Unfortunately, I don't have mod points today. Somebody please moderate the parent up because it gets to the entire crux of the issue.
An organization is considered a single body; therefore, one can "redistribute" a GPL'd work internally ad infinitum without invoking the GPL. ("Redistribute" is in quotes because one can't technically redistribute a program to themselves; that's just copying.)
Posts to this thread are confused. An organization doesn't "give" software to its employees. Rather, the organization acquires software which is then used by employees. There's no redistribution and, therefore, the GPL isn't invoked. As such, the employee has no right to redistribute the software whatsoever. And to do so would, at a minimum, be a violation of company policy. Most likely, it would also (legally) be considered theft.
Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
Hmmm... I have no idea what the Slashdot population might think about school-sponsored computer gaming. I also wonder what members of the NRA think about gun control laws and what members of Planned Parenthood think about a woman's right to choose.
First off- no company gets the opportunity to choose between pure profit and pure 'ethics' as you term it.
I think that you're misunderstanding what I said; I may have been unclear. I never intended to say that a company will always choose profit over ethics. Rather, when forced to choose between behaving ethically and being profitable, a company must choose profitability -- else, it won't survive.
Second- your term 'ethics' is utterly ridiculous. There are good ethics and bad ethics. Using the word the way you did is the equivalent of saying 'it is temperature outside today.'
From dictionary.com:
ethic: 1. A set of principles of right conduct. 2. A theory or a system of moral values.
But, as much as I dislike their product, I just get the strange feeling inside, that their company isn't run by the complete and utter assholes we see everywhere else.
I suspect that you are correct. However, it's largely irrelevant whether or not the people running the company are assholes or not - the company is still required to be competitve and make a profit. Especially since it's public.
When it comes down to it, a company will always choose profits over ethics -- else, it won't survive. This isn't to say that a company can't do good while still making a profit and doesn't mean that RedHat can't be a good member of the free-software/open source community; however, we must always be aware of where their priorities truly lie. If it comes down to it, RedHat will not hesitate to sacrifice the community in order to save itself.
(A good read in this regard is the history of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. This is a company that has always tried to do good. Whenever it came down to it, however, they always chose profits over doing good. And for a very understandable reason -- if they hadn't, they would have been bought out by Hagen-Daas or another competitor. Nevertheless, it shows you who they really are.)
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": I really, really, REALLY want to have my cake and eat it too. Can someone help?
Seriously, for things like this, you often have to make a choice. Sometimes it's a choice between your principles and your desires.
You do have some options for MS-free gaming, most notably Wine and WineX. Or you could limit yourself to games that are available for Linux. TuxGames still has all (most?) of Loki's games available for sale. You could also move to OSX or console gaming.
Or you could decide that your gaming is more important that having an MS-free desktop. And that's okay. What's important is that you decide what's important to you and then follow through on that. If supporting free/open source software is what's important to you, then losing some of your games will be a sacrifice - but, ultimately, it's one that you'll want to make. On the other hand, if gaming is what you want, then just go for it and don't feel guilty about it.
As long as you're not shunning MS just to prove your eliteness...
Re:what's wrong with non-textbooks?
on
Linux Textbooks?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Good instructors should be able to, yes. But, as I'm sure we can all attest to, you're not always guaranteed to get a good instructor. Or even a competent one.
I guess that I see the issue of instructor quality as orthogonal to the issue of textbook quality. A good instructor with a lousy textbook will still be able to teach a good class. And a good instructor with good resources (whether a textbook or otherwise), should be able to teach a great class.
On the other hand, if you've got a lousy instructor, the best textbook in the world isn't going to help you.
You're saying that if a student has a lousy instructor but a good textbook then they can go ahead and study the textbook on their own. I understand the point and obviously it's true in certain cases. But it seems to me that a student who is going to study the textbook on their own already has the resources to synthesize the disparate data sources. So it becomes a moot point: students who are self-directed enough to study a textbook on their own whon't be limited by a crappy instructor anyway.
That being said, I'm all for more and more resources of higher and higher quality. My point of contention is with the idea that a textbook, per se, is desirable. In general, textbooks provide breadth but not depth. If I recall correctly, you mentioned how "Learning Perl" was a lifesaver when you were in a Perl class with a lousy instructor. That's exactly my point. That book isn't a traditional textbook.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative. It's just that this is an issue close to my heart. I'm going to be a professor of sociology one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) and I'm committed to not using textbooks in my courses. (Besides the fact that most textbooks such, I believe that using original sources demonstrates to the class the discipline is really like. Yeah, assigning the original article requires more effort from the students but I think that they get so much more out of it than if they read a textbook's summary of it.)
