That means that if we aren't careful we could end up paying rediculously high sales taxes like they do in Europe (12 to 17%). People should keep in mind that sales taxes place the most disproportionate burden on the poorest segment of society, so they are the most regressive form of taxation.
The European taxes are actually value-added taxes, not sales taxes, and therefore the true costs are higher, but hidden. Additionally, they cascade on each other, so that you have tax on tax.
There are actually two proposals active in the U.S. House to eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with a single-rate, single-stagenational sales tax on first-use retail goods and services only. One plan sets the rate at 15%, the other at 23% and also elminates Social Security and Medicare payroll withholding.
"Holy sh*t!" might be a common reaction to rates that high, but the fact is that corporate income taxes, other hidden taxes, and complaince costs already add 20-40% to the price of everthing we buy -- and buy with after-tax dollars. Of course, it's also a good kick in the pants to Congress to think about trimming down some of that pork-barrel spending so everyone can get a tax cut.
As to regressivity, there are two ways to eliminate that. One can either exempt certain items from the tax, which is a bad idea because it sets a precedent for loopholes and exceptions, and is horrendously complicated to administer. The better way is to provide a rebate to everyone, based on family size instead of income, that refunds the amount of tax paid on subsistence-level spending. The NRST proposals do this latter approach, and even pay the rebate in advance. As such, a family living at the poverty line pays, in effect, no taxes yet still has a 23% tax rate at the register.
The ban on taxes passed by Congress only prohibits federal taxes. Just like mail and phone orders, state (and local) sales taxes must still be paid if the seller has a physical presence in the state or locality.
Additionally, at least some, and I suspect most or all, states require that any items purchased from out of state that have not been taxed are subject to a "use tax" equivalent to the sales tax, that is to be remitted to the state. Of course, this is probably the second-most violated law in the country (after speed limits), because most people don't know about it and the risk of being caught and prosecuted is so low.
Another movie that breaks the traditional mold of American "happy-ending" films is another Douglas picture called "War of the Roses", a dark comedy about a bitter divorce (the ex-wife-to-be is played by Kathleen Turner) -- all I will say is that there ain't no happy ending.
Suprisingly enough, a third Douglas film, Fatal Attraction, originally had an ending where Glenn Close's (?) character, rather than the attack Douglas and his wife, commits suicide and frames Douglas for her murder. (Psychologists said that this original ending was far more realistic behaviour for the type of disorder Close's character exhibited.) The depressing ending didn't test well, and was replaced by the more traditional ending where despite all his faults, Douglas' character becomes a hero of sorts.
Because a society that is constantly hostile to religion, particularly a specific religion, inevitably leads to religious persecution. Check your history.
How is having school officials perform religious acts *not* constituting an 'establishment of religion', and how does it not deprive me of religious freedom?
That's not what the case in question is about -- the case involved a school where a student, not a school official, would be selected by his or her peers, not the school officials, to make a pre-game statement of his or her own choosing on a topic of his or her own choosing.
In addition to totally screwing up the establisment clause, the Court is engaging in prior restraint, becuase this is only a proposed policy that has not yet been put into action...
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The activist Supreme Court has had this ass-backwards for decades, and the balance of the Court has remained such that they are not inclinded to revisit their mistakes (except to compound it as they did recently -- Renquist's dissent points out the fallacy of the majority opinion quite eloquently).
The court has turned the meaning of this protection around by prohibiting public displays of religion (though they typically only enfoce this against the Christian sects, other religions are deemed to bring a proper "diversity" to public life) instead of adhering to its proper intent, which is that the federal government could not create a state religion and tie the rights of citizenship to membership within the state religion. The authors of the Amendment were quite accepting of the individual states having an official religion, but because the states had different sects, they didn't want the federal government to choose one over the others. The Fourteenth Amendment, though, later prevented the states from having established religions.
