS, you can rest easy because it was killed.
Still waiting to find out what it is you find objectionable in USAPA.
I was attempting to point you to much more information than I could ever give in a Slashdot post. It should be at least interesting to you that groups of a variety of political biases, such as the Greens and the Libertarians, all question the real value of this act.
Are you begging the question? Have you not formed an opinion for yourself apart from the propaganda you've absorbed from both sides?
Okay, what about the PATRIOT Act do you think is doing genuine good towards protecting The Land of the Free?
Fine, I'll start. The main effect of the USAPA is to remove silly encumberances like allowing a judge to OK and investigation and surevilance of someone instead of requiring a court order for each and every wiretap on the same individual. It allows the FBI to use publicly available (ie. anyone else could already get it) information like credit reports on individuals. It allows interdepartmental cooperation and sharing of information on individuals who may be targets of investigations by more than one agency.
Since the USAPA did not ammend the Constitution anything prohibited by the 4th, 5th, or 6th Ammendments is still prohibited, and any evidence gathered in violation of those Ammendments is still inadmissable in court.
Now your turn.
I'll take that as a no.
Your dilemma seems to be based on the faulty premiss that welfare is a good system. Give a man a fish and he'll eat tonight, teach a man to fish and he'll never be hungry. Which is more "Christian?"
Have you read the Patriot Act or are you just repeating something you read on slashdot? If so, what exactly about the Patriot Act do you object to?
Please don't tell me you don't know that amongst their senior membership are Cheney, Wolfowitz, Dick Perle, Jeb Bush. Umm, I know that and I'm not even an American.
You KNOW this? How? According to their website the directors and staff are:
William Kristol, Chairman
Robert Kagan
Bruce P. Jackson
Lewis E. Lehrman
Mark Gerson
Randy Scheunemann
Project Staff:
Gary Schmitt, Executive Director
Daniel McKivergan, Deputy Director
Ellen Bork, Deputy Director
Thomas Donnelly, Senior Fellow
Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow, Director of the Middle East Initiative
Christopher Maletz
If you have a link with more information, then by all means, please share! I don't doubt that at some point in history some of the folks you named had some affiliation with the folks on that list, but so what? They might even agree with some of the principles of the organization. That's hardly surprising since it's a conservative think-tank and all of the people you named consider themselves as conservatives. If I agree with them does that make me a part of the vast right wing conspiracy? Robert Byrd was once a member of the KKK, does that mean that the KKK is the real brains behind the Democratic party?
I'm sure you can prove that, right?
What kind of troll crack are you on? The DMCA is no more than 66 pages.
Look at the people involved in it.
Now look at the current administration.
I think you will find that since the list of members overlap at the highest levels of our government that they do, in fact, run our government.
What the hell are you talking about? None of the individuals listed on the About PNAC page hold any position in our government, elected or appointed. It's a conservative thinktank, there are plenty of them. There are plenty of progressive thinktanks too, and they don't run the government either even though most of the crap that comes out of the Dem. ledership sounds plagerized off one of their brochures. Whether you agree with them or not, our nation is run by the people we elected to do so. You might prefer that we let Kofi Anon decide our foreign policy, but fortunatly our elected leaders think that's not a good idea. There is no Illuminati or Pentaverite or T.H.E.Y. or any other secret club pulling the strings.
I think your tin-foil hat is cutting off the blood to your brain.
One of the problems I see is that this can be taken as being almost a 'policy' decision and would be used as ammunition.
How could this be the case? It's a private organization run by some fanatical nutjobs, not a department of our government. Who would confuse their ravings with official policy except and anti-administration propagandist? I'm sure there were similar in the UK before they were crushed out by the constant government surveilance.
It isn't proof of anything unless you specify exactly which works have been infringed. If one of the smaller labels sues you could just claim that you only infringed on RIAA covered works, and they have to prove otherwise. This is a contract between you and the RIAA not to engage in CIVIL litigation. You could still be held CRIMINALLY liable, but the complaintant, RIAA or otherwise, still has to prove that you infringed on specific works.
But it isn't, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." It's "Thou shalt not commit murder." Killing is not always murder. Leagally sanctioned execution is by definition not murder.
I was going to reply in your journal, but it's archived, so here's your proof that you are wrong:
US Code Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 117
This section exempts the, "Owner of a copy of a computer program" from infringement for making copies of the computer program if the copy is an, "Essential step in the utilization of the computer program." This copying includes instaling the program onto a harddrive, or copying it into RAM to run.
The fact that this exemption is written in the law clearly implies that if there was no exemption the action would be infringing. If you are not the owner of the program the exemption doesn't apply to you. So, if a court found that you were not a legal owner of that copy of Linux (since you didn't have a license from SCO) the court could enjoin you from making any further copies. That would include installing Linux onto a new machine, or rebooting one where it is already running.