Re:what's wrong with non-textbooks?
on
Linux Textbooks?
·
· Score: 2
Take it as a compliment, please, when I say that you are in the blessed minority (along with a lot of other/.ers and, I'd hope, myself). You're able to pull together disparate sources of information -- FAQs, man pages, example code on someone's hobby site -- and synthesize a full learning experience from them. And while this can be a very productive way of working, it's also a somewhat non-traditional one.
That's the original poster's point, I believe. You're probably right in that such synthesis is beyond the capabilities of an intro student. However, instructors should be able to synthesize these sources themselves and then provide them to the students.
Textbooks, Resources, LDP
on
Linux Textbooks?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.
First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?
For sources, I would start with the LDP, the FSF, O'Reilly, and Addison-Wesley. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.
Addison-Wesley also does textbooks. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.
On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.
Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.
My girlfriend used to work for the CDC in Atlanta; my stepmother still does. They use one of the more bizarre naming conventions that I've seen: inital letter of first name, random middle initial, initial letter of last name, increment number.
This works fairly well for my stepmother who doesn't have a middle name. She became "dxh4 at cdc.gov." For years I thought that they gave her an "x" because she doesn't have a middle name.
I learned differently when my girlfriend -- Nisha Bipin Gandhi -- became a nag. Specifically, "nag3 at cdc.gov." Needless to say, she got a lot of teasing for that - especially from me.
They've recently started assigning more reasonable email address based upon initial letter of first name and last name but all of the old user names are still floating around.
Even assuming that such a "lemon law" could be passed (which is, to my mind, a dubious proposition in and of itself), it wouldn't affect Free/Open Source Software (or even proprietary freeware) at all because there's no contract between the the author/distributor of the software and the user.
While IANAL, I did consult one about this once - when you give something away, you have no obligation to the recipient. Specifically, the recipient can't sue you if the product is defective in some manner.
In one particular instance, the Japanese market seemed far more demanding of functionality which dealt with quality issues. I am trying to find good books or other resources which address this issue. Are there any out there? What other areas of computing are impacted by cultural considerations? Should I consider these differences when building UIs, for example?"
<sarcasm> I don't believe it. According to Jakob Nielsen's "exhaustive" usability studies of 4 Japanese senior citizens and 16 Israeli children, there are no cultural differences regarding usability. </sarcasm>
In a more serious vein, one place to start might be the Interface Hall of Shame which as a section on "globalization" issues including some tips and recommendations. (Ironically, the site uses frames which means that I can't provide a direct link to the i18n section.)
Another possible source is Microsoft. For better or for worse, they spend a lot of usability and I wouldn't be surprised if that includes i18n.
There's a comprehensive list of Unix-related events and user groups at Rick Moen's BALE (Bay Area Linux Events) calendar: http://www.linuxmafia.com/bale/
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking.
You might the Unix utilities "style" and "diction." They don't do "grammar" checking per say (i.e., they don't cite passive voice or subject-verb agreement) but this is rather simple stuff that you should catch anyways.
Diction identifies (and suggests remedies for) commonly misused phrases and lengthy sentences. Style evaluates the complexity of [sections of] your document.
I don't think that I'm describing them very well, but, as an academic, I've found them (along with wordnet and ispell) to be indispensible. And they're probably already installed on your system. Check 'em out.
The homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
If the WordPerfect filters are decent, this is--for me, at least--huge. WordPerfect still has a strong presence in certain industries. Law is frequently mentioned but many academics are still using WordPerfect as well. Indeed, I keep a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux (the native version, not that crappy Wine port) on my machine for occassional file from my colleagues (as well as for a handful of my own files from my days of using WP).
I no longer have any need for Word thanks to OpenOffice; perhaps AbiWord will permit me to eliminate the last of my proprietary applications from my desktop.
I'm in the same boat. As a grad student in sociology, I write all of my papers in LaTeX even though all of my colleagues use Word or WordPerfect. I haven't had any problems so my first question is "Is Word really required?" (Unlike the corporate world, academics tend to have a lot of freedom.)
For my colleagues, I distribute my papers as either PDF or hardcopy. Most people want to edit on a hardcopy version anyway, so they just print off the PDF. Could you just ask your colleagues to edit a hardcopy format? They might be willing to; especially if you explain to them why you don't use a word processor.