The current SC decision is awful in light of the fact that the majority ruled that because a student-elected speaker might choose to use the platform to do something even remotely religious. Of course, the speaker could also simply read a poem, talk about the environment, or make an impassioned speech about homosexual rights. In none of the other cases would the school have been held culpable for the words spoken by an individual. The school had no control over what the stuent would say, and could therefore not even be held to tacitly endorsing the student's viewpoint.
The hostility toward religion, especially Christian religions, in current society is troubling. I mean, Pat Buchanan is attacked for being a right-wing fundamentalist, but Louis Farrakhan is not similarly labeled a left-wing Muslim. This despite the fact that both men are dangerous demagouges who use their religion as a hook to entice new folloers.
I really want it to be an international standard, set and maintained by an independent organzation.
You don't. Trust me, you really don't.
Standards set by committes stagnate in development -- the turn-around time is slow, and the number of improvements or changes are minimal. The only standards that really work arfe those set by actively developing organizations.
If and when Sun decides that Java is a "complete" language (i.e., no more major additions or modifications to the core language), then that might be a good time to turn it over to something like the ISO. Until then, it needs to stay in the hands of Sun or others who have an active interest in the language's development.
Can Sun be more open and responsive? Quite probably. But an international standards organization would do a far worse job than Sun currently does.
This is actually more insightful than it might first appear. Within the anti-trust laws, Microsoft was dead meat as soon as this trial started, and the findings of fact bore that out. (Providing false testimony didn't help matters.)
The only realistic way Microsoft was going to get out of this one would have been to argue that the plaintifs (the DOJ and the state attorneys general) had no standing to bring a civil suit against them. They would have lost that, too, most likely, but they had no chance actually winning in court.
And any Linux user that ran it as root would deserve what (s)he got as a consequence. In the normal case, some user files could get trashed, but the system should still be safe.
Who said AI is 10 years away? It's here now, in limited forms, yielding a lot of economic value, as your mouse clickstream is datamined so the ads which pop up are for things you might actually buy.
The best way I've heard it described is that once we have acheived something we considered a step towards AI, it no longer appears to be AI, and we change our definition to look at the next unsolved problem. There is that long range ideal of a sentient machine, but even the definition of sentience is subjective...
What if I register microsoftsucks.com? Should MS be able to sue me for violating their trademark?
Probably not. In the US, parody and satire are generally afforded 1st Amendment protection. Also, the use of the Microsoft name in this case does not imply a misrepresentation on your part -- you are not claiming to be Microsoft, a reasonable person would assume your site is not Microsoft's, and you are not attempting to hijack customers of Microsoft by claiming their trademark as your own.
Is at www.dpworld.net -- if you mainly just want unlimited POP3 and mail forwarding boxes and a very small (1 MB storage) web site, they have a $60 one-time setup with no monthly or annual fees.
My family site is there -- I use their email service and have a main family page. Sub-pages link to free web space providers such as Crosswinds.net. You don't have the ability to run much (if any) in the way of CGI scripts, though.
My biggest complaint about DPWorld is that about once a week, give or take, they are unreachable for a few hours.
Seems like what your idea really maps to is a "null" TLD. Name servers would have to look at "apple.records" or "joe.apple",recognize them as "apple.records.null" and ""joe.apple.null", and query one of the the null root server. So we run right back into the hierarchical nature of the DNS: who owns (i.e., is responsible for name service for) records.null, or apple.null?
I wish I could remember who said this a while ago, but the best solution I heard about the DNS lookup was for the root servers to each handle one letter, the first letter of the TLD. Under such a system, all traffic for.com,.cool,.ca, and so on, would be directed to the "C" server for resolution.
Hrm, I doubt thats correct. However, if it were true then the government would be getting the same amount of money from products as they are now, acsept no Income tax. So while the government looses a huge revinue stream it would gain nothing.
Or did I missread you, and you are actualy stating that the price after a national sales tax would not be the same?
Because the government would not be collecting individual income taxes, people would have more disposable income, and retail sales would go up (even if only due to inflation, which is an unlikely risk) accordingly.