The lawn mowing is analgous to the donated services, not the software.
Once more for the cheap seats. MS can deduct the cost to produce the software (the "cost of goods sold") on the software they donate. According to you this is small so their deduction is small. They could also deduct the cost of the employees if those employees are doing work for a charitable org. Neither of these items can be an expense AND a deduction, one or the other.
Who gives a flip why they are doing it, it's a good thing to educate kids. I'd wager the vast majority of the Linux zealots here didn't start out on Red Hat, but rather a MS OS and it didn't stand in their way of learning a "real" OS.
Of course paying those workers is an expense. In this case it is an expense from which Microsoft derives no direct benefit since the work is being done for someone else. Sure, MS will get some "goodwill" benefit, but that's really irrelevant to your point that this is somehow a tax dodge. Expenses are generally considered "bad" and companies try to minimize them as much as possible. This is a real expense that not only affects MS's profits for the sake of taxes, but also their "real" profits.
I could not find a publication specically detailing the rules for corporations claiming charitable contributions, and the instructions for Form 1120 (Corporate income tax) refers to form 526 so I have no reason to believe they would be different.
But Microsoft, being a corporation, will be able to skirt this by having these people on their payroll, which is a corporate expense, effectively reducing their net profit, which is a primary input into the amount of tax they owe.
You act as if this is some type of dodge, but it isn't. MS can only deduct any amount they actually pay these people to work at the school. It can either be an expense or a charitable contribution, but it can't be both just like the inventory they donate. You could do the same thing as an individual. If you pay someone to mow the lawn at your local church you can claim it as a contribution on your taxes.
If you want to be able to make this same kind of contribution personally, you can set up an S Corp with yourself as an employee. Then your company can donate your (the employee's) services.
But Gates Foundation or no, the linked article is very clear on MS' involvement (and it's non-monetary-- so it works is they give stuff to the school which costs them very little incrementally to produce, then they write off the full retail value on their taxes, essentially making a profit on their tax return).
You forgot to say IANACPA. I'm not either, but I do know that according to the IRS your basis for charitable contributions of inventory (that is property you sell in the course of your business) is the SMALLER of the fair market value or your cost.
If MS donates software that cost them very little to produce then they get very little tax deduction. If the software comes directly from MS then MS is donating millions of dollars worth of software that the school could probably never afford in exchange for very little tax benefit. If the software is coming from the Gates Foundation, then the foundation would have to buy the software from MS and donate it. Since the foundation is tax exempt the deduction wouldn't be an issue. If you like you can check out form Publication 526 from the IRS.
Even more interesting is that Diebold would MAKE MORE MONEY if they sold voting machines with add-on printers so you could deposit a paper record of your vote in a separate ballot box! However, Diebold - and the other voting machines companies that happen to be owned by Republicans - OPPOSE this!
What about the companies owned by Democrats? Do they support or oppose this? Why can't they be right or wrong independant of their political views? Is everything you do in your job clouded and retarded by the fact that you are a whiny progressive?
Why? It's perfectly reasonable for him to prefer one party over the other, and to vote and spend his money accordingly. He has opinions like everyone else, why does it bother you that he expresses them?
Can a case be made that posting DVD-copying code and directions on a website makes people more likely to copy DVDs, while there is no correlation to how many people are more likely to build a bomb or murder someone after reading the directions online?
Do you disagree?
From the article:
Forgot to mention the most secure way is to let them VPN in, but only allow access to a terminal server on the inside network. Then they get the full experience of "being there" but you only have to allow then access to a single port in most cases.
Yep, it diminishes the experience. It's all about security boundaries. You've already proven to yourself that VPN users are not at the same trust level as internal users. The appropriate way to seperate different trust levels is with a clear security boundary. Depending on your VPN device the internal filtering might be enough. When security is concerned my preference is to use the right device for the job. That means the outside interface of the device terminating the VPN tunnels is in a DMZ, and the internal interface passes through a different DMZ. Obviously the rules here would be much less strict than public traffic, but this traffic needs to be filtered nonetheless. You can allow them access to a much wider range of ports, but still limit them only to ports and devices they need.
At the very least if you use this design you give yourself the ability to temporarily block problem traffic until you can make sure machines are clean and patched.
- Should we run our unencrypted VPN tunnels through a firewall so that we can filter what gets to our network?
(This being the recommended best practice and all.)Texas also has the Permanent University Fund which is an endowment of over a million acres of land set aside starting in 1839. This endowment funds the UT and the A&M system. Most of the community colleges are funded by the county, (which would mean property taxes) but IIRC can also receive some money from the PUF. There are also several excellent private universities in Texas that do quite well.