Regarding journals, sociology submission guidelines also ask for a "word processor" format (which I read as "Word" or "WordPerfect"). However, I haven't seen any journals that require electronic submission. Most journals require that you send them either 4 or 5 copies of the article or an electronic submission. I prefer to send a hard copy format because that's what's going to be redistributed to the reviewers. And regardless of what anyone says, appearance is important and LaTeX provides a very professional appearance.
If it really is necessary to provide a Word document to your colleagues and/or journals, I think that you're SOL with regard to TeX. Unless I've missed something, TeX, LaTeX, DVI, PS, and PDF can't degrade to a lesser format without losing some, most, or all of the formatting.
In this case, I'd recommend looking into DocBook. I haven't used it myself but, from all accounts, it produces publication quality text. And, if I recall correctly, it can generate TeX, LaTeX, HTML, and RTF. I don't know if RTF can support everything that you would need (for example, I don't know if it can handle images). If it can, great; if it can't, you could always import the document into OpenOffice and go from there.
Since I'm also in academia, I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to do. I'd appreciate it if you could post a response or shoot me an email.
Okay, my gaming backlog has gotten seriously out of control. They've released the source code for a game that I haven't even gotten around to playing yet! I really need a few weeks off from real life to catch up. (Of course, I probably need to upgrade my Pentium 200 first.)
I have been strongly considering picking up an iBook on which to run Debian for precisely the reasons the author mentions - lightweight, good looks, well supported hardware.
I never realized, however, that it doesn't support PCMCIA. Not that big of a deal I guess, considering that networking and modem are built in. But now it appears that Apple is bundling soft-modems instead of hardware modems. That's no better than an x86 based system. At least with the latter, I can use my PC cards.
Although I'll certainly continue to lust over them from afar, my flirtation with Macs may have just ended.
It'll be fun to see what slashdot story is posted about these project a year from now. (Even more fun than seeing what slashdot story is posted about them next Wednesday.)
Given Slashdot's track record, it'll probably be the exact same story!
For the Mac-heads in the audience, I'm curious: Does the Mac community have the same debate about porting vs emulation as the Linux community? Any idea of where people tend to lean? Why or why not?
What we need to do is pass a law that permits only one law to be introduced per bill. What the heck does an adults-only domain have to do with videotaping others without their consent? (Besides the obvious, of course.) Might as well add on a tax increase while we're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I don't have mod points today. Somebody please moderate the parent up because it gets to the entire crux of the issue.
An organization is considered a single body; therefore, one can "redistribute" a GPL'd work internally ad infinitum without invoking the GPL. ("Redistribute" is in quotes because one can't technically redistribute a program to themselves; that's just copying.)
Posts to this thread are confused. An organization doesn't "give" software to its employees. Rather, the organization acquires software which is then used by employees. There's no redistribution and, therefore, the GPL isn't invoked. As such, the employee has no right to redistribute the software whatsoever. And to do so would, at a minimum, be a violation of company policy. Most likely, it would also (legally) be considered theft.
...JonKatz is hung from the ballroom ceiling and used as a pinata...
And this is a bad thing how?
Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
Hmmm... I have no idea what the Slashdot population might think about school-sponsored computer gaming. I also wonder what members of the NRA think about gun control laws and what members of Planned Parenthood think about a woman's right to choose.
First off- no company gets the opportunity to choose between pure profit and pure 'ethics' as you term it.
I think that you're misunderstanding what I said; I may have been unclear. I never intended to say that a company will always choose profit over ethics. Rather, when forced to choose between behaving ethically and being profitable, a company must choose profitability -- else, it won't survive.
Second- your term 'ethics' is utterly ridiculous. There are good ethics and bad ethics. Using the word the way you did is the equivalent of saying 'it is temperature outside today.'
From dictionary.com:
ethic:
1. A set of principles of right conduct.
2. A theory or a system of moral values.
Just felt like you could learn from my criticism.
But, as much as I dislike their product, I just get the strange feeling inside, that their company isn't run by the complete and utter assholes we see everywhere else.
I suspect that you are correct. However, it's largely irrelevant whether or not the people running the company are assholes or not - the company is still required to be competitve and make a profit. Especially since it's public.
When it comes down to it, a company will always choose profits over ethics -- else, it won't survive. This isn't to say that a company can't do good while still making a profit and doesn't mean that RedHat can't be a good member of the free-software/open source community; however, we must always be aware of where their priorities truly lie. If it comes down to it, RedHat will not hesitate to sacrifice the community in order to save itself.
(A good read in this regard is the history of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. This is a company that has always tried to do good. Whenever it came down to it, however, they always chose profits over doing good. And for a very understandable reason -- if they hadn't, they would have been bought out by Hagen-Daas or another competitor. Nevertheless, it shows you who they really are.)