Add to that a more dynamic model of economics, which actually assumes that taxation levels and types actually have an impact on economic activity (this, BTW, is radical thinking for most government organizations...), and the fact that the reduced costs of production would make American (since we are talking about the US in this example) products more competitive with foreign goods, increasing the wage base, which increases the retail sales base, which decreases the necessary tax rate (cycle until the diminishing returns equal zero).
A retail sales tax (in lieu of an income tax) also gets rid of the intrusive IRS, and the need to fill out a return each year.
A national sales tax, and suddenly getting computers to inner-city students just got 20%-30% more difficult.
*Sigh*... no, it wouldn't. Once you've eliminated the corporate taxes and compliance costs that are embedded into the price, the retail cost of most goods, including the national tax, will be roughly the same (within a few percent). Check out Americans for Fair Taxation for more details. The bill they sponsor, HR 2525, is a single-stage, single-rate tax on all new retail goods and services (used goods are not taxed, nor are non-retail sales such as business to business). The bill also provides a rebate set by the poverty line that everyone is eligible to receive the same dollar amount. In other words, it is that rarest of laws these days -- one that would treat every single person identically.
If you don't think Alan Keyes fits in with your libertarian views, I'd suggest you actually read his positions at keyes2000.com. Every position he has is based on the Constitution...
And I guarantee you, the Christian candidates are far less totalitarian than the Democrat socialists (including McCain, who is a Democrat in disguise).
I mean, legal language aside, the desired license seems to contain the main precepts of the GPL:
The information in the database is free to be used, and even incorporated in a derived work, as long as that work is also covered by the same license.
The hosting service is not charging for the data, but rather for the service of providing a means to access that data.
The original owner(s) of any data, which requires that no one else's data was used to create the data, may release the data under any other license(s) they so desire.
It can be irrelevant based on your application -- if you're going to be I/O bound (like a database application) most of the time, it really doesn't make much difference if C++ is 5 times faster than Java for the less than 1% of the time the program's actually doing anything.
Personally, I prefer something that's easy to develop and stable over trying to squeeze out every last clock cycle. Again, it depends on your application. I can crank out powerful, stable Java applets on the server side in a short amount of time (including testing), but I'd certainly avoid using Java for a GUI.
Actually, the scare over DDT has now been discredited. Contaminants in the manure used in "organic" farming is actually more harmful to the crop consumers than DDT, and DDT has no significant impact on the environment outside what it is intended to do (get rid of crop pests).
...I must admit, windows users are what made the internet what it is today.
<HUMOR>Well, that would explain it then.</HUMOR>
Seriously, if you're going to make that list, you would have to include America Online (AOL). The internet is not today what it once was, mostly because of the influx of non-technical people (like the prototypical AOL-ite who does not know proper netiquette, and may never even have heard of USENET, let alone ever religiously read it once upon a time). For all of the hassle the constant influx of newbies have caused, the upside is that there is more effort on infrastructure (cable modems, DSL, etc.) and on a variety of content because of it.
Whether or not this is a good thing overall is a matter of personal opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The European taxes are actually value-added taxes, not sales taxes, and therefore the true costs are higher, but hidden. Additionally, they cascade on each other, so that you have tax on tax.
There are actually two proposals active in the U.S. House to eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with a single-rate, single-stagenational sales tax on first-use retail goods and services only. One plan sets the rate at 15%, the other at 23% and also elminates Social Security and Medicare payroll withholding.
"Holy sh*t!" might be a common reaction to rates that high, but the fact is that corporate income taxes, other hidden taxes, and complaince costs already add 20-40% to the price of everthing we buy -- and buy with after-tax dollars. Of course, it's also a good kick in the pants to Congress to think about trimming down some of that pork-barrel spending so everyone can get a tax cut.
