Unfortunately the tax could be based on the software's perceived value
to the business, and this is already happening in
some counties, which use the software's category as a factor in
determining its tax.
Like the Canada's recording industry tax on blank
media - 21 cents per CD, regardless of
the CD's price/cost - it might not necessarily
be tied to cost. If proprietary software
lobbyists twist this perverse idea to its
logical conclusion, it could turn into open source's worst nightmare.
See my other
comment above.
Ever other poster seems to think this may be the best thing yet to
happen to open source. Let us hope so. But be wary that it depends on how the
law ends up being written. It might backfire and turn into open
source's worst nightmare.
Consider that some software is already being taxed based on factors
other than cost alone (from TFA):
"Kelsie Jones... said county assessors have taken "varying
approaches" in making distinctions about not only taxing software, but
the kinds, as well. For example, Mr. Jones said, some tax operational
software but not that which is applicational."
What might happen in the future is that software might be taxed based
on its supposed value to the business and not on how much it cost. So, each copy
of a word processor, whether MS Word or OO.org, might be taxed a fixed
amount of say $50 per year. Especially if certain commercial
companies get their lobbyists in there to help them draft the new tax
codes. I can see it euphemistically being called "non-discrimatory
taxation"...
A few years ago when I dealt with ERP systems, I had to specify one of
the commercial sales tax databases. Some of them are customized, or
have customization modules, that adapt to particular ERP or order
processing systems. They are broken down not just by county or zip
code, but sometimes even street; there are places in the US where a
given zip code will span two counties or municipalities. Given the huge
number of municipalities, the tax database changes almost daily, and
there are companies specializing in collecting this information - there
is no national central repository. In addition to location, in many
cases the tax is based on one of several classifications that a product
falls into. By the time you add up all variations of laws you end up
with dozens or hundreds of categories, and you need to hire specialist
consultants to correctly classify the products in your inventory. These
databases are huge and you'll just have to bite the bullet and pay the
several thousand dollar subscriptions fees for the continual updates.
There is no way you could do this yourself; a lot of these laws
are on paper only in local government offices, and you have to have
the right contacts to make sure that you haven't missed one.
If this does come to pass, I would hope that the law would also
provide for a publicly accessible database funded by the
government. The subscription fees charged by some of these
commercial database companies would
break a small business, and possibly even one at the $5million
level proposed depending on the nature and margin of the business.
You may want to read about researcher
Karen
Wetterhahn, who died after spilling a drop or so of dimethylmercury, on
top of the latex gloves she was wearing.
Her story gives me the willies.
Yes, it would be a Very Bad Thing (tm) because when a reversal happens, we're left without the Earth's magnetic field
Supercomputer simulations
do not
show that. According to the site: "Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and
during that time--contrary to popular belief--the magnetic field does
not vanish. 'It just gets more complicated,' says Glatzmaier. Magnetic
lines of force near Earth's surface become twisted and tangled, and
magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole
might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti.
Weird. But it's still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects
us from space radiation and solar storms."
The rubber has to meet the road someplace, and at some point the
Peter Jacksons of the world will not be able to raise the cash for a
Really Swell Giant Ape Movie.
You know, I don't think it really matters.
Let's say copyright were abolished tomorrow, and as a result the MPAAs
went out of business, and no new movies ever get produced. That doesn't
bother me at all. There are untold thousands of movies already made
that will keep you entertained for several lifetimes with no repeats.
Almost certainly there are many, many more good ones buried in there that
you've probably never heard of, than there will be good movies that will
come out the next few seasons. Personally, I have no need for new
movies. It would take several lifetimes to watch the existing stuff.
What do you think the chances are of a new movie being better than all
the existing good ones you haven't watched yet? (Possibly some hi-tech
special effects would be better, but nothing else I can think of.)
If the masses clamor for new stuff, then without copyright protection,
either it will
still get paid for somehow, or it won't and the masses will go without.
Actually I think people would still pay to go to the movies. But either
way, big deal, I say. There may be that one in a thousand great movie
every few years, but the overwhelming bulk of the rest is more of the
same dross. Is it really worth setting aside our values of freedom and
privacy in order to guarantee to a few that they can continue to produce
this stuff?
Society has been brainwashed into placing an inordinate amount of
importance on big-business entertainment. It's not a necessity of life
for chrissake, it's just a luxury, an amusement to pass the time.
People aren't going to be harmed by doing without. In fact they might
be better off in many ways, especially if they rediscover reading.
Oh, now I see from another post that any made up credit card number will
work. So they never even bothered to program in the LUHN check.