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": I really, really, REALLY want to have my cake and eat it too. Can someone help?
Seriously, for things like this, you often have to make a choice. Sometimes it's a choice between your principles and your desires.
You do have some options for MS-free gaming, most notably Wine and WineX. Or you could limit yourself to games that are available for Linux. TuxGames still has all (most?) of Loki's games available for sale. You could also move to OSX or console gaming.
Or you could decide that your gaming is more important that having an MS-free desktop. And that's okay. What's important is that you decide what's important to you and then follow through on that. If supporting free/open source software is what's important to you, then losing some of your games will be a sacrifice - but, ultimately, it's one that you'll want to make. On the other hand, if gaming is what you want, then just go for it and don't feel guilty about it.
As long as you're not shunning MS just to prove your eliteness...
Good instructors should be able to, yes. But, as I'm sure we can all attest to, you're not always guaranteed to get a good instructor. Or even a competent one.
I guess that I see the issue of instructor quality as orthogonal to the issue of textbook quality. A good instructor with a lousy textbook will still be able to teach a good class. And a good instructor with good resources (whether a textbook or otherwise), should be able to teach a great class.
On the other hand, if you've got a lousy instructor, the best textbook in the world isn't going to help you.
You're saying that if a student has a lousy instructor but a good textbook then they can go ahead and study the textbook on their own. I understand the point and obviously it's true in certain cases. But it seems to me that a student who is going to study the textbook on their own already has the resources to synthesize the disparate data sources. So it becomes a moot point: students who are self-directed enough to study a textbook on their own whon't be limited by a crappy instructor anyway.
That being said, I'm all for more and more resources of higher and higher quality. My point of contention is with the idea that a textbook, per se, is desirable. In general, textbooks provide breadth but not depth. If I recall correctly, you mentioned how "Learning Perl" was a lifesaver when you were in a Perl class with a lousy instructor. That's exactly my point. That book isn't a traditional textbook.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative. It's just that this is an issue close to my heart. I'm going to be a professor of sociology one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) and I'm committed to not using textbooks in my courses. (Besides the fact that most textbooks such, I believe that using original sources demonstrates to the class the discipline is really like. Yeah, assigning the original article requires more effort from the students but I think that they get so much more out of it than if they read a textbook's summary of it.)
Take it as a compliment, please, when I say that you are in the blessed minority (along with a lot of other /.ers and, I'd hope, myself). You're able to pull together disparate sources of information -- FAQs, man pages, example code on someone's hobby site -- and synthesize a full learning experience from them. And while this can be a very productive way of working, it's also a somewhat non-traditional one.
That's the original poster's point, I believe. You're probably right in that such synthesis is beyond the capabilities of an intro student. However, instructors should be able to synthesize these sources themselves and then provide them to the students.
As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.
First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?
For sources, I would start with the LDP, the FSF, O'Reilly, and Addison-Wesley. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.
Addison-Wesley also does textbooks. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.
On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.
Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.
My girlfriend used to work for the CDC in Atlanta; my stepmother still does. They use one of the more bizarre naming conventions that I've seen: inital letter of first name, random middle initial, initial letter of last name, increment number.
This works fairly well for my stepmother who doesn't have a middle name. She became "dxh4 at cdc.gov." For years I thought that they gave her an "x" because she doesn't have a middle name.
I learned differently when my girlfriend -- Nisha Bipin Gandhi -- became a nag. Specifically, "nag3 at cdc.gov." Needless to say, she got a lot of teasing for that - especially from me.
They've recently started assigning more reasonable email address based upon initial letter of first name and last name but all of the old user names are still floating around.
Even assuming that such a "lemon law" could be passed (which is, to my mind, a dubious proposition in and of itself), it wouldn't affect Free/Open Source Software (or even proprietary freeware) at all because there's no contract between the the author/distributor of the software and the user.
While IANAL, I did consult one about this once - when you give something away, you have no obligation to the recipient. Specifically, the recipient can't sue you if the product is defective in some manner.
In one particular instance, the Japanese market seemed far more demanding of functionality which dealt with quality issues. I am trying to find good books or other resources which address this issue. Are there any out there? What other areas of computing are impacted by cultural considerations? Should I consider these differences when building UIs, for example?"
<sarcasm>
I don't believe it. According to Jakob Nielsen's "exhaustive" usability studies of 4 Japanese senior citizens and 16 Israeli children, there are no cultural differences regarding usability.