As to regressivity, there are two ways to eliminate that. One can either exempt certain items from the tax, which is a bad idea because it sets a precedent for loopholes and exceptions, and is horrendously complicated to administer. The better way is to provide a rebate to everyone, based on family size instead of income, that refunds the amount of tax paid on subsistence-level spending. The NRST proposals do this latter approach, and even pay the rebate in advance. As such, a family living at the poverty line pays, in effect, no taxes yet still has a 23% tax rate at the register.
For more information on the national retail sales tax proposals, see Americans for Fair Taxation (AFT) or Citizens for an Alternative Tax System (CATS).
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Additionally, at least some, and I suspect most or all, states require that any items purchased from out of state that have not been taxed are subject to a "use tax" equivalent to the sales tax, that is to be remitted to the state. Of course, this is probably the second-most violated law in the country (after speed limits), because most people don't know about it and the risk of being caught and prosecuted is so low.
--
Suprisingly enough, a third Douglas film, Fatal Attraction, originally had an ending where Glenn Close's (?) character, rather than the attack Douglas and his wife, commits suicide and frames Douglas for her murder. (Psychologists said that this original ending was far more realistic behaviour for the type of disorder Close's character exhibited.) The depressing ending didn't test well, and was replaced by the more traditional ending where despite all his faults, Douglas' character becomes a hero of sorts.
--
Because a society that is constantly hostile to religion, particularly a specific religion, inevitably leads to religious persecution. Check your history.
--
That's not what the case in question is about -- the case involved a school where a student, not a school official, would be selected by his or her peers, not the school officials, to make a pre-game statement of his or her own choosing on a topic of his or her own choosing.
In addition to totally screwing up the establisment clause, the Court is engaging in prior restraint, becuase this is only a proposed policy that has not yet been put into action...
--
The activist Supreme Court has had this ass-backwards for decades, and the balance of the Court has remained such that they are not inclinded to revisit their mistakes (except to compound it as they did recently -- Renquist's dissent points out the fallacy of the majority opinion quite eloquently).
The court has turned the meaning of this protection around by prohibiting public displays of religion (though they typically only enfoce this against the Christian sects, other religions are deemed to bring a proper "diversity" to public life) instead of adhering to its proper intent, which is that the federal government could not create a state religion and tie the rights of citizenship to membership within the state religion. The authors of the Amendment were quite accepting of the individual states having an official religion, but because the states had different sects, they didn't want the federal government to choose one over the others. The Fourteenth Amendment, though, later prevented the states from having established religions.
The current SC decision is awful in light of the fact that the majority ruled that because a student-elected speaker might choose to use the platform to do something even remotely religious. Of course, the speaker could also simply read a poem, talk about the environment, or make an impassioned speech about homosexual rights. In none of the other cases would the school have been held culpable for the words spoken by an individual. The school had no control over what the stuent would say, and could therefore not even be held to tacitly endorsing the student's viewpoint.
The hostility toward religion, especially Christian religions, in current society is troubling. I mean, Pat Buchanan is attacked for being a right-wing fundamentalist, but Louis Farrakhan is not similarly labeled a left-wing Muslim. This despite the fact that both men are dangerous demagouges who use their religion as a hook to entice new folloers.
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Only if we can get an add-on patch to turn the rocket launcher into a chicken gun... (man, that was my favorite WAD in DOOM...)
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You don't. Trust me, you really don't.
Standards set by committes stagnate in development -- the turn-around time is slow, and the number of improvements or changes are minimal. The only standards that really work arfe those set by actively developing organizations.
If and when Sun decides that Java is a "complete" language (i.e., no more major additions or modifications to the core language), then that might be a good time to turn it over to something like the ISO. Until then, it needs to stay in the hands of Sun or others who have an active interest in the language's development.
Can Sun be more open and responsive? Quite probably. But an international standards organization would do a far worse job than Sun currently does.
--
The only realistic way Microsoft was going to get out of this one would have been to argue that the plaintifs (the DOJ and the state attorneys general) had no standing to bring a civil suit against them. They would have lost that, too, most likely, but they had no chance actually winning in court.