(A well-designed site would do that, by the way, as a courtesy to
the customer to provide instant feedback - without the "this may
take several minutes"
verification delay - when an obviously bad number is mistyped.) I guess
I gave them more credit for their technical adeptness than they
deserved.
A made-up credit card number might get you into the free
service unless they verify each one with the credit card
company (which I think costs them money, although not sure,
so they might not do it for the free account, but
might wait until you are
tricked into upgrading via the fine print on some T&C-like
page you ACCEPT).
On the other hand they may have a local validity check
using the LUHN formula
- see http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html - so you could invent a number to
pass that check. I don't think this is fraud since you aren't
buying anything with the made-up card, and it could never be
charged to anyone anyway even if it matched a real one because the
name won't match, but hey IANAL.
Hey, you're in luck! Just download the 1/2 megabyte
freeware program ToX
and point-and-click your way towards converting
Unix linefeeds to DOS. Or if you're lucky enough to
have Unix shell access, just type
Probably more likely is that the form target is https, just not the
page the form comes from. This would be fine, and is smart design
How am I supposed to know that the form target is https? Am I
supposed to analyze the page source code before I click "buy" with my
credit card number? Your browser might warn you, and give you a chance to
opt-out, if a form submission leaves https mode, but the other way
around you can only know, practically speaking, after it's too late.
Of course I could set the browser to warn about all
non-encrypted submissions (as some do until by default you turn it off).
But that would be extremely annoying for ordinary non-senstive
information submission, like posting to a forum, so most people turn it off,
a quite reasonable thing to do once you're aware of that.
Sorry, this would not get my vote as a "smart design". My
conservative assumption is that submission from a non-encrypted page
will be non-encrypted unless I have good evidence otherwise.
It's that incentive to over-achieve, or even getting "lucky" that
appeals to many people.
If that is what is needed to motivate creativity, that is a very sad
statement. It is even worse than that: people who
count on getting "lucky" as their motivation are deluded and living
in a fantasy world disconnected from reality. It is the same as buying
a lottery ticket: one out of a million may win big, but for all
practical purposes you won't. To base your life on the slim
chance that you might win the lottery, such as getting deep in debt
by buying things you can't afford, is foolish. The chances of someone becoming
the next Britney Spears are much less than winning a lottery ticket.
Perhaps you should step back and ask yourself why you are doing it.
If it is not because you love to do it, then you are living irrationally
and should give it up. Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed,
becoming bitter and disillusioned as you grow old. If you are doing it
for the love of it, continue to do it and expect nothing else. You'll
be much happier that way.
Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
Even though this number shows up on Wikipedia (and its
1000 spam clones), I looked at some of the references and
could not find where they claimed this number. Since it is
20,000%-50,000% (fifty thousand percent) more efficient than soybean oil, why would the latter
even be considered for a second? Are we saying I could set
aside 1/10 acre of my yard (the size of a garden) and
produce 1000-2000 gallons of fuel a year?? That might provide
all of my heating needs, gasoline needs, and electricity needs
with room to spare! Where do I sign up? I'm sorry, I just find it hard to believe.
But if you can find an authentic source (not Wikipedia)
- and I hope you're right - please post it.
IMO the best useability feature of the PowerBook trackball
was the fact that there was a mouse button was directly below the
keyboard, so you could click without lifting your fingers
from the keyboard. I could type/select/cut/paste/type incredibly
fast in BBEdit on my PowerBook 140, all without losing my finger position
on the keyboard.
The current trend on PC laptops is to have the
buttons below the touchpad, so instead of being immediately
accessible under your thumb, you have to lift your hands from
the keyboard and reach way down. Then, after clicking, you have
to move your hands back up to the keyboard and
resync your index fingers to the little F-J indentations
before you can continue typing. Do the people who design
these things have a brain, or any consideration
for usability? They can't even steal good ideas.
So, does this mean Kazaa users can safely share
downloads that made it through the filter, without fear of
being sued by the RIAA?
No, I didn't think so.
Although it still might make an interesting
court argument for someone with the means and motivation
to actually fight one of their lawsuits. In others words,
the fact that such a list, controlled by them, exists, and they fact that they
chose to exclude a certain work, might be construed (by the
right judge/jury at the right time) as an implicit license to
share that work. So, in the best case (from the users' point
of view) this could backfire on the RIAA.
My son's Xbox was one of the ones that caught on fire. Interestingly,
this was a few days after we put in the new power cord from the recall.
I didn't want to open it up to avoid raising any doubts about my claim, but in
experiments outside in the yard - to try to retrieve the game disk - if
I held the cord at a certain angle it would power up, and I got the disk
out. It seemed almost obvious, from the crackling inside when I jiggled
the power cord, that it was a poor connection between the power
receptacle and the pc board it was soldered to. It must have been
marginal to begin with, and the replacement cord must have finally
jiggled it loose.