</sarcasm>
In a more serious vein, one place to start might be the Interface Hall of Shame which as a section on "globalization" issues including some tips and recommendations. (Ironically, the site uses frames which means that I can't provide a direct link to the i18n section.)
Another possible source is Microsoft. For better or for worse, they spend a lot of usability and I wouldn't be surprised if that includes i18n.
There's a comprehensive list of Unix-related events and user groups at Rick Moen's BALE (Bay Area Linux Events) calendar: http://www.linuxmafia.com/bale/
touché
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking.
You might the Unix utilities "style" and "diction." They don't do "grammar" checking per say (i.e., they don't cite passive voice or subject-verb agreement) but this is rather simple stuff that you should catch anyways.
Diction identifies (and suggests remedies for) commonly misused phrases and lengthy sentences. Style evaluates the complexity of [sections of] your document.
I don't think that I'm describing them very well, but, as an academic, I've found them (along with wordnet and ispell) to be indispensible. And they're probably already installed on your system. Check 'em out.
The homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
If the WordPerfect filters are decent, this is--for me, at least--huge. WordPerfect still has a strong presence in certain industries. Law is frequently mentioned but many academics are still using WordPerfect as well. Indeed, I keep a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux (the native version, not that crappy Wine port) on my machine for occassional file from my colleagues (as well as for a handful of my own files from my days of using WP).
I no longer have any need for Word thanks to OpenOffice; perhaps AbiWord will permit me to eliminate the last of my proprietary applications from my desktop.
I'm in the same boat. As a grad student in sociology, I write all of my papers in LaTeX even though all of my colleagues use Word or WordPerfect. I haven't had any problems so my first question is "Is Word really required?" (Unlike the corporate world, academics tend to have a lot of freedom.)
For my colleagues, I distribute my papers as either PDF or hardcopy. Most people want to edit on a hardcopy version anyway, so they just print off the PDF. Could you just ask your colleagues to edit a hardcopy format? They might be willing to; especially if you explain to them why you don't use a word processor.
Regarding journals, sociology submission guidelines also ask for a "word processor" format (which I read as "Word" or "WordPerfect"). However, I haven't seen any journals that require electronic submission. Most journals require that you send them either 4 or 5 copies of the article or an electronic submission. I prefer to send a hard copy format because that's what's going to be redistributed to the reviewers. And regardless of what anyone says, appearance is important and LaTeX provides a very professional appearance.
If it really is necessary to provide a Word document to your colleagues and/or journals, I think that you're SOL with regard to TeX. Unless I've missed something, TeX, LaTeX, DVI, PS, and PDF can't degrade to a lesser format without losing some, most, or all of the formatting.
In this case, I'd recommend looking into DocBook. I haven't used it myself but, from all accounts, it produces publication quality text. And, if I recall correctly, it can generate TeX, LaTeX, HTML, and RTF. I don't know if RTF can support everything that you would need (for example, I don't know if it can handle images). If it can, great; if it can't, you could always import the document into OpenOffice and go from there.
Since I'm also in academia, I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to do. I'd appreciate it if you could post a response or shoot me an email.
Linux is a way of developing software...
And all this time I was under the impression that Linux was an operating system kernel!
Okay, my gaming backlog has gotten seriously out of control. They've released the source code for a game that I haven't even gotten around to playing yet! I really need a few weeks off from real life to catch up. (Of course, I probably need to upgrade my Pentium 200 first.)
After all, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
And of course, as Woody Allen observed, "When everybody actually is out to get you, paranoia is just good thinking."
I have been strongly considering picking up an iBook on which to run Debian for precisely the reasons the author mentions - lightweight, good looks, well supported hardware.
I never realized, however, that it doesn't support PCMCIA. Not that big of a deal I guess, considering that networking and modem are built in. But now it appears that Apple is bundling soft-modems instead of hardware modems. That's no better than an x86 based system. At least with the latter, I can use my PC cards.
Although I'll certainly continue to lust over them from afar, my flirtation with Macs may have just ended.
It'll be fun to see what slashdot story is posted about these project a year from now. (Even more fun than seeing what slashdot story is posted about them next Wednesday.)
Given Slashdot's track record, it'll probably be the exact same story!
His platform makes a good read: http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/bdale
For the Mac-heads in the audience, I'm curious: Does the Mac community have the same debate about porting vs emulation as the Linux community? Any idea of where people tend to lean? Why or why not?
What we need to do is pass a law that permits only one law to be introduced per bill. What the heck does an adults-only domain have to do with videotaping others without their consent? (Besides the obvious, of course.) Might as well add on a tax increase while we're at it.