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And any Linux user that ran it as root would deserve what (s)he got as a consequence. In the normal case, some user files could get trashed, but the system should still be safe.
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Now, now... it's not nice to talk about your government like that... :)
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The best way I've heard it described is that once we have acheived something we considered a step towards AI, it no longer appears to be AI, and we change our definition to look at the next unsolved problem. There is that long range ideal of a sentient machine, but even the definition of sentience is subjective...
--
Probably not. In the US, parody and satire are generally afforded 1st Amendment protection. Also, the use of the Microsoft name in this case does not imply a misrepresentation on your part -- you are not claiming to be Microsoft, a reasonable person would assume your site is not Microsoft's, and you are not attempting to hijack customers of Microsoft by claiming their trademark as your own.
--
My family site is there -- I use their email service and have a main family page. Sub-pages link to free web space providers such as Crosswinds.net. You don't have the ability to run much (if any) in the way of CGI scripts, though.
My biggest complaint about DPWorld is that about once a week, give or take, they are unreachable for a few hours.
--
I wish I could remember who said this a while ago, but the best solution I heard about the DNS lookup was for the root servers to each handle one letter, the first letter of the TLD. Under such a system, all traffic for .com, .cool, .ca, and so on, would be directed to the "C" server for resolution.
--
Or did I missread you, and you are actualy stating that the price after a national sales tax would not be the same?
Because the government would not be collecting individual income taxes, people would have more disposable income, and retail sales would go up (even if only due to inflation, which is an unlikely risk) accordingly.
Add to that a more dynamic model of economics, which actually assumes that taxation levels and types actually have an impact on economic activity (this, BTW, is radical thinking for most government organizations...), and the fact that the reduced costs of production would make American (since we are talking about the US in this example) products more competitive with foreign goods, increasing the wage base, which increases the retail sales base, which decreases the necessary tax rate (cycle until the diminishing returns equal zero).
A retail sales tax (in lieu of an income tax) also gets rid of the intrusive IRS, and the need to fill out a return each year.
--
*Sigh*... no, it wouldn't. Once you've eliminated the corporate taxes and compliance costs that are embedded into the price, the retail cost of most goods, including the national tax, will be roughly the same (within a few percent). Check out Americans for Fair Taxation for more details. The bill they sponsor, HR 2525, is a single-stage, single-rate tax on all new retail goods and services (used goods are not taxed, nor are non-retail sales such as business to business). The bill also provides a rebate set by the poverty line that everyone is eligible to receive the same dollar amount. In other words, it is that rarest of laws these days -- one that would treat every single person identically.
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I had an uncle who lived in Chicago. He voted Republican until the day he died -- then he started voting Democrat.
</JOKE>
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Geez, it was even in last month's issue of Consumer Reports
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And I guarantee you, the Christian candidates are far less totalitarian than the Democrat socialists (including McCain, who is a Democrat in disguise).
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applets --> applications... I should learn to proofread better.
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Personally, I prefer something that's easy to develop and stable over trying to squeeze out every last clock cycle. Again, it depends on your application. I can crank out powerful, stable Java applets on the server side in a short amount of time (including testing), but I'd certainly avoid using Java for a GUI.
--
Actually, the scare over DDT has now been discredited. Contaminants in the manure used in "organic" farming is actually more harmful to the crop consumers than DDT, and DDT has no significant impact on the environment outside what it is intended to do (get rid of crop pests).
--
<HUMOR>Well, that would explain it then.</HUMOR>
Seriously, if you're going to make that list, you would have to include America Online (AOL). The internet is not today what it once was, mostly because of the influx of non-technical people (like the prototypical AOL-ite who does not know proper netiquette, and may never even have heard of USENET, let alone ever religiously read it once upon a time). For all of the hassle the constant influx of newbies have caused, the upside is that there is more effort on infrastructure (cable modems, DSL, etc.) and on a variety of content because of it.
Whether or not this is a good thing overall is a matter of personal opinion.
--