Microsoft's response to this was nothing short of amazing, given my
past experience dealing with their customer support. A new Xbox and a
return carton for the old were shipped by overnight highest priority
fed-ex, and they even called me on the phone an hour after fed-ex had
delivered it to make sure I got the return carton and that I'd be
shipping back the defective unit that very same day, for afternoon
pickup.
I went through a long interview process where they asked all kinds of
questions about whether anyone was injured with burns or smoke
inhalation, whether anyone had seen a doctor or went to the hospital,
what was the fire and smoke damage, etc. They offered to send a form so
I could claim smoke damage, but it didn't seem worth it since we
immediately took it out to the yard and there was only a lingering smell
for a couple of days.
The law of supply and demand in action, I guess...
It would be a shame for them to run out of the more popular
songs, so they price them higher to keep the demand lower, right?
OK, it's time for me to repost what's involved
installing a private certificate server on Windows 2000
via its "intuitive" point-and-click GUI. (You
forgive me if I just link to it, not wanting to repeat
slashdot's lameness filter hell for this kind of post.)
It compares the Linux way and the Windows way. These
were the actual procedures used, that I carefully documented,
for two different projects that accomplished exactly the
same goal.
Here it is. (Scroll past the lameness filter stuff at the
beginning.)
Here's an idea for a file-sharing protocol.
Before you expose your main collection to another party, they MUST first
expose to you (offer to distribute) and allow you to download a special
copyrighted file. Who owns the copyright? Some trusted organization
that dislikes the *AA's strong-armed intrusive entrapment
tactics and has
the ability and motivation to sue, perhaps something similar to the
EFF. If it turns out the other party is an *AA and initiates
a suit against you, this trusted
organization will in turn sue them back, hopefully for more.
(Actually, instead of one special copyrighted file, make it 10 or 100 to
up the number of cases of infringement.)
Well, probably this wouldn't hold up in a pro-*AA court, but it is an
interesting thought experiment.
Just tossing it out for discussion, brainstorming or fine tuning...
(although it may be too pre-coffee in the morning for me....) and
IANAL etc. etc.
From the Format menu, choose Change Case, then Lowercase.
Yeah, but then it loses its satire impact.
I mean, what is it
with lawyers and the ALL CAPS sections of EULAs? What is the
criterion for making a section all caps? Does it mean the other
sections really aren't that important? Does whether or not a
section is in all caps affect its enforceability in court?
I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD THIS, AND IT SEEMS NOT ONLY RUDE BUT
MAKES THEM SOUND LIKE THE WEBTV IDIOTS WHO POST TO USENET.
So the only way you're going to make money off of support/etc. is if
you can 'beat' those freely available resources - and I'm not entirely
convinced that works for 'any' open source software.
Why you think your theory is somehow limited to open source software?
Windows support information is also "freely" available on Microsoft's
site and various forums. How would you explain how all the MCSEs etc.
earn their keep?
The fact is that only a tiny percent of IT professionals earn their
keep producing software for commercial sale. The vast majority
customize software for in-house use and provide support, both in-house
and as consultants. They are hired by people who don't have the time,
skill, or experience to look up the "free" information and determine
what's relevant. Medical information is available for free, too, so why
bother going to the doctor?
Customization is arguably easier with open source, since you have the
source code, and far safer for a company's financial health from a
long-term point of view, since you are not at the mercy of a vendor who
will make their base software obsolete and unsupported (yet who still
won't provide the source code).
Why should IT bear the brunt? Let's just open our borders completely
and see how much cops, nurses, and mailmen make after we open up their
position to everybody on earth.
Actually, what we really need are more H1-B doctors and
lawyers, to drive their rates down from the stratosphere to
something more reasonable like in other countries.
While we're at it, maybe a few H1-B CEOs as well.
Can't any of you get it right?
PHP (used to?) stand for Perl Hypertext Preprocessor.
Perl, in turn, is supposed to have stood for
Practical Extraction and Report Language (although
I vaguely recall that there was some controversy regarding
this and it may have been disclaimed by Perl's
originator, Larry Wall).
Slashdot Mirror
The actual paper (PDF file): http://www.physics.oregonstate.edu/~vpodolsk/repri nts.pdf/resolut.apl2005.pdf
Unfortunately the tax could be based on the software's perceived value to the business, and this is already happening in some counties, which use the software's category as a factor in determining its tax. Like the Canada's recording industry tax on blank media - 21 cents per CD, regardless of the CD's price/cost - it might not necessarily be tied to cost. If proprietary software lobbyists twist this perverse idea to its logical conclusion, it could turn into open source's worst nightmare. See my other comment above.
Consider that some software is already being taxed based on factors other than cost alone (from TFA):
What might happen in the future is that software might be taxed based on its supposed value to the business and not on how much it cost. So, each copy of a word processor, whether MS Word or OO.org, might be taxed a fixed amount of say $50 per year. Especially if certain commercial companies get their lobbyists in there to help them draft the new tax codes. I can see it euphemistically being called "non-discrimatory taxation"...
Pardon my ignorance, but I think I missed this story. Which companies?
One of them was SourceSafe - they dropped the Unix version, apparently for the worse.
If this does come to pass, I would hope that the law would also provide for a publicly accessible database funded by the government. The subscription fees charged by some of these commercial database companies would break a small business, and possibly even one at the $5million level proposed depending on the nature and margin of the business.
You may want to read about researcher Karen Wetterhahn, who died after spilling a drop or so of dimethylmercury, on top of the latex gloves she was wearing. Her story gives me the willies.
Supercomputer simulations do not show that. According to the site: "Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time--contrary to popular belief--the magnetic field does not vanish. 'It just gets more complicated,' says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth's surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it's still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms."
Talk to your friend, the Unix admin. He's had to deal with this problem for years and will give you plenty of creative suggestions.
You know, I don't think it really matters. Let's say copyright were abolished tomorrow, and as a result the MPAAs went out of business, and no new movies ever get produced. That doesn't bother me at all. There are untold thousands of movies already made that will keep you entertained for several lifetimes with no repeats. Almost certainly there are many, many more good ones buried in there that you've probably never heard of, than there will be good movies that will come out the next few seasons. Personally, I have no need for new movies. It would take several lifetimes to watch the existing stuff. What do you think the chances are of a new movie being better than all the existing good ones you haven't watched yet? (Possibly some hi-tech special effects would be better, but nothing else I can think of.)
If the masses clamor for new stuff, then without copyright protection, either it will still get paid for somehow, or it won't and the masses will go without. Actually I think people would still pay to go to the movies. But either way, big deal, I say. There may be that one in a thousand great movie every few years, but the overwhelming bulk of the rest is more of the same dross. Is it really worth setting aside our values of freedom and privacy in order to guarantee to a few that they can continue to produce this stuff?
Society has been brainwashed into placing an inordinate amount of importance on big-business entertainment. It's not a necessity of life for chrissake, it's just a luxury, an amusement to pass the time. People aren't going to be harmed by doing without. In fact they might be better off in many ways, especially if they rediscover reading.
Oh, now I see from another post that any made up credit card number will work. So they never even bothered to program in the LUHN check. (A well-designed site would do that, by the way, as a courtesy to the customer to provide instant feedback - without the "this may take several minutes" verification delay - when an obviously bad number is mistyped.) I guess I gave them more credit for their technical adeptness than they deserved.
A made-up credit card number might get you into the free service unless they verify each one with the credit card company (which I think costs them money, although not sure, so they might not do it for the free account, but might wait until you are tricked into upgrading via the fine print on some T&C-like page you ACCEPT). On the other hand they may have a local validity check using the LUHN formula - see http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html - so you could invent a number to pass that check. I don't think this is fraud since you aren't buying anything with the made-up card, and it could never be charged to anyone anyway even if it matched a real one because the name won't match, but hey IANAL.
sed -e "s/\$/`echo -e '\r'`/" unixfile > dosfile
How am I supposed to know that the form target is https? Am I supposed to analyze the page source code before I click "buy" with my credit card number? Your browser might warn you, and give you a chance to opt-out, if a form submission leaves https mode, but the other way around you can only know, practically speaking, after it's too late.
Of course I could set the browser to warn about all non-encrypted submissions (as some do until by default you turn it off). But that would be extremely annoying for ordinary non-senstive information submission, like posting to a forum, so most people turn it off, a quite reasonable thing to do once you're aware of that.
Sorry, this would not get my vote as a "smart design". My conservative assumption is that submission from a non-encrypted page will be non-encrypted unless I have good evidence otherwise.
If that is what is needed to motivate creativity, that is a very sad statement. It is even worse than that: people who count on getting "lucky" as their motivation are deluded and living in a fantasy world disconnected from reality. It is the same as buying a lottery ticket: one out of a million may win big, but for all practical purposes you won't. To base your life on the slim chance that you might win the lottery, such as getting deep in debt by buying things you can't afford, is foolish. The chances of someone becoming the next Britney Spears are much less than winning a lottery ticket.
Perhaps you should step back and ask yourself why you are doing it. If it is not because you love to do it, then you are living irrationally and should give it up. Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed, becoming bitter and disillusioned as you grow old. If you are doing it for the love of it, continue to do it and expect nothing else. You'll be much happier that way.
Even though this number shows up on Wikipedia (and its 1000 spam clones), I looked at some of the references and could not find where they claimed this number. Since it is 20,000%-50,000% (fifty thousand percent) more efficient than soybean oil, why would the latter even be considered for a second? Are we saying I could set aside 1/10 acre of my yard (the size of a garden) and produce 1000-2000 gallons of fuel a year?? That might provide all of my heating needs, gasoline needs, and electricity needs with room to spare! Where do I sign up? I'm sorry, I just find it hard to believe. But if you can find an authentic source (not Wikipedia) - and I hope you're right - please post it.
The current trend on PC laptops is to have the buttons below the touchpad, so instead of being immediately accessible under your thumb, you have to lift your hands from the keyboard and reach way down. Then, after clicking, you have to move your hands back up to the keyboard and resync your index fingers to the little F-J indentations before you can continue typing. Do the people who design these things have a brain, or any consideration for usability? They can't even steal good ideas.
Although it still might make an interesting court argument for someone with the means and motivation to actually fight one of their lawsuits. In others words, the fact that such a list, controlled by them, exists, and they fact that they chose to exclude a certain work, might be construed (by the right judge/jury at the right time) as an implicit license to share that work. So, in the best case (from the users' point of view) this could backfire on the RIAA.
Microsoft's response to this was nothing short of amazing, given my past experience dealing with their customer support. A new Xbox and a return carton for the old were shipped by overnight highest priority fed-ex, and they even called me on the phone an hour after fed-ex had delivered it to make sure I got the return carton and that I'd be shipping back the defective unit that very same day, for afternoon pickup.
I went through a long interview process where they asked all kinds of questions about whether anyone was injured with burns or smoke inhalation, whether anyone had seen a doctor or went to the hospital, what was the fire and smoke damage, etc. They offered to send a form so I could claim smoke damage, but it didn't seem worth it since we immediately took it out to the yard and there was only a lingering smell for a couple of days.
The law of supply and demand in action, I guess... It would be a shame for them to run out of the more popular songs, so they price them higher to keep the demand lower, right?
OK, it's time for me to repost what's involved installing a private certificate server on Windows 2000 via its "intuitive" point-and-click GUI. (You forgive me if I just link to it, not wanting to repeat slashdot's lameness filter hell for this kind of post.) It compares the Linux way and the Windows way. These were the actual procedures used, that I carefully documented, for two different projects that accomplished exactly the same goal. Here it is. (Scroll past the lameness filter stuff at the beginning.)
Well, probably this wouldn't hold up in a pro-*AA court, but it is an interesting thought experiment. Just tossing it out for discussion, brainstorming or fine tuning... (although it may be too pre-coffee in the morning for me....) and IANAL etc. etc.
Yeah, but then it loses its satire impact.
I mean, what is it with lawyers and the ALL CAPS sections of EULAs? What is the criterion for making a section all caps? Does it mean the other sections really aren't that important? Does whether or not a section is in all caps affect its enforceability in court? I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD THIS, AND IT SEEMS NOT ONLY RUDE BUT MAKES THEM SOUND LIKE THE WEBTV IDIOTS WHO POST TO USENET.
Why you think your theory is somehow limited to open source software? Windows support information is also "freely" available on Microsoft's site and various forums. How would you explain how all the MCSEs etc. earn their keep?
The fact is that only a tiny percent of IT professionals earn their keep producing software for commercial sale. The vast majority customize software for in-house use and provide support, both in-house and as consultants. They are hired by people who don't have the time, skill, or experience to look up the "free" information and determine what's relevant. Medical information is available for free, too, so why bother going to the doctor?
Customization is arguably easier with open source, since you have the source code, and far safer for a company's financial health from a long-term point of view, since you are not at the mercy of a vendor who will make their base software obsolete and unsupported (yet who still won't provide the source code).
Actually, what we really need are more H1-B doctors and lawyers, to drive their rates down from the stratosphere to something more reasonable like in other countries. While we're at it, maybe a few H1-B CEOs as well.
Can't any of you get it right? PHP (used to?) stand for Perl Hypertext Preprocessor. Perl, in turn, is supposed to have stood for Practical Extraction and Report Language (although I vaguely recall that there was some controversy regarding this and it may have been disclaimed by Perl's originator, Larry Wall).